Caveat Emptor (19 page)

38

R
USO WOKE TO
a sense that there was a heavy burden lurking just beyond the comfort of his bed and that when he opened his eyes he would have to get up and shoulder it. Sooner than he wished, the sound of a horse whinnying in the stables brought back the memory of last night: the ghastly journey to town in the dark, enveloped in the smell that none of them would ever forget. Gavo driving the borrowed cart with a subdued Tilla beside him. Dias riding next to Ruso, quietly taking charge of transporting the body in a manner so professional that Ruso began to wonder if he had been mistaken about him. Maybe Dias was no more than an ambitious young man with an overactive love life.

There had been no thought of taking Bericus’s remains to lie indoors next to Asper. The cart had been left in the cemetery all night with a pair of lanterns for company. Dias had observed that nobody was going to steal it, and if anyone but Ruso had felt a slight chill at the thought of ghosts and murderers, or imagined they glimpsed some movement in the darkness as they glanced back over their shoulders, they had not spoken of it. Dias had promised to alert the local doctor and ask him to join them in the morning to see what they could find out before a hasty cremation. Finally, once Tilla had been safely delivered back to Camma’s house with the bad news, Ruso had returned to the mansio, dismissed his guard, and made sure the doors of Suite Three were securely locked.

He swung his feet onto the floor and stretched and yawned before splashing his face with water from the bowl. Then he wandered barefoot out onto the wooden walkway and told the passing slave that he would not be needing breakfast after all. Before long he was going to have to face the remains of Bericus in daylight. He leaned out over the rail that separated the walkway from the garden and took a deep breath of chilly air. The sun was not fully up, but the sky was clear. It would be a fine morning.

A servant emerged from the main kitchen, carried a pail across to one of the flowerbeds, and carefully ran a stream of water along a row of seedlings. Another appeared farther along the walkway with a bundle of bedding clutched to her chest and threw it over the rail. Ruso wondered whether Asper’s funeral procession had set off yet. Tilla had promised to break the latest bad news to Camma and the housekeeper last night.

He wished Tilla were not caught up in this wretched affair. She was only trying to help, but her presence was a further complication. Her courage was beyond doubt. But courage and loyalty would not be enough. He needed to be impartial, objective, and highly alert if he was to steer a safe course for them both among the procurator’s politics, Metellus’s scheming, and whatever the hell Caratius—and possibly Dias—had been up to. He did not need the distraction of worrying about his wife.

Ruso frowned at a beetle scurrying along the edge of a flowerbed and tried to order his thoughts. Caratius had strenuously denied any involvement in the murder, but he had no explanation for why Julius Bericus had been found on his land. It must be the work of “some enemy,” or “that woman’s curse.” The servants and laborers whom there had been time to question seemed as shocked as their master.

Camma had been right about Bericus all along. He was not responsible for the death of his brother. Ruso wondered briefly if events might have happened the other way around—if Asper had been injured while murdering Bericus for his share of the money—but digging even Bericus’s pathetically shallow grave would have been beyond the strength of a man with a serious head injury.

There seemed to be three versions of events, and not all of them could be true. He pressed his right forefinger onto the rail as if to hold down the first version while he considered the others.

Asper and his brother had taken the money, intending to deliver it to Londinium.

Second finger.

Asper and his brother had taken the money, intending to steal it.

Third finger.

Asper and his brother had not taken the money at all, as they were intending to visit Caratius and then go home.

This led to three possibilities. Left hand.

Asper had lied about his intentions.

Second finger.

Someone was mistaken about what Asper had said and done.

Third finger.

Someone was lying to him.

Perhaps the answer lay in whatever Asper had been trying to tell Metellus in that ill-fated letter to Room Twenty-seven. That was unfortunate because he still had no idea what it was. He was going to have to recheck everyone’s story. He also needed to go to a funeral, examine a body, report officially to the Council, get into Asper’s office, talk to the local money changer …

Farther along the walkway, a door opened. A child’s voice was raised in complaint. A slave emerged with both hands full of bags. Behind her he heard the child insisting that she wanted to stay here. Ruso shrugged his shoulders a couple of times to loosen them before he turned and headed back into Suite Three to get properly dressed and face the day.

