Juliana quietly told her father that the gold-plated pills should pass safely through him, and was thanked by Metellus for saving his life. Unhappily, within a very short time Metellus did collapse and die. It appeared that the apothecary is wrong; the gold does dissolve, in this instance causing the death of Metellus, even though by that time he did not wish to kill himself.
Conclusion
It is the view of Falco and Associates that the death of Rubirius Metellus should not rightly be classified as suicide. He had expressed to his wife and daughter a clear wish to remain alive.
His daughter Juliana provided him with the poisonous corn cockle pills, but this was on the basis that she believed them to be safe. Although Metellus voluntarily took one of the pills, Juliana would have come emptyhanded from the apothecary, but for being told that gold-plating would render the pills harmless.
Expert opinion is needed on whether a charge can be laid against Rhoemetalces for murder, as a result of giving false professional advice.
Should such a charge fail, it is the view of Falco and Associates that Rubirius Metellus died by accident.
IX
'Pure gold pills?'
Silius Italicus had received our careful report with all the thanks and all the applause we hoped for. As men about the Forum, we expected none. Just as well.
I let him rave.
'And what's this try-on, Falco? – your substantial donation to the vigiles' widows and orphans fund will obviously all be drunk by the Second Cohort at a better-than-usual Saturnalia knees-up this year!' Even for a man experienced in court rhetoric, the long, irate sentence left him winded.
If the orphans' fund was all he could find to carp about, we were well landed on the jetty. Of course the fund was a fiction, but he knew the form. The vigiles do have a fund; they look after their own – but that's the point: they keep outsiders out of it. They want the grateful widows to save their thanks for the right people – their late husbands' colleagues. Some are good-looking girls who, being paupers, have to give their thanks in kind, poor dears. Much better to keep it in the family.
Excuse me if I sound cynical. I am shocked at such goings-on, but this is what I was told by my best friend Petronius. He is a compassionate man who in his time has looked after quite a few bereaved vigiles' families. Mind you, that was before he started looking after my bereaved sister. Well, it had better be.
'I apologise for the gilded poison pastilles, Silius, but these are the facts we turned up. I put all this to you as a good-quality proof- and it's backed up by creditable witnesses. Trust me: a ludicrous story carries weight. Anything too feasible tends to be a web of lies.'
'Liars always concoct a probable story,' agreed Justinus, standing at my back.
'A mad explanation like this would be stupid – if it weren't true,' his brother added piously. As these two burbled, Silius looked even more irritated, but he soon subsided. He just wanted to be rid of us.
'I cannot take a man called Rhoemetalces before the praetor! I'd be laughed out of court.'
'With luck, you won't have to go to court. The praetor should be able to rule on this evidence from his warm and cosy office,' I declared. 'You know how to get justice -' I was none too sure of that. 'You should walk out with an edict in your favour the same day.'
Now Silius looked annoyed that I was teaching him legal procedure. He must think me a bumpkin, but I knew about praetors' edicts. Each year's new praetor issues a revised version of the civil code, with minor refinements where the law has not been working. When problems are brought before him during the year, he decides which 'formula' for redress from the time-honoured code will fit the problem; if necessary he issues an adjusted formula. The praetor's pronouncements are not supposed to be new law, just clarifications to meet modern times.
I did think it unlikely any wimp of a praetor nowadays would dare to make a judgment in this sticky case. It was a criminal issue, not civil, for one thing. But you have to bluff.
'Rhoemetalces,' Justinus assured Silius in his most serious and most patrician voice, 'is an old-established, very respectable Cilician name.
He was romancing. Silius suspected it, and I was certain. I had seen the lousy pill-producer.
'Don't give me that.' Silius was no fool either. 'The apothecary will be a sinister ex-slave who probably poisoned his master in the recent past as a means of gaining his freedom – and with a forged will!' he added viciously.
'Luckily,' I teased, 'we will be producing him in a murder case, not testing him before the Board of Citizenship.'
