Jail Bait (18 page)

One person who knew the answer now lay dead, and somehow the idea of a convenient husband exacting revenge just didn’t ring true, no matter how hard one tried to make the pieces fit. Was Cal a blackmailer? Trading in sex, maybe information, rather than coins?

Damn you, scarlet curtain, damn you! Thanks to a few strands of dyed thread, you’ve twisted my thoughts like those twisted, dead warriors embroidered the length and the breadth of your drapes. You’ve stirred up a blood-red imagination, distorting pictures of a young man cartwheeling down the aisle into a spy listening at keyholes, creeping round caves and skulking down tunnels.

To whom might he have confided his findings? Dorcan? Pylades? Lavinia…?

What the hell is that woman hiding?
She’s an olive grower, for gods’ sake, how can her son afford this? From a homestead which boasts just the one field hand and maid, where tallows splutter and mattresses sag? What’s she lying about? Did she, after all, see what happened to Cal? And Lalo. How far would the loyal hand go to protect his mistress’s secret?
How far would he go to obey orders?
Why had he taken to disappearing for hours on end since he arrived in Atlantis, and where was he, the afternoon Cal was killed? Claudia had already checked with Ruth—she was alone.

‘Hey!’ Claudia called out. ‘HEY!’

After the twentieth bellow, the redhead finally put in an appearance. ‘Is there a problem, madam?’ she asked, casting a professional eye over the mud pie congealing on the slab.

‘I want to come out.’

‘No, no, no, no!’ squealed the horrified attendant. ‘It’ll undo all the good work, the mud inside won’t be set.’

‘Absolutely correct.’ A strong Sarmatian accent threw her weight behind the argument. ‘The mud needs to dry completely on your skin.’ The senior attendant tapped the sarcophagus. ‘About halfway,’ she calculated. ‘Well worth the wait, I assure you.’

‘I have no intention of waiting,’ Claudia snapped. ‘I want—’ Suddenly she recalled something Lavinia had said, and it was as though she’d been transported to the very highest Alps, so cold was the blood in her veins. ‘A woman died having a mud treatment. Was it
here
?’

The spatula in the redhead’s hands clattered on to the tiles and for the first time the broad smile disappeared. It was left to the supervisor to explain.

‘Ah, now that.’ She exchanged sober glances with her assistant, who began to twist her finger in her fist as she stared at her feet. ‘We um…’ The Sarmatian accent grew more pronounced. ‘We didn’t think anyone knew—’

‘It was terrible,’ cut in the redhead. ‘My best friend was in charge, and she got the sack over that, but, honestly, it wasn’t her fault—’

‘It wasn’t
any
of our faults,’ the overseer corrected sternly. ‘When the girl left, the client was laughing and joking—’

‘Teasing her about her freckles, my friend said—’

‘Exactly. And when the girl returned two hours later…well, it was just one of those things. However,’ the Sarmatian woman sniffed, ‘you mustn’t blame the treatment, her heart simply stopped beating.’

‘It happens,’ the redhead added with a philosophical shrug.

‘Just not here?’

‘Pylades felt the tragedy could only damage Atlantis,’ the supervisor sniffed, ‘and I for one believe he was absolutely right to hush it up—look what effect it’s had on you, for a start. Wanting to come out halfway through—imagine!’

‘I still do,’ Claudia replied through gritted teeth. ‘Would you fetch the nutcracker?’

‘Nonsense, dear,’ the Sarmatian woman tutted. ‘Another hour and you’ll laugh about this. Come along.’

Taking the redhead by the elbow, the pair of them departed deaf to Claudia’s impassioned pleas, her threats, her curses.

Finally, with only swirling steam for company and a few ghostly gurgles from the pipes, Claudia felt the first faint flutterings of panic.

Dammit, I have to get out. She elbowed, she kicked, she used her shoulders, knees, she squirmed, she heaved, but the bloody mud wouldn’t shift. Not one tiny crack had appeared. For the first time since she’d slipped from her mother’s womb, Claudia Seferius lay absolutely helpless.

Except that here, in the cubicle, there were no warm and loving arms to scoop her into, no reassuring breast to suckle, no mother’s voice to soothe.

Claudia was entirely alone.

