Solid Citizens (3 page)

‘Yes, sir?’ he said. ‘Did you wish to comment?’

‘No, Bathyllus. Lunch it is.’

We went through to put on the nosebag. As to the murder, when push came to shove I wasn’t particularly worried. The lady would come round, Festival or no: Perilla couldn’t resist a case, any more than I could. The difference was that she would never admit it.

It was only a matter of time, really.

I
rode over to Bovillae mid-morning the next day, wearing my heaviest cloak because it was raining cats and dogs, with a cutting wind from the north. Par for the course: the weather had been unsettled for days now, with rain being the default.
Not
my favourite Winter Festival weather, by a long chalk.

Nerva had said that Quintus Roscius, the guy who’d had the set-to with Caesius in the street a couple of days before he died, owned a farm on the Castrimoenian side of town. I passed quite a few tracks on the way – most of the rural properties in the Alban Hills are smallholdings, those that haven’t been bought up by wealthy punters from Rome and converted into luxury homes-from-home, that is – but there was no indication as to which one was his. Besides, it was a case of first things first. Roscius and his spat with the dead man could wait until I’d had a talk with the brothel-keeper.

I reached Bovillae, left my horse – not my usual mare, who was back in Rome, but the quietest nag I could find in the villa’s stable – at the snazzy drinking trough on the edge of the market square, and got directions to the brothel from the first likely looking passer-by. It turned out to be quite close, in one of the side streets a bit further along the main drag, just past the burned-out shell of a large building with a weed-strewn courtyard and, from the carved-phallus plaque by the door and the graffiti on the surrounding masonry, easy to identify. I knocked – these places are open all hours, to catch the passing trade – and was let in by the door slave.

‘Boss around, pal?’ I said. ‘I’m not a customer. It’s business.’

‘I’ll check, sir,’ he said. ‘If you’d like to wait here?’

‘No problem.’

He padded away into the interior. I took off my sodden travelling cloak, hung it up to drip on one of the pegs behind the door, and cast an assessing eye over the lobby itself. The decoration was predictable stuff, at least the painting on the main wall was, a frieze of self-consciously bare-breasted dancing girls brandishing tambourines above their heads and wearing what looked like fringed bootlaces round their middles. Someone had scrawled a graffito in the corner recommending Phyllis. I hoped she wasn’t the squint-eyed one immediately above the lettering, but if the frieze was intended to show who the establishment had on offer it was so old and worn that in any case the lady was probably a grandmother by now. Upmarket here we definitely weren’t. Still, Bovillae was only a provincial town with a limited clientele, so you couldn’t expect too much.

The slave came padding back. He was at least as old as the frieze.

‘The mistress says that’ll be fine, sir,’ he said. ‘If you’d like to follow me I’ll take you to her.’

We went down a corridor with doors on either side. One of them opened as we passed, and a girl in the obligatory bootlace but without a tambourine looked out briefly, grunted, and shut it again. At the end of the corridor, before it took a turn to the left, the old guy stopped and opened the final door.

‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘Just go in.’

After the lobby I hadn’t been expecting anything fancy, but I was met with a comfortable, well-lit sitting room hardly bigger than a cubbyhole, most of which was taken up by a couch with a woman lying on it reading a book. Not a bad looker, late thirties, well made up and wearing an impressively coiffured wig, with a Coan silk scarf wrapped round her neck.

The woman laid the book on the table. The scarf slipped down a little as she bent forward, and in the light from the lamps I caught a glimpse of the scar tissue it covered, the red, puckered flesh of a serious burn. It wasn’t, from the look of it, all that old either.

‘This’ll be about the murder, will it?’ she said.

Business-like and to the point. ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ I said.

‘I was expecting someone to drop round. Pull over that stool behind you, sit down and make yourself comfortable.’ I did. ‘Carillus, the customer in Number Five’s time is up. Give him a knock in passing, please.’

‘Yes, madam.’ The old guy closed the door at my back. I could hear him shuffling off back down the corridor, then the sound of a double-knock.

The woman was giving me a long appraising look.

‘You aren’t local, are you?’ she said finally.

‘No,’ I said. ‘The name’s Marcus Corvinus. I’m just visiting from Rome. Castrimoenium, not Bovillae.’

