Three Hands in The Fountain mdf-9

by Lindsey Davis

  'I'd like to borrow a dish,' Frontinus requested calmly. 'One you don't use very much, I suggest.'

  Helena's eyes met mine, dark with concern. We both realised what he probably wanted it for.

  XXIII

  The third hand was swollen, but undamaged. Julius Frontinus unwrapped and presented it without drama, placing it in our dish like an organ removed by a surgeon. The first two relics had been dark with decay. This hand was black because its owner had been black. She must have come from Mauretania or Africa. The fine skin on the back of her hand was ebony, the palm and fingertips much lighter. The cuticles had been kept manicured, the nails neatly trimmed.

  It looked a young hand. The fingers, all still present, would recently have been as fine and slender as those of Helena's which had just now so urgently tapped my wrist. This was a left hand. Trapped in the swollen flesh of the fourth finger was a plain gold wedding ring.

  Julius Frontinus stayed fastidiously silent. I felt depressed.

  Helena Justina had reached out abruptly and covered the severed remains with her own much paler hand, fingers splayed and straight, thankfully not quite touching the other. It was an involuntary sign of tenderness for the dead girl. Helena's expression held the same absorption as when she made that gesture above our sleeping child.

  Perhaps my recognition of it struck a chord; without a word Helena rose, and we heard her walk into the next room where Julia Junilla was safe in her cradle. After a short pause as if she was checking on the baby Helena came back and resumed her seat, frowning. Her mood was dark, but she said nothing so Frontinus and I began discussing our work.

  'This was found during the cleaning of the Aqua Claudia reservoir in the Arch of Dolabella.' Frontinus' manner and tone were businesslike. 'It came up in the sand in one of the dredging buckets. The work gang who discovered it were badly supervised; instead of reporting the find officially they displayed it in public for money.' He spoke as if he disapproved, yet didn't blame them.

  'That caused today's riot?'

  'Apparently. The Curator of Aqueducts was at the Circus, fortunately for him. One of his assistants was not so lucky; he was identified in the street and beaten up. There has been damage to property. And of course there is an outcry for hygienic supplies to be restored. The panic has caused all kinds of difficulties. An epidemic started overnight -'

  'Naturally,' I said. 'The minute I heard the city's water might be contaminated, I started feeling dicky myself.'

  'Hysteria,' stated the consul tersely. But whoever is doing this must now be found.'

  Helena had heard enough. 'So inconsiderate!' She spoke too sweetly. We were about to be blasted. 'Some silly girl gets herself killed by a madman, and disrupts Rome. Women really will have to be deterred from putting themselves in this position. Dear Juno, we cannot have females being responsible for fevers, let alone damage to property -'

  'It's the man who needs deterring.' I tried to ride out the tempest. Frontinus shot me a helpless glance and left me to cope. 'Whether his victims fall into his clutches through their own folly or whether he grabs them from behind in a dark street, nobody suggests they deserve it, love. And I don't suppose the public have even started to think about what he does to these women before he kills them – let alone the way he treats them afterwards.'

  To my surprise Helena subsided quietly. She had had a sheltered upbringing, but she paid attention to the world and had no lack of imagination. 'These women are being subjected to terrible ordeals.'

  'Not much doubt of it.'

  Her face clouded with compassion again. 'The owner of this hand was warm and young. Only a day or two ago she was sewing perhaps, or spinning. This hand was caressing her husband or their child. It was preparing their food, combing her hair, laying wheatcakes before the gods -'

  'And she was only one in a long line, snatched away to end up hideously like this. All with lives ahead of them once.'

  'I was hoping this was a recent phenomenon,' Frontinus said.

  'No, it has been happening for years, sir,' Helena explained angrily. 'Our-brother-in-law works on the river and says mutilated bodies have been discovered for as long as he can remember. For years the disappearance of women has been going unreported – or uninvestigated, anyway. Their corpses have been hidden away in silence. It's only when people begin to think the aqueducts are contaminated that anybody cares!'

