The Grove of the Caesars

by Lindsey Davis

  “Cheeky!” In fact, I found talking to Tuccia draining. We could have had a lot in common, but she was as slippery as wet seaweed. Something about her made it now impossible to take her at face value—and that meant I could no longer like her.

  Tuccia and I shared a slipware saucer of small almond cakes while sipping mint tea. Over in a corner, Suza and Marcia had equipped themselves with cushions, the fancy ones that I liked to keep out of the sun; they were lolling with a platter of treats while they waited for me to be available. Fornix kept carrying out a selection of herb drinks for the shameless sunbathers to try. I shifted position on my bench, so I need not see them.

  Two painters who had taken to working here strolled through the courtyard. Since I had paused with my mouth full, they broke in to say they had heard mention of black and white, so I had better understand that if I wanted a decoration scheme with a black salon and matching white one, which was up-to-date sharp fashion, it came very expensive. I told them off for listening in, so they wandered back to the upstairs balcony where they made as much racket as possible.

  Gratus came and cleared, taking away the dish of fancies even though there were two left. He also carried off our cups, without offering refills.

  “You wanted the other cakes, didn’t you?” Tuccia asked, nodding after the steward.

  I smiled gently, though I disliked the way she must have been watching me. That kind of close observation was supposed to be my job.

  “So, are you planning to investigate the scroll-forgers?” she quizzed me.

  “Probably not.” I gave her a straight look. “Not free right now. I am very busy on another case for a paying client. I don’t have the resources for two searches. Besides, not much point, is there? Where’s anyone to hire me? The scrolls I found were never offered for sale. If there has been no material loss, an informer has no one to prosecute.”

  “Oh!” Tuccia considered this, her mouth a tiny pinched roundel in her always slightly immature face. “Do you take people to court, Albia?”

  “I have done.” I had to use a male intermediary, which was a pain. I preferred other types of work.

  “So, what will you do with the scrolls, Albia?” Tuccia asked obsessively.

  “The scrolls? Sell them at auction, clearly labelled as unreliable.”

  She twinkled mischievously. “So, you have no qualms about benefiting from something that was created with fraudulent intent?”

  I twinkled back, though it was my turn to scrutinise her. Pale skin, small nose and chin, somehow untouched by real life—or unresponsive to it. “No qualms at all. We found them. Nobody will come forward to claim them; they can’t do so without admitting guilt. And so,” I added sweetly, “I may as well benefit myself!”

  At that point, a messenger came to our house from Cluventius. He had people with him who knew something about the garden killings. Tuccia took it as a chance to leave, seeming relieved to escape. I told my cousin Marcia that if she wanted to talk she had better come along with me.

  XXXIX

  Marcia was the daughter of my father’s older brother, a soldier who had died before she was born. Her mother, the fabled Marina, who still survived, had been extremely beautiful. She was bright enough to have latched on to the Didius family with never-failing pincers, pleading for money. Cruelly for both, Marina was now losing her grip on reality.

  Marcia, a looker herself, had recently escaped her home responsibilities via a fast-paced love affair with a man called Corellius. He worked for the Palace’s secret service; he ran a diplomatic house where he spied on visiting ambassadors. Marcia had joined him “to help with housekeeping.” Her mother was cared for by a nurse; I suspected my father paid for it. Marina was no trouble so long as the nurse kept the door locked so she could not wander off.

  But as swiftly as Marcia and Corellius had fallen for each other, their affair had disintegrated. Now he had been abruptly posted abroad. Marcia thought he might have asked for the move. She had had to leave their diplomatic quarters.

  “That’s a shame.” I had thought they were good together. “Will he come back?”

  “He might.” Marcia was pretending to brush this off, though, like all unhappy lovers, she was absorbed in her shattered relationship. “I simply cannot go back to the apartment with Mother.”

  “So where, then?” I asked, with foreboding.

  “Your house? I need a lot of space where I can stomp around cursing him.”

