The Mammoth Book of Classical Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  We thanked our informant, a veteran of the Tenth Legion, and asked for letters of introduction so that we might be reunited with our old friend and I could tend his sick body._

  The reply was a shock. ‘There’s no need. His personal physician is with him. He arrived two days ago and went straight on to Nimes.’

  ‘Who was this physician?’ I asked.

  The old man struggled to remember. ‘He was a Jew, like Paul; a very pleasant, courteous man; rather dark complexion. What was his name? Ah, yes; Manaus, that was it.’

  I turned to Eubulus. ‘We must go, now! We have to stop Manaus.’

  He looked puzzled. ‘But I thought . . .’

  ‘That he was one of us? Yes, so did I. He fooled me thoroughly — not just once; every day for months.’

  As we hurried along the dusty road I asked myself over and again how I could have been so easily duped. I now saw Manaus for what he was — an agent sent from Jerusalem to be revenged on Paul and through Paul, on Jesus. He had feigned membership of the church in order to find information and attached himself to me knowing that I of all people would discover the truth. I had no doubt what he would do if he found Paul. There would be no reliance on Roman justice this time.

  We reached Nimes as darkness was falling. The guards at the Augustus Gate refused to let us in. We argued for over half an hour. It was no use. We were obliged to lodge at a tavern outside the walls and spend a sleepless night waiting, probably within a few hundred paces of our friend yet unable to warn him of his danger.

  In the morning as soon as the gate was opened we went straight to the house close by the temple of Diana to which we had been directed. The door was opened by a slave girl who was plainly terrified at being confronted at such an hour by two strangers demanding to see her master. I could not understand her anxiety until I recalled that the day was a Sunday. All the family would be attending secret worship and she was under strict orders to tell no one of their whereabouts.

  Did she, I asked, know anything about a man called Manaus? She nodded, obviously relieved at being asked a question she could answer. ‘He was staying here, Sir, but he left about half an hour ago. I heard him say he would be going out by the South Gate.’

  Leaving Eubulus to locate the church meeting, I hastened through the quiet streets and squares and out through the gateway overlooking a wide plain. There was, as yet, little traffic passing in and out of the town and travellers could be seen some way ahead along the road.

  I found Manaus, at last, about a mile from Nimes, sitting on a rock. It was as though he was waiting for me.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said as I approached. ‘I’m glad to be able to see you again before my return to Judaea. I have enjoyed our companionship enormously and I was genuinely sorry to have to deceive you.’

  ‘Where is Paul? What have you done with him?’ I demanded.

  ‘He is where he can do no more harm with his blasphemous teaching.’

  ‘You have killed him?’

  Manaus shook his head. ‘I would like to be able to claim that privilege. Perhaps I will when I report to the Sanhedrin. But because of our long weeks of friendship you deserve the truth.’ He stood up and walked a few paces from the highway, beckoning me to follow.

  He pointed down at a rectangle of newly turned earth. ‘He died five days ago - very peacefully, they tell me. His friends actually boasted of how, at the end he quoted one of my people’s prophets—

  “Death where is your sting;

  death where is your victory?”

  It is a pity he did not die in pain, fully aware of his failure. But, really, it matters little. All that does matter is that the world has heard the last of Paul of Tarsus.’

  I know not how long I stayed at the spot, vision blurred with grief, memories cascading through my mind.

  Even now, more than a year later, the letters grow indistinct as I write them and tears splash onto the page. Manaus was right: the world will soon forget Paul but for those of us who knew him he will always have a place in our hearts.

  Farewell,

  Luke

  * Nero committed suicide in June 68.

  ** The Apostle James, the brother of the Lord, was stoned to death by a mob incited by the Sanhedrin.

  THE BROTHER IN THE TREE

  Keith Heller

  Keith Heller has written a number of historical mysteries, the best known being his series about George Man, a London parish watchman, that began with Man’s Illegal Life (1984). He has also written stories featuring the Chinese magistrate Ti Jen-Chieh and William Blake as detectives (though not in the same story!). Here he explores the powers of deduction of the Greek philosopher Epictetus, who lived from around AD 50–120, in one of the most bizarre mysteries I have ever encountered.

