Trade Secrets

by David Wishart

  ‘Oh, he was ever so rough-looking. And I’ll never forget the look he gave me when he, like, saw me coming towards him.’ She shuddered, delicately. ‘He had, like, these sort of mad, staring eyes, proper sink-holes of depravity, they were, that like bored straight through you. You could tell at once he was a ruthless killer.’

  Yeah. Right. Gods! ‘Age?’

  ‘Oh, oldish. Not nearly as old as the other man, like, but too old for me, I noticed that straight off. But he was like fit, you know? Well-built, like. Sort of rugged and solid. He’d a lot of, like, muscle under his tunic. And he kept himself in shape, you could tell that by how he moved. Sort of rippled, like. Lithe as a cat stalking what it might devour. It brought me out all over in goosebumps.’ She paused. ‘Lovely crinkly hair he had, though. Bit like yours, sir, matter of fact.’

  ‘Tall? Short?’

  ‘Like, sort of medium. Tallish rather than shortish. I prefer them tall, me. Especially the crinkly haired ones.’

  She gave me a dazzling smile. I ignored it.

  ‘Clothes?’

  ‘Just the tunic, like. Nothing special, plain grey wool incarnadined with the blood from the, like, dastardly deed he’d just perpetrated.’

  ‘Anything else about him you can remember?’

  ‘No.’ She sighed. ‘That was it, really. It was all over in a minute, like.’

  Yeah, well, I was lucky to have got what I had, if you, like, made allowances for the verbal tic and discounted the Alexandrian bodice-ripper bits. Still, a lady’s maid’s job couldn’t have much excitement in it, so if she’d been milking it for all it was worth I couldn’t blame her. And the description fitted Nigrinus, that was certainly true; the only false note was that ‘oldish’, but to someone like Picentina anyone older than, say, thirty would qualify for an over-the-hill tag. Particularly where her obvious area of interest lay.

  ‘There, now. If you have all the information you want, Valerius Corvinus,’ Clementa said frostily, ‘perhaps you’ll allow the girl to return to her proper duties and get back to yours. Good luck with your investigations. So nice to have met you.’

  I let myself out.

  FOURTEEN

  First thing just before dawn two days later we took the carriage over to Ostia, together with Perilla’s maid Phryne, Bathyllus up front next to driver Lysias, and Meton perched on the roof clutching his set of kitchen knives and best omelette pan: there’d be caretaker staff at the villa, sure, but they wouldn’t run to either a ranking major-domo or a proper chef, and if we weren’t going to be dossing down on Agron and Cass’s living-room floor after all then I’d no intention whatsoever of slumming it. Perilla had got clear directions from her poetry pal before we left – fortunately, as it turned out, because the villa was one of several along the coast south of the town itself – and we arrived just a whisker shy of noon.

  Caesia Fulvina had sent a skivvy through the previous day to say we’d be coming, so at least we were expected. While Bathyllus organized the local bought help to transfer the luggage from the coach and Meton went off to inspect the kitchen facilities, Perilla and I did the tour of the premises.

  Fulvina and her husband – he was something big in Aqueducts and Sewers, I remembered – weren’t short of a silver piece or two, that was certain; they might only use the villa as a holiday home, but it was absolute top-of-the-range. Building space in Rome is at a premium, of course, even on the hills, and unless your last name is Caesar, or close to it, or your annual income’s well over the six-figure mark so you can afford a little property over on the Janiculan with its four dining rooms, covered riding exercise yard, and small private zoo, you can’t be too ambitious. Ostia’s different. Oh, yeah, sure, a seaside villa on the Bay of Naples’ll set you back an arm and a leg, but property prices along the Laurentian coast are still pretty reasonable, and for what you’d pay for a house on one of the better-class hills in Rome there you could buy – or build – a villa three times the size and still have some loose change left in your pouch.

