Caveat emptor

16

The evening chill was creeping up from the river as Ruso went in search of Tetricus the boatman. He was the only person who might know what had happened to Julius Asper between his leaving Verulamium with a brother and possibly seven thousand denarii, and his lone arrival, destitute and fatally injured, at the Blue Moon.

Valens was busy seeing patients. He had offered Ruso an escort of apprentices as if he were doing him a favor, insisting that nobody in his right mind would wander the passages behind Londinium’s riverfront when the workshops and warehouses were closing for the evening. Thus it was a group of three that picked its way along the deserted wharf just after sunset and turned left into a narrow street. Forty paces farther and a right turn took them into the gloom of the weed-fringed alleyway leading to the home of Tetricus the boatman.

A couple of urchins who were bouncing a ball off the high wall of the grain warehouse fled at the sight of them. Ruso could make out several doorways opening onto the alley. The nearest was a patched construction with a heavy plank nailed across the rotten section at the bottom. He was about to knock when he was startled by the tall apprentice whispering, “Sir!” in his ear.

“What?”

“Sir, I think we’ve been followed.”

Ruso glanced back along the empty alleyway, wondering if the body and the coded letter had overexcited the youths’ imaginations. “Really?”

“He looked suspicious, sir. He was wearing a hood.”

To be wearing a hood on a clear spring evening was certainly unusual, but whoever it was had gone about his business elsewhere by the time Ruso and his escort retraced their steps to the street. The only people now in sight were an old man hobbling toward them on two sticks and a heavily made-up girl in a doorway. The girl had not seen anyone in a hood, but it was a pleasure to meet three such handsome men, and would they like to come and join her friends for a drink?

Ruso told her they were busy and drew the apprentices out of earshot. The tall one looked disappointed. The short one looked relieved. It occurred to Ruso that any sensible boatman seeing these three handsome men arriving at his front door would lock up and hide under the bed.

“Stay here on the corner and keep a lookout for your man in the hood.”

The tall boy nodded. “We’ll get him for you, sir.”

“I don’t want you to get him,” explained Ruso. “Just watch where he goes. Stand well away from that girl, stay together, don’t wander off, and don’t talk to anybody while I’m gone. Understood?”

“Will you be all right without us, sir?” The short one was evidently taking his duties seriously.

“Make a note of the door I go into,” said Ruso, who felt a more pertinent question was whether they would be all right without him. “If I’m in trouble, I’ll whistle for you.”

The tall one looked delighted. The short one said, “Then what do we do, sir?”

“I want both of you to run and fetch Valens,” said Ruso, who could imagine what their parents would say if he got them involved in some sort of fracas. “And if you’re in trouble, come and get me.”

He made sure they were stationed up on the street corner before rapping on the door in the alley.

Nothing happened. He knocked again. This time the voice of an old woman shouted something in British that he was fairly sure translated as, “Bloody kids! Clear off!”

He explained who he was. The second reply was even shorter than the first: a summary of the woman’s views on men who worked for the tax office.

The only reply from the second building was the yapping of a small dog. He was about to knock on the third when a scrawny man appeared from a door farther along. His gait reminded Ruso of rolling waves and swaying ships.

“You’re the procurator’s man, right?”

Ruso nodded.

“You want to have a word with them clerks of yours, boss. I told ’em it was the one with the pot outside.”

Ruso glanced past him and saw that a fat olive oil amphora had been half-buried outside a doorway to house a straggly bush. “Tetricus?”

The man jerked his head toward the door. “Best get inside, boss, eh?”

Ruso followed him into a drab room with a table, a couple of stools, and a sagging curtain hiding what he assumed was a bed against the far wall. Most of this faded into darkness as the door crashed shut, a bar clunked into place, and the room was lit by only the faint yellow square of a window covered with oiled cloth.

“Can’t be too careful ’round here, boss,” explained the boatman, striking a flint and eventually managing to light a smelly candle. “So, I’m getting it after all, eh?”

“Getting what?”

“You’re the one who was looking for him, right? Offering money for information leading to the finding of? Well I come back specially to hand in the information, like a good citizen, and a fat lot of thanks I get for it. It weren’t my fault he went and died later on.”

Ruso frowned. “You’ve already talked to the office about this?”

“This afternoon,” explained the boatman. “Jupiter’s balls, didn’t they tell you anything? Useless buggers. You want to sack the lot of ’em. Specially that snotty one with the lisp.”

The unlucky Tetricus must have arrived at the office to claim his reward while Firmus had been out observing the postmortem. “So,” he said, “you came back specially from somewhere today to report a sighting of Julius Asper-”

“Yesterday, it was,” explained the man. “I seen him yesterday morning, but I didn’t hear you was looking till today. Then I come downriver as quick as I could and I went straight to the Forum to hand in information leading to the finding of, and that bunch of tight arses made out they didn’t know nothing about a reward. Then I go for a bite to eat and find out he’s gone and died and you lot have been down to the Blue Moon. You’re not giving them the money, are you?”

“No,” said Ruso. Avoiding the wavering light of the candle, he was trying to assess where the man might have hidden any stolen coins.

“None of that moving the body business had nothing to do with me, right? All I did was find him on the river and give him a tow down to the wharf.”

