by Mike Ashley
He weren’t accountable to her anyway. The bitch.
But dammit, the sulky cow just would not let it rest. On and on she went, about how young the boy was, and hadn’t anyone considered what had driven the poor lad to resort to stealing, because you could see he wasn’t used to it, no-one in their right mind would run off up a busy street with a sack stuffed full of golden objects and not have the army after them, and anyway what seasoned professional would go round leaving ladders against walls to make life easy for his pursuers?
Labeo let it ride. If she wanted to feel sorry for that little turd, that was her business, not his. He’d done the job he was being paid to do, and he was behind the general all the way on this. Let criminals think you’re a soft touch, and every bloody thief will be climbing up the balcony! So while she ranted, he congratulated himself on being such a damn good shot. That arrow went exactly where he’d planned it.
Quite at what point Her Snootyship intended to shut up, Labeo didn’t know. But he was mighty glad when he heard the general call his name from the far side of the wall. The master hadn’t been expected back for ages, but wouldn’t he be pleased to hear his captain had bagged a sewer rat this morning!
Except there were something different about the general’s bellow. Every bit as terse. Nothing usual about that! And no less urgent, neither. (The general weren’t a patient man!) But . . . Well, it just sounded different, that was all.
“I’m over here, General.” He called back. “Caught a burglar stealing your gold. Shot him as he escaped.”
“Is he dead?” Volso wanted to know, scaling the ladder two steps at a time. He was a tall man in maybe his forty-second summer, broad of shoulder and square of jaw, his skin weathered from years of campaigning and thickened from too many nights cradling the wine jar. But he cut a commanding enough figure on and off the field, and regular training in the gymnasium had clearly paid off. It was a lean and nimble figure that swung itself over the adjoining wall.
“Couldn’t be deader,” Labeo told him proudly, as his employer dropped to the ground.
“Pity,” Volso snarled, wiping the dirt from his hands down his tunic. He marched over to where Junius and Claudia were conversing quietly over the body and rammed his foot hard into the corpse. “Bastard didn’t deserve an easy death.”
“Volso!” Horrified, Claudia stepped in front before he could land a second kick. “You are on my property, General, and I’ll thank you to have some respect for it, for me, and for the dead.”
“Respect?” Labeo feared the general’s bellow would deafen the widow. “Respect, you say?” He pushed her roughly aside and slammed his boot into the boy’s side as he had originally intended. “Save your sympathy, Claudia Seferius. If Labeo hadn’t killed him, public execution certainly would.”
“Stealing is a civil matter,” she began.
“Stealing is,” the general agreed. “Murder isn’t. That boy you’re so protective of didn’t just rob me of my gold and silver. He robbed me of my wife.” Volso turned to face his archer. “Callista’s body is still sprawled across the bedroom floor,” he said quietly. “Where this bastard strangled her.”
Moonlight had turned the garden paths to silver. The feathery leaves of artemisia and the pale purple flowers of sweet rocket released musky perfume into heat that pulsated like a cricket, and mice rustled beneath the fan-trained peach trees, pears and apricots. Bats squeaked on the wing in search of moths. An owl hooted from the cedar three doors down, and a frog plopped gently into the pool from a water lily leaf.
The slaves were not back yet. Milking their precious holiday for all it was worth, there was none of the customary clattering of pots and skillets from the kitchens. No bickering coming out of the married quarters. The heather brooms and garden shears were silent. Everything was silent.
Seated on a white marble bench with her back against an apple tree, Claudia watched her blue-eyed, cross-eyed, dark Egyptian cat chase a mouse round the shrine in the corner of the garden and slowly sipped her wine. The wine was dark. Dark as Claudia’s mood. And every bit as heavy. Cradling the green glass goblet in both hands, she stared up at the night sky without blinking. The stars would make life easy for navigation out at sea tonight, she thought. Directly overhead, the dragon roared and Hercules strode purposefully across the heavens, wielding his olivewood club. How appropriate, she mused, that it was the constellation of Sagittarius, which was starting to rise over the southern horizon. Sagittarius, the Archer . . .
