The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction (2 page)

He was last seen alive at a drinks party held at his house by Agathocles, our chief negotiator. It was a small, low-key affair; three of ours, three Romans, four cooks, two servers, two flute-girls. Agathocles and his two aides drank moderately, as did two of the Romans. Naso got plastered. Since he was the ranking diplomat on the Roman side, very little business was transacted prior to Naso being in no fit state; his two sidekicks clearly felt they lacked the authority to continue when their superior stopped talking boundaries and demilitarized zones and started singing along with the flautists and our three were just plain embarrassed. When Naso grabbed one of the girls – he dropped her, and had to use both hands – and wandered off into the courtyard with her, the rest of the party broke up by unspoken mutual consent and went home. Agathocles went into the inner room to bed. The Romans’ honour guard – a dozen marines from the ship they arrived on – stayed where they were, surrounding the house. Their orders were to escort Naso back to the palace. But Naso didn’t appear, so they stood there all night, assuming he’d fallen asleep somewhere. They were still standing there, at attention, when the sun rose. At this point, Naso’s secretary came bustling up; the great man was due in a meeting, where was he? The guards didn’t have the authority to wake him up, but the secretary did. He went inside, then looked round the courtyard, which didn’t take long. No sign of Naso, or the wretched girl. The secretary then made the guards search Agathocles’ house. Nothing.

The secretary and the guard-sergeant had a quick, panic-stricken conference and decided that Naso must’ve slipped past the guards with the girl – why he should want to do that, neither of them could begin to imagine – and was presumably shacked up with her somewhere, intending to re-emerge in his own good time. This constituted a minor diplomatic insult to us, of course, since the meeting had to be adjourned, and our side came to the conclusion that it was intended as a small act of deliberate rudeness, to put us in our place. If we made a fuss about it, we’d look petty-minded. If we said nothing, we’d be tacitly admitting we deserved to be walked all over. It was just the sort of thing Naso tended to do, and it had always worked well for him in the past.

But Naso didn’t show up; not for three weeks. The atmosphere round the negotiating table quickly went from awkward to dead quiet to furiously angry. What had we done with Caecilius Naso? A senior Roman diplomat doesn’t just vanish into thin air. It really didn’t help that Agathocles had been the host. He’d been doing his job rather well, digging his heels in, matching the Romans gesture for gesture, tantrum for tantrum; angry words had been spoken, tables thumped, and then Agathocles had asked Naso round for drinks and Naso had disappeared. Without him, the talks simply couldn’t continue. Ten days after the disappearance, the Roman garrisons on our borders mobilized and conducted unscheduled manoeuvres, as close to the frontiers as they could get without actually crossing them. Cousin Hiero had his soldiers turn the city upside down, but they found nothing. The Roman diplomats went home without saying goodbye. Their soldiers stayed on the border. Then, just as we were starting to think it couldn’t get any worse, Naso turned up again.

He made his dramatic re-entry when the swinging arm of the crane winching a great big jar of sprats off the bulk freighter snapped, on the main dock at Ostia, in front of about a thousand witnesses. The jar fell on the stone slabs and smashed open, and out flopped Naso. He was still in the full diplomatic dress he’d worn to the party, so it was immediately obvious that he was someone important in the military. He was quickly identified, and a fast courier galley was immediately launched, to tell us the bad news.

*

“Presumably,” Orestes said, “it was the extra weight that snapped the crane. A man’s got to weigh a damn sight more than his own volume in sprats.”

Orestes was the bright young Corinthian I’d proposed as my substitute. Instead, he’d been assigned to me as sidekick-in-chief. He was tall, skinny, gormless-looking and deceptively smart, with a surprisingly scientific cast of mind. “So what?” I said.

He offered me a drink, which I refused, and poured one for himself. My wine, of course. “This whole sprat business,” he said. “It’s got to mean something, it’s too bizarre otherwise.”

“Bizarre, I grant you,” I said. “But meaningful …”

“Has to be.” He nodded firmly. “Abducting and murdering a Roman emissary at a diplomatic function,” he went on, “has got to be a statement of some kind. Bottling him and sending him home must, therefore, be a refinement of that statement.”

“Expressive of contempt, you mean.”

