The Grove of the Caesars

by Lindsey Davis

  From his behaviour, I reckoned Berytus might never have seen any of the previous corpses. He knew about them but had always avoided viewing the remains. Karus presumably had made him come out in person to this one. The man had been left deeply troubled. He did not say so, but I knew he would never forget what he had seen now. He made a trite remark about how terrible the situation was, filling time so he could stop thinking about it.

  “How long have you been in post?” I asked him.

  “Three years.” His gaze flickered, as it struck him why I had asked. “I was at the Emperor’s villa in Alba Longa before.” The citadel. It was said that our brooding tyrant’s hideaway had beautiful garden terraces.

  I didn’t bother to look at Karus, though I sensed he was also noting this timescale: too short. Not Berytus, then.

  Karus asked bluntly, “How many staff on your complement have worked here longer than ten years?”

  “Surely you don’t think it could have been one of them? Oh, I suppose you must consider all possibilities … About half. They tend to be either long-term hands who have been here all their lives, or much younger, mere apprentices.”

  “Forget the apprentices. Give me a list of the rest.”

  “Well, yes, I can do that … It’s a joke, of course, that we train them but they are immediately moved to other sites.”

  “Typical,” said Karus, but coolly, like someone who had no experience of that. From what I knew, he always kept a close bevy of loyal men. He hailed from Spain, Tarraconensis. Don’t blame me for knowing; when he first started throwing his weight about, it was my husband who had looked him up. His main command, the troops who helped on the British expedition that had made Karus’s career, was a cohort of Asturians—more Spaniards. He had men of his own in Rome; I had seen them and hated their attitude. Karus was the kind of agent who would accept a special assignment on condition that he brought his own trusted team. It was arrogant, but his kind somehow obtain approval for whatever they want.

  “Any of your staff you would suggest particularly as perverts?” he asked bluntly. “What about those who found today’s corpse?”

  “Oh!” A nervy squeak. “Well, Blandus and his group may be the longest-serving in the gardens, though I can’t say I have had concerns of that kind about them … All the hardy perennials are grim-looking specimens. Not many smiles, not given to cheeriness. I put it down to bad backs and hitting their heads on tree branches. I can place Blandus first on the list for you … This is all so horrible!” Unused to such scenes and frightened, the superintendent kept exclaiming how ghastly the situation was. “What kind of person can do such things to another human being?”

  “I believe murder gets easier after the first time,” I told him bleakly, hoping he would shut up. This was no place for innocents, or not unless they held their peace. Those of us who understood were heavy with our own unspoken response.

  “Your answer is he’s a person who enjoys doing it!” grated Karus.

  The unnecessary put-down only agitated Berytus more. “I still cannot believe anybody would! Why hasn’t he been found? How can this beast be roaming the gardens, yet no one ever spots him?”

  I could have left Karus to deal with it, but I saw he was ready to lash out. I weighed in with a measured explanation: “It’s simple, sir. Because he does not look or behave like a beast. When he is found, this will be the most ordinary man. Everyone will be amazed. Of course, he has also to look like someone who has a proper reason to be here. People must pass him yet not give him a second glance.”

  Berytus settled somewhat, in the face of my quiet certainty. “You know what he is like?”

  “I can prophesy.”

  “So, who is he?”

  “Not young, because we know he has been doing this for fifteen or twenty years. He must have been an adult, or nearly so, when he started. Not too old either, though. He has to be fit, strong enough to subdue victims however hard they fight for their lives—although he has learned to overpower them very quickly.”

  “Why does he do it?”

  “He may have had disappointments in his early life. He may blame others, especially women.”

  “What else do you know?”

  “He is probably married, has a job, maybe children.”

  “Oh, surely not! You don’t think so?” the shocked superintendent demanded of Karus, who did not respond, though neither did he argue against me.

  I continued my ideas. Professionally, it was useful to sum up now. “This killer is competent, well-organised, intelligent. Although he lacks a conscience or human feelings, particularly towards women, in his daily life he hides that. But he has no regard for his victims. Even if he gives himself some reason why they need to die, he is completely unfeeling towards them. To him, the women he snatches are just things, things to be used for his pleasure.”

  “Pieces of meat,” put in Karus.

  “Yet,” I told Berytus who, of course, was looking appalled again, “you will find this strange. His wife will never see him in that way. Does she know what he does? She may suspect, but even if we catch him she will never acknowledge his guilt. He must almost have two personalities. I’d say he is regarded by his community as hard-working, pleasant, a fellow who will do anything for anyone.”

  “She cannot be right!” Berytus appealed again to Karus.

  Karus surprised me. “I think she is. This individual has been in the Transtiberina for decades. As far as we know, no suspicion has ever attached to him. He blends in. We have appealed for suggestions of his identity, even promising anonymity, but nobody has come forward.”

  “No one at all?”

  “Well, we’ve had a few mad ideas that were easily discounted.”

