Three Hands In The Fountain

The pause occurred while I waited for my travel companion to clear his private affairs, which were necessarily more complex than mine. He had a few million sesterces invested in land to demand his attention, and a Senate reputation to cultivate, not to mention his imminent posting to Britain. The preparations for three years at the edge of the Empire couldn't be left to his underlings; his toga folders and secretaries might not yet appreciate how terrible the province was.

Frontinus had insisted on supervising the Tibur investigations. So long as he didn't try to supervise me I wasn't arguing. As a Roman I had little neighbourhood knowledge and no remit except as a member of his aqueduct investigation team. His presence would strengthen my hand. Given the status of the landowners who patronised that district,, resistance to enquiries was quite likely. The filthy rich have more secrets to guard than the poor.

Seizing my chance, therefore, while his honour sorted out his own business, I took myself down to the Florius homestead and spied around outside. A slave trotted out to go shopping, so I collared him, slipped him a small coin, added a few more at his suggestion, and asked what the word was about the missing dame. He clearly hated Flaccida, and willingly revealed that no one in the household knew anything of her whereabouts. I did not trouble to knock and speak to Milvia.

There was definitely no vigiles presence in the street, or I would have spotted them. So I took a stroll back up the Aventine, barged in on Marcus Rubella in the Fourth Cohort's Twelfth District headquarters, and asked him outright what had happened to his surveillance team.

`The Balbinus exercise is finished, Falco. He's dead and we wouldn't want to be accused of harassment. 'What surveillance team?'

Rubella was an ex-chief centurion, with twenty years of legionary experience behind him and now in command of a thousand hard-bitten ex-slaves who formed his fire-fighting cohort. He had a shorn head, a stubbly chin, and still, dark eyes that had witnessed unreasonable amounts of violence. He liked to think of himself as a dangerous spider twitching the strands of a large and perfectly formed web. I reckoned he thought too much of himself, but I made sure never to underestimate or cross the man. He was no fool. And he wielded a great deal of power in the district where I lived and worked.

I saw down in his office uninvited, leaned back in a relaxed manner, and placed my boots gently on the rim of his officer quality work table, letting my heel nudge his silver inkwell as if I might deliberately knock it off.

`What' team? The surveillance outfit that any intelligent tribune like yourself, Marcus Rubella, will have installed to observe the Balbinus' widow, Cornella Flaccida.'

Rubella's brown eyes dawdled on his desk set. His long army career had left him with a respect for equipment; it persisted even now that he held a post where officially there was none. He always kept his inkpot full and his sand tray topped up. A jerk of my insolent foot could make a fine mess of his office. I smiled at him like a man who had no intention of doing it. He looked uneasy.

`I cannot comment on any ongoing investigation, Falco.'

`That's all right. Stuff your comments; I'm not the clerk who edits the Daily Gazette searching for a sensational paragraph. I Just want to know where Flaccida has parked herself It's in your long-term interests.' I could rely on that argument to find favour here. Rubella was a born officer. He never moved unless it was in his own interests, but if it was he jumped.

`What's the score?'

I came clean. He was a professional and I respected that too much to mess him about. Anyway, offering to share a confidence always bothered him, which was pleasing enough. `Flaccida has had a big fight with her son-in-law, dopey Florius. She's bunked off from home. Dim little Milvia thinks the aqueduct killer has nabbed her mama – nonsense of course. The aqueduct killer likes his victims juicier; that's the one thing about him we do know.'

`So how far have you, got?' asked Rubella. `Is' it true a severed head washed up in the Cloaca yesterday?'

`Not quite what the excellent Etruscan engineers originally allowed for – yes, it's true. And a torso in the Tiber the same morning. To tell the truth we seem to be getting nowhere – and that's with full co-operation from all cohorts of the vigiles, and two separate investigations under way. The one for the Curator of the Aqueducts appears to have run into the ground; completely; I'm not sorry to hear it, since it's being led by the Chief Spy.'

Rubella snorted,, quietly. `You don't, like him.'