A Capitol Death Read online

  Nestor was utterly heartbroken, according to Honest Romulus. On the other hand, Nestor was also an idiot. Nestor would always get anything wrong if he could. The alibi was my fault. I had asked where he was that night, which he took as a personal threat, so he had invented a lie purely to double-cross me.

  Paris had not finished. “He was wearing a cloak.” We were learning about our runabout: he could be obsessive too. “When I saw him at Nino’s, he had muffled himself up furtively. He had a cloak with a hood, fastened up to his chin. It was brown. It had ties on the front.”

  “No, that’s not right, son,” disagreed Romulus, flatly. “The guards always fix their cloaks one-shouldered, with a heavy brooch. You’ll never see any of them do anything else.”

  Paris, who obviously had seen it, shot me an appealing look. I nodded, reassuring him he had my trust, never mind a barmy barkeeper. I knew Paris was observant. It had been his first solo commission. He was watchful at the time and now he remembered everything about it.

  Ignoring Romulus and his set ideas, I said to Tiberius and Paris, “Increasingly it looks as if Nestor attacked Lemni. They grappled in the Auguraculum, and Lemni managed to wrench off the tie with the aglet. I found the metal piece, but Florentina had waddled along on her morning walk. She swallowed the lace before I got there. Nestor, being bigger and angrier, had bashed Lemni with his own mallet to subdue him, then disposed of the corpse. That’s assuming Lemni died of the head wound. It’s possible the fall from the Rock actually killed him.”

  Paris shuddered. He was observant, but not tough. Well, not yet. Working for me would stiffen him up. At present he looked as if he was thinking, What if Nestor had spotted me spying at Nino’s?

  I turned back to Honest Romulus. “I don’t suppose you know where Nestor is tonight?”

  “No, he is still barred,” the landlord told me. “He won’t show his face. He tried to come back after his brother died but he was so cut up and gloomy, he was deadly as a customer.” How could anyone tell? They were all dreary.

  “I hope you will be careful if he does show up,” Tiberius suggested, in a low voice.

  Romulus did not get it. “Why should I? I know old Nestor—he’s always a pain, but I can handle him. I’ve been doing this job for thirty years. Nobody scares me.”

  As if he sensed our views on that claim, Romulus suddenly felt the call to attend to other customers.

  * * *

  “I must get going myself.” Time had gone by: Tiberius needed to leave in a hurry to join the other dignitaries. If one of the aediles was missing at his ceremonial breakfast, the Emperor was bound to notice. He would be counting members of the Senate on his tight mental abacus, then checking the magistrates too. “Domitian may not know me personally—but if he sees an aedile is absent, he’s soon going to identify who it is. I dare not risk offending Our Master, or as a family we are finished.”

  I liked that “as a family.”

  He had been thinking about the situation. “This is not easy. Arresting a Praetorian may be impossible.”

  I agreed. “Nestor’s crime will have to be put to the Praetorian prefects. The fact Lemni was so close to the augurs ought to provide leverage, though. Once Larth knows Nestor killed Lemni, he will jump on it. The Praetorians always try to protect one of their own, but this goes beyond covering up.”

  “It sounds as if he was insubordinate in appointing himself to the Capitol. Things must have been slack, with the main Praetorian units away on the Danube. But Nestor has already been recalled to camp. Refusing to obey that order won’t have helped him.” Tiberius reached fast conclusions: “Here is what we can try. Once I’ve done my duty at the Temple of Isis, I shall be close to the First Cohort’s station-house. While the procession sets off, I can go to find Scorpus and report on this.”

  “Julius Karus would be even better,” I admitted, for once prepared to use his special influence. “He must carry weight at the Praetorian camp.”

  “It won’t be safe to go looking for Nestor,” Tiberius warned. He gazed at me gravely while I nodded like a good wife. “Let the authorities catch him. Promise me, Albia.”

  “You want me to go home.”

  “We have our arrangements,” he emphasised. “Your father’s litter is at the Saepta and will bring me.”

  “No change to our plan,” I assured him. “I am going home now to wait for you, Tiberius.”

