Secrets of the Dead (38 page)

A woman in a black dress with dusty grey hair sat behind a trestle table, reading a gossip webpage on a black laptop.

‘I’d like a passport for my sister,’ Michael said in Serbian,
gesturing
to Abby. ‘Her aunt in Zagreb is very ill and she must go at once.’

The woman frowned. ‘The passport office is shut.’

A fifty-euro note appeared in Michael’s hand. The woman gave it a disapproving look.

‘You are police? You think you can bribe me?’ She shook her head vigorously. ‘This is honest shop.’

‘I’m not police. I need a passport for my sister. Her aunt is very ill.’ Two hundred-euro notes came out.

The woman studied Abby’s face, taking in the bruises staining her cheek, the cut above her forehead. She gave Michael a knowing look, her tongue stuck in the corner of her lips.

She thinks he’s trafficking me
, Abby realised. Her skin crawled as if she’d been smeared with filth; she felt naked.

‘Maybe you come back in a week. Maybe your aunt gets better. This is honest shop,’ the woman said again. But she was smiling as she said it.

Michael laid the money on the table. ‘Perhaps you could just see what you have in the back room,’ he encouraged her.

They walked out of the travel agent a thousand euros poorer, though that wasn’t what made Abby feel cheap. But they had the passport. She studied the photograph under a streetlight, sucking in her cheeks to try and mimic the pinched face of the woman it had once belonged to.

‘It doesn’t have to be perfect,’ Michael told her. ‘Just credible enough for the border guards to accept the bribe.’

She checked her watch, eager to have something else to think about. ‘It’s been over an hour. I should call London.’

She found a payphone in the main square and dialled the number from memory. Michael waited outside the booth.

The same routine with the Foreign Office front desk took her through to the Office of Balkan Liaison. This time, Mark answered straight away.

‘Where are you?’

‘In the Balkans.’ They’d probably trace the number, but she wasn’t going to make it easy for them.

‘What the hell’s going on? Jessop’s dead; you’re missing. I’m hearing barmy things about a shooting war in Kosovo and a Roman tomb.’

‘It’s crazy,’ Abby agreed. ‘Remind me to tell you about it some time.’

Mark’s tone altered. ‘You have to come in Abby. You haven’t done anything wrong. We just need to speak to you.’

‘You remember the necklace you and Jessop took off me?’

‘What about it?’

‘I want you to bring it to me.’ She felt the stiff new passport in her pocket and prayed it would do the job. ‘You know the town of Split, in Croatia? Meet me at the cathedral there at two o’clock tomorrow.’

‘You’re expecting me to drop everything and fly out, just to give you a piece of jewellery? You’ve got to give me more than that.’

She put her hand over the receiver and looked around. Michael didn’t fit in the phone box; he’d wandered across the square and was buying some cigarettes from a Gypsy woman. He had his back to her.

‘Michael’s alive,’ she said.

‘Michael Lascaris?’

‘He didn’t die that night in the villa. He’s with me now.’

Across the square, Michael was sauntering back towards her.

‘Two o’clock, the cathedral in Split,’ she repeated. ‘Bring the necklace.’

‘Wait –’

She hung up. Michael had opened the door and was peering in.

‘Did they bite?’

‘He’ll come,’ she said. She took out the passport again and stared at the unfamiliar face. ‘The question is, will we get there?’

Constantinople – May 337

THE DARKNESS IN
the Chamber of Records is immense. I’ve wandered so far, I don’t know where the door is. I can barely tell which way is up.

But still there’s a voice calling my name. I open my eyes. The darkness recedes. A light approaches, flickering through the gaps in the shelves.

‘Gaius Valerius?’

It’s the archivist.

‘I told you to come out if you wanted to read,’ he reproves me. ‘The atmosphere down here, it can overwhelm you.’

I’m too exhausted for pride. ‘Thank you for coming to rescue me.’

‘Rescue you?’ He sounds amused. ‘I came to fetch you. The Augustus wants to see you.’

I don’t understand. ‘Constantine? Has he returned from the war so soon?’

‘He’s at Nicomedia.’

And there’s a finality in those words that tells me he won’t be coming back.

