The Lady Out of Time

7 - Violence

They were arriving now at the scene of the crime, but there were still so many questions to ask. The ride over in the two-horse wooden carriage - a carpentum - had been loud and uncomfortable, and while Agrippa's voice was strong and loud when he wanted it to be, the clattering of the wheels over the pebbled roadways had simply been too overpowering (and headache inducing) to learn all she needed to know.

How was she supposed to carry out a cursory investigation without all the information she needed! It was enough to make her want to command the driver to stop and allow her to interrogate Agrippa the proper way. But unfortunately, he was not her client, she was not his lawyer, and this was not the twenty first century. All she could do was grit her teeth and bear the frustration while consolidating what little she did know.

As he helped her down from the carriage - she was still not used to this smaller, weaker body and nearly sprained her ankle on the way out - she went over the facts in her head:

Lucius was Agrippa's friend. He was the one in the coma now with numerous injuries, and he was the one standing (lying) accused by a third party of having murdered a man named Manius, a fellow wealthy citizen. Neither of them were true statesmen, but they were both heavily active in Roman politics, and their opinions meant a great deal to the rest of the populace. Lucius, Manius, and several other colleagues had gathered two days ago for a discussion on how to resolve the rising discontent with the new market tax, and it had been as heated as ever without Agrippa's presence to keep them civil. He had been unable to attend...something that might have had a hand in what happened next:

Following a vicious fight that nearly erupted into physical violence, they all parted ways in the early evening- only for the slaves to find Manius dead in his own villa that morning, bloodied and broken on the floor. His body was cold and the blood no longer flowing, so it had already been hours since he had died. That meant he must have been murdered in the dark of night...

When the alarm went out, news came that Lucius too had been attacked, but not in quite the same way or seriousness. Bruises on his face and arms, as if someone had beat him with their fists in a panic. But he could not explain what had happened: someone had found him on the way up to his villa on the far hill, collapsed on the road. He was already in a coma and unable to shed light on what had befallen him.

Whoever said it first, no one knew, but someone suggested that the wounds on Lucius's face didn't seem like those inflicted by an ambushing attacker. Rather, they seemed like wounds inflicted by someone trying to defend themselves...And then the rumor came to be that it was Lucius himself who had attacked and killed Manius. The latter, they argued, must have tried to fight back and managed to wound him in return. While staggering home to escape, he must have succumbed to his injuries.

It made sense. After all, those two were always at each other's throats. They were polar opposites in their political stances, and if they ever even caught sight of each other in passing on the street, a vicious public argument was always inevitable. There was proof enough of that. All of Rome had seen them have to be pulled apart by bystanders.

A clear motive. Lucius looked guilty indeed. And now he was all but proclaimed guilty even before the trial had begun. His accusers didn't care if he was conscious to defend himself; the facts spoke for themselves.

Good thing Julia didn't agree with musty old men who thought they knew everything. She looked around the place with narrowed eyes, taking in the architecture of the villa that they had entered. It wasn't as grand as the one Agrippa owned, but Manius had still been a wealthy man. This residence had a beautiful courtyard atrium that they had passed through to get here, the shrine room for the household gods. Manius might have been checking on the offerings before heading to bed when he was attacked and left here, right?

Decorative columns lined the interior of the small room, and the ornate gold-accented decor would have drawn a more distracted eye. But Julia was looking down from at the remains of the blood several feet away from the threshold. Hm.

"Did he have blows to the head?" she asked, keeping her gaze fixed on the floor and trailing over the smaller rivulets that marked the stones. "How was it that he died, exactly?"

Agrippa glanced over at her. He had told her that he was searching for more blood, signs that Manius's body might have been moved here from a primary location, but maybe he hadn't expected her to be investigating on her own, too. Well, now he knew.

"Many blows to the head and upper body, front and back," he said. "All of them deep and hard enough to have felled him quickly."

"That could be inexperience," she said, and she crouched down to inspect the remains more closely. "Overkill happens when the murderer has no idea what they're doing. How about this, then. Was Manius face up, or face down? And in which direction was his body lying?"

This time, there was no mistaking it. Agrippa was staring at her with a curious gleam in his eyes, and she had to wonder if he had thought she was really just some ignorant child. Even in this body, she was an adult - or just several months shy of it, at least. Surely any adolescent with common sense would ask these questions.

She removed her dissecting gaze from the sullied stones and pinned it on the man instead, still waiting for an answer. Finally, he relented.

"He was face up, but neither facing toward or away from the shrine room. He seems to have simply been passing through here."

Ambushed from the front, then? If it had been from behind, he would have fallen forward, right? The attacker could have been waiting around any of the large columns that lined this hallway that led in from the atrium. But at least it meant that the attacker had been standing out here, waiting. They didn't ambush Manius inside the shrine room, unless he had managed to run back out. Or had they leaped out at him?

"What about this?" She leaned over to peer down at a long, narrow wooden stick that lay at the bottom of the wall several feet away. "A cane."

She hesitated to pick it up - disturbing a crime scene was tantamount to killing a case - but it wasn't as if fingerprint testing had been invented yet. The level of forensic investigation possible in these times was limited to what was visible with the naked eye. And besides, she wasn't educated in that field enough to make use of even the more primitive means. She was just a lawyer with a rudimentary knowledge of such things.

So she picked up the ornate, expensive cane with care and brought it over to Agrippa, who accepted and inspected it.

"I don't see a murderer being careless enough to leave this if it belonged to them. Could this belong to Manius? He might have used it in self-defense," she said. "That looks like blood there at that end, and Manius would have been holding the handle here on this side. So if belongs to him, what's the likelihood that the blood is his own?"

Agrippa inspected the wood. "Yes. I think I recognize it. This belonged to Manius."

"So he wouldn't have been holding it from the unwieldy end. That means the blood down here should belong to whoever he was defending himself from. He drew blood from his attacker."

"...It's possible."

"Didn't you say earlier that Lucius had no open wounds? Just some severe bruising on his face that looked like they were left from fists? Nothing that looked like being whipped over the head with a narrow cane?"

"That's true."

"Could be a run in with a burglar. Maybe Manius attacked first, actually, saw someone sneaking out of the shrine room with one of those valuable offerings and attacked."

"Possible."

"You said this happened two nights ago, right?" she asked suddenly, and she put her hands on her hips with a frown. "Two nights ago, as in the night that we had that horrible downpour that muddied every street and field from this side of Rome to the other?"

Agrippa couldn't help but smirk at the serious expression she wore. She seemed so much older than she was yet again, and that amused him to no end. But she wasn't paying attention to him any longer and therefore couldn't see his expression: she was staring past him at the archway that led into the atrium.

"What is it?" he asked, his smile melting away when he identified that shrewd keenness in her eyes that he couldn't ever seem to properly decipher.

She pointed out at the courtyard. "It's set fairly low, isn't it. Out there. I bet he has a problem with mud tracking onto the stones up the steps whenever a rainstorm hits."

"He does, or did. We met here some time ago. A great deal of mud."

A slow smile crept onto her face, and a strange feeling entered his chest at the sight of it. Was he excited? Him? Agrippa the esteemed general who had killed hundreds of men with his own hands in the heat of battle - excited over a little girl's uncanny reasoning skills? He must be exhausted, he thought, but he followed Julia outside without a word.