by Tom Harper
Levin pulled on a pair of latex gloves. He spun open one of the doors and slid out a long, stainless-steel tray. Abby fixed her eyes at a point on the wall, then inched her gaze down until she could see what lay there.
It wasn’t what she’d expected. A skeleton lay full length on the slab, its arms at its sides and its skull staring at the ceiling. The bones were dry, aged caramel brown. It looked more like a museum exhibit than a war crime.
‘This is what Michael brought you?’ A nod. ‘Did he say why he had it?’
‘He just wanted to know what I could tell him about it.’
‘And?’
‘The body belonged to an old man, probably in his sixties or seventies when he died. About six foot tall, well built. And murdered.’
A chill went through Abby. For a second she imagined Michael’s skeleton laid out on a slab somewhere, a pathologist describing his murder as just another fact to be recorded.
Levin didn’t notice. He leaned over the skeleton and pointed to the ribcage. ‘You see here? Sharp force trauma. The fourth rib’s been snapped off – you can see the break.’ He poked a rubber-gloved finger through the chest cavity. ‘There’s a linear defect on the back of the rib where the blade cut the bone on its way out. Went right through him.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Most likely that he was stabbed through the heart. From the front, based on the direction of the cut, with a big knife or a sword.’
With a shock, she realised Levin was smiling. ‘Is that funny?’
‘Not for him, I guess. But we’re not going to open a case on him any time soon.’
She still didn’t get it. ‘Why not?’
‘Because he died something in the order of seventeen hundred years ago.’
Levin walked over to the wall, pulled off his gloves, and washed his hands. When he turned back, the smile had gone and there were no answers in his eyes.
‘Michael brought you a skeleton he’d found that was murdered over a thousand years ago?’ Abby repeated.
‘I got curious, so I ran some common isotope analysis on his molars and his femur. According to the chemical signatures, he grew up around here, but spent his later life somewhere around the eastern Mediterranean, near the sea. Varied diet, so probably rich.’
He pointed to greyish patches of bone on the skeleton’s legs and arms, not smooth but mottled, like coral. ‘That’s woven bone – it grows in response to wounds or bruising. This guy lived a violent life, but always recovered. Until someone stabbed him through the heart.’
Levin crossed to a steel filing cabinet and extracted a folder. From inside came a sheaf of papers and a small brown object in a plastic bag.
‘There was this, as well.’ He slid out the object and laid it under a magnifier on the workbench. ‘It’s a belt buckle. Take a look.’
Abby put her eye to the glass. All she could see was a mottled brown blur, like a bed of autumn leaves. She moved the magnifier up and down until the image became clear. Letters had emerged from the background, crusted and incomplete, but still legible.
‘LEG IIII FELIX.’
‘It’s the name of a Roman legion,’ Levin translated. ‘The “lucky fourth”.’ He caught her surprise. ‘I looked it up on the Internet. Apparently, they were based in Belgrade, so not so far from here. If you look underneath the writing, you’ll see the legionary crest.’
Abby squinted at it. Again, rust distorted the image, but she could make it out. A lean lion, proportioned like a greyhound, with a dreadlocked mane hanging over its shoulders.
‘The NATO guys aren’t the first occupying troops in this part of the world,’ Levin said. ‘I guess this one got unlucky.’
She remembered something he’d said. ‘Why did you say murdered? If he was a soldier, and stabbed with a sword, couldn’t he have been killed in battle?’
‘Sure, I guess. I thought it would be unusual for a guy in his sixties to be on a battlefield, and the wound’s so clean and deep he probably wasn’t wearing armour. It’s just a hypothesis.’
She looked up from the buckle and back at the skeleton on the table. Dead eye-sockets stared up at her. A scratch on the forehead made it look creased in thought, as if having been pulled from the darkness he was squinting to see her.
Who were you? she wondered.
Who are you? the skull seemed to reply.
‘Did Michael say where he found the skeleton?’
