Graveyard of the Hesperides Read online

  Human contact revived my confidence. I started knocking on the dismal doors, even though my first attempts brought no answer. Eventually I summoned a housewife who claimed no knowledge of the barmaid and I believed her, but she did suggest another woman, who pointed out where Rufia had once lived.

  “Did you know her?”

  “Not to speak to.”

  Further questions were clearly unwelcome.

  I crossed the alley, nearly turning my ankle in a rut. Thumping the door eventually brought a fragile, stooped man, who said I should speak to his wife. He closed the door on me. Just when I was about to give up and leave, it reopened; she emerged, looking fearful.

  “It’s all right, I’m not a door-to-door fishwife, so you don’t have to pretend you have no call for razor clams.” She looked baffled. I reined in my wit. “Forget it. I am so sorry to bother you. I am an investigator. I have been told that Rufia used to live here.”

  I could have pretended Rufia was a friend, but I was too young for the claim to look convincing and I knew too little about her. Everyone thinks informers are constantly adopting disguises, but you can tangle yourself up for no purpose that way, while you inhibit witnesses. So I use an honest approach.

  Unexpectedly, the woman unbent. I wondered if she had been waiting all these years for somebody, anybody, to show an interest. But perhaps not, because she asked, “Menendra sent you?”

  I was startled. “No. I’ve never met her.”

  “I don’t like that one.”

  “Any reason?” I demanded, recovering.

  “No. Better come in then.” She let me through the door. I saw a room to one side that must be where she lived with her husband; I could hear him wheezing inside. Narrow stairs led upward. “You can take a look, if you have to. But I’ll come in with you. It isn’t right. There’s all her things.”

  “Have you kept her possessions all this time?” I was amazed. “Was she your lodger?” I asked. As we went up the woman confirmed it, though she was too breathless to elaborate. “And you have never re-let the room? Really?” They were clearly as poor as most people in Rome. If the old fellow had ever worked, he was past it now. She looked younger, though none too sprightly.

  “I didn’t like to. I’m not in a hurry to have other people. We get by. And who knows?”

  Who knows what? I was struck by the oddity of this, but we had reached the top landing so I wanted to give all my concentration to where Rufia had lived. There were no more stairs beyond us even though I had seen from outside that the building had further stories. Anyone who lived higher up must have another entrance. I guessed that when Mucky Mule Mews had had more life, this part had once been a self-contained shop or a workshop, with living quarters above it.

  The peeling door was not locked. The landlady pushed it open, then sent me in first. She followed only as far as the threshold, watching closely, but she let me enter to look around unhindered.

  Sometimes such a room can feel as if its occupant, the dead person, has only just left that morning. Not here. There was no sense of her.

  “Have you touched anything since Rufia disappeared?”

  “No, it’s all just the same.”

  Despite the landlady’s claim that I would find “all her things,” there was not much.

  “Did anyone else ever come and take away possessions?”

  She shook her head. I gazed at her, not so much doubting her as puzzled. She was, as I now took in properly, a worn, faded soul who looked as if she had worked hard all her life, probably for other people. She had thin colorless hair, scraped untidily together, brown liver spots, bony hands, a scrawny neck poking out of the loose opening to a dingy tunic. While she stood watching me, she plucked at her long sleeves and reorganized her tunic neck, pulling it tighter as if she felt cold.

  I turned back to my survey of the room. It was small, of course. As a single working woman, I might have lived somewhere like this, had I not been fortunate to have a father with a tenement he wanted to fill. Otherwise I too would have spent my days in a dire cubicle that was part of someone else’s home, with no cooking facilities, a bucket for washing and sanitary purposes, a small high window I could not see out of though it had a pigeon looking in, one bed, one cupboard, a stool, a hook behind the door and a moth-eaten rag floor mat. Most of those, I guessed, came with the room.

