They found him early the next morning.
Valerius had spent the rest of the evening questioning the legionaries of the headquarters guard. The centurion of the detachment, all men of the Tenth Fretensis who had proved themselves unfailingly loyal to the governor, explained what Valerius already knew. Guards patrolled the exterior of the palace day and night, with pairs alternating at each of the entrances, including the one leading to the palace from the slave quarters. Within the palace itself, only a few corridors connecting the working rooms and the governor’s personal quarters were continuously under guard, and Corbulo’s private offices were only secured when he was there, by the team of men tasked with his close protection.
From the answers he received, Valerius put together a list of people who had used the corridors in the hours before Domitia encountered the cobra. He placed Domitia at the top of the list and himself in second place. They were followed by the senior officers who had visited Corbulo during the day. Finally there were a dozen or so slaves who had access to the governor’s rooms to bring him food, clean, and carry out all the normal domestic tasks of a slave in a Roman household.
When the list was complete he took it to Corbulo to update him on his progress.
‘I’m sure there’s nothing you’d enjoy more than interrogating legate Mucianus,’ the general said. ‘But he and his camp prefect, tribune Niger and legate Traianus all came to see me while I was there, and left immediately. For the moment, concentrate on the slaves.’
Valerius sought out Serpentius, who, despite his new freedman’s status, preferred to live in the slave quarters. ‘If I question them alone,’ he explained, ‘they’ll tell me what they think I want to hear. Your presence always ensures a little more objectivity. We’ll make these four our priority. According to the guards, they were all carrying some kind of container.’
The Spaniard looked over the list.
‘I think you can forget Perellia. From what I hear she does a lot more than give the governor his massage at bath time. Big girl, dark hair and well set up. If she wanted to murder him she wouldn’t need a snake. She could kill him with kindness, if you get my meaning?’
‘But she was carrying a basket, which still makes her a suspect. You’re probably right, but the governor isn’t going to thank us for taking his concubine off the list. We’ll question her first.’
But when they ordered the overseer, a Syrian freedman, to fetch the four slaves they discovered they had more pressing problems than Perellia’s basket.
‘I’m sorry, sir.’ The terrified man was visibly quaking as he confessed. ‘Turpio is missing.’
‘Turpio is the slave who was to replace the governor’s linen?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Is there any reason why he should leave the slave quarters at night?’
The overseer shook his head. ‘He should have been locked in with the rest. They said he went to the latrina and didn’t return.’
‘Who are his friends?’ Valerius demanded. ‘Come on, man. He must have had friends. How long has he been gone?’
‘Three hours,’ the man confirmed. ‘They thought nothing of it. Sometimes… sometimes he sold himself to the guards.’
Serpentius gave a grunt that might have been a laugh. Now they understood why the Syrian was so frightened. If Turpio was regularly allowed to slink out of the slave quarters, it meant that the overseer or his deputy was getting a cut of whatever he was earning.
‘Three hours,’ Valerius calculated. ‘He could be five or six miles away by now. Serpentius, get me the guard commander.’
The centurion arrived bleary-eyed and belligerent, but Valerius had no time for niceties. ‘It seems you may have allowed the man who tried to kill the governor to escape.’ The soldier’s face went pale and it was clear Valerius now had his attention. ‘I want patrols on the main road to Seleucia and Daphne, and on the roads north and west. Every other man will search the palace and the surrounding area.’
When the centurion had rushed out shouting orders to his men, Valerius turned to Serpentius. ‘Let me know if they find him, though I doubt if they will. He’d have to be a fool to stay near the palace. He’ll either be hiding in the city with his accomplices or somewhere on the road where he feels safe.’
‘Where will you be?’
Valerius yawned. ‘In bed. One way or the other it’s going to be a busy day.’
It was easy to see why they hadn’t found Turpio in the night. Who would have thought to look in the river?
The body lay face up and trapped between a fallen branch and a large rock. Turpio’s young features were the bloodless, fish-belly white of unpainted marble and his mouth hung open showing yellow teeth and a stump of tongue. At first Valerius thought it had been cut out, which seemed overly cautious if you were going to kill the man anyway. On closer investigation, however, it seemed that it, like his eyes, had become a delicacy for the pair of ravens that had perched on his chest until he was discovered by a legionary making his discreet morning libation to the Orontes. The rock lay less than four paces from the bank and Valerius could clearly see the vivid scar of the second smile that had been opened below Turpio’s chin.
‘We’ll never know who he was working with now,’ Serpentius said cheerfully. ‘He must have been meeting someone who had promised to pay him or help him escape, maybe both. Whoever it was decided they couldn’t rely on him to keep his mouth shut.’
They waited while two legionaries dragged the body to the bank. Turpio’s threadbare tunic was ripped, probably where it had caught on the branch that had kept him from floating downriver towards Seleucia Pieria. The chest from the throat down had been sheeted with blood, but was now a washed-out pink. Valerius bent over the body and examined the wound. It ran horizontally from one side of the neck to the other, obscene and pink-lipped and deep enough to have cut almost to the spine.
The Spaniard crouched beside him. ‘A nice piece of work.’ Valerius was happy for Serpentius to take the lead. The gladiator knew more about creating wounds like these than was good for a man. ‘Sword work, see? Too deep and clean for a knife if the killer was standing in front of him and too straight if he came from behind. One quick professional stroke that took out the big veins on either side and the windpipe too. Turpio the snake charmer would have bled out in about a minute and he wouldn’t have made a sound. Your man probably used a spatha or something similar, because if it had been a gladius he would have been covered with blood. Gladiator work.’ He rose to his feet and pirouetted, at the same time drawing his long sword and carving the air in a single whispering sweep that had the men standing closest stepping back. ‘Maybe he would have got a few spots on his clothes or his boots, but it would only be noticeable if you really looked. Dump the body in the river and then go back to wherever he came from. He couldn’t know that Turpio would hang around long enough to be found.’
‘And tell us we’re looking for not one assassin, but two.’
‘What’s that?’ The Spaniard pointed at Turpio’s clenched fist where a scrap of green was just visible.
Valerius forced back the dead fingers and pulled out a ragged fragment of bright green cloth. The same green cloth that the tunics and cloaks of the auxiliary escort were manufactured from.
‘Cavalry?’ Serpentius suggested.
Valerius looked across the river to where Antioch was beginning to shimmer in the heat of the morning. ‘It would make sense, when you combine it with the heavy sword.’
‘The Parthians, then. This King Vologases must have spies in Antioch, even amongst the governor’s servants and the Syrian auxiliaries, who to my thinking would as well be Parthian as Roman. If he believes General Corbulo is planning to move against him it would make a kind of sense to kill him. A knife direct to the heart of the enemy. And a snake is a very eastern method of murder.’
‘That’s true, but there is another possibility.’
‘Who supplied the escort?’
Valerius nodded. ‘The Syrian auxiliaries are attached to the Sixth Ferrata, the Scythians to the Fifteenth Apollinaris. So Mucianus and Collega. Gaius Pompeius Collega is not one of the favoured inner circle and it’s plain he disagrees with Corbulo’s plan. What if he decided that the best way to gain the Emperor’s favour was to remove a man who is not only exceeding his orders, but is also, for all his protestations of loyalty, a potential rival? But…’
