Murder in the Forum

Chapter Twenty-one

I shall gloss over the journey that ensued. I am getting too old to be joggled about the countryside, never mind doing it twice in three days. Suffice it to say that any bruises I had sustained in my fall in the alley were reinforced by the lack of springing, and that any threat of a chill after the funeral was redoubled by a dreadful river crossing, where the carriage wheel got stuck in a shallow ford, and Junio and I were obliged to clamber out and wade, with unpleasantly damp results for our footwear and lower garments.

I was glad I had forgone my toga for the occasion. The events of the previous day had taken their toll on my already pathetic garment. I reasoned that interviewing a freeman peasant did not require my formal badge of citizenship and I had sent Junio to the fuller’s with it before we set off, in the forlorn hope of having it cleaned and mended. Since even my long tunic and cloak were clinging damply to the backs of my knees, I blessed the gods at least for my decision. Marcus’s warrant and this carriage would give me all the authority I needed at the inn.

For once Junio’s company did not cheer me. He was miserably anxious himself. The further we got from the familiar roads around Glevum, the more nervous he became. He had been cast down since the stabbing of the fair-headed maid, and this journey seemed the final straw.

I could understand it. Places like Letocetum were merely names to him, and I doubt he would have been surprised if the road had suddenly vanished and we found ourselves galloping briskly into oblivion. Even I, who have travelled half the island (albeit most of it in chains), was sobered to reflect that Roman horsemen routinely cover fifty miles in a single day, and the army can do almost half as much as that on foot, with their heavy kit on their backs.

We were making for the mansio, an official inn and staging post, just such a day’s march away, where weary riders of the post could obtain fresh horses, travellers on official civil business could find a bath-house and accommodation, and even a contingent of marching soldiers could rely on food, water and a place to camp. I was looking forward to the food and water myself: it was long past midday by now, and I was beginning to understand why travellers complain of thirst.

We reached the place at last, a smallish building with stables and a large enclosure, situated near to a crossroads. It was the centre, not exactly of a settlement, but of a number of civilian farms and houses close enough to be in view. A grumbling servant sweated out to meet us, looking very doubtfully at my mere tunic and cloak.

I will say this for Marcus — the presence of his seal on a letter does wonders for the warmth of one’s reception. One glance at the document I carried, and the military innkeeper opened his doors as though I were a visiting tax inspector, and offered to fetch the soldiers who had retrieved the body. A small contingent of guards commanded by an octio, it appeared, were using the facility en route to Letocetum, and the grisly task had fallen to them.

I agreed that meeting the octio would be helpful, and a servant was dispatched to find him.

Meanwhile, Marcus’s letter continued to work its magic. The horses and the driver were taken off to be refreshed, while we were shown into a small but pleasant room with a central table, surrounded by stools, not couches, but comfortable enough. Cold meats and cheeses were rapidly produced and a hunk of fresh bread for each of us. Junio caught my eye. We would have lunched much more frugally at home.

They left us alone while we ate it, which we did sharing my knife and sitting companionably side by side — though, obviously, when the commander of the guard looked in a little later Junio leaped to his feet and tried to pretend he was behaving in a properly servile manner.

The octio looked at me severely. ‘We have retrieved the body again, for your inspection. . citizen,’ he added, after a pause.

‘Again’, I learned, because being an anonymous body without mourners (and therefore no one to pay for a funeral) the corpse had been flung on a cart, ready to be taken to the town and thrown — literally without ceremony — into the nearest paupers’ pit. In deference to my appearance, however, it had been brought back to the mansio and was now lying on a trestle in the entrance, awaiting my examination. I washed my hands in the bowl of water provided, brushed the cheese crumbs from my mouth and followed my guide.

It seemed to be my month for unpleasant sights. The body before me seemed to have bloated with the water, and some of the grotesquely wrinkled skin was beginning to hang loose on the bones. It had been dressed, as Marcus reported, in a pair of plaid trousers, but there was no retaining belt and the cloth had been stretched and torn as if stones had been stuffed down into it to weight the body. The face was brutal, even without the gruesome pallid swelling, and almost clean-shaven, but there were abrasions on the forehead and chin and a clump of short reddish hairs on the upper lip. The chest was badly abraded, too.

What drew my attention, however, was the hand which dangled, bloated and water-swollen, by its side. It was a squat, ugly hand, with curling red hairs still visible upon it, and a cluster of fine bronze rings — so tight they had cut into the flesh — on every finger but one. There was no ring upon the little finger, because the digit was wizened and misshapen. I might not have recognised the face, after that sojourn in the water, but I would have known that deformity anywhere.