Villa Achyron, near Nicomedia – May 337

It’s seventy miles to Nicomedia. In my youth, I’d have flogged every post horse on the road to get there in a day. Now, it takes me the best part of two. It isn’t just my age. The road’s busier than I’ve ever seen it; at every waystation, there are long queues for fresh horses. The messengers are tight-lipped, but the grooms know the gossip. From them, I gather that Constantine’s final campaign ended before it really began. He didn’t even get as far as Nicaea before he started complaining of a pain in his stomach. He diverted to the hot baths at Pythia Therma, hoping for a quick cure, but it only made the symptoms worse. His doctors said he was too ill to make the journey back to Constantinople; instead, they decamped to an imperial villa, one of Diocletian’s old estates near Nicomedia: the Villa Achyron.
Achyron
means ‘threshing floor’, where the grain and the chaff are separated. I don’t suppose Constantine finds that comforting.

The villa stands five miles outside Nicomedia, on terraces cut into the slopes above the coast. Fields of corn surround it, though the threshing floor that gave the villa its name is long gone. The corn should be ripening gold in the May sunshine, but there’ll be no harvest this year. The crop’s been trampled back into the earth by the boots and tents of two thousand soldiers camped around it. It’s hard to tell if they’re guarding the villa or besieging it. I trudge up the hill along an avenue of poplars, and announce myself to the clerk, who has set up an administrative headquarters in the vestibule. Not a secretary or a palace functionary, but an officer of the
Protectores
.

‘How’s the Augustus? Is he … ?’
Dying?
I can’t say it – can barely think it.

An unforgiving stare. ‘His doctors prescribed rest.’

‘He sent a message – he summoned me here from Constantinople.’

‘Your name?’

The question spins me off balance like a slap in the face. Is he making a point? Deliberately putting me in my place? People never ask my name: they
know
it.

He taps his pen on the desk. He’s a busy man; an ambitious young officer in a thankless job. And he has no idea who I am.

I tell him; the eyes don’t blink. All I am is a name to be compared against a list. And found absent.

‘Is Flavius Ursus here? The chief of staff?’ That earns me a few seconds more of his time. ‘Tell him Gaius Valerius Maximus is here to see the Augustus.’

‘I’ll tell him.’

They leave me to wait in an anteroom near the heart of the villa. Priests, officials and soldiers pass in and out and through the chamber: Schola guards in their white uniforms, but also field commanders in red battledress. This is still a campaign headquarters, after all.

Hours stretch by, and my mind reaches back to a different villa on a different sea.

Pula, Adriatic Coast – July 326 – Eleven years ago …

Pula’s a small port near the head of the Adriatic. It’s a quiet, well-maintained town, full of merchants who’ve made modest fortunes in regional trade. I imagine it’s the sort of place Constantine has in mind when he rhapsodises about the delights of his peaceful empire: neat, prosperous and dull. A backwater. A good place for a man to disappear.

I reach the governor’s villa near sunset. It’s taken me almost a week to complete the three-day journey here: I’ve slept badly, started late, found infinite faults with the horses, the food, the lodgings. I don’t want to be here. I pleaded with Constantine to send someone else. For the first time in our lives, he wouldn’t meet my eye.

‘It has to be a man I can trust,’ he told me. ‘You’re the only one.’ He handed me the leather bag with its knotted string, the glass vial heavy inside. ‘I don’t want …’ He trailed off with something that sounded like a sob. The things he doesn’t want are so terrible he can’t give voice to them.

‘Do it quickly.’

I find Crispus on a pebble beach on a promontory south of the town. Grass grows between the stones; fish flit among the rocks in the clear water. Two guards, armed, watch from the pines that fringe the cove, while their prisoner sits by the water’s edge, barefoot and bareheaded, letting the waves ripple over his toes.

The guards see me coming and call a wary challenge, their hands on their swords. They’re anxious. Even when they recognise me, they don’t relax. They’re worried I’m going to make them do it.

I send them away. ‘Make sure no one disturbs us,’ I tell them. They’re so grateful to be gone, they don’t look back once.

Now Crispus and I are alone. I scramble down the rocky bank and cross the beach towards him. He turns, smiles, and gets up.

‘I hoped it would be you.’

A clumsy embrace. An over-zealous wave races up the beach and breaks over my boots. I take a step back and stare into
his
face. There are bags under his eyes, a grey cast to his skin. The smile which once came so naturally is now forced, an act of defiance.

