by Ruth Downie
“Not the whole province,” Firmus reminded him.
Caratius sighed, as if he was about to say something distressing for both of them. “My people are loyal subjects of the emperor, sir. They handed over their money in good faith-”
“And now one of your people has pinched it.”
“Not one of us, sir. A hired man from the Dobunni tribe. We will do everything we can to help, but-”
“You could have helped by taking the body,” Firmus pointed out, getting to his feet. He turned to Ruso. “I’m going to have to talk to the procurator.”
“Anything else we can do, sir,” Caratius insisted. “My people are outraged. The province has been robbed.”
As they were leaving Firmus turned to Ruso and murmured, “Are all the Britons as awkward as this?”
“I’ve not had many dealings with the Southerners before,” Ruso confessed. “I hope not.”
15
Camma’s white face was already blotched with tears when Ruso ushered her and Tilla along the landing past the piles of trunks and boxes topped with Valens’s old legionary helmet, still impressively polished.
The apprentices had done a good job. The limewashed store at the end of the corridor above the surgery had been hastily emptied of junk and cleared of dust and spiders. A lamp stand had been fetched from the dining room to provide a living flame at the foot of the bed, which had been propped up at one end to support the body of Julius Asper. The bed, as Valens had pointed out when he insisted that the tall apprentice surrender it, was not necessary for the comfort of its occupant, but for the consolation of the bereaved.
Ruso had braced himself for a howl of native grief, but Camma entered the little room in silence.
With his face washed, his hair tidied, and the damage to his skull out of sight, Julius Asper looked almost peaceful.
Camma began to speak in British. Her voice failed. She tried again.
“She is asking for a comb,” translated Tilla, confirming what Ruso thought he had understood. “I will fetch it.”
When she had gone Camma knelt on the rough boards of the floor and reached out. She flinched as her hand made contact with the cold fingers.
“He wouldn’t have known what was happening at the end,” Ruso assured her in Latin, glossing over the horrors Asper must have suffered before that. “He would have been in a deep sleep.”
She whispered, “If I had known it would end this way…”
“Who do you think did this, Camma?”
Instead of answering the question, she began to say, “My husband
…”
Through the open window he could hear someone whistling out in the street. It was not the right time to be asking the widow questions, but there might not be another opportunity. “Your husband…?” he prompted.
“Nothing.” She shook her head. “Nothing at all.”
“What do you think happened?”
She ran a forefinger along the back of Asper’s hand. “This is what happened. He is dead.”
“Where should I look for Bericus?”
“Poor Bericus.” She sighed “I suppose they killed him too.”
“Did the brothers ever argue?”
“Bericus would never do this!”
“I’m sorry. I have to ask.”
When she did not reply he said, “Do you know why he would have been on the river?”
She shook her head.
“Or anything about-”
“I do not know!” She buried her face in her hands. “I do not know anything!”
Tilla, returning at that moment, glared at him. Behind Camma’s back she mouthed “Not now!” and motioned to him to get out of the way. Watching her kneel beside Camma and put an arm around her shoulders, he felt like an intruder. But somehow between now and tomorrow morning, he needed to extract whatever information the woman could offer.
Tilla handed over the comb. Camma reached forward. “There,” she whispered, gently teasing Asper’s hair back from his forehead. “That is better.” She turned to Tilla. “You see? He is a fine man.”
Tilla passed her a cloth to wipe her eyes. “I will go with you to take him home in the morning, Sister.”
Camma shook her head. “I cannot go home.”
It was not the right moment to tell her she could not stay here, either.
“I will take him to Verulamium.”
Ruso supposed that if they were all like Caratius, it was hardly surprising that she did not think of Verulamium as home. He said, “Did your husband know people down here?” Catching Tilla’s warning glance, he added, “I mean, is there anyone else in town we should fetch to mourn him?”
“Only the tax men,” Camma said. “I do not want them here. I will keep vigil alone.”
He said, “You should get some rest. I’ll stay with him tonight.”
A small rasping cry sounded from farther along the landing. She sighed. “That is the cause of all this.”
“I will go,” said Tilla. “We will leave you to speak with your man.”
As they left the room, Camma called out something to her husband in British. Moments later, with the door closed, Tilla hissed, “This is not the time for questions!”
“It’s my job.”
“I know,” she said. “But it is a very bad job.”
At that moment, he was inclined to agree.
In the nursery she scooped up the angry baby and laid him against her shoulder.
