Illegally Dead

26

I went back home and packed a bag. I’d got my appointment with Publius Novius the next day, and if I was going through to Bovillae now, with the likelihood of spending quite some time there tracking down someone who’d known the Brabbii, it’d be silly to shuttle back and forth to Castrimoenium. Agilleius Mundus would put me up for the asking, I was sure of that. I just hoped I wouldn’t have to sleep with the snoring coachman.

I said goodbye to Perilla — she’d got her own job in the meantime, setting up a woman-to-woman confab with the elusive Renia re Meton — and headed off.

Mundus’s was one of the older houses off the main square, a big rambling place you could get lost in. The old guy was out, but his equally decrepit major-domo assured me that there’d be no problem about staying. I stabled the mare, dumped my stuff in a guest bedroom overlooking the garden, checked on dinner times — having Meton in your household gets you twitchy about turning up punctually for meals — and set off for the dyers’ and fullers’ part of town, up by the Appian Gate. A handy locale, anyway: I’d give lunch a miss, especially if it meant eating with the slaughterhouse brigade filling the place, but no doubt a cup or two of wine at Veturinus’s would go down nicely in the run-up to dinner.

Okay. So off we went.

I was about a dozen yards from the front door when the back of my neck started prickling. I turned round quickly, but apart from a harassed young mum dragging a squalling kid along the pavement and a couple of bored slaves kicking their heels against the wall of a draper’s shop while they waited for the mistress to finish off her business inside and load them up for the trip home there was nothing to see. Certainly no familiar faces, and any self-respecting mugger with designs on my purse would have more sense than to try it on in broad daylight, especially in the middle of a law-abiding town like Bovillae. I shrugged and grinned. False alarm. Yeah, well: maybe I was just getting needlessly jumpy in my old age.

I’d got to the tenth dyer’s establishment, and got my tenth unequivocal and not-very-friendly brush-off, before I accepted the fact that this was going to be a real bummer of a job. Bugger! I should’ve used Alexis, even though he was still punch-drunk after his marathon with the spiders. It wasn’t just the lapse of time involved — twenty-one years, for a lot of the people I talked to, would be three-quarters of a lifetime — it was the purple stripe: like I say, the dyers are a clannish profession, they stick together and they don’t like strangers shoving their noses in, whatever the reason. Especially purple-striped Romans, who’ve always been about as popular generally in Latium as a cold in the head. I got the impression that quite a few of the older guys and guyesses — and some of them must’ve been tramping mantles when Tiberius was in rompers — could’ve helped if they’d wanted to, but one look at the stripe and an earful of the accent and their lips were zipped.

Shit.

The sun was definitely on the wane when I called it a day and trudged back to the Appian Gate and an unearned but badly-needed half jug of wine. Trouble was, even if I did cut my losses now and send Alexis in, I’d queered his pitch good an proper. If someone else did turn up asking for news of the Brabbian family he’d get the bum’s rush and the lifted finger.

Bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger!

Well, at least the wineshop was empty again. I’d hit the slot between the lunchtime rush and the evening binge, when the slaughterers would be croaking cattle and stiffing sheep. The only bodies in residence were the Veturini, father and son.

‘Half a jug of the Bovillan, pal,’ I said, heaving my weary carcass up onto a stool. ‘And some of that sausage, if you’ve got it.’

The big guy hefted the wine flask and poured while I fumbled in my belt-pouch for coins. ‘Hard day, sir?’ he said, putting the jug and cup down on the counter in front of me.

‘Tell me, friend.’ I tipped the first of the jug into the cup and drank. Gods, I needed that! ‘You haven’t heard of the Brabbii, I suppose?’

‘Nah.’ He unwrapped the sausage and reached for a knife. ‘No Brabbii around here for twenty years. That right, Dad?’

‘What?’ I almost spilled my wine.

Veturinus Junior lowered the knife. ‘You okay, sir?’

‘Yeah. Yeah.’ Oh, gods! Please, please, gods! ‘Ah…that’d be the two brothers, would it? Lupus and Senecio?’

‘That’s right.’ He was looking at me strangely. Well, under the circumstances that was fair enough.

‘Proper bad lots those two were,’ Veturinus Senior said. He was still perched on his stool at the far end of the bar, but this time he had a winecup in front of him. ‘Specially Lupus. Got himself chopped for murder, did Lupus, and his brother went to the boats. My son-in-law defended them, him and his partner. Not that they could do much.’

‘You knew them, then?’ I said.

‘The Brabbii? In and out of here all the time, from when they could lift a winecup.’ Old Veturinus grinned. ‘And they lifted plenty of them, I can tell you. Senecio, he was sweet on our Veturina. I thought she might have him for a while, only she’d more sense. Then Hostilius came on the scene, and that was that.’

