Helena Justina slept peacefully that night. I remembered how last night, when she kept creeping out to be ill after the oregano hotpot, I had woken once to an unexpectedly empty bed. I sat up in alarm, my heart pounding. At that moment I knew all too well how Tullius Statianus must have felt – assuming he did have some feelings for Valeria – alone in his campbed, when she never came home.
The vine leaf parcels went through me like a rat down a drain. It was my turn to be groaning and drenched in sweat all night. My turn too, as I lay tossing and waiting for the next agonising onslaught, to wonder why anybody ever wanted to travel.
I was not the only one awake. The sound of crying drew me to the boys' room. By moonlight through an open shutter, I saw a piteous spectacle. Cornelius was sobbing his heart out, overwhelmed by homesickness. He had never even left Rome before, and had had no real concept of how long we would be travelling. I sat on the bed to console him, and next thing I was trapped there by the hefty, tear-stained eleven-year-old, who had fallen fast asleep.
I dragged my arm from under him and straightened him out so he wouldn't fall off the narrow mattress if he flailed around. I covered him up with a thin blanket for comfort, then tortured myself again with sentimental thoughts of Julia and Favonia back in Rome. Who was tending my little ones, if they cried in the night?
Settle down, Falco. They were safe. They had four old slave
nursemaids who had looked after their mother once, their noble grandma, their doting grandpa, and if all else failed each of my materially spoiled darlings would be tucked up in bed with a whole row of dolls and miniature animals.
Somewhere in the Altis an owl hooted. My stomach emitted a lugubrious glug. I sat still, using the time before my next bout of suffering to think. Diarrhoea can be the informer's friend.
I could see the dim shapes of Gaius (snoring) and Glaucus (breathing the slow measure of the fit) in two other narrow beds. Had the Leonidaion been more crowded, perhaps all of us would have had to share a room. We had made our resources stretch to two rooms. Seeking economy, Helena and I had Albia in with us, which rather inhibited marital affection. We put up with that – or found ways around it. All our accommodation was on an upper storey, or I might have closed the shutter even in the boys' room to keep out thieves and amorous gods disguised as silver moonbeams.
Now I started wondering about sleeping arrangements among the Seven Sights Travel group, at least when they were not camping. According to the list Aulus left us, the group contained a family of four; well, they might bunk up together. Then there were three couples, of whom one was the newly-weds and another seemed to be eloping adulterers; both of those pairs would presumably be anxious for privacy. Completing the group were four – no, five – single people. one female and four male, including Volcasius, the weird one, with whom nobody would ever want to share. Some would have brought slaves, whom the snobbish Aulus had not bothered to list. It could mean that when they stayed at an inn, Phineus had to find them nine rooms, not to mention whatever he wanted for himself, their drivers, and any run-arounds (who must exist, though Aulus had not listed them either.
That meant, either Phineus routed them on main roads, where there might be good, Roman-style mansios – official or semi-official travel lodges with high standards of accommodation and stabling – or else this misfit party of wealthy innocents would find themselves lumped together in all sorts of combinations. On the boat over, they would have been lucky to find even one cabin. Arriving at Olympia, to be faced with just a couple of large tents for the whole group, must have been their first big, bad experience on this trip. For some of them, a serious shock. And they had then been forced to stay camped out on the riverbank for weeks, while Valeria's death was investigated.
By the time they returned to their itinerary these people, who had
been strangers to start with, would have known each other very well indeed.
I needed to find them and study them myself. But, as dawn broke and my guts settled down at last, I went out to do one more piece of sleuthing at Olympia. Cornelius stirred, so I woke him and took him with me, as a treat. It turned out to be a bigger adventure than either of us expected.
XVI
It was barely light. All over the Empire slaves were rousing themselves, or being roused by short-tempered overseers. The most unlucky were stumbling grey-faced to hard labour in the mines, to do appalling, filthy work that would slowly kill them. The fortunate merely had to lay out a clean toga or tidy fine scrolls in a beautiful library. By far the majority would be gathering brooms, buckets, and sponges, ready to clean houses, workshops, temples, baths – and gymnasia.
Nobody barred our entry. Cornelius and I went through the palaestra porch into the colonnade. Anyone watching – as somebody must have been – would have seen my nephew bumbling after me, still with his eyes half-closed and clutching the back of my tunic like one of Augustus' anxious little grandchildren in that parade on Rome's Altar of Peace. Not that Cornelius would ever have been taken on an educational outing to see the Altar of Peace. All my sister Allia had ever taught her children was how to borrow from relatives. Verontius thought being a good father meant bringing home a fruit pie once a week; when he wanted to be a very good father, he bought two.
Cornelius needed wise adult attention or he would grow up like his parents. An onlooker would have seen me turn back to encourage the sleepy-head, tousling his hair affectionately. Someone may well have worked out that they could get to me through him.
A small band of workers in drab tunics was lazily raking down the dampened sand of the skamma. Wherever these slaves originated, they all had the same short build and swarthy features. A couple of torches flared in iron holders. Moths clung to the stonework nearby. Above the great courtyard, the sky was bleached but visible. It grew marginally brighter, as a hot Greek day began. People instinctively spoke in hushed voices, because the day was still too young for socialising.
At my signal, the slaves sauntered over and surrounded us.
I stretched, speaking slowly and hoarsely. "Don't you just hate this time of the morning? It's all whispers and croaks, and finding out who died in the night… I need some help, please. Will you tell me about when you discovered the murdered Roman girl?'
As I had hoped, they were open to enquiry. Most slaves love a chance to stop and talk. No one in authority had thought it important to order them to keep quiet on the subject. If he had known I was coming, the superintendent would have done, if only to annoy me.
They had found Valeria in a corner, with the sand in chaos around her as though she had tried desperately to escape on hands and knees. She was curled up defensively, blood everywhere. Blood and sand were clogged together on her clothing; she was fully clad which, the slaves agreed, suggested things had gone wrong quite early in her encounter with the killer. They had noticed that there was also dust on her dress, the kind of dust athletes used to cover their oiled bodies. I had seen it being applied the other day, flicked on with the palm of the hand and open fingers, so it hung in the air of the application room in clouds. On Valeria the sand was yellow, always admired for giving the body a subtle golden glow; not that that helped me much. Yellow was the most popular colour.
When informed, the superintendent had ordered the slaves to throw out the body. They had lifted her up and taken her to the porch, where they placed her in a sitting position (so she looked more lifelike and took up less room. They were still standing around there when Tullius Statianus turned up.
He started screaming. He squatted on his heels, weeping and staring. The superintendent heard the racket and came out from his office. He ordered Statianus to remove the corpse. After pleading for help, Statianus yelled abuse at the superintendent. Then he gathered up his battered young wife, and staggered off towards the campsite, with her in his arms.