The Ides of April (4 page)

I assumed her heart had suddenly stopped, or something similar. That was how it looked. There was nothing to suggest any kind of interference. Her skin had a few shapeless brown spots you would expect in a woman of her age, that’s all. No bruising. I did notice a short, fine scratch on her left arm, with faint reddening around it, but it was like a graze anyone could pick up brushing clumsily against something. Salvidia had not been an elegant mover.

Even a lifeless body can give off an aura. This woman’s endless agitation was over, yet her corpse signalled permanent disappointment. I felt her unhappy submission to death after a life that was in my terms, and probably her own, mainly wasted. Had she ever known contentment? I doubted it.

Depressed, I left the bedroom. The maid stayed there to watch over her mistress, with more loyalty than I had expected. Staff would forget she had been annoying, it seemed. They would feel normal sadness at her early parting. It should have given me faith in human decency but I felt unsettled. Needing to recover, I made my way to a small outside area beyond the atrium that I had spotted earlier.

With better owners, this space could have been made into a natty little courtyard garden. Salvidia had almost filled it with a huge stone basin of the kind used in public baths, though this was rough and unattractive, not fine-grained alabaster or porphyry. Lolling at an angle, the monster was so unwieldy and heavy-looking I could not imagine how they manoeuvred it in – nor why they bothered. It was stored, no use to anyone, and ruining what could have been a pleasant sitting-out place.

I found a bench, upturned against a low wall. Nobody could have used it for years. With effort, I turned the seat right way up in a tiny patch of sunlight, then perched on it, trying to avoid the mossy parts. I was reflecting thoughtfully in a way that generally means someone is upset – and so I was. I was furious that because of Salvidia’s inconvenient death I had probably lost my payment.

I assumed no one would bother me as I sat brooding there. From the surrounding house came only silence, as if even the maid might have left. I had seen no other staff and wondered if either the mistress had been too mean to have any, or if when she died they took their chance and ran away. Most homes have cooking smells, woofing dogs, distant knocks and footsteps, snatches of indecipherable conversation. This place lay still, seemingly deserted. Not even a pigeon shared my nook. It all gave the impression nothing much had ever gone on here. Even calling it a ‘home’ seemed an exaggeration.

At least it was peaceful. Eventually my annoyance and melancholy settled. Just as I was ready to leave, surprisingly someone turned up. I never heard him coming and he was equally surprised to see me.

The new arrival was in his late thirties, lean build, unremarkable face, clothes decent but not expensive. I could tell he was not, and never had been, a slave. Neither muscle-bound nor dusty, he looked more like a stationer than one of the construction workers. If I really thought Salvidia had had a lover, I might have suspected this was he, but although he had an air of ownership, I doubted that. Instinct again.

The way the man crept up, he could have been a walk-in thief, trying his luck. If so, he would presumably have gone through the atrium to search indoors for items he could quickly pilfer, not come out here and slumped on the little wall between the peristyle columns, looking as low-spirited as me. Perhaps he felt grim for similar reasons. Had he too come from viewing the corpse? Once he noticed me, he made no move to absent himself. Nor, oddly, did he turn me out. He just nodded once, like a stranger sitting down nearby in a public park, then he lost himself in brooding thoughts. So, I stayed and waited to see what would happen. My father would say that kind of curiosity had got him into plenty of trouble. But you have to trust your intuition. (That idea too, as my mother would dryly remark, had often landed dear Papa ankle-deep in donkey-shit.)

Eventually the stranger roused and introduced himself. He was called Metellus Nepos and he was the sole heir and executor. I asked about his name, because I knew ‘Nepos’ was Latin for ‘nephew’.

‘It’s just a name,’ he answered brusquely, like a man who had been asked the same question far too many times. ‘
My
name!’ Fine.

Romans pride themselves on their wonderful organisation, but when it comes to assigning names to babies, they tend to lack logic. Never try to tell anyone this at a dinner party, especially if they have a stupid name.

