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  Albia skipped off. After a moment, the disconsolate Glaucus opened his palms and released the owl, which flew up to a roof furiously, feathers dishevelled. The boys scarpered. I slid unobtrusively towards an exit.

  Only then did I see Aulus outlined in a dark doorway. If he saw me, he gave no sign of it, but quietly vanished.

  LVII

  Next day Helena and I made attempts to find the Seven Sights group in the agora. I was starting to think they must be sailing around the nearby islands, buying overpriced sponges at Aegina or fake vases with Trojan heroes from desultory potters on Hydria. Maybe Phineus and Polystratus had already whisked them off to Rhodes and all cultural points east.

  That afternoon, once more we left the others and spent time together. This time we went a little way out of Athens, where the noisy crowds were bothering us. We hired a frisky two-wheel trap and saw the countryside. Eventually we came to Mount Hymettus, which despite clouds of dust from a marble quarry was famous for its honey. Inevitably it was girdled with honey-selling stalls. Helena did her duty and equipped us with many souvenirs: pots that looked like beehives and contained Hymettus honeycombs. Both our mothers would be delighted with these, or so we convinced ourselves in our desperation to find them presents.

  We had brought Nux. Usually Albia was happy to take care of her, but Albia had seemed sulky today. I thought I had better explain that to Helena. ‘We may be about to lose Albia.’

  ‘To Young Glaucus? I don’t think so,’ said Helena. ‘She says he will wear out his body with sport and die at twenty-seven.’

  ‘That’s rather precise! So is she yearning for somebody else?’

  ‘She is not ready.’ Helena was holding back. She shared her thoughts on most subjects with me, but could be secretive on matters of the heart.

  ‘Not ready to yearn in general, or not ready to jump on someone in particular?’

  ‘I am sure she has nobody in mind.’

  ‘You mean, she hasn’t finalised her scheme to get him yet?’

  ‘Falco, you are so devious!’

  Me?

  Not devious enough to fix up what I wanted, anyway. This afternoon idyll might have led to romance for Helena and me, but Nux put a stop to it. Ever tried even kissing your wife with a jealous dog watching? Don’t bother. This was one foreign trip from which we would not be returning home expecting our next child after a hilltop conception. If we were ever to be respectable parents of three and win our extra social privileges, we would need to make better arrangements.

  There were more hills whose scenery, since we had no option, we doggedly admired. On our way back to town, we reached Mount Lykabettus, a steep little crag which dominates the north-east of the city. We had seen it from the Parthenon; it must have excellent views right across to the sea.

  ‘The Lyceum.’ Helena’s sightseeing notes were becoming terse. ‘Aristotle.’

  Even she was growing jaded now; this time she stayed with the cart, while I took Nux for a constitutional. The dog walked to heel rather quietly as we went uphill, as if whatever happened on the Corinth acropolis with Cleonymus had permanently subdued her.

  It was another fine day, though I had sensibly brought my hat. Even so, I was glad when Nux and I turned a bend in the road and came upon a small thatched hut. A local was sitting cross-legged outside, perched on a small platform; it looked like a low seat that had lost its back. She too wore a hat, a high-pointed straw thing of quaint design, as if she had woven it inexpertly herself. Beside her stood a large water jar; passing travellers could stop here to buy a cold drink.

  My heart took a leap. Unexpectedly I had found a witness. I must have finally caught up with the crone Gaius and Cornelius had met selling Peirene spring water on the way to Acrocorinth.

  I approached quietly. Nux sat down and scratched herself. She always knew how to impose a casual tone on gatherings. A drink was poured for me in a decent sized beaker; I dropped coppers into the outstretched hand. Only then did the crone - as I assumed she would be - look up from under her eccentric hat to thank me. Now I had a second shock. No crone this; she was merely middle-aged and vague. It was Philomela.

  ‘We meet again!’

  ‘You do love cliches, Falco.’

  I drank my water, savouring it thoughtfully. Nux was licking at the spout on the big water jar, so I poured more for her. The dog decided that if a drink was permitted, she did not want it.

