A Body In The Bath House mdf-13 Read online

  'Worth the fire risk.' I grinned, as he blew on the charcoal burner, heating up wine in a small bronze folding saucepan. A man who tolerated life in a temporary camp by bringing his own battery of comforts. It reminded me, with a pang, of my efficient friend Lucius Petronius. Britain was where he and I served in the army. I was seriously missing Petro. 'I've been looking at your stock. I thought most of the planned decoration on the palace would be paint but Togidubnus seems to like his marble too. I'm staying in the old house; there's quite a range there. Surely it's not local?'

  'Some.' He sprinkled dry herbs in two beakers. 'You'll see a bluey coloured British stone. Slightly rough.' Ferreting among the clutter, he tossed me a piece of it. 'Comes from down the coast to westward. And what else has the old fella got? Oh, there's a red from the Mediterranean and some brown speckled stuff from Gaul, if I remember.'

  'You worked on the old house?'

  'I was just a lad!' he grinned.

  Like the other craftsmen, he had a vast array of samples scattered around him. Irregular pieces of multicoloured marble lay everywhere. A few had tablets pegged under them, with what must be firm orders for the new scheme. Leaning casually against the hut's doorframe, used as a doorstop, was a superb finished panel of inlaid veneers with a pentagon set in a circle. I picked up a delicate moulding with a seductive shine. It looked like a dado rail or a border between panels. 'Fillets!' exclaimed Milchato. 'I like a few carved fillets.'

  'This is exquisite. And I've rarely seen so many types of marble in one place.'

  Milchato demonstrated offhandedly. They came from places far apart: the blue stone, plus a similar grey, from Britain and then crystalline white from the central hills of distant Phrygia. He had a fine green and white veined type from the foothills of the Pyrennees, a yellow and white from Gaul, more than one variety from Greece…

  'Your import costs must be staggering!'

  Milchato shrugged. 'That's why there will be quite a lot of paintwork including mock-marbling.' He seemed relaxed about it. 'They've brought a lad over to do it; naturally it's not his field, he's really a landscape specialist-'

  'Typical!' I sympathised.

  'Oh… Blandus knows him. Jobs for the guild, you know. Some smart arse from Stabiae – it's no problem; I can train him in what marble really looks like. The young fellow's all right, quite bright really for a painter.' Milchato drained his beaker. He must have a throat that could swallow hot bitumen. 'My contract is big enough to keep me busy and believe me, Falco, I can buy what I want. Free hand. Authority to draw on resources from anywhere in the Empire. Can't ask for more than that.'

  But could he, though? Was he somehow topping up his salary? I would have to check how much stone was being imported and whether it was all still here.

  'I'll be frank,' I said. 'You know I am here to look for problems. There may be diddling with the marble.'

  Milchato gazed at me, wide-eyed. He was giving his most careful attention to this theory of mine. If he studied it any more seriously, I would think he was mocking me. 'Whoops! Do you think so?'

  'I wouldn't insult you by claiming it, otherwise,' I replied dryly.

  'That's terrible… surely a mistake.' He ran one hand over his beard, which rasped as if he had tough hairs and a dry skin.

  'Do you rule it out?' Only an idiot rules out fraud anywhere on a building site.

  'Oh I wouldn't say that, Falco.' Now he was being open and helpful. 'No, it's entirely possible… In fact, you may well be right.'

  This was easy. I always like that. 'Any ideas?'

  'The sawyers!' cried Milchato at once, almost eagerly. Yes, it was very easy. Loyalty to his labour force was not his strong feature. Still, I was the man from Rome; he would feel even less respect for me. 'Bound to be them. Some of them deliberately use too coarse a grain of sand when they're cutting. It wears away more than necessary off the slabs. We have to order more material. The client pays. The sawyers split the difference with the marble supplier.'

  'Are you sure of it?'

  'I have had my own suspicions for a while. This fiddle is famous. Oldest trick in the book.'