“Where did you find him?”

“In the marshes on the north bank, about seven or eight miles up past the double-span bridge. Saw him at first light. Looked like a loose boat was drifted into the reeds. I went in after it, and there he was. He weren’t looking too well. Kept telling me to go away. I thought to start with he was just sleeping it off, like, then he started saying he’d got to get to Londinium to meet a friend. But he didn’t have no oars. Just a couple of planks. So I said, you don’t want to go down there in that thing with the tide and the currents and just them planks. Daft bugger. You can’t get a proper hold on a plank, see? Not like you can with oars. I gave him a tow down to the bridge and he asked for a cheap place to stay. Somewhere nobody would bother him.”

“So you told him to try the Blue Moon,” said Ruso.

“Well, it’s cheap,” said the man defensively. “And nobody I know would stay there.”

“They charged him two denarii for the night.”

“Greedy bastard!” muttered the man, confirming Ruso’s view of the innkeeper. “I never did know what she saw in him.”

“Are you sure he was alone?” asked Ruso. “There was another man missing as well.”

“Him with half an ear? I’d have remembered.”

“Did he say anything else? Any suggestion of why he was in the boat, or where he’d come from, or who the friend was?”

“Like I said, he wasn’t looking too well. Said his head was hurting.”

“He had a fractured skull.”

“Really?” The whites of the boatman’s eyes showed up in the dim light. “He didn’t say. He didn’t have nothing with him, either.”

“What makes you say that?”

“ ’Cause you lot wouldn’t be bothering with him unless he had something worth taking.”

“Some money was stolen,” Ruso conceded.

“Not by me it weren’t. Wait a minute: There’s still a bit of light. I’ll open the door. Then you can have a good look at everything a man has to show for twenty-four years in the navy.”

“The money I’m looking for should have been delivered to the tax office,” said Ruso. “It’s marked. So if you know anything about it, you’d be wise to say so before we find it.”

“Not a thing, boss,” announced the man, scraping the bar up out of its socket. “Not a thing. Go on, take the candle and search if you don’t believe me.”

Ruso, who did believe him, stepped forward to grope under the bed. He stifled the urge to apologize for the intrusion. Real investigators, he was certain, neither apologized nor explained.

“You lot are all the same.” The man dragged the door open and Ruso caught sight of the tall apprentice ducking back out of sight outside.

“You want to know if I’m honest?” demanded the boatman. “I could’ve sold that boat, but I didn’t. I went and put word out that I found it. You know why? I don’t want some poor sod out of work just ’cause Headache Man helped himself to it.”

“You don’t think it was Asper’s boat?”

“Course it wasn’t. He’d have had the oars, wouldn’t he?”

Ruso held the candle up. Long shadows from the rafters shifted around sooty cobwebs dangling from the thatch. He walked back and forth across the floor, kicking the rushes aside. There was no sign of disturbance in the packed mud beneath. Then he crouched in the doorway and prodded the soil in and around the pot that held the straggly bush. “There’s nothing here,” he agreed.

The boatman cleared his throat. “Have I done enough for the reward, then?”

“Any idea where he might have got the boat?”

The man’s eyes narrowed. “I’m giving you a lot of help here, boss. I only picked him up to do him a favor. I never got paid for it and now it’s causing me all this bother.”

Ruso reached for his purse and the man shut the door again. The candlelit smile revealed a set of black teeth. They disappeared when he realized the large volume of coins he was being given only added up to three denarii.

“I was told forty.”

“Never believe rumors,” said Ruso, who had not mentioned a figure. The light glinted on the edges of two silver coins as he placed them on the table. “My employer would very much like to know where the boat came from.”

The man sucked in air through the black teeth. “You wouldn’t believe how many miles of river join up to here. There’s whole towns. That’s before you count all the farms with land fronting the water.”

Ruso placed his forefinger on one of the denarii and slid it back toward his purse. It was less than an inch from the edge of the table when Tetricus said, “I did hear a rumor.”

The coin came to a halt.

“It might be nothing. People are always losing boats. And it don’t make much sense. I wouldn’t waste your time with it, only I heard he come from Verulamium and so does the rumor.”

“Just tell me,” said Ruso, to whom little of this Asper business was making sense at the moment.

“Farmer by the name of Lund, lives a couple of miles downstream from the town. Going round telling people that a river monster stole his boat.”

“Could Asper have traveled by boat from there to where you found him?”

Tetricus shrugged. “I said it didn’t make sense. He’d have been a lot quicker by road.”

“But it could be done?”

The man frowned, considered it, and agreed that the craft was light enough for the trip to be possible. Ruso slid the money across the table toward him. Tetricus gathered it up and got to his feet. “That’s it, then, is it?”

“That’s it,” Ruso agreed.

Tetricus grinned. “Glad to be of service, boss.”

Back in the street, the two apprentices were standing where Ruso had left them as if they had never moved. The impression of innocence was spoiled by a female giggle from a doorway and a call of, “Another time, eh, lads?”

It was difficult to tell in the poor light, but Ruso was fairly sure the short apprentice was blushing. “Wipe that silly grin off your face!” he snapped at the tall one, and was alarmed to find himself again sounding like his father.