The army had come, conducted its investigation in the twinkling of an eye, and departed hours ago. The young man’s body had been carted away unceremoniously on a stretcher and Labeo had been lauded for a job well done, both by the army and his bereaved employer. It had been left to Claudia and her bodyguard to stack the stolen objects back inside the sack, where Junius later returned them to their owner.
Still staring at the stars, she sipped her wine.
“So then.” A tall, patrician body eased itself onto the bench, leaned its back against the rough bark of the apple tree and crossed its long patrician legs at its booted ankles. “Cut and dried.”
Even above the scents of the junipers and cypress, the heliotrope and the lilies, she could smell his spicy sandalwood unguent. Caught a faint whiff of the rosemary in which his trademark long linen tunic had been rinsed.
“I wondered how long it would take before Marcus Cornelius Orbilio arrived on the scene,” she said without turning her head.
Up there on Olympus, Fortune must be wetting her knickers. Claudia topped up her goblet from the jar. Dammit, she couldn’t make a move without the Security Police popping up in the form of their only aristocratic investigator, who seemed to view her – let’s call them misdemeanours – as his fast track to the Senate. Still. What did she care? She had nothing to hide from him this time. For once, Marcus Make-Room-For-Me-In-The-Assembly Orbilio was whistling in the dark.
She couldn’t see him, but knew that he was grinning. “Why?” he asked. “Were you running a book on when I’d arrive?”
“Tch, tch, tch. You should know that gambling’s against the law, Orbilio.”
“Which happens to be one of the reasons I’ve called round.” A shower of bronze betting receipts scattered on the path. “Yours, I believe.”
“Never seen them before in my life,” she replied. Bugger. That was the best boxer in Rome she’d backed with those. Half a brickwork’s worth, if she recalled.
“What about these?” he said, showering a dozen more.
And that, unless she missed her guess, was the other half, invested at five to one on a Scythian wrestler from the north coast of the Black Sea. Bugger, bugger, bugger.
“We caught the bookie touting outside the imperial palace,” he said cheerfully. “You know, you really should be more careful who you have dealings with, Claudia.”
She skewered him with a glare. “Damn right.”
“How much of Gaius’s money do you have left?” he asked.
The old adage was true, she thought ruefully. The best way to make a small fortune is to start with a large one . . .
“Jupiter alone knows what will happen to the family fortune once I’m married to you,” he continued smoothly. “We’ll probably be celebrating our fifth anniversary in the gutter.”
She supposed it was the moon making twinkles in his eyes, but in its clear, three-quarters light she could see every curl in his thick mop of hair, the solid musculature of his chest, the crisp, dark hairs on the back of his forearm.
“I would go to the lions before I went to the altar with you, Marcus Cornelius, and if you’ve finished littering my garden path, perhaps you’ll be kind enough to sod off. I have a pressing engagement.” She patted the wine jar beside her. “With my friend Bacchus here.”
“Hmm.” He folded his hands behind his head and closed his eyes. “You seem to be having a lot of metal littering your garden path all of a sudden. Tell me about this morning.”
“No.”
Why the hell did he think she wanted to get drunk? To forget, that was why. To forget a young man with an ecstatic grin and eyes as brown as an otter. Eyes that she had watched glaze in death . . .
“Oh, no. There’s more to it than that,” he said, clicking his tongue. “I know you inside out.” He re-crossed his ankles, but did not open his eyes. “Tell me.”
“If I did, you wouldn’t believe me.”
“I don’t believe you’ve never seen these betting receipts. I don’t believe you’ve never defrauded your customers, or that you’ve never smuggled your wine out of Rome to avoid paying taxes, and that’s why I love you, my darling, and that’s why I know that when you marry me, life will never be dull –”
“See a physician, you have a fever.”
“– and I know, equally, that I’ll never be able to trust you with money or business, but I do trust your judgment, Claudia Seferius. What is it about this morning that bothers you?”
