The Spook Who Spoke Again: A Flavia Albia Short Story by Lindsey Davis

going to sack the client and bugger it.
    I see, says Helena.
    Next day you get up, have a bright idea, and solve your case.
    You can’t get bogged down on the first day, that’s too soon to lose heart. You have to do spadework first. Spadework or legwork. I couldn’t do legwork because I wasn’t allowed to walk off on my own, I was supposed to stay in the tented area or at the Circus track. So I did more spadework.
    After the aedile left, the acrobats milled around. They were stretching, balancing and practising sleights of hand, juggling and manipulating. The kennelful of trained little dogs were running around pulling miniature chariots. Faustus had not witnessed this, which was a good thing because only half of the doggies did it, while the others broke out of their reins and scampered about, yapping naughtily.
    I announced loudly that I would not tell my sister’s boyfriend, the aedile Faustus, that the company’s performing dogs were hopeless, so long as someone helped me find out what happened to my ferret yesterday. They all pulled faces, as if they were impressed.
    You have to identify where everybody was when the crime happened. So I walked around asking each person whether they had been in Thalia’s tent yesterday morning, or if not, where? I made a list in my notebook, the one Faustus gave me (he had told me I could keep it unless he ran out of them). There were two columns, one column for people who admitted they had been in the tent and one for those who hadn’t, but when I finished asking, all the people were listed in the same column, saying they had not been there. This was no use. But at least I had now learned their names.
    They all knew me too, so if anyone remembered anything helpful, they could come and find me easily.
    I then made a third column for anyone I believed had lied to me. This was one: the tiny woman called Sassia. She had a face like a monkey and I could see all her bones. The reason I thought she was lying was that she was now wearing a green costume with fringes on it which I knew I had seen in the pile of clothes in the tent. It was a crucial clue.
    On the other hand, it would be very dangerous for Sassia to go into that tent because if Jason thought she was a little monkey, he might make her his prey. But if she had badly wanted to fetch her costume, she might have shown him Ferret as a distraction from her.
    I could not really remember when I saw the green costume. Was it before Ferret disappeared, or afterwards? Luckily it wasn’t my job to remember things, because I was not a witness. I was the enquiry agent. We don’t come under suspicion. We are in command.
    If Sassia collected the costume this morning, she would be in the clear for the crime, which happened yesterday. I didn’t ask her that question. I was biding my time. I could make it a dramatic moment in my revelation of the suspect’s guilt.
    You have to do that in public, gathering together all the interested parties so you can discount them or discredit them. Don’t forget that someone may own up who hasn’t really done it, because they are protecting someone else. There is generally someone with a long-lost lovechild they have not dared to name, or another person has been blackmailing someone to force them to keep quiet about a terrible thing that happened twenty years ago. This is life. Especially when it’s death. Especially murder, because nobody would kill another person just because they lost their temper, would they?
    The acrobats were rather strange. When I was asking questions and working out who they all belonged with, Pollia was sitting across the lap of the one called Laurus; she looked extremely comfortable there so I asked if he was her husband. I knew it was wise to check. I carefully didn’t mention that I had seen her kissing Hesper yesterday. On no, said Pollia with a silly laugh, her husband was Pedo. I couldn’t understand it because Pedo at that moment was snuggling up to the other woman,