Deadly Election

50

She had a point. No real effort had been made to look into Niger’s demise. Once his body had fallen out of the chest at the auction, he had been carried off and cremated. Faustus and the vigiles had had too much to do at the time, calming the fighting factions in the Porticus of Pompey. Afterwards, even with Faustus taking charge, enquiries had dribbled to a halt.

In Rome, if nobody makes a complaint, people can die of obvious unnatural causes yet never be investigated. All you need is to ensure a nice quick funeral and no one contesting the will. That is how murderers get away with it.

I apologised to Galeria.

‘It’s not your fault, dear. Nobody is paying you for that, are they?’

I could have bragged about my constant struggle for truth and justice, but with such a down-to-earth woman it seemed better to give a queenly smile in agreement.

‘Now look, Albia, I would hire you to find out who done him in, but as we just discussed, I’d rather spend the money on a girl to mop the floors. I’ll give you what you say is the right money to put up a notice. Then I shall feel I have done my bit for Niger.’

‘A wise approach.’ I produced a new set of note tablets. ‘But, Galeria, before I chalk up a notice, I need to ask some questions. There’s no charge for this, incidentally. A man has been killed. Somebody did that, and I need to know what I’m going into.’ Galeria looked frightened. I set the notebook to one side. ‘Don’t be scared. Look, I don’t try to catch a murderer without having some idea about who he might be and where he might come jumping out from. This is for my safety, and your own.’

Galeria saw my point; she toughened up. ‘I’ll have a broom ready to whack him.’

‘Excellent!’

‘But what about you, dearie?’

‘Don’t worry about me. The last time a killer came looking for me, I shoved him off the balcony. That’s why the window is blocked up.’ Impressed, Galeria looked over at the folding doors, here in the main room of my office, once a good feature but now boarded with builders’ safety panels. ‘Now, we have to start with Niger. I’m going to ask you about his work in general, then what he had been doing specifically for the Callisti.’

When I interviewed her before, I had thought Claudia Galeria knew little about how Niger spent his time. Nevertheless, like many, she kept her eyes and ears open. She had quite a lot to tell me.

Until recently, Niger had worked for various people, one of whom was an extremely rich woman called Julia Terentia. Through some connection of hers he had been introduced to the Callistus family. ‘That all started when they were looking for an election agent.’

‘To help Volusius Firmus when he was standing for the aedilate?’

‘Niger was finding things out for him to do with the rival candidates.’ Oh, that job! The sleaze pitch. I knew all about that. ‘It fell through, though.’

‘Yes, the man had to stand down …’ A thought struck me. ‘Firmus has a wife I’ve met, called Julia Laurentina. I don’t suppose she is any relation to your Julia Terentia?’

‘Yes, of course!’ Galeria exclaimed in surprise. ‘They are sisters. Laurentina asked Terentia if she could recommend an agent. That was how my Niger was offered the work.’

Another sister! Diana Aventina. How many Julias were there? (Four so far, plus a brother). And how intricately tangled were their links in the events I had to investigate? Claudius Laeta had given me a hint. I definitely ought to go back to him in the very near future, especially if he sent the man from the Palace who wanted to give me a ‘message from his father’.

‘Tell me about Julia Terentia.’

‘She’s the one who got away from her mother. She found her own husband well, she’s done it twice.’

‘Someone told me she was an unpleasant woman.’ That had been Nothokleptes, not that I had taken his word.

‘She just speaks her mind freely,’ said Galeria; we nodded wisely.

Julia Terentia had inherited wealth from her first husband, for whom Niger had worked as a general negotiator. Terentia then remarried, to a sponger, Galeria called him, though he had not drained her resources entirely, as shown by the fact Terentia was still a regular benefactress to others. Her Saturnalia gifts to clients included the glass beakers I had already heard about. She also supported struggling relatives of her own.

‘Terentia has one sister who is married to a difficult man and has a terrible time. My Niger used to take money to them whenever Julia Terentia gave them a handout.’

‘Handouts to Julia Pomponia?’ I guessed. I was interested that the one who had run off with the hod-carrier was being helped by at least two of her sisters, Optata and Terentia. Were they all secretly banding together to defy their mother?

‘Yes. Pomponia’s husband works, but he gets in low company and drinks it all away. Every time Niger went there with a purse, he was supposed to warn them it was the last time.’

‘Hopeless.’ Every time someone says this is the last time, it impresses spongers less and less. Even I was seeing the wealthy Julia Terentia as a soft touch, though we had never met. ‘Then Terentia procured further work for Niger, with the Callisti. Let’s discuss that, Galeria.’

‘He should never have done it. The election work was all right, but then it went wrong on him.’

