‘What does that mean?’
‘Most likely that he was stabbed through the heart. From the front, based on the direction of the cut, with a big knife or a sword.’
With a shock, she realised Levin was smiling. ‘Is that funny?’
‘Not for him, I guess. But we’re not going to open a case on him any time soon.’
She still didn’t get it. ‘Why not?’
‘Because he died something in the order of seventeen hundred years ago.’
Levin walked over to the wall, pulled off his gloves, and washed his hands. When he turned back, the smile had gone and there were no answers in his eyes.
‘Michael brought you a skeleton he’d found that was murdered over a thousand years ago?’ Abby repeated.
‘I got curious, so I ran some common isotope analysis on his molars and his femur. According to the chemical signatures, he grew up around here, but spent his later life somewhere around the eastern Mediterranean, near the sea. Varied diet, so probably rich.’
He pointed to greyish patches of bone on the skeleton’s legs and arms, not smooth but mottled, like coral. ‘That’s woven bone – it grows in response to wounds or bruising. This guy lived a violent life, but always recovered. Until someone stabbed him through the heart.’
Levin crossed to a steel filing cabinet and extracted a folder. From inside came a sheaf of papers and a small brown object in a plastic bag.
‘There was this, as well.’ He slid out the object and laid it under a magnifier on the workbench. ‘It’s a belt buckle. Take a look.’
Abby put her eye to the glass. All she could see was a mottled brown blur, like a bed of autumn leaves. She moved the magnifier up and down until the image became clear. Letters had emerged from the background, crusted and incomplete, but still legible.
‘LEG IIII FELIX.’
‘It’s the name of a Roman legion,’ Levin translated. ‘The “lucky fourth”.’ He caught her surprise. ‘I looked it up on the Internet. Apparently, they were based in Belgrade, so not so far from here. If you look underneath the writing, you’ll see the legionary crest.’
Abby squinted at it. Again, rust distorted the image, but she could make it out. A lean lion, proportioned like a greyhound, with a dreadlocked mane hanging over its shoulders.
‘The NATO guys aren’t the first occupying troops in this part of the world,’ Levin said. ‘I guess this one got unlucky.’
She remembered something he’d said. ‘Why did you say murdered? If he was a soldier, and stabbed with a sword, couldn’t he have been killed in battle?’
‘Sure, I guess. I thought it would be unusual for a guy in his sixties to be on a battlefield, and the wound’s so clean and deep he probably wasn’t wearing armour. It’s just a hypothesis.’
She looked up from the buckle and back at the skeleton on the table. Dead eye-sockets stared up at her. A scratch on the forehead made it look creased in thought, as if having been pulled from the darkness he was squinting to see her.
Who were you? she wondered.
Who are you? the skull seemed to reply.
‘Did Michael say where he found the skeleton?’
‘He said he’d been up north, near the Serbian border. Bandit country. I didn’t ask why he was playing Indiana Jones there. Must have needed protection, though, because he arrived in a US Army Landcruiser. An American soldier helped bring the body in.’
‘Did you get his name?’
‘He left his autograph. Michael made him sign the paperwork, said it was better if his name wasn’t on the docket.’ Levin shuffled through the documents in the folder. ‘Here – Specialist Anthony Sanchez, 957th LMT.’
‘Do you know where I can find him?’
‘As far as I know, all the Americans are down at Camp Bondsteel, by Ferizaj.’ He could see what she was thinking. ‘Have you got a yellow badge?’
Yellow badges were what admitted you to KFOR bases. They were supposed to be limited to NATO personnel, but Michael had had one, somehow. He used to drop in on the bases to buy duty-free cigarettes and alcohol at the PX’s. Is that appropriate for a customs officer? she’d asked. Michael had just laughed.
‘Did you tell the police about this? After Michael was killed?’
‘I showed them the body, just in case it had anything to do with Michael. When they found out how old it was, they didn’t want to know – told me to send it to the cold-case squad. I didn’t mention Specialist Sanchez. I didn’t think it would do him any good.’
The clinical smell in the enclosed basement was beginning to make Abby light-headed. She desperately needed air.
‘Thanks for everything, Dr Levin. I hope I haven’t got you in trouble.’
‘I’ll be fine. Just make sure you don’t end up back here on my table. The sort of questions the police were asking when they came here …’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You might not want to know the answers.’
‘I need to know.’
‘I know.’ Levin locked the file back in the cabinet. ‘You have the look in your eyes. I see it all the time.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The look of someone chasing ghosts.’
Two-handed, Levin pushed the drawer back into its steel mausoleum and slammed the door shut.
XX
Constantinople – April, 337
THE MESSAGE IS waiting for me when I return home. Come to dinner at the palace tonight. It isn’t clear if it’s an invitation or an order, but I’m not going to refuse. My slaves spend the afternoon digging out the toga from the store cupboard where it’s languished, and scrubbing it with chalk to obliterate the stains. It takes us an hour of folding, tucking and cursing to remember how to make it sit right. My steward murmurs that I look splendid, just like the old days. He sounds wistful.
The Hall of Nineteen Couches stands in the palace complex in the shadow of the Hippodrome. A larger-than-life statue of Constantine with his three sons commands the entrance, staring down the length of the hall. In the apse at the opposite end, Constantine and his half-sister Constantiana lounge on the top couch like some incestuous pair of Egyptian gods. From there, the other eighteen couches run down the sides of the hall like the two straight tracks of the hippodrome. This is where the race is decided: the closer you are to the imperial couple, the nearer you are to winning. Constantine never used to like giving dinner parties: he hated having to rank the world so baldly. The sentimentalist in him couldn’t bear to see his guests’ disappointment when they found themselves next to the door; the pragmatist knew the value of uncertainty. You move more carefully when you don’t know where you stand.
I take my allocated place – second from the end, left-hand side, sharing the couch with a gaunt chancery official, who wolfs down his food as if he hasn’t eaten in a week; a senator from Bithynia; and a grain merchant who can only speak in bushels. I listen to his prattle about a blight in Egypt and whether the Nile flood will fail this year, as I scan the other guests. Eusebius is there, near the head of the room, deep in conversation with Flavius Ursus. I wonder what a bishop and a soldier have in common to talk about.
‘The price is already up five denarii from last month.’ The merchant tears into a skewered dormouse. Fat veined with blood dribbles down his chin. ‘It’s curious, you see? Usually in the spring the price drops as the seas open and the grain ships start to arrive again.’ He chuckles, as if it’s a riddle worthy of Daedalus. ‘Augurs and conjurors read the future in dead entrails and the flight of birds. I can read it in the price of wheat.’
I humour him – it’s the least painful option. ‘What do you see?’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ He looks at me as if I’m a child. ‘Trouble.’