The Accusers

IX

‘PURE GOLD pills?'

Silius Italicus had received our careful report with all the thanks and all the applause we hoped for. As men about the Forum, we expected none. Just as well.

I let him rave.

`And what's this try-on, Falco? – your substantial donation to the vigiles' widows and orphans fund will obviously all be drunk by the Second Cohort at a better-than-usual Saturnalia knees-up this year!' Even for a man experienced in court rhetoric, the long, irate sentence left him winded.

If the orphans' fund was all he could find to carp about, we were well landed on the jetty. Of course the fund was a fiction, but he knew the form. The vigiles do have a fund; they look after their own – but that's the point: they keep outsiders out of it. They want the grateful widows to save their thanks for the right people – their late husbands' colleagues. Some are good-looking girls who, being paupers, have to give their thanks in kind, poor dears. Much better to keep it in the family.

Excuse me if I sound cynical. I am shocked at such goings-on, but this is what I was told by my best friend Petronius. He is a compassionate man who in his time has looked after quite a few bereaved vigiles' families. Mind you, that was before he started looking after my bereaved sister. Well, it had better be.

`I apologise for the gilded poison pastilles, Silius, but these are the facts we turned up. I put all this to you as a good-quality proof- and it's backed up by creditable witnesses. Trust me: a ludicrous story carries weight. Anything too feasible tends to be a web of lies.'

`Liars always concoct a probable story,' agreed Justinus, standing at my back.

`A mad explanation like this would be stupid – if it weren't true,' his brother added piously. As these two burbled, Silius looked even more irritated, but he soon subsided. He just wanted to be rid of us.

`I cannot take a man called Rhoemetalces before the praetor! I'd be laughed out of court.'

`With luck, you won't have to go to court. The praetor should be able to rule on this evidence from his warm and cosy office,' I declared. `You know how to get justice -' I was none too sure of that. `You should walk out with an edict in your favour the same day.'

Now Silius looked annoyed that I was teaching him legal procedure. He must think me a bumpkin, but I knew about praetors' edicts. Each year's new praetor issues a revised version of the civil code, with minor refinements where the law has not been working. When problems are brought before him during the year, he decides which `formula' for redress from the time-honoured code will fit the problem; if necessary he issues an adjusted formula. The praetor's pronouncements are not supposed to be new law, just clarifications to meet modern times.

I did think it unlikely any wimp of a praetor nowadays would dare to make a judgment in this sticky case. It was a criminal issue, not civil, for one thing. But you have to bluff.

'Rhoemetalces,' Justinus assured Silius in his most serious and most patrician voice, `is an old-established, very respectable Cilician name.

He was romancing. Silius suspected it, and I was certain. I had seen the lousy pill-producer.

`Don't give me that.' Silius was no fool either. `The apothecary will be a sinister ex-slave who probably poisoned his master in the recent past as a means of gaining his freedom – and with a forged will!' he added viciously.

`Luckily,' I teased, `we will be producing him in a murder case, not testing him before the Board of Citizenship.'

Even Silius was beginning to be seduced by our wry sense of humour. His eyes narrowed. `What's he like, this druggist?'

`Looks successful,' I said. `Works out of the usual booth. Sits there with a wicker chair and a footstool, surrounded by piles of medicine blocks which he cuts up as required by customers. He seems well respected in his trade. He owns some up-to-date equipment – a pill machine, where he pushes in the paste, then it comes out extruded into strips and he slices off individual dosages -'

`Yes, yes…' Silius had no time for technical marvels. More importantly, he could see we would not give up. `Oh Hades. I cannot be bothered to haggle with you rogues. The story hangs together consistently.' As soon as he said this, I could see its glaring holes. Silius seemed to have a sight problem, luckily. `Thanks for the work. Submit your bill. We'll call it quits.'

That may have sounded as though we had seen the last of Silius and the Metelli. Somehow, I doubted it.