The Silver Pigs (8 page)

XXI

I was aiming west so my passport booked me east. After seven years in the army that came as no surprise.

I had planned a gentle trip, with a few days on my own in Londinium to acclimatize myself. The harbour master at Gesoriacum must have signalled across to the depot at Dubris the minute he spotted me. Londinium knew I was coming before I left Gaul. On the quay at Rutupiae a special envoy was tapping his fur-stuffed boot, ready to whisk me out of trouble the minute I fell off the boat.

The procurator's envoy was a decurion who had jumped at special duties in the pompous way such heroes always do. He introduced himself, but he was a lard-faced, lank-haired, unfriendly beggar whose name I eagerly forgot. His legion was the Twentieth Valeria, dull worthies who had covered themselves with glory defeating Queen Boudicca in the Revolt. Now their HQ faced the mountains at Viroconium, ahead of the frontier, and the only useful detail I managed to squeeze out of him was that despite the efforts of succeeding governors, the frontier still lay in the same place: the old diagonal boundary road from Isca to Lindum, beyond which most of the island still lay outside Roman control. I remembered that the silver mines were the wrong side of the line.

Nothing in Britain had substantially changed. Civilization simply topped the province like a film of wax on an apothecary's ointment pot easy enough to press your finger through. Vespasian was sending lawyers and academics to turn the tribesmen into democrats you could safely ask to dinner. The lawyers and academics would need to be good. Rutupiae bore all the marks of an Imperial entry port, but once we rode out down the supply road south of the River Tamesis, it was the old scene of smoky round huts clustered in poky square fields, surly cattle drifting under ominous skies, and a definite sense that you could travel for days over the downs and through the forests before you found an altar to any god whose name you recognized.

When I last saw Londonium it was a field of ash with an acrid smell, where the skulls of massacred commercial settlers were tumbling over one another like pebbles in a clogged and reddened stream. Now it was a new administrative capital. We rode in from the south. We found a spanking bridge, clean-cut wharves, warehouses and workshops, taverns and baths: not a stick more than ten years old. I caught smells both familiar and exotic, and heard six languages in the first ten minutes. We passed a bare, black site earmarked for the governor's palace; and another great space later where the Forum would be. Government buildings reared everywhere, one of which a busy finance complex with courtyard verandahs and sixty offices housed the procurator and his family.

The procurator's private suite had depressing British style: closed-in courtyards, cramped rooms, dark hall, dim corridors with an airless smell. White-faced, white-legged people existed here among sufficient Arretine dinnerware and Phoenician glass to make life bearable. There were wall paintings in ox blood and ochre, with borders of storks and vine leaves executed by a plasterer who might twenty years ago have seen a stork and a bunch of grapes. I arrived halfway through October and already there was a buffeting blast from the under floor heating as soon as I walked through the door.

Flavius Hilaris strode out from his study to greet me himself.

"Didius Falco? Welcome to Britain! How was your trip? You made good time! Come in and talk while I have your baggage taken up."

He was a winsome, vigorous man I had to admire since he had stuck it in government service for nearly thirty years. He had crisp brown hair cut to outline a neat head, and lean firm hands with straight-cut, clean fingernails. He wore a broad gold ring, the badge of the middle rank. As a republican I despised the rank, but from the start I thought the man himself was excellent. His mistake was that he did a thorough job and saw the funny side. People liked him, but to conventional judges these were not the signs of a "good mind'.

The room which the public works officials had designated his private study was in fact used by Hilaris as an extra public office. As well as his own reading couch, shapeless with use, he kept a table with benches where meetings could be held. There were plenty of sconces, all blazing, for it was late. His secretaries had left him on his own, immersed in figure work and thought.

He poured me wine. Kind gesture, I thought, putting me at ease. Then with a shock I realized, maybe putting me off guard!

Our interview was conducted with exhausting thoroughness. Compared with this Hilaris, my client Camillus Verus was just a squashy plum. I had already deleted the procurator from my suspects list (too obvious), but he made a point of discussing the Emperor, to demonstrate where his sympathies lay.

"No better man for the Empire but this is new for Rome! Vespasian's father was a middle rank finance officer, yet now Vespasian's Emperor. My father was a finance officer and so am I!"

I warmed to him. "Not quite, sir. You are the leading civilian in a prestigious new province, with an Emperor who looks on you as a friend! No one but the governor carries more weight in Britain than you. Your father's highest position was as a third-grade tax collector, in a one-ox town in Dalmatia --" The only reason I knew this was because I had delved into his background before I came out. He realized that. He smiled. So did I. "And your father was an auctioneer he threw back at me. My father disappeared so long ago, not many people are aware of that.

"Possibly still is!" I admitted morosely.

He made no comment. A polite man, though one who had made sure before I came out to his province that he knew all about me:

"As for you, Falco, two years' army service, then five more as what the legions would call a scout the type of army agent native tribesmen hang as a spy"

"If they catch you!"

