They ate a light lunch while they discussed the case.
Suetonius, carefully peeling a hardboiled egg, asked, “Are we keeping the murder a secret from Diocles?”
“Especially from him,” Pliny answered firmly. “But I don’t delude myself that our story will hold up long. Someone, a trooper or one of the dog handlers, will talk. And when it becomes known that the second highest Roman official in the province has been murdered we must be seen to take decisive action. This is a disaster, gentlemen, and we must deal with it swiftly. And we can’t do it by just sitting here. The tip about the saddle was a gift from the gods, but we can’t expect more like that. The answer to this puzzle is not going to walk in through the front door. We must go out and find it, and we haven’t much time.”
“And just how do we do that, Sir?” Aquila growled.
“We’re in a better place than we were before, Centurion. When Balbus had simply vanished we had nothing to go on. Now we do. We know that someone hated him enough or feared him enough to kill him. Either Silvanus out of fear or someone else for reasons we can’t even guess. And, mind you, the motive must have been irresistible to take such a risk. Every crime has a logic to it, if we can discover it. It is always the final act in a long train of events.”
“Like following the clew.”
“What’s that, my boy?”
Zosimus, aware of his humble station, seldom spoke at these meetings. When he did, it was to the point. “Theseus and the Minotaur, Patrone. You know the story. How Theseus had to follow a clew of thread that led him back from the Minotaur’s lair through the Labyrinth? It’s like that. We have hold of one end of the thread and we must walk it back to the other end. Following the clew.”
“Or clews,” Pliny laughed for the first time, it seemed, in a long time. “I thank you for that image, my boy, it’s very apt.” Zosimus blushed to the roots of his hair. “But I suspect what we have here is a tangle of many threads, and each one must be followed to its end.”
“One of them being embezzlement—unless we’ve abandoned that theory?” asked Caelianus. He had come over from the treasury building to confer with them. “All we know for certain is that Silvanus was stealing. Whether Balbus was also, who can say? The counting is going slowly; the clerks are mutinous, they stop working every time I take my eye off them.”
“No theory has been abandoned,” Pliny answered.
“Silvanus is our murderer,” Suetonius said firmly. “I can’t forget the way Balbus humiliated him at dinner. Even apart from being caught with his hands in the money chest, he had reason to hate Balbus.”
Pliny shook his head. “You were imagining a knife in the ribs, as I recall. But breaking Balbus’ thick neck? I doubt the chief clerk’s physically capable of it. Not single-handedly anyway.”
“And then there’s Fabia,” Marinus suggested. “In my experience, there’s always a woman at the bottom of these things.”
Suetonius cocked an eyebrow. “Your experience of women being precisely what?”
“Is that bald spot of yours getting bigger, my literary friend?” Marinus leered at him. “I’ve read somewhere that pigeon droppings rubbed briskly into the scalp does wonders.”
These two had been having at each other lately. All of them were on edge.
“Yes, there’s Fabia.” Pliny swallowed a sip of watered wine and dabbed at his lips with his napkin. “And there is a slave in that household, too, who I’ll wager could break a neck. Worth thinking about. If there’s a mistress in the picture, for instance, I would not like to be the man who crossed Fabia.”
“Tattooed Thracian, they say,” Suetonius pulled a comical fierce face.
“Such is the rumor. When I spoke with her this morning and mentioned Silvanus she was more than happy to blacken his character. I got the distinct feeling that she’d like us to think he murdered her husband.”
“But you didn’t actually say he’d been murdered?”
“Oh, no, I told her it was an accident. If she does have something to do with his death, I don’t want her to know how much we know. Not until we have a motive.”
“Right, then,” Suetonius said, “now we’re getting into my line of country. Did Balbus have a woman on the side? Did he visit the brothels? Did he have gambling debts? I assign myself the task