The Mammoth Book of Roman Whodunnits (35 page)

Quick as a snake, she snatched the wine-cup from the table, and drained it in three rapid swallows. I reached out to grab it from her, but she flung it across the room, and exclaimed triumphantly, “There – all gone now!” She began to laugh, a shrill crazed laugh that soon turned into a fit of choking.

She fell forwards onto the floor, curling up into a ball, and I knew there was nothing I could do for her, even if I wanted to.

But Chloe . . . Hemlock works slowly. Might I be in time? I rushed into her bedchamber. She lay on her back on the bed, looking as if she was sleeping peacefully, but when I looked closer, I saw she was dead.

And then terror stabbed me like a knife in the heart. Beside the bed, sprawled limply in a chair, was my Amanda, lying deathly still.

“Amanda!” I shouted, in rising panic. Phoebe had proved she would stop at nothing. Suppose Amanda had discovered about the poison, and accused her . . .

“Amanda!” I yelled, shaking her by the shoulders. She didn’t move.

“
Amanda! Wake up! Wake up, Amanda!
” I shook her hard, and she stirred, and looked at me half-awake; and then she smiled.

“Rufus, you big stupid lump, what’s all the noise about?”

I’ve never been so glad to hear somebody call me stupid.

“I
am
a detective!” cried Flavia Gemina, and she almost stamped her foot. “I’ve solved lots and lots of mysteries!” Because her mother was dead and her father – the sea-captain Marcus Flavius Geminus – was often away on voyages, Flavia was probably the most independent ten-year-old girl in the Roman port of Ostia.

“Detective?” Flavia’s tutor Aristo raised an eyebrow. He was a good-looking young Greek with curly hair. “There’s no such word in Latin. You made it up.”

“I did
not
make it up,” said Flavia. “It was in the scroll Admiral Pliny gave me before he died. The one he called
Great Mysteries of the Past
. He said a detective is someone who ‘uncovers the truth’.”

“Show me where it says that.”

“I can’t. The scroll was lost in the eruption of Vesuvius.” Flavia looked out through the columns of the peristyle into the wet green garden. She still felt a pang when she remembered the old admiral dying on the beach a few months earlier. “It was the only scroll in existence,” she said, “written in his own teeny tiny handwriting.” Flavia looked at Aristo again. “But I remember reading that word: ‘detective’. As soon as I saw it, I knew: I’m a detective.”

“Well,” said Aristo, “being a detective is no excuse for ignoring your homework. So sit down and do that calculation again the way I showed you yesterday.”

Flavia sighed – a deep sigh of the unjustly oppressed – and sat down again at the marble table. She took the abacus and stared at it, but its boxwood beads were inscrutable.

Across the table, a brown-eyed boy was mouthing something at her. Jonathan – a Jew about her own age – was her next-door neighbour and friend, as well as her classmate. Flavia looked up at him from under her eyebrows, but she couldn’t understand the words he was silently forming.

To her right, a dark-skinned girl was pointing behind her hand at one of the rows of beads. That didn’t help either. Flavia’s ex-slave-girl Nubia had only been in Italia for a few months but already she was better at maths than Flavia.

Finally Flavia glanced at Lupus, the youngest of them. Although Lupus had been a homeless beggar until recently, his maths was also better than hers. Because he was mute, Lupus depended heavily on a wax tablet to communicate. He was casually writing something on it now and she read:

But the words on Lupus’s tablet may as well have been Etruscan. She would have to admit defeat.

“I didn’t do the homework,” Flavia said in a small voice.

“Well, then,” said Aristo. “You know the punishment.”

“No!” she wailed.

“You can’t object,” said Aristo. “Last month I asked each of you to choose the punishment you thought best if you didn’t do your homework. The choice was yours.”

“But I hate emptying the latrine bucket!” said Flavia. “I hate it almost as much as I hate maths.”

“That’s why it’s a good punishment,” said Aristo mildly.

“A detective shouldn’t have to empty latrine buckets.” Flavia pouted.

“For the last time: you are not a detective!”

“Yes I am!” Flavia’s chair scraped on the marble floor as she stood up again. “I’ll prove it! Set me any mystery, any task and I’ll solve it for you! And . . . and if I can’t do it I’ll never mention the word again!”

