Caveat Emptor

by Ruth Downie

  “Good point.” Ruso checked again that there was nobody listening outside the window before settling himself into Bericus’s chair and tipping it back so it was balancing on two legs. “Nico doesn’t think Caratius had anything to do with the murders,” he said. “If that’s true, then he hasn’t got the money. I think the brothers were killed because Asper was on the trail of the forgery. But I can’t tie the forgery or the murder to Dias, and I can’t find the money if I can’t work out the sequence of events, and I can’t hang around here much longer with somebody threatening Tilla and the Council and the procurator both telling me to get out of—aargh!”

  He grabbed the edge of the desk to steady himself and rocked the chair forward to a safer angle. “Out of town,” he concluded. “Nico was coerced into taking Asper to the strong room, presumably to make it look as though Asper was taking the money. But Camma’s certain he never took it. Now Nico says he doesn’t know where it is.” Ruso looked up. “You don’t suppose it’s still in the strong room after all?”

  Albanus stared at him. “Well, if it is, sir, why would the Council say it’s missing?”

  “Because Nico told them it is. It’s his job to keep track of what’s in there.” He paused. “You don’t think they’re all lying because they don’t want to pay up, do you?”

  “But they always pay up.”

  “Exactly. Verulamium always pays on time. So when Hadrian canceled everybody else’s tax arrears, they must have been mightily annoyed.”

  “There’s only one thing for it, sir.” Albanus’s tone was resigned, but Ruso recognized the light of battle in his eyes. “I’m going to have to do a complete audit.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “I don’t know, sir. But I can add and subtract, and it can’t be that difficult, can it?”

  Having listened to Nico’s explanation of how the Council ran its finances, Ruso decided not to answer. Albanus reached for a records box and began to riffle through it, muttering about confirming the balance due.

  “I’d imagine Dias found out that Asper was sending coded letters to Londinium,” said Ruso. “A forger would have no problem opening somebody’s correspondence and resealing it. Anybody who can make a fake coin can make a fake seal, but if he couldn’t read the code he wouldn’t know whether Asper was writing about him or not. No wonder he was prowling around Londinium trying to find out.”

  Albanus reached up onto a shelf. “It’s especially easy to intercept a man’s letters if he leaves his seal lying around instead of wearing it, sir.”

  Ruso peered at the ring Albanus was holding out to him and wondered how he could have missed it during his search yesterday. He carried it across to the window and looked at it again. Then he slid it onto his little finger and twisted it around so the stone was hidden in his palm. “Wait here a minute,” he said.

  Satto the money changer halted his queue when he saw Ruso approach.

  “Take a look outside,” Ruso urged, stepping past the counter to the window at the back of the office and glancing over his shoulder to where Dias was watching from the doorway.

  “What for?”

  “Quick,” Ruso urged, placing his own hands up on the high sill and leaning out. As he had hoped, Satto did the same. “Over to your left,” said Ruso, pointing. “See?”

  “What?” demanded Satto, craning for a better view of the unrelenting British clouds.

  “Damn,” Ruso muttered. “It’s gone now.”

  “What’s gone?”

  “I thought I saw an eagle,” said Ruso. “It’s a good omen. But I might have been mistaken.” He apologized to the queue on the way out, ignored Satto’s confused shout of “Which way was it flying?” and nodded to Dias, who was hopefully none the wiser despite having witnessed the whole exchange. Then he hurried back to tell Albanus that the seal he had found in Asper’s office was not Asper’s seal. It was a replica of the one on the hand of Satto, the man who authenticated the bags of money stored in the strong room.

  “Oh, no,” groaned Albanus, uncharacteristically despairing. “Sir, every time I start to get a grip on what’s going on here, it changes shape. So was Asper up to something himself? Authenticating fake money, perhaps?”

  “Possibly. Or somebody wants us to think he was. I’m sure that ring wasn’t in here when I looked before.”

