Caveat emptor mi-4

by Ruth Downie

  A slight smile played around Metellus’s lips “Well done, Ruso. That won’t be necessary. When I need to know, I’ll find you.”

  “Tell me something. What was Asper investigating for you?”

  Metellus shook his head. “You’re making this far too complicated. If I wanted an investigator, I’d have used somebody properly trained. Asper was just one of a number of loyal Britons recruited to keep their eyes and ears open and alert us to anything interesting. Frankly, there was never much of great use in his reports. It was hardly worth paying him, except that the Catuvellauni are allowed to have their own town guards, so we like to make sure they’re as loyal as they claim to be. Since I’ll need to recruit a new informer, it would help to know what happened to the last one.”

  Ruso said, “His last letter said he’d found incriminating evidence of something, and he needed help.”

  “You’ve seen his last letter?”

  Either Metellus was a very good liar or whoever had been spying for him was not very well informed himself.

  “If you know what he was up to,” said Ruso, “then tell me. We’re on the same side.”

  “Of course,” Metellus agreed. “I don’t know at all, but I’d like to. Have you got the letter with you?”

  “So it really wasn’t your man who stole it from Valens’s house?”

  The slight crease between the eyebrows was probably the nearest Metellus ever came to looking disconcerted. “I told you. I know nothing about that. One of my men has been murdered, Ruso. A decent, law-abiding man not unlike yourself. I think we owe it to him to find out what’s been going on up there, don’t you?”

  Metellus had once taken Tilla in for questioning over the death of a soldier on the northern border. Ruso had never been entirely sure what had passed between them in that room but she was still waking with nightmares weeks later. He said, “If we do business, I want Tilla kept out of it. And I want your word that if I find out what happened to your man, you’ll take her name off that list.”

  “I knew you would be a good choice,” Metellus said, ignoring the request. You’ve been a great help already. I had no idea there was a final letter.”

  Ruso did not want to be a great help to Metellus. He wanted Metellus to think he was completely useless. He wanted to be overlooked and ignored. How he longed for the straightforward problems of surgery and sprained ankles and fevers.

  “You may want to be careful what you say to the procurator,” Metellus continued. “It seems that when he was in trouble, Asper felt he couldn’t trust his employers in Verulamium, or the procurator’s office, either.”

  “Maybe they’d found out he was working for you.”

  “Don’t be petulant, Ruso.”

  “Room Twenty-seven isn’t a very good system when your men need to contact you urgently.”

  “I told you, he was merely paid to send reports. Background intelligence. The sort that needs to be sifted and assessed before it’s passed on.”

  “This didn’t need sifting. He was in trouble and he needed help. He must have been afraid of the message being intercepted because he wrote it in shorthand.”

  “It should have been in code. Are you sure it was genuine?”

  “It was found under the bed he died in. He was probably just doing his best: He wouldn’t have been well enough to work out a code. And whatever evidence he’d found may have been the real reason he was murdered, so if you know anything you’re not telling me…”

  Metellus shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “I really have no idea. Do let me know when you find out.” He stepped away from the rail, waited for a couple of porters to pass carrying bales of cloth on their heads, and then turned to follow them at a safe distance back toward the north bank. “I’m glad we’ve been able to renew our acquaintance,” he said. “I’m sure you know better than to upset the procurator by mentioning this little chat.”

  “You think my talking to the governor’s security man would upset the procurator?”

  Metellus sighed. “Don’t be naive, Ruso. Hadrian appoints two men to run a province. Obviously there are going to be tensions. People like you and I are here to-”

  “To spy on the one for the other.”

  “I was going to say, to smooth the path between them. And by the way, if it sets your mind at rest, your wife probably wasn’t part of the forward planning for the ambush on the pay wagon.”

  Ruso raised his voice to be heard over the rumble of approaching wheels. “Of course she wasn’t!”

  “Even though she would have been in a good position to find out when it was coming.”

  Did Metellus really think that would frighten him? Ruso waited until the cart had passed before saying, “Everybody knows when the pay wagon’s coming. The army gets paid on the same dates every year.”

  “Fair enough,” agreed Metellus, untroubled. “So it’s quite possible that she was innocent of any involvement. She may not even have known the money was stolen until you told her.”

  Ruso saw the real trap just in time. “Are you sure she had stolen money?”

  “I’m afraid so,” said Metellus. “And she must know who gave it to her.” He smiled. “Don’t look so worried, doctor. As long as you and I have an understanding, nobody else needs to be told.”

  It was like being locked up with a tiger who promised not to eat you-as long as he wasn’t hungry.

  24

  The room smelled of liniment. The procurator’s portly middleaged form was propped up on a couch instead of sitting at the desk, but the crisp white tunic suggested he was of the no-nonsense school that believed it was necessary to dress properly even when in pain.

  “So,” the man said, “you’re my nephew’s investigator.”

  “Yes, sir.” But not, if he could find an escape route, for much longer.

  The man’s breathing was shallow and quick, as if he did not dare take a full-size breath for fear of splitting open his cracked ribs. Ruso guessed that he too had been awake for much of the night.

