Part 11 (1/2)

'At what point that evening did Statia.n.u.s and Valeria have their final quarrel? Was it when he reappeared drunk?' I wondered if it was Valeria's first experience of this. Given that she had been brought up only by a guardian and a remote grandfather in Sicily, the girl might never before have seen a close relative staggering and vomiting and behaving unreasonably. Maybe she was squeamish.

'Before we men went out.' Sertorius disappointed me.

'It was just a tiff,' his wife murmured, almost whispering the words.

I rounded on her. 'So you do know what it was about?'

She shook her head quickly. Helena shot me a warning not to hara.s.s Sertoria, then leaned forward to her. 'Please tell us. This is so important!'

But Sertoria Silene insisted, 'I don't know.'

Her husband then told us, just as decisively, that none of them knew anything of subsequent events. As a family, he said, they retired early to bed - because of the children, he charmingly explained. His wife had already told us he had been drunk, so no doubt there had been angry words, followed by tortured silences.

As if scared that somebody would say too much, they all stood up and retreated to their room, ending our interview.

Helena let them go with the mild comment that it would do the Sertorius children good to have an enforced afternoon nap.

XXIII.

The other two couples saw the family depart and noisily waved us to their table.

'Up for it?' I muttered to Helena.

'Don't get sozzled!' she hissed back.

'Don't get cheeky! I am total sobriety - but can you keep your hands off the winecup, fruit?'

'Stop me when I go purple.'

'Ah too late, too late!'

The foursome shrieked a welcome. They had watched us bantering snappily; they liked us for it. The men were already beaming like debauched cupid grape-treaders on a wine bar wall-panel. They were well glued to their stools by now, incapable of s.h.i.+fting until their bladders became quite desperate, but the women were probably never static; they leapt up at our approach and together hauled a bench nearer for us, straining in their flimsy frocks like navvies and then flailing into the wrong husbands' laps. Cleonymus and Amaranthus groped them, automatically, then shoved them on to the seats they had previously occupied, like men who had gone through this routine before.

All four were older than befitted their behaviour and bright outfits. I put the men at sixty, the women older if anything - yet it was the men who looked to be flagging at this lunch table. Cleonymus and Cleonyma, the two freed slaves with a huge inheritance, had hands which had quite clearly done much manual labour, though their fingers were now expensively be-ringed. The other couple were harder to place. Amaranthus, the suspected adulterer, had narrow, wary eyes, while Minucia seemed tired. Whether she was tired of life, of travel - or even tired of Amaranthus, we could not deduce.

They positively rushed to tell us all they knew, making the details lurid where they could. I tried saying I hoped they did not mind more questions, at which they bellowed with laughter then a.s.sured me, they had hardly been asked anything yet. So Aquillius was too sn.o.bbish to speak to freedmen. That was no surprise.

'It was me who heard him coming.' Cleonyma took centre stage. She was a thin, wiry woman who burned off her physical excesses with nervous energy. Good bones and lack of fat gave her a handsome face; had she laid off the eye paint she would have looked even better. She shuddered, her skinny shoulders lifting beneath the fine pleats of her gown; it was held together with vivid clasps and, as she moved, ovals of oiled, scrawny, suntanned flesh came and went between large gaps in the material.

'Statia.n.u.s? Was he calling for help?' asked Helena.

'Yelling his head off. No one else bothered to notice; you know how people are. I was going outside. As I went through the tent door, he staggered up, weeping bitterly, with the b.l.o.o.d.y corpse held in his arms. Her dress was all filthy with sand from the exercise yard. Her head, though - her head was so horribly battered you could hardly tell that it was her.. I nursed my master through ten years of a wasting illness; I saw enough there not to faint at mess, you know - but Valeria's body turned my stomach, and I only glimpsed her.'

Cleonyma now looked haggard beneath her glinting face powder. Minucia took her hand. An emerald ring flashed. She carried more weight than Cleonyma, and although she too almost certainly carted around a compendium of face creams, her skin was very coa.r.s.e.

Overcome, Cleonyma leaned her head on Minucia's shoulder; about four pounds of Indian pearls lurched sideways on her flat chest. A fully rounded perfume of rose petals and jasmine on one lady clashed waft for waft with a headier essence of Arabian balsam. After a moment of comfort in a mingled aroma cloud, Cleonyma sat up again; her pearls strands clacked and tumbled straight once more. The women's two scents uncoiled and slid dangerously against each other like towering clouds moving one way while a second raft of weather moves in the opposite direction underneath. Just like a coming coastal storm, it left us restless and unsettled. Minucia even mopped her forehead, though that could have been the drink overheating her.

