Marilyn Todd - Jail Bait

The evidence had been there all along and she had chosen, yes chosen, to disregard it and for what reason? Simply because she hadn’t believed Tarraco capable of cold-blooded murder. Well, at least there was a core of truth in that. The bastard employed minions to do his dirty work.

She leaned over and was sick a second time. From the outset, Tarraco had manipulated her to lure her in and win his trust. His trust!

Barbed lightning flickered, reflecting double in the oily waters of the lake and thunder echoed, low and distant, round the wooded crucible. Her tunic was sticking to her body like a second skin, but despite the heat from the celestial inferno, she found herself shivering. Sometimes, Claudia Seferius, you can be a very silly cow.

Her memory clock flipped back to that first night on the sun porch to where, out on the island, shortly before dawn, a light had sprung up. Instinct told her at the time it was a signal and sure enough, shortly afterwards wasn’t Tarraco hauling on the oars of his little grey rowboat, heading home? Right back then, Claudia had sensed he’d been visiting some kitchen wench with dimpled cheeks and a heaving, ample bosom, the pair of them rolling like puppies in the hay, and now it made sense more than ever. To counteract the shrill and desiccated Lais, Tarraco would tumble with girls who asked for nothing in return and left behind only a smile, to restore the masculinity and pride sucked out by women such as Lais and Virginia. But suppose his wife had got wind of the affair? How would that make her feel?

To try and comprehend what made him flip and snuff out her life with such brutality, Claudia put herself in the other woman’s shoes. Tuder had brought her out to Plasimene, and in an instant Lais had been upheaved from a bustling, lively environment in Rome to an island on which she was virtually marooned. With Spesium not yet in existence and Atlantis in its mere infancy, what desolation must Lais have felt? Then, when Tuder dies, she sees in the mirror a middle-aged woman with twenty long and lonely years ahead. Desperation sets in. She tries to turn back the years with dyes and cosmetics and girlish attire-and then, whoosh, Tarraco drops from the sky. Brooding good looks apart, Lais is charmed by his attentions, flattered by the court he pays her. He’s rich. He can’t be after her money. Which leaves only one scenario. Tarraco must love her for herself.

She doesn’t question his comings and his goings, she adores him. He heaps wealth upon her, upon the island. Peacocks appear on the scene, bronzes, splendid works of art-demonstrations, surely, of his fidelity. His love. Until one day she finds out about the kitchen wench. Tormented, she follows him and sees the laughter, the romping, all the things she never shared with him…

Desperate and betrayed, she confronts him. Mocks his lack of education, his lowly birth, perhaps even his lovemaking skills. Years of low self-esteem burst their banks. Tarraco flips. And too late Lais discovers the true meaning of the phrase drop-dead sexy ‘We need to get going,’ Marcus said. ‘It’s not safe to be under trees with lightning about.’

His warning passed over her head. Like Lais, like Virginia, she’d been conned by cheap tricks, though it was easy to see why women fell for him. Not his muscled good looks, not even his arrogance. It was the irresistible aura of danger. They would have sensed it, as Claudia had sensed it, but men and women reacted so differently. Marcus, she recalled, had shown instinctive hostility. But this was no time for self-flagellation. To acknowledge that, due to her stupidity, he’d go to ground until it became safe to strike up again. When it would be innocents, not Claudia, who’d pay…

‘Suppose Tarraco couldn’t talk?’ she asked.

‘Ha!’

‘No, really. Suppose, for some reason, he wasn’t able to? Pul or Cyrus could still provide the list of confederates, right?’

Marcus laughed. ‘Pul is not the type to buckle under interrogation, not even torture, it would be a matter of honour with him, and Cyrus, I can tell you now, will fall on his sword the second he sees us coming to arrest him, it’s patrician creed. But have no fear, my pretty damsel, I know human nature. Our little Spanish captive will sing like a linnet.’

‘Actually.’ Claudia smiled a sickly smile. ‘There might be a problem with that.’

‘Trust me, he’ll sing. Now what are you hanging about for, we need to get back to the jailhouse.’

‘I tried to tell you when we arrived…’

Preoccupied with shipping his oars, Orbilio merely grunted a ‘huh?’

‘The thing is,’ she drew a deep breath, ‘I paid a visit to Tarraco yesterday.’

‘And?’

‘And…’ She swallowed hard. ‘I let him out.’

As Jupiter shook his great cloak of storm clouds, Livia, wife of the Emperor, Augustus, beckoned her servant across. The window of her private, upstairs chamber was shuttered. A single flame burned from the lampstand, casting two shadows across the polished cedarwood boards, one tall and slender, the other stumpy and misshapen.

‘You have done well, Spaco,’ Livia said. ‘But then,’ she added with a smile, ‘you usually do. What enticing cocktail did you serve up this time?’

‘Aconite, baneberry.’ The dwarf smiled in return. ‘The odd dash of hemlock, our old friend rock cedar…’

‘He suspected nothing?’ she marvelled. ‘Nothing at all?’

‘Right up to his last living breath, he believed it to be an illness brought on by the tension. Even the hallucinations I managed to convince him were the product of too little food for his system to work on.’

‘Surely the doctor…?’

The assassin spread his hands in a simplistic gesture, and Livia nodded in mutual understanding. The plague may have peaked, but bodies were still piling up. What careworn physician would think twice about the nephew of Sabbio Tullus succumbing to dysentery in this heat?

Despite the lateness of the hour, the crisis which ravaged the Empire meant that the clamour of a hundred bawling scribes, petitioners, justices and heralds still drifted up from below. Livia heard all of them and listened to none. Around her, on the walls, Dido and Aeneas played out their bitter tragedy in paint and on an inlaid tortoiseshell table a crystal bowl shaped like a duck perfumed the chamber with its candied contents.

‘Your loyalty, Spaco, will not be forgotten.’ The chamois drawstring purse chinked when it changed hands. ‘And you say there is more?’

‘Oh, yes. Just as your majesty predicted, there was no question of him not falling for that ploy of a burglar breaking in expressly to steal his papers and, as my lady also predicted, he set his own assassin on the trail to kick over the traces. First, his uncle; then his uncle’s agent-’ ‘The chit who broke into the depository?’

‘According to the fat man,’ Spaco replied, ‘the situation in Atlantis is-and I quote-under control. I think we can safely agree on what that means, the man was no slouch. In fact,’ he sniggered, ‘so desperate was he to retrieve his client’s property, he returned with this.’

With his tongue pressing out a lump in his cheek, he handed over the letter sent to Orbilio from the Head of the Security Police, mistaken by the fat man for the genuine article, and watched the face of the Emperor’s wife crease up with laughter. ‘Fools, the pair of them,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘Nothing, but fools.’ She popped a candied cherry in her mouth and turned her considerations to the deeper implications of her servant’s report. ‘What plans have you for this fat man?’ she asked eventually.

‘Already disposed of,’ the dwarf replied airily. Popped his very last cardamom. ‘No loose ends remain, trust me.’