The gold of the statue shone bright in the afternoon sun. The Column of Phocas cast a long shadow toward the Senate House. Flowers were already piling up at the spot where Maximin’s body had been found. A mixed crowd of locals and pilgrims had gathered, and a priest was directing the prayers.
‘He was a leader of the mission to far-off Britain, where the light of the sun is hardly seen. By the power that flowed from the Holy Ghost through his pure soul and body, he worked miracles without number, bringing over thousands of converts from the dark heathenism of their race to the True Faith of Holy Mother Church. Pray for the soul of the Holy Martyr Maximin. Pray for the Intercession of Saint Maximin, who will surely soon be seated at the right hand of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of the Father.’
It was lie after fanciful lie from the grey creature. I’d heard this sort of stuff so often before. But it shocked me to hear it in connection with Maximin. Would we be told any truth about Maximin my friend? About his partiality to red wine? About his ability to lie with a straight face? About those bursts of good humour that could make his body shake with laughter? Not a word. It was all now about the many good works and the utter orthodoxy of Maximin the candidate saint.
Had I seen this priest earlier, hanging around the dispensator’s office? I probably had. It sickened me.
Lucius and I crossed ourselves with convincing reverence as we pushed through the crowd to the spot where the body had been found. Lucius took up some of the flowers that concealed the exact spot.
‘Here, what do you think you’re doing?’ the priest cried. ‘Those flowers are private property. I’ll have the dispensator on you.’
‘Do you know who I am?’ Lucius asked, standing up and looking down at the priest. He spoke in the cold tone he reserved for his inferiors.
The priest did recognise him, and stepped back, a surly look on his face.
‘Get that mob out of my way. There is work to be done here.’
Blood had oozed from that wound to the heart, and had soaked through the clothing to leave a clear shape on the ground. Though people had obviously cleaned much away as they took up what relics they could scrub with their cloths, enough remained.
‘You say there was little blood here when you found him? That would be consistent with his having been murdered some while before being left. Blood dries. Before then, though, it congeals. Even if last night was fairly cold, there still wouldn’t have been a lot of leakage.’
I nodded. The body had been neatly arranged once only, the head closest by the column with a cloth covering. From the mark on the ground, there was no reason to suppose it had been moved or at all repositioned. We looked harder. There was a faint but obvious trail of scrape marks and a few blotches leading back from the column and away from the Senate House.
‘Those who carried the body were tired by the time they got it here. It was mostly dragged,’ Lucius said. That much was evident. We followed the trail easily enough across the fifteen or so feet of the broken pavement that had been uncovered for the presentation of the column. Then we could trace scuff marks in the dirt and breaks in the weeds that covered the steep slope leading back up to the compacted mud that was the modern ground level in the Forum.
After this, the trail was harder to follow. There was so much rubbish and so many weeds. But there was a trail still to be followed. Carrying the weight of Maximin’s body at night through that lot had disturbed things. Occasionally, even before getting to the centre of the Forum, the body must have been dropped and dragged – there were little specks here and there. On a little bush, we found a scrap of cloth that I recognised as a piece of his cloak.
We were followed part of the way by a few idlers who’d grown bored with the prayer meeting back by the column. I wanted to tell them to piss off, but chose to ignore them. Lucius, though, lost patience earlier. He gave an order to his slave, who picked up a stone. Before it had to be thrown, there was a commotion back by the column. I looked back. A man had got up from his knees and was waving his staff.
‘I can see! I can see!’ he bellowed. ‘I have been blind all the days of my life. Now the intercession of Saint Maximin has moved the Lord God our Father to grant me the gift of sight. I can see the face of our reverend father, who directed my prayers, and I see the crucifix he was given by Holy Mother Church. I can look up and see the golden statue of our lord and master the emperor…’
I looked at him in contempt. I’d helped arrange this sort of thing any number of times in Kent. He was drowned out in a general howl of devotion. In a moment, everyone was on his belly, rolling or fighting to roll in what was left of the bloodstain. Those who’d followed us were back there in a flash. It reminded me of nothing so much as those dreadful rats when I first saw them. The priest stood back, a satisfied smirk on his face.
