I
Nobody sensible takes a leisure cruise in February. Only idiots would do it: the kind of well-heeled tourists who turn up in oversized boats with music so loud that their crew cannot hear the protests from commercial craft they are swamping. Down at Ostia and Portus, outward-bound vessels are held up because the seas are stormy and unsafe, so the trippers hang around in the city, annoying the rest of us.
During the lull between Saturnalia and the big spring festivals, people here do not want them. They are too much trouble for too little profit. They catch fevers; they break ankles in potholes; they lose their cash through theft or their own carelessness. At least that makes the locals smile. Occasionally their illnesses or accidents are fatal, which is good for the funeral and carrier trade: embalming and re-patriation of corpses to distant provinces command a high price. “Chersonesus Taurica? Ooh, that’s going to come at a premium…” But sometimes visitors’ disasters are not accidental. Then, if the authorities can be bothered, they may investigate. If they hire a freelance, it might even be me.
That winter, one group of emmets had arrived from northern Europe. I lived up on the Aventine tops so did not witness their disembarkation, but as a young girl I had been brought up in a house at the foot of the hill, so I had observed plenty of these characters as they paraded in their elegant travelling cloaks, pinned with look at me! brooches. Over the years I defined the people wearing them. The new group, I was later to learn, included the usual bigamists, blackmailers and spongers. Parents hated their children; siblings plotted against each other. Adultery was as catching as ringworm. Hanging on to those who possessed fortunes were hopeful remote relatives, bumbling doctors, cheating accountants and baleful secretariat staff. Some of the tourists had mysterious pasts—feel free to groan. All were extremely self-absorbed, and although they made a lot of noise, none seemed to be enjoying themselves.
It would emerge that the group included oddities: a would-be novelist, barred from a career because she was female; an engineer who yearned to see the Forum sewers; a man from Umbria who claimed he was interested in Egyptology, though he behaved like a spy; and a plump elderly person, who spoke in a mannered accent about a mystic search for truth. Possibly he was a druid. I had met one once. I don’t waste my time on druids.
Along the way these characters had gathered up a solo female traveller wearing valuable ear-rings. She had an agenda of her own.
The main party was plodding the heritage trail. It would be too cold and wet to enjoy monumental sites, but they meant to try. In Rome, once deposited on the embankment, they strolled around, bumping into stevedores, then hurting themselves on bollards. They rebuffed hawkers, believing them to be pickpockets, but cosied up to real wharfside thieves. Porters, aiming to pick locks on jewel boxes, rushed up and offered to carry trunks, bales, lapdogs and invalid sedans; endless haggling ensued. A testy official moved the group on. They asked for the name of his superior; he answered with an obvious lie.
After these people had been led to lodgings, they complained about room sizes and the smell of drains, then hired a guide, who took the job because it was the low season, so he was desperate. At least he knew they would believe any myth he invented and they would eat lunch at his cousin’s bar. He led them around the Flavian Amphitheatre, up to the golden Capitol and into the Imperial Palace with its tiring list of coloured marbles; every evening he shovelled them into more bars, where they were entertained by bare-bellied dancers and sold very nasty trinkets that fell apart in five minutes. They now owned faux-bronze lamps shaped like phalluses, and face creams with poisonous ingredients. What more could Rome possibly offer them? Time to move on.
Athens and Alexandria were calling. Off floated a river boat to take this load of cultured loafers back down to the port, where they hoped to find a freighter with passenger space, preferably with a cabin and cooking facilities. Everyone warned them no ships were likely to cross the Mediterranean for weeks, but these people were not big listeners. Tiber boats plied up and down all the time, after all. Dock workers, commercial traders, and customs officers went to and fro on legitimate business; foreigners who did not know the proper fare were always greeted with a toothless smile. I would guess that neither the captain who took them to the coast nor his half-drunk bosun bothered with a passenger headcount. Luggage may not have been properly assigned. Nor did the tourists pay attention to who came up the gangplank to board with them—or who did not.
One had been left behind.
She had not got out of bed too late to catch the boat. Nor was she smitten with a gigolo she couldn’t bear to leave. She hadn’t found long-lost relatives. She wouldn’t be spending more time in our city because she adored its culture, cuisine and colour. She had passed her last day in Rome, though she was not leaving.
The lady with the ear-rings was now in the river, drifting among the sediment.
II
I had never thought much of the Tiber.
In Londinium, where I spent my childhood at the end of the world, the Thamesis flows wide and strong. It remains tidal as far as the new Roman capital, so shipping can move right up the channel, without prior unloading. A Customs House where traders pay their taxes stands on the north bank looking right up to the half-built forum, where bargains are struck, edicts pronounced, and where, in downsized versions of imperial temples, a mixed bunch of gods can be thanked for safe delivery. People who have survived the rough Britannic Strait often turn fervently to religion.
