Ruso and the River of Darkness

by R. S. Downie

  ‘That depends on how he died,’ said Ruso, hoping it was not Asper at all. No matter what Tilla said, the wife clearly did not think she would be better off without him.

  ‘Does it matter how he died?’

  ‘I’ll let you know,’ promised Ruso.

  The body was in a narrow and vile-smelling alleyway that ran up from the docks between the yard of the Blue Moon – the inn he had seen from the ship yesterday – and the back wall of a stable block. It was indeed that of a tallish, thirtyish, brown-haired man who was greying at the temples and had a crescent-shaped scar under his right eye. Apart from a flushed complexion and the awkward angle of his head, he looked as though he had chosen this soft patch of mud at the foot of a damp wall to settle down, close his eyes and worry about his problems. After shooing off a gaggle of curious children, Ruso crouched beside him and slid two fingers behind the jaw in what he knew would be a futile hunt for a pulse. The chill of the clammy skin and the stiffness of the corpse suggested the man had been dead for hours. Despite that, neither his cloak nor his sturdy new boots had been stolen.

  ‘Is that him, then, boss?’ The innkeeper who had reported the find was one of the people Ruso had approached during yesterday’s search: a round-shouldered optimist who seemed to think that combing the remains of his hair forward would hide its retreat underneath.

  Ruso pulled the thin blanket up again so that only the head was showing. He beckoned to one of the Procurator’s Income clerks, who was standing in the sunshine at the foot of the alley with a couple of porters. The man picked his way through the mud with obvious reluctance, gave a quick look and confirmed that this was the man who had delivered taxes from Verulamium. Moments later Ruso watched him hurry away with orders to tell Firmus that Asper had been found, and that a full report would arrive later. He would give the wife the bad news himself. Then he would have to resume the hunt for Bericus.

  ‘Glad to be of service, sir,’ said the innkeeper. ‘I thought he was a drunk to start off with, but he looks too good, don’t he?’

  Good was a relative term. ‘It was you who found him?’

  ‘First thing this morning, when I come out to empty the slops.’

  No wonder the alley smelled so bad.

  ‘We sent a message straight off, in case it was your man.’

  Instead of replying, Ruso bent to examine the pattern of nails in the victim’s boots. Then he checked to remind himself what his own footprints looked like and surveyed the mud of the alleyway. ‘Show me your shoes.’

  ‘Very clever, sir,’ observed the innkeeper. ‘I can tell you’re an investigator. Looking for footprints, eh?’

  Ruso walked the short distance to the top of the alley, looked both ways along the street and strolled back again.

  ‘Any luck, sir?’

  ‘Can’t say,’ lied Ruso. Any footprints that might have led to a villain had been obscured, by either himself, the Procurator’s man, the curious children or the innkeeper. The innkeeper seemed to have circled round the body several times to view it from different angles and run up and down the alleyway, perhaps in search of help.

  ‘Can you get him moved, sir? I got work to do, and the wife don’t like cooking with a body round the back.’

  Ruso got to his feet and beckoned to the slaves he had borrowed from the Procurator’s office. They were carrying one of the builders’ ladders, pressed into service as a stretcher. ‘You found him first thing this morning? So he’d been out here all night?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, sir.’

  ‘Did you hear anything out here after dark?’

  ‘Not a thing, sir. Well, no more than usual. Usually something or other sets the dog going, but they clear off once he starts.’

  ‘And you’ve never seen him before?’

  ‘Never, boss. I’d have told you yesterday.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ruso, reaching up to trail one finger along the soft moss growing on the high wall of the inn yard. As he did so, a furious, deep-throated barking erupted. He withdrew the hand as something began to scrabble at the wall from the other side.

  ‘It’s all right, Cerberus!’ shouted the innkeeper. ‘Settle down!’

  The din subsided, and Ruso turned to help his stretcher-bearers. ‘Doctor Valens’ house,’ he ordered them. ‘Go straight to the surgery entrance, not the main door. Tell whoever answers that it’s from Ruso and not to say a word to the rest of the house. I’ll sort everything out when I get there.’

