by Adrian Speed
“Recall he was in a locked and supposedly empty room,” Sir Reginald replied in English, as if he could read my mind. “Whatever killed Marcus Aurelius is still in the room. If a person, he would have been found by the guards.”
“I’m just being thorough,” I said.
Sir Reginald shrugged. “There was no rebuke in my statement.”
I turned back to the emperor. He was not as pale as I expected. There was still a red blush in his cheeks. He had a darker skin tone in death than I have in life. I could see where the ring was missing. On his left hand there were still three rings, with a gap on the middle finger. All the remaining rings were heavy pieces of gold, thick in every direction and square or oval on the top. Jet, sapphire and other precious gems were set into them. Each one was worth a fortune, so why steal just the pearl?
I peered closer at the middle finger. The skin bulged close to the hand and at the end of the finger but was tight where the ring had once been. The ring had almost carved a groove into the emperor's skin, like a river cutting a canyon.
“Look here,” I pointed to the gap. “That ring was practically part of the emperor. If someone had ripped it off after he died they would have taken most of the finger with them.”
“The same if they had taken it from him in a struggle,” said Sir Reginald. “Marcus must have deliberately removed it.” He looked at the dead emperor. “Although perhaps under coercion.” He turned his gaze back to the hand. “Nevertheless, that is clearly where it used to lie. That mystery pearl.”
“What do you make time of death?” I asked.
“Well Quintinius said he was able to shake him an hour and a half ago,” Sir Reginald sighed and touched the dead emperor. He was ice-cold. “And he is hard as stone now. Rigor mortis. That puts death about eight to twelve hours ago.”
“If we trust the General's word,” I said.
“Aye, and that's the rub,” he replied. “Can we trust anyone's word?”
The General returned. “Your oil lamp, Regulus.” A slave carried in an oil lamp with two wicks dangling from it. It shed much less light than my phone, but was warmer, more natural than the bright flash-bulb.
“Thank you,” Sir Reginald said to the slave.
“My pleasure, anything to help,” the General said. “Was that, er, German you two were speaking?”
“My associate's skill with Latin is much worse than my skill with her language.”
“I can speak Latin perfectly well!” I snapped.
The General squinted one eye at me and then spoke very slowly drawing out each word. “You speak it very well,” the General agreed with an insincere smile. “Considering how late you started learning.”
The General nodded to Sir Reginald and disappeared.
“What was that about?” I asked. “What did I say?”
“‘I to speak Latin greatly well’ would not be an unfair translation.” Sir Reginald turned away to hide a chuckle.
“Surely I did better than that,” I started and felt a blush form around my cheeks.
“My dear, considering your school never provided you with any instruction in Latin, you did far better than anyone could expect,” he soothed. “Now, I suggest that as the emperor has no more secrets to tell us, we should inspect the room.”
An investigation of the room revealed no escape tunnels, or hidden assassins. It was empty of all save a few lost spiders and the copious quantities of silver. There not even much dust. People came down here too infrequently to make it.
“The key is not in the lock,” Sir Reginald noted while he inspected the door. The large baulks of timber were cracked, but only a few shards had broken off. The iron hinges had given way in the end. It held together like broken shell on a boiled egg.
“It's on the desk,” I pointed to it. It was state of the art, by Roman standards, but looked old-fashioned to my 21st-century eyes. It had a large and intricate design that corresponded to slots in the lock.
“That doesn't mean it was locked from the inside,” he said, tapping his cane against the tiles. “Someone could have placed the key there in the confusion when they broke down the door, or at any time since.”
“The same would be true if it was in the lock,” I said.
“No, see how the door fell.” Sir Reginald waved his cane at the broken door. “Nothing out of place, just as it fell. It's like a game of pick-up sticks. If our killer had tried to put the key into the lock they would have lifted the door and the splinters would have rolled off.”
“Pick-up sticks?”
“You never played pick-up sticks? The game, with the sticks, and you pick them up?”
