Dark Horse

Eight

Cooled by white marble and shaded by honeycomb screens, the great soaring atrium oozed peace and tranquillity. Fresh flowers scented the Senator's hall — roses, lilies and pinks. A fountain splashed prettily, birds with bright plumage trilled from their cage in the corner and servants glided silently in and out, while the strumming of a lyre filtered through from a room at the back.

Working for the Security Police, Orbilio had almost forgotten, until recently, what it was like, the indolent lifestyle into which he had been born. A lifestyle of seaside villas like this, where families could just up sticks and retreat for the summer, while his own time was passed scouring crime scenes and meeting informers in strange, secret places or trawling drinking dens and whorehouses in search of those creatures of the night who could help him unravel his latest investigation and bring the perpetrator to book.

'Marcus? Marcus, can it really be you?'

He spun round, his eyes widening in surprise and delight. 'Margarita!' He had forgotten the Senator had remarried.

'There was a time,' she said, linking her arm through his and drawing him towards the back of the house, 'when you were less formal. Called me Darling, Lover, Cherub-'

'That was a long time ago,' he reminded her as sternly as he could muster. 'You're a respectable wife and mother now, Margarita.'

'I was a wife and mother then, too,' she flipped back, 'and I'll kindly thank you not to call me respectable. Give me a kiss.'

He leaned down to plant a chaste kiss on her cheek, but Margarita clasped his face in her bejewelled hands and drew him down hard on her lips. He wondered how long it would be before he'd be allowed up for air.

'I'm investigating a series of burglaries which has been targeting wealthy establishments since Saturnalia,' he explained, once she'd finally released him. 'I gather your own house was a recent victim?'

Robbery was hardly his usual line of enquiry, but after eight months of getting nowhere and with the upper classes growing restless, Orbilio's boss had begun to feel the wind of change blowing underneath his high-backed office chair. Sort it out fast, the breeze was telling him, or there'll be someone else's butt on this cushioned upholstery. Orbilio didn't resent the routine enquiry. It made a change from rapes and murder, allowed him to investigate the horse doping business himself instead of delegating to others, and also, thanks to the intricacies of aristocratic lineage, many of the families involved happened to be his own relatives. Which gave him a perfect opportunity to catch up.

'The bastards took all my lovely jewels, darling. Come in here, and I'll tell you all about it over a jug of chilled wine. It's vintage Ligean, of course. You'll adore it.'

Margarita led him into a small chamber overlooking the sea, where shutters offered shade, coolness, silence — and total privacy. Lavender oil burned in a brazier, heroic scenes plastered the walls and a large, white cat snoozed in a basket. Orbilio noted that the wine and glasses were already in place on the table. Not for him. For anyone, he realized sadly.

In the three, maybe four years since he had last seen her, Margarita had lost weight. Gone was the voluptuous bosom, the dimpled cheeks, the unforced laugh which had attracted him so deeply when he was at a low ebb after his wife had walked out. Now, seeing the lines scoring her eyes, the dyed hair, the increased reliance on cosmetic aids, Marcus felt a pang of something he couldn't identify.

'Absolutely scrummy,' she said, pouring the wine. 'Colour of honeydew with just a hint of freshly mown hay and greengages in the bouquet.' She linked her arm through his and chinked glasses.

'When you say "all" your jewellery…?' Orbilio said, smiling, as his gaze took in the rich array of gold pendants, emerald earrings, silver tiara and bracelets, as well as pearl-studded hair combs.

'These little gewgaws are what I was wearing at the banquet the night we were robbed. They're all I'm left with, unless — ' with one deft movement, she undipped her left shoulder brooch — 'you want to search the premises more thoroughly?'

'Margarita, please.' His voice was hoarse. 'Cover yourself up, before someone comes in.'

'No one will come in,' she assured him, but his eyes told her that fear of disturbance wasn't the reason for the rebuff.

Marcus drained his wine in one swallow. Some things never change, he reflected, although he had forgotten, until now, how Margarita had favoured quick-release clothing. How she'd never bothered with underwear.

'Sex should always be spelt with three Fs,' was her motto. 'Frequent, fast and frivolous, darling.'

Now he understood the lines round her mouth, the hollows under what had, not so long ago, been bright eyes. He had hoped that remarriage to the Senator would have made her happy, let her find whatever she'd been seeking from life, and he watched impassively as she drew the fine embroidered linen over her naked breast and pinned back the brooch without a flicker of embarrassment in her hazel brown eyes.

'You don't know what you're missing,' she said, but he knew exactly. Casual sex, as Margarita was finding to her cost, is not the answer. It leaves a person aching and incomplete, wanting more from life than a succession of bleak hydraulic manoeuvres.

'I'm sorry,' he said, and he meant it. 'My philandering days are behind me.'

Dalliances where the soul plays no part were no longer the answer. As time passed, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio found he needed more. Much, much more.

'You're in love, darling.'

'I most certainly am not,' he protested.

'Who is she? Do tell. Do I know her?'

'Margarita, I'm here to talk about last month's robbery.'

'If you say so, darling.'

As she settled herself provocatively on a couch richly upholstered in a deep shade of scarlet, Orbilio let the wall take his weight. In the basket, the white cat began to snore softly. 'Tell me about the banquet.'

Her cherry-red mouth turned down at the corners. 'One party's much the same as another, darling. Nothing stands out.'

