The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits Volume 2 (The Mammoth Book Series)

by Mike Ashley

  At one point Quintilian spotted something on the floor and bent down to examine it.

  “What have you found?” I asked.

  He stood up. “Wax,” he said. “Candle wax. Just a few drops. Mixed with a bit of blood, so they’re recent, unless someone else has been bleeding in the corridor.” He turned to the girl. “May I assume that these bloody hand prints are the only traces of blood that you’ve found in the corridor?”

  “Oh, yes, sir,” she told him.

  “At any time?”

  “As far as I know, sir. Since I’ve been here, and that would be two years come the feast day of Flora this April.”

  “Thank you, girl. You may lead us to the gate, now.”

  And with that we went home. Titus came by the next day to see whether Quintilian would take the assignment. “I will venture it,” Quintilian told him, “but with no guarantee of success.”

  “You don’t believe the lad is innocent?”

  “Only the gods can determine true innocence or guilt,” Quintilian told him. “What matters to a Roman jury is the force of argument and how well presented it is. It’s just as important to keep fifty-one Roman jurors awake as it is to convince them. I will endeavour to keep them awake.”

  “But what do you think? Do you believe the lad is innocent?”

  Quintilian patted him on the shoulder. “What I think hardly matters. The jury decides who’s innocent and who’s guilty. The beautiful Lucella has engaged Blasus Parenas as prosecutor, and Blasus has a slippery and well oiled tongue. After he has finished greasing the jury with his well chosen words we’ll be lucky if I’m allowed to speak at all. They may all leap to their feet and acclaim the guilt of my client in a unanimous burst of enthusiasm.”

  “You must have bad dreams,” Titus told him.

  “When I’m trying a case I don’t permit myself to dream.”

  “But is the lad guilty or isn’t he? Surely you have an opinion.”

  “Oh. Your instincts were right. Rufus Abracius did not kill his father.”

  “But the bloody hand prints?”

  “Exactly. The bloody hand prints.”

  And that was all Titus could get out of him. I, of course, did not try, curious as I was to know what my mentor had discerned, and what he thought of the case. He would merely tell me to observe and to learn. I observed, but I did not see what he saw. I learned, but he learned more. How was I ever going to be able to emulate the master when from moment to moment I had no idea of what the master was doing?

  The trial commenced three weeks later. Blasus Parenas was as good as Quintilian predicted. A handsome man with long, brown hair, he wore his toga creased into precise pleats, with the end carefully folded over his arm. He called Lucella, the stepmother, as his first witness. She had arrived in a litter carried by eight porters and preceded by a centurion in full dress uniform. She showed more leg than was proper and told the jurors how she missed her husband more every day, and how sweet and good he had been, and if Rufus didn’t kill him, who could have?

  Quintilian’s cross-examination was brief. “Have you ever heard Rufus Abracius say anything against his father, or speak to his father in anger?”

  “Well,” the good Lucella said, trying to look as though her teeth were being pulled against her will, “since you asked – I have heard him mutter imprecations under his breath. I believe he never forgave his father for marrying me.”

  “Thank you,” Quintilian said, sitting down. I looked at him with some astonishment. He never before, to my knowledge, had led a witness into giving questions harmful to his client. But he looked satisfied, and I said nothing.

  Blasus then called the two gardeners who had watched the front door that night, and received agreement that they didn’t have to be questioned under torture. (The custom is dropping out of favour anyway. The Emperor himself has said that a slave under torture will say whatever the torturers want to hear, and therefore his testimony is useless.) They affirmed that no one could have got through the door without their knowing it, and that no one at all, friend or stranger, came in that night. They were also the two who rushed to Lucilla’s aid when she began screaming that morning. They testified to seeing the bloody hand prints and following them to Rufus’s chamber.

  Quintilian rose in cross-examination when the second one was done. “The hand prints were easy to follow?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Bold, strong hand prints, were they?”

