by Marilyn Todd
Fourteen
The second Orbilio opened his eyes he realized he was in trouble. He knew instantly that he’d slept in, something he hadn’t done since his school days, but there was more.
For a moment, he wondered whether he might be dreaming. Same cramped bedsit with its scrubbed floors, polished chairs and window open regardless of the weather. Even, he was sure, the same baby bawling. He had to be dreaming. Reliving the nightmare, as trauma victims invariably do.
But Orbilio was no victim of suffering. True, he was under stress—enormous stress—over the halcyon rapes. But surely he would be reliving those moments, not this? Also. He scratched his head. Would he be able to dream of fresh blankets on the bed, green ones, even though they still smelled of violets? Would his imagination pile a plate of honey cakes on the stove? Would his imagination make it drizzle outside? Maybe, he thought sourly. But no way would imagination catch his skin with a fingernail when it made the pixie clamber on top of him!
‘You were fabulous last night,’ she whispered, rubbing herself against his naked skin. ‘After the fourth time, Marcus Cornelius, I thought you’d be too exhausted ever to rise to the occasion again. But—’ she giggled ‘—I see I’m mistaken.’
To his horror, Angelina was right. Mother of Tarquin, how could he? How could he have taken her to Milo’s tavern, fortified himself with a jug of wine before dumping her, then allowed himself to get so out of his skull that he ends up here. Again.
‘That feels so-o-o good, darling.’
What the hell happened after him taking her to Milo’s and breaking off the relationship?
‘Oh, Marcus. Yes.’
Apart from the obvious, that is, and for a moment he experienced a brief surge of something that might have been pride. (Four times? Well, well, well!) But his performance wasn’t the issue here. It was the fact that he couldn’t remember it. In fact, he didn’t even remember leaving the tavern. Was he really so stressed about the Halcyon Rapist that it was unbalancing his mind? Or did the answer lie closer to home? In the jugs of wine he had taken to consuming, in an effort to blot out the man he had sent to the lions?
Orbilio licked his lips. They were dry, his tongue felt furred, and there was a sour taste in his mouth. So that’s what a conscience tastes like…
He made a vow. No more wine. Ever.
And all the while, those damn castanets behind his eyes—
‘Do you like that?’ Angelina moaned, wriggling on top of him.
Like it? It was driving him wild. ‘I have an appointment,’ he rasped.
‘Break it, darling.’
‘I can’t,’ he said, pushing her away, and he wasn’t referring to his fictitious appointment. ‘I’m sorry, Angelina, I just can’t.’
Kneeling on the bed, the pixie pouted. ‘You won’t stand me up again tonight, will you?’
Orbilio draped his toga roughly over his tunic and hauled on his boots. ‘No,’ he said solemnly. ‘You have my word, Angelina. I’ll call on you tonight, after work.’
This time, he would cut the thing dead once and for all.
*
Dymas was waiting for him in his own atrium, where Orbilio’s steward had provided hospitality in the form of warm tansy wine and dried figs. Rain dripped through the aperture in the roof into the atrium pool via a series of shiny copper waterspouts. Dymas counted the drips. He was not a young man—late thirties and his hair was thinning—and he wasn’t particularly big, but he was strong. Greek-born and a blacksmith by trade, he had retained both native cunning and strength. The instant Orbilio returned, he was off the couch and grabbing his cloak.
‘Bloody fuck, mate, where the hell have you been? All Hades has broken loose and we couldn’t find you any place.’
Marcus had only worked with Dymas twice before, the last occasion, of course, being on the rapes last year. He hadn’t enjoyed either mission, frankly, finding the Greek truculent and temperamental, prone to sulks interspersed with bouts of sullen, protracted silences. Small wonder Dymas tended to work alone. No one had ever seen him with a woman. But credit where it’s due, the man was thorough. Certainly, on the two cases in which he’d been seconded to Orbilio. And loners, in the Security Police, invariably achieved more than team players.
‘I had another case to attend to,’ he lied, swiping his wet hair out of his face.
‘Well, if you were hoping to freshen up, tough luck, mate. The boss wants to see us. Like an hour and a half ago.’
Marcus felt a punch to his stomach. ‘Another rape?’
