Last Rites (Marcus Corvinus Book 6) Page 19

  ‘Popular enough to take the best part of a month off and not feel the pinch?’

  Aegle laughed. ‘We’re none of us earning that much, Corvinus. And Celer isn’t someone to cross. Still, it’s her decision.’

  I remembered what Celer had said about the girls shacking up temporarily with some well-heeled client. ‘She wouldn’t be malingering, would she?’ I said. ‘Caught herself a rich boyfriend and be taking a pre-Festival break?’

  ‘No.’ Again I got the odd sideways look. ‘No, not Harmodia.’

  The tingle was getting stronger. Why it was there, I didn’t know, but you learn not to ignore these things. ‘You happen to know where she lives?’

  ‘Sure. In Transtiber, near the Cestian Bridge. But why?’

  ‘You free tomorrow? Could you show me?’

  ‘If you like.’ She frowned. ‘What’s your interest in Harmodia?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I didn’t; not exactly. ‘Maybe none. Just humour me. So when’s the best time to catch her in?’

  ‘One time’s as good as another. Not evenings, though.’

  ‘Okay. We’ll call it mid-morning. I’ll pick you up at your place.’

  ‘Fine. But don’t bring the litter. It makes me seasick, and I’d rather get wet.’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, right.’

  I dropped her at the junction with Tusculan and the lads turned left and began the slow climb to the Caelian. I was almost whistling.

  Maybe optimism wasn’t such a bad thing after all. At least it was a possible line of enquiry. And after the Scorpus let-down the gods knew I needed a break.

  24.

  Transtiber I don’t know all that well. It’s a little world of its own; or maybe not so little, and not just one world. Like the name implies it takes in the whole far bank of the river, from Vatican Field in the north to the southern slopes of the Janiculan. The full length of the city, that’s to say. The full social spectrum, too. Up on the Janiculan or on Vatican Hill itself you’re in rich urban villa country: mansions with the number of bedrooms well into double figures and a dining-room for each season of the year. The fat-cat belt, new money mostly but lots of it: government contractors, owners of shipping lines, guys who’ve cornered the market in grain or wine or oil or whatever else the city uses in bulk. Spanish racehorse breeders who need a little place to hang their mantles when they do business in Rome. Even the occasional politician who’s managed to salt away enough kickbacks to buy himself some clean country air.

  At the other end of the scale there’re the tenements, crowded into the low-lying land in the bulge of the river next to the bridges and sandwiched north and south by the big warehouse areas. This part’s one of the poorest in Rome. Most other places, ground- and first-floor property makes at least some claim to respectability. In Transtiber after the rains go to bed any lower than the second storey and you can wake up to find eels in your blanket. That’s if you wake up at all. Still, one thing the locals share with their fat-cat colleagues up the hill is exclusivity: rich or poor, they’re Transtiberines first, Romans (in the city sense, at least) second and nowhere. For Transtibbies, Rome stops at the bridges. Cross the Sublician or the Cestian and you’re in another town.

  Harmodia’s tenement was on a corner site next to an oil-seller’s. It looked in better repair than most, although that wasn’t saying much: if I’d been the oil guy I’d’ve had a permanent crick in my neck from checking for falling masonry.

  ‘That’s her flat up there.’ Aegle pointed. ‘Second floor, third window from the right. She isn’t in, though.’

  ‘Yeah? And just how do you know that, lady?’ The shutters were open; it was a beautiful December morning, with not a cloud in the sky.

  ‘She keeps birds in a cage on the ledge. When she’s out she leaves them with a neighbour. That’s them, in the window next door.’

  Yeah; I could see the little fluffballs. Hear them, too. You’d’ve thought this was spring rather than close to the Winter Festival.

  We went up. For a tenement it wasn’t too bad; there were none of the personal smells you’d get on an ordinary city stairway, and not so much as a scribble on the walls. That’s another thing about Transtiber, or maybe the same thing: poor or not, the place is more like a big village than an urban slum. The locals take a pride in their property like wouldn’t happen in the Subura or Circus Valley.

  Aegle knocked on the door just to make sure. There was no answer. I thought of Thalia’s place, but I wasn’t really worried: the girl had been alive and kicking seven days ago, at least, when she’d called in at the guildhouse, and Aegle’s point about the birds showed there was nothing unusual about the housekeeping arrangements. Still, it looked like we’d made another wasted journey, which was a bugger,

  ‘We’ll ask Aquillia,’ Aegle said.

