When they favour me with their stories, I always give them my advice. “You should laugh at him more.”

“Perhaps I should laugh at myself.”

Only a maniac would have tried to kiss her hand. I replaced it like a gentleman in Helena Justina’s lap.

“Thank you,” I said quietly, in a changed voice.

“What’s that for?”

“Something you once did.”

We sat quietly. I leaned back, stretching my leg and folding one hand over my sorely aching ribs. I wondered what she was like, before the rich fool with the snuffle made Helena so venomous to other people and so wretched with herself.

While I was wondering, the evening star materialized among high rags of racing cloud. The noises from the inn behind us had become more subdued as the clientele told dirty stories in twelve languages during the lull between simple gluttony and drinking themselves sick. Carp in the pond broke surface with a greater urgency. It was a good time for thinking, here at the end of a long journey with nothing to do but wait for our boat. Here in a garden. Here, speaking to a sensible woman with whom a man who took a little trouble could so easily exchange thoughts.

“Mars Ultor, I came so close…I just wish I had managed to find how those ingots are shipped out!”

Fretting aloud. Hardly expecting answers.

“Falco,” Helena began carefully. “You know I went to the coast. The day I came back angry—”

I chuckled. “A day, like any other day.”

“Listen! There was something I never told you. They were loading shale. Lopsided pantry goods—beakers, bowls, candlesticks, smirking sea lion table legs. It’s hideous stuff. Goodness knows who would ever buy it. It needs to be oiled or it crumbles away…”

I squirmed guiltily, remembering the tray I had given to my mother. “Oh lady! Something like that could be their cover. Did you think to ask—”

“Of course. Falco, the man with this gimcrack export market is—Atius Pertinax.”

Pertinax! His was the last name I expected to encounter here. Pertinax, trading in poor quality kitchenware! Atius Pertinax: that pointy-nosed aedile who had me arrested when he was looking for Sosia, then beat me up and broke my furniture! I spat out a short word used by slaves in lead mines which I hoped Helena would not understand.

“There’s no need to be disgusting,” she replied in a still voice.

“There’s every need, lady! Do you know that twitchy tick?”

Helena Justina the senator’s daughter, who constantly caused me such astonishment, recited in a voice which became uncharacteristically subdued, “Didius Falco, you’re not very bright. Yes I know him. Of course I know him; I was married to the man.”

Too much travelling finally overwhelmed me. I felt squashed and sick.

XXXV

“Now you think it’s me.”

“What?”