Illegally Dead (Marcus Corvinus Book 12)

by David Wishart

  ‘Just a change of scenery, pal,’ I said easily: I wasn’t going to compromise my stranger-off-the-street pose unless it was really necessary, and if he hadn’t seen hide nor hair of his sister or brother for two years then it wasn’t likely I’d get anything useful. Half-brother, I corrected myself. Now that had been interesting. ‘Castrimoenium’s okay, but there isn’t enough concrete around up there for my liking.’

  ‘Not thinking of buying any property in the area, then?’

  ‘Uh-uh.’ I took a mouthful of wine and made inroads on the bread, cheese and pickles. ‘Too many Romans. Besides, like I said, I’ve got a rooted aversion to lawyers.’ I glanced sideways at the old man. ‘No disrespect to your late son-in-law intended. My experience’s mostly been with the big city variety, and your Bovillan guys are probably a different thing altogether.’

  Veturinus Junior chuckled. ‘Don’t you believe it, sir! They’re the same all over.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Take our local man for example, Novius his name is, been in practice here for, oh, forty-odd years and more. Now he –’ The door opened and half a dozen workmen with seriously bloodstained tunics trooped in. ‘’Scuse me, sir, the hard drinkers from the slaughterhouse’ve arrived. Hullo, lads, that’s you for the morning, is it? The usual? Dad, give me a hand, will you?’

  I went back to my sausage, cheese and pickles while the bar stools filled up around me with a gaggle of Bovillae’s thirstiest, smelliest and rowdiest and the two Veturini busied themselves with filling jugs, slicing bread and swapping insults. Well, I couldn’t fault the slaughterhouse lads’ timing. Perfect; bloody perfect. No pun intended.

  Bugger!

  There was no chance to resume the chat, either, because the door didn’t stop swinging for two minutes together until I’d cleaned my plate and emptied the half jug, and by that time the place was filled to the walls. I’d obviously hit the happy hour. Ah, well, it hadn’t been time wasted, far from it. And it was always good to find a decent wineshop, barring the rather malodorous clientele. Still, the afternoon was getting on, I had to walk back to the town square, and after I’d checked with Alexis I had a fair ride to Castrimoenium. I stopped at a pastry-seller’s on the way to buy him a peace offering - Alexis is no wine drinker, but he’ll kill for a nut-and-honey pastry sprinkled with poppy seeds - and carried on to the public records office.

  He was waiting for me outside, and totally transformed from the snarling grouch I’d got earlier. The guy might still look like he’d been dragged through an unused hypocaust backwards, but he was grinning all over his face and brandishing a set of cobwebby tablets like they were the missing Sibylline Books.

  ‘I’ve found it, sir!’ he said. ‘Just ten minutes since! At least I think I have. Twentieth of May, Tiberius Three, consulship of Statilius Taurus and Scribonius Libo. That’s almost exactly, uh’ - he did a quick calculation - ‘twenty-one years ago.’

  ‘Brilliant!’

  ‘I can’t give you any details - I only looked at the beginning, for the names of the accused and the lawyers, and the end for the verdict and sentence - but they seem to fit. You want them now?’

  ‘Yeah. Yes, please.’

  ‘Accused were two brothers, Brabbius Lupus and Brabbius Senecio. Some sort of burglary and murder. The defence was Lucius Hostilius and Quintus Acceius, and –’

  ‘Hang on, pal,’ I said. ‘The defence?’

  ‘Yes, sir, that’s right. Still, I thought you might want it in any case. It’s all I’ve come up with.’

  ‘Fine, fine. No problem, Alexis. Who were the prosecutors?’

  ‘Just one, sir. Publius Novius.’

  ‘Shit!’ It had to be this one, it just had to be, whatever the explanation! ‘Sorry, pal. Don’t mind me, carry on.’

  ‘There’s just that, sir, and the verdict. The men were found guilty. Lupus was executed and Senecio was sent to the galleys for twenty years.’

  Bull’s-eye! ‘Alexis, you are a fucking genius! Have a pastry.’ I handed it over, and he gave me the tablets. ‘Can I hang on to these?’

  ‘For the time being, sir. Latro - that’s the clerk - says there’s no problem. Just be sure to bring them back when you’ve finished.’

