Man Eater (9 page)

‘Fronto might be many things, sir, but he was no sexual deviant. In fact, until very recently, he was employed on my staff.’

Macer silenced the buzz of excitement with his hand. ‘Quiet, please. Moreover,’ he continued, ‘the description of the arsonist laying waste those lands so close to your own, my dear Claudia, matches your description of Fronto to a T.’

Claudia jumped to her feet. ‘For gods’ sake, man! Do I look the sort of woman who goes around stabbing total strangers?’

The Prefect studied her for a full five seconds before a slow grin spread across his face. ‘No, Mistress Seferius, you do not.’ He bared shiny, white teeth. ‘Which is precisely why you thought you could get away with it.’

VI

The imbecile! The half-wit! The absolute bloody cheek of it! Claudia stomped out of the room and slammed the door into next week. Behind her swarmed a sea of faces, some slack-jawed, some shouting, some still digesting the evidence, though none made an effort to stop her. Let them try, she thought. Just let them bloody try. The opulence of the atrium flashed past unnoticed. Pyrenean marble. Friezes. Frescoes. Gold lampstands. Lavender stalks and elecampane burned unheeded in silver braziers, a fountain splashed in vain. Garlands of daphne draped round the columns might have been invisible.

What was he thinking of, Macer, fixing the trial for next Wednesday? She was overtaking a bronze bust of somebody’s pug-nosed ancestor and imagining a scene, not too far in the future, in which Macer lay prostrate at the Emperor’s feet, begging to be spared the disgrace of patrolling the Dacian frontier for the remainder of his career, when she stopped dead.

I’m seeing things. By the gods, that moron has made me hallucinate!

At the far end of the atrium, however, clouds of dust bellying out from the cloak he was shaking, that tall, strong figure of a man was most definitely of the flesh. Patrician stock, you could tell by the length of the tunic and the high purple boots. Military background, you could tell by the set of the shoulders, the dead straight line of the backbone. Totally unwelcome, you could tell by the mop of wavy hair and a hand that would be used any minute to cover his mouth and stifle a laugh.

‘Well, beat me on the bottom with a bun!’

In fact the aristocrat made no effort to conceal his grin. ‘I’ll have you know, madam, I’ve not ridden ten hours solid just to satisfy your strange sexual fantasies.’ He agitated his hair with his hands. ‘At least, not until I shake the dust off.’

How strange. No matter how many times she’d tried to stamp on his memory, his features were exactly as she remembered them. Right down to the rich baritone. She wanted to move, but found someone had glued her soles to the floor.

‘So!’ With a practised swirl, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio folded his cloak and handed it to the porter, who closed the vestibule doors behind him. ‘Since when have you taken to disguising yourself as a marigold?’

‘I did it to pass the thyme. Is this visit coincidence?’

‘Not entirely. I thought I’d give you the chance to explain why you sent my letters back.’

The sour smell of powdered soil and horse sweat tickled the back of her throat, and yet it was a citrusy scent that lodged in her nostrils and refused to budge. Can’t imagine where that came from. ‘Letters?’

‘Not only my beautifully scripted scrolls—if I recall, last time you returned the entire messenger.’

Poor bugger was spotted trotting along the Via Sacra with
‘Not known at this address’
unwittingly pinned to the back of his cloak. Orbilio had been the laughing stock of the Esquiline for weeks.

Would I? Claudia’s eyes implored.

You bet your sweet buttercups, his replied.

She smiled.

‘Poor you. Saddlesores for nothing.’ She walked to the vestibule and opened the front doors wide.

‘Forget the explanation, then.’ Orbilio stamped his boots. ‘I’ll hang around, anyway.’

Dammit, I don’t need this. ‘Despite riding all this way for a case of mistaken identity?’

‘Oh, no one mistakes you for another woman, Claudia.’

‘You did. You mistook me for someone who,’ she snapped her fingers, ‘cares this for beautifully scripted scrolls. Or their author.’

By the time she reached the colonnade, he’d just about caught up His expression was unchanged, she noticed, but the light in his eyes seemed to have hardened. Good. He might just leave her life in peace now.

‘I hear you’re in a spot of bother,’ he said indifferently.

