Marilyn Todd - Sour Grapes

(or inebriated enough not to care) were engaged in darts, discus or the javelin as children trundled hoops and spun tops.

'The thing is,' he said evenly, 'Tages didn't slip. The area had been canvassed several times in the past week, and the reason the search team missed it was because the body had been banked over with earth. Earth, which the recent downpour uncovered.'

Rex dismissed buried shepherd boys with a snort. 'Storm most likely the culprit. Same way the rain washed it out, it probably covered his corpse in the first place. Just hope the lad wasn't alive at the time, eh?'

'Oh, Tages was dead, Rex.' Orbilio looped his thumbs in his belt. 'The rescue team say his throat had been cut.'

'Wolves. Bloody things are a menace. Take my lambs, they would, if I didn't fence my bloody pastures. Even then, I have to mount a guard.'

'Some of the big cats have been known to hide their kill from the competition, but I've never heard a wolf pack do that.' Marcus puffed out his cheeks. 'And by a strange coincidence, wouldn't you just know it? The place where Tages was dumped was a mere fifty paces from the yew tree where Lichas was killed, and do you know what's really bugging Hadrian, Rex?'

The tiredness dropped like a stone. 'If you're accusing my son-'

'I'm not.'

As he'd told Claudia, he'd had Hadrian pegged for the toy-maker's murder until he'd wangled that session beside his prime suspect at the hot springs. Softly, softly had been his attitude. In rekindling their childhood friendship (if that was the word), he hoped to win Hadrian's trust and that, combined with the soothing warm mud and a relaxing massage, he'd wring out the boy's confession. The technique was successful. Having swapped do-you-remembers and some rather bland childhood experiences, the warm mud started soothing, the massage began relaxing and in no time the lot came tumbling out.

He loved Lichas, Hadrian said. Lichas was a good person, a kind person, and maybe the oils were too fragrant and the steam too calming, because this outburst immediately prompted an extensive list of the toy-maker's worthy deeds which, if Orbilio remembered correctly, included a contraption to help a crippled boy regain the strength in his legs and a doll's house for a poverty-stricken orphan called Jemma.

Right. Boy meets boy, but not round Mercurium, because both Hadrian and Lichas had to come to the hot springs to meet like-minded souls. And Hadrian had admitted sneaking out after dark, because he was shit-scared of his father's reaction should Rex get wind that his son's homosexuality wasn't the passing phase he had hoped. So far, so good — but at this point Orbilio's softly-softly technique threw up a response as startling as it was unexpected.

'I was prepared to leave everything to be with him,' Hadrian blubbed. 'I loved him, I'd have done anything for him, but Lichas said it was madness, throwing my life away.' Tears made runnels in the mud plastered to his pallid face. 'He said he loved me too much to let me waste my future on someone like him. He said I didn't know what he had done. I said I didn't care. He said I should, and when it got out my father would disown me, so I told him again I didn't care. Lichas said, "that's what you say now, but what about when we 're broke, when we 're the scandal of the town and no one will talk to us, and when the luxury you've been used to and the family who raised you are both cut off irrevocably? " That's what we rowed about, Marcus. That's why my big honey-babe took his own life.'

Orbilio ran his hand over his jaw and heard the scrape of his own stubble. {Honey-babe?) 'Were you aware that your son genuinely believes Lichas committed suicide?'

Rex looked startled. 'Bollocks.'

'Hadrian is convinced Lichas fell on his own dagger after their row, and that somehow Lichas either crawled to the river to throw himself in and finish the job quickly, or he tried to ease the pain with the water and fell in, or else he got disorientated stumbling around in the dark and somehow missed his footing.'

The general ran his tongue under his lower lip. 'Pity my son didn't tell me that at the outset, but can't be helped, I suppose. If it was suicide, it was suicide. End of story.'

Orbilio tugged at his earlobe, because they both knew full well that the knife was too deeply embedded for Lichas to have yanked it out himself. Not when he was in that kind of agony. 'What about Tages?'

'Isn't it obvious? That snide little queer killed him, then covered his tracks best that he could.'

'His motive being?'

'Equally blatant, I would have thought. Couldn't bugger my son, so he tried his luck with the nearest available male, only Tages spurns his advances, so Lichas kills him.'

'And then commits suicide?'

'Absolutely. Filled with remorse. Realizes what a monster he's become. Does the decent thing.' Rex threw back his shoulder blades and tossed his chin in the air. 'Case solved, d'you hear me? Case — let me make myself absolutely clear, Marcus — closed.'

Orbilio sank down on the low stone wall that encircled the fishpond and buried his head in his hands. He didn't believe it. More to the point, he didn't want to believe it. A hero of how many campaigns? All the values he'd been raised to appreciate, all the qualities he'd come to admire in one of Rome's finest living generals, shattered like glass at his feet. Where was the honour in saving one's own skin? Where was the integrity in conspiring to cover up murder? He thought back to watching with pride as a child as the Emperor laid crowns of laurels and oak on the head of the man his own father had been proud to call a friend. Which crown for cowardice, Rex? He spiked his hands through his hair. God knows, his father would be turning somersaults in his grave, knowing his son had forsaken the family profession in favour of lowly investigative work, but what would the old man make of his friend's betrayal of patrician principles, he wondered? What would the two say when they finally met?

'When a chap sits there with a face like a walnut, there's only one possible conclusion,' a voice breezed in his ear. 'That just when you think things can't get worse, life proves you wide of the mark.'

Orbilio felt his bad mood lifted from his shoulders like a weight. 'Do you want to know the truth of it?'

'Good heavens, Marcus, surely you know me better than that!' She sat down beside him and he inhaled the richness of her spicy, Judaean perfume. 'So what happened to leave you looking like you've sat on a wasps' nest? Did you come home and find your girlfriend in bed with another man?'

'I'd have given him a bloody good hiding, too, if it hadn't been her damned husband.'

Claudia's laughter was like a drug to him and he drank deeply. He repeated his conversation with Rex.

'What are you going to do?' she asked, producing a linen cloth bursting with warm, sticky pancakes.

'Not going to let it drop, that's for sure.' Orbilio hadn't realized he was hungry until he reached for a second one. 'But Rex isn't only a local hero, he's a national icon — and he wields a hell of a lot of power around here.'

'Well, you know my motto. If at first you don't succeed, quit.'

He licked the honey off his fingers. 'Oh, so if all else fails, lower your standards?'

'There's no sense in being obstinate, Marcus. You can't win 'em all.'

'Agreed.' This time, he selected a pancake bursting with raisins and figs. 'But I'm buggered if I'm going to let Rex get away with two murders.'

Was it stubbornness on his part? A refusal to back down, even though he risked his career? Or was it because Rex had been a close friend of his father's, and he was worried he'd be tainted with the same brush of corruption? Both, probably, but at the root it was knowing he could not in all conscience turn his back on justice. Justice was blind out of impartiality, not bias.