He relaxed enough to explain that the original Metellus who founded the company was his father, while Salvidia had been a second wife, his stepmother. Nepos told me he now had no intention of carrying on the business, but would sell up. He said that with enough bitterness to convince me I was right about the stepmother edging him out. At least he had gone off and done what he had always wanted; he became a cheesemaker. I said that was different. He said not really, if you like cheese.

I do. We had a meeting of minds, though not extravagantly.

He decided to become official. ‘May I ask what you are doing here?’

I had been waiting for this and saw no reason to prevaricate. ‘My name is Flavia Albia. I work as an informer. Salvidia hired me to apply legal pressure against some compensation-seekers.’

‘After a botched job?’ Clearly he knew the family firm. I related the sad story of little Lucius Bassus being run over. Nepos asked what settlement the parents wanted; when I told him he immediately offered, ‘Fair enough. Tell them once I’ve sold up here, I’ll pay them.’

I was amazed. ‘To be honest, my commission was to fend them off!’

‘Despite the drunken driver and overloading?’

‘Metellus Nepos, I don’t like all the jobs I have to do.’

‘The family deserve something. I am overruling Salvidia. I never saw eye to eye with her. And you would have been due something?’

Still bemused by his attitude, I said what I had hoped to charge Salvidia, plus expenses; Nepos agreed to honour that as well. I saw no reason to mention it had been no win, no fee.

I did not suppose this man had turned benevolent in the throes of grief. More likely, he was just lying to get rid of creditors. While they were lulled by his promises, he would grab his inheritance and make off. He had not told me where his dairy farm was. Out of Rome, I could bank on it.

Still, he might be unusually honest. If he wanted to be good-natured as some kind of moral cleansing, it was his own business. I don’t meet a lot of that, but I was open-minded.

Then Metellus Nepos leaned back against a pillar, turned up his face to the tiny patch of sky that was visible above us, and let out the kind of ponderous sigh that was all too familiar to me.

‘That sigh sounds like one of my clients, at an initial consultation,’ I said. He certainly looked troubled. ‘When they half wonder if their intended commission will sound like madness – which it often does, apart from “I think my wife is sleeping with the butcher”. That’s usually true. A sudden effusion of escalopes at the dinner table tends to be the giveaway.’

‘Tell me what work you do,’ urged Nepos. It was not a social question.

I gave him my professional biography. I stressed the mundane side: chasing runaway adolescents for anxious parents, routine hunts for missing birth certificates or army discharge diplomas, or for missing heirs, or missing chickens that naughty neighbours had already cooked up in tarragon . . . I mentioned other aspects of my strangely mixed portfolio. The time I investigated the quack doctor who raped female patients after giving them sleeping draughts. How I sometimes eliminated innocent suspects from vigiles enquiries, when our fair-minded lawmen went for an easy option, regardless of proof. Then there was work I did occasionally for the Camillus brothers, two rising prosecution lawyers who might need a woman’s assistance when they were gathering evidence.

‘Impressed?’

‘You work mainly for women?’

‘I do.’ Female clients trusted me. They shied off male
informers, who had a reputation for groping and worse indecency. Besides, many male informers were simply no good. ‘Why do you ask, Nepos?’ I had a glum premonition.

‘Do something for this woman!’ Nepos was short. ‘I shall hire you. I want someone to check my stepmother’s sudden death.’

This was a shock. My guess would have been that he sought an informer because he believed a devious rival had stolen his best cheese recipe. ‘Nepos, if I had not needed the money I wouldn’t have given her a cold, in life.’

‘Help her in death, Albia.’

Startled, I ran through all the reasons I had previously produced for myself as to why Salvidia’s demise was of no interest at all. ‘Just because somebody dies unexpectedly does not mean their death was unnatural. It happens. Happens all the time. Many people die for reasons that are never explained. Ask any funeral director.’

‘No,’ he disagreed. ‘This death is not right.’

‘Why? What’s bothering you?’

Nepos moved restlessly. ‘The old lady was completely tough, she was not even fifty, she was thriving. Her people say she was herself this morning – yet apparently she comes in, dumps her shopping in the hall, and just passes out for no reason. I don’t believe it. That’s impossible. I didn’t get on with her, but I’m not having that.’