‘Mm.’ I had the feeling she was filing the information away carefully for future reference, and her eyes hadn’t moved from my face. ‘Pleased to meet you. I’m Andromeda. Opilia Andromeda.’ A freedwoman; yeah, well, it made sense for a brothel-keeper, although I’d’ve thought she was pretty young not only to have her freedom but to be the owner of a business into the bargain. ‘So why you, Marcus Corvinus?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘As someone to be looking into a Bovillan murder. Why a visitor?’

I shrugged. ‘Because Silius Nerva of the local senate asked me to.’

I got the distinct impression that the answer hadn’t satisfied her, which was fair enough because it didn’t really say anything. Still, the really interesting thing was that she’d asked the question. I gestured at the book beside her.

‘Anything interesting?’ I said.

She frowned. ‘Oh, just a bit of Alexandrian froth. I need to be here all day to keep an eye on things, and I have to pass the time somehow.’

Yeah, right. Only I’d caught a glimpse of the tag on the roller before she’d put the book down, and it’d looked more like a copy of Plato’s
Gorgias
to me. In the original. Sure, it was none of my business how she spent her mornings, and she could read what she liked as far as I was concerned, but even so it was interesting that she’d taken the trouble to lie. I filed that one away on my own account.

‘Well, then.’ She raised herself on the couch and turned to face me fully. ‘Back to the business of the old man’s murder. What do you want to know?’

‘Anything and everything you can tell me.’

‘Such as what, to start with?’

‘Was he a regular customer?’

‘Over the past two or three months, yes, fairly regular. Before that, only occasionally.’

‘The past two or three months? Why just then?’

‘His wife died in September. That could have been the reason – it sometimes is, with a certain type of client – but I really can’t say for definite.’

Delivered coldly and clinically. She could’ve been a doctor giving a case history. ‘He was, uh, quite active for his age, then?’ I said. Nerva hadn’t told me what that had been, but if he’d been elected censor he must’ve been touching sixty, at least, and she’d referred to him as an old man, so it seemed a logical deduction.

‘Well, now, Corvinus.’ Andromeda smiled and lowered her head. ‘That isn’t a question I can answer personally. You’d have to ask Lydia.’

‘Who’s Lydia?’

‘His favourite partner. Oh, he’d go with one of the others willingly enough when she wasn’t available, but he always asked for her.’

‘Was she the girl he was with the evening he died?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Could I talk to her now?’

‘Certainly, if you want. She’s occupied at present, but she shouldn’t be long. When you’ve finished with me I’ll fetch her for you.’

‘Thanks. That’d be great.’

‘So.’ Her hand went to the silk scarf, and she tugged it back down until it covered her lower neck completely. ‘What can I tell you myself?’

‘Just the basic background details would be useful. Nerva didn’t give me any of those.’

‘Yes, well, he wouldn’t, would he?’ She smiled. ‘All this is so dreadfully sordid and embarrassing for him and his cronies in the senate, is it not? A prominent man like Quintus Caesius being found dead outside a brothel.’ I said nothing. ‘Which details did you want exactly?’

‘The time frame, for a start. When did he arrive and leave?’

‘He arrived just after sunset and left about an hour later.’

‘That his usual time for visiting?’

‘Yes. Or perhaps slightly earlier than usual. He never came before sunset, when the shops in the alleyway were open and there would be people to see and recognize him. A very cautious man, Quintus Caesius. One of his most signal traits.’ This time she didn’t smile, but it was there in her eyes.

‘And he always left through the back door?’

Andromeda laughed. ‘But of course! Corvinus, he was a highly respected and very familiar public figure! Cloaked and hooded or not, there was always a chance that he’d be known. He came in that way, too, by arrangement. It’s very private; if you’d carried on past this room and round the corner you would’ve seen that for yourself.’

‘How so?’

‘There are no bedrooms between it and here; Lydia’s is the first, and that’s immediately next door to us. In fact, I suspect that was why the girl
was
his favourite, and it was a matter of convenience and safety as much as personal preference.’

‘The door isn’t used otherwise? By the customers, I mean.’

