The slave who kept this gate was older, plumper and more confident. ‘We get an occasional tradesman or peddler, but there were none this morning, only a scruffy urchin asking for alms, and another wanting Maximilian. I sent them both packing. No one else. Though I am expecting a delivery of charcoal for the kitchens, and the funeral musicians and anointers will be at the front gates in a minute. And, of course, the slaves will be back with their various purchases. Are we to let them in?’
We gave them permission, and let them go.
‘Well,’ Marcus said, taking another sip of wine, ‘what does that tell us?’
‘Only what we knew before,’ I said. ‘Whoever stabbed Ulpius is still on the property. There is no question of some stranger with a grievance coming in on an off chance and murdering him, unless whoever it is is still hiding here somewhere.’
‘But you think that is improbable?’
‘With respect, Excellence, I think it is almost impossible,’ I said. ‘Any assassin would bring his weapon with him. He could not rely on finding one to hand. And how could he know that Ulpius would be unattended? Usually the man is surrounded by slaves and secretaries.’
Marcus thought about that for a moment, and then rewarded me with a smile. ‘Well done, Libertus. Now we are making progress. I had come to the same conclusion myself. The facts seem to argue that the murder was committed by somebody already inside the house.’
‘There is only one problem, Excellence,’ I told him gloomily.
He looked at me quizzically. ‘And that is?’
‘Exactly the same objections seem to apply to them.’
Chapter Six
Sollers had rounded up for us all the slaves who were anywhere near Quintus’s reception room at the time of the murder. There were at least a dozen of them, and when I first glimpsed them, lined up outside the door of the study, my heart sank at how long the questioning was going to take. A closer inspection, however, made me simply goggle. If it were not for the ochre-tunicked figures of the secretary and the chief slave — who stood out from the others like two Vestal virgins at an orgy — I might have suspected that I had drunk too much watered wine and was seeing everything double. We brought the chief slave in to question him, and soon discovered why.
The poor man was half gibbering with fright lest the death of his master might be attributed to a slave’s negligence, which of course would ultimately be his personal responsibility. He was more impassioned than the forum orators in his desire to explain to us how no possible blame could attach to any servant under his control.
Ulpius, it seemed, not only possessed an enormous number of slaves, drawn from all over the Empire, but — whether to impress the populace or because he felt it befitted his position — generally deployed them in pairs, except for those with specialist functions like the secretary and the exquisite page I had seen earlier. Many of the ‘pairs’ were even matched as closely as possible for height and appearance — hence, presumably, the physical similarity of the two boys who had attended us on our arrival. This piece of conspicuous extravagance must have cost a fortune, and, apart from amusing Quintus, was evidently designed to dazzle visitors with an exhibition of wealth.
It had certainly dazzled Marcus: I shouldn’t be surprised to find matched pairs of serving lads at his own banquets in future. Quintus’s servants, though, were probably less enthusiastic about the arrangement. Slaves have little enough privacy in any household, but short of being manacled together, these poor creatures could scarcely have had less. The pairs ate together, worked together, washed together, waited together and even shared the same sleeping space in the slaves’ quarters. If I had been treated so when I was a slave, I should have found life ten times harder to bear, especially since a man could not even choose the companion who was linked to him with these invisible chains.
However, it did have one advantage now, from our point of view. The system meant that each half of a ‘pair’ had at least one witness to his movements for the entire day: indeed, I thought, with a little pang of sympathy, a witness to every minute of his life.
The chief slave confirmed this more strongly. There were so many slaves in the household, he explained, that each pair had specific duties, related to a particular person, function or ‘domain’, and most of the time were in full view of one or other of their fellow pairs. If they were not required, they were stationed in the slaves’ ante-room next to the kitchen, where he personally could keep an eye on them. Therefore, unless there was a conspiracy involving most of the household, we could eliminate any of the paired slaves at once.
Marcus was delighted when he saw the force of this. ‘Splendid,’ he said. ‘That will save a lot of time.’
It was a relief to me, too, though for different reasons. The chief slave was worried about his own safety, but strictly the law requires that if a master is killed by one of his slaves, the whole household should be put to death. The penalty is not often invoked these days, but in the case of someone as important as Quintus, Marcus might easily have felt that a firm example was needed.
Now, however, he was saying, ‘In that case, we hardly need to question them at all.’
That was no use, either. ‘You are quite right, Excellence,’ I said, before he could commit the indiscretion of letting them all go. ‘Under the circumstances, we need only question them a little. Naturally, you will wish to hear their stories, in case anything out of the ordinary occurred this morning, or one of them happened to see something significant.’
Marcus gave me a sharp look, but I met his eyes blandly, and in the end he smiled. ‘Naturally,’ he agreed. ‘We’ll have them in — in pairs.’
In fact, there was not a great deal to be learned. Whatever the slaves had been doing that morning — fetching and carrying, sweeping and cleaning, bringing chairs and serving food, filling lamps and trimming wicks, running errands, dancing attendance or simply waiting interminable hours for someone to call upon them — they had done it in full view of someone else. Until Quintus’s death, there had been nothing unusual about the day’s routines, apart from the additional tasks occasioned by our own arrival.
Even the pair who had actually been attending Quintus had very little information to offer. It was their duty, they said, to sit outside the door while Ulpius was receiving clientes and await a summons. They very rarely went into the room while business matters were discussed, unless their master called them in specially. From time to time they were called to take messages or plump up cushions, or to fetch wine, or ink and the delicate rolls of thin tree bark which he used for official documents instead of his usual wax tablet and stylus. Mostly, they just waited.
‘At which door?’ I wanted to know.
It varied, they said. Usually it was the rear door, into the central courtyard, but for the last day or two Quintus had seemed uneasy about something and had insisted that they wait in the ante-room, where they were closer at hand while he received his clientes.
Marcus was instantly all attention. ‘So, Quintus did fear something?’ he suggested. ‘One of his clientes, perhaps?’ He sounded grim, and I realised he was thinking again about the possible connection with Pertinax.
The slaves exchanged uncomfortable glances.
‘Well?’ Marcus demanded.
There was a pause, and then one of the slaves spoke up. ‘I suppose he must have done, Excellence,’ he said, doubtfully. ‘Sollers thought so. He had the visitors give up their knives and leave them in full view. We. . we were proved wrong, but we thought it was ridiculous. Many of the visitors came here every day. We knew most of them well — and even the citizens Flavius and Lupus are hardly strangers, at least by reputation. They are illustrious men, their names are well known to everyone in Corinium.’