Petronius had cursed him for a piece of offal—but he managed to reserve this view until he was alone. Perhaps the guild master would come good. Wrong. It took him no time to ‘consult his members’—in other words, he had not bothered. He said he had no member of that name on his current list and nobody had ever heard of Volusius. He declared the lad must have been an impostor. Petronius asked why would anyone ever lower themselves to claim fraudulently that they thrashed schoolchildren for a living? The guild master offered to demonstrate his big stick technique. Petro left, not hastily but without lingering.

The vigiles cohorts keep lists of certain undesirable professions (mine, for instance), though teachers are excluded. Impersonating a teacher, as the master had suggested, ought to be illegal but there were no lists for that either: probably because the pay was so low, fraud was in fact so unlikely.

Rubella still refused to allow Petronius to leave Rome. So by the time our meeting broke up, I had volunteered for another trip to Antium, to reinterview people at the bar where the escaped Volusius had turned up screaming for help ten years ago. If the bar was still there, which Petronius doubted, someone surely would remember a hysterical youth falling on the counter while screaming he had been abducted and scared witless. Even in the country, that must be more unusual than calves being run over by hay wagons.

The bar was there. It had been sold to a new owner who knew nothing about the incident. His clientele had changed. They knew nothing either.

Or so the bastards told me.

I pointed out quietly that if they left these killers on the loose, one of them could be a body in a shallow grave one day.

‘Never!’ a wall-eyed sheep-stealer assured me. ‘All of us know better than to accept an invitation from Claudius Pius to go for a little walk down a marsh track to see his brother’s spear collection.’

‘Who mentioned Claudius Pius?’ I asked in a level tone.

He rethought rapidly. ‘You did!’ he snapped. ‘Didn’t he?’

They all agreed that I had done so, despite it being obvious I had not. So against expectations I had discovered who lured away the victims—though this feeble conversation would not count as proof.

‘Anyone seen Pius around here recently?’

Of course not.

‘So tell me about “seeing the spear collection”. How do you know that was the lure?’

‘It’s what the teacher said.’

‘I thought you knew nothing about the teacher?’

‘Oh no, but that’s what people around here all reckon.’

‘Anything else people around here know? Which brother’s spears were on offer, for instance?’

‘Oh Nobilis, bound to be. Probus has some, but nothing by comparison.’

‘Any recent sightings of Nobilis?’

No. They said anyone who saw Claudius Nobilis would quickly look the other way.

‘So what exactly are you scared of?’