Second Act

by Marilyn Todd

  Purity did not seem to be the issue in the corner where Jemima was peering through her chunky ankles and asking the crowd what did they think they were looking at. Ceres could stick her salt and spelt.

  The house, Claudia reflected, wouldn’t be the same after Saturnalia. Sure, there’d be more oil in the jars, more charcoals in the store, and yes you’d be able to hear the fountain babbling in the atrium again, listen to the birds in the aviary, walk without fear of tripping over ratlines and actors sprawled out as they practised their lines. Felix the dancer would no longer make your jaw drop with manoeuvres usually only undertaken by eels. There’d be no Ugly Phils in furry leggings and horns camping it up as the Satyr. No masked actors leaping out of the alcoves to frighten the slaves. No ‘plumptious’ thighs, no ‘volumptuous’ wobbles, no Doris with eyes darkened by kohl and bracelets jangling softly as he let himself in and out at all hours. Ion wouldn’t be found sitting alone in the kitchen at midnight with a tortured look on his handsome, bearded, god-like face, and the boards on the gallery would not creak from the processions of female flesh which passed through Caspar’s doorway. And, of course, there would be no bald Buffoons tickling the kitchen girls and making them fall in love with him…

  The advertisement had reached the point where the director had quite lost control over his quarrelsome crew and insults were about to be exchanged for something more physical. Even Meno the penitent was distracted.

  ‘You never said,’ a girlish voice whined in Claudia’s ear. ‘If I’d known they were going to be here, I’d have come earlier.’

  That was Flavia, whinge, whinge, whinge, and she hadn’t even had the common courtesy to wear white for the festival. Suddenly, though, her spotty little face brightened as Adah grabbed a handful of Jemima’s red hair and yanked downwards.

  ‘Look,’ she goggled. ‘There’s a cat fight outside the Granary.’

  ‘Good heavens, so there is.’ (Oh, come on. You’d hardly let someone like Flavia in on the secret, now, would you?)

  ‘They’re all pitching in,’ she said, her gasp lost among a hundred others as Ion lunged to Erinna’s aid and came away with her tunic.

  And there it was. The thing Claudia hoped she had been mistaken about. What she’d prayed she’d read too much into yesterday and the day before that. Skyles. During the sacrifice of the ram outside the Temple of Janus, she couldn’t help but notice the way he’d been watching Erinna from the corner of his eye. Saw how he’d kept his gaze locked on her after the show. And, although Claudia had seen that same scene repeated at the Circus, she was more than prepared to give her other impressions the benefit of the doubt.

  Until now.

  For a man who gave the word intensity a whole new meaning, the expression on Skyles’ craggy face as Erinna’s tunic came off in Ion’s hands was completely blank. And that was the problem. When Claudia had gone to his room that first time and he’d offered her expensive cherries and cheap wine, it bore all the hallmarks of a seduction. Skyles throbbed with raw sex, yet all they did was sit on his bunk and sip wine from chipped cups in silence. Ditto yesterday. They had sat, widow and actor, alone in the semi-darkness of his bedroom, masculinity oozing from every pore, and on neither occasion had Claudia felt threatened, or felt anything other than under control. With Skyles, as she’d known from the outset, everything was an act. The monkey walk. The tripping over invisible objects. His riding imaginary horses round the garden to amuse the children. And if he wasn’t clowning with the slaves or chasing the maids round the kitchens, he was flirting with Flavia, playing another role with Claudia, yet another as he imparted the lurid details of his sex life to Periander.

  Act. Act. Act.

  Pretend. Pretend. Pretend.

  Beside the grain store, Skyles was whipping off his tunic to cover Erinna. Maybe it was what Flavia, like many others, perceived as a spontaneous act of chivalry that prompted the girl’s lower lip to drop open, but Claudia wouldn’t care to bet on it. Not the way Skyles was flexing his physique in a manner which appeared careless…yet highlighted every corded muscle, every thin, white scar.

  Act. Act. Act.

  Pretend. Pretend. Pretend.

