“Oh, don’t be stubborn, Albia. Why doesn’t matter. Face up. Men make all the judgements. Men want men.”
“You mean men have the cash? There is no reason at all why a woman cannot possess her own money, then use it for fine-art collecting. A woman may buy scrolls—either for her fancy library or, if she is really daring, so she can read them.”
“Cynic.”
“A woman can have taste and critical values.”
“But this is Rome,” my cousin argued. She managed not to say that I came from a dead-end province, therefore had no idea. “Men form the opinions, especially daft ones. If someone buys your scrolls because they are fakes,” said Marcia, “that idiot will be male, believe me. A pompous, conniving, thinks-he’s-artistic male snob who follows all the other sheep when buying.”
“Some men are decent!” I argued back. Even if a woman had really created the scrolls, I said she would be somebody who understood male buyers. Marcia did not disagree with that.
“Albia, I’m going to visit the Writers’ Guild to see if they have anyone who might be capable of plagiarising philosophy.”
“They don’t. Only no-hopers and has-beens bother with the Guild. They’ll either run away, scared witless because you’re female, or leer and grope you. Do what you want.”
We stopped wrangling. Marcia posed herself with her head covered, enjoying how miserable she was, crazily yearning for her lover. She did not even know where Corellius had gone. If he really was trying to dodge her, I suggested the escapee had kept quiet about his destination because otherwise she would pack a bag and follow him. That went down well.
I skulked off to my room, where I wrote a sad letter to my husband.
Around mid-morning, Dromo barged in to declaim that, due to his skill as an interviewer, Galanthus had told him everything.
“Everything” turned out to be little more than the sequence I had guessed, yet better than nothing.
* * *
On the night of the Cluventius party, the two boys had tried to gate-crash. After they were swiftly expelled, they hung around within earshot of the music. They continued to entertain themselves with moves they knew. Any watching pervert would have seen them: two louche, long-haired, unsettlingly beautiful young boys, sinuously dancing.
They hid when they saw Victoria Tertia. They watched a man stalk her, rush her and grab her. In horror, they watched everything he did to her. Dromo was embarrassed to say; I told him to skip it.
They knew who Victoria was because they had seen her at her husband’s party. While the killer went deep into the trees, they were too scared to move, only discussing in whispers what they ought to do; they had had such a rollicking from the ushers they dared not return to report what they had seen.
When the man came back from depositing the body, he must have returned very quietly. They never heard him. He hit them both with something heavy, something like a boulder. Galanthus passed out. When he came round, bloodied, he saw the man trying to strangle Primulus.
Galanthus threw himself on the man, biting and kicking him. As dancers they were quite athletic, so somehow he and Primulus, who was just about alive, fought off their attacker. They must have shocked him into loosening his hold, unable to control two of them simultaneously. They managed to escape into the dark.
They heard him blundering about, trying to find them. They hid in undergrowth all night. Primulus was in a bad condition; he could barely breathe.
Next day, Primulus’s condition deteriorated. Galanthus carried him. He saw the vigiles but was afraid to approach them. He managed to find our site, but Larcius was missing and two strange men angrily sent him away. Terrified that the killer was in the gardens still looking for them, they wandered until Seius came past them in his cart. He let them ride along. When he stopped, Galanthus hauled his brother off the cart, found the tomb guardian’s shed, secretly crept in and hid.
His brother never spoke again. Galanthus thought he had died the first night. He then did not know what to do, whom to trust, or whether the terrible man who had attacked them would follow and find them. He thought that he, too, would die. Even now that he was back with us, Galanthus was terrified the man would come for him.
“Will he?” Dromo asked me apprehensively.
I said that we must keep Galanthus safe. Even if I could catch the man, the poor boy would remain afraid for the rest of his life. The nightmares might fade slowly, but his terror would not leave him. The man had taken the boys’ amulets, which seemed to make Galanthus, and also Dromo, feel he had acquired a permanent hold over them. Galanthus thought he was coming to finish what he had started. That might be true; I knew the killer would want to silence his surviving witness.
