Jail Bait by Marilyn Todd Read Free Book Online Page A

her.
    Yesterday. It was the boat she had taken out to the island.
    His hair still hung like drapes from that same central parting, and in the clarity of Aurora’s rosy rays, his muscles showed stark and rounded as he hauled on the oars.
    Then the movement stopped abruptly, and Claudia knew then that he’d been aware of her presence all along. For maybe thirty seconds he sat motionless before pushing the oars once more through the water, and in the pellucid light she saw a flash of white which could have been a smile, or then again might have been nothing more than a grimace of exertion.
    I’m tired, she thought. Weary. I need to lie down. But she made no move to leave, and the V of the grey rowboat’s wake grew fainter and fainter.
    Fifty feet below this spot, Cal’s twisted body had lain for how long before somebody noticed? An hour? Three? A stone dropped in Claudia’s stomach. Suppose he’d been trying to attract her attention? To warn her, say, about the bear? Might the accident have been avoided, had she stayed with him, or would he still have been tempted to leap on to the rail to show off?
    A frown puckered her brow. Surely if Cal had been treating this as a tightrope, he’d have wanted an audience…? Wait!
    The tiredness evaporated as Claudia grabbed the torch and, running now, retraced yesterday’s route. The secret doorway… Through the cave… Down the tunnel… Her bare feet crunched on the shingle as she sprinted to the spot where Cal’s body had lain. Now she knew what was so odd about it.
    Cal had not died here.
    With daylight supplementing the light from her torch, her suspicions were confirmed. There was no trace of blood on the stones. Of course not. The body had been brought here and arranged as though it had fallen, although the limbs had been rather too artistically placed for her liking. Someone had killed him by snapping his neck, and as an afterthought tried to make it look like an accident by smashing the bones of his face.
    Someone who knew the only person they had to fool was a doctor used to corns, rather than tumours. Someone familiar enough with Kamar to know he was too bone-idle to examine a corpse once life was extinct…
    Slowly this time, scouring the ground with her eyes, Claudia returned to the mouth of the tunnel and tears stung in her eyes. Cal had waited here, just as he promised, and she didn’t need to bend down to see that the rusty brown patch which discoloured the rock was his blood.
    ‘Damn you!’ She hurled the burning brand into the lake and heard the flame sizzle as it died. ‘Damn you, you murdering son-of-a-bitch!’
    She didn’t know who had killed Cal, she didn’t know why, and what’s more, she didn’t give a toss for the reason.
    All Claudia knew, so help her, was that she’d unearth the bastard who murdered this boy and, by the gods, she’ d make him pay for his crime.

VIII
    As dawn broke across the seven hills of Rome, its residents braced themselves for revelations of an altogether different kind. Are those spots, or just a bruise where she fell over? Are you off your food from fever, or was it curdled milk which made you queer? In every household, from the richest to the squalid, families lined up to inspect one another for the symptoms of the plague, because with seventy more souls ferried over the Styx every day, they needed reassurance they weren’t going to be on the next boat.
    For Marcus Cornelius Orbilio, trudging down from the Capitol, he was simply too bone weary to care. His eyelids, he was sure, could double as scouring pads, every muscle he owned cried out for rest. Forty-two hours had passed since his last proper sleep, his stubble itched and the soles of his feet felt like they’d been beaten with paddles. He needed a drink. He knew that he shouldn’t, that his brain and digestion were shot all to hell, but Mother of Tarquin, what he wouldn’t give for a drink!
    In the shadow of the Temple of Concord, he glanced across to the