‘See what beasts this corpse religion makes of men?’ Lucius spat out the question. ‘Don’t you just long for a cleaner and more rational worship?’
‘I want my hands round the neck of Maximin’s killer,’ I said. ‘If your Gods can bring me that, I’ll worship them as these men worship theirs.’
‘Is that a promise?’ Lucius asked with a little smile. ‘If it is, I’ll hold you to it.’
I broke the silence. ‘Is that a broken twig?
‘No – but here is another mark on the ground. We go this way.’
I thought several times as we worked our way towards the edge of the Forum that we’d lost the trail. But as the thickets became more dense, we saw an increasingly consistent pattern of broken twigs and flattened greenery. It was lucky for this purpose Maximin had been so heavy.
We emerged from the Forum round the back of the Basilica. Here, the pavement was still at ground level, and we could trace the smudges where the body had brushed the ground. As we got closer to the killing spot, we found more evidence of blood.
We followed the trail through the outer arches of the Colosseum. We were moving back towards the Caelian Hill.
Then, as we reached a burnt-out library building at the foot of the hill, we saw the big dark patch we’d been hunting. It was just below the broken portico. Beyond that, for about twenty yards, there were faint scuff marks on the unfrequented pavement leading to the main road up the hill.
‘He was set on here.’ Lucius pointed to the corner of the side street as it joined the main road. ‘He was struck and knocked unconscious. He was dragged – look, see the two lines on the mud patch here as his feet dragged on the ground when he was taken under cover of the portico.’
We returned to the portico. The dark patch of my friend’s life blood was a vague circle with a diameter of about four feet. On the edge and leading off – I hadn’t taken this in at first – was a confusion of footprints, and the unmistakable signs of a blood-sodden corpse being pulled and then carried off for dumping. A few feet away, hidden in some lengthening grass, were scattered the three broken fragments of Maximin’s staff. It had been sliced roughly in half, and one of the halves had had about five inches lopped off.
I breathed hard, fighting back the misery and the nausea. At first, I couldn’t make any pattern in the bloody prints. But by measuring with our hands and looking for irregularities in the imprinting leather, we finally made out five distinct sets of prints. Two were of large, heavy men. These were the most frequent going in and out of the circle. One was of a smaller man, who seemed mostly to have stood on the edge, going in perhaps only once.
There were two other sets of prints. These were inconsistent with the others. They went in once to the circle – we could see a clear impression, as if the blood were already congealing when they passed over it. They came out again, leaving increasingly faint prints as they moved back towards the Forum.
‘The small man used the sword,’ said Lucius. ‘The others held your friend on either side. Before then, he fought like a hero – staff against swords. His staff was sliced first in half. Then he defended himself with the part that remained, until this was sliced off by the hand. You say fingers were missing. I fear we should look for them.’
‘The question is…’ My voice was a croak. I started again: ‘The question is, why stun him and then bring him over here to be murdered?’
‘Something may have gone wrong,’ Lucius replied. ‘What was meant as a robbery or abduction became a murder. Perhaps your friend recognised someone. There is reason to believe he was left here for some while after death. The two others may have been sent back to remove the body to the Forum, though for reasons I cannot yet imagine.
‘But this is guessing. For the moment, we need evidence. I’m afraid we must look for those fingers. They may not tell us much. Then again, they might. At least, they can be added for burial.’
We looked, but no fingers. Perhaps the rats did get them after all. Whatever the case, I was quietly relieved.
The slave produced a small book of waxed wooden tablets. He scraped with his stylus as Lucius gave a dictation – everything plain and matter of fact, with no surmise.
‘Always keep a record,’ he explained. ‘What we are seeing now won’t be here tomorrow. Already, much evidence by the Column of Phocas may have gone for good. Always keep a record. Even the least important detail may turn out important – but only if you have it recorded.’
He had manners enough not to show it. But I could see that Lucius was enjoying himself. He was enjoying the challenge of the investigation, and he was enjoying my company as his apprentice. I was grateful for the help. At the least, I no longer felt alone in that city.
