Death on the Tiber by Lindsey Davis

Author:Lindsey Davis [Davis, Lindsey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery & Detective - Ancient Rome
ISBN: 9781399719605
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2024-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

I did know some­one who had met him.

Al­though he sup­pos­edly never did any­thing use­ful, Ju­ven­tus was the mem­ber of the Sec­ond Co­hort who ar­rived early at the of­fice. The rest of the day shift were still buy­ing their break­fasts in streets nearby. It was their cus­tom not to hurry. Never be­ing party to their heated dis­cus­sions about why the Greens were crap and the short-arse Reds should all be sent to the sil­ver mines, Ju­ven­tus turned up at their sta­tion-house on his own.

I was still pass­ing the time of day with their night-shift clerk. My mind was not fully on pleas­antries. It had given me a jar to come back through the Horti Lami­ani to the Sec­ond’s base. On the way I had passed the black­ened pyre. Ev­ery­one con­nected with the fu­neral had now dis­persed. Ashes of Old Ra­bir­ius and Clau­dia Deiana must have been col­lected, but scents of burn­ing hung around. Gar­den­ers were be­gin­ning re­in­state­ment tasks. They were re­plant­ing shrubs among white can­de­labra, gor­geous great mar­ble things that had ivy carved on them. When I en­quired, these work­ers con­firmed that a small fam­ily group had been to col­lect what was left of Old Ra­bir­ius and, un­known to them, Clau­dia Deiana. So she had gone to eter­nal rest in­ter­min­gled with the King of Kings. I hoped it would be more peace­ful than her life with Flo­rius.

At the bar­racks, even Ju­ven­tus could tell how my walk through the gar­dens had af­fected me. With an in­no­cent lack of guile, he tried to cheer me up. He was un­ex­pect­edly help­ful. I was the first per­son who had ever asked him to look through his many note­books. His record of what he had over­heard or per­suaded peo­ple to tell him was mainly a waste of ef­fort; no of­fi­cers ever let him make re­ports or asked him for fac­tual in­for­ma­tion. Want­ing my nugget of de­tail, I be­came his favourite.

It took him a while to hunt through screeds of spi­dery ob­ser­va­tion notes. But stuck in the room where the co­hort shut him away on his own, he had or­gan­ised a fil­ing sys­tem; it even con­tained an in­dex. He found what I wanted.

Like all hit­men, Tur­cus pro­tected him­self with se­crecy. How­ever, Ju­ven­tus had taken an in­ter­est af­ter he had met the man. He once heard a salami-seller’s wife telling a gar­land-mak­ing florist the dis­trict where Tur­cus lived with his fam­ily.

The dis­trict was enough for me. I went there. I made en­quiries. Ev­ery­one lo­cally thought Tur­cus was a de­cent busi­ness­man – so to them it was no se­cret where he lived. He sup­ported the lo­cal tem­ple. He served as a neigh­bour­hood of­fi­cer. His team (that key mark of char­ac­ter in Rome) was the Blues.

Tiberius sup­ported the Golds, on the kindly grounds that some­body had to, but my fa­ther also pre­ferred the Blues so I warmed to this killer in ad­vance. Rome is a city of tra­di­tion, where your char­iot loy­alty is in­her­ited with your eye­sight and your bunions. Even though I was adopted, it had al­ways been ex­plained to me whom I must shout for in a sta­dium.

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