“Blood,” I decided. It certainly was not cartography ink.
Magnus was watching me. He was intelligent, forthright and highly respected on this site. He also hated Pomponius, and had probably clashed with him as many times as anyone except Cyprianus -who seemed a close ally to Magnus. I thought two people had combined to murder the project manager. Those two, perhaps.
I spoke quietly. We were both subdued. “You’ve worked it out, Magnus. Your five-four-three was unravelled from around the dead architect’s neck. That and your set of compasses are the murder weapons. If Pomponius had been impaled on the bath-house floor with yourrowd, you couldn’t be in more trouble.”
Magnus said nothing.
“Did you kill him, Magnus?”
“No!”
“Short and sharp.”
“I did not kill him.”
“You’re too shrewd?”
“There were other ways to get rid of him from the project. You were here to do that, Falco.”
“But I’m working with the system, Magnus. How long would it have taken me? Incompetence is a persistent weed.”
Magnus sat quietly. He had chosen an X-shaped stool, one that must once have folded, though I knew it had seized up. Grey-haired and controlled, he had a still core that would not be easily broken into. His grim expression and tone of voice almost suggested it was him testing me, not the other way round.
I put my palms on the edge of the table and pushed back, as if distancing myself from the whole situation. “You don’t say much, for a prime suspect.”
“You do enough talking!”
“I shall act too, Magnus, if I have to. You always knew that.”
“I thought you capable,” Magnus agreed. “You had assessed the situation. You would have tackled Pomponius and not necessarily by removing him. You have the ear of high authority, Falco; you even summon up a kind of tact sometimes. You could have imposed workable controls, when you were ready.”
I gazed at him. This speech of his was a compliment, yet sounded like a condemnation.
“Well, that’s what I thought until this morning, when you came up with the damned idea of bringing Marcellmus back on site Magnus added. He now spoke with pent-up fury.
“He’s the King’s darling,” I replied curtly. Magnus had just told me why the project plotters were against me. They had loathed Pomponius, sure enough-but they did not want him replaced by another disaster. A worse one, maybe. “This morning we had Verovolcus listening in, Magnus. The King, his master, is the client. But don’t suppose the client will be allowed to impose a no-hoper on this scheme. If I have to thwart him, believe me I’ll do it but I’ll do it with sensitivity if possible. If you don’t know my views on Marcellinus, Magnus, that’s because you never asked.”
We glared at one another in silence.
“So if I believed you could handle Pomponius,” Magnus muttered at last, ‘why would / take the personal risk of killing him?”
I let the Marcellinus issue go, though clearly it needed sorting, and fast.
The surveyor was right. I could just about believe a scenario where he came upon Pomponius at the wrong moment and then snapped suddenly but premeditated killing, when there were other solutions, contradicted this man’s natural restraint. Still, self-control would not impress a court as evidence, whereas the murder weapons his possessions-could.
“Risk is not your style,” I agreed. “You’re too fastidious. But you don’t tolerate bungling either. You are vocal and you’re active. You are a suspect for this murder precisely because you don’t stand back.”
“What does that mean?”
“You have strict standards, Magnus. That could make you lose your temper. Yesterday we had all endured a long, irritating day. Suppose you went to bathe, very late, to relax and forget the Mandumerus fiasco. Just when you were calming down, you came to the last hot caldarium. That fool Pomponius was there. You flared up. Pomponius ended up dead on the floor.”
“I do not take my five-four-three string inside the baths, Falco.”
“Somebody did,” I answered him.
“I use a strigil, not a damn set of compasses.”
“What’s your tool for excavating eyeballs?”
Magnus breathed hard and did not reply.
“Did you see Cyprianus yesterday evening?” I demanded.
“No.” Magnus looked at me sharply. “Does he say I did?”
I gave no answer. “There are some half-baked workmen at the baths this morning. Are you part of that?”
“No. I gave Togidubnus an estimate, way back. Anything after that is his affair.”