  'Milchato, that is extremely helpful.' I rose to leave. He came to the door with me. I slapped him around the shoulders. I'm glad I called on you. This will save me days of work, you know. Now I'm going to leave you with it for a while; I want you to look out for the trick, and see if you can put a stop to it. I could order the bastards to be sent home again, but we're really stuck out here. I can't lose them. Obtaining new labour for a specialism is too difficult.'

  'I'll jump on it, Falco,' he promised gravely.

  'Good man!' I said.

  It was time to leave. He had another visitor. An elderly man in a Roman tunic, wrapped in a dramatic long scarlet cape and with a travelling hat. He acted as if he was somebody but whoever it was, I was not introduced. Though Milchato and I parted on good terms, I was sure the marble master waited deliberately until I left the area. Only then did he greet his next visitor properly.

  It was decent of him to admit the fault. If all the supervisors with scheming workmen came through so well, I would soon be going home.

  On the other hand, when any witness in an enquiry owned up too readily, my habit was to look around to see what he was really hiding.

  Iggidunus brought his five barred gates late that afternoon. They started off large, then became smaller as he ran out of space on his tablet. I could see at once that if his count was vaguely accurate, my fears were correct.

  'Thanks. Just what I wanted.'

  'Aren't you going to tell me what it's for, Falco?' Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Gaius, head down over his work, looking apprehensive.

  'Auditing pottery,' I decreed smoothly. 'The storekeeper isn't happy. Seems we've had too many beaker breakages on site.'

  Iggidunus, thinking he would get the blame, scurried off hastily.

  Gains and I at once grabbed the tablet and started to set our official labour records against the numbers who were actually here on site according to the mulsum round. The discrepancy was not as bad as I had expected, but then they were still digging foundations and the current complement was low. When the walls of the new palace started rising, I knew Cyprianus was due to take on a very large tranche of general masons, plus stone-cutters to shape and face the ashlar blocks, scaffolders, barrow boys and mortar-mixers. That would be any day now. If we acquired non-existent workers in the same proportions, our numbers would at that point be out by nearly five hundred. In army terms, someone would be defrauding the Treasury of the daily cost of a whole cohort of men.

  The clerk was extremely excited. 'Are we going to report this, Falco?'

  'Not straight away.'

  'But -'

  'I want to sit on it.' He did not understand.

  Discovering that a fraud exists is only the first step. It has to be proved and the proof has to be absolutely watertight.

  XXVI

  I whistled to Nux and took her on a walk. She wanted to go home for her dinner, but I needed the exercise. As I plodded along, lost in thought, she looked up at me as if she thought her master had gone crazy. First I dragged her on a frightening ship, then an immense journey overland, and finally I brought her to this place where there were no pavements and the sun had died. Half the human legs she sniffed were clad in hairy woollen trousers. Nux was born a city dog, a sophisticated Roman layabout. Like me, she wanted to be kicked at by the bare-legged bullies of home.

  I took her to the painters' hut, hoping to ask the assistant about Blandus' progress. There was no sight of this lad everybody talked about. I did see more of what must be his work. In the blank space where someone had previously written 'lapis blue here', that note was now scrawled out and a different hand had added 'pomponius too mean: blue frit!' Perhaps that was the assistant. Some deep blue paint was mixed in a bucket, no doubt ready to obliterate the graffiti before the project manager saw it.

  Since I was last here, someone had tried out new
types of marbling. Blue and green paints were smeared together in an artistic technique he had not quite mastered, with pairs of symmetrical patches like the mirrored patterns of split-open marble blocks. Endless squares of better-executed dull pink and red veining had been added to the chaos. There was a landscape panel, a stunning turquoise seascape, with finely touched white villas on a shore that looked exactly like Surrentum or Herculaneum. No; it was Stabiae, of course – whence the smart arse had been fetched.

  Light seemed to dance off the waves. With a few competent brush strokes the artist had created a haunting miniature holiday scene. It made me long for the Mediterranean…

  The fresco assistant had loafed off somewhere. Given what Cyprianus said about painters, he might be after some woman. It had better not be one of my party.

  In the hut next door I did find the bereaved mosaicist, Philocles Junior.

  'I'm sorry about what happened to your father.'

  'They say you hit him!'

