‘Do you need me to find out where the. .?’ Minimus began, and trailed off, scarlet. ‘I’ll go and see about the horse at once. And I’ll ask that new soldier on duty on the gate about the dancers. He’s quite a friendly chap. He was the one taking those bodies to the paupers’ pit yesterday — I’ve talked to him before.’
‘That might have been a little different,’ I said. ‘You were escorting His Excellence and Lucius at the time.’ But it did not deter him, and I watched him hurry off and speak to the soldier at the gate. He must have been successful, because first a gesturing arm directed Minimus round behind the gatehouse to the stable yard, and then the guard looked up and signalled me to come forward.
I was making my way towards him — the throng was lighter now — when a sudden thought struck me, like a hammer blow.
If the plaid dress was at the villa, and the tunic on the stall, what was Morella wearing? A naked body was surely the most conspicuous kind. I closed my eyes. Of course. Why hadn’t the possibility occurred to me before? Two corpses found out on the Isca road, one of them a girl who had been ‘stripped and robbed’. And rebels who had only confessed to half of the crime, even under torture?
And this guard had been involved! I wondered what he knew. I hurried over to ask him about it, but he held up his hand as I approached.
‘Not so fast, citizen. No need to rush like that.’ He looked at me, his tanned face wrinkled in a knowing smile. ‘I hear you want to find those dancing girls? I hope you’ve got some money, then, that’s all I can say. Cost you a fortune to have just one of them.’
I smiled weakly. I was a little impatient of his teasing, but I dared not let him see — I did want the information, after all, and I needed his cooperation with the other matter too. Better to grin and bear it. ‘It isn’t for myself,’ I said. ‘It’s for. .’ I was going to say ‘His Excellence’ but the soldier winked.
‘For a friend?’ he said. ‘Of course, it always is. Well, I’ll tell you where they’re staying, but I don’t know if they’re there. Half a mile or so along the military Aqua Sulis road you’ll find an inn. Used to be a hiring stables at one time, but now it just operates as a lodging house. Bit more extensive than a lot of them — they’ve turned the old carthouse into extra rooms. That’s where the girls are staying, I believe.’ He chuckled. ‘I wish you luck. Always supposing you can get past the dragon in charge.’
I wished, not for the first time that day, that I was carrying a purse. A little tip would not have gone amiss. ‘Thank you, soldier. And there’s another thing. .’ I was all at once so nervous that I had to clear my throat. ‘Those rebels that you executed a day or two ago, for robbing travellers on the Isca road. .’
This was a different matter. The friendliness had vanished all at once. ‘What about it?’ he said suspiciously, and then a look of recognition spread across his face. ‘Of course! I knew I’d seen that red-haired slave of yours before. He spoke to me that day. Only — he wasn’t accompanying you. What are you doing with His Excellence’s slave?’
I nodded. ‘It’s a long story,’ I murmured. ‘But he’s now been lent to me. He told me that he’d seen you with the rebel corpses on the road. The thing is, I believe there was a girl they were accused of having killed?’
‘So I understand. They found her with lying with her father in a ditch — both stabbed and stripped and left there by the road. There’s been a lot of trouble in those parts in this last moon or two.’
‘You’re sure it was her father?’
‘Well — we could hardly ask! But he was too old to be her husband. Who else would it have been?’
‘And the rebels denied killing her?’
‘Well, of course they did — according to them they didn’t even know that she was there. But we had the evidence; there couldn’t be much doubt. One of the Silurians actually had the old man’s bloodstained clothes with him, bundled underneath him like a saddle on the horse. And the other had a leather pocket purse — cut off at the drawstring but still full of silver coins. Seemed the ancient was a hermit and lived more or less alone — apart from this daughter whom no one’d seen before — so no doubt the rebels reasoned that he would not be missed. But as luck would have it he had been to town that day, and there were people to say that they’d seen him with the purse and wearing the very garments which the rebels had in their possession. You didn’t have to be a rune-reader to see what had occurred. Anyway, the torturers obtained a confession in the end.’
‘For both the murders? Or only for the man’s?’
He shrugged. He was becoming the impatient one now. ‘I don’t know, citizen. Does it matter? The rebels would have been executed just the same however many people they had killed and robbed!’
‘The girl’s fate may be of some interest to His Excellence,’ I said, choosing my explanation with some care. ‘I believe that her garments were discovered at his house. If it’s the young woman I think it is, that is. Can you describe the girl?’
He looked at me suspiciously. ‘I don’t know, citizen,’ he said again. ‘I didn’t see the victims. I was only detailed to take the rebels under guard, and take them off for burial when they were finished with.’
That was a blow, when I felt I’d been so close. ‘So you wouldn’t know, for instance, if she had greenish-yellow braids?’
He shook his head. ‘Couldn’t tell you, citizen.’ He paused, and frowned. ‘Though, come to think of it, the hair was hacked off anyway — chopped off a thumb’s-width from the scalp, I heard.’ He raised his armoured shoulders in an apologetic shrug. ‘Some of these rapists have strange propensities and do that kind of thing. A sort of humiliation for the victim, I suppose. Like leaving her wearing nothing but those awful clumsy boots.’
‘She still had her boots on?’ This was more than I had hoped. The clouds seemed to stand still for a moment in the sky.
He nodded. ‘So I understand. Not that they had any value, I suppose. They wouldn’t have fitted anybody else. No point in casting lots for them, or bringing them back to the market stalls to sell.’
‘So what would have happened to them?’
‘They would just have been thrown into the public pit with her, I suppose. You could have gone and had a look, if you’d thought of it earlier, but those corpses were put in there several days ago. By now there will be others thrown in on top of them — and very likely they’ll have been covered up with soil to stop the stink. I doubt you’d get authority to dig them up again.’
Poor Morella. By this time I was quite certain it was her. ‘Cruelly stabbed’ and left beside the road with an old man who had already been set upon and robbed so that she looked like another victim of the Silurians, then tossed into a ditch with all the paupers in the town. And rape? That was most likely guesswork — there was no way to tell unless there’d been clear violence, and he hadn’t mentioned that. Perhaps the soldiers had assumed it, because the body was naked and the head was shaved — and it was the sort of thing they might have done themselves. But I was sure that the missing hair was no sexual deviance, but a cold desire to disguise the identity of the victim. Those plaits were so distinctive, they might be recognised and, if my deductions were correct, the murderer had intended that the body by the roundhouse (if it were ever found) should be supposed to be Morella from the fragments of the cloth. So the corpse on the Isca road must not be recognised as hers.
Of course, there may have been a sexual interlude — from what I had heard of Morella earlier, it was more than possible. Possible, even, that she’d agreed to it. The poor girl might have willingly undressed herself, in fact, and made her killer’s job a little easier.
I turned back to the soldier. ‘You think it was a rape?’
He gave me that knowing look again, clearly suspecting me of an unhealthy interest. ‘I remember hearing that she was badly bruised — as if she had been beaten, or savagely attacked.’