‘Number three,’ Dymas confirmed. ‘And the boss is going ballistic.’
Stomach churning, Marcus stared at the bust of his father glowering censoriously down from his podium. That’s another gel you’ve failed, m’boy. Another life you’ve ruined, because you cocked up. The atrium swam. He was glad to close the door on it behind him.
‘Where did it happen?’ he asked thickly.
‘Near the river.’ Dymas kept his eyes to the ground to avoid stepping in the puddles. Not that he ever looked up when he walked. ‘Same modus operandi as before. Masked attacker drags his victim off the street, strips her clothes off with a knife, forces her to have oral sex with him, then beats her to a pulp, buggers her senseless and dumps her in the filth on the middens.’
He might just as well have been talking about the weather or describing a handcart.
In his office, the Head of the Security Police was hopping up and down. Enough that the rapes had started again. Enough that he was looking at full-scale panic in the city right over the holiday period, a time of peace and goodwill and festivals which would bring every young woman in Rome on to the streets to be exposed to the beast who’s still stalking them. But that he, a man of such standing, should be kept waiting for nearly two hours by some patrician underling…
‘Wait outside,’ he told Dymas.
Dymas scowled. ‘This is my case, too, boss.’
‘Are you fucking deaf, man? Outside. And you.’ His boss’s gaze ranged over the tunic Orbilio had been wearing yesterday, the stubble on his chin. ‘What the fuck is going on?’
Marcus tugged at his earlobe. ‘I don’t honestly know, sir.’
‘Well, there’s a young kid called Deva who does fucking know, and if you’d been there like you should, at the scene of the fucking crime, you’d have seen for yourself. Seventeen years old today, on her way to her mother’s, and now the poor cow can’t even speak. Just clutches some bit of red cloth to her breast, shouting, “My baby, my baby,” and that is not fucking good enough.’
‘No, sir, it isn’t— Did you say Deva? The Damascan girl from over the river?’
‘You know her?’
‘Not exactly, but—’ He began to pace the office. ‘I met her when I interviewed her husband last summer. He’s a herbalist, and I was picking his brains over that crackpot who tried to poison the Emperor by putting what turned out to be monkshood in the sweetmeats.’
Two civil servants and a slave died that day. A high price to pay for filching Imperial sweeties.
The Head of the Security Police pursed his thick lips and sat down behind his desk. The silence alone should have been enough to set alarm bells ringing, but Orbilio couldn’t rid himself of the haunting image of a young woman clutching her favoured red fringed shawl and mourning a baby that she might now never have.
‘You realize I have the Emperor’s people on my back, don’t you?’ his boss snarled. ‘You don’t need me to draw diagrams, Orbilio. Thanks to your fuck-up, they blame me for this unit turning into a laughing stock that can’t tell a copycat crime from its elbow. Well, sonny boy, let me tell you, I don’t propose to lose my job over your stupidity. I’ve worked too bloody hard to get my arse on this chair and if it’s going anywhere, my arse, it’s going bloody upwards, you hear?’
Orbilio stopped pacing. ‘Are you firing me?’
‘The hell I am!’ A fat fist pounded the desk. ‘If I were to sack you now, there’d still be another rape tomorrow
and with the head of the original investigating team out of the loop, how does that make me look? Use your bloody noodle.’
‘You’ve lost me, sir. What are you saying?’
His boss sighed. ‘What I’m saying, Orbilio, is that I’m putting Dymas in charge of this investigation.’
‘You’re not serious?’
‘What’s the matter? Don’t you fancy the idea of reporting to a low-born dago blacksmith’s son?’
Sometimes his boss was truly beneath contempt. ‘You want results, the Emperor wants results and believe it or not, sir, I want results as well.’ Generations of breeding kept his voice level. ‘Give me another forty-eight hours.’
‘No.’
‘Twenty-four, then.’
‘What the fuck will that prove? You sent an innocent man to his death, for Croesussakes.’
‘Twenty-four hours should prove whether this is a copycat or otherwise.’
‘You’re pissing in the dark, Orbilio.’
Bloody right. ‘Let’s not lose sight of the fact that we got a confession,’ he said carefully. ‘We found the mask under the rapist’s bed—’
‘Alleged rapist’s bed.’
