A Body in the Bathhouse (30 page)

“I’ll have to check with your boy, if you don’t mind. … Why had Pomponius dumped Plancus yesterday?”

“Same reason as always.”

“Oh, buck up, Strephon. What reason is that? Since Pomponius was done in yesterday, yesterday’s cause of distress seems relevant!”

Strephon, in whom I had begun to see a glimmer of accomplishment despite his gawky air and his revolting way of copying Pomponius’ hair pomade, drew himself up: “Pomponius was a self-centered bastard who easily got bored. Whatever you think of Plancus, he was a true devotee. But Pomponius almost hated him for being so steadfast. When it suited, then Plancus was his darling. When being horrid was more fun, then he avoided poor loyal Plancus.”

“Right,” I said.

“Good!” Strephon retorted sparkily, picking up my own repartee. Well, he was an architect. He should have a feeling for elegance and symmetry.

The door opened behind us. The team was coming out. Foremost in the gaggle, Lupus was joshing Blandus, the chief painter. “Hope you did an alibi submission for that assistant of yours! He gets around. Whoever knows what he’s up to—”

Alexas squeezed out among them. I nodded to Strephon and we left smartly.

XXXVIII

A
LEXAS SENT
for a stretcher to collect the corpse. We walked back to the old house and waited in my suite for the bearers. Alexas thought he might as well take a look at Aelianus’ leg. I was impressed by the meticulous care he applied to the cleaning and rebandaging processes. The wounds looked foul now, and the patient had grown feverish. That was bound to happen. It was where my worry started. Many a mild dog bite has turned into a will reading. Aelianus, clearly feeling rough, said little. He must be worried too.

Alexas spent additional time advising Helena on how her brother should be cared for. He really was thorough.

“Where’s Maia?” I asked. “I thought she was helping to nurse him?”

“She probably wanted to bathe,” Helena said.

“Not today. You’ve forgotten the corpse. I had the bathhouse closed.”

Helena looked up sharply. “Maia will be annoyed!” I could see she was concerned about the safety aspects, with a killer haunting the place.

“It’s all right. Alexas and I are just going there.”

“Ask Alexas to look at your tooth, Falco.”

“Problem, Falco?” he asked helpfully. I showed him. He reckoned the fiery molar needed to be removed. I decided I would live with it.

“You’ll have less pain if it’s taken out, Falco.”

“It may be just a flare-up.”

“When the pain takes over your life, you’ll think again.”

“Is there a decent tooth puller in this area?” Helena was determined I should act. I must be more irritable than I had realized.

“I’m not complaining,” I muttered.

“No, you’re trying to winkle it out yourself,” Helena accused me. I wondered how she knew.

“Well, let me know when you want help and I can find you someone local with a set of pincers,” Alexas volunteered. “Or Helena Justina, you can take him to Londinium and spend a lot of money.”

“For the same brutal job!” I grumbled. Alexas grasped he had a difficult patient and offered to grind me a herbal painkiller instead.

I dragged him off for our unsavory task. Passing another room in my suite, I spotted our nursemaid obviously about to try on one of Maia’s dresses in my sister’s absence.

“It suits the real owner better,” I announced loudly from the doorway. “Put it back in the chest and mind my daughters, please, Hyspale!”

Hyspale turned round to the doorway, still unashamedly holding the red dress against her body. She would probably have uttered some surly rejoinder, but saw I had a male stranger with me, so that caught her interest. I informed her the medical orderly was married with three sets of twins—at which the simpering chit had the cheek to tell Alexas that she loved children.

“If you want her, she’s yours,” I offered as we headed down the corridor.

He looked rightly scared.

With a sense that everything around me was going wrong, I set off through the internal corridor to the royal bathhouse. Alexas took a detour through the garden, looking for his stretcher-bearers, he said. He seemed to be avoiding this corpse with every possible excuse; it was odd, because when he showed me the body of Valla, the dead roofer, way back on my first day here, he had been perfectly composed.

I went on ahead to the baths, where a shock awaited. I could appoint myself the project manager and imagine that I now ran this site—but Fate took a different view. My precautions had been thwarted.

