“We call him the Pest,” Blandus told me, taking over again. “That man who takes the women. Whoever he is. A nasty pest.”
“Pest doesn’t sound nasty enough,” I suggested.
“Then you’ve never had sooty mould or lily beetles! If I ever catch him, I’ll squash him under my boot, like the big slug he is.”
He made a mime of doing it. The action was so vivid I could hear the squelch.
* * *
I fell quiet, wondering what else I could possibly ask. There was no point querying if they ever found jewellery, meaning the trophy pieces that were taken from dead victims. These workers were paid a trifle. Anything of value that turned up on a path or in a fountain bowl would be considered theirs by right. They might possibly share profits among themselves, though I doubted that. Seated here, they formed a group, yet any man who found something would turn it into cash secretly, I suspected.
Rullius, the polite one, leaned in closer than I liked. “I heard you were interested in some writing things that were found.” I distanced myself physically and simply nodded. “I saw some people who came and buried those.”
“Oh?” The puzzle of the scrolls had faded to insignificance today, but I made myself show interest in what Rullius was saying. “When was that?”
“Couple of months back.”
“Know them?”
“No.”
“What did they look like?”
“A man and a woman. I took notice because they had a big spade with them.”
“Can you describe them?”
“Too far away. I thought at first they were going to the old cave to have it off. Obviously,” he told me, with the humility I found two-faced, “we have to stop lewd acts in the sacred precincts of the Grove.”
“Too right! We have proper gazebos for bunk-ups!” His unnamed colleague, who had not spoken before, was their rude joker, it seemed. “Adultery arbours. With beautiful views—for us to watch what happens inside!”
“Lovers don’t usually bring a big spade!” scoffed Rullius, ignoring him.
“People do come to steal plants,” Blandus weighed in and told me, as if trying to control his men. “We have to watch out for anyone who turns up equipped for taking our shrubs and trees. Settle down, lads,” he warned directly. “The lady doesn’t want to hear any dirty talk.” Though he said this, I could see they were jeering at my supposed primness, all of them, including him.
I could have lived without hearing about buried scrolls too. But I was stuck with it. “So, this couple you saw were not having a tryst, but digging holes among the rocks, Rullius? I presume it happened before my men took control of the site.”
“Before, yes. I went over to look at what they had been up to, after they went off again. I dug up what they left behind. When I saw what it was, I just put it all back. I thought they were getting rid of some old rubbish. Or leaving a votive offering to the spirits of the Grove,” added Rullius in a tone that mocked religion. He was a cool one.
“Assuming wood nymphs like to read,” I countered, in the same spirit, though I was feeling drab. I could not imagine a dryad enjoying a quick flip through Philadespoticus of Skopelos, even on a quiet day for tree-haunting. “If you do ever see them and their spade again—”
“Run to the station-house and tell bloody Ursus!” muttered Blandus.
If these men realised they might be murder suspects, they were not trying very hard to look innocent. Apart from the silent apprentice, three were old enough to qualify. One aggressive, one lewd, one disrespectful to women: any of those characteristics would fit the perpetrator. Did they know how I was thinking? It seemed none of them cared.
Karus and Ursus, and even I, had assumed there was only one killer. What if more were involved? Sometimes or always? Or if he really did act alone, yet the rest knew who he was? Suppose, because he was one of their own, they had covered up for him all these years—suppose they were still protecting him now?
I wouldn’t employ these men to prune my courtyard roses. Perhaps all staff in the gardens were equally unlikeable. Or perhaps I was being prejudiced and so failed to relate to them. Perhaps they refused to connect with me. They could be too stupid, or too ingrained with unhelpfulness, to see that it would be better to cooperate with me than to wait until Julius Karus jumped all over them.
I changed the subject. I reminded them about Primulus and Galanthus, asking them to look out for my two lost boys. They all nodded solemnly. Gardeners had been previously asked this; had seen the notices my workmen had put up on my instruction. The men here showed little interest, though Rullius gravely assured me they were trying hard to find the missing ones.