Jupiter! ‘They, uh, have a sister at all?’ I said.

Veturinus Junior was frowning now, and he’d set the sausage knife down. ‘What’s going on here?’ he said. ‘What’s this about?’

Well, it was a fair cop. And I couldn’t keep up the pretence of the bar-fly shooting the conversational breeze forever. On the other hand, saying that I’d been asked by the Castrimoenian senate to investigate Lucius Hostilius’s death and that the two people currently being held responsible were the Veturini’s daughter and son and sister and brother respectively didn’t seem such a sharp idea. ‘Uh…my name’s Valerius Corvinus,’ I said. ‘Quintus Libanius over in Castrimoenium asked me to look into the murder of a woman up at Caba. I thought she might be a relative of the Brabbii.’

‘What, Habra?’ Veturinus Senior said. ‘Habra’s been murdered?’

My stomach went cold. ‘There was a sister called Habra?’

‘Sure. Younger sister. Haven’t seen her for years, mind, she left Bovillae after the trial and hasn’t been back since, to my knowledge. So she was up in Caba, was she, and someone’s done her in?’ He chuckled. ‘I’m not surprised. She was the worst of the three.’

‘Yeah? And why was that?’

He made a sprinkling movement with his fingers. ‘Doctoring. You know what I mean. No one ever caught her, mind, but everyone knew she did it. Girls who got themselves in trouble, they knew to go straight to Habra.’

‘She was an abortionist?’

‘That’s the fancy name, aye. That and worse, maybe, although if there was worse she was careful. She had the trade from her mother. A proper old witch she was, when she was alive. I remember — ’

‘Did she come in here? Habra? With her brothers, I mean?’

Another chuckle. ‘Did she come in here? You hear that, Marcus? Oh, yes, sir, you couldn’t keep her out. Habra could sink a half jug with the best of them. And she was fond of her brothers, I’ll give her that. Stuck by them right the way through the trial and after all the way to the end, always back and forward to the lock-up seeing they’d enough to eat and drink. I couldn’t fault her there, she was a good sister.’

‘Your son-in-law’s partner. Quintus Acceius. He ever drop in for a cup of wine?’

‘‘Course he did, along with Hostilius. I told you, Hostilius was no stranger, he liked his wine and he only lived up the road. Didn’t come as often after he married my daughter, but until they moved to Castrimoenium the two of them’d be in here of an evening, the three of them sometimes, oh, three or four times a month, easy. That was why the Brabbii boys went to them when they got into trouble. Who else would they ask?’

‘So, uh, Acceius would know Habra, then?’

‘Well enough. Not that they were friendly, mind.’ Another chuckle. ‘Not in that way, Habra’d no time for that sort of nonsense and Acceius wouldn’t’ve looked at her twice, a good-looking man like him. But he’d know her, certainly he would. Specially come the time of the trial.’

I sat back on my stool. Bugger! The guy’d been lying through his teeth after all! And even if, for some reason, he hadn’t recognised her physically when she’d attacked him he’d known of her existence. So why had he lied? It had to have something to do with the trial; everything came back to that…

Abortionist. Acceius’s first wife had died in childbirth, round about the same time, and he’d married again, what? a couple of years later, was it? And Seia Lucinda had been quite a catch, financially, socially and probably sexually. Convenient, right? Too convenient. And much too coincidental to be coincidence…

Except that men who murder their wives, or have them murdered, don’t keep marble busts of them in their private studies. And they don’t break down — genuinely break down, as far as I’d been able to tell — when a stranger refers to the murdered woman twenty years on.

It didn’t make sense. None of it. The only thing I knew for certain was that when Quintus Acceius strangled Brabbia Habra he knew exactly who he was killing.

‘You want the sausage now, sir?’ Veturinus Junior, with the plate.

‘Hmm?’ I refocused my eyes. ‘Oh. Yeah. Yeah, thanks, pal. It’s good sausage.’

‘Real Bovillan sausage, that. You can keep your Lucanian.’

I turned back to the old man. ‘You remember anything about the trial?’

‘Nah. ‘Fraid I can’t help you there.’ Veturinus Senior sipped his wine. ‘I’d enough to do, keeping this place going, without gadding off down to the courts. And why should I? I said: the Brabbii may’ve been customers, good customers, but that was just business. I wouldn’t’ve trusted either further than I could throw them, and I poured a full cup of my best to the Good Lady Venus when my daughter split with Senecio and took up with Lucius Hostilius. Proper peeved he was at the time, but there wasn’t nothing he could do about it. She had a lucky escape, as things turned out. They were guilty as hell, and good riddance to the pair of them.’

‘The prosecutor was Publius Novius.’

