Three Hands in The Fountain mdf-9

by Lindsey Davis

  'The nature of the crime, especially what Lollius told you about the mutilations that are carried out, indicates you are looking for a man.

  'The killer could be anyone, senator or slave. The one thing about him that you can safely deduce is that he does not look suspicious. If he did, the dead women would never have gone with him.

  'You know something about his age: these deaths go back years. Unless he started in his cradle, he must be middle-aged or older.

  'You and Petro both think he's a loner. If he was working with someone else, then after all this time one or other would either have made a mistake or let slip part of the story. That's human nature. The more people involved, the greater the chance of one getting drunk, or being spied on by his wife, or attracting notice from the vigiles on an unrelated charge. Shared knowledge spills out more easily. So you reckon it's one person.

  'You think he finds it hard to make social contact. The nature of the crime suggests its motive is sexual gratification, excitement through revenge.

  'If Bolanus is right that he lives outside Rome – which you are still considering – then he is someone with access to transport. So women like Asinia are being abducted near the Circus then taken elsewhere – whether they are still alive or already dead by then we don't know.

  'He can use a knife. He must be fit. Overpowering people, butchering them, and carrying their bodies, takes physical strength.

  'He lives somewhere he can be secretive. Or at least he has access to a bolthole. He has privacy for killing, and whatever else he does. He can store bodies while he starts disposing of them. He can wash himself and his bloodstained clothes without being noticed.

  'It does sound quite detailed,' Helena mused as she completed the picture for me. 'But it isn't enough, Marcus. Most urgently you need to know what he looks like. Someone must be able to describe him, though they obviously don't realise who he is. He can't be successful every time. He must sometimes have approached women who ignored him or told him to get lost. There may even be a girl somewhere he has tried to grab, who got away from him.'

  I shook my head. 'No one has come forward. Even Petro's famous advertisement in the Forum failed to produce any witnesses.'

  'Too scared?'

  'More likely it's never even occurred to them that the pest they escaped from might be the aqueduct killer.'

  'She would report him,' Helena decided. 'Men who shoo away muggers just snort and say "Ha! Let him give someone else a shock!" but women worry about leaving dangers for others like themselves.'

  'Women have a lot of imagination,' I said darkly. For some reason she smiled.

  I found myself glancing round the Circus at the audience nearby. I didn't see an obvious killer. But I did notice my old tentmate, Lucius Petronius. He was only a few rows behind us, talking gravely to his female companion about the race that was about to start. If I knew him, he was explaining that the Greens were disasters who couldn't steer a chariot straight even if they had the whole Field of Mars to do it in, whereas the Blues were a stylish, streamlined outfit who would wipe the floor with everybody else.

  I nudged Helena, and we smiled together. But we were saddened too. We were watching what was likely to become a much rarer spectacle: Petronius enjoying the company of his seven-year-old daughter.

  At his side Petronilla listened gravely. Since I last saw her she had stopped looking babyish and become a real little girl. She seemed quieter than I remembered her; I found that worrying. She had brown hair, neatly tied in a topknot, and solemn, almost sad brown eyes.

  They were both eating pancakes. Petronilla had managed quite nicely, for she had inherited her mother's daintiness. Her father had a sticky chin and honey sauce down his tunic front. Petronilla noticed this. She soon cleaned him up with her handkerchief.

  Petronius submitted like a hero. When his daughter sat back he slung an arm around her while she snuggled up against him. He was staring at the arena with a set expression; I was no longer sure he was watching the race.

  XXXIV

  Next day Julius Frontinus summoned us to a case conference. It was the kind of formality I hate. Petronius was in his element.

  'I'm sorry to have to press you, but I am being urged to produce results.' The Consul was being poked from on high, so he was Passing down the aggravation to us. 'It's now the eighth day of the Games -'

  'We already have a much better picture of what's been happening than when you commissioned us,' I assured him. It seemed unwise to argue that we had only been on his enquiry for four days. Always look ahead, or it sounds as if you're wriggling.

