A Body In The Bath House

XLII

As soon as the surveyor left, I dropped the charade. I sat quiet. Too quiet, anyone who knew me would have said. The clerk had worked with me, though not long enough or closely enough. Even so, apprehension pinned him to his stool.

"That tooth of yours still playing up, Falco?" he asked in a nervous voice. It could be a joke, real sympathy, or a frightened mixture of both.

Too busy to deal with it, I had forgotten my aching tooth until that moment. Informers don't collapse at mere agonising pain. We are always too busy, too desperate to finish the case.

"Where were you last night, Gaius?" It sounded like a neutral question.

"What?"

"Place yourself for me." He had attended my project meeting this morning. He had filed a witness statement but I had had no time yet to look at it.

T… went into Novio."

I scrutinised the bastard with a thin half smile.

"You went into Novio?" Repeating it, I sounded like a careworn lawyer dragging out his weakest rhetorical manoeuvre. I was hoping that the witness would cave in out of sheer anxiety. In life they never do.

"Novio, Falco."

"What was that for?"

"A night out. Just a night in town." I still gazed at him. "Stupenda was dancing," Gaius maintained. A nice touch. Detail always makes a falsehood sound more reliable.

"Any good?"

"She was brilliant."

I stood up. "Get on with your work."

Ts something wrong, Falco?"

"Nothing that I don't expect every day." I let him see my lip curl.

I had liked Gains. He had made a good show of harbouring the right attitude. But it had been an act. "In my job," I elaborated grimly, "I run into lies, fraud, conspiracy and filth. I expect it, Gaius. I encounter mad people who kill their mothers for asking them to wipe their feet on the doormat. I deal with lowlife muggers who steal half a denarius from blind army veterans in order to buy a drink from a thirteen-year old barmaid whom they subsequently rape…"

The clerk was now looking as puzzled as he was petrified.

"Get on with your work," I repeated. "Let me know when you decide to revise your story. In the meantime, don't distress yourself about my feelings. Your contribution to this enquiry, Gaius, is just a routine pile of mule shit though I can say that being betrayed by my own office backer-up hits a new low for me."

I left him, striding out as if I had to go and hold a bridge against a wild horde of barbarians.

He did not know that I had been in Novio myself last night, also hoping to see Stupenda. Which of course I had not done because last night in Noviomagus Regnensis, the woman called Stupenda did not dance.