Marilyn Todd - Stone Cold

Who said men can't multi-task?

Claudia was in the garden, peering at one of the statues (a wood nymph, to be precise) and calculating exactly how dangerous an enemy she'd made of Vincentrix, when she felt the first tingle at the base of her scalp. a

Someone was watching her.

She looked round, but it was just another day up at the villa, with slaves rushing about like wasps with their stingers on fire, rolling barrels, fetching sacks, rumbling amphorae across the courtyard, while others brought in baskets of charcoal and bundles of hay or carried armfuls of linen down to the river. Surely it wasn't possible for a peeping torn to be snooping in broad daylight with so much activity going on?

She glanced through the arch of the rose arbour to where Semir, dressed, if you could call it that, in his customary loincloth, was stroking the velvety leaves of a senecio to check how it had transplanted. Further down, his shaven head gleaming every bit as brightly as Semir's olive skin, Qeb was struggling along the path with a huge crate in his outstretched hands. Whatever new addition he was fetching to the menagerie, judging by the thrashing inside, the creature wasn't going gracefully, but, although the big Egyptian was too far away for her to catch his words, Claudia could hear him crooning to the animal as though it were a baby. Immediately, she was reminded of the king cobra she'd caught him caressing. And how Qeb liked to stroke little girls' hair…

Moving on to inspect another of Semir's masterpieces, a box tree topiaried in the shape of a cockerel, she decided that whatever faults he might have you couldn't criticize the Babylonian's artistry or his gardening expertise, and it didn't seem to bother him, either, that he had to rely on slave labour when it came to pruning, planting and clipping. Of course, the daily drudgery of watering and manuring would be done by slaves, anyway. All the same, it was unusual for a man of Semir's standing to hand over control of his landscaping project to a higher authority, especially a woman and an amateur at that. As Claudia continued to admire the cockerel's proud crest and applaud his strutting pose, the prickles returned and she shivered. Dammit, she was being watched!

Adopting an air of unconcern, she moved to the cockerel's southern side. Hor, she could see now, was in conversation with his brother. Could it have been him? Their voices weren't raised, but they seemed to be arguing and, from the increase in hand gestures, Hor was becoming more and more exasperated with his older brother. Glancing over her shoulder, there was nothing to suggest that Paris had been remotely interested in her, either. Down on his haunches, he was examining the gilding on the sandals of a statue of Minerva. But the sensation persisted…

In two leaps, Claudia was across the lawn and diving into the laurel.

'Got you, you pervert!'

Credit where it was due, at least the pervert was freshly laundered and smelled of rich, musky oils with just a hint of… just a hint of… oh, shit. Just a hint of sandalwood.

'Orbilio, what are you doing in the bushes?'

'Right now, I appear to be flat on my stomach chewing a mouthful of bay leaves with a harpy glued to my back,' he wheezed. 'What is even more bizarre is that I don't actually find this situation objectionable.'

'You must have been in the laurels for a reason.'

'Hope springs eternal and this is proof that patience eventually pays off. Have you been putting on weight?'

'Why do you ask?'

'Because that question usually makes women jump a mile.'

'Well, you ought to know, you lecherous bastard. What are you planning to do, anyway? Inseminate the whole of Santonum while you're here?'

'Only the women,' he rasped, 'but if you don't move soon, my broken spine is going to leave an awful lot of ladies disappointed and you wouldn't want that on your conscience, now would you?'

Dear Diana, what was she thinking of, flattening the Security

Police then straddling them like a bloody donkey? (And why didn't she find the experience objectionable, either?) 'What's a conscience?' she asked, scrambling off.

They were solid muscles she'd been astride, too. No wonder Curvy Thighs dropped her guard (and everything else).

'Why were you watching me?'

'Don't assume everyone else has eyes in the back of their head just because you have,' he puffed, straightening the crick in his neck.

Fair point. She couldn't have pinned him face down, if he'd been looking her way. All the same, the sensation of being observed had been strong…

'If you must know what I was doing, I spotted this.'

'It's a doll.'

'Ten out of ten, Mistress Seferius.'

'Don't tell me, you haven't been able to get to sleep at night without Dolly and that's the only reason you came back to the villa. To collect her.'

'Actually, you're thinking of Teddy and I was careful to take him with me. What do you notice about this doll?'

'Other than the fact that she's extremely ugly and has only one arm?'

'You don't think this little cutie might be a treasured possession, then?'

'Might have been,' she corrected. 'Past tense.'

Carved out of oakwood and jointed, it would have been a little girl's dream when it was new. Right now, though, the doll's long black hair was caked with dust, what was left of her miniature tunic was in holes and the reason she was ugly was because her head had either been trampled or had fallen under a wheel. Which was probably how she had come to lose her arm, too.

'Uh-uh,' he said. 'Is. Present tense. Look.'

The hair was human and, like most dolls' hair, it was stitched on to linen then glued into place. When Orbilio shook off the dust, the hair shone.

'It's been washed,' he said. 'Recently. And the clothes might be ragged, but see how clean they are. In fact,' he added, turning the doll over, 'I'd say this little poppet couldn't have been lying here for much more than a week.'

'How fascinating, but if you'll excuse me I'll leave you honing your investigative skills in the bushes-'

'I'm not analysing dolls to keep my hand in,' he said evenly, and the amusement in his eye snuffed like a candle. 'I think this might be connected to the case I'm involved in.'

Something skittered in Claudia's heart and that something was happy. Whatever dirty pies she might have her fingers in, dolls, broken or otherwise, didn't figure! 'That's the case that brought you to Gaul, right?'

He bent down to adjust his bootlace. 'Actually, that wasn't the reason I came to Santonum, no.'

The skittering clattered to a halt and solidified. 'No?'

'No,' he confirmed. 'But shortly after I arrived, I received an anonymous tip-off about a paedophile ring from someone personally affected by the gang's activities, who felt unable to report it to the authorities for fear of involvement at a high level.'

'Anonymous?' she repeated for want of nothing better to say, because suddenly the lump in her stomach was turning to ice.

'My informant hoped the newly arrived representative from Rome would be objective,' he explained, 'but left the note unsigned just in case.'

'High places?' she echoed dully. Anything to keep his mind off her fraud. 'You think the traffic might be going through Marcia's villa?'

'It crossed my mind.'

'Then it was a very short journey,' she said. 'You know Marcia's history, Orbilio. After what happened to her, she's hardly likely to inflict the same hell on others, is she?'

'You've obviously never heard of victims repeating their own abuse?'

There's no embarrassing way to get rich, Marcia had said. And what he said was true. Victims of cruelty, whether physical, emotional or sexual, often visited the same torture on others, although for what reason Claudia could not say. Comfort in a pattern repeated? Justification on the grounds that it had done them no harm?