It would be difficult to imagine this anthology without one of the Slave Detective stories by Wallace Nichols. Throughout the 1950s and well into the 1960s Nichols produced a regular stream of stories about Sollius, the slave of senator Titius Sabinus, whose detective skills are known throughout Rome. The stories appeared exclusively in the London Mystery Magazine and have not been collected in book form. In The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits and The Mammoth Book of Historical Detectives, I reprinted the earliest Sollius stories, which take place in the final years of reign of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. The following is one of the later stories from the series, set in the reign of Septimius Severus, but the years have not dulled the detective powers of Sollius one jot.
One morning in the late Roman spring Sollius the slave, returning from an errand for his master, Titius Sabinus the Senator, heard hurrying footsteps behind him. Continuing on his way, the Slave Detective – for so ran his fame in Rome – slightly slackened his pace to let the other overtake him. But he kept taut and wary: many among the dregs of the City wished him ill.
‘Sollius, Sollius . . .’ came in a panting voice.
The Slave Detective glanced over his shoulder. An elderly man, a fellow slave, as could be seen from his base attire, gestured to him to stop.
‘What is it?’ Sollius asked as soon as the other came up.
‘Will you come in and speak with my mistress, Dacia, the wife of Marcus Albinus the architect?’
Sollius recognized the name as that of an architect of repute in Rome.
‘There is great trouble in our house,’ went on the old slave beseechingly.
‘That house – where is it?’
‘You’ve just passed it,’ and he pointed to a small mansion on the Palatine, clearly the residence of a rich man.
Sollius nodded, and followed the other into the atrium.
Dacia, obviously agitated, was a still-handsome woman in latish middle age. She greeted him breathlessly.
‘Only you, Sollius, can help me. I saw you pass by – and so to see you was a grace of the Gods.’
‘What is your problem?’ he asked.
‘My son has been arrested by Licinius the Prefect.’
‘For what crime, lady?’
‘Murder,’ she answered, a sob behind her voice. ‘Get him released,’ she went on hysterically. ‘I will pay you anything you ask.’
‘I can only serve you, lady, with the permission of my master.’
‘I will get it – but at least hear me now.’
‘As you will,’ he answered, and humbly composed himself to listen.
‘We are a strange household,’ she began, wringing her hands. ‘Marcus Albinus is my second husband, and Agenor is my son by my first husband, a gentleman of Greek origin. I have a daughter, Nanno, by Albinus. Recently my husband adopted the daughter and only child of his greatest friend who died three years ago, leaving her destitute. She is a girl of the same age as Nanno, seventeen, and she is – O Gods, was! – named Melissa. She was found stabbed yesterday. The Prefect has arrested Agenor. But he is – he must be – innocent. Save him, Sollius!’
‘Ask permission from Titius Sabinus, lady, and I will look into the case. Meanwhile it will do no harm to ask the City Prefect what evidence he has against your son.’
‘I will see the noble Sabinus at once – and oh, Sollius, hasten to the Prefect!’
The Slave Detective changed his steps to the barracks of the Urban Cohorts, and there broke in upon Licinius, whom he saw to be frowning.
‘The very man I most desired to see and for whom I was about to send!’ cried the Prefect, leaping up. ‘I can keep order in the Emperor’s City, but I’m a poor hand at solving mysteries.’
‘You have one?’ innocently inquired Sollius.
‘A murder,’ replied Licinius grimly. ‘On what seems overwhelming evidence I have arrested a man – yet, against its showing, I half believe him not guilty. You must help me, Sollius.’
‘That means two I must help,’ smiled Sollius, ‘you and Agenor’s mother.’
‘You know about the case already?’ cried the Prefect, open-mouthed. ‘Is this magic?’
‘Neither magic nor knowledge. Only a mother’s anguish. So tell me.’
‘It seemed such a simple case,’ sighed Licinius. ‘There was bad blood between the young man Agenor and the girl Melissa. He had tried to seduce her – though his mother won’t believe it – and she had repulsed him, as a slave witnessed, with a biting mockery at his deformity, for he is slightly humpbacked, a scowling fellow, as you will see. I have little liking for him, but justice is justice, and I am unhappy: still, the evidence is against him.’
‘What is it?’