The entrance should have stayed roped off. My instructions last night had been clear. The rope was there all right. But it had been slung aside in an untidy heap, on top of which lay two battered tool baskets that contained a few chipped chisels, flagons, and half-eaten loaves. Squatting in the doorway were a pair of slack-mouthed, hopeless workmen. They were holding a wooden spar across the threshold, which gave the impression they were leveling or measuring. They did neither. One was deep in argument about some left-footed gladiator, while the other stared into space.

“This had better be good!” I roared at them. My imitation of Mars the Avenger had all the effect of a warm-up act at a run-down theater in the off-season.

“Keep your curls in, Tribune.”

“You moved that rope?”

“What rope? You don’t mean this one?”

“Oh yes, I do. But you’re right—why not untie the thing? It will be a lot easier to use the rope to hang the pair of you!”

They exchanged glances. They were treating me like any wild-eyed client at the end of his tether—with utter indifference.

“What are your names?”

“I’m Septimus and he’s Tiberius,” the spokesman informed me, implying that such a question was bad manners. I took out a tablet and pointedly wrote down the names.

“Stand up.” They humored me. “What are you doing here?”

“Spot of work required, Tribune.”

“I don’t see you doing it!” I snarled. “You’re loitering at a crime scene, interfering with my security measures, allowing unauthorized access—and irritating all Hades out of me.”

They pretended to look impressed. Big words and a bad temper were a novelty. I had plenty more of both to call on. And they had plenty of stubborn defiance.

“Have you entered the baths since you took off the rope?”

“No, Tribune.”

“You had better hope I believe that.” I did not, but there was no point nit-picking. “Has anyone else been in?”

“Oh, no, Tribune. Not with us sat here.”

Wrong. At that moment my own sister marched out from the changing room behind them. She was carrying her personal oil flask and scraper and was livid. “This is a complete disgrace—there is no hot water and no heat at all in the steam rooms!”

“My orders, Maia.”

“Well, I might have known!”

“There’s a dead man in the hot rooms—not to mention a killer preying on lone bathers. Did you go in past these two brazen layabouts?”

“Well, I stepped over them,” Maia sneered.

Septimus and Tiberius just smirked.

Maia was storming off, but I held her back. “Is anyone else inside?” I asked.

A guarded look crossed her face. “Not now.”

“What do you mean? Was there someone?”

“I thought I heard movement.”

“Who?”

“No idea, Marcus. I was undressed as far as my undertunic, just exploring the cold room—what a waste of time! I didn’t know who had turned up, so I kept quiet.” Maia knew what I thought about her visiting a mixed baths alone. She didn’t care. Being Maia, she might have enjoyed the frisson of risk.

“Next time, drag Hyspale along to stand guard. You may like being leered at by lads looking for women in wet breast bands—but being spied on by a strangler would be a different beaker of maggots.”

“I might just have heard these two messing about,” Maia returned, cheerfully implicating the workmen.

“Oh, surely not,” I responded sarcastically. “Septimus and Tiberius would never spy on a lady, would you, lads?”

They gazed at me, not even bothering to lie. Given the dopey way they were hanging about in the entrance when I turned up, playing at voyeurs probably never occurred to them. Besides, my sister exuded the air of a woman who would savage peephole spies.

With a whisk of her skirts, Maia darted away back towards our suite. I let her go. I could ask more questions later, with Helena in support.

Alexas finally turned up. When he saw the two workmen, I thought he looked slightly awkward. They were quite unabashed and greeted him by name.

“You know these scoundrels?” I demanded angrily.

“They work for my uncle.” Septimus and Tiberius watched our confrontation with the bright eyes of happy troublemakers.

“Your uncle is the King’s bathhouse contractor?”

“Afraid so.” Alexas sounded rueful. Well, I knew all about awkward relatives.

“So where is this uncle?”

“Who knows? He won’t be on-site!” A true professional.

“What’s your uncle’s name?”

“Lobullus.”

No one I was after, then.

I led the way indoors, heading a convoy that consisted of myself, Alexas, a couple of whey-faced lads carrying a pallet to remove the body, and the two workmen, both suddenly nosier about the corpse than they had professed to be about Maia.

