Nobody in Rome uses a household latrine if there is any alternative. They are disgusting. The man was given a bucket and a scoop to remove the contents; we sieved the sordid products of his labour. I helped. I don’t hang back. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about the household’s eating habits, until I feared I would never manage dinner myself again. What we produced was the usual: apart from fish and meat bones, vegetable husks and nut shells, horrible pot and bowl scrapings, dead rats, and enough human pooh for an army cohort, there was lost jewellery, oil lamps that had fallen in at night, fresco painters’ leavings that ought to have been taken off site, odd shoes, snapped styluses, tablets that could have been fascinating love letters or signifi-cant lists of property but which were too indecipherable now to be clues for me, and a big group of broken potsherds that must be the end result of the quarrels between slaves that I had heard about.

There was no silver. Still, it could not be called a waste of time. I had nothing else to do that afternoon. At least we would be leaving the apartment with a spotless, free-running home facility.

Manlius Faustus had sent a docket that his foreman brought me to sign on completion. I was able to certify that the search had been thorough. This must be a bluff on the aedile’s part. I could not decide whether he genuinely believed it would make the men more diligent if I was watching them – or if he thought ticking off the job on a waxed tablet would give me a laugh.

28

Failing to find that silver left me downhearted. It had to be key to the mystery. While it might yet turn up a few pieces at a time in some dodgy backstreet homeware shop, the longer those goblets stayed missing, the less chance we had of finding them and we were missing the big clue as to who came into the apartment and carried out the murders.

If the Rabirius gang never took the loot, I had to accept that the vigiles investigator Titianus had been right all along: this must be an inside job. I badly wanted to best Titianus. But suppose he was right and the slaves were guilty: what had they done with the items they stole? Those who fled surely did not rush through the dark streets to the Temple of Ceres carrying a sack full of rattling bullion.

Well, it was just possible. We would look really silly if the lost property had been hidden there in plain sight all along. I would ask Faustus, the next time he was in the Temple, to double-check the display cases of gifts to the goddess. People deposited treasure to win themselves divine favour (or at least the glutinous thanks of the priests).