The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits Volume 1 (The Mammoth Book Series)

by Mike Ashley

  Varus shrugged. “What’s to report? Another dead Senator. It’s not like a visitation from Olympus, is it?”

  Yes, the times were like that.

  “I’ve sent for Asklepiodes,” I said. “He may be able to tell something from the condition of the body.”

  “I doubt he’ll be able to come up with much this time,” Varus said, “but if you want, I’ll appoint you to investigate. Make a note of it, Junius.”

  “Will you lend me a lictor?” I asked. “I’ll need to summon people.”

  Varus pointed to one of his attendants and the man sighed. The days of cushy duty in the basilica were over. I said, “Go and inform the family of the late Senator Auius Cosconius that they have just been bereaved and that they can claim the body here. Junius should be able to tell you where they live. Then go to the contractor who built this place. His name is . . .” I opened one of my own wax tablets. “. . . Manius Varro. He has a lumber yard by the Circus Flaminius, next to the temple of Bellona. Tell him to call on me first thing tomorrow morning, at my office in the Temple of Ceres.”

  The man handed his torch to a companion and conferred with Junius, then he shouldered his fasces and marched importantly away.

  Asklepiodes arrived just as Junius and Varus were leaving, trailed by two of his Egyptian slaves, who carried his implements and other impedimenta. Hermes was with him, carrying a wineskin. I had trained him well.

  “Ah, Decius,” the Greek said. “I can always count upon you to find something interesting for me.” He wore a look of bright anticipation. Sometimes I wondered about Asklepiodes.

  “Actually, this looks rather squalid, but the man was of some importance and somebody left him in a building I was inspecting. I don’t like that sort of thing.” Hermes handed me a full cup and I drained it and handed it back.

  Asklepiodes took the lantern and ran the pool of light swiftly over the body, then paused to examine the wound. “He died within the last day, I cannot be more precise than that, from the thrust of a very thin-bladed weapon, its blade triangular in cross-section.”

  “A woman’s dagger?” I asked. Prostitutes frequently concealed such weapons in their hair, to protect themselves from violent customers and sometimes to settle disputes with other prostitutes.

  “Quite possibly. What’s this?” He said something incomprehensible to one of his slaves. The man reached into his voluminous pouch and emerged with a long, bronze probe decorated with little golden acanthus leaves and a stoppered bottle, rather plain. Asklepiodes took the instrument and pried at the wound. It came away with an ugly little glob of something no bigger than a dried pea. This the Greek poked into the little bottle and restoppered it. He handed the probe and the bottle to the slave, who replaced it in his pouch.

  “It looks like dried blood to me,” I said.

  “Only on the surface. I’ll take it to my surgery and study it in the morning, when there is light.”

  “Do you think he was killed somewhere else and dragged down here? That’s not much blood for a skewered heart.”

  “No, with a wound like this most of the bleeding is internal, I believe he died on this spot. His clothing is very little disarranged.” He poked at the feet. “See, the heels of his sandals are not scuffed, as usually happens when a body is dragged.”

  I was willing to take his word for it. As physician to the gladiators he had seen every possible wound to the human body, hundreds of times over. He left promising to send me a report the next day.

  Minutes later the family arrived, along with the Libitinarii to perform the lustrations to purify the body. The dead man’s son went through the pantomime of catching his last breath and shouted his name loudly, three times. Then the undertaker’s men lifted the body and carried it away. The women set up an extravagant caterwauling. It wasn’t a patch on the howling the professional mourners would raise at the funeral, but in the closed confines of the cellar it was sufficiently loud.

  I approached the young man who had performed the final rites. “I am Decius Caecilius Metellius the Younger, plebeian Aedile. I found your father’s body and I have been appointed investigator by the Praetor Varus. Would you come outside with me?”

  “Quintus Cosconius,” he said, identifying himself, “only son of Aulus.” He was a dark, self-possessed young man. He didn’t look terribly put out by the old man’s passing: not an uncommon attitude in a man who has just found out that he has come into his inheritance. Something about the name ticked at my memory.

