Jail Bait

by Marilyn Todd

  ‘Great spot for a picnic,’ Marcus said, chasing the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘It was you who said you could eat a horse, remember?’

  ‘What I said was…’ Claudia’s voice trailed off. That’s not Drusilla in the basket? ‘W-what about the tribune?’ Marcus shot her an amused sideways glance. ‘You wanted him along as well?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Claudia scratched her head. Well, this rather changes matters. Maybe she wasn’t wanted by the army, after all? At least, not yet. Of course, had it not been for this dire hangover, she’d have realized long ago that Tarraco would leave no trace of anything behind him. ‘Why the sudden urgency?’

  ‘This, of course.’ He tapped the wicker basket. ‘I’m starving, aren’t you?’

  Actually, now you come to mention it…

  ‘Besides,’ he said, spreading out a selection of cold cuts, wine cakes, cheeses, fruit and some fresh-baked steaming pies, ‘this is one place where we can talk openly without risk of being overheard.’

  ‘Funny you should say that.’ Claudia sank her teeth into the crumbly pastry of a venison pie and decided now was as good an opportunity as any to re-evaluate the situation. Win him over. Make him understand. Perhaps.

  Far out on the waters, fishermen were casting their nets. ‘Because,’ a trickle of sweat ran down her neck, ‘I have a tiny confession to make.’

  ‘You know, that place,’ Orbilio said, perching on a square, flat chunk of rock and nodding backwards to Atlantis, ‘reminds me of a snowscene. Snow is nothing but pretty frozen water until you scoop it up and make a snowman. Then it becomes something altogether different.’

  Excitement stirred in Claudia’s blood. But at base it’s still snow, she thought, consigning her confession down a mental shute. ‘What if I tell you,’ she said, licking the last vestige of gravy from her fingers, ‘there might be a connection between certain seemingly isolated incidents? Deaths, for instance, which have been dismissed as accidental, but which might have had a more sinister motivation?’

  And before his eyebrows raised themselves up off their elbows, she launched into the rumour surrounding the woman who wore red, the silversmith, the lady in the mud room and expected him to laugh, pass it off as idle speculation, and say the same could be true of oysters, and there was a vast difference between a grain of grit and an iridescent pearl. Except he didn’t. He merely scooped up a handful of pebbles and began skimming stones across the water.

  ‘Why don’t you just marry me and have done with,’ he said mildly. ‘It would cut out so much duplication, minimize the workload—’

  ‘It’s your brain which has been minimized,’ she snapped, reaching for a wine cake. ‘Goddammit, Orbilio, I’ve just told you Atlantis is nothing short of a bloody murder factory and all you’re concerned about is getting your leg over.’

  ‘So was that a yes?’ Orbilio skipped another half a dozen stones before swivelling round to face her. She mashed the wine cake underneath her heel and wished it was his nose. ‘I notice,’ he added, crossing his feet under his thighs, ‘you made no mention of a young man in his prime who falls fifty feet in the middle of the afternoon and no one sees it happen.’

  As though an unseen hand had added a pile of logs to some celestial fire, the temperature on the lakeshore seemed to soar. Plucking a white arabis, Claudia began to strip the petals off. She wished they were his ears.

  ‘You have to admit,’ he grinned, ‘we make a damned good team.’

  ‘Whatever I do, you’re always against me.’

  ‘Oh, Claudia. If only that were true.’ Marcus unfurled his legs and stretched full length on the rock, supporting his weight on one elbow. ‘Now, let’s go back a bit, to the part where I—rather foolishly with hindsight—thought that by bringing you to Atlantis, it would keep you out of trouble. I was rather hoping that with your, shall we say, natural curiosity—’

  ‘Insight.’

  ‘—you might be able to pinpoint some of the anomalies and clearly I was not disappointed. Now then,’ he rolled on to his back and folded his hands beneath his head, ‘suppose I tell you that the case I was working on in Rome involved the curious death of a woman who kept cats. Twelve of them, I recall.’

  Claudia reached for a terracotta pot and lifted the lid. ‘Her bastard of a husband,’ she said, fishing out a peach preserved in honey, ‘strangled them.’

  ‘Which in itself is curious,’ he said. ‘Did you know he strung them up the day after she left home?’