  'It has initiated an enquiry at last.' Frontinus was a braver man than me to suggest it. 'Of course it's a scandal, and of course this enquiry is too late; nobody denies that.' 'You're being disingenuous,' she chided him mildly. 'Practical,' he said.

  'Whoever they were,' I assured Helena, 'these women will have the investigation they deserve.'

  'Yes, I think they will now.' She trusted me. It was a serious responsibility.

  I reached for the dish and held it. 'One thing I shall have to do – even though it seems disrespectful – is remove this poor soul's wedding ring.' It would be best done unobserved. The ring was embedded in waterlogged flesh and would be ghastly to extricate. 'The only way we stand any chance of solving this is to identify at least one of the victims and work out exactly what happened to her.'

  'How likely is that?' Frontinus asked.

  'Well, it will be the first time the killer has to dispose of remains while somebody is actually looking out for him. The girl's torso is likely to be dumped soon in the Tiber, as Helena said.' The consul looked up quickly, already responding and considering logistics. 'In the next few days,' I told him. 'At the latest just after the Games finish. If you have any men at your disposal they could be watching the bridges and embankments.'

  'A day and night watch calls for more resources than I have.'

  'Which are?'

  'A modest allocation of public slaves.' His expression told me he realised he was heading an investigation on the cheap.

  Lindsey Davis

  Three Hands in The Fountain

  "Do your best, sir. Nothing too obvious, or the killer will be scared off. I'll put the word among the water boatmen, and my partner may be able to get some help from the vigiles.'

  Helena's great brown eyes were still sorrowful, but I could see she was thinking. 'Marcus, I keep wondering how these smaller remains are being put into the water system in the first place. Surely most of the aqueducts are either deep underground or high on arches and inaccessible?'

  I passed on the query to Frontinus. 'Good point,' he agreed 'We must consult with officials about how unauthorised entry is possible.'

  'If we can find where it's happening we may trap the bastard in action.' I was interested in how our intervention would affect Anacrites. 'But won't speaking to water board officials cut across the Curator's own investigation?'

  Frontinus shrugged. 'He knows I have been asked to provide an overview. I will ask for an engineer to be made available for consultation tomorrow. The Curator will have to accept it.'

  'He won't encourage his staff to help. We'll have to win them over with guile,' I said.

  'Use your charm,' smirked Helena.

  'What do you recommend, love? Approachability and the dimpled grin?'

  'No, I meant slip them some coinage.'

  'Vespasian won't approve of that!' I pulled my face straight for Frontinus. He was listening to our banter rather cautiously. 'Consul, we should be able to extract something useful from the engineers. Will you want to be in on this part of the enquiry, sir?'

  'Certainly.'

  Oh dear. 'Oh good!'

  I wondered how Petro and I would manage, sharing our hunches with an ex-magistrate. Cosying up to a consul was not our style.

  The question was about to be addressed; Petronius had shambled up to visit us. He must have spotted the lictors wilting in Lenia's entrance. In theory he and I were still not speaking, but curiosity is a wonderful thing. He hovered in the doorway briefly, a tall, wide-shouldered figure looking diffident at interrupting.

  'Falco! What have you done to acquire six rod-and-a
xe men in your train?'

  'Belated recognition of my value to the state… Come in, you bastard. This is Julius Frontinus.' I saw that Petro was receiving the message in my glance. 'He's this year's Consul – and our latest client.' As Petronius nodded pleasantly, pretending to be unaffected by rank, I explained about the commission of enquiry and how our expertise was needed for the legwork. I managed to slide in a warning hint that our client intended to impose himself on our interviews.

  Sextus Julius Frontinus was of course the man who in our lifetime would achieve an unrivalled reputation for his talents as lawyer, statesman, general, and city administrator, not to mention his skilled authorship of major works on military strategy, surveying and water provision (an interest which I would like to think he acquired while working with us). His career structure would be the illustrious ideal. At the time, though, the only question that concerned Petro and me was whether we could endure him as a supervisor – and whether the mighty Frontinus would be prepared to bunch up his purple-bordered toga on his knobbly knees and stand his round like an honest trooper in the seedy winebars where we liked to hold our debates about evidence.