We moved on. Most of the houses in the side street where Maximin seemed to have been grabbed were in ruins. The end house, though, was still sound. It looked inhabited. The upper storey had windows that must have overlooked the Forum.
Lucius nodded to his slave.
‘Open for the lord Basilius,’ the slave shouted, banging on the flimsy door. ‘The noble lord desires information of the householder. Open for the lord Basilius.’
Connections really are everything. The slave had no sooner fallen silent than there was a scraping of bolts and the door opened a few inches. An old woman looked suspiciously out – ruined teeth, wrinkles, a few wisps of hair. She must have been a good twenty years younger than I now am. It pleases me to think she looked much worse. Such is the effect of poverty.
‘What do you want?’
‘Information,’ Lucius replied.
‘You’ll get nothing from me,’ she said. ‘I’m just a poor old woman. Go away and leave me be.’
She tried to shut the door. But the slave had deftly pushed his right foot into the opening. The old woman made a feeble effort to eject him, then gave up. The door opened wide. We walked in.
I can’t be bothered to describe how the place stank. You can imagine that for yourself. Filth and great age so often go naturally together. Even though I make a certain effort, I know that I am hardly a sweet flower to my students. Being half paralysed from a stroke, the old woman had made no effort. I don’t know how long she’d been alone. I suppose she was waiting for death to claim her, and in the meantime she was living on the papal charity that supported much of the Roman population.
I don’t think the building had originally been a house. It was too small for a house in such a fine location, and had the remains of an elaborate stucco. It must once have been a row of offices. Now what was left was a hovel for the poorest of the poor.
The old woman settled herself into a cot that was the only furniture in the single room of the ground floor, and pulled some rags around her. The light that came through the blocked window just above street level was too poor for me to see the stinking refuse with which she surrounded herself in the cot to keep warm at night. We stood leaning against a wall that seemed cleaner than the others by comparison.
‘With proper respect for your many years, mother, we seek information of the highest value,’ Lucius opened in a surprisingly charming voice. He allowed a slight emphasis on the words ‘highest value’.
‘A man of God – a priest, no less, of Holy Mother Church – was set upon last night by vagabonds. They robbed and murdered him just by your house. We are charged by His Holiness himself to bring these enemies of God and man to justice. Did you hear the commotion last night?’
She had. She’d been woken by a sound of shouting outside. She’d crawled upstairs to the disused upper part of the house and looked out of the window. She babbled on for a while about the nothings that flit through the minds of the very senile or uneducated. Then: ‘Three men was on him,’ she jabbered. ‘They pulls him away. They was followed by two others.’
‘Two others?’ I asked. Lucius hushed me with a movement of his hand.
She drooled awhile from her sagging lips. Her mind seemed to wander. Lucius snapped his fingers impatiently in her face.
She pulled herself together with a look of perhaps habitual alarm – the old, I can tell you, need often to be wary of the young – and continued: ‘Two others. They follows close behind. Far down the way, there was sounds of more shouting. I hears fighting. I can’t say nothing more.’
She cackled a prayer that the killers might be brought to justice. ‘We had a way with bastards like that in the old days.’ She jerked her head in the general direction of the Colosseum. ‘They was fine display with the animals. Rome was safe in them days – safe as the Emperors’ Palace, I tell you.’
I doubted this. Lucius had told me a story the other evening about a young man in the great days of Rome. For a bet, he’d dressed as a woman one night and gone out alone. He was raped before he got forty paces. But it pleases the old to think the past was better. It compensates for the lack of any future.
As Lucius was paying out some small change for her trouble, I spoke up again: ‘Can you give any description of the attackers? I know it was a dark night. But did you have any sight of those men?’
She thought. ‘They had torches. I seed them once all bright. One, he looks up at me.’
‘Can you tell me what he looked like?’
‘Big man, he was – big and ugly. Patch he had on one eye.’ She cackled at the recollection.
‘Your One-Eye, perhaps?’ Lucius asked.
Yes, it was One-Eye. He’d been in at the kill.