The Ides of April (7 page)

Don’t misunderstand me. I like dogs. At one terrible time of my young life, I had lived on the streets of the town I was born in, scavenging with the feral dogs; they were kinder to me than most humans. I became as wild as they were. Maybe at heart I still was. If ever I paused quietly to consider my origins and character, the fear of having an unRoman nature unsettled me. It positively scared other people. Men, particularly. Not that I minded upsetting men.

The ideal Roman matron was supposed to be docile, but I had noticed how few of them were. It seemed to me, Roman men had devised their prescriptive regime for their women precisely because the women really held domestic power. We let them think they were in charge. But in many homes they were wrong.

I liked the Armilustrium because even without dog dirt it did harbour a smell, a musky odour near any undergrowth, a rank scent of wildlife that deterred many people: foxes frequented the area. When sitting still and silent I had often seen them. To me, since I had never kept ducks or chickens, foxes were a wilder, more intriguing kind of dog.

The Aventine foxes were currently causing me anxiety. It was April. In the middle of the month would come one of the numerous festivals that cluttered the Roman calendar, this one dedicated to Ceres, the Cerialia. Like the Armilustrium, it always had several days of public events down in the Circus, but with one extra feature that I found loathsome. On the first night, live foxes would be driven down the hill, with lit torches tied to their tails. Whooping celebrants would herd them into the Circus, where they died in agony.

Some years I went away. My family owned a villa on the coast.

This year there was a big auction in which Father was involved, so the others were not going to the sea until later, and they wanted me to stay in Rome too. Ever since I was widowed, it had been understood I would be with them at this time. Our family had almost as many ritual days as the city had festivals, and the Ides of April was a compulsory engagement for me. In an unstated way, they had made it conditional on their allowing me to be independent the rest of the time. The thirteenth day of April, during the Cerialia, was my birthday. On the Ides, I had to be with them.

Oh let’s get this out of the way.

Nobody really knows when I was born, nor who my parents were. No one will ever know. Being an informer now, in a family of investigators, made no difference. I could never find out. Even I had accepted years ago that a search would be a waste of time. I would never go back to Britain. There was nothing for me there. Not even the truth.

I was discovered as a crying baby in the streets of Londinium, that ramshackle shanty town at the mist-covered end of the world. I had been abandoned, or perhaps hidden for safety, when the Boudiccan tribes attacked and burned the Roman settlement. There were few important officials in Britannia in Nero’s day; it was a new, very remote, province. I was unlikely to be an official’s baby or my loss would have been noted. There were soldiers, but soldiers were not supposed to have families and in a rebellious frontier province that rule tended to be enforced. The most likely possibility is that I was a trader’s child, which meant I could be of any nationality, or half and half, with my mother possibly British though just as likely not.

Orphaned babies plucked from horror tend to be hailed as miracles. They give hope at a time of chaos and grief. People fostered me. My childhood was spent among shopkeepers. These slipshod, uneducated people, emigrants from mainland Europe, were decent to me, until caring for an extra infant and feeding an extra mouth became burdensome. I began to sense they had ideas of selling me into one kind of slavery or another, so I ran away. I was a skinny, bitter, unwanted street-child who slept in chilly colonnades, handed as many blows as curses.

Finally, more compassionate people saw me there and saved me. Didius Falco and Helena Justina, my new, cultured, adventurous, warm-hearted and eccentric parents, certainly did not object to a challenge; by then I was undomesticated, vermin-ridden and although we never talked about it afterwards, I had been targeted by a brothel-owner and raped. I was aggressive and angry, too – moods I never really lost. But I also yearned for survival. I recognised a chance. Never stupid, I took it.

I came to Rome. A diploma of Roman citizenship had been arranged for me. I agreed to be formally adopted (my rescuers had principles; they gave me the choice). Birthdays are important in Roman families and I was encouraged to choose a date we could call my own. Since the Boudiccan Rebellion had happened in the autumn, and by then I had survived without a mother, spring seemed a likely time for me to have been born. Father’s birthday was in March; I selected a date three weeks after his, time for us to recover from one family party and arrange the next. I chose the Ides of April before ever I knew anything about the foxes.