“Are you sure it wasn't just an attempt to make you tidy up?”
“It's a real game!” Sir Reginald threw up his hands and stood up. “It's a travesty you’ve never played. Regardless, my dear, if this door had moved we would know for certain.” He thrust his cane point at the desk. “That key we have no assurances about.”
“As you say,” I inclined my head in agreement. Then I paused. Something had caught my eye under one of the shelves. “Oh, hello–”
I knelt down. A bundle of papers lay hidden. Papyrus scrolls, by the look of them. I pulled them out. They were covered in the small, neat handwriting of the emperor, some of it in Latin and some in Greek. They looked like rough notes, not as neat as the rest.
“Why would anyone put these down here?” I wondered as I read them. Bits of it looked like lines of poetry; other parts were musings on the nature of existence. “It's not as if they're important.”
“Unless they weren't put down there.” Sir Reginald strode over, the metal tip of his cane clacking on the stone.
“What do you mean?”
“They could have been dropped,” he suggested. “Regard,” the cane point darted to one of the last lines on the page. “A smudge.”
“So? People smudge ink. That's why we switched to computers.”
“None of the other pages are smudged. They were all left patiently to dry, or sanded with the care of an emperor who is used to doing everything in his life with military precision. The only reason these pages would be smudged is if he gave them to someone else to read while the ink was still wet.”
“Then they dropped them? Why would they drop them and not pick them up? Or the emperor not pick them up?”
“Perhaps because at the moment they dropped those papers, or shortly before or after, the emperor collapsed and breathed his last?”
“Someone was in here!” I shot upright, clutching the papers in shaking hands. “Someone was in here when he died! But who?”
“I think, Hannah, it is time to begin our interrogations.”
Chapter IV
“May I?” Sir Reginald held out a hand for the papers as we walked towards the door.
“Sure,” I passed them over. He scanned them with a swift eye, and flicked through them briskly.
“Aha!”
“A-who?”
“A-here.” Sir Reginald pointed to a red thumbprint on the back of one of the last papers in the pile. Not of ink, but a red, waxy, muddy substance.
“That's too smudged to use.” I leaned in close to get a good look at it. “It could be anyone's.”
“It's not the thumbprint that's useful, my dear, it is the fact it exists at all.” Sir Reginald reached into his breast pocket and brought out a small plastic bag and a pair of tweezers. With great delicacy he scraped some of the thumbprint into the bag. “Don’t let me forget it,” he said, and slid the bag into his pocket. He returned the papers to me and I put them down on the late emperor's desk.
“Quintinius?” called Sir Reginald through the open doorway.
“Regulus?” The troubled General appeared almost instantly. “Do you have something?”
“The puzzle pieces are arranged, General; we merely have to put them together,” Sir Reginald said with cool élan. “I require interviews with everyone who had access to this room, the guard on the door, and the scribe. I sh
ould also like to interview you and the other generals.”
“I should be able to arrange that.” Quintinius Cassius's eyes darted in his eye sockets as he processed the instructions. “That means we must inform General Tiberius Claudius Pompeianus. I had hoped we could leave him out of this until the matter was sorted.”
“Every powerful man is a suspect in this case, Quintinius.”
“Oh, not for his sake, but his—”
“Gods preserve us! It's true!” a female shriek cut through Quintinius's reply. Sir Reginald, Quintinius and I all looked up into the light. A Roman woman, wrapped in red silk and her hair coiled up on her head, stood at the top of the stairs down to the vault. A hand covered her mouth and even from the bottom of the stairs I could see tears forming in her eyes.
Before anyone could react, the woman had raced down the stairs in a flurry of gowns and heavy perfume, her slave following behind. She threw herself past Sir Reginald and the General and down at the feet of the emperor.
“Oh father,” the woman fell to her knees and wept into the emperor's tunic.
“You know this is a crime scene,” I coughed, the first one to come to my senses. The cough was also in response to the heady perfume the woman was drenched in. “You really shouldn't do that.”
