‘That’s nice. I’ll tell you what.’ He struggled to his feet, swaying. ‘Put the interrogation on hold for a minute, will you, while I take a leak round the back. The old bladder’s not what it was. I promise I won’t run.’
‘Sure. No problem,’ I said.
‘You’ll excuse me, then?’
I waited while he staggered out of the door and closed it behind him. Then I got up and went over to the bar.
‘Yes, sir,’ the barman said. ‘You want the other half?’
‘No. Just the answer to a quick question, pal, if you will. Four nights ago. Was Lucius in here at all, do you remember?’
He shot me a look. ‘The night of his brother’s murder?’
‘Yeah, that’s right.’
‘Sure. Same as he always is, from the time we open right up until closing time. He was where you’re sitting now, talking to Roscius.’
I stared at him. ‘Roscius? You mean Quintus Roscius?’
‘Yeah. Farms just outside town on the Castrimoenium road.’
Shit! ‘He a regular?’
‘He comes in now and again.’
‘Pally with Lucius?’
‘Not especially, but it was a quiet night, what with the weather being so bad. They were the only two in the place.’
‘Until closing time, you said. Sunset, would that be?’
‘About an hour after.’
‘That late?’
‘I wasn’t in any hurry. Lucius is a good customer, and I didn’t have the heart to throw him out. My brother has an olive farm, and he lets me have the oil cheap. It’s not the best stuff, third pressing standard if that, but it’s good enough for the punters I get from around here. And keeping open the extra hour sometimes is good for business. These days, you have to make use of every edge you can get.’
‘They leave together?’
‘Yeah. When I closed up.’
‘Thanks, pal.’ I went back to my seat. Bugger! There went straight-as-a-die Roscius’s alibi! When the bastard had told me he’d been at home the evening of the murder he’d been lying through his teeth!
Lucius came back in and sat down with a sigh. ‘That’s better,’ he said. He topped up his cup from my jug. ‘Now where were we? Oh, right. Your investigation. You’ve just started, you say.’
‘Yeah.’ No harm in putting out a few feelers and seeing if they produced any result. ‘I was round at Publius Novius’s earlier. The lawyer.’
‘I know who Novius is. Scumbag.’
‘He tells me that you were disinherited in your father’s will, ten or so years back. That so?’
Lucius scowled. ‘My father never made that will, Corvinus. Oh, sure, we’d had nothing to do with each other for twenty-odd years before that, but he wasn’t the bastard that Quintus was. He wouldn’t’ve done that to me, disinherited his own son.’
‘Hang on,’ I said carefully. ‘You’re saying the will was a fake?’
‘Of course it was. It must’ve been. I’m telling you, my father would never have cut me off without a penny. Quintus and that slimy lawyer pal of his cooked the will up between them. Did Novius tell you I challenged it?’
‘What?’
‘No, he wouldn’t, the canny bastard. Certainly I did. In open court. For all the good it did me.’ He emptied his cup again; at this rate I’d have to get the other half jug after all, but at least it didn’t seem to be having much effect. If anything, the old guy seemed to be sobering. Mind you, it was only halfway through the morning, and he was used to it. ‘Novius and Quintus and their like lead the senate by the nose. They are the senate. And the senate provide the aediles, and the aediles do the judging. Two solid citizens and a jury stacked with their pals against a drunk with a grudge? What do you think the verdict’d be?’
Yeah, well, that was true enough, whatever the ins and outs of the rest of it: you couldn’t buck the Old Boy network, whether it was in Bovillae or Rome, once they’d made their minds up about something. I took a sip of my own wine. ‘Still,’ I said, ‘your brother carried on paying your allowance.’
‘Novius told you about that as well, did he?’ Lucius said sardonically. ‘Talkative little shit, isn’t he? Oh, yes, I got that regularly enough every month, for what it was worth. Then, at least. But did he mention that Quintus had stopped it recently?’
‘No. No, he didn’t.’
‘Fact. A couple of months ago, it was, just after Vatinia died. You know who Vatinia was?’
‘Your brother’s wife. Sure.’
‘My brother’s, as you say, wife.’ He gave the half-grin, half-snarl and sank another mouthful of wine. ‘Yes. She was OK, Vatinia. A real lady, patient and tolerant as hell. She had to be, mind, the bugger didn’t deserve her. Well-off, too, in her own right. She’d money of her own, quite a bit of it, a lot more than he had, originally. When he married her, Quintus got by far the best of the deal, and not just financially. Anyway, the allowance came from her, or from the income from her own holdings. She was the one who insisted that he pay it. When she died, Quintus decided that wasn’t necessary any more, so when I went to see Novius as usual on the next kalends to pick up my month’s cash I got the straight finger. Still’ — after pouring me a token splash, he topped up his cup with the rest of the wine in the jug — ‘all’s well that ends well, isn’t it? Novius’ll just have to grit his teeth and cough up the whole boiling. I’m all right now.’
‘Yeah. You are.’ He was, at that — by his own estimate, about a million sesterces all right. I picked up the cup, drained it, and got to my feet. ‘Thanks for the chat. I’ll see you around.’
‘You leaving?’ he said. Surprised, evidently, but that was his business.
‘Yeah. No more questions. Interrogation done and dusted.’ There was the business of his hobnobbing with Roscius the night of the murder to go into, sure, but I wanted to think that one over before I faced him with it. Roscius, too, for that matter. Besides, I’d had about enough of Brother Lucius as I could stomach for one day. Personally, my sympathies were with the dead Caesius; brother or not, the guy was a useless git, and a prime sponger. The fact that he was obviously intelligent only made things worse. ‘Things to do, places to go.’
‘Yeah? Where would that be, then?’
I hadn’t really thought about it, but if I had I wouldn’t have told him. Out of there and away from Lucius bloody Caesius was enough for me, for the time being.
So where was I going? There was still a fair slice of the day left, but I’d no one else to see, not at present, anyway, barring the rival collector (Baebius, wasn’t it?) that the old guy in the antiques shop had said had gone home furious with Caesius for stealing a march on him over the purchase of a Greek figurine. I could easily go back to the shop and get his address, sure, but I reckoned that could wait; Baebius hadn’t exactly sounded the type likely to hang around the back of a brothel after sunset waiting to zero his co-auction-goer in a fit of pique. Mind you, it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility: some of these antiquities nuts were, well, nuts. Look at Priscus. No, Baebius would keep; I’d got enough to think about at present. Maybe I should just go back home, talk with Perilla and start putting things together.
Only there was one other place I could go to follow up an angle I knew about already. It probably wouldn’t take long, and since I was in Bovillae in any case with time on my hands I might as well do it now. When we’d been talking about the wool store fire in the wine shop the argumentative punter (what was his name? Battus, right?) had mentioned a night watchman who lived over by the meat market. Garganius. Sextus Garganius. I might as well look him up, see what I could get.
One good thing about a small town like Bovillae, as opposed to Rome, is that everywhere’s practically within spitting distance of the centre. The meat market was only a few hundred yards further along the Hinge from market square, in the direction of the Roman Gate. I cut back through the square and turned right.
This time of day, the market was crowded with the local wives and bought help shopping for the evening’s dinner. The guy running the third stall I asked at pointed me towards a side street closer to the gate, and an old biddy trudging along the pavement lugging a string-net bag full of assorted root vegetables and chitterlings narrowed the search to the last house along, next to an oil shop on the corner. I knocked on the door and it was opened by a youngish woman holding a baby on her hip.