Marilyn Todd - Black Salamander

It wouldn’t, of course. Boys like that are so damaged inside, so lost, that the only time they feel close to being in control is when they’re wielding power over their infatuated lovers. Men like Volso, for instance, who can delude themselves that they’re ‘normal’, because the object of their desire dresses like a woman, moves like a woman. Flaunts her sexuality like a woman.

‘Excuse me, did you say transvestite whore?’

‘And in any case, his vertigo is no act. He couldn’t possibly have murdered Nestor, not on the edge of a precipice.’

‘Sorry, I’m still having trouble following that bit about the transvestite whore.’

‘When you grow up, sonny, I’ll explain all about the birds and the bees, but in the meantime, my money’s on old Hanno.’ Has been all along. ‘Never mind his age, he’s strong, cunning and enjoys everybody’s trust. Motive, means and opportunity,’ she said. ‘Arrest him, if you’re so fond of manacles.’

Another time, ‘let’s-save-that-for-our-honeymoon’ would have tripped off his tongue. Instead Marcus bit into his nail and felt a piece chip off. ‘Are you suggesting he killed his own grandson? That show of grief-’

‘The string of pack mules going down was part of the plan. To ensure we were without supplies such as ropes and the like. As you say, delaying tactics…and who better than a muleteer to predict the behaviour of horses? Unfortunately, in an attempt to save some of the others, the ledge crumbled and his grandson fell to his death. That was pure accident, I saw it happen.’

Often, in the night, she could hear the screams of the boy and the mares. Re-lived the sight of their bloodied bodies twitching two hundred feet in the ravine below.

Three rows behind, the unsuspecting Hanno was chortling away at the actors clowning out a pantomime in their cork masks and thick-soled buskins, his leathery face crumpled into crevices deeper than the rutted side streets, his bony shoulders heaving in merriment. What an act.

‘Why should a popular muleteer nearing the end of his life work for a creep like Galba?’ Orbilio asked.

‘Money. To retire in comfort and spend his final days in luxury. To set up a stud farm. Who knows? You can ask him while you slip him in irons.’

‘Sorry.’ Orbilio turned round to face the front again. ‘I can’t accept Hanno’s our killer.’

I can. ‘Why not?’

‘Because…’ he coughed apologetically, ‘because I like him, that’s why.’

Claudia laughed, and not at the mime. ‘Isn’t that the idea,’ she retorted. ‘The one person you never suspect.’ She glanced over her shoulder at the chuckling prune. It had to be Hanno. Who else?

‘What about Titus?’ Marcus asked.

‘Titus plans to make his fortune through the side door,’ Claudia said slowly. The day they were up on the plateau, before Theo spotted the coil of woodsmoke, she had rifled through the spice merchant’s pack. ‘It occurred to me then,’ she mused, ‘that when you told us to discard all bar the necessities, Titus kept certain gums and resins with him.’

Not the pepper. Not the cinnamon. Not capers, cloves or cardamom.

‘Presumably the most expensive of his stock?’ Orbilio suggested. ‘Or leastways, the most precious. After all, he carried myrrh, which he generously donated for the brick-maker’s pyre.’

‘The myrrh was a fragrant smokescreen,’ Claudia said, waving back at a squad of tiny tots dressed up as wild beasts. ‘The majority were narcotics.’ Of which laudanum was just one.

Orbilio’s breath came out in a whistle. While he digested the importance of her discovery, the leopard pulled the tiger’s hair, and suddenly two small boys were rolling around in the Forum, stripes and spots and tails flying to all points of the compass. A little ostrich flew in to help, and got her beak pulled off for her pains.

‘Titus,’ he whistled. ‘Running drugs.’

‘Those Armenian seeds, in particular, have a very distinctive aroma, which even myrrh cannot mask,’ Claudia explained. ‘Once sniffed, never forgotten-especially if one throws them into a fire.’ She watched as her point was absorbed and considered. The marsh plant, on its own, was harmless. But when heated, it smoked blue like incense, and was as intoxicating as a bucketful of wine-and every bit as addictive.

‘He picked a good market,’ Orbilio said, grinding his teeth because there was not a damned thing he could do to stop the filthy racket, Titus was breaking no law. ‘The Sequani have fires burning in their roundhouses from autumn through to spring, they’ll make him a very wealthy man.’ He swallowed the bitter taste which had risen in his mouth. ‘I should never have trusted that blasted fringe dangling over one eye.’

A tiny, fat flamingo pulled off the rhinoceros’s horn, making her cry, while the leopard and the tiger remained locked together, exchanging kicks and punches.

‘Don’t read anything sinister into that,’ Claudia said, catching the woollen hoof which came flying through the air. When they had hauled her back over the ledge, roped up to Theo, Titus had been the first to grab hold of her arm and vanity had not topped his list of priorities. ‘He trains that hank of hair over his face, because one eye’s green and the other is brown.’ Hardly a freak, yet curiosity enough to send superstitious buyers scuttling elsewhere, for who knows what other curse Titus might carry?

‘All the more reason for him to hook up with the Salamander.’

‘Uh-uh.’ Claudia tossed back the tiny grey hoof. ‘Titus might be misguided, but at heart, he is not a wicked man. Besides, he already has everything he wants,’ she said. ‘A failsafe get-rich-quick scheme and a wife who is as besotted with him as he is with her.’

He wouldn’t risk his wild adventuress for all the gold in Dacia, let alone a few bob from Galba! Not that Claudia could picture Iliona settling down anywhere, be it Rome, Vesontio or Crete, after this past week. Having had her spirit set free by its tumultuous events, her thirst for novelty and risk would grow stronger and, for this reason alone, Titus was unlikely to make the killing he hoped for. Iliona wanted to taste life, not waste it, and in that lay the Sequani’s only chance to avoid mass addiction.

‘If you want to put a stop to his trade before it starts,’ she said, ‘simply have a quiet chat with Iliona. Talk to her about land-locked Arcadia, where goat-legged Pan is worshipped. Reminisce about the sights of the Nile, the pyramids, spooky hieroglyphs and jackal-headed gods. Oh, and don’t forget to toss in a mention of Babylon, where the dead are buried in honey and bitumen forms fireballs on the ground in a thunderstorm. Then see how she fancies settling down to a rigorous winter in Gaul!’

That girl will put adventure before wealth any day, sweeping her husband along on her tidal wave of passion.

‘Happy ever after, eh?’ His laughing eyes swivelled towards the bookbinder and his wife. ‘Can you say the same for those two?’

Down in the Forum, a little hippopotamus was raining blows on a squirming crocodile, and the zebra pulled the whiskers off a wailing hyena. The polar bear was on her knees in floods of tears, because her white coat was black down one side.

‘Maria is bitter,’ Claudia explained sadly, ‘because life hasn’t come to her door, perfumed and covered with roses. She’s barren, and she channels her frustration through Dexter by convincing herself that this resentment has been brought about by marrying beneath her.’ Claudia crossed one leg over the other and rested her elbow on her knee. ‘For his part, Dexter has become the child he never had, his succession of ailments a means of getting noticed.’

But as for happy ever after? Oh dear. Gemma might be overweight and frumpy, but she was barely seventeen with twice as many childbearing years ahead of her as Maria. Were she to bestow on Dexter the attention he so desperately craves, and the signs were already there, who knows where it might lead? Maria, though, had already recognized that threats don’t always come in obvious packages and she was shrewd enough to see that the risk of losing Dexter might force her to re-evaluate both their lives. Well, she still had a marvellous figure. Time to use it, Claudia reckoned. Tonight in her husband’s bed.