Three Hands in The Fountain

LI

The place where we would be staying lay near the various springs which fed the Aqua Marcia. Bolanus had suggested their underground position would make access for the killer both difficult and unlikely. That was not how the dismembered hands entered the supply.

But Bolanus reckoned he could provide our answer. He and Frontinus were waiting for me as arranged, at the forty-second milestone: beside a large mud reservoir where the Anio Novus began. The valley was full of birdsong. It was a bright country afternoon, in grim contrast to the dark conversations we were about to hold.

A dam with a sluice in the bed of the river helped steer part of the current into this basin. It formed a huge settling tank which filtered out impurities before the start of the aqueduct. Now for the first time in years it had been drained and cleaned out. Banks of dredged-up mud were drying all around it. Slow-moving public slaves were unloading their breakfast from a donkey, leaving their tools in his pack: a typical scene. The donkey turned his head suddenly and grabbed a bit to eat himself; he knew how to get the better of the water board.

'With aqueducts,' Bolanus explained to us, 'it's difficult and unnecessary to design a filtration system along the whole run. We tend to make a big effort at the start, then have extra tanks at the end, just before distribution starts. But that means anything which gets past the first filter can go all the way to Rome.'

'Arriving as little as a day later,' I reminded him, remembering what he had told me in an earlier discussion.

'My star pupil! Anyway, as soon as I came up here I could see we had problems. This basin had never been cleared since Caligula inaugurated the channel. You can imagine what we found in the mud.'

'That was when you uncovered more remains?' Frontinus prompted.

Bolanus looked sick. 'I found a leg.'

'Was that all?' Frontinus and I exchanged a glance. The message that had reached us previously had implied limbs of all sorts and sizes.

'That was enough for me! It was horrendously decayed; we had to bury it.' Bolanus, who had seemed so sanguine, had become appalled now he had actually seen the gruesome relics involved. 'I can't describe what it was like clearing out the mud. There were a few loose bones we could not identify.'

A foreman produced them for us. Workmen like to keep a jar of interesting finds. All the better if it includes parts of old skeletons.

'I'll ask somebody who hunts,' suggested Frontinus, ever practical, as he fearlessly handled the pieces of knuckle and leg bone. 'But even if we decide they are human, they won't help identification.'

'No, but these might.' Bolanus himself was unpacking his knapsack.

He produced a small fold of material; it looked like a napkin from one of his excellent lunch hampers. Carefully unfolding it, he revealed a gold earring. It was of good workmanship, crescent-shaped and covered with handsome granulation, with five dangling chains, each ending in a fine gold ball. Bolanus held it up between his fingers in silence, as if to imagine it hanging gracefully on a female ear.

Accompanying the earring was a string of jewellery, probably part of a longer necklace, since there was no clasp. Bright blue glass beads – lapis, or something very similar – had metal caps which joined them to small squares of delicate patterns cut from sheet gold.

'It's very unusual to find items like this up here,' Bolanus said. 'In the sewers, yes. They could have been lost in the street or anything. Coins and all kinds of gems turn up there – one work gang even discovered half a silver dinner service once.'

'It looks as though somebody threw them into the water to get rid of them,' I said. 'What girl goes tripping along a remote riverbank in her big city finery?' My companions were silent, leaving it to me to comment on girls.

Depressed by the conversation, Frontinus walked back towards the river. 'Should I have the bed of the Anio dragged?' he asked glumly as I followed him, sharing his low mood. 'I could send my allocation of public slaves; may as well use them for something.'

'In due course, maybe. But for now we should avoid any obvious official activity. Everything should look normal. We don't want to scare off the killer. We need to lure him out – and then grab him.'

'Before he kills again,' Frontinus sighed. 'I don't like this, Falco. We must be close to him now – but it could go badly wrong.'

Bolanus had joined us. For a moment we all watched the water rushing into a diversion pipe that currently fed the aqueduct. I turned round and scanned the woods, almost as if I suspected the killer might be lurking up there watching us.

'I'll tell you what I think happens,' said Bolanus in a sombre voice. Then he paused.

He was upset. The isolated spot had worked on him; in his imagination he was sharing the last moments of the women who had been brought so far from home to a terrible fate, possibly killed, mutilated and dismembered very near to where we stood.

