by Mike Ashley
‘Love so easily turns to hate,’ sighed Sollius. ‘May I see him?’
Agenor was not a prepossessing youth, but his fear had subdued his native sullenness, and he saw in the Slave Detective a possible saviour.
‘I will tell you all you ask – all,’ he cried vehemently.
‘How was it that you were the first to find her?’
‘I had just come in from the Baths. She was lying near the threshold of my bedroom. Her killer could not have long left her, for she was still warm, but dead, quite dead.’
If that were true, thought Sollius, it meant that the murderer, if not Agenor, was most likely another member of the household.
‘It was daylight?’
‘In the middle afternoon. On my way in I saw no one running from the house.’
‘Was Melissa liked in the house?’
‘Except for my stepfather, by no one – by neither the family nor the slaves. My stepfather spoilt her abominably, even at the expense of his own daughter.’
‘That would not make for peace between the two girls,’ murmured Sollius.
‘Nor between Melissa and my mother,’ added Agenor. ‘Have you questioned Silvius?’
‘Who is Silvius?’
‘The head slave. He hated her,’ he added venomously. ‘She had enticed him – and then haughtily mocked him when he became familiar. She was not a good girl.’
He began to sob, and put his head into his hands.
‘But I loved her – by all the gods, I loved her . . .’
Before taking any further steps in the case the Slave Detective had to return to his master’s great mansion on the Esquiline to receive the necessary permission. He found that Dacia had already visited Sabinus and obtained it. Taking the younger slave Lucius, his usual assistant, with him, he limped back to the house on the Palatine.
‘Tear the heart out of the head slave,’ he instructed him. ‘His name is Silvius. I shall first interrogate Marcus Albinus.’
The architect received him in his working-room, dismissing a young slave who had been busy at a drawing board. He was a gross man between fifty and sixty, with an intelligent but sensual face. He was very grave in his manner as he greeted Sollius.
‘This is a terrible thing,’ he said heavily. ‘It has been a very great shock to me. I was in here, working at my drawing board alone, when I heard the commotion in the house. I rushed out – to see my adopted daughter in the state you know, and my stepson being held by my head slave. I have really nothing else I can tell you. It is terrible, terrible . . .’ he kept repeating.
‘Do you believe your stepson guilty?’
‘How else? He was found on the spot – and the girl was but then dead. I myself – this room is quite near – heard them quarrelling, and then silence. And hasn’t the City Prefect arrested him? The Prefects of Rome do not make many mistakes, and Licinius is a good Prefect.’
‘You dislike Agenor?’
‘A most unsatisfactory fellow! His mother – my second wife – indulges him beyond all reason.’
‘Then you would not favour his love for your adopted daughter,’ said Sollius softly.
‘By no means, slave! I was glad that she had rejected him, though I fear now that it was the cause of this tragedy.’
‘May I speak now to your own daughter?’
‘If you must,’ conceded Albinus. He clapped his hands for a slave and gave directions that Nanno should meet the Slave Detective in the atrium.
Sollius waited for her by a stilled fountain. Presently she came, a girl without charm or beauty. Dacia came with her.
‘This is Nanno,’ said her mother, and Sollius bowed meekly.
‘Do you know,’ he asked, ‘where you were when Melissa was stabbed?’
‘I was here in the atrium, arranging flowers. I heard cries, and a slave told me what had happened.’
‘You did not go to see? You were not far away here.’
‘I was very busy with the flowers. I took the commotion to be yet another drunken scene with Agenor.’
‘You must not be so foolishly bitter with your half-brother,’ snapped her mother angrily.
‘You did not get on with Agenor?’ Sollius asked.
Nanno shook her head.
‘It has always been a great grief to me,’ said Dacia.
‘Let us leave Agenor. What were your relations with Melissa?’ pursued Sollius, his eyes suddenly keen.
‘None of us, save my husband,’ interposed Dacia, ‘found Melissa anything but false, secret and intolerable. She must have left a trail of hate wherever she went. Some broken lover will have got into the house by stealth, and taken his revenge.’