  Petronius found himself a seat and installed himself comfortably in our group. He took the dish containing the most recent hand, stared at it with a suitably depressed sigh, listened while I pointed out some apparent axe-marks on the wrist bones, then placed it carefully on the table. He did not waste his breath on hysterical exclamations; nor did he demand a tiresome review of the conversation he had missed. He simply asked the question which he reckoned took priority, 'This is an enquiry of major importance. I presume the fee will be appropriate?'

  I had trained him well. Lucius Petronius Longus was a real informer now.

  XXIV

  With the wedding ring we had our first useful clue. Removing it sickened me. Don't ask me how I managed it. I had to slide off to another room alone. Petronius assessed the job then pulled a face and left me to it, but I relied on him to keep Helena and the Consul out of the way.

  I was glad I persevered: inside were engraved the names 'Asinia' and Caius'. There were thousands of men called Caius in Rome, but finding one who had recently lost a wife called Asinia might prove feasible.

  Our new colleague said he would ask the City Prefect to make enquiries of all the vigiles cohorts under his command. We let Frontinus take this initiative, in case his rank speeded up the response. Knowing how the vigiles tended to react to rank, however, Petronius also made a private approach to the Sixth, who patrolled the Circus Maximus and were now the hapless hosts of his old second in command Martinus. Since the murders seemed to be connected with the Games, the Circus might be where the victim had met her assailant. The Sixth were the most likely candidates to receive her husband's plea to find her. Martinus, in his unreliable-sounding way, promised to tell us at once if it happened. Well, he wasn't entirely hopeless; he might eventually get round to it.

  While we waited to hear something, we tackled the aqueduct issue. Petro and I presented ourselves at Frontinus' house early the next morning. We wore neat tunics, combed-down hair, and the solemnity of efficient operatives. We looked like the men for the business. We folded our arms a lot and wore thoughtful frowns. Any ex-consul would be happy to have two such sparks on his staff.

  Although we were allowed to interrogate an engineer, the Curator of Aqueducts had had the choice of which to send. The man he imposed on us was called Statius, and we could tell he would be a nincompoop by the size of his back-up team: he brought a couple of slaves with note tablets (to record what he said so he could check it minutely afterwards and send us corrections if he had inadvertently been too frank), a satchel-carrier, an assistant, and the assistant's chubby clerk. Not to mention the litter-bearers and the armed guard with cudgels he had left outside. In theory he was here to contribute expert knowledge, but he behaved as if he had been summonsed on a full-blown corruption charge.

  Frontinus asked the first question, and it was typically direct: 'Do you have a map of the water system?'

  'I believe a locational diagram of the substrata and super-strata conduits may exist.'

  Petronius caught my eye. His favourite: a man who called a spade a soil redistribution implement.

  'Can you supply a copy?'

  'Such classified information is not generally available -'

  'I see!' Frontinus glared. If he ever assumed a position administering water, we could tell who would be the first bad nut tossed out of the window.

  'Perhaps, then,' suggested Petro, playing the sympathetic fraternal type (well, a big brother with a hard stick in his fist), 'you could just tell us something about how things work?'

  Statius had recourse to his satchel, wherein he had secreted a linen handkerchief to mop his brow. He was overweight and red in the face. His tunic crumpled around him in grubby-looking folds, even though it had probably been clean on that day. 'Well, it is complicated to explain to lay persons. What you are requesting is highly technical…'

  'Try me. How many aqueducts are there?'

  'Eight,' admitted Statius, after a horrified pause. 'Nine, surely?' I ventured quietly.

  He looked annoyed. 'Well, if you're going to include the Alsietina -'

  'Is there any reason why I should not?'

  'It's on the Transtiberina side.'

  'I realise that.'

  'The Aqua Alsietina is only used for the naumachia and for watering Caesar's Gardens -'

  'Or for the Transtiberina paupers to drink when the other aqueducts are dry.' I was annoyed. 'We know the quality is filthy. It was only ever intended to fill the basin for mock trireme fights. That's not the point, Statius. Have any women's hands, or other parts of human corpses, been found in the Alsietina?'