They came in from the country, following the great highways, sneaking at dusk up through the roadside ditches along the Via Latina, the Via Appia and the Via Ostiensis. They came to raid rubbish piles and detritus in gutters. They knew the places in the city where poultry was kept in cages, ready for butchers’ shops or market stalls: ducks, hens, pheasants, geese, even occasional exotics like peacocks or flamingos. They ate mice. Occasionally they snatched puppies or kittens, or tame doves; certainly they carried off the corpses of dead pets, and also rats and pigeons. Perhaps sometimes they would scoop a fancy lamprey from a garden pond. They licked fish skins and skeletons; picked through rabbit bones; ran off, weighed down lopsidedly with meat carcasses in their mouths; skulked around butchers’ stalls, licking the blood on the streets; snatched the remains of religious offerings from outdoor altars.

After a night’s foraging, most probably scampered back to their dens on the open Campagna, the agricultural plain surrounding Rome. Others stayed. I knew that because I recognised at least one animal at the Armilustrium. I had seen him a few times; I knew the size and shape of him, and his regular habits. The time of evening when he visited the walled enclosure. How he paused, ears up, to check for safety. How he slipped along in shadow, almost impossible to see unless your eyes were keenly used to the darkness and spotted slight movements. He must have made a lair somewhere. I called him Robigo. It’s the name for wheat rust.

Some nights I slipped out to the Armilustrium with a bowl of scraps and fed him. He had learned that I would come. If I stayed long enough, I might see him. I had learned to look for his ears, pricked up as he crouched on the top of the enclosure wall, waiting and watching until he felt secure. Then he slid down the full height of the wall, tail at full stretch, vanishing into shadow. I had to strain my eyes to find his movements. Keeping close to the wall, he would approach the bowl, with his neat tread and constant hesitation. He sniffed, he ate. The way he took food was surprisingly dainty. He made domestic dogs look like untidy gluttons.

Any slight sound would send him silently melting back into cover. But soon he would creep out again, returning until the whole bowl of food was eaten.

He liked pies, with gravy, or other broths. He thought dry grains were an insult. In many ways his appetite was the same as mine.

Once, a piece of fish I put out for him must have been dangerously rotten. Robigo lifted it out delicately and laid it on the grass a stride away, before returning to the bowl and finishing the other scraps.

He never acknowledged my presence. I knew I was communing with Nature, while Nature remained aloof.

Maybe the fact that I had been nearly burned alive myself in the firestorm that destroyed Londinium made me so angry about the torches and terror that the devotees of Ceres perpetrated on the Aventine foxes. The foxes were like me. Private, ruthless and self-sufficient. Intelligent and untameable, yet capable of strong loyalty. Loners who could socialise, joyously and playfully, but afterwards slip back into being reclusive.

We all lived within the city community, yet surreptitiously. We were never truly part of it.

I
nformers have ridiculous rituals. One is that if anyone connected with a case dies, especially if it is your client, you must go to the funeral. Everyone pretends this action symbolises our good nature and fine feelings. Diligent nurses brought us up from the cradle to have elegant manners. We not only sympathise with the bereaved, we ourselves are troubled souls who share their sorrow . . .

The real reason is a myth – nothing more, believe me – the myth that you chance seeing the perpetrator wailing beside the pyre. Sometimes they are indeed present, if only because most murders are committed by a member of the victim’s family. If so, you can give up immediately. The person you are looking for has exactly the same snub nose and bad breath as all of their innocent relatives, and the same gormless expression. If they brazen it out, you will never home in on the guilty and catch them.

The funeral myth presupposes your killer is an idiot, who will be drawn to the scene, yearning to witness the grim results of their crime and daring you to identify her or him. It also implies informers have powers of prophecy and can tell, without using spells or magic talismans, exactly which of the off-putting mourners is really going crazy with guilt.

I have never met any informer who has achieved this feat of recognition. I go, but I never expect results.