  'I expect that's how you normally lull your clients into a sense of security.' Frontinus seemed to be joking. But we did not bank on it.

  'Identifying Asinia gave us a good start,' declared Petro. More lulling. Frontinus remained unimpressed.

  'It has been suggested to me that we ought to aim to solve the problem by the end of the Games.'

  Petronius and I exchanged a glance. We were both used to impossible deadlines. Sometimes we met them. But we both knew never to admit they might be feasible.

  'We have had graphic evidence that this killer carries out his work during festivals,' Petro answered levelly. 'He snatched Asinia on the first day of the Ludi Romani. However, I am wary about assuming too readily that he is still here. Maybe he visited Rome for the opening ceremony only. Grabbed a girl, had his thrill, then left. Maybe once he had carved up Asinia, his bloodlust subsided until some future time. Besides, there is a theory that he does the carving up and dumping outside the city.'

  That was rich. It was Petronius who had insisted we should ignore that possibility on logistical grounds. When I had discussed it with Helena, she inclined to the theory that we were searching for a man who travelled to and fro, and I had a feeling she would be right.

  Given what I had heard about such men, I also thought privately: the corpse is only a week old yet. He has cut off one hand, but he could still be snuggling up to the rest of her in some lair.. . No. September was a very hot month.

  Frontinus was grumbling at us. 'I cannot have my enquiry put into limbo until the start of the next Games. If we do that, we lose impetus and the whole thing stagnates. I have seen it happen too often. Besides, what would it entail? That we allow the man an opportunity to kill some other girl during the Augustales opening ceremony?'

  'Too great a risk,' Petro agreed. We might have no choice.

  'That's the worst scenario,' I suggested, rousing myself to take part. 'But we don't plan to sit on goosedown cushions until October, just because our quarry might have left Rome.'

  'If he has, you ought to go after him,' said Frontinus.

  'Oh, we would, sir, but we don't know where to look. Now is the time to follow leads – and we do have some.'

  'Can we go through them?' The Consul's manner as always was brisk. He managed not to suggest he was calling us incompetent, although his presumption that professionals would be eager to supply exactly what he wanted did impose a strain. We would need to be sharp with this one. His standards were sky high.

  To start, I plied him with Helena Justina's summary of what we knew about the killer's personality. He looked pleased. This was well thought out. He liked its clarity and sense. Petronius assumed I was extemporising; he let me know by a frozen expression that he preferred not to have an imaginative orator for a partner. Still, he too recognised good stuff. He was only annoyed he had not thought of it first.

  Petro then did some fly work of his own. 'We know, sir, that Asinia disappeared somewhere between the apsidal end of the Circus Maximus, where she was last seen, and her home. She had set off heading north. She may have been abducted in the Press around the Circus, or later when she reached quieter streets. It depends whether this man works by tricking his victims, or if he just jumps on them. Falco and I will continue our nightly surveillance. Solid routine may throw up something.'

  'Solid routine,' repeated Frontinus.

  'Exactly,' said Petronius in
a firm voice. 'What I want to pursue as well is whether any of the commercial chair and litter hire men saw anything on opening night.'

  'You think it's one of the commercial transporters doing this?' We could see Frontinus immediately deciding to hammer the aedile who had responsibility for managing the streets.

  'It's an ideal cover.' Petro clearly had a ruse. Trust the vigiles; they have to invent a single hypothesis then prove it, whereas informers can cope with several ideas at once. When real life throws up something that departs from the vigiles' scenario, they come unstuck. Being Petro, however, his theory did sound apt. 'The chairmen can pick up the women without looking at all suspicious – and afterwards they have the means of conveying the corpses about.'

  'They tend to work in pairs, though,' I demurred.

  Petro went on levelly, 'Maybe we'll find in the end that a couple of them work as a pair for more than carrying. Julius Frontinus, I'll be making my own enquiries, but there are plenty of these characters. It would help, sir, if you could ask the Prefect of Vigiles to order an official survey.'

