Very little time passed before Claudia heard another sound in the hallway. With the faintest of jangles, Doris snaked his way past the tables and the shelving, checking over his shoulder as he eased the door shut behind him. It could, of course, be simply an assignation. Then she recalled that look in his eyes earlier. That dangerous, feral expression.
In the alcove, Claudia shivered.
She attributed it to the young man with chiselled cheekbones who’d just made his exit.
In fact, it was the draught from the front door. As another member of the cast slipped silently into the crowd.
*
Skyles hadn’t seen Claudia in the kitchen, but he had smelled her. That rich, Judean perfume was unmistakable, and he had hovered in the doorway for a minute or two, waiting for the scent to dissipate, as it surely would if she’d just been passing through. But the scent lingered, which meant she was waiting. Hidden some place, and watching.
Skyles slipped out through the vestibule instead. Past the porter, whose sleeping mouth was still curved upwards from laughing so much during the show.
*
Dawn was poking a bony finger through the darkness as the Digger breakfasted on warm bread and smoked liver sausage from a street vendor. Like the rest of the cast, the Digger was on something of a high still, the dress rehearsal having sent a rush of adrenalin coursing through everyone’s veins, a combination of excitement, pride, fear of failure, supreme confidence and stage fright.
Performing The Cuckold in ‘real’ time, as opposed to endless rehearsals, the sense of achievement had acted like a rivet, uniting every member of the team and turning them into one cohesive unit as invincible as any Roman legion.
No one in the troupe underestimated this feat. Two months ago, they were a band of strangers brought together by circumstance and held together by chance. Some were old hands at the performing arts. Some, like the Digger, were new to the challenge, but had taken to it like widgeon to water.
But in those two turbulent months, they had united to become Caspar’s Spectaculars in the truest sense of the word. And, just like the hum a n tortoise made when legionaries overlapped their shields and advanced upon a besieged fortress, so the company had united, several individual pieces forming a single unified body.
Indestructible and proud.
But killers are like leopards, they can’t wash off their spots. Dawn might be breaking, the streets might be a crush of barrows piled high with cabbages, live fowl, flowers and carcases, but the Digger’s mind remained trapped in the rich russet shades of autumn.
In a world where the leaves hung permanently limp in the warm, humid air and the proliferation of butterflies never moved on. The smell of moist, Frascati earth remained for ever in the Digger’s nostrils, and the rut of the stags and the yaffle of a woodpecker were a relentless echo in the Digger’s brain. As was the grunt of surprise, when spade crashed down upon skull.
This time, however, the woman in the shallow grave said nothing. She merely pointed a skeletal finger at the blood on the spade. The same hot, red blood which had splattered her murderer’s face.
Warm bread and smoked liver sausage turned to ash in the Digger’s mouth.
Twenty-Five
‘Won’t be long, sweetie.’
The young woman planted a kiss on her baby’s cheek, soft and flushed with sleep, and combed his silky hair with her fingers.
‘Be a good boy while Mummy’s gone.’
With luck, the little ’un wouldn’t stir until she got home, and whilst she didn’t like leaving him on his own, it wouldn’t be for long. But today was the Festival of Consus, another public holiday, and she had chores which would not keep. He ought to sleep through for another hour yet.
Striding out along the Via Sacra, she noticed that there were very few people around at this time of the day. As dawn clawed its way through the heavy grey sky, the last of the delivery carts would be rumbling out of the city, the gates closing behind them, and there were no farmers this morning to set up for market.
Public holidays meant very little to this young mother. As the wife of a hot-food vendor, there was just as much work servicing the needs of the crowds who flocked to the Circus Maximus as there was meeting the daily demands of their regulars. No more work, but certainly no less, and that’s exactly how she liked it.
Predictable income + predictable outgoings = domestic serenity.
Turning off the Via Sacra opposite the Regia, she thought she noticed someone hesitate at the entrance to the narrow passageway. She smiled grimly to herself, well aware that she fitted the pattern of the rapist’s victims. She was young-twenty-two in a range of ages varying from sixteen to twenty-four-and she came from a respectable, though hardly wealthy, background. Those same attributes, however, applied to several hundred other women all around the city. Why should he pick her? Nevertheless, the vendor’s wife had chosen a route this morning where, should anyone be following her, she’d quickly know about it and be able to thwart him with evasive action.
Emerging from the passageway, she checked left then right before setting a brisk pace between the high-rise tenements which dominated this commercial quarter of the city. Secure in the district’s respectability, the young woman finalized her plans for Saturnalia. Four days with no work, just Shorty and her and the baby, was nothing short of a dream come true, and although the baby was too young to understand the garlands and the gifts, she and Shorty would take great pleasure in watching the little ’un’s face light with pleasure at the sculpted candles and painted clay dolls. Shorty had carved him a wooden donkey on wheels to pull along on a rope and She stopped. Glanced back over her shoulder. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just an old man coming out of a doorway and hobbling away down the hill.
Ridiculous! Whatever would Shorty say, the mother of his child being spooked by an old man! She marched on up the Esquiline, planning her Saturnalia party, just the three of them, with them all wearing funny felt hats, green for her, blue for Shorty and a mustard-yellow miniature one for the baby that would tie beneath his fat, dimpled chin. Engrossed in the games they would play, she did not notice that the old man had straightened up, turned round and become someone else altogether as he followed her cracking pace up the hill.
Twenty-Six
The baths were just opening when Sextus Valerius Cotta arrived. Divesting their master of his heavy striped toga, his luxurious woollen tunic, his soft undershirt and helping him into thick-soled wooden sandals so his feet would not burn on the hot mosaic floors, his slaves then handed over his valuables to the attendants for safe-keeping and took themselves off to the gymnasium.
‘You’ll be the only one in the sweat room, Senator,’ the usher apologized, leading the way through the thick, swirling steam.
‘Good.’
The handsome mouth of the Arch-Hawk pursed in approval. He couldn’t cope with chit-chat and gossip today. His mind was reeling from the devastating news he’d received from Frascati. Choosing a seat in the corner, he leaned his elbows on his knees and buried his head in his hands.
Dead? Sonofabitch, she couldn’t be dead. Not the girl who knew the formula to make saltpetre explode.
‘Boy!’ He snapped his fingers and an attendant materialized out of nowhere. ‘Hot room.’
The baths were filling up fast. Vaulted halls rang with grunts of massaged pleasure, the slap-slap-slap of pummelled flesh, the clomp of wooden clogs as attendants puttered back and forth with linen towels and strigils, scented massage oils and tweezers for plucking eyebrows and unwanted hair. Along the lofty promenade, lined with works of art looted from Greek temples, a group of youths had organized a raucous competition rolling iron hoops with hooked sticks round the twenty-foot-high marble statues, first one past the Minotaur is the winner.