  We had space. “We have no beds.” We had a few.

  “I can help you shop for furniture.” This was like having an extra sister. “Albia, don’t make me live at home. She was driving me nuts and it’s just too sad to watch as she deteriorates. She drinks. She smells. She keeps getting out and bothering strange men.”

  “Your mother always bothered strange men.”

  “Yes, but in the old days they liked it.”

  “How long has Corellius gone away for?”

  “A month.”

  That was not too bad, I told myself.

  * * *

  As we walked, I outlined my two casework problems. These should take anyone’s mind off a broken heart. “They could be linked,” suggested Marcia, easily hooked in. “The scroll-forger may be the Pest. Every time he goes to bury a load of phoney literature, he grabs a woman.”

  “Too many flaws.” I rejected it. “A witness saw a man and a woman burying the scrolls. But that was recent; the killer has been operating for years. According to Tuccia, fakes never happened before, not until Mysticus was fooled.”

  “She lies,” declared Marcia. A woman of rapid judgements—but I had worked with her before, often startled by her astuteness. Occasionally it would be suggested that Uncle Festus might not really have been her father, only for Marcia to say something needle-sharp, which proved she was one of the quick-witted Didii. She also had the madcap dark curls and raunchy humour. She was theirs all right.

  “You took against Tuccia?”

  My cousin sniffed, an oratorical ploy. “I’m surprised you can be fooled by a mould-coloured stole and a spotty snood. Don’t annoy that one; I bet she broods. Get on her wrong side and months later, she’ll put a dead rat under your mattress.”

  “I tend to agree!”

  “Do you really think she forged those scrolls, Albia?”

  “Conceivably. First, she has the right staff to make the goods and second, she herself has studied enough to produce the creative writing. I believe she would actively enjoy the task.”

  “I can’t stand her,” declared Marcia. “That hideous ‘Poor little me, what do I know? I wasn’t there in those days’ act, when she’s as quick as mercury.”

  I chuckled. “You were listening, then?”

  “Flavia Albia, I have no interest in your pitiful earrings collection or in palling up with your maid. She’s just a dim girl from the coast with a big bust and mediocre ideas.”

  “You are so rude!” I had always loved Cousin Marcia—precisely for that reason.

  “It’s a knack. Of course I was listening! Tuccia came to find out what you know. I was on to her. You and I can work together against her, can’t we? So is it settled that I’m staying?”

  I said Marcia could live at our house if she didn’t whine about losing Corellius and as long as she helped with my work.

  “Oh, I will! I need to haul you out of Tuccia’s clutches. Face it, Albia, you wanted to be giggly with her because you don’t have any female friends. Any woman who runs her own business appeals to you, however big a crook she is. Well, now you have me instead.”

  “Thank you, darling,” I said meekly. “But you are staff, Marciana. I am in charge. Don’t push it.”

  She snorted.

  * * *

  At the Cluventius apartment we were to meet two witnesses. First, we faced the usual situation where my client, though a tragic recent widower, immediately noticed that my chaperone-cum-assistant was a very striking woman. Then his adult son, though barely past puberty, came in
and stared. Finally, the male party in the new witness duo had a good look at Marcia too.

  Men are not simply attracted to beauty. They sniff out character; they cannot cope when they get it, but the allure is there. Marcia was super-intelligent, highly demanding of her partners, and stroppy with absolutely everyone. In addition, she went to boxing lessons. One wrong move, she could break teeth. This was not immediately obvious to the men who noticed her good looks, but some later found out. That was fun.

  Luckily, Marcia, bereft of Corellius, never registered today’s droolers. They could moon all they wanted: she was in her own world. Her lover not only had an intriguing past, an exciting role as a spy for the Empire and even an interesting limp, he could also price wet fish and mend shutters. I understood why she was smitten, for these useful traits are what a woman needs. Marcia’s indifference to anybody else would probably continue for at least a week.

