‘Yes.’ Clarus chewed reflectively on his bread and cheese. ‘He recognised the woman. That what you mean?’
‘Yeah. And it was important, for some reason, that no one should realise that he had.’ I stood up. ‘You finished?’
‘You’re going to see him? Now?’
‘As ever is. The bastard’s got questions to answer, and the sooner the better.’
Clarus tucked the rest of the cheese inside the bread and stood up too.
We went to Acceius’s.
25
They were at breakfast, Acceius and Seia Lucinda, when the slave showed us in.
‘Corvinus! And Clarus.’ Acceius put down his breakfast roll. ‘What on earth are you doing here at this hour?’
‘We’ve just been round at Bucca Maecilius’s,’ I said. ‘Asking him about the corpse that he ferried over to Caba three days back.’
His eyes widened. ‘Indeed? What corpse is this?’
‘I was rather hoping you’d tell me, pal. After all, you dumped her on him in the first place.’
Silence. Long silence. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Seia Lucinda shoot him a look. Acceius dabbed carefully at his lips with his napkin and stood up, wincing as he did so. Yeah: the stitches would still be in.
‘Perhaps we’d better go into the study,’ he said.
I stood aside to let him pass, with Clarus tagging along behind. I could feel Seia Lucinda’s eyes on my back all the way to the door.
We went in.
‘Sit down, please.’ He indicated the couches. ‘I’d rather stand, if you don’t mind. It makes things rather formal, but standing’s more comfortable for me at present, and besides under the circumstances perhaps a certain degree of formality is called for.’
We sat.
‘Now.’ He took a breath. ‘How did you know?’
‘You admit it?’
‘Yes. No point in a denial, is there?’ He was frowning. ‘I should’ve said I’d killed her - her, not him - straight away. Making up that story was silly. Worse than silly, stupid.’
‘So why did you?’
He closed his eyes. ‘Because I’m a lawyer, Corvinus, and because I’m a man. The first sometimes thinks too much, the second too little. Unfortunately the combination will sometimes act very stupidly indeed. As I did.’ The eyes opened again. ‘As far as the killing went, it followed roughly the same lines as I described, except that the struggle was more prolonged and of course ended...differently. She was a very powerful woman, you must be aware of that if you’ve seen the body. Also...well, she really, really wanted me dead. I managed to turn her round and get a tight grip of her knife hand about the wrist, but that was as much as I could do: she wouldn’t drop the knife and I couldn’t move the arm itself. I...got my left arm up to her throat and my fingers caught in her necklace. I thought if I twisted that and held on tightly, choking her, I could force her to let the weapon fall, or at worst render her unconscious. I...well, I simply held on too long and too hard. When she did finally go limp and I risked releasing her I found that she was dead.’ He paused and looked me straight in the eyes. ‘I swear to you I didn’t mean to kill her. It was like the other time, an accident. I was so damn scared I just acted without thinking.’
I let that one pass for the moment. ‘Okay. So why the story? You’d been attacked, badly wounded, you’d defended yourself and accidentally killed the attacker in the process. You’re a lawyer, you’d know you were within your rights. So why try to cover things up?’
He smiled weakly. ‘It was because I’m a lawyer, Corvinus. Or partly so. I told you, the combination of ordinary man and lawyer can give rise to acts of unbelievable stupidity. Thus far I’d acted as a man. I was frightened, I panicked, I overreacted.’ He paused. ‘No, I’m being unfair to myself, I didn’t overreact, I simply fought as hard as I could to avoid being killed, which I knew I would be if I gave the woman the smallest degree of quarter. Once she was dead, unfortunately, the thinking lawyer took over. I’ve argued cases, Corvinus, for the defence and prosecution both, all my life. I know all about circumstantial evidence, and how damning it can be, how difficult it is to get round. She was the second person I’d killed by “accident”’ - he stressed the word - ‘under identical circumstances inside half a month. Suspicious? Of course it is! Besides, she was a woman, I’m a strong man; why could I not simply have disarmed her? And strangulation? A fatal knife wound could be sudden and truly accidental; but strangulation is slow, and therefore deliberate. Oh, yes: I could make a case myself, a very good one at that.’ I said nothing. ‘So the upshot was that the lawyer made his points and the man accepted and acted on them. Stupidly, as I say, criminally so. I hid the body as best I could - yes, I suppose I did know it was Bucca Maecilius’s yard, but it was the handiest place at the time and I was almost out of my mind with pain and fear - and...well, the rest you know. Or I assume you do. When I talked to you the next day, of course, it was as a lawyer trying to make the most of a bad job, a nightmare situation. I’m sorry about Bucca, very sorry: I will, naturally, go straight round to Libanius, explain the whole business and take the consequences.’
