Free The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis Page A

the wet ink stained her white dress around the wound. Perhaps she knew him. When she found him, he realized she needed to be silenced, so he stood up and rapidly stabbed her, a rising blow through the heart, once, with his pen.
    Petronius was right. Sosia Camillina could not have expected that.
    I rose. I managed neither to stumble nor break down.
    "Her father..."
    "I'll tell them," stated Petronius drably. A task he so hated. "Go home. I'll tell the family. Marcus, just go home!"
    I decided after all to let him tell them.
    I could feel his eyes watching me as I walked away. He wanted to help. He knew there was nothing anyone could do.

XIX

    I went to the funeral. In my line of work, this is traditional. Petronius came with me.
    According to custom, they conducted the ceremony out of doors. They came in procession from her father's house, bringing Sosia Camillina in an open bier with garlands in her hair. The cremation took place outside the city near the family mausoleum on the Appian Way. They dispensed with professional mourners. Young men who were friends of the family carried her funeral bed.
    There was a blustery wind. They brought her through Rome in daylight, with flute music and lamentation, disrupting the city streets. At the pyre, built of untrimmed wood like an altar and with dark leaves woven round the sides, one of the young bearers stumbled. I stepped forward to help, without looking. The bier was so light it nearly flew from our hands as we swung it up.
    Her father's oration was short, almost perfunctory. That seemed right. So too had been her life. What Publius Camillus said that day was simple, and simply the truth.
    "This was my only daughter, Sosia Camillina. She was fair, reverent and dutiful, snatched from the world before she could know the love of a husband or child. Receive her young soul gently, O ye gods..." He seized one of the torches and, with formally averted gaze, he lit the pyre.
    "Sosia Camillina, Hail and Farewell!"
    Surrounded by flowers, small trinkets, sweet oils, she left us. People wept. I was one of them. Scented flames crackled up. I glimpsed her once through the smoke. She was gone.
    Petronius and I had endured the respectful ritual scores of times. We never liked it. I raged under my breath, as we stood to one side. "This is obscene. Remind me again what in Hades I'm doing here!"
    He answered in his low voice, lecturing me to steady me, "Official sympathy- Plus a forlorn hope that the maniac we are looking for may turn up too. Fascinated by his crime, flaunting his mad mask at the mausoleum..."
    Keeping on my funeral face, I scoffed, "Exposing himself to curious scrutiny in the one place where he knows uncomfortable law agents are standing about, just longing for a chance to gallop after any uninvited guest who has a funny look about the eyes"
    Petro dropped a hand on my arm. Then again, you know, we may spot a mood in the family that doesn't fit."
    "We can rule out the family," I declared.
    Petronius raised an eyebrow. He had left this delicate issue to the praetor let a magistrate of their own rank plant his nice clean shoe in the manure. I think he assumed I was too brokenhearted to consider it. But I had.
    "Women not strong enough, children not tall enough. Decimus Verus has fifty members of the government whose word I don't rate a bean and the old slave from the Black Sea who cleans his boots who is good enough for me to swear he was at the senate, while Publius Meto was discussing merchant ships with his brother's daughter's divorced husband which incidentally, Petro, has ruled out the ex-husband too, before we even bothered to rule him in." I had checked. I knew the whereabouts of relations the senator and his brother had forgotten they ever owned.
    The only thing I had not done was to meet Helena Justina's ex-husband. Never even troubled to ask his name. I excused him for two reasons. The useful Black Sea boot-slave had told me where he was. And anyway, Helena's husband had