* * *
After discussion with Marcia, I decided what to do. Paris had left for Fidenae, but I sent my intelligent steward and burly cook as bodyguards. Wrapped up so he looked like a delivery sack, Galanthus was put on Dromo’s handcart then wheeled down the hill to my parents’ house. Marcia went to explain. My mother would take care of the boy. Feed him, soothe him, have her doctor look at his head, assess him mentally.
“She’ll say, ‘Another of Albia’s strays!’ like she did when she came here one day and met Suza,” Dromo informed me. “Can I stay there too and be looked after?”
“No. You must come straight back and lurk around here.”
“Why? Am I pretending to be him?”
Marcia gave me a tart look. “Decoy!” Yes, I would be using Dromo, making him bait, just as I had said we would never do because it was too dangerous. To most people one slave is indistinguishable from another. If the man came looking, he might suppose we had the right boy at the house. All we had to do was keep the door locked. Dromo would be safe. “Well, he’s just a slave, isn’t he, Albia!” my cousin sniffed.
“He is our slave and we shall protect him.” I hoped that was true.
I was anxious for Galanthus, too. Another thing I now had to decide might force me to put him in the way of the authorities. It was: would I tell Julius Karus we had found our missing runaway—and that he was a key witness?
XLIV
I would have to tell Karus. I could see no other way forward.
The problem with Galanthus being a slave was that the law would distrust his evidence. To be used in a court, anything he said would have to be extracted formally under torture. This is a stupid aspect of procedure, which guarantees that slaves say what people want to hear. Because of it, they are often too scared to come forward with evidence in the first place.
I would never subject Galanthus to that. I would have objected even before the killer had put him in his current state. He was too young, and now too fragile, to withstand the hostile legal process. Even if the killer thought no slave would be used to testify, he would have one fear: he could not stop the rest of us acting on anything the boy remembered.
That, however, was limited to how the attacker had behaved. Although Galanthus had seen what was done to Victoria Tertia and the attack on his brother, I knew he was unable to identify the man responsible. It had been dark. He could give me no physical description; he had never seen a face. The man had never spoken. All Galanthus could say was that the killer was strong. His actions were swift and vicious. When he was chasing the boys, he was agile and determined. They had been very lucky to escape, because he knew his way around Caesar’s Gardens and the Grove much better than they did. That in itself told us something about him.
* * *
Since Paris had left with my letter to Tiberius, Gratus took a message from me to the Seventh Cohort’s station-house. Karus was out, so Ursus intercepted Gratus. It was Ursus that Gratus brought back with him.
The inquiry chief was chipper. He had pre-empted the despised imperial agent, gaining a meaty clue to follow up by himself. Of course he demanded to see Galanthus, but I managed to avoid that. I said the boy was too traumatised; he might clam up completely if faced with a scary official. The shaven-headed, big-eared Ursus, w
ith his plodding feet and well-picked teeth, did not scare me, yet to a whimpering lad he would represent the oppressive side of life. For one thing, Ursus really liked the idea that people feared him.
He surveyed the house, gazing all around from our courtyard. “Nice place! How many families live here?” He assumed rooms and suites were rented out.
“Just one,” I said. He whistled. “Plus a tribe of builders.” The two painters were staring down from the balcony, as visual proof. Being nosy saved them having to paint. “And hangers-on.” Marcia and Suza were giving each other manicures. They waved sweetly.
Who likes people to think they live extravagantly? I moved on swiftly to work.
Ursus had not brought his clerk. He scribbled notes for himself. “This is one of those lads you put up notices about?”
“Yes, when they first went missing. I understand our appeals have been taken down. By gardeners, said my witness.” Ursus looked up from his note-tablet. “I suppose,” I suggested slowly, “their story will be that they remove advertising for tidiness. I dare say bill-posting is not allowed.” Ursus said nothing. Still, he sucked his lips as if in thought. I left him to absorb the point.
