Secrets of the Dead

past the Villa Borghese. Popular with lovers,’ he added, for the benefit of the teenagers.

‘Thanks.’

Abby found a taxi opposite the Colosseo metro station. At half-past five on a Friday evening, the Roman traffic was locked tight. It took twenty minutes just to get into the Via Flaminia. She sat on the back seat, gripping the door handle and staring straight ahead. Rain began to bead on the windscreen.

He dedicated this arch as a sign of his victory. The inscription pointed to the arch, but the arch itself was just a symbol, a sign pointing to the battle it commemorated. It was a dim hope, even she could see that – a mad detour on a fool’s errand. But she had to try.

The bridge stood on the northern edge of Rome, just where the Tiber’s concrete embankments took over from nature. She paid off the taxi and advanced on to the bridge. Thick trees crowded the riverbank; ripples gouged the surface of the river where it ran fast over shoals. If you tuned out the apartment blocks and market stalls beyond, you could almost imagine it as it must have been in Constantine’s day, a wild place beyond the city.

The ancient Romans had built it as a road bridge, but modern Romans preferred not to trust their traffic to its 2,100-year-old arches. She had it almost to herself, except for a few businessmen walking back from work, and a pair of teenagers giggling in front of her. As she watched, they knelt together in front of a rail at the edge of the bridge. The boy took a padlock from his pocket and locked it on to the rail. He said something, and the girl kissed him. Then they both stood, and with one arm around the girl the boy threw the key over his shoulder into the river.

Curious, Abby went over and looked at where they’d been. Locked on to the rail was a gleaming, shaggy coat of literally hundreds of padlocks. Some had hearts and words scrawled on them in black marker pen: messages of love, passion, perpetual devotion. None of them, so far as she could see, was for her.

A tide of loneliness washed through her. She stared at the steel wall the padlocks made, a barrier locking her out. All those people tight together in their loves, and a lonely woman standing there because an anonymous text message might have told her to.

Mark’s right, she thought sourly. I do need a psychiatric evaluation.

She walked back across the river. Halfway along, she caught herself dawdling, clinging to the hope that someone might yet tap her on the arm, sweep her up like a lost teenager and give her the key she needed. Idiot. The bridge was empty. Even the teenagers had gone home. She redoubled her pace and wondered where she could catch a tram back into the city.

As she stepped off the bridge, she noticed a black Alfa Romeo sedan parked on the kerb, engine running. A man jumped out of the passenger seat.

‘Abigail Cormac?’ He had an accent, probably not Italian. Something more guttural. He was wearing a black rollneck jumper and black jeans, with a long black leather coat and black leather gloves. ‘I need to speak to you about Michael Lascaris.’

Michael. The name was a narcotic, overriding all caution. As if hypnotised, she carried on walking towards the car. The man smiled, baring teeth that glinted with gold. He was nodding, encouraging her forward like a cat into a cage. The black butt of a pistol bulged against his stomach where it stuck out of his waistband.

And suddenly she saw how stupid she’d been. I can help, the message had said, and she’d believed it because she was desperate. But people who wanted to help didn’t send you cryptic messages you couldn’t reply to, or drag you halfway across Europe on an obscure treasure hunt.

She turned to run, but she was too close and too slow. The man was beside her in a single step. A black arm wrapped around her, pinning her arms; a second locked itself around her throat and forced her down into the car.

A voice in her ear said, ‘If you struggle, we will kill you.’

XIV

Italy – Summer and Autumn 312 – Twenty-five years earlier …

AND THEN THERE were four.

Galerius died last year, an embarrassing death, which Constantine went to great lengths to publicise. His bowels rotted from the inside out; a tumour grew inside his genitals until (they said) he looked like a man in a permanent state of arousal. Worms infected his body, so that his attendants could lay a piece of fresh meat against his wound and pull it away crawling with maggots. The Christians were delighted.

But Constantine still has battles to fight. The marriage alliance with Fausta has borne neither children nor peace with her usurping family. Last year, old Maximian tried to turn Constantine’s army against him. Constantine forgave his father-in-law; Maximian showed his gratitude by trying to stab him while he slept, but the plan was betrayed. At that point, Constantine lost patience and suggested Maximian drink poison.

But the son, Maxentius, Constantine’s brother-in-law, still occupies Rome and all of Italy, unrecognised and unrepentant. With Galerius dead, Constantine can afford to turn his attention south.

The priests say we shouldn’t go. They went through all the correct procedures: killed the animals in the prescribed manner, dissected the organs, tested the evidence. The guts said it was a bad time for a campaign. Constantine said: what do dead animals know about war? Maxentius has the bulk of his army in Verona, on the north-eastern frontier, expecting an attack from the Balkans. An attack from the north-west will catch him where he’s unprepared. ‘Show me where it says that in the entrails,’ says Constantine.

‘My brother always does what the soothsayers recommend,’ Fausta observes. It’s hard to tell if it’s a rebuke – or a suggestion. Five years on from the wedding, the ripeness of adolescence has started to go hard, like a date left in the sun. When her father tried to have Constantine murdered, it was she who came to the bedchamber and warned her husband. Now we’re tilting at her brother, and those long-lashed eyes are as blank and innocent as ever.

It’s a miracle you were able to kill the old man with poison, I think. That whole family have it running through their veins.

And so we cross the Alps, like Hannibal six centuries earlier. Constantine proves a better augur than his priests. At Segusio, the gateway to Italy, we set the town on fire with the garrison inside it. The lesson’s not lost on the