A Body in the Bathhouse

by Lindsey Davis

  “If you want her, she’s yours,” I offered as we headed down the corridor.

  He looked rightly scared.

  With a sense that everything around me was going wrong, I set off through the internal corridor to the royal bathhouse. Alexas took a detour through the garden, looking for his stretcher-bearers, he said. He seemed to be avoiding this corpse with every possible excuse; it was odd, because when he showed me the body of Valla, the dead roofer, way back on my first day here, he had been perfectly composed.

  I went on ahead to the baths, where a shock awaited. I could appoint myself the project manager and imagine that I now ran this site—but Fate took a different view. My precautions had been thwarted.

  The entrance should have stayed roped off. My instructions last night had been clear. The rope was there all right. But it had been slung aside in an untidy heap, on top of which lay two battered tool baskets that contained a few chipped chisels, flagons, and half-eaten loaves. Squatting in the doorway were a pair of slack-mouthed, hopeless workmen. They were holding a wooden spar across the threshold, which gave the impression they were leveling or measuring. They did neither. One was deep in argument about some left-footed gladiator, while the other stared into space.

  “This had better be good!” I roared at them. My imitation of Mars the Avenger had all the effect of a warm-up act at a run-down theater in the off-season.

  “Keep your curls in, Tribune.”

  “You moved that rope?”

  “What rope? You don’t mean this one?”

  “Oh yes, I do. But you’re right—why not untie the thing? It will be a lot easier to use the rope to hang the pair of you!”

  They exchanged glances. They were treating me like any wild-eyed client at the end of his tether—with utter indifference.

  “What are your names?”

  “I’m Septimus and he’s Tiberius,” the spokesman informed me, implying that such a question was bad manners. I took out a tablet and pointedly wrote down the names.

  “Stand up.” They humored me. “What are you doing here?”

  “Spot of work required, Tribune.”

  “I don’t see you doing it!” I snarled. “You’re loitering at a crime scene, interfering with my security measures, allowing unauthorized access—and irritating all Hades out of me.”

  They pretended to look impressed. Big words and a bad temper were a novelty. I had plenty more of both to call on. And they had plenty of stubborn defiance.

  “Have you entered the baths since you took off the rope?”

  “No, Tribune.”

  “You had better hope I believe that.” I did not, but there was no point nit-picking. “Has anyone else been in?”

  “Oh, no, Tribune. Not with us sat here.”

  Wrong. At that moment my own sister marched out from the changing room behind them. She was carrying her personal oil flask and scraper and was livid. “This is a complete disgrace—there is no hot water and no heat at all in the steam rooms!”

  “My orders, Maia.”

  “Well, I might have known!”

  “There’s a dead man in the hot rooms—not to mention a killer preying on lone bathers. Did you go in past these two brazen layabouts?”

  “Well, I stepped over them,” Maia sneered.

  Septimus and Tiberius just smirked.

  Maia was storming off, but I held her back. “Is anyone else inside?” I asked.

  A guarded look crossed her face. “Not now.”

  “What do you mean? Was there someone?”

  “I thought I heard movement.”

  “Who?”

  “No idea, Marcus. I was undressed as far as my undertunic, just exploring the cold room—what a waste of time! I didn’t know who had turned up, so I kept quiet.” Maia knew what I thought about her visiting a mixed baths alone. She didn’t care. Being Maia, she might have enjoyed the frisson of risk.

  “Next time, drag Hyspale along to stand guard. You may like being leered at by lads looking for women in wet breast bands—but being spied on by a strangler would be a different beaker of maggots.”

  “I might just have heard these two messing about,” Maia returned, cheerfully implicating the workmen.

  “Oh, surely not,” I responded sarcastically. “Septimus and Tiberius would never spy on a lady, would you, lads?”

  They gazed at me, not even bothering to lie. Given the dopey way they were hanging about in the entrance when I turned up, playing at voyeurs probably never occurred to them. Besides, my sister exuded the air of a woman who would savage peephole spies.

