‘Yes,’ I said, to no one in particular. ‘This is the real Egobarbus.’
‘A rich man, by the look of it,’ the octio remarked. ‘There’s some fine work in those rings.’ He turned to one of his men. ‘Did he not have a buckle, too, when we brought him in?’
The man turned scarlet and vanished, to return a moment later with a magnificent belt of ox-hide, with a great bronze buckle worked in the shape of a dragon eating its tail. It was a work of art.
‘It must have fallen off him when he was moved,’ the soldier said, but no one was deceived. It occurred to me with a jolt of horror why the flesh above the rings had been so cruelly torn. Perhaps, if I had not arrived in time, my old enemy would have been tipped into his pit without any fingers at all. Though one could hardly blame the guards. The clothes and ornaments of executed criminals are routinely shared among their executioners. There is no point in wasting valuables.
The owner of the rented house was sent for (he had not been permitted to leave the mansio) and I heard the story from his own lips. My lack of an official garment may have won his confidence, but in any case he was garrulous with fright.
His story was simple. He had returned to the premises the previous morning, as he had arranged. ‘I’d had my money from the Roman gentleman in advance, you see, and after what he’d said I expected to find the house empty. Never thought anything of it until that courier arrived asking questions. Course, being a law-abiding sort of man, I told him what I knew.’
I made no answer to this, although he glanced at me hopefully.
‘And then, going out to draw water for my own purposes, I found the body in the well. And it didn’t fall down there, either,’ he concluded. ‘I’ve got a slab covering my well, to keep the pigs from slipping down it, and the cover was back in place when I came to it. No, someone pushed him in and drowned him, that’s what I say.’
I doubted it myself. The grazes on the face and chest suggested to me a body that had been dragged to the well after death, and stuffed down it — perhaps as a crude means of disposing of the body. That also made sense of the poison bottle. What I did not know was who had done it.
‘There was a bottle found on the road,’ I said, ‘a mile or two from here. It had some liquid in it. Do you know anything about that?’
His expression of injured innocence was replaced by a look of pure surprise. ‘A bottle? No. I did put out an amphora of wine — same wine I always give my visitors — and there was a jug of something of his own on the table. I don’t know anything about a bottle.’
‘Well, citizen,’ the octio said to me, when the interrogation was over and our informant — at least temporarily — released. ‘What do you want to do with the body?’
It had become my corpse, I realised, because I had endowed it with identity. I hesitated. Egobarbus was not a man I mourned, but he was a fellow Celt. Somehow I could not consign him to a paupers’ pit. In the end I gave instructions to have him buried, Celtic fashion — curled like a newborn baby and facing the rising sun — wrapped in a piece of linen with his buckled belt at his side.
The soldiers, impressed by my official warrant and seal, and accustomed to obeying orders, complied immediately, although visibly bemused by the idea of daytime burial. They watched in bewilderment as I murmured a prayer over him — to the ancient gods of earth and stone — and left my old enemy under a mound of rocks. I did not weep.
‘Well, master,’ Junio whispered, as we made our way back to the mansio. ‘What will you do now?’
It was a good question. The house-owner had been present at the burial — not entirely from choice — and for want of any clearer plan, I suggested that I might begin by seeing the house. It had begun to interest me. The owner was a fat, grimy man, with an expression of foolish cupidity and a certain flabbiness of stomach which suggested that however he earned a living, it was not chiefly from labouring on his land.
I was right. The house was sizeable enough — two large draughty rooms on the ground floor and a couple of lofts above, both with frowzy curtains on one wall and crude straw palliasses on the floor. Downstairs there was a scattering of plain battered furniture. The place was not dirty, exactly, but there was a general air of dinginess: even a woven rug before the fire, which might once have been cheerfully coloured, had faded to a dismal grey over the years with dirt and soot. Outside, a scruffy field was home to a thin cow and a mangy sheep.
An odd place, I thought again, for Felix to have hired as his own.
‘Tell me about it,’ I said. ‘From the beginning. Who asked you to rent out the house, and when?’
The oily face assumed a patient frown. ‘I have been telling you,’ he said. ‘It must have been a half-moon ago. That Roman fellow turned up here, wanting to take the house. For two people, he said — there would be a friend. Well, I knew how to interpret that.’ He gave me a hopeful smirk. He had learned of my citizen’s status at the funeral, but he still seemed to regard me as a sort of fellow-conspirator against authority. ‘He didn’t just want a room, the way they sometimes do, but the whole house. I had been recommended to him, he said, by some of the guard at Letocetum, so he knew I was discreet, and he was prepared to pay — more than the usual rate. Naturally I agreed.’
Junio glanced at me, grinning widely, and enlightenment dawned. ‘Did you offer. . entertainment?’
The fellow smirked. ‘I offered him a pair of girls, of course. Clean as a whistle my girls are, no disease and no rotten teeth. But he wasn’t interested. Didn’t look like that sort of fellow, if you understand me.’
I understood him all right. I realised all of a sudden what kind of house this was, and what kind of pictures might be screened behind those uninviting curtains upstairs. Clearly the intelligence from Marcus’s spies had not included that information.
The man took my silence for encouragement. ‘All he wanted was a tray of food on the table — good food and wine for two, and a bite of something simple for the servants. I was to leave the door ajar and keep myself well away.’ He smiled, oleaginously. ‘I knew how to do that. You learn to hold your tongue, in my trade, and he paid me well.’
‘But nonetheless you spied on him?’ I suggested. He began to look aggrieved, and I added quickly, ‘You saw the Celts arrive.’
‘It’s my house, citizen. It isn’t where I live, but I own it. Naturally I kept a watchful eye. I always do.’
In the hope of extorting money from his customers later, I surmised. ‘So what did you see?’
He shrugged. ‘That Celtic fellow with the moustache turned up with his servants, and I saw them go in. Worn out with the walk, they looked, and glad to be here. I was expecting to see the Roman, but he never came. I think he sent a message, though, later in the evening, as I heard horses, and when I looked out I saw someone at the door.’
‘You saw the messenger? What did he look like?’ I was expecting a description of Zetso. It was not hard to guess whom Felix would have entrusted with that task.
Disappointingly, the fellow shook his head. ‘I couldn’t say, citizen. I couldn’t see. It was dark and he was cloaked and hooded. One of those fancy fringed military capes, not a simple woollen cucullus like yours.’ He nodded at the one I was wearing. ‘Gifted horseman, though — I heard him set off again, and he rode off galloping — at night too. Must have been fearless.’
‘Did he go in?’
‘No. I’m sure he didn’t. He wasn’t there long enough. Just came, delivered a message at the door and left. I thought his master was obviously delayed. I didn’t wait any more. I went to bed. When I looked out in the morning, the carriage was outside and the Celts were leaving. I waited until yesterday, as I promised, and then I went in to clear up the place. The rest you know.’