Caveat emptor mi-4

by Ruth Downie

  Moments later he found himself staring into a narrow black gap between two shops and trying to listen for the sound of footsteps over the pounding of blood in his ears. He could see nothing. The alleyway might be empty. It might contain one man, or ten.

  Alone and unarmed, he was not going in there to find out.

  He glanced over his shoulder several times as he made his way back to the house, suddenly aware of shadowy hiding places all around him. He paused in the middle of the street and looked around, but as far as he could tell, there was nobody else out here.

  A gaggle of bleary-eyed people in various states of undress had gathered in Valens’s hall to ask each other what was going on. Ruso locked the door, counted to make sure everyone was safe, and explained that he had chased off a man who had been trying to break into the house.

  The confession that the man had succeeded, and that Ruso had allowed him to spend a long time sneaking around downstairs while most of them were asleep, could wait for daylight.

  19

  Someone was shaking his shoulder. Tilla wanted him to know that the sun had risen, everyone else was up, and she had prepared breakfast.

  “Uh,” said Ruso, rolling over and closing his eyes to catch the last tail of sleep as it fled.

  “It was a busy night.”

  “Uh.” He had a feeling there was something he should remember, and it was connected with the ache in his ribs. “Thanks for taking over.”

  After all the excitement of the burglar, Tilla had helped him rub salve into his bruises and volunteered to take over the vigil.

  “Valens has been looking around the house,” she said, “We are all lucky you did not give that man a chance to steal anything.”

  Ruso wondered how thoroughly Valens had checked. It was difficult to gauge the passage of time at night, but the prowler must have been creeping around for at least half an hour after he had scraped open the front door ready to make his getaway.

  “I am glad you have had a good sleep.” Tilla was smiling down at him. It seemed his efforts to protect the household had aroused an unusual degree of wifely devotion.

  He rubbed his eyes and wondered if there was time for a further attempt to create an heir before breakfast. “I’ve got some bruised ribs you could kiss better.”

  The kiss was perfunctory. Instead of drawing closer, Tilla sat up and started chattering about next door’s cockerel. “He has stopped crowing at night now: Did you notice?”

  He agreed without thinking, and reached for her. “I’m well rested. Come here.”

  She dodged his hand and stood up, still looking more cheerful than anyone who had been awake half the night had any right to be. Only slowly did it dawn on him that there might be a link between the silence of the cockerel, Tilla’s smile, and the rather stringy meat in last night’s stew.

  He was not going to ask. Instead he rolled over and grabbed her. Breakfast could wait.

  An hour later, the morning traffic came to a halt in the street as the occupants of Valens’s house stood to watch a shrouded body being loaded onto the floor of a carriage. Camma was pale and tight lipped, her grief marked only by the damp patches on the shawl wrapped around her fatherless baby.

  Ruso, who had paid the driver well with Firmus’s money, accompanied the carriage to the edge of town. When it reached the gates to the North road he bade the women good-bye and reminded the driver of his duty to deliver them to their door. The carriage passed under the arch and out toward the cemetery under an overcast sky, picking up speed as the driver urged the horses into a trot. Ruso lifted one hand in a last farewell, but if there was any response, it was hidden by an oxcart coming toward him.

  They were gone.

  Yesterday Ruso had been an object of interest to the procurator’s staff, providing relief from the daily routine. Today he had sunk to being just another nuisance, making annoying requests and placing demands upon their time. They had indeed suffered a visit from Tetricus the boatman yesterday afternoon, and the expenditure clerk seized his chance to point out that if Ruso planned to go around the town announcing rewards, it would help if he warned the office first.

  “Sorry,” said Ruso, and meant it.

  The resigned tone of, “Never mind, sir,” suggested that the staff was used to being uninformed and underappreciated. Ruso’s attempts to improve things did not seem to help. They did not look at all pleased to be told that others might be arriving to report sightings of the missing Julius Bericus.

  “I’ll clear all this with Firmus,” said Ruso, correctly guessing that this would not impress them either.

  “He’s in a meeting with the procurator, sir.”

  “Any idea how long he’ll be?”

  The expenditure clerk’s, “No, sir,” somehow also conveyed the information that since nobody in authority ever told the office anything, only a fool would have asked such a stupid question.

  “You don’t happen to know where the Catuvellauni magistrate’s staying, do you?”

  “That would be the one who turned up yesterday, sir?”

  “Caratius. Yes.”

  “I believe he lodges with a friend opposite the west gate of the Forum when he’s in town, sir.”

  “Excellent!” said Ruso, pleasantly surprised. “Thank you.”

  He was almost out of the door when the man added, “But he’s not there now, sir.”

  Apparently the magistrate had been summoned to meet the procurator first thing in the morning, and left for Verulamium immediately afterward.

  Ruso left Firmus a note explaining that he needed to question Caratius again. He would have tried to catch him on the road, but he had promised to have that incomprehensible letter looked at, and in all the confusion, he had forgotten to retrieve it from the apprentices this morning.

  “Would you care to tell us when you’ll be back, sir?”

