The philosophy wasn't his, of course, it was a standard army axiom, dragged out whenever a barbarian war band swooped down to slaughter soldiers or civilians in a merciless guerrilla attack, their aim being to goad Rome into quick retaliation and lure them into ambushes and the enemy's strategy. Wait! the generals would urge. The time to remember this outrage, to avenge your friends and colleagues, is the moment right before we strike. Because when we strike, where we strike, who, how and what we strike must be Rome's decision, not theirs.
The generals were right. Claudia followed plumes of steam coiling upwards to the ceiling. Her father was right, but then, wasn't he always? Mental lips kissed his whiskery cheek as he marched off to war, waving and grinning to his ten-year-old daughter. Not to march back ever again.
What would he have thought of her now, she wondered, begrudging the time spent catching up on sleep or relaxing in a bath? Those are necessities, girl, not time wasted, he'd have said. Look upon them as an opportunity to give your brain a workout while your body rests.
Claudia's head throbbed behind her eye sockets as it invariably did, when she thought about her father. Why hadn't he come home? The army had had no answers for her mother. There was no record of him being killed, they said, but then again, fighting had been fierce. Bloody and brutal, they added. Especially hard on the camp followers over the ridge. What they failed to say, however, was who, in the midst of so much hand-to-hand fighting when the battle might go either way, who gave a damn about one individual? So what if an orderly ran off in the melee?
Claudia flipped over on to her back, tilting her head so the Syrian girl could reach under her chin, and frog-marched her mind back to the business in hand. Namely saving Junius from ending up as the main course for a hungry lion!
But before she could proceed, Doodlebug had taken it upon himself to investigate the pleasures of the bath and was waddling round the rim trying to lap the water, urging the level to rise closer to his tongue.
'Out you go. Shoo, shoo!' Cypassis might as well have asked the sticky breeze to stop blowing. 'He'll fall in,' she warned.
'Then he'll add another string to his bow of accomplishments. Swimming.' Claudia was smiling in spite of herself.
To his delight, Doodlebug discovered a playmate in the water. Another small, black, podgy creature with amber eyes and floppy ears who ran when he ran, stopped when he stopped, leaned forward when he leaned forward too.
'I don't know what Drusilla will say when she finds out you've brought a dog in.' Cypassis sighed.
So far it had taken scheming on an Olympian scale to keep the two apart, but on one point everyone was agreed: disaster loomed ahead! But what was Claudia supposed to do? Leave Doodlebug at risk of being trampled under careless hob-nailed boots? Crushed under rubble? With Supersnoop's front door open as the army tramped back and forth, anything could happen in the street. Now Flavia, she would have happily seen run over by a chariot or kicked by a horse. Not an eight-week-old puppy!
Tipping forward at a precarious angle, Doodlebug dredged up what he thought (bless him) was a bark. Strange, the other fellow didn't respond! He let loose a second yelp-cum-cough and still nothing came back. Not even a whimper. He was teetering perilously close to himself, when Cypassis swooped to his rescue.
'Come on, you!' She tucked him up under her arm and marched him away, telling him that they'd have to call him Narcissus, if he kept up that relationship with his reflection and what would he like for his tea? A piece of stewed rabbit?
The beautician chuckled as she massaged an unguent of sweet-smelling calendula into Claudia's fingers, and suddenly the world was back in kilter and Claudia knew what she must do next. She must sleep. Deep, healing sleep, after which her judgement would no longer be clouded by emotion or hysteria or this overpowering sense of defeat. Like any good general, she could then line up her clues like troops and view the evidence objectively.
She slept.
And later, in her office, in a flowing linen robe scented with thyme and her hair hanging loose around her shoulders, a very different Claudia set out parchment, quill and ink. Her efficient rustle alerted the blue-eyed, cross-eyed cat stretched lengthways on the maple chest.
'Now then.' She unrolled a crisp sheet of parchment and anchored its corners with ivory figurines representing the seasons. 'With no idea of Flavia's whereabouts, we have to get Hotlips off this hook of house arrest. Why? In order for him to use his official clout to set young Junius free, of course, and we can only do that by solving the riddle of the body in the wall. Now, what clues do we have, Drusilla?'
'Prr.'
'I agree. Precious few.' Claudia leaned across to tickle the cat's pricked ears. 'But let's set them down on paper, anyway.'
'One.' She dipped her pin in the inkwell. 'Skeleton stripped of tell-tale clothes and jewellery.' The cat jumped up on the desk and knocked Autumn flying. 'Two. Skull has all its own teeth, bones show few signs of damage.' Which leaves us with a young person and no indication of their status! 'Three. Killer too squeamish to pull out knife, yet composed enough to pull rings off finger!'
'Prrrrr.' The cat rolled on to her back so Claudia's fingernails could work their magic on her tummy.
'Good thinking, poppet! Four. Is body a slave, a skivvy? Who wouldn't own rings in the first place?'
Better-placed slaves, such as Verres, Leonides (Junius, of course!), earned healthy bonuses and could often be seen at the races, bow-backed with the weight of their jewellery. You see, that was the irony. No one minded slaves getting rich. Indeed, many owned shops, businesses — taverns were a popular choice — they even owned slaves of their own. It was impersonating a citizen which carried the ultimate forfeit. To wear the toga, meant death.
Claudia rolled the figure of Autumn around in her fingers, absently feeling the bunches of ivory grapes, the carved basket of olives. 'Five,' she wrote, uncurling the corner and anchoring it back with the figure. 'No hasty cover-up. No hasty crime?'
The body had been stood against the original storeroom wall and pinned there with leather straps nailed into the brickwork. One, which had come away when the first hammer went into the wall yesterday, ran round the forehead, to stop the head sagging forward, and a second went under the armpits to support the weight of the corpse. The killer knew what he was about.
According to Orbilio, the force of the blow to the head would have killed her. He certainly hoped so, he added. Rather than the knife first driven into her ribs and then being coshed to prevent her from screaming.
'Mrrrp?'
'How do we know the corpse was a girl?'
Claudia's stomach flipped somersaults as she recalled that gut-wrenching moment, shortly after dawn, when they realised that it was not one body they were staring at, but two. Inside the pelvic bones, lay the remains of a second, minuscule skeleton.
She leaned back in her chair and saw past the floral painted wall, the leaping antelopes, the flying cranes and leopards. Was the victim's pregnancy the motive for her murder? It had happened before, the mistress threatening to tell the wife, cause a scene, demand he divorce his wife and set up home with her and the baby. Sometimes it's blackmail, sometimes the product of rape, but whatever the reason, the end was as brutal as it was tragic. The mother murdered, the baby dying — later — inside her.
'Unable to identify the victim, we'll have to work back from the killer.'
'Frrr.' Drusilla squirmed with pleasure, her eyes closing to slits.
'And the one thing that anyone who knows him can tell you, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio would not kill a woman, and never like that!'