I munched a bite but did not dally. Still leading a tired Dromo, I skirted around the southern side of the Palatine, capped with its summit-top burden of marble palaces. We trudged past the apsidal end of the Circus Maximus, then kept going on the flat along the long western side, until we were below the part of the Aventine that held the Temple of Ceres. We climbed slowly up the hill, a short ascent but steep, then we crossed to the aediles’ office beside the squat old-style temple with its wide-set thick pillars and its air of Greek disdain.

As we completed that last part of our journey, I felt a twinge of homecoming. Why should this be? There were the same dusty tenements and introverted private mansions as on the Esquiline, the same teeming stalls and bars, the same colourful crowds in the street. Yet even the taste and smell of the air seemed different. I found myself coughing mildly, before my lungs became acclimatised. It was still June, so the roses that grew in enclosed gardens and the lilies in sun-baked doorstep pots were zapping out pollen at their top rate. The bakers, fishmongers and greengrocers arranged their loaves, sardines and vegetables in special Aventine patterns. Street cries had a new ring. When Aventine dogs chose rats and litter to bark at, they woofed from shallower lungs. Working on the largest, highest hill in Rome, Aventine mules developed a special wheeze. Some of the people had it too. You could hear it when they cursed, every time they made a bad judgement while crossing a road where the dung was deep.

Home. I was home. I realised that although this case had intrigued me, I had not enjoyed working in what had been somebody else’s house, far from my base, a stranger in the neighbourhood. I yearned for my own apartment, containing my own things. However much I derided my own folk, I was longing to be back among them. I wanted the laundry where they still had a tunic and sheet of mine, the bakery and bath house where I had built up customer goodwill, the caupona run by my relatives. Once the rest of them returned from the coast, I wanted to be among my own family in our riverbank town house.

I did not regret working for Manlius Faustus. I would do it again, if ever he asked me. I knew, as a woman, that was a distinct possibility. He had a germ of interest in me that would drag him back. Even so, it would be better if I could somehow turn in this commission with a satisfactory final report.

I was feeling low, as if I had lost my confidence.