  Ruso looked the clerk in the eye. “Later,” he said, then relented. He had suffered from enough unreliable colleagues to know how aggravating it was to work with someone who might or might not turn up at any moment. “I’ll drop by for messages when I get here,” he promised.

  The smirk on the face of the expenditure clerk suggested his concession had been seen as a sign of weakness.

  He headed back to Valens’s house to collect the letter, glancing around occasionally to see who else was in the street. The events of last night had left him uneasy. While everyone else had been reassuring themselves that no harm had been done, nothing had been stolen, and the only damage was a serious fright, Ruso had been mulling over the identity and the intentions of the intruder. Pausing to lean on the rail of the footbridge while an elderly man and a dog ushered four sheep across the stream, he wondered if he should have taken the tall apprentice’s sighting of a hooded man more seriously. What if they really had been followed? Whoever it was must know where they lived-although why anyone should care was a mystery. Besides, any sensible burglar would try to disguise himself. A hood was the easiest way to do it.

  There was no answer to Ruso’s knock at Valens’s street door. After last night’s events he was not surprised to find it firmly locked. Three patients were lined up on the bench outside the surgery entrance. That was closed too.

  He walked along the side of the building and turned into the back lane. From here he could see into the garden, but his plans to vault over the wall were thwarted by a group of figures outside the kitchen window. The figure in the middle with the toga draped untidily over his head was Valens. He was lifting a cup into the air and speaking to it while the apprentices and the kitchen boy looked on, wide eyed. Then he tipped the cup and a pale stream of wine cascaded down into the scrubby undergrowth. Evidently he had taken the break-in seriously enough to seek divine protection.

  Distracted by the sight of this unusually diligent appeal to the household gods, Ruso was startled to hear a heavy sigh beside him. A pair of muscular arms leaned on the wall. They were attached to solid shoulders encased in plate armor. Above the armor a
thick neck led to a square jaw, a broken nose, and an army haircut.

  Valens finished his devotions and looked up. “Can I help, sir?”

  “I’m a friend of the landlord,” said the centurion. “Saw the address on the night watch report. Any damage?”

  Valens unwrapped his toga and rolled it into an untidy bundle as he made his way through the weeds to the garden wall. “Just a downstairs window forced. Ruso there chased him off before he could take anything.”

  The gaze was aimed at Ruso while the broken nose veered slightly off to the left. “Don’t suppose you got a description?”

  “It was dark,” Ruso said. “I tried to stop him getting past me, but I couldn’t get hold of him. He was covered in something slippery, he was wearing a hood, and he’d left the door open to make a quick escape.”

  “Greased himself to avoid capture,” said the centurion, as if it was something Ruso should have expected. He glanced at the apprentices and the kitchen boy. “Any of you lot see anything?”

  The taller lad looked delighted to be asked. “I’m almost sure there was a man with a hood following us down behind the wharf last night, sir.”

  “I meant here.”

  “No, sir. We were asleep till we heard all the crashing around and the ladies calling out, sir.”

  The man grunted. “I’ll submit a report.” He gestured toward the window, said, “Get some bars put on it,” and walked away.

  While Valens was dealing with his patients, the short apprentice emerged from the surgery with a small box of broken pottery. Part of the disturbance Ruso had heard last night was a jar of bear grease smashing on the tiled floor.

  “He took the hall lamp in there, sir,” the lad observed. “He must have been clever not to wake anybody. But he wasn’t much of a burglar. Doctor Valens’s equipment was all laid out in there, but nothing’s been taken.”

  “Good,” said Ruso, his unease growing. Quality medical instruments were precision made, portable, and costly, and a thief as intelligent as this one seemed to be should have stolen them. He had been prowling around the house for longer than Ruso cared to remember. What had he been doing?

  It was a mystery he did not have time to ponder.

  “That letter I gave you,’ he said. ‘Did you have any luck deciphering it?”

  They had not, but both apprentices had spent a couple of hours trying. Oblivious to how happy this must have made Valens, the short apprentice went back into the surgery to fetch the wax tablet on which it was written.

  While he was waiting, Ruso gathered up a couple of chunks of fallen plaster almost the size of his fist from the foot of the hall wall. He tried to fit them, painted side out, into the hole made by whatever weapon had narrowly missed his head. More dry plaster crumbled away from the lath and showered onto his feet. The hall table, presumably broken, had been removed. Serena was not going to be pleased when-if-she returned.

  Ruso unfastened his left boot and shook out a piece of plaster grit. Then he leaned back against an intact stretch of wall, folded his arms, and began to make a mental list of the new questions he was going to ask Caratius.

  He was interrupted by the reappearance of the short apprentice, pink in the face and clearly agitated. “It must be in our room, sir,” he declared, scuttling away toward the back of the house. “Won’t be a moment.”

  There followed a series of muffled crashes, thumps, and screeches that suggested the flinging open of cupboards and the shifting of heavy furniture. After a brief silence in which Ruso wondered if he should offer to help, the noises recommenced with increased vigor. Finally the youth reemerged, his face even pinker and shiny with sweat. “Sorry about this, sir. He’s put it somewhere.”

  “He” was presumably the tall apprentice. Moments later both youths were in the hallway denying having moved the letter from the surgery shelf and blaming each other for its disappearance.