‘The bruise on your hand,’ I said. ‘You made that deliberately? After you’d killed her?’
Another weak smile. ‘No. I’m not that devious, I’m glad to say. I must’ve grazed my knuckles against the wall in the struggle, although I didn’t notice it at the time. But yes, you’re right, I did turn it to use later.’
‘But you did recognise the woman?’
He looked at me blankly. ‘What? No. No, of course I didn’t! Why should I?’
‘Come on, pal! She was a relative of the guy you killed, the guy who attacked you and your partner. Senecio.’
‘No, Corvinus, I’m sorry, but –’ He frowned. ‘Hold on. Senecio...Senecio...’
‘You defended him, you and Hostilius. Him and his brother Lupus, on a burglary and murder charge.’
‘Wait. I –’ He was still frowning. ‘The Brabbius brothers. Yes, by god, you’re right. It must’ve been over fifteen years ago, in Bovillae, before we moved here. We lost the case, Lupus was executed and Senecio went to the galleys. The man was Brabbius Senecio?’
‘Yeah. At least, I think so. And it was twenty-one years ago.’
‘So it was.’ He was staring at me. ‘Why should Brabbius Senecio want to attack us? Yes, we lost and his brother died, but we did our best, it wasn’t our fault. And I realise I shouldn’t be saying this, but we never had a chance from the start because they were obviously guilty. You say the dead woman was a relative?’
‘Yeah. My guess would be a wife or a sister. He have either of these, that you know of? Or anything like them?’
He shook his head numbly. ‘No. I’ve genuinely no idea. Oh, I remember Senecio, yes, of course I do, although I’d never have recognised him in the man who attacked us even if I’d known who it was, certainly never made any sort of connection. But apart from Lupus I never met any of his family, to my knowledge. If they did exist then they kept well clear.’
I stood up. So did Clarus. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Thanks, pal. Very informative.’
His lips pursed. ‘Yes...well. I’m sorry about all this, Valerius Corvinus. Sorry and deeply ashamed. As I said, I will see Quintus Libanius and make a full confession at the earliest opportunity. My apologies to your father, too, Clarus. I’ll see you out.’
He did. No sign of Seia Lucinda now, but no doubt she’d be having a talk with her husband after we’d gone.
‘You believe him, Corvinus?’ Clarus said as the door closed behind us and we went down the steps.
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Jury’s out on that completely.’ He’d handled it well, though, I had to give him that. If he was lying, somewhere along the way, it’d be hellish difficult to prove. ‘All we can do now is dig and see what turns up.’
One thing was certain: if I was going to get any more answers I’d have to do my digging in Bovillae.
26
/> I went back home and packed a bag. I’d got my appointment with Publius Novius the next day, and if I was going through to Bovillae now, with the likelihood of spending quite some time there tracking down someone who’d known the Brabbii, it’d be silly to shuttle back and forth to Castrimoenium. Agilleius Mundus would put me up for the asking, I was sure of that. I just hoped I wouldn’t have to sleep with the snoring coachman.
I said goodbye to Perilla - she’d got her own job in the meantime, setting up a woman-to-woman confab with the elusive Renia re Meton - and headed off.
Mundus’s was one of the older houses off the main square, a big rambling place you could get lost in. The old guy was out, but his equally decrepit major-domo assured me that there’d be no problem about staying. I stabled the mare, dumped my stuff in a guest bedroom overlooking the garden, checked on dinner times - having Meton in your household gets you twitchy about turning up punctually for meals - and set off for the dyers’ and fullers’ part of town, up by the Appian Gate. A handy locale, anyway: I’d give lunch a miss, especially if it meant eating with the slaughterhouse brigade filling the place, but no doubt a cup or two of wine at Veturinus’s would go down nicely in the run-up to dinner.