  “Yes sir?”

  “And the boy, Rufus, what was he doing when you entered his room?”

  “He were asleep, your honour.”

  “So you had to wake him up to tell him what he did?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There was blood all over him, of course.”

  “No, your honour. I didn’t see no blood.”

  “Thank you. That’s all.”

  Dr Heraclates, who had been treating Rufus for the past year, was the next witness. “The lad is suffering from melancholia,” he said, “brought on by the death of his mother.”

  “But his mother died two years ago,” Blasus pointed out. “Surely Rufus should have got over that by now.”

  “Normally yes, I would say,” Dr Heraclates said, his white Greek beard bobbing as he spoke. “But the lad and his mother were very close,”

  “Ah!” Blasus adjusted his toga with his thumb and forefinger, getting the crease just so as he turned to face the jury. “You mean to say,” he asked, his hands behind his back, his face bland, “that Rufus Abracius had an unnatural” – he drawled out the word “unnatural” – “affection for his mother?”

  “Well, very strong, yes.”

  “Unnatural?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “You don’t need to, Doctor,” Blasus said, with a wave of his arm leaving it for the jury’s imagination to go at least that far.

  Then Serpo, Rufus’s own body slave, was called. Quintilian, who had been dozing, or pretending to doze, suddenly jumped to his feet. “Come now!” he thundered. “A slave cannot be called to testify against his own master. Surely my learned opponent knows that. The chairman of the court knows that. Everybody in this room” – and he waved his hand to take in the entire fifty-one jurors and the hundred or so onlookers – “knows that!”

  Blasus Parenas turned to Senator Claudius Aquillus, the chairman of the court, an elderly man with a hawk nose, piercing blue eyes, and a brain like a lawbook of Roman custom and precedent, for a ruling. “Your honour?”

  “He’s right, Citizen Parenas,” Chairman Claudius said. “Why should this slave be exempt from the established custom?”

  “Technically, your honour, the slave was not Rufus’s property at the time in question; Rufus’s father was still alive, and so everything of which Rufus was possessed, including his slave, was, in law, his father’s property. He should not be allowed a legal defence for the crime of murdering his father that is only made possible because he murdered his father.”

  “Ah, but that’s what you must prove!” Quintilian said. “Can you seek to prove that my client murdered his father by bringing in evidence that is only admissible provided that he did murder his father?”

  “Interesting,” Claudius said, looking from one advocate to the other. He leaned back and pondered, closing his eyes.

  After a minute he opened them to look at Blasus Parenas. “I believe that this time you’ve won your point, counsellor, by a hair. Go on with questioning the slave.”

  Quintilian leaned back on the bench and smiled benignly. “There’s nothing old Claudius loves so much as a point of law,” he murmured to me. “I thought Blasus would have to work a little harder to get that in. Still it might throw him off his stride.”

  “Is this slave’s testimony damaging to our client?” I asked him in an undertone.

  “I don’t see how,” Quintilian murmured. “But Blasus doesn’t know that. Even now he’s wondering what question I fear his asking the little slave.”<
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  And so it proved. Serpo said all he could say that was of interest in the first three sentences: He’d been body slave to Rufus since the lad was twelve. It was he who had warned the stepmother about the poison, since he’d followed Rufus to the Mausoleum that day and watched him clutch the small vial to his chest and occasionally raise it to his lips, and then shake his head and put it away. He had on occasion heard Rufus muttering curses that might have been directed towards his father.

  Quintilian stood up and interrupted. “Those curses, you didn’t hear them clearly?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Could have been against his father?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Could have been against the gods who blinded him and killed his mother?”

  “Yes, I suppose so, sir.”

  “Could have been against himself, for being so accursed as to fail to rescue his mother?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so.”

  “Could have been against the green team for losing in the chariot races that day?”

  “Well –” Serpo shifted uncomfortably as the jurors chuckled.

