Jail Bait (10 page)

‘The minion is eminently trustworthy,’ he murmured, fixing his chubby visitor with his cold, fish eyes. ‘The question, my friend, is—
are you
?’

XII

So soon, thought Claudia. She hadn’t expected Orbilio to pop up so soon. Ordinarily, of course, she’d have mapped out a strategy for dealing with him, but too many events had intruded—Cal, the bear, that wretched funeral—in too little time, with too many sidetracks. And now he was here. The thief-taker, goddammit, was here.

In the Great Hall, she cannoned into a middle-aged woman with a snub nose and hard eyes and the pair of them went tumbling. Stony-faced cow didn’t even apologize, thought Claudia, stepping over the woman’s tangled legs and blind to the venomous glare.

You should have anticipated his arrival, she told herself. You should not have assumed he’d turn up at some unspecified time in the future. You should have thought this through—dear Diana, you’ve encountered him often enough. For a start, there was the investigation into your husband’s death. Then Sicily. Umbria. Plus he was around that time—Jupiter, Juno and Mars, what is this? Some kind of maths test? Who cares how many times their paths had crossed, who gives a damn the way his hair falls across his forehead when he’s tired, and come off it, she’d hardly noticed that little scar underneath his collarbone as he lay sprawled on the couch!

Outdoors, the air pulsated, the crickets rasped as she skipped down the steps towards the shoreline, where two red dogs chased and tumbled in the long rough grass. Across the marshes, cranes trumpeted to one another and smells of roasting goose wafted down from the kitchens. A horse whinnied far in the distance.

Official business, he
said…

Arbutes, tree spurge and straggly capers clung to the rock which thrust its way out of the water. Atlantis. Perched on top of this cliff. Atlantis. A triumph of marble and porphyry and cool colonnades. Where a glass of cloudy water can cure anything from gout to an ingrowing toenail. Where fortunes change hands for the privilege of being pummelled with oils and lolling in tubs of foul-smelling mud.

A miracle, the augurs pronounced, when Pylades discovered Carya’s sweet spring. Really? Claudia watched a lazy heron flap across the lake. Was Atlantis truly a place of miracles? Or mirages?

Of high standards? Or just double standards?

As a lone curlew let free its bubbling call, her mind considered the anomalies. The cave, the tunnel, Mosul the priest—as incongruous as they were linked. Because why should Pylades go to the substantial expense of gouging out an underpass and not show off this feat of civil engineering? Why not allow guests direct access to the spring? Surely not to keep sick pilgrims at a distance? That was unheard of! And yet Pylades had certainly segregated the classes here. Members of the aristocracy, alternating between their vast country estates and this spa. Merchants, flaunting their wealth as they indulged in long mudbaths and canoodled with women who in no way resembled their wives. Rich hypochondriacs, attracted to the waters for their chest/kidney/liver problems, oh yes, the wily Greek had separated the wine from the vinegar all right! Of course, there were always the artisans, gambling on wheedling noteworthy commissions from the relaxed holidaymakers, but by and large his clientele were the very cream of society.

Except for Lavinia.

See what I mean? Claudia paused to watch a two-tailed pasha flutter round the arbutes, to be joined by a second butterfly, this time an early grayling. Every time I turn my mind to Supersnoop and his wretched official business, another diversion leads me astray!

Without realizing where her steps had been leading, Claudia found herself down on the point where, perched on the jetty with one foot swinging free and his hair still tied back in a fillet, Tarraco whittled away at his woodcarving, undeterred by heat which could have fried oysters to a crisp.

‘I knew you would come.’ He did not look up.

‘Actually—’ She’d never even considered keeping the appointment.

‘Here.’ He blew the sawdust off the carving and tossed it across with a lopsided grin. ‘The only bear you encounter today.’ He turned to unhook the rowboat Claudia was so familiar with.

‘Sorry—’ she began, and then thought, what the hell? I’ve had it up to here with is-it-murder-is-it-not, of suspecting everyone I meet, of being petrified the army will clap me in irons any minute. At least there’s one place which offers a refuge outside the messy muddle of my life. One man who is not involved or under suspicion.

