Yeah. Fair enough. ‘Uh … Does the name Quintus Baebius ring any bells with you, by any chance?’
‘I know the gentleman exists, certainly, but the master never mentioned him.’
‘What about Opilia Andromeda?’
Phrontis’s lips set in a tight line. ‘That lady, sir, I do know. Unfortunately. And of course the master mentioned her frequently.’
‘They were having an affair, right?’
‘Gentlemen of the master’s standing do not have affairs with ex-slaves, sir. There was a relationship, yes.’
I grinned, mentally: I’ve never yet met a major-domo who doesn’t have a higher regard for what’s done and not done than the guy who owns him. Social snobbery is built in with the bricks. ‘OK, pal,’ I said. ‘“Relationship” will do fine. They saw a lot of each other, certainly.’
‘Yes, sir. Or so I assume. She’s never set foot in this house, of course. The mistress would never have allowed it, and to be fair to him the master respected her wishes.’
‘The place where the body was found – the pine grove – that in the direction of anywhere in particular?’
‘No, sir. It’s well away from the road, on the edge of our property where it adjoins Quintus Roscius’s farm.’
‘So your master would’ve been going there specifically? To the grove, I mean?’
‘Yes. At least, that’s a logical assumption.’
‘Could there’ve been any particular reason for that? Under normal circumstances, that is.’
‘No, sir. None that I can think of.’
‘Did he know Roscius at all? Socially, I mean.’
Phrontis sniffed: pure Bathyllus. ‘The families don’t mix socially,’ he said. ‘He knew him as a neighbour, of course. But whether he did any more than speak to him in passing, I can’t say.’
‘So they’d no contact? Social or business? As far as you’re aware?’
‘No, sir. None.’
The answer had come out flat. Well, that was pretty final. Still …
‘OK, Phrontis,’ I said. ‘I might just—’
‘Hello, Corvinus. You wanted me?’
I turned. Clarus was coming in through the front door.
‘Oh, hi, pal,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t expecting you for another half hour, at least.’
‘I was visiting a patient this side of Castrimoenium. Nerva’s messenger caught me on the road. What’s going on? The man said Aulus Mettius has been found murdered.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I thought you might want to show off. Save me a bit of bother and just tell me who did it.’
He grinned. ‘I’ll do my best. But I don’t perform miracles, Corvinus, and sleuthing’s your department.’
‘Fair enough.’ I turned to Phrontis. ‘This is my son-in-law. Do you think we could see your master’s body now?’
‘Certainly, sir.’ The major-domo was frowning at Clarus: doctors tend to come pretty low in the social pecking order, and doctors visiting dead patients rank even lower. ‘If you’d like to follow me?’
They’d put him on the bed in his room, just as they’d brought him in, on a makeshift stretcher. The way he was lying, like with Caesius, there was no sign of the wound, and what I noticed most of all was the look of surprise on his face.
‘We’re waiting for the undertakers to come from town,’ Phrontis said quietly. ‘They shouldn’t be long. Would you like me to stay?’
‘No, that’s fine. We’ll come back out when we’ve finished. If you could arrange to have someone show us to where he was found?’
‘Yes, sir. I’ll do that.’
‘Oh, and maybe send someone over to the Roscius place, ask Quintus Roscius if he’d meet us there to give us the details. Nerva’s slave Tertius would do. He came over here with me.’
‘Yes, sir. Of course.’
He left.
‘OK, Clarus,’ I said, stepping back. ‘Do your stuff.’
I waited while he examined the body. Me, I’m OK with corpses, but like the last time I’d watched him do it I found his brisk detachment chilling. Finally, he pulled the bed well away from the wall, moved round into the space behind it, and put his hands beneath the corpse’s armpits.
‘Take a hold of his head for a second, will you, Corvinus?’ he said. ‘Don’t let it droop.’
‘What?’
‘I need to see the wound. Unless we roll him over – which I don’t want to do, because he’s beginning to stiffen – I have to pull him clear of the stretcher so I can get underneath. Do it quickly, please, in case anyone comes.’