  With a whisk of her skirts, Maia darted away back towards our suite. I let her go. I could ask more questions later, with Helena in support.

  Alexas finally turned up. When he saw the two workmen, I thought he looked slightly awkward. They were quite unabashed and greeted him by name.

  “You know these scoundrels?” I demanded angrily.

  “They work for my uncle.” Septimus and Tiberius watched our confrontation with the bright eyes of happy troublemakers.

  “Your uncle is the King’s bathhouse contractor?”

  “Afraid so.” Alexas sounded rueful. Well, I knew all about awkward relatives.

  “So where is this uncle?”

  “Who knows? He won’t be on-site!” A true professional.

  “What’s your uncle’s name?”

  “Lobullus.”

  No one I was after, then.

  I led the way indoors, heading a convoy that consisted of myself, Alexas, a couple of whey-faced lads carrying a pallet to remove the body, and the two workmen, both suddenly nosier about the corpse than they had professed to be about Maia.

  “And where were you last night, Alexas?”

  “It’s on my tablet.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “I went into Noviomagus to see my uncle.”

  “Will he vouch for you?”

  “Of course he will.”

  I never like family alibis.

  The vaulted rooms were colder than last night. Even with the furnace out of action, it takes a while for the fabric of a bathhouse to cool. A slight clamminess was creeping through the steaming suite. We reached the final chamber. The dead Pomponius was still lying as I left him, as far as I could tell. If anyone had been in here and tampered with the body, I would never prove it.

  Initially, there was no reason to think anyone had done that. Everything looked the same. After my companions finished exclaiming over the way the architect had been mutilated, they hoisted his corpse onto the pallet. I adjusted the small towel to cover his privates. Then I heard a rattle and something fell on the floor.

  “Oh look!” cried Tiberius helpfully.

  “Something was caught up in the poor fellow’s towel,” added Septimus, bending to capture the object and hand it obsequiously to me. Everyone else watched my reaction. A cynical informer might have thought it was a planted clue.

  It was an artist’s paintbrush. Tightly bound pig’s bristles with carefully shaped tips for delicate work. Traces of azure on the short handle: Was that blue frit? There were letters handily scratched there too. LL.

  Comment from me was unavoidable. “Well, that’s a curious hieroglyphic.”

  “Would it be the owner’s initials?” enquired Tiberius with almost intellectual interest.

  “Hey,” murmured Septimus, suddenly shocked. “You don’t think one of the site painters was responsible for the murder, Falco?”

  I had to hide a smile. “I don’t know what to think.” But somebody was trying very hard to tell me.

  “An architect wouldn’t bring a paintbrush when he came for a bath, would he?” Tiberius asked Septimus.

  “That painter in charge is called Blandus,” his mate answered. “So he’s not LL.”

  “You know, I believe it must be his assistant,” I broke in. Septimus, Tiberius, and even Alexas, whose role in this fiasco seemed the most subdued, all looked at each other and nodded, impressed by my deductive
powers.

  I held the brush in the palm of my hand, looking from the silent Alexas to his uncle’s two workmen.

  “Congratulations, Septimus. This seems to be an important clue—and you just helped me work out what it means.”

  I could see what it really meant. Someone was being framed.

  I seized the towel and shook it out, in case any other offerings had been deposited. Negative. I replaced the linen rectangle neatly over the dead architect’s loins. I signaled to the bearers to carry off the body.

  “So! It looks like that young painting assistant has killed Pomponius. There’s only one way to be sure. I’ll ask him to be a good boy and own up.”

  XXXIX

  IT WAS natural to retrace my steps down the corridor, via my own quarters. I needed to calm down. I found Helena and told her what had happened.

  “That paintbrush had arrived there since last night. Opening the baths so anybody could get in was deliberate, not just negligence by workmen. I’ve spent a morning allowing myself to be detained and delayed by Alexas—and I think by Strephon earlier. Half the project team must have been rushing around behind my back.”

