I wrote a letter resigning my military commission the same day, saying farewell to ten years of my life. I knocked on the legate’s door to hand her the letter before my courage failed, but to my frustration her admin officer told me she wouldn’t be back from a meeting in the Defence Ministry until the afternoon. So I went down to the mess bar and downed a double brandy. Navigating the shocked faces of my fellow officers and their commiserations over lunch was hard enough, but dealing with my inner resentment was worse. When the legate called me in that afternoon to give me feedback about the two Prussians we’d caught, I was in a morose mood and I hadn’t even handed her my letter.
‘Sit down, Major.’ She fiddled with the papers on her desk, pushed the bridge of her spectacles up her nose. ‘I’m afraid it’s not good news. They’ve claimed diplomatic immunity.’
‘Impossible!’
‘I’m afraid not. One is the younger son of some court official and the other is his friend.’
‘But they were caught in actu – the transceiver, antenna wire, combat knives, ration packs,’ I said. ‘Hardly innocent hiker stuff, especially creeping across a guarded frontier.’
‘I agree, but I had some snotty-nose kid from the Foreign Ministry with a signed order in my office the day after you brought them in.’
Why did we bother?
The legate gave me a bitter little smile. ‘It’s a bugger, isn’t it? I’ve had the same, years ago, though. I thought that sort of thing had stopped. Obviously not. Until these cosy little arrangements are done away with, I’m afraid we have to swallow it.’ She snapped her file closed, then glanced at me. ‘Don’t worry, I’m pushing this one all the way up the chain to the Defence Minister. He’s no big reformer, but the magister militum is a hundred per cent on our side.’
Perhaps having the country’s top soldier on his heels would spur the damned politico into action to push the legislation through. I wasn’t optimistic. I stayed in my seat.
‘Something else, Major?’
I swallowed hard and drew the resignation letter from my pocket. I rubbed the envelope between my fingers. Hades. I shot my hand forward and laid it on the legate’s desk before I lost my nerve.
She raised her eyebrow as she opened and read it.
‘I see. I’m very sorry to see this, Aurelia. You are one of the few I can trust not only to carry out a task but to take it further, if necessary, without overdoing it. I realise you have to take over while your mother is unwell, but your resignation is refused. You’re on indefinite leave. I want you back afterwards.’
*
Imperatrix Justina called me in to a full imperial council meeting to take the oath of loyalty. I wore the gold collar and myrtle-leaf insignia over formal robes and palla, but as I walked from the threshold of the double doors across the soft purple carpet and passed the measuring eyes of the twenty-odd councillors seated round the long table, I felt a sham. I was the understudy and would be found lacking and thrown out.
I felt less of a fraud when the matter of diplomatic immunity came up for foreigners caught in undiplomatic activity. The council members listened in silence as I outlined exactly what had happened on the top of the cold mountain with the Prussians and nodded in agreement with the magister militum’s recommendations read out by the Defence Minister. But when they voted to refer it to the Foreign Ministry for further investigation, I slumped in despair. Justina took one glance at me and then told them to implement the recommendations with immediate effect. The tiny triumph won me a frown from the foreign minister and a hard but not unfriendly stare from Defence.
The vigiles prefect came to the house the next day wearing an impeccable maroon uniform and a solemn expression, as any policeman would when delivering bad news. The gods knew why, but he walked across the atrium marble floor carefully and slowly as if it was into the pit of Tartarus itself.
‘Countess,’ he said and gave me a brief nod. A middle-aged man, dour and pasty-faced from being indoors too much. He stood stiffly, tapping his peaked hat against the side of his leg until I looked at it, then he stopped. He glanced over my shoulder when he spoke rather than look at me. I felt immediately antagonistic to him. It was illogical; we were colleagues in a way, dedicated to catching the ungodly, but instinctively I knew he didn’t like me. I decided not to invite him to sit.
