‘Your attendant interrupts us, citizen!’ Lucius was outraged by this affront to his dignity. ‘If he were my servant I should have him flogged.’ Shutters had come down across his face, like a shop-front at the market closing up, and his previous thawing manner had frozen hard again.
‘Nevertheless, we must investigate all possibilities,’ I urged.
But he was not to be wooed into friendliness again. ‘Then you can leave me to arrange a search for the missing gatekeeper. You, I believe, have other things to do. I think there is someone awaiting you outside?’
It was a dismissal, and a timely one, in fact. So much had happened that I had almost forgotten Stygius and his land slave. ‘Of course,’ I murmured. ‘I must go at once. But. .’
Lucius gave me that tight smile again and raised a warning hand. ‘That is your priority, citizen, I fear. Your patron requested you to solve this crime, and it is important that you make a start if you are to put that corpse to rest before the Lemuria begins.’ He swallowed self-importantly, so that the cartilage in his throat bobbed up and down. ‘I only hope that the disappearance of this Aulus fellow is not another manifestation of a curse upon this household. But, as I say, you can leave that in my hands. I will go and talk to the chief steward now, and arrange a search party.’ And without another word he turned away, and strode from the atrium.
‘I’m sorry, master.’ Minimus was beside me in a trice. ‘I did not mean to interrupt you and provoke the citizen.’
I grinned at him in mock severity. ‘Then ensure you mind your manners another time,’ I said. ‘Now, take me to the stable block at once. I’ll see Stygius and this land slave, if they’re still here.’
They were. Stygius was doggedly standing vigil beside the shrouded corpse — from which, as Lucius had said, a distinctive odour was now beginning to emerge — while his companion loitered uncomfortably nearby. The older man came across to greet me as soon as I appeared.
‘Ah, Citizen Libertus, there you are. This here is Caper — the slave I told you of. The one who interviewed the father of that girl. You’ll have to speak slowly. He’s fairly new to us.’
I nodded at Caper. The word means ‘he-goat’ and presumably some recent slavemaster had given him the name. I could see why. He was a tall, rangy-looking youth with curly, thick black hair, which sprouted not only from his long and bony head, but from his sinewy hands, legs and forearms too. A straggling beard and whiskers formed a sort of frame around his face so that he did look like a kind of half-tamed animal — a mountain goat perhaps — standing on its hind legs for a trick. He was dressed in a grimy tunic, with a leather apron and rough rags tied about his feet for boots. He raised a pair of wary eyes to me as I approached, and Stygius prodded him forward with one brawny arm.
‘Now then.’ Stygius poked the unfortunate Caper fiercely in the ribs. ‘This citizen is your master’s special protégé, so you make sure you answer when you’re spoken to.’
It didn’t altogether look as if the goat could manage that. He was gazing at my toga with a doubtful air, as if it overawed him.
‘You spoke to the family of this girl?’ I said.
He nodded, but said nothing. Before Stygius could offer a rebuke, I spoke again. ‘You could take me to the place?’
Another nod. ‘Nicely place,’ he said at last. His voice was what I had expected, gruff and low, with the strong accent of the local tribe. Brought up in some poor family, I would judge, and sold to slavery to help the funds when he was old enough. As Stygius said, his Latin was not good, though obviously he could understand my words. I wondered how he had coped with asking questions in some of the Roman households round about.
‘Nice place?’ I said, in Celtic, and earned a wondering smile. My dialect was not the same as his, but it was close enough to give him confidence.
‘Good pigs, they’ve got. And hens. And cabbages,’ he told me eagerly. ‘All sorts of things. It’s quite a little farm.’
‘How long will it take us to get there?’ I asked.
He looked at me, taking in the toga and the greying beard. ‘Took me half an hour,’ he said. ‘Take you a good bit longer, I expect.’
It took me twice that time, in fact. Several times Caper had to wait for me (though sometimes for Minimus as well, I was amused to note) and once again he lived up to his name. He led the way so quickly there was no time for speech. After a mile or two I was panting after him, far too breathless for conversation anyway.
Our destination lay in the opposite direction from my house, and we were soon in an area that I did not know at all. We hurried past the trappers’ hut and a scattered farm or two, but Caper did not pause. Away from the main lane he led us at a trot, till we were toiling up hilly forest tracks. We seemed to be leaving civilisation far behind when, stumbling along a little stony path, we suddenly came to a clearing in the woods. Caper stopped, and spread out one arm to indicate the crest of a small hill with a roundhouse enclosure on the top of it. ‘There it is,’ he said triumphantly.
It was a sizeable homestead, for a peasant farm, and I could see why Caper thought it a ‘nicely place’. I could make out four roundhouses at least, a large expanse of cultivated spelt, and half a dozen sheep and horses corralled into a field. But there was evidence of Roman ways as well. There were watch-geese roaming inside the inner yard; plump ducks and chickens pecked among long rows of cabbages, and we had already passed the portable woven fences which were moved around the woods to give swine new feeding grounds while keeping them enclosed. A stack of firewood was cut and standing at the gate, with a sprig of holly hanging over it for luck, and another pile of something (it looked like bundled leaves) was drying in a rick as winter fodder for the animals. Woodsmoke curled up from the roof-holes and from somewhere inside the enclosure a dog began to bark.
Clearly the place was mildly prosperous, but I was rather surprised to find that this was the household we’d been looking for. Stygius had told me yesterday that his land slaves were looking for news of a missing girl with soft, unblistered hands. The inhabitants of such a farm as this would work their land themselves — just as they would have built the roundhouses, dug the surrounding ditches and woven the triple fence. No troops of slaves to do the work for them — the women of the household would labour with the men. I said as much to Caper, when I found the breath to speak. ‘You were looking for a girl with tender hands,’ I said. ‘What made you come and ask your questions here?’
He looked at me, furrowing his eyebrows closer across his narrow eyes. ‘They told me at the big Roman house down there’ — he waved a vague hand in the direction we had come — ‘that there was someone missing from this farm. Apparently the father went down there a little while ago, saying that his eldest girl had run away, and asking if their land slaves had seen any sign of her. Of course they couldn’t help him, but they told me what he’d said. So up I came. I didn’t think there was much chance of its being any use, considering the hands and everything, but I thought I’d be in trouble if I didn’t try. I didn’t know then that the body was a man, or I might not have bothered coming here at all.’
‘You did the right thing, all the same,’ I said. ‘It turns out that we may be looking for a peasant girl.’
He grinned — a malicious little smile that showed his long and yellow teeth and reminded me more than ever what his nickname meant. ‘Course, that enquiry from her father was a little while ago, before her family got word that she was safe. She has joined a travelling entertainment troupe and sent a message home, saying she was well and happy and not to look for her. You knew that, didn’t you?’ He seemed to take a gleeful pleasure in the notion that my breathless exertions might have been in vain. ‘But there’s the father — you can ask him for yourself.’