David Wishart: White Murder

Which left the rarer, third reason…

‘Sir?’

‘Hmm?’ I came back to myself: Bathyllus, with the mullet and the quiche. ‘Yeah, okay, little guy, serve away.’

I topped up my cup from the jug on the table. Well, at least we had a logical starting point. The Green and White stables – in fact, the stables of all four factions – were in Mars Field, a stone’s throw from the Tiber. I could go there tomorrow, have a word with Pegasus’s current and former bosses.

They might, too – at least the White boss might – be able to shed a bit of light on what the guy had been doing at Renatius’s. No reason why he shouldn’t go there, of course, but the factions, like most other closed groups in the city, are a gregarious bunch. They have their own favourite wineshops, and when they’re off-base the drivers tend to stick to them. Besides, although the Whites – like the Reds – are a second-string team their stables are self-contained units, with eating and drinking facilities on site. That was another problem that needed solving.

I looked up. Perilla was watching me with a small smile on her lips.

‘What’s tickling you?’ I said.

‘Nothing, Marcus.’ She started in on her mullet. ‘Nothing at all.’

Sometimes I wonder about that lady. I held up my plate for Bathyllus to fill. He slid the mullet off the serving dish. It missed and landed on the table.

The little guy looked mortified. He scooped the fish up onto the plate with the spatula. ‘I’m terribly sorry, sir, that was clumsy of me,’ he said. ‘I’ll get a cloth at once.’

I watched his retreating back. One thing our major-domo wasn’t was clumsy; it went with ‘distracted’. And a lot of his sarky snap was missing, too. Odd; more than odd. ‘Hey, Perilla,’ I said. ‘What’s biting Bathyllus?’

‘I don’t know, dear. He’s been distant all day. I did ask, but he only sniffed at me.’

Yeah; been there, had the experience. Jupiter! Staff! It wasn’t anything we’d done, at least, I was sure of that: even the little guy’s huffs don’t allow him to compromise where his job’s concerned. The same went for the opening of fresh hostilities in his ongoing battle with the anarchist Meton. Whatever was going on under that hairless pate it was something very much out of the usual.

Well, I wasn’t going to push. Bathyllus isn’t exactly the type you can take into a quiet corner and have a heart-to-heart master-and-slave chat with. If it was important we’d find out eventually. I ate my mullet.

Something out of the usual was right; but then at that stage I couldn’t even have guessed at the answer. That came out later.

Even then I didn’t believe it.

Well, we’d got spring, finally. The weather over the past few days had been a hangover from winter, but this was real March stuff, bright and blustery, and the city looked like someone had just taken it to the cleaners to have the grime washed out. Even the crowds were different. Most of the time your average city centre punter is a prime contender for the All-comers’ Unfriendly Bastard title and you need to move sideways fast if you don’t want to be mown down by yard-wide old biddies en route from the vegetable market; but that morning even the chunky bullet-heads who do the portering in the Velabrum seemed willing to give an inch or two. I even heard one whistling, and there weren’t any pigs flying over the Capitol, either.

I turned up Triumph Road and headed for Mars Field. The stables are all in a line on the stretch between Pompey’s Theatre and the river: adjacent-paired Blue/White and Green/Red, with the Blues and Greens being the biggies, self-sufficient units more like a country farm than something you’d normally find inside the city boundaries. Or rather something between a farm and a military base, because racing’s a big business in Rome, horse-nobbling’s endemic and security procedures are tighter than a gnat’s sphincter. Mean, too: try sneaking in past the gate guards and you’re likely to leave in a hurry with a few bust ribs and a deficit in the teeth department. Get caught with serious cash or a suspect substance under your tunic and you don’t come out at all.

The Whites stable was second in the row after the Blues, just beyond Tiberius Arch. The guy outside the big double gates looked like he’d been put together from the same material they’d used to build the wall, and whatever effect the spring weather had had on the rest of the population it obviously hadn’t stretched his length. I got a scowl like I’d turned up clinking with enough bottles of whacky medicine to put the entire string of nags on their backs with their hooves in the air.

‘Yeah?’ he said.

‘The boss around?’

‘Who wants him?’

I gave him my name. ‘I’m looking into the death of one of your drivers. Pegasus.’

If I’d thought that might ease matters I was wrong, because all it got me was a long stare. Not a particularly friendly one either.

‘You with the Watch?’ he said finally.

This was the tricky part. ‘No. But I was in the wineshop when it happened. And when the Watch turned up. I thought maybe your boss might like a second opinion.’

‘Is that so, now?’ Cement-Features didn’t bat an eyelid. The stare raked me from crown to toes before he gave a grudging nod. ‘Okay. Wait here.’

Not that I’d any option, because when he disappeared inside he closed the gate behind him and I heard the clunk of a bar thudding into place. I stepped back and looked around.

Military base was right: the wall must’ve been ten feet high, with broken pottery sherds spiking the top. It stretched all the way back to a junction with the Blues wall a hundred yards down the road, and it was smooth-faced with concrete: no foot- or handholds. You might’ve got over with grappling-hooks and a rope, sure, but that’d be what it took, nothing less. And I’d bet sides and rear were the same.

The gate opened and Cement-Features came back out, looking almost friendly. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘The boss says he’ll see you. You follow me close, right?’

‘Right.’ I went through the hallowed portal and he shut it behind me, pulling the heavy bar down into its sockets. ‘Uh…what’s the boss’s name, by the way?’

That got me another stare; not a hostile one this time, just an unbelieving one like young Lucius’s when I’d asked who Pegasus was. Fair enough; every racegoer out of leading-strings, whichever team he supports, knows the names of the four faction masters. ‘Cammius,’ he said. ‘Lucius Cammius.’

I was looking round me with interest because this was the first time I’d been inside a faction stable. It was a complete world in itself. Over to the right, beyond a fenced exercise yard, were the stables proper: long and low like a series of army barrack blocks with tiled roofs and half-doors every two or three yards. Some of the doors had an equine head sticking out above the bottom flap, but most had piles of dirty straw outside and what looked like a small army of guys beavering away with pitchforks loading the stuff onto carts. There was a hell of a lot of it. Disposal must’ve presented quite a logistical problem, and I was just lucky the breeze was blowing in the right direction.

‘How many horse have you got here, friend?’ I asked.

I was only making conversation, but obviously that information came into the classified category. Cement-Features gave me a suspicious look and no answer.

We went through what turned out to be the workshop area: smithies, tackle shops and so on, all busy, all well-manned; like I say, the factions operate as self-contained units, like an army camp. I breathed in. The whole place smelled of horses and leather, and it buzzed; there isn’t a better word, because the feeling was like being inside a giant beehive, with the qualification that there were no drones around, just workers. Single-minded workers at that. The fans aren’t the only obsessives. The racing world’s all about obsession, and when you’re inside it the rest of the city might just as well not exist.