‘He said he’d been up north, near the Serbian border. Bandit country. I didn’t ask why he was playing Indiana Jones there. Must have needed protection, though, because he arrived in a US Army Landcruiser. An American soldier helped bring the body in.’
‘Did you get his name?’
‘He left his autograph. Michael made him sign the paperwork, said it was better if his name wasn’t on the docket.’ Levin shuffled through the documents in the folder. ‘Here – Specialist Anthony Sanchez, 957th LMT.’
‘Do you know where I can find him?’
‘As far as I know, all the Americans are down at Camp Bondsteel, by Ferizaj.’ He could see what she was thinking. ‘Have you got a yellow badge?’
Yellow badges were what admitted you to KFOR bases. They were supposed to be limited to NATO personnel, but Michael had had one, somehow. He used to drop in on the bases to buy duty-free cigarettes and alcohol at the PX’s. Is that appropriate for a customs officer? she’d asked. Michael had just laughed.
‘Did you tell the police about this? After Michael was killed?’
‘I showed them the body, just in case it had anything to do with Michael. When they found out how old it was, they didn’t want to know – told me to send it to the cold-case squad. I didn’t mention Specialist Sanchez. I didn’t think it would do him any good.’
The clinical smell in the enclosed basement was beginning to make Abby light-headed. She desperately needed air.
‘Thanks for everything, Dr Levin. I hope I haven’t got you in trouble.’
‘I’ll be fine. Just make sure you don’t end up back here on my table. The sort of questions the police were asking when they came here …’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You might not want to know the answers.’
‘I need to know.’
‘I know.’ Levin locked the file back in the cabinet. ‘You have the look in your eyes. I see it all the time.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The look of someone chasing ghosts.’
Two-handed, Levin pushed the drawer back into its steel mausoleum and slammed the door shut.
XX
Constantinople – April, 337
THE MESSAGE IS waiting for me when I return home. Come to dinner at the palace tonight. It isn’t clear if it’s an invitation or an order, but I’m not going to refuse. My slaves spend the afternoon digging out the toga from the store cupboard where it’s languished, and scrubbing it with chalk to obliterate the stains. It takes us an hour of folding, tucking and cursing to remember how to make it sit right. My steward murmurs that I look splendid, just like the old days. He sounds wistful.
The Hall of Nineteen Couches stands in the palace complex in the shadow of the Hippodrome. A larger-than-life statue of Constantine with his three sons commands the entrance, staring down the length of the hall. In the apse at the opposite end, Constantine and his half-sister Constantiana lounge on the top couch like some incestuous pair of Egyptian gods. From there, the other eighteen couches run down the sides of the hall like the two straight tracks of the hippodrome. This is where the race is decided: the closer you are to the imperial couple, the nearer you are to winning. Constantine never used to like giving dinner parties: he hated having to rank the world so baldly. The sentimentalist in him couldn’t bear to see his guests’ disappointment when they found themselves next to the door; the pragmatist knew the value of uncertainty. You move more carefully when you don’t know where you stand.
I take my allocated place – second from the end, left-hand side, sh
aring the couch with a gaunt chancery official, who wolfs down his food as if he hasn’t eaten in a week; a senator from Bithynia; and a grain merchant who can only speak in bushels. I listen to his prattle about a blight in Egypt and whether the Nile flood will fail this year, as I scan the other guests. Eusebius is there, near the head of the room, deep in conversation with Flavius Ursus. I wonder what a bishop and a soldier have in common to talk about.
‘The price is already up five denarii from last month.’ The merchant tears into a skewered dormouse. Fat veined with blood dribbles down his chin. ‘It’s curious, you see? Usually in the spring the price drops as the seas open and the grain ships start to arrive again.’ He chuckles, as if it’s a riddle worthy of Daedalus. ‘Augurs and conjurors read the future in dead entrails and the flight of birds. I can read it in the price of wheat.’
I humour him – it’s the least painful option. ‘What do you see?’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ He looks at me as if I’m a child. ‘Trouble.’
