The Fateful Day Read Online Free

footsteps coming from within. No clatter from the store-yard behind the inner wall. A faint, insistent tapping was the only sound – and even that, on consideration, was not coming from the house. It seemed to emanate from somewhere at my side – apparently from the little cell beside the gate, where the absent gatekeeper had his sleeping-bench and stool. I frowned. Where could everyone have gone, and what could the gate guard have left behind that made that knocking sound – irregular but repeated and scarcely audible?
    I was increasingly uneasy, but extremely curious by now and, though the door to the keeper’s porch was closed, I pushed it gently open. And was appalled and horrified by what I found.
    The tapping sound was caused by the inhabitant himself. He was suspended by his own belt from a ceiling hook. The stool on which he had been standing had been kicked away and he was swinging gently in the draught which blew in through the stone bars of the window-space. He was extremely dead. At first I was inclined to guess at suicide but I quickly realised that it was nothing of the sort. As he rotated slowly in the air, his hands came into view – firmly secured behind his back with a short length of chain.
    I sat down on the sleeping bench and tried to take this in. There could be no mistake – it was the gatekeeper all right. I’d have known him anywhere, even without the uniform tunic – a great bear of a fellow with a mane of tawny hair and the muscles of an ox. He’d been a wrestler in a travelling show when Marcus purchased him. It must have taken someone of enormous strength to subdue a man like that, overcome his struggles and hoist him up on the hook. Or, more likely, several someones working as a team.
    He had never been a handsome man in life, but in death he was entirely hideous. His face was purple and contorted horribly, his tongue protruding like that of an ox-head on a plate, while his bulging, bloodshot eyes stared sightlessly at me. The air was foetid with a smell like a latrine, and I could see what caused the tapping: one sandal seemed to have dislodged itself (during his final struggles, probably) and now dangled from its straps, just low enough to lightly touch the corner of the table as he swayed.
    Noticing the sandals drew attention to the feet. They – and the lower legs – seemed blotched with pooling blood. That was so astonishing I took a closer look – indeed, my first impression was correct. This was not bruising, it was simply that the blood had gathered there. I shook my head, bewildered. I’d seen enough of bodies to be fairly sure that such a thing took quite a time to manifest itself – which suggested that the man had been here many hours. Could this be connected in some way with that carriage I had seen?
    But that could not be right. Marcus’s land-slaves must have been here at the villa overnight. Surely they would have known if somebody had killed the gatekeeper – and I couldn’t believe that it would occasion no remark. Wouldn’t that be the first thing that the overseer said to me, instead of calmly discussing the proper time of day for planting vines?
    Perhaps I was wrong in my estimation of the time of death. I reached out a reluctant hand and touched the lifeless thigh. It was cold – which in itself was not a proof of anything, since the body had been hanging in a very chilly draught. But it was also stiff – so stiff that when I tried to move the knee, it would not budge at all. I would have needed to apply such force I would have snapped the joint. That kind of rigid stiffness did not occur for many hours – another indication that the victim had been dead since yesterday.
    My mind went back again to the florid visitor of the night before. It was tempting to suppose that he was guilty of this death. But I shook my head. From what I’d seen of that aggressive citizen, he was middle-aged and over-fed and not especially fit. He would be no match for this