Jail Bait by Marilyn Todd Read Free Book Online Page B

Imperial Palace and cursed his boss under his breath. Bastard. Simply because Orbilio had dined with a select group of senators, two of them personal friends of the Emperor, and his superior officer hadn’t been invited! Never mind these were Orbilio’s relatives, that he had no say in who was or wasn’t asked. In his boss’s eyes this was a snub, a sharp reminder that, in class terms, the Head of the Security Police ranked lower than his patrician employee and thus, to keep the upstart in his place, he’d hauled Marcus Cornelius away from the murder he was investigating and assigned him instead to round-the-clock guard duty outside the Imperial Palace.
    That he could justify the humiliation by citing the dire consequences of the plague entering the imperial bloodstream made it doubly hard for Orbilio to swallow, because on that particular issue at least he backed his boss to the hilt. Rome had enough on her plate, she daren’t lose Augustus!
    It was only seven weeks back, remember, that Agrippa died so unexpectedly, depriving the Emperor in one single blow of best friend, son-in-law, his finest general—and, most importantly, his heir. Rome had become a bucking bronco, with revolution, anarchy and sedition jostling to jump in the saddle, and no one left to hold the reins. Jupiter alone knows what backlash might unfold. No, Augustus’ life needed careful guarding at the moment, that went without saying, but the Palace watch was a job for the Praetorian Guard and, unlike the Head of the Security Police, Augustus was no snob. He wouldn’t give a toss who kept the plague out.
    Rather, Orbilio felt, being a red-blooded bloke himself, the Emperor might be sympathetic towards what Marcus’ boss would undoubtedly call deserting his post…
    Glancing across to the Senate House, Marcus felt a sour taste in his mouth. Accusations of desertion would not sit well with his ambitions to take a seat one day, so he had to play this right. One step wrong and it’s no use shouting about the double standards of putting the Senate in unofficial recess until May, so the politicians can escape the plague. The mud would stick and Orbilio’s chances of crossing that most illustrious of thresholds would be squashed for ever. On the other hand. His step quickened. Minor slurs could be forgiven, providing he solved enough cases—and naturally, the higher their profile, the higher the odds. Well, the profile of what he’d been working on (leastways until his boss got the hump) could outstrip the Great Pyramid of Egypt. And murder was just the tip of the pyramid…
    Once across the Forum, Marcus kept to the diminishing shade of the Via Sacra. The beads of sweat which had linked hands round his belt told him today would be another stinking inferno and already, even at this early hour, fumigatory fires burned the length and breadth of the city. Orbilio did not think that, in this heat, they helped.
    How long, he wondered, before the contagion ran its course and the Forum could reflect a different mood? Lately, in place of strings of roped ostriches kicking up mayhem, scrawny pigeons pecked in the dust, with no children to chase them away. Gone were the dancers, the acrobats, the fire-eaters in their gaily coloured costumes. Silent were the taunts of the bare-knuckle fighters, the strident cries of the hucksters, the hup-hup-hup of the litter bearers. For the past week, heads wagged low in sombre consultations with fortune-tellers while augurs studied the stars, the entrails of sheep, even the flight patterns of owls in search of encouraging auspices. The sun might shine, thought Orbilio, but the light had gone out in the city. Swerving past a man up a ladder fixing his gutterspout, he glanced down a sidestreet and saw yet another handcart wheeling away a tiny body concealed by a sheet and heard that most heartrending of sounds—the muted sobs of a father bereaved.
    ‘Shit.’
    As Orbilio pressed on up the Velian slope, the lump in his throat