Her chin went up. ‘Are you still the same man?’

The truth was, I no longer knew. ‘I hope so.’

Helena let me suffer, but briefly. Staring at the floor, she said, ‘We will go to your father’s villa on the Janiculan.’

She started to rise. I went across to her; taking her hands in mine I forced her to look at me. ‘When I have finished, I will come and fetch you all.’

Helena tugged her hands free.

‘Helena, I love you.’

‘I loved you too, Marcus.’

Then I laughed at her gently. ‘You still do, sweetheart.’

‘Cobnuts!’ she snapped, as she swept from the room. But the put-down she had used was a habitual one of mine, so I knew that I had not lost her.

I had to bring this to a finish.

Petronius and I had told the man we would not kill him. We could never give him back, however. Capturing one of the spy’s agents was irreversible. So what happened to him next would involve more terror, cruel treatment and—soon, probably, though not soon enough for him—his death, even if it was not at our hands.

Petro and I had talked about a solution. We abandoned our efforts to extract information and made final arrangements. I had thought of a way to do this, so there would be no comeback.

I left the house, the first time I had been out for days. I went to see Momus. For an eye-watering sum, Momus fixed it up for me. I did not say who we wanted to put away so discreetly, or why; with his sharp grasp of a filthy situation, Momus knew better than to request details. When he wrote out a docket he just asked, ‘Are you telling me his real name—or shall I give him a new one?’

We still did not know who he was. He was so hard, he consistently refused to tell us. ‘Anonymity would be ideal.’

‘I’ll make him a Marcus!’ Momus jeered, always one for a joke in bad taste.

I was startled how easy it was to make somebody disappear. Anacrites’ man would be taken away from my house that night. The overseer who worked for the Urban Prefect was now expecting an extra body; when we delivered the Melitan, he would be infiltrated among a batch of convicts who were going for hard labour in the mines. This punishment was intended to be a death sentence, an alternative to crucifixion or mauling by the arena beasts. Protest would be pointless. Convicted criminals always claimed to be the victims of mistakes. Nobody would listen. No one in Rome would ever see him again. Chained with an iron neck-collar in a slave gang in a remote part of some overseas province, stripped and starved, he would be worked until it killed him.