Man Eater (25 page)

‘So, have you interviewed the widow?’ Claudia pictured her, painted and flabby and dressed like a newlywed.

‘I treat my cases the way a doctor treats his,’ Orbilio replied between mouthfuls. ‘They require a thorough examination and a bedrock of background information before I make my diagnosis. I’ll see Balbilla later.’

So that was her name. Claudia rolled it around on her tongue. Balbilla. Balbilla. The sort of name that would belch, slap you on the back and have a laugh like a horse. She almost felt sorry for Fronto.

‘Did you notice the amphitheatre as we came in?’ he asked.

You could hardly miss it. Behind the law courts, a splendid edifice soared to the skyline, its brickwork interspaced every cubit with a wafer-thin layer of baked clay whose purpose was purely to advertise the wealth and prosperity of the Tarsulani. Happy days.

‘It made me wonder why Pictor didn’t exhibit at least some of his animals there,’ Orbilio added. ‘Can you imagine the impact of even the tamest of shows upon the audience? The dancing bears, for instance, or the monkeys riding in saddles upon goats?’

‘Sergius is going for broke with these spectacles, it’s Rome or nothing, and he has no intention of getting pipped to the post by someone sniffing out what he’s up
to.’ Sworn to secrecy,
apparently the estate workers felt the bite of the lash if they so much as opened their mouths in public, because although the locals knew he kept a menagerie, they didn’t know the purpose behind it.

Orbilio ordered a bowl of stuffed dates and received a plate of pastries instead. ‘Fair enough, but you’d think he’d at least take the elephant to the Megalesian Games, wouldn’t you?’

Claudia bit into the crumbly, cheesy pastry. ‘The trouble is, Corbulo would need to go with the wrinkly beast,’ she explained. ‘Sergius’ schedule would be set back still further, he’d then miss the games in June. Why do you ask?’

‘Just curious,’ he said, licking his fingers. ‘It’s like a mosaic, this case. I’m sure all the pieces are there, only I can’t seem to make sense of them.’

Who can? ‘Who cares?’

You do, his eyes said, but she refused to listen to them.

‘A man who, until recently, worked for the newly appointed Prefect of Police is lured to the Villa Pictor and stabbed in order to make you appear a murderess,’ Orbilio said, ‘and the girl bribed as a witness has her neck broken in order to silence her.’

‘But in apparent and utterly confusing contradiction, I am almost a victim myself, by an unknown assassin at that—’

‘—and it is distinctly possible the head of the household is being poisoned.’

Claudia had seen Sergius, eyes rolling, legs dragging, supported by slaves on his way to the bath house as she was making her getaway this morning. The colour of his skin was neither yellow nor grey, but, like catkins on a pussy willow, it was a combination of the two.

‘I have a fair knowledge of herbs,’ she said—in fact it was better than average but that was none of his business—‘and I’ve never encountered symptoms like Pictor’s, and besides, who’d want to kill him?’ She helped herself to the last little pastry on the plate and wished the wine had been as good as the food. ‘Not Alis, that’s for sure.’

That little mouse wouldn’t have the guts to kill her own husband, especially while there was a Prefect, a senior representative of the Security Police, a junior tribune plus a whole host of uniformed officers prancing round the house. That wouldn’t be gall, that would be outright stupidity.

‘Unless she’s desperate for money,’ she added as an afterthought.

Orbilio leaned back and put his feet on the table. ‘How do you mean? What would she gain by killing Sergius?’

Claudia wetted her finger and collected several cheesy crumbs on the tip. ‘The estate must be worth a tidy sum, especially with the performing beasts.’

‘But—’ Orbilio frowned. ‘You obviously don’t know.’

‘Know what?’ She licked the crumbs off her finger. ‘The estate is hers already. She inherited it from Isodorus when he died.’

Claudia felt her eyeballs bulge. ‘You mean it’s
Alis
who’s rich and not Sergius?’ Now that put the wolf among the nannygoats. She ran back over events in her mind, but while it might change the perspective, the basic picture remained unaltered.