  As the farce ground to its conclusion, the Buffoon’s gaze travelled round the crowd as though seeking someone, or something, out. When it alighted on Claudia, it stopped. Several seconds passed. Then he blinked, his intense expression relaxed, and he allowed his eyes to drop to the young girl at her side. Blushing to her roots because the great man winked at her, Flavia danced through the crowd to congratulate her hero on his gallantry. Skyles had made no effort to pull on the ‘spare’ tunic which Ion just happened to have at hand, even though the temperature down here by the river was freezing. Claudia watched, and admired, his performance as he accepted the accolades from his tongue-tied young female admirer. And noted that, even though his lips were addressing Flavia, his attention was very much elsewhere. On Erinna. Just like before, his blank eyes followed the girl who had not looked his way once.

  Without waiting for the sacrificial pork to crackle to a crisp or even remind the crowd who was sponsoring these damned Spectaculars, Claudia shot round to her agent’s office behind the State Record Office on the Capitol. Her agent was out, but she left him a note on a wax tablet.

  ‘Find out everything you can about the actor called Skyles,’ the note read. ‘And treat this as urgent.’

  *

  Up in Frascati, the woodsman’s grisly find had caused quite a stir.

  ‘Who is she?’ the townspeople clamoured. ‘How was she murdered? What shall we do with her? When did she die?’

  The woodsman, who knew all about nature red in tooth and claw, was able to provide some of the answers to the crowd which had packed into the tavern at the crossroads. From his experience with rotting remains, he pronounced sombrely, the victim had been in the earth a month at least. He did not add that his sole brush with buried corpses, as opposed to wild animal remains, came from accidentally digging up Xerxes’s predecessor when he was planting his cabbages. Instead, the woodsman allowed himself a refill of unwatered wine on the house.

  ‘The cause of death was definitely that spade we found on top of the grave,’ he added, wiping his callused hands down his hide leggings as though wiping away the memory of the hideous discovery. ‘Someone really clobbered her with it, too. Skull smashed like an eggshell.’ The woodsman pointed to the side of his head. ‘Right here.’

  ‘Poor cow,’ said the barber. ‘Let’s hope it were quick and she didn’t see it coming.’

  The woodsman found images of her long black hair and shattered face haunting his every waking hour and preventing him from sleeping. His wife said he must tell someone about what he had found, but who was there to tell? Frascati had no army barracks nearby, no resident magistrate, he could hardly post a notice on the wall of his house. Found. One body. Please enquire within. In the end, he had summoned his friends to help him.

  ‘Spade, you said?’ The ostler from the post house frowned. ‘You know, now I thinks about it, some time around about the back end of October, I do believe some bugger stole one from right outside me stables.’

  The ostler didn’t know it yet, but his role in the girl’s murder would haunt him for the rest of his life. Even though the post-house slaves dug carrots for the horses every day, he would come to think that he should have somehow ensured that the spade was locked safely away. Irrational and ridiculous, but the ostler would go to his grave feeling that he’d been responsible for the girl’s death, never forgiving himself for leaving the murder weapon out in the open.

  ‘Was she—’ The fuller cleared his throat. ‘Was she raped?’

  A heavy silence fell over the tavern.

  ‘She were naked, weren’t she?’ growled the blacksmith.

  This time the silence was even heavier. No one touched their wine.

  ‘At least we can rest easy that she weren’t one of us,’ the woodsman’s wife piped up at last. ‘I know it’s a terrible t
hing to say, but it’s better for the town that both the victim and the killer were strangers.’

  Terrible to say, yes. But natural. A murmur of guilty agreement rippled round the tavern. Heads hung down. Feet shuffled.

  ‘I suppose she was a stranger?’ the fuller asked.

  ‘Well, of course she was,’ the barber replied. ‘We’d have noticed if one of our own women had gone missing, you daft oaf!’

  ‘No, no, I didn’t mean that. I was just remembering that time when one of Senator Cotta’s slaves ran away. The one who screamed her bloody head off when they caught her.’

  A different kind of silence gripped the tavern now.

  ‘She had long, dark hair,’ the fuller reminded everyone.

  ‘So do lots of women,’ the barber said carefully. But he, too, remembered her well from the fight she put up. Her screechings, kicks and protests had drawn a wagonload of attention that afternoon. Which, for a town at the junction of three main roads to Rome and long accustomed to drama, had to be quite a show to draw a crowd, especially when it came so hot on the heels of the old man blowing himself up, although it was before Senator Cotta had gone swanning off to Cumae to consult with the Oracle.

