Anacrites did not find Albia. Officially, her whereabouts remained unknown.
As I read on in weary amazement, Lentullus crept up to me with his usual confiding manner. He burped shyly. 'Falco, I know where your girlie may have gone -'
I raised a finger. 'Stop! Don't say it! Don't even think about it, Lentullus, in case Anacrites can read your brain.' In fact not even the devious spy could untangle that ball of wool, but Lentullus sat down obediently by me on the bench, full of joy that we were sharing this Big Secret.
While he carefully kept quiet, I read the rest of Helena's letter. That was personal. You don't need to know.
Afterwards, I folded up the document and tucked it inside my tunic. We all sat a while longer, listening to the whispers of the dark ocean, each contemplating death and life, love and loathing, the long years of tragedy that had brought us here, and the hope that at last we were ending it.
A faint breeze had got up and morning was not far away, when we said our goodnights and for a few short hours all sought our beds.
LVIII
A lot of things had happened in the past few days. I told Silvius what we could now deduce about Nobilis and his movements. Anacrites had ordered him to leave Rome; Nobilis must have obeyed, much at the same time as Justinus and I left. We could easily have encountered him on the road down here.
His killing of Demetria confirmed his arrival. He must have been doing that while we were in the marshes arresting Virtus. We knew Nobilis must have carried out the attack on his ex-wife alone, because both Pius and Probus had been in custody. With troops swarming everywhere, he was probably pinned down in the Antium area. We set up a search.
If he went into the Pontine Marshes, we had no hope. The wild bogs stretched for nearly thirty miles between Antium and Tarracina, and between ten and fifteen miles across. This great rectangle of terrain was impossible to monitor. Nobilis knew the marsh intimately, had roamed there since childhood, had lived there all his adult life. He could elude us forever.
Catching Nobilis quickly was now imperative. We had to hope that activity during the forest search had prevented him slipping away. The troop movements could have trapped him close to Antium itself, or forced him west. We searched the town – no luck. A polite house-to-house was set up among the handsome coastal villas. Of course we encountered resistance from their wealthy owners, who would rather put up with a depraved killer in their midst than let the military check their property. Each huge spread possessed innumerable outbuildings, any of which could be a hiding-place. Justinus and I spent half a day attempting to mediate with the rich and secluded; Silvius had reckoned us respectable (a senator's son and a man with his own auction house) so he assigned us the role of winning over the landed classes. For the most part, they saw it differently, though only one set the dogs on us.
We held a midday conference. Silvius had convinced himself that once Nobilis knew we had found the forest bodies, he would not just hunker down but would try to leave the area. Available roads were either north along the coast, taking the Via Severiana towards Ardea, Lavinium, and ultimately Ostia, or else the main road that skirted the northern edge of the marshes. That would take him over to the Via Appia, on the way to Rome. In Rome, could he still call on Anacrites for protection? Even if not, Nobilis could easily vanish into the city alleys as so many criminals had done. Ostia, if that was his choice, would give him access to ships bound for anywhere.
We pulled everyone off the property searches. It turned out to be the right choice. While we were still sitting around our lunch packs, coordinating our next moves, Lentullus edged up to Justinus and me. He asked if we wanted to know something funny about an ox cart that had just passed. The driver had seemed like any of the locals who pottered around. 'He looked all right – for a farmer, if that's what he is,' said Lentullus. Lentullus had come from a farm originally. 'And guess what – he had an ox that was just like Nero!'
'Spot!' Quintus and I roared at him, as we scrambled to our feet.
We all mounted up; we had a mix of mules and donkeys. Checking our weapons, we piled in pursuit. If this was just some inept ox rustler, we would look stupid, but we knew where Nero had been stolen so none of us believed that.
The countryside was gently rolling; when he turned off down a dirt track, we were close enough behind to see him leave the highway. A bullock cart can put on a fast turn of speed, a fully grown ox less so -and Nero had always been a plodder. Nonetheless, it was two miles before we caught up. It was Petro's ox all right, but by then abandoned. No mistaking that dun-coloured hunk of beef, with his mournful low and his permanent stream of dribble. He was even hitched to our own cart, the one we had had to leave in the marshes after the ox was taken. There was no time to make jokes about salvage rights, but Petronius and his po-faced brother would be delighted.
Nobilis had left the cart and taken off on foot. I made Lentullus stay with the ox. His bad leg would have hampered him, and those two simple souls could look after one another while the rest of us, the hard men, tracked our killer. We stayed on mule-back as long as possible, but soon, like him, we had to leg it. He vanished down a deep ravine and there was no choice but to follow him in.
'I know this place,' said Silvius. 'It's where we first found bodies!'
Italy is a strange country geographically, so long and narrow, with its great spine, the ever-present Apennines. They were there in the distance, low-looking grey ridges far away but visible beyond the undulating foreground plain. Even in summer, towering clouds rise over those hills. You can see them as you approach Rome. After storms and in winter, rain pours off the Apennines. Trapped water causes the Pontine Marshes. Here close to Antium, groundwater lay very close to the surface but instead of forming marshes, rivers carved phenomenal channels through the alluvium, down which they sucked the surplus to the sea. For century after century it happened, creating strange caves, deep seasonal gullies, and incredible ravines. You would not know they were there. From above, the countryside seemed featureless. The presence of these gullies made farming harder, so only a short way past Antium was a near wilderness. In this dire place, Claudius Nobilis had struck down one of the deep ravines. There was nothing else to do: trusting our souls to the gods – - those of us who believed in gods – - we went in after him. A few who did not believe in a deity until then may have offered a swift apology for doubting and beseeched divine protection after all.
Why does it always happen to me? In the course of my work, I had been at the bottom of some ghastly holes. This was another appalling experience. Nobilis had scrambled into a fissure in the earth that became fifty feet deep in places, though never much more than six feet across. The sides rose perpendicularly. Soon we felt quite cut off from the world; we feared we would never manage to return. No place I had ever been in contained such a sense of menace. It felt like one of the approaches to Hades.