‘Your son, lady, fits that supposition.’
She looked at him angrily.
‘I am hiring you to defend my son!’
‘I am but showing you, lady, how difficult that is!’ he retorted, then turned again to Nanno, and asked, with a deep glance: ‘What young man did she steal from you? I can soon find out who it was. Tell me!’
‘The only man I shall ever love!’ she cried, and ran blindly out of the atrium.
‘This house is a cauldron of hate,’ he said. ‘Where were you yourself, lady, when the girl was killed?’
‘In the garden, instructing the gardener. We both rushed in at the cries. He will tell you so.’
‘I shall ask him,’ replied Sollius gravely.
‘Do you always work against your clients?’ she asked haughtily.
‘I work for truth and justice. I have no other clients,’ he answered, his gaze level and by no means that of a slave, and he saw her grow pale. With a deeper anger – or a new fear? He had no guess, nor, for once, a speaking intuition.
‘Truth and justice,’ she rejoined with spirit, ‘commit you to defend my son.’
‘It seems,’ he replied quietly, ‘that no one grieves for the dead girl.’
‘Except my husband,’ she flashed back. ‘He valued her above his own daughter. The adopted daughter of his old friend went in silk, his born daughter in the mere Roman wool. You will not find the murderer in the house, O Sollius. He will be one of Melissa’s tormented lovers, slipping in stealthily. Have you looked for such a one?’
‘The City Prefect is covering that,’ Sollius answered, and broke off the interview.
Leaving the atrium, he saw Lucius emerging from the slaves’ quarters. He called to him, took his arm, and led him into the gardens.
‘I have a question to ask the gardener,’ he said.
He found him so exceedingly deaf that it was difficult to make him understand the question when it was asked.
‘I heered nothin,’ he growled at last. ‘The mistress just tugged at me and rushed me indoors – and there we found . . . what we found.’
‘How long had she been with you?’
‘Long? Why, she’d but just come!’
‘You saw young Agenor by the body?’
‘Ay, and the mistress gave a great shriek, she did. Oh, yes, I heered that!’
Sollius was silent for a moment, then he nodded, and turned away. As he and Lucius passed out through the atrium they saw Dacia comforting her sobbing daughter. None of them spoke. The Slave Detective and Lucius walked to the barracks of the Urban Cohorts.
‘What did you learn from Silvius?’ inquired Sollius as he limped along.
‘He hated the girl; that is sure. And he saw Agenor by the body and holding the knife – and, so he says, Dacia ran in almost at the same moment. He could just have had time to slip in and do the killing, slip out again, and then, hearing Agenor unexpectedly entering, have run in on the clever impulse of accusing him of the murder. Silvius is a sly man. I can tell you that.’
‘Everybody, except Albinus, seems to have hated the girl. The house is a nest of evil,’ sighed Sollius. ‘Each and all seem to have had motive and opportunity in equal degree. None of them was sufficiently away from the spot where Melissa was killed, not even her adoptive father. Licinius, indeed, can justify his arrest
of Agenor. He could be justified in the arrest of any of them.’
‘One of whom,’ commented Lucius dryly, ‘we are hired to prove innocent.’
The Slave Detective made no response, and was unwontedly frowning. He seemed to walk with more pain than ever from the old wolf-trap injury.
‘You make me suspect each of them in turn,’ laughed Lucius.
‘As I do myself!’ almost snarled Sollius, and then they reached the barracks, entered and sought the Prefect.
They found him irritable and dispirited.
‘Is the case solved?’ he asked, a sudden gleam of hope in his eyes.
‘What,’ asked Sollius without answering the question, ‘did your cohort men discover about intruders to Albinus’ house?’
‘They asked diligently but there seemed to be none, neither fishsellers nor beggars,’ Licinius replied heavily.
‘You confirm me,’ nodded Sollius. ‘It is an inside case – of that I am sure. Each in the house had proximity, opportunity and motive, but one is guilty. That one must be tricked into full sight of us. If anything there are too many clues.’
