‘Myla was not guilty of murder.’ I won’t say wine makes me belligerent, though I had become decisive. ‘But I cannot exonerate the other slaves. The master and mistress of the house were killed while a bunch of them did nothing – nothing to intervene, nothing to try to save their owners.’

‘That’s what I can’t understand!’ declared Fauna, waving an arm so her cheap bangles jingled, a tintinnabulation of glass-eyed Cleopatra snakes and faux silver charms. ‘It’s natural to go and help. Surely anybody would?’

‘I suspect there was simply no time to react.’ Even awash with honeyed and fiery Caecuban, I could still try to be fair. ‘I learned just now that from the moment the shouting began to when the couple were discovered dead was a very short period.’

‘Fair enough then!’ Fauna liked rapid judgements.

‘I disagree. Even if they couldn’t stop it happening, they ought to have rallied to capture the killer afterwards.’ Galla could be thoughtful. Perhaps that explained why people had previously accused her of murderous schemes: they believed she had worked out a thoughtful plan to remove the couple …

I jumped and shifted restlessly. ‘So afterwards, what did happen to the killer? Wouldn’t they try to make a getaway? But how? Nicostratus was by the front doors, and there is no other way in and out. I know Nicostratus was there, because he let Libycus back in. Nobody was seen leaving. Polycarpus came down, which was just after the deaths, and he was spotted. There was a fixed number, smaller than usual, in the apartment. This says to me that all along the killer was one of those slaves.’

‘Well, that’s depressing!’ Galla was acerbic – and a pragmatist. ‘If my darling ex-husband had taken a grip instead of shilly-shallying, if he had sent them all to be sold at the right time, none of them would have been present to do him and Mucia in!’

‘I thought you didn’t like her,’ Fauna murmured.

‘Known her for years. She was a nice woman.’

I suggested, ‘Plenty of people have told me your late ex was a nice man.’

‘He had his good points.’

‘Many do.’

‘If you can overlook them farting in bed all night.’ Fauna spoke with such deep feeling we could tell it was from experience.

As Galla and I tried to keep straight faces, I said I had no need to ascertain whether Valerius Aviola suffered from night-time wind. The fact was, or seemed to be, that by staying in an apartment staffed by disaffected slaves, he had put himself in the classic position of ‘wrong place, wrong time’. That did not excuse what one of them did to him. Even though his policy of shying away from telling his slaves their fates outright may have caused the tragedy, neither he nor his bride deserved such violent, frightening deaths.

What were the slaves so worked up about anyway?