  “To cause confusion? As a setup it’s not very subtle, Marcus. If the young painter is innocent—”

  “His innocence is not the point,” I said.

  Helena pursed her lips, her great eyes dark with concern. “Why do you think he has been set up as the culprit? He has offended someone?”

  “Well, he drinks, flirts, gets into scrapes, and hits people.” Mind you, Justinus still liked him, despite being punched. “Then, too, I have seen his work. He is a strikingly good artist.”

  “Jealousy?”

  “Could be.”

  “It sounds as if half the project team conspired to lay this false clue,” Helena said angrily. “So did the project team—or some of them—kill Pomponius?”

  “I’m not ready to decide.” My mood cleared slightly. “But one thing’s for sure, the project team really hates the new project manager.”

  Helena knew at once what I had decreed at that morning’s meeting. “I see! You want your own chance to be dogmatic and overbearing?”

  I grinned. “And I’m ignorant of professional practice too, as was pointed out. I’m perfect for the job. With these talents, I could have been an architect!”

  I had a quick word with Maia. She had little to add. Whoever she heard at the baths that morning had walked past the cold room briskly, then returned to the exit soon afterwards. That fitted. They must have gone into the hot rooms, dumped the brush, and done a flit.

  Now, Maia had reflected on how she would have felt if she stumbled on the dead man. She confessed that she regularly lurked in the bathhouse alone, at hours when she hoped no one else would be around. She had gone there last night, for instance, she told me guiltily.

  “This was after I left for Novio?”

  “After dinner.”

  “Stupid! Maia Favonia, your mother brought you up to know that bathing on a full stomach can give you a seizure.”

  “It can give you a lot of thinking time too,” Maia growled. I preferred not to know what she was thinking about. Exploring the dark elements of my sister’s soul would have to wait.

  “Strangers might assume you are making assignations.”

  “I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks.”

  “You never did! So you were at the crime scene last night, Maia. Tell me about that. Tell me every little detail.”

  Maia was now prepared to help. “I knew someone had gone through ahead of me. When I arrived, there were clothes in two of the bunkers.”

  “Two?”

  “I can count, Marcus.”

  “You can be rude too! Describe this clothing.”

  Maia had worked for a tailor in her youth. “Bright stuff in one—expensive cloth, untidily crammed in. Unusual; figured cloth, maybe with silk in the weft. In another row of bunkers, there was a plain white tunic—wool, a common weave—folded neatly, with a man’s belt on top.”

  “Was the expensive material dyed brown and turquoise?” She nodded. “Pomponius. So who was the other man? Could it have been Cyprianus, who discovered the corpse? Was your visit just before I came home from Noviomagus?”

  “No, quite a lot earlier.”

  “Before the crime was committed. Anyway,” I remembered, “Cyprianus was wearing blue last night. You never saw these men?”

  “I decided not to stay,” said Maia. “I reckoned they were in the hot rooms, but they could have stayed there for hours.” The three hot rooms lay in sequence, normal procedure for a small suite. People had to come out the same way they went in, meeting anybody following. A woman alone would not want to be relaxing in a tiny towel when men strolled back through.

  “So you decided not to wait?”

  Maia confirmed her reluctance. “I’m perished in this province. I could not face shivering in the cold room, applying my oil at a dawdle, while I waited to hear them leave. I thought I would go back this morning—but I’m still thwarted!”

  “Sweetheart, just be glad you didn’t trip naked into the last caldarium while Pomponius was croaking on the floor.”

  “He was a man,” said Maia grimly. “One who thought he ran the world—I expect I could have borne it.”

  I was leaving when she added in an offhand tone, “The one with the white tunic had hung a bag on the cloak hook.”

  She was able to describe it with the accuracy of an alert girl who took a practical interest. She described it so well, in fact, I knew whose bag it was.

  As I set off to go the painters’ hut, I saw that studies were afoot for incorporating the previous palace into the new design. Strephon and Magnus were in deep discussion while the surveyor’s assistant stood around meekly with measuring equipment.

