Intuitively, Claudia knew that it was true. The mother who’d looked after him, protected him against himself and the world, probably drugged him when the mental pain became too bad. She could almost hear the woman whispering ‘magic’ as she wiped his sweating brow and trickled the draught through his lips.
‘Yes,’ she said, and heard the tremble in her voice. ‘Mamma’s dead.’
Distant eyes re-focused. Became beady. ‘That’s right,’ he said smugly. ‘She died the day your husband died. I wrote you a letter, told you how we were united in grief, you wrote back, remember? That’s when it started. Back in August. You do remember, don’t you?’
Claudia’s breath came out in a series of tiny gasps. ‘Every detail.’
The inadequate creature who called himself Magic shuffled closer in the doorway. ‘You’re mine,’ he said thickly. ‘Mine.’ In the dim light, she saw his eyes clamp on her breasts, and he all but licked his lips. Smile. For gods’ sakes, smile at him! He smiled back. Then the smile hardened and was replaced by a frown.
‘You tried to kill me.’ It came over sulky.
She took a step towards him. One step closer to Magic. One step closer to the steps which led to freedom. She could smell his stale breath and body odour, heard his laboured lungs. ‘No, I—’
‘Yes, you did!
You fucking tried to kill me!’
This time, there was no reasoning with him. No words which would mollify, no looks to calm him down. Ducking under the flailing twin blades, Claudia ran headlong across the porch towards the marble stairs. Three steps from the bottom, she slipped, her feet trapped in the fabric of her wrap.
‘Now it’s your turn, you bitch!’
Magic plunged towards her, yelling obscenities and waving the knives. Kicking and squirming, Claudia rolled on to the bottom step, then the madman was on top of her, pinning her down with his knees. With her face pressed into the dirt and no escape possible, she braced herself for the thrust of the knife.
It didn’t come.
And suddenly the weight on top of her was gone. Croesus, he bottled it after all!
Claudia spun round on to her back. Magic hadn’t run off, he’d been hauled off. She saw an arm round his throat, a man’s knee in the small of his back. She watched a knife plunge upwards into his kidneys. Saw him arch with the pain. And as he arched, the knife came down straight in his heart.
The last thing she heard as the darkness swallowed her up was a voice in the distance saying, ‘I think you’ll find that terminates the correspondence course.’
*
As Claudia struggled back to consciousness, strange pictures formed and dissolved. A man with the head of a hawk. Another like a jackal. A woman in a blue dress with cow horns on her head—
‘Janus!’
‘It’s only the priestess,’ a deep voice said soothingly. ‘You’re in the Temple of Isis.’ He paused. ‘You passed out, I carried you here.’
Isis? Memory crawled back, inch by inch. The Field of Mars. A path into the woods. The old voting hall. There was a fight…
‘Ssssh,’ the man said. ‘Easy, now.’
A cool compress was pressed against her forehead and the lap in which her head lay smelled of musk. Close by, the woodpecker from hell drummed for all it was worth. It turned out to be Claudia’s teeth.
‘Is he dead?’ she asked, remembering everything now.
Kaeso grinned. ‘Most emphatically.’
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.
XXXII
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.
As he shook off the drips, Severina’s face floated into his memory. Not how she’d looked in death, but how she looked in life. Beautiful, full of joy, with everything to live for.
Why?
he wondered. Why, of all the girls who bore a blue tattoo, should dark, vivacious Zygia be a target for the killer’s warped and twisted mind? What is it that sets the elfin Annia apart?
Orbilio felt he was on the brink of more than just the plunge pool. He was—if only he dared follow up his instinct—poised on the brink of a terrible solution, because suppose (just suppose) he’d got this whole thing back to front? Arms outstretched, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio dived into the icy waters of the plunge pool.
And shuddered.
XXXIII
‘Claudia?’
The bunch of keys jangled in his hand as Marcus let himself in, but only his voice came back to him, the echo undistorted by kitchen steam or by the clatters, bangs and jabber that denote a household’s heart.
‘I need to talk to you about Arbil.’
Tossing the keys upon a vacant chopping block, he crossed the silent kitchen into an atrium where only marble eyes stared out and chatter came solely from the fountain. Where the hell was everybody?
‘Claudia,’ he bellowed, and ‘ya, ya, ya’ echoed back to him as he belted up the stairs. Her bedroom, and all the guest rooms, were deserted. Where the devil were the servants?
‘Like whether a goblet is half empty,’ he called out, as he checked the second gallery, ‘or half full—’
Dare he barge into the bathroom? Nine days ago, she’d staunched his bleeding wounds and pressed sweet balms on to his bruises. You’d never know, from looking round, what had passed between them in this room.
‘—it’s a question of perspective.’
Dammit, Claudia, I thought you’d be home. And then he remembered the musical farce. She must have taken the whole household as a treat.
‘This murder business,’ he said, more to keep himself company in this ringing hall of columns. ‘You talked of conjurors, remember? Seeing only what you’re deceived to see?’
He may as well check the office before leaving.
‘Hell, we’ve been fed a stage set from the start.’