No, I do not care for priests. My father taught me to distrust them, whether they are members of the public holding office to further their ambition, or devious professionals with filthy morals and an eye for behind-the-cult-statue liaisons.

Yes, some priest must have upset my papa badly. Though Didius Falco can take against members of other professions just because they have a wart or are wearing pea green. Actually I agree with him over green.

Enough of this rambling – another thing my father taught me. You are supposed to witter on about nothing important, while the answer to your problem pops into your mind.

Look, even a brilliant informer can believe in crackpot routines. Father had them. I had them. You do your work your own lousy way, legate, and leave us to solve our cases in ours.

I admit, I had hit the low point here: that moment in an inquiry when frustration and even boredom threatens to make you abandon it. I had to remind myself that I was hired to report to Manlius Faustus that the slaves at the temple could be proven innocent. The truth threatened to be that I could not prove it – and maybe they were not.

It seemed impossible to say that any of the refugee slaves, except the deceased porter Nicostratus, were certainly not involved in strangling their master and mistress. Even Nicostratus could have been part of a conspiracy to steal the silver.

I kept returning to him. Even allowing a scenario where Aviola and Mucia were killed by their slaves for one of the normal reasons slaves turn against masters, I was unable to explain the first attack that night. However I looked at it, what happened to Nicostratus was an anomaly. Who killed him? Who beat him up so violently he died of his injuries – and why?

I supposed it was feasible that the other slaves conspired against Aviola and Mucia, but Nicostratus remained loyal to the couple and refused to join in. So the others may have turned on him. Perhaps they carried him away with them because if he regained consciousness he could tell the vigiles what the rest had done? But that was no surety because he could still have told the temple authorities.

If the other slaves had murdered Aviola and Mucia, they cannot have been tender-hearted. Why in that case did they not finish off Nicostratus straightaway?

Another curious aspect: why was Libycus, Aviola’s bodyslave, out of the house? If he was part of a conspiracy, what was the point of him being off-scene when the killing took place? Had he too objected to killing Aviola, whom he had served so intimately for so many years? Did somebody suggest he go and see his friends in the shop, to get him out of the way?