Nemesis

'Oh I see your game! I repudiate my brother. I reject Nobilis. If he and Pius did those things, I dissociate them from our family. They shame us. They are blackening the family name.'

'What family name? Don't make me spew.'

Virtus just stared at Silvius. He was not a clod. None of them were. That was how those of them who committed the crimes had covered up their tracks for so many decades.

'We'll get the truth,' sneered Silvius. 'Probus is here in custody, you know that. Your Probus seems a fellow with a conscience. Probus has begun telling us a lot of helpful things – all about his perverted brothers.'

'Probus is just as bad as them,' scoffed Virtus.

When Silvius needed a break, I was given a go. 'Tell me about your connection with Anacrites, Virtus.'

'Nothing to say.'

'When did you find out about him?'

'Around two years back. We went up to Rome and asked him for work. He thought he could use us, so it was fixed up. I know when it was, because our mother had just died.'

'Casta? Was her death something to do with you going to see Anacrites?'

'Yes and no. When we lost her, we felt cast adrift.'

'Oh you poor little orphans!'

'Have a heart, Falco!' Justinus broke in, grinning. Silvius let out a short laugh too. He had bad teeth, not many left.

I had remembered something someone told us about Casta. Unexpectedly, I strode up, grabbed the prisoner by his hair, then turned his head to demonstrate he had part of an ear missing. 'Did your mother do that to you?' I yelled.

'I deserved it,' said Virtus, immediately and without blinking.

We had to stop then, because news came in about the discovery of more bodies.

Justinus and I went with Silvius to inspect the site. On the way, Silvius owned up that the Urbans had been using Claudius Probus for the past few days to help them identify places where his brother Nobilis might have buried corpses. 'We believe Probus is himself implicated in the abductions, though not as the principal.'

'How did you make him talk?'

'We had to provide immunity. The way it works, Probus suggests places that Nobilis liked – secret lairs he had, on his own or with Pius.'

'Pius was the one who lured the victims; he brought them to Nobilis?'

'Seems so. These spots are difficult to access, so Probus takes us and points out where to look.'

'He knows too much about it to be innocent.'

'He admits that. He says he was young, and coerced by his brothers. He claims he became too horrified and stopped joining in.'

I hated him being given immunity. Sometimes you have to compromise, but if Probus was directly involved in the deaths, immunity was wrong. Silvius just shrugged. 'When you see the terrain, you will understand. There is no other way we could ever find the bodies. My seniors conferred. It's worth it, to clear up the old disappearances.'

Silvius was quite right about the dreadful terrain. The first place we went was a forest, a few miles out of Antium. A thick canopy of slim-trunked scented pines, intermingled with stunted cork oaks, filled this thickly wooded area. At ground level, dense brushwood impeded movement. Nobilis must have used a narrow track. A slightly wider access had been bashed down by the Urbans. Following a guide, we struggled along it to a dell. We went in silence. When we reached the activity, the shocked hush continued, broken only by rustles and chopping spades as work went on slowly at the sordid scene.

Bodies had been excavated and placed on flattened underbrush. There were eight or nine, of different ages; their poor condition prevented an exact tally. Most were now collected in proper array, but the bones of one or two could only be hopelessly jumbled on a sack. The troops had lifted most remains from their resting places and laid them in a row – except one. One body lay apart and they had not touched it. One was new.

The men stood back. Silvius, Justinus and I went to look. While the workers waited, watching us, we surveyed the remains, pretending to be experts.

Most of the recovered bodies had been found in the ritual position, face down and with outstretched arms – the mark of the Modestus killers. There were no more severed hands. Petronius must have been right that this was the letter-writer's particular punishment for making appeals to the Emperor.

We had all seen dead men. Dead women too. We had seen flesh battered and bones treated disrespectfully. Even Justinus, the youngest here, must already know the swift sag of the stomach that comes in the presence of unnatural death. That smell. The mocking way skulls grin. The shock at the way human skeletons can hang together even when entirely stripped of meat and organs. The worse shock, when long-dead bones suddenly fall apart.

What lay here was in one sense no longer human; yet these bodies were still part of the wider tribe we belonged to. Most had died years ago. Many would never be identified. But they called on us as family. They imposed responsibilities. I cannot have been the only one who silently promised them justice.

The newest corpse was a woman.

'How long?'

'Two days, at most.'

Her killer must have been fleeing from the forest almost as the first troops approached. Perhaps the noise of them stomping down thickets had disturbed him. Perhaps he even glimpsed them through the trees.

She lay on her own, not with the others. Those who found her had felt she was different – - still close enough to living to count as a person, not simply anonymous 'remains'. Indeed, it would have been possible to recognise her face – - had her killer not battered her badly. She had suffered; large areas of her skin were discoloured by bruising. Someone suggested much of the beating was inflicted after death; we preferred to think so. Either her trunk was swollen because of what had happened internally during the violence, or she had been pregnant. Unlike the other bodies, which were deposited face down in scraped graves, this one had been left unburied and looking at the sky. She had not been ripped open. He had not finished with her corpse.

Around her neck still lay a gold chain that must have been the means by which Nobilis managed to get close to her again. The expensive granulation looked like the hanging loop on the Dioscurides cameo. I could see the fastening. I forced myself to bend down over the body, unhook it, and remove the chain. It had dug into the flesh, but I pulled on it as gently as I could.

'I know who this is.'

I recognised her dress. I remembered that sad rag from when she was brought to see Helena and me in the inn at Satricum. It was Demetria, daft daughter of the morose baker Vexus, obedient lover of the foolish grain seller Costus – and one-time wife of Claudius Nobilis, the pernicious freedman who so relentlessly refused to release her from his possession, that he finally came after her and slaughtered her.

LVI

Word of the grisly discoveries in the forest had inevitably spread. The bodies were carried out on hurdles; we left a small group of men still searching. When we came back to the road, a crowd had gathered. A few, who must have lost friends or relatives in the past, rushed forwards as the cortege emerged from the woods, and had to be held back by troops. Also there, though keeping to themselves in a tight knot, was a group of women I was told were from the Claudius family: three sisters, plus the sisters-in-law, Plotia and Byrta.

They neither spoke to us, nor we to them. They stared, blank-faced, as we removed the dead. It seemed to me they would never speak, never assist with any knowledge they had of the crimes, never even defend themselves. Others kept away from them; who could believe these women were truly innocent of the crimes their men perpetrated? How could they really have known nothing? They would be ostracised. They and their children were further casualties. A grim cycle would repeat itself. The children would grow up angry and isolated. Already none of them knew anything except neglect and violence. Which descendants of Aristocles and Casta could ever escape the stigma of this bleak family? To start a new life would be too hard; to learn new behaviour impossible.