  ‘She the neighbour?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She went to the door opposite and knocked on that. ‘She should know.’

  At least we struck lucky this time. Aquillia turned out to be a real butterball: a little middle-aged Spanish dumpling as far from Thalia’s Mother Nemesis as you can get. She ushered us in, set down the bowl of ground chickpeas she’d been making into rissoles on the table and wiped her hands on a cloth. A clean cloth, I noticed, which went with the rest of the room. Obviously Aquillia was the house-proud type.

  ‘She’s staying at her mother’s for a while, dear,’ she said. ‘Girlfriend trouble.’

  I glanced at Aegle. Uh-huh; so that explained why she’d turned down my suggestion of the rich toyboy. ‘She been gone long?’ I said.

  ‘Six or seven days, sir.’ Aquillia gave me an assessing look, but she hadn’t hesitated. ‘She said she wouldn’t be back until after the Festival.’

  ‘You happen to know where the mother lives?’

  ‘In the city, down by Pottery Mountain.’ Yeah; I’d got her: way downriver, beyond the Aventine and near Ostian Road. Pottery Mountain was just that: a huge scrapheap built up over the years from the city’s empty oil and wine jars, ferried there on barges and unloaded by municipal slaves. ‘She runs the family pastry business in Bakers’ Market.’

  Six or seven days. So she’d left at the time of her visit to the guildhouse, which was two days after the first murder. It fitted. The back of my neck prickled. ‘Uh, what kind of girlfriend trouble would that be, now?’ I said.

  Aquillia shook her head firmly. ‘No, sir,’ she said. ‘You ask her yourself about that, if you really want to know.’

  ‘It’s okay, Aquillia,’ Aegle said. ‘Corvinus here’s a friend. And it’s important.’ She glanced at me. ‘Right?’

  ‘Yeah.’ The prickle was becoming a full-blown itch. ‘I think it might be very important.’

  Aquillia looked from one of us to the other. ‘She’s in some sort of trouble?’

  ‘Nothing that’s her fault,’ I said. ‘But she may be, yeah. I’m sorry, lady, but this once you’re going to have to break your rule.’

  Aquillia grunted and looked at Aegle again. Aegle nodded. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’m saying nothing against Harmy, mind. She was bad news, that one, the worst. I told Harmy from the beginning: “You drop her, girl, before she drops you hard.” Thank the gods she saw sense while she still could. She’s a good girl, Harmy. I don’t like to see her hurt.’

  ‘You know this girlfriend’s name?’

  ‘She called herself Myrrhine.’

  I caught Aegle’s eye but she shook her head. ‘Means nothing,’ she said. ‘No one I know. What did she look like, Aquillia?’

  ‘Biggish woman; woman, not girl: mid-, maybe late twenties. Not tall but well-built. Broad shoulders, muscular arms. Face had pockmarks all over.’

  Aegle was looking excited. ‘She have very short nails?’ she said. ‘Short to the quick, like she bit them?’

  ‘That’s her.’

  ‘Yeah. Right.’ Aegle turned to me. ‘You’ve got your flutegirl, Corvinus.’

  Jupiter! I stared at her. ‘You sure?’

  ‘Hund
red per cent. I noticed the nails while she was playing. We all have short nails, you need them for the pipes, but these’d been chewed. And the pockmarks explain the heavy make-up.’

  Shit; the killer had been a woman after all.

  ‘She played the flute, all right,’ Aquillia was saying. ‘That was how Harmy and her got friendly. They met in a cookshop in the Subura.’

  ‘Maenalus’s?’ That was Aegle again.

  ‘That’s the name. Harmy says she uses it a lot while she’s working.’

  ‘It’s where a lot of the girls hang out,’ Aegle told me. ‘Just up the road from the guildhouse.’

  ‘Who made the running, Aquillia?’ I asked. Then, when the woman’s brow furrowed: ‘Did Harmy start the conversation or was it this Myrrhine?’

  ‘That I don’t know, sir, but I’d guess Myrrhine. Harmy’s a quiet girl. She don’t talk much.’