  The slaves set off to carry the remains of Julius Asper down the alleyway. Ruso examined the area where he had been lying. It was just as wet as the ground around it.

  ‘Now that you’ve found him, sir,’ prompted the innkeeper, ‘who do I see about the reward?’

  Ruso leaned back against the wall and checked that his knife was in place before folding his arms in a deliberately casual stance. ‘You won’t be getting the reward,’ he said. ‘It’s more likely you’ll be tried for murdering him.’

  ‘Me, sir? Oh no, you’ve got that all wrong!’

  ‘What was he doing in your yard?’

  The innkeeper opened his mouth to protest further. The only sound that came out was a faint squeak. He gestured towards the mud as if expecting it to answer for him. Finally he exhaled. ‘It’s not how it looks, sir. I swear.’

  ‘I hope not.’

  ‘It’s the wife, sir. I told her not to get involved, but she’s soft-hearted. Three-legged dogs, pigeons with broken wings – you name it, she takes it in. She’s soft, see? I keep telling her, it’s no good being too soft. Now look what’s happened.’

  ‘I’ll need to talk to both of you.’

  ‘Me, I said we should tell you the truth straight off. It was her what said nobody would believe us. And we was only trying to help him, poor bugger.’

  Whatever their intentions, Asper was beyond help now.

  The innkeeper was shaking his head. ‘I knew it would never work,’ he continued. ‘I told her, we don’t know nothing about this sort of thing. Footprints and so on. We never thought about footprints.’

  Ruso said nothing. They had not thought about the man’s clothes, either, which had been dry despite the rain in the early hours of the morning. Nor had they noticed that the efforts to heave Julius Asper over their yard wall had scraped off some of the moss, which had landed in the mud beneath him. Since nobody else could have got past the dog, they were the only plausible culprits.

  The man ran one hand through his hair, then hastily smoothed it forward over the bald patch. ‘How much trouble are we in, sir?’

  ‘That depends what you’ve done,’ said Ruso. ‘And don’t waste my time with any more tales, because you’re an even worse liar than I am.’

  11

  Since coming back to Britannia Ruso seemed to have discovered an ability to frighten people. Yesterday he had scared off two small boys in the street, and today he had managed to terrify an innkeeper’s wife. She now sat opposite him, weeping over a kitchen table still scattered with vegetable peelings and cat hairs. The husband sat next to her, grim-faced. His defence for dumping a dead man and then pretending to find him again seemed to be that they were only trying to help and: ‘We didn’t know what else to do.’

  Privately Ruso felt that this sentence would have been more honest if it had ended: ‘we didn’t know what else to do to get the Procurator’s reward’, but for the moment he was more interested in finding out what the elusive Julius Asper had been doing here all alone in the first place.

  ‘One of the boatmen sent him here yesterday morning,’ said the innkeeper.

  ‘Which boatman?’

  The man shook his head. ‘He weren’t looking too well even then. Said he’d got a headache. And he didn’t have no luggage.’ He gestured towards his wife. ‘If I’d been here I’d have sent him packing, but she felt sorry for him.’

  The wife sniffed. ‘He looked awful poorly, sir. I said we’d call a doctor, but he said no. I did ask, sir.’

  ‘He wanted a
private room so he could lie down till he felt better. And if anybody come calling, we was to say he weren’t here. So we did.’

  ‘Did he say why?’

  The wife shook her head. ‘I gave him a cold compress for his head, sir. I thought I was doing right.’

  ‘Did he mention anyone else? Another man? Or a woman?’

  ‘No, sir.’ She looked at her husband. ‘I knew we should have called a doctor.’

  ‘He didn’t want a bloody doctor!’ snapped the husband. ‘He didn’t want anybody. We done everything he asked and then he went and died on us.’

  ‘So when I came looking for two men yesterday …’ prompted Ruso.

  ‘If he’d died a bit earlier you could have had him,’ said the man. ‘We wouldn’t have had none of this bother.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have had it if you’d told me the truth in the first place. Somebody might have been able to save his life.’

  ‘We didn’t know you was official.’