  The day after she left home. Claudia lobbed the peach stone into the trickling stream. Not the day he received news of her death…

  ‘His reply, when I tackled him, was not so much that he wasn’t anticipating her return as he didn’t give a damn about the consequences.’ Marcus sighed, and a wasp probed the lid of the terracotta pot. ‘Nothing could be proved, of course, I doubt it ever will, but once I began to delve, I saw a pattern forming. A whole series of untimely deaths surrounding this luxurious establishment, and out of the eleven deaths which have occurred in Atlantis over the past few months, on at least five occasions the victim’s death was premature and—’

  ‘They all had relatives who benefited financially.’

  ‘How did you know that?’

  Claudia shooed the wasp away, then wiped her sticky hands on the grass. ‘Everyone who comes here is, for the main part, inordinately wealthy. It stands to reason, but there’s a problem.’ Her fingers prodded around in the honeypot until she found an apricot. ‘No one benefits from Cal’s death, his heirs are richer than he was. I’ve checked.’

  Orbilio chewed on a blade of couchgrass and stared up at the darkening clouds. ‘Which means Cal was killed for an altogether different reason,’ he said slowly. ‘Let me tell you what’s happening in Spesium.’

  ‘Has this any connection with the crimes in Atlantis?’

  ‘Crimes?’ he mocked. ‘With an “s”? Oh no, we’re dealing with one crime, just one, but it’s so big, you can’t see it close up.’ Marcus spat out the stalk and sat up. ‘Thanks to Pylades building this resort,’ he said, ‘all manner of shops and businesses were attracted to the area. First a few lodging houses appeared for those unable to afford Atlantis prices, then bootmakers, glassblowers, goldsmiths and so on trickled in, tempting the clientele to take home reminders of their holiday. Then one day, someone looks around and notices a whole new town’s sprung up. Brickworks, granaries, tile-makers, you name it, it’s here. In fact, everything and everyone is represented over there in Spesium except, funnily enough, law and order. Because it has all happened so fast.’

  ‘Hardly,’ Claudia reminded him. ‘There isn’t a single part of the Empire which isn’t under someone’s governorship.’

  ‘Correct. But the Prefect whose patch this includes has a massive area to cover. Don’t forget, until Pylades moved in, Plasimene had been left to the fishermen for two hundred years. Indeed, just across the stream, on the far side of that gully there, lies the expanse of marshy wasteland known as The Place of Bones.’

  Claudia kicked off her sandals and dangled the tips of her toes in the brook. In contrast to the sweltering steambath formed by the clouds, the water was a delicious icy cool. Upstream a dipper negotiated the current.

  ‘So then,’ Marcus turned over to lie on his stomach, running his finger round and round the rim of the honeypot, ‘we’ve established that the Prefect more than has his hands full policing the Etruscan countryside while Spesium continues to expand at breakneck speed—and even when he does put in the odd appearance, what does he see? A gentle, law-abiding community too busy building houses and laying out its temples to allow something as ugly as crime to intrude.’ Orbilio tossed her a pie and reached for one himself. ‘The Prefect files his report accordingly, a garrison is built—small, but effective—and Cyrus is appointed on the first leg of his career. But what the Prefect doesn’t see, in fact no one does, is the spectre of greed moving about in the backgr
ound. One who covets Spesium’s flourishing new trade.’

  He paused to munch on the pie.

  ‘One by one, shopkeepers, landlords, property owners are approached and it’s pointed out to them that, without military protection, all manner of things might occur, and a hint is dropped that for a few sesterces per month…’

  A sudden shudder ran through Claudia, colder than the mountain stream in which her toes splashed. Coming from the slums herself—lawless, dangerous places—she knew all about rackets like those. Traders who took a stand against protection would find their shopfront smashed in, their stock tainted and unfit for sale, and since the insurance was low, it would be stupid not to give in. Gradually, though, the premiums would be stepped up and those who refused to pay would wake to find fire raging through their premises or find their wives and children beaten up, and once again they would be terrorized into submission until finally, destitute and broken, they had nothing left to give. Either the business was sold for a pittance or else the craftsman/shopkeeper/landlord was retained as a poorly paid manager. But whichever way it went, it ended in tragedy.

