Wolf Whistle

by Marilyn Todd

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Critical Acclaim for Marilyn Todd

  Wolf Whistle

  Dedication

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  XXXV

  About the Author

  Jail Bait

  I

  II

  Previous Claudia Seferius Mysteries

  Wolf Whistle

  By Marilyn Todd

  Copyright 2014 by Marilyn Todd

  Cover Copyright 2014 by Untreed Reads Publishing

  Cover Design by Ginny Glass

  Cover image courtesy of http://jagged-eye.deviantart.com/

  Model: Dori

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Previously published in print, 1998.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Also by Marilyn Todd and Untreed Reads Publishing

  I, Claudia

  Virgin Territory

  Man Eater

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  Critical Acclaim for Marilyn Todd

  ‘Claudia—a super-bitch who keeps us all on the edge where she loves to live… The Roman detail is deft, the pace as fast as a champion gladiator.’ Sunday Express

  ‘A timeless heroine for today—you’ll be hooked.’ Company

  ‘An endearing adventuress who regards mortal danger as just another bawdy challenge.’ She

  ‘Terrific read…thoroughly entertaining.’ The Bestseller

  ‘Marilyn Todd’s wonderful fictional creation—a bawdy superbitch with a talent for sleuthing—[is] an enormous triumph.’ Ms London

  ‘A daring debut from a promising writer.’ Oxford Times

  ‘The first in a very entertaining series of mysteries.’ Lancashire Evening Telegraph

  ‘Feisty and fun.’ Yorkshire Post

  ‘I, Claudia was one of the best and most amusing historical detective narratives of the last year, and Virgin Territory is a fine follow-up.’ Crime Time

  ‘Thoroughly entertaining mystery. This heroine will run and run.’ Richmond and Twickenham Informer

  ‘A murder mystery with a difference, which gives a vivid view of life in Roman times.’ Northern Echo

  ‘If you’re looking for a romp through the streets of Rome in 13BC then this is the book to buy!’ Books Magazine

  Wolf Whistle

  Marilyn Todd

  To Tara, whose guidance and whose friendship

  are valued in equal measure

  I

  Rarely do moneylenders, when faced with non-payment of debt, veer towards benevolence. But this one was in a good mood. In fact, so keen was he, today, to demonstrate his generosity, that he offered Claudia a head start before unleashing his dogs.

  ‘Bastard!’ she yelled over her shoulder. That was the last time she’d do business with him!

  At the first turn, she slewed the honey-seller’s table across the lane behind her. Dozens of small red pots oozed their sticky sweetness on to the pavement. Although Claudia was running too fast to catch the shopkeeper’s exact words, she believed he called her a something-some-thing-little-something, and threatened that if she ever came back he’d something-something her, which seemed none too polite. Then again, gentlemanly conduct tended to be thin on the ground around here.

  ‘Stop her,’ cried one of the dog handlers. ‘Stop that woman!’ But the crowd had no intention of being deprived of their free entertainment. They cleaved a path.

  Croesus, thought Claudia, haring down the street, it was a hardboiled pack that bloodsucker had put on her tail and no mistake. Baying and slavering, you’d think they hadn’t eaten for days. She skidded into a charcoal dealer, sending his coals tumbling over the cobbles. Hell, maybe they hadn’t, but no way did Claudia Seferius intend to be on their menu tonight! Skirting a pile of slippery fish guts which the fishmonger had jettisoned into the gutter, she paused at the tallow man’s.

  ‘I turned left, understood?’ She threw the candle-maker sufficient bronze to keep him in food (or more probably drink) for a week.

  His appreciative grin showed a row of blackened teeth. ‘Left, yer said.’

  Good. If duff directions didn’t put the dogs off the scent, the stench from his rotting teeth would. Before ducking to the right, Claudia stopped to check her pursuers. The tallow man was pointing directly her way.

