A Body in the Bathhouse (32 page)

We walked the short distance to my office. Gaius, the clerk, prepared to leave, but I signaled him to remain as a witness. He sank back on his seat, undecided whether this was to be a routine interview or something more serious.

“You’ve declared your movements last night, Magnus.” For a second the surveyor looked at Gaius. There was no doubt about it. The glance, involuntary and cut short, was enough to make me wonder if my clerk was his pretty boy. Did everyone on this site have unmanly Greek tastes? “One of my team is working on the witness statements, so I’ve not seen them yet. Remind me, please.”

“What team, Falco?”

“Never mind what bloody team!” I snarled. “Answer the question, Magnus.”

“I was in my quarters.”

“Anyone vouch for that?”

“Afraid not.”

“Always the clever-witness answer,” I told him. “Avoids what sounds like easy collusion after the event. Genuinely innocent men quite often lack alibis—that’s because they had no idea they needed to fix one.” It would not clear Magnus—but it would actually not condemn him either.

I took the satchel from him and flapped it open on a table. In silence we both studied the neatly arranged equipment, all secured under stitched leather loops. Spare pegs and a small mallet. A pocket sundial. Rulers, including a fine, well-worn folding one marked with both Roman and Greek measurements. Stylus and wax tablets. And a hinged metal pair of mapping compasses.

“Used these today?”

“No.”

I carefully released the compasses from their restraining strip of leather, using only my fingertips. I teased them open. Barely visible along one pointed prong was a faint brown stain. But under the leather band into which the instrument had been pushed, more staining was obvious.

Blood
, I decided. It certainly was not cartography ink.

Magnus was watching me. He was intelligent, forthright, and highly respected on this site. He also hated Pomponius, and had probably clashed with him as many times as anyone except Cyprianus—who seemed a close ally to Magnus. I thought two people had combined to murder the project manager. These two, perhaps.

I spoke quietly. We were both subdued. “You’ve worked it out, Magnus. Your five-four-three was unraveled from around the dead architect’s neck. That and your set of compasses are the murder weapons. If Pomponius had been impaled on the bathhouse floor with your
groma
, you couldn’t be in more trouble.”

Magnus said nothing.

“Did you kill him, Magnus?”

“No!”

“Short and sharp.”

“I did not kill him.”

“You’re too shrewd?”

“There were other ways to get rid of him from the project. You were here to do that, Falco.”

“But I’m working with the system, Magnus. How long would it have taken me? Incompetence is a persistent weed.”

Magnus sat quietly. He had chosen an X-shaped stool, one that must have folded once, though I knew it had seized up. Gray-haired and controlled, he had a still core that would not be easily broken into. His grim expression and tone of voice almost suggested it was him testing me, not the other way around.

I put my palms on the edge of the table and pushed back, as if distancing myself from the whole situation. “You don’t say much for a prime suspect.”

“You do enough talking!”

“I shall act too, Magnus, if I have to. You always knew that.”

“I thought you capable,” Magnus agreed. “You had assessed the situation. You would have tackled Pomponius—and not necessarily by removing him. You have the air of high authority, Falco; you even summon up a kind of tact sometimes. You could have imposed workable controls, when you were ready.”

I gazed at him. This speech of his was a compliment, yet sounded like a condemnation.

“Well, that’s what I thought until this morning, when you came up with the damned idea of bringing Marcellinus back on-site,” Magnus added. He now spoke with pent-up fury.

“He’s the King’s darling,” I replied curtly. Magnus had just told me why the project plotters were against me. They had loathed Pomponius, sure enough—but they did not want him replaced by another disaster. A worse one, maybe. “This morning we had Verovolcus listening in, Magnus. The King, his master, is the client. But don’t suppose the client will be allowed to impose a no-hoper on this scheme. If I have to thwart him, believe me I’ll do it—but I’ll do it with sensitivity if possible. If you don’t know my views on Marcellinus, Magnus, that’s because you never asked.”

We glared at one another in silence.

“So if I believed you could handle Pomponius,” Magnus muttered at last, “why would
I
take the personal risk of killing him?”