  ‘I told you who I was,’ Ruso pointed out.

  ‘But how did we know you wasn’t lying?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Ruso, losing patience, ‘when I told you, if you saw either of them, to send a message to the Procurator’s office?’

  The man said nothing. The wife wiped her eyes on her apron. Ruso glanced across to where a row of small scraggy creatures had been skewered along a spit and were now shrivelling and browning above the fire. In the absence of fur or feathers it was hard to guess what they were, and probably wiser not to speculate.

  ‘Go back to this headache for a minute,’ he said. ‘Did he complain of anything else? Nausea, disturbed vision, fever? How about a slurred voice? Difficulty moving? Nosebleed, ear discharge?’

  ‘He just said it was a headache,’ said the man. ‘We don’t poke our noses into –’

  The wife clutched at his arm to stop him. ‘Not fever, sir,’ she said. ‘I know fever when I see it. He did have a bit of a limp, but I didn’t see any of them other things.’

  Ruso nodded. Perhaps the body would reveal more when it was properly examined. ‘So you found him dead after I’d gone?’

  ‘About the third hour of the night I saw a light under the door,’ the man explained. ‘I went in to make sure he weren’t asleep with the candle lit. You can’t be too careful in a place like this. And there he was, halfway out of bed. Staring at me. Stone dead.’

  The wife shuddered. ‘I had to shut his eyes, sir. It was horrible. We didn’t know what to do.’

  Despite this repeated claim, it seemed to Ruso that at least one of them had known exactly what to do.

  ‘So we went through his clothes,’ said the man. ‘Trying to find out where he come from, see? If he had any family.’

  Or if he had anything worth stealing. ‘And what did you find?’

  ‘Nothing, sir. He didn’t have a thing except what he was standing up in when he come.’

  ‘So, assuming for a moment that you’re telling the truth, whose idea was it to dump him in the alley and claim the reward as if you’d never lied to me?’

  ‘Hers,’ said the husband, just as the wife said, ‘It was him.’

  Ruso got to his feet. ‘Show me his room.’

  The room was as drab and poky as he had expected from the state of the kitchen. The door opened outwards to avoid collision with the furniture. What looked like an old sail sagged between the rafters, presumably nailed up to hold back draughts but now giving the impression that a heavy shower of dirt would fall on to the guests below if it were moved. The bed itself filled most of the room and was wide enough to accommodate several sleepers huddled together for warmth under the single blanket. There was only one pillow, with an unpleasant stain in the dent where a head would have been.

  On the floorboards next to the bed a chipped cup was still half full of water. Ruso sniffed it, and was none the wiser. The rough wooden box crammed in against the far wall contained only a broken comb.

  ‘We haven’t touched nothing, sir,’ said the man.

  Ruso did not greatly want to touch anything either, but forced himself to pick up the pillow and sniff the stain. The smell reminded him of work.

  The small window was open. He glanced down into the yard. Whoever had named that dog after the hound guardian of the Underworld – presumably not its owners – had a sense of humour. Unlike its namesake, the Cerberus now lumbering to its feet in the yard had only one head. However, to make up for this it had a front leg missing. Another ailing stray taken in by the woman, whose sniffling was starting to annoy him.

  Ruso ducked his head back before the dog decided to bark at him again and surveyed the room. Whatever Julius Asper’s reasons for being here, he felt sorry for him. This was a miserable place for a man to spend his final hours.

  There was nothing under the blanket, but when the innkeeper and his wife folded back the second half of the mattress for his inspection, he spotted something lying on the floor between the slats of the bed. He lay down on the floor, reached under the bed and pulled out a writing tablet garnished with grey fluff.

  ‘Ah,’ said the man. ‘He did ask for some writing things to do a message.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me that before?’

  ‘I forgot.’

  Evidently the innkeeper had been hoping to erase the writing-tablet and reuse it.

  ‘He never gave us nothing to send, though.’

