Caveat emptor

11

Since coming back to Britannia, Ruso seemed to have discovered an ability to frighten people. Yesterday he had scared off two small boys in the street, and today he had managed to terrify an innkeeper’s wife. She now sat opposite him, weeping over a kitchen table still scattered with vegetable peelings and cat hair. The husband sat next to her, grimfaced. His defense for dumping a dead man and then pretending to find him again seemed to be that they were only trying to help and, “We didn’t know what else to do.”

Privately Ruso felt that this sentence would have been more honest if it had ended, “We didn’t know what else to do to get the procurator’s reward,” but for the moment he was more interested in finding out what the elusive Julius Asper had been doing here all alone in the first place.

“One of the boatmen sent him here yesterday morning,” said the innkeeper.

“Which boatman?”

The man shook his head. “He weren’t looking too well even then. Said he’d got a headache. And he didn’t have no luggage.” He gestured toward his wife. “If I’d been here I’d have sent him packing, but she felt sorry for him.”

The wife sniffed. “He looked awful poorly, sir. I said we’d call a doctor, but he said no. I did ask, sir.”

“He wanted a private room so he could lie down till he felt better. And if anybody come calling, we was to say he weren’t here. So we did.”

“Did he say why?”

The wife shook her head. “I gave him a cold compress for his head, sir. I thought I was doing right.”

“Did he mention anyone else? Another man? Or a woman?”

“No, sir.” She looked at her husband. “I knew we should have called a doctor.”

“He didn’t want a bloody doctor!” snapped the husband “He didn’t want anybody. We done everything he asked and then he went and died on us.”

“So when I came looking for two men yesterday…” prompted Ruso.

“If he’d died a bit earlier, you could have had him,” said the man. “We wouldn’t have had none of this bother.”

“You wouldn’t have had it if you’d told me the truth in the first place. Somebody might have been able to save his life.”

“We didn’t know you was official.”

“I told you who I was,” Ruso pointed out.

“But how did we know you wasn’t lying?”

“Perhaps,” said Ruso, losing patience, “when I told you that if you saw either of them, to send a message to the procurator’s office?”

The man said nothing. The wife wiped her eyes with her apron. Ruso glanced across to where a row of small scraggy creatures had been skewered along a spit and were now shriveling and browning above the fire. In the absence of fur or feathers, it was hard to guess what they were, and probably wiser not to speculate.

“Go back to this headache for a minute,” he said. “Did he complain of anything else? Nausea, disturbed vision, fever? How about a slurred voice? Difficulty moving? Nosebleed, ear discharge?”

“He just said it was a headache,” said the man. “We don’t poke our noses into-”

The wife clutched his arm to stop him. “Not fever, sir,” she said. “I know fever when I see it. He did have a bit of a limp, but I didn’t see any of them other things.”

Ruso nodded. Perhaps the body would reveal more when it was properly examined. “So you found him dead after I’d gone?”

“About the third hour of the night I saw a light under the door,” the man explained. “I went in to make sure he weren’t asleep with the candle lit. You can’t be too careful in a place like this. And there he was, halfway out of bed. Staring at me. Stone dead.”

The wife shuddered. “I had to shut his eyes, sir. It was horrible. We didn’t know what to do.”

Despite this repeated claim, it seemed to Ruso that at least one of them had known exactly what to do.

“So we went through his clothes,” said the man, “trying to find out where he come from, see? If he had any family.”

Or if he had anything worth stealing. “And what did you find?”

“Nothing, sir. He didn’t have a thing except what he was standing up in when he come.”

“So, assuming for a moment that you’re telling the truth, whose idea was it to dump him in the alley and claim the reward as if you’d never lied to me?”

“Hers,” said the husband, just as the wife said, “It was his.”

Ruso got to his feet. “Show me his room.”

The room was as drab and cramped as he had expected from the state of the kitchen. The door opened outward to avoid collision with the furniture. What looked like an old sail sagged between the rafters, presumably nailed up to keep out drafts but now giving the impression that a heavy shower of dirt would fall onto the guests below if it were moved. The bed itself filled most of the room and was wide enough to accommodate several sleepers huddled for warmth under the single blanket. There was only one pillow, with an unpleasant stain in the dent where a head would have been.

On the floorboards next to the bed a chipped cup was still half full of water. Ruso sniffed it and was none the wiser. The rough wooden box crammed against the far wall contained only a broken comb.

“We haven’t touched nothing, sir,” said the man.

Ruso did not greatly want to touch anything, either, but forced himself to pick up the pillow and sniff the stain. The smell reminded him of work.

The small window was open. He glanced down into the yard. Whoever had named that dog after the hound guardian of the Underworld-presumably not its owners-had a sense of humor. Unlike its namesake, the Cerberus now lumbering to its feet in the yard had only one head. However, to make up for this, it had a front leg missing. Another ailing stray taken in by the woman whose sniffling was starting to annoy him.

Ruso ducked his head back before the dog decided to bark at him again and surveyed the room. Whatever Julius Asper’s reasons for being here, he felt sorry for him. This was a miserable place for a man to spend his final hours.

There was nothing under the blanket, but when the innkeeper and his wife folded back the second half of the mattress for his inspection, he spotted something lying on the floor between the slats of the bed. He lay down on the floor, reached under the bed, and pulled out a writing tablet garnished with gray fluff.

“Ah,” said the man. “He did ask for some writing things to do a message.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

“I forgot.”

Evidently the innkeeper had been hoping to erase the writing tablet and reuse it.

“He never gave us nothing to send, though.”

“So you don’t know who he was writing to?”

“No, sir.”

