Ruso and the Root of All Evils

29

Ruso tried to imagine what he would do if Claudia were not his ex-wife or, conversely, if the woman he was about to visit were not Claudia.

What was the correct course of action if a husband who was intending to be unfaithful to his wife arrived at someone else’s house, collapsed and then died with the words ‘The bitch has poisoned me!’ on his lips? Should his host keep these words a secret and then go straight away next morning to reveal them to the widow?

Probably not.

The trouble was, he could not picture Claudia poisoning anyone. Shrieking at them, yes. Throwing things, yes. Sulking, yes. Poisoning — no. Why go to that bother when, as they both knew, one could simply get a divorce?

On the other hand, if not Claudia, then who? He had still not managed to question Cass, but it was inconceivable that his sister-in-law, a woman so tolerant with her children and so generous with her time, would have murdered somebody.

The gatekeeper of the big estate was a fearsome creature with only one eye. He went to consult the steward, leaving Ruso to guess whether man and guard dog had gained their scars in a fight with each other, or whether there had been others involved.

Ruso was wondering whether the gatekeeper had wandered off and forgotten him when the heavy gate finally swung open on silent hinges to reveal the weasel-faced steward. He announced, ‘The agent’s widow will see you now,’ in a tone that suggested he had to obey his instructions but he didn’t have to like them.

Ruso followed the man in through the gates. The white roses trained around the pillars of the house contrasted with the dark cypress branches of mourning hung above the front door. From somewhere within came the sound of wailing. Ruso was relieved to be led away to the right, where a walled garden dotted with statues separated the house from the farm buildings. The garden occupied the sort of space the Army would have deemed adequate for five hundred infantrymen, their stores, their officers, and all their officers’ friends, relations and horses. As he crunched along a shaded pathway past a fishpond the size of a swimming pool, Ruso suspected that the slaves currently hoeing the flowerbeds were waiting to pounce on the gravel and rake away his footprints.

The place radiated the genteel elegance to which his stepmother aspired, but which she would never achieve. And access to this was what the charmless Severus had to offer that he himself didn’t, and never would have. The words of Lollia Saturnina came back to him: Claudia has made some very bad decisions in the last few years.

Oh, Claudia, he thought, you fool.

The steward motioned him to wait and approached a high-backed wicker chair facing away from them beneath the shade of a summerhouse. All Ruso could see of its occupant was one slender foot in a grey sandal. After a brief and inaudible conversation the man beckoned him forward.

Ruso was appalled to find himself wondering whether, if he hobbled fast enough, he could be out of sight behind the hedge before she turned round. Instead, he took a deep breath and approached the throne.

‘You can leave us, Zosimus,’ she told the steward. ‘I will ring if I need help.’

Ruso blinked. Between them on the little stone table there really was a brass bell.

The steward gave Ruso a look that said he had better not try anything and walked away.

Claudia’s skin looked waxy. Her eyes were puffy below the make-up, and the dark hollows beneath them matched the murky grey of her outfit. She said, ‘Zosimus thinks you poisoned my husband.’

Ruso shifted the bell to one side and sat on the table, since there was nowhere else and he was not going to hover like a servant. ‘I know.’

‘Well, did you?’

‘No. Did you?’

A crease appeared between the plucked brows. ‘Still as tactless as ever, I see.’

Ruso had wondered how this would go, and so far it was going just as he had expected. ‘Let’s start again, shall we? Hello, Claudia. I’m very sorry about Severus.’

She groped down in the side of the chair and drew out a fan. ‘Thank you,’ she said, wafting cool air across her face. ‘I’m sorry too. Surprisingly.’

He wanted very much to know what that meant, but knew it would be a mistake to ask.

She said, ‘Did he suffer?’

He told her the death had been very quick. He was not sure she believed him, but she seemed grateful. It occurred to him that he could not remember seeing her dressed without jewellery before.

‘I’m supposed to be up at the house, receiving condolences,’ she said, ‘but if I have to stay in that room with Ennia much longer I shall strangle her. I don’t care who’s going to take her back to Rome now, so long as somebody does. Preferably very soon.’

‘Did your husband have any other close family?’

‘No, thank goodness. Can you imagine what it would be like with a whole bunch of them, weeping and collapsing all over the place? All this is just a pantomime, you know. She did nothing but whinge when he was alive.’

It seemed to be the way with sisters. He said, ‘I suppose there’ll be an investigation.’

‘Eventually.’

‘Had he been ill recently?’

‘I thought you said he was poisoned?’

He took a deep breath. ‘I’m just trying to make sure of the facts. I’ve had some experience with things like this over in Britannia. Let me see what I can find out for you.’

‘You?’

Ruso could not think what he could say that would change the opinion Claudia had formed of him during three years of marriage, so instead he said, ‘I’d imagine Severus had enemies.’

‘Of course he did. It wasn’t his job to make friends, it was his job to manage the estate. As you know.’

‘I’ll need names. Details.’