  On summer afternoons, when the olive trees and cypresses swayed in a green wind, the students of Epictetus would gather under a spacious colonnade for their lessons. There, sheltered from the sneers of boys and the profiles of girls, the young men would ready themselves for their Master’s visit. Some would go over the day’s readings. Some would beg others to argue with them or try to tempt them with fantasies of glory or terrors of Caesar. The best pupils would simply sit alone, balancing themselves on mounds of rock between desire and aversion. Their composure amazed even the distant mountains, at least until the bronze sun shifted or a travelling bee rousted them off their perches and into the gestures of a frenzied drunkard at a bacchanal. Then their friends knew them again for what they were, nothing but little souls carrying around the corpse of a body, just as the Stoic had always taught them.

  The Master was usually late. Since his recent marriage, Epictetus had seemed more and more distracted. Apparently following his idol, Socrates, he had chosen a brooding woman with a tongue shriller than a hound’s, a companion to help him save from an early death a sad unwanted child who had been exposed on a hillside to die. The sudden family had filled their modest house with more liveliness than they had ever known. Now, throughout the poor neighbourhood in Nicopolis, the city in Epirus on the northwestern shoulder of Greece where he had been exiled, the philosopher was becoming as famous for his housework as for his principles. He could often be seen hanging out of a window with a rag and a sneeze, or advancing on the vegetable market with a list in one hand and a knitted bag in the other. A lesser man might have thought his reputation diminished by such outrages, but Epictetus was not the most revered philosopher in town for nothing. He bore the weight of such changes manfully and even used the worst of his indignities as lessons in his classes. ‘Where is the difference,’ he would challenge any scoffer, ‘between airing out a room and airing out your own soul?’ Of his marketing excursions after fresh produce he said considerably less.

  Today, the innermost circle of students was standing at the country end of the colonnade, staring as one out into the forest. Flavius Arrian, the Master’s pet and a compulsive recorder, was frowning with worry as he listened to another student finish telling them the latest news. Lesbius, a short man whose constantly sour expression had made his beard grow crooked, had related the morning’s warmest gossip as eagerly as a girl, enjoying the evil of others that he had suspected all along. He had assured his listeners that none of this meant anything to him personally. But just so that they would have no doubt on that score, he told them all of it over once again.

  ‘And that’s why, Crinus,’ he added to the shivering sapling of a man standing next to him, ‘the man was left where he is. After a lifetime of imprisonment, where could he go? I suppose our city fathers only want to investigate the crime before anything in the scene becomes disturbed.’

  ‘Who said they thought it was a crime?’ All eyes turned to a younger man on a bench who was adjusting the strap on one of his sandals. ‘I mean,’ Polus went on, ‘who can say that the poor fellow wasn’t surprised there while he was out hunting or that he didn’t fall asleep and get caught in there so tightly that he couldn’t struggle free without help? You said yourse
lf that he was found in the loneliest, most dense part of the forest where no one but wild boars ever go. He could have been there for days or weeks, calling for food, and none of us here in town would have heard him. But that doesn’t prove that someone deliberately trapped him there in order to murder him.

  ‘I recall getting wedged inside a tree once when I was a boy,’ he smiled, ‘pretending to be Dryope for some of my friends. We had to wait for a woodsman to come by to cut me out. If we hadn’t been near a travelled road, we might never have been able to manage it on our own. I could have been caught there for hours.’

  Lesbius scowled down at the handsome young actor on the bench. Polus was talented and already famous, but sometimes he listened to no one’s voice but his own. And the uglier Lesbius simply could not bear to be unnoticed.