‘—his clothes stank of aniseed, plus some of the victims were also able to identify the man as their attacker.’
‘Exactly why I’m taking you off the case.’ His boss tapped the piles of scrolls on his desk with an irritated finger. ‘This bears all the hallmarks of the original rapes, and I ought to know, because while I was waiting for your high-and-mightyship to condescend to pay me a call this morning, I had plenty of time to read through the bloody files.’
Orbilio leafed through the scrolls. ‘Where did these come from?’
This was the Security Police, for heaven’s sake. Only current cases were ever retained, everything else was destroyed, Imperial policy. Too sensitive by far to keep on file. In the wrong hands, went the theory, stuff like this could destabilize the Empire.
His boss smiled the sort of smile that curdled fresh milk. ‘Your superior officer kept them.’
‘Dymas?’
‘Obviously he had reservations at the time.’ He folded his hands on the table and stared at his patrician subordinate for at least two full minutes. ‘You said you knew the girl who was raped this morning.’
‘Deva? Sort of. Why?’
His boss reached across to a scroll tied in blue ribbon on the table behind him. ‘On the morning before the tribunes were sworn in, the first attack took place just behind the Temple of Lucina on the Esquiline Hill.’ He looked up. ‘That’s not far from where you live, is it?’
Marcus shrugged. ‘A hundred yards, I suppose.’ He wished he knew where this was leading.
‘And yesterday morning, a girl called Blandina was dragged off Armoury Row.’
Orbilio waited for some kind of explanation, but his boss merely re-rolled the parchment and replaced it on the table behind him. ‘So?’ he prompted.
His boss leaned back in his chair and considered the young man standing in front of him. Twenty-six years old, handsome as hell, muscles like armour, wanted for nothing his entire life. Hell, the family had even bought him a commission in the fucking army.
‘So, nothing,’ he said cheerfully. ‘But it’s interesting that she happened to be the daughter of the man who supplies you with your harnesses. Don’t you think?’
Fifteen
‘There are many things I might have envisaged happening during the Festival of the Seven Hills,’ Claudia murmured to Drusilla. ‘But Flavia to come home laughing wasn’t one of them.’
‘Hrrrrow,’ Drusilla agreed.
We’re not talking smiling. We’re not talking grinning. We’re not even talking about a fit of adolescent giggles. No, for perhaps the first time in her life, Flavia was in the grip of genuine happiness. Well, well, well, will wonders never cease. Eyes which were normally twin balls of resentment set in a perpetual scowl shone like hilltop beacons, transforming her face into something approaching radiance. And not just her face, either. Happiness had loosened the slump of her shoulders, lifted her head, freed her spine from its withdrawn posture. In fact, Flavia looked exactly like a girl of fifteen ought to look. Young, carefree, with the world at her feet and a flower in her hair. Oh, and a ring missing from the middle finger of her right hand…
‘Bmp.’
‘I know, poppet. It was the one set with amethysts.’
But Drusilla wasn’t interested in what fate might have befallen Flavia’s jewellery. Tickles round the ear were nice, but they didn’t begin to compare with tormenting little jewel-coloured birds until they squawked themselves hoarse. With a lithe jump, she returned to her sentry post on the roof of the aviary and began to tweak at the wire with vicious hooked claws. Claudia slipped into a pair of fur-lined slippers warming underneath the brazier. Day Two of the advertising campaign had exceeded her expectations and not purely because of the increased crowd attendance at the Circus Maximus. The players were now established in their roles, firing off the banter that much faster, and Skyles’s chivalrous offer of giving Erinna his tunic happened so quickly that it never occurred to the spectators to question whether he couldn’t have asked someone for the loan of a long cloak instead.
Claudia couldn’t help but notice that the races which followed came as something of an anticlimax to those closest to the impromptu performance. Wheels might fall off, chariots overturn, drivers get thrown into the path of oncoming vehicles, but for those seated in the vicinity of Claudia Seferius, the antics of her sponsored actors had overshadowed anything the Circus organizers could hope to stage. Thanks to three well-upholstered females, there was enough gossip to see them through dinner parties for a month, and now it looked like war was being declared over who would sponsor the Spectaculars after Saturnalia.