That was the problem, of course. In the twenty-eight robberies since Saturnalia, the overlap between guests and jugglers, dancers and musicians, caterers and slaves was enormous. No one and nothing stood out.

'These are sophisticated thefts,' he explained. 'Each job netted a tidy haul, but no one's tried to fence any of it. Where's the stuff going?'

'Perhaps you're chasing a thrill-seeker, who steals for the sheer hell of it?' Margarita ran her fingertip round the top of the glass until it let out a soft hum.

'A thrill-seeker with a warehouse to store the stuff in.' Marcus laughed, topping up both their glasses with the chilled wine. 'No, this has to be for pure profit.'

'I don't see how the scam could work without an outlet,' she said, letting her fingers brush his as he handed the glass back.

'Sooner or later I'd expect things to resurface,' he said, pretending not to notice. 'Then someone somewhere would recognize their own necklace in a shop in the Forum or see their rings on someone else's fair hand. Yet in eight months, nothing. Not one single lead.'

'Marcus, dear, this is all very interesting, and it's a real shame I won't see my lovely baubles again — there was a cameo I was particularly fond of, the one you bought me, remember? — but darling, at twenty-six don't you think you should consider adopting a more appropriate career?'

'Margarita,' he said, laughing, 'you are impossible.'

She stuck out her pretty pink tongue and he watched the light dance on the emeralds round her neck as she stood up and walked towards him.

'I'm serious, darling,' she whispered, coiling one arm round his waist. 'Your father was a highly respected advocate, both your brothers are in the law and, if you really want that seat in the Senate, that's where you should be, too. In court.'

'I often am,' he insisted softly, uncoiling the arm. 'Giving evidence for the prosecution.'

Hazel eyes rolled in mock exasperation. 'You know damn well what I mean,' she said, and somehow the arm was back. 'You want to swap your lowlifes for the high life again, settle down, raise a family.'

'I was married.'

'I know you were, darling, I helped you get over the bitch. But the Senate won't take you unless you're married, and funnily enough, I know just the girl. Sweet little thing, she'll give you boatloads of babies and I promise she won't run off with a sea captain from Lusitania and leave you broken-hearted like that other cow.'

'Since our hearts were never joined, there was nothing to break,' he said carefully. 'Humiliated is the word, I believe. Not broken-hearted.'

'Whatever,' Margarita murmured, entwining her other arm round his neck. 'But I know this girl, she's my niece-'

'Hold it right there.' He laughed. 'You, of all people, know I'll be buggered if I'll kow-tow to family convention with a second bloody marriage of convenience. Not when the first one caused such grief.' Past tense? Orbilio could tell Margarita as many lies as he liked, but the bottom line was, that marriage was causing grief still. 'When — if- I remarry,' he said, 'social class won't come into it. Love's all that matters. Without it, there are no foundations to build on.'

'Love!' she scoffed gently. 'When your foolish plebeian infatuation wears off, what will you be left with? I can tell you in one short word, Marcus. Isolation. Your peers won't respect you, the lower orders will see it as weakness, you'll be despised and ostracized on all sides. Duty, darling. Duty is what counts, because at the end of the day, duty is all there is.'

'Bullshit. I joined the Security Police because that's one place where I can make a difference. By rooting out vermin who undermine our society, I help make Rome a safer city to sleep in, which in turn stabilizes the whole Empire.'

'And this business you're engaged in at the moment? How exactly does investigating common burglary buttress the Empire, darling?'

'You're incorrigible,' he said, disentangling his curls. 'I'd have thought you, of all people, would be pleased that I'm assigned to this case, considering many of the targets are your own relatives.'

'Our own relatives,' she corrected. 'And I am, darling. If anyone can catch the culprit, it will be you. The Senator and I are well aware of your record. One hundred per cent success rate, so I'm told.'

'Ninety-nine,' he corrected, thinking of a certain young widow with vineyards in Etruria and principles nowhere to be seen.

'Your trouble,' Margarita breathed, 'is that you need a woman, Marcus.'

Goddammit, she was right, he did need a woman, but it was not Margarita he longed for. Whenever his loins stirred, it was at the thought of a girl with thick, dark curls streaked with the colours of an autumnal sunset which tumbled over her shoulders. A wild, unpredictable creature, who raged like a forest fire out of control, scorching everything within range. He pictured her long legs scissoring up the Forum, her laugh filling the whole room, her eyes blazing with passion, her magnificent breasts heaving like the ocean in winter. And there was only one woman like that. Claudia Seferius.

But he needed a wife, too.

Not, as Margarita suggested, as a good career move. It was true that the Senate would not accept him without one, but his reasons for wanting a wife was more for a soft, warm embrace to come home to at night than for ambition. He longed for someone to laugh with, to share his triumphs and his tribulations, as well as his bed. He wanted a wife, a best friend, a lover, someone to grow old and wrinkly with. But, most of all, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio longed to hear his house ring with the laughter of children. His children. And therein lay the problem.

For all his passionate arguments, he was a patrician whose family traced their ancestors back to Apollo himself. Could he really, when all was said and done, deny his children their birthright by marrying a woman from a lower social order?

Sadly, he knew the answer to his own question.

And the knowledge made him feel sick.

Outside, seagulls screamed as he ripped off the gold shoulder brooch. A tumble of embroidered linen cascaded on to the floor, and suddenly Orbilio was glad Margarita wore nothing but perfume under her gown.