Her heart pounded erratically, her breathing quickened. In desperation, she turned to the green curtain, but it was no longer Arcadia, where the sun always shone and goats chomped as the goatherd blew on a flute. It was a piece of cloth upon which some clever madam had stitched a scene or two, that was all. There was nothing restful about it, nothing reassuring, it was merely a sheet.

So why then, thumped her heart, wasn’t the red curtain the same? Why not a two-dimensional portrayal of the siege of Troy on a single bolt of fabric? Look, there are the battlements, with Priam and his sons. There’s the wooden horse, and down there the warships, while a dozen brave heroes slugged it out, she recognized Hector and Achilles, Ajax and Lysander. That, too, is simply a curtain.

But it wasn’t. It was a reflection of the wrath of Sabbio Tullus. Of some terrible, unnamed repercussion. Of Tarraco, whose boat was moored here the day young Cal was killed. Beads of sweat broke out on her forehead. Tarraco already had one tragedy behind him and now his second wife had disappeared. His second rich, middle-aged wife, to be precise. Lais, who had inherited all of Tuder’s wealth with or without a certain Spaniard’s connivance…

With a shudder, Claudia realized she knew absolutely nothing about this place or the people in it, yet in the space of three short days she had become aware of a huge and deadly shadow hovering over Atlantis. Cal was dead and so, according to Lavinia’s gossip, were others.

A young mother last night in childbirth. The silversmith with the tumour. An orphan boy, whose cousin, as Lavinia pointed out, so fortuitously inherited. The woman who kept cats. The nightmare vision in Claudia’s dream came back to haunt her. And then there was the woman who died, lying on one of these very slabs…

This is madness, she told herself. Wild imaginings born of helplessness. But instinct fought back. And instinct told her that, by meddling, her own life might be in jeopardy…

What was that?

The hairs on her scalp began to prickle. Footsteps. Heavy. Male. Like drumbeats in a sinister play, they grew louder with each rhythmic beat. Closer. Closer…

Claudia stopped breathing. Please pass by. Sweet Jupiter in heaven, make them pass by.

The footsteps grew louder, and Claudia thought of Pul, his bulging pectorals, his shining skull with just that stupid topknot on the poll. She pictured that tight leather vest, straining from heavy musculature. The curved blade on his hip—

Holy shit, Pul wouldn’t need a weapon. He’d use a pillow, to hold over her face. No screams, no struggles. Just—what was the phrase that oh-so-homely Sarmatian woman used?
Her heart would stop beating.

Like a white heifer to the sacrificial block, Claudia had allowed herself to be led to this chamber and imprisoned in a rigid coffin…and now she might pay the ultimate price for stupidity. Panic beat in her chest. I don’t want to die. Mighty Mars, help me! Please don’t let me die. She remembered how Pul’s almond eyes had followed her as she conversed with Dorcan after Cal’s funeral, had pinpointed her with hostility as she talked with Kamar at the Agonalia. Always around, always watchful. From the moment she’d first clapped eyes on him, Claudia had known Pul was evil…

The footsteps stopped, and now Claudia could only hear the terrible pounding of her blood in her ears. He was outside her cubicle. Waiting. For what? In her mind, she saw his monstrous walrus moustache lifting in a blood-thinning smile as he plumped the pillow he’d pulled from under her head…

Sweet Jupiter.

A brown hand closed round the curtain at the end of the cubicle. Brown on blue. They would be the last colours she ever saw in this life—

Slowly the hand drew back the drape.

XIX

Claudia opened her mouth and screamed. There was nothing subtle about the sound, it was a bug-scrunching, ear-splitting, milk-curdling yell which would have reached as far south as the Libyan deserts and north to the rugged homelands of the Scythians who’d invented this bloody treatment, may they rot with scrofulous sores. She squinted up her eyes, her nose, her entire face and she screamed. She screamed until her lungs were on fire. Until her tonsils were raw. Until, in fact, a whole platoon of attendants came running.

‘Mighty Earth Mother, what’s wrong?’ gasped the Sarmatian supervisor. ‘Are you in pain, dear?’

‘It was a spider,’ an amused baritone explained. ‘A big, hairy black thing which scuttled over her neck, but she’s fine now. I er—’ he lowered his voice to confide ‘—squashed it.’