  ‘Silly girl, Nux! For some reason, I am now thinking longingly of my children; they are terrors too… Time to travel home, I think.’

  ‘Then there is something I should say,’ announced Philomela. ‘I want to entrust a message to you, Falco. I want you to explain something to somebody in Rome.’

  ‘Who? What? Something that happened where?’

  ‘Olympia.’

  Gaius and Cornelius had said their water-seller told them she had worked on the Hill of Cronus. Whatever Philomela was finally going to tell me, I knew it would be important.

  I squatted on my haunches and surveyed her. Philomela remained silent as if she wanted to extract maximum suspense. She only achieved aggravation. I tried to spur her on. ‘I hope this is about what befell either Valeria Ventidia or Marcella Caesia. I suppose your trade makes you likely to have seen Caesia?’

  ‘My trade!’ She laughed briefly. ‘I live humbly, as you see -‘ she gestured behind her, to the hut, which was tiny and no doubt extremely crude inside. I preferred not to know. I hate country cabins; they smell of smoke and chicken-shit. ‘I sell water to earn a pittance, simply to survive.’

  ‘No family to assist you?’

  ‘Relatives by marriage. They are unaware that I have returned to Greece. They believe I am travelling in another province. That suits me. I wanted to lose myself -‘

  I could not bring myself to indulge her romantic attitude. ‘People who ‘lose’ themselves are either failures or frauds with guilty secrets.’

  ‘You are a sad man.’

  ‘I am an informer. I was a merry gadfly once, but informing makes you brutal. Philomela, tell me the truth. Were you in Olympia when Marcella Caesia went up the Hill of Cronus and then disappeared?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Were you actually on the Hill of Cronus that day?’

  ‘Yes; I was there.’

  ‘You saw her go up? Was anybody with her?’

  ‘Two people went up the hill together.’

  ‘One was a man?’

  ‘No. One was Marcella Caesia; the other was a woman, Falco.’

  That gave me pause.

  ‘Do you know what happened to Caesia?’

  ‘I do.’

  At this dramatic moment we were interrupted. A familiar voice hailed me. Helena must have tethered the pony and followed me up the hill after all. Nux ran to greet her. ‘So you do have a wife!’ commented the so-called Philomela.

  ‘I said so.’ I made introductions. ‘Helena Justina, daughter of the noble Decimus Camillus Verus, gracious wife to me; Helena, this is a lady from Tusculum who now calls herself Philomela.’

  Helena regarded the wide-eyed wonder. I had warned her previously that I thought Philomela was not all there. ‘I believe I know who you are,’ Helena asserted cheerfully.

  Philomela lifted off the peculiar straw hat as if unveiling her true personality. Helena herself tidied her fine hair back behind her ears, pulling out a bone pin which she replaced with an unconscious gesture. They were like two friends settling down to mint tea at an all-women afternoon gathering.

  ‘Tell me, are you Marcella Naevia?’

  ‘Your wife is extraordinary, Falco!’ warbled Marcella Caesia’s aunt.

  Caesius Secundus had assured us this woman was travelling in Egypt. All the time, she was loitering in Greece, under an assumed name.

  I never supposed that the death of her niece at Olympia was what turned her into a moonstruck nymph. Marcella Naevia must always have had a tendency to be wide-eyed and wistful in the face of real life. It put a dark gloss on the
tragedy. Entrusting a young girl to her sole care on a long-distance journey had been very unwise. Not that we would ever say that to Caesius Secundus. He would have enough to bear, without blaming himself for trusting the unsatisfactory aunt.

  She was worse than unsatisfactory, as we were about to find out. I was glad that Helena had joined us. I needed a witness. Helena would back me up when I had to report the story. Now at last Caesius Secundus could stop wondering, although when he knew what had really happened to his daughter, it would increase his agitation. At least he could finally reconcile himself, bury those bones that I had seen in the lead coffin, apportion blame if he wanted to.

  ‘My niece and I wanted to experience peace and solitude.’ That fitted all I had seen in Marcella Naevia. And already I was viewing her apprehensively. I wondered if the girl had been another dreamer; maybe not.

