A flotilla of ducks trod the furious waters of the Tiber. Claudia picked up a small yellow cake and crumbled it for the hungry birds, and when the warden came running over, silenced his protests with a look that would have raised blisters on steel.
‘Ready?’ Orbilio asked.
She nodded.
Chalk and ash are a must on any woman’s make-up shelf, and whilst Claudia used cosmetics only rarely (perhaps a little antimony round the eye, a touch of ochre for the lips) she always kept a decent stock to hand. Watching Marcus Cornelius take a dab of ash and a flurry of chalk mixed with water from the river and rub it into his eye socket was quite a revelation. He looked as sick as any of the poor unfortunates clustered round the shrine…
‘Another Runaway Success for your scrap book,’ he grinned. ‘With you faking illness on this scale, the old trouts won’t even ask questions.’ He rinsed away the paste and was walking down the path towards the Temple of Vediovis before he added, ‘He’s the lowest form of pondlife.’
‘Is that the title of your autobiography?’
A muscle twitched in his cheek. ‘Arbil,’ he said.
‘This is the man you want me to visit? Consider me flattered.’
Unlike Aesculapius, hooded and cloaked, Vediovis had no qualms about nudity. Apart from a cloak slung over one shoulder, he stood tall and proud in his nakedness, his head thrown back, his pelvis thrust forward as he invited admiration. Claudia duly obliged.
‘The trouble is,’ Orbilio said, leaning against the dark, fissured bark of an alder and sombrely folding his arms, ‘there’s no law against what he does.’
Claudia pulled faces at a group of children waving from the river bank. ‘And what does he do on his farm, this Babylonian?’
‘He’s a flesh peddlar,’ he snarled. ‘On a huge scale, taking babies from middens and rearing them for re-sale.’
Claudia’s hand froze in mid-waggle, to the great delight of the children who thought it was part of the game. But already she’d forgotten them, seeing instead four sinister figures picking over the middens by torchlight. ‘You mean he grows those poor kids like cabbages?’
Orbilio made a kind of snorting sound. ‘And Penelope’s baby was one of them,’ he rasped. Several emotions cantered over his face before he lashed them under his control. ‘So will you do it?’ he asked quietly. ‘Will you help me on this, Claudia?’
She reached up and ran her fingers through the unfurling leaves of a chestnut tree. ‘I might,’ she answered back, her eyes fixed firmly on the puffs of clouds scudding high above the branches. ‘But remember, Marcus Cornelius. The earth’s axis turns on trade.’
*
Just as Orbilio had predicted, the old boilers fell for the fake illness hook, line and sinker. Which is not to say there wasn’t a hitch.
‘Arbil?’ Annia gasped, when Claudia confided the scheme. ‘I’m not going back there!’
Claudia had been prepared for this, because Orbilio had explained the link between the murder victims and the slave trader-although that was all he’d been able to establish, he admitted wearily. Granted his cousin knew the victims and was able to put names (if not addresses) to the girls who’d shared the dormitory, but Annia, too, was baffled why they-and indeed she-had been targeted. Now, watching Annia smooth her fine, white pleats into place, Claudia suspected that, although Orbilio had not said as much, he was banking on their visit establishing some form of connection. Without it, he was merely winking in the dark and Claudia knew that, like a Molossan hunting hound, the Boy Wonder was not one to give up on a scent. If the motive lay with Arbil and his vile baby farm, the sudden appearance of Annia could not fail to unsettle the killer-and you didn’t need a Greek philosopher’s brains to know he’d be hamstrung in so public a place, and dared not strike in the open.
‘I know you’re scared,’ Claudia said-the danger lay not at Arbil’s, but once Annia returned to the city, by which time Supersleuth would be around to protect her-but before she could begin to explain, the girl’s antecedents burst free.
‘Excuse me, Claudia! We Orbilios are not intimidated by anyone!’ They were standing in Claudia’s bedroom, and Annia had her nose in the jewel casket. ‘Especially greasy foreigners. Do you mind if I try this on?’ She held a filigree torque to her neck.
Claudia phrased her next question carefully. ‘Don’t you want to help your room-mates, then?’
‘Why should I?’ Speedwell blue eyes goggled in genuine amazement. ‘I never liked them, they never liked me, there’s no point in pretending otherwise-whoops.’ The ring she’d been examining rolled under the stubby legs of the maplewood chest. Dropping to her knees, she fumbled around in the dust. ‘They were beastly to me, but that,’ a spider scuttled out, but no ring, ‘I suppose, comes from lack of breeding.’ She stood up and brushed her hands. ‘Naturally, I rose above it.’
Naturally.