‘He was found standing over her, the knife that had killed her in his hand. He swears he had found her dead, and had taken the weapon – which was a hunting-knife of his own – out of her body from hatred to see it there. She was a very beautiful girl, with Greek looks from a Greek mother. Moreover, he had taken his repulse, which was only a day or so before the murder, and as the same slave has sworn, with evil looks, words and threats.’
‘Threats?’
‘That beauty, when scornful, deserved a brand, burnt in!’
Unaccountably, Sollius shivered.
‘What was the stepfather’s part in this?’
‘He has never approved of his stepson, and kept him without money. I should have believed Agenor more surely guilty had it been Albinus who had been stabbed. However angered the young man may have been at the girl’s treatment, he loved her.’
‘Love so easily turns to hate,’ sighed Sollius. ‘May I see him?’
Agenor was not a prepossessing youth, but his fear had subdued his native sullenness, and he saw in the Slave Detective a possible saviour.
‘I will tell you all you ask – all,’ he cried vehemently.
‘How was it that you were the first to find her?’
‘I had just come in from the Baths. She was lying near the threshold of my bedroom. Her killer could not have long left her, for she was still warm, but dead, quite dead.’
If that were true, thought Sollius, it meant that the murderer, if not Agenor, was most likely another member of the household.
‘It was daylight?’
‘In the middle afternoon. On my way in I saw no one running from the house.’
‘Was Melissa liked in the house?’
‘Except for my stepfather, by no one – by neither the family nor the slaves. My stepfather spoilt her abominably, even at the expense of his own daughter.’
‘That would not make for peace between the two girls,’ murmured Sollius.
‘Nor between Melissa and my mother,’ added Agenor. ‘Have you questioned Silvius?’
‘Who is Silvius?’
‘The head slave. He hated her,’ he added venomously. ‘She had enticed him – and then haughtily mocked him when he became familiar. She was not a good girl.’
He began to sob, and put his head into his hands.
‘But I loved her – by all the gods, I loved her . . .’
Before taking any further steps in the case the Slave Detective had to return to his master’s great mansion on the Esquiline to receive the necessary permission. He found that Dacia had already visited Sabinus and obtained it. Taking the younger slave Lucius, his usual assistant, with him, he limped back to the house on the Palatine.
‘Tear the heart out of the head slave,’ he instructed him. ‘His name is Silvius. I shall first interrogate Marcus Albinus.’
The architect received him in his working-room, dismissing a young slave who had been busy at a drawing board. He was a gross man between fifty and sixty, with an intelligent but sensual face. He was very grave in his manner as he greeted Sollius.
‘This is a terrible thing,’ he said heavily. ‘It has been a very great shock to me. I was in here, working at my drawing board alone, when I heard the commotion in the house. I rushed out – to see my adopted daughter in the state you know, and my stepson being held by my head slave. I have really nothing else I can tell you. It is terrible, terrible . . .’ he kept repeating.
‘Do you believe your stepson guilty?’
‘How else? He was found on the spot – and the girl was but then dead. I myself – this room is quite near – heard them quarrelling, and then silence. And hasn’t the City Prefect arrested him? The Prefects of Rome do not make many mistakes, and Licinius is a good Prefect.’
‘A most unsatisfactory fellow! His mother – my second wife – indulges him beyond all reason.’
‘Then you would not favour his love for your adopted daughter,’ said Sollius softly.
‘By no means, slave! I was glad that she had rejected him, though I fear now that it was the cause of this tragedy.’
‘May I speak now to your own daughter?’
‘If you must,’ conceded Albinus. He clapped his hands for a slave and gave directions that Nanno should meet the Slave Detective in the atrium.
Sollius waited for her by a stilled fountain. Presently she came, a girl without charm or beauty. Dacia came with her.
‘This is Nanno,’ said her mother, and Sollius bowed meekly.
‘Do you know,’ he asked, ‘where you were when Melissa was stabbed?’
‘I was here in the atrium, arranging flowers. I heard cries, and a slave told me what had happened.’
‘You did not go to see? You were not far away here.’
‘I was very busy with the flowers. I took the commotion to be yet another drunken scene with Agenor.’
‘You must not be so foolishly bitter with your half-brother,’ snapped her mother angrily.