“He's my father,” the woman whirled on me and looked me up and down. “You...you foreign harlot.”
“I'm showing less skin than you are—” I started, but gave up.
“How did you find out about his death?” Sir Reginald asked.
“It's on the lips of every slave,” the woman snapped between sobs. Then she turned. “Who are you?”
“Honourable lady,” Quintinius bowed to the woman at the emperor's feet. “May I introduce Regulus. He has come to find your father's killer. And his assistant, a German freewoman. Regulus, this is Annia Aurelia Galeria Lucilla, wife of Tiberius Claudius and daughter of Marcus Aurelius.”
“Killer?” Lucilla looked up at Sir Reginald through the tears and then to her father. “But there's not a mark on him.”
“More insidious things can be employed to kill a man than mere blows,” he said as he tipped his hat to the crying woman.
She was thirty years old and in the prime of her beauty, although muddled by the tears. The dark kohl around her eyes had run and her face was puffy and damp. Despite the disfiguring effects of grief her beauty still shone, if less brightly – skin delicate as a rose, and pink and soft as if it never suffered more hardship than a warm bath, hair dark and sleek as chocolate. She was in every respect the image of an emperor's daughter draped in rare silks.
However, I saw no innocence behind her eyes. Despite the tears welling up inside them, Lucilla's eyes were cold, hard and calculating. When she looked at Sir Reginald she was weighing him up in her mind as a threat.
“You see, madam,” Sir Reginald took some steps towards Marcus Aurelius and pointed to the late emperor's hand, “one of his rings is missing, and so far there is no explanation except theft. When a man dies on the same night he is robbed, it is not unreasonable to at least entertain the prospect of murder.”
“Not my father.” Lucilla turned her face away and sank against Marcus’s tunic. “Not one man in all the empire wanted him harmed. The only enemies he had in the world were the barbarous Germans and Parthians.”
“Quite so. And yet here he lies.” Sir Reginald let the silence hang in the air for a moment, then waved a hand at me to come closer. I drew out my phone, keyboard at the ready. “Madam, can you account for your whereabouts last night?”
“Surely the honoured lady is not a suspect?” Quintinius balked.
“Everyone is a suspect.” Sir Reginald held up a hand and glared at Quintinius. “You wanted me to find the truth, not root around to find some likely-looking slave to blame. If you did not want the truth you should never have written to me.”
“It’s all right, Quintinius,” Lucilla said. She tried to regain composure and her slave dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “I was asleep last night. From quite early in the evening, not long after supper. We’d had a small family supper: father, Commodus, his wife, my husband and I. Then we went our separate ways. I think Tiberius Claudius and I exchanged a few words and then I went to bed. Attia will attest to that.” Lucilla nodded to the slave who had carefully wiped Lucilla's face clean of tear-stained make-up.
“Any freeman who could attest to the same?” he pressed, squatting down next to the noblewoman.
“Er,” Lucilla blinked for a few seconds. “Bruttia has the room next to mine. That's my sister-in-law. She would have heard if I stirred in the night.”
“Commodus's wife?”
“Yes.”
“If you'll forgive me, I am surprised you have rooms here at the fort,” Sir Reginald said.
“I've lived here for eight years,” Lucilla said bitterly. “Father wants the Germans north of the Danube subdued, and he wants his family nearby while he does it.”
“So you have a private room here, and your father?”
“My father spends – spent – little time here,” Lucilla said looking at Sir Reginald like he was an idiot. “He and my husband have armies to lead. They spent all their time north of the border, months at a time.”
“Leaving you here with no-one but slaves and your sister-in-law for company.” Sir Reginald nodded. “A lonely life, I imagine.” Lucilla didn't reply. “At supper last night, were there any arguments?”
“Only the usual one.”
“Which is?”
“Commodus wants to go back to Rome. He thinks this whole war against the Germans is a waste of time,” Lucilla said. She was much recovered now, with a dry, clean face. Her slave was preparing a stick of kohl to reapply to her lady's face.