More subdued now, the party of four described subsequent events: how Statia.n.u.s was persuaded to relinquish his ghastly burden; the few muddled attempts by locals to discover what had happened; the cursory investigation carried out by Aquillius. n.o.body at the site took any real interest in Valeria's fate initially, beyond the usual lascivious nosiness in whether the young woman had been having affairs.

'Who called in the quaestor to take charge?' asked Helena, thinking it must have been Sertoria Silene, or perhaps the widow Helvia.

'I did!' Minucia surprised us. In outward style she resembled Cleonyma, especially since the two couples had shopped for their present outfits at the same market boutique. I found it hard to place her otherwise. She could have been a freed slave too, but equally I could see her as the hardworking wife of some freeborn craftsman or shopkeeper; maybe she had tired of arguing with a lazy husband and rebellious children, had run off with Amaranthus in desperation, and now knew she could not easily return to her home town.

'How come, Minucia?'

'Things were getting ridiculous. I had nothing against Valeria, poor soul. She did not deserve what happened to her. The priests were all trying to ignore the problem, some d.a.m.ned women from Elis were extremely obnoxious - what in Hades had it to do with them in any case? - and when I heard there was a Roman official at the VIP's guesthouse, I just marched right up to him and made a fuss.'

'Aquillius seems convinced Statia.n.u.s was the guilty party,' I said.

'Never!' We all looked at Cleonyma. True, she was enjoying the drama. Even so, her verdict was that of a shrewd, quietly observant woman. 'I saw him straight after he found her. I'll never forget his face. The boy is innocent.'

'Aquillius Macer must be fairly inexperienced,' Helena brooded. Amaranthus scoffed, summing up the quaestor as a man who would abuse his mother. Cleonymus insulted that n.o.blewoman even more lewdly, not only casting doubt on the quaestor's paternity, but suggesting that an animal had been involved. Not one of the cuddly ones. Helena smiled. 'You are saying Aquillius could not organise his way out of a bran sack?'

'Not even if he had a great big map,' agreed Amaranthus, glumly drinking wine.

Until now, Helena had barely touched her cup, but now she topped it up herself. 'Here's a question for you. Your tour is supposed to be escorted. So where was your organiser, Phineus?'

A silence fell.

'People think Phineus is wonderful,' Cleonyma remarked, to no one in particular. She left the statement hanging.

'One or two people think he's b.l.o.o.d.y terrible,' her husband disagreed, but they did not argue over it.

'Did Phineus help, after the murder?' Helena persisted. 'Aren't you all paying him to keep you out of trouble?'

'He did what he could,' snorted Cleonymus. 'That wasn't much - still, there wasn't much anyone could have done, given that Aquillius was determined to keep us trapped in that tent until he could arrest someone - and that he failed miserably to decide who it should be. Only the fact that Aquillius wanted to come back to Corinth made him say we could all go free. Even then -' Cleonymus gave me a dark look. 'Our reprieve was temporary.'

'So what, to be precise, did Phineus really do for you?' I asked.

'Kept the food coming and ensured the wine improved,' Minucia told me, caustically. 'I thought he could have moved us into decent accommodation, though that never happened. But he kept at it, talking to Aquillius. 'Negotiating for us,' he maintained.'

'Aquillius speaks well of him.'

'Mind you -' Amaranthus used a heavy mannered delivery which combined making a point with making a joke. 'We have established to general satisfaction, haven't we, that Aquillius Macer is so bright he could lose himself in an empty sack.'

I smiled at his response. 'So, my friends - any idea where your wonderful escort is right now?'

Apparently, Phineus was earning himself a few drachmas, trotting off to Cythera with some other visiting Romans, while he waited for this group to be given their release. Cythera, an island at the extreme southern end of the Peloponnese, seemed a d.a.m.ned long way to let a suspect travel.

'I hope, for their sakes, he doesn't take them to that conniving murex-seller who cheated us last year,' said Cleonyma. Murex is the special sh.e.l.lfish dye used for purple cloth; its cost is phenomenal. Cleonyma and her husband apparently had an intimate knowledge of shopping for luxury goods.

Since we seemed to have exhausted their knowledge of the murder, Helena started asking Cleonyma about their past travels. Although this was their first trip with Seven Sights, the couple were old hands.