That was when he noticed the pale rectangular shape lying just inside the street door. He flipped open the thin leaves of wood. Neatly penned across them in a bland script were the words,
Get out of town as fast as you can. From a well-wisher.

He snatched the key from the hook, sliding it back and forth in the lock with an unsteady hand and swearing as the prongs failed to find the holes. Finally he wrenched the door open.

Dias was leaning against the stable wall opposite. The rest of the alley was empty except for a couple of hens scratching in the dirt.

Ruso forced himself to stay calm. “How long have you been there?”

“I came to take you to the cemetery, sir. The doctor’s on his way out there now.”

“Why didn’t you knock?”

“I did.”

“Did you see anybody put a note under my door?”

“No. Is there a problem?”

Ruso retreated. “No. I’ll be ready in a minute.”

Get out of town as fast as you can.

Why? And how long had Dias been standing there? Had he put the note there himself and then waited calmly for Ruso to find it?

He should have checked the street door as soon as he got up. Instead, he had wandered out to the garden with his mind full of the day ahead. The note could have been there all night.

He was halfway to the reception area when Serena’s cousin, whose name he had forgotten again, came out of the door clutching a ring of heavy keys. “Hello Ruso! There’s a message for you to pop next door and look at a carriage. How was your dinner party?”

“Short,” he said. Evidently the news about Bericus had not reached her yet. “I’ve had a confidential note pushed under the door,” he continued, “but nobody’s signed it. Could you ask the staff if anyone saw anything? Has anyone been asking which room I was in?”

“Of course.” A furrow appeared between the neatly plucked brows. “Are you all right? You look a bit pale.”

“I’m fine,” he assured her, backing away and giving what he hoped was a reassuring wave. “Absolutely fine. No problem at all. Fine.”

Any illusion that she might have believed him was spoiled as he heard her say, “Oh dear.”

39

T
HERE WAS NO
need to go to the stables to find Rogatus: Outside the mansio the overseer’s bandy legs were stationed next to a vehicle whose roof was being loaded with luggage.

“You wanted to see it before it went out, boss.”

The carriage was old and much repaired. Ruso walked all around it, conscious that Dias was watching him and wishing he knew what he was looking for. There was a fresh scrape along one side at about the right height for the overhanging oak. Other signs of damage to the woodwork could have been caused by wear and tear. There were no marks that looked like weapon scars. Rogatus, who clearly thought this was a waste of time, said he could see nothing, either.

“Perhaps,” said Ruso, crouching to squint along the shadowy line of a mud-spattered axle and wondering who wanted him out of town, “you could remind me exactly what Asper said about where he was going.”

“He was on the way to your office, boss,” replied the man without hesitation. “He’d got the tax money ready to go.”

Noting that he had now become
boss
instead of
sir
, Ruso said, “Did he mention calling on anyone on the way?”

“Not a word, boss.”

“And you’ve no idea why he was setting out so late?”

“I never asked. He could have made it before dark, though.”

Ruso moved to the front and eyed the hefty team of four who would pull the carriage to its next destination. “Are these—?”

“That’s them,” Rogatus confirmed.

One horse was munching thoughtfully on its bit. Another bent its neck to rub its muzzle against an itch on its left foreleg. None looked highly strung. Rogatus had rightly described the carriage as a “heavy old vehicle” and Ruso suspected the weight must be near the limit of their strength. Evidently the overseer did not believe in wasting horsepower. This was not a carriage that could outrun a mounted enemy, and he could see why it had not been stolen for a fast getaway.

He approached the weather-beaten native who was loading the luggage. “Are you the regular driver?”

“It’s no good talking to him, boss,” put in Rogatus. “He don’t know a thing.”