  ‘I’ve already told you,’ he cried to the growing ring of classmates around him. ‘This man had grown old inside the tree! Don’t you understand? He must have been forced into a fissure in the tree when both he and it were still very young. He must have been strapped in at first, for they say that the rotted leather fibres still hang on his one exposed arm. But then the tree was allowed to grow up all around him, swallowing him whole, until only his face and his right forearm can be seen. He seems to be struggling outward as if he were sinking into quicksand, only the tree’s bole is hard as stone, and its bark swirls around his body as if he were wearing it as a robe. The awful thing is that he could apparently breathe and even eat and drink as well as any of us. But he could not move. He could only grow taller and older in the centre of the tree as the tree grew layer upon layer on top of him. He even had enough room inside to scream,’ Lesbius said, for once even his sneering voice shaken. ‘But, out there, who could have ever heard him wailing but himself?’

  The gathered students shared a moment of private terror, as they each felt that they could not get quite enough air into their lungs. They studied the gay colours of the distant trees and the narrow gaps between them where last night’s darkness seemed to have hidden itself. And they had to look away, towards the more spacious, human city, before any of them could catch their breath again or quiet the tingling in their hands.

  As Crinus tried to turn away from the story, a larger, more massive student spoke up. His bull’s neck, deformed ears, and fleshy nose belonged more in the wrestling ring than in the school of Epictetus. Yet his honest strength and solid good sense often pleased the Master with insights into life and effort that were too simple to be seen by most of the other, cleverer students.

  ‘But what did the dead man look like?’ Bato wanted to know. ‘Was there nothing left but bones, a bare skeleton, or was there enough of a man remaining to be recognized? If he died from hunger and exposure, was it so long ago that no one in Nicopolis would even know him now?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Lesbius informed them. ‘The general thinking is that he died but a few days ago, perhaps during that thunderstorm when whoever had been keeping him alive would not have been able to go out. The body is evidently hardly even cold or hard, and there is still a sweetness in the skin as if the man were only sleeping. Even his eyes are still open, though the rains have left their lashes moistened as if with pathetic teardrops. I’m told that he’s still quite the sight and that many townspeople are visiting the area as an attraction. Isn’t this what we’d all like?’ he asked everyone around him. ‘To look on death without actually having to die? Isn’t that what we all study here?’

  The healthy young men all paused, some sighing, reminded of their worst fears and all the tragedies their own lives might someday contain.

  ‘Do you mean,’ tiny Crinus suddenly stammered, ‘that someone was cruel enough to keep him alive for twenty or thirty years, locked inside that growing tree? But who would want to do a thing so monstrous? Who was the man, anyway? Does anyone know him? If we knew that, maybe then we’d know who’d want to make someone’s whole life into a daily torture. But until then –’

  Before anyone could respond, a limping shadow approached the students from the rear as the tardy philosopher came up to join in their discussion. Epictetus, as usual, had heard everything already.

  ‘The dead man,’ he began, bobbing his grey beard as his long hair fell across the shoulder left bare by his rough cloak, ‘has been identified as the missing son of Aprulla, that old woman at the city gate who raises and trains fighting quail for competitions. She’s never made more than a few obols a day, but it’s always been enough to keep her and her boys happy. The only sorrow in her life was the loss of the first of her triplets, the silver boy, the one whose grey eyes reminded her, she used to say, so much of her dead husband’s. When he disappeared as a boy, she only had the other two. And though that would have been enough for most women – more than enough,’ he mused in a weary aside, ‘for mine – still, Aprulla mourned for her lost son as if the other twins had never existed. Now, of course, her mourning will never cease . . .’

