anything to do with me,” she said.
“We talked, and then he left. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t go anywhere. I was clearing up. Then we all went to bed. Ask Susanna.”
“You were talking about money, weren’t you?”
“Who’s been-?” She stopped. “Her, I suppose? Nosy cow.”
Ruso said nothing.
“Felix gave me a loan a few weeks ago to buy some new shoes. I said I would pay him that night and I did. That’s all.”
“And a few hours later he was dead.”
“I told you, it’s nothing to do with-”
“Did he say where he was going when he left?”
“It was a business arrangement, all right? He wasn’t my boyfriend.”
“What did you pay him?”
“Does it matter?”
Had the girl been more cooperative Ruso would not have bothered questioning her much further. As it was, she was giving the impression of having something to hide.
“Why did you leave town the next morning?”
“My mother was ill.”
“And if I check with her neighbors they’ll confirm that, will they?”
The girl sucked in her lower lip and chewed at it for a moment.
“It doesn’t look good for you, does it?” prompted Ruso. “You’re the last to see him, you hand over some money you probably don’t want to part with-”
“How many times? It wasn’t me! I was here all the time!”
“So why run away?”
Dari glanced around to make sure nobody was listening. “I had a reason,” she said. “I can’t tell you what it was.”
“If they take you in for questioning,” he said, “you’ll have to tell them. And it will hurt. If you tell me, I may be able to keep it quiet.”
“That’s not much of a choice.”
“It’s the best offer you’ll get.”
The bosom sagged onto the table. “I didn’t steal it,” she muttered. “I found it. Finding’s not stealing.”
“You found some money?”
She frowned. “Of course not. I wouldn’t have to tell you that, would I? Money all looks the same. I found a ring. Under a bench in the bathhouse. A gold ring. Felix wanted his money and I didn’t have any. So I used it to pay him.”
Susanna emerged from the kitchen and gave Ruso a look that said she was disappointed in him. He pretended not to see it. “Tell me about this ring,” he said.
“It was one of those lattice patterns,” she said. “So it looks fancy but it doesn’t use much gold. There were letters in the pattern.”
“Did you know what they said?”
She shrugged. “Not a clue. But it can’t have been anybody’s name or he’d have asked me how I got it, wouldn’t he?”
Not, reflected Ruso, if Felix was simply going to use it to buy off Rianorix, who doubtless couldn’t read either.
“It wasn’t really stolen,” she insisted, “but I knew there might be a fuss when he tried to sell it. So I thought I’d stay out of town for a while. Then I heard he’d been murdered the same night.”
“So you guessed it was safe to come back.”
She nodded.
“One last thing,” said Ruso. “When you paid him, did he make a note of it?”
“He wiped me off his list. I watched him do it.”
He got to his feet. “Thank you, Dari,” he said. “You’ve been very helpful.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“I know.”
“And you won’t tell anybody?”
“Not if I can help it,” he said.
57
Tilla had been surprised by the sudden cacophony of “Aemilia!” echoing around the hall of the bathhouse as a group of young women in the corner noticed their arrival. There had followed a flurry of greetings and compliments and surprise, as it seemed everyone needed to assure everyone else very loudly-in Latin-how lovely it was to see them and how Aemilia wasn’t looking at all terrible and she was being wonderfully brave and-finally-who was her friend?
“This is my cousin,” announced Aemilia, putting an arm around Tilla’s shoulders. “Her name is Darlughdacha.”
This seemed to cause some confusion. “Hasn’t she got a Roman name?” demanded one of the girls.
“Does she speak Latin?”
Tilla eyed the eager faces framed with fancy hairstyles and decided that she did not wish to hear her beautiful name mangled by the lips of strangers. “Tilla,” she said. “You can call me Tilla.”
Aemilia pulled up a stool and introduced her to each girl in turn, declaring the names as if she were proud to have so many friends.
“I remember you,” said Tilla, accepting the space on a bench beside a girl with a squint who was introduced as Julia but who had been called something very different when they had last met. She slipped back into the ease of her native tongue. “You lived in one of the houses near Standing Stone Hill. Your da used to work a lathe.”
The girl tossed her head and replied in Latin, “Oh, that was a long time ago! Now I live here in a proper house.”
“Julia has a son,” confided Aemilia. “Her man is with the Tenth. Like-”
Tilla saw apprehension in the faces of the other girls.
“-my poor Felix,” finished Aemilia. She gulped, and made a sudden grab for her purse. “We need some oil. Come and help me choose, cousin.”
As Tilla followed her cousin across the hall, she was almost sure the jumble of echoed voices around her held a hiss of, “She really doesn’t know, does she?”
Tilla adjusted her towel and leaned back against the wall of the warm room, closing her eyes to the sight of the painted dolphins leaping across the walls and, beneath them, the unpleasant things women were having done to themselves in the pursuit of elegance. She wished she could also close her nose to the stench of competing perfumes and her ears to the babble of voices laced with the occasional grunt from the massage couch and “Ow!” as the plucker of unwanted hairs delivered her own particular form of torture. The smell, the heat, and the noise were making her head ache. It was hard to imagine why anyone would want to come here at all, let alone turn up every day to be exposed and prodded by strangers.
She let out a long breath and let her head fall slightly to one side, mimicking sleep. Around her, the brittleness of the chatter became more obvious as she shut out the wide eyes and overeager smiles. It was as if, with few shared memories to link them, these women were so far apart that they needed to keep reassuring themselves by waving and shouting across the gap.
She thought of the long comfortable silences at home. The nights snuggled under warm blankets, listening to the low murmur of adult voices. The heavy crunch of another log being thrown onto the fire. The gentle trickle of beer being poured. Later, sometimes, the giggling and shuffling and gasping from her parents’ bed that she and her brothers were not supposed to hear.