  “Quintus Cosconius? Aren’t you standing for the tribuneship for next year?”

  “I’m not alone in that,” he said. Indeed he wasn’t. Tribune was the office to have, in those years. They got to introduce the laws that determined who got what in the big game of empire. Since the office was restricted to plebeians, Clodius, a patrician, had gone to the extremity of having himself adopted into a plebeian family just so he could serve as tribune.

  “Did your father have enemies? Did any of the feuding demagogues have it in for him?” I was hoping he would implicate Clodius.

  “No, in recent years he avoided the Senate. He had no stomach for a faction fight.” I detected a faint sneer in his words.

  “Who did he support?”

  “Crassus, when he supported anyone. They had business dealings together.” That made sense. Crassus held the largest properties in Rome. If you dealt in real estate, you probably dealt with Crassus.

  “I take it you don’t support Crassus yourself?”

  He shrugged. “It’s no secret. When I am Tribune I shall support Pompey. I’ve been saying that in the Forum since the start of the year. What has this to do with my father’s murder?”

  “Oh, politics has everything to do with murder, these days. The streets are littered with the bodies of those who picked the wrong side in the latest rivalries for office. But, since your father was a lukewarm member of the Crassus faction at best, it probably has no bearing upon his death.”

  “I should think not. What you need to do something about is the unchecked and unpunished violence in the City. It strikes me as ludicrous that our Senatorial authorities can pacify whole provinces but are helpless to make Rome a safe city.” He looked as if a new thought had occurred to him. “Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger? A friend of Milo’s are you not?” It wasn’t the first time that association had been held against me.

  “Yes, but, like your father’s political connections, it has no bearing here. If Milo should prove to be responsible, I shall hale him before the Praetor like any other malefactor.”

  “Rome needs a genuine police force!” he said, heatedly. “And laws with teeth!”

  I was getting tired of this. “When did you last see your father?”

  “Yesterday morning. He spoke to me in the Forum. He had been out of the City, touring his country estates – ” I saw that look of satisfaction cross his face. They were his estates now. “– but he came back to inspect one of his town properties. This one, I think.”

  “He certainly seems to have ended up here. What plans did he have for this building?”

  He shrugged again. “The usual, I suppose: Let out the ground floor to some well-to-do tenant and the upper floors to the less affluent. He owned many such properties.” He smoothed a fold of his exceptionally white toga. “Will there be anything else?”

  “Not at present. But I may wish to speak with you again.”

  “Anything for one on the service of the Senate and People of Rome,” he said, none too warmly.

  With the crowd gone, I went back to my inspection duties, giving them less than half of my attention. Much as I disliked the man’s attitude, Quintus Cosconius had spoken nothing but the truth when he said that Rome needed a police force. Our ancient laws forbade the presence of armed soldiers within the sacred walls, and that extended to any citizen bearing arms in the City. From time to time someone would suggest forming a force of slave-police, on the old Athenian model, but that meant setting slaves in power over cit
izens, and that was unthinkable.

  The trouble was that any force of armed men in the City would quickly become a private army for one of the political criminals who plagued the body politic in those days. In earlier times we had done well enough without police, because Romans were a mostly law-abiding people with a high respect for authority and civic order. Ever since the Gracchi, though, mob action had become the rule in Rome, and every aspiring politician curried favor with a criminal gang, to do his dirty work in return for protection in the courts.

  The Republic was very sick and, despite my fondest hopes, there was to be no cure.

  “You’ve been drinking,” Julia said when I got home.

  “It’s been that sort of day.” I told her about the dead Senator while we had dinner in the courtyard.

  “You have no business investigating while you’re in another office,” she said. “Varus should appoint a Iudex.”

  “It may be years before a Court for Assassins is appointed to look into this year’s murders. They’re happening by the job lot. But this one occurred on my territory.”

