Richard Blake - Conspiracies of Rome

‘That will be all,’ I said to Gretel as she seemed inclined to linger in the main room. My tastes didn’t yet run to threesomes, and I was beginning to suspect Lucius had no interest whatever in women. I changed back into my own clothes and took Lucius down the corridor to Maximin’s old suite.

Lucius stretched his legs in the chair he’d taken and drank a little to clear his throat. He was back to business as usual. ‘What he may have thought is a mystery into which we cannot enter,’ he began. ‘But we know all that Maximin did during his last day. He was called to the Lateran by the monk Ambrose. He was probably stopped by another message, sent by person or persons unknown. The slave Martin was involved in this deception, but I doubt as a principal. His function was to carry information back and take instructions. Maximin was then sent another message – almost certainly by the same – that probably called him again to the Lateran just as night was falling.

‘We know his movements in some detail from this house down to where he was jumped and then taken off and murdered. We can also imagine why the body was placed beside the Column of Phocas – it was meant as some kind of offering to the emperor. We can be sure those letters that both the dispensator and the Column of Phocas want – assuming, of course, they are not one and the same – were not with Maximin at any time during his last day. He hadn’t burnt them: there would have been evidence of that. But we can also at least suppose that he had read them the night before.

‘The letters weren’t with him on that last day, because he’d have had to hide them somewhere in the house. And we know that the house was searched by the professionals sent out by the dispensator who came for all his papers. Therefore,’ Lucius sat up, a bright smile dawning on his face, ‘therefore, he must have got rid of the letters some time between reading them and the beginning of our knowledge of his movements the following day.

‘What a fool I am not to have seen this. It’s so obvious. The Gods, it seems…’

In probable deference to me, he trailed off. I knew he wanted to claim that the Gods had spoken to him in their own way, after accepting his sacrifice.

He continued: ‘Did Maximin go out the previous evening?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I was with you. So, by the way, was Martin for much of the evening.’

But wait… I looked at the uncleaned boots over by the bed. It’s strange how you can look at things and not see them for what they are. Maximin must have gone out! Hadn’t I tripped over these boots, put out for cleaning, as I staggered in from the sacrifice? Maximin couldn’t have been wearing those boots when he was murdered. No – he’d been wearing his nice boots, and they’d been taken off with his body to the Lateran. Hadn’t it rained early the previous evening? Hadn’t it rained the evening when I had taken as read that he’d been in all night?

I explained this to Lucius. He sat, looking for all the world like a clever schoolboy. ‘I say, then,’ he cried softly, ‘those letters are with the Sisters of the Blessed Theodora. That’s where he went the night before he died. Why else would he have said he was going there when he went out to be murdered? Anything else, and he’d surely have had the letters with him when attacked.

‘No, Maximin was ordered in that last message to take the letters down to the Lateran. Before he could do that, he had to collect them. That meant going back to the Sisters of the Blessed Theodora. I don’t like jumping to conclusions, as you know. But I’ll break that rule tonight for my own reasons, and because the evidence is at least highly suggestive. He was going to the Sisters of the Blessed Theodora on his last evening because he’d already been there the evening before.’

He took another sip of his wine, repeating once more, and now with contemptuous relish, the name of the place. ‘If only the Column of Phocas could have been a shade more patient, whatever was in those letters might by now be before the whole world.’

‘But the abbess denied Maximin had been at the convent,’ I said.

‘Even if she had, why believe her unsupported word?’ Lucius asked with a curl of his lip. ‘Besides – though I don’t have our notes with me – she didn’t say that Maximin had never been to the convent. She only said he hadn’t been there on his last day.’

‘Then we must question her again,’ I said. ‘We can go as soon as the sun comes up.’

‘We haven’t much time,’ Lucius agreed. ‘But she might well tell us a direct lie if we ask a direct question. And then where does that leave us? Is there any objective evidence that Maximin was there?

‘I think we should get Marcella back out of her bed this moment, and start reconstructing Maximin’s probable movements from the time you and Martin left him.’

I thought suddenly of that slip of papyrus Maximin had used as a bookmark when I’d found him reading. What did this say? Was it blank? Was it some final message from him? Or was it the message that the child had brought?

I’d forgotten about it until now. It had passed me by in the confusion. But I thought more and more that it might have something to say that was valuable in one way or another.

‘Is the library here unlocked?’ Lucius asked after I’d told him about the thing.

It was unlocked. We crept in with a couple of lamps. If the old watchman were still awake and sober, he might come snooping. But this was only a guest looking up a reference. And the lord Basilius was with him.

I pulled down a book at random. It was an account of someone’s journey to the shores of the Baltic. It looked interesting in its own right, but was hardly the sort of reading material to satisfy Maximin. I looked along the titles on the bookcase, taking down everything that was religious and about the size of the book I’d seen with Maximin.

We found the slip in – of all things – a life of Saint Vexilla. It marked a passage in which she made her long defence before Diocletian of the double nature of Christ – as if the old tyrant would have cared one way or the other about that: it simply dated what was said to be a contemporary record to after the beginning of the Monophysite dispute a hundred and fifty years after her alleged death.

I moved the lamp closer and strained over the faint writing: ‘It was so good to see you again, and share memories of our dearest Jacob. You can trust absolutely in my discretion.’

There was no name at top or bottom of the message. I turned it over. In much fainter writing, I saw:

… tua nunc opera meae puellae

flendo turgiduli rubent ocelli

Lucius had been right about where Maximin had been. We had the woman! Serves the pious old philistine right if I now turned her convent upside down.

‘What now?’ I asked Lucius, back in my rooms.

He looked again at the message. ‘My slaves will be back at dawn from their all-night deception,’ he said. ‘Until then, I suggest we sleep. It’s been the most dreadfully long day, I’m sure you’ll agree. I, at least, am quite fagged out. Who knows when we’ll sleep tomorrow?’

Fully clothed, we lay down on my bed. I doubted I could sleep in all this excitement. But I was asleep almost before I was comfortable.

As agreed, the slaves returned just after dawn. They made a racket that got everyone up who wasn’t already awake, and they stank of wine and cheap scent.

Lucius and I washed and took a private breakfast in my rooms. The sun was glinting at us over the tiles of the wing opposite.

‘I don’t think we should send ahead,’ he suggested. ‘The more warning she has, the more she may think of another deception.’