  Uh-huh. Things were beginning to take shape. ‘And when did this happen?’

  ‘The day before the kalends.’ Four before the murder in other words. We’d got our killer for sure. ‘Myrrhine moved in the next day. That was when the trouble started.’

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘The woman was a bitch.’ The word, out of character, came out quiet and deliberate. ‘The morning of the third day Harmy came to me crying.’

  ‘Yeah?’ I pricked up my ears. The third day would be the day of the murder. ‘She explain why?’

  ‘She’d been bad for a while with her throat. It’d got worse, seemingly, and she’d had to give up her place playing at the rites of the Good Goddess to another girl.’

  ‘Thalia,’ Aegle said.

  ‘That was her.’ Aquillia nodded. ‘Anyway, that morning she’d told Myrrhine. They had words. Myrrhine punched her, loosened a tooth and almost broke the poor girl’s jaw. Then she left.’

  Yeah, well: it didn’t take much to see what had been going on here. Loose tooth or not, Harmodia had been lucky; Jupiter, had that girl been lucky!

  ‘And she didn’t come back,’ I said. It was a statement, not a question: if the bitch had done then we’d’ve had another corpse on our hands. That was certain as tomorrow’s sunrise.

  ‘Not for three days.’ Aquillia’s lips set. ‘I told Harmy: “You go to your mother’s now, girl; you leave that woman to us, to me and my Aulus, we’ll handle her.” She wouldn’t, the silly girl, not at first; you know how they are at that age, sir, they haven’t the sense they were born with. Only two days later she came round with her birds to say she’d changed her mind.’ Yeah; that’d be after she’d had the news at the guildhouse and tumbled to what was going on. Kid or not, Harmodia wasn’t stupid. ‘She was just in time, too. The woman came back that night and tried to get in but the door was locked and we had the key. I sent Aulus out, and he said the language you wouldn’t believe. Aulus’s been a stevedore down at the docks for fifteen years and he’d never heard the like. It took him all his time to get rid of her.’ She paused. ‘That Myrrhine’s evil, sir. And I don’t use the word lightly.’

  Yeah; I’d go for that assessment. And stevedore or not, Aulus had been pretty lucky himself not to end up with his throat slashed; in view of which I wondered if the guy hadn’t glossed over the details a bit where his wife’s sensibilities were concerned. If so, personally I didn’t blame him. ‘One more question, Aquillia,’ I said. ‘You happen to know where this Myrrhine lived before she moved in here? Or even where she might be now?’

  ‘No. And I don’t think Harmy does either.’

  Well, we’d have to see about that. Certainly our next job was to talk to the girl herself.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, getting up. ‘Thanks for your help, mother. Harmy’s lucky in her neighbours.’

  The woman reddened. ‘She’s only nineteen, sir,’ she said. ‘Aulus and me, we had a daughter of our own once, but she died. I don’t need thanks.’

  ‘Even so, unless I’m wrong you saved the kid’s life. Literally.’ Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Aegle giving me a sharp look. ‘Last thing. If Myrrhine calls round again, or anyone else for that matter, you play dumb, right? And tell the local Watch. Mention my name’ – I gave it to her in full, plus the address – ‘give the guy in charge Myrrhine’s description and ask him to get his lads to keep an eye out for her, pick her up if they can.’

  Aquillia frowned. ‘You don’t know the Watch around here, sir,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t do a lot of good, believe me. As for the rest of it, whatever happens across the river in this neighbourhood we look after our own. If the woman makes any more trouble there won’t be a third time. My Aulus’ll see to that.’

  Ouch; that had the quiet sound of a promise, not a threat. Dumpling or not, the lady had a core that was pure steel. You don’t mess with Transtibbies.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Just take care, you and Aulus both. And let me know, right?’

  ‘Where to now?’ Aegle said as we left the building. ‘Pottery Mountain?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I was looking around carefully, but I couldn’t see any sign of a homicidal fluteplayer in the vicinity. Even so – and call it paranoia if you like – I wasn’t taking any chances: if Harmodia had lived this long it was because her new girlfriend didn’t know where she was, and the logical thing for Myrrhine to do in that case was to stake out the girl’s flat and wait for her to come back. And if Myrrhine was watching then it made getting to Harmodia without running the risk of taking the bitch with us in the form of a tail a real bugger.

