The Spook Who Spoke Again: A Flavia Albia Short Story (6 page)

‘Any extras?’ asked Faustus. He seemed to know what to ask. I wondered how you learn to be an aedile. Perhaps there was an instruction book.

‘As many as you can take. A young woman – well, she’s got five children and isn’t as young as she looks – plays the water organ. That usually follows on its own, because getting the organ on stage is a palaver. If Thalia’s still got her donkey who does tricks, we’ll write him in for extra light relief.’

‘The crowd generally likes “business”?’

‘Absolutely – if Ned’s dead, the lads can mess about with a rope. We once tried to use Jason as the rope – you know, he starts stiff, the rope wrestlers don’t notice what they’ve picked up, suddenly they get a big surprise that it’s a live snake, so they run off screaming while the audience hysterically wets itself – sadly, the scaly bugger was too unpredictable on stage.’

‘Hmm,’ commented Faustus, who now knew from me that Jason was a murderer of ferrets. ‘Is this python dangerous? I have a remit to deal with marauding wild animals.’

‘Oh Thalia has him under control. She loves the thing. Owned him for years without incident.’ Davos continued talking about the acts, in ignorance that the question was asked for my investigation. ‘Originally old Falco wrote in a pair of stand-up clowns who commentated –’

‘Clever cook and boasting soldier?’ asked Faustus, raising an eyebrow. He looked tired.

‘Got it in two! You may be glad to hear we have Congrio, who is all the rage. Very big star. I’m lucky to employ him. You must have heard of Congrio.’

‘A barber, a fisherman and an intellectual went into a bar …?’ suggested Faustus.

Davos winced. ‘Hilarious, trust me. It’s the way he tells them.’

‘Hmm,’ said Faustus again, making a short note on his tablet.

‘Would you like to hear him do his set about the man from Kyme?’

‘Too Greek. Make it a place that people in Rome may have heard of, Davos.’

Davos waved up the comedian who was a thin ugly person with bandy legs, very sure of himself. After a huddled discussion, Congrio announced grumpily, ‘Ditch Kyme then. For you, legate, it shall be the man from Ostia.’

‘Thanks,’ answered Faustus instantly. ‘I come from there.’

‘Shit!’ muttered Davos. ‘Quick! Think up another town, Congrio, for god’s sake! Any damned town, so long as it’s not famous for libel lawyers …’

‘Ostia is fine,’ Faustus soothed him. ‘I was having you on. I grew up at Fidenae.’

‘Too many comedians here!’ Davos commented, pretending to be hard done by. I could see that insulting a magistrate didn’t really bother him. This was like Falco, so if Davos was my real father, I would know what to expect.

Davos saw me looking at him again, so gave me another suspicious frown. Faustus saw that. ‘Davos, this is Marcus Didius Falco’s adopted son.’

Davos groaned. ‘Oh, you’re Thalia’s unexpected little bundle, are you!’

He didn’t seem pleased. I told him in a stiff voice, ‘I am Marcus Didius Alexander Postumus.’

‘Very nice!’ Davos didn’t sound as if he believed that. He wasn’t interested in me either, and went off to organise a rehearsal of
The Spook Who Spoke
for the aedile.

I took the chance to ask Faustus an important question. If Davos and Thalia were married, did that mean Davos was my father? Faustus replied, not necessarily. Then he assumed a kindly expression, adding that Flavia Albia was bound to say, he was almost certainly not. My sister Albia is famous for her wise experience of life.

‘You mean, Albia will ask, was any handsome wine-seller passing by, ten months before my birth?’

‘That would be like her.’

‘I don’t know. I wasn’t here.’

‘And that,’ said Faustus, ‘sounds like the punchline of a joke about the man from Kyme.’

I said I hoped then that the man from Ostia would be funnier. He laughed easily.

The actors performed a scene, which I found dull. It had a lot of talking and nothing happened. Afterwards Faustus took me down to Thalia and Davos on the race track. He gave orders that the full script of the play they intended to perform must be sent to him tomorrow at the aediles’ office so he could try to get to grips with it. Then they would not be allowed to vary a word after he approved it. He said he liked the acrobats, but he had to view several companies, so would only confirm whether Thalia’s were chosen for the Games once he had seen the others.