‘Oh, yes. On occasion, and for the same reason. Don’t be naïve, Corvinus; Quintus Caesius wasn’t – isn’t – the only important man in Bovillae who makes use of our services, and as you can imagine the town’s great and good are not very keen to bump into an ordinary client, or use the front entrance on the main street and run the risk of being seen. So we have a special arrangement for our special guests. I can easily hear a knock on the back door from here, and I open it myself; not even Carillus is involved, so it’s all done very discreetly. Discretion is something that I pride myself on, and our more special clients know it, which is why they continue to
be
our clients.’

‘Could you show me it?’

‘Now? Certainly, if you like. I’ll take you.’ She got up – she was big, tall for a woman – and led the way into the corridor. Nice figure, and walking immediately behind her I caught the scent of her perfume: seriously expensive stuff, if I was any judge.

Like she’d said, the door was no more than a few yards further on, at the corridor’s end. She slid back the central bolt, opened it and stepped back.

‘There you are.’

Winter sunlight flooded in: at least the rain had stopped for the time being. We were under an external flight of steps that led up to the building’s first floor, at the dead end of a short alleyway with a couple of open-fronted shops in it, a general merchant’s and a bootmaker’s. At the open end of the alley I could see people passing the gap. A main street, obviously, or at least one busy enough to have regular pedestrians.

‘He was lying on the ground over there.’ Andromeda pointed to a spot a few yards from the door, then waved at the bootmaker, who was sitting outside his shop a few yards away, stitching the upper of a shoe to the sole. ‘Good morning to you, Gratianus!’ He waved back. ‘Gratianus was the one who found the body, Corvinus. He’d be able to give you fuller details, so you may want to talk to him later.’

‘Yeah. Yeah, I’ll do that,’ I said. ‘Presumably no one went through this way – coming in or going out – after Caesius left?’

‘No. That was the last time it was opened that evening.’ She turned. ‘So. You’ve seen enough for the present?’

‘Sure.’

‘We’ll go back in, then. Lydia will probably be finishing off by now. Unless I can help you further, I’ll send her to you. You’re welcome to use my room. Hers will probably be a bit of a mess, and it’s rather cramped.’

We went back inside, and she re-bolted the door.

‘Did you let Caesius out yourself?’ I said.

‘No, I didn’t. I never do, for any of our specials, because there’s no need. I heard him go, naturally, when he passed my door, and the sound of this door being opened and closed, but there was no reason for me to see him out personally. I came out and locked up again, of course, a few minutes later.’

‘You didn’t hear anything else? Noises outside, maybe?’

‘No, nothing. That would’ve been most unlikely, whatever they were. As you can see, the door is quite thick, and the door of my own room was closed.’

Fair enough. ‘Ah … one last question, lady. Not about the murder as such. Like you said, the guy was a public figure. All this hole-in-the-corner stuff, doesn’t it get to you at all? I mean …’

She smiled. ‘You mean, don’t I think it’s a bit hypocritical? On the part of the clients?’

‘Yeah. That was it. More or less.’

‘Corvinus, I have a business to run. I don’t judge, at least not outside the privacy of my own head, which is my affair and no one else’s. How long do you think I could stay open if I put Bovillae’s most respected citizens’ backs up by advertising the fact that they’re just as human as the rest of the world? Besides, their money’s as good as anyone’s. Better, in fact, because they’re willing to pay well over the odds for that discretion I mentioned. Now, if you’ve finished with me I’ll tell Lydia you want to see her. Use my room to talk to her as if it was your own, and take as long as you please. When you’ve done, let yourself out the back. Did you have a cloak?’

‘Yeah. Yeah, it’s hanging in the lobby.’

‘Then I’ll have Carillus bring it to you. Remember, please do take as long as you like; you’re not inconveniencing anyone.’ We’d reached the door of her room. She opened it and stood aside. ‘I’m delighted to have met you.’

Delivered with all the formal politeness of an elderly dowager. I went inside and closed the door behind me. The book was still lying on the table. I picked it up and partly unrolled it. Plato’s
Gorgias
in Greek it was, and annotated in the margins in a neat, small hand that I’d guess was Andromeda’s own. An interesting lady, right enough.

A couple of minutes later there was a soft knock on the door and a girl came in. Heavy-featured, suicide blonde, with a good half inch of black hair showing at the roots. She was wearing a thin dressing gown, and not much else, as far as I could see.