‘Albia is bound to deny it.’ I had not asked her. Why invite tears? Indeed, why give your daughter a reason to hurl abuse at you? ‘He’s been away a lot, which is one good thing,’ I went on gloomily. ‘We ran into him a couple of times when we were travelling, but as far as I know, they just wrote to each other.’

‘Oh letters!’ scoffed Petro darkly. He did not have my literary leanings. ‘Soulmates, eh? Falco my friend, you are in deep donkey shit.’ He handed me his beaker again, though it was a joyless panacea. ‘What’s his new wife like? A looker?’

‘A spender.’

‘And a Greek prosecutor’s daughter?’

‘Guilty until proven innocent. We met her father in Athens. As a boozer he makes Bacchus look restrained.’

‘Jupiter and Mars!’ Petronius Longus viewed all lawyers as pests. Lawyers so easily demolished the criminal cases he put together; he ignored the fact that this feat was achievable because the vigiles’ definition of ‘proof’ was simply a man whose face they did not like who walked down a street where they happened to be. ‘How are the senator and his wife taking this?’

I laughed drily. ‘Considering all three of their children have now, without permission, taken a spouse who is either foreign or plebeian, Helena says Decimus and Julia are calm. They have to be careful showing opinions, because not only is the Hellenic bride living in their house with the captured Aulus, but her go-getting, influence-seeking, hard-drinking Athenian father came to Rome too. Of course he would do. A niche among the ruling class, with access to a wine cellar? His sole purpose in fixing up the marriage.’

‘The bastard!’

I shared Petro’s curse, then put my troubles aside and let him tell me his. He was stumped on a peculiar case: a family who went to their mausoleum to hold a funeral discovered that someone had broken in and dumped an unknown body. Foul play among the tombs was commonplace. Some people would have just chucked out the corpse for the crows, but this family was sensible enough to notice disturbing elements. It was the body of a well-kept man of mature age, not the usual young rape or mugging victim, and he was laid out in an odd ritual position.

‘Violence. Someone really enjoyed it.’ Petronius was very experienced. He knew when death had been caused by an unexpected drunken fury and when it had a perverted smell.

‘You think there will be other victims?’

‘Dreading it, Falco.’ He dealt with atrocity all the time, but never became inured to humans’ absence of humanity.

I told him if anyone could solve this case it was him, and I meant it. Then I went home to be ready for an early start next morning on the trip to my father’s villa.