I start to say something, but he interrupts, ‘How’s my father?’

‘Lost without you.’

‘I’m sorry I ruined his celebrations.’ He scoops up some pebbles and tosses them one by one into the sea. ‘It’s funny. Three weeks ago, I was watching everything, imagining how it would be for my own
vicennalia
. Now …’

The last pebble drops into the water and barely makes a splash.

‘Your father –’ I begin. Again, Crispus cuts me short.

‘Did he get to the root of the conspiracy?’

‘Which conspiracy?’

‘The conspiracy against me.’ He swings away, as if he knows that looking at me will rob him of something valuable. ‘The whole thing was ridiculous. You know I never tried to kill my brothers. I love them like …’ He pauses, laughs. ‘Like brothers.’

‘Constantine conducted a thorough investigation.’

In fact, he almost tore the palace apart looking for evidence to clear Crispus. All he did was damn him more. Letters from Crispus emerged boasting
When I am sole Augustus
… Chests of coins struck with his insignia were found in his baggage. Two commanders of the imperial bodyguard came forward and testified that Crispus had ordered them to have their men ready to secure the palace. No one explained why the first act of Crispus’s supposed coup was the botched murder of his adolescent brothers, rather than striking at Constantine himself.

‘The tablet you found under my bed – I never saw it. Never knew it existed.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Doesn’t it?’ He stares out to sea, to the flaming sun slowly being eclipsed by the horizon. ‘I suppose not.’

‘You broke your father’s heart,’ I say.

At last he listens to me. He spins around, anger animating his face. ‘I didn’t do anything. Nothing. If my father wants to believe their lies, instead of his own son, then he can break his own heart.’

I try to block out the bitterness. ‘
Their
lies –
whose
lies?’

‘Can’t you guess?’ A husk of a crab shell is lying on the beach, long since picked clean by the gulls. He pokes it with his toe. ‘Who accused me? Who benefits? If I’m gone, Fausta’s children will inherit the empire.’

‘Probably.’

He stamps on the crab shell, shattering its thin carapace. ‘Am I the only one who can see the truth staring him in the face? Can’t you recognise it? Don’t you care?’

I shrug. ‘What is truth, after all?’

Crispus drifts away from me. He wanders close to the water, flinching a little as the waves nibble his feet.

‘I loved him,’ he declares, speaking to the sea. ‘More than any son ever loved his father. I’d have died for him.’ He pauses, lets his breathing slow. ‘Now I suppose I will.’

I loosen the string that binds the leather bag and pull out the bottle. ‘Your father told me to give you this.’

There were tears in Constantine’s eyes then, and they’re here in mine now.
Please
, I beg silently,
don’t make this any harder for me
.

But it’s his life. He looks at the little bottle, doesn’t touch it.

‘Don’t make me do this.’

‘Do you think you could escape? That you wouldn’t be recognised? Your statue’s in every forum from York to Alexandria. You wouldn’t last a week.’

I step forward, press the vial into his fist and clasp my hand around it. Like a suitor trying to get his beloved to accept his token. Crispus tries to pull away, but I keep my grip tight. I only brought one bottle.

‘It’s an honourable death.’ The lie tastes like dirt in my mouth. Neither of us believes it. Maybe opening your veins because you’ve defended the republic and lost, a final victory over your enemies, is honourable. Drinking aconite on a deserted beach, merely for the convenience of your murderers, is rather different.

‘If I kill myself, I sin against God,’ says Crispus.

‘That’s God’s business.’

But he won’t accept it. The tired face turns up to me, taut with desperation.

‘You’re an old friend, Gaius. Are you going to take away my last consolation?’

‘I can’t.’

‘I don’t want to die a guilty man,’ he pleads. ‘Leave me my innocence. It’s all I’ve got now.’ I shake my head, but it doesn’t stop him. ‘Why do you think my father sent you, instead of some thug from the legions? He knew you’d do the right thing.’

Because he knew how hard it would be
, I think.
Because he couldn’t bear to be alone in his pain. He wanted to make someone else hurt as much as he did. To take the weight of his guilt
.

With a sudden movement, Crispus pulls his hand free of my grip. I’m not expecting it; before I can react, he’s leapt away from me, arm poised to throw the poison into the sea.

I don’t move. ‘If you make me do this, you’re no better than your father.’