Ruso and the River of Darkness

by R. S. Downie

  Ruso told her they were busy and drew the apprentices out of earshot. The tall one looked disappointed. The short one looked relieved. It occurred to Ruso that any sensible boatman seeing these three handsome men arriving at his front door would lock up and hide under the bed.

  ‘Stay here on the corner and keep a lookout for your man in the hood.’

  The tall boy nodded. ‘We’ll get him for you, sir.’

  ‘I don’t want you to get him,’ explained Ruso. ‘Just watch where he goes. Stand well away from that girl, stay together, don’t wander off and don’t talk to anybody while I’m gone. Understood?’

  ‘Will you be all right without us, sir?’ The short one was evidently taking his duties seriously.

  ‘Make a note of the door I go into,’ said Ruso, who felt a more pertinent question was whether they would be all right without him. ‘If I’m in trouble, I’ll whistle for you.’

  The tall one looked delighted. The short one said, ‘Then what do we do, sir?’

  ‘I want both of you to run and fetch Valens,’ said Ruso, who could imagine what their parents would say if he got them involved in some sort of fracas. ‘And if you’re in trouble, both come and get me.’

  He made sure they were stationed up on the street corner before rapping on the door in the alley.

  Nothing happened. He knocked again. This time the voice of an old woman shouted something in British which he was fairly sure translated as: ‘Bloody kids! Clear off!’

  He explained who he was. The second reply was even shorter than the first: a summary of the woman’s views on men who worked for the tax office.

  The only reply from the second building was the yapping of a small dog. He was about to knock on the third when a scrawny man appeared from a door further along. His gait reminded Ruso of rolling waves and swaying ships.

  ‘You’re the Procurator’s man, right?’

  Ruso agreed.

  ‘You want to have a word with them clerks of yours, boss. I told ’em it was the one with the pot outside.’

  Ruso glanced past him and saw that a fat olive-oil amphora had been half buried outside a doorway to house a straggly bush. ‘Tetricus?’

  The man jerked his head towards the door. ‘Best get inside, boss, eh?’

  Ruso followed him into a drab room with a table, a couple of stools and a sagging curtain hiding what he assumed was a bed against the far wall. Most of this faded into darkness as the door crashed shut, a bar clunked into place and the room was lit only by the faint yellow square of a window covered with oiled cloth.

  ‘Can’t be too careful round here, boss,’ explained the boatman, striking a flint and eventually managing to light a smelly candle. ‘So, I’m getting it after all, eh?’

  ‘Getting what?’

  ‘You’re the one who was looking for him, right? Offering money for information leading to the finding of? Well I come back specially to hand in the information, like a good citizen, and a fat lot of thanks I get for it. It weren’t my fault he went and died later on.’

  Ruso frowned. ‘You’ve already talked to the office about this?’

  ‘This afternoon,’ explained the boatman. ‘Jupiter’s balls, didn’t they tell you anything? Useless buggers. You want to sack the lot of ’em. Specially that snotty one with the lisp.’

  The unlucky Tetricus must have arrived at the office to claim his reward while Firmus had been out observing the post-mortem. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you came back specially from somewhere today to report a sighting of Julius Asper –’

  ‘Yesterday, it was,’ explained the man. ‘I seen him yesterday morning, but I didn’t hear you was looking till today. Then I come downriver as quick as I could and I went straight to the Forum to hand in information leading to the finding of, and that bunch of tight-arses made out they didn’t know nothing about a reward. Then I go for a bite to eat and find out he’s gone and died, and you lot have been down the Blue Moon. You’re not giving them the money, are you?’

  ‘No,’ said Ruso. Avoiding the wavering light of the candle, he was trying to assess where the man might have hidden any stolen coin.

  ‘None of that moving the body business had nothing to do with me, right? All I did was find him on the river and give him a tow down to the wharf.’

  ‘Where did you find him?’

