Marilyn Todd - Second Act

‘Wait outside,’ he told Dymas.

Dymas scowled. ‘This is my case, too, boss.’

‘Are you fucking deaf, man? Outside. And you.’ His boss’s gaze ranged over the tunic Orbilio had been wearing yesterday, the stubble on his chin. ‘What the fuck is going on?’

Marcus tugged at his earlobe. ‘I don’t honestly know, sir.’

‘Well, there’s a young kid called Deva who does fucking know, and if you’d been there like you should, at the scene of the fucking crime, you’d have seen for yourself. Seventeen years old today, on her way to her mother’s, and now the poor cow can’t even speak. Just clutches some bit of red cloth to her breast, shouting, “My baby, my baby,” and that is not fucking good enough.’

‘No, sir, it isn’t- Did you say Deva? The Damascan girl from over the river?’

‘You know her?’

‘Not exactly, but-’ He began to pace the office. ‘I met her when I interviewed her husband last summer. He’s a herbalist, and I was picking his brains over that crackpot who tried to poison the Emperor by putting what turned out to be monkshood in the sweetmeats.’

Two civil servants and a slave died that day. A high price to pay for filching Imperial sweeties.

The Head of the Security Police pursed his thick lips and sat down behind his desk. The silence alone should have been enough to set alarm bells ringing, but Orbilio couldn’t rid himself of the haunting image of a young woman clutching her favoured red fringed shawl and mourning a baby that she might now never have.

‘You realize I have the Emperor’s people on my back, don’t you?’ his boss snarled. ‘You don’t need me to draw diagrams, Orbilio. Thanks to your fuck-up, they blame me for this unit turning into a laughing stock that can’t tell a copycat crime from its elbow. Well, sonny boy, let me tell you, I don’t propose to lose my job over your stupidity. I’ve worked too bloody hard to get my arse on this chair and if it’s going anywhere, my arse, it’s going bloody upwards, you hear?’

Orbilio stopped pacing. ‘Are you firing me?’

‘The hell I am!’ A fat fist pounded the desk. ‘If I were to sack you now, there’d still be another rape tomorrow and with the head of the original investigating team out of the loop, how does that make me look? Use your bloody noodle.’

‘You’ve lost me, sir. What are you saying?’

His boss sighed. ‘What I’m saying, Orbilio, is that I’m putting Dymas in charge of this investigation.’

‘You’re not serious?’

‘What’s the matter? Don’t you fancy the idea of reporting to a low-born dago blacksmith’s son?’

Sometimes his boss was truly beneath contempt. ‘You want results, the Emperor wants results and believe it or not, sir, I want results as well.’ Generations of breeding kept his voice level. ‘Give me another forty-eight hours.’

‘No.’

‘Twenty-four, then.’

‘What the fuck will that prove? You sent an innocent man to his death, for Croesussakes.’

‘Twenty-four hours should prove whether this is a copycat or otherwise.’

‘You’re pissing in the dark, Orbilio.’

Bloody right. ‘Let’s not lose sight of the fact that we got a confession,’ he said carefully. ‘We found the mask under the rapist’s bed-’

‘Alleged rapist’s bed.’

‘-his clothes stank of aniseed, plus some of the victims were also able to identify the man as their attacker.’

‘Exactly why I’m taking you off the case.’ His boss tapped the piles of scrolls on his desk with an irritated finger. ‘This bears all the hallmarks of the original rapes, and I ought to know, because while I was waiting for your high-and-mightyship to condescend to pay me a call this morning, I had plenty of time to read through the bloody files.’

Orbilio leafed through the scrolls. ‘Where did these come from?’

This was the Security Police, for heaven’s sake. Only current cases were ever retained, everything else was destroyed, Imperial policy. Too sensitive by far to keep on file. In the wrong hands, went the theory, stuff like this could destabilize the Empire.

His boss smiled the sort of smile that curdled fresh milk. ‘Your superior officer kept them.’

‘Dymas?’

‘Obviously he had reservations at the time.’ He folded his hands on the table and stared at his patrician subordinate for at least two full minutes. ‘You said you knew the girl who was raped this morning.’

‘Deva? Sort of. Why?’

His boss reached across to a scroll tied in blue ribbon on the table behind him. ‘On the morning before the tribunes were sworn in, the first attack took place just behind the Temple of Lucina on the Esquiline Hill.’ He looked up. ‘That’s not far from where you live, is it?’

Marcus shrugged. ‘A hundred yards, I suppose.’ He wished he kn ew where this was leading.

‘And yesterday morning, a girl called Blandina was dragged off Armoury Row.’

Orbilio waited for some kind of explanation, but his boss merely re-rolled the parchment and replaced it on the table behind him. ‘So?’ he prompted.

His boss leaned back in his chair and considered the young man standing in front of him. Twenty-six years old, handsome as hell, muscles like armour, wanted for nothing his entire life. Hell, the family had even bought him a commission in the fucking army.

‘So, nothing,’ he said cheerfully. ‘But it’s interesting that she happened to be the daughter of the man who supplies you with your harnesses. Don’t you think?’

‘There are many things I might have envisaged happening during the Festival of the Seven Hills,’ Claudia murmured to Drusilla. ‘But Flavia to come home laughing wasn’t one of them.’

‘Hrrrrow,’ Drusilla agreed.

We’re not talking smiling. We’re not talking grinning. We’re not even talking about a fit of adolescent giggles. No, for perhaps the first time in her life, Flavia was in the grip of genuine happiness. Well, well, well, will wonders never cease. Eyes which were normally twin balls of resentment set in a perpetual scowl shone like hilltop beacons, transforming her face into something approaching radiance. And not just her face, either. Happiness had loosened the slump of her shoulders, lifted her head, freed her spine from its withdrawn posture. In fact, Flavia looked exactly like a girl of fifteen ought to look. Young, carefree, with the world at her feet and a flower in her hair. Oh, and a ring missing from the middle finger of her right hand…

‘Bmp.’

‘I know, poppet. It was the one set with amethysts.’

But Drusilla wasn’t interested in what fate might have befallen Flavia’s jewellery. Tickles round the ear were nice, but they didn’t begin to compare with tormenting little jewel-coloured birds until they squawked themselves hoarse. With a lithe jump, she returned to her sentry post on the roof of the aviary and began to tweak at the wire with vicious hooked claws. Claudia slipped into a pair of fur-lined slippers warming underneath the brazier. Day Two of the advertising campaign had exceeded her expectations and not purely because of the increased crowd attendance at the Circus Maximus. The players were now established in their roles, firing off the banter that much faster, and Skyles’s chivalrous offer of giving Erinna his tunic happened so quickly that it never occurred to the spectators to question whether he couldn’t have asked someone for the loan of a long cloak instead.

Claudia couldn’t help but notice that the races which followed came as something of an anticlimax to those closest to the impromptu performance. Wheels might fall off, chariots overturn, drivers get thrown into the path of oncoming vehicles, but for those seated in the vicinity of Claudia Seferius, the antics of her sponsored actors had overshadowed anything the Circus organizers could hope to stage. Thanks to three well-upholstered females, there was enough gossip to see them through dinner parties for a month, and now it looked like war was being declared over who would sponsor the Spectaculars after Saturnalia.