"Risk is not your style," I agreed. "You're too fastidious. But you don't tolerate bungling either. You are vocal and you're active. You are a suspect for this murder precisely because you don't stand back."
"What does that mean?"
"You have strict standards, Magnus. That could make you lose your temper. Yesterday we had all endured a long, irritating day. Suppose you went to bathe, very late, to relax and forget the Mandumerus fiasco. Just when you were calming down, you came to the last hot caldarium. That fool Pomponius was there. You flared up. Pomponius ended up dead on the floor."
"I do not take my five-four-three string inside the baths, Falco."
"Somebody did," I answered him.
"I use a strigil, not a damn set of compasses."
"What's your tool for excavating eyeballs?"
Magnus breathed hard and did not reply.
"Did you see Cyprianus yesterday evening?" I demanded.
"No." Magnus looked at me sharply. "Does he say I did?"
I gave no answer. "There are some half-baked workmen at the baths this morning. Are you part of that?"
"No. I gave Togidubnus an estimate, way back. Anything after that is his affair."
"Is much work needed?"
"Needed- none at all," Magnus opined acidly. "Possible as much as a rich client, urged on by a shameless contractor, wants to waste his money on."
"So you say you are not connected with the wastrels on site today?"
"No."
"Let's get to the main point. Did you go to the bath house last night, Magnus?"
Magnus held back his answer. I waited stubbornly. He continued to maintain his silence, trying to force me to break in, to take back the initiative. He was desperate to know whether I had any firm information.
After an age, he decided what to say. "I did not go to the baths."
Overcome by the tension, the clerk, Gaius, let out a gasp. Magnus kept his eyes on me.
"You're lying, Magnus." My arm gave a wild sweep. I dashed the satchel of instruments right off the table. I then yelled out at full pitch, "Oh shit in Hades, Magnus! Just tell me the truth, will you?"
"Steady, Falco!" Gaius squeaked in great alarm. He spoke for the first time since we came in. His eyes flickered, blinking too rapidly.
I really let my temper rip. "He was at the baths!" I roared at the clerk. "I have a witness who says so, Gaius!" I would not look at Magnus. "If you want to know why I'm raving about it, I thought he was a man of superior quality. I thought I could trust him- I did not want the killer to be him!"
Magnus gave me a long hard stare. Then he simply stood up and said he was going back to work. I let him go. I could not arrest him but I did not apologise for implying he was the murderer.
XLII
As soon as the surveyor left, I dropped the charade. I sat quiet. Too quiet, anyone who knew me would have said. The clerk had worked with me, though not long enough or closely enough. Even so, apprehension pinned him to his stool.
"That tooth of yours still playing up, Falco?" he asked in a nervous voice. It could be a joke, real sympathy, or a frightened mixture of both.
Too busy to deal with it, I had forgotten my aching tooth until that moment. Informers don't collapse at mere agonising pain. We are always too busy, too desperate to finish the case.
"Where were you last night, Gaius?" It sounded like a neutral question.
"What?"
"Place yourself for me." He had attended my project meeting this morning. He had filed a witness statement but I had had no time yet to look at it.
T… went into Novio."
I scrutinised the bastard with a thin half smile.
"You went into Novio?" Repeating it, I sounded like a careworn lawyer dragging out his weakest rhetorical manoeuvre. I was hoping that the witness would cave in out of sheer anxiety. In life they never do.
"Novio, Falco."
"What was that for?"
"A night out. Just a night in town." I still gazed at him. "Stupenda was dancing," Gaius maintained. A nice touch. Detail always makes a falsehood sound more reliable.
"Any good?"
"She was brilliant."
I stood up. "Get on with your work."
Ts something wrong, Falco?"
"Nothing that I don't expect every day." I let him see my lip curl.
I had liked Gains. He had made a good show of harbouring the right attitude. But it had been an act. "In my job," I elaborated grimly, "I run into lies, fraud, conspiracy and filth. I expect it, Gaius. I encounter mad people who kill their mothers for asking them to wipe their feet on the doormat. I deal with lowlife muggers who steal half a denarius from blind army veterans in order to buy a drink from a thirteen-year old barmaid whom they subsequently rape…"
The clerk was now looking as puzzled as he was petrified.
"Get on with your work," I repeated. "Let me know when you decide to revise your story. In the meantime, don't distress yourself about my feelings. Your contribution to this enquiry, Gaius, is just a routine pile of mule shit though I can say that being betrayed by my own office backer-up hits a new low for me."
I left him, striding out as if I had to go and hold a bridge against a wild horde of barbarians.
He did not know that I had been in Novio myself last night, also hoping to see Stupenda. Which of course I had not done because last night in Noviomagus Regnensis, the woman called Stupenda did not dance.
XLIII
pounds A vf" aybe this clerk got his nights mixed up," Aelianus suggested. 1VJ-Whatever draught the medical orderly supplied had perked him up enough to take an interest.
I disagreed. "Be practical. You don't confuse yourself over yesterday, especially when being in the wrong place could make you the killer."
"Might he have been a bit fuddled? Does Gaius drink a lot?"
"Doubt it. I've seen him pour away half a cup of mulsu m just because a fly looked in the cup."
We were in my suite, the invalid sprawled on a padded couch. Aelianus had created a crude sketch of the new palace on which to mark witness positions in red ink, together with a box (headed by a lopsided graffiti wine cup where he listed those who claimed they went to town last night.
"They are all involved," I raved. "So tell me your results, Aulus. Can we prove anything?"
"Not yet. Some seedy character called Falco has failed to report in."
"Novio," I muttered. "Vouched for by your dear brother, plus a retainer of the King's. Come to that, you know perfectly well I refused dinner and trotted off on a pony… Is there any of your medicine left?" My tooth was on fire.
"No, Larius swigged it." Larius was now flaked out in a wicker chair that Helena normally used, white in the gills and semiconscious. "Exhausted by his wild life," Aelianus opined piously. "Or poisoned off."
My elder daughter Julia was using her little wheeled cart to play chariots around Larius, with him as a circus spina. The baby slept, for once, in her two-handled travelling basket. There were faint indications that Favonia's loincloth needed changing, but I was managing not to notice. Fathers learn to live with guilt.
"So what do we have, Aulus?"
"These tablets are a joke. Believe them, and the site was deserted
and nobody could have done it. It's amazing the corpse was ever discovered. Most of the project team claim they were in town."
"Gaius?"
"Yes, he says he was in town."
"With any of the others?"
"Not specific. He's put down Magnus as a witness."