Caveat emptor mi-4

by Ruth Downie

  Grata crushed a clove of garlic into submission against the grits in the surface of the bowl. “One of his slaves,” she said, not looking up. “I don’t know his name.”

  “Could you pick him out?”

  “Whoever it is will deny it,” said Camma. “You will have to beat him to get the truth.”

  “I don’t suppose the message was written down?”

  All three women eyed him with varying levels of scorn. “We don’t bother with all that here,” explained Grata. “We remember things.”

  It was a speech he had heard before from his wife, when he had assured her that she would have no trouble learning to read. “So what was the wording, exactly?”

  She shrugged. “Just asking him to visit later that day to talk.”

  “Did it say what about?”

  The scornful expression returned. “No, but I think he could guess.”

  When Ruso did not reply, she turned to Tilla. “So, now your man has asked all his questions, when are you leaving?”

  Ruso did not listen to Tilla’s response. So, now your man has asked all his questions…

  Seen from the outside, his trip had been remarkably successful.

  Extraordinarily successful.

  Unbelievably successful.

  The vague doubts that had been drifting around the edges of his mind had finally reached the front. He had not asked nearly enough questions.

  What were the chances of a man stumbling across a body in the woods on the very evening that the investigator was visiting?

  Come to that, why had it been possible to stumble across it at all? If it had been buried by the landowner, why had it not been properly hidden? There would have been plenty of time. Moreover, surely a murderer who lived near the scene of his crime would have wanted to dispose of his victim thoroughly lest he rise up and haunt him?

  Camma was talking now, holding something out to him and looking as though she was waiting for an answer.

  It appeared to be a badly formed burned tile with holes stamped into one side. Camma said, “I thought it might be a doctor’s mold for drying out pills in an oven, but Tilla says no.”

  He took it from her with a sense of foreboding. As the only man in a house full of women, he seemed to be expected to know instinctively what this piece of equipment was. “It looks more like something to do with the kitchen,” he offered. He turned it over, exploring the pocked surface with a forefinger that would not fit into the holes. “Some sort of fire brick?” he suggested. “Something to set hot dishes on?”

  “It was in the box with the money,” explained Tilla.

  “If it is of no use to you,” said Camma, “I will throw it away.”

  He turned it over and held it toward the window, squinting along the edges for some sort of clue. Whatever it was, if Asper had hidden it in the box with his savings, it must be significant. He peered again at the side with the holes, then poked at a small green speck with one finger. “Is that copper?”

  Camma had lost interest in it. She picked up the baby, wrinkling her nose at the smell. “Another cloth!”

  Tilla was silent. He knew she could tell from his expression that something had changed. “The bronzesmiths next door,” he said, slapping the clay tile against the palm of his hand. “Can they be trusted?”

  Grata shrugged. “As much as any man can be trusted.”

  “Good,” he said, ignoring the insult. “Tilla, come with me. We’re going next door for a chat.”

  49

  The elderly man who was sweeping the clay floor of the bronzesmiths’ shop put the broom aside as soon as he saw them. He eyed Ruso’s Gaulish clothes, assessed the shaggy remains of his foreign haircut, then greeted them in Latin. “Good afternoon, sir and lady! What can we do for you? We have quality lamps, beautiful brooches… A nice figure of Venus for the lady? Take a look. We can make anything to order on the premises.”

  Tilla, as they had agreed, went to distract the guards with a message of thanks to Dias for his help with the funeral.

  “I’m working for the procurator’s office,” explained Ruso, stepping into the workshop so the tile could not be seen from the street. “I’ve just been given this. I wondered if it was yours.”

  The man took one look and backed away, clutching at the little bronze phallus hung around his skinny neck as if Ruso had just offered him poison. “Oh, no, sir! Nothing like that. You must be misinformed. This is a respectable workshop.”

  “I’m not informed at all,” said Ruso, taken aback. “I don’t know what it is.”

  The man retreated so fast that he bumped into his display and sent a couple of lamps and a six-inch high miniature of Mercury tinkling to the floor. As he did so a second man of similar vintage emerged from the back of the shop, wiping his hands on a cloth. There was a hurried conversation in British, most of which Ruso could not catch.

  The second man stepped forward. “What you have there must be very old, sir. Nobody we know has used one of those since our grandfather’s day. Even if we had one, we would never use it. They make all the coins in Rome these days.”

  Ruso blinked. “It’s for making money?”

  “In the days of the old kings, sir, yes. To make the blanks for stamping into coins. But nobody alive has ever seen it done, I promise you.”

  A slack-faced lad with lank hair about his shoulders came forward and grabbed the man by the arm, pointing at Ruso and saying something in British. The man was trying to reassure him.

  Ruso backed away, conscious that he was frightening them all. The lad repeated his question. The man said the same thing again, assuring him there was nothing to worry about.

  He switched back into Latin. “I am sorry. He doesn’t understand. He thinks you are angry with us.”

  “I’ll go,” said Ruso, sorry for them.

  “Sir, whoever told you to ask about that mold-”

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” Ruso assured him, turning to call across the street to Tilla. “I told you it was rubbish, wife. We’ve been swindled.”