How? Godsdammit, it was Junius who stole that bloody horse, Junius who sent for… Her eyes narrowed to slits. I’ll have the skin off your back, you abject little toad. No one betrays Claudia Seferius’ secrets, especially not to this ferreting son-of-a-bitch. Come the next slave auction, my boy, I’ll turn you into silver.

‘Nothing’s wrong, Orbilio. Get your ears tested.’

‘In my profession, ears are always in tip-top working order.’ He paused. ‘How else can we listen under windows?’

Nightmare! Deep inside her ribcage, Claudia’s vital organs threatened to crush each other to death.

‘Then you’ll appreciate Macer is after glory,’ she said levelly. ‘Unfortunately, he has the wits of a woodlouse and appears to be on the wrong treadmill with his investigation.’

So help me, I’ll squeeze that Prefect till his pips squeak. Day after day, the little lowlife will wake and ask himself, when will my torment end? And I shall say to him, ah, but that’s the thing, Macer. It will never end. Not so long as I breathe—and even afterwards, I wouldn’t count on it.

But that was small beer in the overall scheme of things and in the meantime it prickled (really prickled) finding curly-haired investigators nosing around all over the place. Last time he dug up her past. Croesus only knows what he’ll unearth this time.

‘The evidence is stacked in the Prefect’s favour.’ Orbilio crossed to the central pool, splashed his face with water, then settled himself on the tiled rim, one leg thrown casually over the other. ‘Tell me about you and Quintilian and the land devalued by mysterious fires.’

‘There’s nothing to add,’ she lied.

‘This isn’t your first run-in with him, is it?’

Isn’t it? You couldn’t have picked that up by eavesdropping. I wonder what else you know, my fine patrician friend? ‘Senators aren’t above the law,’ she snapped. ‘Why doesn’t Macer pick on him?’

‘Perhaps for the simple expediency that Quintilian wasn’t found with the arsonist dangling on the end of his blade.’

‘Orbilio, if I wanted to dispose of dung-beetles, I’d use more style than a common kitchen knife.’

He looked up to the opening in the roof where sunlight poured into the atrium, flooding it with light. ‘Claudia,’ he said eventually, ‘these are very serious accusations. Macer’s convinced he’s dealing with a simple case of thieves falling out, that you connived to meet Fronto at the Villa Pictor—’

Claudia threw her arms into the air. ‘I argue with my fellow conspirator right here in the hallway, is that it? I lose my temper, stick a knife in him (which I just happen to have handy) and then what? Drag the body under the bed and hope no one will notice till summer? What sort of an idiot are you, Orbilio?’

The best in Rome, Claudia. The best in Rome. ‘I’m merely repeating the Prefect’s case and reminding you that it’s more than sufficient for him to take to trial. Especially,’ he calmly rinsed his hands in the cool, clear water of the pool and shook the drips on to the marble floor, ‘as Macer believes it was no accident, that you deliberately plotted to kill Fronto.’

Shit! Claudia marched up the length of the colonnade, then marched back down, stopping short at a statue of Minerva.

‘Someone let him in,’ Orbilio reminded her. ‘By one means or another, Fronto sneaked past thirty security guards into a house which is locked, barred and bolted.’

This is your doing, she told the goddess. You’ve always had it in for me. With a hefty shove, she toppled Minerva from her podium. ‘This whole wretched affair has spiralled right out of proportion,’ she snapped. ‘I am not a violent person, I did not kill the dung-beetle, and when I’ve finished with Macer,’ the libation jug from the family shrine crashed against a painting of the Minotaur, ‘there will not be one inch left of his skin that he recognizes.’

Orbilio watched as her hand swept a bowl of dried rose petals on to the floor. Mother of Tarquin, this woman’s amazing. Accused of premeditated murder, does she crumple? Does she hell! Claudia Seferius throbs with the very essence of life, spitting, cursing, hurling china as fast as insults.

It was, he decided, deftly ducking a potted fern, a highly powerful aphrodisiac.

‘You can take that smug look off your face, too.’ A scarlet cushion whizzed past his left ear and bobbed upon the water. ‘It’s not your damned cat that’s gone missing!’

