‘Do you have any paper on you?’
‘Oars are made of wood, as a rule,’ he said.
‘But I need to send a letter,’ she protested. To warn an old woman. Just in case.
‘You need to sober up.’ He grinned, and she didn’t see what was so funny. Croesus, what time was it she stumbled into bed? Dawn was breaking in the east, she remembered that, and the something hot and horrid which had twisted inside her as she recalled the fifty-foot colossus, Memnon, who sings to his mother, the dawn. For an instant, Claudia could almost hear the peacocks ‘rrrow, rrrow’, could almost smell his valerian and roses wafting on the sultry air. This morning Tarraco would not be around to hear Memnon sing. No longer could he spin his magic on a dead man’s island, or suck up to wealthy women in Atlantis…
Unexpectedly her vision blurred, and a lump formed in her throat. Dammit, she should be glad she’d never feel the charge which shot through her veins when his hands latched over her wrists or watch his long mane shining in the sunlight. The same damned mane he used like a tool, one moment to veil his expression, another to tie back with a long, scarlet fillet ‘It must be one lulu of a hangover,’ Orbilio remarked cheerfully, hauling on the oars. ‘You look as though you’re chewing a wasps’ nest.’
‘Then bee quiet and let me get on with it.’
They rounded a sharp jutting point and suddenly green eyes loomed up, not black, bringing back memories of a cave, a tunnel, a hundred whispered secrets…
Hurry, Marcus, hurry. Get me away from this place. So jumbled were her thoughts, her fears, her vivid recollections that Claudia was taken aback when Orbilio pulled up at a small rocky beach beside a stream which danced down a gully to disgorge into the lake. She looked upwards, where the hill rose sharply, pines and birch and juniper and hawthorn, dense and seemingly impenetrable. Claudia frowned. ‘Where’s the horse?’
‘Try to exercise a modicum of restraint.’ Orbilio laughed. ‘Your humble servant has not yet secured the painter and you’re asking-’
She was immediately contrite. Heavens above, he’d risked his reputation to do this thing for her, the least she could do was let him get his breath back. Helping him heave the boat ashore, she watched him lug a heavy basket out from under the seat. Drusilla! Good grief, in her panic she’d forgotten all about her cat or the packing. Idly wondering what tactics this intrepid investigator had used to lure Drusilla into a strange basket, Claudia scrutinized the sky. Clouds hung low, like a grey canvas awning, trapping heat which grew stickier by the minute. There was a rumble, grumble growl in the distance. The Titan rattling his chains.
‘Great spot for a picnic,’ Marcus said, chasing the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand.
‘Excuse me?’
‘It was you who said you could eat a horse, remember?’
‘What I said was… ’ Claudia’s voice trailed off. That’s not Drusilla in the basket? ‘W-what about the tribune?’ Marcus shot her an amused sideways glance. ‘You wanted him along as well?’
‘Not exactly.’ Claudia scratched her head. Well, this rather changes matters. Maybe she wasn’t wanted by the army, after all? At least, not yet. Of course, had it not been for this dire hangover, she’d have realized long ago that Tarraco would leave no trace of anything behind him. ‘Why the sudden urgency?’
‘This, of course.’ He tapped the wicker basket. ‘I’m starving, aren’t you?’
Actually, now you come to mention it…
‘Besides,’ he said, spreading out a selection of cold cuts, wine cakes, cheeses, fruit and some fresh-baked steaming pies, ‘this is one place where we can talk openly without risk of being overheard.’
‘Funny you should say that.’ Claudia sank her teeth into the crumbly pastry of a venison pie and decided now was as good an opportunity as any to re-evaluate the situation. Win him over. Make him understand. Perhaps.
Far out on the waters, fishermen were casting their nets. ‘Because,’ a trickle of sweat ran down her neck, ‘I have a tiny confession to make.’
‘You know, that place,’ Orbilio said, perching on a square, flat chunk of rock and nodding backwards to Atlantis, ‘reminds me of a snowscene. Snow is nothing but pretty frozen water until you scoop it up and make a snowman. Then it becomes something altogether different.’
Excitement stirred in Claudia’s blood. But at base it’s still snow, she thought, consigning her confession down a mental shute. ‘What if I tell you,’ she said, licking the last vestige of gravy from her fingers, ‘there might be a connection between certain seemingly isolated incidents? Deaths, for instance, which have been dismissed as accidental, but which might have had a more sinister motivation?’
And before his eyebrows raised themselves up off their elbows, she launched into the rumour surrounding the woman who wore red, the silversmith, the lady in the mud room and expected him to laugh, pass it off as idle speculation, and say the same could be true of oysters, and there was a vast difference between a grain of grit and an iridescent pearl. Except he didn’t. He merely scooped up a handful of pebbles and began skimming stones across the water.
‘Why don’t you just marry me and have done with,’ he said mildly. ‘It would cut out so much duplication, minimize the workload-’
‘It’s your brain which has been minimized,’ she snapped, reaching for a wine cake. ‘Goddammit, Orbilio, I’ve just told you Atlantis is nothing short of a bloody murder factory and all you’re concerned about is getting your leg over.’
‘So was that a yes?’ Orbilio skipped another half a dozen stones before swivelling round to face her. She mashed the wine cake underneath her heel and wished it was his nose. ‘I notice,’ he added, crossing his feet under his thighs, ‘you made no mention of a young man in his prime who falls fifty feet in the middle of the afternoon and no one sees it happen.’
As though an unseen hand had added a pile of logs to some celestial fire, the temperature on the lakeshore seemed to soar. Plucking a white arabis, Claudia began to strip the petals off. She wished they were his ears.
‘You have to admit,’ he grinned, ‘we make a damned good team.’
‘Whatever I do, you’re always against me.’
‘Oh, Claudia. If only that were true.’ Marcus unfurled his legs and stretched full length on the rock, supporting his weight on one elbow. ‘Now, let’s go back a bit, to the part where I-rather foolishly with hindsight-thought that by bringing you to Atlantis, it would keep you out of trouble. I was rather hoping that with your, shall we say, natural curiosity-’
‘Insight.’
‘-you might be able to pinpoint some of the anomalies and clearly I was not disappointed. Now then,’ he rolled on to his back and folded his hands beneath his head, ‘suppose I tell you that the case I was working on in Rome involved the curious death of a woman who kept cats. Twelve of them, I recall.’
Claudia reached for a terracotta pot and lifted the lid. ‘Her bastard of a husband,’ she said, fishing out a peach preserved in honey, ‘strangled them.’
‘Which in itself is curious,’ he said. ‘Did you know he strung them up the day after she left home?’
The day after she left home. Claudia lobbed the peach stone into the trickling stream. Not the day he received news of her death…
‘His reply, when I tackled him, was not so much that he wasn’t anticipating her return as he didn’t give a damn about the consequences.’ Marcus sighed, and a wasp probed the lid of the terracotta pot. ‘Nothing could be proved, of course, I doubt it ever will, but once I began to delve, I saw a pattern forming. A whole series of untimely deaths surrounding this luxurious establishment, and out of the eleven deaths which have occurred in Atlantis over the past few months, on at least five occasions the victim’s death was premature and-’
‘They all had relatives who benefited financially.’
‘How did you know that?’
Claudia shooed the wasp away, then wiped her sticky hands on the grass. ‘Everyone who comes here is, for the main part, inordinately wealthy. It stands to reason, but there’s a problem.’ Her fingers prodded around in the honeypot until she found an apricot. ‘No one benefits from Cal’s death, his heirs are richer than he was. I’ve checked.’