Lindsey Davis - Graveyard of the Hesperides

It struck me that nobody knew I had come here. Tiberius would say I should always tell him where I was going; he would be right. I must learn to do it. Well, one day perhaps, but I had survived on my own for twelve years so I saw no urgency for change. I had no intention of living in my husband’s pocket like his little pet mouse. He would have to get used to that.

If nobody else knew I was coming here, at least no one with bad intentions would have trailed me; no one would have come ahead to lie in wait. Only the people who lived here posed any danger.

They did not seem to exist. It was excessively quiet. To reach this place I had only walked down a short side street, yet the racket on the Vicus Longus was completely muffled by the intervening buildings. Though the mews was grimy and oppressive, as a professional myself I could see that a woman who worked late and who wanted somewhere to sleep undisturbed by day might find the isolation helpful. Rufia could have overlooked its sordid aspects, much as I did at Fountain Court. It would take a brave acquaintance to come bothering her at home. Any stalkers who followed her unbidden might give up at the end of such a horrible alley. In view of the time since Rufia had disappeared, I nearly gave up myself. What was the point of hoping somebody here would remember her?

I jumped: a shadow came out from a doorway. Quite suddenly I was passed by a little arthritic old woman with a basket on one arm. Such an ordinary apparition, her sheer normality was startling. I pulled myself together to run after her, calling out: “Granny, stop, will you!”

She looked round, squinted at me with near-blind eyes, then told me to get lost. If she could have scuttled away, she would have done. Instead, she kept going, at her slow but steady pace. Here was a ninety-year-old biddy in flat shoes and a ragged stole going out for a melon and a pinch of powder to take away her pains. She had no intention of talking to a strange young woman, let alone of being helpful.

“You must have known Rufia!”

The only reply was a humph . She would have said that if I had asked the way to the Forum, told her she had come into money, or pretended her landlord wanted to put up her rent. Her own long-lost love child would have received the same angry rebuff. She managed to creak up into the side street ahead of me and was gone on her way.

Human contact revived my confidence. I started knocking on the dismal doors, even though my first attempts brought no answer. Eventually I summoned a housewife who claimed no knowledge of the barmaid and I believed her, but she did suggest another woman, who pointed out where Rufia had once lived.

“Did you know her?”

“Not to speak to.”

Further questions were clearly unwelcome.

I crossed the alley, nearly turning my ankle in a rut. Thumping the door eventually brought a fragile, stooped man, who said I should speak to his wife. He closed the door on me. Just when I was about to give up and leave, it reopened; she emerged, looking fearful.

“It’s all right, I’m not a door-to-door fishwife, so you don’t have to pretend you have no call for razor clams.” She looked baffled. I reined in my wit. “Forget it. I am so sorry to bother you. I am an investigator. I have been told that Rufia used to live here.”

I could have pretended Rufia was a friend, but I was too young for the claim to look convincing and I knew too little about her. Everyone thinks informers are constantly adopting disguises, but you can tangle yourself up for no purpose that way, while you inhibit witnesses. So I use an honest approach.

Unexpectedly, the woman unbent. I wondered if she had been waiting all these years for somebody, anybody, to show an interest. But perhaps not, because she asked, “Menendra sent you?”

I was startled. “No. I’ve never met her.”

“I don’t like that one.”

“Any reason?” I demanded, recovering.

“No. Better come in then.” She let me through the door. I saw a room to one side that must be where she lived with her husband; I could hear him wheezing inside. Narrow stairs led upward. “You can take a look, if you have to. But I’ll come in with you. It isn’t right. There’s all her things.”

“Have you kept her possessions all this time?” I was amazed. “Was she your lodger?” I asked. As we went up the woman confirmed it, though she was too breathless to elaborate. “And you have never re-let the room? Really?” They were clearly as poor as most people in Rome. If the old fellow had ever worked, he was past it now. She looked younger, though none too sprightly.

“I didn’t like to. I’m not in a hurry to have other people. We get by. And who knows?”

Who knows what? I was struck by the oddity of this, but we had reached the top landing so I wanted to give all my concentration to where Rufia had lived. There were no more stairs beyond us even though I had seen from outside that the building had further stories. Anyone who lived higher up must have another entrance. I guessed that when Mucky Mule Mews had had more life, this part had once been a self-contained shop or a workshop, with living quarters above it.

The peeling door was not locked. The landlady pushed it open, then sent me in first. She followed only as far as the threshold, watching closely, but she let me enter to look around unhindered.

Sometimes such a room can feel as if its occupant, the dead person, has only just left that morning. Not here. There was no sense of her.

“Have you touched anything since Rufia disappeared?”

“No, it’s all just the same.”

Despite the landlady’s claim that I would find “all her things,” there was not much.

“Did anyone else ever come and take away possessions?”

She shook her head. I gazed at her, not so much doubting her as puzzled. She was, as I now took in properly, a worn, faded soul who looked as if she had worked hard all her life, probably for other people. She had thin colorless hair, scraped untidily together, brown liver spots, bony hands, a scrawny neck poking out of the loose opening to a dingy tunic. While she stood watching me, she plucked at her long sleeves and reorganized her tunic neck, pulling it tighter as if she felt cold.

I turned back to my survey of the room. It was small, of course. As a single working woman, I might have lived somewhere like this, had I not been fortunate to have a father with a tenement he wanted to fill. Otherwise I too would have spent my days in a dire cubicle that was part of someone else’s home, with no cooking facilities, a bucket for washing and sanitary purposes, a small high window I could not see out of though it had a pigeon looking in, one bed, one cupboard, a stool, a hook behind the door and a moth-eaten rag floor mat. Most of those, I guessed, came with the room.

So what was Rufia’s? An inventory of personal possessions could be written in three lines. Of course a barmaid would earn little and own little. But if I assumed Rufia had gone to work in her clothes the day she died, she had left behind hardly any other personal items. No spare tunic (well, that might be correct on a barmaid’s wages), no accessories, no cloak for winter.

At least she owned her food bowl, beaker, cheap bent cutlery. There was a pair of beaten-up backless slippers, kicked under the bed, one with a sole long gone. She had had small feet. With no other clothes to guide me, I could not picture the rest of her. On the rag rug, I noticed a hairpin. That was surprisingly nice. Probably some ordinary bone, though it masqueraded as ivory. I picked it up. Sniffed it, finding no relic of perfume, not that there could have been after all this time.

“Tell me about her.” I was holding the hairpin on the palm of my hand. “Was Rufia a girl who used cosmetics?”