Tiberius Claudius Laeta was a rising comet, experienced but still with a decade or two of conniving in him. His forenames indicated he had been a slave in the imperial house, freed under a previous emperor; from his age it would be Claudius. The imperial household had produced many senior bureaucrats, including my bugbear Anacrites, who had wormed his way up to be Chief Spy very quickly and, to me, quite unaccountably; he was the kind of light garbage that floats. Anacrites was younger than Laeta and had been freed by Nero—hardly a recommendation, to have that eye-rolling maniac think well of you.

‘You submitted a man’s petition, Watch Captain.’ Prepared for the meeting, he waved it at us.

‘Found in a murder victim’s baggage,’ Petro confirmed. ‘I assessed it as the dead man’s last words. Delivery seemed the decent thing.’

‘Yes, you explained—’ Laeta laid down the tablet abruptly, hoping to cut off bloody descriptions of the corpse. I made a grab to see what was written. Laeta was too refined to snatch the tablet back but watched jealously, like a man seeing his lover depart on an international journey.

The complaint was as Petro had described. The handwriting was decent, the language civil service Greek. If the author was not a professional scribe, he had certainly had general clerical training. One aspect surprised me: a tone of familiarity. ‘Had this man written in before?’

‘One of our regulars.’ Laeta sounded weary.

‘Classic aggrieved citizen?’

‘Let’s say, detailed!’ Free Roman citizens have the right to petition the Emperor. That did not mean Vespasian personally read every scroll. He thought he did. So did those who made petition-writing their hobby. In truth, officials like Laeta censored out the batty ramblings of obsessives, at the same time as they were checking for unhinged threats against the Emperor’s person and simple-minded do-gooders offering religious advice.

‘Bit of a menace then?’ Petronius asked, more mildly than me.

Laeta was too professional to insult a member of the public. His duty required him to be fair, to defend the high principle of equal access to the Emperor. ‘On the one side—’ elbows on the table, he turned back his left hand as if holding up a market weight, ‘—he has the right to campaign. And on the other—’ he balanced the hypothetical weight with his other hand, ‘—resources are limited, so we just cannot investigate every perceived problem.’

Perceived said a lot. No wonder Laeta looked relaxed. He perceived he could ignore such stuff.

‘Did this fellow always make the same complaint?’ I asked.