"Which they never did... So you were invalided out, recovered briskly perhaps so briskly it smacks of sharp practice then you took up your present work. My sources say you have a dozy reputation, though past clients speak well of you. Some of the women," he observed, looking down with a prim mouth, "have an odd look when they do!"

I let that pass.

Then he confronted me with what we had been skirting round since the interview began: "You and I," smiled the British financial procurator, "served in the same legion, Didius Falco."

Well, I knew that. He must have realized.

Twenty years apart. Same legion, same province. He served when the glorious Second Augusta were the crack troops in the British invasion force. Vespasian was his commander-that was how they met. I served in the Second at Isca, at the time when Paulinus the British governor decided to invade Mona Druids' Island to clear out that rats' nest of troublemakers once and for all. Paulinus left us at Isca, guarding his back, but was accompanied by our commandant among his advisory corps. We were stuck therefore with an incompetent Camp Prefect named Poenius Postumus, who called Queen Boudicca's Revolt "just a local tiff. When the governor's frantic orders arrived informing this half wit that the Iceni had swept a bloody swathe all through the south, instead of ha ring off to join the beleaguered field army, either from terror or further misjudgement Postumus refused to march out. I served in our legion when its glorious name stank.

"Not your fault!" remarked my new colleague gently, reading my mind.

I said nothing.

After the rebels were annihilated and the truth came out, our pea brained Camp Prefect fell on his sword. We made sure of that. But first he had forced us to abandon twenty thousand comrades in open country with no supplies and nowhere to retreat, facing two hundred thousand screaming Celts. Eighty thousand civilians had been massacred while we polished our studs in barracks. We might have lost all four British legions. We might have lost the governor. We might have lost the province.

If a Roman province had fallen, in a native rebellion, led by a mere woman, the whole Empire might have blown away. It could have been the end of Rome. That was the kind of "local tiff the British rebellion was.

Afterwards we witnessed what the barbarians had done. We saw Camulodunum, where the huddled townsfolk had melted in each other's arms during a four day inferno at the Temple of Claudius. We choked in the black dust of Verulamium and Londinium. We cut down the crucified settlers at their lonely country villas; we flung earth on the burned skeletons of their strangled slaves. We stared in shock and horror at mutilated women hanging like crimson rags from the trees in the pagan groves. I was twenty years old.

That was why, when I could, I left the army. It took five years to arrange, but I had never had second thoughts. I worked for myself. Never again would I entrust myself to orders from a man of such criminal ineptitude. Never again would I be part of the establishment that foists such fools into positions of command.

Flavius Hilaris was still watching me in my reverie.

"None of us will ever quite recover," he acknowledged, sounding pretty hoarse himself. His face had shadowed too. While the governor Paulinus was frightening mountain tribesmen, this man had been prospecting for copper and gold. Now his job was finance. Below the governor he sat on the second highest administrative notch. But ten years ago, at the time of the Revolt, Gaius Flavius Hilaris had occupied a more junior post; he was the procurator in charge of the British mines.

It could be him! My weary brain kept telling me that this clever man with the clear-eyed smile could be the villain I had come to find. He understood the mines, and he could fudge the paperwork. No one in the Empire was so beautifully placed.

"You must be exhausted!" he exclaimed softly. I felt drained. "You missed dinner. I'll send sustenance to your room, but do use our bathhouse first. After you eat I want to introduce you to my wife..."

These were my first dealings with the diplomatic middle class. Until then they had escaped me, for the simple reason that they led lives so lacking in deceit that they attracted nobody else's unkind attention and never needed to employ me for themselves. I had come expecting to be treated like a servant. Instead I found myself lodged incognito in the procurator's private suite, being offered a welcome more suited to a family guest.

Fortunately I had packed one set of decent clothes.

XXII

My billet was disturbingly cosy. I had a spacious room with a bed groaning under colourful quilts. Oil lamps flickered. Warmth filtered through the wall flues. There were seats with low square footstools, cushions, floor rugs, writing materials for my private use, late apples in a glossy ceramic bowl.

A dapper slave escorted me to the bath suite, another scraped me down, then back to find a pudgy boy struggling to unload a tray of silverware covering cold game and glazed ham. I packed in the victuals while I could. The boy waited to serve me; he seemed impressed. I winked at him then looked away in case he got the wrong idea.

As a compliment to my host I combed my hair. Then I rooted out my best tunic, a limp off-white article which according to my clothes dealer had only been worn by one other person before me. (My mother says always ask what they died of, but so long as there are no visible bloodstains, I don't. What dealer is going to confess that your predecessor had a flaky skin disease?)

Opening my baggage roll, I sucked thoughtfully at the remnants of ham that had trapped themselves between my teeth. It had been skilfully done, but during our talk in the study my props had been searched.

