Jail Bait (6 page)

The Judaean girl ignored her mistress to put her hand on Lavinia’s forehead, then studied the whites of her eyes. ‘You’ve been drinking again,’ she said. ‘You know what happens when you mix your drugs with the wine.’

‘Never touched a drop,’ Lavinia said, pulling the coverlet over the wineskin, then turned to Lalo and said, ‘For heaven’s sake, stop fussing.’

‘I’m not fussing,’ the field hand said, scooping her into his arms, and Claudia noticed that his knuckles were bleeding and raw, as though he’d been in a fight. ‘Merely taking precautions, and it’s bed for you, my lady.’

Leaving Ruth to wheel out her day couch, Lavinia clasped her wizened hands round the outworker’s neck and shot Claudia a vulgar wink before the trio disappeared.

Claudia rested her elbows on the gold-painted rail and gazed out over the water as she wondered again what the old woman was concealing. Had someone appeared in the doorway? Overheard the discussion about Cal? Or was Claudia’s overworked imagination running away with itself? Other islands were popping up now, smaller, rockier outcrops close to the north shore of the lake. The flame on Tuder’s island, she noticed, had been extinguished. A heron stalked the shallows for tadpoles and eels, and an osprey scooped a fish in its talons.

About twenty strokes out, a lone rowboat cleaved a
path through the opalescent water, leaving ripples which reflected the misty mauve of the dawn. Claudia frowned. That boat. Where had she seen it before? As though her head was befuddled by a heavy cold, she couldn’t seem to think straight.

Then it came to her.

Yesterday. It was the boat she had taken out to the island.

His hair still hung like drapes from that same central parting, and in the clarity of Aurora’s rosy rays, his muscles showed stark and rounded as he hauled on the oars.

Then the movement stopped abruptly, and Claudia knew then that he’d been aware of her presence all along. For maybe thirty seconds he sat motionless before pushing the oars once more through the water, and in the pellucid light she saw a flash of white which could have been a smile, or then again might have been nothing more than a grimace of exertion.

I’m tired, she thought. Weary. I need to lie down. But she made no move to leave, and the V of the grey rowboat’s wake grew fainter and fainter.

Fifty feet below this spot, Cal’s twisted body had lain for how long before somebody noticed? An hour? Three? A stone dropped in Claudia’s stomach. Suppose he’d been trying to attract her attention? To warn her, say, about the bear? Might the accident have been avoided, had she stayed with him, or would he still have been tempted to leap on to the rail to show off?

A frown puckered her brow. Surely if Cal had been treating this as a tightrope, he’d have wanted an audience…?
Wait!

The tiredness evaporated as Claudia grabbed the torch and, running now, retraced yesterday’s route. The secret doorway… Through the cave… Down the tunnel… Her bare feet crunched on the shingle as she sprinted to the spot where Cal’s body had lain. Now she knew what was so odd about it.

Cal had not died here.

With daylight supplementing the light from her torch, her suspicions were confirmed. There was no trace of blood on the stones. Of course not. The body had been brought here and arranged as though it had fallen, although the limbs had been rather too artistically placed for her liking. Someone had killed him by snapping his neck, and as an afterthought tried to make it look like an accident by smashing the bones of his face.

Someone who knew the only person they had to fool was a doctor used to corns, rather than tumours. Someone familiar enough with Kamar to know he was too bone-idle to examine a corpse once life was extinct…

Slowly this time, scouring the ground with her eyes, Claudia returned to the mouth of the tunnel and tears stung in her eyes. Cal
had
waited here, just as he promised, and she didn’t need to bend down to see that the rusty brown patch which discoloured the rock was his blood.

‘Damn you!’ She hurled the burning brand into the lake and heard the flame sizzle as it died. ‘Damn you, you murdering son-of-a-bitch!’

She didn’t know who had killed Cal, she didn’t know why, and what’s more, she didn’t give a toss for the reason.

All Claudia knew, so help her, was that she’d unearth the bastard who murdered this boy and, by the gods, she’
d make him pay for his crime.

