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"Of course. Then next morning, the bloody girl went missing, her damned aunt raised an outcry, and just when we were due to leave, we spent a day fruitlessly searching for darling Caesia. I'll never forget. It was bloody pouring with rain.
"She had vanished overnight?"
"The aunt reported it when we were ready to go. I think she waited until morning." Phineus saw me looking sideways. "In case darling Caesia had just found herself a boyfriend and wanted to stay with him."
"Did you have any reason to think that she had?"
"Found a boyfriend? I wouldn't think so. She was a prim little mouse. Jumped, if anybody so much as looked at her. Didn't seem to like men."
That was new. Inaccurate too. Her father had said there was an episode with a man at home in Rome. "You thought she had no experience?"
"She hid behind the skirts of older women on the trip." Hid from what, I wondered.
"Who was making advances?"
"Nobody." Phineus looked a
I changed tack. "Did you meet her father – afterwards?"
Now it was Phineus who jumped. "Why? What's her father said, Falco?"
"Touchy! It was a straight question."
"I met him," stated Phineus. "I was polite to him. He had lost his child and I sympathised. There simply wasn't anything that I could do to help the man. I know nothing about what happened to Marcella Caesia." He paused then. I could not tell what he was thinking – but once again I felt there were things Phineus kept hidden. "Except this, Falc o- if Caesia really disappeared the night before we left, this is a certainty. none of the male clients on that tour harmed her. It would have been impossible. All of them were with me all Day Four, from when we left the women in the morning – with Caesia among them, perfectly all right."
XXXII
It had taken Aquillius and me a long time to find Phineus, and it had been a hard walk. Talking to him had scrambled my brain too. I knew he was bamboozling me. After I left him, I felt unsettled. Looking up at the crag, with its distant temples dreamily far off, I was filled with inertia. I lost interest in climbing the acropolis today.
I went back to the Elephant, learned that Helena had gone shopping, and fell back on an informer's honest standby. writing up my notes. (There are other excuses, less useful, though often more fun.) The good work just happened to occur in the courtyard of the Bay Mare, where eventually I was offered lunch. Since I was occupying their table, it would have been discourteous to refuse.
When Helena came and found me looking guilty with a bowl and goblet, I escaped censure due to guilt of her own. She carefully arranged the folds of her light skirt and graceful stole – a delaying tactic that I recognised. Then she admitted she had been purchasing ancient vases. We could afford these antiquities, for which Corinth had once been famous, but her intention was to export most back to Rome for my father's business. I said what I thought of that. Helena thought I was unfair to Pa. We had a satisfying wrangle about the meaning of "unfairness', after which, since none of our party was around, we slunk off to our room, threw off our clothes, and reminded ourselves of what life together was all about.
Nothing that is anybody else's business.
Some time later, I remembered to give Helena the letter that Aquillius had brought from her brother.
Our vagrant scholar was as trusting as ever that we would have rushed out to Greece when he whistled. How he guessed we might come through Corinth was not revealed. Aulus wrote a blunt epistle, void of frills; explanations were not his strength. It boded ill for his career as a lawyer, should he ever take it up.
He must have reasoned we would go to Olympia because that was
where the deaths took place, then since Corinth was roughly in a line with Athens, we would rest here on our way to see him. He had convinced himself that if we were in Greece we were coming to find him. That he, Aulus Camillus Aelianus the layabout law student, might not be my priority during a murder hunt never struck him. There was a time when I disliked this fellow; now I just despaired.
After hoping we were well (a courtesy which meant he must be ru
Aulus had decided Tullius Statianus was i
"Oh nuts!"
"Don't be sceptical," Helena cautioned. "Many people do believe in it."
I restricted myself to the scathing remark that many people were idiots.
"Just to be doing something may calm him, Marcus."
"Doing this will waste his money and drive him crazy."
We were dealing with travellers who had come to Greece in search of its ancient mysteries, so Statianus' pilgrimage was in character. Even I conceded that he must be deeply shocked and devastated by the classic feelings of helplessness. Aulus had tried to promise our aid, but had to confess the possibility that his letters had never reached us. So the two men had gone across to Delphi together. There they had discovered what is rarely spelt out in the guidebooks. only one day each month is assigned for prophecies – and, worse, only nations, major cities, and rich persons of extreme importance tend to be wi
"Apollo's oracle has a queue?"
"Truth is valuable, Marcus. They have to ration it."
Given that by tradition no one can understand the prophecies, this seemed doubly harsh on the desperate.
Aulus had never been famous for sticking-power. Since the oracle seemed a waste of time, he gave up. With no sign of hypocrisy, he wrote to his sceptical sister that he now felt it proper to honour his parents' wishes and make his way to university. Helena guffawed. I amused myself imagining their parents' reaction. We assumed that once Aulus had seen the Statue of Zeus at Olympia and explored the Delphic sanctuary, it was time for him to add the glorious Parthenon to his wish-list of fancy sights.
Statianus, the distraught bridegroom, had been left behind, still looking for a chance to submit a lead tablet asking "Who murdered my wife?" to the Pythia; she was the frantic priestess who, even in these modern times, sat on a tripod chewing bay leaves until the god (or the bay leaves) overwhelmed her with unintelligible wisdom and a bad headache afterwards.
If Statianus did not rejoin the travel group soon, someone would have to go to Delphi and gather him up. I bet I knew who that would be. It might be easier to extract him when I could answer his tragic question myself, so I filed the obsessive widower in my "do later' pigeonhole.
"As an oracle, you are a lazy bastard, Falco!" Helena commented.
"O woman of disbelief! As an oracle, I am hot stuff. I prophesy this. seek for him who comes and goes amongst those who go and come."