I found Hilaris reclining, minus his belt, in a warm family room. He was reading for pleasure, so had emerged from the study to sit with his wife. I identified her as the slender, rather ordinary woman in a crimson dress, slightly uneasy within her elegant attire. A baby slept on her own arm, while a little girl of two or three was sprawling over the knees of a younger woman in much darker clothing, who was by an oversight not immediately introduced.

Flavius Hilaris sprang up eagerly.

"Didius Falco - Aelia Camilla, my wife." The one in crimson.

I had no great hopes. He was a dedicated long-term diplomat: he would have married a good, plain woman who could serve sweetmeats to a governor from the proper shape of dish, or be polite to a tribal king for three hours at a time, then remove the royal paw from her knee without giving offence.

I was right. Aelia Camilla, the senator's sister, was a good, plain woman. She could do all that. But she had vividly eloquent eyes. It would be a brave king or governor who took liberties with her.

Though her husband did. As soon as he had jumped up to bring me in, he abandoned his own couch and relaxed beside her instead, dropping a hand onto her thigh as if it were quite natural for a man to fondle his wife. Neither looked embarrassed. It would never happen in Rome. I felt amazed.

Decimus Camillus had spoken of his sister with affection. She was younger than him, an afterthought in their family, still somewhere short of forty, a shy, private woman excelling in her public role. She smiled at me, a special smile, which she used so well it seemed real.

"So you are Sosia Camillina's friend!"

"Not a very good one," I confessed. Then I drowned my sorrows in those sympathetic eyes.

Good, plain women meant nothing to me, yet I took to Sosia's aunt at once. This was the sweet-natured lady a boy dreams of when he decides he has been lost at birth by his real mother and is being brought up by scolding strangers in a foreign land... Oh I was fantasizing merrily. But I was whirling through a personal nightmare and had just racked up fourteen hundred miles.

Friend Gaius motioned me to a couch, but they had a brazier for extra cheer so I perched on a small stool near that, holding out my hands to the charcoal glow. In a different situation I would have stayed silent about my discovery upstairs, but I prefer to hit clients with frankness, then hear them squeal.

"I gather somebody picked over my belongings. Can't have been pleasant. Thousand miles of unwashed under tunics -"

"It won't happen twice!" Hilaris said, smiling. "Just cautious," he added. It was not an apology. Nor was I disturbed. A professional risk, which we acknowledged to one another with polite nods on both sides.

A violent voice broke in so abruptly I jumped.

"You have a bracelet that belonged to my cousin!"

I half turned: the stiff young woman with the little girl. Eyes like burnt caramel in a bitter almond face. Golden hoop earrings, each hung with a fine carnelian bead. Suddenly I understood; this was my senator's daughter, this was Helena.

She was sitting in a half-round basket weave chair, the child happily squirming on and off her lap. (I knew she had no children of her own, so the little girl must belong here.) No one would call the young woman plain, but in appeal she raised no competition for her aunt. She had her father's domineering eyebrows, but her air of tight-lipped distaste reminded me of his brother Publius.

"You should return it, Falco!"

Females with loud voices and bad manners were never my type. Thanks, but I'll keep it."

"I gave it to her!"

"She gave it to me."

I could see why the senator was so attached to his kind-eyed sister, if this was the spiteful virago he had spawned himself.

As the tension flashed between us, Aelia Camilla interrupted, a note of reproof in her light voice. "It seems to me we shall all need to be adult in our loyalties! Didius Falco, you were fond of my poor niece?" She was the classic type of Roman matron; Aelia Camilla did not permit angry scenes.

After thirty years of deflecting my mother, questions about women slide by me.

"I'm so sorry!" Aelia Camilla reproached herself. That was unforgivable."

These open, intelligent people were shaking my confidence. I managed to reply, "Madam, anyone who knew your niece would have been fond of her."

She smiled sadly. We both realized my mundane compliment was not what she had meant.

Aelia Camilla glanced at her husband, who took over the conversation again.

"I received a formal brief, of course, on why you were coming to Britain, though I should like to hear your own account of your motives," he put to me with his acceptable bluntness. "Do you blame yourself?"

"I blame the man who killed her, sir," I stated. I saw his thinning eyebrows lift. "But until he is identified, I take responsibility."

The woman I had quarrelled with extracted herself from the child then swiftly left the room. She was tall. Watching her, I remembered bleakly how once I had liked women who were tall.

Since it pays to be hypocritical, I spoke up with gravelly respect. "Have I just had the honour of offending the noble daughter of my client?"

Aelia Camilla was looking anxious over the way the young girl had stormed out. Hilaris gave his finger to the baby, which clasped hold of it while still asleep, kicking out haphazardly with one foot. Evidently he took a wry view of tantrums. Rather than grin too broadly, he concentrated on reattaching his baby's tiny felt boot as he spoke. "Falco, my apologies! That is Helena Justina, my wife's niece. I ought to have introduced you I believe there is a suggestion you should escort our Helena home?"

I held his eye long enough to share the joke, then replied without commitment that I believed there was.