At last the meal’s over. Slaves clear the platters away. Guests stand and begin to mingle. The grain merchant makes his excuses and escapes to the other side of the room, as bored of me as I am of him. I push forward to the front of the room, trying to catch Constantine’s eye, but the press of bodies is too thick. Instead, I stumble into a circle of men deep in a conversation. They fall silent when I intrude.
‘Gaius Valerius Maximus.’ It’s Eusebius, in a gold-trimmed toga hardly less grand than Constantine’s. Again, there’s an edge of ridicule in the emphasis as he says my last name. ‘Have you found the truth yet?’
‘I’m waiting for someone to enlighten me.’
‘One of our brothers in Christ was beaten to death with a statue of the philosopher Hierocles,’ Eusebius explains for the benefit of the others. ‘A notorious persecutor was sitting just behind him. The Emperor has ordered Gaius Valerius Maximus to find the killer.’
The knot of men around him nod seriously. They’re strange company for a bishop to keep: the Prefect of Constantinople; the Prefect of Provisions who oversees the bread ration; two generals whose faces are more familiar than their names; and Flavius Ursus, Marshal of the Army. Nothing in his face acknowledges the conversation we had yesterday.
Eusebius glides away to talk with a pair of senators who’ve accosted him. He seems to know everyone here. I spend a few more minutes with Ursus and the generals, discussing arrangements for the Persian campaign, its prospects, whether they can reach Ctesiphon by autumn. Just like the old days.
But something’s different. These are men at the peak of their powers – they should be brimming with confidence. Instead, they seem stiff and tentative. Even as they’re speaking to me, their eyes dart around the hall. At first, I assume they’re merely bored. But they’re not looking for someone to speak to: they’re watching everything. Who brushes whose arm. Who smiles, frowns, nods. Who makes a joke and who laughs.
The most powerful men in the empire, and they’re rigid with fear. The Emperor’s a colossus: if he falls, the carnage will be bloody and indiscriminate.
The crowd’s thinning. People are slipping away, making excuses. It never used to be like this. I carry on towards the front of the room, but Constantine seems to have left already, unheralded and alone.
I think I’ll do the same. I don’t know why Constantine invited me here, but it’s been a wasted evening. I turn to go and find my way blocked by a palace eunuch. He doesn’t say anything, but beckons me towards a side door artfully hidden behind a pillar. Two dozen jealous pairs of eyes watch me go, and note it.
After the smoke, scent and heat of the hall, the night air cleanses me. The eunuch leads me across an empty courtyard, through an arch and along an arcade to a door. Lamps burn in brackets on the walls; guards from the Schola stand erect, wraithlike in their white uniforms. The eunuch knocks, hears something inaudible to me, and gestures me to go in.
Of course, I’m expecting Constantine. Instead, sitting in a wicker chair with a blanket around her shoulders like an old woman, is his sister Constantiana. It must be some sort of dressing room: there are clothes strewn over the furniture, a pair of red shoes kicked into the corner. Two slave girls kneel beside her, stripping back the layers of paste and powder on her face like workmen restoring a statue.
‘I hear you have a new commission from the Augustus,’ she says without preamble. Always ‘the Augustus’, never ‘Constantine’ or ‘my brother’. ‘I didn’t think he had any use for you any more.’
She stares into a silver mirror on her dressing table without looking at me. Technically, she’s Constantine’s half-sister, though there’s less than half a resemblance. Her face is a long oval and flat; she used to be considered beautiful, in the featureless way some men like. She wears her hair in intricate braids, piled up on her head and wrapped around an ivory headband. The style’s too youthful for a woman her age.
I don’t think her comment wants an answer, so I don’t offer one.
‘I’m told the Augustus has you investigating murders now,’ she continues. ‘It must make a change from committing them.’
I bow and focus my eyes on a painting on the wall behind her. Three Graces: Splendour, Happiness and Good Cheer. A forlorn hope, in this room.
‘I obey the Augustus in all things. Always.’