Even Silius was beginning to be seduced by our wry sense of humour. His eyes narrowed. 'What's he like, this druggist?'
'Looks successful,' I said. 'Works out of the usual booth. Sits there with a wicker chair and a footstool, surrounded by piles of medicine blocks which he cuts up as required by customers. He seems well respected in his trade. He owns some up-to-date equipment – a pill machine, where he pushes in the paste, then it comes out extruded into strips and he slices off individual dosages -'
'Yes, yes…' Silius had no time for technical marvels. More importantly, he could see we would not give up. 'Oh Hades. I cannot be bothered to haggle with you rogues. The story hangs together consistently.' As soon as he said this, I could see its glaring holes. Silius seemed to have a sight problem, luckily. 'Thanks for the work. Submit your bill. We'll call it quits.'
That may have sounded as though we had seen the last of Silius and the Metelli. Somehow, I doubted it.
X
It was the off season for law. New cases have to be brought by the last day of September which was eight weeks gone, so even if Silius decided to take up our suggestions, he was too late. Autumn passed. We sent in our bill. This time Silius proved slow in paying it. That gave me an opportunity to train the two Camilli in techniques for squeezing stubborn debtors. Since at our level of informing it was a frequent occupation, I viewed this more as work experience than the annoyance it might have been. We had the money by Saturnalia.
By then we had re-established our presence in Rome. Clients were sluggish, but we knew there would be plenty as soon as the cries of 'lo Saturnalia' died down. As always, that time of unrestricted relaxation and large family gatherings had brought out the worst in people. Marriages were breaking up on every street. As soon as Janus let in the New Year in a screaming gale, we would be offered missing persons to trace after violent fights with unknown assailants who were disguised in fancy dress (but who looked like that snotty swine from the bakery). Upset employees would hand us evidence of malpractice by employers whose Saturnalia gifts had been too miserly. Festive wax tapers had burned down homes, with the loss of crucial documents. Houses left empty had been broken into and stripped of their artworks. Could we recover the loot? The wrong people had been kissed in dark corners, only to be spied on by spouses who now wanted not only divorce, but also their rights (in the form of the family shop). Children had been abused by uncles and stepfathers during the ghost stories. Could we blackmail the bastards and stop it? Drunks had never come home. Slaves playing king-for-the-day acquired too much of a taste for role-swapping and locked crazy old masters and mistresses in cupboards while they took over the house permanently. Lonely recluses had died unnoticed, so their cadavers were now smelling out their apartments. Once long-lost offspring were found and lured back to arrange burials, a hunt would start for missing fortunes that had long ago been whisked away by swindlers, then there would be work hunting down the swindlers, then the swindlers would swear their innocence and want their names cleared – and so on.
We had plenty to do. Since dear Aulus and Quintus, my patrician assistants, thought such stuff was beneath them, I was doing it. It was beneath me, too, but I had been an informer through some desperate times and I had not learned to say no.
It had been the first Saturnalia when Julia Junilla was old enough to take an interest. Helena and I had our work cut out ensuring that she stayed awake when her grandparents came calling,
or running after her when she snatched her darling little cousins' presents and insisted they were her own. Sosia Favonia, our baby, went down with some frightening sickness, which parents soon learn is inevitable at festivals; it comes to nothing as soon as you are both utterly worn out with panic, but you suffer first. Few doctors were answering their doors, even if patients were successfully rushed to them through the crowded streets. Who wants to hand their tiny baby to a medico who is falling down drunk? I tried the nearest, but when he threw up on me I just carried her home. Favonia could vomit all over my holiday tunic. She didn't need him giving her ideas.
After seven days the torture ended. Saturnalia, I mean. Favonia recovered in five.
Then Julia caught whatever Favonia had had, after which naturally Helena was stricken with it. We had a British girl living with us, who looked after the children, but she collapsed too. Albia had led a troubled life and was normally withdrawn; now she also felt terribly ill in a strange, enormous city where everyone had gone mad for a week. We were responsible for placing her in this nightmare. Helena dragged herself out of bed to comfort the poor girl, while I curled up on a couch in my office with the little ones, until I was rescued by Petronius.