Okay. So off we went.
I was about a dozen yards from the front door when the back of my neck started prickling. I turned round quickly, but apart from a harassed young mum dragging a squalling kid along the pavement and a couple of bored slaves kicking their heels against the wall of a draper’s shop while they waited for the mistress to finish off her business inside and load them up for the trip home there was nothing to see. Certainly no familiar faces, and any self-respecting mugger with designs on my purse would have more sense than to try it on in broad daylight, especially in the middle of a law-abiding town like Bovillae. I shrugged and grinned. False alarm. Yeah, well: maybe I was just getting needlessly jumpy in my old age.
I’d got to the tenth dyer’s establishment, and got my tenth unequivocal and not-very-friendly brush-off, before I accepted the fact that this was going to be a real bummer of a job. Bugger! I should’ve used Alexis, even though he was still punch-drunk after his marathon with the spiders. It wasn’t just the lapse of time involved - twenty-one years, for a lot of the people I talked to, would be three-quarters of a lifetime - it was the purple stripe: like I say, the dyers are a clannish profession, they stick together and they don’t like strangers shoving their noses in, whatever the reason. Especially purple-striped Romans, who’ve always been about as popular generally in Latium as a cold in the head. I got the impression that quite a few of the older guys and guyesses - and some of them must’ve been tramping mantles when Tiberius was in rompers - could’ve helped if they’d wanted to, but one look at the stripe and an earful of the accent and their lips were zipped.
Shit.
The sun was definitely on the wane when I called it a day and trudged back to the Appian Gate and an unearned but badly-needed half jug of wine. Trouble was, even if I did cut my losses now and send Alexis in, I’d queered his pitch good an proper. If someone else did turn up asking for news of the Brabbian family he’d get the bum’s rush and the lifted finger.
Bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger!
Well, at least the wineshop was empty again. I’d hit the slot between the lunchtime rush and the evening binge, when the slaughterers would be croaking cattle and stiffing sheep. The only bodies in residence were the Veturini, father and son.
‘Half a jug of the Bovillan, pal,’ I said, heaving my weary carcass up onto a stool. ‘And some of that sausage, if you’ve got it.’
The big guy hefted the wine flask and poured while I fumbled in my belt-pouch for coins. ‘Hard day, sir?’ he said, putting the jug and cup down on the counter in front of me.
‘Tell me, friend.’ I tipped the first of the jug into the cup and drank. Gods, I needed that! ‘You haven’t heard of the Brabbii, I suppose?’
‘Nah.’ He unwrapped the sausage and reached for a knife. ‘No Brabbii around here for twenty years. That right, Dad?’
‘What?’ I almost spilled my wine.
Veturinus Junior lowered the knife. ‘You okay, sir?’
‘Yeah. Yeah.’ Oh, gods! Please, please, gods! ‘Ah...that’d be the two brothers, would it? Lupus and Senecio?’
‘That’s right.’ He was looking at me strangely. Well, under the circumstances that was fair enough.
‘Proper bad lots those two were,’ Veturinus Senior said. He was still perched on his stool at the far end of the bar, but this time he had a winecup in front of him. ‘Specially Lupus. Got himself chopped for murder, did Lupus, and his brother went to the boats. My son-in-law defended them, him and his partner. Not that they could do much.’
‘You knew them, then?’ I said.
‘The Brabbii? In and out of here all the time, from when they could lift a winecup.’ Old Veturinus grinned. ‘And they lifted plenty of them, I can tell you. Senecio, he was sweet on our Veturina. I thought she might have him for a while, only she’d more sense. Then Hostilius came on the scene, and that was that.’
Jupiter! ‘They, uh, have a sister at all?’ I said.
Veturinus Junior was frowning now, and he’d set the sausage knife down. ‘What’s going on here?’ he said. ‘What’s this about?’
Well, it was a fair cop. And I couldn’t keep up the pretence of the bar-fly shooting the conversational breeze forever. On the other hand, saying that I’d been asked by the Castrimoenian senate to investigate Lucius Hostilius’s death and that the two people currently being held responsible were the Veturini’s daughter and son and sister and brother respectively didn’t seem such a sharp idea. ‘Uh...my name’s Valerius Corvinus,’ I said. ‘Quintus Libanius over in Castrimoenium asked me to look into the murder of a woman up at Caba. I thought she might be a relative of the Brabbii.’