They struck me as untrustworthy, but it could simply have been that they lived in isolation out of doors, with little social interface. They were used to people ignoring them. They had come to resent that. In return they cut themselves off from normal communication.
Only as I made my way home did I wonder if introducing that talk of the scrolls had been a tactical distraction.
XXXVIII
I crossed the river so I could go to see Cluventius. He took the news of the latest death and discovery of bones spikily, as if the increasing body count was a further offence against him. Since the known victim was a working girl, he seemed less concerned about Satia than he might have been. Social prejudice never fails. I assured him investigations were in hand, with Karus using due diligence.
Client report done, I was free. I had really wanted to go back up the Aventine because it was about time for Paris to come from Fidenae. As I entered the house, he was tying up the donkey in the yard. Paris himself could be heard through the open yard door, crossly yelling at Patchy, then Patchy furiously braying back. Fornix trotted out from the kitchen corridor to assist.
Leaving the cook to it, Paris stormed into the main courtyard. “He’s all right, but he has to stay there longer. His aunt got sick. The nippers keep snivelling; he worries about them. There’s a letter, when that mad creature lets me get at the pack on him.” Fornix had already stopped Patchy treading around in circles, quietened him, and was unstrapping baggage. “He sent back Dromo,” added Paris to me, his tone rich with meaning.
“Dromo! Come out! Have you been driving your master crazy?”
The reluctant figure of Dromo sidled around the frame of the yard door. There was little of his clever-slave act in evidence. For Tiberius to blow up at him was highly unusual, a sign of my husband’s state of mind. Dromo hung his scurfy head while he gruffly admitted that they were “not seeing eye to eye at the moment.”
I was angry. “It’s your job to see things the way your master does! Who is looking after him without you?” Tiberius would look after himself. That was not the point. With his family worries, he needed support.
“Where are those horrible dancing boys?” demanded Dromo, who could very easily pretend to lose the thread of a conversation. I rarely thought he changed the subject on purpose; he was not that bright.
“Not here. Don’t ask where, because we don’t know.”
Dromo had his mouth open to ask me anyway, but my expression stopped him. “What am I supposed to do around here without my master?”
“Keep well out of my way, I would suggest!”
I felt like someone in a comedy, taking the frantic-housewife part. At any moment, someone would rush in to say my husband had been captured by pirates while trying to dodge a brothel madam whose daughter was in love with him. If I was lucky, a handsome soldier would be after me—though, more likely, he wanted my big chest of treasure and, anyway, he would turn out to be my long-lost love child …
Watching me irritably handle the situation were three other people. My maid, Suza, had taken it upon herself to bring out all my jewellery so she could “polish things.” Cobnuts. That meant try on pieces. She must have found out where I hid the key. Helping her brazenly explore my collection was my cousin Marcia. I glared; they pointedly avoided notice.
Slightly aloof and
not fingering necklaces sat Tuccia, the scroll-shop owner. At least when Suza had emptied my jewellery box onto the small table, she must have cleared away the scroll collection first. Either that or Gratus had whipped them out of sight.
“Suza! I hate people playing with my stuff. Put everything back and take my box upstairs again. Marcia, you can unhook my best Etruscan earrings right now and help her. If you came for a chat, just occupy yourself and I’ll be with you as soon as possible. Tuccia, this is a surprise! What can I do for you?”
A sensitive woman might have asked whether this was a bad time.
I plumped down on the stone bench. Barley took a nervous look at me, then slunk into her kennel. At my signal, Tuccia pulled her seat nearer, though not too near.