My old friend Petro was escaping from the noise at the house he now shared with my sister Maia. Most of the racket was not caused by rowdy children, but by my mother and other sisters telling Maia she always made bad choices with men. The rest of the rumpus was Maia losing her temper and yelling back. Sometimes my father would be lurking on the sidelines; Maia helped with his business so he reckoned he could irritate Petro by appearing at every possible awkward moment and eavesdropping. Petronius, who until then had always thought I was hard on Pa, now understood why the sight of his grey curls and sly grin could make any sensible man climb out of a back window and leave town for three days.
He and I went to a bar. It was closed. We tried another, but it was full of the relics of riotous behaviour. I had had enough of that, looking after my sick children. The third bar was clean but still had the rioters; when they started being cheerful and friendly, we left. The only place where we could be morose was the Fourth Cohort's station house. Not for the first time, we ended up there. After seven long days and even longer nights of dousing fires caused by sheer stupidity, and then dealing with rapes, stabbings, and persons who had snapped and turned into maniacs, the vigiles were in a grim mood. That suited us fine.
'Nightmare!' Petronius uttered.
'You could have stayed single,' I reminded him. His wife, Arria Silvia, had divorced him and for a short while he had enjoyed his freedom.
'So could you!'
'Unfortunately, I loved the girl.'
It would have been good to hear Petro assure me that he loved my sister – but he was pushed to the limit and only growled angrily.
We would have been sharing a drink but we had forgotten to bring any. He leaned back against a wall, with his eyes closed. I stayed quiet. A few months beforehand, he had lost two of his daughters. Petronilla, the survivor, had been brought up to Rome to spend Saturnalia with her father. The child was taking life hard. So was her father. Enduring bereavement among the festivities had been grim; the fun and games that were always arranged by Maia's thriving brood were not the best solution for anyone. What choice was there, though? It would have been a desperate week for Petronilla alone with her mother.
'I thought I would never get through this month,' Petro admitted to me. I said nothing. He rarely broke into confidences. 'Gods, I hate festivals!'
'Has Petronilla gone back to Silvia yet?'
'Tomorrow. I'm taking her.' He paused. I knew that since he had had to admit to Arria Silvia that he was now sharing a bed with Maia, he found it easier to avoid his ex-wife. My sister had played no part in their separation, but Silvia accused Petronius of having always lusted after Maia – and he stubbornly would not deny it. 'I'd better see for myself. Can't be sure what we'll be walking into.' He paused a second time, trouble heavy in his voice. 'Silvia had a bust-up with that lousy boyfriend of hers. She was facing Saturnalia alone and not looking forward to it. She threatened -' He stopped altogether. Then he said, 'She made wild threats about killing herself.'
'Would she?'
'Probably not.'
We sat in silence.
It was Petronius who told me that when the courts reopened, Silius Italicus was to charge the apothecary with murdering Metellus. Petro had heard it from the Second Cohort. They were agog because not only was Rhoemetalces to be offered to the praetor as having a case to answer, but Silius was putting up Rubiria Juliana as his co-accused. Well, that mischief will have brought festival joy to yet another Roman family.
Lo Saturnalia!
XI
'Silius is doing this because he wants a Senate hearing,' Petro said.
He was a good Roman. Legal gossip excited him. 'He's out to make his name. Parricide is a bloody good way to ensure it; the public will be avid for details. This Juliana woman is patrician, so it will go before the Curia. If the family have imperial influence it could be even better than that. To spare her the ordeal, Vespasian may himself take her case at the Palace -'
'He won't,' I disagreed. 'The old man will distance himself from this family. Ordinarily, he might have rescued them from the ordeal of a public trial, but the corruption conviction will put them on their own.
'You mean he is an Emperor who won't fiddle things for the elite?'
'I mean, Petro, he won't want it to look that way.'