  The aunt’s vague manner had hidden steel. I could imagine her being insidiously persuasive with her much younger companion, luring Caesia into her weird attitudes. Isolated with her aunt for weeks, a perfectly normal teenager might have lost her sense of reality.

  ‘We walked up the Hill of Cronus to communicate with the gods. While we were there, there was a dramatic lightning storm. We felt close to Zeus, the All-Thunderer.’

  ‘That’s hardly peaceful!’ I muttered. We had seen for ourselves how storms raged around Olympia.

  ‘We were in another dimension of the world. We had taken ourselves far away from other people,’ Marcella Naevia rhapsodised. ‘We had escaped…’ She paused.

  ‘Escaped from whom?’ snapped Helena. ‘Your niece was young, a lively character,’ she supplied. ‘Her father described her to us as curious about the world - but she was - how old? - eighteen, I think. Was she immature for her age? I mean socially?’

  Marcella Naevia nodded.

  ‘Let us suppose,’ Helena pressed on, ‘there was a man among the group you travelled with, a man who took advantage of women, a man who groped and harassed them. Marcella Caesia would have hated it.’

  ‘I see you understand!’ The aunt gushed with gratitude.

  ‘Well, I would feel the same as she did. I can imagine your role too. You tried to protect the girl. You and she kept to yourselves. Eventually you went up the Hill of Cronus to get away from him.’

  ‘Did he follow you?’ I interrupted.

  ‘He did not.’

  ‘So he did not kill her?’ So much for theories.

  ‘No!’ The aunt looked almost shocked that I’d suggested it.

  Slowly I spelled out the situation to this ridiculous woman. ‘Her father thinks that Marcella Caesia fell victim to a sexual predator. Caesius Secundus is tormented by that thought. If you know otherwise…’

  ‘It rained heavily.’ Marcella Naevia abruptly resumed her story. She took on the trance-like demeanour which I found so annoying. ‘I knew that sheltering was dangerous, but my niece would not heed my warnings. She hated being wet; she squealed and tried to take cover under a tree. The tree was struck by lightning. She was killed instantly.’

  ‘For heavens’ sake!’ I could not believe what I was hearing. ‘If you knew this, why not tell people?’

  Helena too was outraged. ‘You went back to the group; you said nothing that evening - but in the morning you raised a huge outcry. You held up the planned journey and made them all search - yet you never once said that you knew what had happened to Caesia? Then you let Caesius Secundus fret his heart out for a year before he himself came to Greece and found the body! Even then, he told us, you pretended to be devastated… One word from you could have saved all that. Whatever can you have been thinking about?’

  The woman’s voice was cold. ‘I decided that Zeus had taken her. That was why,’ stressed Caesia’s aunt, as if anybody rational would see this, ‘I left her there.’

  I was used to unnatural deaths, deaths that had to be hidden because of the cruel ways they were brought about. Simply abandoning a body after an accident shocked me much more. ‘You just left Marcella Caesia lying on the Hill of Cronus, under the burnt-out tree?’

  Marcella Naevia sounded dreamy again. ‘I laid her straight. I folded her hands gently upon her breast. I covered her with pine cones and needles. I kissed her and prayed over her. Then I let the gods, who so obviously loved her, keep her with them at that holy place.’

  LVIII

  There had been no crime. Since Camillus Aelianus was associated with a jurisprudence expert, we would check that point, but I felt sure of the outcome. Minas of Karystos would confirm that in law, Caesia’s death was natural. We could not prosecute Zeus.

  Of course, in life, what happened afterwards was reprehensible. In life, no one sane, no one humane would refuse a father proper knowledge of his child’s fate. Prevent him giving her a funeral and monument. Condemn him to years of obsession and unending mental torture.

  Even in Athens, the community which had founded democratic legal principles, there was a wide gap between law and life.

  Helena and I returned to the city, deeply disturbed yet helpless.

  We left Marcella Naevia to her hillside existence. If anybody wanted to pursue her for her actions, they would find her. She was going nowhere. Greece had claimed her. She would most likely live out her semi-reclusive existence without interference. Poor diet and lack of care would deny her a long life. Dreams and spiritual fantasies would sustain her for a few more years, until she wasted into a slow decline, perhaps tended by bemused locals.