  The procurator’s gray eyes moved to his nephew. “Thank you, Firmus. I’ll have you called if I need you.”

  “But sir, I-”

  “Have you finished looking through the ingot ledgers?”

  Firmus had not.

  The man shifted slightly and gasped. Ruso guessed he was waiting for the pain to subside before continuing. “I understand the local magistrate’s blaming the dead man for everything.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And what do you make of that?”

  “The magistrate has a personal grudge against Asper,” said Ruso, realizing that in all the excitement over Room Twenty-seven he had failed to tell Firmus about Caratius’s broken marriage. “So it’s hard to say. He claims Asper left town with only his brother for security. The brother’s still missing and so is the money. Perhaps they were both robbed, or the brother turned on him. The woman says he never had the money in the first place, but if he was planning to leave her and run off with it, he’d hardly tell her beforehand.”

  “It’s an odd business altogether,” said the procurator. “We’ve never had any trouble with Verulamium before. They usually pay up straightaway. They’re more enthusiastic about being Roman than most of Rome is. Firmus tells me you have a codes man tackling a mystery letter?”

  Ruso explained. To his relief, the procurator was not impressed. “Sounds like his mind was going. Don’t waste any more time on it. I want you to concentrate on helping the magistrate track down the money.”

  Ruso realized he had also failed to tell Firmus that someone thought the letter worth stealing. With luck, it would be quietly forgotten. Metellus’s name would never need to be mentioned.

  The procurator extended one arm at an awkward angle, then winced as he lifted the drink off the table. “Tastes disgusting,” he observed after a long drink. “Wretched medic says I’ll be like this for weeks. Not much he can do except strapping up and doping, he says. When I asked how much I was paying him for doing
nothing, he said he was saving me from all the other quacks who’d make it worse.”

  Ruso could imagine that conversation. “There’s not much else can be done for ribs, sir.”

  “Ah. Yes. Young Firmus tells me you were working undercover as a medic.”

  There it was. The escape route. If he were dismissed by the procurator, he would be of no use to Metellus. The security man would lose interest in him, and in Tilla. Ruso took a deep breath and fixed his gaze on a point on the far wall just above the procurator’s head. “I think there’s something you should know, sir,” he said. “I’m not really an investigator. I’m just a medic who happens to have gotten involved in a few things by mistake. This has all been a misunderstanding.”

  To his surprise, the procurator did not react. Ruso was baffled. Had he not made it plain enough? The combination of pain and medicine must be slowing the man’s brain. He stood at attention and tried again. “I’m not an investigator at all, sir,” he repeated. “I never have been. I accepted the job under false pretenses.”

  The procurator downed the last of the drink, then put both hands on the edge of the couch and gasped as he lifted himself into a slightly different position. “So have you worked for Metellus, or not?”

  Ruso cleared his throat. “Only as a medical officer when he was dealing with an incident up on the border, sir.” It was near enough to the truth. “I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”

  “So you should be.” There was a pause while the procurator seemed to be considering what to do next. Finally he said, “Strictly speaking, none of this is our problem. We could insist that the Catuvellauni pay up. The magistrate knows that as well as I do, but he’s pretending he doesn’t. And frankly, I’d rather pretend I don’t too. We have enough trouble with the difficult tribes without upsetting the ones who are supposed to like us.”

  Ruso waited. He had expected to be punished, or dismissed in disgrace. He had not expected to be offered the procurator’s views on fiscal politics.

  “I hear you did a good enough job with the body. Just go up there, look helpful, and try not to annoy them or make me look a fool.”

  Ruso swallowed. “You still want me to carry on, sir?”

  The man frowned. “Am I not making myself plain? I’ve promised them an investigator. I don’t have anyone else to offer, so you’ll have to do. Consider yourself seconded to the Council at Verulamium.”

  “Yes, sir.” He was available, cheap-and expendable.

  “Ask some sensible questions and see if there’s any chance of getting their money back. It’s probably long gone, but while you’re there you can take a discreet look at this connection with the Iceni. I take it that having worked alongside Metellus, you do know what ‘discreet’ means?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Ruso, his spirits sinking even further.

  “Last time there was trouble around here,” continued the procurator, “one of my esteemed predecessors got the blame for stirring up the Iceni with unreasonable tax demands.”

  So that was it. The man was trying to find out how hard he could push the natives if the money didn’t turn up.

  “Of course,” he continued, “all that business was sixty years ago. I doubt there’s anyone alive up there who remembers it.”

  Ruso wondered about the quality of the briefing the procurator had received before taking up his post. Evidently nobody had suggested that he spend time listening to the locals. If he had, he would know that a lack of living witnesses made little difference to the Britons. If Camma’s people were anything like Tilla’s, the tale of How We Nearly Chased Off The Roman Oppressors would be lovingly polished, embellished, and passed around the tribal hearths for many generations to come.

  “The natives have long memories, sir,” he ventured. “But the Iceni woman who came here wasn’t hostile to Rome.”

  The Procurator grunted. “Hooking up with the local tax collector could have given her access to a lot of information. I’m told the first one seemed friendly enough till some idiot upset her.”