  'Certainly.' Frontinus made a swift note on a waxed tablet.

  'He needs to get the Fifth and the Sixth Cohorts on to it so we can cover both ends of the Circus. The killer may stick to a favourite route, but we cannot rely on that. The vigiles should also make enquiries among the night moths.'

  'Who?'

  'The Prostitutes.'

  'Ah!'

  'If this man approaches women regularly, one of themoths who flit around near the Circus must have encountered him.'

  'Yes, of course.'

  'He may in fact hate the professionals; he may prefer respectable women because they are cleaner, or less adept at escaping from trouble. Who knows? But if he hangs about a lot, then the night girls may know he exists.'

  It was my turn to make suggestions. Like Petro I adopted a pious manner. 'I want to look further into the water systems, sir. The engineer's assistant who came here, Bolanus, had some good ideas. He's willing to examine the aqueducts out in the country too, just in case our man's not a city boy. That's another reason we aren't rushing outside Rome ourselves; Bolanus may turn up something specific.'

  'Pursue it with him,' Frontinus commanded. 'I will give instructions to the Curator that Bolanus is to assist as we require.'

  'What about the magnificent Statius?' Petro enquired wickedly.

  Frontinus looked over the rim of his note-tablet. 'Suppose I say we have asked for Bolanus so as not to remove his superior from his more vital managerial work. What else?'

  'Make contact with the Prefect of Vigiles -'

  He nodded, though he looked as if he realised we were giving him the boring jobs while we escaped on our own. Still, we were confident the two contacts would be made. He would do it this very morning, then he would keep chasing the Curator and the Prefect for results. He had not minded us telling him his duties either; he accepted as much chivying himself as he handed out to us. For a man of his rank that was rare.

  We had hoped the enquiry was just taking off. The new evidence connected with Asinia seemed to give us a boost. It was temporary, though. We left the conference with Frontinus already aware we were bluffing, and as the next few days passed depression overtook both of us.

  Petronius wore himself out interviewing chairmen, which was dreary enough, and trying to interview streetwalkers, which was positively dangerous. He learned precious little from any of them. Meanwhile I eventually managed to make contact with Bolanus, who seemed to be always out on site now. When I did catch him, he appeared curiously deflated. He said he had been conducting searches of the castelli and other parts of the aqueducts out across the Campagna; as yet he had found nothing. I feared he might have been warned to be obstructive. Ready to bring in the full might of the Consul to lean on his superiors, I asked him straight, but Bolanus denied it. I had to leave him to it.

  We had hit a low point. It was one both Petro and I recognised. Unless we had some luck, this was as far as we would ever go. The Ludi Romani were trundling through their final days. The damned Greens were going to come out ahead of the Blues overall in the chariot racing. Several prized gladiators had suffered unexpected defeats and gone to Hades, breaking women's hearts and bankrupting their trainers. The dramatic performances were dire as usual. As usual nobody but me dared say so.

  And the case was slipping away from us.

  XXXV

  We were not going to complete the enquiry by the end of the Ludi Romani.

  I expected that Julius Frontinus would pay us off. Instead, he accepted that without further clues we were stuck. He cut our retainer. He gave us stern talks. Without a solution to offer the Emperor, he was deprived of glory too, so he must have felt he needed us.

  Our only advance was that Petro's enquiries drew out a few names of women who had gone missing in the past. Most had been prostitutes. Others in the same profession named them to us, and when we berated them for not reporting the disappearances to the vigiles, half the time they insisted that it had been done. (Sometimes there were children to care for; sometimes the women's pimps had noticed they had lost part of their livelihood.) Nobody had ever made a connection between the incidents; nobody had bothered much at all, frankly. It was difficult to put together a reliably complete file on the old cases, but Petro and I both felt there had been increasing numbers recently.

  'He's bolder now,' said Petro. 'Common pattern. He's almost defying discovery. He knows he can get away with it. He's addicted; increasingly he needs his thrills.'