I let the Marcellinus issue go, though clearly it needed sorting, and fast. The surveyor was right. I could just about believe a scenario where he came upon Pomponius at the wrong moment and then snapped suddenly—but premeditated killing, when there were other solutions, contradicted this man’s natural restraint. Still, self-control would not impress a court as evidence, whereas the murder weapons—his possessions—could.

“Risk is not your style,” I agreed. “You’re too fastidious. But you don’t tolerate bungling either. You are vocal and you’re active. You are a suspect for this murder precisely because you don’t stand back.”

“What does that mean?”

“You have strict standards, Magnus. That could make you lose your temper. Yesterday we had all endured a long, irritating day. Suppose you went to bathe, very late, to relax and forget the Mandumerus fiasco. Just when you were calming down, you came to the last hot caldarium. That fool Pomponius was there. You flared up. Pomponius ended up dead on the floor.”

“I do not take my five-four-three string inside the baths, Falco.”

“Somebody did,” I answered him.

“I use a strigil, not a damn set of compasses.”

“What’s your tool for excavating eyeballs?”

Magnus breathed hard and did not reply.

“Did you see Cyprianus yesterday evening?” I demanded.

“No.” Magnus looked at me sharply. “Does he say I did?”

I gave no answer. “There are some half-baked workmen at the baths this morning. Are you part of that?”

“No. I gave Togidubnus an estimate, way back. Anything after that is his affair.”

“Is much work needed?”

“
Needed
—none at all,” Magnus opined acidly. “
Possible
—as much as a rich client, urged on by a shameless contractor, wants to waste his money on.”

“So you say you are not connected with the wastrels on-site today?”

“No.”

“Let’s get to the main point. Did you go to the bathhouse last night, Magnus?”

Magnus held back his answer. I waited stubbornly. He continued to maintain his silence, trying to force me to break in, to take back the initiative. He was desperate to know whether I had any firm information.

After an age, he decided what to say. “I did not go to the baths.”

Overcome by the tension, the clerk, Gaius, let out a gasp. Magnus kept his eyes on me.

“You’re lying, Magnus.” My arm gave a wild sweep. I dashed the satchel of instruments right off the table. I then yelled out at full pitch, “
Oh shit in Hades, Magnus!
Just tell me the truth, will you?”

“Steady, Falco!” Gaius squeaked in great alarm. He spoke for the first time since we came in. His eyes flickered, blinking too rapidly.

I really let my temper rip. “He was at the baths!” I roared at the clerk. “I have a witness who says so, Gaius!” I would not look at Magnus. “If you want to know why I’m raving about it, I thought he was a man of superior quality. I thought I could trust him—
I did not want the killer to be him!
”

Magnus gave me a long hard stare. Then he simply stood up and said he was going back to work. I let him go. I could not arrest him—but I did not apologize for implying he was the murderer.

XLII

A
S SOON
as the surveyor left, I dropped the charade.

I sat quiet. Too quiet, anyone who knew me would have said. The clerk had worked with me, though not long enough or closely enough. Even so, apprehension pinned him to his stool.

“That tooth of yours still playing up, Falco?” he asked in a nervous voice. It could be a joke, real sympathy, or a frightened mixture of both.

Too busy to deal with it, I had forgotten my aching tooth until that moment. Informers don’t collapse at mere agonizing pain. We are always too busy, too desperate to finish the case.

“Where were you last night, Gaius?” It sounded like a neutral question.

“What?”

“Place yourself for me.” He had attended my project meeting this morning. He had filed a witness statement, but I had had no time yet to look at it.

“I … went into Novio.”

I scrutinized the bastard with a thin half smile.

“You went into Novio?” Repeating it, I sounded like a careworn lawyer dragging out his weakest rhetorical maneuver. I was hoping that the witness would cave in out of sheer anxiety. In life, they never do.

“Novio, Falco.”

“What was that for?”

“A night out. Just a night in town.” I still gazed at him. “Stupenda was dancing,” Gaius maintained. A nice touch. Detail always makes a falsehood sound more reliable.

“Any good?”

“She was brilliant.”

I stood up. “Get on with your work.”

“Is something wrong, Falco?”