  Quintilian sat back down, and Blasus artfully ignored him and went on. He gnawed at every possible relationship that Serpo might have been privy to, convinced that there was meat in there somewhere. He came up without even a radish.

  Quintilian stood again and asked, “That sword we’ve heard about; did you ever see young Rufus Abracius with a sword?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did his father have any swords that you know about?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No, indeed, and what would he be doing with a sword?” Quintilian asked rhetorically, and sat down.

  “We’ll get to the sword soon enough,” Blasus said dramatically, signalling for his next witness to come forward. This was the city guard who had come in response to the call for help from within the house. He described the scene he found there: the head of the family dead in his bed with a sword thrust deep into his chest, the weeping widow, the dazed and silent blind boy, the bloody hand prints in the corridor leading from the murder room to the boy’s room.

  “And what sort of sword was it that did the deed?” Blasus demanded.

  “A regulation legionnaire’s gladius. The short sword that is used by all the legions.”

  “And do you have that sword with you?”

  “I do.” The guard unrolled a bolt of red fabric he was carrying and revealed a plain, iron, double-edged sword, of the sort used by the regular infantry. The fore part of the blade was still crusted with the dried blood of Marcus Vexianus Abracius, and several of the jurors or audience members gasped at the sight. They had, most of them, performed military service for the State, and had seen men die before their eyes, and probably killed a few themselves. But there is a difference between battle and murder: one is sanctified by the gods, the other is a foul and cowardly act.

  Blasus Parenas passed the sword around the jury and, eventually, even to the spectators. Finally, with a great sweeping gesture that fluttered his toga, he handed it to Quintilian. Then he turned back to the jury and, pacing from side to side in front of them with a deliberate gait, began his summation.

  In the best tradition of the Roman prosecutor, Parenas went on for hours, and he had no trouble keeping the jurors awake. He began by drawing a word-portrait of the murdered Marcus: what a fine husband and father he had been, what a prince of an employer, what a noble Roman, with all the virtues that Rome looks for in her citizens. And then on to the most important thing in a murder trial: motive. Unless the speaker can convince the jury that the defendant wanted to kill the victim, it’s hard to convince them that he did kill the victim. And oh how Rufus wanted to kill his father, according to Blasus: “And then a worm grew slowly inside him: the worm of hate. He hated his father as the cause of his blindness; he hated his father because, in saving him first from the fire, he failed to save his beloved mother. Perhaps too beloved, but we’ll let that pass.”

  Blasus trotted out all the usual reasons why a son might murder his father, and added a few of his own: Rufus was angry that his father remarried, thus dishonouring his mother’s memory. Rufus was secretly in love with his stepmother and jealous of his father. Marcus Vexianus Abracius had been a rich and successful man; Rufus was jealous of the success, and wanted to inherit his father’s money and be free of his father’s stifling influence. Free to do what, Blasus didn’t say.

  “And all these,” Blasus intoned, “finally came together in the disturbed mind of this poor boy one night a month ago when he took the sword that he had been hiding – possibly under his bed so he could reach down and feel the strength of the blade, the sharpness of the edge – and determined to strike, strike, strike! And cut down his father while the man slept – slept peacefully, expecting no harm, next to his loving wife.”

  Now we were getting to it: the murder itself. The coughing and fidgeting among the jurors ceased, and they listened intently.

  “Picture the scene,” Blasus told them. “In the dead of night, the only time when a blind man can successfully hope to commit such a dastardly crime, Marcus’s son leaves his room and creeps down the hall, sword in hand. He enters the bedroom where his father and stepmother are sleeping and – with one well aimed thrust – stabs his father through the heart!” Here Blasus mimed a well aimed thrust, and some in the audience shivered.

  “And then young Rufus staggers back to his room, blindly leaving behind him the blood-red hand print of a murderer – not once but seven times – along the wall of the corridor.”