  No wonder they needed to trade through a funeral. No wonder that when they had the chance to unwind, they went overboard.

  Claudia made a pastry raft and floated it on the bubbling waters. It had eddied round two rocks and was heading for the lake before she said, ‘Naturally, this mastermind would want a henchman to oversee the day-to-day running of his investments—a chap of particular distinction, charm and grace, you’d think. Such as Pul?’ Strange how a man she’d never met, had never spoken to, had instinctively stirred up such deep-rooted misgivings. And it went deeper than that sinister walrus moustache, the curved blade at his hip, or his menacing attire. It was more than curiosity which made her question where Pylades (who else?) would have met such a man…

  Marcus hauled himself to his feet and watched an otter swim towards the marshes round the headland. ‘This whole sordid business—call it murder, extortion, whatever—it all boils down to money. Just the cold, hard jangle of coins.’

  Sweet Jupiter. Claudia was suddenly transported back to Thursday afternoon, when Cal had shown her the secret of the concealed door, the hidden cave, the tunnel leading to the foreshore. ‘Remember the golden rule,’ he had said. That whoever possesses the gold rules.

  Now she understood why Cal had been killed. How easy for Pylades, standing in the loggia, to overhear the conversation below, and hadn’t Cal deliberately raised his voice? Knowing full well, Pul’s paymaster was listening, to let him know that he could, if he wished, spill the beans and destroy the Greek’s evil business in one swipe?

  ‘Why don’t you have Pylades and his succubus arrested?’

  ‘Well, for one thing it’s pretty obvious Cyrus is on the payroll. He deliberately keeps the few troops he has well clear of town. Which means that if I start rocking the boat by bringing Pul in for questioning, it’s going to alert everyone involved in this racket.’

  Claudia remembered Lalo with his split knuckles, disappearing for hours on end. ‘That’s not the reason, though?’

  ‘Nope.’ Marcus punched his fist into the palm of his hand. ‘Dammit, Claudia, Pylades is the obvious suspect, but I tell you, I’ve searched his office top to bottom, rummaged through his records, sat up all night last night going over his accounts and I can find nothing, nothing to indicate the incredible wealth which would have been generated from squeezing Spesium dry. He’s rich, yes, but so obsessed is our friend the Greek, he ploughs everything back into Atlantis. A library here, a loggia there, but nothing on the scale you’d expect from mass extortion.’

  ‘Well, if Pylades isn’t masterminding it—’ Claudia watched coracles reel in their lines, and realized it must be late afternoon by now ‘—you don’t have many options. That only leaves Mosul or Kamar.’

  ‘I’ve investigated them, as well.’ Orbilio shrugged. ‘Mosul is a wealthy man, which you would expect of a priest of his stature, although there’s nothing to suggest he’s anything other than a conscientious pawn in a very successful enterprise.’

  ‘I’ll say Atlantis is successful.’ Miracle or mirage? ‘From the moment I arrived and Cal revealed the secrets of the spa, I wondered…why? Why hide a door in a niche behind a statue? Why hide the entrance to the cave? Come to that, why hide the cave at all? Why not encourage pilgrims to visit the spring, rather than dispense water from outside the shrine? But most of all, why have the tunnel’s entrance at the rear of the grotto and its mouth concealed by a thicket? Why disguise a masterstroke of civil engineering?’

  There was a light dancing in Orbilio’s eyes. ‘I’m assuming you found the answer?’

  Damn right. And I stumbled across it the day poor Leon took a beating.

  ‘It all hinges on whether Mosul is a conscientious priest—or a man with something to hide.’ Cal had virtually told her, hadn’t he? In his own way, he’d shown Claudia the answer. ‘You said it yourself, Lake Plasimene had been left to its own devices for two centuries,’ she said, ‘and suddenly a Greek architect appears on the scene and stumbles across an underground spring—hey presto, it’s a miracle. But what if that Greek architect had done no such thing? What if that Greek architect saw a vision for a splendid place of luxury? The only thing missing was the reason for its generation, but what the hell, there’s water all around, let’s invent a reason.’

  ‘So he gouges out a tunnel by which lake water is ferried up in secret and stored in a cistern in the cave? No,’ Orbilio scratched his head, ‘it can’t work. Carya’s waters are a cloudy white.’