I moved in and took Mettius’s head in both hands, supporting it, while Clarus heaved the body backwards.
‘That should do it,’ he said. ‘Don’t let go, right? Rigor’s setting in quite fast, and we might not be able to get it to go back the way it is now.’
Gods!
He took a metal stylus from his tunic pouch, knelt down and peered up at the wound, prodding it. Finally, he grunted with satisfaction.
‘OK, that’s enough,’ he said, straightening and moving back to the corpse’s feet. ‘Hang on for a bit longer while I pull him back on to the stretcher.’
He did. Then we moved the bed into its original position.
‘Well?’ I said.
‘He’s been dead three or four hours, but you knew that already, I suppose. Killed by a single blow to the back of the skull. From the shape of the wound, the weapon was about an inch and a half thick at its striking point. Possibly a club of some kind, but because the angle and the position suggest a lateral blow rather than a downward one, more probably a longish weighted stick. That’d account for the severity of the damage, too. The bones of the skull aren’t just broken at the point of impact; they’re completely shattered and driven into the base of the brain itself. My guess is a double-handed swipe with a lot of force behind it and plenty of leverage.’
‘So the murderer was probably a man?’
‘No, not necessarily. A strong woman in good health could’ve done it, easy. Given, as I say, a long, heavy stick and plenty of room to swing it.’
I sighed. ‘So we’ve narrowed it down to the murderer being either a man or a woman, right?’
‘More or less.’
‘Great. Score one for science. You’re not helping much here, pal.’
‘I warned you, Corvinus, I don’t do miracles. I can tell you at least that you’re not looking for a one-armed midget. Whoever hit him was as tall as he was, or not all that much shorter. Unless he was kneeling down when he got clouted, of course, in which case all bets are off.’
‘Very useful,’ I said sourly. ‘Thanks a bunch.’ The bottom line was that none of it ruled out any of the likely suspects – including Andromeda – barring maybe Brother Lucius, who probably couldn’t have mustered up the requisite strength. But then if Marilla’s theory was right – and it was the best one going, under the circumstances – he wouldn’t be doing his own dirty work in any case, would he?
Hell.
Mind you, the long, heavy stick side of things was interesting. Who did we know whose everyday job involved carrying a long, heavy stick and knowing how to use it offensively?
Right.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘If you’re finished then we’ll go and take a look at the scene of the crime.’
It wasn’t far, just out of sight of the villa complex where the cultivated land stopped and nature took over, a dip in the landscape made even more secluded by a close-packed grove of pine trees with thick, man-high bushes growing between them. The perfect place for a clandestine meeting.
A good place for a murder, too.
‘Where exactly was your master found, pal?’ I asked the slave who’d brought us.
He pointed to a patch of flattened grass just inside the clearing. ‘Just there, sir.’
Yeah. That fitted. The way things were arranged, the killer could’ve hidden behind the screen of foliage and scrub, waited for his victim to pass or turn his back, then come out and let him have it. Which is
what I reckoned had happened. It’d been raining, but not heavily, and there were still clear splashes of blood on the ground.
‘Which way’s the Roscius property?’ I said.
‘We’re on the edge of it, sir. The farmhouse is over there.’ The slave pointed again, to the right. ‘About two or three hundred yards.’
‘Uh-huh.’ I looked round. Clarus was poking about in the undergrowth. ‘You find anything?’
‘No. Nothing that could’ve been the murder weapon, anyway,’ he said.
‘See if you can …’ I began, then stopped. Quintus Roscius was coming through the trees from the direction of his farm. ‘Ah. Hi, Roscius. Thanks for coming over.’
‘No problem.’ I noticed he very carefully wasn’t looking at the spot where the body had been. ‘There isn’t much I can tell you, though.’
‘Just what you’ve got will be enough, pal,’ I said easily. ‘So what’s the story?’
He shrugged. ‘I was hunting. When the dog led me down here I thought she was following a scent. Mettius was lying face down, with the back of his head all bloody. I went down to the villa and raised the alarm. That’s all there is.’
‘You usually hunt in this part?’