  So what was Rufia’s? An inventory of personal possessions could be written in three lines. Of course a barmaid would earn little and own little. But if I assumed Rufia had gone to work in her clothes the day she died, she had left behind hardly any other personal items. No spare tunic (well, that might be correct on a barmaid’s wages), no accessories, no cloak for winter.

  At least she owned her food bowl, beaker, cheap bent cutlery. There was a pair of beaten-up backless slippers, kicked under the bed, one with a sole long gone. She had had small feet. With no other clothes to guide me, I could not picture the rest of her. On the rag rug, I noticed a hairpin. That was surprisingly nice. Probably some ordinary bone, though it masqueraded as ivory. I picked it up. Sniffed it, finding no relic of perfume, not that there could have been after all this time.

  “Tell me about her.” I was holding the hairpin on the palm of my hand. “Was Rufia a girl who used cosmetics?”

  “Don’t they all?”

  “Where are her paints and powders then?” For heavens’ sake, everyone owns at least a pot of cream. Rufia almost certainly had to wash the Hesperides’ bowls and beakers, because I could not imagine Nipius and Natalis doing that; so she would have had dry, cracked hands.

  “I told you, I’ve taken nothing!”

  “I was not accusing you.”

  “She kept her stuff at the bar where she worked, I suppose. That was where she would have wanted to look nice. Nice for the customers.”

  Hmm! “Did she ever have a boyfriend?”

  “I never knew of one.”

  “And she never wore jewelry?” People who do, however basic it is, generally have more than one piece so they can swap around.

  “Don’t look at me! She had a bangle that she always wore. I never took it.”

  Fine.

  “I was just thinking,” I said sadly after a while, “this is so little to show for a life.”

  The woman from downstairs settled; she liked me showing sympathy. “I took her pillow. That was all I ever came and took out. For the old one down below, when he has trouble sleeping. I could have returned it if she ever came back.”

  “She is never coming back.” I wondered whether to say we thought we had found Rufia’s body, but stalled at the woman’s next remark.

  “No. That’s what the other one said.”

  XXIV

  She had turned around and was making her way downstairs again. Although our discussion about Rufia ought to have been sad, she seemed to take it matter-of-factly. I cast a rapid glance back at the room before I started down but there was nothing there to detain me longer.

  “Who was it?” I demanded, once we reached the ground again. “This other one?”

  “That Menendra. I told you, I didn’t take to her.”

  “She came here, and recently?”

  “She came yesterday.”

  “Yesterday? What did she want?”

  “To see the room, like you. Only I just showed her from the doorway and wouldn’t let her go inside. I never liked her attitude.”

  “You knew her already? I have been told she was something to do with Rufia, I don’t know what that was—friends, or they worked together?”

  “They worked. That was all. I met her once with Rufia. That was enough for me, thank Juno.”

  The landlady had a tight mouth, disapproving of the other woman. Somehow I knew she regarded me more favorably. With luck, she would talk to me.

  “I have not met Menendra yet, though I shall have to.” I spoke openly, on equal terms. “I am not sure what to expect. Can you tell me what she’s like?”

  “Pushy. You won’t like
her. I can tell you’re not that kind.” That would be news to my friends and family, who all thought me an obstreperous fiend.

  “Is she foreign like some of the others?”

  “Something. Speaks with a funny accent. Don’t they all?”

  “Barmaids, you mean?”

  She let out a hard laugh, loaded with meaning. “And the rest!”

  “She is a prostitute?”

  Now my informant retracted. “Not for me to say!” Her voice told me, however, just how she regarded Menendra; whether she thought the same of Rufia was unclear, though I thought not.

  “So why did this Menendra come now? Why was she interested in Rufia’s room?”

  The worn landlady drew herself up, becoming a pillar of rectitude. “That I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to know her reasons. But what I can say is this, young lady. That Menendra came here in the morning. I gave her the runaround and saw her on her way, quick as I could. The same night, and yes I mean last night, someone else came and they tried to break in on us!”