  So, to work.

  Cluventius allowed me to interview the witnesses in private in a small room at his apartment. They were the husband and mother of a previous victim of the Caesar’s Gardens killer. She, Methe, had disappeared five years ago. They had never found out what happened although, because of the other victims, they had guessed. Knowing about Victoria Tertia, this pair had come today to express fellow-feeling for the family. Cluventius might have felt more bemused than grateful, but he had kept them there, saying they ought to talk to me; he made them wait until I came. After greeting Marcia and me, he left us alone to talk.

  The couple said Methe had been a wonderful girl, loving, hardworking, good-tempered and, according to them, beautiful. Marcia and I took that to mean she had a good nature and they had forgotten any faults.

  The husband admitted, not too shame-faced, that Methe used to go out to earn a few coppers when his income as a freelance carrier was not making ends meet; he had his own cart but needed to hire a mule to pull it. Her mother had come to live with them: another mouth to feed. He knew what his wife did on those nights. He said he had never liked it, but what else could they do? One night, she just never returned.

  The husband had let the mother-in-law stay on afterwards, so he was not all bad. Hardly bad at all, by most standards.

  The couple hoped the newfound bones might be their missing one. Karus, they told me, had found details of Methe’s loss in case-notes so that morning he had come to them at home to discuss the find. At least he was following up on old reports—and doing it effectively, it seemed. He asked questions about Methe’s height and build, whether she had had all her teeth or had ever suffered broken bones, even whether she was pregnant when she disappeared. He was going to let her relations know if anything in his investigation identified her.

  “This is good, isn’t it?” her mother pleaded. “It may help us learn what happened to her.”

  “It may.” I was guarded. I knew how many other victims there had been. “Did he ask whether Methe wore jewellery?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Well, tell us, then.” Marcia, an abrasive assistant, came across as so crisp she was like laundry left in the sun too long. “What did she have on that day?”

  I had seen a lot of this with the Didii. Love was always shattering their worlds. Then they were bad-tempered. Unaware of the reason, our witnesses seemed to take Marcia’s grouchiness as efficiency. By comparison, I must have seemed too soft to be any use.

  Methe, they said, would have been wearing her snake bangle. They described it as like thousands of other snake bangles, a double coil of cheap metal around the wrist, originally with two tiny chips of glass glitter as eyes. If anyone ever found it, Methe’s Cleopatra snake would be as horrid as all the rest in Rome, except hers had one of its eyes missing.

  “We still miss her so much,” her mother mourned. It sounded like a much-told tale, yet no less moving for that. Even Marcia fell quiet and tenderly took the poor woman’s hand.

  Years of grief showed in her lined face. Although the pair had spoken of hungry lives, she was heavily rounded, a woman who spent most of her day sitting, unhealthily immobile, while she fretted over her lost daughter. “We think about her all the time, wondering what could have happened to her. Every day I have a little talk to her, as if she was with me. Not knowing the truth is the hardest part. I want to find her and fetch her back.”

  Her son-in-law nodded. He spoke little but hung his head with a pained expression as if on the verge of tears. This did not come across as false; he was sincerely at a loss as to how to show his pain to other people or internally cope with it.

  I let them talk about the day Methe went missing. They spoke vividly of their fears that they might never know what she had had to endure or where her body lay. I promised that everything possible was being done, with revived interest from the vigiles. Karus, the specialist agent, had been assigned for extra muscle, while I too would monitor what happened.

  * * *

  Afterwards, as Marcia and I walked home together, my cousin was quiet for some time. Finally, she piped up, “We have to do something. We need to try to lure this man out. He will have seen you in the gardens, but he won’t know me, or won’t know that I am connected to you. I ought to go and walk about there, when it’s getting dark.”

  “Absolutely not!” I said.

  Marcia supposed she would end up doing it anyway. She was quite surprised, not at me saying no so fast, but that I kept saying no and I meant it.

