Free A Pattern of Blood by Rosemary Rowe Page B

somewhere.’
    ‘But you think that is improbable?’
    ‘With respect, Excellence, I think it is almost impossible,’ I said. ‘Any assassin would bring his weapon with him. He could not rely on finding one to hand. And how could he know that Ulpius would be unattended? Usually the man is surrounded by slaves and secretaries.’
    Marcus thought about that for a moment, and then rewarded me with a smile. ‘Well done, Libertus. Now we are making progress. I had come to the same conclusion myself. The facts seem to argue that the murder was committed by somebody already inside the house.’
    ‘There is only one problem, Excellence,’ I told him gloomily.
    He looked at me quizzically. ‘And that is?’
    ‘Exactly the same objections seem to apply to them.’

Chapter Six
    Sollers had rounded up for us all the slaves who were anywhere near Quintus’s reception room at the time of the murder. There were at least a dozen of them, and when I first glimpsed them, lined up outside the door of the study, my heart sank at how long the questioning was going to take. A closer inspection, however, made me simply goggle. If it were not for the ochre-tunicked figures of the secretary and the chief slave – who stood out from the others like two Vestal virgins at an orgy – I might have suspected that I had drunk too much watered wine and was seeing everything double. We brought the chief slave in to question him, and soon discovered why.
    The poor man was half gibbering with fright lest the death of his master might be attributed to a slave’s negligence, which of course would ultimately be his personal responsibility. He was more impassioned than the forum orators in his desire to explain to us how no possible blame could attach to any servant under his control.
    Ulpius, it seemed, not only possessed an enormous number of slaves, drawn from all over the Empire, but – whether to impress the populace or because he felt it befitted his position – generally deployed them in pairs, except for those with specialist functions like the secretary and the exquisite page I had seen earlier. Many of the ‘pairs’ were even matched as closely as possible for height and appearance – hence, presumably, the physical similarity of the two boys who had attended us on our arrival. This piece of conspicuous extravagance must have cost a fortune, and, apart from amusing Quintus, was evidently designed to dazzle visitors with an exhibition of wealth.
    It had certainly dazzled Marcus: I shouldn’t be surprised to find matched pairs of serving lads at his own banquets in future. Quintus’s servants, though, were probably less enthusiastic about the arrangement. Slaves have little enough privacy in any household, but short of being manacled together, these poor creatures could scarcely have had less. The pairs ate together, worked together, washed together, waited together and even shared the same sleeping space in the slaves’ quarters. If I had been treated so when I was a slave, I should have found life ten times harder to bear, especially since a man could not even choose the companion who was linked to him with these invisible chains.
    However, it did have one advantage now, from our point of view. The system meant that each half of a ‘pair’ had at least one witness to his movements for the entire day: indeed, I thought, with a little pang of sympathy, a witness to every minute of his life.
    The chief slave confirmed this more strongly. There were so many slaves in the household, he explained, that each pair had specific duties, related to a particular person, function or ‘domain’, and most of the time were in full view of one or other of their fellow pairs. If they were not required, they were stationed in the slaves’ ante-room next to the kitchen, where he personally could keep an eye on them. Therefore, unless there was a conspiracy involving most of the household, we could eliminate any of the paired slaves at once.
    Marcus