Man Eater

‘Get this down,’ he barked. ‘To Marcus Cornelius Orbilio, at the Villa Pictor in the Vale of Adonis- What? Yes, of course, I bloody want a messenger going off with it this afternoon! Yes, of course, I know it’s a public fucking holiday, now quit yapping and write.’

The letter, when he eventually read it over, was concise and to the point. He liked that.

It would also make one cocky young aristocrat very hot under the collar and he liked that even more.

*

Dusk, swamping the Vale of Adonis with its sepia tints, had been thwarted by a hundred flickering torches, but the darkness inside Orbilio’s head refused to go away. His mouth was dry, he needed a drink, and the need brought him out in a sweat. Dammit, he should have spoken to the slave girl earlier. Frustration tightened an invisible band beneath his ribcage. Again and again he saw the coronet of blond hair swirling in the cloudy current and again and again he asked himself, could he have saved her? When Orbilio ran his hands over his face, to his shame he realized they were shaking.

With the basins at the sulphur pools worn so shiny and smooth, it was relatively simple to pass the girl’s death off as an accident, a tragic end to an otherwise perfect day, thereby allowing the killer to think they’d got away with it. Because, for the moment, there was nothing to be gained from showing his hand. Cynically Orbilio had wondered how many other murderers had ‘got away with it’ over the years, their inconvenient spouses slipping and, oh dear, breaking their necks? Uncomfortable with the answer, he’d concentrated on his search of the girl’s meagre quarters.

‘How can you be sure it wasn’t an accident?’ Claudia had asked, and his answer flowed without need for concentration.

‘I’m willing to put my job on the line that our Coronis was paid to take that early morning walk,’ he’d replied, ‘and that the bowl she carried was a prop.’ The subsequent discovery of two shiny gold pieces sewn inside the girl’s moth-eaten bolster sealed the matter.

The murderer needed a witness.

With hindsight, it explained Coronis’ nervousness, which was in the face of interrogation, rather than authority-not to mention her inability to look Claudia in the eye. Her best friend, a fat girl with rabbit’s teeth, swore black was white through gulping sobs that Coronis couldn’t-wouldn’t-have taken money to lie, that she was a hard and honest worker who wouldn’t say boo to a goose, but her final statement brought everything into focus. All she ever wanted, the friend had said, was to go home to Greece. While two gold pieces wasn’t enough to buy Coronis her freedom, Orbilio reflected as he made his way towards the fodder store, it was one hell of a good start.

So many times he had witnessed violent death-on the battlefield, on the streets, it was part of his job-yet he could not recall one single instance when the sight of the corpse had not moved him. Relentlessly and without fail, death diminished every last one. They were smaller, slighter. Even Fronto, whom he hadn’t even known. Diminished and cheapened. Perhaps that’s what happens when the soul departs? The shell is simply devalued?

Inside the fodder store, Coronis rested on a rude, wooden handcart, one stiffening arm over the side where it had fallen unchecked, small bronze coins for her eyes.

Not for Coronis oak wreaths or laurels, sacred myrrh or cinnamon. She would be burned on a pyre at night-this night-her unmarked, unmourned ashes buried in a field. No feasts, no mourning, no elaborate purification ceremony. Marcus Cornelius Orbilio slipped a silver denarius under her tongue to speed the oars of the ferryman and hasten her soul to Hades. There was no other way to tell her how sorry he was, how ashamed.

He heard the steward strike the gong for dinner and bowed reverently in the dusty barn.

On the other hand, he told her ghost, it was still within his powers to avenge her.

*

The deep reverberations of the dinner gong had not yet died in the air before Timoleon was out of his room and striding towards the dining hall, rubbing his hands together and whistling. Claudia watched him through the hole in her bedroom door that she’d made by wheedling a knot out of the woodwork, and when she was sure the atrium was empty she flitted across to his room.

Praise be to Juno and to hell with the cost, he’d left three good-sized lamps burning, the place was lit like a carnival. When she’d searched Barea’s quarters, all she’d had was one measly candle to work by and sustained broken two nails in the process. Here, it was a different problem. You could hardly find the bed for clutter, but the most striking aspect of the room was the portrait of the great man himself, a recent one to judge by the yellow hair, set against a backdrop of Corinth. Claudia supposed that was to remind him as much as anyone else of his supposed antecedents.