Roman funerals comprise two events, over a week apart. Traditionally, informers attend the gloomy outdoor interment, not the jollier feast nine days later. Whoever wrote our rulebook must have been depressing – although, let’s be fair; if you were to wait nine days and enjoy the feast, all the villains would have got their acts straight and any evidence would have vanished; also, anyone who might have paid you to investigate has learned they will inherit an olive grove, so they have lost interest in causing upsets.

The will is supposed to be read on the day of the feast, but anyone who hopes for a legacy has already popped the seal off the scroll by lamplight and peeked. You, the unlucky informer, will be granted no opportunity to spot a suspicious reaction. If anyone is going to froth with rabid rage at an outrageous bequest, it happened several nights ago, in the library, with no witnesses but moths.

Perhaps there is nothing to cause offence in any case. Most wills have been put together by lawyers, and some lawyers can do a decent job of advising a client (I know it hurts to hear that). Besides, people planning for their deaths have a besotted wish to be well thought of, so many wills adopt a shamelessly conciliatory tone. The slave who expected to be riven with disappointment because the horrid master fails to give him his freedom has in fact been freed, with an almost adequate pension and enough money to put up a dear little plaque praising the master’s liberality. The pinched sister tormented by fears of neglect has acquired the villa at Laurentium. The disgruntled wife is praised as the most deserving of women. Business partners are delirious because they will now get their hands on the legendary wine cellar . . .

All these thoughts ran through my head as we said farewell to Salvidia. It was the next evening, out in the necropolis on the Ostia Road. Roman funerals involve a long period of standing about; unless you roll up late, exclaiming that the roads from Tarentum are terrible, you have to wait for hours, from the arrival of the bier until the body burns sufficiently for some sad mourner to scrape up the ashes. Winter is worst, but even in April the wood at this funeral was green and claggy. Although undertakers have covert ways of making fire take hold quickly, it seemed as if Salvidia was reluctant to go.

Metellus Nepos was there of course, carrying out the offices of chief mourner. Most of the mourners appeared to be Salvidia’s home and business workforce, rather than friends or neighbours. It did not surprise me that she had no real social circle. I identified the stepson’s wife, younger than him and about six months pregnant; she stood among a small group of women of a similar age, probably her own friends coming to support her, rather than people showing respect to the dead woman. They talked inanely of their houses and children, until I moved away.

I ended up alongside one of those old ladies who loves going to funerals. She could have been my grandma. A tiny, frail figure wrapped in swathes of black, she had had her mourning garments out of the clothes-chest regularly and knew how to keep a head-veil in place, even on a breezy day. She looked vague, and as sweet as honeycake, but without doubt had a vicious tongue when it suited her. I hoped she would be better value than the young housewives.

‘Nothing like a good funeral to get you out of the house!’ I said, striking up conversation. She looked interested in my frank attitude. ‘I am Flavia Albia; I had business dealings with the deceased. Did you know Salvidia well?’ There was a chance this treasure had not known Salvidia at all, but just hung around the necropolis every day, attaching herself to any procession that came by; she could gloat at having herself outlived the corpse, whoever it was, and I bet she was adept at tagging along when the chosen few went back to the house for refreshments. Nobody ever likes to challenge an old lady. Gran managed to look inside plenty of strangers’ houses that way.

‘Oh I knew her for years. You’re the investigator, aren’t you?’ That told me she did have prior connections, or she would not have known what I did. And as I expected, she took a nosy interest.

‘Neighbour?’ I guessed. I wanted to place her before I gave too much away myself.

She wasn’t having it. She ignored my question with the selective deafness old ladies apply so readily. ‘Such a good son. It’s right that he asked you.’

I gave up on the first question and lightly posed another. ‘So do
you
think something odd happened?’

‘Ooh, I couldn’t say!’ That’s a trick they like to use. None of them are self-effacing really. She pursed her lips to show there was much she
could
say, but she clung on to pretending she was too insignificant to comment. ‘Nobody wants my opinion.’