For a trip out, she had dressed herself in an unbleached long tunic with cherry-red cord bands and a sludge-green stole, which had, fortunately, almost all faded to anonymity. She wore a hat. It appeared to have been made by a couch-upholsterer, in mustard cloth, dotted like measles, on a padded bandeau at the front. All her hair must have been roughly clustered inside it, apart from two quite tightly rolled little ringlets in front of her ears. Her manner was a matching mix of moods. She was bright yet wary today, firm yet indecisive. I had liked her last time; I was suspicious of her now.
“I had to come!”
“Really?”
“Somebody said you investigate things.” Was this alarming to her?
“I help solve problems.”
“I heard you found some other scrolls.”
“Yes, and I’ve learned a lot about them.” I was really wound up, no chance of holding back. “This bunch includes Didymus Dodomos, for instance, a complete fantasy. Now don’t tell me you read him, Tuccia, along with Epitynchanus and the other idiot!”
She hung her head. “Oh, Juno,” she murmured, as open as you like. “You must think it was our workshop that produced the Didymus fraud.”
I did, but I had expected I would struggle to make her acknowledge their involvement, not for her to point it out herself. I was not yet ready to show any leniency. I didn’t only disapprove of forgery, it made me angry. My father would say punters’ greed encourages deception, yet I reckoned sometimes innocents were exploited. “Your repair people have all the skills—plus I heard them joke about buried scrolls.”
Tuccia leaned forward, full of earnest appeal. “You have to believe me, the problem with the difficult scroll was before my time.”
I was meeting a lot of sincere people today. Professionalism took over. I grilled her as firmly as I would any suspect. “The controversy only involved Mysticus, then?”
“Yes, but he certainly had not had the scroll made. He was taken in by the fake himself. He was very experienced, yet he thought it looked properly authentic.”
“His customer was sure Mysticus was implicated. The word in the trade is that he accused Mysticus of deliberate deception. It was going to court?”
“Yes, to be honest, there was some talk of that.”
To me, Tuccia did not seem sufficiently perturbed, so I asked, “Is litigation common in the world of book-collecting?”
“Oh, no, it never happens.”
I remembered what Donatus had told me about collectors: that could be because they were so secretive. They would flinch from challenging. Going to law would expose too much idiocy.
“Where did that scroll come from in the first place, according to you? How did Mysticus acquire it?”
“He bought it. I know he did.”
“Previous owner?”
“I never heard. But he obtained it in good faith.” Good faith and bad judgement!
“Do you think Mysticus was so upset by the confrontation with his customer it might have affected his health?”
Tuccia looked surprised but seized on it. “Well, that could be so. Yes, indeed! He was very ill around that time, and then he died. He could have been affected by worry.”
Indeed, I thought—but by the worry that he was found out. “Stress is a wonderful thing!”
“Oh, don’t!” Tuccia’s expression changed slightly. She leaned forwards and asked, almost in an undertone, “Somebody told me you investigate crimes, like your father, Falco?”
She had already asked me this and seemed obsessed by my occupation. I realised I had not mentioned it when we met before. Was that what had brought her scurrying here today? “Sometimes I do.”
Now Tuccia pleaded, to a degree that I found overdone: “Albia, please understand. You have to!”
I wanted to hear the story. I cocked my head. “So, what’s to understand?”
“Let me tell you.”
“You do that!” I sat and waited, wearing the face that my family call Albia’s Medusa Mask.
Tuccia clasped and unclasped her hands, like a pent-up child waiting for a present. “Oh, Albia! What have you heard about the Didymus scroll? Has Marcus Ovidius been talking to you?”
“Ovidius?”
“The collector who nearly bought it.”
“On my list to interview!” He would be, if I could trace him, now she had revealed his name. “He brought in an expert for a scholarly opinion, I believe?”
“As I wasn’t involved at the time, I don’t really know,” Tuccia answered, once again distancing herself from the old scandal. I watched her: she was wearing that slightly troubled, almost puzzled face, yet on another level she was not exactly quelled. She was still able to come out with the kind of jokey insight I might use myself: “Mysticus had to pay his own expert to give counter-arguments. You know how it is in that situation, Albia. My expert witness says black, your scholar says white, and anyone could call in a third who will review what both his colleagues have decreed, then say there is much to be said on both sides and he will call it grey.”
