The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Acknowledgements

  Introduction: Return to the Crime Scene

  by Mike Ashley

  Archimedes and the Scientific Method

  by Tom Holt

  Something to do with Diana

  by Steven Saylor

  Eyes of the Icon

  by Mary Reed and Eric Mayer

  Night of the Snow Wolf

  by Peter Tremayne

  Jettisoned

  by Deirdre Counihan

  A Fiery Death

  by Ian Morson

  Hide and Seek

  by Tony Pollard

  The Fourth Quadrant

  by Dorothy Lumley

  Brodie and the Regrettable Incident

  by Anne Perry

  Forty Morgan Silver Dollars

  by Maan Meyers

  Trafalgar

  by Charles Todd

  Dead of Winter

  by Richard A. Lupoff

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Copyright Acknowledgements

  With the exception of the story below, all of the stories are copyright © 2011 by the individual authors, are original to this anthology and are printed with the authors’ permission.

  “Brodie and the Regrettable Incident” © 1998 by Anne Perry was first published in Murder, They Wrote II, edited by Elizabeth Foxwell and Martin H. Greenberg (New York, Boulevard Books, 1998) as “Brodie and the Regrettable Incident of the French Ambassador”. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, MBA Literary Agents Ltd, London.

  Introduction

  Return to the Crime Scene

  The stories in this anthology cover over four thousand years of crime. We travel from the Bronze Age of 2300 BC to the eve of the Second World War, passing through ancient Greece and Rome, the Byzantine Empire, medieval Venice and seventh-century Ireland, before heading for Britain and the United States.

  All except one of these stories are brand new, written especially for this anthology. This is my fifteenth anthology of historical crime and mystery fiction (for those interested there is a full list on the ‘Also in the series’ page), and this time I wanted to feature longer stories. This allows the author to concentrate on the historical setting, character and mindset of the period, so that not only do these stories present fascinating crimes and puzzles, but you also get to know the people and their world in more detail. There are twelve stories in this volume compared to the usual twenty or twenty-five; they are almost like mini-novels, allowing a greater understanding of the time.

  I’ve also broadened the coverage. Rather than focus solely on a mystery and its solution, here we have a broader range of crimes and a wider variety of those trying to solve them. Hence you will find, among others, a young girl in Bronze Age Britain trying to understand whether a series of deaths over a period of time were accidental or deliberate; an icon-painter in ancient Byzantium, suddenly out of work when all icons are banned, who becomes embroiled in a case of deception; a priest-finder trying to track down attempted regicides; Charles Babbage and the young Ada Byron trying to crack a coded message and stop a master criminal; and New York detectives on the lookout for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

  Your guides are twelve of the leading writers in historical crime fiction who are about to bring the past alive. Let us return to the scene of the crime.

  – Mike Ashley

  Archimedes and the Scientific Method

  Tom Holt

  Tom Holt is best known for his many humorous fantasy novels, which began with Expecting Someone Taller (1987) and include Who’s Afraid of Beowulf? (1988), Paint Your Dragon (1996) and The Portable Door (2003) – the last heralding the start of a series featuring the magic firm of J. Wellington Wells from Gilbert and Sullivan’s light opera The Sorcerer. But Holt is also a scholar of the ancient world and has written a number of historical novels including The Walled Garden (1997), Alexander at the World’s End (1999) and Song for Nero (2003).

  The following story, which is the shortest in the anthology and so eases us in gently, features one of the best known of the ancient Greek scientists and mathematicians, Archimedes. He lived in the third century BC in the city of Syracuse, in Sicily, under the patronage of its ruler Hieron II. It is a shame that the one enduring image we all have of Archimedes is of him leaping out of his bath shouting “Eureka”, meaning “I have found it.” But it does encapsulate how Archimedes operated. When presented with a scientific problem he applied his whole self to it using scientific principles, many of which he had propounded. Archimedes unified much scientific theory into a coherent body of thought which allowed him to apply what he regarded as the scientific method. It probably made him the world’s first forensic investigator.