The native sniffed, wiped his nose on the back of his hand, and swung a heavy bag up into the carriage. “At least I know how to drive.” Continuing in Latin that was effective rather than elegant, he added, “Him over there, he tell me there is no work for the day, then he give my team to some fool who lose them on the road and he think I will not find out.”

Rogatus pretended not to have heard. “Like I said before, boss, I was doing the tax man a favor. Most of us around here”—plainly this excluded the sniffing driver—“know how to show a bit of respect to authority.”

“Hah!” said the driver before Ruso could answer. “It is himself he is doing the favor to. The tax man drives, and the driver gets no wages.”

“The driver might get some wages,” said Rogatus, “If he got off his backside a bit more often.”

The driver tutted. “It is lucky I am a patient man,” he said, shaking his head as if contemplating the horrors that would ensue if he were not. “Without me here, his stables will fall to pieces.”

Rogatus gave the smallest of shrugs, as if the driver were not worth the effort of more. “Good luck getting any sense out of that one, boss. I tell you, if the rest of him worked as hard as his mouth, he’d be a wonder.”

The driver stabbed a rude gesture toward Rogatus’s departing back before bending to lift the next trunk. Ruso could imagine returning in twenty years’ time to find the pair of them toothless and shriveled with age, propping up opposite ends of the same bar and still complaining about each other over their beers to anyone who would listen.

The driver gasped a few choice words in British as he heaved up the weight of the trunk. It landed on the floor of the carriage with a crash. “What is it women put in these things?” he demanded.

“Crockery,” said Ruso.

The driver stepped back from the door. “You want a look, then? Have a look.”

Ruso climbed in, and out, and learned nothing other than the fact that today’s passengers had vast amounts of luggage. He was outside on the driver’s seat assessing how well he could see approaching robbers when a boy’s voice announced, “That’s a new driver.”

Ruso turned and recognized the officer’s family he had seen stopping to use the latrines at the posting station yesterday. He explained his presence with, “I’ve just finished checking your vehicle.”

“He is here to ask questions,” the real driver explained. “The last man who take it is murder on the road and the horses run off.”

The woman gave a small squeak of terror and clutched at both children.

“No problems, mistress,” the driver continued, giving her a grin that displayed a solitary tooth and slapping the nearest horse on the neck as if to show how dependable it was. “All safe with me today.”

Ruso climbed down, fixing him with the same look that had frightened Albanus’s young followers and the innkeeper’s wife. The driver did not seem to notice.

“Was it the natives?” asked the girl, peering wide eyed from behind her mother’s skirts.

“Of course it was,” the boy said. “I bet they tied him up and stuck a big spike through his—”

“No they didn’t!” said Ruso and the mother in unison.

At that moment the riders who had been escorting the family yesterday clattered out of the stables and halted, two in front of the vehicle and two behind. Ruso had just promised the mother that she would be perfectly safe when Serena’s voice called out from the top of the mansio steps, “Of course you’ll be safe! I hope Ruso hasn’t been frightening you with some silly nonsense about the natives?”

The woman was looking up at Serena with the expression of a stray dog begging to be taken in.

“Absolutely not,” insisted Ruso.

“Good,” said Serena. “There’s no need to worry about the natives down here. You’ll meet the dangerous tribes in the North.” After these words of doubtful comfort, she added, “Have a good journey!”

“You’ll be fine,” Ruso assured the woman. “You’re on the main road and you have a good escort.”

“But that poor man who was—”

“He was a native himself,” said Ruso, knowing that would reassure her. “He was known to be carrying a lot of money and he had no guards with him.”

The woman said, “Why not?”

“That’s what I’m trying to work out.” He glanced across at Dias, who seemed to be more interested in the maid sweeping the steps, and wondered whether he knew.

Before leaving he stepped back inside the mansio and told Serena and the cousin that if there were any urgent messages, he would be out at the cemetery with Dias to supervise a postmortem examination and then he was going to report to the Council.

Dias, who must have overheard, greeted him with something that might have been a smile. Or a smirk. Without knowing what the man was thinking, Ruso had no way of telling the difference.