“And you’ll empty the latrine bucket every day for a month? Until the Saturnalia?”

“Yes,” said Flavia. “But if I win, if
I
solve the mystery then we don’t do any maths for a whole month, we’ll just read Greek myths.”

Aristo’s brown eyes gleamed. “Very well,” he said. “If you’re a detective, why don’t you find out who’s been robbing Pistor the baker?”

Flavia’s face fell. That was precisely the puzzle she’d been trying to solve for the past few weeks. And Aristo knew that.

“I’ll give you three days,” said Aristo. “And today counts as the first.”

“Am I allowed to ask Jonathan and Nubia and Lupus to help me?” asked Flavia.

Aristo grinned up at her. “Of course. You know I encourage teamwork whenever possible. In fact, if you’d conferred with the three of them yesterday afternoon you’d know how to do those calculations. But I’ll bet you had your nose in a scroll, didn’t you?”

Flavia nodded. “I’ve been reading Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
,” she murmured.

“What?” Aristo’s face grew pale. “You’ve been reading
what
?”

“Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
?” said Flavia in a tiny voice.

“Where did you get it?”

Flavia tried to look innocent. “From the top shelf in pater’s study. Behind the Catullus,” she added.

“And do you have any idea why your father put it up there? Well out of your reach?”

“No,” Flavia lied.

“He put it on the top shelf because it’s completely unsuitable for a young lady of your class.”

“But it’s so good.”

“Of course it’s good,” said Aristo. “It’s a masterpiece. But it’s also extremely violent and full of unsuitable sex scenes.”

“If I solve the mystery –” began Flavia.

“No!” cried Aristo.

“If I solve the mystery of who’s stealing Pistor’s bread in the next three days,” Flavia persisted, “then will you let us read bits of it? Just the bits that aren’t full of unsuitable sex and violence?”

“I suppose I could choose excerpts,” said Aristo slowly. He stood, too.

“If you solve that mystery in the next three days then we’ll read carefully selected passages from Ovid instead of doing maths. But if you fail, then you’ll empty the latrine bucket for a month, do your homework and never mention the word ‘detective’ again. Agreed?”

“Agreed!” said Flavia.

They shook on it.

“OK,” said Flavia Gemina to Jonathan, Nubia and Lupus. “What do we know so far?”

The four friends and their three dogs were having a conference in Flavia’s bedroom. Outside, a soft but steady rain fell on the umbrella pines in the necropolis and dripped from the sill of a small window. The pearly light of a November morning filled the bedroom.

Jonathan sat cross-legged on Nubia’s bed next to his puppy Tigris. “Well,” he said, “We know that the robberies have been going on for nearly half a year. Alma told us that.”

Flavia nodded. Her old nursemaid Alma was cook in the Geminus household.

Jonathan continued. “Last Saturday we watched Pistor’s customers from dawn till noon. But that didn’t get us anywhere.”

“I think I know why, now,” said Flavia.” Alma just told me that Pistor thinks it’s an inside job.”

“What is ‘inside job’?” asked Nubia. Her first exposure to the Latin language had been Virgil and this was not an idiom he used.

“It means the thief must be someone inside the bakery. One of Pistor’s family, or one of his slaves.”

“What makes Pistor think it’s an inside job?” asked Jonathan.

“Last week he mentioned to Alma that sometimes the rolls go missing from undelivered batches. They were never taken to the shop front. That means it’s an inside job, and
that
means we have eight suspects.” Flavia counted on her fingers: “Pistor’s wife, his daughter, his two sons and their three slaves. Alma told me how many people there are in his household,” she added.

THAT’S ONLY VII
, wrote Lupus on his wax tablet.

“Yes,” agreed Jonathan. “Who’s the eighth?”

“Pistor himself,” said Flavia. “Pliny’s scroll taught me never to discount the person who first brings the crime to light. It told the story of a man whose mule fell into a cistern and broke its neck. The man blamed his neighbour because the fence around the cistern had a gap in it. But it turned out the mule was ill and the mule’s owner broke the fence on purpose and pushed the mule towards the cistern. He wanted to make it look like negligence, so that his neighbour would have to compensate him and buy him a healthy new mule. And that,” she concluded, “is why we can’t even tell Pistor we’re trying to solve the mystery.”

