There were no confidential tablets; Anacrites was tenaciously secretive. Petronius looked with longing at some secured cupboards, but we were not in a mood to force locks. Usually, however late it was, our bugbear had a dandruffy clerk or one of his dreadful agents moping in here with him. As soon as he was sent abroad, they must have all rushed off. The room was strangely still and quiet. The strife and duplicity that emanated from it had been placed on hold.

We stared around, then Petronius shook his head slightly, bemused. I wriggled my shoulders as if to slough off the very air the spy had breathed. We left without a word.

By the time we emerged from the rambling old buildings, the night had taken a shift onwards. Still simmering with remains of the day’s heat, Rome had become its darker self. Families and workers were back in their homes. The streets now carried streams of delivery carts, each alley ringing with the trundle of battered wooden wheels and the bloody-minded curses of crude drivers. Stray dogs ran for their lives from heavy-duty wagons that were so laden they could neither swerve nor stop in a hurry. Even the burglars and muggers who emerged at dusk kept their sandalled feet well back from the kerb. We sensed their presence, as they skulked through streets where they had conveniently blown out any lamps. None of them bothered us. We looked too capable.

I saw Petronius savour the warm air, trying to tell whether various wafts of smoke from baths and cookshops meant fire duty for the vigiles. He was in full professional mode, alert for any kind of trouble.

He and I made a few quick plans as we strolled, via the winding lane at the foot of the Capitol, back to our own haunts. He then returned to the patrol house, up on the Aventine. I watched him go, with that familiar fast, loping stride. Quietly I continued along the Marble Embankment to my house.

15

‘Marcus, darling, you should be ashamed! Why ever didn’t you tell us about the funeral?’

Let’s call Marina my sister-in-law, though it had always been a title of convenience. She and my legionary brother, Festus, had never lived together, though the ditsy dumpling claimed they would have done, but for his tactlessness in getting himself killed. She still made out our scamp would have settled down on his return—a concept he guffawed at, as I more accurately recollected. Suggestions of marriage always made Festus need a very large veal pie and so much drink to wash it down he would fall unconscious on the caupona counter.