  “You just like to snoop. And you’re hoping to get something on Clodius.”

  “What will one more murder laid at his doorstep mean? No, for once, I doubt that Clodius had anything to do with it.” Luckily for me, my Julia was a favourite niece of the great Caius Julius Caesar, darling of the Popular Assemblies. Clodius was Caesar’s man and dared not move against me openly, and by this time he considered himself the veritable uncrowned king of Rome, dispensing largesse and commanding his troops in royal fashion. As such, sneaky, covert assassination was supposedly beneath his dignity. Supposedly.

  At that time, there were two sorts of men contending for power: The Big Three were all that were left of the lot that had been trying to gain control of the whole Empire for decades. Then there were men like Clodius and Milo, who just wanted to rule the City itself. Since the great conquerors had to be away from the City for years at a time, all of them had men to look after their interests in Rome. Clodius represented Caesar. Milo had acted for Crassus, although he was also closely tied in with Cicero and the star of Crassus was rapidly fading, to wink out that summer, did we but know it at the time. Plautius Hypsaeus was with the Pompeian faction, and so it went.

  “Tell me about it,” Julia said, separating an orange into sections. She always believed her woman’s intuition could greatly improve upon the performance of my plodding reasoning. Sometimes she was right, although I carefully refrained from telling her so.

  “So you think a prostitute killed him?” she said when she had heard me out.

  “I only said that was in keeping with the weapon. I have never known a man to use such a tool to rid himself of an enemy.”

  “Oh, yes. Men like sharp edges and lots of blood.”

  “Exactly. This little skewer bespeaks a finesse I am reluctant to credit to our forthright cutthroats.”

  “But if the man owned property all over the City, why take his hired companion to the cellar of an unfurnished house?”

  “Good question,” I allowed. “Of course, in such matters, some men have truly recondite tastes. Why, your own Uncle Caius Julius has been known to enjoy . . .”

  “Spare me,” she said, very clearly, considering that her teeth were clamped tightly together.

  With my fellow Aediles I shared the warren of office space beneath the ancient Temple of Ceres. A man was waiting for me when I climbed the steps. “Aedile Metellus?” He was a short, bald man and he wore a worried look that furrowed his brow all the way back to the middle of his scalp. “I am Manius Varro, the builder.”

  “Ah, yes. You recently completed a townhouse property for Aulus Cosconius?”

  “I did,” he said, still worried. “And I used only the best . . .”

  “You will be happy to learn that I found no violations of the code concerning materials or construction.”

  Relief washed over his face like a wave on a beach. “Oh. It’s just about the body, then?” He shook his head ruefully, trying to look concerned. “Poor Aulus Cosconius. I’d done a fair amount of business for him over the years.”

  “Was there any dispute over your payment?”

  He looked surprised that I should ask. “No. He paid in full for that job months ago. He’d been planning to put up a big tenement in the Subura, but he cancelled that a few days ago.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “No, just that he didn’t want to start anything big with uncertain times ahead. I thought he meant we might have a Dictator next year. You never can tell what that might mean.”

  “Very true,” I said, my gaze wandering out over one of Rome’s most spectacular views, the eye-stunning expanse of the Circus Maximus stretching out below us. To a native son of Rome, that view is immensely satisfying because it combines three of our passions: races, gambling and enormous, vulgar buildings. His gaze followed mine.

  “Ah, Aedile, I take it you’ll be organizing the races next month?”

  “To the great distress of my purse, yes.”

  “Do you know who’s driving in the first race?”

  “Victor for the Reds, Androcles for the Greens, Philip for the Blues and Paris for the Whites.” I could have reeled off the names of all sixteen horses they would be driving as well. I was good at that sort of thing.

  “You Caecilians are Reds, aren’t you?”

  “Since Romulus,” I told him, knowing what was coming.

  “I support the Blues. Fifty sesterces on Philip in the first race, even money?” He undoubtedly knew the names of all the horses as well.

