Jail Bait (26 page)

‘What? Oh, Cyrus keeps us out on foot patrol, mostly. Making the roads safe to travel, and all that. After all—’ the soldier pulled a face ‘—there’s sod all else to do around here, pardon my Phrygian.’

Behind the stable yard, a small stone-built structure with iron bars at the small and solitary window sat forlornly on its own, allowing every angle to be covered, because whilst cells acted as storage space, rather than as places of punishment, it wasn’t to say the occupants were content to remain incarcerated and bandits tend to have friends. Still, it was a hell of a sight better than Rome’s dank, dingy holes that adjoined the Great Sewer.

‘I’ll have to lock you in,’ the legionary mumbled apologetically. ‘But if there’s any trouble, Miss, just holler—I’ll be right outside this door.’

‘Thank you, officer, I’ll bear that in mind,’ she said, as the heavy wooden door swung open on hinges so well oiled, it showed even the maintenance men were desperate for tasks.

Tarraco was leaning against the far wall, supporting his weight on his forearm and despite the burst of light which invaded the isolated, darkened cell, he continued to stare at the low stone ceiling, his jaw tilted upwards in either arrogance or defiance, or both.

‘You have a visitor, my son,’ the soldier boomed. ‘Make the most of it, ’cos you won’t be having many more.’

Long after the key clanked hollow in the lock, long after Claudia had acclimatized to the gloom, the rough wooden pallet, the hole in the floor which served as a latrine, Tarraco moved not a single muscle and it was left to Claudia to break the silence.

‘Nice duds,’ she said, indicating the coarse peasant tunic he’d been given. ‘But I see it didn’t match my scarlet ribbon. You’ve thrown that away.’

‘Confiscated,’ he growled. ‘In case I use it to tie round iron bar and strangle myself. Me! Tarraco! They think I take coward’s way out?’ There was a pause, before he gave a gruff laugh. ‘Did I not tell you everything would be decided between us?’

‘I shouldn’t boast about second sight, if I were you,’ Claudia replied, prodding the lumpy mattress. ‘Had I been in your shoes and seen into the future, I’d have been in Ancona by now, heading for Dalmatia.’

‘Second sight is not seeing the future, it is feeling. Understanding.’ He half turned towards her, but his eyes remained on the ceiling. ‘I did not expect this.’

I’m sure.

‘You know, is strange,’ he said quietly. ‘When you think me single and rich, when I save you from being killed by a bear, you do not wish to know. Instead, when I butcher two wives to get my hands on their fortunes—’

‘There’s nothing quite like a confession of brutality to lift the heart.’

‘You expect me to plead? On my knees, swear I did not murder Lais? Whatever I say, Claudia, I will die and what’s more, that fat slug of a tribune will devise some slow and painful execution, he hates my guts.’

‘Don’t you rather think you might have underestimated us Romans, Tarraco? Silly things, we will insist on fripperies. Like a trial, for instance.’

‘Where you find judges, lawyers, jurists here, eh? This afternoon the tribune and your tall friend, Marcus, they go out to my island—they say, to look for evidence.’ He hissed in his breath.
‘I say to plant it.’

‘So what’s your defence?’ Claudia asked, tipping out the dead hare and the bell. ‘Still sticking to the theory that someone rowed out purposely to strangle Lais, are we?’

‘That is not what I said.’ Tarraco slammed his fist into the stonework. ‘Why do you always belittle me?’

Blood oozed down his knuckles to drip-drip-drip on the tamped earth floor. Outside a flycatcher trilled.

Claudia wrapped her fingers around the iron bars of the slot which called itself a window and heard the blood hammer in her ears. With his back against the stable block and his arms folded over his chest, the soldier drew pictures in the dust with his toe. Smells from an unappetizing stew filtered across from the kitchens. The clouds from the west had moved over to cover the sky. They were low and grey, and trapped the stifling heat.

Which surely explained why she could not breathe?

‘Even you, you cannot resist coming to gloat.’ She heard him swear under his breath. ‘You bring me a smelly bunny and think, ha, ha, that is so funny.’

Claudia counted silently to ten. ‘I do not think murder is funny, Tarraco. In fact, I’m not amused at all.’

From the stables, a horse whinnied softly, and raucous laughter drifted down from the lookout tower as the shift changed over.

