Cyprianus had told me where to look. I had to go to the hottest steam room. Treading carefully in my leather-soled outdoor boots, I crossed the first room, entered the second, then checked the large square tepidarium with its plunge bath. There were lingering odors of cleansers and body oils, but the room had begun to cool and the scents were now growing faint. An abandoned bone strigil caught my eye, but I thought I had seen the same one there before.
There seemed nothing unusual. Nothing any late arrival has not witnessed at any commercial bathhouse where the ticket woman has already left and the water has cooled down. And most private baths would be like this after the stoker went to dinner. You could rush through and still end up clean enough, but there would be no real comfort for your bones.
Even in the ascending heat of the sweat rooms, the floor and flue convection was now fading slowly, although bare feet might still need the protection of wooden-soled slippers. I went into the third steam room. The body was lying on the floor. There was no sign of life. Cyprianus was right about that.
At about the time I found the corpse, I heard noises: someone behind me in the outer regions was now wedging open heavy doors to cool the inner rooms. Sensible. Sweat was pouring off me. Fully dressed, I felt damp and unhappy. My concentration was slipping, when I needed to be alert. I put my sword down and wiped my face roughly with my arm.
Take notes, Falco.
I had no tablet or stylus, but memory was always my best tool. Well, Hades, I can still see the scene today. Pomponius was lying facedown. His hair was wet, but its color and florid style made him recognizable. He was turned slightly, partly on his left side, facing away from me; his knees were slightly drawn up so the posture was a curve. One arm, the left, was under him.
Someone with poor eyesight might suppose he had fainted. I spotted at once that a very long thin cord was wound tightly around his neck. Several times. A loose end was caught under his right arm; it trailed backwards, then meandered over the floor towards me as I stood near his feet. He was wearing slip-on bath clogs. If there had been a struggle, they would probably have come off. A modesty towel encircled the body, loosened yet still more or less in situ around the waist.
A small pool of pallid, watery blood was near his head. Cyprianus, horrified, had warned me what that was. He had pulled up the body, ready to turn it over. Shocked by what he saw, he had let the corpse fall back.
I braced myself. I steadied my foot against the center of the dead man’s spine to stop him from sliding across the floor, and pulled his upper arm hard. He was slippery with sweat, steam, and oil, so I had to change my hold and grasp the wrist more firmly. In one strong movement, I hauled him right over onto his back.
Then I looked. One of his eyes was gouged right out. I stood back, I managed not to gag, but a hand came up over my mouth involuntarily.
Cyprianus now came in behind me. He had brought spare towels to dry the running sweat off our faces.
“Aargh … there’s something about eyes.”
“He’s been stabbed too.” My voice sounded dull. Maybe it was due to the acoustics in here. “You probably didn’t notice—”
“No,” he admitted. “I just ran.”
In the throat and on the naked torso there were wounds, made with something that caused extremely small entrance and exit cuts. Cyprianus pulled a face. “What caused such wounds, Falco?”
“It’s curious. They are almost bodkin-size. Could a woman be responsible?” I pondered, looking around for inspiration. The weapon was no longer in the room. Little blood had escaped. These stabbings could well have been done after death.
A bodkin? Would a woman have had the strength to strangle Pomponius, apparently without him fighting back? The towel that must have been tucked around his midriff as he bathed was the usual useless napkin that you have to tighten up every five minutes. It would have fallen off straightaway if he did anything energetic—even if he tried twisting around quickly. Could it have been placed back over him after the killing? Probably not. It was not just lying on the corpse; before I moved him, and although Cyprianus had made an attempt, the linen cloth was still wrapped right under his hips.
It was the strangling that did it for him, I was sure of that. Either somebody came up behind him unexpectedly, or he was relaxed in the “safe” presence of a social acquaintance. Most people sit in steam rooms on the side ledges, facing inwards to the room, backs to the wall. So coming up from behind was less likely.
