‘Usually. He worried over law-and-order issues. He was agitated about a large tribe of petty criminals who should, in his opinion, be exterminated. The fact is,’ Laeta informed us smoothly, ‘all over the Empire, groups exist who arouse their neighbours’ prejudice, perhaps because they seem feckless or a little different. They live rough, they rebuff approaches from the community. People suspect them of stealing, of luring away women, insulting priests, depressing property values and having lewd habits. Drink and putting curses on cattle are a constant theme of complaints.’

‘Living next door to deadbeats can be a real problem,’ Petronius corrected him. He had no truck with social misfits. He didn’t believe curse tablets could make cows barren, but he did reckon that when people bestirred themselves to complain formally, the thefts and assaults they protested about were probably real. To him, Laeta’s bland remarks were official excuses for inaction.

To be angry about neighbours’ bad behaviour would seem a crazy waste of time where we grew up. On the Aventine, there were too many persons of lewd habits to write petitions about it. Everyone drank, to take away the pain of existence. Nobody wore themselves out trying to have ethical standards. Even joining the army when we were eighteen was such a nod to the establishment it had made Petro and me objects of raucous derision.

‘Of course we take all such reports seriously,’ Laeta assured us. Tell that to the man who wrote in, I thought.

‘You rush to rootle out the villains?’ I teased him. ‘Their horrid shacks are upended by military-style machines, their filthy possessions tossed away, and the pilfering layabouts are made to take regular jobs in nasty occupations?’

Laeta scowled. ‘We ask the district magistrate to make enquiries.’

‘And if your correspondent writes again—when he does, since he refuses to give up—you just send another soft request to the same magistrate who let everyone down the first time?’

‘Dispersed responsibility, Falco.’ Laeta let my jibes trickle off like river water from a cormorant.

‘Well, it’s hardly corrupt, but I’d define it as inept and complacent.’

‘Always yourself!’ smiled Laeta. ‘I do admire that, Falco . . . Sometimes these complaints die down,’ he said to Petronius, as if addressing the reasonable man in our pairing. ‘So much better if a situation is dealt with peacefully, and at the local level. Nevertheless, should there be a flare-up that the local authorities cannot handle, it will be tackled—tackled aggressively.’

‘This involves more than bad neighbours,’ Petronius assessed. He was glum. ‘Now a man has died. Tortured, killed, and his body deposited in a blasphemous way. He appears to have been coming to Rome to appeal to the Emperor personally. That, to me, places a moral duty on Rome to look into what happened—and to pursue the victim’s complaints.’