“Is much work needed?”
“Needed-none at all,” Magnus opined acidly. “Possible as much as a rich client, urged on by a shameless contractor, wants to waste his money on.”
“So you say you are not connected with the wastrels on site today?”
“No.”
“Let’s get to the main point. Did you go to the bath house last night, Magnus?”
Magnus held back his answer. I waited stubbornly. He continued to maintain his silence, trying to force me to break in, to take back the initiative. He was desperate to know whether I had any firm information.
After an age, he decided what to say. “I did not go to the baths.”
Overcome by the tension, the clerk, Gaius, let out a gasp. Magnus kept his eyes on me.
“You’re lying, Magnus.” My arm gave a wild sweep. I dashed the satchel of instruments right off the table. I then yelled out at full pitch, “Oh shit in Hades, Magnus! Just tell me the truth, will you?”
“Steady, Falco!” Gaius squeaked in great alarm. He spoke for the first time since we came in. His eyes flickered, blinking too rapidly.
I really let my temper rip. “He was at the baths!” I roared at the clerk. “I have a witness who says so, Gaius!” I would not look at Magnus. “If you want to know why I’m raving about it, I thought he was a man of superior quality. I thought I could trust him-I did not want the killer to be him!”
Magnus gave me a long hard stare. Then he simply stood up and said he was going back to work. I let him go. I could not arrest him but I did not apologise for implying he was the murderer.
XLII
As soon as the surveyor left, I dropped the charade. I sat quiet. Too quiet, anyone who knew me would have said. The clerk had worked with me, though not long enough or closely enough. Even so, apprehension pinned him to his stool.
“That tooth of yours still playing up, Falco?” he asked in a nervous voice. It could be a joke, real sympathy, or a frightened mixture of both.
Too busy to deal with it, I had forgotten my aching tooth until that moment. Informers don’t collapse at mere agonising pain. We are always too busy, too desperate to finish the case.
“Where were you last night, Gaius?” It sounded like a neutral question.
“What?”
“Place yourself for me.” He had attended my project meeting this morning. He had filed a witness statement but I had had no time yet to look at it.
T… went into Novio.”
I scrutinised the bastard with a thin half smile.
“You went into Novio?” Repeating it, I sounded like a careworn lawyer dragging out his weakest rhetorical manoeuvre. I was hoping that the witness would cave in out of sheer anxiety. In life they never do.
“Novio, Falco.”
“What was that for?”
“A night out. Just a night in town.” I still gazed at him. “Stupenda was dancing,” Gaius maintained. A nice touch. Detail always makes a falsehood sound more reliable.
“Any good?”
“She was brilliant.”
I stood up. “Get on with your work.”
Ts something wrong, Falco?”
“Nothing that I don’t expect every day.” I let him see my lip curl.
I had liked Gains. He had made a good show of harbouring the right attitude. But it had been an act. “In my job,” I elaborated grimly,
“I run into lies, fraud, conspiracy and filth. I expect it, Gaius. I encounter mad people who kill their mothers for asking them to wipe their feet on the doormat. I deal with lowlife muggers who steal half a denarius from blind army veterans in order to buy a drink from a thirteen-year old barmaid whom they subsequently rape…”
The clerk was now looking as puzzled as he was petrified.
“Get on with your work,” I repeated. “Let me know when you decide to revise your story. In the meantime, don’t distress yourself about my feelings. Your contribution to this enquiry, Gaius, is just a routine pile of mule shit though I can say that being betrayed by my own office backer-up hits a new low for me.”
I left him, striding out as if I had to go and hold a bridge against a wild horde of barbarians.
He did not know that I had been in Novio myself last night, also hoping to see Stupenda. Which of course I had not done because last night in Noviomagus Regnensis, the woman called Stupenda did not dance.
XLIII
pounds A vf” aybe this clerk got his nights mixed up,” Aelianus suggested. 1VJ-Whatever draught the medical orderly supplied had perked him up enough to take an interest.
