“Falco! Why? For heaven’s sake, Falco, he’s Sosia’s papa!”

“That’s why. It would be too easy for me to ignore him—”

“Didius Falco, your one certainty must be that none of her relations—her father least of all—can be part of anything that let that child be harmed!”

“What about your own father?”

“Oh really, Falco!”

“Pertinax was his son-in-law; a close tie.”

“My father seriously disliked him after I was divorced.” It fitted what I had seen. Decimus had been clearly annoyed when I mentioned Pertinax.

I asked her who was party to the Domitian conversation. She listed some names that meant nothing to me.

“You know anything about an alley called Nap Lane?” I sprang the question at her; she looked at me, wide-eyed, as I pressed on. “Sosia Camillina died in a warehouse there. Belongs to an old patrician stick, fading from the world on his country estate—a man called Caprenius Marcellus—”

“I know him slightly,” Helena interrupted in a steady voice. “I have been in his warehouse; Sosia came with me. A dried out, painfully dying old stick who had no son. He adopted an heir. Common enough. A presentable young man with no hopes of his own, who was pleased to be welcomed by Marcellus into his noble house, honour his resplendent ancestors, promise to bury him with devoted respect—and in return supervise the substantial Marcellus estates. The Censor’s office would have told you if you bothered to ask. My husband’s—my ex-husband’s—full legal name is Gnaeus Atius Pertinax Caprenius Marcellus.”

“Believe me,” I commented blackly, “your ex-husband has several other filthy names!”

It seemed most comfortable not to talk for a while.

“Falco, I suppose you searched the warehouse?”

“You may suppose we did.”

“Empty?”

“By the time we searched.”

More frogs plopped. Some of them croaked. Some fish plopped. I threw a stone into the little pond and that plopped. Clearing my throat, I croaked.

“It seems to me,” the senator’s daughter dictated, sounding like her British aunt, “boors in a praetor’s office and brats at the Palace cannot organize world events.”

“Oh no, a real manager runs this monkey troupe!”

“I don’t believe,” she said, in a much smaller voice, “Atius Pertinax is capable of murder.”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so! Be cynical if you must. Perhaps people never really know anybody else. Yet we must try. In your work you must trust your own judgement—”

“I trust yours,” I admitted simply, since the compliment was true.

“Yet you don’t trust me!”

My ribs were causing me severe distress, and my leg hurt.

“I do need your opinion,” I said. “I do value it. For her sake—Sosia’s sake—there can be no luxuries in this case. No loyalty, no trust—then with any luck, no errors.”