  “Perhaps Asper and his brother were working with Dias and they fell out.”

  Ruso shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ll try and have another go at Nico but we need to find out what’s in that strong room. Preferably not when Dias is around.”

  “This evening?”

  Ruso shook his head. “I’m supposed to be dining with one of the magistrates tonight,” he said. “Which reminds me, I’ve got another job for you while I’m there.”

  “Sir, I may not have finished the audit by this evening.”

  “Oh, you can take some records with you. This is guard duty. I want you to look after the two witnesses you saw earlier in the hall.”

  “Me, sir? The ladies? Are you quite sure?”

  “You’re an intelligent man with military training. I can’t think of a better man for the job.”

  It was so easy to make Albanus happy. In truth Ruso could not think of any other men at all for the job, but he was not going to say so.

  58

  R USO HAD NOTED before how the arrival of an infant released a deluge of washing. Rows of it were dripping into the vegetable patch behind Asper’s house, and when he queried Grata’s absence, he was told she had gone to take bedding to the laundry.

  “I was hoping the three of you would stay together.”

  “I asked her to stay,” replied Tilla, holding up a bone-dry linen towel and pulling it to tug out the creases before folding it and adding it to the pile beside her. “She is nothing but bad temper. I offered to help her turn out Bericus’s room this afternoon, but she says I will only get in the way.”

  “She is upset,” put in Camma from beside the hearth. She had removed the baby’s swaddling to massage his limbs, just as Ruso had read in the textbook. “She has a kind heart underneath.”

  Tilla reached into the basket for another towel. “I hope so. Did you find the man who sent you the strange letters, husband?”

  Ruso helped himself to a stool. “Yes, but he doesn’t know who attacked you.” Their eyes met and he knew she understood that there were things he could not tell her in Camma’s presence.

  Tilla grasped a crumpled linen undertunic in both hands and snapped it out flat. The sound startled the baby, who flung his arms into the air. Ruso suspected that Grata was not the only woman here who was in a bad temper. The bluebells had been received politely, but without the gratitude a man deserved for being seen carrying a bunch of flowers through the streets. He wondered if his wife was jealous. She would be returning to Londinium tomorrow, leaving Grata here with the baby and the woman who had become her friend.

  He felt partly responsible for Grata’s bad temper. Her upset state was his own fault. The sight of Bericus’s body would have shaken anyone, let alone somebody who had shared a home with him. Even Dias had seized her by the wrist to try and keep her away. Later he had rebuked Ruso for allowing her forward.

  Something whispered at the back of Ruso’s mind. For a moment he could not think what it was. He ran over his thoughts again, trying to catch it. It was something Albanus had said this morning. Albanus was alone in the hall with Camma because the other one left to go off and argue with your guard chap.

  He looked up. “Camma, what’s the connection between Grata and Dias?”

  “Who knows?” she said lightly. “One minute they are friends, the next not. He is not the sort of man to settle with one woman. Why do you ask?”

  Tilla said, “That is another reason for her bad temper. Camma, where do you want me to put these clothes?”

  The two women carried on discussing the domestic arrangements as if nothing had happened. Meanwhile Ruso was considering the sudden collap
se of the case against Caratius. Nico had already suggested that Caratius knew nothing about the murders. Anyone could have put the body on his land. The only real evidence against him was the message luring Asper and Bericus out of town. The message that only Grata had heard. Now it seemed that same Grata was close to Dias. What if Dias had persuaded her to lie?

  A further thought struck him. Grata had been in the room when they had been discussing the coin mold. If she had told Dias, then he would know they had found the evidence of forgery.

  Ruso would say nothing to Camma. He might be wrong. Even so, he would warn Albanus before leaving him in charge here this evening. Grata could not be trusted.

  On the way out he beckoned Tilla into the garden. Gavo’s large form stood awkwardly amid the washing as he kept guard over the back of the house. When Ruso explained that he would like a moment alone with his wife, Gavo nodded and made his way back through the alleyway toward the street. Ruso noticed he did not look at Tilla. After the way she had stalked them through the woods on the way to dinner with Caratius, he probably thought she was dangerously unstable.