  “No,” I told him. “Absolutely not.”

  You don’t talk like that to kings, not even if they’re distant cousins, not even if they’re relying on you to build superweapons to fight off an otherwise unbeatable invader, not even if you’re a genius respected throughout the known world. It’s like the army. Disobeying a direct order is the worst thing you can possibly do, because it leads to the breakdown of the machine. You’ve got to have hierarchies, or you get chaos.

  He looked at me. “Please,” he said.

  He, for the record, was King Hiero the Second of Syracuse; my distant cousin, my patron and my friend. Even so. “No,” I said.

  “Forget about the politics,” he said. “Just think of it as an intellectual problem. Come on,” he added, and that little-boy look somehow found its way back on to his face. Amazing, how he can still do that, after the life he’s lived. “You’ll enjoy it, you know you will. It’s a challenge. You like challenges. Isn’t that what it’s all about, finding answers to questions?”

  “I’m busy,” I told him. “Really. I’m in the middle of calculating the square root of three. If I stop now—”

  “The what of three what?”

  “I’ll lose track and have to start all over again. Four years’ work, wasted. I can’t possibly drop that just to help out with some sordid little diplomatic issue.”

  One of these days, people tell me, one of these days I’ll get myself into real trouble talking to important people like that. Don’t be so arrogant, people tell me. Who do you think you are, anyhow?

  “Archimedes.” He wasn’t looking at me any more. He was staring down at his hands, folded in his lap. It was then I noticed something about him that I’d never realized before. He was getting old. The bones of the huge hands stood out rather more than they used to, and his wrists were getting thin. “No,” I said.

  “You never know,” he went on, “it might lead to a great discovery. Like the cattle problem or the thing with the sand. Those were stupid little problems, and look where they ended up. For all you know, it could be your greatest triumph.”

  I sighed. You think somebody knows you, and then they say something, and it’s obvious they don’t. “No,” I said. “Sorry, but that’s final. Get one of your smart young soldiers on to it. That Corinthian we had dinner with the other evening; sharp as a razor, that one; I’m sure he’d relish the chance to prove himself. You want someone with energy for a job like this. I’m so lazy these days I can hardly be bothered to get out of bed in the morning.”

  He looked at me, and I could see I’d won. I’d left him no alternative but to use threats – do this or it’ll be the worse for you – and he’d decided he didn’t want to go there. In other words, he valued our friendship more than the security of the nation.

  “Oh, all right,” I said. “Te
ll me about it.”

  *

  The extraordinary thing about human beings is their similarity. We’re so alike. Dogs, cows, pigs, goats, birds come in a dazzling array of different shapes and sizes, while still being recognizable as dogs, cows, pigs, goats, birds. Human beings scarcely vary at all. The height difference between the unusually short and the abnormally tall is trivial compared with other species. The proportions are remarkably constant – the head is always one-eighth of the total length, the width of the outstretched arms is always the same as the length of a single stride, and the stride is so uniform that we can use it as an accurate measurement of distance. Human beings have two basic skin colours, three hair colours, and that’s it. Just think of all the colours chickens come in. It’s a miracle we can ever tell each other apart.

  That said, I can’t stand Romans. They’re practically identical to us in size, shape, skin and hair colour, and facial architecture. Quite often you can’t tell a Roman from a Syracusan in the street – no surprise, when you think how long Greeks and Italians have shared Sicily. I’ve known Romans who can speak Greek so well you wouldn’t know they weren’t born here; not, that is, unless you listen to what they actually say.

  It’s ridiculous, therefore, to take exception to a subsection of humanity that’s very nearly indistinguishable from my own subsection; particularly foolish when you consider that I’m supposed to be a scientist, governed by logic rather than emotion, and by facts susceptible to proof rather than intuition and prejudice. Still, there it is. I can’t be doing with the bastards, and that’s all there is to it.