‘I regret to inform you that despite several appeals, no witnesses to your mother’s accident have come forward. We took statements from three people who’d looked out of their windows to find out what had happened to cause the noise,’ he droned as if he’d rehearsed a set speech. ‘Forensics have picked the accident site apart but found nothing significant. There were tyre marks on the street, some headlight glass shards and paint scratches on the wreck of your mother’s car. These all matched the standard patterns of an imported BMW. These new Bavarian cars are becoming very popular,’ he added, and shrugged while spreading his hands in a brief open gesture. ‘The CCTV cameras on the main road showed a dark BMW 1500 saloon turning into the side street but then it disappears. Can’t have CCTV everywhere, you know. No number plate, but the definition wasn’t good enough to make a pastefit of the driver’s face. Sorry.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Yes, we can’t do any more. We can’t find evidence if it’s not there.’ He looked almost truculent. I knew he was delivering a difficult message, but there was an edge to his manner that confirmed my first impression. He shifted from one foot to another.
‘However, I can’t understand why there was a collision there,’ he continued. ‘It’s a road with light traffic, only the back of a factory with infrequent deliveries, otherwise, the end of a row of those experimental red-brick two up, two downs. From the deposits on the road from the wheel arches, Forensics conclude that your mother’s car was parked when it was hit.’ He looked away. ‘We’ve put it down to an idiot boy racer. But I can’t imagine why your mother was there in the first place.’
‘Don’t you find that peculiar in itself?’ I said.
‘Well, I don’t know what her personal habits were.’
I gasped. How dared he?
‘Would you care to rephrase that?’ I said in my coldest voice.
‘I didn’t mean any offence, I’m sure.’
‘Have you questioned my steward and my mother’s business manager about her movements?’
‘I’m sure my inspector covered that.’
‘Wait here,’ I ordered. I lifted the house intercom handset and summoned both of them to the atrium.
An awkward silence was relieved after two minutes when the steward marched in, carrying his housebook in his hand, followed a minute later by the business manager with his diary.
Suited and smiling, the business manager was a grey-haired and spare figure. His organiser, packed with high-level contacts, stretched back through his thirty-year career in running corporations. Working for my mother was his pre-retirement job, but she counted herself lucky to have secured such a competent manager.
Milo, the steward, knew everything about everybody connected with the house, including me since I was a young child. His upright figure almost stood to attention when he came to a halt. He was an ex-centurion my mother had found through the services redeployment scheme. Although he was dressed in slacks, shirt and tie, the short haircut and self-confidence made me imagine the silver vine stick rank badges on his collar points.
I waved towards the prefect, but spoke to the two other men. ‘Please look in your records for the day of my mother’s accident and tell me what appointments she had and any meetings she went to or hosted here. Everything she did.’
‘We had the usual weekly investments review in the morning and she was due at a Senate committee meeting that afternoon,’ the business manager said.
‘She had lunch with your daughter, domina,’ Milo added. ‘I remember because Marina knocked her glass of juice off the table and, er, cried. We had to send the rug to the specialist cleaners.’ He frowned and flicked the pages of his h
ousebook. ‘The countess left the house shortly after that, driving her own car.’
‘No chauffeur? That’s odd.’ My mother only drove herself in the country on the farm. Going to the Senate, she used the journey time to check her paperwork and left it to the chauffeur to negotiate the traffic.
‘Did you tell the vigiles inspector all this?’
‘She didn’t ask,’ Milo replied. His face was empty of any emotion.
‘What?’ Grilling the household was basic procedure. I turned to the prefect. ‘What are your people playing at? Can’t they conduct a straightforward investigation?’
‘My officers know their job. They might not be as glamorous as the Praetorians, but they carry out solid procedure methodically. If they didn’t ask, they didn’t think it necessary.’ His eyes tightened and his face took on a red flush. ‘I don’t think there’s any more to be said or done. We’ll be in touch if there are any developments. I bid you good day.’ He turned on his heel and strutted out. Anger and surprise robbed me of the ability to reply.