I disagreed. “Be practical. You don’t confuse yourself over yesterday, especially when being in the wrong place could make you the killer.”
“Might he have been a bit fuddled? Does Gaius drink a lot?”
“Doubt it. I’ve seen him pour away half a cup of mulsu m just because a fly looked in the cup.”
We were in my suite, the invalid sprawled on a padded couch. Aelianus had created a crude sketch of the new palace on which to mark witness positions in red ink, together with a box (headed by a lopsided graffiti wine cup where he listed those who claimed they went to town last night.
“They are all involved,” I raved. “So tell me your results, Aulus. Can we prove anything?”
“Not yet. Some seedy character called Falco has failed to report in.”
“Novio,” I muttered. “Vouched for by your dear brother, plus a retainer of the King’s. Come to that, you know perfectly well I refused dinner and trotted off on a pony… Is there any of your medicine left?” My tooth was on fire.
“No, Larius swigged it.” Larius was now flaked out in a wicker chair that Helena normally used, white in the gills and semiconscious. “Exhausted by his wild life,” Aelianus opined piously. “Or poisoned off.”
My elder daughter Julia was using her little wheeled cart to play chariots around Larius, with him as a circus spina. The baby slept, for once, in her two-handled travelling basket. There were faint indications that Favonia’s loincloth needed changing, but I was managing not to notice. Fathers learn to live with guilt.
“So what do we have, Aulus?”
“These tablets are a joke. Believe them, and the site was deserted
and nobody could have done it. It’s amazing the corpse was ever discovered. Most of the project team claim they were in town.”
“Gaius?”
“Yes, he says he was in town.”
“With any of the others?”
“Not specific. He’s put down Magnus as a witness.”
“What did Magnus write?”
“In Novio too. Gaius is supposed to vouch for him.”
That’s wrong. Magnus just told me he was in his quarters.”
“Must have forgotten his official excuse under the stress of your questioning!”
“Don’t be rude,” I rebuked him mildly. “So, was anybody left here?”
“The two junior architects, vouching for each other.”
“Strephon and Plancus heart-searching, swigging and snoring. I am inclined to believe them. It’s too touching to be a bluff.”
“Also the clerk of works.”
“Cyprianus, mooching round the site on his own, hoping to forestall trouble then heading for the baths and an unpleasant discovery. I think I trust him. He has family on site; if he was building a false alibi, he would make them say he was at home.”
Aelianus dipped his pen and marked a blob at the baths for Cyprianus. “Isn’t the person who claims to find a corpse sometimes the obvious suspect?”
“Rightly so, half the time.” I considered the man’s demeanour when he came to find me. “Cyprianus was in shock when he rushed here with the news. He seemed genuine. He was sickened by the gouged eye. It looked like genuine surprise.”
“Still, it could be a ruse,” Aelianus replied. He had second thoughts: “But if he had been the killer, would he have run out naked?”
“I see why you ask.” Inactivity was doing Aelianus good. A bandage on his leg seemed to improve his brain. He surprised me with his logic, in fact. “The killer stayed calm. He cleaned and replaced one of the weapons in Magnus’ satchel…”
We both paused.
“He took it out; he put it back. Curious,” I said.
Aelianus mimed the actions. “The instrument satchel must have stayed on the clothes peg throughout the killing…”
‘… So where was Magnus?”
He could be the killer. Then there were two possibilities that left him innocent. “Either he was in the tepidarium taking a slow cold plunge and oiling up-or he was fooling about with Gaius.”
“Likely?”
“Neither seems the type.”
“How can you tell?” asked Aelianus. “I’ve known people who poked anything handy, whatever the sex.” It was Roman tradition, especially in high places. But it raised interesting questions about some of his own friends.
