A Pattern of Blood (8 page)

Marcus, however, had no time for such speculations. He looked at Maximilian stonily. ‘They were visiting your father. I asked them to remain. Just as I asked the gatekeeper to lock the gates. I presume you too would wish to prevent the murderer’s escape? Even if that left you embarrassed in the street?’

That was a threat, and Maximilian knew it. Failure to take satisfactory steps to find a benefactor’s killer is sufficient legal grounds for having a legacy overturned. He said sullenly, ‘I apologise, Excellence. I bow to your decision. My house is at your command. Obviously.’

Marcus ignored the hidden barb in the last remark, but I knew that he had noted it, and that it would not be forgotten. Sooner or later, Maximilian would pay for that, and for his earlier rudeness. Marcus took his position very seriously. For the moment, though, he contented himself with a tight smile. ‘In that case, perhaps we could make a start?’

‘Of course.’ Maximilian gave a brief nod to one of his attendants, who scurried away instantly. ‘And with your permission, I shall begin preparations for the lament.’ His voice was carefully polite, but his manner was still defiant. By proposing to begin the lamentation he made it deliberately difficult for Marcus to send for him for questioning: one cannot interrupt a mourner’s wailing without showing serious disrespect to the dead. I saw Marcus’s jaw tighten. I did not care for Maximilian, but I was tempted to utter a warning. This was a dangerous game.

It was Sollers who spoke. ‘Permit me a suggestion, Excellence. My friend has, of course, left instructions for his funeral. He revised them shortly after he was stabbed in the street. I witnessed them myself, and no doubt Mutuus knows where to find them. Ulpius wished, I know, to have a burial – in order that Julia might be interred with him – and had already purchased a stone coffin and a tombstone, and named the professional mourners and arrangers that he wished to have. Since there is all this to organise, could you graciously break with tradition and deal with some of the menials first, and let them return to work? The gatekeepers, perhaps, so that we can admit the anointing women and funeral arrangers when they come; and the personal slaves who were on duty in this part of the house at the time? While you are doing that, perhaps I could, with your permission, make a start with my own duties. If poor Ulpius is to be cleansed for burial, his wounds must be decently dressed and covered.’

Marcus looked at me, and I nodded. It was exactly what I should have chosen myself. Maximilian, however, shot Sollers a poisonous look. ‘I shall be needed for the ritual too. I am the heir here. It may be your job to tend his wounds, but it is my place to close his eyes and burn the herbs and light the candles around the body.’

‘Of course,’ Sollers said smoothly. ‘Perhaps you should be spoken to immediately after the servants – that will give you time to take a little sustenance before the lament begins.’ I realised as soon as he had spoken that this was exactly what he had always intended. ‘Perhaps the other citizens could also go to the triclinium?’ Sollers went on. ‘I have already spoken to the cooks, and they are preparing a light meal.’

It was neatly done: in one deft and deferential move Sollers had promoted himself over Maximilian as the organiser of the household. I glanced at Marcus, wondering how he would react – it should have been his place to decide on the order of interrogation – but he was nodding approvingly.

Sollers’s suggestions also overcame a difficult social dilemma for all of us. By custom a household does not offer formal meals while officially in mourning, except for the funeral banquet – presumably lest the spirit of the departed might feel neglected or peckish and return in spectral form to join the feast. On the other hand, there were important guests in the house who must be offered hospitality. By suggesting refreshment before the lament, Sollers solved the problem delicately.

Not everyone, however, was so pleased. ‘You spoke to the cooks? In my father’s house?’ Maximilian cried, heatedly. ‘I seem to have no position here at all.’

This outburst restored my patron to positive good humour. ‘Very well,’ he said, ignoring Maximilian. ‘Sollers, please see that it is arranged. Libertus and I will take refreshment in the study, and we will deal with people in the order you suggest.’

It was soon arranged. Marcus and I were shown into the room, which had been prepared for us with oil lamps and a brazier and even a water-clock to enable us to keep track of time. A couch and table had been provided for Marcus, and after we had partaken of a ‘snack’ (a tray of cold roast meats with fish pickle, and a selection of bread and cheeses which would have been a fine meal in my house), we were ready to begin.

