Moments later the legate had swept out of Ria’s bar on his way to deal with the next crisis. Ruso forced himself not to look longingly at the porridge. The legate had gone, but he had left the tribune behind.
“A word in private, Ruso,” said Accius, swinging a leg over the nearest bench and resting his elbows on the table. “This Mallius chap. It’s not as straightforward as it might be. He says it wasn’t him, he doesn’t know anything about anything, the boy has identified the wrong man, he was asleep when the boy was taken, and all he did the other night was mistake a patch of moonlight for a ghost.”
“Well, he would, sir.”
“The sleep thing isn’t a problem. I’ve reinterviewed everyone and it seems our witness didn’t see the face of whoever it was in the bed. There are other candidates.”
“And the boy identified him?”
“Oh, that’s conclusive. We’ll try him for kidnap. But whatever antics your wife got up to the other night didn’t really give us any answers about Candidus, and frankly it would be useful to get this this thing settled. Nobody wants it coming back to bite us later on. I was wondering if you had any thoughts.”
So the legate was pretending to know nothing while his junior dealt with the problem. It seemed Accius was reluctant to risk using torture again, especially now that there was no life at stake. That was something to be glad about. There were men who got a taste for it.
“He’ll be executed anyway for the boy.”
Ruso shook his head, trying to clear the drowsiness of the poppy, and wished he had not. Then he said, “Do we have the men’s records here, sir?”
“They’re all back at Deva as far as I know. Why?”
“Just a thought. Can I talk to Mallius?”
“Go to the east gatehouse at Parva. Tell them I sent you.”
Chapter 74
Warned by Valens that nobody had been allowed in to clean the prisoner up, Ruso arrived at the gatehouse with his medical case and a jug of water. Mallius looked as though someone had picked him up by his chains and swung him round and round the cubicle, crashing him into the stone walls as he spun. Ruso’s own bruising and stitching and black eye—which he could now open, thank the gods—felt trivial in comparison. At least the first half hour of his visit was spent washing and examining and applying salve and bandaging, and in between, Mallius wept and groaned and insisted that he had nothing to do with anything, nobody believed him, the boy was lying, they were going to kill him for thinking he’d seen a ghost, and was there anything the doctor could do to convince them?
“Perhaps,” mused Ruso, wiping salve off his fingers and dropping the cloth back into his case, “it would help if we send for your family.”
Mallius’s eyes widened. “No! They mustn’t know, sir. They would be heartbroken. It would kill my mother.”
“We should contact them before the trial, though,” Ruso insisted. “You should have someone there.”
“Please don’t, sir. Please.”
Ruso sighed and shut the case. “Let’s save them the trouble, then. They won’t recognize you anyway, will they?”
“Sir?”
Mallius’s apparent innocence was impressive. But then, he’d had plenty of practice. “What’s your real name?”
“Real name, sir?”
“It definitely isn’t Mallius. His family wouldn’t have known you even before you were beaten up, would they?”
The red-rimmed eyes stared into his own for a moment. Then the man slumped back against the wall, all sign of weeping suddenly gone. “I never thought it would do any harm.”
Ruso waited.
“It was the slave at the dealer’s, right?”
“He recognized you,” Ruso told him. “You should never have stopped bleaching your hair.”
“I thought he did.” He sighed. “I never wanted to hurt anybody. Seven years of no bother, then just when I stop looking over my shoulder, two people turn up out of the past.”
“The Legion wasn’t the best choice you could have made.”
“I was hoping to get a transfer overseas, sir.”
“You couldn’t join in the first place,” Ruso pointed out. “You were a slave. Were you ever freed?”
“I wasn’t far off,” said the man who was not Mallius. “I had plenty saved up to make a good start in business. And then the new wife came.”
The story came out slowly and in a confusing order, but what Ruso managed to piece together was that Mallius had been a trusted slave in a wealthy household until the owner remarried. The new wife took a fancy to him, which left him in the extremely awkward position of having to disobey either master or mistress. He turned the woman down, and she accused him of rape. The new husband, still dazzled by love, believed her. Mallius—whose real name was Agelastus—fled. By some kindness of the gods he happened to be passing a bar when the young man really called Mallius was killed in a knife fight.