'Does he fiddle?' Petronius was certain that I had inside knowledge.
'Presumably. Don't they all? What's the point of ruling the world if you never fix things?'
'I thought Vespasian didn't give a toss about the upper class.'
'Maybe not. But he wants them in his debt.'
'You are a cynic,' observed Petronius.
'You get that way.'
'It's very hard for Juliana,' Helena reckoned when I went home and told her. 'To be accused of killing her papa, when she bought the pills only because he sent her.'
'Silius will argue that Juliana is lying. Why send her? Why not send out his wife or a house slave?'
'She was his daughter,' Helena said. 'She knew the apothecary. Metellus trusted her to make sure they were pills that would be quick and clean and painless.'
'Would you do it for Decimus?'
Helena looked shocked. She loved her father. 'No! But then,' she reasoned, Juliana tried -'Helena learned fast; she quickly swung along with my caution. 'Or she says she tried – to thwart her father's suicide.'
'I am sure the defence will parade that claim on her behalf.'
'I'm sure the defence will bungle it!' Helena was even more cynical than me. I was not sure whether this had always been so, or whether living with me had hardened her. 'She's a woman. With scandal in the air, she will stand no chance. The prosecution will allude to the previous corruption trial whenever possible, implying by association that Juliana is corrupt too. Like father, like daughter. In fact yes, she did buy the pills – but her father had declared to all the family that he intended to commit suicide. That is a recognised device at his rank, sanctioned down the centuries. Juliana was simply his instrument.'
I sniffed. 'He changed his mind.'
'So he was a vacillating coward! But Juliana had tried to save him, so that's a double tragedy for her. And to be then accused of murdering him is vile.'
We were sitting in my office at home, me on a couch with the family dog shoving at me to make more room available, and Helena sitting on a table swinging her legs. The scrolls she had moved to clear a space for herself were squashed against a wall cupboard. From time to time she fiddled with my inkwell, while I watched, waiting for it to go over. It had a non-spill device, supposedly, which I was curious to test. 'You met the apothecary, Marcus. What did you think of him?'
I repeated what I told Silius: Rhoemetalces was a successful professional who seemed to know what he was doing. Even accused of murder
, I thought he would hold up well in court. As well as he could, that is. He had sold the pills which killed a man, he could not alter that. Everything hung on the court's interpretation of Metellus senior's intentions. Suicide is not illegal, far from it. So could the apothecary be held liable for a man who changed his mind? I thought it would be unfair – but fairness and justice are two different bines on the hop.
'You met Juliana,' I reminded Helena. 'What was your opinion?'
Helena acknowledged that she had not viewed Juliana as a prospective killer. 'I wanted family background. I did not scrutinise her as a possible suspect.'
'Still, what about her behaviour struck you?'
Helena pulled back the scene from her memory. 'I saw her only briefly. She had a family resemblance to her mother Calpurnia, but younger of course, and softer. Sad and strained, but it looked well etched, so either those were always her natural features or all this business has worn her out.'
'Happy marriage?' I asked.
'Nothing to say yes or no,' Helena shrugged. 'Juliana thought I had come to express condolences. I felt she liked that. She seemed more genuine in her feelings than her mother had been – much less conscious of how everything would look.'
'Someone had told her not to answer questions.'
'Oh yes. She was quick to bridle and she jumped up to call for more attendants, once she realised what I had really come for.'
'Was she frightened?' I wondered.
'A little. Whether scared of me and what I might ask her, or afraid of whoever had told her to be very careful, I can't say.'
'The husband?'
'Most likely. What did you think of him, Marcus?'
Rufus? Unhelpful bastard. Not just to us – to his wife too.'
We talked about the second time Juliana was questioned, after she became a suspect, when Justinus and I had interviewed her formally, with her husband grimly sitting by. We had seen Paccius Africanus lurking at their house, so he was clearly still advising the family, including Juliana. So at what stage had it struck him that her involvement with the pill purchase might cause her problems? Presumably now he would be the defence in the new court case.
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