  'He thinks he's invincible?'

  'Yes. But he's wrong.'

  'Oh? And if we can't find the crucial clue to his identity?' 'Don't think about it, Falco.'

  It was impossible to link either of the first two hands we had found to any of the missing women. To show willing, we did regularly copy our list of victims to Anacrites in case he could make a connection with anything reported to the Curator. He never responded. Knowing him, he never read what we sent.

  We had hoped the previous cases would throw up more information. It was hopeless. The abductions were too old. The dates were vague. The ethics of the profession discouraged the women's friends from helping. Seeing a whore approached by a man had hardly aroused other people's curiosity. All the women had apparently vanished off the streets without any witnesses.

  At least we had some progress to report to the Consul. At our next conference Petronius suggested to Frontinus that we should call on the vigiles to help us watch during the final night of the Games; he wanted to smother the area around the Circus with plainclothes observers keeping a special eye on the prostitutes.

  'The killer does not confine his attentions to prostitutes,' Frontinus reminded Petro. 'Asinia was perfectly respectable.'

  'Yes, sir. It's possible that Asinia was a mistake. She was alone, late at night, so he may have jumped to the wrong conclusions. Alternatively, he is now widening his interests. But the night moths working the colonnades are still the most vulnerable girls.'

  'How many registered prostitutes are there in Rome?' the Consul asked, ever keen on figures.

  'Thirty-two thousand at the last count.' Petronius made the statement in a typically calm manner; he left Frontinus to reach his own conclusions about the impossibility of protecting them.

  'And what is being done to discover whether any other respectable women have been similarly taken?'

  'My old second in command, Martinus, is now assigned to enquiries in the Sixth Cohort. He has been reviewing unsolved missing person reports and in likely cases the family is being re-interviewed. He thinks he has found one or two that may be aqueduct killings, but so far there is nothing definite.'

  'Should this have been spotted by the vigiles before?' Petronius shrugged. 'Maybe. You certainly can't blame Martinus because he was with me then up on the Aventine. Different officers took the reports, and over a long period. Besides, if a woman disappears during a public holiday, we first assume that she has run off with her lo
ver. In one or two cases, Martinus has found out that was true; the woman is now definitely living with a boyfriend. One has even returned to her husband because she and the boyfriend fell out.'

  'At least Martinus can close those files now,' I said.

  My own area of investigation was still the water supply.

  Bolanus grew tired of my nagging him. He was certain that there was no easy access to the aqueducts in Rome itself. Those which did not come in underground were carried on immense arcades which thrust across the Campagna on arches a hundred feet high. Once they reached the city they stayed high, to take them above the streets and to supply the citadels.

  Bolanus had been asking workmen he trusted whether our man might actually be employed by the water board and have gained admittance that way. If anyone had had doubts about a fellow slave Bolanus would probably have been tipped a wink. Corruption was rife on the aqueducts, that was understood. The willingness of water board officials to take bribes was legendary – and they knew how to be obstructive if the bribes were not forthcoming. But perverted killing is a special crime. Anyone with real suspicions about a colleague would have turned him in.

  Julius Frontinus began to show an interest in Bolanus. He was intrigued by the system, and drew up his own sketch plans. One day Bolanus took the two of us to see the crossover of the Aqua Claudia and Aqua Marcia, to demonstrate his theory that severed limbs might start out in one channel but be transferred later to another, confusing us about their real source.

  Bolanus took us into the channel of a branch of the Marcia. It was about twice the height of a man, flat-roofed, and lined with smooth, continuous waterproof cement.

  'Lime and sand, or lime and crushed brick,' Bolanus told us, while we were reaching our destination through a manhole above. 'Watch your step, Consul – It's laid in layers. Takes three months to set. The last lot is polished to mirror brightness, as we call it.'

  'Seems a lot of effort,' I remarked. 'Why is the water board such a keen housekeeper?'