"Have you looked around, Buxus?"
"No sign of it here."
"The man who stuck it in probably carried off what was left. Do you think it could have been one of the bestiarii?"
"It was someone who could fight," Buxus reckoned. "Leonidas wouldn't just roll over and let any killer tickle his tum with a weapon."
"Had any of the lads been showing an interest in Leonidas?"
"Iddibal had a chat to me about him."
I raised an eyebrow. "What was he asking?"
"Oh just general talk. He knows a lot about the business."
"How's that, Buxus?"
"Don't know. He just takes an interest."
"Nothing suspicious?"
"No, Iddibal was just homesick for Africa."
"He comes from Oea like Calliopus?"
"No, Sabratha. He doesn't talk about his old life. None of them do."
"All right." This seemed to be going nowhere. "We need to know what happened last night, Buxus. Let's start with whether Leonidas was killed in his cage."
The keeper looked surprised. "Must have been. You saw this morning. It was locked."
I laughed. "Oldest trick there is. ‘The body was in a locked room: nobody could have got in there.' Usually it's meant to look like suicide. Don't even try to tell me this lion killed himself!"
"No call to," joked his keeper darkly. "Leonidas had too good a life. Me to hunt for him and talk to him all day-then every few months we put ribbons in his mane and sprinkled him with real gold dust to make him look pretty, and sent him to run free after criminals."
"So he wasn't depressed?"
"Of course he was!" the keeper snapped, changing mood suddenly. "Falco, he was turning into a cage-pacer. He wanted to be running after gazelles back in Africa, with lionesses available. All lions can be solitary if they have to-but for preference they love to fornicate."
"He was fretting, and you were very fond of him. So was it you who put him out of his misery?" I asked sternly.
"No." Buxus' voice was miserable. "He was just restless. I've seen worse. I'm going to miss the old beast. I never wanted to lose him."
"All right. Well that puts us back with the mystery. A locked cage isn't a closed room though; it's accessible. Could he have been speared through the bars?"
Buxus shook his head. "Not easily."
I was outside the cage by then, trying it out with the long spear. "No, there's not much space-" With hardly room to draw back my arm, it was a short, awkward throw. "It would take someone extremely accurate to loose off a shot through the bars. The bestiarii are good, but they don't hunt indoors. I suppose they could have just poked him-"
"Leonidas would have tried to avoid the spear, Falco. And he would have roared. I was only next door. I'd have heard him."
"That's a good point. It was some spear thrust that killed him anyway. From close quarters, and with space to maneuver." I knelt beside the corpse, checking it over again. There were no other wounds on the body. The lion was definitely killed by one terrific blow-with the weapon handheld, I reckoned, not a throw-impaling the beast from straight in front. It was extremely professional. The situation must have been damned dangerous. The spear itself would have been a heavy one, and withstanding the onrush of the lion would have taken courage and power. Then I guessed Leonidas had fallen immediately, right where he was killed.
"Maybe he was killed near the front of the cage, the spear broke, then he crawled away." Buxus lacked my expertise in working out the processes. He had a slave's habit of self-contradiction too-unless he were deliberately trying to confuse me.
"We said killing him through the bars wouldn't work." Even so, to cover the possibility, I led Buxus to the front of the cage and examined the straw. "Look-no blood. You haven't mucked him out today, have you? If he was alive and crawling, he would have bled." I walked the keeper back to where the lion lay. Seizing the beast by its massive paws I braced myself and dragged him sideways to examine the straw under his belly. Buxus lent a hand. "Some blood, but not enough."
"What's it mean, Falco?"
"He was not killed through the bars, and I doubt if anyone came inside the cage. It would be far too risky and there isn't enough space to wield the spear."
"So what happened to Leonidas?"
"He was killed somewhere else. Then his body was moved in here after he died."
Eight
IF LEONIDAS WAS taken elsewhere, let's look for signs of what happened-"
"Falco, nobody could have got him away from here!"
"It will do no harm to look."
Buxus was looking nervous now, as if he had remembered that Calliopus wanted him to mislead me. I needed to search for evidence quickly, before some slave came along with a flat-headed broom and either accidentally or purposely swept away clues.
Outside in the exercise area the gladiators had stirred up so much dust there was no longer any chance that tracks from last night would show. I wondered if this was deliberate, but the fighters had to train, and this was where they normally did it. They had gone back to their exercises and kept up their racket, leaping around me with horrible yells as I crouched looking for pawprints on the hard dry ground. Their aggression made me feel tense. It was supposed to be practice, but they were big enough and moving fast enough to do serious damage if we collided. Occasionally one of the sparring men crashed so close I was forced to scramble aside. They ignored what I was trying to do. That in itself was unnatural. People are normally more curious.
"There's no hope of prints or spots of blood. We're too late-" I stood up. Time for a new tack. "Buxus, if you had been moving Leonidas to the arena, how would you have done it? I presume you don't take the big growlers out for walkies on dog leads?"
The slave looked shifty for some reason. "We have traveling cages."
"Where are they kept?"
Controlling his reluctance he led me slowly around the back of the barracks to a row of lean-to stores. Impassively he watched as I glanced into most of them, finding bales of straw and tools-buckets, long poles for controlling angry animals, straw figures to distract the wild beasts in the arena, and finally under an open-sided shed three or four compact cages on wheels, neat enough to be squeezed between the cages of the menagerie, and just large enough to transport a lion or leopard from place to place.
"How do you get the beasts inside one of these?"
"It's quite a game!"
"But you're well practiced?"
Buxus squirmed in his rough tunic; he was embarrassed, though pleased, by my praising his skill.
I examined the nearest cage closely. There was nothing suspicious. I was walking away when intuition drew me back.
Empty, the wheeled cages were easy to manipulate. I managed to pull out the one I had examined single-handed; Buxus stood by, glaring. He said nothing and made no attempt to stop me, but nor did he weigh in to help. Perhaps he knew, or guessed, what I would find: the next cage did provide evidence. Kneeling down inside it, I soon discovered traces of blood.
I jumped out and dragged the second cage into the light. "Someone has made a very crude attempt to hide this, simply pulling out another cage and parking the significant one at the back."
"Oh really?" said Buxus.
"Pathetic!" I showed him the blood. "Seen that before?"
"I might have done. It's just an old stain."
"That stain is not too old, my friend. And it looks as if somebody tried to wash it away-the kind of useless scrubber my mother would refuse to have working on her kitchen floor." The watery run-off had been absorbed far along the grain of the wooden floor of the cage, but the original splashes of blood could still be seen as darker, more concentrated marks. "Not much effort went into it-or else there wasn't enough time to do a good job."