  Certainly the place’s owners hadn’t spared any expense, either where scale or decoration were concerned. The driveway up from the gate passed through carefully landscaped grounds planted with trees and bushes that screened the house itself from the coastal road and the shoreline beyond it. The rooms were twice as big as the ones we had at home, and there were more of them. Most of the ones downstairs had mosaic-inlaid floors – there was a lovely one in the atrium with its centrepiece Neptune’s chariot drawn by seahorses, surrounded by conch-blowing Tritons – and at least one wall with a full-scale fresco on it; while the bedrooms upstairs were big enough to swing several cats, were floored with cedar, and had windows looking out to sea or down onto the porticoed garden studded with statues to the rear. There was even, off to one side, a small cistern-fed bath suite.

  ‘But this is lovely!’ Perilla said as we made our way back downstairs. ‘Absolutely perfect!’

  Yeah, I had to agree. I’d been through to Ostia quite a few times over the years, but by the nature of things they’d been flying visits, and they’d been restricted to the town itself with, when I couldn’t manage the thing in a oner, a shakedown on the couch at Agron’s place. Getting the use of Fulvina’s villa had been a real stroke of genius on the lady’s part. Once Meton had sussed out the local market – which, knowing Meton’s scale of priorities, would be as soon as he’d laid out his chef’s knives, made sure everything was hunky-dory where equipment and larder were concerned, and terrified the wollocks off Fulvina’s kitchen skivvies – I reckoned we’d be as well-set-up here as we were at home. Better.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll just leave you to settle in and get on with things.’

  She stopped, and stared at me. ‘Oh, Marcus! Be reasonable!’ she said. ‘You’re not going to start straight away, surely?’

  ‘Naturally I am. What did you expect?’

  ‘Come on, dear! We are on holiday after all.’

  I grinned. ‘You may be, lady. Me, I’ve got a job to go to. And after six hours twiddling my thumbs in the coach I could do with the walk.’ True: I’m no coach-traveller, me, and fourteen-plus miles with only a couple of cushions between me and the Ostian Road cobbles, even if Lysias had stuck to the unpaved verge whenever he could, had left me in sore need of exercise. ‘Sore’ being the operative word. ‘Enjoy. I’ll see you later.’

  Like I said, the villa was on the coast road, and the town itself was a bare half-mile away, at the Tiber’s mouth. An easy distance to walk, particularly given the weather we had at present: it was distinctly cooler here than in Rome, and much fresher-smelling, although that wouldn’t’ve been difficult, particularly at the height of summer in comparison to anywhere in the city downwind of the river, with a pleasant, salt-tangy breeze off the sea. Perfect weather for walking, in fact, especially after a six-hour carriage-drive. The countryside wasn’t bad, either: the Laurentian coast on the inland side of the road grows a fair proportion of the town’s fruit and vegetables, and most of the space between the big villas is taken up with small farms and market gardens, with the occasional vineyard or orchard; while on the sea side you get the small family owned boats that supply the town’s fish market.

  Yeah, well, maybe Perilla’s point about being on holiday wasn’t too far off the mark after all; the case aside, I reckoned we could spend a very pleasant few days here. The lady’s pal Fulvina and her husband certainly had the right idea. Perhaps we should get out of the city more often.

  I still had most of the afternoon to play with when I reached the Laurentian Gate. Coming from the east along the main road as I always did when I travelled through from Rome, I wasn’t too familiar with this part of town. The Tiber, with its various wharves, landing stages, warehouses, and so on, not to mention the main dockyard area just outside the walls at Tiber Mouth itself and most of the public buildings – my usual stamping ground – was on the northern side; the Laurentian quarter to the south was almost exclusively upmarket residential. Even so, Ostia’s
not big; you can walk across it from end to end practically inside of half an hour. And although the old fort that was built originally to protect Rome’s harbour is long gone, for practical purposes it’s given the place an overall shape. The street leading up from Laurentian Gate – the Hinge – takes you directly to the Market Square, the original fort’s centre, where it crosses the main drag, Boundary Marker Street, which runs the length of the town to the Roman Gate.

  Easy-peasy, right? Especially when you compare it with Rome, which is a town planner’s nightmare. Mind you, off the main drag things got a bit more haphazard.

  So; where to start? I’d have to call in on Agron, of course, to say we were here, check if he’d managed to trace the cack-handed crane operator Siddius for me, and maybe invite him and Cass round for dinner, but his yard was diagonally across town, by the river on the Roman Gate side. Lippillus had said that Correllius’s house – or his widow’s, now; what was her name? Mamilia, right – was one of the big properties south of Market Square on the Hinge itself. As a first port of call, then, that made sense; at the very least I could suss out where it was for later reference.

