Enemies at Home by Lindsey Davis Page B

all wore simple patched tunics in neutral colours. They looked fit and tidy, products of a decent home. In conversation none of them really told me much about Aviola or Mucia, though they spoke well of both.
    Before we started, I reminded the group that the law said slaves had to give evidence under torture. I would not be doing that. ‘– Not at this stage.’ They knew what I meant.
     
    I saw Phaedrus first, the other door porter. He was a sturdy, fair-haired young man with north European origins, a Gaul or German. He had an open face and honest manner – which generally signals a lying witness. According to him, although I had been told Nicostratus was the night porter, it was the other way around. Phaedrus was to have been on late duty but had stayed in the kitchen, having his supper first; it was when he went to relieve his colleague that he found Nicostratus and raised the alarm.
    ‘So were you in the kitchen throughout the robbery and murders?’
    ‘Yes, but I heard nothing.’
    ‘Phaedrus, I have been in that kitchen. I know the layout. Are you sure you never heard the intruders breaking in and attacking Nicostratus?’
    ‘No. They must have put him out cold with the first blow.’
    ‘Then they continued knocking him about? Unlikely! You heard no one come across the courtyard?’
    ‘They must have tiptoed through the columns on the opposite side.’
    I agreed that fitted with them going over to the dining room to take the silver. ‘Would you have run to help if you heard a commotion?’
    ‘Of course I would have! Sorting trouble is my job.’
    ‘You don’t shy from a rumpus?’
    ‘I would have been straight in.’
    ‘So what made you deaf? Was anybody else with you?’ The blond belligerent looked shifty but said no. ‘Oh, come on, Phaedrus. You can do better than this. What was taking up so much of your attention that you missed all the racket? Were you playing around with somebody?’
    Phaedrus had no answer, or none he would give me.
    I asked about working with Nicostratus. Apparently they hardly knew each other, but got on well. It was routine for a house to have two porters, since one could not stay alert both day and night.
(‘Alert’
? In my family, we reckon door porters are dopey at all times.
)
Phaedrus let slip that he himself was an incomer from Mucia’s household.
    ‘Really? It’s common on marriage for staffs to merge,’ I mused. ‘Sometimes they don’t gel, and that causes upsets.’
    ‘Oh, not us!’ maintained Phaedrus, looking innocent. Maybe the young men bonded. They were both in their twenties, Nicostratus slightly older. They could have palled up, talked about gladiators, discussed women (shared one?). A woman could well explain why Phaedrus was oblivious to noise that night.
    ‘So were you very upset when you discovered Nicostratus so terribly hurt? How do you feel about him dying today?’
    His face changed then, showing true distress.
    I let him go.
     
    Who next? I chose the gardener.
    Diomedes was short, lumpy in the body, big-eared and almost bald. He readily agreed that he was not over-taxed in his duties, though he claimed to hanker for the wider acreage of the country villa in Campania. At the Rome apartment he was a general handyman. He supplemented the water carrier, fetching extra buckets from the local fountain. He nailed things and cleared gullies. He went up ladders to wash shutters − which presumably meant he looked in through windows and saw room contents. He would have known the silver existed.
    I told him Polycarpus had said Diomedes was asleep in the garden. ‘The robbers went through to the dining room, then the bedroom. So you are the person most likely to have seen them. What do you say?’
    Diomedes said shamelessly that there had been wine at the feast, to which he and Amethystus helped themselves. So yes, they were slumped in a corner of the peristyle, but he bragged that both were completely ‘crocked’. They would not have woken if the