Scraping off the cosmetics, one of the slave girls presses too hard. Constantiana winces; a spot of red appears on her bleached cheek. Without turning, she reaches across and plants an expert slap on the girl’s face.
‘I saw you at church with Eusebius of Nicomedia yesterday,’ I say.
No reaction. Why should she justify herself to me?
‘He had a lot to gain from Bishop Alexander’s death,’ I add.
‘He has a lot to gain whatever happens. He’s an exceptional man and he has a bright future.’
‘Unless he’s accused of murder.’
‘You wouldn’t dare.’
I think of the guards on the door. If I learned something she didn’t like, would I leave alive?
‘Constantine asked me to find the truth – however unlikely.’
I examine the three Graces again. The artist who painted them made some curious choices. Splendour is an elderly woman with long, silver hair and a face that looks as if a smile would break it. Happiness looks remarkably like the woman in front of me, a younger incarnation, whose proud eyes say that her greatest happiness is herself. Good Cheer is the only grace who resembles her eponym – but her face has been altered, inexpertly, so that her head’s out of line with her body. As if her neck’s been broken.
Constantiana catches my attention wandering. ‘Are you listening to me?’
‘Forgive me,’ I apologise. ‘I was remembering your wedding.’
Milan – February 313 – Twenty-five years ago …
The declaration they issue begins like this:
When I, Constantine Augustus, and I, Licinius Augustus, happily met in Milan, and considered all matters pertaining to the public good …
Constantine and Licinius – the last two emperors. Licinius, a peasant-soldier with a homely face and a depraved imagination, has succeeded Galerius in the East, while Constantine now rules the West unopposed. They come to Milan, six months after Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge, to divide the world between them. To cement the partnership, Licinius is marrying Constantine’s sister Constantiana. No one mentions that the last person to make a marriage alliance with Constantine’s family is now a headless corpse at the bottom of the Tiber. It’s a happy occasion.
And Constantiana looks radiant. At twenty-four, she must have worried that she’d be left on the shelf, a chip for a bargain never to be struck. At one stage there were rumours that Constantine might have offered her to me. Now she’s sister to one Augustus and wife to the other – the most powerful woman in the world, you might think.
In fact, she’s not even the most powerful woman in the room. Constantine’s silver-haired mother Helena sup
ervises the slave girls, who are combing and pinning Constantiana’s hair, while Fausta, Constantine’s wife, lounges on a couch and offers pointed compliments. How much improved Constantiana looks with her hair up; how well her dress disguises her flat chest; how lovely it is to see a mature bride. It doesn’t seem to inhibit them that Crispus and I are in the room, waiting to escort Constantiana to the wedding. They’re used to talking over children and servants.
The door bangs open. There’s only one man who could barge in to this gathering like that and, sure enough, it’s Constantine. He takes in the three women, spies me and Crispus in the corner and fixes his gaze on us for safety.
‘Gaius. I need you.’
Constantiana turns in her chair. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘Licinius is making trouble. He’s still willing to concede toleration of Christians, but he’s demanding that I offer to send Crispus back to Nicomedia as a hostage.’
‘Surely it’s not too much to ask,’ says Constantiana.
‘No.’ Helena’s tone allows no argument.
Constantine, who defers to no man on earth, struggles to defy his mother.
‘You weren’t so squeamish with me when you sent me to Galerius’s court,’ he complains.
‘That was a necessary gamble – now you have everything. You don’t need to take this risk.’
‘You’re speaking as if my future husband is some sort of murderer,’ Constantiana complains. ‘Why shouldn’t my nephew come to stay with us in the east?’
She might as well not have spoken. Helena crosses to Crispus and puts a protective arm around him. He’s thirteen now and growing fast, with an easy manner and a ready smile that make him the palace favourite.
‘Your only son,’ Helena reminds Constantine.
‘Your only son so far.’ Fausta rolls back on the couch and pats her belly, which has finally begun to swell under her dress. In my experience, there’s nothing so smug and anxious as a pregnant empress.
