Marilyn Todd - Jail Bait

‘The bastard gave you my harebell gown for nothing? He’s slipping.’ When Lais laughed, deep furrows appeared in her cheeks. ‘You don’t know what you missed. In that department he is truly exceptional. However, one expects loyalty from one’s subordinates.’

She clicked her fingers and Pul released his boot. Claudia wondered whether she might be reduced to looking right for eternity.

‘Also-’ incredibly, Lais appeared to be offering her a glass of wine. Girl to girl, and all that. ‘-my husband,’ she sneered over the word, ‘had ideas way above his station.’ She indicated Claudia take a seat. ‘You know, that little toe-rag began to imagine he owned me. Me! Can you believe it? After all I’d done for him, too.’

As though her face was not bleeding, grazed and swollen, Claudia accepted the chair. ‘Such as?’

‘Disposing of that awful Virginia, for a start.’ Lais rolled her ridiculously painted eyes. ‘Dreadful woman. Brayed like a donkey, stank of cheap scent, Virginia had absolutely no conversation whatsoever. Tarraco was far better off with me.’

‘You drowned her in the lake?’

‘So gullible, that woman. And you’d think Tarraco would have shown a pinch of gratitude. Hell, were it not for my intervention, Virginia would have willed everything to some silly daughter in Gaul instead of him.’

Except, mused Claudia, at that stage Tarraco believed he had been doing Lais a favour. There was a subtle irony in the two of them playing off against each other.

‘Unfortunately,’ Stonypuss said, ‘despite the clothes I bought him, the trinkets I lavished on him, indeed the decent manners that I taught him, that little dago bastard had the temerity to shag some kitchen slut from Atlantis and expect to get away with it.’ She flashed her flint-hard eyes at Claudia. ‘No one crosses me. No one.’

As though in a theatre, the play ran before Claudia’s eyes. The staged argument. A weeping prisoner secretly throttled and beaten. Innuendoes whispered concerning Lais’ disappearance. The athletics display. The body, weighted underwater in the oyster beds for the requisite length of time, now cut loose to be ‘discovered’. Cyrus enters the stage. So, too, Tarraco, strutting, arrogant, haughty, defiant. A dramatic arrest. Execution follows…

Revenge was clearly a dish Lais served icy cold.

‘After a couple of months,’ Claudia supposed aloud, ‘no doubt the grieving widow would make her reappearance, admitting the row, to storming off, saying-what? you’d sought solace with a friend in Ancona? — and my, my, how horrified you’d be to hear of your poor husband’s fate.’

‘Another superlative performance,’ Lais agreed. ‘Without a single flaw.’

Except that Tarraco didn’t care you’d done a bunk.

‘Except that Tarraco is free.’ Unwise, Claudia felt, to declare her role in that particular interlude.

‘Pity,’ Lais said sadly. ‘I’d set my heart on seeing him pay, but I know that boy. He’ll be in Cadiz by now, out of my grasp.’

For once, Lais, I am in total agreement with you. He’ll bluff, he’ll bluster, yet deep down Tarraco is insecure. Cyrus had played on that aspect beside the running track, when Lais’ double was fished out of the water, and Claudia had added to it, when she provided him with the means to escape. A bittersweet chord tugged inside her. At least she was right on one count. Tarraco was not capable of killing Lais in a murderous frenzy.

‘Do have another glass of wine-you have no idea how I’ve longed for an appreciative audience,’ Lais was saying.

Claudia glanced at the door, guarded by the massive Oriental in his leather vest and kilt, feet solidly apart, hands across his chest. She did not like the gleam in his eye.

‘Efficient, isn’t he?’ Lais gloated.

Efficient. The word sent shivers down Claudia’s skin. Like a well-greased machine, Pul arranges for families to be evicted, men beaten up, property destroyed, he calmly tells Kamar who should die. Did Pul, she wondered, experience no flutterings of remorse when he brought food to the woman scheduled to die in Lais’ place? Was there the slightest nip of conscience when he put his hands around her throat and squeezed? And what skipped through his mind when he crept up behind Cal and snapped his neck like a dry twig?

Cold-blooded, cold-hearted, but Claudia felt a faint glimpse of comprehension. All men have a living to earn, even Pul. But Lais? Claudia swallowed her revulsion along with the wine. ‘Why?’ she asked simply.

With a short laugh, the hard-eyed, ravaged harpy indicated the rows of chests, embellished by glorious lamplight. Gold plate, gem-studded salvers, goblets, vases, silver pitchers twinkled back.

‘Tuder was a banker, a successful one at that, but he also was a miser.’ She let out her deep, throaty chuckle. ‘And in that he was most successful, too. Which is why he purchased an island isolated from virtually every living soul and built himself this hidden chamber. Day after day he spent closeted in here, feasting his eyes on the proceeds of his business, running his fat hands over their contours, yet what of his wife of thirty-six years? What of the wife who had buried three sons all aged under five? The first I knew of our move to this hellhole was when the wagons arrived to transport us from Rome.’

For one brief second, Claudia was almost tempted to feel sorry for her.

‘Faced with a choice, twenty years of obscurity against the chance of fulfilling a vocation, what would you do?’

A ball of lead settled in Claudia’s stomach. ‘I’d get rid of my husband,’ she said quietly, ‘with the aid of a greedy physician.’

‘Exactly.’ When Lais clapped her hands, Claudia counted seven liver spots. ‘After that he kept on doing my bidding, for which he received ample rewards, with the choice of keeping quiet-or me screaming to the world that he murdered my dear, departed husband. And who would be believed in this scenario? A sexual pervert or the faithful wife?’

‘Pervert?’

‘You didn’t know about his predilection for boys? Oh, my, he likes them tender, does Kamar.”

Fire shot through Claudia’s veins. Janus, Croesus, she’d had him in her power, with ample hemlock in his dispensary. Instead, she didn’t just fall into his honeyed trap, she pinched her nose and jumped in. Small surprise he led her here. When she’d given the game away by saying it was Tarraco she was after, he’d simply handed her over to Lais.

Idly, she wondered what expression would be on his face when he was chained in the arena with a pack of snarling, starving dogs and a warm glow spread over her. Then Claudia recalled what Lais had said earlier and snapped out of her reverie.

‘ What vocation?’ she asked. Pretending to smooth her skirt as she crossed her legs, she felt for the thin-bladed knife. Juno be praised, it was still there.

‘Have you ever been in the position where you know there is something missing in your life, but have never known what that gap might represent?’ Lais moved across the room, draped herself across a blue upholstered couch and began to toy with the arm carved in a lion’s head. ‘When I was younger, I suspected it was children, my lost boys, but then we arrived here-’ she waved her hand around to indicate not just the villa, but the island ‘-and I knew. Just-’ she snapped her fingers ‘-like that, I understood my destiny was to be Queen of the Lake.’

‘Ex-cuse me?’

Lais smiled a patronizing smile. ‘Let me simplify it for you. You see, for so long, Plasimene, like myself, had been spiritually abandoned. Suddenly here was my chance to redress the balance. Using Tuder’s precious fortune, I was able to start building up my empire-indeed, Pul reports that in another three months, maybe four, the entire town and its environs will belong to me.’