  The women were surprised to see him back. They were even more surprised when he laid out all of Asper’s coins on the kitchen table Grata had just wiped clean. First he pushed aside the bronze sestertii, which were much too big to fit in the holes of the mold. He sorted the rest into denominations, turned them all face up, and peered at the profiles of various and mostly dead emperors. Some of the emperors, he now saw, were not stamped very clearly. Some of them had worn flat and others had never been quite in the middle in the first place. The designs on the reverse sides were even more confusing. Some of the backs aligned with the fronts while others did not.

  He heard Camma whisper to his wife in British, “What is he looking for?”

  “You said Asper was trying to find a way out,” said Tilla as Ruso tried a juggling motion, weighing one coin against another in his hands. “Perhaps this was it, whatever it is.”

  He peered at the edges of the coins. He tried stacking like for like on top of one another to check for size: an exercise that proved futile because very few of them were really round. He even attempted a tentative bite on one or two, trying not to recall the screams of a patient whose molar had been cracked by the very same exercise.

  After the third or fourth attempt to sort them into piles that shared one particular odd characteristic or another, he concluded that either the official mint was not terribly fussy about the standard of its coins, or that most of these were fakes. Or more likely he didn’t know what he was doing. How foolishly overoptimistic he had been when he had walked along that street in Londinium telling himself that you didn’t need to know much to be an investigator.

  He arranged the coins into a grid and counted them. “You said there were forty-seven denarii?”

  “We spent one of them today,” said Tilla.

  He scooped the grid across the table with one hand and slid it toward the edge. “I’ll need to borrow all of this.”

  Camma shot a look at Tilla.


  “It is all right,” Tilla assured her. “He is honest.”

  As he got up to leave, he reflected on the very Britishness of that exchange. At home, he would have needed to offer a written receipt.

  “I’ll bring it back as soon as I can,” he promised.

  Tilla said, “I will walk toward the mansio with you. I must say hello to Serena before we go.”

  “We won’t be leaving early,” he told her. “I may have one or two things to finish off tomorrow.”

  Her face brightened. When she said, “So we can stay a little longer?” he knew she was not thinking of the inquiry, but of the baby.

  50

  As Ruso approached, the money changer’s eyes went straight to the clenched fist that was hiding Asper’s bag of cash, then flicked away as if he had noticed nothing. Satto propped his elbows on the counter, clasped both hands together, and rested his chin on them. “Welcome back, investigator. Congratulations. I hear the murderer stands accused and the tax will be paid. So what else can I do for you?”

  When they were alone Ruso said, “I’m just weaving in a few loose ends.”

  “And would that have something to do with what’s hidden in your hand?”

  Ruso was not sure how far the man could be trusted. On the other hand, if he went to Londinium to consult the procurator’s officials, he might not be allowed back. He brought his fist up over the counter and straightened his fingers. The little bag landed on the surface and slumped sideways.

  Satto smiled.

  Moments later Ruso watched in awe as the trick he had pretended to perform at the Blue Moon was enacted in front of him. Satto was sorting the coins into two piles, muttering, “Yes,” and “No,” and occasionally, “Hm,” as he pondered a coin, peered at it, weighed it against another, and even held it up to his nose and sniffed it. Eventually there were thirty-nine coins in the “Good” pile, seven classed as “No,” and one about which he seemed unable to decide. Reaching under the counter, he produced a small hammer and some sort of awl. He flipped the coin over. “Better not make a hole in the emperor,” he observed before tapping the awl into the surface.

  He handed the result across the counter. Where the damage was done, Ruso could see a glint of something beneath the surface that was not silver. That made eight fakes out of forty-six. He wondered which sort of coin Tilla had spent this afternoon, and how Camma would take the news that a sizeable chunk of Asper’s savings had just disappeared.

  “You could say,” said Satto, dropping the coin on the “No” pile, “That as long as everybody thinks it’s worth something, then it is. Only I wouldn’t agree with you because I can tell the difference.”

  “Do you ever get asked to pretend not to notice?”

  “I can’t pretend not to know what I know.”

  Ruso was not sure if he had just been given a lesson in coinage or in philosophy.

  “Where did you get this money?”

  Ruso had anticipated the question. “Londinium.”

  The man’s face betrayed nothing as he raked the “No” pile toward his side of the counter. “I’m sorry to say that someone in Londinium has swindled you. Julius Asper brought me a false coin from the same source a few months ago. If you can trace the forgers, they’ll be put before the governor and executed.”

  “They?”

  “It usually takes two men. One to hold the dies in position with tongs, one to bring down the hammer for the stamping. That’s always assuming one of them is the engraver, which isn’t always the case-it’s skilled work.”

  Ruso watched the “No” pile being placed on a workbench at the back of the office. “Don’t I get them back?”

  “It’s my duty to destroy false coins. I also destroyed the one Asper showed me.”

  “I’ll have to track down these people in Londinium once I’ve finished here. Tell me how they make the forgeries.”

  “These? A thin layer of silver stamped over a core of bronze. Sometimes they use iron, but there is the problem of rust.”

