We had seen nothing on the road, beyond a lumbering farm cart and a lone cloaked messenger galloping hell-for-leather towards Glevum, but presently there was a distant glint of bobbing metal ahead. I saw Marcus grimace. A cohort of soldiers on the march; auxiliaries recently relieved from Isca, probably. They would keep up a good pace, but they filled the road, and with their supply carts and camp followers up ahead (wives were not allowed, but many soldiers had families all the same) the whole procession could straggle for miles.
‘There is a back way to Crassus’ estate,’ I said doubtfully. ‘I learned it when I was staying at the villa. It is shorter, but the road is poor.’
That was an understatement. The road is villainous, one of the narrow, winding, unsurfaced tracks which used to serve as local thoroughfares before the Romans came. As a pedestrian, struggling to and from the villa with my mosaic pieces on a handcart, I had rather enjoyed its melancholy charm. There was even a ruined roundhouse halfway along it, presumably the homestead of the original native farmer from whom Crassus had ‘acquired’ the land.
In a fast gig, the journey promised to be exacting rather than melancholy.
Marcus had no such qualms. ‘We’ll take it,’ he said, and I instructed the driver where to turn.
It was exacting — more exacting than a Roman tax-collector. We lurched perilously down the rocky track, the gig threatening to overset at every turn and with overhanging branches clawing at our faces, until we shuddered down a final hill and joined up with Crassus’ wide and gravelled farm lane. We forked through the left-hand gate, round to the back of the estate into the farm and farmyard. Unchallenged. The usual gatekeeper was not at his post, and there were no land-slaves tending the animals or working the estate. Only a tethered goat looked up at us in surprise.
It was almost eerie.
We took the gig right to the inner gateway, and left the driver to wait (again). The gate was open, and we walked straight in, past the heaped woodpiles for the furnaces and the fruit trees neatly planted against the wall. We had almost reached the door to the inner garden before someone came scurrying to greet us: a big raw-boned man, wringing his hands like a soothsayer prophesying doom. I recognised him at once, as much from the fluttering hands as from the blue tunic: I had met him when I was laying the librarium pavement. Andretha, the foreman of the slaves.
He was breathless with self-justification. ‘I have rounded everyone up, excellence. In the inner courtyard. The aediles left a guard.’
He led the way. They were all there. Not just the household, but anyone who had happened to be passing by when the discovery was made; all waiting, trembling with cold, fear and the bitter draught which always blew through the colonnades. I remembered it vividly. The librarium was in a tiny room leading off that courtyard.
Why is it that retired officers, especially foreign ones, insist on building country villas like this, on the Roman style? Lofty columns and courtyard gardens fed by the rain from the high sloping roofs might be very welcome and cool in the heat of Rome. Here, in the wet, cold winters of the Insula Britannica, despite all the paintings on the surrounding walls and the statues in little arbours, the effect was damp, draughty and dank. No wonder Crassus had arranged to have a private hypocaust and bathhouse installed. It wasn’t just a sign of status; the underfloor heating made the front of the house — the owner’s quarters — tolerably habitable.
‘They are all here, all the household!’ Andretha bowed and bobbed his obeisance like a twig in a whirlpool. ‘And anyone passing by the gate. I had them stopped and brought here for you, most respected excellence. One can’t be too careful.’
I glanced at the huddled group. The outsiders first. Two turnip sellers, fuming at losing a day’s trade at the market. A pedlar. A beggar. A soothsayer. Even, incongruously, a travelling merchant and his plump wife, conspicuous in British embroidered wool.
Behind them, the household. I recognised some of them slightly. Land-slaves in hessian aprons, rough tunics and with leather ‘boots’ roughly shaped and bound around their feet with strings; cleanshaven house-slaves in neat blue tunics; ageing slavewomen in shapeless sacks; and, in the corner, the two short-skirted, perfumed slavegirls with haunted faces and braided hair. The guards smirked, obviously imagining only too clearly what duties those two performed for gross, ugly Germanicus.
‘They are all waiting, excellence,’ Andretha was saying, over and over like a Vestal chant.
‘I will speak to them later,’ Marcus said. ‘First, let us see this body.’
I could have shown Marcus to the spot myself. Out of the courtyard and round to the side of the house where the boiler room lay. Another large guard with a stave was standing at the entrance to the stoke room.
Marcus gestured him aside and we went in. It was dark and stuffy. The air was heavy with the nauseous, unmistakable smell of death, and still oppressively warm, although the fire had been allowed to die more than a day ago. The room was empty: nothing there but the great heaps of fuel and the open entrance to the furnace, its white embers still faintly glowing.
Nothing, that is, except for the body of a man. He was dressed in centurion’s uniform — leather-skirted doublet, breast-armour, groin protector, greaves and sandals. A sword and dagger still hung at the belt and there were torcs of office around his neck. A beaten brass mask of Mars leaned drunkenly against the wall, and one dead arm still trailed against the crested helmet as if in some final gesture of farewell. The other hand, and the head, or what remained of them, were thrust into the open furnace. The effect was obscene.
‘Examine it, Libertus.’ Marcus seemed unable to bring himself to look too closely at that charred skull, the blackened, fleshless bones which had once been fingers and hand.
I bent forward and lowered the lifeless trunk gently to the floor. The legs and arms had been shaved, recently by the look of it, but the torso was short, stocky and disconcertingly hairy. The features had been consumed by the flame, but there was no mistaking the ring on the charred finger. Crassus’ seal. I had seen it many times. Marcus, too.
There was one obvious conclusion to be drawn. Marcus drew it.
‘By Mithras,’ he exclaimed, ‘the aediles were right! It is Germanicus! No wonder they couldn’t find him. So! All we have to do now is find someone who wanted him dead.’ He grinned at me as he spoke — that description probably encompassed almost everyone in Glevum. ‘All right, let’s go and see what these people have to tell us. We’ll see them in the triclinium. I’m sure there will be a brazier in there, and if this looks like taking too long we can have some food served in comfort.’
‘Naturally, excellence.’ Andretha led the way. It wouldn’t occur to Marcus that there might be difficulties for anyone in these arrangements. With the other servants under guard, Andretha would have to light the brazier and organise the food himself, to say nothing of the problems of the waiting passers-by who would have families concerned for their safety.
The dining room was a fine room. I had seen it before — painted plaster walls and a mosaic floor in a geometric pattern (not one of mine, but I recognised good workmanship). Marcus reclined on one of the gilded couches, and I perched on a bronze stool nearby.
The questioning began. The ‘outsiders’ were easily disposed of. The merchant and his wife had never visited Glevum before and had lodged at a nearby inn the night before. There would be a dozen witnesses who could swear to their movements. They had left their lodgings only an hour earlier, and it would have needed that time to get here. It was the same with the turnip growers; it was impossible for them to have been at the villa before the body was discovered.