Reluctantly, I tackled the other possibility: “Why ever Magnus went to the baths, he could still have been one of the killers.” I screwed up my face, still resisting the thought. “I caught him out when I showed him the string this morning. He owned up to it openly. But if he had knoum it was used to strangle Pomponius, he would at least have played down his ownership.”
“Let’s face it, Falco Magnus would have known better than to leave something that could be identified as his property on the body.”
“Too disgusted to remove it?” I argued.
“No, no!” Aelianus had really entered into the spirit and his response was fierce. “If you hate someone enough to strangle them, and to gouge their eye out, you can remove the evidence.”
“Agreed.” I reflected. “It’s interesting that whoever did it thought that the compasses should be replaced-but apparently they thought the string was just anonymous twine. Were they trying to implicate Magnus, or had they just never seen-or never noticed a five-four three being used to make a right angle? That means it was not a surveyor, and most likely not the clerk of works.”
Aelianus shrugged. This was my theory. He would not argue, but he would not become excited by it either.
“If there was more than one man involved,” I suggested, ‘it could reflect different personalities. One removed the compasses, the other simply did not bother about the twine.”
“Neat and Slapdash?”
“Even if they were Neat and Tidy the killer, or killers, could have been interrupted. Maia arrived at the baths,” I pointed out. My sister was tough, but I tried not to dwell on her near encounter with the killers. “Cyprianus too, if we accept he was an innocent participant.”
“It just won’t work,” Aelianus rebuked me, typically frank. “Maia Favonia never ventured further than the changing room. And we can discount even Cyprianus. You know bath houses have dead acoustics. Nobody in the final caldarium would have heard anyone outside until that person was on top of them. Then it was too late to escape.”
“So,” I began, pursuing a new line, ‘do we reckon the killer or killers went to the baths on purpose, did their deed and quickly tied?”
“It they went there especially, Falco, how could they be certain that Pomponius was all alone and that nobody would interrupt?”
“They kept the baths under observation until it was safe to strike.”
“It’s rather horrible,” mouthed Aelianus. “Pomponius is inside lazing with his stngi
l set…” He tailed off for a moment. “Well, that’s clear premeditation anyway.”
“No doubt a good barrister, untroubled by conscience, would argue them out of that…” I thought little of lawyers.
“But Falco! He was cornered like vermin. Once you get in the bowels of a bath house, you’re trapped.”
“Don’t dwell on it, Aulus. Or next time you’re slaking off the grime with your lavender oil, you might get jumpy.”
Aelianus whistled through his teeth.
After a moment he perked up and decided, “So we think it’s a conspiracy by the entire project team.”
He and I had been so absorbed we had forgotten our companions. At that, there was an upheaval from the wicker chair. Larius bestirred himself, wriggled himself upright and let out an extraordinary belch. Aelianus and I looked pained. Julia Junilla sat down on a rug with her fat legs in front of her and tried to copy the disgusting noise.
“Myths!” exclaimed Larius. “You two mad buggers are indulging fantasies. Why say it’s the damned project team?”
I raised an eyebrow. “You’re defending them?”
“They are a bunch of wet-arsed, boneless sea anemones,” Larius growled. “Jelly throughout. Not one of them could fight his way out of a cushion-case. The whole team together couldn’t work out a plan to open a latrine door even if they all had the squits.”
“You give us a fine assessment of these noble men,” Aelianus congratulated him sarcastically.
“Let’s have your assessment then, Larius.”
“Uncle Marcus, the place is swarming with angry parties who all hated Pomponius for much better reasons than any of your suspects. The worse the project team had against him was that he was overbearing and horrible.”
“I concede that if being unpleasant were enough to get a man slain at the baths, Rome would be an empty city.”
“Try these,” Larius listed. “The rnarblers. Who needs bloody marble veneers anyway?” he complained professionally. “I can paint better veining, without any expensive breakages… They had some ruse, which has been stopped.”
Lindsey Davis - Falco 13 - A Body In The Bath House Page 25