The Ides of April (25 page)

‘He had missed me.’

‘How wonderful.’ Innocuously I slipped in, ‘Did anything else happen?’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Clara. I left it, mainly because I was not sure what I did mean.

Instead, I said brightly, ‘Changing the subject, I believe you met a good friend of mine that evening! Did you run into their lovely archivist, name of Andronicus?’

Just as she had over Tiberius being present, Cassiana Clara blanked this. ‘Possibly. I don’t remember.’

I supposed the memory failure must be because Clara had been so preoccupied with her attempts to evade the grabby Uncle Tullius.

‘I wonder about this household,’ I mused. ‘All male, and from what I have heard, rather a lot of unhappiness. Old guilt and current resentment. Did you find the atmosphere seethed—’

‘It was fine.’ Clara interrupted as if she could no longer bear to remember the evening. ‘A perfectly ordinary dinner!’ At least that made a change from calling it nice.

Something had happened. Something she was refusing to discuss with me.

At that point her damned mother had to intervene. She was elderly, upright, pleasant but firm, and she came into the room on purpose, aiming to get rid of me: Mama thought helpless little Clara had given me enough of her time. She was still grief-stricken and suffering; I ought to be more considerate. There could not possibly be anything else I needed to know; I should say goodbye now.

A brief glance passed between Cassiana Clara and me, like two girlfriends mildly deploring the older generation. She did not argue with her mother. Perhaps she really was glad to shed me – though I still thought she had been relieved to have a visitor to talk to. Someone who had come to see
her
specifically, as if she mattered. While she was married, she had mattered to her husband. I believed that now.

We embraced and kissed, just like old friends; after so much confiding, it had become a necessary ritual. I have little patience for that charade. I would not want her for a friend. I could not dislike her, but I agreed with what Andronicus had said: she was not exactly stupid, but out of her depth. He meant out of her depth when men talked business in front of her, but with ten years between us I felt she was out of her depth with me too. Not enough character or experience on her side to make us equals.

Perhaps I was snobbish. I certainly felt sorry for her. Before I left, I remembered how anxious Clara had been before, afraid that her husband’s killer might pursue her too.

‘I should have reassured you more. Let me do it now. From what we have worked out, he selects his victims randomly. Afterwards he moves on. He never seeks out anyone connected with his previous crimes.’ Well, not apart from Celendina after Salvidia’s funeral, but I had no idea how or why that happened.

Cassiana Clara gave me an oddly fixed stare. ‘Unless you know who he is, and why he is doing this, how can you be sure, Albia?’

I did not protest that I was sure because I was the expert and she was just an innocent. She might be right. Sometimes an outsider can be perceptive just because they view an event with new eyes. I would think about what she had said.

I
had no appetite for lunch. I had no interest in anything, obsessed only with what was about to happen that evening with the foxes.

The Aventine’s mood degenerated. Outsiders, here for the festival, had taken over. Locals were struggling to find places in their regular haunts. We were jostled on our own streets by visitors who seemed to have no sense that they had invaded our ground. Why do tourists never allow space to other people on pavements? Why are they so loud, why be such disrespectful idiots? Do they all leave their brains at home, sitting on a shelf with their good manners, when they pack their travel bags? They climb out of their carrying chairs, right in your way, then stand about, gaping vacantly. They don’t ignore us; they simply do not see us.

I was not even a Roman but I loathed this influx of grockles. The impact would be temporary but, as every year, it unsettled us.

A killer who didn’t care who he attacked would find these morons easy pickings, but I doubted ours would take one. They posed no challenge. It would be someone local, someone who had drawn his notice in some way.

How long since he last struck? Too long, I thought. He must be in need of excitement again. Such killers had regular patterns of behaviour. Assuming he planned in advance, he would certainly be planning a new death now.

If he did not plan, but acted on sudden urges, the desire for power, the callous sense of power that repeat murderers enjoy, might agitate him at any moment. He could be jabbing at his next victim while I stood here in the Vicus Armilustrium, scowling as I was buffeted by braying idiots in their best tunics, just in from Campania without their brains.