Tuder’s dead, Virginia’s dead, Lais is dead but most of all, my arrogant young stud, Cal, is dead. In the pit of her stomach, something primeval slithered.

Holy Venus, it’s not too late to stop. Pick up the hare and bell, walk away. Justice is for others to administer, not you. Call the guard.
Walk away.
Then she heard an echo of a young man’s laugh. Saw again his beech-leaf eyes, caught a whiff of mint and alecost. And Claudia knew then that she could not—would not—walk away.

‘So then.’ Taking one last, lingering glance at the bored legionary, she composed herself and turned to Tarraco. You really have no option—’ with her toe, she indicated the items that she’d brought ‘—other than to be a good boy for Mummy and play with your toys.’

XXVII

‘A
key
?’ Even Tarraco could not disguise the amazement on his face. ‘How did you get hold of a key?’

‘Sssh.’ The soldier’s head had jerked up at the change in voice tone. Claudia waited for his interest to dwindle, and while she did so, patted herself on the back. She’d fooled the tribune, she’d fooled the amazon, she almost fooled the Spaniard…for who would suspect this mad March boxer, glassy-eyed, with drips of blackened blood around the nostrils, had previously been gutted, filled and sewn back up again?

‘Won’t Cyrus be looking for this?’ Tarraco said, fondling the heavy iron key.

Claudia dismissed his worries with an airy wave of her hand. Before she frogmarched Pylades to the garrison, she had excused herself, ostensibly to replace the ribbons in her hair, but in practice to slip a wax tablet into the voluminous folds of her robe. Having engineered the overturning of the tribune’s desk, taking an impression of the jailhouse key was child’s play and all that was required from there was a visit to the locksmith in the town. There was nothing for Cyrus to look for, because nothing was missing.

‘Why do you do this for me?’ Tarraco asked, his head tilting on one side. Outside the sun was sinking fast, turning the sky an ominous storm-coloured yellow.

‘There’s sufficient money inside that hare to buy you basic provisions for five or six days,’ she said, taking care to watch a cloud of midges dancing in the courtyard, ‘providing you sleep rough, I’m afraid. Too many coins, you see, and the hare would be suspiciously weighty.’

‘Why, Claudia?’

‘The silver bell you can sell. It might, if you’re lucky, buy you a passage back to Iberia.’

‘Hey.’ His voice was a whisper. ‘I ask you a question.’

A fluttering of wings beat inside her chest. ‘Because I don’t believe you killed Lais.’

‘You are in minority,’ he rasped, and her nostrils tingled with pine and woodshavings even above the smell of his coarse woollen tunic. ‘The evidence is overwhelming, is it not?’

‘I don’t believe you killed Virginia either.’

‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Damned pig-headed woman! She would take that boat out in the storm—she was like you.’ In the darkness of the cell, a flash of white showed clear. ‘Knows it all.’

‘Where—?’ She could barely speak for the lump in her throat. Tarraco was right. There would be no fair trial in Spesium. Cyrus would nail his hide to the wall. ‘Where will you go?’

As the setting sun snuffed out the last trace of twilight in the jail, Tarraco shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said simply.

Claudia swallowed hard. ‘I have to go,’ she said, and strangely her eyes appeared to be allergic to something in the cell, they’d begun to sting.

‘Claudia—’

‘Don’t say it, Tarraco,’ she whispered. Don’t say anything at all.

Outside, night had darkened the waters of Lake Plasimene and in the hills which cradled this idyllic paradise, foxes yawned and stretched and set off to hunt, leaving their newborn cubs curled up cosy in their dens. In ravines and woods and gullies, porcupine and badgers would be rooting in the undergrowth and in the reedbeds, melancholy frogs called and answered one another. Ribbit-ribbit. Bedeep. Ribbit-ribbit. Bedeep. The scents of flag irises and valerian, marsh mallows and wild allium mingled in the dense, trapped heat and a deer ventured down to drink.

Now what? Claudia asked herself. She had no stomach for food, but as she sat, chin in hands, on a fallen birch, she realized dinner would have long since been cleared away, the roast meats and fricassees served by liveried waiters while rose petals showered from the ceiling and flautists piped sing-a-long tunes. Even the kitchens would be quiet, the pots scrubbed out and turned upside down to drain, the oven fires raked.

