David Wishart - Old Bones

Sicinia was frowning. 'Our family has always been….I hesitate to say clumsy, but certainly accident-prone. On the male side, at any rate. Indeed Navius himself is' – she stopped – ' was recovering from a broken forearm occasioned when he fell down the hayloft ladder last month.'

'Yeah?' I pricked up my ears. That was interesting too. 'Were there any witnesses?'

That got me a glare; accidents, seemingly, were one thing, but any suggestion of foul play was bad form. 'I was present myself, as it happens. He simply misplaced a foot. He found the convalescence very irksome. Attus always was a very energetic boy, and he actually enjoyed physical labour. That was something I often found difficult to understand.'

Yeah; she would. 'Did your son have any other enemies? Or people that might wish him ill, rather?' I said when her mouth opened to protest: precious darlings like Attus Navius clearly couldn't have enemies from first principles.

'Of course not. Attus was very popular. Naturally there's that dreadful old man Larcius Arruns who insists that he owns two of our vineyard terraces, but he was always an embarrassment rather than a danger, and to give him his due I don't believe he would stoop to violence. Not that Attus's death would have improved his position to the slightest degree.' Sicinia frowned again. 'Corvinus, am I to understand from the tenor of your questions that you don't believe Larth Papatius killed my son?'

Astigmatic or not the lady was no fool. I gave her the simple truth.

'I don't know,' I said. 'Sure, I'm nine-tenths certain he did, and the more I find out the more things point that way, but there's still that last tenth. How about you? Have you any views yourself?'

She was quiet for a long time. Finally she gave the ghost of a smile. 'No,' she said. 'To be honest, I have not. But I do know that whoever murdered Attus was quite mad. He was a lovely boy, he had everything to live for, he'd offended no one and he would have grown up a credit to our family and to Vetuliscum. His murder was completely without sense and an insult to rationality in any form. And whoever was responsible for it, catching them will not bring him back.'

Yeah; that last bit was true enough, but as far as a mad killer went I wasn't taking any bets. Whoever had put Navius away – and Hilarion – had done it for a reason. The problem was, I still didn't know what that reason was.

There wasn't much else to say. I thanked her for the wine and left.

The morning was wearing on and I was getting peckish. I decided to give Clusinus a miss for the moment and rejoin the main road, call in at the Gruesomes' in passing in the hopes of catching Vipena, then go home for a quick bath, something to eat and a jug on the terrace while I waited for the family to come back; sleuthing was all very well, but a holiday's a holiday, and you don't want to kill yourself over it. Besides, when I finally met Bright-Eyes I wanted to look my snappy sartorial best.

The sisters were on the terrace as usual: peas this time instead of beans. They sniffed a bit when they saw my tunic, and a bit more when they caught my scent -a couple of hours' strenuous walking in the September heat overlaid by a spell of ditching is enough to put paid to the most persistent of bath oils, and I stank like a camel – but Perilla's influence still lingered and they were politeness itself.

'Gnaeus is inside, Valerius Corvinus,' Tanaquil said, 'talking to his foreman. Just go through.'

'Inside' was an exaggeration: the ground floor, at this point at least, was an unroofed work area. I walked through the small cobbled entrance court into what was obviously the main fermenting yard. The wide necks of half a dozen huge buried vats projected above the floor, and a slave with a long-handled brush and a bucket of hot water was on his knees next to one of them scrubbing at its innards.

'The boss around?' I said.

He jerked his thumb to the left. There was a big conduit running about three feet above the floor with an arrangement of sluices and piping at the near end that fed directly into the vats, its other end disappearing through a hole in the wall into the next section of the yard. Beside the connecting door was a stack of wine jars. I glanced at them in passing and noticed that the potter's stamps were botched: the letters in the centre had come out clear, but the two either side were a mess. Vipena must've got them cheap in a job lot. Yeah, well: priests and augurs, you've got to get up early to be ahead of those guys. Every one I've ever met with is near enough to skin a flint.

I went through. This was where the press was, and I could see why it was unroofed too: the press was huge, with a wooden lever fully thirty feet long. There were two guys there: a squat bruiser with a broken nose who I took to be the foreman and a tall thin vinegary-looking man who looked so like the Gruesomes that he had to be Vipena.

'Hi,' I said to this guy. 'Sorry about the interruption, but your sisters said just to come on in. My name's Marcus Valerius Corvinus.'

'Ah.' The thin man put his hand out. 'Yes, they told me that you and your wife had visited yesterday. I'm delighted to make your acquaintance, Corvinus.'

'Likewise.' I took the hand. It felt like wash-leather, which was par for the guy's skin texture in general.

Vipena turned to the bruiser. 'We'll talk later, Baro,' he said. 'The gods willing.'

Jupiter! Well, he was in the business, after all.

The bruiser left. I glanced around with interest.

'So this is where it all happens, right?'

Vipena gave me a quick sideways look. 'Where what all happens?' he said.

'Making the wine.'

'Ah, yes!' He smiled, or maybe it was dyspepsia. 'To be sure! Lord Bacchus's gift. You've never seen a winery before?'

'Uh-uh.' I shook my head. 'I tend to be more into the consuming side of things.'

'It's simple enough.' He cleared his throat. 'The grapes are loaded into the press here and the juice extracted. It flows along the conduit into the vats next door where it is fermented uncovered. Wine ferments best in the open air, exposed to the elements; that is what gives it its character and its body.'

'Yeah?'

'Indeed. After pressing the portions of the pulp mat which overflow the press are cut around and pressed separately: were the juices to be mixed the resultant wine could have rather a chalybeate tang.'

'"Chalybeate"?'

'It would taste like an iron skillet. Not that I've ever tasted an iron skillet, of course.' He sniffed. 'I’m sorry. A small joke.'

'Ah…yeah. Yeah, right.' Jupiter! Or Bacchus, rather. Well, I'd asked for the guided tour, and if I'd got it I couldn't blame anyone but myself. It was a shame Perilla wasn't there; she loves that kind of high-tech stuff. I pointed to a series of deep cisterns ranged along the wall with spigoted lead pipes projecting from them at waist level. Underneath the cisterns there was an iron grid like you see in bakers' shops to hold the burning charcoal. 'So what're these things for?' I said.

'These?' The frown was back. 'Oh, we don't use these very often. They're a stage in a sub-process which it would be tedious to explain.' He took my arm. 'Shall we go out and join my sisters?'

'Fine,' I said. There was something adrift somewhere, but whatever it was I couldn't quite put my finger on it. 'If I'm not interrupting your work.'

'If you are then it was foreordained, and so not your fault.' Gods! A weird bugger, this guy, but then he was an augur after all when he wasn't pressing skillets, and these bastards are half out of their skulls at the best of times. It comes of spending a large chunk of your life up to your wrists in sheep guts reading livers.

We went back outside. The girls were still slitting pea-pods, but they put the bowl away and brought out the honey wine and cake. The four of us settled down for what promised to be a not-so-jolly chinwag.