  She ran and she ran, darting left, hooking right, constantly cursing the strong Judaean perfume which blazed a trail for zealous snouts. What was wrong with that moneylender? For heaven’s sake, we’re only talking a few hundred gold pieces (all right, a thousand, who’s counting?) It’s not as though she intended to decamp with his money! It was merely that, at present, the repayment date required a modicum of flexibility…surely he could trust her on that? Fine cottons, gold rings and the ivory combs in her curls had been reassurance enough when he was dishing out the loan, and look how his eyes had popped when she’d written down the address. Quite right, too. It was a bloody good address. Up on the Esquiline, where the patricians hang out. A rather modest house, perhaps, by Esquiline standards, with a courtyard of shade and gentle fountains and sweet singing birds. You can’t miss it, she’d told the moneylender. It’s right opposite the goldbeater’s. Which it was. It just happened not to be Claudia’s address.

  Jupiter, Juno and Mars! Whichever way she turned, the lanes twisted, narrowed, doubled back and led relentlessly downhill. Damn! The dogs were not giving up, either. One had a distinctive howl—not dissimilar, she mused, to the sound her cat, Drusilla, made this morning when her tail got caught in the door.

  Kneading the stitch in her side, Claudia paused and looked around and felt a sudden chill of terror. She could not say when or where it had changed, but twisting wynds had turned into stinking runnels, sedate apartment blocks were now crumbling tenements. A standpipe dripped at the end of the street and a young mother with a child at her hip blew her nose with her fingers. Daylight was beginning to fade, too, exacerbated by the heavy grey clouds which had been building up during the course of the afternoon. Doors were being slammed, latches fastened, shutters drawn. With panic rising in her breast, Claudia knew she was well and truly lost. While the dogs still bayed close by.

>   ‘Hello?’ Someone help me. Please. But only shadows and vermin roamed the alleys amid the raw sewage, the vegetation rotting on the middens, the bloated corpse of a puppy being picked over by rats. A three-legged trucklebed sat upended where it had been dumped, broken pots crunched underfoot, and from open windows came the sounds of drunken bullies beating their wives and their children in the name of obedience. Spooked by the rankness that defines sheer and utter hopelessness, Claudia went spinning down the lanes. Stumbling. Tripping.

  Oblivious to the cess trenches, the dogs and the thugs who ran with them, she had to get out…

  ‘Shit.’

  Swallowing hard, she blinked back the tears as she again came face to face with the truckle-bed, the rats and the dead puppy dog.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit!’

  Perhaps, then, it was time to use brains and not footwear? A raw-boned mongrel, grey around the face, wandered up to the broken bed, cocked its leg then lolloped off. Dear Diana! Impossible to imagine that all roads lead from Rome, reaching even the darkest outpost of our mighty Empire, while these alleys criss-cross like the Minotaur’s labyrinth.

  ‘There! There she is!’

  Dammit, they’d caught up. Claudia shot down the nearest passageway, then skidded to a halt. The mongrel was examining something dark and sticky on a rusty skillet. The inspection appeared to be in its early stages. Plenty of time for a girl to unclip her blue cotton wrap, rip it with the brooch pin and ram the poor mutt’s head through the hole before it even a had chance to snarl its disapproval. Stung in the rump by a shard of pottery, it shot off down the street, flapping oceans of blue cotton in its wake. Blue cotton heavily scented with Judaean perfume, no less.

  As she flung open the nearest tenement door, Claudia realized her ploy had failed. The dogs wanted to follow the scent, but the handlers had sharp eyes. The gap was closing. Claudia flew up the dimly lit stairs two at a time. While they searched the lower floors, she could hide. She ran along the corridor, testing door after door until, finally, one surrendered.

  ‘Anyone home?’

  A toothless crone sat on a stool supping porridge straight from the crock.

  ‘Can you hide me? I can pay.’ She pulled off a ring set with emeralds.

  Watery gruel dribbled down the old woman’s chin. Sweet Janus, was she blind?

