Silva conducted us to the room, which opened off a central courtyard. Nervous slaves stood by with lamps. 'Hermes,' I said, 'take the lamps inside and place them yourself. You know how to do it.' By this I meant that he had long practice at not disturbing a crime scene.
'Yes, Praetor.' He took the first lamp and walked in very carefully. Then he returned for another, taking them in one at a time until he had placed eight or ten within. When the room was illuminated, I walked in.
Immediately I was conscious of the smell that Manius Silva had noted-the sordid smell of death. Quadrilla lay on the bed amid luxuriant, disordered pillows. She was quite naked and had that deflated look common to the newly dead, like a wineskin that has been drained. She was a handsome woman of advancing years and clearly had once been a great beauty. Her overstretched navel gaped obscenely, the sapphire gone from its setting. I looked around the room and did not see it anywhere.
'Manius,' I said, 'where did Quadrilla keep her-her abdominal sapphire?'
He pointed to an ivory box upon a table. 'She had a number of them.'
'Hermes,' I said. He opened the box to reveal around twenty sapphires. Some were rimmed with gold, some carved intaglio, even one with a pearl set in its center. They were nestled in yellow silk, each in its own depression. One depression was empty. 'Which one is missing?'
'The largest,' Silva said. 'It was her favorite.'
'Was she wearing it earlier today?'
'She was.'
'It may be in the bedding,' I said. 'We'll have it searched once her body is attended to.'
There was no mystery about how she had died. She lay in an untidy sprawl, her head twisted to one side. The hilt of a miniature dagger protruded from the base of her skull, at what my physician friend Asklepi-odes would term the insertion point of the neck vertebrae.
'Manius, do you recognize this weapon?' I asked. 'Is it from this house?'
'Never saw it before,' he said. From without, I heard whispering to the effect that Quadrilla had been killed in the same fashion as Gaeto. Hermes shushed them.
Beneath the smell of death I detected another fragrance, one with which I had grown familiar of late. 'Manius, I suppose you can identify this perfume?'
He stepped closed and sniffed with a sick look on his face. 'Of course. It is Zoroaster's Rapture. It was her favorite, and incredibly costly. Even I was able to procure only small amounts of it. She wore it for special occasions.'
'And was she wearing it when she left you earlier?'
'She was not,' he said grimly, not missing the implication.
I walked carefully around the room. There was no disorder save on the bed, where the cushions and coverlets were in some disarray, possibly as a result of the death struggle, but I doubted that.
I examined the lamps that had been in the room before we entered. Each had a good supply of oil. Either they had been snuffed out, or they had not been lit that night.
'There is no more to be done here,' I said. 'Call in the
Hermes had put the man in a small room opening off the triclinium. As his name would indicate, he was Egyptian. Hapi is the twin god of the Nile. He was middle-aged, bald, and pudgy, possibly a eunuch. When I walked in, he was sweating profusely.
'Praetor!' he piped. Yes, definitely a eunuch. 'Praetor, I had no idea- I don't know what-'
'Just tell me what you
'Just after sunset, Praetor.' He wrung his hands, eyes darting in all directions save toward me.
'Was she alone?'
'Well-well, she arrived in a litter. A closed litter.'
'Then I will want to speak to the litter bearers.'
'It was not my lady's litter, Praetor. Her own litter had returned perhaps an hour earlier. She had dismissed her bearers, telling them that she wished to stroll in Diana's Grove, and that she would walk home, since it was such a fine evening.'
'I see. And did you recognize this litter or its bearers?'
He looked down at the floor as if his salvation lay there. 'No, Praetor. It was costly, and the bearers were all black Nubians.'
'And she did not explain how she came to return in this fashion? Were you not curious?'
'One-one learns not to ask, Praetor.'
'I understand. Tell me exactly what happened.'
'At an hour past sunset, as I said before, the litter arrived at the front gate. The janitor admitted it, and when I came into the atrium, my lady told me that she was going to her bedroom and I was to dismiss her gii'ls to their quarters.'
'Did you see who else might be in the litter?'
'No. My lady only put her head out and held the curtains close around her. The bearers took her right back to the bedroom, and a few minutes later they left with the litter.'
'And you didn't- Yes, I know, one learns not to ask. Did you hear anything unusual from the bedroom?'
'No, Praetor. She said that the master would be at the guild banquet until very late and I might as well retire to my own quarters. It was not a suggestion, Praetor. I know when I am receiving a command, however gently it is put.'
'Do you remember anything else?'
'Just that my lady seemed-very happy, Praetor.'
The janitor was of no help at all. He was an elderly Bruttian who was barely able to speak and whose intelligence seemed just about equal to his duties. One doesn't need much in a slave who does little but open and shut the front door.
By the time I left it was determined that the sapphire was nowhere in the bedroom.
'I rather liked the woman,' I told Julia when I returned to our town house. 'I am sorry that she is dead.'
'At this rate,' Antonia observed, 'there will be no one left alive to give you any trouble.'
'The last one still alive will be the killer,' said Marcus helpfully. 'That makes it simple, at the very least.'
'If there's only one,' I grumbled. 'There may be a whole pack of them.'
'Quadrilla was killed by Gaeto's murderer,' Julia said. 'The method was the same.'
'Or somebody is copying this homicidal technique to cover up an unconnected murder,' I speculated. 'In the bad old days in Rome, when senators were being proscribed, many men used the confusion to settle old scores.'
'Nonsense,' Julia said. 'Quadrilla smuggled a lover home and the lover killed her and took that sapphire.'
'Why?' Circe queried. 'I mean, why take that sapphire, fabulous though it was? There was ten times its value in the box that held her other navel adornments.'
'The killer was taking a souvenir, a keepsake,' I said.
'That's insane,' Julia said.
'Clearly, this murderer is not quite sane, however clever,' I said.
'Gorgo was killed haphazardly, and perhaps the killer did not go to meet her with murder in mind. Gaeto and Quadrilla were killed with an incredible cold-bloodedness. And then there was the bizarre, ritualistic way Charmian's body was laid out.'
'Assuming there is just one killer,' Julia said. 'If it is just one, and he is not sane, we may never find out his identity.'
'Why do you say that?' Antonia wanted to know.
'Because people usually kill from greed or jealousy,' she answered. 'A madman does not act from such motives. Do you remember that madman in Lanuvium a few years ago?'
'Oh, I remember that one!' Antonia said, clapping her hands with delight like a little girl. 'Was it twenty or thirty bodies found in his well?'
'Twenty, I think,' Julia said. 'He testified that he heard Pluto calling from the bottom of his well, demanding