Shame.

The fire crackled amid sounds of laughter, clanking goblets, the clatter of plates. Watching him at ease in his chair, boots on the table, running his finger round the rim of his glass, there was an inexplicable tightness around her solar plexus. Damned indigestion. Wouldn’t you just know it?

Orbilio tapped his finger against his chin. ‘You know, I have a feeling that if we can just crack open the shell of this case, the whole nut will come tumbling out.’ That, thought Claudia, is the crunch, isn’t it? Knowing where to begin.

And praying that, before the killer is unveiled, more souls won’t be ferried across the river Styx.

XX

Outside the tavern, Claudia ground her heel into a weed growing up through the flagstones and wished it was Orbilio’s nose.

‘I suppose you’ll be sticking to me like a tick from now on?’ she had asked ten minutes earlier, smoothing out the creases in her scarlet gown as he sorted the bill and thinking, now
that
will have set me up for the journey.

‘Front or back, which would you prefer?’

The look she gave him could have turned grapes to raisins, but Marcus Cornelius seemed to be adjusting the purse on his wrist with immense detail.

‘I was referring to the element of trust. You see, when it comes to me, yours appears filigree thin.’ That’s it, shame him into leaving you alone, that way you can slip away while his back’s turned.

‘I can’t imagine where you got that idea from.’ Orbilio was nonchalantly tossing a key in the air.

Claudia looked round in mock agitation.

‘What’s up?’ he asked.

‘I’m looking for the rat I can smell.’ Not for nothing had that key materialized out of nowhere.

‘You’ll thank me in the end,’ he said, taking care to keep his eye on the metal object flipping into his hand. ‘I’ve been doing you a favour.’

Like hell. ‘Like what?’

‘Like…keeping Drusilla out of the midday sun.’ The key had disappeared deep into the folds of his tunic. ‘Like…knowing how frightened she’d be without Junius to keep her company—’

His voice trailed off into the gutter where it belonged, and much to Claudia’s disappointment, this aristocratic prig did not break out in the mass of suppurating sores that she prayed so violently for. He simply winked and strode off.

Now, as Claudia ground another weed into juice, there was a bubbling sound in her ears as her blood reached boiling point. Godsdamnit, Orbilio, this is not your manor. You can’t go locking up people’s cats willy-nilly, or banging up their bodyguards whenever the whim is upon you.

But no matter how intense her fury, no matter how numerous the curses she visited upon him and his family, his house, his job, indeed anyone who’d ever spoken to him in their entire lives, the fact remained.

Claudia Seferius was grounded.

So just what does a girl do when she’s stuck in this dead-end town for the rest of the afternoon? She digs out the grubs who ran her off the road, that’s what. Before she takes the skin off their backs to hang on her walls for her to paint pictures on.

Across the street a young mother, a child at her hip and another clinging to her skirts, helped her one-legged husband up the steps of the public baths. An old man, as thin as Barea, hobbled to the barber’s for a long overdue shave and outside the fuller’s yard a frizzy-haired washerwoman made sheep’s eyes at the temple warden when any fool could see she was wasting her time, it was boys he was interested in. A random slice of Tarsulae life, Claudia thought, which succinctly sums up this town. It shows the two very separate divisions, those who have little option but to stay on, to eke a living where otherwise they could find none and whose only alternative was the Emperor’s dole. And those who make a living from these proud, possibly stubborn, survivors.

She clapped her hands to cleave a path through a gaggle of pecking hens and feared not only for the future of the townspeople, but for the soul of the town itself. Tarsulae was degenerating fast. And as she began her search for the yobs, she pondered which of the two categories Fronto had fitted into.

‘How old yer say?’ The hunchback clipping his donkey with a pair of iron shears shook his head. ‘Nah! No young men left nowadays, they’ve all found work in Hispellum or Narni.’ Which is rather what Claudia had concluded, but it didn’t hurt to double check.

‘Don’t know of no one with a birthmark like that.’ Ankle deep in sawdust, the wizened carpenter worked on smoothing a yoke. ‘Couldn’t have made a mistake, could you, lass?’