VIII

As dawn broke across the seven hills of Rome, its residents braced themselves for revelations of an altogether different kind. Are those spots, or just a bruise where she fell over? Are you off your food from fever, or was it curdled milk which made you queer? In every household, from the richest to the squalid, families lined up to inspect one another for the symptoms of the plague, because with seventy more souls ferried over the Styx every day, they needed reassurance they weren’t going to be on the next boat.

For Marcus Cornelius Orbilio, trudging down from the Capitol, he was simply too bone weary to care. His eyelids, he was sure, could double as scouring pads, every muscle he owned cried out for rest. Forty-two hours had passed since his last proper sleep, his stubble itched and the soles of his feet felt like they’d been beaten with paddles. He needed a drink. He knew that he shouldn’t, that his brain and digestion were shot all to hell, but Mother of Tarquin, what he wouldn’t give for a drink!

In the shadow of the Temple of Concord, he glanced across to the Imperial Palace and cursed his boss under his breath. Bastard. Simply because Orbilio had dined with a select group of senators, two of them personal friends of the Emperor, and his superior officer hadn’t been invited! Never mind these were Orbilio’s relatives, that he had no say in who was or wasn’t asked. In his boss’s eyes this was a snub, a sharp reminder that, in class terms, the Head of the Security Police ranked lower than his patrician employee and thus, to keep the upstart in his place, he’d hauled Marcus Cornelius away from the murder he was investigating and assigned him instead to round-the-clock guard duty outside the Imperial Palace.

That he could justify the humiliation by citing the dire consequences of the plague entering the imperial bloodstream made it doubly hard for Orbilio to swallow, because on that particular issue at least he backed his boss to the hilt. Rome had enough on her plate, she daren’t lose Augustus!

It was only seven weeks back, remember, that Agrippa died so unexpectedly, depriving the Emperor in one single blow of best friend, son-in-law, his finest general—and, most importantly, his heir. Rome had become a bucking bronco, with revolution, anarchy and sedition jostling to jump in the saddle, and no one left to hold the reins. Jupiter alone knows what backlash might unfold. No, Augustus’ life needed careful guarding at the moment, that went without saying, but the Palace watch was a job for the Praetorian Guard and, unlike the Head of the Security Police, Augustus was no snob. He wouldn’t give a toss who kept the plague out.

Rather, Orbilio felt, being a red-blooded bloke himself, the Emperor might be sympathetic towards what Marcus’ boss would undoubtedly call deserting his post…

Glancing across to the Senate House, Marcus felt a sour taste in his mouth. Accusations of desertion
would not sit well with his ambitions to take a seat one day, so he had to play this right. One step wrong and it’s no use shouting about the double standards of putting the Senate in unofficial recess until May, so the politicians can escape the plague. The mud would stick and Orbilio’s chances of crossing that most illustrious of thresholds would be squashed for ever. On the other hand. His step quickened. Minor slurs could be forgiven, providing he solved enough cases—and naturally, the higher their profile, the higher the odds. Well, the profile of what he’d been working on (leastways until his boss got the hump) could outstrip the Great Pyramid of Egypt. And murder was just the tip of the pyramid…

Once across the Forum, Marcus kept to the diminishing shade of the Via Sacra. The beads of sweat which had linked hands round his belt told him today would be another stinking inferno and already, even at this early hour, fumigatory fires burned the length and breadth of the city. Orbilio did not think that, in this heat, they helped.

How long, he wondered, before the contagion ran its course and the Forum could reflect a different mood? Lately, in place of strings of roped ostriches kicking up mayhem, scrawny pigeons pecked in the dust, with no children to chase them away. Gone were the dancers, the acrobats, the fire-eaters in their gaily coloured costumes. Silent were the taunts of the bare-knuckle fighters, the strident cries of the hucksters, the hup-hup-hup of the litter bearers. For the past week, heads wagged low in sombre consultations with fortune-tellers while augurs studied the stars, the entrails of sheep, even the flight patterns of owls in search of encouraging auspices. The sun might shine, thought Orbilio, but the light had gone out in the city. Swerving past a man up a ladder fixing his gutterspout, he glanced down a sidestreet and saw yet another handcart wheeling away a tiny body concealed by a sheet and heard that most heartrending of sounds—the muted sobs of a father bereaved.