Ruso turned it toward the light and saw “ROOM XXVII” inked on the outside. He flipped the leaves open. A couple of lines of script trailed over the wax in a gentle curve, as if the letters were running downhill. The straggly squiggles seemed to include parts of an alphabet Ruso had never met before. He snapped the letter shut. He would look at it later. In the meantime he followed the owners back down to the kitchen, reflecting that if they had needed to smuggle the body up these stairs instead of down them, they would have been forced to leave it where it was, treat it with respect, and cause him a lot less trouble.

The thought of having to break the bad news to Camma took away any sense of satisfaction Ruso might have felt at finding the missing man. It seemed that after arriving in Londinium, Asper had made no attempt to deliver the money or to report its theft to the procurator. Perhaps Tilla was right: The man was himself a thief who had abandoned his family. Or perhaps he had been betrayed and murdered by a greedy brother. However he had ended up here, the sorry tale was unlikely to be of much comfort to his widow.

Asper was beyond help, but it might still be possible to trace the cash. “The money that he was carrying with him was marked,” he said, improvising. “It can all be identified. So if you have it, or you know what happened to it, I suggest you hand it over now, because if you try to spend it you’ll be in even deeper water than you are already.”

The man looked at his wife. “Two denarii, weren’t it?”

The wife’s nod was a little too hasty.

The man reached for the keys dangling from his belt. “I’ll fetch it.” As he headed off somewhere to find his takings, he called over his shoulder, “I don’t suppose there’ll be compensation?”

“No,” agreed Ruso, who had hoped to flush out considerably more than two denarii, an outrageous overcharge for a very shabby room. “I don’t suppose there will.”

When the husband had gone, the wife abandoned the small creatures on the spit, placed her reddened face alarmingly close to Ruso, and whispered, “Sir! Sir, please, I beg you-just take two denarii. Take whatever you want. Please.”

Ruso loosened her grip on his arm. “I’m not asking for a bribe,” he said. “All the procurator wants is the money that Asper had with him when he went missing.”

“But it’s not there, sir!” She dropped her voice and mouthed almost silently, “He didn’t have no money.”

“But-”

She nodded toward the door. “I told Grumpy that, just to shut him up. The man said he had a friend what would pay the bill, and he looked honest, and I felt sorry for him, and-”

She broke off as her husband came back into the room carrying a shallow wooden box. He placed it on the table and lifted the lid to reveal a series of compartments for different denominations of coin. “Two denarii, sir,” he reminded Ruso. “Taken in good faith by my wife, who has got me and her into all this trouble and caused you a whole lot of bother because she can’t bloody say no.”

Ruso was conscious of the wife’s eyes on him as he scooped up seven or eight small silver coins. He began to flip them over in his palm. He dropped three back into the box, picked one out, then flipped over a couple more before holding a second one up, squinting at it, and pretending to find what he was looking for. Then he tugged open his own purse, found enough coin to make up the value, and placed it in the correct compartments of the box before closing the lid.

“Oh, thank you, sir!” gasped the wife.

“How do you tell?” asked the innkeeper, looking as though he had just seen some sort of magic trick and was not sure he believed it.

“It’s confidential,” Ruso told him.

“So what happens now?”

“I’ll examine the body and report to the office,” said Ruso. “They’ll have to decide whether they believe your story. Whatever happens, you’ve lied repeatedly and wasted official time. Do you two have the faintest idea what the penalty is for getting in the way of a procurator’s inquiry?”

A tear slid down the woman’s cheek. The man was twisting a fistful of tunic into a knot as he said, “No, sir.”

“I didn’t think so,” said Ruso, who had no idea either. “But if you’re still lying, it’ll be even worse. So is there anything else you want to tell me before it’s too late?”

In the silence that followed, Ruso reflected that he was sounding like his father. “The name of the boatman would be a good start.”

Finally the woman said, “It was Tetricus, sir.”

The innkeeper muttered something under his breath that sounded very much like “Stupid cow.”

“Tetricus,” repeated Ruso, guessing Tetricus would not be bringing them any more business and wondering if he was one of the boatmen who had denied all knowledge of Asper and his brother yesterday. “Where can I find him?”

The woman glanced at her husband, then said, “He’ll be out on the river, sir. But after dark he lodges somewhere behind the grain warehouse on the corner.” The look the innkeeper gave her suggested she would be sorry for this later.

“Good,” said Ruso, adding, “At least one of you has some sense,” although he doubted that his approval would offer her any protection once the door had closed behind him. “You’ll be hearing from us,” he continued. “In the meantime, get that room scrubbed clean, wash the bedding, and air the mattress. It’s a disgrace. If the accommodation inspectors see that, they’ll close you down.”

The man looked up. “What accommodation inspectors?”

“The ones who are about to go around checking lodgings ready for the visit of the Imperial household,” invented Ruso. “Who, frankly, wouldn’t put their lowliest turd collector in a room like that.”

According to the unemployed boatmen whose board game Ruso interrupted, Tetricus had been seen heading upriver just after dawn. Nobody knew where he was going, or indeed whether he had subsequently returned, rowed past, and traveled in the opposite direction. Despite the promise of the cheapest rates on the river, Ruso rejected the offers of a boat trip on which they might be lucky enough to spot him. He left a message instead. He ought to break the news to Camma. And although she was unlikely to care, he would have to ask her if she could read the letter, or if she had ever heard of Room Twenty-seven.

Mulling over his morning’s experiences as he strode back up the sunlit street, he decided that being an official investigator was much easier than being a doctor. It was the sort of job where you could impress people without knowing very much about anything at all. On the other hand, it seemed to consist largely of making other people miserable. Tilla was right about one thing: The sooner it was over, the better.