  I was shocked. This was a harmless couple with nothing to steal. “That’s terrible. What did you do?”

  “Our son was here,” she replied, relishing this. “Bad luck for them! He calls in to see us most days. He had his three big dogs with him—they are sloppy things but they bark loud. So whoever it was, they stopped trying to get in the door and they scrammed.”

  “Did any of you see them properly?”

  “No, they hopped it too quick. Our lad ran down the alley after them, but it was no good. He’ll be back this evening,” she assured me, seeing I felt great concern for the besieged couple, especially the frail old man. “He’s going to bring materials to make the door safer. One of the dogs will stay here with us; the other two cry if they’re not in their own bed.”

  Rome was full of mosaics saying beware of the dog, with portraits of fierce curs in big spiked collars. Few houses actually had a guard dog, or if they owned one, he was gentler than his portrait. Of course we had the usual men who wanted to look tough, leading about horrible curs they could not properly handle—and also families with much-loved pets who wanted to greet strangers with ferocious licking.

  “That’s good. All good. I’m very glad you have someone to look out for you.” I let the woman see me thinking hard. “What’s your name?”

  “Annina.”

  “Look, Annina, if the people who tried to break in had something to do with Menendra’s visit, they must want to find something.”

  “That was what we thought.” These people were savvy. She and her husband and son had debated this. Their conclusions were the same as mine. The burglars and Menendra were connected, and they all wanted something. Something they thought Rufia had had, something they wanted to get to before me.

  “Did any of you go up and search?”

  “We know there’s nothing.”

  “May I take another look?”

  She nodded at once, almost as if she had been hoping I would ask. She let me go back by myself. This time I searched hard, scoured the room like a professional. I went through everywhere, hunting for hidey-holes. Not simply under the mattress and behind the cupboard, but seeking out loose boards, removable bricks, hollows in plaster above architraves. I found the secret places that Rufia may have used when she lived there. But they were all empty.

  XXV

  As I left Mucky Mule Mews I remembered to stay alert. When preoccupied by odd discoveries, it is all too easy to become so abstracted you fall prey to villains. Wise informers wait to start their brooding.

  Even so, I was wondering what people might think Rufia could have left behind.

  I walked carefully back to the Vicus Longus. The main thoroughfare, which had once seemed so insalubrious, suddenly felt familiar, populated and safe. I took a long breath and relaxed, as if I had narrowly escaped a scare. It was ridiculous. Nothing had happened, not to me. But I had enough experience to know what was possible in obscure places.

  I went along to where Tiberius and I had enjoyed breakfast. I sat down with refreshments, fruit juice and a complimentary almond biscuit. Of the two who ran the stall, the mother was alone today, so she joined me in the sunlight. We exchanged names. She was Lepida, a good Latin designation, so I asked whether she had lived around here long.

  “Born and bred.”

  “That seems fairly unusual. A lot of people I’ve spoken to are incomers.”

  “Too many slaves and foreigners,” Lepida grumbled. It was a classic complaint: unwanted low-class persons flooding in from overseas, taking all the work.

  I decided not to mention Britain. With brown hair and despite blue-gray eyes, I had no really alien features. No stuck-out Pictish ears, no eastern steppes high cheekbones, no unusual skin tone. No one could tell my origins, unless I told them. Any bright occupant of the Empire can soon pick up Roman gestures and habits, learn to speak conventionally, then blend in. If anything, what marked me out was having too well-bred an accent nowadays.

  I kicked out to scatter pigeons as they pecked too near. One of the automatic traits you soon learn eating out in the Mediterranean.

  Cradling my beaker, I sat deep in thought, letting my jadedness show. “How is it going?” asked Lepida sympathetically. I pulled a face. “You’re trying to find out what happened at that bar, aren’t you?” she asked. I agreed, deliberately leaving her to take the initiative. I remembered how yesterday, with her daughter present, she had held back.