  ‘There was talk she’d run away a second time,’ the potter said.

  ‘So there was.’

  Memories surfaced now. Of the Senator’s men searching high and low for a girl who had effectively disappeared off the face of the earth. Now they knew why. The earth itself had claimed her—

  ‘If she was that important to him, I’d best send word to the Senator,’ the woodsman said. ‘Tell him we’ve found her body.’

  But he wasn’t really concerned about how crucial the slave girl might or might not have been to Sextus Valerius Cotta.

  The harrowing image of the hand plopping from his dog’s mouth refused to leave him, and it wasn’t much of a leap of the imagination to picture any number of pretty young women taking their last walk with this killer. A smooth operator, the woodsman thought, who could win a girl’s trust so completely that she’d followed someone wielding a spade meekly into the woods. What an actor that person must be!

  What worried the woodsman more than the past, though, was the future.

  That the killer had already marked out another victim. And was simply waiting for the right moment to strike.

  Nineteen

  Damp from the air mingled with the damp from the river, cloaking the city in a cold, dark blanket of grey. The tramontana might have relented, but the moist air it left in its wake carried sickness and disease disguised as a mantle of softness. Lungs would soon start to clog, just as surely as the damp would smuggle in fevers, rheumatics, colics and piles, and steadfastly refuse to heal sores. At times like this, the Roman people looked to two sources to safeguard their health and that of their children.

  One was religion. Money (from the rich), garlands (from the poor) would be left for Aesculapius at his temple on the island in the Tiber, for Aesculapius was the god of medicine and healing, and it was to him they looked if sickness descended. Carna’s shrine up on the Caelian Hill would be inundated with cakes of fat bacon and beans in the hope that the goddess who watched over their vital organs might make them stronger, if she was propitiated accordingly. And they would pour solemn libations to their family gods with the prayer, ‘Admit no plague or sickness into this household. If disease comes to our threshold, make it stay there.’ However, the populace was well aware that the Immortals would be rushed off their feet in times of crisis and, even though they’d hedged their bets three ways, it was still possible for their entreaties to slip through the divine net. Hence the second arm of the pincer.

  Armed with potions and ointments, tablets and suppositories, the trickle of visitors from the herbalist’s door was slow but steady as Orbilio and Dymas approached.

  ‘Trust me, mate, we have to do this,’ Dymas said, his hobnailed boots echoing dully on the timbers of the Sublician Bridge.

  ‘The rape only took place yesterday morning.’

  The people who visited the herbalist were not rich. Their coarse cloaks were patched, their sandals made from woven palm leaves rather than leather, and the men wore beards, since they were not in a position to afford barbers. Yet they were prepared to hand over what, to them, were vast sums of money for poultices and infusions, indemnity against the inevitable.

  ‘I know, but you said yourself we don’t have any fresh leads. Bloody fuck, mate, we need Deva’s statement or we’re screwed.’

  Orbilio knew Dymas was right, but calling on the poor girl so soon after the attack felt like another assault. Unfortunately, time wasn’t on Marcus’s side. This morning another girl had fallen victim to the Halcyon Rapist. More lives had been destroyed by this monster. Panic was filling the streets. As much as it went against his personal and professional grain, he had caved in to his colleague’s demands.

  ‘We’ll take it slowly,’ he told him. ‘See how it goes.’

  The sneering allegation of his boss that Orbilio knew the victims had cut no ice. Whether he knew the girls directly, indirectly or not at all was irrelevant, but that was something he could sort out later, this vicious attempt to smear his reputation and character. Right now, all he cared about was that four young women had been brutalized. Four more young women violated because of him.

  ‘Bloody fuck, mate!’ Dymas had snorted with derision when Orbilio confided to him how he felt. ‘You did everything you could, didn’t you? Confession. Identification. Evidence. You got the bugger bang to rights, he paid the price, now quit beating yourself up. This is the work of a sick bastard copycat and don’t you forget it.’