She shook her head. ‘We don’t need you, Gaius. Daddy’s gone to see Fuscus to ask him to send a message to his cousin the Senator.’

His cousin the Senator. Even Claudia was doing it now.

She said, ‘We expect he’ll send one of his own men to investigate.’

‘From Rome? That’ll take for ever.’

There was still a hint of superiority in her tone as she said, ‘The message will go on the official despatch service.’

‘Even so, it’ll be at least two or three weeks.’

Claudia patted her hair. A couple of strands dislodged themselves and tumbled down over one ear, making her at once half as formal and twice as attractive. ‘Daddy said that’s what we should do,’ she said. ‘When he finds out I’ve been talking to you, he’ll be furious.’

Ruso knew better than to argue with Daddy. He got to his feet and stepped across to check that there were no gardeners lurking behind the neatly sculpted cypress hedges before saying, ‘This probably isn’t the right time to tell you, but you need to know. I was alone with Severus when he died. His last words were, The bitch has poisoned me.’

She fell back into the chair as if he had struck her. ‘What?’

‘Don’t make me repeat it.’

‘But I — that’s ridiculous!’

‘If I thought you’d done it, I wouldn’t be telling you.’

‘Well, you’d better not tell anybody else.’ When he did not reply she said, ‘You haven’t, have you?’

‘Not yet.’

She began to pick at the feathers of the fan. ‘You may as well know. The man was a reptile.’

‘I’m sorry you weren’t happy,’ said Ruso, and meant it.

‘There’s no need to gloat.’

‘I wasn’t.’

A spurt of gravel rose up as the fan hit it. ‘Stop being so gallant, Gaius! I know all about him chasing Flora. Arria came to warn me.’

‘So I heard.’

‘I’m not surprised somebody poisoned him, are you?’

‘Don’t let anyone else hear you saying that.’

‘You’re the one who said I should speak my mind.’

‘Did I?’

‘You always said you could never work out what I was thinking!’

Ruso, enlightened, bit back, ‘No, what I said was that I wasn’t a bloody mind-reader.’

She gestured round her at the elegant garden. ‘I put up with him in exchange for all this, Gaius. In return he had access to Daddy’s business advice. The local contacts were very useful for him, because everybody he knew was back in Rome, and he didn’t want to be too beholden to Fuscus.’

‘I see.’ So Severus had harboured ambitions of his own.

‘It was a business arrangement. I didn’t want him dead.’

It made sense, and it made sense of Lollia Saturnina’s assertion that Claudia had made some very bad decisions lately. ‘So if it wasn’t me,’ he said, ‘and it wasn’t you, who was it?’

‘How should I know? It must have been somebody in your house. I expect it was Arria.’

‘Arria didn’t go near him,’ said Ruso, rapidly considering and dismissing this alarming possibility. ‘I’ve already made inquiries at home. How did he get on with his sister?’

‘I told you. They argued.’

‘About what?’

‘Going back to Rome, what else? As if any boyfriend would wait for her for this long!’

‘These were serious arguments?’

Claudia sighed. ‘Don’t be silly, Gaius. She didn’t kill him. She was hoping he would take her back there. Promise you won’t repeat what he said. You know what everyone will think.’

‘People will ask what his last words were.’

‘Then make something up.’

It was the second time in two days that he had been told to stave off questions with lies.

Claudia was frowning at him. ‘You’ll have to practise. You’re a terrible liar, you know. Try not to look shifty. And whatever you do, don’t scratch your — you’re doing it now! For goodness’ sake, Gaius!’

Ruso snatched his right hand away from his ear.

‘That always gives you away,’ said Claudia.

He said, ‘I’m not prepared to wait for a man from Rome. I want this looked into now.’

‘But Daddy said — ’

‘Daddy isn’t suspected of murdering him,’ pointed out Ruso. ‘And unless I tell people what Severus said, neither are you.’

Her eyes widened. ‘Are you threatening me?’

‘I want permission to talk to the household here,’ he said, wondering if she realized that it was unlikely to be her household for much longer. ‘I need to find out what Severus did that morning. What he ate, where he went, who he spoke to.’

In the silence that followed he watched her fiddle with her hair.

‘Think about it, Claudia. The investigator from Rome won’t know any of us. As long as he can offer up somebody plausible to the court, he won’t care who it is. He’ll get a smooth lawyer to drag up everything that person’s ever supposed to have done or said, and the magistrates will convict them. You know what happens after that.’

She sank back into the chair. Behind her, a lizard skittered up the plinth of a statue, and vanished amongst the folds of a stone toga. Finally she said, ‘All right. We’ll start before we get instructions from Rome. But I want it done properly.’

‘I know what I’m doing,’ he insisted, feeling old resentments rise.

‘There’s only one way to do this sort of thing.’ She lowered her voice and glanced round to make sure the garden slaves were safely out of earshot. ‘The funeral contractor — a horrible man, he smells — has offered to supervise the questioning.’