‘What, Habra?’ Veturinus Senior said. ‘Habra’s been murdered?’
My stomach went cold. ‘There was a sister called Habra?’
‘Sure. Younger sister. Haven’t seen her for years, mind, she left Bovillae after the trial and hasn’t been back since, to my knowledge. So she was up in Caba, was she, and someone’s done her in?’ He chuckled. ‘I’m not surprised. She was the worst of the three.’
‘Yeah? And why was that?’
He made a sprinkling movement with his fingers. ‘Doctoring. You know what I mean. No one ever caught her, mind, but everyone knew she did it. Girls who got themselves in trouble, they knew to go straight to Habra.’
‘She was an abortionist?’
‘That’s the fancy name, aye. That and worse, maybe, although if there was worse she was careful. She had the trade from her mother. A proper old witch she was, when she was alive. I remember –’
‘Did she come in here? Habra? With her brothers, I mean?’
Another chuckle. ‘Did she come in here? You hear that, Marcus? Oh, yes, sir, you couldn’t keep her out. Habra could sink a half jug with the best of them. And she was fond of her brothers, I’ll give her that. Stuck by them right the way through the trial and after all the way to the end, always back and forward to the lock-up seeing they’d enough to eat and drink. I couldn’t fault her there, she was a good sister.’
‘Your son-in-law’s partner. Quintus Acceius. He ever drop in for a cup of wine?’
‘‘Course he did, along with Hostilius. I told you, Hostilius was no stranger, he liked his wine and he only lived up the road. Didn’t come as often after he married my daughter, but until they moved to Castrimoenium the two of them’d be in here of an evening, the three of them sometimes, oh, three or four times a month, easy. That was why the Brabbii boys went to them when they got into trouble. Who else would they ask?’
‘So, uh, Acceius would know Habra, then?’
‘Well enough. Not that they were friendly, mind.’ Another chuckle. ‘Not in that way, Habra’d no time for that sort of nonsense and Acceius wouldn’t’ve looked at her twice, a good-looking man like him. But he’
d know her, certainly he would. Specially come the time of the trial.’
I sat back on my stool. Bugger! The guy’d been lying through his teeth after all! And even if, for some reason, he hadn’t recognised her physically when she’d attacked him he’d known of her existence. So why had he lied? It had to have something to do with the trial; everything came back to that...
Abortionist. Acceius’s first wife had died in childbirth, round about the same time, and he’d married again, what? a couple of years later, was it? And Seia Lucinda had been quite a catch, financially, socially and probably sexually. Convenient, right? Too convenient. And much too coincidental to be coincidence...
Except that men who murder their wives, or have them murdered, don’t keep marble busts of them in their private studies. And they don’t break down - genuinely break down, as far as I’d been able to tell - when a stranger refers to the murdered woman twenty years on.
It didn’t make sense. None of it. The only thing I knew for certain was that when Quintus Acceius strangled Brabbia Habra he knew exactly who he was killing.
‘You want the sausage now, sir?’ Veturinus Junior, with the plate.
‘Hmm?’ I refocused my eyes. ‘Oh. Yeah. Yeah, thanks, pal. It’s good sausage.’
‘Real Bovillan sausage, that. You can keep your Lucanian.’
I turned back to the old man. ‘You remember anything about the trial?’
‘Nah. ‘Fraid I can’t help you there.’ Veturinus Senior sipped his wine. ‘I’d enough to do, keeping this place going, without gadding off down to the courts. And why should I? I said: the Brabbii may’ve been customers, good customers, but that was just business. I wouldn’t’ve trusted either further than I could throw them, and I poured a full cup of my best to the Good Lady Venus when my daughter split with Senecio and took up with Lucius Hostilius. Proper peeved he was at the time, but there wasn’t nothing he could do about it. She had a lucky escape, as things turned out. They were guilty as hell, and good riddance to the pair of them.’
Illegally Dead (Marcus Corvinus Book 12) Page 19