  “Will you?”

  “Or what? Go tramping around in the dark, trying to apprehend a volatile, angry, armed soldier with élite training, who has already murdered someone?”

  “You’re daft enough!” Tiberius scoffed briefly. Then he gripped my hand. “Don’t just say what I want. I dread how many times I shall hear you are running alone into danger. ‘Nipping off to see a killer. Home for supper…’ I won’t even mention our wedding.” The lightning strike during our marriage procession had blotted out many memories, but he never seemed to forget that one. “Flavia Albia, daughter of Marcus Didius, wife to me, I love you. Think of that, will you? Please tell me I do not have to worry.”

  I kissed him; I made it lingering. “Manlius Faustus, you do not have to worry. I mean that.”

  I did too.

  Being honest, I can say I meant it at the time.

  LIX

  You guessed. Possibly he guessed too. I meant it when I said it—then a crisis intervened.

  I waved him off, thinking how fine he looked when togate and conducting formal business. He always said if you sought a high position, you could not shirk its responsibilities. Office involved more than seeing your name in the Daily Gazette. It was about more than enjoying your power, imposing eye-watering fines on feeble people. If a man was elected as an aedile, he must accept it came with crud.

  Once he left us, I sat and thought some more. Paris had another drink, while trying to persuade one of the young waiters to run out to another bar to borrow nuts or olives. The boy said he would, yet looked vague. He would not go. I stopped watching.

  I had talked to a large number of people in this inquiry, many more than usual. Mostly it was casual questions about whether those on the Capitol saw anything, rather than deep interrogation of any part they personally played. Just as the triumphal procession would be a series of tableaux, I had encountered a series of participants in the victims’ lives.

  Almost without me noticing, the focus had narrowed down. My area of interest shrank until what had happened on Tarpeia’s Rock concerned only two families linked by an unhappy marriage. Two pairs of brothers, one sister. Two dead, three left behind to grieve.

  Several very young children were affected, but I guessed the elder ones were at this moment excitedly putting on their jewelled Dacian tunics, unaware that their mother and two uncles had been touched by tragedy for ever. Their father was dead, but they had never seen much of him anyway. Their loving uncle was lost, but they were young enough to forget. To the toddler and the unborn baby, Gabinus and Lemni would only ever be names on the memorial plaque.

  Naevia seemed the kind of woman who would take them to the necropolis. Visiting the place where the face-pot was deposited would be a regular family trek. Naevia would make everyone leave flowers, feast with the dead, appease their souls, remember them.

  I reckoned Gemellus would often accompany them. He was Naevia’s twin. They had that special bond. That bond …

  Now I thought more about Gemellus. The landlord here had painted a picture of him after Lemni rescued Suza. Even though they had lived in the same building, Lemni went home first, with his rage cooling and with words of resignation. Gemellus stayed, brooding darkly. On the night, Gemellus sat longer, all on his own, moving the money around on the table … Then suddenly Gemellus jumped up and left quietly, without a word to anyone.

  I had been wrong. It was not Lemni who had pushed Gabinus. Larth and Lemni had spoken the truth when they said they were in their observation tent when that hated man died. What they were keeping from me was a different secret: Larth a
nd Lemni had both been sure that Gemellus killed him.

  I pictured it. They heard the cry. They ran outside. Perhaps they even saw Gemellus on the top of the cliffs, immediately after the event. Whether shoving Gabinus had been pre-planned or an accident, Gemellus was now in deep trouble. Valeria Dillia had told me she looked up after the body fell: There was a commotion. Some temple officials popped up on the top and had a look down, gabbling and pointing.

  That was Larth, Lemni and Gemellus. Their agitation was not simply because Gabinus was dead: Gemellus was still standing there in shock, guilty. The augur and his brother must have yelled at him to make himself scarce. He rushed home to hide. Back at the tenement, at some point, on somebody’s suggestion, Gemellus persuaded his lover and her son to provide him with an alibi for that morning.

  This meant one terrible thing: If it was really Nestor who killed Lemni, the guard had murdered the wrong brother. Nestor was utterly heartbroken … Nestor was also an idiot … Nestor would always get anything wrong, if that was possible.