  “And they make the core-how?”

  “Usually in a clay mold: not as easy as it sounds. Your next question is, how does he engrave the dies for stamping the coin?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the answer is, not quite well enough. The S on HADRIANUS is damaged: I’d guess the engraver got confused when he was trying to reverse the shape and then had to correct it.” Satto picked up something that looked like a chisel. He placed a coin on the bench and aligned the edge of the chisel with its center. “But they are quite good,” he said, reaching for the hammer. “I wouldn’t like the procurator to think I was keeping them.”

  The sound of the hammer smacking into the head of the chisel must have been heard outside in the Hall. Ruso wondered what the guards would make of it.

  Only when he had finished mangling Ruso’s evidence did Satto say, “You should know that if Rome doesn’t send enough small change, a man who makes bronze coins is helping the soldiers spend their wages and his neighbors buy their bread.”

  “Does that happen?”

  “Not these days. And I’m talking about bronze, not silver. All I’m saying is, good men have made coins as well as bad.”

  Ruso got to his feet. “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”

  Satto handed him half of one of the ruined coins. “Two more things you should know, investigator. The first is that apart from the one Asper showed me, I’ve never seen denarii like these before in Verulamium.”

  “And the other?”

  “If a forger is caught, he has nothing to lose.”

  51

  The sooty-fingered boy who was mixing ink at the table in the Council clerk’s office had a lopsided mustache smeared beneath his nostrils. Ruso saw it just after the lad looked up in alarm and before the chain-mailed bulk of the guards came between them. Moments later the clerk was fiddling with the lock on Asper’s office door and muttering that this was all quite irregular: He had been told the investigation was over and he really needed permission from the quaestor.

  He need not have worried. The cramped space contained nothing but furniture and disappointment. There was no money stashed away anywhere. No discernable notes about evidence or investigations. No lumps of iron with hammer scars on one end and the emperor’s profile engraved in reverse on the other.

  Ruso put the last records box back on the shelf. Then he leaned against the wall, folded his arms, and stared around the room. If only he had Albanus here. Even if there were secrets hidden among the lists of names and figures in the records, the only thing Ruso could deduce from them was that neither Asper nor his brother was an overly tidy man.

  The desk where Asper must have sat was the larger of the two. Carved legs, polished sheen on the surface, set squarely in the middle of the room facing the door. Designed to impress. The one that must have belonged to Bericus was crammed into the corner and had a chunk of wood wedged under one leg to level it up. Asper had a brass inkstand, Bericus a simple pot. He imagined the brothers had argued over more than Camma.

  If only the man had spoken to her about his suspicions. If only he had left some hint of where he had found that coin mold. No one was going to admit to owning it, even if he could track down every metalworker in town to ask, and that would take hours. Camma’s neighborhood seemed to be full of them. The elderly bronzesmiths next door, the silversmiths farther down the street… then there were the repair shops and the wagon works at the stables, not to mention any number of forges scattered across the local farmsteads where smiths would call for trade or where laborers with some rudimentary skill might bash out repairs to damaged tools. It would be impossible to search them all and even if he did, what were the chances of him finding what the owners would be careful to hide?

  Ruso leaned back in the chair and scowled at the door handle. It was possible that he was wasting his time. He was not even sure that the forgery business had anything to do with the murders. Caratius was as likely to be guilty as not. One thing of whic
h he was certain, though, was that if he was going to find out anything else, he needed to do it quickly. He had fulfilled the procurator’s orders to look helpful. He should be on the way back to Londinium with a reassuring report about the links with Iceni. Tilla would be packing her bag in the morning and the Britons, to whom he had been seconded, were expecting him to leave.

  One of them was desperate for him to leave.

  For your own safety, get out of town.

  If only he could track down the person who sent that message, he might find out what was really going on here. Whatever it was, he was convinced that Dias was involved in it.

  52

  There was still plenty of daylight, but the bustle of the day was over. Workshops had fallen silent, children had been called indoors, and there was hardly anyone about as Tilla hurried across the Forum on the way back to Camma’s house. She had hoped the scribe’s office might still be open, but the shutters were already in place. There was no reason to linger. Ahead, she noticed one of Dias’s men staring at her from the doorway of the rooms the guards used as their headquarters. How long had he been watching her?

  She quickened her pace, telling herself he was probably just an ill-mannered man who was bored. Even though Dias could not be trusted, that did not mean all the other guards were corrupt too. She passed him and walked out under the arch to the street without glancing back.

  Back at the house, Grata would be preparing the evening meal. Tilla had turned down the Medicus’s invitation to dine with him in his grand suite of rooms tonight, preferring one last evening with Camma and the lovely baby. Ruso had accompanied her across to the mansio and then left her to talk to Serena while he rushed off somewhere like a dog on a fresh scent. She had no idea where he was going, nor what time he would be back.

  In the morning she would go with Camma to bury the ashes, and then talk to her about a name for the baby. Perhaps a name would mark a new start. After that she would go and visit the scribe again, and then she would be ready to leave for Londinium whenever her husband had finished his investigations.