But for a moment he had contemplated the idea! ‘I was thinking of the escort,’ I amended hastily. ‘They could travel fast. In fact, if two of them could go, they could do this twice as quickly as one man alone. Just swiftly check the local inns and then report to us.’ He was still looking thoughtful, so I cast a final die. ‘If there are costs involved, I’m sure my patron would be prepared to cover them.’ I hoped that I sounded properly convinced, though I could not, of course, be certain that Marcus would do anything of the kind.
The commander shook his head. ‘And supposing they discover where the party spent the night? What do you expect the escort-men to do? Ride to Glevum to inform us? And what would that achieve? There would be a hundred questions you would want to ask, I’m sure, so you would be asking next to go and see the place. There is no time for that, the day is drawing on — night falls quite quickly at this time of year — and anyway, I could hardly let you leave the fort again.’
‘Then if Florens drags me before the court tomorrow, I shall simply have to hope I can persuade the magistrate to allow me extra time to find some witnesses.’ I sat back in my uncomfortable seat. ‘Someone must have seen the escort on the road, so at least we could discover whether it set out at dawn today — or whether it was genuinely travelling in the dark.’
The commander gave me an exasperated glance. ‘Oh, very well,’ he said at last. ‘You give me little choice.’ He called the escort over. ‘Two of you ride on towards the south. Go as quickly as you can to all the inns along the road — let us say within five miles or so of here. I can’t agree to any more than that. Ask the owners if the lictor’s cart paused there, or stayed there overnight, or whether they even saw it pass, and if so, when that was. Oh, and whether there were any other people passing through who might have seen it, too.’ He turned to me. ‘Is that right, citizen?’
‘More than I deserve,’ I mumbled gratefully.
He turned back to the horsemen. ‘If you discover anything at all, ride back to us at once. Speed is everything.’ He climbed into the carriage lightly, as he had done before. ‘We will return to Glevum as fast as possible.’ He turned to Scowler, who was still fidgeting nearby. ‘Though the death-cart can come with us for mutual protection, as it were, and that is obviously not designed for speed. The sesquipularius, however, will travel in the back, to accompany the driver’s corpse and begin a proper lamentation as the ritual demands. If this was a member of our garrison it is the least that we can do.’
Scowler looked rather less than pleased, but he had asked to join our party and he could not well object. He bowed his head and said, ‘The commander is most gracious.’
His senior officer nodded and turned his attention to the escort once again. ‘As soon as the shadows start to lengthen and it lightens in the west, the outriders turn their horses and start back again, no matter where they are, even if there is another inn in sight. Is that understood? I don’t want anyone benighted on the road. Very well. Give orders to the drivers that we are ready to depart.’
The leader of the escort wheeled his horse round to obey. He shouted to his riders and two of them set off, while the others formed up loosely around the coach. Our driver, looking sulky, climbed back on to his seat and a moment later we were lurching off, with the death-cart taking up position at the rear.
FOURTEEN
I glanced sideways at the commander as we jogged along. I was feeling rather uncomfortable by now — and not only because of the motion of the carriage. Though he had sent his riders out at my behest, I was not at all certain that much would be achieved.
I squirmed a little on my seat. What I had really hoped, forlornly, was that I might be permitted to go with them myself. Sending mounted soldiers to ask questions in this way — even the questions that I wanted asked — was not likely to be much of a success. Many villagers and country folk round here still clung to Celtic ways — much more so than people in the towns — and were generally suspicious of Roman cavalry. I would have spoken to them in their native tongue, but I doubted that the horsemen would get much out of them, especially given the constraints of time and distance which had been placed on them.
I could understand the commander’s reasoning, of course. He was thinking in military terms. A fully laden cart does not travel very quickly, at the best of times, and when the load is a really weighty one — like gold and marble statues, as this one had been — progress can be particularly slow. So as they would only have been travelling since dawn, five miles was probably a reasonable estimate.
Equally, if the attack had happened before dusk yesterday (as I was still personally inclined to believe), it was logical to suppose that they were aiming to reach Glevum before dark — no one willingly frequents the road at night without a torch — in which case they would almost certainly have made a rest-stop in the latish afternoon, if only to water the horses and buy some food themselves. Again, five miles was a likely radius.
But I had my doubts about the basis for that whole argument. I was still convinced that there had been two parts to this attack. If I was right in thinking that the treasure was removed along the way and the corpses loaded in its stead, the cart could have travelled a good deal faster and further than we were allowing for. Human bodies weigh a great deal less than gold.
The commander had turned in time to see my frown. He raised his brows at me. ‘Something worries you?’
I shook my head. There was no point in confiding my misgivings to him. It was too late now to bring the horsemen back and I’d already given him an outline of my views. I still found my own theory thoroughly bizarre. Even given that someone wanted to frighten Voluus, who would kill a half a dozen men and carry their corpses stacked up on a cart, simply to strew them in the woods and make it look as though the rebels had attacked? It seemed such an elaborately unlikely thing to do.
‘Libertus?’ the commander prompted, breaking through my thoughts. ‘I asked if something was concerning you?’
‘Everything about this worries me,’ I said, and made him smile. ‘I have a hundred questions. But there is one you might know the answer to. What will happen to Calvinus now — since it seems unlikely, after all, that he was involved in this?’
The smile faded and he looked surprised. ‘What makes you come to that conclusion, citizen?’
I stared at him. ‘But surely. .?’
‘Libertus, you are the one who convinced me that this whole affair was indeed a premeditated plot against the lictor, and not a simple accident of fate. That means that someone in his household must have been involved: somebody who knew about the cart, what it was carrying, when it would arrive and how big the mounted guard was going to be. Who else but the steward was in possession of those facts?’
I was about to comment wryly that half of Glevum could have made a guess, but the commander did not pause to let me speak.
‘And you yourself suggested why the escort was off guard and how they could be so quickly overwhelmed: because they supposed their attackers to be friends or, at least, a prearranged relief. People, in any case, they were forewarned about and expected to encounter at that time and place. Who but a steward arranges things like that?’
There — it was true — he had a valid point. ‘I can see the force of what you say,’ I answered carefully. ‘But I would swear that when I met him, Calvinus was shocked — and not a little frightened — by the news he’d just received. Wasn’t his first act to send to you for help?’
‘And isn’t that exactly what a guilty man would do, to divert suspicion from himself?’ the commander countered. ‘As for being tense and frightened — what else would you expect if a man had just connived the theft of half his master’s fortune and the murder of that same master’s — no doubt expensive — hired escorting slaves? It’s hardly evidence that the steward’s innocent.’