Marcus and I had worked together before. What he liked was to have people brought before him one by one. He did most of the questioning, sitting in state on a chair, while I squatted on my stool beside him and threw in an additional query now and then.

It was a system which worked well in many ways. Marcus had authority and status. Even members of the curia could be exiled at a word from the governor’s agent, and he could open the doors of the gaol or bring the torturer running. People who would have dismissed me with a supercilious stare were inclined to grovel helpfully to Marcus.

However, terror can tie as many tongues as it loosens. I have often found that a little unguarded gossip is more help in an enquiry than hours of carefully constructed testimony – and no one is truly unguarded in the presence of an imperial agent. Besides, Marcus is inclined to lose patience with a line of questioning if he cannot see the immediate relevance of it, so I didn’t expect this joint questioning session to produce any immediate answers.

Even so, I was surprised by how little we learned.

Sollers was right to suggest starting with the gatekeepers. Their testimony was crucial because, from their little rooms beside the front and back gates they could see everyone who came in and out of the house.

The keeper of the main gate was whiter than goat’s cheese with terror, but his story was quite clear. Yes, there had been a small crowd of clientes calling at the house early this morning. Yes, he recognised most of them. Two of them were strangers, but they claimed to have been invited by Maximilian, and they were admitted. Then our party arrived, and then Maximilian in a litter, but by this time most of the visitors had left again. When the message came to close the gates there were, by the keeper’s calculation, apart from ourselves, only the two strangers within the walls, an ‘elderly councillor with a wig, and a red-faced narrow-striper who had left a fancy carriage waiting in the street’. Lupus and Flavius, evidently.

Marcus pressed him fiercely, but he was adamant. No one else had come to the house, and no one else had left it. The walls around the property were high, and no one could have scaled them without ladders and grapple irons. Whoever stabbed Quintus had not escaped that way.

The slave guarding the back gate had a similar story to tell. Various slaves had come and gone, sent into the town for oils and provisions, but there had been no strangers admitted. Visitors did not often come to that gate, which was reserved for animals and for access to the small farm at the rear of the property, where fresh food for the table was reared.

The slave who kept this gate was older, plumper and more confident. ‘We get an occasional tradesman or peddler, but there were none this morning, only a scruffy urchin asking for alms, and another wanting Maximilian. I sent them both packing. No one else. Though I am expecting a delivery of charcoal for the kitchens, and the funeral musicians and anointers will be at the front gates in a minute. And, of course, the slaves will be back with their various purchases. Are we to let them in?’

We gave them permission, and let them go.

‘Well,’ Marcus said, taking another sip of wine, ‘what does that tell us?’

‘Only what we knew before,’ I said. ‘Whoever stabbed Ulpius is still on the property. There is no question of some stranger with a grievance coming in on an off chance and murdering him, unless whoever it is is still hiding here somewhere.’

‘But you think that is improbable?’

‘With respect, Excellence, I think it is almost impossible,’ I said. ‘Any assassin would bring his weapon with him. He could not rely on finding one to hand. And how could he know that Ulpius would be unattended? Usually the man is surrounded by slaves and secretaries.’

Marcus thought about that for a moment, and then rewarded me with a smile. ‘Well done, Libertus. Now we are making progress. I had come to the same conclusion myself. The facts seem to argue that the murder was committed by somebody already inside the house.’

‘There is only one problem, Excellence,’ I told him gloomily.

He looked at me quizzically. ‘And that is?’

‘Exactly the same objections seem to apply to them.’

Sollers had rounded up for us all the slaves who were anywhere near Quintus’s reception room at the time of the murder. There were at least a dozen of them, and when I first glimpsed them, lined up outside the door of the study, my heart sank at how long the questioning was going to take. A closer inspection, however, made me simply goggle. If it were not for the ochre-tunicked figures of the secretary and the chief slave – who stood out from the others like two Vestal virgins at an orgy – I might have suspected that I had drunk too much watered wine and was seeing everything double. We brought the chief slave in to question him, and soon discovered why.