I described the killer’s attacks and mentioned he had taken the lads’ amulets. I had never looked at them closely, but Ursus, no jewellery specialist, was happy just to jot down “two neck charms.” If trophies were ever discovered, there would be time enough to persuade Galanthus to identify the boys’ property.
“Having these items back would do us,” Ursus reassured me. “We wouldn’t need your boy in court.”
“He is not going to be put there. I say that right now. And no one gets to torture him.”
“I can live with that, Flavia. You’ll have to vouch for what he says.” Ursus paused. “That is, I’ll need your head of household. Where is he, incidentally?”
“Away. Family business. He has the wild idea it’s safe to leave me here in charge. I’m sure you could put him straight on that madness!”
“Well, you seem to be managing all right on your own, Flavia,” Ursus crushed me with patronising false praise. “Those painters could do with a boot up the arse, though. What do they think they are here for?”
“I believe they are discussing the philosophy of colour while a dado dries.”
Ursus grunted. “He’s an aedile, isn’t he? The householder?”
“Until New Year. Then he reverts to ordinary hen-pecked husband … Let’s get on, shall we?”
I wanted to discuss my theory about the killer living and working close to his field of action.
“Interesting. I can go along with that. Don’t tell bloody Karus, because of the Naumachia. Karus is convinced this individual is a sailor…” Actually, Karus had claimed to me that this idea obsessed Ursus. I glimpsed tensions I could play on. Station-house investigator is a lonely job. Ursus might talk to me because he had to be aloof with his men: I did not look to him for promotion and he did not need me for support. I encouraged him to carry on decrying Karus: “He’s had me looking at the salts for days.”
“Pointless! You must be going crazy with it.”
“Right. Then he decided it could be one of the ambient snack-sellers. Turned out they are more transient than anyone thinks. But every time I came up with a suspicious stuffed-vine-leaf vendor, he was just standing in for a cousin with a bad knee, normally lives in the Campagna and is shit useless for the case. His cousin’s done the job since he was fifteen, but he’s only eighteen now.”
“Shitty ditto! Fast turnover?”
“You might imagine sausage-sellers are solid tykes who have done the job for ever.”
“But they come and go?”
“Flit around like sand flies. Never in one place. My theory is they make so much money at it, they slide away on holiday and never come back.”
Ursus and I were friends now. He was telling me jokes. Worse luck, they were as lousy as those your best buddy knows, the ones he regurgitates after too many drinks. At least your pal can burp amusingly. Ursus was too clean-cut and disciplined. He would rather give himself a hernia holding it in.
“I would expect gardens, and especially sacred groves, to be packed with deviants, Ursus?”
“Alibis. Deviants are clever. They always have someone to vouch that at any relevant time they were screwing a rent-boy, or drunk in a gutter, or locked up for pinching loincloths off washing lines. Either that, or someone gives me good gen about a character who behaves weirdly, only I then extract the awkward fact that he dropped dead three years ago.”
“Don’t you hate awkward facts?” I murmured.
Ursus careered on. “Next, old Karus persuaded himself it must be someone who uses Caesar’s Gardens as his outdoor office. So why would he be there in the dark, which is when these bints are bumped off? Besides, can I find a man who has sat on a bench reading for the past two decades? Of course I can’t. For one thing, anyone who tried it would have been mossed over long ago. Even statues don’t stick around that long—they get nabbed by lovely homeowners for their peristyles.” Ursus let his eyes wander around our home again. Fortunately, we had no statues. “Where did you get that bloody big urn with the octopus?” He had passed it in our atrium.
“Wedding present. So,” I said, sticking to the task in hand, “everyone acknowledges that the killer knows the area, but I am not sure we have given that enough attention. He must live and work nearby. My uncle, ex–Fourth Cohort, had a theory about multiple murders. He’d draw an arc on a map, including all known disposal sites. Nine times in ten, the killer turned out to live within walking distance.”
