David Wishart - Last Rites

We went up. For a tenement it wasn’t too bad; there were none of the personal smells you’d get on an ordinary city stairway, and not so much as a scribble on the walls. That’s another thing about Transtiber, or maybe the same thing: poor or not, the place is more like a big village than an urban slum. The locals take a pride in their property like wouldn’t happen in the Subura or Circus Valley.

Aegle knocked on the door just to make sure. There was no answer. I thought of Thalia’s place, but I wasn’t really worried: the girl had been alive and kicking seven days ago, at least, when she’d called in at the guildhouse, and Aegle’s point about the birds showed there was nothing unusual about the housekeeping arrangements. Still, it looked like we’d made another wasted journey, which was a bugger,

‘We’ll ask Aquillia,’ Aegle said.

‘She the neighbour?’

‘Yeah.’ She went to the door opposite and knocked on that. ‘She should know.’

At least we struck lucky this time. Aquillia turned out to be a real butterball: a little middle-aged Spanish dumpling as far from Thalia’s Mother Nemesis as you can get. She ushered us in, set down the bowl of ground chickpeas she’d been making into rissoles on the table and wiped her hands on a cloth. A clean cloth, I noticed, which went with the rest of the room. Obviously Aquillia was the house-proud type.

‘She’s staying at her mother’s for a while, dear,’ she said. ‘Girlfriend trouble.’

I glanced at Aegle. Uh-huh; so that explained why she’d turned down my suggestion of the rich toyboy. ‘She been gone long?’ I said.

‘Six or seven days, sir.’ Aquillia gave me an assessing look, but she hadn’t hesitated. ‘She said she wouldn’t be back until after the Festival.’

‘You happen to know where the mother lives?’

‘In the city, down by Pottery Mountain.’ Yeah; I’d got her: way downriver, beyond the Aventine and near Ostian Road. Pottery Mountain was just that: a huge scrapheap built up over the years from the city’s empty oil and wine jars, ferried there on barges and unloaded by municipal slaves. ‘She runs the family pastry business in Bakers’ Market.’

Six or seven days. So she’d left at the time of her visit to the guildhouse, which was two days after the first murder. It fitted. The back of my neck prickled. ‘Uh, what kind of girlfriend trouble would that be, now?’ I said.

Aquillia shook her head firmly. ‘No, sir,’ she said. ‘You ask her yourself about that, if you really want to know.’

‘It’s okay, Aquillia,’ Aegle said. ‘Corvinus here’s a friend. And it’s important.’ She glanced at me. ‘Right?’

‘Yeah.’ The prickle was becoming a full-blown itch. ‘I think it might be very important.’

Aquillia looked from one of us to the other. ‘She’s in some sort of trouble?’

‘Nothing that’s her fault,’ I said. ‘But she may be, yeah. I’m sorry, lady, but this once you’re going to have to break your rule.’

Aquillia grunted and looked at Aegle again. Aegle nodded. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’m saying nothing against Harmy, mind. She was bad news, that one, the worst. I told Harmy from the beginning: “You drop her, girl, before she drops you hard.” Thank the gods she saw sense while she still could. She’s a good girl, Harmy. I don’t like to see her hurt.’

‘You know this girlfriend’s name?’

‘She called herself Myrrhine.’

I caught Aegle’s eye but she shook her head. ‘Means nothing,’ she said. ‘No one I know. What did she look like, Aquillia?’

‘Biggish woman; woman, not girl: mid-, maybe late twenties. Not tall but well-built. Broad shoulders, muscular arms. Face had pockmarks all over.’

Aegle was looking excited. ‘She have very short nails?’ she said. ‘Short to the quick, like she bit them?’

‘That’s her.’

‘Yeah. Right.’ Aegle turned to me. ‘You’ve got your flutegirl, Corvinus.’

Jupiter! I stared at her. ‘You sure?’

‘Hundred per cent. I noticed the nails while she was playing. We all have short nails, you need them for the pipes, but these’d been chewed. And the pockmarks explain the heavy make-up.’

Shit; the killer had been a woman after all.

‘She played the flute, all right,’ Aquillia was saying. ‘That was how Harmy and her got friendly. They met in a cookshop in the Subura.’

‘Maenalus’s?’ That was Aegle again.

‘That’s the name. Harmy says she uses it a lot while she’s working.’

‘It’s where a lot of the girls hang out,’ Aegle told me. ‘Just up the road from the guildhouse.’

‘Who made the running, Aquillia?’ I asked. Then, when the woman’s brow furrowed: ‘Did Harmy start the conversation or was it this Myrrhine?’

‘That I don’t know, sir, but I’d guess Myrrhine. Harmy’s a quiet girl. She don’t talk much.’

Uh-huh. Things were beginning to take shape. ‘And when did this happen?’

‘The day before the kalends.’ Four before the murder in other words. We’d got our killer for sure. ‘Myrrhine moved in the next day. That was when the trouble started.’

‘Trouble?’

‘The woman was a bitch.’ The word, out of character, came out quiet and deliberate. ‘The morning of the third day Harmy came to me crying.’

‘Yeah?’ I pricked up my ears. The third day would be the day of the murder. ‘She explain why?’

‘She’d been bad for a while with her throat. It’d got worse, seemingly, and she’d had to give up her place playing at the rites of the Good Goddess to another girl.’

‘Thalia,’ Aegle said.

‘That was her.’ Aquillia nodded. ‘Anyway, that morning she’d told Myrrhine. They had words. Myrrhine punched her, loosened a tooth and almost broke the poor girl’s jaw. Then she left.’

Yeah, well: it didn’t take much to see what had been going on here. Loose tooth or not, Harmodia had been lucky; Jupiter, had that girl been lucky!

‘And she didn’t come back,’ I said. It was a statement, not a question: if the bitch had done then we’d’ve had another corpse on our hands. That was certain as tomorrow’s sunrise.

‘Not for three days.’ Aquillia’s lips set. ‘I told Harmy: “You go to your mother’s now, girl; you leave that woman to us, to me and my Aulus, we’ll handle her.” She wouldn’t, the silly girl, not at first; you know how they are at that age, sir, they haven’t the sense they were born with. Only two days later she came round with her birds to say she’d changed her mind.’ Yeah; that’d be after she’d had the news at the guildhouse and tumbled to what was going on. Kid or not, Harmodia wasn’t stupid. ‘She was just in time, too. The woman came back that night and tried to get in but the door was locked and we had the key. I sent Aulus out, and he said the language you wouldn’t believe. Aulus’s been a stevedore down at the docks for fifteen years and he’d never heard the like. It took him all his time to get rid of her.’ She paused. ‘That Myrrhine’s evil, sir. And I don’t use the word lightly.’

Yeah; I’d go for that assessment. And stevedore or not, Aulus had been pretty lucky himself not to end up with his throat slashed; in view of which I wondered if the guy hadn’t glossed over the details a bit where his wife’s sensibilities were concerned. If so, personally I didn’t blame him. ‘One more question, Aquillia,’ I said. ‘You happen to know where this Myrrhine lived before she moved in here? Or even where she might be now?’

‘No. And I don’t think Harmy does either.’

Well, we’d have to see about that. Certainly our next job was to talk to the girl herself.

‘Okay,’ I said, getting up. ‘Thanks for your help, mother. Harmy’s lucky in her neighbours.’