Marilyn Todd - Virgin Territory

She sliced off a chunk of sheep’s cheese. ‘You could do yourself a bigger favour by getting a bath.’ She wrinkled her nose and flapped her hand. ‘Downwind…well, I mean to say.’

Alarm flushed his face as he snatched at a handful of tunic and sniffed. It smelled of nothing more offensive than cloves and sandalwood and bay, and he was annoyed with himself for falling for it.

‘I’m in no mood to play games.’ Orbilio walked across to the table, laid his hands flat and leaned over to face her. ‘A woman lies dead and mutilated right outside that door. Tell me about the family.’

She hadn’t heard from this man in heaven-knows-how-long and he expected her to do his work for him? Unfortunately, telling a policeman to go knot himself wasn’t a particularly clever move. There were laws against that sort of thing. Which was rather a shame, really.

‘Eugenius: dirty old man, face like a walnut.’ Claudia ticked them off on her fingers. ‘Matidia: over fifty, overdressed, over made-up. Aulus: drunk as a skunk with a nose like a trunk. Fabius:-’

Orbilio wanted to pull her into his arms. He wanted to tell her she looked ravishing in pale blue. He wanted to confess his overwhelming relief that the mutilated corpse wasn’t hers. He wanted to bury his face in her thick, wayward curls. He wanted to ask, ‘Do you mean an elephant’s trunk or a traveller’s trunk?’ Instead he heard a pompous voice saying:

‘Point taken, Claudia. You’re not obliged to make an investigating officer’s life easy. But you found the body, you are obliged to co-operate on that.’

‘Very well.’ She folded her arms in a defiant gesture.

‘I was proceeding along the footpath in a westerly direction at approximately noon yesterday, when I espied, lying on the grass-’

Orbilio held both hands up, palm outwards, in a gesture of surrender. ‘All right, forget it.’ He was unable to keep the irritation out of his voice. ‘Just remember the key to all successful outcomes, regardless of whether it’s solving murders or…anything else…is communication.’

That’s rich, coming from a man with your liberal attitude towards it.

‘I appreciate the advice and now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a tan to work on.’

‘Wait.’ Pushing aside a bowl of grapes, he perched himself on the edge of the serving table, leaving one leg dangling. ‘Where’s Junius?’

Uh-oh. She made a great show of studying the hunting scene on the floor. ‘Junius?’ Gracious, that was one ugly stag.

‘You know the fellow. Gaul. Aged about twenty-two. Big chap. Muscular.’ He paused. ‘Heads your bodyguard.’

‘Oh, that Junius. Isn’t he around?’

‘Mother of Tarquin!’ She could hear the grate of nails on stubble. ‘Must I spell it out? Sabina’s been butchered, your bodyguard goes missing. Don’t you think that’s stretching coincidence?’

Claudia began to count the colours in the mosaic. Excluding black and white, there were five shades of brown, three red-

‘Croesus, woman!’ His fist came down so hard on the table that the plates, bowls and goblets rattled. ‘Don’t you care a damn?’

She bit deep into her lower lip. One shade of orange, two greens-

‘Sabina was beaten, bitten, stripped and raped while she lay paralysed and dying. Doesn’t it prick your conscience just a little, hiding a suspect?’

The look she eventually gave him was as impenetrable as she could make it. His were the only red-rimmed eyes in the house, she thought idly, and those from lack of sleep rather than grief.

‘Junius isn’t the killer and you know it.’

‘I’ll ask again. Where is he?’

Ten seconds ticked past. ‘He’s running an errand for me, if you must know. He’s due back any minute.’

‘Now, that wasn’t too painful, was it?’ He helped himself to dates. ‘What about this Tanaquil and her brother?’

‘She’s a two-bit hustler. One whiff of trouble and those two are off faster than chalk on a chariot wheel. Can I go now?’

‘One more question.’

He sank his teeth into an apple, and she was forced to listen to the sounds of crunching for a full half-minute before he followed up.

‘What brings you all the way from Rome to Sullium?’

‘Business.’

It was irritating, the way that single eyebrow lifted like that, as though it didn’t believe her.

‘Would you mind telling me what sort of business?’

‘That’s two questions.’

‘Humour me.’

‘Well, in. case it slipped your sharp investigative mind,’ she replied through a mouthful of almonds, ‘let me remind you that seven weeks ago I inherited a sizeable business from my late husband, and that Eugenius Collatinus is also a wealthy businessman.’ She waved her hands in an expansive gesture. ‘There are certain…certain links and…things.’

‘You’re in wine, he’s in sheep-and you talk of links?’ It was getting bloody warm in this room, someone ought to open a window.

‘Naturally.’

Take the bones out of that.

‘Nothing to do with the fact that you might be living beyond your means in Rome?’

‘Good heavens, where did you hear that ridiculous rumour?’

I never live beyond my means, Orbilio. Not when I can borrow.

‘And nothing to do with the fact that Sabina was passing herself off as a Vestal Virgin? For which purpose, incidentally, she would need an accessory. Ideally a woman.’

‘You have heard some funny stories.’

‘But you knew she wasn’t a real Vestal?’

‘I did?’

‘Come on, you spent over two weeks in her company and that bridal dress is brand new. Don’t tell me the retiring priestess ordered a new dress to show off at home.’

‘You’re slipping, Orbilio. Losing your touch.’

‘Oh?’

‘Sabina was due to be married. To Gavius Labienus. At the end of November.’

‘Oh.’

He looked about seven years old at that moment, despite the hollow eyes and roughened chin, and Claudia wondered why she should find Marcus Cornelius Orbilio so damned attractive. Well he wasn’t, of course. She was just desperate.

‘It still doesn’t add up,’ he said, prizing himself off the table and sauntering over to the window. ‘I mean, if you know she’s an imposter and I know she’s an imposter, how come we’re the only ones?’

‘You’re the policeman, you work it out.’

‘The family obviously believe she was the retiring Vestal.’

‘And you haven’t put them straight? How noble.’

Orbilio shrugged. ‘I don’t see what good can come of disillusioning them’. ‘After all, it’s not as though it was a motive for murder.’

‘Personally, I wouldn’t go around making sweeping statements until I knew who was responsible,’ she said, surprised to find more astringency in her voice than she bargained for.

‘That’s no problem,’ he said simply, turning his gaze back on Claudia. ‘I know who killed her.’

The yellow sandstone of the old Pharos, grating slivers off Claudia’s backbone, was perversely comforting as she sat watching the sun cast a cloak of molten copper over the landscape. Using her palla as a cushion instead of a wrap, she stubbornly refused to acknowledge the nip in the air. The strong, powerful wingbeats of a pair of cormorants whirred overhead. Below, white frills laced the deserted shoreline.

She picked up one of the fallen stones from the crumbling, abandoned edifice and lobbed it, but the peninsula was deceptive and the stone bounced off a boulder before slithering pitifully into the sea.

Where the bay opened out, tightly packed pines whispered softly to each other in the breeze, and beyond them, in the hills, a solitary bleat reminded her this was sheep country, not cornfields. Yet Eugenius had once been a prosperous wheat farmer. Why the switch?