“OK,” said Jonathan. “So we know there are eight suspects and that it’s an inside job.”

“But we are not even knowing all their names,” said Nubia and Lupus nodded.

“And you know what
that
means, don’t you.” said Flavia.

They all looked at her.

“To solve an inside job,” said Flavia Gemina, “we’ll have to get inside!”

Ostia’s Imperial Granary was almost as big as the town’s famous theatre just up the road.

But unlike the white, marble-covered theatre, the granary was red. It was red from the top of its terracotta roof tiles to the bottom of its brick thresholds. Even the elegant half columns which flanked the doorways and the triangular pediments above them were made of brick.

Some Ostians called the Imperial Granary a monstrosity. But Jonathan liked the way it looked. And he liked the way it smelled: of freshly baked bread. That was because so many of Ostia’s bakeries were situated all around it.

Pistor’s was one of the smallest of those bakeries. But size
didn’t matter: everyone knew Pistor’s bread was the best. Especially his poppy-seed white rolls, which were even famous in Rome.

Jonathan’s stomach rumbled as he caught the yeasty scent of hot bread. He followed his friend Lupus up the two steps to Pistor’s shop front. The rain had stopped, but the stones were still wet.

The boys pressed their faces against the damp wooden shutter. By putting his eye to one of the cracks between the horizontal slats, Jonathan could see the marble counter where bread was sold to the public between dawn and noon. Behind it he could make out the wide doorway which led to the bakery beyond. A dim shape moved briefly into the doorway, then disappeared.

“There are still people in there.” Flavia and Nubia had joined the boys at the shutter.

“We know that,” said Jonathan. “We can smell the bread baking.”

“I wonder if there’s a back way in,” said Flavia.

“Must be,” said Jonathan, and Lupus nodded.

“Hark!” said Nubia. “I am hearing a sound.”

They all listened and Jonathan heard a faint donkey’s bray. He frowned. “It’s coming from inside!”

“They are having a donkey inside the bakery?” said Nubia.

“Yes,” said Flavia. “I think they use donkeys to grind the grain.”

“Why are you lot nosing around here?” said a voice behind them.

The four friends turned to find a pudgy boy standing on the rain-slicked pavement below them. He wore a long-sleeved tunic under a brown cloak and his arms were folded across his chest. Jonathan guessed the boy was about his age. Perhaps a little younger.

“Can’t you see we’re closed?” said the boy.

“Hello,” said Flavia. “Do you work here?”

“
Work
here?” the boy snorted. “Do I look like a slave? My father
owns
this bakery.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” said Flavia, and then brightly introduced herself. “My name is Flavia Gemina. This is Jonathan, and Nubia and that’s Lupus. Um . . . our tutor asked us to do a project on bread. ‘From the harvest to the loaf’. And we wanted to see how bread was made.”

“Bakeries close at noon when the baths open,” said the boy. “Everybody knows that.”

“But we smelled bread,” said Jonathan.

“And we are hearing the donkey,” added Nubia.

The boy looked at Nubia again. “What did you say your name was?” he asked her.

“My name is Nubia.”

“I’m Sextus Nasenius Pistor,” said the boy. “But you can call me Porcius. Everyone does.”

“Nice to meet you, Porcius,” said Flavia.

Porcius ignored her. “I suppose I could give you a tour,” he said to Nubia and unfolded his arms. “Would that help you with your project?”

“That would delight us,” said Nubia solemnly.

“Right,” said Porcius with a nod. “Come on, then.”

Nubia looked around the first room of the bakery – a small storeroom filled with sacks of grain and flour. She liked the low vaulted roof overhead and the pretty herringbone pattern of bricks on the floor.

“The first stage of baking bread,” Porcius told her, “is getting the best Egyptian grain. We get our grain from the horrea down the street.”

“The horror?” asked Nubia. “Do they name it thus because it is scary?”

Porcius corrected her patiently. “The horrea,” he said. “The granary.”

“But the words are related,” said Flavia. “
Horrere
means to bristle. So horrea means a place where bristly grain is stored and
horrere
is when your hair bristles because you’re scared!”