  ‘Only because Mosul makes regular additions. Chalk, I think.’ While she was hiding in the cavern, she’d watched the mole-eyed priest stir the waters with his hand and when she’d tried to drink it, the water was bitter where he’d overdone it. ‘That’s the real reason he won’t tolerate acolytes. He makes excuses to get rid of them before they discover the scam.’

  ‘Which suggests Mosul and Pylades are both in on the secret of Atlantis, but not rich enough to be associated with the extortion racket. Hmm.’

  ‘Unless they’re salting it away. What about Kamar?’ Sweet Juno, please let it be Tortoiseface sent to a slow and painful death, if only on account of that poor infant he all but murdered the night before the Agonalia.

  ‘Whilst our physician friend has plenty in his coffers, it’s not sufficient to arouse suspicions, and since they’d have no call to imagine they’d be under surveillance, there’s no reason for any of them to stash their money away.’ Orbilio combed his hands through his hair. ‘Which brings us right back to where we started,’ he said sadly. ‘Who’s behind all this? Who is pulling these unseen strings?’

  Claudia sat down on a tuft of grass and drew her knees up to her chin. Marcus tossed more stones into the water. Two swans skimmed the surface of the lake and disappeared around the headland. The only sounds were the gabbling of the stream, the gentle drone of bumblebees and a cuckoo in the distance. The little pastry boat had disappeared. Dinner for a pike.

  ‘Don’t you think it odd,’ Claudia said eventually, ‘that no one has approached Pylades for protection money?’

  ‘We don’t know they haven’t,’ Orbilio said, settling beside her, one knee straight, the other bent. ‘But if I was masterminding this operation, I’d wait until I had the whole of Spesium in my hand before making my move. By then, Atlantis will be an island in a sea of corruption—Croesus, that’s it! That’s bloody it. The island!’

  He jumped to his feet. A thousand cockroaches began to abseil down Claudia’s spine.

  ‘That little lump of rock,’ he said, ‘is in danger of sinking into the lake with the weight of gold and marble and its treasures of antiquity.’

  Claudia’s teeth began chattering. He could be wrong, of course…

  ‘Who else,’ Marcus said, ‘could afford to finance that racket?’

  He had to be wrong. It was Pylades behind it. Pure coincidence that Tuder’s villa was bursting its seams with r
ich treasures. Clever investments, that’s all. Nothing to do with the fruits of extortion…

  ‘Perhaps Lais rumbled him, maybe she’d simply outlived her usefulness, but Cyrus is so deep in Tarraco’s pocket that between them they decide to stage that fiasco on the lakeshore yesterday.’

  Claudia wondered whether she might be physically sick. ‘Fiasco?’

  ‘Don’t you think that “dirty dago” routine was just a smidgen over the top? Can’t you see, the whole damned thing was a put-up start to finish? It struck me as odd at the time that Lais just happened to turn up like that—and wouldn’t you know it was Pul, of all people, who suddenly plays helpful citizen and lends his hand to pulling Lais from the water? Even then, it smacked of a stage set.’

  Tell me about it.

  ‘But Cyrus arrested him,’ she said feebly. ‘Had him thrown into jail.’

  ‘Sure, the tribune goes through the motions, but you wait. Tarraco will be set free on a legal technicality or else a fake suicide note will turn up beside some poor vagrant’s body, confessing to the murder.’

  ‘Why…go to those lengths?’

  ‘Because not only will the outcome be made public, thus clearing Tarraco of any suspicion, it will give the two of them the perfect excuse to be seen together afterwards. No hard feelings, eh, old chap? No, no, none at all—a man has to do his duty, what? Then guess who’s the best of friends? No skulking around, it’s all open and seemingly above board, what more perfect cover? That’s when I suspect the squeeze will be made on Atlantis. Once their armour plating is in place.’ Orbilio kicked over the remains of the picnic, now crawling with reddish-brown ants. ‘Well, he’s clever enough, and greedy enough, to get away with anything, including premeditated murder—except this time our friend Tarraco has overstretched himself.’ He sprinted over to the boat and untied the rope. ‘Come on.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Claudia asked, and wished with all her heart that she could make time stand still so she wouldn’t hear his answer.