  ‘Great. How’s your time in Bovillae been, incidentally? Apart from the spiders?’

  ‘Not bad. I’ve been staying just round the corner, in the household of Agilleius Mundus.’ Yeah, I remembered Mundus: Libanius’s opposite number in Bovillae. ‘Only they put me in with the coachman, and he snores. I’ll be glad to get back.’ He hesitated. ‘Oh, by the way. I had a long chat with Latro yesterday when the...when I felt I needed a break. We got quite friendly.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘It’s just that...well, I admit I deliberately steered the conversation round to Quintus Acceius, sir. Latro’s been working here long enough to remember Acceius before he moved to Castrimoenium, and although he didn’t say so in so many words I got the feeling that the gentleman wasn’t quite as...punctilious then as he is today. Or seems to be.’

  ‘That so, now?’ Of course, Bucca had said the same thing; but Bucca had an axe to grind, and besides he was just passing on what could’ve been a snide bit of backstabbing from Acceius’s professional rival. Latro, being a disinterested party, was another matter altogether. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I thought so. Worth going more deeply into, certainly.’ He finished his pastry and licked his fingers. ‘Now, if there’s nothing else you want me to do here I’ll get over to Mundus’s and pick up my bag and the mule.’

  ‘What?’ I’d been wool-gathering. ‘Oh. I’m sorry, Alexis. Right, thanks, pal, you’ve been a great help. I’ll stay on for a bit, read over this trial record and take it straight back to your friend Latro.’ I put my hand in my belt-pouch and found a gold piece. ‘There’s no hurry for you. Buy yourself a new tunic, have a bath, see the town and pig out on pastries. Or whatever.’

  He grinned. ‘Yes, sir. Thank you. I’ll do that.’

  I gave him a farewell wave and moved off in the direction of the wineshop I’d spotted earlier. A smart cookie, Alexis, very smart: not many garden-slaves know the word “punctilious” to start with, a hell of a lot fewer would go to the bother of finding out that a man their master was interested in didn’t use to be it, and only one in a thousand of them would add that “or seems to be”.

  So when he practised in Bovillae Acceius wasn’t as punctilious as he was today, right? Or seemed to be, rather.

  Hmm.

  The wineshop wasn’t busy, despite its prime location, and when I’d tasted the wine I could see why. Still, all I really wanted was somewhere quiet to sit down for half an hour and see what we’d got here. I carried my cup outside onto the terrace, settled down at a corner table, opened the tablets and began to read.

  It was fairly sordid, run-of-the-mill stuff: the two brothers, Lupus and Senecio, described as ‘dyers from Bovillae’, had broken into and started robbing a silversmith’s shop near the precinct of Mercury. Unfortunately for them, the owner - a guy called Titus Vectillius - who lived at the back of the premises heard them furkling about and came through with the poker. There was a scuffle, Vectillius was knifed and the two of them fled, straight into the arms of a group of zealous but inebriated citizens further up the street who pinned them down and fetched the Night Watch. Lupus and Senecio claimed that they’d just been passing when the real villains burst out of the shop doorway and legged it in the other direction; that Lupus had found the silver bracelet he was clutching lying on the ground outside, and had had every intention of handing it over to the proper authorities in the morning; and that the knife Lupus was carrying in his other hand was used exclusively for the slicing of sausage and other edibles.

  I had to hand it to the defence, Hostilius and Acceius, who’d evidently done their best to cast doubts on the reliability of a pack of witnesses who were pissed as newts and hadn’t actually seen the two guys coming out of the shop. However, the facts that Lupus had a
record of violence and petty thievery a yard long already and that he and his brother had been barrelling up the street like a pair of Phaedippideses after Marathon were pretty well clinchers. The jury found them both guilty as charged. Lupus, as the probable ringleader, got the strangler’s noose and Senecio a twenty-year stretch in the galleys. End of trial, end of record.