After a while, Claudia began to think well, yes, maybe she had. Maybe that ginger thatch had been dyed, maybe that birthmark was no more than paint. Then she remembered the third boy.

‘Eyes like a frog?’ The bone-worker shook his head. ‘Not from round here. Fancy them dice, do you? All four for a brass sesterce?’

As the shadows made their inexorable progress across the forum, Claudia sat on the steps of a bronze mounted hero and tried to come up with a feasible alternative to the monstrous thought that kept swelling and swelling inside her head. Any minute, and I’ll explode like an overripe pumpkin, because it can’t be true, it can’t, it can’t. Those boys have to be local. What other explanation could there be? She dare not admit, even privately, that they might have been hired in Narni or Hispellum. Or that the prospect of returning to the Villa Pictor, to share her roof with a murderer, was more than she could cope with…

There are, of course, ways to combat fear and the swell of nausea that comes with it. You tense all your muscles, then release them. You take little breaths, and sigh them away very slowly. And you do this while reciting an epic poem backwards, preferably one of Virgil’s. Claudia was halfway through the sack of Troy before she felt able to attack the practicalities of her situation.

She moved round the statue to follow the shade. Firstly, since the chances of another getaway seemed unlikely, the hiring of a lawyer became paramount. The man she wanted—correction, the man she intended should represent her—was middle-aged, lived on the Esquiline and took an equal interest in horseflesh and beekeeping. He won an average of seven cases out of eight, charged exorbitant fees for his services, and was, somewhat predictably, fully booked for months in advance.

But this lawyer would come to Narni on Wednesday.

In an effort to conceal her vast gambling debts from her husband while he was alive, Claudia had taken to offering certain services to men rich enough to pay for such exclusivity. How well she remembered the lawyer’s love of horses. In fact, the number of times he’d whinny and neigh while she led him around by a bridle beggared belief. Damn right, he’d be here on Wednesday

Then there was the little matter of the land sale in Etruria. With the auction just two days away, she had no intention of allowing Quintilian to win this round by default. Best write to her agent, telling him…

Having rooted out a scribe shifty enough to ask no questions and having entrusted her scrolls to a multi-scarred army veteran whose appearance was forbidding enough to deter even a hardened thief, Claudia drew a deep and satisfied breath then rapped at Fronto’s iron-studded door. The house was an impressive affair of gilded stucco and far too many servants, but why oh why, she wondered, wasn’t she surprised to find Marcus Cornelius Orbilio waiting in the atrium, one leg flung over the other, his hands folded behind his head, as he leaned his chair against the gaily painted wall?

‘Great minds think alike,’ he remarked to the room in general, and Claudia stuck her tongue out just at the point Fronto’s major-domo arrived, flanked by two of the ugliest infants you could hope to find in a freak show. The lady of the house was not home, he apologized, and again Claudia was not surprised. Had she been married to the dung-beetle, she, too, would have been out celebrating. The steward, however, suggested the widow might be found at her father’s clothes shop on Pear Street, he would be happy to furnish the guests with directions.

Orbilio had been busy, he told Claudia, linking his step to hers as they hiked up the hill. At the time Macer took over the prefecture, Fronto had been working in what some called civilian and others a mercenary capacity, though whether Macer decided external help was unnecessary or whether it was a straightforward personality clash, no one could say for certain. But one thing was sure. Fronto was off Macer’s payroll faster than a comet through the night sky. Moreover, Fronto was not only celebrated for taking backhanders in the army, but since retiring he’d acquired the reputation of a Master Fixit among certain unsavoury orders of the Tarsulani. In other words, Orbilio said, if anyone had been able to arrange for a group of hooligans to run Claudia off the road, that man was Fronto.

‘I think what I’m saying,’ he said wearily, as they turned left at the Shrine of Ceres, ‘is that every goddamned person on Pictor’s estate could know about this scumbag’s activities.’

After that, they walked to Pear Street in silence, where clothes shop, Claudia discovered, was something of a euphemism.