“And is it?”
“It's been eight years and there don't seem to be any less of the damned things,” Lucilla spared a glance at me. If looks could kill, I would have been the epicentre of a nuclear explosion. “They're not like the Gauls or the Spaniards. They can't be tamed. They're even worse than the Britons. They're nothing but warlike brutes who drink too much and wake up next to pigs instead of their wives. Not that you can tell much difference.” Lucilla sniffed and turned away when she failed to get a rise out of me.
“Was this argument very heated?” Sir Reginald asked.
“No worse than usual. Commodus is the age where he thinks the loudest opinion ought to win.” Lucilla closed her eyes to let her slave apply the kohl.
“I understand.” Sir Reginald smiled. “We've all been that age once. Tell me, other than the Germans and the Parthians, is there anyone who would have wanted your father killed?”
“No,” Lucilla said in a quiet voice. “Perhaps one or two ambitious generals, but they wouldn't do it like this. They would have raised an army, like Avidius Cassius did. They wouldn't have sent someone to skulk in and kill my father in the dark.”
“Unless they wanted to take advantage of the instability his death would cause?”
“There will be no instability,” Lucilla sneered. “Commodus was born in the purple. No-one can contest him.”
“Hm.” Sir Reginald replied only with a small noise in his throat. “I think that will do for now, Lucilla, and I thank you greatly for this time. I know it cannot be easy when your father passes on.”
“He will always be with us,” said Quintinius, thumping his chest in salute. “He was not a mere man. He was a god on earth. All he has done in death is ascend to join Jupiter Magnus.”
“Be that as it may, it does not stop us here on earth suffering the pain of loss.”
Lucilla held her late father's hand, the right, free of the rings of office. The bronze stylus was still trapped in his fingers by rigor mortis. She moved by instinct towards the wax tablet he had been working on.
“Ah, if you please,” Sir Reginald said swiftly. “I want nothing disturbed that my associate or I did not ourselves disturb.”
“I–” Lucilla reached for the tab
let anyway. “I just wanted to see what he had been writing–”
Sir Reginald snatched up the tablet before she could get to it and flipped it open on his arm. The oil lamp that had been resting on it dropped to the table. His eyes moved swiftly over the Ancient Greek script inside.
“Ah, it appears the last words written by our late emperor were for our encouragement,” Sir Reginald flipped the tablet to show the room. “Men are given the challenges they are capable of overcoming.” He smiled. “He has confidence we will solve this little mystery, I am sure.” I looked at the tablet. A second sentence was started but the only word left lost and alone was “When”.
“Quintinius, please be so good as to set up our other interviews.” He turned to Lucilla while Quintinius dashed from the room. “And my lady, while I wish to give you time to grieve, I must ask you to touch nothing else.”
“Commodus is already awake, Regulus,” Quintinius's voice called down. “I think we should do that interview as soon as possible!”
“Excuse me, madam,” Sir Reginald took his hat off and bowed to Lucilla. “Come along Hannah.” Sir Reginald span on his heel and paused only at the doorway to tap the guard on the segmented plates of his armour with his cane. “Make sure she touches nothing, understand?” Sir Reginald's warm smile did little to stop the cold sweat running down the man's face. On one hand, Sir Reginald did not look like a man you could disobey. On the other, Lucilla was the emperor's daughter. Disobeying her would almost definitely have him killed. The war over who to obey sent his heart pounding. I tried to flash him a sympathetic smile but it didn’t seem to help.
*****
Commodus had a large room in one of the barracks. A wooden wall set him apart from the lesser soldiers around him and he had a separate entrance. Incense burners smouldered in every corner, filling the chamber with smoke. None of the foul odours of the camp made it to Commodus's nose; he replaced it with foul odours of his own.
Quintinius opened the door and we entered to find Commodus in the centre of the room dressed only in a loin cloth. Every contour of his body gleamed with olive oil and a slave was running a scraper across his muscles, removing the oil and every scrap of dead skin and grime from the day before.