“You’re the procurator’s man, right?”
Ruso nodded.
“You want to have a word with them clerks of yours, boss. I told ’em it was the one with the pot outside.”
Ruso glanced past him and saw that a fat olive oil amphora had been half-buried outside a doorway to house a straggly bush. “Tetricus?”
The man jerked his head toward the door. “Best get inside, boss, eh?”
Ruso followed him into a drab room with a table, a couple of stools, and a sagging curtain hiding what he assumed was a bed against the far wall. Most of this faded into darkness as the door crashed shut, a bar clunked into place, and the room was lit by only the faint yellow square of a window covered with oiled cloth.
“Can’t be too careful ’round here, boss,” explained the boatman, striking a flint and eventually managing to light a smelly candle. “So, I’m getting it after all, eh?”
“Getting what?”
“You’re the one who was looking for him, right? Offering money for information leading to the finding of? Well I come back specially to hand in the information, like a good citizen, and a fat lot of thanks I get for it. It weren’t my fault he went and died later on.”
Ruso frowned. “You’ve already talked to the office about this?”
“This afternoon,” explained the boatman. “Jupiter’s balls, didn’t they tell you anything? Useless buggers. You want to sack the lot of ’em. Specially that snotty one with the lisp.”
The unlucky Tetricus must have arrived at the office to claim his reward while Firmus had been out observing the postmortem. “So,” he said, “you came back specially from somewhere today to report a sighting of Julius Asper-”
“Yesterday, it was,” explained the man. “I seen him yesterday morning, but I didn’t hear you was looking till today. Then I come downriver as quick as I could and I went straight to the Forum to hand in information leading to the finding of, and that bunch of tight arses made out they didn’t know nothing about a reward. Then I go for a bite to eat and find out he’s gone and died and you lot have been down to the Blue Moon. You’re not giving them the money, are you?”
“No,” said Ruso. Avoiding the wavering light of the candle, he was trying to assess where the man might have hidden any stolen coins.
“None of that moving the body business had nothing to do with me, right? All I did was find him on the river and give him a tow down to the wharf.”
“Where did you find him?”
“In the marshes on the north bank, about seven or eight miles up past the double-span bridge. Saw him at first light. Looked like a loose boat was drifted into the reeds. I went in after it, and there he was. He weren’t looking too well. Kept telling me to go away. I thought to start with he was just sleeping it off, like, then he started saying he’d got to get to Londinium to meet a friend. But he didn’t have no oars. Just a couple of planks. So I said, you don’t want to go down there in that thing with the tide and the currents and just them planks. Daft bugger. You can’t get a proper hold on a plank, see? Not like you can with oars. I gave him a tow down to the bridge and he asked for a cheap place to stay. Somewhere nobody would bother him.”
“So you told him to try the Blue Moon,” said Ruso.
“Well, it’s cheap,” said the man defensively. “And nobody I know would stay there.”
“They charged him two denarii for the night.”
“Greedy bastard!” muttered the man, confirming Ruso’s view of the innkeeper. “I never did know what she saw in him.”
“Are you sure he was alone?” asked Ruso. “There was another man missing as well.”
“Him with half an ear? I’d have remembered.”
“Did he say anything else? Any suggestion of why he was in the boat, or where he’d come from, or who the friend was?”
“Like I said, he wasn’t looking too well. Said his head was hurting.”
“He had a fractured skull.”
“Really?” The whites of the boatman’s eyes showed up in the dim light. “He didn’t say. He didn’t have nothing with him, either.”
“What makes you say that?”
“ ’Cause you lot wouldn’t be bothering with him unless he had something worth taking.”
“Some money was stolen,” Ruso conceded.
“Not by me it weren’t. Wait a minute: There’s still a bit of light. I’ll open the door. Then you can have a good look at everything a man has to show for twenty-four years in the navy.”
“The money I’m looking for should have been delivered to the tax office,” said Ruso. “It’s marked. So if you know anything about it, you’d be wise to say so before we find it.”
“Not a thing, boss,” announced the man, scraping the bar up out of its socket. “Not a thing. Go on, take the candle and search if you don’t believe me.”
Ruso, who did believe him, stepped forward to grope under the bed. He stifled the urge to apologize for the intrusion. Real investigators, he was certain, neither apologized nor explained.
“You lot are all the same.” The man dragged the door open and Ruso caught sight of the tall apprentice ducking back out of sight outside.
“You want to know if I’m honest?” demanded the boatman. “I could’ve sold that boat, but I didn’t. I went and put word out that I found it. You know why? I don’t want some poor sod out of work just ’cause Headache Man helped himself to it.”
“You don’t think it was Asper’s boat?”
“Course it wasn’t. He’d have had the oars, wouldn’t he?”
Ruso held the candle up. Long shadows from the rafters shifted around sooty cobwebs dangling from the thatch. He walked back and forth across the floor, kicking the rushes aside. There was no sign of disturbance in the packed mud beneath. Then he crouched in the doorway and prodded the soil in and around the pot that held the straggly bush. “There’s nothing here,” he agreed.
The boatman cleared his throat. “Have I done enough for the reward, then?”
“Any idea where he might have got the boat?”
The man’s eyes narrowed. “I’m giving you a lot of help here, boss. I only picked him up to do him a favor. I never got paid for it and now it’s causing me all this bother.”
Ruso reached for his purse and the man shut the door again. The candlelit smile revealed a set of black teeth. They disappeared when he realized the large volume of coins he was being given only added up to three denarii.
“I was told forty.”
“Never believe rumors,” said Ruso, who had not mentioned a figure. The light glinted on the edges of two silver coins as he placed them on the table. “My employer would very much like to know where the boat came from.”
The man sucked in air through the black teeth. “You wouldn’t believe how many miles of river join up to here. There’s whole towns. That’s before you count all the farms with land fronting the water.”
Ruso placed his forefinger on one of the denarii and slid it back toward his purse. It was less than an inch from the edge of the table when Tetricus said, “I did hear a rumor.”
The coin came to a halt.
“It might be nothing. People are always losing boats. And it don’t make much sense. I wouldn’t waste your time with it, only I heard he come from Verulamium and so does the rumor.”
“Just tell me,” said Ruso, to whom little of this Asper business was making sense at the moment.
“Farmer by the name of Lund, lives a couple of miles downstream from the town. Going round telling people that a river monster stole his boat.”
“Could Asper have traveled by boat from there to where you found him?”
Tetricus shrugged. “I said it didn’t make sense. He’d have been a lot quicker by road.”
“But it could be done?”
The man frowned, considered it, and agreed that the craft was light enough for the trip to be possible. Ruso slid the money across the table toward him. Tetricus gathered it up and got to his feet. “That’s it, then, is it?”