  ‘What made you keep the records of this case, Dymas?’ They were almost at the herbalist’s door. ‘I mean, if you didn’t have reservations about the rapist yourself, then why bother?’

  ‘Same reason I keep all the others,’ the Greek said dryly. ‘Insurance, mate.’

  ‘Insurance?’

  Dymas glanced up from his feet. ‘Oh, fine for you. Midwife removed the silver spoon before she cut the umbilical bloody chord, didn’t she?’ The eyes dropped again. ‘Me, I’m a foreigner. What you Romans very nicely call an alien, and a low-born blacksmith’s son at that. If anything goes arse-over-tip, I don’t have no poncy family to fall back on, do I? I’m in no position to bribe my way out of the shit, like some I might mention. Them case notes are my insurance policy.’

  There it was, the old chip on the shoulder revealing itself to be half a pine tree. Another reason Marcus despised the surly Greek.

  The herbalist opened the door to his knock and his eyes narrowed when he recognized his visitors.

  ‘Have you caught him?’

  Orbilio shook his head sadly. ‘How’s Deva?’ he asked.

  ‘How do you think?’ the herbalist rasped back. Deep purple hollows surrounded his eyes and the skin on his face hung slack, like a person newly bereaved.

  The house consisted of three tiny chambers. His workroom, the main room which served as living-area-cum-kitchen with wood-burning stove, plain, wooden furniture and functional clay plates and pots. And the sleeping chamber above, masked off by a makeshift screen that the herbalist had hastily thrown up and behind which Deva lay curled like a foetus, clutching her red Damascan shawl. The cottage smelled of balsam and fennel, horehound and sulphur, and sprigs of herbs hung from the joists on the ceiling. Thyme, hyssop, licebane and borage.

  ‘We need to ask a few questions,’ Marcus told the distraught herbalist under his breath. ‘Any detail, no matter how small, how trivial it might seem, brings us one step closer towards putting this bastard where he belongs.’

  ‘She hasn’t uttered a word since it happened,’ the man replied, ‘and I haven’t forced her. But— Well, if it’s important, I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘Of course it’s bloody important,’ Dymas snapped, making no effort to keep his voice low. ‘If this is a repeat of last year’s shenanigans, we’re looking at ten more girls getting bugger
ed and beaten, and if we don’t nail the sick bastard this time, it’ll be fourteen more next year, as well.’

  The makeshift curtain was suddenly pulled back. Three heads jerked upwards in surprise. Her face battered and swollen, the skin beneath white as parchment, Deva stood looking down at the men. Her fingers clenched over the wooden rail.

  ‘Deva! Darling—’

  But before the herbalist could form one more word, the Damascan girl had launched herself into space.

  *

  It was late, nearly midnight, when Marcus retraced his steps. He was alone this time. His knock was soft. At first he did not think the herbalist had heard it, then the door opened. Without a word, he motioned Orbilio inside.

  ‘I gave her a dose of poppy juice. Too much, probably, but…’ His voice trailed off, crushed by horror, exhaustion and grief.

  Indeed, the opiate dominated the other scents inside the small dwelling which the chill river air could not seem to penetrate. A single candle burned in the corner and Orbilio wondered if the herbalist had eaten since Deva had been brought home yesterday. Somehow he doubted it.

  ‘You saved her life,’ the herbalist said thickly. ‘You can’t imagine how grateful I am to you, Marcus.’

  ‘I did not save her life.’ Orbilio patted him reassuringly on the shoulder. ‘I saved her from breaking an arm or a leg, that was all.’

  When he saw Deva’s fingers unclench from the rail, caught the look of hopelessness and utter despair in her eyes, the hairs on his neck had started to prickle. Almost before her feet had left the landing, he had flung himself forward to catch her.

  The other man almost smiled. ‘You’re still a hero to me.’

  ‘If I was a hero,’ Orbilio replied wearily, ‘Deva would have gone to her mother’s house yesterday, sold her honey at market, then come home the same bubbly young woman she was when she left.’

  ‘Hm.’ The herbalist led him into his workroom, lit an oil lamp and reached for a jar on the shelf. ‘I think we both need some of this,’ he said, pouring a thin, pale yellow liquid into two cups.