Lindsey Davis - Graveyard of the Hesperides

He was more refined than the funeral director I had recently taken to using for unidentified corpses. Unlike the disreputable Fundanus, little about Silvinus suggested he played with the dead for secret sexual pleasure. This did not make him entirely civilized. “Keeping the skeletons for a while,” as requested by Manlius Faustus, meant they were disrespectfully jumbled in a large chest, so broken-up and higgledy-piggledy they could never be reassigned to sets. “So what will you do if a relative is found? If they want to reclaim one of the bodies?”

“Ask pertinent questions to weed out a description, then use my skill to put together a few bones that look nearest.”

“In fact, we thought the males all looked similar in build. Maybe they worked in the same profession, or came from the same village.”

“Want my expert opinion?” he offered, carrying on whether I wanted it or not. “One of these men’s nasal bones survived, which doesn’t always happen. See…” He rummaged merrily among the skulls, tossing aside the noseless ones. “He must have had a hooked snout; could have been eastern. Possibly even North African, but if so, from the Greek end of the Mediterranean.”

“You are talking Egypt?” I suggested.

“This nose would look very appropriate in the Nile basin. But it’s only a guess. Half the republican Senate had a beak like this, if you believe the Forum statues.”

“It would cause a stir if I said five senators were buried under the Garden of the Hesperides. A cynic might mutter in that case it was no surprise nobody noticed them missing for the past ten years. But disappearing senators are unlikely … I can tell you take an unusually keen interest in features,” I complimented Silvinus.

“The only way the dead can communicate. ‘ When I was alive I looked like this. Drink up and enjoy your time, for you will soon be ashes’…”

Silvinus himself had a bald head and significant ears. Perhaps they helped him catch the faint sigh if ever a corpse had been brought in mistakenly. It would prevent that nightmare nervous people have, where they are helplessly buried or burned alive.

“Now, Flavia Albia, to work! What are you looking for?”

“A little fragile scrap of rib. One of the vigiles told us it was a chicken bone.”

“Ah, that!”

“You know what I mean?”

“I saw it.”

“I hope you didn’t throw it out?”

“Oh no.” Did a strange expression appear then? “Your man miscalled it.” Well, that was Morellus. “Definitely not poultry in my humble opinion-which is never wrong. Are you here because you suspect as much, Albia?”

“I don’t know what I suspect,” I answered honestly. “I feel uneasy-the more I think about it, the more I have to take a second look.”

“Well, that’s understandable!” he commented obliquely.

Silvinus began excavating in his assembly of bones, which took a long time since the rib in question was so small. At first he followed the well-known masculine route of tossing stuff around unsystematically, soon losing track of what he had searched already. Bones were broken in the process. Eventually I managed to prod him into being more methodical. When he had searched through and set aside about a quarter of the remains, he reached in and picked out what we wanted.

I managed not to say wasn’t he glad he did it my way? I just smiled and thanked him. Better keep him sweet. I still needed his expertise.

The fragment looked as much like a chicken bone as when I first saw it. I reminded Silvinus that the skeletons had been found in the backyard of a bar, where all manner of food leftovers could have been chucked out for decades. “It seems reasonable that this should be a relic of somebody’s Chicken Vardana.”

“Doubt it. A customer might toss a small bone over his shoulder onto the ground if he was badly brought up. Invariably, a dog or cat or vermin would remove it,” Silvinus demurred. “How many rats do you think live in the average eating house?”

“Too many! And indeed the bones were buried deep. I accept what you say. So what is it?”

“Did you dig up any other food remains?” I had agreed with him, but he kept pressing his point, clearly proud of his skill. “Bars cannot afford to hurl their cooking products out into an area where people will sit. Customers will be put off by awful smells, and scavengers running over their feet. No, no, cookshops and bars will take their rubbish to the nearest dump outside. Let the rats run wild at the end of the street or, better, in someone else’s street.”

“Right. So was this some hasty sacrifice, buried with the dead?” While he lectured me, I was holding the tiny piece of bone in the palm of my hand. “I suppose I am now half-prepared for your verdict, Silvinus,” I hinted.

He accepted the prod. “It was a kind of tragic sacrifice. A soul was given to the gods … That is from a child, Flavia Albia.” He broke the news gently, so I was braced. “In my view, that is a rib from a baby.”

I let out an unintended sigh.

Having broken the news, the undertaker went into unrestrained macabre detail: “It was probably unborn. Could have been lying in the pelvis and became separated when the workmen were digging.”

“It’s true they were not careful with the first body they found. The woman had perhaps been disturbed; a lot of her is missing.”

Silvinus would not be deterred. “Alternatively, sometimes in burials the body’s gases expel a fetus into the grave. Don’t ask me how I know about that.” Pointedly, I did not ask, so he told me anyway. “If you are digging a hole for a funerary urn and you come across an old grave, you can occasionally find the baby has been pushed out between a woman’s thighs. I mean, after she was put in the ground.”

“Alive?” I revised my opinion: all undertakers are gruesome. “I mean the baby.”

“Not for long!” If he saw my face, he ignored my qualms. “Almost certainly the fetus would be dead when its mother was interred. However, there is a school of thought that expulsion can happen even while a female corpse is being laid out. It’s a horror story directors use to scare their apprentices.”

Since I was not his apprentice, I did not need scaring. I checked that he was certain about the bone. “It’s from a fetus then. Once we knew what we were excavating, care was taken. Why did we only find one rib?”

“How old is your burial?”

“Ten years.”

“No coffins?”

“Bare earth.”

“That’s your answer. Lost over time. All the other baby bones must have decayed completely in the soil.”

“Even the little skull?” I really did not want the child to have been beheaded like its mother.

“The head would be soft and unformed, remember. So yes, it could vanish into the earth. I don’t know why this single rib should have survived on its own. No reason. Just coincidence.”

I felt the structure of my case shift. If the skeleton was Rhodina, she had been pregnant. From the size of the child’s rib, Silvinus believed she must have been showing, and more likely into her final trimester, so everyone who saw her would be aware of it. This could be so relevant. All kinds of dynamics might have been altered by her expecting a baby. It could be simple: this was a reason why she wanted to free herself from Old Thales. It could be why he wanted to get rid of her . Or it could have affected other people.

Several suspects in my disreputable cast list might have felt annoyed or threatened by the potential child. Sometimes repercussions will depend on who the baby’s father is, though with a bar waitress there was no way she could have known. Did that matter? When a father is named by a woman, it can stick, however ridiculous her claim. She couldn’t prove who was responsible-but nor could anyone prove it was not the man she named. What might matter in my investigation was who she said he was, and whether he accepted it.