‘Has your intuition not spoken?’ asked the Prefect with a touch of slyness in his tone.
‘It has spoken,’ answered Sollius seriously, ‘but, though I trust it, no paramount clue is evident. I am not always right, Prefect. Do not release Agenor because I may suspect someone else. There is more evidence against him than against any other. You may still,’ the Slave Detective sighed, ‘have the right man,’ and he sat for a long moment twiddling his thumbs. Then he went on: ‘The one hope is that one in that house of hate does love another.’
Again he sat twiddling his thumbs. The Prefect and Lucius glanced at each other, and waited. At last his edict came.
‘Send a centurion, and arrest them all – Agenor’s mother, half-sister and stepfather, and also the slave named Silvius. We will interrogate them together. Send at once.’
The water-clock had but registered little when the Centurion brought in his gaggle of protesting prisoners.
‘This is monstrous!’ burst out Albinus. ‘I shall complain to the Emperor – by whom I am known personally.’
‘Severus is in Britain,’ answered the Prefect curtly. ‘Meanwhile it is a matter of murder. You will answer our questions.’
Further protest was silenced by an uplifted hand, and then Licinius turned to Sollius.
‘Let the play begin,’ he said.
The Centurion had lined them up to face the Prefect and Sollius with military precision, using his marching stick to level them off. He and the Prefect stood in full uniform, bronze-girt and helmeted. In his drab tunic and bare legs Sollius showed very unimportantly between them – except for his stance and his eyes. The Prefect’s office was lofty and oblong, and in its furnishing was more in the grave taste of the old Republic than in the gilding of the long-confirmed Empire.
‘Let Agenor be added to them, Prefect,’ said Sollius, and Licinius gave the order to a soldier standing guard at the door.
Presently Agenor was brought in, and the Centurion ranged him at the end of the line, stationing him, as it happened, next to his half-sister, Nanno. Every eye was fixed, most uncomfortably, rather upon the slave than upon the Prefect.
‘The girl, Melissa,’ Sollius began, ‘gave cause for all of you to hate her.’
‘Not me!’ pronounced Albinus haughtily.
‘She caused dissension in your house,’ Sollius asserted.
‘I, at least, loved her,’ cried Agenor.
‘And she laughed at you!’
‘I always treated her as a daughter,’ said Dacia.
‘And she repaid you with ingratitude. She put discord in a harmonious circle. All of you had opportunity. I have worked it out, and it is so.’
None of them could raise a voice in denial. Each had been at rest or at work near by at the time of the murder. Sollius levelled his glance keenly upon them in turn from one end of the line to the other. He had one doubt in his mind: which, of two, was the one that another loved? Whose eyes fastened most frequently upon another’s? Was that, however, in a knowledge of guilt, or in a desire to protect? One person’s eyes thus flickered – and at two faces. The face of that person was grey. The Slave Detective knew that he would have to make his choice – and at once, for the silence was growing painful and the Prefect was looking at him in puzzled disbelief in his intuitional efficiency.
‘Licinius,’ he snapped suddenly, ‘arrest Dacia!’
A cry of anguish went up, but it was not hers.
‘Fool, O Slave Detective – it was not she, but I!’
Out from the line broke Albinus, striding menacingly up to Sollius. The Centurion plucked him back.
‘Melissa was a goddess’ – he spoke with a slight foam at the corners of his lips – ‘how sweet at first, and then how evil! But I loved her – beyond my peace I loved her, so deeply that I became unclean to myself. I saw the devastation she had caused in the house and in my own heart. It came to the pass that I must either take her, or destroy her. All our lives had become shadowed as from the Furies’ wings! I chose to destroy the pest!’
He broke into a wild sob, and would have fallen had the Centurion not supported him.
‘Take him!’ ordered the Prefect. ‘And release the others.’
Sollius grinned at him when they were alone together.
‘I had in the end to guess at the lever of his affections – his wife or his daughter. I had to accuse one of the two. As it was, I guessed rightly. That is all there is to it, Prefect!’ he added in mock modesty, and limped out.