  'Not hard.' The son was obviously all fired up. 'Keep calm. He was going mad and had to be restrained.'

  The son took after his father, I could see. It seemed best not to hang about. I had too much to do; this was no time to start making myself a slow-burning, brooding enemy. If Philocles Junior wanted a feud in his late father's mould, he must look elsewhere.

  I led Nux past the parked wagons, hunting for Aelianus. He was lying in the statue cart not quite asleep today, but looking bored.

  Recognising him, Nux jumped on him happily.

  'Ugh! Get it off me.'

  'Not a dog-lover?'

  'I spend half my time hiding from the guard dogs from the secure compound.'

  'Fierce?'

  'Man-eaters. They bring the pack out once a day, looking for human flesh they can train them with.'

  'Ah, British dogs have a tremendous reputation, Aulus.'

  'They're gruesome. I was expecting them to howl all night – but their silence is worse, somehow. The handlers can hardly hold them. They snake around, virtually towing the men, searching for someone who's stupid enough to try running away. It's clear they'd kill anyone who did. I think the handlers bring the dogs out so would-be thieves see them and are too terrified to break in.'

  'So you're not going over the fence to pick up a new fountain bowl for your father's garden?'

  'Don't joke.'

  'All right. I don't want to have to tell your mother I found you with your throat torn out… Anything to report?'

  'No.'

  I'll be off, then. Stick with it.'

  'Can't I stop doing this, Falco?'

  'No.'

  Nux and I set off to our elegant royal quarters for dinner, leaving Aelianus out in the damp woods. As I started walking back, I wondered how his brother was, and when Justinus might manage to send me word of his activities. My assistants and I were too scattered.

  I needed a runner. At home I could have brought in one of my teenage nephews; here there was no one I could trust.

  Nux was rootling. This was better. She had learned that in Britain there were at least ways of getting her hair full of twigs and her snout earthy. Maybe the guard dogs had left fascinating messages as they passed this way. She spent long pauses with her nose in the leaf litter at the side of our track, then she tired of that and rushed crazily after me, dragging a large branch and barking hoarsely.

  'Nux, let's show the barbarians some forum manners, please – don't roll in that!' Too late. 'Bad dog.' Nux, who had never grasped the finer points of reprimands, wagged her tail frenetically.

  Why had I taken in a reckless street mongrel with a taste for dung as an unguent, when other Romans acquired sleek lapdogs with long pointed noses to appear in the stone plaques they commissioned? Father togate and serious with a scroll, mother matronly and bestoled, infants tidy, slaves respectful, moneybags flaunted and clean pet gazing up at them adoringly… I should have known better. I could at least have let myself be picked by a dog with short hair.

  Mine was happy now she stank. She had simple taste. We walked on. Gloomily, I pondered the possibility of taking Nux through the Great King's bath house. It could have raw consequences. Ever since the official insensitivity that led to Boudicca and the Great Rebellion, all Romans who came to Britain were required to conduct themselves with clean-hands diplomacy. No rape; no plundering inheritances; no racial abuse; and absolutely no cleaning muck off your dog in a tribal king's domestic plunge bath.

  I was trying to call her back to me, with a view to attaching a rope to her so she did not rush indoors before I had had a chance to sluice her down, when Nux found new excitement. A pile of roughhewn tree trunks had slipped. I could see that, because some were spilt across the track. Nux dashed up the remaining pile, scrabbling.

  'Get down from there, Stinky! If they roll again, I'll leave you crushed in the woodpile!'

  Nux obeyed me enough just to lie rigid with her muzzle in a crack between two tree trunks, whining. I put my boot up beside her and craned to peer at her discovery. For some reason, I thought it might be a dead body. You get like that. Something whimpered. I could now see cloth, which turned out to be a child's clothing. The child was still inside the dress, alive luckily. She was not herself trapped under the timber, but her skimpy gown had been caught so securely she could hardly move. She was scared mostly that she would be in trouble.