  ‘In the marshes on the north bank, about seven or eight miles up past the double-span bridge. Saw him at first light. Looked like a loose boat was drifted into the reeds. I went in after it, and there he was. He weren’t looking too well. Kept telling me to go away. I thought to start with he was just sleeping it off, like, then he started saying he’d got to get to Londinium to meet a friend. But he didn’t have no oars. Just a couple of planks. So I said, “You don’t want to go down there in that thing with the tide and the currents and just them planks. Daft bugger. You can’t get a proper hold on a plank, see? Not like you can with oars.” I gave him a tow down to the bridge, and he asked for a cheap place to stay. Somewhere nobody would bother him.’

  ‘So you told him to try the Blue Moon,’ said Ruso.

  ‘Well, it’s cheap,’ said the man defensively. ‘And nobody I know would stay there.’

  ‘They charged him two denarii for the night.’

  ‘Greedy bastard!’ muttered the man, confirming Ruso’s view of the innkeeper. ‘I never did know what she saw in him.’

  ‘Are you sure he was alone?’ asked Ruso. ‘There was another man missing as well.’

  ‘Him with half an ear? I’d have remembered.’

  ‘Did he say anything else? Any suggestion of why he was in the boat, or where he’d come from, or who the friend was?’

  ‘Like I said, he wasn’t looking too well. Said his head was hurting.’

  ‘He had a fractured skull.’

  ‘Really?’ The whites of the boatman’s eyes showed up in the dim light. ‘He didn’t say. He didn’t have nothing with him, either.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘’Cause you lot wouldn’t be bothering with him unless he had something worth taking.’

  ‘Some money was stolen,’ Ruso conceded.

  ‘Not by me it weren’t. Wait a minute: there’s still a bit of light. I’ll open the door. Then you can have a good look at everything a man has to show for twenty-four years in the Navy.’

  ‘The money I’m looking for should have been delivered to the tax office,’ said Ruso. ‘It’s marked. So if you know anything about it, you’d be wise to say so before we find it.’

  ‘Not a thing, boss,’ announced the man, scraping the bar up out of its socket. ‘Not a thing. Go on, take the candle and search if you don’t believe me.’

  Ruso, who did believe him, stepped forward to grope under the bed. He stifled the urge to apologize for the intrusion. Real investigators, he was certain, neither apologized nor explained.

  ‘You lot are all the same.’ The man dragged the door open, and Ruso caught sight of the tall apprentice ducking back out of sight outside.

  ‘You want to know if I’m honest?’ demanded the boatman. ‘I could’ve sold that boat, but I didn’t. I went and put word out that I found it. You know why? I don’t want some poor sod out of work just ’cause Headache Man helped himself to it.’

  ‘You don’t think it was Asper’s boat?’

  ‘Course it wasn’t. He’d have had the oars, wouldn’t he?’

  Ruso held the candle up. Long shadows from the rafters shifted around sooty cobwebs dangling from the thatch. He walked back and forth across the floor, kicking the rushes aside. There was no sign of disturbance in the packed mud beneath. Then he crouched in the doorway and prodded the soil in and around the pot that held the straggly bush. ‘There’s nothing here,’ he agreed.

  The boatman cleared his throat. ‘Have I done enough for the reward, then?’

  ‘Any idea where he might have got the boat?’

  The man’s eyes narrowed. ‘I’m giving you a lot of help here, boss. I only picked him u
p to do him a favour. I never got paid for it, and now it’s causing me all this bother.’

  Ruso reached for his purse, and the man shut the door again. The candlelit smile revealed a set of black teeth. They disappeared when he realized the large volume of coins he was being given only added up to three denarii.

  ‘I was told forty.’

  ‘Never believe rumours,’ said Ruso, who had not mentioned a figure. The light glinted on the edges of two silver coins as he placed them on the table. ‘My employer would very much like to know where the boat came from.’

  The man sucked in air through the black teeth. ‘You wouldn’t believe how many miles of river join up to here. There’s whole towns. That’s before you count all the farms with land fronting on to the water.’

  Ruso placed his forefinger on one of the denarii and slid it back towards his purse. It was less than an inch from the edge of the table when Tetricus said, ‘I did hear a rumour.’

  The coin came to a halt.

  ‘It might be nothing. People are always losing boats. And it don’t make much sense. I wouldn’t waste your time with it, only I heard he come from Verulamium, and so does the rumour.’