  Blasus raised his hands to the heavens. “Perhaps it was the gods that caused him to leave behind these bloody markers.” Blasus dropped his hands sadly to his sides. “Perhaps, after his dreadful deed, the lad wanted to be caught. Who can say? But no one can deny his guilt – it is marked by his own hand on the corridor wall – and marked, and marked, and marked, and marked.” And Blasus sat down.

  After a suitable pause Quintilian rose and faced the jury. “Honourable Romans,” he began, “I stand before you, charged with the task of defending a young blind boy of impeccable character who has been accused of murder – and the most foul murder imaginable at that: the murder of his own father.

  “I have heard speculation as to how I am going to plead this unfortunate lad’s case.” Quintilian raised his right hand, palm upraised, in supplication to the jurors. “I could beg for the court’s mercy because the boy is blind and an orphan. I could attempt to convince you that he was driven mad with grief, and is therefore not responsible for his actions. I could speak to you of his heroism in saving his father from a terrible fire, and losing his eyesight in the attempt to save his mother. I could somehow try to justify this horrible crime.” He lowered his hand.

  “But there is no justification for such a horrible crime. And, thanks to the gods who have opened my eyes to the truth, I do not have to attempt such a hopeless task. The fact is, as I will prove to you by the evidence we have already heard and about which there is no dispute, Rufus Abracius is innocent of the charge.” Quintilian moved over to stand next to his client, and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “He did not murder his father.”

  There was a murmur from the jurors. The chairman of the court turned to glare them into silence, and then nodded at Quintilian to continue.

  Quintilian gave the jurors a word-picture of the life of Marcus Vexianus Abracius, his first wife and their son in the days before the fire, showing what a close and loving family they were. Then he spoke of Rufus’s double tragedy of losing his mother and his eyesight. “Even though it was not his fault,” Quintilian told them, “the guilt and remorse he felt overwhelmed him. Yes, he loved his mother, just as you and I love our mothers. We have no need to look to Oedipus for an explanation.” He looked slowly around at the jurors. “Consider this my friends: How would you like to be on trial for something – anything, it doesn’t matter what – and have some unctuous prosecutor tell the jury that your
love for your mother was ‘unnatural’? Bah! We will speak no more about it.”

  Quintilian then verbally took the jurors along to watch sympathetically as Rufus retired to his room after the fire, to spend his days in darkness and in pain. Slowly he brought them along when Rufus suffered the new shock of his father’s remarriage. “Rufus was still clinging to the ghost of his mother,” he told them, “when his father gave it up for a new love.” Rufus moved his bedroom further away from his father’s so he would not have to listen to the endearments his father whispered to someone who was not his mother. But he didn’t resent his father’s new happiness, he merely didn’t want to have to deal with it. “A deceased wife,” Quintilian said, “no matter how well loved, will make way in the mind for a new wife; replaced but not supplanted, the new love separate from the old. But a mother cannot be replaced.”

  After a short pause, Quintilian continued, “There is the vial of poison we have heard about. You all heard Serpo’s description of Rufus’s actions at his mother’s tomb. Can any of you doubt that what was on his mind was suicide? Not the actions of an untroubled mind, perhaps, but hardly the equivalent of murder. We will speak no more about it.”

  Now Quintilian reached down and picked up the sword Blasus had passed to him earlier and held it flat out before the jurors. “We have been told this is the murder weapon, my friends. A good, honest Roman gladius. Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t. But if so, and if Rufus is the murderer, then where did he hide it before the murder? For he must have had it for a long time; he hadn’t been away from his room, other than briefly, for months. And those times he did leave his room, his faithful body slave Serpo went with him. Even when he didn’t want Serpo along, even when he didn’t know Serpo was following him, Serpo was there. But Serpo never saw Rufus with a sword. Did you, Serpo?” he looked out into the audience, where Serpo might be standing, and then looked back. “And so blind Rufus must have hidden the sword, and he must have hidden it well.”