  Partly, I guess, my dislike stems from the fact that they’re taking over the world, and nobody seems willing or able to stop them. Hiero tried, and he couldn’t do it. They smashed his Carthaginian allies, and he was forced to snuggle up and sign a treaty with the Roman smile and the Roman hobnailed boot. Not sure which of those I detest most, by the way. Probably the smile.

  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.

  But Naso didn’t show up; not for three weeks. The atmosphere round the negotiating table quickly went from awkward to dead quiet to furiously angry. What had we done with Caecilius Naso? A senior Roman diplomat doesn’t just vanish into thin air. It really didn’t help that Agathocles had been the host. He’d been doing his job rather well, digging his heels in, matching the Romans gesture for gesture, tantrum for tantrum; angry words had been spoken, tables thumped, and then Agathocles had asked Naso round for drinks and Naso had disappeared. Without him, the talks simply couldn’t continue. Ten days after the disappearance, the Roman garrisons on our borders mobilized and conducted unscheduled manoeuvres, as close to the frontiers as they could get without actually crossing them. Cousin Hiero had his soldiers turn the city upside down, but they found nothing. The Roman diplomats went home without saying goodbye. Their soldiers stayed on the border. Then, just as we were starting to think it couldn’t get any worse, Naso turned up again.

  He made his dramatic re-entry when the swinging arm of the crane winching a great big jar of sprats off the bulk freighter snapped, on the main dock at Ostia, in front of about a thousand witnesses. The jar fell on the stone slabs and smashed open, and out flopped Naso. He was still in the full diplomatic dress he’d worn to the party, so it was immediately obvious that he was someone important in the military. He was quickly identified, and a fast courier galley was immediately launched, to tell us the bad news.

  *

  “Presumably,” Orestes said, “it was the extra weight that snapped the crane. A man’s got to weigh a damn sight more than his own volume in sprats.”

  Orestes was the bright young Corinthian I’d proposed as my substitute. Instead, he’d been assigned to me as sidekick-in-chief. He was tall, skinny, gormless-looking and deceptively smart, with a surprisingly scientific cast of mind. “So what?” I said.

  He offered me a drink, which I refused, and poured one for himself. My wine, of course. “This whole sprat business,” he said. “It’s got to mean something, it’s too bizarre otherwise.”

  “Bizarre, I grant you,” I said. “But meaningful …”

  “Has to be.” He nodded firmly.
“Abducting and murdering a Roman emissary at a diplomatic function,” he went on, “has got to be a statement of some kind. Bottling him and sending him home must, therefore, be a refinement of that statement.”

  “Expressive of contempt, you mean.”

  “Must be.” He frowned at his hands. A nail-biter. “That’s not good for us, is it?”

  “The crane,” I reminded him.

  “What? Oh, right. I was just thinking, the timing of the discovery of the body. If the crane hadn’t broken, the jar would’ve been loaded on a cart and taken to Rome. It had been ordered by—” He looked up his notes. “Philippus Longinus,” he recited, “freedman, dealer and importer in wholesale foodstuffs. Disclaims all knowledge, et cetera. They’ve got him locked up, of course.”

  “Greek?”

  “Doesn’t say,” Orestes replied, “but he’s a freedman with a half-Greek name, so presumably yes. Loads of Greek merchants in Rome nowadays. Anyhow, in the normal course of business that jar of sprats would’ve stayed in his warehouse for months.” His eyebrows, unusually thick, lowered and squashed together. “Which makes no sense.”

  I nodded slowly. “If you’re right about the murder as a statement,” I replied.

  “Unless,” Orestes went on, looking up sharply, “whoever did it knew the extra weight would break the crane, in which case—” He looked at me, and sighed. “A bit far-fetched?”

  “As wine from Egypt,” I said. “Of course,” I went on, “someone could’ve sawed the beam part-way through.”

  “That’s—” He looked at me again. “You’re teasing me,” he said.