“Must be.” He frowned at his hands. A nail-biter. “That’s not good for us, is it?”

“The crane,” I reminded him.

“What? Oh, right. I was just thinking, the timing of the discovery of the body. If the crane hadn’t broken, the jar would’ve been loaded on a cart and taken to Rome. It had been ordered by—” He looked up his notes. “Philippus Longinus,” he recited, “freedman, dealer and importer in wholesale foodstuffs. Disclaims all knowledge, et cetera. They’ve got him locked up, of course.”

“Greek?”

“Doesn’t say,” Orestes replied, “but he’s a freedman with a half-Greek name, so presumably yes. Loads of Greek merchants in Rome nowadays. Anyhow, in the normal course of business that jar of sprats would’ve stayed in his warehouse for months.” His eyebrows, unusually thick, lowered and squashed together. “Which makes no sense.”

I nodded slowly. “If you’re right about the murder as a statement,” I replied.

“Unless,” Orestes went on, looking up sharply, “whoever did it knew the extra weight would break the crane, in which case—” He looked at me, and sighed. “A bit far-fetched?”

“As wine from Egypt,” I said. “Of course,” I went on, “someone could’ve sawed the beam part-way through.”

“That’s—” He looked at me again. “You’re teasing me,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Fine. In that case, it makes no sense.”

“If,” I reminded him, “we approach the problem from the diplomatic-statement direction, as you seem determined to do.”

He gave me a respectfully sour look. “In the circumstances …”

He had a point, of course. “It would seem logical to assume that it’s something to do with politics and diplomacy,” I conceded.

“Exactly. So we should start from there.” I sighed. “No,” I said. “We should start from the beginning.”

*

We took a walk. On the way there, we discussed various topics – Pythagoras, the nature of light, the origin of the winds – and paused from time to time to let me rest my ankle, which hasn’t been right since I fell down the palace steps. We reached Agathocles’ house just before midday, a time when I was fairly sure he’d be out.

“I’m sorry,” the houseboy confirmed. “He’s at the palace. Can I tell him who called?”

“We’ll wait,” I said firmly.

*

Of course I’d been there before, many times. I knew that Agathocles lived in his father’s old house, and his father had been nobody special, a cheese merchant who was shrewd enough to buy into a grain freighter when the price was right, and then reinvest in land so his son could be a gentleman. I can only suppose Agathocles liked the place; happy childhood memories, or something of the sort. It was a small house, surrounded by a high wall, on the edge of the industrial quarter. If you stood on the street outside the front door, you could smell the tannery round the corner, or the charcoal smoke from the sickle-blade factory, or the scent of drying fish on the racks a hundred yards north. An unkind friend described it as pretentiously unpretentious, and I’m tempted to agree. Inside, you could barely move for statues, fine painted pottery, antique bronze tripods. It looked rather more impressive than it was because the rooms were so small, but even so, the collection represented a substantial amount of money, leaving you in no doubt that the great man lived where he did because he wanted to, not because he couldn’t afford anything better.

It was an old-fashioned house, too; rounded at one end, with two main rooms, for living and sleeping. The upstairs room, more of a storage loft than a gentleman’s chamber, was presumably a legacy of Agathocles’ father’s business activities, a dry and airy place to store cheeses, with a door opening into thin air, like you see in haylofts. The house stood in the middle of a larger-than-usual courtyard, half of which had been laid out as a garden, with trellised vines and fruit trees, herb beds and an ostentatious row of cabbages. The other half, shaded by a short, wide fig tree, was for sitting and talking in, and a very attractive space it made. It was surrounded, as I just told you, by a wall, and the reports said that on the fatal evening, the guards had stood all round the outside of the wall, with a sergeant minding the gate.

“Not good,” Orestes said sadly. “Not good at all.”

I concurred. I could see no way in which anyone could have scaled the wall – coming in or going out – without being seen by the guards, even in the dark; also there were sconces set in the wall for torches, and hooks for lanterns, and the report said that the courtyard had been lit up that night. Well nigh impossible, therefore, for Naso to have slipped out past the guards; equally implausible that anyone else could have climbed in to kill him.

“Bad,” Orestes said.

“Quite. If Naso was killed—”

He looked at me. “If?”