  'I have no precise information on that.'

  'Then you concede remains may be there?'

  'It could be a statistical possibility.'

  'It's statistically certain that a watercourse somewhere is awash with heads, legs and arms too. Where there are hands the rest of the set tends to exist – and we haven't found any of them yet.'

  Petronius weighed in again, still complementing me by playing the kind-hearted reasonable type: 'Well, shall we call the tally nine? With luck some can be eliminated fairly quickly, but we must start by considering the whole system. We have to decide how a man, and his accomplices if he has any, are taking advantage of the aqueducts to flush away the relics of their hideous crimes.'

  Statius was still bound up in irrelevance. The water board accepts no responsibility for that. 'You cannot be suggesting that the notoriously unpleasant quality of the Aqua Alsietina is accounted for by illegal impurities of human origin?'

  'Of course not,' said Petro grimly.

  'Of course not,' I agreed. 'The Alsietina is full of perfectly natural crap.'

  The engineer's eyes, which were too close together, fluttered nervously between us. He knew Julius Frontinus was too important to despise, but he saw us as unpleasant insects he would like to swat if he dared. 'You are trying to trace how a few – a relatively few – undesirable remains have been introduced to the channels. Well, I sympathise with the initiative -' He was lying. 'But we have to appreciate the magnitude of scale impeding us -' At least he was talking.

  We listened in silence. He had somehow gained confidence; maybe refusing requests made him feel big. 'The freshwater installation comprises between two and three hundred miles of channel -' That seemed a very vague calculation. Somebody must have measured more accurately, at the very least when the aqueducts were built. 'I am given to understand that these extraordinary pollutants -'

  'Limbs,' stated Petronius.

  'Have been manifesting themselves in the water towers – of which the system is provided with a daunting multitude -'

  Frontinus demanded immediately, 'How many?'

  Statius consulted his assistant, who readily informed us, 'The Aqua Claudia and Anio Novus together have nearly a hundred castelli, and for the whole system
you could more than double that -'

  I noticed that Frontinus was jotting down the figures. He did it himself, not using a scribe though he must own plenty. 'What's the daily water discharge?' he barked. Statius blenched. 'Roughly,' Frontinus added helpfully.

  Again Statius needed the assistant, who said matter-offactly: 'It's difficult to measure because the currents are constantly flowing and also there are seasonal variations. I roughed up some statistics once for the Aqua Claudia, one of the big four from the Sabine Hills. It was mind-boggling, sir. We managed to do some technical measurements, and when I extrapolated the figures I reckoned on a daily delivery of something over seven million cubic feet. Call it, in everyday terms, going on for seven million standard amphorae – or by the culleus, if you prefer, over sixty thousand.'

  Since a culleus is one great mountain of a cartload, sixty thousand rolling up full of water was indeed hard to imagine. And that was only the quantity delivered to Rome by a single aqueduct in one day.

  'Is it relevant?' asked Statius. Far from being grateful, he seemed annoyed at being shown up by a subordinate.

  Frontinus looked up, still round-eyed from the figures. 'I have no idea, yet. But it's fascinating.'

  'What nobody knows,' continued the assistant, who was rather enjoying himself, is whether any human remains are lying undiscovered in the settling tanks along the route.'

  'How many tanks are there?' asked Petro, jumping in before the intrigued Consul could beat him to it.

  'Innumerable.' Statius supplied the put-down crisply for himself. The assistant looked as if he knew the real answer, but he kept quiet.

  'You can take a census and count them now,' growled Frontinus to the senior engineer. 'I understand this revolting contamination has been happening for years. I am astonished the water board has not investigated long ago.'

  He paused, obviously expecting an explanation, but Statius failed to take the hint. Petro and I were watching a head-on clash between intelligence and stodge. The ex-Consul had all the flair and quickness that shines in the best administrators; the engineer had floated up through a corrupt agency by virtue of just sitting back and putting the seal on whatever his underlings passed to him. Neither man could quite believe the other specimen existed.