  It looked a busier version of the scene I saw a few days ago. Magnus, distinguished by his smart outfit and gray hair, was setting up his elaborate diopter, while more junior staff had to settle for the basic groma. Some were responsible for raising twenty-foot-high marked posts that helped in taking levels, while others were awkwardly deploying a huge set square to mark a right angle for the initial setting-out of the intersection of the two wings of the new palace. As they struggled to work close up against the building, hindered further by its cloak of scaffold, I overheard Magnus telling them to dispense with the cumbersome square in favor of simple pegs and strings. He had straightened up and caught my eye. We exchanged cool nods.

  First things first. A fresh breeze riffled through my hair as I marched off to the hutments outside the west end of the site. I had crossed the great platform, striding over the flat area that would one day be the great courtyard garden and picking my way over the dug trenches of the formal west wing and the first blocks laid for its grand stylobate. There was action on-site, but it seemed subdued. I could hear hammering from the yard where I knew stone blocks were shaped and faced, and from a different direction came the rasp of a saw slicing marble. Sunlight, bright but in Britain not glaring, gently warmed my spirits.

  Ahead of me scavenging seagulls wheeled above the wooded area where the carts were parked. I could smell the wood smoke again from the camp. I walked up the track quietly, passing the mosaicist’s hut, which seemed devoid of life. I stopped at the adjoining home of Blandus and his lad. Its door was open; someone was inside. It was not Blandus.

  He had his back to me, but was standing at a slight angle so I could see he was working on a small still life. It was fresh fruit in a glass bowl. He had crated the arrangement of apples and was now adding delicate white lines to represent the ribs of a translucent comport. Unsure whether he had heard me, I stood still, admiring the flushed rotundity of the ripened fruit and the exquisitely hinted glassware. The young painter seemed absorbed.

  He was a big lad. I could see one protruding ear, half covered by unkempt dark hair that would have been improved by a serious trim and work with a teasing comb. His clothes were covered with multicolored pain
t splashes, though the rest of him looked clean enough, given that he was about eighteen and a thousand miles from home. He worked steadily, adept and confident. His design was already alive in his head, needing only those thoughtful, rhythmic brush strokes to create it on the wooden panel.

  I cleared my throat. He did not react. He knew I was there.

  I folded my arms. “Creativity for your own pleasure is a high ideal—but my advice is, never waste effort unless you persuade some half-wit client to pay for it.”

  Most painters would have spun about ready to thump me. This one only grunted. He kept going. The glass bowl acquired a thread of painted light to indicate a handle.

  “The project-team plotters have decided who eliminated Pomponius,” I said. “They’ve settled on the smartarse from Stabiae. A stippling brush with some incriminating initials has been dumped on the body—just where I was bound to find it and shriek, ‘Ooh, look at this!’ So tell me, smartarse: did you kill him?”

  “No, I bloody well did not.” The artist stopped painting and turned around to face me. “I was screwing a girl from a bar in Noviomagus—she wasn’t as good as I hoped she would be, but at least I can tell Justinus that I got there first.”

  I gave him a long cold stare. “The only good thing about that story is that you were screwing the floozy, not my brother-in-law.”

  “Plus another good thing.” He scowled, as unabashed as he had always been. “You know the story’s true, Falco.”

  I knew him, so I did believe it. He was my nephew Larius.

  XL

  ITOSSED HIM the brush from the bathhouse. He caught it one-handed, the other hand still holding the finer one he had been working with, plus his thumb pallette. “That’s your pig’s bristle?”

  “LL. That’s me. Larius Lollius.”

  “Thank Juno you were not born under a laurel tree,” I scoffed. “A third L would have been obscene.”

  “Two names are sufficient for me and Mark Antony.”

  “Listen, big shot, when you’ve finished aligning yourself with the famous, you are to get yourself to Novio and ensure that your luscious Virginia is not bribed to forget your romantic alibi.”