There were cupboards and clothes chests. A long footstool, probably repositioned neatly after the fracas, stood by the open side of the bed.

The bed was a noble size, not some scrimped single cot, but plenty of room for two people to sleep, or do whatever else they chose. They cannot have envisaged violently dying in it together.

I propped myself against the opposite wall, moving to one side to avoid squashing Perseus making a manly approach to a monster. It might be a painting, but the gritty Greek hero had a very big spear and he wasn’t going to get ideas about my resting posterior.

Although no sign remained of the crime that took place here, I tried to imagine it, to hear the sudden onslaught of noise and confusion, to feel panic giving way to outright terror, to envisage the dead couple as they had been discovered afterwards, lying on that bed.

Were they cowering together? Out-flung? Curled up foetally? I wondered if they had been awake, or if they woke when their room was invaded, or were they killed before they understood what was happening? With two to be despatched, it was likely that one did realise what happened first to the other. Was it dark? Were there lamps? Did the criminals bring lights of their own? From what I knew so far, neither Aviola nor his wife had time to make any escape attempt. Neither managed to scramble off the bed. Their killer or killers would have dealt with the nearest victim, then leaned across the warm corpse to kill the other. I guessed that Mucia Lucilia, the weaker victim, was second. She may have shrunk against the backboard in terror while she heard Valerius Aviola being choked. Then came her turn. She, poor woman, would have known what was coming.

When I married years ago, I deliberately chose a marriage bed that was not designed with one solid side like the back of a couch. Otherwise, one of you is always having to climb out over the other person. It is so much more convenient to give both partners free exit on their own side of the bed, much more convenient during marital tiffs. Besides, it saves a feisty woman having to spell out for her beloved that she is not allowing him the access side. Which will come as a big shock to him, and inevitably leads to one of those tiffs I mentioned.

Then, too, when someone thinks they have heard a noise at night, the wife who stays in bed does not want to be crushed by enormous feet while her ridiculous husband insists on going to investigate. Or again when he comes crashing back, after he has found nothing.

But what about when the suspicious noise turns out to be a real emergency?

What if you don’t hear intruders until they burst in, rush at you and tighten a rope around your throat?