‘That’s right. He was the only other lawyer in Bovillae, still is, the old bugger’ll outlast us all. Proper sharp he is, too, does a roaring trade. You don’t put much past Novius.’

‘Just how straight is he? As a matter of interest.’

The old man gummed his winecup. ‘Oh, well, now,’ he said. ‘We’re talking lawyers, sir, they’re another breed. He’s straight enough by his lights, far as I know, but like I said he’s sharp, and he knows his business backwards. Not one to let a chance slip, if you get me, so long as he thinks he won’t be caught out. Hostilius was different, I’d a lot of time for him. That partner of his, mind…well, him and Novius had a lot in common. Smart as a whip, sure, but a pusher, desperate to get on, up to every trick he could get away with and too smooth-tongued by half. No, I wasn’t too taken with young Quintus Acceius.’

‘You remember his wife? His first wife?’

‘Nah, I never met her, can’t even remember the name, and the family wasn’t from around here. Father was in the perfume trade in a small way down in Capua. She didn’t keep well, died having their first.’

‘He was fond of her?’

Veturinus shrugged. ‘She was his wife, that’s all I know, sir, and like I said I never met the girl. I never heard nothing to the contrary, certainly.’

‘How about the second wife? Seia Lucinda?’

‘Oh, now.’ He chuckled. ‘She was a different kettle of fish altogether. Big family around here, the Seii. Poultry breeders, supply most of the local butchers and send out as far as Rome. She was a catch, right enough, although word at the time was she’d done the chasing. A wild girl, young Seia was. They made a proper pair, those two.’

Yeah, that checked with what Gabba had told me. Interesting. ‘Did — ?’

— but that was as far as I got before the door opened and we got the Invasion of the Slaughterers, Part Two. Things got rapidly hectic, and I turned back with a sigh to my wine and sausage. Ah, well; I couldn’t complain, certainly not. I’d got a name for the dead woman, cast-iron proof that Acceius had known her, and possibly — possibly — the scent of a reason why he’d want her dead and burned. There were still some googlies in there, though, by the gods there were, especially with old Veturinus’s description of the younger Acceius. Even if the guy was a liar to his boots — which he was — and guilty of something — which he also was — a lot of that just didn’t square. We’d just have to see what the chat with Publius Novius produced.

I spent a leisurely half hour finishing off the wine and sausage and pushed the cup and plate across the counter. Veturinus Junior looked up from his conversation with one of the slaughterers.

‘You want a refill, sir?’ he said.

‘No, that’ll do me for the present, pal.’ I stood up. ‘You have a latrine I can use?’

‘Out the front door and round the side to the back. Thanks for your custom, Valerius Corvinus. Give our regards to my sister when you see her.’

‘I’ll do that.’ I left.

The latrine was a lean-to affair on the far side of a small yard full of the sort of junk you get in nine back yards out of ten; stuff that’s either waiting to be thrown out properly and never will be or that someone thought might come in handy at some future date but wouldn’t get round to using until the Greek kalends: empty wine jars, the remains of a cart that looked like it’d sat there providing a home for beetles and wood-lice for the past thirty years, a bedstead frame that was more rust than honest iron and a pile of nameless rubbish forming the remains of a half-hearted bonfire. The latrine itself, though, was relatively up-market, with cement flooring, a hole-in-the-floor toilet and a urinal slab with the guttering leading into a collecting bucket. I used the slab, adjusted my tunic and turned round…

‘Hey, Roman.’

There were two of them, big guys, filling the space between the dead cart and the wall of the yard, blocking the entrance to the alleyway that connected it with the street. The one on the left was red-headed, and although I couldn’t quite place him he looked vaguely familiar. On the other hand, I’d no problem recognising the two as a pair because I’d seen them both earlier that morning, propping up the wall outside the draper’s near Mundus’s house waiting for someone who obviously hadn’t been their mistress to come out. Mind you, on that occasion they hadn’t been swinging blackjacks and looking like they were just dying to try them out on me. Little details like that tend to fix your attention.

Bugger; so much for premature senility clouding the judgment. When the hairs on the back of my neck had prickled, I should’ve listened.

The guy on the left took a step forward. ‘Broken arms or broken ribs, friend?’ he said. ‘Which is it to be? Your choice.’

Something clicked in my brain. Finally. ‘You’re one of the slaves from the Hostilius place,’ I said. ‘I saw you when I was over there last, three days ago. Who sent you? Castor or the widow?’

‘Oh, now, then.’ He paused, glanced at his pal, then back to me. ‘Okay, so maybe you don’t have a choice after all.’

Slowly, deliberately, he tucked the blackjack into the belt of his tunic, reached behind his back, drew out a knife and grinned.

