Jail Bait

XXVII

‘A key?’ Even Tarraco could not disguise the amazement on his face. ‘How did you get hold of a key?’

‘Sssh.’ The soldier’s head had jerked up at the change in voice tone. Claudia waited for his interest to dwindle, and while she did so, patted herself on the back. She’d fooled the tribune, she’d fooled the amazon, she almost fooled the Spaniard…for who would suspect this mad March boxer, glassy-eyed, with drips of blackened blood around the nostrils, had previously been gutted, filled and sewn back up again?

‘Won’t Cyrus be looking for this?’ Tarraco said, fondling the heavy iron key.

Claudia dismissed his worries with an airy wave of her hand. Before she frogmarched Pylades to the garrison, she had excused herself, ostensibly to replace the ribbons in her hair, but in practice to slip a wax tablet into the voluminous folds of her robe. Having engineered the overturning of the tribune’s desk, taking an impression of the jailhouse key was child’s play and all that was required from there was a visit to the locksmith in the town. There was nothing for Cyrus to look for, because nothing was missing.

‘Why do you do this for me?’ Tarraco asked, his head tilting on one side. Outside the sun was sinking fast, turning the sky an ominous storm-coloured yellow.

‘There’s sufficient money inside that hare to buy you basic provisions for five or six days,’ she said, taking care to watch a cloud of midges dancing in the courtyard, ‘providing you sleep rough, I’m afraid. Too many coins, you see, and the hare would be suspiciously weighty.’

‘Why, Claudia?’

‘The silver bell you can sell. It might, if you’re lucky, buy you a passage back to Iberia.’

‘Hey.’ His voice was a whisper. ‘I ask you a question.’

A fluttering of wings beat inside her chest. ‘Because I don’t believe you killed Lais.’

‘You are in minority,’ he rasped, and her nostrils tingled with pine and woodshavings even above the smell of his coarse woollen tunic. ‘The evidence is overwhelming, is it not?’

‘I don’t believe you killed Virginia either.’

‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Damned pig-headed woman! She would take that boat out in the storm-she was like you.’ In the darkness of the cell, a flash of white showed clear. ‘Knows it all.’

‘Where-?’ She could barely speak for the lump in her throat. Tarraco was right. There would be no fair trial in Spesium. Cyrus would nail his hide to the wall. ‘Where will you go?’

As the setting sun snuffed out the last trace of twilight in the jail, Tarraco shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said simply.

Claudia swallowed hard. ‘I have to go,’ she said, and strangely her eyes appeared to be allergic to something in the cell, they’d begun to sting.

‘Claudia-’

‘Don’t say it, Tarraco,’ she whispered. Don’t say anything at all.

Outside, night had darkened the waters of Lake Plasimene and in the hills which cradled this idyllic paradise, foxes yawned and stretched and set off to hunt, leaving their newborn cubs curled up cosy in their dens. In ravines and woods and gullies, porcupine and badgers would be rooting in the undergrowth and in the reedbeds, melancholy frogs called and answered one another. Ribbit-ribbit. Bedeep. Ribbit-ribbit. Bedeep. The scents of flag irises and valerian, marsh mallows and wild allium mingled in the dense, trapped heat and a deer ventured down to drink.

Now what? Claudia asked herself. She had no stomach for food, but as she sat, chin in hands, on a fallen birch, she realized dinner would have long since been cleared away, the roast meats and fricassees served by liveried waiters while rose petals showered from the ceiling and flautists piped sing-a-long tunes. Even the kitchens would be quiet, the pots scrubbed out and turned upside down to drain, the oven fires raked.

Far in the distance, a jagged flash of white lightning flickered and then died.

Death.

Like Plasimene, death was all around her-Tuder, Lais, Virginia and Cal-and it was water, this water, which connected them. Tuder, out on his island. Virginia, found drowned in the lake. Lais, floating face down in the reeds. And, of course, Cal. Somersaulting, backflipping, cartwheeling Cal, found sprawled on the shingle beneath the sacred spring of Carya.

Gone.

Each and every one of them. And soon Tarraco, too, would be gone.

Why. he had asked. Why set me free when the evidence against me is overwhelming?

Well, that was the problem, wasn’t it? It was too overwhelming, too contrived. Like Cal, it didn’t feel right, and besides. That the Spaniard was capable of killing Claudia had no doubt. (Oh yes, this man could kill. Passion ran through every bone, every artery, every sinew.) But to take a life in anger is not the same as battering a woman over and over again, and most troubling of all was the way the corpse was discovered. Tarraco, had he killed his wife, would have either left the body where it lay and to hell with the consequences-or else he’d have weighted it down in the lake where it would have remained undiscovered for ever. It was almost as though Lais had been delivered to the foot race this afternoon.

An owl hooted in the sultry night. Claudia didn’t hear it.

I ought to go. I ought to warn Lavinia of my suspicions that she’s being poisoned, but even with that there was a problem. Who was the person who had fed Claudia the information about the rash of mysterious deaths in the first place? Who, with abominable cunning, made sure she linked up the string of innuendoes? That’s right, the old olive grower-and why should she do that? Why choose a fellow guest to load her suspicions on to, instead of Cyrus or Pylades? By her own admission, Lavinia lapped up every juicy story, embroidering them, as Ruth had pointed out, with details of her own. The old girl enjoyed gossip, she enjoyed mischief, she enjoyed being pampered-and from the way she acted after the death of her husband, it was also obvious Lavinia was a consummate actress. Add these together, and the foundations are laid for the fiction that her own life is in peril-could an old peasant woman ask for more? The wealth of attention, doctors and bureaucrats, the army-suddenly all solicitous. Fab and Sab running after her for once. Think of the commotion.

No, there was only one thing to do with the rest of the night, Claudia decided. Go get steaming drunk.