‘Shit.’

As Orbilio pressed on up the Velian slope, the lump in his throat refused to subside. Death he was used to. He was twenty-eight, for gods’ sake, he’d seen men die—good men, bullies, bigots and cowards, he’d watched them expire on the battlefield and from public execution—
but a child
? Its soul stolen away in the night? That can’t be right. And whilst his objective in visiting Jupiter’s temple had been to gain ammunition to fight his boss rather than to offer up prayers, Marcus couldn’t help wondering when the King of Olympus intended to tear himself away from his drinking and his whoring and send a thunderbolt to put paid to this murderous heat.

People were dying, and Jupiter did not care. Orbilio snorted. Who did
that
remind him of! Three painstaking weeks he’d spent gathering evidence on that damned murder and, snap, just like that, his boss suspends further enquiries. Well, the case was too important to walk away from, both from the victim’s point of view, as well as Orbilio’s. He needed a weapon to fight back with and this morning he had found it.

A personal application from his boss for his brother to fill the role of Jupiter’s priest. Brilliant!.Just what Orbilio needed.

For the last seventy-five years the job had not so much been vacant, more covered by the collegiate as a group, but lately, to emphasize the importance the king of the gods played in Augustus’ golden age of peace, the Emperor decided to entrust the task once more to a single individual. Heaven knows, the list of applicants would be tremendous (what a feather in their cap, whoever got the job) but the post would not be as easy to fill as some might imagine. Few people in living memory had ever seen the original functions performed, but only a foreigner could not be aware of hundreds of taboos by which Jupiter’s special priest was bound and the job would only go to a man who could recite the rules and regulations.

Well, Orbilio knew. The whole list lay in his family vault.

And with this information, he could trade with his superior officer, for the man’s ambitions knew no bounds. His brother, as weak and clumsy as he was strong and shrewd, would not care a jot. But for the Head of the Security Police to boast a sibling in this prestigious role… Oh, yes. Orbilio was in an excellent position to bargain.

He paused in the street to stroke the ginger tomcat which came rubbing round his ankles, and vowed he would not bargain with his boss unless pushed to the limit. Scrubbing the cat’s ears, Marcus was keenly aware that, if he could solve this outstanding murder case—correction, this Giant Pyramid of a case—there’d be no need for horsetrading at all. His skills would see him through. Hadn’t those selfsame skills put him on to it? Long, weary legs began the long, slow haul up the Esquiline Hill.

It had all started with a bit of gossip. One man in the steamy atmosphere of the public bath house bragging to another how he planned to spend the fortune he’d inherited from his wife. The voice was not that of an old man, and Marcus’ investigative ears twitched, albeit idly.

‘Didn’t she keep cats or something, your late wife?’ the friend asked.

‘Twelve of the fuckers,’ the husband spat. ‘Got rid of them
straight
away!’

That was all. A snippet of overheard conversation, but somehow it stuck in his mind. Twelve cats, the man said. Twelve’s a lot, an awful lot, but perhaps Orbilio would have thought no more of it, had the husband not sounded so bitter when he snarled out the number. Plus, he didn’t like the way the man laughed when he said ‘straight away’. In fact, the whole tone of it stuck in Orbilio’s craw, and it was more to put his own mind at rest that he checked out the fellow’s history. Which was shabby, to say the least. A wastrel, a womanizer, a professional sponger, but he could not have killed his wife. He had an alibi, his wife was a hundred miles away, and she died of natural causes—

Except healthy women do not die of natural causes.
Uneasy now, Marcus delved deeper, and what he found made his blood turn to ice.

At which point, his boss got the hump.

‘The woman’s been dead three fucking months,’ he had snapped. ‘What difference does another month make? Just get your arse up to the Palace and keep the fucking plague out!’

Well, sorry, but Orbilio had no intention of dropping this case. Not this one! Solving it would propel him through the Senate House doors faster than a tornado and since there’s more than one way to snare a song thrush, even when his brain felt like porridge and every muscle screamed, Marcus Cornelius trekked all the way across town at the end of his shift to verify his boss’s application regarding the role of Jupiter’s priest.