Jail Bait Read Online Free PDF

filtered down from the colonnade above.
    ‘Cal?’ Louder she called up the tunnel, and when only a distorted echo answered back, Claudia felt a twinge of misgiving. In the same way she’d misheard ‘bear’ for ‘boar’, had she credited Cal with more depth than was actually present? Had he taken off after fresh quarry?
    Admittedly their acquaintance was brief, but the relationship had been plunged into immediate intimacy. He would come! Perhaps he was having trouble finding the ice? Yet the longer she waited, the more Claudia realized that, far from bridging the gap between youth and maturity, Cal had merely been acting in type. Bored and seeking to pass the siesta hour, how better than by making love with a stranger? Claudia’s cheeks reddened as she recalled the mintiness of his breath on her face…
    That, my girl, is what you call a narrow squeak. Which makes two this afternoon, if my arithmetic is correct.
    In the puncuated gloom of the underpass, Claudia smiled grimly to herself. At least it proved one thing, Cal standing her up. It proved he wasn’t a military spy, or he’d be here, keeping an eye on his suspect.
    Halfway up the tunnel, a scream cut short Claudia’s speculations. It came from directly above, piercing and shrill. Typical. Silly cow wakes up, totters out for a view of the lake, spots a dead dog floating past and it’s brought on an attack of the vapours. Claudia strode off up towards the cave. They’re all the same, these rich wives. Closeted in isolation, slaves doing this for them, slaves doing that, they’re never exposed to real life. Sure, they live in the country, but nature red in tooth and claw? Do me a favour. Yet still the silly bitch screamed.
    By now, though, curiosity was guiding Claudia towards the next hole in the rock face. What, exactly, was so gruesome that others now joined in the cacophony? She poked her head over the rough sill. Talk about a fuss over nothing. She rolled her eyes in disgust. The only thing floating in Lake Plasimene was water! She was about to withdraw when she heard footsteps on the foreshore. Men. Running. Shouting. Ghoulishly curious, Claudia craned her neck further.
    ‘Oh, no. Sweet Jupiter, please. Say it’s not true.’
    Tears filled her eyes as she stared at the shingle below. Say there’s been a mistake. That I’m wrong. Claudia shook her head again and again. But even by the time she’d shaken it dizzy, there was no mistaking the truth.
    The body which sprawled, twisted and bloody, was all too familiar. The blue linen tunic. The corn-coloured hair.
    She shivered and hugged her arms to her body, and then, in the pied seclusion of the very tunnel that he’d shown her, Claudia bade a silent farewell to Cal.

VI
    Sabbio Tullus surveyed his nephew (the one who was related by marriage to a second cousin of the Emperor’s wife), through well disguised distaste. A fleshy man himself, he considered rotundity an encapsulation of all things good, all things healthy both in mind and spirit, yet here he was facing a young blade twenty years his junior with a face like a weasel and dead man’s eyes.
    ‘Are you certain of this?’ Tullus asked, and when a rivulet of sweat ran down his backbone he was not sure it was entirely due to humidity.
    ‘Positive,’ the nephew replied, in that singular grey monotone of his.
    Tullus twisted in his chair, and trusted that the creaks were the basketweave, not his discomfort manifesting itself aloud. He reached for his goblet and gulped at the apple juice. Bloody quacks! Putting him on fruit juice and sherbets. What did they think he was, dying? They were only a few chest pains, for gods’ sake. Indigestion. Nothing to do with the theft from that bloody depository… When a second twinge clawed at his heart, it was the wine that he reached for. Bloody quacks. The liquor glowed inside him like a log fire on a February night and he leaned down to pat the wolfhound panting at his feet, its long, pink tongue lolling