I went home. I stomped moodily up to my office, as if I wanted to distance myself from the crowds that way. It was not entirely successful, since noise rose between the narrow buildings and seemed amplified when it reached me. For the next few hours, even when I stayed indoors and refused to look out over the balcony, I was increasingly aware of large numbers of people moving about below. For the most part they were quiet so far. The festival involved sacrifice and solemn rites, with a deep religious purpose. And most had yet to find a hole they liked, in which to dig in for the evening and drink themselves silly.

In any case, there was the race. It was a big event. Horses and riders had been training for a long while. This was the first outing of the season; owners hoped their horses would become this season’s famous winner. Jockeys, too, were eager for fame. Public gambling was illegal – yet big money rode on the outcome.

My local neighbourhood grew still as everyone flocked to the Circus. The bulk of the Aventine’s main peak lay between Fountain Court and the Circus Maximus, muffling sound partially; yet when surrounding buildings lay quiet on great occasions, we could always make out the distant roar. It started with snatches of distant music as the religious procession entered through the ceremonial gates at the apsidal end further from us, passing under the new triple arches built in honour of the Emperor Titus. Then a slight surge of vocal approval might cover the arrival of our current emperor in his official box, though Domitian’s new elaborate viewing platform, high on the edge of the Palatine in his grand palace, made him almost invisible to the crowd so far below.

On legal advice I retract that. People had supposedly been thrown to the arena beasts for insulting the emperor in his hearing at the Games. Writing about him critically was as bad.

There came a lull in the noise, which would be when white-robed women carried out mysterious rites for Ceres; those rites were reserved for female initiates, though one of Rome’s cadre of senior priests, the Flamen Cerialis, would officiate in his cape and pronged headdress, while the plebeian aediles also had a traditional role in the prayers. This would be important for the ambitious Manlius Faustus. Aediles who managed the Games well and won the crowd’s approval could later use their public support to help them gain more important positions. It was not easy to impress a Roman crowd. Indifferent to his glory, many in the predominantly male audience would be still gathering, talking among themselves and assessing their surroundings during this part of the proceedings. They had to endure the rites, but would be bored. You can’t make bets on the sacrifice of a pregnant sow. Indeed, even for a suave audience of hard-nosed Romans who would gamble away their grandmothers, placing bets during this solemn moment is generally frowned upon. Their upright grandmas would have taught them that.

Next came a long, steady noise as the audience settled in their seats for the race, a steady hum that broke into a strident crescendo once the runners emerged. This outburst was always heard loud on the Aventine, because the twelve brightly painted starting gates stood at our end of the track. A burst of sound marked the moment when they opened. As the horses completed each circuit, the noise swelled. You could follow the progress of each lap, without needing to be there. You knew each time the leaders passed the turning points at the ends of the central barrier, that curious construction dividing the tracks that bore big marble eggs for counting laps, among dolphin statues, obelisks, refuges for assistants, small temples and shrines.

A race in the Circus was seven laps. The finish came with a full-throated roar that resonated even up here, through the unstable fabric of my building. The audience would have thrown themselves to their feet in ecstasy. Enormous gusts of garlic- and cabbage-laden farting would billow above the stadium, a ripe miasma that was barely contained by competing breath pastilles and hair pomades. The ovation for the winner would be the high spot of the jockey’s life; even the exhausted horse would toss his head and enjoy the glory.

After the race finished, normally the many exits would empty the Circus in moments. Tonight, though, people would not leave. Tonight, they would wait in their seats for more entertainment. The snack-vendors would run up and down the steps handing out beakers and bundles of food for the peckish. Marshals would try to order people about, just to show they had that privilege. In a crowd of that size – it was estimated to be a quarter of a million, though boy cousins of mine once did the sums and claimed it was only two thirds of that – someone was bound to have fainted. Someone would have keeled over and not come round, exciting rumours that they had died. Nosy folk would crane their necks to gawp at the stretcher-bearers, until new lights flickered at one end of the stadium, where whoops and wild cries announced that the foxes had arrived.

I went downstairs, so any screams of pain and smells of burning flesh were less likely to reach me.