‘You did not get on with Agenor?’ Sollius asked.
Nanno shook her head.
‘It has always been a great grief to me,’ said Dacia.
‘Let us leave Agenor. What were your relations with Melissa?’ pursued Sollius, his eyes suddenly keen.
‘None of us, save my husband,’ interposed Dacia, ‘found Melissa anything but false, secret and intolerable. She must have left a trail of hate wherever she went. Some broken lover will have got into the house by stealth, and taken his revenge.’
‘Your son, lady, fits that supposition.’
She looked at him angrily.
‘I am hiring you to defend my son!’
‘I am but showing you, lady, how difficult that is!’ he retorted, then turned again to Nanno, and asked, with a deep glance: ‘What young man did she steal from you? I can soon find out who it was. Tell me!’
‘The only man I shall ever love!’ she cried, and ran blindly out of the atrium.
‘This house is a cauldron of hate,’ he said. ‘Where were you yourself, lady, when the girl was killed?’
‘In the garden, instructing the gardener. We both rushed in at the cries. He will tell you so.’
‘I shall ask him,’ replied Sollius gravely.
‘Do you always work against your clients?’ she asked haughtily.
‘I work for truth and justice. I have no other clients,’ he answered, his gaze level and by no means that of a slave, and he saw her grow pale. With a deeper anger – or a new fear? He had no guess, nor, for once, a speaking intuition.
‘Truth and justice,’ she rejoined with spirit, ‘commit you to defend my son.’
‘It seems,’ he replied quietly, ‘that no one grieves for the dead girl.’
‘Except my husband,’ she flashed back. ‘He valued her above his own daughter. The adopted daughter of his old friend went in silk, his born daughter in the mere Roman wool. You will not find the murderer in the house, O Sollius. He will be one of Melissa’s tormented lovers, slipping in stealthily. Have you looked for such a one?’
‘The City Prefect is covering that,’ Sollius answered, and broke off the interview.
Leaving the atrium, he saw Lucius emerging from the slaves’ quarters. He called to him, took his arm, and led him into the gardens.
‘I have a question to ask the gardener,’ he said.
He found him so exceedingly deaf that it was difficult to make him understand the question when it was asked.
‘I heered nothin,’ he growled at last. ‘The mistress just tugged at me and rushed me indoors – and there we found . . . what we found.’
‘How long had she been with you?’
‘Long? Why, she’d but just come!’
‘You saw young Agenor by the body?’
‘Ay, and the mistress gave a great shriek, she did. Oh, yes, I heered that!’
Sollius was silent for a moment, then he nodded, and turned away. As he and Lucius passed out through the atrium they saw Dacia comforting her sobbing daughter. None of them spoke. The Slave Detective and Lucius walked to the barracks of the Urban Cohorts.
‘What did you learn from Silvius?’ inquired Sollius as he limped along.
‘He hated the girl; that is sure. And he saw Agenor by the body and holding the knife – and, so he says, Dacia ran in almost at the same moment. He could just have had time to slip in and do the killing, slip out again, and then, hearing Agenor unexpectedly entering, have run in on the clever impulse of accusing him of the murder. Silvius is a sly man. I can tell you that.’
‘Everybody, except Albinus, seems to have hated the girl. The house is a nest of evil,’ sighed Sollius. ‘Each and all seem to have had motive and opportunity in equal degree. None of them was sufficiently away from the spot where Melissa was killed, not even her adoptive father. Licinius, indeed, can justify his arrest of Agenor. He could be justified in the arrest of any of them.’
‘One of whom,’ commented Lucius dryly, ‘we are hired to prove innocent.’
The Slave Detective made no response, and was unwontedly frowning. He seemed to walk with more pain than ever from the old wolf-trap injury.
‘You make me suspect each of them in turn,’ laughed Lucius.
‘As I do myself!’ almost snarled Sollius, and then they reached the barracks, entered and sought the Prefect.
They found him irritable and dispirited.
‘Is the case solved?’ he asked, a sudden gleam of hope in his eyes.
‘What,’ asked Sollius without answering the question, ‘did your cohort men discover about intruders to Albinus’ house?’
‘They asked diligently but there seemed to be none, neither fishsellers nor beggars,’ Licinius replied heavily.