As Tarraco began to turn the boat around in the water, her eye was drawn to a figure watching from the sun porch and despite the searing heat, she shivered. Coincidence? That that just happened to be the spot from which Cal was supposed to have fallen?

Fluttering her fingers in a wave, Claudia smiled a cheesy smile at the man who leaned his weight against a glistening, gilded column.

Marcus Cornelius did not wave back.

*

The dispatch rider felt sure he must have put Pegasus to shame, the speed with which he covered the distance from Rome. The seal of the heron was sufficient to appease the most officious of post-station bureaucrats, and in the one instance where it was not and some pompous little twit had demanded to check the documents in full, the rider had ignored the silly sod and simply helped himself to a fresh horse. Let others set him right regarding the seal of the Security Police!

‘Will there be an answer, sir?’

He had delivered the letter, personally as instructed, to the tall patrician standing in the scorching heat of the sun porch, and the recipient had merely grunted his thanks as he maintained a tight-lipped watch on a rowboat cleaving a path across the silvery lake. Considering the contents were so urgent they’d brought the sparks flying from the hoofs of his horses and had jammed every joint of his backbone, the least he could do, the rider felt, was open the bloody thing!

Orbilio tapped the scroll against the gilded pillar. ‘Why don’t you get something to eat?’ he suggested, leaving the exhausted rider to make what he could of the answer.

Marcus stared at the shingle beach fifty feet below, then squinted towards the boat, practically swallowed by the heat haze. He exhaled slowly and with a shrug of resignation, finally broke the heron seal. Even before he started reading, he tasted bile in his mouth.

‘The choice
,’ wrote his boss,
‘is simple. Either you ride back to Rome this instant, or you don’t come back at all.’

Shit. He knew his boss would go ballistic, but he didn’t expect to be sacked. Orbilio took three deep breaths as he stared across the hazy blue hills, then read on. There was only another line.

‘You aren’t the only one who doesn’t like the plague.’

Bastard! Orbilio’s knuckles were white where he gripped the golden rail. The dirty rotten little bastard! His teeth clamped together in white-hot anger as he visualized the scene in an office stuffed with lackeys hanging on to every word the master dictated—and his boss would be sure to have dictated this loving missive in his very loudest voice. Let no man miss the fact that Marcus Cornelius Orbilio is a coward. That whilst patricians have blue blood in their veins, it’s the yellow streak down their backbone folk should be wary of.

At that moment, had Orbilio dipped his finger in a bowl of ice, steam would have risen from the surface, he was so damned mad. Him. A man who only ever sought for justice, being accused of cowardice. The stinking, oily little bastard.

For another quarter hour Marcus let the anger flow, releasing every pent-up gripe he held against the worm who he reported to. The same worm who had not worked for his position, but had bought it. The very creep who had no idea what was involved in catching murderers and fraudsters, yet basked in the reflected glory like a lizard in the
sun…
Finally, when he’d luxuriated in his rage for long enough, Orbilio took himself off to the bath house, where the scraping and the pummelling, the oiling and the unguents drained the remaining tension in his flesh. Cracking his knuckles in cheerful anticipation, he then called for a scribe.

In the end it took five drafts, but when the rested rider set off back for Rome, Orbilio was confident that not only would his superior officer rescind any threat of dismissal, but that to get his hands on the list of taboos surrounding Jupiter’s priest, the smarmy toad would actually send an apology by return.

Orbilio had not trekked all the way up to the Capitol and back yesterday morning for nothing.