  “Boudica?”

  The bushy eyebrows met again. “We don’t mention that name here, Ruso. And you’d be wise not to mention it in Verulamium, either.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Our people learned a lot of lessons after that little fracas,” observed the procurator. “It pays to keep the locals sweet. Give them money to put up a few grand buildings and let them run their own affairs. That way they do their falling out with one another, not with us.”

  Ruso reflected that the tribes down here must be very different from those in the North, with its dreary cycle of native raids and vicious crackdowns by the army.

  “Honor the gods, obey the law, and pay the emperor,” observed the procurator. “The three secrets of success. Although since Hadrian generously made a bonfire of all the old unpaid tax bills, some of the tribes seem a little hazy over the last one. Any questions?”

  “I don’t think so, sir.”

  “Good. Keep in touch and watch your back. The Britons are a tricky bunch. Even the ones who speak Latin and know how to use a bathhouse. You can never tell what they’re thinking.”

  “Yes, sir,” agreed Ruso, remembering last night’s chicken dinner. “I will.”

  25

  Firmus must have been waiting for Ruso to leave the procurator’s office, because he appeared from somewhere and latched on to him as soon as he emerged. “So, what do we do now?”

  He seemed to have decided they were a team. Ruso said, “I’m going straight up to Verulamium to try and track down the money.” And to find a way of keeping Tilla out of this business without mentioning Metellus. If there was even the slightest chance that she might be pregnant, he did not want to frighten her.

  Firmus was insisting on knowing what his uncle had said about the letter.

  Ruso said, “All it shows is that Asper was ill and confused.”

  “I don’t agree. With all respect to my uncle, of course. I think Asper was about to expose some sort of crook who had him murdered.”

  Ruso loyally defended the procurator’s position, aware that he was talking too much and it must be obvious that he was lying. Aware too that he should never have allowed Firmus to get so deeply involved in this. The lad had been sent here by his mother to work in an office, not to chase thieves and murderers, and certainly not to get within the striking range of vipers like Metellus.

  Finally Firmus gave up. “So what do we do now?”

  “While I’m away, I’d be grateful if you’d forward any news that comes into the office.”

  The aristocratic nose wrinkled. “That sounds boring.”

  “Most investigating is boring, sir,” Ruso assured him, adding the “sir” to try and reestablish the distance that he should have had the sense to keep between them all along. “It’s just collecting detailed information, and most of what you find out turns out to have nothing to do with what you want to know.”

  They were almost at the gatehouse now. Seeing them approach, Albanus raised one hand and hurried toward them, cramming his official writing tablets into his satchel. “Sirs!”

  “I was just explaining to the assistant procurator that investigating isn’t as exciting as it sounds,” said Ruso, noticing to his discomfort that Albanus’s eyes were bright and he was shifting his weight from one foot to the other as if he was eager to say something. “For example, you’ve just spent the afternoon recording-how many sightings of the missing brother?”

  “Twenty-four, sir. Sir, I-”

  “Twenty-four. And how many of them are credible?”

  “Probably about three, sir. And even those contradict one another.”

  Ruso fixed him with what he hoped was a meaningful stare. “So would you say investigating was exciting, Albanus?”

  “It was a tedious afternoon, to be honest, sir.”

  “Exactly,” said Ruso.

  “Until I found out what Room Twenty-seven really means,” continued Albanus, unable to resist beaming with
pride as he destroyed all Ruso’s good work in a sentence.

  “Oh, well done!” cried Firmus. “I knew you were wrong, Ruso!”

  At Albanus’s suggestion, they moved across to stand by the hitching rail on one side of the courtyard. Horses might hear, but they would not talk.

  Apparently as he sat listening to the various accounts of sightings of men with mangled ears, Albanus had watched the stream of people going in and out of the Residence. Among them had been several couriers, most of whom delivered their items to the guard house at the gates to be distributed.

  “And that’s when I thought again about the letter, sir. And about the way my aunt’s letters got forwarded on to me after I left the army, and that’s when it dawned on me. It doesn’t matter what you write on the outside. What matters is that the person who receives it knows what to do with it.”

  Albanus paused here, perhaps waiting for his listeners to catch up.

  “So where’s the real Room Twenty-seven?” demanded Firmus.

  “We saw it earlier,” Albanus said. “But that’s not the point. The point is, when the men in the sorting room here get letters with addresses that don’t make sense, they put them all in the bottom right-hand pigeonhole. And there they stay, until somebody comes to look for them.”

  So that was how Metellus did it. It was ridiculously simple.

  “Or until there’s a clear-out, whichever happens sooner.”

  “But that doesn’t prove that Room Twenty-seven means anything,” said Ruso, attempting to head them off. “It could just be a mistake by a dying man.”

  “It could, sir,” agreed Albanus, “but the post room clerk says somebody’s been writing to it every week. And the pigeonhole hasn’t been cleared for a month, but there aren’t any Room Twenty-seven letters in there.”

  “Somebody’s been collecting them!” exclaimed Firmus. “Oh, well done, Albanus! So all we have to do now is keep a watch on the post room-”