  Everyone around him nodded in sympathy. They had all heard the story before. Not long before her husband’s death in a hunting accident, Aprulla had given birth to three of the most handsome baby boys that the town had ever seen. The first one had been named Felicio, for the joy that she had felt at his full head of hair. The other two were called Kore and Kunos, the first thoughtful as a poet, the second noisier than a volcano. She had kept the triplets secluded in her house through much of their first years, preserving their unity, until that unhappy day when Kunos had hurried in from the forest with a disastrous tale to tell. According to the two brothers, Felicio had gone out with his brothers to explore for coloured rocks when a terrible mishap had occurred. Tempted by an errant butterfly, the lovely boy had hurried ahead, only to tumble into a crevasse in the earth. A scrabbling search had turned up nothing, and the first of the triplets was soon forgotten by the city that had too much living to do to remember. But the mother never forgot, her future days wearing shadows that even her remaining sons could not lighten. Nor did the brothers escape unwounded. Smaller Kore grew inward and melancholy, grey in his eyes and in his dreams. Rougher and more careless, Kunos quickly became the favourite of the town, louder than the loud and never far from wine and women and mistakes that were never his fault. By now, most people had come to accept the twins as polar strangers to each other, never seen in public together, with their mother playing the part of a Medea whose family was being slowly consumed by an unkind fate. But all Nicopolis knew that the last two brothers together would never fill their mother’s heart quite as well as the lost son used to do all alone.

  Now, with the news of Felicio’s being found again poisoned by the imagined dread of his buried life, the town hardly knew what to think or feel. But already many were saying that no one but wild Kunos could have invented such a procrustean destiny for the brother who had every day stolen their mother’s brightest smiles away from him.

  ‘Are you telling us,’ Arrian asked the Master, ‘that the city has already taken Kunos into custody for the torture and killing of his brother? Do they have any evidence for such an action?’

  ‘They haven’t touched him yet,’ Epictetus said. ‘But we all know what a hunter Kunos has always been, how he’s forever out alone in the woods, traipsing after game and adventures with a sack of food as his only company. He usually stays out for days at a time and sometimes has little enough to show for his efforts when he does come home. This all looks very suspect now. Add to all this the vicious nature of the man – his animal roughhousing that contrasts so sharply with Kore and his gentleness – and you must see how the situation begins to look.

  ‘I must say I never thought very much of Kunos myself,’ the Stoic added primly. ‘No man should ever betray his human reason as madly as that man has done his entire life. It just seems to go against our inner nature.’

  He looked up at a frieze of disappointed faces.

  ‘What?’ he suddenly demanded of his offended students. ‘Do you think that the wide earth holds only teachers and students an
d wise thoughts? Or do you suppose that a man with a trained eye cannot, like a doctor or a mathematician, spot a tumor or a miscalculation from across a field? Why did I spend so many hours with my own master, Rufus, if not to be able to detect failings and errors in others? You want to take my philosopher’s judgements away from me, then, and leave me as only a shell to echo the gibberish of the mob?’

  The circle of young men murmured among themselves like dry leaves in woods, until one of the group found enough voice to remind the philosopher of his own words.

  ‘Wasn’t it you, Master,’ began Maximus, a faded sailor who had come to the practice of reason only late in life, ‘who lectured us not to judge even known thieves and robbers too harshly or desire their death, any more than we would that of a blind man or a deaf man? Don’t you teach us that the actions of other men are beyond our control, and so none of our affair? Pardon me if I haven’t understood you correctly,’ the wrinkled man said. ‘But does this mean we should suspend your teachings in this one particular case and act just like everyone else?’

  Taken aback, Epictetus only grumbled something about how late today’s lessons would be and ordered everyone to take out his wax tablet. Then he proceeded to talk at a volume and speed that not even his oldest students had ever heard. He was inspired, and today more than one young man felt his future life change forever at a single turn of phrase. But through it all the philosopher could not help glancing alternately at the outspoken sailor and the waiting forest. And by the close of the session, all his mind was on the woods, listening for a muffled voice that he knew logically must be only the dying wind.

  Once the trees closed behind them and obscured the town, the forest grew black as if the morning overhead was connected to some other day. Dead branches hung heavy, and the decay of lifetimes crowded matted around their feet and erased their tracks. Sounds disappeared, or they changed in midair into the weeping of mosses and the panic of insects. Mites and gnats tormented them as the impossible stillness of raw nature overcame them, and from time to time they were forced to stop and hold each other upright by the shoulders. By the time they finally found the stand of trees that was indicated on their makeshift map, they were both so drained that they almost envied the dead brother in the tree his eternal detachment from the world.