‘Yes,’ I said, to no one in particular. ‘This is the real Egobarbus.’

‘A rich man, by the look of it,’ the octio remarked. ‘There’s some fine work in those rings.’ He turned to one of his men. ‘Did he not have a buckle, too, when we brought him in?’

The man turned scarlet and vanished, to return a moment later with a magnificent belt of ox-hide, with a great bronze buckle worked in the shape of a dragon eating its tail. It was a work of art.

‘It must have fallen off him when he was moved,’ the soldier said, but no one was deceived. It occurred to me with a jolt of horror why the flesh above the rings had been so cruelly torn. Perhaps, if I had not arrived in time, my old enemy would have been tipped into his pit without any fingers at all. Though one could hardly blame the guards. The clothes and ornaments of executed criminals are routinely shared among their executioners. There is no point in wasting valuables.

The owner of the rented house was sent for (he had not been permitted to leave the mansio) and I heard the story from his own lips. My lack of an official garment may have won his confidence, but in any case he was garrulous with fright.

His story was simple. He had returned to the premises the previous morning, as he had arranged. ‘I’d had my money from the Roman gentleman in advance, you see, and after what he’d said I expected to find the house empty. Never thought anything of it until that courier arrived asking questions. Course, being a law-abiding sort of man, I told him what I knew.’

I made no answer to this, although he glanced at me hopefully.

‘And then, going out to draw water for my own purposes, I found the body in the well. And it didn’t fall down there, either,’ he concluded. ‘I’ve got a slab covering my well, to keep the pigs from slipping down it, and the cover was back in place when I came to it. No, someone pushed him in and drowned him, that’s what I say.’

I doubted it myself. The grazes on the face and chest suggested to me a body that had been dragged to the well after death, and stuffed down it — perhaps as a crude means of disposing of the body. That also made sense of the poison bottle. What I did not know was who had done it.

‘There was a bottle found on the road,’ I said, ‘a mile or two from here. It had some liquid in it. Do you know anything about that?’

His expression of injured innocence was replaced by a look of pure surprise. ‘A bottle? No. I did put out an amphora of wine — same wine I always give my visitors — and there was a jug of something of his own on the table. I don’t know anything about a bottle.’

‘Well, citizen,’ the octio said to me, when the interrogation was over and our informant — at least temporarily — released. ‘What do you want to do with the body?’

It had become my corpse, I realised, because I had endowed it with identity. I hesitated. Egobarbus was not a man I mourned, but he was a fellow Celt. Somehow I could not consign him to a paupers’ pit. In the end I gave instructions to have him buried, Celtic fashion — curled like a newborn baby and facing the rising sun — wrapped in a piece of linen with his buckled belt at his side.

The soldiers, impressed by my official warrant and seal, and accustomed to obeying orders, complied immediately, although visibly bemused by the idea of daytime burial. They watched in bewilderment as I murmured a prayer over him — to the ancient gods of earth and stone — and left my old enemy under a mound of rocks. I did not weep.

‘Well, master,’ Junio whispered, as we made our way back to the mansio. ‘What will you do now?’

It was a good question. The house-owner had been present at the burial — not entirely from choice — and for want of any clearer plan, I suggested that I might begin by seeing the house. It had begun to interest me. The owner was a fat, grimy man, with an expression of foolish cupidity and a certain flabbiness of stomach which suggested that however he earned a living, it was not chiefly from labouring on his land.

I was right. The house was sizeable enough — two large draughty rooms on the ground floor and a couple of lofts above, both with frowzy curtains on one wall and crude straw palliasses on the floor. Downstairs there was a scattering of plain battered furniture. The place was not dirty, exactly, but there was a general air of dinginess: even a woven rug before the fire, which might once have been cheerfully coloured, had faded to a dismal grey over the years with dirt and soot. Outside, a scruffy field was home to a thin cow and a mangy sheep.

An odd place, I thought again, for Felix to have hired as his own.

‘Tell me about it,’ I said. ‘From the beginning. Who asked you to rent out the house, and when?’

The oily face assumed a patient frown. ‘I have been telling you,’ he said. ‘It must have been a half-moon ago. That Roman fellow turned up here, wanting to take the house. For two people, he said — there would be a friend. Well, I knew how to interpret that.’ He gave me a hopeful smirk. He had learned of my citizen’s status at the funeral, but he still seemed to regard me as a sort of fellow-conspirator against authority. ‘He didn’t just want a room, the way they sometimes do, but the whole house. I had been recommended to him, he said, by some of the guard at Letocetum, so he knew I was discreet, and he was prepared to pay — more than the usual rate. Naturally I agreed.’