“And where were
you
last night, Alexas?”

“It’s on my tablet.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“I went into Noviomagus to see my uncle.”

“Will he vouch for you?”

“Of course he will.”

I never like family alibis.

The vaulted rooms were colder than last night. Even with the furnace out of action, it takes a while for the fabric of a bathhouse to cool. A slight clamminess was creeping through the steaming suite. We reached the final chamber. The dead Pomponius was still lying as I left him, as far as I could tell. If anyone had been in here and tampered with the body, I would never prove it.

Initially, there was no reason to think anyone had done that. Everything looked the same. After my companions finished exclaiming over the way the architect had been mutilated, they hoisted his corpse onto the pallet. I adjusted the small towel to cover his privates. Then I heard a rattle and something fell on the floor.

“Oh look!” cried Tiberius helpfully.

“Something was caught up in the poor fellow’s towel,” added Septimus, bending to capture the object and hand it obsequiously to me. Everyone else watched my reaction. A cynical informer might have thought it was a planted clue.

It was an artist’s paintbrush. Tightly bound pig’s bristles with carefully shaped tips for delicate work. Traces of azure on the short handle: Was that blue frit? There were letters handily scratched there too.
LL
.

Comment from me was unavoidable. “Well, that’s a curious hieroglyphic.”

“Would it be the owner’s initials?” enquired Tiberius with almost intellectual interest.

“Hey,” murmured Septimus, suddenly shocked. “You don’t think one of the site painters was responsible for the murder, Falco?”

I had to hide a smile. “I don’t know what to think.” But somebody was trying
very
hard to tell me.

“An architect wouldn’t bring a paintbrush when he came for a bath, would he?” Tiberius asked Septimus.

“That painter in charge is called Blandus,” his mate answered. “So he’s not LL.”

“You know, I believe it must be his assistant,” I broke in. Septimus, Tiberius, and even Alexas, whose role in this fiasco seemed the most subdued, all looked at each other and nodded, impressed by my deductive powers.

I held the brush in the palm of my hand, looking from the silent Alexas to his uncle’s two workmen.

“Congratulations, Septimus. This seems to be an important clue—and you just helped me work out what it means.”

I could see what it really meant. Someone was being framed.

I seized the towel and shook it out, in case any other offerings had been deposited. Negative. I replaced the linen rectangle neatly over the dead architect’s loins. I signaled to the bearers to carry off the body.

“So! It looks like that young painting assistant has killed Pomponius. There’s only one way to be sure. I’ll ask him to be a good boy and own up.”

XXXIX

I
T WAS
natural to retrace my steps down the corridor, via my own quarters. I needed to calm down. I found Helena and told her what had happened.

“That paintbrush had arrived there since last night. Opening the baths so anybody could get in was deliberate, not just negligence by workmen. I’ve spent a morning allowing myself to be detained and delayed by Alexas—and I think by Strephon earlier. Half the project team must have been rushing around behind my back.”

“To cause confusion? As a setup it’s not very subtle, Marcus. If the young painter is innocent—”

“His innocence is not the point,” I said.

Helena pursed her lips, her great eyes dark with concern. “Why do you think he has been set up as the culprit? He has offended someone?”

“Well, he drinks, flirts, gets into scrapes, and hits people.” Mind you, Justinus still liked him, despite being punched. “Then, too, I have seen his work. He is a strikingly good artist.”

“Jealousy?”

“Could be.”

“It sounds as if half the project team conspired to lay this false clue,” Helena said angrily. “So did the project team—or some of them—kill Pomponius?”

“I’m not ready to decide.” My mood cleared slightly. “But one thing’s for sure, the project team really hates the
new
project manager.”

Helena knew at once what I had decreed at that morning’s meeting. “I see! You want your own chance to be dogmatic and overbearing?”

I grinned. “And I’m ignorant of professional practice too, as was pointed out. I’m perfect for the job. With these talents, I could have been an architect!”

I had a quick word with Maia. She had little to add. Whoever she heard at the baths that morning had walked past the cold room briskly, then returned to the exit soon afterwards. That fitted. They must have gone into the hot rooms, dumped the brush, and done a flit.