The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction

Needless to say, the problem Hiero had just blackmailed me into investigating was all about Romans. One Roman in particular. His name was Quintus Caecilius Naso, diplomatic attaché to the Roman delegation to the court of King Hiero, and what he’d done to make trouble for Syracuse (and perplexity for me) was to turn up, extremely dead, in a large storage jar full of pickled sprats, on the dockside at Ostia, when he should have been alive and healthy in the guest quarters of the royal palace at Syracuse.

Quintus Caecilius Naso — why Romans have to have three names when everybody else manages perfectly well with one is a mystery to me — was, at the time of his death, a thirty-six-year-old army officer, from a noble and distinguished family, serving as part of a delegation engaged in negotiating revisions to the treaty Hiero had been bounced into signing twenty years ago; in other words, he was here to bully my old friend into making yet more concessions, and I know for a fact that Hiero was deeply unhappy about the situation. However, he’d managed to claw back a little ground, and it looked as though there was a reasonable chance of lashing together a compromise and getting rid of the Romans relatively painlessly, when Naso suddenly disappeared.

I never met the man, but by all accounts he wasn’t the disappearing sort. Far too much of him for that. He wasn’t tall, but he was big; a lot of muscle and a lot of fat was how people described him to me, just starting to get thin on top, a square jaw floating on a bullfrog double-chin; incongruously small hands at the end of arms like legs. His party trick was to pick up a flute-girl with one hand, lift her up on his shoulder and take her outside for a relatively short time. He was never drunk and never sober, he stood far too close when he was talking to you, and he had, by all accounts, a bit of a temper.

He was last seen alive at a drinks party held at his house by Agathocles, our chief negotiator. It was a small, low-key affair; three of ours, three Romans, four cooks, two servers, two flute-girls. Agathocles and his two aides drank moderately, as did two of the Romans. Naso got plastered. Since he was the ranking diplomat on the Roman side, very little business was transacted prior to Naso being in no fit state; his two sidekicks clearly felt they lacked the authority to continue when their superior stopped talking boundaries and demilitarized zones and started singing along with the flautists and our three were just plain embarrassed. When Naso grabbed one of the girls — he dropped her, and had to use both hands — and wandered off into the courtyard with her, the rest of the party broke up by unspoken mutual consent and went home. Agathocles went into the inner room to bed. The Romans’ honour guard — a dozen marines from the ship they arrived on — stayed where they were, surrounding the house. Their orders were to escort Naso back to the palace. But Naso didn’t appear, so they stood there all night, assuming he’d fallen asleep somewhere. They were still standing there, at attention, when the sun rose. At this point, Naso’s secretary came bustling up; the great man was due in a meeting, where was he? The guards didn’t have the authority to wake him up, but the secretary did. He went inside, then looked round the courtyard, which didn’t take long. No sign of Naso, or the wretched girl. The secretary then made the guards search Agathocles’ house. Nothing.

The secretary and the guard-sergeant had a quick, panic-stricken conference and decided that Naso must’ve slipped past the guards with the girl — why he should want to do that, neither of them could begin to imagine — and was presumably shacked up with her somewhere, intending to re-emerge in his own good time. This constituted a minor diplomatic insult to us, of course, since the meeting had to be adjourned, and our side came to the conclusion that it was intended as a small act of deliberate rudeness, to put us in our place. If we made a fuss about it, we’d look petty-minded. If we said nothing, we’d be tacitly admitting we deserved to be walked all over. It was just the sort of thing Naso tended to do, and it had always worked well for him in the past.