Petronius and I had endured the respectful ritual scores of times. We never liked it. I raged under my breath, as we stood to one side. “This is obscene. Remind me again what in Hades I’m doing here!”

He answered in his low voice, lecturing me to steady me, “Official sympathy. Plus a forlorn hope that the maniac we are looking for may turn up too. Fascinated by his crime, flaunting his mad mask at the mausoleum…”

Keeping on my funeral face, I scoffed, “Exposing himself to curious scrutiny in the one place where he knows uncomfortable law agents are standing about, just longing for a chance to gallop after any uninvited guest who has a funny look about the eyes—”

Petro dropped a hand on my arm. “Then again, you know, we may spot a mood in the family that doesn’t fit.”

“We can rule out the family,” I declared.

Petronius raised an eyebrow. He had left this delicate issue to the praetor—let a magistrate of their own rank plant his nice clean shoe in the manure. I think he assumed I was too brokenhearted to consider it. But I had.

“Women not strong enough, children not tall enough. Decimus Verus has fifty members of the government—whose word I don’t rate a bean—and the old slave from the Black Sea who cleans his boots—who is good enough for me—to swear he was at the senate, while Publius Meto was discussing merchant ships with his brother’s daughter’s divorced husband—which incidentally, Petro, has ruled out the ex-husband too, before we even bothered to rule him in.” I had checked. I knew the whereabouts of relations the senator and his brother had forgotten they ever owned.

The only thing I had not done was to meet Helena Justina’s ex-husband. Never even troubled to ask his name. I excused him for two reasons. The useful Black Sea boot-slave had told me where he was. And anyway, Helena’s husband had got himself divorced. I had seen enough of other people’s marriages to believe that the parties concerned were usually best off when they put an end to their formal union. If Helena’s husband agreed with me, he was obviously a reasonable sort of man.