‘Sure. Technically, this is my land, although that wouldn’t matter much because it’s useless ground and no one around here gets uptight about things like that. You get a few deer coming down into the fields, particularly in the winter when food’s scarce. I usually leave some vegetable scraps lying around to attract them and take a walk up this way when I’m out after the small stuff. Sometimes I get lucky.’
Yeah; now he came to mention it there was a pile of old cabbage leaves and a few rotting carrots at the edge of the clearing. Fair enough. ‘Did Mettius do any hunting?’ I said.
‘Nah. Never took any interest in it. He was a town boy, and the family’s well enough off not to have to bother about keeping their larder stocked personally. They get their bailiff to set a few snares and limed twigs, sure, but that’s about it.’
‘So why would he be up here?’
He shrugged again. ‘Search me. Why not? It’s a free country, and like I say no one bothers about boundaries.’
‘You didn’t see anyone else around?’
‘Not a soul. But then again, I wasn’t looking.’
‘You’d been out for long?’
‘Not very. An hour or so.’
‘Close by to here?’
He was frowning. ‘No. The other side of my property, as it happens. There wasn’t much doing over that way, so I thought I’d try in this direction. Like I say, there was always the chance of a deer. Corvinus, what is this?’
‘Just getting the facts straight, that’s all, pal,’ I said. ‘So you, uh, didn’t have much contact with Mettius? As a neighbour, I mean.’
‘We passed the time of day occasionally, sure. He was OK, friendly enough, not stuck up like a lot of the nobs around here, and the family’s old Bovillae, like mine is. But like I said, he was a townie, not a farmer. We didn’t have much in common.’
‘Fair enough.’ I looked round. Clarus was chatting to the slave, obviously intentionally keeping a low profile while I talked to Roscius. ‘You done, pal?’ I said to him.
‘Yes. Not a lot I can do for you here, Corvinus.’
‘We’ll get going, then. Clarus is my son-in-law,’ I explained to Roscius. ‘He’s the de facto doctor over in Castrimoenium.’ They nodded to each other. ‘Oh, by the way, how’s the business with the farm going? You get that loan problem sorted out?’
‘Yeah,’ he said guardedly. ‘Yeah, that’s all fine now. More or less.’
‘So you managed to square things with Lucius Caesius?’
‘He’s given me a year’s extension, and he’s happy to go beyond that if it’s necessary. I told you, old Lucius is all right, and he isn’t exactly pressed for cash himself now.’
‘I suppose it helps, him being a drinking crony of yours, doesn’t it?’
‘I wouldn’t exactly call him a drinking crony. We see each other around, that’s all.’
‘Like on the night of the murder? When you split a jug or two in the wine shop near the back of the brothel and left together an hour or so after sunset?’
Long silence; he was staring at me. ‘Who told you that?’ he said.
‘You mean it isn’t true?’
‘Sure it’s true, as it happens. So what?’
‘So why did you lie when I asked you where you were that night?’
‘Wouldn’t you? Come on, Corvinus! It didn’t matter. I know I didn’t kill the guy, and it’d only have complicated things.’
Yeah, well; the jury was still seriously out where that was concerned. Still, I let it go unremarked. ‘You go straight home?’ I said.
‘Of course I did! I’d work to do in the morning.’
‘So you didn’t happen to bump into Caesius at all on the way, then? You and good old Lucius?’
I thought he was going to hit me; certainly his fists balled, and his whole body tensed. Then, abruptly and without another word, he turned and walked away, back the way he’d come. At the edge of the trees, he turned again and levelled a finger.
‘You fuck off, Corvinus!’ he said. ‘You just keep the fuck out of my sight from now on! Is that clear?’
‘Yeah.’ I nodded. ‘Yeah, it’s clear. Thanks for your help, Roscius.’
Hmm.
EIGHTEEN
I let Clarus get on with his rounds, collected my horse from the villa and headed back into town for another word with Opilia Andromeda. Me, I don’t go for coincidences as a rule, and the lady turning up late for work and flustered a scant couple of hours after her lover had had his head bashed in, with every evidence that she’d been away from home, was too coincidental for comfort. Particularly since at that point Mettius’s death hadn’t been reported, so she couldn’t have known about it and it couldn’t have been a factor.