  When they were alone together beside the bean patch, he gathered her into his arms. He kissed her for the benefit of anyone who might be snooping before murmuring his suspicions about Grata.

  “Dias is definitely involved in forging money,” he said, “but I can’t get any more names out of Nico.”

  She nibbled his ear and breathed, “It must be a man. A woman working in a forge would be noticed.”

  He let her think he had already considered that possibility and dismissed it.

  “What about the other man Dias was with when I found them stealing the furniture?”

  “What other man?”

  She broke away from him. “Wait here.”

  She ran back into the house, and returned to whisper, “Camma says his name is Rogatus.”

  “The overseer at the stables?” Ruso stared at her. Several things fell into place. Rogatus could intercept the post. He had access to a forge at the vehicle repair workshop. It was Rogatus who had sworn that Asper said he was going to Londinium and had sent him out in a carriage without even the basic protection of a driver. At last this wretched business was starting to make some sense.

  He grasped both her hands. “Promise me you’ll stay in the house till I come and collect you,” he said. “And dress for dinner.”

  59

  T HERE WERE MANY reasons why Ruso was glad he was not the emperor, but one that he had never considered until this evening was that the more power you appeared to wield, the more determined people were to impress you in inappropriate ways. The conversation in the dining room of Gallonius’s town house was conducted across a fleet of little tables while the staff appeared to be carrying out an experiment to see how much could be loaded onto each one before its expensively spindly legs gave way.

  It was hard not to conclude that the food and wine had been arranged by Gallonius while the delicate furnishings and the tasteful red and marble effect walls had been the choices of his wife, a small pale creature whose skin seemed barely able to stretch over her bones and whose conversation consisted mostly of, “Yes, dear.” She did manage to ask Ruso whether he was finding Britannia rather cold and should she ask for more coals on the brazier, but when he assured her that he was quite warm enough, her husband said, “Our guest’s been here before, woman. Right up on the border. He knows what cold is.”

  The wife retreated back into, “Yes, dear.”

  “Boy? Go and see if the piglet’s done!” Gallonius gave a sonorous belch, sighed, and explained that he was a slave to his digestion.

  “My poor husband has been to all sorts of doctors,” ventured the wife, perhaps feeling this was a safe subject on which to expand, “but they can’t do anything for him.”

  Gallonius said, “My father was just the same,” as if eating too much and too fast were passed from father to son like a family heirloom.

  Tilla reached up to check that the bluebells were still tucked into her hair and said innocently, “Have they recommended any special diets?”

  As the staff began to clear the tables, Gallonius and his wife began to describe the various regimes he had followed in the hope of relief.

  Ruso was not listening. Now that Tilla had given him the final name, it was all beginning to make sense. Realizing—perhaps with Grata’s help—that the tax man was on their trail, the forgers had arranged to murder Asper in such a way as to make it look as if he had run off with the tax money. Asper would be lured out of town by a false message to visit Caratius. Rogatus would tell everyone that he had gone to Londinium, but in fact he and Dias would have intercepted him just outside of town.

  Things had gone wrong. Perhaps they had not been expecting Bericus to go too. Somehow Asper had escaped. The killers had also underestimated Camma. Instead of going to the local guards, where her testimony would have sunk without a trace, she had traveled twenty miles to appeal to the procurator.

  The trouble was, if everybody stuck to their lies, he could not prove any of it.

  Ruso was wondering what Dias was up to this evening—the guards currently waiting to escort them home were strangers—when a roasted piglet appeared on the table in front of him, accompanied by the sort of silence that told him his host was waiting for a reply.

  The tentative “Er—” was a mistake. It implied that he had heard the question and was considering the answer.

  “Have a try,” urged Gallonius, failing to stifle another belch.