  I set the tablets down and took a large gulp of the sub-standard Signinan. Yeah, well, it added up, in general terms anyway: Senecio does his stint behind an oar, survives it against all the odds and comes back with a grudge to pay against the two guys who’d defended him. Or failed to, rather. None the less, there were serious holes in the logic that needed filling. It sounded like a fair cop, for a start: the two had been convicted on circumstantial evidence, sure, but as it stood that was pretty damning. Even if by some wild stretch of the imagination they had been telling the truth, Senecio couldn’t complain that his advocates hadn’t done their best with what they’d got. He’d a right to feel angry against the jurymen who’d returned the verdict, yeah, no argument, or against the judge who’d done the sentencing; but not against Hostilius and Acceius, not to the degree of hunting them down twenty years later. That took real hatred, and unless he was totally out of his tree - which was a possibility, I admitted, after twenty years in the galleys - I couldn’t see he’d have a valid reason for it. Odd.

  The second major hole was that with Lupus and Senecio both dead there should’ve been no one left. So who the hell had tried to put a knife into Acceius? Someone had, that was sure, and the chances there wasn’t a connection were pretty remote. Oh, the probable answer was obvious: a relative, a third brother perhaps, here in Bovillae, that Senecio had been in touch with before the attack. He wouldn’t’ve been involved in the affair, so naturally the trial record wouldn’t mention him, but with two brothers dead now - the second killed by Acceius personally - he’d have a grudge in spades. I remembered the guy Trophius had mentioned, the guy who’d been hanging around the tombs when Trophius’s lads burned Senecio’s body. Right. That fitted as well. He’d’ve wanted to be there, at the funeral - if you could call it that - but if he’d been planning then, as he would’ve been, to pay off his brother’s killer, plus the back-debt, there was no way he’d’ve come forward and shown himself properly...

  It all made sense. The only question now was, how did I find him? I took another swig of the wine, the last, and emptied the cup.

  Dyers. The record had described the brothers as ‘dyers from Bovillae’. It was a long shot, sure, twenty years long, but at least I was lucky there. Dyeing’s one of those professions that tends to go in families and stay there. Dyers, fullers and tanners largely keep to themselves, sticking to their own special area of town, because the raw materials of the trade can be pretty niffy when stored in bulk or put to use. In fact, there was a clear-cut dyers’ and tanners’ quarter in Bovillae. I could –

  I stopped. Something was tugging at my memory; nothing to do with Bovillae or Senecio. Tanners’ quarter...tanners’ quarter...

  Then I remembered. Acceius had said that the night he was attacked he’d been visiting a client in the tannery and slaughterhouse area of Castrimoenium, out by the Bovillan Gate. Shit! There had to be a connection! The guy could’ve moved, it was only four or five miles; would probably have moved, under the circumstances, with two of his brothers - we’d assume brothers - convicted of murder. He wouldn’t’ve changed his profession, though, there was no need for that, none at all...

  Still, if I was going to find him then I needed a name. There was no point starting afresh with Castrimoenium, not when I’d got a lead here. I could come back tomorrow and ask around the dyers’ shops by the Appian Gate. If I was really, really lucky, then someone might just remember, and in that case we were in business.

  Of course, there was that one, other possibility, that our mystery knifeman hadn’t been a knifeman at all. But then, tempting to pursue as that line might be, before you can start faffing around with complications you’ve first got to check the obvious.

  Yeah, well: enough for the present. If that was my day in Bovillae then I’d had it. I left the empty cup on the table, returned the tablets to Latro with thanks, collected the mare from her long stint at the water-trough and set off back to Castrimoenium.

  23

  I called in at Hyperion’s in passing just in case Clarus was there - Marilla had told me the day before that he had something to tell me re the dead woman up at Caba - but he wasn’t, so the odds were he was helping Marilla on Meton-dogging duties and I’d catch up on both of them later. Hyperion, though, had two interesting pieces of news: one, that Libanius had put Veturina under the gentlest form of house arrest he could officially manage; and two, that Castor had flown the coop for a second time.

  ‘He has what?’ I said. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Oh, quite sure.’ We were in Hyperion’s workroom, and he was doing something complicated involving a lot of mixing and grinding of tiny quantities of dried herbs from stoppered pots. ‘According to Scopas - and he sent word to Libanius - he packed a bag and left shortly after Libanius did, without saying where he was going, why or for how long. Veturina might know the answers to any or all of these questions, in fact she probably does, but she refuses to say.’