‘Nepos, there is no evidence of foul play. Keep the commission.’ I decided he was not the only person in Rome who could make gestures. Besides, I had that terrible sense of gloom that you experience when you think a tiresome case is safely over, then it bobs right back at you. ‘You would be wasting your money, hiring me.’

‘That’s for me to decide,’ replied Metellus Nepos in a grim tone. ‘Either you look into it for me, or I’ll hire someone else.’

So I took the job. If the stepson was set on wasting his newly inherited cash, why should some other informer benefit? I was here in position, so I stepped up obligingly, took on the task and said a polite thank you.

He had to be wrong.

But then, there is always that little niggle that won’t go away. It always gets you. What if his daft suspicions were not daft at all? What if he was right?

I
did not believe I had a case to investigate, but I still looked into the facts. There was a routine; I followed it. Nepos dogged me like a hungry hound so I could not be desultory. Anyway, I really did want my final report to reassure him. Sometimes that is the point − telling your client that they do not need to worry.

Occasionally, when it’s best to protect them from the awkward truth, you have to say that everything is fine even though you have proved their suspicions are well-founded − but I did not expect that to be the result here.

I rechecked the corpse, this time with the stepson standing beside me so I could point out its sad normality to him. He sniffed, unconvinced.

I then spent several hours retracing Salvidia’s movements earlier that day. I interviewed the maid and a few other household staff whom Nepos winkled out of back rooms for me. I ascertained that their mistress had shown no signs of being suicidal. I talked to the workmen at the yard. They said she was definitely full of plans, enjoyable plans to do customers out of money. The maid then escorted me round all the market stalls where Salvidia habitually bought provisions; we identified those where she had been that morning, matching the produce that still lay in her shopping baskets. Nobody in the markets told me anything unusual.

I pondered motive. Suppose Nepos was right. Unnatural death has a cause, which we could not identify here, and it has a perpetrator. If the woman really had been sent on her way deliberately, who would want to do it? The picture that emerged matched my own previous experience of Salvidia; she was an ill-natured character you wouldn’t share a fish supper with yet, after all, she had been a businesswoman so it was never in her interests to fall out with people completely. She ordered her house slaves about, but not unbearably; she rampaged around the yard, but the workers were used to it; she let down customers almost on principle, but they rarely bothered to complain. That was the limit of her aggression. When she dealt with me she had had a testy attitude, but not so bad that I refused her case. I had decided I could work with her. So when I now asked the usual question − did she have any enemies? − the answer was, not particularly. Rome was stuffed with women who were just as unlikeable.

I pointed out to Nepos that the one person who benefited from Salvidia’s death was him: he inherited. We agreed that if
he
had finished her off in some undetectable way, it would be very stupid of him to draw attention to it. If he had, hiring me could be a smokescreen. But unless someone else had become suspicious of the death, there was no need at all for him to set the wood smouldering.

I made sure we considered the family of the toddler, Lucius Bassus. Salvidia’s drunken driver and overloaded cart had killed the child. Nevertheless, she had brazenly tried to avoid paying compensation. That meant the bereaved parents might harbour real loathing of her. But they stood to gain a large amount of cash soon – because, being realistic, they had an unbeatable claim for negligence which my best efforts would not have thwarted. It was in their interest to keep her alive, so she could pay. Anyway, I went and saw them. They all had alibis.

Reluctantly, Nepos accepted that no misadventure was indicated. He still wanted to bring in a doctor to look at the body; I persuaded him to keep the money and ask an opinion of a funeral director, who had to be hired anyway. They see enough to give the best assessment of what has happened to a dead person.

The undertaker who came seemed competent. He surveyed the body and refused to excite himself. He did take notice of the mark that I myself had noticed on Salvidia’s arm, though like me he thought it was some accidental scrape. He claimed that women were quietly passing away all over Rome for no obvious reason that spring. It might mean some kind of invisible disease was claiming them, but more likely it was just a statistical coincidence. His verdict was that old saying, ‘There’s a lot of it about.’