  ‘Just tell me,’ said Ruso, to whom little of this Asper business was making sense at the moment.

  ‘Farmer by the name of Lund, lives a couple of miles downstream from the town. Going round telling people that a river-monster stole his boat.’

  ‘Could Asper have travelled by boat from there to where you found him?’

  Tetricus shrugged. ‘I said it didn’t make sense. He’d have been a lot quicker by road.’

  ‘But it could be done?’

  The man frowned, considered it, and agreed that the craft was light enough for the trip to be possible. Ruso slid the money across the table towards him. Tetricus gathered it up and got to his feet. ‘That’s it, then, is it?’

  ‘That’s it,’ Ruso agreed.

  Tetricus grinned. ‘Glad to be of service, boss.’

  Back in the street, the two apprentices were standing where Ruso had left them as if they had never moved. The impression of innocence was spoiled by a female giggle from a doorway and a call of ‘Another time, eh, lads?’

  It was difficult to tell in the poor light, but Ruso was fairly sure the short apprentice was blushing. ‘Wipe that silly grin off your face!’ he snapped at the tall one, and was alarmed to find himself again sounding like his father.

  17

  When Ruso finally returned the apprentices to the safety of Valens’ house, he could hear the ominous strains of Tilla singing the sort of song she sang to relieve the boredom of cooking.

  He found her disembowelling a plucked fowl by lamplight while the baby lay in a wicker crib in the shadows under the kitchen table. A cauldron was bubbling over the coals, and the mixture of steam and chopped onion assaulted his eyes and his lungs. No wonder the kitchen-boy had taken himself off to tidy up the dead flowers and sweep the hall.

  ‘Your medicine worked,’ said Tilla, wiping the back of her hand across her forehead in a vain attempt to push a damp curl out of her eyes. ‘Camma went to sleep.’

  He reached across the table and tucked the hair out of the way. ‘It’s late to be starting dinner. We could get something brought in.’

  ‘I will boil it very fast,’ she promised. ‘So. Have you found out what you wanted to know?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ He explained about the boatman.

  The bird’s leg-joint made a sucking noise as Tilla disarticulated it. She sliced it away with a couple of deft strokes. ‘Camma does not know why he was on the river,’ she said, holding the leg between finger and thumb to examine both sides before dropping it into a bowl. ‘How near is it to the road?’

  ‘Miles away. Apparently they diverge just out of Verulamium.’

  Tilla pondered this as the second leg hit the side of the bowl and slithered down to join its mate.

  ‘Did you ask about the letter?’

  ‘She does not know, but two weeks ago she took some of his letters to the stables for the southbound carriage to pick up, and she thinks one of them had the number of that room written on the outside.’

  The southbound carriage would have been heading here. ‘She can’t remember any more of the address?’

  ‘Numbers are easy. Words are hard to read.’ Tilla, who could not read herself, sliced something away from the bird’s tail end and tossed it into the waste bucket in the corner.

  It occurred to Ruso that his wife seemed to have a particular talent for anything involving a knife. She would probably have made a far better surgeon than she had a cook.

  ‘It wasn’t a planned escape,’ he mused. ‘If it had been, he wouldn’t have needed to steal the boat. It’s looking more and more as if they both took the money, and then the brother murdered him for it.’

  Tilla sniffed, either from disdain or from onion: it was hard to tell. ‘She says Caratius is lying.’

  ‘We’ve been round this already. They looked to me like old enemies.’

  ‘She says he must be lying because Asper was not on the way to Londinium, he was only going to visit a neighbour just outside town. And the neighbour was Caratius.’

  ‘What? Why didn’t she say so?’ Why had the Magistrate himself not mentioned it? He considered the problem while Tilla hacked the torso of the bird into quarters. He was going to have to question the man again. ‘Maybe Asper lied to her about where he was going.’

  ‘Or else Camma is right, and that Magistrate is not telling the truth.’ The cauldron hissed and spat as she upended the contents of the bowl into it. ‘What is funny?’

  ‘Last night you were convinced Asper was the villain because he was a tax man.’

  ‘But now I have seen the Magistrate, and I do not trust him either.’

  ‘You hardly met him.’