In Rome, as I had learned on my first arrival, the ocean approach had strong winds but was not as hellish as crossing between Britain and Gaul. Even so, landing or exporting goods involved a struggle. Everything had to progress nearly twenty miles inland from the sea by road across bleak salt marshes or via the tricky, meandering river.
Rome had come into existence at an unprepossessing spot where the river could be crossed by a muddy ford or ferry. The Tiber was two hundred and fifty miles long. It came winding down from the Apennine Mountains, crystal clear at first, then picking up as much loose material as old Father Tiberinus could suck in. Silt surged downstream, giving the molten-lead-coloured water a yellowish tinge. Fools called it the golden river; wise people never drank from it.
The Tiber pushed through the city bottleneck, its current sickly with alluvial sediment. In winter it rose and spread widely. The original habitation site had always been marshland, and parts remained squelchy for centuries after Romulus and Remus emerged from their hilltop huts. A couple of small historic temples had had to be built on tall perches to keep them out of repeated floods. However, in summer, there were also periods when the river was not deep enough for commercial shipping. At one point in historic times, a substantial and permanent island emerged in the middle of the stream; only bumboats could creep past, and transport beyond was operated by a guild of specialist navigators who were licensed for that part of the river. Bridges, bearing the names of ancient men of note, had hunched piers that caused worse blockages of sand, tree branches and any rubbish that feckless people further upstream had chucked in. Dead dogs, dumped horses and decaying human bodies were quite common.
Still, silt was the chief menace. This applied all through the city, above and below the bridges, continuing down to the sea. A new port had been built after Ostia became too sludged-up. This basin needed constant maintenance. A linking canal thickened like porridge if no one tended it. For miles out to sea, plumes of escaping silt changed the water colour from glorious blue to queasy green. To keep things as clear as possible, the authorities used dredgers.
One February day, in the glorious fifteenth consulship of our Emperor Domitian and the second of his decrepit colleague Nerva, one of these dredgers caught the attention of my husband and me. Tiberius Manlius, a building contractor, had been at the great Emporium to see whether he could pick up a marble column on the cheap for a temple porch he was renovating. He was a mild man, currently seething.
Back at home we had left sick children who had passed on colds to their nursemaid, quarrelsome staff and unhappy visitors. We had run out of lamp oil and the doors to the dining room had jammed shut, just when the painters who sometimes showed up unexpectedly had indeed shown up, intent on doing a new triclinium fresco. Who ordered The Battle of Salamis, with dolphins on the dado? Who the hell was going to pay for it? What idiot had reckoned its rows of curly waves, trireme oars and fishy tails would dry out properly in winter? Because I, his feisty wife, was growing stressed, Tiberius had brought me out with him. He knew the adage that most murders happen domestically and he didn’t want blood on our atrium mosaic. We had brought the dog with us, keeping her on a short rope because of the bustle.
In the hectic noise of the Emporium, Tiberius, too, became tetchy when a suitable piece at a suitable price could not be found. He was advised to visit the new imperial marble yard on the Field of Mars, an open-air treasure house where they might show him more useful offcuts; he dug in his heels because his grandfather, a marble importer, had never had to do that—and, besides, the word “imperial” gave him indigestion.
We moved outside to the wharf, him chewing his lip and me now playing the tolerant partner.
“Calm down, darling.”
“I don’t need to calm down.”
“Of course not…” Is that the oldest marital exchange in the world?
The river was crowded, which we came to realise was partly because of a hold-up caused by the cumbersome dredging vessel and a barge that took away the silt it scooped up; both were uncharacteristically moored on the Embankment.
“Hello! What’s going on? Look at this!”
A queue of ferries, lighters and a few larger cargo boats were having to wait to reach the unloading wharf, though that could have been because the men who assigned berths had given up and gone for a break while they waited for a problem to be sorted. The big dredging boat was berthed at what ought to have been the busiest landing bay.
Beyond the dredger floated a flat-bottomed hopper barge, into which silt had been loaded—silt and something else. A grumbling dockhand told us the story, as he went off to get a hot toddy while everything was at a stop. The dredger had stirred up, and picked up, a corpse. This had been quickly tipped out into the hopper barge, perhaps with a view to losing it discreetly later. When people on other boats began shouting, the dredger came to shore.
No one was paying the body any attention when we arrived. On transports riding out in the river, crewmen leaned on rails with a grim patience that said they had seen this before; they hadn’t been impressed on the other occasions and expected nothing better now. Lower in the water a couple of one-man skiffs had their oars laid up while men were fishing. If they had seen the corpse before it was picked up, they probably rowed around it on purpose. Don’t drown yourself in the Tiber: you will be given no respect.
Someone must have called in the authorities. Milling around on the quay was a small group of vigiles troops in their red tunics; the law-and-order lads were acting officious on principle, which meant doing nothing to sort out the standstill.
I am a private informer, when home duties allow, so I noted what was happening, though with only mild curiosity. Drowned bodies were not new. I assumed this one was being dealt with as routine. Tragic, Legate. Someone fell in. Pull them out and call for a clearance cart.
