Shall I fetch Kamar?’ she asked sweetly.
‘That useless fool!’ the old woman retorted. ‘Couldn’t tell a fracture from a freckle. No, no,’ she waved away the phial, ‘I’m all right.’
And Claudia thought, I bet you are.
‘Ah, Ruth! Lalo!’ Lavinia addressed the amorous couple. The negro, his skin still glistening from his aerobic endeavours, had pulled on a tunic of such rough quality it would have curled Pylades’ lip, while the girl was wearing a fringed skirt below a tight high bodice which revealed her ancestry as much as her midriff. ‘You three have met, then?’ Lavinia asked, her blue eyes shining with mischief.
The Judaean girl ignored her mistress to put her hand on Lavinia’s forehead, then studied the whites of her eyes. ‘You’ve been drinking again,’ she said. ‘You know what happens when you mix your drugs with the wine.’
‘Never touched a drop,’ Lavinia said, pulling the coverlet over the wineskin, then turned to Lalo and said, ‘For heaven’s sake, stop fussing.’
‘I’m not fussing,’ the field hand said, scooping her into his arms, and Claudia noticed that his knuckles were bleeding and raw, as though he’d been in a fight. ‘Merely taking precautions, and it’s bed for you, my lady.’
Leaving Ruth to wheel out her day couch, Lavinia clasped her wizened hands round the outworker’s neck and shot Claudia a vulgar wink before the trio disappeared.
Claudia rested her elbows on the gold-painted rail and gazed out over the water as she wondered again what the old woman was concealing. Had someone appeared in the doorway? Overheard the discussion about Cal? Or was Claudia’s overworked imagination running away with itself? Other islands were popping up now, smaller, rockier outcrops close to the north shore of the lake. The flame on Tuder’s island, she noticed, had been extinguished. A heron stalked the shallows for tadpoles and eels, and an osprey scooped a fish in its talons.
About twenty strokes out, a lone rowboat cleaved a path through the opalescent water, leaving ripples which reflected the misty mauve of the dawn. Claudia frowned. That boat. Where had she seen it before? As though her head was befuddled by a heavy cold, she couldn’t seem to think straight.
Then it came to her.
Yesterday. It was the boat she had taken out to the island.
His hair still hung like drapes from that same central parting, and in the clarity of Aurora’s rosy rays, his muscles showed stark and rounded as he hauled on the oars.
Then the movement stopped abruptly, and Claudia knew then that he’d been aware of her presence all along. For maybe thirty seconds he sat motionless before pushing the oars once more through the water, and in the pellucid light she saw a flash of white which could have been a smile, or then again might have been nothing more than a grimace of exertion.
I’m tired, she thought. Weary. I need to lie down. But she made no move to leave, and the V of the grey rowboat’s wake grew fainter and fainter.
Fifty feet below this spot, Cal’s twisted body had lain for how long before somebody noticed? An hour? Three? A stone dropped in Claudia’s stomach. Suppose he’d been trying to attract her attention? To warn her, say, about the bear? Might the accident have been avoided, had she stayed with him, or would he still have been tempted to leap on to the rail to show off?
A frown puckered her brow. Surely if Cal had been treating this as a tightrope, he’d have wanted an audience…? Wait!
The tiredness evaporated as Claudia grabbed the torch and, running now, retraced yesterday’s route. The secret doorway… Through the cave… Down the tunnel… Her bare feet crunched on the shingle as she sprinted to the spot where Cal’s body had lain. Now she knew what was so odd about it.
Cal had not died here.
With daylight supplementing the light from her torch, her suspicions were confirmed. There was no trace of blood on the stones. Of course not. The body had been brought here and arranged as though it had fallen, although the limbs had been rather too artistically placed for her liking. Someone had killed him by snapping his neck, and as an afterthought tried to make it look like an accident by smashing the bones of his face.