  They had probably received more loopy reports than he suggested. When my uncle was with the Fourth Cohort, Lucius Petronius used to rant about crackpot theorists. Karus clearly knew most tips would be irrelevant, spiteful or purely unhinged. All the same, having to look into the suggestions tied up the vigiles. The very ordinariness of the man involved made every allegation a potential clue. In an inquiry like this, even unlikely pointers must be checked, in case.

  * * *

  There was no reason for me to stay. I asked Karus to let me know if he found anything. So far, neither the recent victim’s property nor anything that could relate to the much older bones had turned up. I then requested details of the friend who last night had reported the latest missing woman. To my surprise, Karus told me.

  I confirmed honestly that I intended to interview this witness. Apparently, she had been so fraught last night that he could extract little. Now he must reckon maybe she would talk to me.

  Later, I said, I would inform my client Cluventius about the new discoveries. We should hope he did not hear of them from elsewhere. It would serve no purpose if he rushed off in high agitation to the praetor again.

  “You’re doing a good job with him!” answered Karus. His praise, I thought, was tongue-in-cheek.

  XXXVI

  The woman who had reported her friend missing lived in a one-room rental in a quarter inhabited by waterfront workers. Here were the dangerous glass and pottery kilns, watermills on the Janiculan slopes and brick factories on the Vatican. Tanners, fish-pickle suppliers, metal-beaters, dye-brewers and other antisocial small businesses had been shifted to the Transtiberina out of the luckier districts of Rome. People of influence lived centrally, whereas here there were only the poor, foreigners, and others with no political voice.

  Here, too, lived thin women, old before their time, who struggled to earn a tiny income from selling themselves. Many of the men they went with were brutish. Most of the women died young. They expected they would succumb to battery, disease or pure exhaustion, though at least they would make it into their twenties or thirties. The one taken last night had had her thread snipped at nineteen. Even at that age, she had two children, by different fathers, neither of whom were around. I heard the infants grizzling from the bed, as I intervie
wed her friend.

  This older woman maintained she had been like a mother to the victim, though they were neighbours, not relatives. She was of an earlier generation, yet I suspected she still occasionally worked in the same trade. She might well have introduced the younger one to this hard method of survival. Her appearance was as the other must have been in life: hollow-cheeked, scrawny, an unhealthy colour. She looked as if she drank, or worse, if ever she could afford it. And as if she would drink, or worse, in preference to eating or sleeping.

  She told me they had heard what had happened to Victoria Tertia. Their attitude had been He is at it again; watch out. Most did not stop working. Prostitutes in the district were being as careful as they could, but they had to live. When the young woman, whose name was Satia, had decided she had no choice but to go out to Caesar’s Gardens last evening, she left her children in her neighbour’s care, saying she would collect them by midnight, sooner if she managed to find a customer and earn something. She was a good mother. That was why she had had to venture out in the first place, because they were all starving. On previous occasions she had always returned when she had promised. When she failed to reappear yesterday, it meant serious trouble had befallen her.

  Satia had no pimp. She was not that type. Neither did she have a close friend with whom she could go out in a pair, watching out for one another, as some girls managed to do. Caesar’s Gardens was her usual walking ground. She never went up by the Naumachia: it wasn’t a nice place.

  Originally, Satia’s family were immigrants, though none but her survived. She looked foreign. She could have been beautiful, but misery had worn her down. She had grown up half starved and remained so all her life. There was nothing of her. In fact, she was so slight that anyone could have subdued her physically—though a man from the vigiles, who came to say they had found her, had told her neighbour that Satia had fought hard to survive.

  Her missing clothes had been nothing but rags. She had no jewellery to speak of, only a tiny wire bracelet that someone had given her when she was a child. As an adult, her arms were so thin she could still wear it.

  Nobody knew what would happen to her orphaned infants. The neighbour promised me she would look after them for the time being. She seemed so willing to hang on to them that I knew she planned to sell the poor mites into slavery. Whatever pittance she got for them would be used up within a week.

  That was how it had been in the Transtiberina for years. Again and again, women like Satia had been abused and killed. Few people would miss them when they disappeared—sometimes they were never missed at all. Either way, no one thought that anything could or would be done about it. Until now, nobody had cared.

  XXXVII

  My mood was doleful when I emerged outside. There, for some odd reason, the Transtiberina seemed more normal than usual. I passed through streets with better shops. I even found the famous area where an oddly placed group of businesses sold high-quality furniture. Embittered by this contrast with the sad world I had left behind, I did not pause to look. Tiberius and I had discussed having a citronwood table when we could afford it, but right now I had no interest in researching fancy goods.

  I wished he would come home. With my mind trammelled in the troubles of this district, I pushed aside the longing. I almost blamed myself for having a life. Normality. Security. Husband. Home. People. Enough money to live …

  I walked slowly back to the gardens. I had been told that the group who had found Satia’s body had been taken off the search and sent to recover. I went to the huddle of hutments that the superintendent had pointed out.

  Inside the gardeners’ hedged compound, Berytus had a cottagey office, prettified with a border of shrubs but so tiny it contained only a worktable and a cupboard. I looked inside, but he must still have been stuck with Karus. I found a stable, barely hanging together, for the pony that dragged away rubbish to dump in the countryside; I had seen the rough-coated, sturdy creature, barely able to haul his overloaded cart, especially after Larcius and company had added building rubble to it.