Four men that I took to be the dredger’s crew were being interviewed aboard by a vigiles enquirer. He was keeping them on deck, and had his note tablet out, though was not writing in it. The ex-slaves from his troop just wandered about on shore in case they found anyone to pin to a wall who might be a purse-thief, one who would hand over any stolen purses in order to be let off. Then it would be warm pies all round for the law-and-order boys.
The investigator was new. He was a moon-faced loon with a ponderous manner and I soon viewed him as useless. My uncle, Lucius Petronius, who had done that job before retirement, would already have had his troops on store-to-store enquiries all the way from here to the Aemilian Bridge—and because Petro could command respect, they would have done it properly and not have minded. One would have been singled out for finding a purse-thief while the rest diligently searched for witnesses to the death. Then Petro would have been included in the warm-pies round. Before he licked the last crumb from his beard stubble, he’d have had an idea of who the victim was and what had happened.
This new boy had much to learn.
* * *
Tiberius Manlius, in his usual way, was soon talking to the vigiles troops. They invited my ever-courteous husband to go onto the dredger. At once Tiberius strode aboard. He cut a lithe figure with good balance on the gangway and a cheery manner now that he had forgotten about his failure to find a column. He had worn his toga to the Emporium, hoping to look important if he had to haggle. It had the wide purple bands of his previous role as a magistrate, so anyone could see at once he was a man of authority. Even a courtesy title counts in Rome. He greeted the investigator, who looked baleful.
My role here as the wife meant I had to stay on land with the dog. The vigiles assumed I was scared of going up the plank onto the dredger’s stern, so they offered steadying hands; I explained that, no, I had once been married to an ex-marine. I could do it. But the boat carried a rat-catcher, a short-legged, heavy-bodied, flap-eared, beagly hound, which had placed front paws on the rail and was looking down as if my genteel Barley would make him a good lunch. I had to keep them apart.
Tiberius disappeared out of view; he must have gone off the other side of the dredger and jumped down onto the hopper barge. For ease of movement, he had left his toga with a crew member. I saw the skipper break away from the enquirer and go with my husband as if he thought talking to Tiberius would be a better way to spend his morning.
I waited patiently. Wives learn to do this.
When they eventually reappeared, Tiberius called down to me that the dredger had fished out a dead woman. He added that her wrists were bound together; he had stayed on the boat in case I wanted to take an interest. He began fussing the ears of the beagly dog, which had barked at him loudly but now changed his attitude and reckoned Tiberius Manlius was the best friend he had met all week. Tiberius had that effect. He had pulled the same trick with me, so I ended up married to him.
There are various ways bodies can end up in the river: suicide, accident, people too mean to pay for a normal funeral—or murder. Bound wrists indicated foul play. Even so, I wanted to avoid being drawn in. I had recently finished a complex investigation and I had a load of domestic trouble waiting for me at home.
I knew it would be kind to identify the deceased, for her sake and that of her family. Of course that assumed it wasn’t her own relatives who had done her in. Typically, your murderer is somebody you know. Where that happens, sometimes my role is to let the relatives know politely that suspicion has fallen on them.
The fact she had been tied up niggled me more than it bothered the officials. I could see they were not intending to do much. I also knew that if the boatmen were left with the problem, they would quietly tip the corpse back into the water. They would know where to drop her so the current would swing her across to the other side. Perhaps a different cohort over there would take more action, though more likely not. I had worked with the Seventh in the Transtiberina—those lads did not like putting themselves out any more than the Fourth did over here.
“Are you coming up?” asked Tiberius, not even bothering to grin at me. He knew I could not resist. I was already fastening Barley to a bollard. The vigiles, who were grinning, promised to look after our dog; they held out hands, but I skipped up the gangway unaided as my first husband had taught me. My second husband then received me on deck like a man whose day had improved. No doubt he imagined that if he could finesse the vigiles, I would acquire a new case with a fee from the Fourth’s budget that would pay for those fresco dolphins of ours.
No chance. The Fourth Cohort’s tribune was Scaurus, a notorious tight-fisted misery. He hated to lash out on consultants, even if their solutions beefed up his charge sheet for the Prefect of Vigiles. The prefect himself would rather spend petty cash on lady friends; this was a known fact. Scaurus could not afford a mistress: he was embroiled in a very expensive divorce. It had made him even more bitter. He saw freelance help as unnecessary; he would rather shove difficult case-notes under a pile of rope and forget about them. I was a particular bugbear. In my time I had impressed most of his colleagues with some quiet success, even though I knew none of them would want me around permanently. But every time Scaurus had a drink with one of the other tribunes, they chaffed him: “Isn’t Flavia Albia on your patch, that Falco’s daughter? You must find her really helpful when your dopey squad gets in a mess!”
Scaurus would choke if I took on the dredged-up lady. That thought almost made it worth doing.
Copyright © 2024 by Lindsey Davis