“Ah Falco again!” Publius now adopted the note of thinly disguised contempt he had always used when dealing with me. “Falco has ridden dangerously close. If anything is to be salvaged from all this we shall need to deflect that young man.”

“Oh I’ve tried that!” Helena Justina gave an oddly narrow smile. A cold fist clenched in my stomach; an involuntary tremor ran down the back of my thigh.

“I thought so!” scoffed Publius candidly. “Well, this heirloom is an unexpected bonus for you. What will you do with it then, run off with friend Falco?”

“Believe me,” Helena snapped fiercely, like the girl I first met in Britain, “Didius Falco would not thank you for suggesting that. His one aim in life is to shed me as soon as he can.”

“Really? My spies tell me he looks at you as if he were jealous of the very air you breathe.”

“Really?” Helena echoed sarcastically; then she snapped back vigorously, “And what spies are those, uncle?”

Her uncle did not answer her.

It was then, contemplating what Helena might possibly be about to reveal of her private feelings for me, that fright and yearning tore me apart so much that I was racked by a catastrophic sneeze.

There was no time to back out down the passage, so I adopted my most nonchalant face and slid out into the vault.

“Your green peppers are top quality!” I congratulated Helena to camouflage the reason for the sneeze.

“Oh Falco!” I hoped I detected a gleam in her expression, as though she welcomed me, yet she sounded quite angry. “Whatever are you doing here?”

“I understood you had invited me.”

“I understood you had declined to come.”

“Luckily for you, when the third five-year-old kicked my shins with his tiny iron-shod boot, family duty began to pall. Is this where Atius Pertinax used to keep his petty cash?”

“It’s a saffron vault, Falco.”

“I must make a note to build one in when I design my country villa. Any chance of me palming half a pint of Malabathron? I want some for a special girl I know.”

“Only you,” remarked Helena, “could offer to flatter a woman with a present you had stolen from her first.”

“I hope so,” I agreed cheerfully. “With any luck I’m the only one who knows which really suits you best.”

All this time her sneering uncle had been watching the two of us, and I had more sense than to imagine he was hoping to learn anything from my seduction technique.

“Young man,” he accosted in his thin voice, “why exactly have you come wandering in here?”

I beamed at him, as guileless as a village idiot. “Looking for the silver pigs!”