  ‘Bugger!’ That Veturina had killed Hostilius, or connived at his death, purely out of love I could accept, absolutely; Castor, however, was much more of a grey area. Oh, sure, in my report to Libanius it hadn’t been up to me to make fine distinctions of guilt between them, and I’d been very loath to think along those lines in any case, under the circumstances: their motives - individual and shared - had been like one of these compact masses of underground roots that Alexis had shown me once, so tangled together that the plants and the weeds they belonged to were impossible to separate. All I could do, like Alexis, was dig the whole lot up, good and bad mixed, then hand them to Libanius to unravel as best he could. Even so, if one of the pair could be regarded as a proper murderer - and I wasn’t forgetting Cosmus - then Castor was it, no question. And now the bastard had done a runner and left his sister to face the music on her own.

  ‘It was to be expected, of course.’ Hyperion added a little water to the powdered herbs in his mortar and began to grind them to a paste. ‘He has very little to lose in any case, no property to be sequestrated, no family apart from Veturina herself. At least no family that he’d bother about, or who’d bother about him. No doubt he’ll take ship from Puteoli for Gaul, or Spain, somewhere suitably remote, and that’ll be the last anyone hears of the fellow.’

  Shit, what a mess. ‘Libanius isn’t putting out the word on him?’

  ‘No. Definitely not. To tell you the truth, Corvinus,’ - Hyperion used a tiny metal spatula to transfer the paste into a pill-mould - ‘I suspect he was angling for something just like this. Libanius is a very astute man, in the political sense. With Castor escaping from justice the whole business, or the more unsavoury aspects of it like Cosmus’s murder, can be laid at his door unequivocably, and Veturina left out of the picture. He has become, as a Jewish colleague of mine would once have said’ - he pressed the mixture hard down into the mould - ‘a scapegoat. In the word’s best possible sense.’

  Yeah, right, I could see the benefit of that, even if I couldn’t agree with it. Now Castor had gone - the guilty party fleeing, in admission of guilt - there would be no legal need for a trial, Veturina was off the hook and the whole sad mess could be shelved and forgotten. Like Hyperion had said, it was a politician’s solution to the problem, ends justifying means, and if there’s one thing I’m not it’s a politician. Still, I couldn’t complain: I’d handed the whole boiling over to Libanius to do with as he thought fit, and there was no point in grousing now about how he’d gone about it. ‘What about Veturina herself?’ I said. ‘Did Libanius say she’d admitted to anything?’

  ‘No. But neither did she deny it. In fact she said nothing at all, absolutely nothing. You’ve met the lady, Corvinus. Y
ou know, or you can guess, how stubborn she can be.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I frowned. ‘How about Paulina?’

  ‘Libanius has sent her to a sister of his own in Rome. With Veturina’s knowledge and consent, of course. That side of things will be very difficult, I suspect. However, I’m sure it’ll resolve itself in time.’ He set the mould aside. ‘Now. How are matters going otherwise? Libanius said you were still looking into that business of the woman at Caba.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Among other things. Call it idle curiosity, pal, because I doubt if any of the strands I’m following will lead anywhere particularly profitable. Even so, I can’t just let them go now the Hostilius problem’s over and done with. It just wouldn’t sit right.’

  He smiled. ‘Oh, I can understand that perfectly, Corvinus. I hate to walk away from a puzzle myself, once I’ve set myself to solving it, no matter how unimportant I know the eventual answer will be. And Clarus would be very disappointed.’

  ‘Right. Speaking of which I’d best be getting back, see what he has to tell me. You know what it is?’

  ‘Oh, yes, indeed.’ Hyperion wiped the spatula on a cloth. ‘But I’ll let him tell you for himself because it belongs to his field of expertise, not mine. You’ll find it most interesting.’

  I got back home just shy of dinner time. No sign of Perilla - the lady was up in Marcia’s room, because the old girl was still bed-bound and she was keeping her company - but Clarus and Marilla were deep in conversation on the terrace. I cleared my throat and they sprang apart.

  ‘Hi, Corvinus,’ Clarus said. ‘Any luck in Bovillae?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I carried my jug and winecup over to the table. ‘Chances are the tramp who attacked Hostilius was a guy called Brabbius Senecio. Hostilius and Acceius defended him in a burglary and murder trial twenty-one years back.’ I gave them a quick run-down of events. ‘So the next stage is to see whether we can trace the third brother, or whoever he is, who went for Acceius.’