  XL

  The use of a decoy had been discussed in my family on other occasions. It had been considered during investigations my father or I had run as informers, or when my uncle was investigating officially. We never did it. The idea was always rejected as too dangerous. Far too many things could go wrong: either the female lure might not be able to fight off the criminal or the observers who were supposed to keep her safe might fail to intervene in time. The villain could never be relied on to turn up where the decoy was or, if he did, he would spot the set-up and retreat.

  “I can be careful, Albia.”

  “You won’t have to. You are not to do it.”

  “How the hell shall we catch him then?”

  “Meticulous casework.”

  “Oh, right! Like that agent asking whether Methe had all her teeth left and was she pregnant?”

  “Karus is awful, but not an idiot.” I was forced to defend him, since I knew his reasoning. “Listen, I couldn’t tell her mother and husband he asked those questions because he is now in a position to count the teeth that are grinning out of a festering skull they dug up this morning. Maybe there were tiny little bones from a foetus inside that skeleton, like another corpse I once investigated. I couldn’t say that, Marcia Didia—nor tell them how today I saw what might have been their own darling, collected up by the vigiles then stuck in a big old dung bucket on a filthy cart.”

  Marcia quietened down. Even so, she muttered, “I still think I should do it.”

  My father, with whom she had always been a favourite, would kill me if I let her.

  * * *

  Still combative, we kept walking along the Vicus Armilustrium in silence. Then a male voice behind us called our names. Perhaps tense after discussing the decoy idea, we turned more nervously than usual. But it was Methe’s husband.

  His name, we knew, was Seius. In his thirties, half bald already, all stubble and wheeze. His bulky mother-in-law was too slow, so he came hurrying after us alone. Standing outside a trinket shop, he explained: after we had left, he and she had had a conversation, concluding there was information he ought to pass on.

  It was not about Methe. “You put up a notice?” He told us that he always looked at communiqués fixed to trees, in case they related to his lost wife. He had seen Karus’s appeal for information, but he wanted to discuss my own small poster about our missing boys. To my annoyance he told me it was no longer there. “The gardeners take them down.”

  I stiffened. “Are you sure it is gardeners?”

  “Seen it happen.”

 
“Any particular gardener?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  That was a pity.

  I asked what was bothering him. Seius looked awkward, then said there was a problem. Keeping calm, I said, “Tell me what.” Marcia assured him I could be very understanding. I tried to look like someone with that quality, though it’s one of many that I scorn.

  Seius, it seemed, was sometimes given piecework when Caesar’s Gardens produced more waste than the gardeners’ own beaten-up pony could haul away. I admitted I was aware that heavy loads of rubble from dismantling the old cave had been added by our men. Seius had helped remove this. Now that he said so, I thought I remembered Larcius mentioning him.

  “Nothing wrong with you helping out, surely?” demanded Marcia.

  He was still reluctant, but confessed he knew someone who wanted the larger pieces of stone. Apparently, the friend gave small payments to Seius. This private arrangement now embarrassed him. I saw no reason to object. I already knew that scavengers had been rifling through our rubbish piles, with Larcius willing to let them. It was only rock. It had no resale value for us.

  Once we were clear on that, Seius relaxed and told me that while he had been ferrying our refuse, he had come across Primulus and Galanthus in Caesar’s Gardens. One was limping, while he hauled along his brother, in an even worse condition. They looked so pathetic he gave them a lift on his cart, out through the Portuensis Gate on the far side of the Transtiberina, then a short way down the road towards Portus. When he stopped to offload, they disappeared. If I wanted to come across the river, he could show me where.

  We went, of course. First Seius picked up his cart, along with his mother-in-law, patiently seated in it. Marcia and I let her stay alongside Seius on the driving seat, while we sat on the back with our legs swinging. In theory it was easier than walking, though by the end we had stopped laughing. We were hurled about like badly tied-down cargo.