‘Dear lady, I cannot thank you enough,’ Caspar glowed, as patrician fought merchant for the privilege of backing future performances. ‘A more fortuititious meeting between our two parties I could not have envisaged and I praise the day our humblesome group was evicted from that fleapit tavern on Silversmith’s Rise. The gods, I feel certain, smile on the Spectaculars.’
‘Not nearly as much as they smile on my strongbox,’ Claudia assured him. ‘I’m on twenty per cent of the takings for six months. Or hadn’t I mentioned that earlier?’
The feather in his turban reeled sideways. ‘T-twenty?’
‘All right, then, twenty-five.’ She squeezed his plump little arm. ‘After all, I have done all the groundwork.’ Once Caspar and his troupe had retired from the Circus—ostensibly to lick their moral wounds, but in practice because to linger would be to dilute the effect—Julia had forged her way through the crowds.
‘No shame,’ she hissed, plumping herself down on Claudia’s cushion. ‘None at all. Did you see what happened? No, of course you didn’t, you weren’t in your seat, but I saw the whole thing very clearly—’ she pointed six rows up, to the left ‘—and I tell you, those women are nothing but strumpets.’
‘It was hardly Erinna’s fault that her tunic came off when Ion rushed to help.’
‘Poor girl, of course it wasn’t,’ Julia agreed. ‘But afterwards, did the wench exhibit a single sign of embarrassment? She did not, and I ask you, what kind of woman is more concerned with cuffing the culprit round the ear than covering her nakedness? If it wasn’t for the decency of that nice chap with the shaved head, she would still be flashing her bazoomas round the amphitheatre and you want to watch yourself, sister-in-law, having floozies like that under your roof. You’ll end up being tarred with the same brush.’
Claudia thought of twenty-five per cent of the takings and decided she very much liked the aroma of tar. ‘Why didn’t Flavia come to the races?’ she asked.
‘Don’t be silly, I could hardly leave her mooning about the house, that child has gathered more wool than a whole crew of shearers lately. Of course I brought her along. Flavia? Come and say hello to—’
But when she turned her he
ad, the seat beside her was empty. And that’s when they both realized that Flavia had sloped off with the actors.
‘Leave her,’ Claudia said. ‘Enjoy the chariot racing. She’ll come to no harm with Caspar.’
Which was true. She would have come to no harm with Caspar. Only Flavia didn’t stay with the maestro and his colourful troupe. According to Doris, while the troupe was still in the shadow of the Circus walls, Flavia slipped into the crumbling ruins of the old temple to Juventus. Which, by Claudia’s reckoning, was between four and five hours ago.
‘And she wasn’t alone,’ Doris had added, with a mischievous rattle of bangles.
Really? And what could a fifteen-year-old girl possibly have been up to that made her return home radiant with joy?
That didn’t have three letters and end with an ‘x’?
*
Claudia was sitting on the upper bunk, legs dangling, when Skyles breezed in through his bedroom doorway. She had counted it out in her head. One: drop Flavia at front entrance. Two: slip round to side. Three: flirt with a couple of the kitchen girls. Four: help self to something tasty off the griddle. A ham and onion rissole, from the smell of it.
He could, she thought, at least have feigned surprise at finding her in his room.
‘My compliments to the chef,’ he said, breaking off half the remains of the rissole and lobbing it over. ‘Absolutely delicious.’
Ham and onion it was—with a smattering of chives, parsley and just a smidgen of garlic. Craggy eyes didn’t leave hers. Not even when a strong arm reached behind him to pull the blue tapestry across the doorway. Curious how much sound was muffled by one piece of embroidered cloth. The clamour from the kitchens receded to a muffled hum. The rehearsals in the atrium to a distant drone.
Amazing how much light was blocked out from the torches that burned in the corridor, too. Plunged into sudden blackness, she heard him cross the tiny cupboard of a room without faltering. Felt the brush of air as his shoulder passed a whisker from her knees. Listened to him reach unhesitatingly for his tinderbox. Fssst. A small flame flickered on the rough wooden table between the two lower bunks as the tallow’s wick caught light.