I had to admit this is always the trouble with experts. Peer review has all the strength of slopping wet clay. More tolerantly, I suggested, “In the auction house, we reckon you have to use your own intuition. First instincts are generally correct.”
Tuccia sighed. “Unfortunately, for once, Mysticus’s instinct let him down. It seems I am stuck with the results,” she complained. No charges had been levelled at her, so she was unnecessarily sorry for herself.
“Perhaps Mysticus was already sickening,” I offered, now being as fair as I could. “He lost his sharpness because of illness, perhaps.”
“I’d like to think there was an explanation.”
She could not know what Donatus had told me last night, so I asked innocently, “Had suspicious scrolls turned up before in the trade? Was forgery a known problem?”
“No, I think that was why Mysticus was unprepared. He had never encountered anything like that before.” If true, he must never have heard about the Dictys memoirs of the Trojan War, with wily Odysseus glossing the script for added value: the story Donatus had told me. If that happened in Nero’s time, Mysticus was a dealer then and should have been aware of it.
“What happened to the contentious scroll? Where is it?”
Tuccia looked blank. “I’m afraid I have no idea.”
“Please ask your staff. Have a good look in the shop in case Mysticus left it there. I would very much like to see it.” Something told me that was asking a lot. The suspect scroll would not resurface.
Tuccia quickly worked out why I wanted it. “You think because you have another fragment that mentions Didymus Dodomos, they must both have been produced—”
“By the same forger,” I concurred easily. “If this author really is a modern invention, that would point to the rest being suspect.”
“Oh!” Tuccia went pink, perhaps with excitement. “Will it help you find the people responsible, Albia?”
“The criminals?” I deliberately called them that. “I doubt it,” I thought best to say. “These scroll-producers seem extremely clever. They leave no clues as to their identity. I imagine they are proud of their concealment processes. Mind you,” I added inconsequentially, “I do have a wit
ness who once watched them digging at the Grove of the Caesars.”
Wide-eyed, Tuccia squealed, “Ooh! Caught in the act. So, does that mean your witness will be able to identify them? Who was it?”
“Best not to say,” I murmured, not least because I regarded the witness, Rullius, as suspicious himself. Never mind protecting my sources; if he was telling the truth about the two diggers, I did not want anybody getting to Rullius to pay him off. “Remember, your shop is somewhat suspect!” I aimed at Tuccia, though without direct evidence I was not threatening her too heavily. She giggled, seeming to find this a game. I wanted to snap her out of that. “You need to be careful, it seems to me.”
“Oh, get away! It is not us.” She appeared to think she and I were giggling together, the way we had done the first time we met. She had not noticed my attitude had changed. Tuccia heaved a mighty sigh. “Oh, Albia, I wish I had your job. It must be so interesting!”
“What about yours?” I returned, genuinely curious. “You work with literature; you love to read. You meet a variety of people, you have challenges daily. You are a woman in charge. I get the impression you were thrilled to have taken over the shop. Weren’t you glad to inherit from Mysticus?”
“Oh, yes,” Tuccia admitted. “I cannot deny that. The circumstances were sad, but I wanted it more than anything. I love being the owner—I love finding works for customers. I even love commerce. Some dealers shy away from that, but I revel in both buying and selling. And, of course, people will always want books. I am now secure for life.”
“Nothing beats security,” I agreed. “Mind you, if you think my life looks exciting you need to know we informers traditionally deplore our precarious income, our dubious clients and the wild uncertainty of our survival!”
* * *
I excused myself, went to use the facilities, washed my face, holding the linen towel to my skin with closed eyes, then came out to ask Gratus to bring refreshments.
“More relaxed now, are we, madam?”
The Grove of the Caesars Page 18