Caveat emptor

51

The sooty-fingered boy who was mixing ink at the table in the Council clerk’s office had a lopsided mustache smeared beneath his nostrils. Ruso saw it just after the lad looked up in alarm and before the chain-mailed bulk of the guards came between them. Moments later the clerk was fiddling with the lock on Asper’s office door and muttering that this was all quite irregular: He had been told the investigation was over and he really needed permission from the quaestor.

He need not have worried. The cramped space contained nothing but furniture and disappointment. There was no money stashed away anywhere. No discernable notes about evidence or investigations. No lumps of iron with hammer scars on one end and the emperor’s profile engraved in reverse on the other.

Ruso put the last records box back on the shelf. Then he leaned against the wall, folded his arms, and stared around the room. If only he had Albanus here. Even if there were secrets hidden among the lists of names and figures in the records, the only thing Ruso could deduce from them was that neither Asper nor his brother was an overly tidy man.

The desk where Asper must have sat was the larger of the two. Carved legs, polished sheen on the surface, set squarely in the middle of the room facing the door. Designed to impress. The one that must have belonged to Bericus was crammed into the corner and had a chunk of wood wedged under one leg to level it up. Asper had a brass inkstand, Bericus a simple pot. He imagined the brothers had argued over more than Camma.

If only the man had spoken to her about his suspicions. If only he had left some hint of where he had found that coin mold. No one was going to admit to owning it, even if he could track down every metalworker in town to ask, and that would take hours. Camma’s neighborhood seemed to be full of them. The elderly bronzesmiths next door, the silversmiths farther down the street… then there were the repair shops and the wagon works at the stables, not to mention any number of forges scattered across the local farmsteads where smiths would call for trade or where laborers with some rudimentary skill might bash out repairs to damaged tools. It would be impossible to search them all and even if he did, what were the chances of him finding what the owners would be careful to hide?

Ruso leaned back in the chair and scowled at the door handle. It was possible that he was wasting his time. He was not even sure that the forgery business had anything to do with the murders. Caratius was as likely to be guilty as not. One thing of which he was certain, though, was that if he was going to find out anything else, he needed to do it quickly. He had fulfilled the procurator’s orders to look helpful. He should be on the way back to Londinium with a reassuring report about the links with Iceni. Tilla would be packing her bag in the morning and the Britons, to whom he had been seconded, were expecting him to leave.

One of them was desperate for him to leave.

For your own safety, get out of town.

If only he could track down the person who sent that message, he might find out what was really going on here. Whatever it was, he was convinced that Dias was involved in it.