“Nothing that I don’t expect every day.” I let him see my lip curl. I had liked Gaius. He had made a good show of harboring the right attitude. But it had been an act. “In my job,” I elaborated grimly, “I run into lies, fraud, conspiracy, and filth. I expect it, Gaius. I encounter mad people who kill their mothers for asking them to wipe their feet on the doormat. I deal with low-life muggers who steal half a denarius from blind army veterans in order to buy a drink from a thirteen-year-old barmaid whom they subsequently rape. …”

The clerk was now looking as puzzled as he was petrified.

“Get on with your work,” I repeated. “Let me know when you decide to revise your story. In the meantime, don’t distress yourself about my feelings. Your contribution to this enquiry, Gaius, is just a routine pile of muleshit—though I can say that being betrayed by my own office backer-up hits a new low for me.”

I left him, striding out as if I had to go and hold a bridge against a wild horde of barbarians.

He did not know that I had been in Novio myself last night, also hoping to see Stupenda. Which of course I had not done—because last night in Noviomagus Regnensis, the woman called Stupenda did not dance.

XLIII

“M
AYBE THIS
clerk got his nights mixed up,” Aelianus suggested. Whatever draft the medical orderly supplied had perked him up enough to take an interest.

I disagreed. “Be practical. You don’t confuse yourself over
yesterday
, especially when being in the wrong place could make you the killer.”

“Might he have been a bit fuddled? Does Gaius drink a lot?”

“Doubt it. I’ve seen him pour away half a cup of
mulsum
just because a fly looked in the cup.”

We were in my suite, the invalid sprawled on a padded couch. Aelianus had created a crude sketch of the new palace on which to mark witness positions in red ink, together with a box (headed by a lopsided graffiti winecup) where he listed those who claimed they went to town last night.

“They are
all
involved,” I raved. “So tell me your results, Aulus. Can we prove anything?”

“Not yet. Some seedy character called Falco has failed to report in.”

“Novio,” I muttered. “Vouched for by your dear brother, plus a retainer of the King’s. Come to that, you know perfectly well I refused dinner and trotted off on a pony. … Is there any of your medicine left?” My tooth was on fire.

“No, Larius swigged it.” Larius was now flaked out in a wicker chair that Helena normally used, white in the gills and semiconscious. “Exhausted by his wild life,” Aelianus opined piously. “Or poisoned off.”

My elder daughter, Julia, was using her little wheeled cart to play chariots around Larius, with him as a circus
spina
. The baby slept, for once, in her two-handled traveling basket. There were faint indications that Favonia’s loincloth needed changing, but I was managing not to notice. Fathers learn to live with guilt.

“So what do we have, Aulus?”

“These tablets are a joke. Believe them, and the site was deserted and nobody could have done it. It’s amazing the corpse was ever discovered. Most of the project team claim they were in town.”

“Gaius?”

“Yes, he says he was in town.”

“With any of the others?”

“Not specific. He’s put down Magnus as a witness.”

“What did Magnus write?”

“In Novio too. Gaius is supposed to vouch for him.”

“That’s wrong. Magnus just told me he was in his quarters.”

“Must have forgotten his official excuse under the stress of your questioning!”

“Don’t be rude,” I rebuked him mildly. “So was anybody left here?”

“The two junior architects, vouching for each other.”

“Strephon and Plancus—heart-searching, swigging, and snoring. I am inclined to believe them. It’s too touching to be a bluff.”

“Also the clerk of works.”

“Cyprianus, mooching round the site on his own, hoping to forestall trouble—then heading for the baths and an unpleasant discovery. I think I trust him. He has family on-site; if he was building a false alibi, he would make them say he was at home.”

Aelianus dipped his pen and marked a blob at the baths for Cyprianus. “Isn’t the person who claims to find a corpse sometimes the obvious suspect?”

“Rightly so, half the time.” I considered the man’s demeanor when he came to find me. “Cyprianus was in shock when he rushed here with the news. He seemed genuine. He was sickened by the gouged eye. It looked like genuine surprise.”

“Still, it could be a ruse,” Aelianus replied. He had second thoughts: “But if he had been the killer, would he have run out naked?”

“I see why you ask.” Inactivity was doing Aelianus good. A bandage on his leg seemed to improve his brain. He surprised me with his logic, in fact. “The killer stayed calm. He cleaned and replaced one of the weapons in Magnus’ satchel. …”