  People would believe she had money (maybe she did have; she must have been wealthy once.) That would guarantee her some notice from the community.

  We could not even tell if she realised her niece’s corpse had now been removed from Olympia by her distraught father. Talking to the woman, it was hard to tell which of our words made contact and which she chose to blot out.

  I never thought her mad. She was rational, in her own way. She had made herself different, out of perversity. For me, if Marcella Naevia was culpable, she should be blamed for that deliberate withdrawal from normal society. Good Romans respect the community.

  She had indulged herself, at the expense of destroying Caesius Secundus. He could be told the truth when Helena and I returned to Rome, but he would never fully recover from his long search. Once, he might have learned to live with the accident of nature that killed his daughter, but too much distress had intervened. He had lost his balance permanently. For him, peace of mind was now irretrievable. Helena said, every family has a crazy aunt. But they do not all cause such anguish or inflict such damage.

  LIX

  Helena and I arrived back at our inn, appalled and subdued. We then dampened the atmosphere for our young companions, telling them what we had learned from Marcella Naevia, and what we thought of her behaviour. All of us retired early to bed.

  The evening was sultry and had made us short-tempered. It seemed appropriate that we were woken some hours later when the weather broke. Flashes of light through my eyelids disturbed me first, closely followed by brief cracks of thunder. As the storm came nearer, Helena also awoke. She and I lay in bed together, listening to the rain’s onset. The thunder passed over but steady rain continued. It matched our melancholy mood. I fell asleep again, lulled by the incessant wash of water on the shutters of our room.

  Later I woke a second time, suddenly aware of my mistake. Shocked by Marcella Naevia’s story, I had left a big question unasked. I should have pressed her for the name of the man who bothered women. I needed to make her identify him formally. Phineus, presumably. He may not have killed Caesia - yet the aunt blamed him, and her father would always regard Phineus as implicated. Even Phineus himself had fled back to Rome, as if nervous of the consequences of his bad behaviour. It made him now my prime suspect in the murder three years later of Valeria Ventidia. But to accuse him, I must have evidence that he was a menace and a danger to the women on his tours. I needed Marcella Naevia to make a statement naming him.

  I would have to go back again to Moun
t Lykabettus. I would have to speak to the crazy lady again. Now even more depressed, I sank towards miserable slumber.

  Helena grabbed my arm. She had heard something I had missed above the storm. Groaning, I forced myself back awake yet again. We listened. We became aware of voices in the inn courtyard, a storey below us. Men were shouting. One of the things they were shouting was my name.

  I had been called out at night for many things - all bad. The old panic gripped immediately. If we had been in Rome, I would have thought at once that this commotion was caused by the vigiles - my crony Petronius Longus, the enquiry chief of the Fourth Cohort, summoning me once again to some grim scene of blood and mayhem in which he thought I had an interest. Here, who knew how the streets were policed? And why would anyone seek me to attend on trouble?

  ‘Didius Falco - where are you?’

  I grabbed a blanket and stumbled out on to the balcony which ran around the inn’s dark courtyard. The night was pitch black and the rain currently pouring harder than ever. Only someone with an emergency would be out in this - or idiots. Angry shouts from other bedrooms told us most guests reckoned it was idiots calling out. I soon agreed.

  Dim torches struggled to stay alight, showing us our visitors. They were too drunk to care about the weather. Hair plastered their foreheads. Tunics clung to their backs and legs, running with rivulets of rain. One or two still had wreaths of flowers, now dripping water into their reddened eyes. Some leaned against one another for balance, others teetered, solo. I spotted Young Glaucus, recognisable by his size, his sobriety, and the fact that he alone was trying to impose sense on the procession. Helena came up behind me; she had dragged on a long tunic and held another round her shoulders.

  ‘What’s happened? Is it Aulus?’ Alarmed, she thought her brother must be in some desperate situation.

  ‘Oh it’s Aulus all right!’