Suppose this: Pomponius, bathing in the normal sequence, had reached the hottest room. After a hard day, irritating me and others, he had been full of torpor. Someone he may not have liked but whom he knew came in, sat fairly close, alongside maybe. If they had carried any large weapons, he would have seen. So they had a string, coiled up in the palm of the hand perhaps, and a small blade of some kind, also concealed. They whipped out the string and wound it around the architect’s neck very fast—they stood up to do that, probably. They were strong enough to hold him still. (Or perhaps they had help—but either way I could see no bruising on his arms.) He stopped breathing. To make sure—or to exact further vengeance, they stabbed him and scooped out his eye. The eye could have been extracted with the same stabbing weapon, pushed in and then turned in a circular movement, like shucking an oyster. Finally they lowered the body to the floor. My guess was that the whole incident had been very quick.
There could have been more than one assailant. One each side of him? A little too threatening when they first took up position. Say this: one sat beside him, one at a distance. The near one had the string. The second rushed up when the action started. He maybe had the concealed bodkinlike tool.
I bent and made myself unwind the string, jerking it from the folds of flesh into which it had dug so cruelly. Someone really pulled this tight. Loop and tug, loop and tug again. … If Pomponius sat to relax in the steam the way so many of us do, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his head bowed, it would have been easy to collar him. Especially if he expected nothing. Both ends of the string had lain to the left of the head, as if the killer attacked from that side.
When I unwound the string fully, I found a couple of small knots along its length. They were very old, made so long ago that they were now solid and impossible to untie. The string was a firm, tightly twisted type, with no stretch. It seemed to be waxed and was blackened with ancient dirt. Both free ends were tied in little loops.
While I was bending over, I had noticed the wet floor was muddy from my outdoor boots. Circular footprint smudges, in black watery slurry, marked every step I had taken. Cyprianus, now booted, had made the same mucky trail. There had been no other dirt when I first came in. None I had noticed in the other rooms either.
“Cyprianus, I take it you were bathing when you found him? No clothes? Bare feet?”
“Slip-ons. Why?”
“Look what a mess our feet are making now.”
He nodded. “The floor was clean. Sure of it.”
“So whoever it was, when they entered this caldarium, they too looked like an innocent bather or bathers. You didn’t see anyone?”
“No. I thought I was alone. That made it more of a shock when I walked in here.”
“No one went out past you as you first entered the baths?”
“No, Falco. Must have been long gone.”
Not so long gone as all that, probably. He may have just missed meeting the killer or killers face-to-face.
“The next question must be: Did they come here on purpose to kill? No question, in fact. Who goes into a bathhouse equipped with a length of twine and a bodkin?”
“Could a strigil have caused these wounds, Falco?”
“Too big. Snapped and splintered, maybe yes—but these entry wounds are very neat. Whatever made them was smooth, not broken. Like a poultry needle, or something medical.” I made a private note to discover if Alexas had an alibi.
Cyprianus crouched briefly and checked out one of the stab wounds. “Straight,” h
e confirmed. “In and out through the same channel. Not a curved implement.”
Looking around, I found strigils lying right on the water basin. There were three decorative bronze implements with fully right-angled curves, in various sizes. They were clearly made as a set, along with a globular oil flask and dipper, all of which could hang on a fancy ring. I sniffed the oil: rampantly expensive Indian nard.
“I’ve seen Pomponius scraping himself down with those,” Cyprianus said. The architect’s strigils had smooth rounded ends and were all undamaged. No bloodstains either.
We were both expiring with the heat. We left the corpse and sought fresh air.
XXXVI
HELENA HAD followed me to the bathhouse. Looking anxious, she was waiting in the entrance, accompanied by Nux and our bodyguard. I asked the Briton to go and tell the King what had happened, then to arrange quietly to close off the baths, leaving the corpse inside for the moment. That way nobody else would discover the dead man.