He gave some money to his slave Dromo, a sneery, spotty young man, who I could see was jealous of me being on such friendly terms with his master. Faustus told Dromo to run to the sweetmeat-seller and buy me a cake.

‘Can I have one?’ demanded Dromo; he was like the cheeky slave in Falco’s play.

‘All right. Just one; no more, Dromo.’

I think Faustus intended me to go along with Dromo on the cake errand but I stayed behind. I didn’t like the look of Dromo and I was hoping to hear what his master said to Thalia if it was about me. It was. The magistrate stood with one hand on my shoulder like an uncle. He suggested that Thalia should consider how I was a boy with potential, but if at some point in the future it ever became known I had worked with entertainers that would be a certain career impediment. She knew the legal situation.

Thalia gave him a nasty look but said quietly she would bear it in mind. Dromo came back and gave me a cake he had bought with the aedile’s money. He tried to pass me the smallest, but I pointed out that I had seen what he was doing so he had better swap them over.

After they left, Thalia changed her attitude. She told me in private that maybe Faustus was right. If I wanted to be a big rissole one day, I had best stop mucking out the menagerie animals. I asked what kind of rissole I could be. Thalia said, sounding less cross than before, that since Didius Falco was an equestrian and Helena Justina’s family were senators, the menu was mine to choose. As a Roman, I could be any kind of exotic rissole I wanted, with whatever fancy gravy I liked on it and a side dish of radishes. And I was not to worry because Falco knew what he owed me so he would pay for it. With fish pickle on the radishes.

From what I knew of Falco, that seemed a rash claim. He often said to his children that we shouldn’t raise our hopes because he intended to spend everything and only leave us his good wishes and a pair of old boots.

Thalia did not know about me taking visitors’ money for the menagerie. I decided not mention that, because I was halving the new increase in the ticket price with her, in case I needed any petty cash for my enquiries into Ferret’s disappearance.

I felt that my enquiries were bogged down. People in my family say this happens. You have to go home and rave about, groaning like an ogre, while everyone keeps out of your way. If you start throwing your boots at the walls too noisily, Helena comes in and settles you. She says, calm down, darling, you don’t frighten me but you are scaring your poor innocent children. Tell me what the matter is, please. Nothing is the bloody matter. I know, just tell me about it, sweetheart. You growl that the case is impossible, you wish you never took it on, why don’t you ever learn, you are going to sack the client and bugger it.

I see, says Helena.

Next day you get up, have a bright idea, and solve your case.

You can’t get bogged down on the first day, that’s too soon to lose heart. You have to do spadework first. Spadework or legwork. I couldn’t do legwork because I wasn’t allowed to walk off on my own, I was supposed to stay in the tented area or at the Circus track. So I did more spadework.

After the aedile left, the acrobats milled around. They were stretching, balancing and practising sleights of hand, juggling and manipulating. The kennelful of trained little dogs were running around pulling miniature chariots. Faustus had not witnessed this, which was a good thing because only half of the doggies did it, while the others broke out of their reins and scampered about, yapping naughtily.

I announced loudly that I would not tell my sister’s boyfriend, the aedile Faustus, that the company’s performing dogs were hopeless, so long as someone helped me find out what happened to my ferret yesterday. They all pulled faces, as if they were impressed.

You have to identify where everybody was when the crime happened. So I walked around asking each person whether they had been in Thalia’s tent yesterday morning, or if not, where? I made a list in my notebook, the one Faustus gave me (he had told me I could keep it unless he ran out of them). There were two columns, one column for people who admitted they had been in the tent and one for those who hadn’t, but when I finished asking, all the people were listed in the same column, saying they had not been there. This was no use. But at least I had now learned their names.

They all knew me too, so if anyone remembered anything helpful, they could come and find me easily.

I then made a third column for anyone I believed had lied to me. This was one: the tiny woman called Sassia. She had a face like a monkey and I could see all her bones. The reason I thought she was lying was that she was now wearing a green costume with fringes on it which I knew I had seen in the pile of clothes in the tent. It was a crucial clue.

On the other hand, it would be very dangerous for Sassia to go into that tent because if Jason thought she was a little monkey, he might make her his prey. But if she had badly wanted to fetch her costume, she might have shown him Ferret as a distraction from her.