Junio glanced at me, grinning widely, and enlightenment dawned. ‘Did you offer. . entertainment?’

The fellow smirked. ‘I offered him a pair of girls, of course. Clean as a whistle my girls are, no disease and no rotten teeth. But he wasn’t interested. Didn’t look like that sort of fellow, if you understand me.’

I understood him all right. I realised all of a sudden what kind of house this was, and what kind of pictures might be screened behind those uninviting curtains upstairs. Clearly the intelligence from Marcus’s spies had not included that information.

The man took my silence for encouragement. ‘All he wanted was a tray of food on the table — good food and wine for two, and a bite of something simple for the servants. I was to leave the door ajar and keep myself well away.’ He smiled, oleaginously. ‘I knew how to do that. You learn to hold your tongue, in my trade, and he paid me well.’

‘But nonetheless you spied on him?’ I suggested. He began to look aggrieved, and I added quickly, ‘You saw the Celts arrive.’

‘It’s my house, citizen. It isn’t where I live, but I own it. Naturally I kept a watchful eye. I always do.’

In the hope of extorting money from his customers later, I surmised. ‘So what did you see?’

He shrugged. ‘That Celtic fellow with the moustache turned up with his servants, and I saw them go in. Worn out with the walk, they looked, and glad to be here. I was expecting to see the Roman, but he never came. I think he sent a message, though, later in the evening, as I heard horses, and when I looked out I saw someone at the door.’

‘You saw the messenger? What did he look like?’ I was expecting a description of Zetso. It was not hard to guess whom Felix would have entrusted with that task.

Disappointingly, the fellow shook his head. ‘I couldn’t say, citizen. I couldn’t see. It was dark and he was cloaked and hooded. One of those fancy fringed military capes, not a simple woollen cucullus like yours.’ He nodded at the one I was wearing. ‘Gifted horseman, though — I heard him set off again, and he rode off galloping — at night too. Must have been fearless.’

‘Did he go in?’

‘No. I’m sure he didn’t. He wasn’t there long enough. Just came, delivered a message at the door and left. I thought his master was obviously delayed. I didn’t wait any more. I went to bed. When I looked out in the morning, the carriage was outside and the Celts were leaving. I waited until yesterday, as I promised, and then I went in to clear up the place. The rest you know.’

‘And when you went in,’ I said urgently, ‘what did you find?’

He shrugged. ‘Nothing. Nothing you wouldn’t expect. Someone had eaten half the food, drunk all the wine, and the beds had been slept in. Nothing else. No signs of a struggle, if that is what you thought.’

It was what I had thought. I shook my head doubtfully. ‘And Felix took the house. You are sure of that?’

He spread his hands in a gesture of despair. ‘Lucius Tigidius Perennis Felix. He told me his name himself, and I saw his seal. I wouldn’t forget him in a hurry. I don’t get many customers like him.’

That made me smile. ‘I imagine not.’ Clearly the Perennis name meant nothing to him: he was merely aware that Felix was a very rich man to be interested in such squalid entertainment. ‘No wonder you were tempted to spy. A man with that much purple on his edges must have aroused your suspicion.’

The brothel-keeper shook his head. ‘I don’t know about his toga-edges, citizen; he was only wearing a tunic and cloak. Mind you, he looked well in them. A flashy sort of gentleman.’

I stared at him. ‘Perennis Felix,’ I said carefully, ‘is — or rather was — a squat middle-aged Roman with an ugly face. He wouldn’t look well in anything.’

My informant shrugged. ‘Not this Perennis Felix, citizen. He was as handsome a young man as I have ever seen astride a horse. Though I have heard a rumour he is dead.’ Suddenly he tugged my arm and pointed through the open door behind me. ‘But the rumours can’t be true. There is no “was” about it, citizen. Here he is now, riding up the lane. Ask him yourself.’

I turned in the doorway and looked at the horseman.

It was Zetso, naturally. For a moment he clearly did not recognise me — the last time he had seen me I had been dressed in a toga. Then recognition dawned, and from the expression on his face he was as shocked and astonished to see me as I was to see him. Indeed, if it had not been for the guard waiting at the gate, who quick as thought zipped out his sword and laid a hand on the bridle, I believe that Zetso would have turned round and galloped away as fast as his horse would carry him.