  I wedged a couple of stones under the bottom of the pile and then heaved up the top log just enough to free her. I lifted her down then caught her just before she ran away. Upset by her fright, though bravely not crying, she glared. We had rescued a tough eleven-year old girl called Alia who knew how to lie but who finally admitted she had been warned by her father several times not to play on the stacked logs. It emerged, after a fierce extraction process, that her father was Cyprianus, the clerk of works. I grabbed her hand and took her back to the site to find him.

  'This little loner is yours, I think? I don't want to snitch, but if it were one of mine, I'd like to be aware she had had a scare today.'

  Cyprianus made as if to swipe her. She nipped behind me. If he meant it, he had a terrible aim. She pretended to bawl her head off, but this was done purely on principle. He jerked his head at her; she stopped crying.

  I got the picture. Alia was bright, bored and mostly unsupervised; an only child, or the only one to have survived infancy. She roamed about, mainly content with her own company. Cyprianus, with his own busy concerns, had to ignore the fact she was at risk. There was no mention of a mother. That gave two possibilities. Either the woman had died or Cyprianus had joined up with a foreigner in some other exotic territory and now she stayed out of sight. I imagined her in their hut stirring stock pots having little in common with him or the places he brought her to and probably bemused by their solitary, highly intelligent, Romanised offspring.

  'Want something to do? You could come and help me,' I suggested.

  'Your dog smells.' My dog had saved her from a night in the open, maybe worse. 'What would I have to do?' she deigned to ask.

  'If I provide a donkey, can you ride?'

  'A donkey!' I was in the land of the horse.

  'A pony, then.'

  'Of course.' She was a bareback terror by the sound of it. Her father stood back and let me negotiate. 'Ride to where?'

  'Into Noviomagus sometimes to see a friend of mine. Can you write, Alia?'

  'Course I can.' Cyprianus, who had to be both literate and numerate, must have taught her. As she boasted, he was looking on with a mixture of pride and curiosity. They were close. Alia probably knew how much you had to pay per day for first-class plasterers and how long new root-tiles should be left to dry out at the clamps where they were made. One day she would run off with some layabout scaffolder, and Cyprianus would be heartbroken. He already knew it would happen, if I were any judge of him.

  'Are you a good girl?'

  'Never – she's terrible!' Cyprianus grinned, cuffing his roughneck fondly.

  'Come and see me
in my office tomorrow, then. I'm Falco.'

  'What if I don't like you?' Alia demanded.

  'Yes you do. It's love at first sight,' I said.

  'You think a lot of yourself, Falco.'

  She might have been brought up entirely in a series of foreign provinces, but little Alia had the pure essence of any scornful Roman sweetheart at the Circus Maximus.

  Back at the old house we ate outside again. I can't say it was warm, but the light was better than indoors. Tonight's food was lavish; apparently the King had visitors and the royal cooks had made a special effort.

  'Oysters! Ugh. I like to know where my oysters come from,' mouthed Camilla Hyspale.

  'Suit yourself. British oysters are hymned by poets, the best you'll ever taste. Give yours to me then.' I had my arm out to snaffle the rest when Hyspale decided she might try one after all. Thereafter she hogged the serving dish.

  'That painter was here looking for you again, Marcus Didius.'

  'Wonderful. If it's the assistant from Stabiae, I was at his hut looking for him. What's he like?'

  'Oh… I don't know.' I had not yet trained Camilla Hyspale to provide a witness statement. Instead, she blushed slightly. That was clear enough.

  'Watch him!' I grinned. 'They are notorious for lechery. One minute they are chatting to a woman harmlessly about earth colours and egg-white fixers, the next they have fixed her up in quite a different way. I don't want any lout in a paint-stained over tunic getting the better of you, Hyspale. If he offers to show you his stencil stumping brush, you say no!'

  While Hyspale was spluttering in confusion, some of us wondered hopefully if we could pair her off. Helena and I were diehard romantics… And leaving the nursemaid in Britain would be bliss.

  The royal party must have dined formally, but afterwards some of the usual group with Verovolcus among them brought their wine, beer and meal into the garden. We never saw the King in the evening; his age must have condemned him to an early-night routine. When we had finished eating, I went over to the Britons to broach with Verovolcus the subject of the King's bath-house upgrade.