For all she pushed her food around her plate, dinner was not dull. She’d seen enough of Sargon’s mood swings-quiet conspirator, detached professional, sinister threatener, teller of jokes-to understand that inside lay a deep and complex character, and the documents she’d found in his room told her this was a man without conscience. But the objective of trekking into the countryside was to find a link between four butchered women, not to pass judgement, so until she learned more about Silverstreak, far simpler to go with the flow.
‘What’s good in bed and winks?’ Sargon asked across the table.
‘I’ve no idea,’ she confessed.
To which he just winked, and even Claudia couldn’t help laughing along with the others.
Dinocrates she found herself liking. Intelligent, personable, dedicated and loyal, she remembered the letters hidden in his lampstand and wondered how far the Greek orphan would go to protect his secret…?
Tryphon, on the other hand, seemed to have no obvious personality. He was Dino’s lieutenant, gruff, capable and eminently trustworthy, but admirable though these characteristics might be, he appeared to lack the ability to think for himself. Say ‘Tryphon, do this’ and it’ll be done to perfection. Ask ‘Tryphon, what do you think about so-and-so?’ and his eyes will glaze over. With his firm and authoritative manner and ability to respond calmly in a crisis, it was easy to see how he came to be called Captain-yet, surely captains are expected to use their initiative? Moreover, she had not been able to establish where he acquired that livid red scar. Pity his quarters were in the staff block, beyond the scope of her search.
Arbil, squat and smug as he presided over his table, was unquestionably proud of his achievements. ‘Without men like me,’ he said, ‘unscrupulous brigands would snatch children from farms or from villages. I give life to babies left to perish on the middens. If you like, I am their deliverer.’
For that, Claudia understood, Arbil expected both gratitude and obedience, and strangely enough he was rarely disappointed.
The sixth member of the dinner party was the Indian girl who, Claudia was astonished to learn, was Arbil’s wife. Throughout the meal, Angel never spoke a word, merely nibbled at her food or fidgeted with the bangles at her wrist and kept her cold eyes cast downwards. Claudia’s mind ran over the dirty pictures in Arbil’s terracotta trunk. Is that what makes Angel so sour, the prospect of her husband’s demands? Possibly, but there was a hardness about the woman, a calculating awareness, that suggested Claudia needed to see more of husband and wife together before jumping to conclusions about this seemingly ill-matched pair.
Dinner was a protracted affair, with music and dancing between courses and if nothing else, Arbil proved a generous and hospitable host.
‘Stay the night,’ he suggested, and Claudia thought, why the hell not? ‘Now perhaps you will excuse us? This lovely lady and I have business to discuss. Come, my dear, come with me.’
As he took her arm, Claudia became aware of a flicker from Angel, and the warning in her eyes was unmistakable. Claudia’s brows furrowed in thought as Arbil led the way to his office.
Declining a glass of the thick brown sludge he called date liqueur, she settled herself in a high-backed chair and listened to the mechanics of subdividing the slaves, the methods of identifying those most suitable for training and then the process of deciding which trades they’d be most suited to. She couldn’t say at what stage she noticed, but after a while, a strange light burned in the Babylonian’s eyes. His fingers began to tap his armrest, his words rambled. Then suddenly he lunged over the desk, his fat hands gripping Claudia’s shoulders.
‘By Marduk, you’re beautiful,’ he was saying, his accent slurring heavily as his lips tried to find hers.
She felt his bristly, too-black beard scraping her cheek.
‘You’re so bloody desirable, Claudia, d’you know that?’
Reaching for the nearest thing to hand, Claudia upended the contents of the liqueur jug over his head.
‘Wha-?’ Arbil spluttered. The dye from his hair streaked his cheeks, the curls from his beard had dropped out and his jowls were shaking in utter perplexity. ‘Claudia, I’m sorry,’ he said, wringing his hands. ‘Holy Marduk, forgive me, I…I don’t know what came over me.’
‘About a pint.’
Surprisingly, Arbil didn’t even smile. His hands were trembling as he buried his head in them, and he began to babble about memory lapses and blackouts and strange behaviour patterns.
He didn’t even notice when she slipped away.
*
The complex lapsed into silence, broken only by the occasional cry from a baby or the distant bark of a fox, and a velvet sky twinkled with the lights of a million silver stars. From woods high up the hillside, two owls exchanged hoots and the cloying scent of night stocks wafted through the open shutters of Claudia’s guest room. It was well after midnight, but she was reluctant to lie on some creaky contraption which threatened to launch her over the treetops at the first threat of a sneeze. The night was warm, and in any case she was far from sleepy. Leaning her elbows on the windowsill, Claudia watched the silent white shape of a barn owl cut through the air and listened to the high-pitched squeaks of the bats while her mind bounced like a stone on a trampoline. Something about Arbil disturbed her, and it was not that ham-fisted charge in his office. Incidents like that she brushed off-no, it was something deeper which niggled away at her composure.
The Babylonian had gone overboard to show a perfect stranger round his premises. His top management were co-opted as guides, his hospitality was unstinting, yet it didn’t add up. Claudia appealed to the waning moon for inspiration. What was wrong here? She closed her eyes and tried to get inside the slave trader’s mind. Oh-oh. Her lashes sprang apart in the darkness. Oh-oh! She had thought-and indeed Marcus Cornelius had thought-they’d been clever by sending her here, but Arbil had rumbled Claudia from the beginning. The shrewd old sod knew that, sooner or later, a connection would be made between the murders in Rome and his own establishment and that someone would be along to investigate. Her whole visit had been run like a stage play, dammit, she was merely a puppet. They must be laughing in their spring-loaded beds!
A horse snickered softly from the stables. Well, it proves one thing, at least. Underneath it all, Arbil is nervous, otherwise he’d simply have dismissed the accusation with a wave of his hand. Oh yes, she thought, licking her lips. We are definitely on the right track here.
She was just at the point of asking herself where the word ‘we’ fitted in, when a movement caught her eye. There was no disguising that waddle and in the bright three-quarters moon she could see he was cradling an object in his arms. Swinging her legs over the windowsill, Claudia hurried after him. Whatever he carried, not only was it large and stiff and heavy, Arbil felt it necessary to conceal his burden under a blanket. It stank of death and putrefaction, and the smell made her retch.
Sticking to the shadows, Claudia followed silently. So still was the night she could hear Arbil puffing with the weight, saw his knees buckle with the strain. They passed rows of cultivated fields, skirted the edge of his olive grove and now the path was leading uphill into deep and denser woodland. For all the night was warm, she wished she’d brought a wrap, she had started to shiver. He stopped in a clearing, and the gibbous moon lit the scene brighter than torchlight. Retreating to a cushion of pine needles, Claudia crouched. And waited.
Arbil looked around, a hideous furtive gesture. Carefully he laid down his stinking burden and Claudia clamped her hand over her mouth as he untied the blanket. So sure was she that the Babylonian had been carrying a corpse that she nearly cried aloud when just three logs and some strange idol tumbled out. She puffed out her cheeks with relief. The idol had a lion’s head, and it was that which stank like a charnel house. Arbil had started a fire, but not using his own logs. The fire let off the smell of gum juniper, and small flames licked upwards from a bowl on the ground. Claudia sucked in her breath.