I asked about working with Nicostratus. Apparently they hardly knew each other, but got on well. It was routine for a house to have two porters, since one could not stay alert both day and night. (‘Alert’? In my family, we reckon door porters are dopey at all times.) Phaedrus let slip that he himself was an incomer from Mucia’s household.

‘Really? It’s common on marriage for staffs to merge,’ I mused. ‘Sometimes they don’t gel, and that causes upsets.’

‘Oh, not us!’ maintained Phaedrus, looking innocent. Maybe the young men bonded. They were both in their twenties, Nicostratus slightly older. They could have palled up, talked about gladiators, discussed women (shared one?). A woman could well explain why Phaedrus was oblivious to noise that night.

‘So were you very upset when you discovered Nicostratus so terribly hurt? How do you feel about him dying today?’

His face changed then, showing true distress.

I let him go.

Who next? I chose the gardener.

Diomedes was short, lumpy in the body, big-eared and almost bald. He readily agreed that he was not over-taxed in his duties, though he claimed to hanker for the wider acreage of the country villa in Campania. At the Rome apartment he was a general handyman. He supplemented the water carrier, fetching extra buckets from the local fountain. He nailed things and cleared gullies. He went up ladders to wash shutters − which presumably meant he looked in through windows and saw room contents. He would have known the silver existed.

I told him Polycarpus had said Diomedes was asleep in the garden. ‘The robbers went through to the dining room, then the bedroom. So you are the person most likely to have seen them. What do you say?’

Diomedes said shamelessly that there had been wine at the feast, to which he and Amethystus helped themselves. So yes, they were slumped in a corner of the peristyle, but he bragged that both were completely ‘crocked’. They would not have woken if the robbers had trampled all over them and left boot-prints on their heads.

I bought the story. He was clearly a sloppy workman, yet I found him free of guile.

How trusting, Albia! You ought to know how that works: the ‘honest’ suspect makes a small confession − to hide a bigger one.

Amethystus obviously came next. Taller and leaner, he carried his years better than Diomedes. It could have been because he had lighter work indoors, although I noticed he had more scars from punishment beatings. As he told it, his life was hard. He not only mopped marble and swept up detritus, he was constantly moving furniture, fetching and carrying, and being sent on errands outside the home, usually for heavy goods that, poor thing, he had to transport unaided.