  It was Tilla who saved him. “It is no good asking my husband to guess what is in there,” she said. “He is from Gaul, where the food is very strange and has different names.”

  It was their host’s turn to say, “Really?”

  “Oh, yes,” Tilla assured him. “When I cook for him, I have to tell him what he is eating.”

  Gallonius threw his head back and guffawed. His wife smiled wistfully, as if she wished she understood the joke. Tilla adjusted the bluebells again and grinned at her husband. Gallonius answered his own question with obvious pride and a servant stepped forward with a carving knife.

  Musing while he ate, Ruso wondered how anyone could think that the best way to astonish and delight a visiting official was to see how many items of unrelated food could be crammed inside a deceased piglet before it exploded under the strain.

  “Well!” exclaimed Gallonius as the debris of honey cakes dipped in wine was cleared away and Ruso was congratulating himself on having politely managed a taste of everything, “I’d imagine that’s better than you got from old Caratius.”

  “Much better,” said Tilla, dabbling her fingers in the bowl of water the servant was holding in front of her. “More food and no bodies.”

  Ruso wondered how much wine she had drunk.

  “Our guards frightened Caratius’s mother,” she added.

  “A very sad case,” put in the wife, seizing on another safe subject. He never brings her into town these days, does he, dear? She wanders off looking for the family silver.”

  “She’s been dotty for years,” said Gallonius. “His father only married her because she convinced him the silver was really there. Of course, they never found it. I expect the Iceni had it. If it ever existed.” He turned to Tilla. “Which reminds me, my dear. It’s very good of you to look after that girl, but you should be careful. The Iceni can’t be relied upon.”

  The awkward silence that followed was broken by the slaves carrying out the last of the empty tables and Gallonius announcing, “And now …” in a tone that sounded alarmingly as if they were about to reappear with more food on them. To Ruso’s relief he was only announcing that the ladies could withdraw next door while the men talked about things that would not interest them.

  Tilla said, “What things?”

  “Off you go, wife,” Ruso urged her. “Perhaps you could ask the cook for the piglet recipe.”

  Gallonius’s wife dipped her thin fingers in the water bowl, rose from her c
hair, and began to drift toward the door. Tilla followed, but not before giving her husband a look that said he would be hearing about this later.

  As soon as the door had closed behind them, Gallonius sat up straight and said, “I hear you’ve brought in an assistant.”

  “He’s taking a look at the finance records,” said Ruso, adding, “I’ve spoken to Nico,” as if the two facts were related and Nico had given his blessing to the audit.

  “Is that really necessary?”

  “Yes. You need to be careful what you say about Caratius. Some new information has come up.”

  Gallonius’s eyes widened. “What sort of information?”

  Ruso decided not to name his suspects in case Gallonius tried to interfere. “I can’t explain until I’m certain,” he said, “but Asper’s death may have been nothing to do with Caratius. I think there was something illegal going on and Asper got mixed up in it. As Nico’s off sick I’ll need your permission to go into the strong room.”

  Was that a brief hesitation before Gallonius stifled a belch and reached for his wine? “We’ve nothing to hide,” he said. “I’ll take you in there myself tomorrow morning. But don’t be fooled by the amount you find down there. Everything we have is set aside for some purpose or other. Did Nico tell you we have a generous fund to provide bread and schooling for orphans?”

  “I did hear you have a fund for the theater.”

  “A lot of the money for the theater is still just promises, I’m sorry to say.” The magistrate called for one of his servants to come and adjust his cushions before leaning back and removing his belt. “If you’re right, and Caratius doesn’t have the money, where is it?”

  “I’m working on that.”

  “We shall struggle if the procurator expects us to make up the missing payment. There will be a lot of dissatisfaction.”

  “Yes,” said Ruso, “that’s more or less what Caratius said right back at the start of this.”

  Gallonius looked up. “I hope you don’t think, Investigator, that this is some sort of elaborate ruse to defraud the procurator.”