‘Yeah. Yeah, I understand.’
‘Good.’ He reached for a wax tablet. ‘Then if you’ll excuse me — ’
Bugger. Well, Lippillus had warned me, and I should’ve kept a firmer control of my mouth, but all the same… Still, there was no use pushing things further. I stood up.
‘Thanks for your help,’ I said, and exited.
So what now? Obviously, the tenement, and hopefully a word with this Lucceius Caepio. Oh, everything could be above board, like Mescinius assumed, but the way things were developing I didn’t like the smell. Not above half, I didn’t. Forget about calling the case a wrap: the cold feeling at the back of my neck was telling me it was very much alive and kicking.
So was Placida. The guy I’d left holding her lead didn’t look too gruntled, either. Being yanked down a flight of steps and dragged over the cobbles for twenty yards can get some people that way.
7
Like Natalis had said, the tenement was a fairly new property, six storeys high and upmarket compared with most of the others in the immediate area, which probably explained why Carsidius’s factor had chosen it for his flat. There was a butcher’s shop directly underneath one side of the entrance door, with a guy looping sausages over a hook, but I was learning: I didn’t even think of approaching him for information, not while I was attached to Placida. Diagonally opposite, on the other side of the street, a large-breasted woman in a bright red tunic and earrings was selling fruit and vegetables from a stall. Fruit and veg should be safe enough. I took a firm grip of Placida’s collar and manoeuvred her over.
The woman beamed when she saw us coming. I was beginning to realise that there were basically two reactions to Placida; one was to coo over her, the other was to look for the nearest climbable wall. Strangely enough, women seemed to favour the first option.
‘Oooh! Isn’t she a pet!’ she said. ‘What’s her name?’
‘Uh, Placida.’
‘There’s a luvvums!’ Placida reared, tongue lolling, to put her paws on the woman’s ample chest, but I was ready for that one and hauled her down before she could cause an embarrassing incident. ‘Doesn’t she have a beautiful face?’
‘Yeah. Yeah, she does.’ Sure; if you happened to like jaws that could rip the throat out of a bear and a muzzle permanently covered in spit. Still, as a conversational icebreaker with strangers — women especially — I couldn’t fault her. I wondered if Perilla’s stepdad the poet had featured Gallic boarhounds in his book on seduction. The brutes’ other, less appealing proclivities would be a bit of a style-cramper at a later stage, mind.
‘Now, sir,’ the fruit-lady said. ‘What can I get you?’
‘Just an apple, thanks. One of these Matians’ll be fine.’
She picked it up, rubbed it off and handed it to me while I took a coin from my belt-pouch.
‘I heard there was a suicide here two or three days ago,’ I said.
‘That’s right. Dreadful thing.’ She counted out my change. ‘He was hardly more than a boy.’
‘You see it happen?’
‘Couldn’t but help it, could I? It’s the sort of thing gives you nightmares.’
I glanced up at the tenement. Some of these places — the upmarket ones, anyway — have balconies, at least on the first floor, but this one didn’t. ‘He, uh, jump straight off from the window-ledge?’ I said.
‘Can’t tell you that. I wasn’t looking. You don’t, do you? Not up.’
‘He didn’t shout first, then, or scream? Give any kind of warning?’
The woman gave me a long stare; the friendliness had gone. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said finally. ‘No disrespect, but I don’t hold with ghouls. The poor lad’s dead and there’s an end of it. That’s no one’s business but his.’ She bent down to rearrange the fruit on her tray. ‘Enjoy your apple.’
Yeah, well. That was fair enough; I’d no time for ghouls and rubber-neckers myself. And at least she’d confirmed what Mescinius had said. I put the Matian away for later and crossed the road to the tenement entrance, lugging Placida behind me and steering her away from the bucher’s shop.
New was right: the steps were clean, there was no sign of graffiti on the white-plastered walls inside and no smell of urine on the stairs. Give it time. I tied Placida to the banister, making sure the knot was tight, went up to the first floor and knocked on the door marked ‘Lucceius Caepio’.
I thought for a minute there was no one in — tenement dwellers spend most of their time elsewhere — but as I raised my hand for the second knock the door was opened by a thick-set, unshaven guy in his forties wearing a lounging-tunic and chewing on a hunk of bread.
‘Lucceius Caepio?’ I said.
‘Yes.’ There was suspicion in his eyes. ‘Who’re you?’
‘Valerius Corvinus. I’ve just come from Titus Mescinius over at the Watch-house.’ No harm in dropping the name, and given he didn’t look particularly welcoming I reckoned the ambiguity would get me over the threshold faster. ‘You have time for a chat, pal?’
He hesitated, then stepped back, still chewing. The eyes hadn’t shifted. ‘A little,’ he said. ‘You’d best come in.’
I followed him, closing the door behind me. There was something badly wrong with the guy’s leg, because he held it stiffly and didn’t so much move as lurch.
‘Sorry about the mess,’ he said. ‘The wife’s at her sister’s down in Capua. New baby. You want a bite of breakfast?’
‘No thanks. You carry on, though.’
He grunted and sat down at the table. Tenements, even upmarket ones, are pretty basic, and tables don’t come as standard, but Caepio seemed to be fitted up quite snugly here. There was even a small dresser with a set of Samian bowls and plates, and a line of the cheap souvenir statuettes they sell outside the Circus. The other thing I noticed was a key-board with numbered hooks fixed to the wall.
‘It’ll be about that youngster, no doubt,’ Caepio said, dipping his crust of bread in a bowl of oil. ‘Sextus Papinius.’
‘Right.’ I pulled up a stool.
‘You’re no Watchman. Not with that stripe.’
‘No. I’m looking into the kid’s death. Or the reasons for it, rather. On behalf of the mother and a family friend.’
He gave me a quick, sharp look and bit into the bread. ‘That so, now?’ he said. ‘Sad business. Terrible.’
‘He worked for the fire compensation board. I understand you and he had a professional connection.’
‘If you can call it that, sure. I was factor for a couple of other properties further up the hill that got burned down. He came over a couple of times and we talked through the details.’
‘But you didn’t know he was here the afternoon he died?’
Long silence. Then, finally, Caepio said: ‘That’s not quite true.’
I frowned. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Look.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I knew he was here, but not that he intended to…use the upstairs flat. Okay?’
‘That’s not what you told the Watch, friend,’ I said carefully.
‘No.’
‘All right.’ I kept my voice neutral. ‘So why the lie? And why bother to tell the truth now?’
‘Where lying goes’ — Caepio shrugged — ‘well, if you think about it you’ll understand that yourself. I’d nothing to do with the death, first thing I knew was when I heard the commotion in the street and went down.’ He dipped his bread again. ‘But the kid had died on my property and I didn’t want to get involved, right? Besides, he only called in in passing to confirm some of the figures we’d discussed. At least that’s what I thought at the time, because that’s what he told me. As far as telling the truth now’s concerned’ — he got up, hobbled over to the board on the wall and pointed to the last hook — ‘there’s your answer there.’