I helped him out. 'The killer lives somewhere locally. He abducts his victims in Rome, probably because he is not known there and he hopes he won't be traced. Then he brings them forty miles back here.'

Bolanus found his voice again. 'After he has finished whatever he does to these girls, he drives back to Rome to dispose of their heads and torsos in the river and the Cloaca – probably to minimise the chance of anything pointing to him locally. But first he cuts off their limbs and throws them into the river -'

'Why doesn't he just throw all the parts into the Anio, or else take everything to Rome?' Frontinus asked.

'I imagine,' I said slowly, 'he wants the large pieces as far away as possible because they look like identifiable human remains for longer. So he takes them back to Rome – but while he's disposing of them in the sewer or the river he's vulnerable. He wants just a couple of large parcels which will sink out of sight quickly if he's being observed. But he thinks he's safe chucking the smaller limbs away here because they will quickly deteriorate beyond being recognised. Thrown into the stream, they could be eaten by carrion birds or animals, either here in the hills or down on the Campagna. And anything that went over the cascade at Tibur would be well smashed up.'

'Right, Falco,' said Bolanus. 'I don't think he ever intends that they should turn up in the water supply in Rome. But sometimes smaller and lighter parts – hands, for instance – find their way into the Novus basin, and then on into the channel. The killer may still be unaware that this happens. If they happen to float out of the filtration system, the body parts will travel on to Rome. At the end of the run, two aqueducts join on one arcade; the Novus is carried above the Aqua Claudia, with switching shafts. And the Claudia also has an interchange with the Marcia, as I showed you both -'

Frontinus and I nodded, remembering how we saw the torrent crashing from one aqueduct to the other.

'So we can see how these small relics might move around once they reach Rome. The only puzzle,' said Bolanus slowly, 'is the first hand, the one that Falco found, which was supposed to have been pulled out on the Aventine, in a castellum of the Aqua Appia.'

It seemed a long time ago that Petro and I had shared a drink in Tailors' Lane. 'Are there no links between the Aqua Appia and any of the Tibur channels?' I asked.

'There are possibilities. The Appia source isn't underground; it starts at a reservoir in some ancient quarries on the Via Collatina.'

'So anyone could have driven past one day and thrown in a package?'

Bolanus didn't like it. 'More likely your public fountain has two jets, drawn from different aqueducts. It enables us to maintain a supply by a swap if needs be. It's true the Appia serves the Aventine; the terminus is by the Temple of Luna. But there could be a second feed from the Aqua Claudia -'

'So it all fits,' Frontinus interrupted. 'And it all starts here.'

'But who is this bastard?' fretted Bolanus, for whom the hunt was starting to be personal.

'All I found back along the road,' I reported, 'was a trio of cheerful brothers who – apparently – have not been to Rome for ages, with a few slaves, plus an old man who looks too feeble to go anywhere.'

'So what do you suggest?' asked the Consul. 'We know what the bastard does, and we know he does some of it here. Unless we act, at the next festival he will be here doing it again.'

'If we were very cold-blooded,' I answered him slowly, 'when the Augustan Games start' – they were only a week away – 'we would station your public slaves behind trees all the way up this valley from here to Sublaqueum, telling them to make themselves look like twigs until they spot someone chucking something suspicious out into the Anio.'

'But to do that and catch him in the act -'

'- a woman has to die first.'

Frontinus took a deep breath. 'We shall do it if we have to.' Pragmatic to the end, it seemed.

I smiled. 'But if we can, I want to catch him earlier.'

'Good, Falco!'

'We have a few leads. Before the Augustales begin, I want us to be set up for trapping him in Rome. We haven't much time. I'll stay at Tibur for one more day, and give our suspects list a final look-over. I want to be quite sure we haven't missed anything. We know the killer is prepared to travel long distances. Maybe he actually lives at Tibur but comes up into the hills when he starts butchering the bodies.'

So it was back to Tibur. As we moved away from the sunny riverbank a startled kingfisher swooped away in a brilliant flash of colour. Behind us a dragonfly hovered in stunning livery above the sparkling and seemingly clear waters of the contaminated Anio.