  Equipment stores leaned askew as if homemade. Haphazardly positioned between them were compost bins, piles of rotting prunings, a collection of battered trolleys and carts. A manure heap steamed. Log piles teetered. An area was dug, a nursery for young plants, though at this time of year only a few miniature cuttings struggled among hardy weeds. A couple of statues loitered; a muscle-bound nude man looked as if he was waiting for a war to come along, while a half-size young goddess in not-quite-white marble looked over her shoulder at her bottom as if wondering who had smacked it so often that it was grimier than the rest of her.

  From the lack of accommodation, I gathered the staff in theory lived elsewhere, though I thought it quite likely they could stay surreptitiously overnight in their sheds. A pipe from the Alsietina brought them water, which poured endlessly into an overflowing basin beside which stood rusty buckets. I could see nothing that looked like human sanitary provision.

  In an outside grassy area stood benches and other outdoor furniture, borrowed from the public gardens; this was where staff must gather for rest and refreshment. At a licheny goat-legged table, four men were waiting to be sent home or given new instructions. All looked hardy, suntanned, wearing short-sleeved brown tunics that had seen years of life but not many launderings, all sporting scratches and bruises from their work. One was clearly senior, in charge, another a lad. Even before I arrived, they were barely talking, still stunned by discovering the corpse. The lad, a presumed apprentice, was most shocked, visibly tear-stained and shivering.

  I sat down with them, then introduced myself. I said I was working alongside Julius Karus, which implied he and I were collaborating. If he disagreed, let him put them right.

  Though I addressed myself to the senior, I recognised one of the others. First, I reminded that one of how we had met briefly, when I was lost while looking for our building site. As before, he was polite, almost too much so; I felt the humility was feigned and he was laughing up his ragged sleeve. He hoped I had found the right place. I confirmed it, thanking him for his directions. His name was Rullius.

  Blandus took over, making it plain he was the man I was supposed to talk to. While he held forth, no one else got a word in. We began gradually, taking time to get used to one another. He, too, appeared sceptical of a woman, though he let me ask my questions, to which he responded, even though he was such a slow conversationalist that the hard work felt like digging up weeds with deep taproots.

  “I met your superintendent.” Out of my direct vision, I thought a couple of the other men exchanged satirical glances. It might have been dislike of their supremo, or something else. “Berytus tells me your team is the longest-serving?”

  “We’ve done some time here, that’s correct,” confirmed Blandus.

  “So, you have prior experience of these deaths?”

  Blandus agreed that there had been bodies before. It went back many years. Sometimes gardeners had found them. Or it might have been members of the public. With the public, they generally reported their discovery to the gardeners, so summoning the vigiles was up to them. They called them in to avoid trouble later. Besides, the red-tunics would take away the remains. I probed, but Blandus would not be drawn much on his opinion of the Seventh, though he did say drily that they were a fire brigade, so if they ever found anyone to arrest they would just throw a bucket of water over him. Once bodies had been removed, for the gardeners that was the end of it—until the next time.

  “It seems most of the victims were working girls,” I said. “Satia certainly came here for that reason last night. A witness told me. Apparently you knew her?”

  “We knew who she was. We had seen her.” Blandus seemed to become more aggressive.

  “Spoken?”

  “We don’t have time to speak to people.” This was untrue: I had seen gardeners leaning on spades or brooms on plenty of occasions. They clustered to natter over piles of leaves more often than I ever saw them
sweeping those piles together. Gardens are not only made for strollers to engage in high-minded reflection; they are places of low-grade communion. Gossip is easier than weeding.

  “You knew what she was called?”

  “I suppose.”

  “I suggest, without judgement, some workers might have known this poor girl and—I dare say—some of the others who died, through using their professional services?”

  Blandus, now definitely defensive, would not say. He could be as coy as he liked: I firmly believed some garden staff would have engaged with the women who patrolled the garden walks, and I bet they didn’t wait for dusk to fall. Probably all of them paid for a trick from time to time. “All right. What do you think about them coming here to work?”

  “It’s harmless,” said Blandus, still aggressive. “It’s nature, isn’t it?”

  “When women are desperate … My next question is obvious, so I apologise. The vigiles must have asked it, but has anyone who works in the gardens or in the Grove of the Caesars ever noticed someone who could be the man who does this?”

  “Oh, yes. The firemen always ask!” Blandus made himself sound like an extremely patient country-dweller being generous to a numbskull townee. “Have we ever seen anyone acting suspiciously? Hanging around unnaturally? Bothering women?”

  “No?” I kept my cool.

  “No!” The men let out laughs at being asked yet again. I sensed they all thought that the women who died were not worth investigation time.

  “Well, thank you.”

  “And if we do,” Blandus carried on, regurgitating what must be their constant assurance to the Seventh, “we have to run along like good boys and hand in the information at the station-house. We’ll give it to bloody Ursus.”

  “Who will stuff it in his old tips cupboard!” chimed Rullius, letting his contempt show as he suddenly spoke up.