The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fic - By Mike Ashley Page 0,9

– perhaps. To a trained engineer, even – quite possibly. But King Hiero of Syracuse has in his service the greatest living expert, fellow delegates, the world’s foremost authority on the use and application of levers and mechanical advantage; I refer, of course, to the universally acclaimed inventor Archimedes, son of Phidias, who is sitting before me as I speak; the man who once boasted, as I’m sure I need not remind you, ‘Give me a firm place to stand, and I can move the Earth’. Fellow delegates—”

I’m afraid I missed the rest of the speech. Two of Hiero’s men took me politely by the elbows and walked me out of the room, before I could say anything.

*

On my way home, Orestes and I stopped off at Stratocles’ warehouse. It was a huge place, and the nearest uninhabited building to Agathocles’ house. Inside, there were more jars than I’ve ever seen in my life. There were sealed jars, rows and rows of them, ready to be loaded and shipped. There were empty jars, sent back to be washed out and refilled. There were damaged jars waiting to be hauled off and dumped in the bay, and two long lines of half-filled jars, containing the preservative oil but as yet no sprats, standing by to be stoppered and sealed with pitch.

I stood next to one of these – it was about two fingers’ width taller than me – and tried to imagine lifting a dead body high enough to drop inside it. It’d take several men.

“Come on,” Orestes said sadly. “This part of the evidence isn’t in dispute.”

“I guess not,” I said. “I’d still like to know why sprats, though.”

“Excuse me?”

“The body was bound to turn up sooner or later,” I said. “When the jar was opened. I grant you, it was sheer chance that it ended up in Rome. Even so—”

I didn’t finish the sentence because at that point I slipped and nearly ended up on my face. The floor was slick with oil. Someone had tried to blot it up with sawdust, but hadn’t been thorough enough.

Orestes grinned at me. “Archimedes’ principle of the displacement of fluids,” he said. “I read about it at school.”

I gave him a look. “I’m guessing,” I said, “that this is where the body was tipped in, and the displaced oil came gushing out. He was a big man, so there was a lot of spilt oil.”

“Quite,” Orestes said. “So where does that get us?”

I wiped oil off the sole of my sandal with the hem of my gown. “Nowhere,” I said.

*

The next day, Orestes came to see me. I sent word that I didn’t want to talk to anybody. He insisted. I pointed out that I was having a relaxing, well-earned bath, in which I hoped to dissolve every trace of the air I’d been forced to share with Publius Laurentius Scaurus. Orestes came in anyway, and sat down on the floor looking sadly at me and not speaking.

“I told Hiero,” I said. “I didn’t want to get involved.”

“You’re involved all right,” Orestes said. “They’re demanding your extradition.”

I’m not a brave man. I squealed like a pig. “Hiero’ll never agree.”

“No,” Orestes said, “he won’t. And that means there’s going to be a war. Which,” he added, with a faint shrug of his shoulders, “we’ll almost certainly lose, unless you can think of a way of blasting the Roman fleet out of the bay. Pity about that,” he added.

“Yes,” I said. “But it’s not my fault.”

“Nobody said it was,” Orestes replied gloomily. “Still, that’s one thing I never thought I’d see.”

“What?”

“Archimedes,” he said, standing up. “Outsmarted by a Roman.”

He was just about to leave. I called him back. “I don’t suppose,” I said, “you’ve still got your file on Naso.”

He grinned at me. “As a matter of fact,” he said, and pulled out the papers from under his tunic.

I sighed. “Read them to me,” I said. “My eyesight—”

So he read his notes on the life and times of Quintus Caecilius Naso, up to a point where I told him to stop and go back a bit. He read that bit again, and I asked him some questions, which he was luckily able to answer.

“You wouldn’t happen to have,” I said quietly, “anything similar on our friend Scaurus?”

“Wait there,” he said.

*

The bath was getting cold when he came back, but I hadn’t bothered to get out. I’d been too busy thinking; or, rather, bashing helplessly at the locked door of my intuition, behind which I