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his feet, “you could ask Doctor Pera to step in here when he has a moment?”
The youth nearly tripped over his own bucket in his eagerness to escape.
    Pera found a moment almost immediately, but had the demeanor of a man who wanted to get a tricky job over and done with. Ruso apologized for interrupting him. “Just a few questions about this chap.”
    “That’s Tadius, sir.”
“The one you were told fell and hit his head.”
“Yes, sir.” There was no hesitation this time. “The occipital bone’s fractured: you can’t see it from there.”
“I just wondered,” said Ruso, who had already discovered the fracture for
    himself, “what you make of the broken nose and jaw, the broken fingers on the right hand, extensive bruising to the face and torso, and the circular abrasions around one ankle.”
    “I’d imagine he got into a fight, sir.”
“Doesn’t anyone supervise them?”
“You’d have to ask their centurion, sir.”
“You didn’t query it at the time?”
Pera cleared his throat. “He might have fallen off the stretcher, sir.” “Fallen off the stretcher?” It was such a farcical excuse that Ruso could
    not resist seeing how far his former pupil would take it. “This was after he’d received the blow to the head?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was this in the hospital or outside?”
Pera seemed to be having trouble with his neck again. “On the steps outside, sir.”
“I see.” If the injuries had been more plausible, he might have believed it. Accurately noting a cause of death was one thing; admitting to dropping a patient was quite another: It was the sort of embarrassing mishap that nobody wanted on record, except perhaps the outraged patient himself. “So if you question the fight injuries, this fall will come to light?”
“Perhaps, sir.”
Ruso nodded. “I suppose if he was dead when he came in, a few more bruises wouldn’t have made much difference.”
“Exactly, sir. He—” Pera stopped just on the edge of the trap. “Well, he wasn’t quite dead sir, but as good as. He was clearly slipping away.”
“I see.”
“There was just time for the bruising to develop before he died,” Pera explained, digging himself deeper into the hole.
“I see,” said Ruso, baffled as to why the man would lie over a small mishap when it was clear that Tadius had been in much bigger trouble than anything that could be inflicted by incompetent stretcher bearers.
“Sir, there was nothing more we could have done for him.”
Ruso smoothed the young man’s hair, then lifted the cloth and laid it over the body, adding another scatter of rose petals.
“Are we in trouble, sir?”
“I don’t know,” said Ruso. “But somebody should be.”


R
    USO LEFT PERA to worry, and seated himself on a wobbly stool in the office. He was aware of his every move being scrutinized by a hefty clerk who, despite being told to stand easy, still looked as though he were being squeezed into a small space on one of his own shelves.
    Medical rec ords, as Ruso had insisted to Pera and dozens like him over the years, were crucial. They told the next medic what you’d seen and done. They told you what you’d seen and done, after a string of night duties when it was hard to remember your own name, let alone anything about the patient. If you took the time to review them, they helped you to decide which treatments were useful and which weren’t, or which patients were genuinely ill and which were constant complainers. The trouble was, when you were the doctor, there was always something more urgent to do. And when you were supervising other doctors, the prospect of sitting down to read their notes made you aware of a pressing need to go and do . . . well, almost anything.
    Like asking what that wooden box with “Sulio” chalked on the side was doing here.
“It’s his effects, sir. We’re waiting for someone to collect them.”
Ruso eyed the bloodstained writing tablet sticking out from a fold of cloth. “Did he write