“It’s late; it’s dark; half the people from the site are off in town. Let’s keep this quiet until morning. Then I’ll call a site meeting and start an enquiry. I always like to examine witnesses before they hear what’s happened.” The Briton looked worried. “This is my job,” I said patiently. “Work I do for the Emperor.”
He gave me a look as if he felt perhaps I caused such tragedies by my very presence. He still seemed not to believe I had an official role, but toddled off to report to the King. Togidubnus would know the position. Vespasian would have told him I was to investigate the rash of “accidental” deaths. Little did we think that would include the project manager.
“What are we to do now?” Cyprianus groaned. He sat on one of the benches in the changing area. I dumped myself nearby; Nux jumped up on another bench and lay there with her big hairy paws together, taking an intelligent interest; Helena sat alongside me. With the cloak I had earlier discarded pulled tightly around her body, she was frowning. I told her the details rapidly, in a low voice.
I was tired. Shock had worsened how I felt. Nonetheless, I stared hard at the clerk of works. “Cyprianus, you were on the scene within a short time of the murder; your evidence is crucial. I shall have to ask you to go through it sometime. Let’s start now.”
Like most witnesses who sense they have become suspects and must explain themselves, he showed a flash of resentment. Like the intelligent ones, he then realized it was best to accept the situation and clear himself.
“I had a long day, Falco. Meetings, arguments with the men. I stayed on-site, pottering. I must have been the last one there.”
“That’s usual?”
“I like it. Especially when things are going wrong. You get time to think. You can make sure no bastards are hanging around, up to no good.”
“And were they?”
“Not once they saw me doing my rounds. Most of the types who enjoy plotting had scampered into town early.”
“Because of the Mandumerus exposure? Do you expect trouble?”
“Who knows? In the end, they want the work. That helps encourage them.”
I sat quiet, wearily.
Helena Justina adjusted her wrappings, turning one end of the cloak back over her left shoulder like a proper modest stole, and tightening the rest around her body so her long skirt flounced from under it, hiding legs that deserved display. “I heard about the quarrel this morning between Pomponius and Falco,” she said. “Wasn’t there another site meeting in the afternoon?”
Cyprianus looked askance, expecting my support against this feminine intrusion. When I, too, simply sat and waited for his answer, he forced out, “There was.”
“What happened?” I nudged him myself so he would get the idea that Helena and I worked in partnership.
“We all went over the same ground again. Magnus lost his temper exactly the way you had, Falco. I managed to hold on to mine, though I was close to dotting Pomponius more than once. Lupus did not want to take the Britons onto his complement, so our plan to reorganize the labor force was soon bogged down.”
“Why is Lupus opposed to it?” Helena asked.
Cyprianus shrugged. “Lupus likes to do everything his way.”
“So Lupus was angry; Magnus was angry; you were too,” Helena counted off. She spoke quietly and calmly. “Anybody else?”
“Rectus—the drains engineer—was sounding off. A new consignment of ceramic pipes has walked. They are very expensive,” the clerk of works explained, assuming Helena would have no concept of equipment pricing. He was not to know that far from having a steward to pay all her bills, she carried out that task for me. Helena checked invoices with a meticulous eye.
“What are these pipes?” I asked.
“We are using them in the garden watering system. The garden goes in last; Rectus was a fool to have called them up so early. Still, who else in Britain would have a use for them? I’ll have to check the site. The damn things just could have been unloaded in the wrong area, though Rectus says he’s looked. …”
Something bothered Cyprianus. He was worrying over this missing-pipes issue as if there was more to it than routine theft.
Helena was on to it: “Have you lost expensive materials prior to this?”
“Oh … it happens.” Cyprianus clammed up. “Falco knows the score.” There was at least one problem, with the marble cladding. Milchato had admitted it.
Falco was not taking back the baton yet, however. Falco liked seeing his darling investigate on his behalf.
“Was Rectus angry?” she asked next, seeming merely curious.