  “Working as an informer,” I said, when she stalled, “isn’t always easy.”

  “What are you stuck over?”

  “Oh pretty well everything!” I sipped my drink, gazing vacantly across the street. “Who died? Who killed them? Why? Five men and a woman vanished from their daily lives, yet nobody seems to have missed them. I know a few people who admit being in the Hesperides that night, but they are all keeping mum. I’m sensing fear—which is understandable. And now an innocent couple, who merely happened to be Rufia’s landlords, have been attacked in their own home.”

  “That’s terrible!” breathed Lepida, wide-eyed.

  “It’s connected. Has to be. Digging up those sad old bones from the bar is starting to have repercussions.”

  We sat in silence for a while. I knew when not to apply pressure.

  The street lay bathed in August sunshine. At noon, this was an ordinary-looking thoroughfare. Sounds and scents of people having lunch at home in apartments all around us. Mothers nagging children to eat their bread nicely. Men whose work involved late shifts rousing from sleep, starting to make their presence felt in a world that had managed without them for the past few hours; wives resisting as they tried throwing their weight about. Dogs standing up and stretching their long backs. Dogs lying down again in diminishing patches of shade. Shops closing up for a lengthy siesta.

  “I never knew that Rufia.” Lepida was opening up. “I never spoke to her.”

  “You knew who she was, though?”

  “I had seen her. If you pointed her out, I could have told you her name. I was young then. But I never mingled with women of that sort.”

  “Barmaids?”

  She pursed her lips and didn’t answer. We drank our juice.

  *

  After a while she suddenly came out with, “Things are not the same around here.” She paused, reflectively. “It’s all got very rough.”

  Although I was surprised, I merely said some people would think the whole Subura had always been a rough area.

  “Oh, it wasn’t too bad,” answered Lepida, who had presumably never lived anywhere else. She seemed unaware her local district was historically notorious. “All the usual things went on, but it was … oh, I don’t know. In a bar like the Garden of the Hesperides, yes, if a man wanted to go upstairs, the landlord probably had a daughter or a cousin who would oblige for a copper. But it was casual, you know what I mean. More of a favor than a business. Now it’s all much more … professional.”

  I absorbed this. “Was Rufia
like somebody’s daughter or cousin?”

  “Yes, I think she was one of those types to start with.”

  “She changed?”

  “Oh I would think so!” Lepida exclaimed, though I could not see why she was so exercised. “Don’t you, Flavia Albia?”

  “You mean she worked here a long time and acquired some respect?” I remembered I had been told Rufia was not native-born. “Somebody told me she came from overseas; Illyria was mentioned.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “So why do you think she changed?”

  “Maybe she got used to running things.”

  “The bar?”

  “Anything that needed sorting.”

  I started to doubt that Lepida knew anything useful. This conversation was meant to steer my investigation in a friendly way, yet her attempt to help was pretty vague.

  “So is it your impression, Lepida, that what happened at the bar was connected to the rougher elements who have come in?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just saying what I think.”

  No, she was not saying much, and perhaps not even thinking. But that’s witnesses.

  XXVI

  Sometimes when you are looking for someone, they come looking for you. This is generally bad news.

  I had finished my juice and said friendly farewells to Lepida. Tiberius and I would be back for more breakfast another day. With no clear plan for taking things forward, I had wandered back toward the Garden of the Hesperides. I reached the bar, but hesitated, because there was no reason for me to go in. I could hear our workmen inside, talking in low voices, chipping with spades. From where I stood I could not actually see them, nor they me.

  “Here, you!”

  A hoarse female voice accosted me. I knew it was me she wanted. There was nobody else around. It was Menendra. As Lepida had said, like so many in Rome she had a heavy foreign accent. Earlier she had avoided me. Now, from her stance, feet apart and arms folded, she had sought me out deliberately. Her attitude was not friendly.