word to the rest of the house. I’ll sort everything out when I get there.”
The slaves set off to carry the remains of Julius Asper down the alleyway. Ruso examined the area where he had been lying. It was just as wet as the ground around it.
“Now that you’ve found him, sir,” prompted the innkeeper, “who do I see about the reward?”
Ruso leaned back against the wall and checked that his knife was in place before folding his arms in a deliberately casual stance. “You won’t be getting the reward,” he said. “It’s more likely you’ll be tried for murdering him.”
“Me, sir? Oh no, you’ve got that all wrong!”
“What was he doing in your yard?”
The innkeeper opened his mouth to protest further. The only sound that came out was a faint squeak. He gestured toward the mud as if expecting it to answer for him. Finally he exhaled. “It’s not how it looks, sir. I swear.”
“I hope not.”
“It’s the wife, sir. I told her not to get involved, but she’s softhearted. Three-legged dogs, pigeons with broken wings-you name it, she takes it in. She’s soft, see? I keep telling her, it’s no good being too soft. Now look what’s happened.”
“I’ll need to talk to both of you.”
“Me, I said we should tell you the truth straight off. It was her what said nobody would believe us. And we was only trying to help him, poor bugger.”
Whatever their intentions, Asper was beyond help now.
The innkeeper was shaking his head. “I knew it would never work,” he continued. “I told her, we don’t know nothing about this sort of thing. Footprints and so on. We never thought about footprints.”
Ruso said nothing. They had not thought about the man’s clothes, either, which had been dry despite the rain in the early hours of the morning. Nor had they noticed that the efforts to heave Julius Asper over their yard wall had scraped off some of the moss, which had landed in the mud beneath him. Since nobody else could have got past the dog, they were the only plausible culprits.
The man ran one hand through his hair, then hastily smoothed it forward over the bald patch. “How much trouble are we in, sir?”
“That depends on what you’ve done,” said Ruso. “And don’t waste my time with any more tales, because you’re an even worse liar than I am.”
11
Since coming back to Britannia, Ruso seemed to have discovered an ability to frighten people. Yesterday he had scared off two small boys in the street, and today he had managed to terrify an innkeeper’s wife. She now sat opposite him, weeping over a kitchen table still scattered with vegetable peelings and cat hair. The husband sat next to her, grimfaced. His defense for dumping a dead man and then pretending to find him again seemed to be that they were only trying to help and, “We didn’t know what else to do.”
Privately Ruso felt that this sentence would have been more honest if it had ended, “We didn’t know what else to do to get the procurator’s reward,” but for the moment he was more interested in finding out what the elusive Julius Asper had been doing here all alone in the first place.
“One of the boatmen sent him here yesterday morning,” said the innkeeper.
“Which boatman?”
The man shook his head. “He weren’t looking too well even then. Said he’d got a headache. And he didn’t have no luggage.” He gestured toward his wife. “If I’d been here I’d have sent him packing, but she felt sorry for him.”
The wife sniffed. “He looked awful poorly, sir. I said we’d call a doctor, but he said no. I did ask, sir.”
“He wanted a private room so he could lie down till he felt better. And if anybody come calling, we was to say he weren’t here. So we did.”
“Did he say why?”
The wife shook her head. “I gave him a cold compress for his head, sir. I thought I was doing right.”
“Did he mention anyone else? Another man? Or a woman?”
“No, sir.” She looked at her husband. “I knew we should have called a doctor.”
“He didn’t want a bloody doctor!” snapped the husband “He didn’t want anybody. We done everything he asked and then he went and died on us.”
“So when I came looking for two men yesterday…” prompted Ruso.
“If he’d died a bit earlier, you could have had him,” said the man. “We wouldn’t have had none of this bother.”
“You wouldn’t have had it if you’d told me the truth in the first place. Somebody might have been able to save his life.”
“We didn’t know you was official.”
“I told you who I was,” Ruso pointed out.
“But how did we know you wasn’t lying?”
“Perhaps,” said Ruso, losing patience, “when I told you that if you saw either of them, to send a message to the procurator’s office?”
The man said nothing. The wife wiped her eyes with her apron. Ruso glanced across to where a row of small scraggy creatures had been skewered along a spit and were now shriveling and browning above the fire. In the absence of fur or feathers, it was hard to guess what they were, and probably wiser not to speculate.
“Go back to this headache for a minute,” he said. “Did he complain of anything else? Nausea, disturbed vision, fever? How about a slurred voice? Difficulty moving? Nosebleed, ear discharge?”
“He just said it was a headache,” said the man. “We don’t poke our noses into-”
The wife clutched his arm to stop him. “Not fever, sir,” she said. “I know fever when I see it. He did have a bit of a limp, but I didn’t see any of them other things.”
Ruso nodded. Perhaps the body would reveal more when it was properly examined. “So you found him dead after I’d gone?”
“About the third hour of the night I saw a light under the door,” the man explained. “I went in to make sure he weren’t asleep with the candle lit. You can’t be too careful in a place like this. And there he was, halfway out of bed. Staring at me. Stone dead.”
The wife shuddered. “I had to shut his eyes, sir. It was horrible. We didn’t know what to do.”
Despite this repeated claim, it seemed to Ruso that at least one of them had known exactly what to do.
“So we went through his clothes,” said the man, “trying to find out where he come from, see? If he had any family.”
Or if he had anything worth stealing. “And what did you find?”
“Nothing, sir. He didn’t have a thing except what he was standing up in when he come.”
“So, assuming for a moment that you’re telling the truth, whose idea was it to dump him in the alley and claim the reward as if you’d never lied to me?”
“Hers,” said the husband, just as the wife said, “It was his.”
Ruso got to his feet. “Show me his room.”
The room was as drab and cramped as he had expected from the state of the kitchen. The door opened outward to avoid collision with the furniture. What looked like an old sail sagged between the rafters, presumably nailed up to keep out drafts but now giving the impression that a heavy shower of dirt would fall onto the guests below if it were moved. The bed itself filled most of the room and was wide enough to accommodate several sleepers huddled for warmth under the single blanket. There was only one pillow, with an unpleasant stain in the dent where a head would have been.
On the floorboards next to the bed a chipped cup was still half full of water. Ruso sniffed it and was none the wiser. The rough wooden box crammed against the far wall contained only a broken comb.
“We haven’t touched nothing, sir,” said the man.