  ‘Please!’ A cupboard. Under the bed. There must be some way out of this mess. ‘Will you help me?’

  ‘Oi!’ Fists pounded the door. ‘Open up!’ The hinges were weak, they would not stand much rough treatment.

  Rheumy eyes watched disinterestedly as the crone continued to slurp from the bowl. Bugger! Claudia ran to the window and looked down. The front door was bulging more and more with each shove from the moneylender’s thug.

  ‘No way out, luv,’ he crowed. ‘You’re trapped.’

  Really? Ignoring the dizziness, Claudia climbed on to the sill. What about that balcony over the way? She took a deep breath.

  Now eight feet is not very far. Measure it out and you’d be hard pressed to fit in, say, a decent bout of shadow-boxing or half a game of hopscotch, you couldn’t even rig up a funeral pyre. So, no, it’s not very far…on the ground. Heart pounding, mouth dry, Claudia launched herself into space.

  Yes! As her hands connected with the balustrade, she felt a rush of such elation that she actually laughed aloud.

  Then she heard the crack.

  This wasn’t a rail. This was woodworm holding hands.

  Her knuckles were white as she glanced down. Janus! It must be seventy feet at least. Waves of nausea washed over her as she struggled to swing her body on to the balcony before the rail gave way.

  Too late. With a splintering sound, the balustrade began to bow inexorably downwards. Claudia closed her eyes. And wondered which great Olympian divinity owed her a favour.

  *

  It was true, then. At times like this, you do hallucinate. Claudia could have imagined glimpsing flashes of her past as she hung there, limp and helpless, like a festival banner on a wet and windless day. Maybe her mother, drunk as usual. Perhaps her father, despite his being absent most of the time. Or post-childhood scenes—say, that sea of leering faces as she danced, or coins changing hands and not necessarily for dancing. Definitely she’d have expected Gaius Seferius to pop up—he was the man she’d married after all. Ah, yes! Rich, shrewd, fat, old Gaius. Who had not loved her, but who had required a trophy wife. Maybe, even, she’d see the glinting piles of money that he’d left her when he died. Instead, as the wood cracked relentlessly, Claudia heard a voice.

  ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh!’

  A voice, it would appear, in the final throes of ecstasy.

  ‘Oh, yes, Venus! O-oh, yes, yes!’

  Her wits solidified with common sense. That was no hallucination, so where the devil was it coming from? Pinpointing the sound to the room one down, Claudia noticed that it, too, had a balcony. Could she make it? Did she have a choice?

  ‘Yes! Yes! Venus, yes!’

  Actually, old chap, she thought, as the rail finally parted company with its mortice and tenons, we might shortly be giving a new dimension to the phrase coitus interruptus.

  The wooden floor absorbed her tumbling weight and when Claudia eventually found the courage to unclamp her eyelids, it was to view a tiny apartment with one narrow pallet, one chair, one table laid with one cup, plate and knife. Curiously, its tenant was prostrate on the floor, mother-naked, mumbling what appeared to be abject apologies.

  ‘F-forgive me, blessed lady.’

  Heavy footsteps rumbled on the stairs beyond, accompanied by a backdrop of yips and yelps. Damn. The handlers had raced across the road and were already searching this block.

  ‘I am but a worthless wretch.’ He was a scrawny individual, whose appearance was not enhanced by jug ears and heavy pock marks, although it was his twisted backbone which explained his solitary tactics for gratification. ‘Do not punish me harshly, oh goddess.’

  Goddess? Claudia blinked and blinked again. In fact, had there been a competition for blinking, she’d have won the laurel crown. He couldn’t—? Nobody in their right mind—? Not seriously—? But he did. Incredibly, the hunchback believed Venus had dropped down from Olympus to punish him!

  ‘I’ll n-never take your name in vain again. I swear!’

  The footsteps on the stairs were drawing closer. She had just one chance…Claudia stepped forward purposefully. ‘Remember Actaeon?’