  Being where we were, and going where we were going, of course, the solution was obvious. And that was unfortunate…

  Yeah, well, there was no way round it; walking was out anyway, and, besides, Pottery Mountain was a long way off. Bite the strap, Corvinus.

  I turned back to Aegle.

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Litters make you seasick, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Fine. You want the good news or the bad news?’

  ‘Come on, Corvinus, stop messing! What is this?’

  ‘Just answer the question.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said cautiously. ‘The good news.’

  I grinned. ‘We’re not taking a litter.’

  25.

  I hate boats. Sea boats are the absolute pits, but river boats I can live without as well. I don’t think Aegle was too keen on them either, although by the time we’d cleared the tip of the island she’d gone the colour of a bad mussel and wasn’t communicating much. At least the skiff or the punt or whatever the hell it was that we’d hired at the Cestian was fast, and we were travelling with the current: even in winter when the river’s high the Tiber’s no place to be for longer than you can help, not if you like to do your breathing through your nose. I noticed that the guy who owned the thing and was propelling us downriver breathed with his mouth. Probably an old seadog’s trick, like never pissing into the wind.

  He dropped us at a wharf just upstream of the mountain itself. I asked directions from a couple of guys fishing – Jupiter knew what they expected to catch, and why: this far down, below the exits for the city’s drains, the water looked like soup – and we headed off for Bakers’ Market.

  Aegle was a better colour now, but she was still looking pretty queasy. ‘You think this Myrrhine would really have killed Harmodia?’ she said as we walked past the long line of state granaries: this is corn country, the main unloading stretch for the grain barges ferrying the city’s life-blood from the big transports down at Ostia.

  ‘Sure she would. That was why she came back.’

  ‘But why kill her at all?’

  ‘Use your head, lady!’ I said. ‘Harmodia was the first victim; or she should have been, rather. It was a set-up. For the mechanics of Cornelia’s murder to work Myrrhine needed an in with one of the girls playing at the rites. She stakes out that cookshop near the guildhouse you mentioned…’

  ‘Maenalus’s.’

  ‘Right. Once she’s found her mark she makes friends with her; the idea being when the time co
mes she zeroes the girl and takes her place.’

  ‘So Thalia died instead.’ Aegle was looking sick, and it wasn’t sea-sickness now. ‘Because she was standing in.’

  ‘Yeah. That sore throat saved the girl’s life. Myrrhine had set the scam up nicely, only it went down the tubes at the last minute when Harmodia told her she’d cancelled out. She had to cut her losses there and then and go for the replacement.’

  ‘Why didn’t she kill Harmodia anyway?’

  ‘She couldn’t run the risk of being caught. Also she’d other fish to fry. Besides, Harmodia was no threat, she didn’t know nothing from nowhere. Later, after the murder, things were different, especially since Thalia was dead too. Harmodia would’ve been a fool if she hadn’t put two and two together. If she’d still been around when Myrrhine came calling the girl would’ve died. Myrrhine had to kill her to shut her mouth.’

  ‘That’s horrible.’

  ‘Sure it’s horrible. The kid can just thank Aquillia and her husband that it didn’t happen.’

  Aegle went very quiet after that, and she looked even sicker.

  We were getting close. I could see Bakers’ Market up ahead; smell it, too, a combination of fresh bread, herbs and spices. The street trade in sweet and savoury buns, bread-rings and honey cake, like every other trade in Rome, is run by families who’ve been in the business for generations, and most of them had set up here to be near the corn supply and save on freight charges. Harmodia’s mother would belong to one of these. Jupiter knew why the girl had gone for a fluteplayer rather than sticking with the family trade, but you get these mavericks at every level. Look at me. If I’d stuck with tradition and done things the way Dad wanted me to I’d’ve had my place in the senate by now, maybe even made city judge, and be spending my time hobnobbing with slick bastards like Nomentanus and buttering up sleazeballs like Galba. Yeah, well; it’s nice to get something right now and again.

  I’d forgotten to ask Aquillia for the mother’s name, but Aegle knew it anyway so we found the particular bakery no bother: a small concern in an alleyway off the main square. There was a slim, dark-haired girl inside, pulling a tray of hot bread-rings from the oven.