  ‘I have met men like him before.’

  ‘That’s more or less what he said about Asper.’ No wonder Albanus was reduced to dinning letters and numbers into small boys: the art of logic did not seem much prized amongst the Britons. Ruso leaned back against the wall, folded his arms and watched as she wiped the table clean and wrung out the cloth.

  She said, ‘You can tell Valens that dinner will not be long.’

  Her words reminded him of another mystery. ‘Has he said anything about Serena coming back?’

  ‘If you really want to know, why do you not ask yourself?’

  ‘You know what Valens is like.’

  ‘Hm. I expect Serena has found out what he is like, too.’

  Fond as he was of Valens, he had to admit that she had a point.

  ‘I think we should listen to Camma,’ Tilla continued. ‘She is not a fool. When we get to Verulamium I will try and find out the truth.’

  ‘I’d rather you concentrated on looking after your patients,’ he said, alarmed by the prospect of Tilla arriving in a strange town and confronting the Chief Magistrate. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can, but get the driver to take you right to the door and be careful who you talk to. If Camma’s neighbours think her husband’s stolen their money, I don’t think you’ll be getting a warm welcome.’

  Tilla raised her chin. ‘The Catuvellauni have always been a tribe that likes to rule over others,’ she said. ‘A warm welcome in their home town is not something to be proud of.’

  ‘Stay out of trouble, Tilla.’

  ‘I am not going there to make trouble,’ she said. ‘I am going there to – oh!’

  The Iceni woman was standing in the doorway. Even in a creased mud-coloured tunic that was too short, one hand rubbing sleep out of her eyes and her hair wilder than usual, she was beautiful. She said, ‘There is something you must know before we go to Verulamium.’

  Tilla pointed to the chair by the fire. ‘Come and sit while I cook.’

  Camma did not move. ‘When I tell you, you may not want to come with me.’ She paused, as if she was hoping Tilla might promise to come no matter what she said. When the silence gre
w awkward, Ruso offered to leave.

  ‘No, you must know this too. I am to blame for what has happened.’

  Tilla looked up from stirring the pot and assured her that nothing was her fault.

  Camma took no notice. ‘It was my husband,’ she said. ‘My husband put a curse on him.’

  Ruso had very little faith in that sort of irrational nonsense himself, but for people who believed in its power, a curse could stir up an untold amount of trouble. ‘Your husband put a curse on Caratius?’ he said. ‘What for?’

  ‘No!’ She was sounding impatient. ‘My husband was the one doing the cursing. He cursed Julius Asper.’

  For a few seconds it made no sense. Then Tilla said, ‘So Asper was not –’

  ‘Julius Asper is the father of my baby,’ explained Camma. ‘My husband …’ She stopped to clear her throat. ‘My husband is Chief Magistrate Caratius.’

  18

  Ruso was still considering the implications of Camma’s confession as he stretched his legs out across the floorboards and leaned back against the rough wall of Valens’ store-room. At least he would not be bored during the long hours of the night. Watching over the remains of the man who was not Camma’s husband after all, he was going to have to go back over his conversations with Caratius. The ground had shifted beneath his feet. He understood now why she had said the baby was ‘the cause of all this’. He understood, too, why the Magistrate had insisted that Asper was a crook and Camma a liar. Camma, in one simple sentence, had transformed Caratius from outraged victim to chief suspect.

  She had also shaken Ruso’s confidence. What sort of an investigator did he think he was? How the hell had he failed to see it when the two of them had confronted each other in Valens’ dining room? Come to that, why had neither of them admitted it? He supposed neither had thought their complaint would be taken seriously if they told the truth.

  It was possible – understandable, in fact – that the Magistrate would want revenge. But a man planning to do away with his wife’s lover would surely keep the matter within his own family, or at least his own tribe. Why involve a large sum of public money and attract the attention of the Procurator’s office? As for Camma’s claim that Asper had not been on the way to deliver the tax at all, but had disappeared after announcing a visit to Caratius, he would follow it up, but that would make the Magistrate a fool as well as a murderer. Caratius did not seem like a fool. Still, it was obvious that he was glad to see the back of Julius Asper.