Oh, shit. Nice one, Corvinus. I looked around for a weapon. Zilch. Whatever junk the Veturini, senior and junior, had thrown out over the past thirty years or so hadn’t included lengths of two-by-four or useful sections of lead piping. Or not within grabbing distance, anyway. Of course, there was the collecting bucket…

They were moving as I turned, but I got a grip on the thing and swung it just as Blackjack was closing in on my right side. Stale urine might not figure all that prominently in the military manual as an offensive weapon — not offensive in the army sense of the word, anyway — but a gallon of it in the face at point-blank range ain’t something you can ignore, and Blackjack reeled back spluttering and cursing. The wooden bucket itself caught Red-head on the shoulder: not enough to do any real damage, but it threw him off-line. I moved in and made a grab for his wrist, driving my own shoulder into his chest.

He ducked under my left armpit and shoved hard. My heels met the concrete ledge of the latrine floor and I went arse over tip backwards, pinning the guy’s head between the inside of my elbow and my chest, my right hand pushing down against his neck, forcing it lower. There was a dull thud as his skull hit the floor. He grunted and went limp.

One down and out, or hopefully so, anyway. I rolled sideways, letting go and trying to ignore the stab of pain as my elbow met the concrete; just as Blackjack came at me for a second shot. There was a flash of metal in his right hand: another knife. Fuck; we weren’t out of the woods yet, not by a long way. I lashed out desperately with my foot, felt it connect against his shin and saw him stagger. Good, but not good enough; and I was still on my back.

The bucket was where I’d dropped it, just within reach. I grabbed it and swung it round, bottom up, as the knife came down straight for my chest. There was a thunk! as the point bit deep into the wood. I held the bucket steady for a split second, then heaved upwards and to the side, wrenching the knife from his hand, and tossed the whole boiling away from us as hard as I could. Blackjack swore and grabbed at my throat, thumbs pressing against my windpipe. I brought my knee up into his groin, and he gasped; his grip relaxed and I rolled again, forcing myself out from under him into clear space, scrabbling onto my hands and knees, then to my feet.

I was just in time. I’d scarcely got upright before he hit me again with a roundhouse punch that caught my shoulder, knocking me sideways. I managed a straight left that rattled his teeth but didn’t stop him, and he came at me with both fists swinging…

‘Hey!’

He turned his head; not by much, but the break in concentration was enough. I planted another left, then swung a punch of my own that met square with the side of his jaw and sent him sprawling against the latrine wall.

‘What the hell’s happening here?’

One of the slaughterhouse lads, latrine-bound himself; no quick thinker, obviously, because he was just standing at the exit to the yard like a bovine third actor in a play, but it was enough for Blackjack. The guy staggered to his feet, broke into a stumbling run, pushed him out of the way and hared off down the alley fast as a professional sprinter.

I moved over to the nearest wall and leaned against it, gasping my lungs out.

The slaughterer hurried over. ‘You okay, sir?’ he said.

‘Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.’ I caught my breath, finally, and stood up straight. ‘Thanks, pal.’

…which was when he noticed Red-head, and his eyes widened.

‘He dead?’

‘Search me. I was too busy to check. You want to do it for me?’

He flashed me a worried look, then did, turning the body over. The forehead was a mess of blood and the eyes were closed. ‘Nah, he’s breathing,’ he said. ‘Just stunned.’

‘Pity.’

That got me another nervous look, but I ignored it. I wasn’t feeling too charitable at that point towards Red-head, myself.

‘So what happened?’

‘They jumped me. After my purse.’ No sense in complicating things, not with Brain of Bovillae here, anyway. I was still in one piece, relatively unscathed, with all my bits attached, and that was enough to be thankful for. ‘Do me a favour, pal, you and your mates inside.’

‘Sure.’

There was a length of half-decent rope beside the remains of the cart. I picked it up, took it over to Red-head and used the two ends to tie his wrists and ankles. ‘Keep an eye on him in case he wakes up, see he doesn’t do a runner, while I nip round to the local Watch-house and have someone collect him.’

‘You’ve got it. No problem.’ He watched with slack-jawed fascination while I tied the final knot and pulled it tight.

‘Great. Oh, and if you want to use the facilities you’d better replace the bucket.’ Not that, with the latrine floor already awash with the best part of a gallon of fuller’s delight, there was much point to that, really, but it’s the thought that counts.

I left him staring and headed for the alley.

So: Veturina or Castor? One of them, certainly, and my bets were on the second: Red-head had been on his way to the east wing when I’d seen him, so he was probably Castor’s slave rather than Veturina’s, and a physical attempt to put me out of the game seemed more Castor’s style than his sister’s. On the other hand, I didn’t trust Veturina the length of my arm, and I wouldn’t be too surprised to find I was wrong. At least I’d got one of the murdering bastards alive, and this time I wouldn’t object too strongly about what methods the authorities used to get the truth from him.