“I don’t care what tree that foul bird exudes his guano in—”

“I can’t keep him out of the laundry. I thought before the wedding you might carry off your parcel from the vat—”

The original silver pig! The one found in the street, which Petronius and I had rescued afterwards from Sosia Camillina’s bank box. I had forgotten all about it; so had everybody else…

Hauled up by our mighty Lenia, my pig was soon drying under some seedy temple’s weekly batch of soiled smalls. Wiping it with a priest’s headcloth amidst a whiff of last Thursday’s incense, Lenia asked, “Did you know that someone had attached a laundry list?”

Petronius and I had left a rope round the pig; fixed to the rope now was a single wax tablet…

“Oh dear gods!”

Before ever I took it from Lenia’s swollen hand I knew what it was, and whose. I could hear Lenia telling me six months ago, I let her pee in the bleach vat, then she left a note upstairs…Then, too, I remembered Helena Justina when she was raging at me that first night in Britain. She said she had told you…

And so she had. Formally enough to be presented in evidence, Sosia Camillina had given me a list of names.

Sosia Camillina, daughter of P. Camillus Meto, to M. Didius Falco, private informer. On the Ides of October in the second consulship of VESPASIAN AUGUSTUS, his first as Emperor
T. FLAVIUS DOMITIANUS
L. AUFIDIUS CRISPUS
CN. ATIUS PERTINAX CAPRENIUS MARCELLUS
TI. FAUSTUS PLAUTIUS FERENTINUS
A. CURTIUS GORDIANUS
A. CURTIUS LONGINUS
Q. CORNELIUS GRACILIS

I name these men in duty to the Emperor and devotion to the gods.

There they all were. All? All but one, apparently. Above her final sentence was a one-line gap. It looked as if Sosia had written an extra name; as if she had written, then at once pulled the flat end of her stylus back through the wax, deleting the line she had just inscribed there with its point.

In this case, I had once told Helena, there could be no loyalty and no trust. Sosia Camillina possessed both. It must have made a heavy burden for a sixteen-year-old girl.

This tablet proved nothing. Just seven men who knew each other; it read like a dinner-party list. Perhaps Sosia had found one in a house she had visited, a note, written out to give instructions to someone’s household steward. Sosia had then carefully copied out the names…

Seven men, who could say, if we challenged them in court, they had been dining quietly together. Though their real purpose might be not one jot less sinister for that.

And who, then, had been this ugly dinner party’s host?