“Rectus is a flaming comet. He only knows how to curse and rage.”
“What else happened at the meeting?” Helena asked. “Was anyone else upset?”
“Strephon was agitating about that statue-seller you’re friendly with, Falco, the one who wants an interview. Pomponius hates salesmen. Strephon tried him again, but he still said no. Strephon can’t tell hawkers to march. Strephon is too nice. He hates unhappiness.”
“Would Sextius know yet that Pomponius won’t see him?” Helena was wondering if Sextius might have a grudge.
“Only if Strephon has been a big boy and passed the information on. But Strephon was sulking the last I saw.”
“What form did his sulk take?”
“Biting his nails and kicking the stool Plancus was sitting on.”
“Was Plancus irritated by that?” I put in, grinning.
“Plancus wouldn’t notice if his head fell off. Dim as a duck.”
“How did he get on a prestigious project such as this?” Helena asked.
Cyprianus eyed Helena nervously and refused to answer.
“It’s a good question. Tell us how!” I insisted.
The clerk of works looked at me scathingly. “Plancus was Pomponius’ boyfriend, Falco. I thought you realized.” The thought had never crossed my mind.
“So Plancus joined the project only because he was the chief architect’s favorite—but he’s untalented?”
“Coasting. World of his own.”
“Strephon? Is he a pretty boy too?”
“Doubt it. Strephon has a wife and child. As a designer, he shows potential. But with Pomponius ruling everything, it’s never been called upon.”
“What are the relations between Plancus and Strephon, then?”
“Not close!”
“And is Strephon jealous of the bond between Pomponius—his superior—and the boyfriend Plancus?”
“If he’s not, he ought to be.”
“It all sounds rather unhappy,” Helena said.
“Normal,” Cyprianus told her gloomily.
There was a thoughtful pause. Helena stretched her feet out, staring at her sandals. “Did anything else happen that we should know about?”
Cyprianus gave her a long look. He was a traditionalist, unused to women asking questions on professional subjects; that “we” of hers had raised his hackles. I knew Helena was aware of it. I shot him an inquisitive look myself,
and eventually he forced himself to shake his head to Helena’s question.
After a moment, he repeated his anxiety when we first sat down here: “What are we to do now?”
“About the body?” I queried.
“No, about the loss of our project manager, Falco! This is an enormous site. However is the job to continue?”
“As normal, surely?”
“Someone to steer. Pomponius was a Rome appointment. We’ll have to send off for a new man; they must identify someone who’s good, persuade him that a remote sojourn in Britain is just the torture he wants, then extract him from whatever he’s working on at present. … We’ve no hope they can find a good architect who is free at this moment. Even if they could, the poor sod has to get here. Then he must learn his way around someone else’s design plans. …” He trailed off in despair.
“Would you say,” I asked slowly, “Pomponius had been chosen for this project because he was good?”
Cyprianus considered the proposition, but his answer came swiftly. “He was good, Falco. He was very good if he was held in check. It was just power he couldn’t handle.”
“So who can?” I sneered.
Cyprianus and I both laughed. It was a man’s joke. Even so, Helena gave a little smile at some amusement of her own.
We heard noises; the King had sent people to lock up the baths as I suggested. I stood up stiffly. “It was late before; now it’s later. Two requests, Cyprianus: keep your mouth shut over this—don’t even relate the tale to your friend Magnus, please. And in the morning, can you fix me up another site meeting, with everyone who attended today?”
He said yes to both. I was past caring whether he obeyed the plea for secrecy. This had been a long day and tomorrow was bound to be longer. I wanted my bed.
I don’t know what arrangements Cyprianus made for his own security, but I made damn sure that my family’s suite was well locked up that night.
XXXVII
MY BAD tooth had reasserted itself when I arrived at the project meeting. I was late. I had had a rough night, due in part to the baby crying. But I absolved Favonia. I can never rest peacefully after an encounter with a corpse.
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