Of course he was good. My father trained him.
The station house of the Second Cohort had been built down the highway from the Esquiline Gate. It was most fragrantly situated between the large Pallantian Garden, created by a freedman of the Emperor Claudius, and the even more elaborate, statue-crammed, water-featured, gazeboed and porticoed Gardens of Lamia and Maiana, with the Gardens of Maecenas adjacent, containing a fancy auditorium where my father in a misguided moment once held a public poetry reading. This area was a topiary seller’s dream. Lopsided sea monsters and one-winged phoenixes, clipped in laurel and box, watched your every move. In June you couldn’t breathe for poplar fluff. The vigiles were beset by elegant recreational facilities — which I bet they never even noticed. More importantly for their work as firefighters, they had easy access to aqueducts.
On a good day, Titianus would have been off duty. I would have pressed his disloyal colleagues to give their opinion of his half-baked Aviola inquiry, and they might have dished dirt. It was not a good day. Instead of working at night, like any conscientious investigator who goes out on foot with the troops, this swine liked to take his ease on the day shift, playing with paperwork by himself. He was available in his snug.
I could see why the Second Cohort had made Titianus their inquiry officer. He would never meld in anywhere else. The average firefighter is built like a stone sarcophagus, with short wide legs and no neck: a wide-loom tunic man. They like ripping those tunics off in public, to amaze onlookers with their physique.
Sadly for him, Titianus had hair of an indiscriminate colour, pouchy eyes and a desolate expression, while his physique was far from fantastic. He did wear a tunic that was wider than it was long, but it hung off him in folds. It looked like the skin of an obese patient whose doctor has starved him into losing two hundred pounds, the week before he collapses and dies of malnutrition. (‘At least he was healthy when he passed away.’ ‘Well, thank you, doctor!’)
Unlike normal inquiry officers, we found Titianus sitting up straight at his desk. Evidently he had not been shown how to put up his boots on the table while he cleaned out his ear-wax. What was wrong with the Second Cohort’s training manual? Finding him not belching over a packet of cold bar snacks, Uncle Quintus looked disappointed. He is always hungry and was expecting to pinch nibbles.
After introductions, Quintus left me to it; he wandered back outside to the exercise yard, the hub of any vigiles barracks, where men on call were tidying equipment. I knew he would start asking questions about firefighting kit, then while he endeared himself to the troops by treating them as human, he would fish for any facts that Titianus might prefer to keep from us.
In the office, I started by asking the dolorous-eyed Titianus about the night of the robbery. There were no surprises. That in itself was no surprise.
‘Yes, it all fits!’ He probably thought my remark was a commendation. ‘One thing you can tell me, Titianus, is what the killers used to strangle the victims. Rope has been mentioned. Is it correct you took it away as evidence?’
This time Titianus squirmed unhappily. ‘There was a rope, left around the dead woman’s neck. That steward, Poly-wotsit, took it off her — act of respect to the dead. I didn’t collect it from the scene immediately as I was too busy, and later it had vanished. Thrown out when they tidied up? It wasn’t important.’
‘It might be. An aggressive lawyer may call this carelessness,’ I warned him frankly.
‘Bull’s balls. Let him. I don’t see it. What point is some nasty twine? We confiscate knives — to be honest, we find our own uses for those. But we haven’t enough space to store endless crates of rubbish, just because perps have used them as murder weapons. We’d be cluttered up with rusty pruning hooks and broken planks off building sites. We can’t do it.’
‘Not even in cases you haven’t solved yet, where these may turn out to be clues?’
‘Oh, face it, Flavia Albia — nobody’s ever going to solve this case!’
I was tempted to declare that I would solve it, but I was starting to agree with him. I made much of needing to file a report for the aedile: ‘He’s going to ask about the robbers, Titianus. What story can we give him there?’ Saying ‘we’ was deliberate. Even a vigiles inquiry officer who stayed in the office to play about with bureaucracy, or whatever Titianus played with, would avoid having his work checked by a magistrate.
‘I don’t reckon there were any robbers,’ Titianus claimed, his attitude now defensive. ‘It’s staring you in the face, woman: the slaves killed their masters, then they snaffled the silver and made up a story about the house being broken into, using that as cover.’
‘They didn’t fool you then … Still, I assume you do have villains around here who occasionally climb into apartments and remove important property?’
‘Plenty.’
‘Care to suggest names? I like to supply detail. Then my employer thinks I have been thorough.’ Actually, I like to be thorough in fact, so any details I supply to a client are correct.
Titianus listed some Esquiline ne’er-do-wells, each time asserting that these were small-fry no-hopers who would not touch serious bullion even if they came across it hanging on a washing line, let alone would they go out deliberately targeting fine drinksware. Nobody here wanted to steal anything that would be recognisable. According to Titianus, this was because the crafty vigiles would come calling while the thieves were still in possession of the goods.
According to me, that was cobnuts.
‘Somebody is in possession of the pierced silver wine strainers and the dinky goat-legged coaster set!’ Titianus looked puzzled that I could itemise the stolen goods. I almost expected him to start writing down what I said; I felt pretty sure he had never made a list himself. ‘So who is the big octopus on the Esquiline rocks?’ He shrugged. ‘Come on, Titianus, share your expertise. Which gangster has the fattest file of case notes in the scroll cupboard, yet no arrests are made − or if they ever do go to the praetor and onwards to court, somehow no prosecutions stick?’ Titianus remained boot-faced. ‘Who are all the other villains afraid of, Titianus? Who dares brazenly kill, in the process of another crime?’
‘Could be the Rabirii.’ He answered straightaway, now I spelled it out for him. He could have told me in the first place.
‘So have you pulled the Rabirii in for questioning?’
‘Of course not,’ snarled Titianus. ‘They would only deny it. Then their barristers would take my tribune for a drink and suddenly I would lose my job. The Rabirii would visit my old mother and make her cry. If they were particularly annoyed, they’d write foul messages about my sexual habits on a Forum wall.’
I smiled at him gently. ‘I understand. But I expect your ma would give them a seeing to … Mothers tend to be tough. So,’ I nagged, refusing to give up, ‘Titianus, if I want to have a word with the deadly Rabirii, where shall I find these exciting master crooks?’
Titianus spent the next few minutes telling me I was out of my mind, with colourful details of what led to his diagnosis. ‘Are you so bored with life you want to be found in pieces on a rubbish dump?’ Uncle Quintus put his head back around the door, looking interested.
Once the officer simmered down in senatorial company, Quintus spoke sympathetically. ‘It’s very good of you to care so much about Flavia Albia’s welfare, Titianus … Tell me, if you very sensibly wouldn’t go anywhere near these muckers, does the Second Cohort have a man who does? Someone who has annoyed your tribune so much the poor fellow has been deployed as your organised crime liaison officer? I know it’s usual to assign specialist oversight.’