Marilyn Todd - Wolf Whistle

He dipped his kerchief in the holy fountain and dabbed at the cuts and bruises on her face as images of Magic flashed through her head. The twin blades clutched between his fingers. The surprise upon his face. The professional assassination, with oh so little blood…

Numbly, Claudia allowed Kaeso to ease her into a sitting position. Amber-coloured walls were painted floor to ceiling with regimented lines of birds and snakes and vibrant coloured figures. Hieroglyphics they were called, and the priestess with the cow horns threw heavy resins on the fire and gently rattled a sistrum before the goddess Isis, robed in dazzling white. Behind her, Osiris weighed a heart against a feather.

‘You followed me.’

‘Yes,’ he said simply, and there was no need to ask why. The answer lay there, in his eyes.

Claudia wanted to thank him for saving her life, but words were inadequate, payment obscene. So she cupped her hands and sipped the icy waters and told him instead about Sargon’s plans to sell the children into brothels.

There was silence, while sharp features scanned the symbols on the walls. Cartouches, they were called. Or, holy names.

‘You know, I never once suspected that of Sargon,’ he said eventually, wrenching his gaze from a painted papyrus. ‘I thought he was my friend, yet he imagined I would track down frightened runaways and send them back to his gang of paedophiles.’ Kaeso shook his head in bewilderment. ‘How could he get involved in an enterprise as sordid as that?’

‘Money,’ she said simply. ‘He can never have enough, it runs through his fingers like this water in my hands.’

The rattle of the sistrum ceased when the blue-gowned priestess disappeared through a door in the stonework.

‘Does Dino know?’ he asked.

‘I doubt it,’ she replied. ‘Nor the Captain.’

An acolyte emerged from the bowels of the temple, wearing a thick black wig and bangles. Smiling shyly, she began to dust the statue of hawk-faced Horus. Claudia waited until her egret feathers had moved on to Anubis.

‘One other matter I think you ought to know about. Arbil has given up the date liqueur.’ She watched the significance of her statement sink in.

‘I see.’ The only sign of anxiety was the pacing.

‘So you’d better get Angel out of Rome, and fast.’ Her eyes followed the slow, familiar lope.

It could not have been Lugal who Angel hooked up with, the boy was too young, too one-dimensional for her tastes. She’d used the groom, led him on, and poor Lugal was too trusting to suspect he’d been tied up tighter than a goose for the oven. Angel wouldn’t care what befell him, either, once Arbil found out. Remember, this was the woman who affected concern for her husband, when in reality those checks were a necessary excuse to mark the progress of his blackouts and sow further seeds of doubt in his mind. The bruise on her cheek she had flaunted as a badge of Arbil’s deterioration-how she must have laughed, knowing it was the effect of her drugs which, by turns, rendered him impotent, put him to sleep and, when it suited her, made him violent. Claudia imagined that Arbil, when he uncovered her treachery, was unlikely to lean towards clemency.

She recalled her very first meeting with Angel. The Indian had not been able to disguise her suspicion, which she masked with hostility, and in the end, that hostility had betrayed her. Otherwise Claudia would have thought nothing of oleanders and thorn apples and strong, date liqueur… Would not have made the connection between the hothouse lilies up at Arbil’s and the hothouse lilies in Kaeso’s bedroom ‘At the start, it was exciting,’ he said. ‘An affair under Arbil’s nose.’

Claudia could almost feel the intoxication that the plotting and the planning would induce. The illicit meetings, whispered messages. The knowledge that Arbil might find out any moment and exact his terrible revenge…

Kaeso stopped pacing and ran his hands through his collar-length hair. In his belt was the knife he’d used to still Magic. ‘I didn’t know, until yesterday, that Angel meant Arbil harm.’

‘She meant to kill him, Kaeso.’ The bitch wanted him dead. It’s the only way she could get her hands on his money box.

The junior priestess shook her egret feather duster out of doors and began to sweep the steps with a broom. The swishing of the heather twigs grew fainter stair by stair, and the heat inside the shrine intensified. Blood pounded through Claudia’s veins, throbbing at her pulse points and at the base of her ears.

‘Are you…in love with her?’

‘I was,’ he said slowly, turning to look Claudia full in the face.

Her cheeks coloured, and the only sound was the trickle of the fountain. ‘What changed your mind?’ she asked.

For several seconds, Kaeso simply held her gaze without blinking. ‘What changed my mind,’ he said huskily, ‘is that I met someone else.’

A lump blocked her windpipe. There was no mistaking his meaning…

Claudia kept her eyes clear of the powerful frame of the man tracker, the sleek war machine who had silenced her stalker for ever, as she pretended to re-arrange the folds of her gown. ‘Kaeso, I-’

But he had gone.

‘Kaeso?’

She was all alone in the temple. And when she asked the priestess which direction he had taken, the girl frowned. ‘No one came down these steps, but you, ma’am,’ she replied.

Tight-lipped, Claudia smiled. To the end, Kaeso kept up his chicanery, and she knew she could return to that house on the Quirinal a hundred times and never find him.

Not unless Kaeso wanted her to.

His body beaded with sweat, his hair hanging limp in saturated ropes, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio made his way towards the steam room. The game of small ball, fast and physical, had exhausted him, but his mind was buzzing like a bee around a hyssop bush as he collapsed face down upon the table to submit to the ministrations of a Spaniard who’d clearly scraped kidskins for vellum in a previous incarnation.

There were many aspects of these bizarre and grisly killings that worried him, he brooded, as the strigil scraped his flesh. Ritual murder’s always tricky, because despite the killer’s distinctive signature upon the crime, in most cases he’s virtually impossible to trace. But for once, Marcus had a fair old list of suspects.

The Spaniard rolled him on to his back and proceeded to torture the remaining life out of his prostrate victim. True, he had eliminated those five suspects, but in the same way he’d overlooked the obvious regarding Zygia’s hair, somewhere along the line, Orbilio knew he had made a crucial mistake.

His flesh raw, he tipped the Spaniard and let a square-jawed Sarmatian work warmed oils of chamomile and marjoram into his skin. Claudia had been positive Shannu could not pass his bars, now a chill descended on Marcus, despite the ministrations of the masseur. Suppose someone deliberately unbolted that door…

Donning wood-soled sandals to protect his feet against the searing tiles, Orbilio clip-clopped into the hot room. ‘Ritual murder, ritual murder’ went the rhythm of the clogs, forcing him to recap the observances which the killer so assiduously followed.

One: lasso the victims, drag them backwards, knock them out. Two: strip them naked, tie their hands and then their feet, and he must gag them too, and remove the gag later, because no one had screamed. Then he started slashing, but why the twenty-seven cuts? What was the significance of the hair in the lap? And where did the whistle fit in? It all seemed so over the top. Almost an over-kill. Pinching his nose, Orbilio dived beneath the steaming waters. Of course! Bobbing up, he pushed the hair from off his face and grinned. It was the ritual which mattered, not the actual killing.