‘Ah … Publilia Clementa?’ I said.
‘Yes. That’s right.’ The head never moved. I went round the front where we could see each other properly. Mistake. Me, if I’d been Picentina, I’d’ve used a trowel; not the most prepossessing of females, Publilia Clementa, with a face like one of her husband’s less successful productions and in need of all the artificial help it could get. ‘Who are you?’
‘Valerius Corvinus.’
‘Yes, I know your name, but who exactly are you?’
‘Uh …’
‘You’re very well-turned-out for a Watchman. Quite spruce. And are you entitled to that purple stripe?’
‘Yeah. Yeah, I am.’ Jupiter! ‘And I’m not part of the Watch, as it happens. I’m just doing a favour for the Palatine District Commander. He’s a friend of mine.’
‘Indeed. Well, keep it short. As you can see, I’m extremely busy. My husband and I are attending a very important official dinner this evening. A guild dinner. He is the current guild president.’
‘Actually, I wanted to talk to your maid if that’s convenient.’ The girl looked up, cosmetics pad poised. ‘It shouldn’t take long.’
‘About this silly stabbing business at the Pollio. Yes, my door-slave told me that too. Very well.’ Then, to the girclass="underline" ‘Get on with it, spit-spot. Tell the man what you saw.’
‘Ah … maybe we could go somewhere private?’ I said.
‘Certainly not! Your reason for calling may be as innocent as you say, but I will take no chances. You will conduct the interview in my presence, please.’
Gods! Still, if that was the way she wanted it, it was no skin off my nose. I turned to the girl.
‘You like to tell the story in your own way, Picentina?’ I said. ‘Just as it happened, OK? Right from the start. You were in the Pollio gardens, yes?’
The girl put the make-up stuff down on the ledge beside the pool.
‘’S right,’ she said. ‘The mistress sent me there while she was, like, chatting to her young man.’
‘We’ll leave the incidental details aside if you don’t mind, Picentina,’ Publilia snapped. ‘She means Quintus Rubrius, Corvinus. A charming boy, one of my husband’s clerks. Very cultured. He happens to have a great interest in art, as I do myself, and we met in the Porch quite by chance. Now just get on with it, girl!’
‘Yeah, so anyway,’ the maid went on. ‘I was coming down the path from the Porch, like, and I sees this man standing behind another man, a fat old gentleman, sitting on one of the benches, like, sort of slumped against one end. Very close, they were, practically touching, like. He looks up and sees me, the first man does, I mean, and then he like walks away quickly. That’s it, really, I didn’t pay no more attention to the fat old gentleman ’cos he was asleep, or at least I thought he was at the time, like. When I went back there next day to ask about the mistress’s missing earring and heard he’d like actually been murdered you could of knocked me down with a feather. And the thought that I’d, like, seen the monster what done it fair made my skin crawl.’
‘Can you describe him at all?’ I said. ‘The, uh, monster?’
‘Oh, he was ever so rough-looking. And I’ll never forget the look he gave me when he, like, saw me coming towards him.’ She shuddered, delicately. ‘He had, like, these sort of mad, staring eyes, proper sink-holes of depravity, they were, that like bored straight through you. You could tell at once he was a ruthless killer.’
Yeah. Right. Gods! ‘Age?’
‘Oh, oldish. Not nearly as old as the other man, like, but too old for me, I noticed that straight off. But he was like fit, you know? Well-built, like. Sort of rugged and solid. He’d a lot of, like, muscle under his tunic. And he kept himself in shape, you could tell that by how he moved. Sort of rippled, like. Lithe as a cat stalking what it might devour. It brought me out all over in goosebumps.’ She paused. ‘Lovely crinkly hair he had, though. Bit like yours, sir, matter of fact.’
‘Tall? Short?’
‘Like, sort of medium. Tallish rather than shortish. I prefer them tall, me. Especially the crinkly haired ones.’
She gave me a dazzling smile. I ignored it.
‘Clothes?’
‘Just the tunic, like. Nothing special, plain grey wool incarnadined with the blood from the, like, dastardly deed he’d just perpetrated.’
‘Anything else about him you can remember?’
‘No.’ She sighed. ‘That was it, really. It was all over in a minute, like.’
Yeah, well, I was lucky to have got what I had, if you, like, made allowances for the verbal tic and discounted the Alexandrian bodice-ripper bits. Still, a lady’s maid’s job couldn’t have much excitement in it, so if she’d been milking it for all it was worth I couldn’t blame her. And the description fitted Nigrinus, that was certainly true; the only false note was that ‘oldish’, but to someone like Picentina anyone older than, say, thirty would qualify for an over-the-hill tag. Particularly where her obvious area of interest lay.
‘There, now. If you have all the information you want, Valerius Corvinus,’ Clementa said frostily, ‘perhaps you’ll allow the girl to return to her proper duties and get back to yours. Good luck with your investigations. So nice to have met you.’
I let myself out.
FOURTEEN
First thing just before dawn two days later we took the carriage over to Ostia, together with Perilla’s maid Phryne, Bathyllus up front next to driver Lysias, and Meton perched on the roof clutching his set of kitchen knives and best omelette pan: there’d be caretaker staff at the villa, sure, but they wouldn’t run to either a ranking major-domo or a proper chef, and if we weren’t going to be dossing down on Agron and Cass’s living-room floor after all then I’d no intention whatsoever of slumming it. Perilla had got clear directions from her poetry pal before we left – fortunately, as it turned out, because the villa was one of several along the coast south of the town itself – and we arrived just a whisker shy of noon.
Caesia Fulvina had sent a skivvy through the previous day to say we’d be coming, so at least we were expected. While Bathyllus organized the local bought help to transfer the luggage from the coach and Meton went off to inspect the kitchen facilities, Perilla and I did the tour of the premises.
Fulvina and her husband – he was something big in Aqueducts and Sewers, I remembered – weren’t short of a silver piece or two, that was certain; they might only use the villa as a holiday home, but it was absolute top-of-the-range. Building space in Rome is at a premium, of course, even on the hills, and unless your last name is Caesar, or close to it, or your annual income’s well over the six-figure mark so you can afford a little property over on the Janiculan with its four dining rooms, covered riding exercise yard, and small private zoo, you can’t be too ambitious. Ostia’s different. Oh, yeah, sure, a seaside villa on the Bay of Naples’ll set you back an arm and a leg, but property prices along the Laurentian coast are still pretty reasonable, and for what you’d pay for a house on one of the better-class hills in Rome there you could buy – or build – a villa three times the size and still have some loose change left in your pouch.
Certainly the place’s owners hadn’t spared any expense, either where scale or decoration were concerned. The driveway up from the gate passed through carefully landscaped grounds planted with trees and bushes that screened the house itself from the coastal road and the shoreline beyond it. The rooms were twice as big as the ones we had at home, and there were more of them. Most of the ones downstairs had mosaic-inlaid floors – there was a lovely one in the atrium with its centrepiece Neptune’s chariot drawn by seahorses, surrounded by conch-blowing Tritons – and at least one wall with a full-scale fresco on it; while the bedrooms upstairs were big enough to swing several cats, were floored with cedar, and had windows looking out to sea or down onto the porticoed garden studded with statues to the rear. There was even, off to one side, a small cistern-fed bath suite.