“You really want to know?” Claudia drew a deep breath. Stared up at the celestial Archer. Let her breath out slowly to a count of five. “What bothers me, Orbilio, is that a woman was murdered today and the wrong man took the blame. A young man who, conveniently, is not around to tell his side of the story.”
“You think Labeo –”
Claudia snorted. “That arrogant oaf?” In her mind, she heard again the sickening thud as the general’s boot thudded into the dead boy’s ribs. Heard the youth’s exuberant yell as he scrambled down the fig tree on the wall.
“No, Marcus,” she said wearily, ‘Labeo did not kill Callista.” She thought of her tiny, fair-haired neighbour laid out on her funeral bier in the atrium next door, cypress at the door, torches burned at her feet. “The thing is, Volso is a domineering drunk and a bully.” She sighed. “Who liked to beat his wife and his children.”
Juno in heaven, how often had she heard them. The muffled screams. The pleading. Racking sobs that lasted well into the night . . . Many times she would rush round there, only for the door to be slammed in her face, and the next day Callista’s story would be the same. The children had fallen downstairs, she’d say, or she had walked into a pillar. Sweet Janus, how often had Claudia begged her to leave the vicious brute? One day, she’d told Callista, he will end up killing one of the children.
“Think of them, if not yourself,” she’d advised.
Months passed and nothing changed, until, miracle of miracles, last week Callista called round to confide that she was leaving. Enough was enough, she’d said. Claudia was right. One of these days she feared Volso would go too far and as soon as she’d found suitable accommodation for herself and the children, she would pack her bags and leave.
“So you think Volso killed his wife?” Marcus said.
“No,” Claudia replied sadly, “I killed her.”
She could easily have taken Callista and the children in, but she had not. She’d been too busy trotting round placing bets on boxers and wrestlers, ordering new gowns for the Vinalia in six days’ time, planning parties, organising dinners, garlanding the hall with floral tributes. A battered wife with moping children would have got in the way. Put a dampener on everybody’s spirits.
As surely as Paulus Salvius Volso throttled the life out of poor Callista, so Claudia Seferius had provided him with the ammunition.
Orbilio was forced to admit that, when Claudia told him he wouldn’t believe what she was going to tell him, he was wrong. He’d said he was convinced that he’d believe her. But. Wrong he was.
That Volso killed his wife he could accept. The minute he’d heard that Callista had been found strangled in the course of a burglary, his suspicions were aroused. Having listened to the report of the centurion sent to investigate the killing of the thief, he’d not been at all satisfied with the army’s neat conclusion. Volso’s reputation preceded him and Marcus knew him as the type who vehemently believed that his wife and children were his property, that he would say who came and who went, and that nobody, but nobody, left him unless he threw them out. That was why he’d called on Claudia this evening. To hear her view on the matter.
But that she was in any way morally responsible was bullshit.
In time, of course, she would come to see this for herself, and surely the best way of helping her to reach this point was for her to help him clap the cold-blooded bastard in irons.
“The killing required a lot of planning,” he said.
And together, as the Archer rose and the level in the wine jug sank, they gradually pieced together the sequence of events.
First, Callista, having made her decision, must have somehow given the game away. Perhaps she had started to put things together in a chest. Maybe she’d confided to one of the older children. Who knows? Hell, she might even have lodged her claim in a divorce court, where Volso was just powerful enough to have the scribe report the matter back. Either way, he knew about her plan but did not let on.
Instead, he went out and hired himself a thief. A military man, he’d know exactly where to look and, as a commander of long standing, he would know what type of character to choose. Someone gullible, for a start. Someone who would believe the story he had spun them about having fallen on hard times and how the debt collectors would be knocking at his door any day now to seize his assets. But if he could beat them at their own game? Stage a burglary, whereby the thief was paid handsomely to steal the goods, which he would hand over to the general’s henchman outside in the street to be converted into liquid assets, which the debt collectors would not know about.
“How do you know he’d told the boy there would be an accomplice?” Orbilio asked.