I tried not to imagine how the terrified, wriggling foxes would have been grabbed, grappled, fastened down and encumbered with the torches that were tied to their beautiful brushes. I tried to blot out thoughts of their agony, as flames were given to those torches, then as the foxes bounded free, men whistled and yelled, driving them away from the temple, running headlong down the lower slopes to the great valley of the Circus, headed off, herded in through the starting gates, shocked by the cruel uproar their arrival caused, and then subjected to slaughter amidst screams of delight from the crowd.

Then, only those of us with compassion in our souls understood it was a cause for shame. And every year I wondered, was not living decently supposed to be a gift to humans from the generous goddess Ceres?

N
ext morning was the thirteenth day of April, the Ides. It was a long day for me, and in due course I was to see that it was the pivotal point of my enquiries. It was also my birthday, although when I woke in the morning I had forgotten about that. When you live alone, all days are equal.

It began mundanely. A domestic day. I made life hell for the boy who swept the stairs, the water carrier, the lamp provider and Rodan. Supervision of lacklustre male staff is the traditional role of a Roman woman, in a business, on a farm, in the home. We hold the keys. We organise the rota. We know where to lay hands on equipment when it is needed. We keep things running smoothly, while the half-baked and the blatantly bone-idle mess about. Men are convinced they run the Empire. The Empire would collapse without us.

Throwing my weight around perked me up. I then changed the covers on my bed, sorted my wardrobe, tidied my jewellery box. I went to the baths, scrubbed myself harder than usual, layered on moisturising oils, let a girl arrange my hair exotically, invested in a manicure, let myself be lured into a pedicure as well, had some overdue depilatory work done, and slowly relaxed.

Prisca appeared. ‘I’ve heard all about those murders you’re involved with!’

‘Ah, word has got out now?’

‘I’ll say! When are you going to catch him?’

If I knew that, I thought glumly, I would be out putting a neck-collar on the bastard right now. The bathhouse owner did not want to hear me speaking reason. Public hysteria was now rife and according to Prisca there were hundreds of victims. For once, I felt a mild sympathy with Manlius Faustus for having wanted to keep this epidemic of deaths a secret.

The killer was a mad poet, I was curious to learn. He had a grudge against anyone born on Thursdays, whom he stabbed with specially made silver stilettos. Prisca had been told this nonsense by an ointment-seller on Lupin Street whose nephew worked in the tax office.

‘Are you telling me murderers are notorious for not turning up to be taxed?’ I scoffed. ‘And I suppose he has a harelip, a crooked toe and his star sign is Aquarius? Oh, come off it. None of the victims had a stab wound, Prisca. I think he must use poison.’ I decided right at that moment. His weapon was too small to inflict noticeable damage; he must use a small piercing device of some sort and coat it with a deadly paste like that used on hunters’ arrows. The poison was what eventually finished off the victims. But it was not the same as hunters used, because theirs paralysed before death and we had no reports of that. All we knew was that it must be swift-acting.

‘Poison!’ Prisca rushed off, brimming over with excitement that she had a chance to tell other people something new.

By this evening, the mad murderer would have a golden alabastron containing a deadly potion made by Cappadocian dwarfs from a recipe handed down through thirty generations, to which there was no antidote except moonbeams, and he would identify himself by etching a Greek letter onto the foreheads of all his victims as they twitched and gasped their last. The Omega Killer had been born, and it was my fault.

I slipped into a clean tunic and laced shoes, then disappeared from the baths to apply myself to proper enquiries.

When evidence is sparse, you have to dig, dig, dig away at what little you have. Once again, I trudged to the apartment of Laia Gratiana and attempted to see her maid, the elusive Venusia.

They had set their hearts on disappointing me. This time I was told that Venusia was no longer there. She had been sent away ‘for a rest’ to one of her mistress’s estates in the country. I could not tell whether this was a disguised punishment, or a reward for good service. In a week when her mistress was taking part in an important festival, it seemed odd that anyone on Laia’s staff whose duties involved such personal care should leave Rome. What woman lets her maid vanish the very moment she herself will be on public display at ceremonies in the Circus Maximus? Come to that, what maid wants to miss such an occasion? The chance of receiving a festival thank-you present, or better still a cash-in-hand gratuity, must be hard to pass up.