‘You mean, the strongbox? He thought not paying for it would damage his reputation?’

Galeria shook her head. ‘He was upset, yes. But he could have told people the Callisti had had a disagreement among themselves, so it wasn’t his fault. I said no one would care – well, he was only obeying their orders. But something much worse had happened. Something to do with the old man. Niger was going spare. He said he just didn’t know what to do for the best.’

‘Over what, Galeria?’

‘There were two things, really. First, Albia, when he was asked to go and see that body – you know, the one that was found in that strongbox …’ Her voice faltered. ‘The box where some villain put my Niger afterwards.’

I helped her out, as she bit back tears: ‘The Callistus family asked him to go to see whether the first corpse was their father. Niger said not, although I can tell you for certain that it was Valens. So what happened? Did Niger accidentally get it wrong? Was the body too degraded to recognise?’

Galeria was quick to defend him. ‘Well, be fair, Niger didn’t know the father well. He only met him once. And he told me that body was horrible. He could hardly bear to look at it.’

‘But?’

‘Niger was dead set in his mind that something else had happened. He had already been to their estate to see if he could find out why Valens had disappeared. He came up with nothing. Absolutely nothing. So he was convinced the old fellow had just bunked off for a few days, in his litter, taking his escort slaves, maybe a tryst with some secret girlfriend.’

I balked at that. Nothing had ever suggested Callistus Valens had had a mistress − or that, if he had, he needed to keep it hidden from his family. Some men like the thrill of leading a double life but everyone said Valens was a dear person. I doubted whether his relations would interfere.

Galeria saw my doubts. ‘Or a gambling party? Men in a barn, playing with counters for a lot of money?’

‘Two problems there, I think. The Callisti all like a flutter, but they generally bet on chariots. More importantly, at the time Valens was perturbed that they were short of cash, after their election efforts went bottom-side up. Valens doesn’t sound like a man who would play games of chance, with meaningful stakes, at the same time as he left his lads desperately trying to recoup funds.’

‘Well, then. My Niger was very soft-hearted. He didn’t want to have to tell those relatives that corpse was their father, not when it was in such a terrible state. If he had said it was, they would have rushed down there. He didn’t want them to look at it. And he wasn’t sure. Albia, he really was not sure.’

I managed not to show what I thought. Did Niger, the soft-hearted idiot, never think that the missing man’s absence would eventually need an explanation? The Callisti would have to find out one day that Valens was dead.

‘He should have just told them, shouldn’t he?’ Galeria quavered woefully.

‘If he recognised the dead man, I think so.’

‘The point is, he couldn’t tell for certain. The funeral director hadn’t bothered to do up the corpse nicely. He was all green and blue and bloated. Only afterwards – and this is the second thing, Albia − someone else said something to him, so poor Niger realised it must have been Valens.’

I sat up slightly. ‘Who said what?’

Galeria saw how significant this was. ‘A man he knew, Albia. Talking about the strongbox at the auction. After Niger bid for it, this fellow came up and got talking to him, then made a peculiar joke. He said that the Callistus brothers had just bought back their father’s sarcophagus, hadn’t they? Niger told him to be more sympathetic, and the man said he’d been told Callistus Valens had had it coming to him. He had had it coming for years and now he had paid.’

I tried to stay calm. ‘Who was this man? Who was Niger talking to?’

‘He wouldn’t say,’ sighed Galeria. ‘Afterwards, talking to me, he felt the man knew more than he should do – he must have been there at the murder. Apparently he was that sort of man. Very strong. Handy with his fists. Up for any crooked scheme, if it would make money. Niger said there was nothing we could do about the situation so he didn’t want me to know any more. It was safer if he didn’t tell me who the man was.’

But I knew who it was. Our staff at the auction had witnessed that conversation. I remembered them telling me they had seen Niger talking to the man in the puce tunic.

That bastard had looked suspicious all along. All afternoon I had worried about what he was up to. I’d watched him bid for The Boy with a Thorn in His Left Foot as if that accounted for his presence. Then he never paid for it. All along, his real interest must have been the strongbox.

‘The thing is,’ said Claudia Galeria, ‘my Niger had a conscience. He was always very straight. I worry that he might have gone to see the man again, and maybe the man didn’t like to be asked about it.’

I believed it. Puce Tunic was stupid to have made his veiled comments to Niger but killers are often stupid. Perhaps, later, he regretted what he had said. He would certainly have seen his mistake once an anxious Niger turned up and tackled him. Cornered and threatened with exposure, a man who had finished off Valens might well kill Niger to silence him. After which he had lacked imagination to think up a new solution and just stuffed the second victim into the same strongbox as the first.

That left me with the urgent question: who was Puce Tunic?