  For me, this coloured the augur’s odd behaviour over Lemni. Larth had seen the horrid truth: his good friend’s murder was mistaken identity. Determined to protect and help the family, Larth could not tell me that. He could never find justice for Lemni. Larth must continue to conceal what he knew about Gemellus.

  With hindsight, I decided that Larth—Gellius Donatus, the old-fashioned elderly senator—had probably told his wife, Percennia. She backed him. Hades, if I could, I would do the same. They would know Gemellus had acted against Gabinus for his twin sister; he was no danger to anybody else.

  Paris was still maundering on about the lack of nuts. “I told him what he ought to do. He’s taken no notice! Come here, boy!”

  “Leave it, Paris. We have snacks at home. Around here they will only be rancid.”

  Abruptly, I dropped a hand on his arm. Tiberius would have known what I meant. Paris kept going, then gradually took my point and hushed. Two new customers had turned up.

  The young waiter said in passing, “Valeria Dillia. And her boyfriend.”

  I waved. They came over. Dillia took the seat that Tiberius had vacated. As a gesture to her evening out, she had rearranged the fluff on her dress and added a decrepit necklace, which she wore lopsided. Her companion took the seat Romulus had been using.

  The man whom people at the Centaur called Dillia’s boyfriend was definitely not Nestor. Calling him that was a joke—I think.

  He was in his sixties, so dapper he would have been out of place anywhere. He had a thin moustache that my mother would call the adulterer’s version, small feet in very polished shoes, his hair lashed down with wax, then ploughed with heavy comb tracks, and he was sucking a fragrant-breath pastille. This fellow was like a highly committed finance officer, who needed to get out more. However, that was not his role in life. Valeria Dillia introduced him as her long-term chum, the Tullianum jailer. The prospect of being strangled by him must feel like facing a tricky business audit.

  “Well, this is a night of surprises!” I tried to sound cheery. “I thought you never came round to the Forum Holitorum, Valeria Dillia?”

  “I never trust their overpriced veg—but I have a little drink at the Centaur. A nightcap with Genialis.”

  Yes, Genialis was the jailer’s name. The Empire’s strangulation king was no plug-ugly bruiser who smelt of body odour and menace; once you accepted that, his name seemed less satirical. His manners matched. He could make himself welcome anywhere, though some hosts might be wary.

  We conversed politely. In a bar this is expected. It turned out that, like everyone else with a job on the Capitol, Genialis had inherited his position. He was the latest in a line of friendly family jailers, proud of his calling, nonchalant about his special skill. His father had trained him by taking him to a funeral director who let him practise on corpses. Since they were already dead, he joked, it did not matter if he bungled the job a few times while learning. To him, as to Dillia, what he did was not at all sinister.

  He thanked me for putting him in possession of two trolley thieves he could use tomorrow as faux foreign chieftains. His gratitude was heartfelt. Knowing Rome, it came as no surprise that, with no Dacian or Chattian prisoners to hand, substitutes from among the criminal fraternity would be quite acceptable. It was the ritual that counted.

  Genialis was glad he had them in advance because he had been able to give instructions on death-cell deportment. “I want a good clean expiry. I’ll make it quick for them, but we have to have a lot of screaming. The crowds like that, and it attracts divine attention. After all, this is a sacrifice to the gods who have protected Rome.”

  I saw Paris blenching.

  “So,” I managed to venture as their wine came, “what has happened to your other young man, Dillia? Where’s Nestor?”

  “Off on his own tonight.” The old woman spoke frankly, even in front of Genialis. The jailer did not appear to view the Praetorian as a rival.

  Dillia seemed less eager than usual to give extra information, but she grumbled, “I don’t know what he’s playing at.”

  “I do!” scoffed Genialis. His cynical view reassured me. As they had known each other such a long time, I hoped he would protect Dillia.

  “You said,” I reminded her, “Nestor has been upset about a relative’s death. It was his brother.” She nodded, once more reluctant. “Has he told you who his brother was?”