  Already pale, the poor chap blenched. Actaeon the warrior had stumbled across the goddess Diana as she was bathing. His punishment was to be turned into a stag, whereupon he was promptly torn apart by his very own pack of hunting dogs.

  ‘Oh, divine one!’ They could probably hear his gulp back in the Forum. ‘I s-swear on the life of my mother—’ The rap on the door cut short his grovelling and Venus watched him turn green.

  ‘Mortal, here is thy test. Breathe one word of my divine presence, and thou shalt suffer as Actaeon suffered. Answer the door.’

  The hunchback’s gibbering denials more than convinced the gruff questioner, and Claudia’s breath came out in a hiss. Juno be praised, that was close. When she looked up, pleading eyes were upon her.

  ‘You think Venus does not keep her word? Leave the room, mortal, and do not return for two hours.’ A little harsh, but he wasn’t the one scheduled to satisfy some hungry tripehound’s appetite.

  As he pulled on his tunic and scuttled down the stairs, Claudia pressed her hands to her forehead. So far so good, but I’ve still got to get out of here. She’d long since realized she was in the notorious district between the Esquiline and the Viminal, but where towering blocks had frustrated navigation, being five storeys up meant she could now see a way out of this maze. Lost she might be, but thanks to the march of the aqueducts and the statues high on temple roofs, trapped she most certainly was not.

  Once outside, with the sound of disappointed dogs fading into the distance. Claudia dusted her hands, took a deep breath, and s
et off up the darkened street. An unseen tomcat howled, but nothing else stirred, and neither did she expect it. Too poor to light candles just for the hell of it, darkness signalled bedtime for the denizens of the slum. Any man abroad after sunset would certainly be up to no good.

  Especially a group of burly individuals holding a blazing torch apiece.

  Claudia melted into the shadows, surreptitiously slipping her rings and her ear studs into the pleats of her cotton stola. The men waved their brands back and forth as though searching and she realized, with horror, that these were the Midden Hunters. Men who scoured the cess pits and rubbish dumps for babies to raise into slavery.

  She shivered in the darkened doorway. Who hadn’t heard of these ghouls? Until now she’d imagined them legends, bogeymen born out of rumour. Empty-handed, the four moved level with Claudia’s niche and a thousand crawling insects prickled her skin. She dared not breathe as the flickering torchlight distorted their features in a way that, elsewhere, would have been comical—except for the bearded man. The scar on his cheek, vermilion and shaped like a horseshoe, made her flatten her backbone tight to the stonework.

  ‘Well, Captain, you owe me another denarius.’ The voice was cultivated, quiet, jocular, even. ‘That’s three out of three I’ve been right.’

  The man addressed as Captain, the man with the scar, snorted. ‘Your luck can’t hold, lad. Double or quits.’

  ‘Hear that?’ A lushly embroidered sleeve gestured to the two men bringing up the rear. ‘You boys are my witnesses, when this miserly sod tries to dodge out of it.’

  When their footsteps and laughter had faded, Claudia released her pent-up breath and set off at a run. In theory, she supposed, Midden Hunters could be seen as men who were saving the lives of the newborn, but Claudia wouldn’t give you that (mentally she snapped her fingers) for theory. It was not difficult to see why mothers here abandoned their babies. Where food was scarce, money was scarcer, precious few mouths could survive. The Emperor had stamped out the worst of the poverty by issuing males over ten with the dole, but all too often those wooden tablets changed hands on the black market for wine, leaving the men befuddled and the women half-starved. By exposing their infants on the middens to be seen—or rather heard—attention would be drawn to their plight. For all the unwanted children born in this city, there was an equal number of barren women sobbing through long, lonely nights for a babe of their own. When dawn showed the child to be gone, its mother would weep with relief and pray to Cunina, Goddess of the Cradle, to protect it. Claudia wondered how easily these poor women would sleep if they knew the stories about the Midden Hunters were true.