‘You confirm me,’ nodded Sollius. ‘It is an inside case – of that I am sure. Each in the house had proximity, opportunity and motive, but one is guilty. That one must be tricked into full sight of us. If anything there are too many clues.’
‘Has your intuition not spoken?’ asked the Prefect with a touch of slyness in his tone.
‘It has spoken,’ answered Sollius seriously, ‘but, though I trust it, no paramount clue is evident. I am not always right, Prefect. Do not release Agenor because I may suspect someone else. There is more evidence against him than against any other. You may still,’ the Slave Detective sighed, ‘have the right man,’ and he sat for a long moment twiddling his thumbs. Then he went on: ‘The one hope is that one in that house of hate does love another.’
Again he sat twiddling his thumbs. The Prefect and Lucius glanced at each other, and waited. At last his edict came.
‘Send a centurion, and arrest them all – Agenor’s mother, half-sister and stepfather, and also the slave named Silvius. We will interrogate them together. Send at once.’
The water-clock had but registered little when the Centurion brought in his gaggle of protesting prisoners.
‘This is monstrous!’ burst out Albinus. ‘I shall complain to the Emperor – by whom I am known personally.’
‘Severus is in Britain,’ answered the Prefect curtly. ‘Meanwhile it is a matter of murder. You will answer our questions.’
Further protest was silenced by an uplifted hand, and then Licinius turned to Sollius.
‘Let the play begin,’ he said.
The Centurion had lined them up to face the Prefect and Sollius with military precision, using his marching stick to level them off. He and the Prefect stood in full uniform, bronze-girt and helmeted. In his drab tunic and bare legs Sollius showed very unimportantly between them – except for his stance and his eyes. The Prefect’s office was lofty and oblong, and in its furnishing was more in the grave taste of the old Republic than in the gilding of the long-confirmed Empire.
‘Let Agenor be added to them, Prefect,’ said Sollius, and Licinius gave the order to a soldier standing guard at the door.
Presently Agenor was brought in, and the Centurion ranged him at the end of the line, stationing him, as it happened, next to his half-sister, Nanno. Every eye was fixed, most uncomfortably, rather upon the slave than upon the Prefect.
‘The girl, Melissa,’ Sollius began, ‘gave cause for all of you to hate her.’
‘Not me!’ pronounced Albinus haughtily.
‘She caused dissension in your house,’ Sollius asserted.
‘I, at least, loved her,’ cried Agenor.
‘And she laughed at you!’
‘I always treated her as a daughter,’ said Dacia.
‘And she repaid you with ingratitude. She put discord in a harmonious circle. All of you had opportunity. I have worked it out, and it is so.’
None of them could raise a voice in denial. Each had been at rest or at work near by at the time of the murder. Sollius levelled his glance keenly upon them in turn from one end of the line to the other. He had one doubt in his mind: which, of two, was the one that another loved? Whose eyes fastened most frequently upon another’s? Was that, however, in a knowledge of guilt, or in a desire to protect? One person’s eyes thus flickered – and at two faces. The face of that person was grey. The Slave Detective knew that he would have to make his choice – and at once, for the silence was growing painful and the Prefect was looking at him in puzzled disbelief in his intuitional efficiency.
‘Licinius,’ he snapped suddenly, ‘arrest Dacia!’
A cry of anguish went up, but it was not hers.
‘Fool, O Slave Detective – it was not she, but I!’
Out from the line broke Albinus, striding menacingly up to Sollius. The Centurion plucked him back.
‘Melissa was a goddess’ – he spoke with a slight foam at the corners of his lips – ‘how sweet at first, and then how evil! But I loved her – beyond my peace I loved her, so deeply that I became unclean to myself. I saw the devastation she had caused in the house and in my own heart. It came to the pass that I must either take her, or destroy her. All our lives had become shadowed as from the Furies’ wings! I chose to destroy the pest!’
He broke into a wild sob, and would have fallen had the Centurion not supported him.
‘Take him!’ ordered the Prefect. ‘And release the others.’
Sollius grinned at him when they were alone together.
‘I had in the end to guess at the lever of his affections – his wife or his daughter. I had to accuse one of the two. As it was, I guessed rightly. That is all there is to it, Prefect!’ he added in mock modesty, and limped out.