Someone who knew the only person they had to fool was a doctor used to corns, rather than tumours. Someone familiar enough with Kamar to know he was too bone-idle to examine a corpse once life was extinct…
Slowly this time, scouring the ground with her eyes, Claudia returned to the mouth of the tunnel and tears stung in her eyes. Cal had waited here, just as he promised, and she didn’t need to bend down to see that the rusty brown patch which discoloured the rock was his blood.
‘Damn you!’ She hurled the burning brand into the lake and heard the flame sizzle as it died. ‘Damn you, you murdering son-of-a-bitch!’
She didn’t know who had killed Cal, she didn’t know why, and what’s more, she didn’t give a toss for the reason.
All Claudia knew, so help her, was that she’d unearth the bastard who murdered this boy and, by the gods, she’d make him pay for his crime.
VIII
As dawn broke across the seven hills of Rome, its residents braced themselves for revelations of an altogether different kind. Are those spots, or just a bruise where she fell over? Are you off your food from fever, or was it curdled milk which made you queer? In every household, from the richest to the squalid, families lined up to inspect one another for the symptoms of the plague, because with seventy more souls ferried over the Styx every day, they needed reassurance they weren’t going to be on the next boat.
For Marcus Cornelius Orbilio, trudging down from the Capitol, he was simply too bone weary to care. His eyelids, he was sure, could double as scouring pads, every muscle he owned cried out for rest. Forty-two hours had passed since his last proper sleep, his stubble itched and the soles of his feet felt like they’d been beaten with paddles. He needed a drink. He knew that he shouldn’t, that his brain and digestion were shot all to hell, but Mother of Tarquin, what he wouldn’t give for a drink!
In the shadow of the Temple of Concord, he glanced across to the Imperial Palace and cursed his boss under his breath. Bastard. Simply because Orbilio had dined with a select group of senators, two of them personal friends of the Emperor, and his superior officer hadn’t been invited! Never mind these were Orbilio’s relatives, that he had no say in who was or wasn’t asked. In his boss’s eyes this was a snub, a sharp reminder that, in class terms, the Head of the Security Police ranked lower than his patrician employee and thus, to keep the upstart in his place, he’d hauled Marcus Cornelius away from the murder he was investigating and assigned him instead to round-the-clock guard duty outside the Imperial Palace.
That he could justify the humiliation by citing the dire consequences of the plague entering the imperial bloodstream made it doubly hard for Orbilio to swallow, because on that particular issue at least he backed his boss to the hilt. Rome had enough on her plate, she daren’t lose Augustus!
It was only seven weeks back, remember, that Agrippa died so unexpectedly, depriving the Emperor in one single blow of best friend, son-in-law, his finest general-and, most importantly, his heir. Rome had become a bucking bronco, with revolution, anarchy and sedition jostling to jump in the saddle, and no one left to hold the reins. Jupiter alone knows what backlash might unfold. No, Augustus’ life needed careful guarding at the moment, that went without saying, but the Palace watch was a job for the Praetorian Guard and, unlike the Head of the Security Police, Augustus was no snob. He wouldn’t give a toss who kept the plague out.
Rather, Orbilio felt, being a red-blooded bloke himself, the Emperor might be sympathetic towards what Marcus’ boss would undoubtedly call deserting his post…
Glancing across to the Senate House, Marcus felt a sour taste in his mouth. Accusations of desertion would not sit well with his ambitions to take a seat one day, so he had to play this right. One step wrong and it’s no use shouting about the double standards of putting the Senate in unofficial recess until May, so the politicians can escape the plague. The mud would stick and Orbilio’s chances of crossing that most illustrious of thresholds would be squashed for ever. On the other hand. His step quickened. Minor slurs could be forgiven, providing he solved enough cases-and naturally, the higher their profile, the higher the odds. Well, the profile of what he’d been working on (leastways until his boss got the hump) could outstrip the Great Pyramid of Egypt. And murder was just the tip of the pyramid…