  “The Sparrow has a sore forefoot,” I said, naming the Red’s near-side trace horse. “Give me three to two.”

  “Done!” he grinned. We took out the little tablets half the men in Rome carry around to record bets. With our styli we scratched our names and bets in each other’s tablets. He walked away whistling and I felt better, too. Victor had assured me personally that the Sparrow’s foot would be fine in plenty of time for the race. I flicked the accumulation of wax from the tip of my stylus, my mind going back to the condition of Cosconius’s body.

  I had dismissed Varro as a suspect in the murder. Building contractors as a class are swindlers rather than murderers and his manner was all wrong. But our little bet had set me on a promising mental trail. My borrowed lictor was sitting on the base of the statue of Proserpina that stood in front of the temple before the restorations commissioned by Maecaenas. He looked bored senseless. I summoned him.

  “Let’s go to the Forum.” At that he brightened. Everything really interesting was happening in the Forum. In the Forum, lictors were respected as symbols of imperium. With him preceding me, we went down the hill and across the old Cattle Market and along the Tuscan Street to the Forum.

  The place was thronged, as usual. It held an aura of barely-contained menace in that unruly year, but people still respected the symbol of the fasces and made way for the lictor. I made a slow circuit of the area, finding out who was there and, more importantly, who was not. To my great relief, neither Clodius nor Milo were around with their crowds of thugs. Among the candidates for the next year’s offices I saw the young Quintus Cosconius. Unlike the others standing for the tribuneship in their specially whitened togas he wore a dingy, brown toga and he had not shaved his face nor combed his hair, all in token of mourning.

  On the steps of the Basilica Opimia I found Cicero, surrounded as always by clients and friends. Ordinarily I would have waited upon his notice like everyone else, but my office and my lictor allowed me to approach him at once.

  “Good morning, Aedile,” he saluted, always punctilious in matters of office. He raised an eyebrow at sight of my lictor. “Does your office now carry imperium? I must have dozed off during the last Senate meeting.”

  “Good morning, Marcus Tullius, and no, I’m just carrying out an investigation for Varus. I would greatly appreciate your advice.”

  “Of course.” We made that little hal
f-turn that proclaimed that we were now in private conference and the others directed their attention elsewhere. “Is it the murder of Aulus Cosconius? Shocking business.”

  “Exactly. What were the man’s political leanings, if any?”

  “He was a dreadfully old-fashioned man, the sort who oppose almost anything unsanctioned by our remote ancestors. Like most of the men involved in City property trade, he supported Crassus. Before he left for Syria, Crassus told them all to fight Pompey’s efforts to become Dictator. That’s good advice, even coming from Crassus. I’ve spent months trying to convince the tribunes not to introduce legislation to that effect.”

  “What about next year’s tribunes?” I asked.

  “Next year’s? I’m having trouble enough with the ones we have now.”

  “Even if Pompey isn’t named Dictator, he’s almost sure to be one of next year’s Consuls. If the Tribunes for next year are all Pompey’s men, he’ll have near-dictatorial authority and the proconsular province of his choosing. He’ll be able to take Syria from Crassus, or Gaul from Caesar, if he wants.”

  Cicero nodded. “That has always been Pompey’s style – let someone else do all the fighting, then get the Tribunes to give him command in time for the kill.” Now he looked sharply at me. “What are you getting at, Decius?”

  “Be patient with me, Marcus Tullius. I have . . .” at that moment I saw a slave, one of Asklepiodes’s silent Egyptian assistants, making his way toward me, holding a folded piece of papyrus, which he handed to me. I opened up the papyrus, read the single word it held, and grinned. “Marcus Tullius,” I said, “if a man were standing for public office and were caught in some offense against the ancient laws – say, he carried arms within the boundaries set by Romulus – would it abnegate his candidacy?” My own solution to the law was to carry a caestus. The spiked boxing glove was, technically, sports equipment rather than a proper weapon.