“The yells,” she explained. “The yells were to alert the person he believed would be loitering in the street to move up to my back gate in readiness to relieve him of the sack and pay him whatever price Volso had agreed.” She shrugged. “As I said, it had to be somebody gullible.”
Older boys would not have swallowed the bait. This boy had to be new at the game. No-one else would have been told to leave the ladder up against the wall and actually left it!
“Except his yells alerted Labeo instead,” Marcus said. “Who had been primed beforehand by his master that, on a slaves’ holiday, the house might well be a target for thieves and that he was to shoot on sight.”
Perhaps it wasn’t Labeo’s fault, after all, Claudia mused. He’d been as much a pawn in the game as the boy, the one lured by greed, the other by pride. The only difference, Labeo was alive.
“So.” Orbilio steepled his fingers. “The house is empty, because all the slaves are out celebrating. It’s just Labeo in there on his own, and Callista, who Volso had undoubtedly drugged. The boy sneaks in, probably through your garden, shins up the fig tree and over the wall. He then places the ladder so he can make his escape. Inside, he fills the sack with the items he’s been instructed to pick and then, when he’s finished, he screams like a banshee, because it’s vital the accomplice is outside for a quick handover.”
“Unfortunately, the yell alerts Labeo, who finds no trouble chasing him, thanks to the ladder Volso thought to set in place.” Claudia could see why he’d made general. In military tactics, timing is crucial. “Because while we’re all nicely diverted by the robbery and the killing, the master of the house is free to walk in through his own front door and throttle his wife at his leisure.”
“Ah.” Orbilio plucked a blade of grass and chewed it. “That’s where it starts to get tricky. You see, Volso refused point blank to give his porter the day off today, and the porter is adamant his master left the house shortly after dawn and did not come back until after the boy had been shot. He knows this, because, when Volso came home, the porter told him about the robbery and he was actually with him when he found Callista’s body.”
He paused. Cracked his knuckles. Spiked his hands through his hair in frustration.
“Therefore, Volso could not have killed his wife.”
Dawn was painting the sky a dusky heather pink wh
en Claudia finally stood up. The first blackbird had started to sing from the cherry tree, mice made last-minute searches for beetles and frogs began to croak from the margins of the lily pond. She shook the creases from her pale blue linen gown, smoothed pleats which had wilted in the heat and forced half a dozen wayward ringlets back into their ivory comb.
The first of the slaves had begun to trickle home three hours ago. Gradually, the rest had staggered in, singing, belching, giggling under their breath, their footsteps and their voices restoring order to the silent house. Without their presence, it was as though the bricks and mortar had been in hibernation. Now it was a home again, for them as well as Claudia, the rafters resonating with their drunken squabbles and their laughter, the clang of a kicked pan here, the spluttered expletive from a banged shin there, the bawling of too many over-tired children.
For most of the night, she and Orbilio had sat in silence in the moonlight, trying to figure out how Volso could have done it. Twice Marcus got up to fill the wine jar and fetch cheese, dates and small cakes made from candied fruit, spices and honey to help mop it up but now, as dawn poked her head above the covers of the eastern horizon, the Security Policeman admitted defeat.
“He’s got away with it, hasn’t he?” he said, yawning. There was a shadow of stubble around his chin, she noticed. And lines round his eyes which didn’t come from lack of sleep. “The cold, conniving bastard is going to walk.”
Claudia stretched. Massaged the back of her neck. And smiled.
“You fetch the army and arrest him,” she said. “I’ll give you the proof.”
She glanced across at the garden wall, then back at her own house. Gotcha, you son-of-a-bitch.
It started in the garden, it was fitting that it should end there, she supposed. By the time half a dozen legionaries came clunking in, their greaves and breastplates shining in the sun, Claudia had changed into a gown of the palest turquoise blue and was seated in the shade of the portico beside the fountain, taking breakfast. In her hand was a letter from her bailiff and the news was good. The spots were not contagious, he had written. According to the estate’s horse doctor, they were the result of eating tunnyfish. The grapes for Jupiter were on their way.