Ursus nodded. “Standard. You can see why. This sick bastard is constantly in the district and nobody queries him. He feels secure. He can scout for new victims, then jump back home fast after he does the foul deed. If we ever arrive to ask questions, he points to his dear old mother, who sweetly swears he’s been there all the time with her. Sometimes if she’s daft enough, she actually believes what she’s saying.”
“Then while sonny stays at home with Mother, says my uncle Petronius darkly, he can watch the local forces who are out trying to catch him.”
“Oh, yes, this bug has got his eye on us!” Ursus sounded bleak. Pessimism was his favourite act. “He thinks we are going nowhere. He believes himself much cleverer than us. Too clever to be caught. He’s probably working up to doing another woman right now, just to show everybody and himself that he is invincible.”
“And isn’t he?” I could be morose myself. Informers, on bad days, are the worst pessimists. We have a lot of bad days.
“No, he’s bloody not. His time has come. I’m going to get him now,” declared the Seventh’s man. He dropped his voice. “If only so I can stuff bloody Karus!”
Ironically, that might be how this was solved. I had wondered if Karus would manage it—but perhaps it would be the other way around. The vigiles, who had never yet stirred themselves to take out this killer, might be driven into positive action by jealousy: jealousy of the incomer, the official favourite, the Palace scrutineer. To them, Julius Karus was a lousy imposition. He had no experience of day-to-day law enforcement. Until recently, he had never been to Rome—let alone lived with it year after year, learning all this city’s grubby criminality, its stinking social perversions, its dreary, petty, uncontrollable theft and its vicious professional underworld.
The vigiles, if they chose to stand up for themselves, could master Karus. To catch the kind of individual we had at Caesar’s Gardens, doing his foul deeds and dumping remains in the sacred Grove, required a specialism the red-tunics had neglected, yet they did own it. Now they would finish, do what was needed. Finally. Not to save women. Not to give survivors vengeance. Not even to impose justice on the man. But purely to stuff Karus.
“If this killer is really a bold one,” I suggested, “he’s probably had a drink with some of your lads.”
Ursus did not take that amiss. “Trust me, I’ve got them looking out for anyone who asks
too many questions about the case.”
“I wonder if he has tried making friends with Karus?”
“Would he? Is he totally deranged?”
“No, perhaps not that unhinged.”
“So—this lad of yours, who has gone all timid,” Ursus mused. “Where have you got him?”
“Safe. But I won’t tell anybody where.”
“Fair enough.” Finalising, Ursus flipped through his tablet pages. “So, you say Galanthus was hit on the head and he bled profusely?” This was unexpected. He took good notes.
“Yes, the clots were so bad, we had to cut off his hair.”
“Something to go on,” Ursus shared with me. “We may find the implement, and sonny may not have washed it.”
With a smile, I told him he was thinking like Karus.
Without one, he told me what I could do with that statement.
I grinned and apologised.
He grinned back. He closed his tablet set. “So! Who do you think he is, Flavia Albia?”
I had firmed up a theory. “I think he is one of the gardeners. What about you?”
Ursus flexed his shoulders. Crunch time. He was open with me: “It is a grub from the gardens. I agree with that. I’m going to line them all up and take a proper look at them.”
I decided to give him everything that might be useful: “From the little I have seen, the gardeners all have nasty tendencies, so the criminal could be any of them. Their superintendent is ineffectual and his workforce are crude. But,” I said, “Galanthus said something about their escape. He went for the man, Ursus. If you come across the killer, look for distinguishing marks. They all carry scratches and casual wounds from their occupation. But if you can get to him soon enough, the one Galanthus fought off will have specific scars.”
Ursus was sharp. When I first recited what the boy had said about his adventure, Ursus had paid attention. “Say no more, Flavia! I’ll be going after the individual who has human bite marks.”
The Grove of the Caesars Page 21