  I carried on up the Hinge. Not altogether an easy matter: the street was pretty narrow, and there were quite a few pedestrians around, although not as many as there would’ve been in Rome at that time of day, plus – as wouldn’t be the case in Rome – you had the occasional cart to contend with. The locals didn’t seem to be in all that much of a hurry, either, as they would’ve been at home, which slowed things up further. Lippillus had been right, though: judging by the overall length and carefully maintained condition of their frontages the houses in this part of town were definitely well upmarket. I spotted a door-slave sunning himself outside one of them and asked for directions to the Correllius place, which turned out to be a scant twenty yards further up the street.

  There was a door-slave there as well: a much bigger guy this time, bald as an egg but with arms as thick – and hairy – as an ape’s. Definitely prime bouncer material, which in a laid-back place like Ostia was interesting.

  I went up to him, getting a long, suspicious stare all the way.

  ‘Afternoon, pal,’ I said when I’d reached conversational distance. ‘Would this be the Correllius house?’

  He considered for a while, inserted a little finger into an ear the size and general shape of a cabbage leaf, wiggled it around, withdrew it, inspected the result, and wiped it off on his tunic.

  ‘It might be,’ he said finally.

  I wondered for an instant whether that might be one of those weird philosophical paradoxes, like Achilles and the tortoise, but then Zeno the guy definitely wasn’t. What we had here was obfuscation, which was interesting again. I sighed.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I know the master’s dead, right, but I was wondering if I could have a word with your mistress. That possible at all?’

  ‘Mistress is out.’

  ‘OK. Make it someone else, then. You choose.’

  ‘Business or social?’

  ‘Business. I’m through from Rome. It’s about your master’s death, as it happens.’

  That got me another long, suspicious stare. Then he grunted and stood up.

  ‘Mister Doccius do?’ he said.

  ‘Perfect. Who’s Mister Doccius?’

  ‘The master’s deputy.’

  ‘Great. Mister Doccius it is.’

  ‘OK. You wait here, right?’ He paused, his hand on the door knob. ‘Name?’

  ‘Corvinus. Valerius Corvinus.’

  Another grunt. He disappeared inside, closing the door behind him, and I kicked my heels for a good five minutes before he reappeared.

  ‘Mister Doccius’ll see you,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’

  I did. Once through the front door I’d been expecting the usual standard arrangement of lobby plus atrium with rooms off to the sides and back, plus a peristyle garden to the rear, which was in effect what I got. But then chummie led me straight through the peristyle to a block of rooms on its far side whose doors opened onto a series of what, from their furnishings, were obviously offices. Most of them had clerks beavering away inside them, and the place had a definite busy feel about it that didn’t square at all with the private house side of things.

  Interesting yet again.

  ‘In here,’ chummie said, and without another word turned on his heel and disappeared back into the house proper, presumably to excavate the cabbage-leaf’s partner in comfort.

  It was the middle room of the line, and bigger than the rest, but without the office furnishings. There were a couple of chairs facing outwards and a small table with the makings of a meal on it. The guy sitting on one of the chairs working his way through a plateful of bread, cheese, and cold vegetables was mid-thirties with black curly hair. If he wasn’t quite in the door-slave’s class for size, he was big enough, and most of it was muscle. One good step up socially from the bouncer on the door, this Mister Doccius, but clearly out of the same mould. I was beginning to get some pretty definite signals here: your ordinary provincial merchant establishment, let alone laid-back Ostian private residence, this place clearly wasn’t.

  ‘Sorry, pal,’ I said. ‘Bad timing. I’m interrupting your lunch.’

  He gave me a long, considering look. Then, finally, he grunted and speared a piece of cheese with his knife.