  “It was probably Doctor Valens,” suggested Ruso, not wanting to voice a growing suspicion that it was none of them. “You two get back to work. I’ll have a word with him in between patients.”

  As they headed back through the surgery lobby, the tall apprentice voiced Ruso’s own thoughts. “Perhaps the burglar took it.”

  “Huh,” said his companion. As the door closed Ruso overheard, “That’ll be the same thief as took the only decent pen I had, and gave you one just like it.”

  Ruso went into the dining room. Since the apprentices were not allowed to use the room, there was no reason why the letter should be in it, but he might as well do something while he was waiting.

  Shifting cushions and peering under the couch produced several small coins, a wooden whistle, a child’s shoe, a crust of bread hardened to the consistency of concrete, a green hair ribbon that must belong to Serena… and a writing tablet. His brief moment of elation was destroyed by the words Pharmacy List inked on the outside. Idly curious, he took it across to the window to read.

  What it contained was not a list but a message.

  Scrawled in a large and badly formed hand were the words, “When you finally notice that we are not here, you may want to know that I have taken the boys and gone to live with my cousin.” The message was scraped so deep into the wax that it had scored the wood underneath.

  So that was it.

  Ruso was more saddened than surprised. He wished he had found the note before Tilla had gone. She would have known what to say. In fact it would have been better not to have found it at all, or at least to have left it unopened. Now he felt like the woman in the old Jewish tale: the one who ate the fruit from the tree and knew too much. He should say something helpful to Valens, but what? How could a man interfere in his friend’s marriage? Especially since he was not supposed to have read the note, anyway.

  He pushed the message back under the couch. When the apprentices reappeared with orders from Valens to question the kitchen boy and search the rest of the house, he closed the door of the dining room and told them he had already checked it. There was nothing there.

  He entered the surgery just in time to see a middle-aged man stagger out into the street with a poultice clutched to his face and a message for the next patient that he would be called in a moment.

  “Splendid abscess,” said Valens, describing the departed patient rather than the space beside a stack of rolled bandages to which he now pointed. That was where he had seen the letter late last night. He had almost called one of the boys to put it away until he realized it was not a patient record after all. “Somebody must have come in here after me.”

  Ruso waited until the patient had shut the door-before suggesting, “The burglar was in here.”

  Valens’s eyes widened. “Ruso, you don’t think you’re taking this investigation business a little too seriously? I know it must have been a shock finding this chap in the house, but really-what sort of burglar steals somebody’s letters?”

  “The sort who wants to know what’s in them?” Ruso suggested, remembering Caratius’s eagerness to see the letter. “Or the sort who already knows and doesn’t want other people to find out.” He glanced around at the neatly stacked shelves. “If it was here last night and it’s not here now, where is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Valens admitted.

  “The women wouldn’t have taken it. Neither of them can read.”

  “Nor can the kitchen boy, much.”

  “Which leaves only the burglar.”

  “I’m sure it’ll turn up,” Valens assured him. “You can let the lads carry on hunting for a while. I’m running late for house calls, and it’s much quicker in here without them. Don’t fancy seeing a few patients yourself, do you? Keep your hand in?”

  “Sorry,” said Ruso, backing out of the room. “I’m only an investigator.”

  At the far end of the hall there seemed to have been an explosion in the laundry basket. It was the work of the kitchen boy, still delving down and flinging out the contents. As Ruso approached, a blanket unfurled in the air. A sock disenga
ged from it and sailed past his shoulder. The kitchen boy apologized. He had not found the letter yet. “But we’re all looking, sir.”

  “Thank you,” said Ruso, grateful for his efforts even though the bottom of the laundry basket had obviously lain undisturbed since whenever it was Serena had walked out and taken the staff with her. “Let me know if you find anything.”

  He was not optimistic. If he was right about the burglar, then one question about the letter had been answered: Its contents were important to somebody. Unfortunately, the manner in which he had learned of their importance meant he was not going to be able to find out what they were.

  The apprentices had now moved on to the upstairs rooms in their efforts to vindicate themselves. Remembering Tilla’s precious crockery, Ruso hurried up to restrain them. The box had been dragged out from under the bed and he deduced from the shape of the legs protruding in its place that the tall apprentice was conducting a thorough search.

  “It won’t be under there,” Ruso pointed out. “Nobody who had it came in here.”

  “I know, sir,” agreed a muffled voice. “But we’ve tried everywhere else.”

  The legs began to shuffle back toward Ruso. The tall apprentice’s face, when it appeared, was smudged with soot. His hair was sticking up at unintended angles and a cobweb festooned one ear, evidence of his searching in other unlikely places.

  “I’m going to have to go out,” said Ruso. “If you have to look in here, be careful of that box with “fragile” written on it.”

  The boy’s bewildered glance around the room showed that he had not noticed the warning when he moved it.

  “And that trunk has my medical texts and instruments locked in it, so don’t bother looking there.”

  He turned to leave, and found himself facing the short apprentice. He was about to say, “There’s no point in two of you wasting time in here,” when he noticed a battered piece of parchment cut from a scroll in the youth’s hand.