‘You could have told me this earlier,’ I said.
He smiled and opened his mouth but I cut him off – I’d wasted enough breath already.
‘Mr Punch,’ I said. ‘Where did he come from?’ I held up my hand. ‘And if you try to tell me he has roots in the sixteenth-century Italian commedia dell’arte you’ll be amazed at how long and painful the comeback will be.’
‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘It’s a sad story.’
‘I’m the police, Ty – they’re all sad stories.’
‘Imagine this geezer,’ said Tyburn. ‘Let’s call him Cata. He’s like the fifth living son of an Atrebates sub-chief, a bit weedy, raised to ride a chariot and handle a spear but you know, heart’s not in the family business. Only a teen when the Romans turn up and his old man goes, “Fuck me, underfloor heating? That’s the shit for me!” and they all go Roman faster than a Basildon girl in an Italian discotheque.
‘Now you’re thinking about the glories of Rome and all that painted stonework, but back at the start London’s essentially a bridge with a shanty town attached. Not that it stayed that way with all the silver denarii flooding in to pay the legions. There’s three legions, remember. That’s fifteen thousand men, plus the same again in auxiliaries. And these are professional soldiers, so they like to get paid. And they like to get fed too. Anyone with a couple of acres, a plough and some manpower is going to be coining it. Hence docks and warehouses and some tasty new dwellings. Still wattle and daub, but in the modern rectangular style where you get separate bedrooms and don’t have to shag in front of the rest of the family.’
‘And what were you doing when all this was going on?’ I asked.
‘I was pretty incoherent with rage at the time,’ said Tyburn, ‘but this isn’t about me, this is about our boy Cata, who’s sharing a Greek tutor with his brothers and learning reading, writing and rhetoric. Now, his brothers spend their lessons dreaming of their chariots and the thunder of the hooves. But Cata finds being Roman is the dog’s bollocks. He loves the poetry, loves the gear, loves the not-having-to-literally-fight to maintain your position. Rest of the family, they’ve got the house and the togas but it’s still all piss-ups, hunting and mistreating the servants.’
‘So our boy hightails it up the brand new road to Londinium back when, like I said, the place is still basically a muddy field with a bridge attached to one end. Rents some land cheap, builds a house and pops down the market to buy himself a foreign wife from Alexandria. Sets himself up as a middleman between the clueless Roman importers at the docks and the dangerous barbarian-infested hinterland that is Britannia. Foreign wife speaks Latin and Greek and drops four sons and two daughters into his lap.
‘Ten years later he’s holding literary salons with guests from Alexandria, Ephesus and the Capital itself.’
A band was tightening around my chest but I didn’t dare break the flow.
Tyburn gave me a fierce look. ‘He liked being a Roman and he was good at it,’ he said. ‘Loyal, but not too loyal, to his patron. Generous with his largesse, diligent in his religious observance. He was a true believer in law and order and all the benefits that brings a man born without a taste for violence.
‘And then one day it all came crashing down. Queen Boudicca lost her rag and led an army of seriously pissed-off Trinis and Iceni down through Camulodunum and ground the useless fucks of the Ninth into dog meat – literally, in some cases.
‘Londinium is next. But Suetonius, the governor, doesn’t fancy his chances so he buggers off with what troops he has and leaves the city to its fate.’
I’ve read my Tacitus – I knew what was coming next.
‘The gentry always buggers off when London’s in danger. Have you noticed that?’ he said. ‘One whiff of the plague, some social unrest, a bit of light bombing and the Establishment’s nowhere to be found.’
Like your dad, I thought. But darkness was seeping into the corners of my eyes so I told him to get on with it.
‘But our boy Cata still had faith. That the army would defend him and his family. That civilisation would save him.’ Tyburn spat on the ground. ‘He ended up there in the Temple of Jupiter with the rest of the schmucks when the Iceni rolled up and murdered the lot of them.
‘The story is that they killed his wife and his kids in front of him to force him to reveal where he’d buried his treasure. Slowly and painfully, and one by one, because they didn’t believe him when he said nothing was buried. Because he believed in truth, justice and the Roman way – so why would he need to bury anything? By the time they were working on his youngest they say he was laughing like a madman. And this started to freak them out, those big, brave Iceni child-killing warriors, so they slit his belly and left him to die.’
The pain in my chest had driven me to my knees, but it was the waves of panic that made it hard to concentrate.
‘You’ve met Oberon and the Old Soldiers like him,’ said Tyburn. ‘You know what can happen when a lot of people get slaughtered in the same place. All that life has to go somewhere.’
Sometimes, about one time in a hundred thousand, it goes into some poor sod dying slowly of something long and terminal . . . and he becomes something else. What, we haven’t worked out. But something stronger, tougher and very long-lived. Only I didn’t think that’s what Tyburn was talking about.
There are some people who believe that if you spill enough blood you can make yourself a god. They’re right, if you don’t mind dying yourself. I had a horrible feeling that I knew where this story was taking me.
‘So up he sprang. A thing full of hatred and mad laughter, capering through the ashes of the city. Because order did not save his children. Law did not save his wife. And, for all his faith in the gods, they did nothing.
‘But London is London, because of the bridge and the river and the north and the south. And so, almost before the ashes were cool, the Romans were back with their groma and their chromates – drawing their straight lines across the world. Cata set about them – waylaying them in the dark places, whispering in the ears of the drunk and foolish, rocking the boats and kicking over amphorae full of fish guts.
‘But they were a canny people, the Romans. The Greeks would have debated and written a play. His own people would have abandoned the city and made it a place of sacred fear. What do the Romans do?’
‘They made him a temple,’ I whispered.
‘They did more than that,’ said Tyburn. ‘They made him a god. They were clever that way, the Romans. They could do things you modern boys can’t even dream of. And they weren’t afraid to slit the occasional throat to do it.’
And suddenly it all made sense: the bloody awful screenplay, the bacchanalia, that terrible unfocused rage, and the reason I was able to pin him to the bridge. Or at least pin his memory to the memory of London Bridge.
And then I thought of the skulls that the archaeologists had pulled out of the Walbrook. The ones they thought might be victims of the Boudiccan sack of Londinium. And I thought of a seemingly young woman with the sort of light brown complexion and features you might inherit if your dad was an ancient Brit and your mum was Egyptian.
Older, Beverley had said.
I used the last of my willpower to pull myself upright and face Tyburn.
‘What happened to his youngest?’ I asked.
‘You what?’
‘You said they killed his wife and kids but they were just starting on the youngest when Cata went mad,’ I said. ‘So what happened to the youngest?’
Sir William grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me close so he could whisper in my ear.