Ruso stared into the eyes of his former wife. ‘You’re not serious?’

‘Well, you aren’t going to do it, are you? I can hardly ask the staff to question each other, and besides, you know what will happen. Unless you frighten them enough, they’ll just all cover up for each other.’

‘And if you frighten them too much, they’ll make up whatever you want to hear.’

‘That’s why we need an expert. Attalus knows what he’s doing, even if he does smell. He has the contract for the amphitheatre.’

‘Just because he can shift dead bodies — ’

‘He’s had to do this sort of thing several times before.’ She paused. ‘I know it’s not nice, but he’s promised to be very discreet. He’ll do everything a long way from the main rooms so there’s no disturbance, and his men will bring their own equipment and clear up afterwards.’

‘But — ’

‘This is not the time to be squeamish! What else are we going to do? We’ll tell him to stop as soon as we’ve found out who did it.’

Ruso clamped his fingers around the warm stone of the tabletop. ‘No.’

‘Oh, do make your mind up! You said yourself, we need to question everybody. I’ll get Daddy to pay him for doing the people here, and you can pay for yours.’

Ruso frowned. ‘My what?’

‘Your household, of course. He did die in your house, after all.’

‘No.’

The painted eyes locked with his own. ‘I’m the family,’ she said. ‘I decide what’s to be done.’

‘If you insist on having the staff tortured,’ said Ruso quietly, ‘I’ll have to tell people what Severus said. That way at least the male slaves will stand a chance of being left alone.’

‘Oh, Gaius!’ Claudia flung her hands in the air in exasperation. ‘Why do you always have to be so difficult?’

He was spared having to answer this question by the arrival of a kitchen slave with a plate of Claudia’s favourite honey cakes. He wondered what the staff who had arranged this kind gesture would think if they knew she had been discussing having them questioned under torture.

‘All right,’ she conceded, reaching for a cake. ‘You talk to people here and I’ll ask Daddy about Severus’ business contacts. But I can’t see how it’s going to help.’

Ruso waited until the slave was out of earshot. ‘Yesterday morning,’ he said, ‘can you remember exactly what Severus did? Was there anything out of the ordinary?’

She hesitated for a moment. Then she said, ‘He’d been having trouble sleeping lately. He was like that sometimes. Business worries, I suppose. Anyway, he woke up much too early as usual, farted, scratched his privates, jumped on me and woke me up too.’

Ruso hesitated. There was nothing of any investigative value in this account of his former wife waking up with another man, and certainly nothing he wished to hear repeated, but he had to ask. ‘If you were asleep, how do you know what he did when he woke up?’

She sighed. ‘Because I was pretending, Gaius. Sometimes he didn’t bother me if he thought I wasn’t awake.’

Ruso said, ‘Oh,’ and felt like an intruder. Then he said, ‘I don’t need that much detail.’

‘Then why did you ask?’

He wanted to say, Did you ever pretend to be asleep with me? ‘What did he do after that?’

‘He washed himself over at the basin, put on a clean tunic, grumbled as usual.’

‘About what?’

‘I thought you didn’t want all these silly details? About being ill.’

How illness could be seen as a silly detail when the man had dropped dead the same day was a mystery to Ruso. Trying not to sound too eager, he said, ‘So he was already ill?’

‘No worse than usual. Country air didn’t suit him. He said it gave him palpitations.’ She sniffed. ‘But the headaches and the bad stomach only ever struck after a big dinner.’

‘If he really had trouble with his heart — ’

‘If it was anything serious it would have killed him ages ago. So anyway, then he put on his house shoes, shut the door behind him and went to his office, and I never saw him alive again.’ She paused. ‘I wasn’t always cross with him, Gaius.’

Coming from Claudia, this was almost an expression of affection. Ruso was aware that she had honoured him with a confidence, and that he was supposed to respond accordingly. He coughed, urgently summoning and discarding various possible replies. I’m sorry was ambiguous. I know was untruthful. You weren’t always cross with me either was irrelevant, and …

And it was too late. The silence was growing awkward. Ruso said, ‘How do you know he went to his office?’

‘He always went to his office in the mornings to meet up with the steward. Not everyone is as disorganized as you.’

‘I’ll have to talk to the steward.’

‘Well, good luck. Zosimus is being no help at all. It’s the household steward’s job to organize the funeral, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, it is, I’m sure. But every time I tell him to do something he says he can’t act without orders from Rome. So I said, I’m the wife of the Senator’s agent and part of the family, and do you know what he said?’

This sounded like the sort of question Claudia usually answered herself, so Ruso raised his eyebrows in what he hoped looked like anticipation.

‘ “Not any more.” Not any more! So who am I, then?’

Ruso said, ‘Are there slaves mentioned in his will? People who would be freed after his death?’

‘I don’t know what’s in his will,’ said Claudia. ‘But he didn’t own any of the slaves. We’re the poor relations. Practically everything here belongs to the Senator.’ She paused. ‘Do you think he’ll pay for the funeral?’