I could not really remember when I saw the green costume. Was it before Ferret disappeared, or afterwards? Luckily it wasn’t my job to remember things, because I was not a witness. I was the enquiry agent. We don’t come under suspicion. We are in command.

If Sassia collected the costume this morning, she would be in the clear for the crime, which happened yesterday. I didn’t ask her that question. I was biding my time. I could make it a dramatic moment in my revelation of the suspect’s guilt.

You have to do that in public, gathering together all the interested parties so you can discount them or discredit them. Don’t forget that someone may own up who hasn’t really done it, because they are protecting someone else. There is generally someone with a long-lost lovechild they have not dared to name, or another person has been blackmailing someone to force them to keep quiet about a terrible thing that happened twenty years ago. This is life. Especially when it’s death. Especially murder, because nobody would kill another person just because they lost their temper, would they?

The acrobats were rather strange. When I was asking questions and working out who they all belonged with, Pollia was sitting across the lap of the one called Laurus; she looked extremely comfortable there so I asked if he was her husband. I knew it was wise to check. I carefully didn’t mention that I had seen her kissing Hesper yesterday. On no, said Pollia with a silly laugh, her husband was Pedo. I couldn’t understand it because Pedo at that moment was snuggling up to the other woman, Silvia. They were murmuring to one another and giggling the way people do when they are being all lovey. I didn’t know how to show all this on my chart of which people were linked to each other. These acrobats did not even try to make my job easy.

After I had made a whole lot of notes, I noticed the scene-shifters were bringing in the water organ that Davos had mentioned. I had only seen one from far away before, so I walked up to watch.

‘Oi, oi,’ said a young man called Theopompus as they were setting it up. ‘Here comes the supervisor! Watch your backs.’

I gave him a sickly smile, saying I hoped they knew how to do this without me helping.

A nicer one called Epagatus stood aside with me and discussed how they put the organ together. That left Theopompus with all the heavy lifting, which did not please him.

I knew something about this because in our library at home, I mean Falco’s house, we had a scroll with drawings of inventions. It included a hydraulus, which is the official name of a water organ. There is an octagonal base with the pipes on top, twenty four (I counted) in decreasing sizes. The big fat longest pipe was twice as tall as me, so it was a very imposing structure. The force of the water descending somehow makes air rise up from a chamber into the pipes which creates sound. A double keyboard is used to choose which pipe, and so which sound comes out. Epagatus tried to explain the works, but I could not follow. He was not a good explainer.

I wasn’t going to hear the hydraulus playing because Sophrona, the musician, had to look after all her brood instead that morning. Epagatus said that as well as five children she had a useless husband she couldn’t get rid of and also a lover, Ribes, the orchestra conductor, whom Epagatus called as dim as muck, and who was in fact the father of all her children. Theopompus called out scathingly, not too dim to have it away whenever he wanted, then let another idiot have the expense and trouble of his brats. Sophrona specialised in twerps. You wouldn’t think she was also capable of playing sublime music.

‘Does Sophrona’s useless husband know he’s being made a fool of?’ I asked.

‘Oh, no. He’s extremely short-sighted, is Khaleed. Nobody knows the number of times he’s glimpsed Ribes making a fast getaway from their tent with his tunic still halfway up his arse, and not realised it was him, let alone what he must have been up to!’

I was cross because that was another very complicated link to draw in my chart.

As the organ wasn’t playing, I wandered off to where a properties controller from the theatre company was sorting out equipment. Large baskets had been delivered, which he was emptying out and exploring. He had a fake baby wrapped in a moth-eaten shawl, enormous rattly cooking pots, a shaggy coil of rope, bags of wooden money and a very old home-made snake with spangly eyes. He waggled the snake wildly, hoping I would scream though I didn’t. Sand fell out of it.

They had some cracked leather armour for the boasting soldier to wear and a couple of wooden swords that any suitable character could use. I picked up one, struck a few attitudes and tried the edge. It didn’t feel sharp. ‘Would you be able to kill a person with this?’ I was thinking about my task of bringing retribution on whoever was to blame for my loss of Ferret. I really meant, would
I
be able to kill someone. Someone such as Thalia.