THREE
OK. So where to next? The places I needed to go were the office on the Sacred Way to talk to Tullius’s partner, Poetelius, and Trigemina Gate Street itself, to check out the murder site; plus I had to pay a call on the Thirteenth District Watch Commander, who had his station on the slopes of the Aventine opposite the Circus. I couldn’t do all three today, not comfortably, anyway. I tossed a mental coin and it came down Poetelius.
I got to the Market Square end of the Sacred Way just after mid-afternoon, with a short stopover at a wineshop for a badly needed cup of wine and a plate of cheese and olives. The office was on the second floor of one of the old properties you tend to get a lot of on the Way, rubbing shoulders with the new stuff that went up under Augustus; a stiff climb up a rickety wooden spiral staircase that looked like it’d been home to the same families of woodworm and beetles since Sulla was in nappies. If Tullius and his partner ran an export business then we clearly weren’t talking market leaders here.
Office space was pretty cramped too. There were only four clerks, but they were sitting practically on top of each other at a couple of desks that virtually filled the available floor space, and the walls were completely lined with record cubbies.
‘Afternoon, pal,’ I said to the nearest clerk. ‘The boss around?’
He hesitated. ‘Which one did you want to see?’
Yeah, well, I’d’ve been surprised if Tullius was on offer, but I appreciated his tact. When I said Poetelius, he looked relieved.
‘Then there’s no problem, sir. Just go straight through.’
I gave him a nod and squeezed past.
Poetelius was sitting at a desk in what was basically a glorified broom closet. He put down the wax tablet he’d been reading and looked up.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’
A youngish guy, not much older than Annia; I’d’ve put him mid-thirties, max. No sign of a mourning mantle, but maybe it’d put the customers off. Certainly there wasn’t much else about him that might indicate he’d suddenly found himself bereft of a close friend and partner and was taking it badly, but I was beginning to recognize that that was par for the course where Gaius Tullius was concerned.
‘Valerius Corvinus,’ I said. ‘Your late partner’s widow, Annia, maybe told you I might be dropping in. Or it could’ve been his sister Tullia Gemella.’
‘Actually, it was both. The messages reached me yesterday evening.’ We shook. ‘Yes, Corvinus, I was expecting you. Pull up a stool.’
I did; there was one – just one – tucked out of the way below the desk. When I sat down I was so close to the door that I could lean back against it.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘What can I tell you? I should say that Gaius’s death came as a great shock, but on the professional rather than the personal level. Please don’t feel that you have to be delicate in any way.’
Straight in and up front, just like Quintus Annius, albeit a smidgeon more tactful. I blinked; truth be told, prime rat though the guy seemed to have been, I was beginning to feel more than a little sorry for Gaius Tullius. First his sister, then his wife and brother-in-law, now his business partner. It’d be nice, somewhere along the line, to come across someone who wasn’t as happy as not to see him dead.
‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘So. First off. He was killed in Trigemina Gate Street. Was there any reason he should be in that part of town?’
Poetelius hesitated. ‘You mean for business purposes?’ I nodded. ‘Yes, there was. Two of our suppliers have factories there. Lucilius Festus has a pottery and Titus Vecilius a glassworks. He could have been visiting either of them.’
‘“Could have”?’
‘He didn’t mention it to me beforehand, no, but there wouldn’t’ve been anything unusual about that. Except that it was officially a holiday, of course, the Festival of Mercury, so the office was closed. Gaius generally handled the personal-contact side of the business. He was much better at that than I am. I deal mostly with the legal and accountancy side of things, plus the correspondence with our overseas customers.’ He smiled. ‘To tell you the truth, that’s quite enough. I’m rarely out of the office from one month’s end to the next. Not that I mind; it’s what I’m good at. We work’ – he caught himself – ‘worked very well together.’
‘So the business is doing OK?’ I said.
‘Not too badly, considering.’
There’d been a small but noticeable hesitation there. Uh-huh: I knew an evasion when I heard one. ‘Look, pal,’ I said. ‘You told me not to be delicate, and I’m taking you at your word. I’m not a potential customer sussing you out. All I’m interested in is who knifed your partner, and I’m right at the start here. What information’s relevant and what isn’t, I don’t know yet, but if I don’t have all the facts originally I can’t make the distinction later. And that might mean I miss something that’d turn out to be vitally important. You understand me?’
He frowned. ‘Very well. I’m sorry, I’ll expand on that. Tullius controlled the purse-strings. Or rather, he controlled the money he got through Annia every month which acts at need as a float.’ He must’ve noticed me blink at the last word, because he went on patiently: ‘It can take months between the time we pay the supplier for a consignment and ship it and the time we get the money back plus our profit. Oh, yes, the customer pays a deposit, naturally, a large one, but there’s always an initial shortfall which has to be filled. And in the meantime we have other orders coming in which have to be treated in the same way. Then there’s the risk – the constant risk – of shipwreck. If a ship carrying a cargo of ours goes down then we bear the loss, and of course that can be very substantial. Which is why, like everyone else in the trade, we don’t normally put the whole of a large order into the one ship. All this means that having an export business is rather like walking a tightrope. Get the balance right, build up a clientele of enough regular customers to keep things moving along smoothly so you’re always in profit, and you can do extremely well. The business funds itself. But you need a safety net, in case things go wrong or there are unforeseen expenses. Which is what Gaius provided.’
‘So what’s your problem?’ I said. ‘The safety net or the tightrope?’
Poetelius didn’t smile. ‘Very good, Corvinus. The tightrope. I told you: Gaius effectively controlled the company’s finances. He also, by extension, had the final say where suppliers were concerned. I drew up the contracts and worked out the profit margins, certainly, but he did the actual hiring and firing. We’ve been having complaints from customers recently about the quality and general saleability of the goods we’re sending them. Some – quite a number, in fact – have taken their business elsewhere, which means the momentum’s gone, or going at least. To change the metaphor, we’ve been living on our fat.’
‘So what you’re saying is that Tullius was choosing the wrong suppliers.’
‘Yes. Or rather, from a list of possibles, not choosing the best available.’
‘And why would he do that, now?’
Poetelius’s eyes shifted. ‘Gaius wasn’t really a businessman, a proper one, I mean. His judgement was flawed, and he made mistakes. That can happen to anyone in the trade from time to time, of course, but in Gaius’s case it happened too regularly not to matter. And as I said the final decision regarding suppliers was his.’
‘Come on, pal! Give! There was more to it than that, right?’
A pause; a long one. ‘Yes. Yes, there was. But I’m afraid I can’t-’
‘Did it have anything to do with his women?’
Poetelius looked startled. ‘You know about them?’
‘Yeah. From both his sister and his wife, so you’re not breaking any confidences. If that’s what’s worrying you.’
‘Very well.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Just as an example. I mentioned we had a supplier – a pottery supplier – called Lucilius Festus.’
‘With a workshop in Trigemina Gate Street. Right.’