“If,” I repeated, then shrugged. “It must have been one of the people in the house at the time. Agathocles, his two aides, the two Romans, or the domestics. As you say,” I added, “bad for us.”

Orestes walked to the foot of the wall and stood on tiptoe. “Then how did they get rid of the body?” he said.

I smiled. “That,” I said, “is probably the only thing standing between us and war.”

He jumped up, trying to grab the top of the wall. He was a tall man, like I said. He couldn’t do it. “Maybe they hid the body,” he said, “and came back later.”

I shook my head. “Naso’s secretary and the guard-sergeant searched the house,” I reminded him. “And it’s not like there’s many places you could hide a body. I’m morally certain that Naso was off the premises when the house was searched.”

“But the guards were still in place. They’d have noticed.”

“Yes,” I said, and sat down, slowly and carefully, under Agathocles’ rather splendid fig tree. My neck isn’t quite as supple as it used to be, so I couldn’t lean back as far as I’d have liked.

“You think,” Orestes interpreted, “the body was in the
tree
?”

I smiled at him. “The outer branches overhang the wall,” I said, “And it’s a fact that when people are looking for something, they quite often don’t bother to glance up. But no, I don’t think so. Even if you were standing in the upstairs door—”

“What? You know, I hadn’t noticed that.”

“Which proves my point,” I said smugly. “You didn’t look up. I noticed that door as soon as I walked though the gate, but I don’t think it’s relevant in any way. It’s nowhere near the wall, and it’s too far for anybody, even a really strong man, to
throw
a dead body from there to the tree.” I frowned, as a thought slipped quietly into my mind, like a cat curling up on your lap. “We ought to take another look inside,” I said. “I believe our problem is that we’ve been searching for what isn’t there rather than paying due attention to what is. Also,” I added, “we suffer from the disadvantage of noble birth and civilized upbringing.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure,” I replied. “I’ll tell you when I’ve worked it out.”

*

We snooped round the house for a while, ending up in the upstairs room. Nothing obvious had caught my eye; no bloodstains, or tracks in the dust to show where a body had been dragged. I sat down on an ancient cheese press, while Orestes sat at my feet on a big coil of rope, the image of the great philosopher’s respectful disciple. That made me feel like a complete fraud, of course.

“A grown man,” I said, “walks out of a drinking party—”

“Staggers out of a drinking party.”

“True,” I said. “But he was used to being drunk. And he took the flute-girl. What about her, by the way?”

“What about her?”

“Has she turned up? Or has nobody thought to ask?”

Orestes shrugged. “I expect that if she’d been found they’d have held her for questioning.”

That made me frown. Call me squeamish if you like; I don’t like the notion, enshrined in the law of every Greek city, that a slave’s evidence can only be admissible in a court of law if it’s been extracted under torture. It gave the wretched girl an excellent motive for running away, that was for sure – assuming, that is, that she knew that something bad had happened, and she was likely to be wanted as a witness. “Let’s consider that,” I said. “I’m assuming Hiero’s had soldiers out looking for her.”

Orestes grinned. “Fair enough. I wouldn’t imagine it’d be an easy search. For a start, how would they know who to look for?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Explain,” I said.

“One slave-girl looks pretty much like another.”

“But her owner—” I paused. “Who owns her? Do we know?”

Orestes took another look at his notes. “One Syriscus. Freedman, keeps a stable of cooks and female entertainers, hires them out for parties and functions. Quite a large establishment.”

I nodded. “So it’s not certain that Syriscus himself would recognise her. It’d be an overseer or a manager who’d have regular contact with the stock-in-trade.”

“Presumably.”

“And he,” I went on, “gives a description to the patrol sergeants: so high, dark hair, so on and so forth. Probably a description that’d fit half the young women in Syracuse. So the chances of finding her, if she doesn’t want to be found—”

Orestes nodded. “Pity, that,” he said. “Our only possible witness.”

“And if she
had
seen anything,” I went on, “and if she managed to get outside the wall – if she had the sense she was born with she’d run and keep on running.” I sighed. “She must’ve got out somehow, or she’d have been found. Now we’ve got two inexplicable escapes instead of one.”

“Unless,” Orestes pointed out reasonably, “they escaped together.”