  “That Gabinus,” Dillia admitted. Then she revived. “So what? It doesn’t change anything. Nestor stays near me because I was the person who saw his brother fall. Knowing me is his link to his brother’s last moments.”

  “He cosied up to you for a reason,” I warned. “He wants to know if you recognised who argued with his brother. Who pushed him.”

  “Well, I can’t help. My old eyes are not that good.”

  “Keep saying that!” Genialis urged her heavily. “Don’t be involved. That man is trouble.”

  “He has been very nice to me!” Dillia wailed plaintively. Her friend humphed. Clearly his affection was genuine. He was pressuring her over Nestor, with some chance of prevailing.

  Genialis turned to me. Even though he looked like a second-rate ledger clerk, this man was sharp. He glanced at Paris, checking whether to trust him. I nodded. So Genialis the strangler, with an air of relief to be sharing this, told me the bad news. “Nestor has been hanging around the tenements looking for Lemni’s brother, Gemellus. I think we know what that is about. He sees himself as a holy instrument of justice. The Praetorian is out of control. He’s armed and dangerous.”

  I shared my own concern. “Gemellus has not been at the Centaur tonight. So where is he? Does anyone know?”

  Facing up to the guard’s real motives freed Dillia’s tongue. “His lady love persuaded Gemellus to start being more friendly with her son. When the Triumph ends tomorrow, Jupiter Custos will be back to normal again. Callipus went up to clean his hut, after those horrible transport men. His mother convinced Gemellus to help him out. She said they can settle their differences over a dirty task together.”

  “Nestor has another target, too,” warned Genialis. “Take care, Flavia Albia—he blames you for hampering him while he was looking for his brother’s killer.”

  I groaned. “I can look after myself. But I shall have to do something about this. So Gemellus is up on the Capitol—and Nestor is tracking him? When did Gemellus go?”

  “Just now. We passed him on our way here.”

  My heart became heavy. If nothing was done, I foresaw another tragedy. Like me, Nestor had figured out his mistake over Lemni. No one needed an augur to see what Nestor had in mind.

  With the whole of Rome intent on Domitian’s Triumph, there was little hope of finding someone in authority to take an interest. So that was why I went myself. Nestor wanted to punish Gemellus fatally. I must try to stop him.

  I did my best. I told Paris to run after Tiberius, who should have reached where the magistrates were gathering. It wa
s hopeless, but if Paris did make contact, Tiberius might be able to send reinforcements. I had nobody else to call on. There was no time for elaborate explanations to troops who would not want to know. There was no one I really trusted.

  I did not even have my dog. When we left home, Barley had put her nose out of the door, but she found the smell of the night too dangerous and ran back to her kennel.

  Good dog! That was the right idea. On the eve of the Triumph, the very air was tingling with hazard. Nobody with any sense would now climb the Capitoline in darkness, all alone, following a vengeful killer.

  LX

  Rome was ready for Domitian now. Crowds must have been thronging the entire triumphal route. All the way down the Via Flaminia, around the huge monuments by the river, down along the mighty racetrack of Circus Maximus, then up the Forum on the Sacred Way. Even here by the Capitol, which the procession would not reach for a whole day, they had clustered. Camaraderie flowered everywhere. Well, except when young men without futures decided to stab one another. Or wives found their husbands having holiday recreation with the wrong people.

  Those who wanted to watch the procession had decided the only way to ensure a good view was to sleep on the streets. Many lay on pavements, wrapped up in blankets with flagons and picnic baskets, remembering old wars, then telling anyone mad enough to listen how much they adored the imperial family. Some had brought pictures of Vespasian and Titus, not caring how much Domitian—the younger son, the less than charismatic brother—would hate that. They started sing-songs. Occupants of apartments above threw down cabbage ends and worse. Glued to their spot on the edge of the pavement, the advance spectators would be outraged later when other people simply turned up and parked large families in front of them in the roadway.

  The nearest gate to me lay below the Temple of Faith, where soldiers’ honorary discharges were stored. It was the Pandana, the gate in the Capitol’s fortifying walls that had been locked against the murex dyers. The Porta Pandana is always closed at night …