  ‘That’s OK,’ he said. Grudging as hell; clearly not one for the pleasantries, Correllius’s exec. ‘Corvinus, wasn’t it? Through from Rome about the boss’s death.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Sit down.’ I did, and he chewed for a bit in silence, watching me. ‘This official in some way?’ he said finally, and then before I could answer: ‘Only we were told the death was natural. No surprises there. Correllius was fat as a pig, sixty plus, and he got breathless just walking across a room. He could’ve gone any time these past five years, so his doctor said.’

  Delivered deadpan, and without so much as a smidgeon of sympathy. In fact, if anything there was a trace of contempt in the tone.

  ‘Yeah, it was natural,’ I said. ‘Matter of fact, the guy who found the body was my son-in-law. He’s a doctor himself, and he made the diagnosis. Also by coincidence the Watchman the clerks at the Pollio notified is an old friend of mine.’

  ‘Is that so, now? Bully for you.’ Doccius picked up the wine-cup and took a swig. ‘So. If the boss just up and died natural, then what’s this all about?’

  ‘He was stabbed. After he was already dead, sure, so there’s no actual crime involved, or not much of one as far as the Watch is concerned, but still. You knew that, presumably?’

  ‘Sure I did. I’m not blind, and I saw the body when they brought it back.’

  I waited, but there was nothing more.

  ‘And you don’t think that’s worth looking into,’ I said at last, making it a clear statement, not a question, and loading it with as much sarcasm as I could.

  His eyes never shifted from my face, and he carried on eating.

  ‘Should I?’ he said finally.

  ‘Yeah, I’d say that’d be a reasonable assumption.’ I was beginning to get angry now, and I was more than a little puzzled. ‘You’re his deputy, after all, or so the door-slave told me. The guy may’ve died naturally, but that’s only a technicality. In effect he was murdered.’

  He speared another piece of cheese, chewed deliberately and swallowed.

  ‘“Murdered” is a strong word,’ he said at last. ‘And you admit yourself that it’s the wrong one, because Correllius was already dead. Me, now, I’ll settle for the technicality. If that’s OK with you and the Roman Watch. It saves a lot of hassle that way, and hassle I can do without. We all can here.’

  I just didn’t believe this. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Seemingly he’d arranged to meet a guy that day, a business associate by the name of Pullius. Marcus Pullius.’

  Doccius’s hand, poised over the bowl of vegetables, stopped in mid-air.

  ‘Who told you that?’ he
said sharply.

  Hey! We’d got a reaction at last! ‘The slave he had with him. Mercurius. Or at least that was the name he gave to my Watchman friend. You know anything about him?’

  He picked up the bread and broke it.

  ‘Not a thing,’ he said. ‘Pullius is no one I’ve ever heard of, that’s for sure. And you don’t want to believe anything that dozy bugger Mercurius said. He always did have his head up his backside.’

  ‘You can ask him for yourself. He’s on the premises, presumably.’

  ‘Was.’ He took another swig of the wine.

  ‘How do you mean, “was”?’

  ‘I told you: he was a dozy bugger without the sense he was born with. He had an accident twelve or fifteen days back. Fell off the roof while he was up replacing a cracked tile and broke his neck.’ His eyes challenged me over the lifted wine-cup. ‘So that’s that. I’m sorry, but you’ve had a wasted journey.’

  ‘OK. Fine.’ I was having real trouble keeping my temper now, but if he wanted me to lose it I wasn’t going to give the bastard the satisfaction. ‘Just one more thing before I go, pal. Correllius was in the import-export business, right? Wine and oil, specifically?’

  A blink, and the answer was too long in coming. ‘Yeah. We deal in wine and oil, among other things. So forget your “specifically”, because the company has various business interests covering a pretty wide range.’

  Yeah; that, from what I was beginning to glean about the set-up here, was probably true. And I’d bet that not all of them would figure among the Ostian Honest Trader of the Year categories.

  ‘Your boss had a consignment about half a month back bound for Aleria on a ship called the Porpoise, master Titus Nigrinus,’ I said. ‘That right?’

  Again the hesitation, and his eyes definitely flickered. ‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘I’d have to check the records to be sure, but I’ll take your word for it. Again, so what?’

  I gave him my best smile. ‘Probably nothing. Certainly nothing to do with your boss’s murder; sorry, death. Just a snippet of information I came across recently in connection with something else. Don’t let it worry you.’