Tittering broke out behind the curtains and Claudia dared not unscrew her eyes. She knew—she bloody knew that Sarmatian cow would be laughing at her. Her and a dozen others! She waited until the women clopped off.

‘Orbilio, you bastard!’ Her lungs were down to a burning wheeze. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

‘There’s no segregation in the treatment area,’ he said amiably. ‘I mean, who could make improper advances to a sarcophagus? Indeed,’ narrowed eyes capered the length of her mudpack and his mouth turned down at the edges, ‘who’d want to?’

She’d skin him. Flay him alive and then fly his hide as a kite.

‘I was not crying rape,’ she protested through tightly gritted teeth—and immediately realized her error. Perhaps, with luck, he was too busy sniggering to notice?

‘You weren’t, were you?’

Damn.

Orbilio leaned over, leaving her in no doubt that he had not misread the terror etched on her face when he pulled back the drapes. Watching a pulse beat at his neck and with the smell of his sandalwood unguent tingling down her throat, she waited for him to ask, ‘Who were you scared of, Claudia? Who did you think I was just now?’

Goes to show the scrambled state of your brains, you silly bitch! It sounded utterly preposterous, even to herself, to admit that she’d cowered in fear of her life from a total stranger with whom she’d exchanged not so much as a nod. Claudia sent a silent prayer of thanks to Jupiter that thoughts weren’t as easily communicated as words put down on parchment.

Marcus straightened up and hooked a stool across with his toe. Another time, the scrape of wood on tile would have set Claudia’s teeth on edge. Right now, she didn’t even notice.

‘Why won’t you trust me?’ he asked quietly.

‘Who says I don’t?’ she said. ‘Last night I slept in that wide double couch you so magnanimously paid for and you made no assault on my virtue.’

Orbilio rested one booted foot on the stool and grinned. ‘If that’s a complaint…’

Claudia’s mouth twisted at one corner, while her mind heaved a sigh of relief. Not only was he no mindreader, he hadn’t picked up on her mistake. She’d implied, over breakfast, her night had been spent with Tarraco—

‘Claudia,’ he sighed, leaning his weight upon the bent knee, ‘we’ve played mind games long enough. Isn’t it about time you came clean with me?’

‘But my dear Marcus, I shall. The instant this shell is cracked off.’

The quip fell short of its mark. ‘Would it speed our weary progress,’ he suggested carefully, ‘to know I’m aware of your involvement with Sabbio Tullus?’

Claudia heard something crack, and had a feeling it was her optimism, not the mud coffin.

‘What did you take from his strongroom? Uh-uh.’ Orbilio held up a hand. ‘The truth, please. How much did you steal?’

‘The—’ gulp ‘—truth?’

‘The truth.’

Claudia’s eyes followed the plumes of steam coiling round the ceiling and noticed that lamps had been lit to counteract the twilight. ‘Three hundred.’

‘What else?’

‘All right, three thousand, but you can tell Tullus I intend to pay back every single quadran come the end of the month. I’ve just had a cash flow problem with that consignment of wine to Armenia—Orbilio, are you listening?’

Never mind Armenia, his mind seemed to have
wandered to the Libyan desert. ‘Yes. Yes, of course I am.’

The eyes refocused and a sharp light hovered round the edges of his pupils. ‘You’re saying it was only money you stole?’

‘Borrowed,’ she corrected sternly. ‘You know what it’s like, a poor young widow struggling to remain in business when every merchant in Rome is trying to edge her out—what else did you imagine I ran off with?’

Something about the set of his face suggested it wasn’t Tullus’ jewels or a rare piece of artwork Supersnoop was worried about.

Orbilio bridged his fingers. ‘Who told you there was a weakness in the wall of Tullus’ depository?’

Claudia thought of telling him she’d noticed a looseness round the stonework some time back in the winter, but his face was steeled and unforgiving, and right now he was every inch the Security Police. Whose function, as if she needed any reminding, was to protect both Emperor and Empire. Not a physical bodyguard like the Praetorians, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio belonged to a small and elite corps of men whose job it was to root out fraud, extortion, treason, forgery—in fact any crime which might undermine the foundations of this new and precarious epoch in Roman history. At the moment, Augustus was without legal heir, and whilst this issue was high on the political agenda, nothing concrete had yet been resolved by way of a legitimate (cynics might say acceptable) appointment.