  ‘So you don’t know who he was writing to?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Ruso turned it towards the light and saw, ‘ROOM XXVII’ inked on the outside. He flipped the leaves open. A couple of lines of script trailed over the wax in a gentle curve, as if the letters were running downhill. The straggly squiggles seemed to include parts of an alphabet Ruso had never met before. He snapped the letter shut. He would look at it later. In the meantime he followed the owners back down to the kitchen, reflecting that, if they had needed to smuggle the body up these stairs instead of down them, they would have been forced to leave it where it was, treat it with respect and cause him a lot less trouble.

  The thought of having to break the bad news to Camma took away any sense of satisfaction Ruso might have felt at finding the missing man. It seemed that after arriving in Londinium Asper had made no attempt to deliver the money or to report its theft to the Procurator. Perhaps Tilla was right: the man was himself a thief who had abandoned his family. Or perhaps he had been betrayed and murdered by a greedy brother. However he had ended up here, the sorry tale was unlikely to be of much comfort to his widow.

  Asper was beyond help, but it might still be possible to trace the cash. ‘The money that he was carrying with him was marked,’ he said, improvising. ‘It can all be identified. So if you have it, or you know what happened to it, I suggest you hand it over now, because if you try to spend it you’ll be in even deeper water than you are already.’

  The man looked at his wife. ‘Two denarii, weren’t it?’

  The wife’s nod was a little too hasty.

  The man reached for the keys dangling from his belt. ‘I’ll fetch it.’ As he headed off somewhere to find his takings he called over his shoulder, ‘I don’t suppose there’ll be compensation?’

  ‘No,’ agreed Ruso, who had hoped to flush out considerably more than two denarii, an outrageous overcharge for a very shabby room. ‘I don’t suppose there will.’

  When the husband had gone the wife abandoned the small creatures on the spit, placed her reddened face alarmingly close to Ruso and whispered, ‘Sir! Sir, please, I beg you – just take two denarii. Take whatever you want. Please.’

  Ruso loosened her grip on his arm. ‘I’m not asking for a bribe,’ he said. ‘All the Procurator wants is the money that Asper had with him when he went missing.’

  ‘But it’s not there, sir!’ She dropped her voice and mouthed almost silently, ‘He didn’t have no money.’

  ‘But –’

  She nodded towards the door. ‘I told Grumpy that, just to shut him up. The man said he had a
friend what would pay the bill, and he looked honest, and I felt sorry for him and –’

  She broke off as her husband came back into the room carrying a shallow wooden box. He placed it on the table and lifted the lid to reveal a series of compartments for different denominations of coin. ‘Two denarii, sir,’ he reminded Ruso. ‘Taken in good faith by my wife, who has got me and her into all this trouble and caused you a whole lot of bother because she can’t bloody say no.’

  Ruso was conscious of the wife’s eyes on him as he scooped up seven or eight small silver coins. He began to flip them over on his palm. He dropped three back into the box, picked one out, then flipped over a couple more before holding a second one up, squinting at it and pretending to find what he was looking for. Then he tugged open his own purse, found enough coin to make up the value, and placed it in the correct compartments of the box before closing the lid.

  ‘Oh, thank you, sir!’ gasped the wife.

  ‘How do you tell?’ asked the innkeeper, looking as though he had just seen some sort of magic trick and was not sure he believed it.

  ‘It’s confidential,’ Ruso told him.

  ‘So what happens now?’

  ‘I’ll examine the body and report to the office,’ said Ruso. ‘They’ll have to decide whether they believe your story. Whatever happens, you’ve lied repeatedly and wasted official time. Do you two have the faintest idea what the penalty is for getting in the way of a Procurator’s inquiry?’

  A tear slid down the woman’s cheek. The man was twisting a fistful of tunic into a knot as he said, ‘No, sir.’

  ‘I didn’t think so,’ said Ruso, who had no idea either. ‘But if you’re still lying, it’ll be even worse. So is there anything else you want to tell me before it’s too late?’

  In the silence that followed, Ruso reflected that he was sounding like his father. ‘The name of the boatman would be a good start.’

  Finally the woman said, ‘It was Tetricus, sir.’

  The innkeeper muttered something under his breath that sounded very much like ‘Stupid cow.’