Frankly, I didn’t expect to hear anything further and I didn’t. The vigiles were more interested in tidying up paperwork and submitting high clear-up statistics than actually solving cases.
But the prefect’s strange attitude from the beginning worried me. I managed to speak to the justice minister for five minutes after the council meeting the following week. She frowned when I told her about the prefect’s manner, but said she was sure they had investigated thoroughly. I asked if she would let me see the file – I had the required security clearance – but she refused on confidentiality and personnel grounds. Faced with the steely, direct look, I had nothing else I could say, but as she strode off to her ministry car, I was left with the feeling something wasn’t as it should be.
*
In a self-delusion that I could solve the mystery around my mother’s accident I carved out two hours from my workload to visit the site. Most of my skills were military, but reconnaissance and intelligence training had taught me that nothing was ever as it appeared. Juno, I was no expert. After walking up and down the narrow road, crouching down to search the gutter for any traces of I didn’t know what, I stood up and panned around to take in the closed factory gates and the houses running in perpendicular lines from them. What on earth was my mother doing here, parked as if waiting?
The red-brick flat-faced terrace rows were well cared for, gates and woodwork all trim and painted. I nodded to an older woman clipping plants and weeding in one of the little gardens.
‘Morning,’ I said. ‘Very peaceful around here.’
‘Are you selling something?’ She frowned at me, pushed a stray strand of hair back with her gloved hand and left a smear of earth on her forehead.
‘No, absolutely not.’
‘What do you want then?’
‘I came to see where the accident was a few weeks ago.’
‘That!’ She looked down the street. ‘Never seen so many vigiles around here before. You get no traffic through here for hours, then five police cars and an ambulance fall on us. They cut the poor woman out, but she looked in a bad way.’ She turned round to face me. ‘You’re not a reporter, are you, or one of those ghouls who come to rubberneck?’
‘No, that poor woman is my mother.’
She had nothing material to add as we drank a cup of tea in her small, but immaculate, reception room full of dark, polished-to-death traditional furniture. Although my mother owned some of them for rental, I’d never been in one of these strange houses, built as an experiment by an eccentric English architect in the 1800s. He’d gone bankrupt as few Romans then wanted a house with such a small hallway and closed rooms.
‘I didn’t see the accident,’ the woman continued, ‘but I rushed out when I heard the noise. The vigiles took my statement, then pushed off. I haven’t heard anything more.’
*
It took me nearly a month to grasp the extent of my mother’s work, let alone accomplish any of it. Not only did she lead an extended family of nearly a thousand, if you counted cousins to the third degree; her business and industrial interests were legion. I knew her business manager, but not the whole accounts team, and I had no idea her interests were so international. I slogged like a sixteenth-century indentured worker for the next few weeks, hoping I could remember all the new faces.
Then the family recorder presented me with a list of hearings I had to adjudicate. Unlike the business group who were happy to work in a direct way, giving me succinct non-partisan advice and accepting my decisions, the family affairs were a nightmare. I had to judge disputes, real or imagined, between people forty years older than me who frequently reminded me how they had wiped the snot from my nose as a baby.
I did away with the daily petitioning where a horde of ‘clients’, read indigent hangers-on, haunted the vestibule each morning. This old Roman custom had revived itself during the Great War in times of hardship and uncertainty, but that had ended in 1935 and we were in the nineteen sixties, for goodness’ sake. I told the under-steward to deal with them as he saw fit. He could offer them jobs in the house or on the farm at Castra Lucilla. No more free handouts.
I squeezed in quick visits to the hospital most days, but these dwindled to once or twice a week by the second month. My mother’s ruined face showed no sign of life, let alone animation. Only the green lines wobbling up and down on the screen showed she was technically still alive. They’d cut her beautiful hair short; it was now more grey than tawny. The nursing staff murmured polite comments that she was as well as could be expected, but hurried off as soon as they’d given me their brief report. I sat by my mother’s bed each time, telling her everything I was doing, hoping somehow she would sit up, jump out of bed and come home.