With the sun sinking fast behind the hills which cradled Plasimene, he worked his way round to the shrine of Carya, where a corpulent priest gathered hyssop in the dusky pink rays to purify the altar, growling at his lanky novice to put some effing elbow grease behind his effing broom, or the boy would be working in the effing dark. At the edge of the walnut grove, Marcus leaned his hands on the low wall which surrounded it. The stone was warm upon his palms, purple from the glow of the sunset. All around, hills tamed into providing wood for hurdles, yokes and charcoal sank into the gentle, smoky twilight. Sheep grazed contentedly on the marshy plains and cattle chewed the cud, lowing softly now and then to rein in their boisterous calves. Lowering his gaze, he watched coracles and fishing boats, homeward bound and heavy, studding
the surface of a lake which rippled with nibbling fish. Finally his meandering eyes found what they had, of course, set out to find from the beginning, and Orbilio could fool himself no longer. One of the fishermen’s hooks must have got left behind by mistake, it pulled in his gut as he watched lights far across the water twinkle in the darkening sky. There was no mistaking the island that they came from and he swallowed the lump in his throat. So many lights, they danced like fireflies out on that wooded lump of rock developed by a banker and his wife into a villa of great luxury and grounds which were, he understood, a beauty to behold. Then the banker died, and not so many months ago. And earlier this afternoon, his successor had rowed a certain party over to the island.

But had not yet rowed her home.

*

Out where those torches burned like fireflies, a man and a woman walked side by side, one unaccustomedly voluble, the other unaccustomedly quiet.

This island, Tarraco told her, was once a sacred Etruscan burial site and though the tombs had been robbed long ago, probably at the time of the Battle of the Lake, the paintings inside could rival the artists of Rome. One day, maybe tomorrow, maybe next day, he would show her.

‘But they are nothing compared to what I show you. Come.’ He led her to the eastern tip of the island. ‘My colossus. Fifty feet high, it takes your breath away, no? Is Memnon, son of the Dawn, and at daybreak he calls to his mother. Oh, you scoff, but is true. Memnon sings. You wait and you see. Memnon sings.’

Let me show you the gardens, magnificent gardens, with the peabirds who spread out their fan of fine feathers and the cote of white doves. Listen with me to the murmuring fountains; we feed the fish in the ponds. You like the villa? This marble here comes from the high Pyrenees, the doors are cedar from the forests of Lebanon.

Like a gentle tide, his words went in, his words went out, and Claudia’s mind was the beach they left no trace on. For her, this offered the perfect breathing space. Coldblooded murder could not intrude on this island. Strongroom robberies did not exist. The tentacles of the Security Police could not reach this far out. As the sun turned the banker’s villa salmon pink, stress floated away like a leaf on the water. Pressure flew home with the geese.

Leaving his guest in a portico planted with basil to counteract the clouds of midges, Tarraco returned a few minutes later with a magnificent gown in his hands—harebell blue, vivid rather than flamboyant, daring, yet anything but flashy. Claudia gasped with surprise. It was exquisite, true, but more than that, the gift revealed so much about the Spaniard. Perhaps it smacked of arrogance, that Claudia would show at the jetty, but it betrayed what she had suspected yesterday. That Tarraco could read her thoughts, because this was a gown she’d have chosen herself. In the setting sun, she smiled inwardly. In her experience, the only men who have such taste and comprehension are inclined towards their own sex, but not Tarraco! His dark eyes were compelling, his movements lithe and beguiling and she did not need to hear his sharp intake of breath to appreciate the effect of his gift when she changed into it. Without a word he led her between a line of tall cypress to a white marble seat which looked out over the lake. Laid out in the centre were platters piled high with oysters and stuffed eggs, asparagus and wild mushrooms.

‘The shadows lengthen,’ he said as they pushed their plates away. ‘Come.’

With the flat of his hand on her back as a guide, he led her to the dining terrace, where spiky palms flanked the marble steps and garlands of flowers—roses, lilies, valerian—hung from the capitals of deeply fluted pillars. Two couches upholstered in Tyrian purple and cast in bronze gleamed in the light of a score of burning torches and Claudia knew, as she stretched out, that the colour of her gown set off the scene to perfection. Tarraco, she reflected happily, was not just rich, he was an artist.

Crab and lobster, venison and quail sizzled under silver-lidded platters and the silence was broken only by the rasping of cicadas and an occasional mew from the peacocks. Across the lake, the lights of Atlantis reflected like stars in the water.

‘Your—’ Claudia cleared her throat and started again. ‘Your servants. Are they invisible?’

‘You wish for a crowd?’ he asked, stroking his long, dark mane out of his eyes.