Unless, of course, one way or the other she did.
I’d been thinking things over on the ride into town, and my bet was that the business in the pine grove had been an arranged meeting that had gone wrong. As far as I could see, there were two possibilities that fitted the circumstances, the first being that the meeting was between Mettius and Andromeda, pure and simple. Possible though that scenario might be, circumstantially speaking, it didn’t make any sense: as Vatinia had said, Andromeda never came near the villa, and when the pair got together it was in the comfort of the lady’s flat. So why, if Mettius had wanted to meet his girlfriend or vice versa, should either of them faff around by changing the usual arrangement for something a lot less convenient and, given the weather conditions, a hell of a lot less comfortable? While if there’d been some skulduggery involved on Andromeda’s part – which was hard to credit in itself – surely that would unnecessarily invite her boyfriend’s suspicion.
The second possibility was a lot more likely. My guess was that the meeting had been by arrangement between the two of them on one side and the killer on the other. In which case we were left with the obvious questions of who and why. I could theorize, sure – Roscius, as being practically on the spot, Baebius, because of the missing statuette, and Manlius’s rod man regarding the weapon used were prime contenders, albeit for different reasons flawed ones – but the simplest way of getting answers was to ask Andromeda herself.
So to the brothel I went. The front door was open, and this time I didn’t stop to knock. I was heading along the corridor towards the lady’s sitting room when Carillus materialized and intercepted me.
‘Can I help you, sir?’ he said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not this time, pal. No problem, I was hoping to have another word with the boss, that’s all.’ I made as if to go past him, but he moved directly in front of me, blocking the way.
‘I’m sorry, but you can’t do that,’ he said firmly. ‘The mistress has gone out.’
Right; and I was Cleopatra’s grandmother. I pushed past him without another wo
rd, carried on down the corridor, and opened the sitting-room door.
The room was empty. I turned to find Carillus glaring at me.
‘There, sir,’ he said. ‘You see?’
Sure I did, for what it was worth: she’d probably nipped upstairs when she heard my voice and would now be lying low. Even so, I couldn’t bet on it, and in any case, however urgent the matter ostensibly was, forcing my way into her private flat would’ve been taking things too far.
Bugger. Well, we might as well play the game through to the end, if only for appearances’ sake.
‘You any idea where she’s gone?’ I said. ‘Or when she’ll be back?’
‘None whatsoever, sir.’ And you can take a running jump, Carillus’s tone said.
‘OK. Fine.’ I moved towards the exit. ‘When you see her again, just tell her I called to say that Aulus Mettius has been murdered, will you?’
‘What?’ He was staring at me. ‘When?’
‘Early this morning, near his villa.’ I kept on going. ‘No hassle, pal, and no doubt she’ll get the news from someone else in any case, if she hasn’t heard it already. I only thought she might be interested, that’s all.’
I left him gawping, shut the door behind me, and walked off in the direction of the market square.
What now? If we were to discount a talk with Andromeda, at least for the time being, it came down to the mechanics of checking alibis, particularly – because I knew about Roscius’s already, or rather his lack of one – Marcus Manlius’s rod man’s. Clarus hadn’t seen the wound that killed Caesius, sure, so I couldn’t be certain, but I’d bet a gallon of Alban to a busted sandal strap that the two of them would’ve matched. That didn’t automatically make Rod the killer, mind, but like I said where your ordinary everyday rod man’s concerned the weighted stick is the weapon of choice. I didn’t have any problem with likelihood, either: rod men are all bloody-minded thugs with a penchant for GBH as it is, or they wouldn’t be doing the job in the first place, while Rod – Decimus, that was his proper name, wasn’t it? – had already been involved criminally up to his neck in the wool store business. He’d simply be the muscle, sure, with Manlius being the one who gave the orders, but I reckoned in theory at least that that horse would run: Manlius already owed Mettius for blowing the whistle on him and his chum over the wool scam, while if they were behind Caesius’s murder, leaving a loose barrel like Mettius rolling around just wouldn’t be safe.
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