*
Although disquiet still crawled around like a tiny worm in the back of my mind, I had to accept that the investigation into my mother’s accident was closed and nobody had a clue why she had been there. As a last throw attempt, I tried to contact the investigating inspector, but she’d been moved to a different department and was away on a course. Another coincidence or was I being paranoid? I wandered up to my mother’s room, touching the brushes on her dressing table, opening the drawers, looking through the books, magazines and notepad full of jottings by her bedside. I even rifled through her study desk, feeling as if I were a barbarian invader, but couldn’t find anything that hinted at what she was doing in that backstreet.
She regained consciousness three months after the accident and recovered enough to come home. Propped up in her wheelchair, she would stare out of the window on to the garden and parkland. On warmer days, the nurse wheeled her outside where she would raise her face to the sun and close her eyes as if sunbathing. But when she opened them again, the stare was empty. I wept to see my so able mother bound into a world of silence, miscomprehension and utter dependency. She smiled vaguely at me and patted Marina’s head, but we couldn’t be sure she knew us.
I was distracted by the workload I strove to undertake for my mother’s sake. Attempting to rationalise it, I felt as if I were standing on a muddy battlefield with weapons firing at me from all directions with no quarter given, and making no progress in any direction. My social life had collapsed but Severina, Justina’s daughter, came to see me now and again with her little boy, Julian. I was pleased to see them. Julian was a sunny, smiling child, happy to be entertained by Marina, but Severina started to get on my nerves after a while with her chatter and dithering. My only real relief was precious time alone with Marina after her tutor had left for the day.
IV
One afternoon, not quite a year after my mother’s accident, I was pinioned to my desk by a mountain of paper. I was finalising a commentary on the efficiency of the law enforcement system. The ineffectiveness, almost obstruction, of the vigiles after my mother’s accident had made me determined to do something about the whole system; its operating organisation had hardly changed since the grand reforms in the 1700s.
/> Fingerprinting, forensics and other techniques had been integrated on the technical side, and their forensics service was excellent, if bureaucratic. But in their heads, the vigiles operated like a field gendarmerie. They were efficient at containing people and traffic, but responded with a hard thump more often than not. They couldn’t think things through, nor were they fired by a passion to pursue cases. Consequently their investigative branch was badly trained and poorly regarded. The public called them scarabs, or dung beetles; my legate had called them jumped-up firefighters; that’s what they’d been in ancient Rome and that’s what she reckoned they still were. I smiled at the memory of her forthright opinion.
I’d amassed my suggestions for reform and was herding them together into some kind of order for my secretary to type up when my mother’s nurse burst into my study.
‘Domina, come now. The countess.’
I was still fast enough to reach my mother’s room before him. She was still, her head braced by the headrest, tilted up towards the sunlight, her mouth open and jaw sunk back. Sightless eyes stared at nothing. I laid two fingers across her carotid artery, searching for a pulse in her still warm neck.
‘I’ve pressed the alarm. The doctor will be here in ten minutes, but—’
We exchanged glances.
‘Tell me,’ I said.
‘She gave a long moan, then silence.’
I clamped my lips together, and stared down at the tiled floor. The gods and we knew she would never recover from her accident, but my insides still tore apart at her sudden departure. I swallowed hard, blinking back sudden tears.
‘Vale Felicia Mitela,’ I whispered, and bent and kissed her lips.
*
Hundreds of the great and the good came to her funeral. Justina led the official mourning, which was just as well as I could scarcely finish the laudatio, my public speech, in front of the crowd in the forum. My throat ached when I’d finished and Justina led me back to my seat where I slumped, hardly hearing the secondary tributes.
AURELIA (Roma Nova Book 4) Page 3