wish is to be granted. Did I hear a child crying as I came in?’ he asked with a change of subject.
‘I have no doubt’, said I, ‘you’ve heard many children cry on your entry.’
Perhaps it didn’t do to treat the man with the contempt he deserved. But unless he happened to be standing over you in one of his dungeons, it was a hard reaction to avoid. And I was for the moment at least his equal in status.
Priscus looked into the various compartments of his pouch. He took out a spoonful of green powder and dropped it into his cup.
‘This has a far more soothing effect than wine,’ he assured me as I waved him away from my cup.
There was a long moment of silence.
‘Now,’ he said finally with a drugged brightness, ‘I’ve had the main facts from my Divine and Ever-Sagacious Father-in-Law. It all sounds utterly intriguing.
‘I know it’s Sunday, but would you mind awfully if I had the whole household taken in for questioning? I promise not to have any of them on the rack until tomorrow morning.’
‘My Lord Priscus,’ I said, looking coldly at him, ‘I am in charge of this investigation. It will proceed by my rules, not those of the Black Agents. There will be no use of torture until we have a definite suspect.’
Priscus smiled and poured himself more wine. ‘Oh, come now, Alaric – none of this softie philosophising,’ he said with a dismissive wave at my bookshelves. ‘If you’d been in charge of things, Justinus would still be running about to spread his poison. The surest road to truth runs through the rack.’
I thought of a jeering question about how many other people he’d arrested in place of Justinus, before tracking the man down to a public table in one of the city’s most expensive restaurants.
But it didn’t do to push things too far. I went back to the business in hand.
‘We proceed by my rules,’ I said, ‘or you can explain yourself to His Majesty when I back out of the investigation. What you do with the criminal when I’ve produced him is for you to decide. Investigation is my business.’
As I rose to my feet, a sound of distant cheering drifted through the window.
‘What’s that?’ I asked with involuntary interest.
‘That’, said Priscus, ‘will be my Divine and Ever-Victorious Father-in-Law declaring an amnesty for all offences but treason. He really needs the crowd on his side, now that Heraclius is moving over in person to handle the siege.’
Fat lot of difference that would make, I grunted to myself. During my entire stay in the City, I’d not seen a single offence – from murder all the way down to cutting purses – that hadn’t been twisted into some variety of treason.
Still, Phocas seemed to have pleased the crowd again.
I frowned and returned to the original subject. ‘I think, My Lord, you can be spared for the important work of defending the City. I am myself under some pressure of time – I must ready myself for the funeral service in the Great Church. The investigation will move faster if I am able by myself to interview the key witnesses between now and this evening.’
‘Then, my darling Alaric, we shall begin tomorrow morning.’
No, I thought to myself. Not only did I want to interview every actual and potential witness without Priscus beside me to put them off. I also needed to do it now. The longer matters were left unresolved, the more people would start forgetting important facts. Continual repetition to others would blur and distort recollections that even now were still reliable.
Before I could think of some emollient lie to send Priscus on his way, the door opened again. It was Martin.
‘Aelric,’ he said, ignoring Priscus and the need to use my public name, ‘you’d better come quickly.’
His voice shook. I saw tears glistening on his deathly pale face.
‘It’s Authari,’ he said.
42
In his last convulsion, Authari had pitched forward out of his seat. When I arrived in the Permanent Legate’s bedroom, he lay face down in the pool of now congealed blood.
Martin had found him after he’d finished gathering all the papers he could lay hands on into one of our document crates, ready for inspection in my own office. He’d gone into the room to see if Authari wanted something to eat.
At first he’d supposed that Authari had got himself some wine and drunk himself into a heap. Now, weeping softly, he stood back while Priscus and I inspected the body.
‘My darling boy,’ Priscus drawled, ‘would it alter me in your estimation if I observed that this doesn’t look at all like the Permanent Legate?’
Yes – where was the other body? Nothing else in the room had been disturbed. The window shutters still lay open as I’d left them. There, now in sunlight, was the blood patch still on the floor. But where the Permanent Legate’s body had lain was now only an expanse of less bloody floorboards.
Two sets of footprints led away to a rug on which bloody footwear had evidently been cleaned before the body was taken off to God knew where.
Now, in place of that corpse, lay Authari.
I swallowed and made no reply.
Priscus took up the wooden cup that had lain in a corner of the room. He ran a finger round the moist inside of the cup and licked his finger. He spat vigorously and rinsed his mouth from a wine flask he carried in his robe.
‘It’s one of the metallic poisons,’ he said, rinsing his finger. ‘This isn’t the low-grade muck women buy in the shops to use on their husbands. You need a licence to buy it, and use is confined to the Imperial Service.
‘I’ve used it myself many times,’ he added thoughtfully. ‘When I was operating against the Persians in Mesopotamia, I once had a pair of gloves steeped in the stuff, and presented them to a barbarian ally I thought was dealing both ways. Everyone believed he died of a heart attack while wiping his arse.’
Priscus gave me a complacent smirk, then looked down at the twisted, blackened face as I rolled the body over.
‘Taken as a liquid, and in that concentration,’ he added, ‘I’d say your man was dead before the first mouthful reached his stomach. The tongue would have swollen like that just after death.’
He turned to the blood patch on the floor.
‘I imagine he was killed so the body could be removed,’ he said. ‘My normal preference is for something a little slower. But I can see this was an emergency.’
‘That seems to follow,’ Martin broke in, still agitated. Ignoring Priscus, he looked at me. ‘My suspicion is that the Permanent Legate’s killer was hiding somewhere in this room. Just because we didn’t find the hiding place on first inspection doesn’t mean there isn’t one.’
Priscus gave Martin an unpleasant look, then turned back to an inspection of the body.
‘Whoever poisoned Authari must have had his trust,’ I said. ‘That wouldn’t be someone who’d just crawled out of a wall space. More likely, someone he knew came in, put him out of the way, then rescued the hidden killer and helped him lift the body.’
It made sense that a hidden killer would need Authari out of the way. But why bother taking the Permanent Legate’s body? It wouldn’t have been an easy thing to carry. And where had it gone? The Legation was sealed.
Perhaps there was something about the body I hadn’t noticed, but that the medical inspection I’d ordered might reveal. But this was more speculation.
‘My Lord Priscus,’ I said, turning back to the matter in hand, ‘if, back in my office, I gave any impression of not welcoming your involvement in this case, I apologise.’
I steeled myself, and followed with the inevitable: ‘Can I call on you for immediate assistance?’
Priscus smiled. He knew that everything had changed. Finding the Permanent Legate’s killer was a duty that I had to discharge sooner or later. Now I also had Authari to avenge. Unlike Martin, I wouldn’t give way to emotion in