‘Drusilla?’ His eyebrows rose by a fraction.

‘If it hadn’t been for her—’an oak-carved Pegasus clattered off an incense burner‘—none of this would have happened.’

‘But she’s here.’

A sandal remained poised in Claudia’s hand. ‘Say that again?’

‘That’s right, this is my second encounter with a—’ He let his voice trail off. Perhaps this wasn’t the time to mention words like spitting, snarling, hissing—or, indeed, cat. ‘Outside,’ he said instead. ‘About an hour ago.’

‘Are you sure it was Drusilla?’

He rolled up his sleeve and showed her the claw marks.

Men! Who needs ’em? One keeps you here under false pretences. One rates the shine on his breastplate higher than justice. One sells your secrets and one… One turns up when you least want to see him and then he doesn’t even have the decency to end your misery over images of small furry carcases ravaged by jackals. Claudia pushed hard against Orbilio’s chest.

‘Hey!’

It was, she decided, a thoroughly gratifying yelp that rang to the rafters. Before the splash drowned it out.

*

Say, twenty-four hours earlier, a friend or colleague had asked Marcus Cornelius Orbilio to define the word dignity, he would have had no problem. His answer would have mingled breeding with demeanour, propriety with self-possession, solemnity with honour. In short, he would have said, it is nobility of bearing—and said friend or colleague would have taken one look at Marcus Cornelius Orbilio and understood implicitly.

Then came the incident with Gisco the charioteer, calling at his house in the dead of night and (he imagined) flashing a short, sharp gelding knife into the bargain. As a result, half his ride along the Via Flaminia was preoccupied with the question of how dignified was it, a patrician of rank and seniority, legging it out of his own bedroom window like a common thief. He had reached Narni, where the Bridge of Augustus strides east across the valley and leaves the old road behind, before he felt close to redeeming himself. This, he told himself as his stallion’s hoofs crunched the weeds underfoot, is an emergency. It would not have helped Claudia’s cause, had he stayed to reason it out with Gisco. Thus it was, sporting a full set of dignities, that Orbilio had arrived at the Villa Pictor.

With great personal regret he observed the same thing could not be said at the moment.

And even now, when he thought decorum had reached its lowest ebb at the point where Sergius lent a sceptic arm to pull a waterlogged stranger out of his atrium pool, Orbilio discovered he had miscalculated.

His boot slipped on the sodden, sunken cushion and he crashed back into the water.

Taking his host in with him.

Oddly, it was not the loss of his dignity that concerned him, rather the emancipation of an almost illegal sense of jubilation. Orbilio had physically to force himself to stop grinning like a lunatic before Sergius mistook him for one and ejected him from the premises, while at the same time the flood of elation that swept through every artery was so great, he was in danger of paying tax on it.

So she hasn’t found someone else, then? She still feels the same.

Admittedly it would be difficult to explain to an outsider that being shoved backwards into a pool of cold water was Claudia’s way of showing affection, but Orbilio had no man to account to except himself.

And himself was more than satisfied with progress.

*

To the uninitiated, it might not be immediately obvious how a sleeping cat can bristle with indignation, but bristling Drusilla most certainly was.

The turned back, the stiff spiky coat, the refusal to open a single eyelid, those signs were plain enough, but the disdain with which she treated Claudia’s bolster, still bearing the impression of her head—now that was the clincher.

‘Think you can treat me like this, do you?’ the embattled form blazed. ‘Throw me down hillsides, pelt me with stones, disguise the trail with rhino and tiger dung, then expect me to hunt for my suppers? Well, fine. Fine. Just don’t expect portable pillows from me as well.’ Emphasizing her point, Drusilla butted even tighter against the foot of her bed, curling herself inwards like a dormouse and pointedly anchored her tail with her paw. The drawbridge was up.

Claudia focused on the ceiling. For a moment it was as though yesterday’s fog had swept back in to blind her, and when she tried to speak Drusilla’s name, a frog slipped out instead. In the far corner, paint from a cherub’s cheek was beginning to crack, twisting an innocent grin into a leer. Of course, the cat’s tantrum might have carried more weight, she reflected, had the dish of veal and flatfish not been licked spotless.