MOSAIC
Rosemary Aitken
With the character of Libertus we are seeing the start of a new type of investigator. Skilled, and clearly with some experience behind him, Libertus is a freedman and craftsman in Roman Britain some years after the conquest. Libertus has gone on to appear in other stories and novels including The Germanicus Mosaic (1999), A Pattern of Blood (2000), Murder in the Forum (2001) and many more. Rosemary Aitken is the author of many highly respected textbooks in the field of language and communication, but has recently returned to her roots with a series of novels set in turn-of-the-century Cornwall exploring the lives of the tin miners. The series began with The Girl from Penvarris (1995). She currently lives near Gloucester, the Roman Glevum, where this story is set.
‘Libertus! Damn the man, where has he got to now?’ It was Sergius Maximus, in his customary bad temper.
Libertus the pavement maker struggled to his feet, so that he could ostentatiously bend one knee and drop his head as Sergius blustered into the room. ‘I am here. Your servant, master.’
That was not, strictly, true. As his name suggested, Libertus was a freed man, not a slave – a craftsman, given his freedom on the death of his master and now officially ‘employed’ by Sergius, who wanted a spectacular new mosaic for his new wife. Not that being employed made a great deal of difference. As a freedman Libertus was technically a citizen, and entitled to the protection of the law – but since Roman Law, in this god-forsaken part of the Insula Brittanica, was mostly represented by Sergius himself, the matter was largely academic.
Sergius turned to the young man at his elbow. ‘Remarkable work, you see Marcus. A present for my wife. And for posterity. People round here won’t forget Governor Sergius Maximus in a hurry.’
That was another lie. Sergius was not a governor at all. He had begun as a centurion in the occupying legion, but when the peace was enforced and his age permitted he had elected to retire from the army and take residence in the country. He had acquired an estate, by the very efficient method of offering the owner a few denarii for his land and threatening to run him through if he did not accept it. The land enabled him to set himself up as sort of unofficial local dignitary – a long way from the nearest Roman outpost, which was at Glevum, forty leagues away. The Commander at Glevum troubled him only once a year by sending a messenger with a bundle of new directives and demands for tax – t
his year the messenger was Marcus. Sergius obviously hoped that he would take back reports of the mosaic with him.
The emissary looked at the pavement politely, but he seemed more interested in its maker. ‘You are Libertus?’ he said, heartily. ‘I have heard of you. Last year, when my predecessor came – his guard was murdered and gold stolen. You solved the problem, he told me. Found the real culprit and saved an innocent man from stoning. In the nick of time, I hear?’
Libertus flushed. This was dangerous talk. Sergius did not enjoy it when other people became the centre of attention. He shook his head, ‘A trifling matter, excellence.’
Sergius snorted in agreement. ‘As he says – a trifle. Such a fuss over nothing. Suppose the fellow had been executed? He was a merely a slave. Probably guilty of something, if the truth were known. You can’t trust these people.’ Sergius had acquired household servants with his ‘purchase’ as well as having a few dozen slaves taken in battle. ‘Finding the murderer was very clever, no doubt – but it was mostly chance. Anyone might have done it. But this . . .’ he gestured towards the pavement, ‘this requires a real craftsman. And a master with vision enough to order the work. I shall be the envy of the Island.’
Certainly Sergius had established for himself a very agreeable lifestyle – if you discounted the toll it had taken on his appearance. The swarthy, muscular centurion had become florid and flaccid in middle age, his battle-scarred face slack with wine and easy living. He was, Libertus thought dispassionately, quite the ugliest man in the country. Nevertheless, he bowed again. ‘Thank you, excellence.’
Such civilities were wise. Sergius was apt to take lapses very personally. When the vines (which he had introduced at great expense) failed in the British frost, Sergius had set an example by decimating the estate labourers. (Not, as some ignorant people supposed, simply destroying most of them – but literally ‘decimating’ them – executing one in ten and leaving their bodies tied to wooden gibbets, one every forty paces on the road to the villa.) It had effectively cowed the others but the vines still perished.