Far in the distance, a jagged flash of white lightning flickered and then died.

Death.

Like Plasimene, death was all around her—Tuder, Lais, Virginia and Cal—and it was water, this water, which connected them. Tuder, out on his island. Virginia, found drowned in the lake. Lais, floating face down in the reeds. And, of course, Cal. Somersaulting, backflipping, cartwheeling Cal, found sprawled on the shingle beneath the sacred spring of Carya.

Gone.

Each and every one of them. And soon Tarraco, too, would be gone.

Why. he had asked. Why set me free when the evidence against me is overwhelming?

Well, that was the problem, wasn’t it? It was too overwhelming, too contrived. Like Cal, it didn’t feel right, and besides. That the Spaniard was capable of killing Claudia had no doubt. (Oh yes, this man could kill. Passion ran through every bone, every artery, every sinew.) But to take a life in anger is not the same as battering a woman over and over again, and most troubling of all was the way the corpse was discovered. Tarraco, had he killed his wife, would have either left the body where it lay and to hell with the consequences—or else he’d have weighted it down in the lake where it would have remained undiscovered for ever. It was almost as though Lais had been delivered to the foot race this afternoon.

An owl hooted in the sultry night. Claudia didn’t hear it.

I ought to go. I ought to warn Lavinia of my suspicions that she’s being poisoned, but even with that there was a problem. Who was the person who had fed Claudia the information about the rash of mysterious deaths in the first place? Who, with abominable cunning, made sure she linked up the string of innuendoes? That’s right, the old olive grower—and why should she do that? Why choose a fellow guest to load her suspicions on to, instead of Cyrus or Pylades? By her own admission, Lavinia lapped up every juicy story, embroidering them, as Ruth had pointed out, with details of her own. The old girl enjoyed gossip, she enjoyed mischief, she enjoyed being pampered—and from the way she acted after the death of her husband, it was also obvious Lavinia was a consummate actress. Add these together, and the foundations are laid for the fiction that her own life is in peril—could an old peasant woman ask for more? The wealth of attention, doctors and bureaucrats, the army—suddenly all solicitous. Fab and Sab running after her for once. Think of the commotion.

No, there was only one thing to do with the rest of the night, Claudia decided. Go get steaming drunk.

XXVIII

In his office on the Aventine, in the shadow of the Temple of Minerva, Sabbio Tullus’ nephew rinsed the vomit from his mouth.

It was the dust, it had to be. Desiccating marble dust from the warehouse next door. You could see it in the air, making the whole room white and hazy like cobwebs spun across the walls. Day after day, this distorted, fuzzy view was enough to make anyone throw up, never mind the torrid heat. There was nothing to worry about.

In the street below, the timekeeper called out the hour. Midnight. Mopping the perspiration from his face, the young man was surprised how damp his handkerchief was when he went to fold it up. Caused by the vomiting, that. Makes one sweat like a racehorse. That, and the diarrhoea, of course.

When he tried to stand up, his knees refused the rest of him permission and he sank back against the hard maplewood chair and rested his head on the desk. Not surprising, this bout of the squits. It was all that bloody fruit juice he’d been knocking back, because any kind of wine had made him hoarse. Come to that, so had the fruit juice, be it apple, peach or cherry, but what was the alternative? Milk,
curdled before it left the cow? Water, warm and brackish? Or that foul beer the Egyptians drank, which made his stomach heave?

Lifting his head, he checked his appearance in the mirror. In the cobweb haze of this marble-dusty room, his skin appeared yellow, but he knew that couldn’t be the case. Picking up a gavel on his desk, he hammered on a metal plate. The dwarf came running.

‘You can take this bucket away,’ he instructed. ‘But bring a fresh one, in case.’ Several times before, he thought he’d finished being sick…

‘Very good, sir.’

The dwarf withdrew, leaving the nephew toying with the mirror. Praise be to Mars, he didn’t have the bloody plague, that’s all he was grateful for. No livid rash breaking out on his stomach. Nevertheless, he peered down his tunic, double-checking with the mirror. Told you. You’ve got the squits because of all that fruit. You’re throwing up because you’re weak from diarrhoea and from being stuck inside this hot, dry, dusty room. That, coupled with the strain of waiting.