Jupiter Myth

II

I'm sorry to drag you out, sirs," murmured the centurion. He must be wishing he had kept quiet. He was totting up how much additional documentation he had let himself in for, and had realized belatedly that his commander would give him all Hades for involving the civil powers.

"You did the right thing." I had never seen Hilaris back off from trouble. Strange to think that this man had served in the army (Second Augusta, my own legion, twenty years before me). He was part of the Invasion force too, at a time for pragmatic dealings with the locals. But three decades of civic bureaucracy had turned him into that rare highflying wonder, a public servant who followed the rules. Even rarer, instead of stagnating uselessly out here, he had mastered the art of making the rules work. Hilaris was good. Everyone said so.

By contrast the centurion covered his ineptitude by moving slowly, saying little, and doing even less. He was wide-bodied and short-necked. He stood with his feet planted wide apart, his arms hanging loose. His neckerchief was tucked into his armor with just enough untidiness to express contempt for authority, yet his boots were buffed and his sword and dagger looked sharp. He would be the type who sat around obsessively honing his weapons and complaining about higher offices. I doubted he grumbled at the Emperor. Vespasian was a soldiers' general.

Vespasian would know that the army is stuffed with such characters: not as good as those in charge would like, but sound enough to coast along in a far-off province where the frontiers were fairly quiet and open rebellion was no longer an issue. The legions in Britain carried no dead wood. In a real crisis, something could be made of this centurion.

We had a crisis here. Correctly, the centurion had sensed it. And to be fair, he responded properly. He had noticed the white circle around the dead man's neck where a torque had habitually sat, and he saw the grazes where the heavy twisted metal must have been wrenched off by a thief or thieves. He realized this was serious. It was not the theft itself that made for trouble, but in tribal Britain heavy gold and electrum neck torques were worn only by the rich and well-born. That torque, now missing, was a mark of rank. Persons of status do not usually die shabby deaths alone in taverns, whatever their culture. Something was up. So the centurion had sent a runner to the governor.

Julius Frontinus was in his first year of office here. When the message came, he was eating breakfast during an early-morning meeting with his right-hand man. We all shared the official residence so I was there too. "Gaius, go and see if you recognize the victim," Frontinus told Hilaris, who had been in Britain all those decades and so knew absolutely everyone. Since the governor had previously worked with me on a murder hunt in Rome, he then added, "Sounds your sort of thing, Falco. You should trot along there too."

So here I was. I had been dispatched to the crime scene as an expert in unnatural death. But I was a thousand miles from my own patch. How would I know the motive for a local British murder, or where to start looking for the killer? I was on holiday, intending to claim that I had nothing to contribute. My own official mission in Britain was finished; afterward I had brought Helena to Londinium to see her relatives, but we were pretty well en route for home now.

Then when the centurion presented the sodden body, Hilaris went quiet and I too felt queasy. I knew at once that I might have had a direct involvement in how the victim came to be here.

So far, only I knew that.