“I can’t escort a body to Verulamium,” Ruso told her over the din of the crying. “I’m supposed to be tracking down the brother and the money.”
With one hand supporting the baby’s wobbly ginger head, Tilla began to croon the song they had heard from the riverside bar yesterday morning. She was swaying to the rhythm of the music. Despite the terrible squalling in her ear, she looked more contented than Ruso could remember seeing her for a long time.
To his relief, the frantic cries began to fade. The small red face relaxed back into human shape. His wife kissed the baby’s head before finally returning her attention to him. “I did not say you would go.”
“But-”
“We will be quite safe without you,” she continued. “We are two married ladies escorting each other, and it is not far. I knew you would say yes.”
“But-”
“You always say yes in the end.”
She ignored his protest of, No I don’t. “I will try and ask her your questions later. But she has enough troubles. Let her grieve for a fine husband who was attacked and robbed by bandits.”
He said, “I’m beginning to have doubts. Why did he leave town with only a clerk to guard him? And if he’d been robbed, why not ask for help instead of hiding away at the Blue Moon?”
When Tilla looked blank, he realized nobody had told her what he had been doing all morning. When he had explained he added, “Obviously I didn’t tell Camma about the back alley. She can think he died in his bed and stayed there.”
“I shall say nothing,” Tilla promised, resting her head against the baby’s. Then she said, “Perhaps when you have finished being a tax man in Verulamium you can stay and be a doctor.”
“So you can stay and help look after the baby?” Out on the landing, he lowered his voice in case the woman could hear. “This isn’t more of that Christos business, is it? Finding widows and orphans to look after?”
“You think without Christos I would leave a woman to give birth in the street?”
“Of course not.” He gestured to her to go first down the stairs. “But you do seem very attached. You barely know the woman.”
“If I was living with the Catuvellauni and my husband was killed-”
“I know. But be careful how much help you promise.”
“There is a housekeeper to look after her when she gets home.”
“Good. You can’t fight her battles for her, Tilla.”
The silence that followed was punctuated by the eerie sound of wailing from the storeroom. To his surprise, Tilla paused
at the foot of the stairs and kissed him on the cheek. “You and I should never part in anger,” she said. “Hear how it is for her now, begging his forgiveness.”
He said, “I’ll raid Valens’s medicines. See if I can find something to calm her.”
“She should not be left alone with the baby.”
“Did I really hear her say he was the cause of all this?”
“That,” said Tilla, running a finger along the crinkled curl of the baby’s ear, “is why she should not be sent home alone with you, little one. There is a storm inside her mind. Whoever caused this, it was not you, was it?”
16
The evening chill was creeping up from the river as Ruso went in search of Tetricus the boatman. He was the only person who might know what had happened to Julius Asper between his leaving Verulamium with a brother and possibly seven thousand denarii, and his lone arrival, destitute and fatally injured, at the Blue Moon.
Valens was busy seeing patients. He had offered Ruso an escort of apprentices as if he were doing him a favor, insisting that nobody in his right mind would wander the passages behind Londinium’s riverfront when the workshops and warehouses were closing for the evening. Thus it was a group of three that picked its way along the deserted wharf just after sunset and turned left into a narrow street. Forty paces farther and a right turn took them into the gloom of the weed-fringed alleyway leading to the home of Tetricus the boatman.
A couple of urchins who were bouncing a ball off the high wall of the grain warehouse fled at the sight of them. Ruso could make out several doorways opening onto the alley. The nearest was a patched construction with a heavy plank nailed across the rotten section at the bottom. He was about to knock when he was startled by the tall apprentice whispering, “Sir!” in his ear.
“What?”
“Sir, I think we’ve been followed.”
Ruso glanced back along the empty alleyway, wondering if the body and the coded letter had overexcited the youths’ imaginations. “Really?”
“He looked suspicious, sir. He was wearing a hood.”
To be wearing a hood on a clear spring evening was certainly unusual, but whoever it was had gone about his business elsewhere by the time Ruso and his escort retraced their steps to the street. The only people now in sight were an old man hobbling toward them on two sticks and a heavily made-up girl in a doorway. The girl had not seen anyone in a hood, but it was a pleasure to meet three such handsome men, and would they like to come and join her friends for a drink?
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, 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 that 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 farther along. His gait reminded Ruso of rolling waves and swaying ships.
“You’re the procurator’s man, right?”
Ruso nodded.
“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 toward 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 by only 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 postmortem. “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 to 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 coins.
“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.