The poor man was half gibbering with fright lest the death of his master might be attributed to a slave’s negligence, which of course would ultimately be his personal responsibility. He was more impassioned than the forum orators in his desire to explain to us how no possible blame could attach to any servant under his control.

Ulpius, it seemed, not only possessed an enormous number of slaves, drawn from all over the Empire, but – whether to impress the populace or because he felt it befitted his position – generally deployed them in pairs, except for those with specialist functions like the secretary and the exquisite page I had seen earlier. Many of the ‘pairs’ were even matched as closely as possible for height and appearance – hence, presumably, the physical similarity of the two boys who had attended us on our arrival. This piece of conspicuous extravagance must have cost a fortune, and, apart from amusing Quintus, was evidently designed to dazzle visitors with an exhibition of wealth.

It had certainly dazzled Marcus: I shouldn’t be surprised to find matched pairs of serving lads at his own banquets in future. Quintus’s servants, though, were probably less enthusiastic about the arrangement. Slaves have little enough privacy in any household, but short of being manacled together, these poor creatures could scarcely have had less. The pairs ate together, worked together, washed together, waited together and even shared the same sleeping space in the slaves’ quarters. If I had been treated so when I was a slave, I should have found life ten times harder to bear, especially since a man could not even choose the companion who was linked to him with these invisible chains.

However, it did have one advantage now, from our point of view. The system meant that each half of a ‘pair’ had at least one witness to his movements for the entire day: indeed, I thought, with a little pang of sympathy, a witness to every minute of his life.

The chief slave confirmed this more strongly. There were so many slaves in the household, he explained, that each pair had specific duties, related to a particular person, function or ‘domain’, and most of the time were in full view of one or other of their fellow pairs. If they were not required, they were stationed in the slaves’ ante-room next to the kitchen, where he personally could keep an eye on them. Therefore, unless there was a conspiracy involving most of the household, we could eliminate any of the paired slaves at once.

Marcus was delighted when he saw the force of this. ‘Splendid,’ he said. ‘That will save a lot of time.’

It was a relief to me, too, though for different reasons. The chief slave was worried about his own safety, but strictly the law requires that if a master is killed by one of his slaves, the whole household should be put to death. The penalty is not often invoked these days, but in the case of someone as important as Quintus, Marcus might easily have felt that a firm example was needed.

Now, however, he was saying, ‘In that case, we hardly need to question them at all.’

That was no use, either. ‘You are quite right, Excellence,’ I said, before he could commit the indiscretion of letting them all go. ‘Under the circumstances, we need only question them a little. Naturally, you will wish to hear their stories, in case anything out of the ordinary occurred this morning, or one of them happened to see something significant.’

Marcus gave me a sharp look, but I met his eyes blandly, and in the end he smiled. ‘Naturally,’ he agreed. ‘We’ll have them in – in pairs.’

In fact, there was not a great deal to be learned. Whatever the slaves had been doing that morning – fetching and carrying, sweeping and cleaning, bringing chairs and serving food, filling lamps and trimming wicks, running errands, dancing attendance or simply waiting interminable hours for someone to call upon them – they had done it in full view of someone else. Until Quintus’s death, there had been nothing unusual about the day’s routines, apart from the additional tasks occasioned by our own arrival.

Even the pair who had actually been attending Quintus had very little information to offer. It was their duty, they said, to sit outside the door while Ulpius was receiving clientes and await a summons. They very rarely went into the room while business matters were discussed, unless their master called them in specially. From time to time they were called to take messages or plump up cushions, or to fetch wine, or ink and the delicate rolls of thin tree bark which he used for official documents instead of his usual wax tablet and stylus. Mostly, they just waited.

‘At which door?’ I wanted to know.

It varied, they said. Usually it was the rear door, into the central courtyard, but for the last day or two Quintus had seemed uneasy about something and had insisted that they wait in the ante-room, where they were closer at hand while he received his clientes.