He drew the blankets back over the dead girl and closed her eyes. It was the least he could do and did not make him feel any better. He tried to look for signs in the room. There were some scuffs on the floorboards that looked fresh, which suggested the hobnailed boots of soldiers, but that might mean no more than a recent visit by the prefect to his lover. Nearer the window the boards were wet from damp seeping up from the ground and there was a print or two, faint, but showing traces of at least two boots – one markedly smaller than the other.

‘Look at this.’ Sulpicia Lepidina was holding up a writing tablet. As Ferox took it he saw that her eyes were moist. She must have gripped it tightly because her thumbs had left deep smudges in the wax coating on the surface of the thin wooden sheet – made from silver ash by its feel and colour.

Vegetus, assistant slave of Montanus, the slave of the August Emperor and sometime slave of Iucundus, has bought and received by mancipium the girl Fortunata, or by whatever name she is known, by nationality a Diablintian, from Albicanus, for six hundred denarii. And that the girl in question is transferred in good health, that she is warranted not to be liable to wander or run away, but that if anyone lays claim to the girl in question or to any share in her…

He did not bother to read on. He had seen hundreds of similar documents, recording the sale and purchase of slaves. Somewhere there was surely another document announcing her manumission. Until now he had not thought of Vegetus, who had also made the jump from slave to free man.

‘Do you think that she is dead?’ The question was direct and he knew that the lady was not asking about the corpse in the bed.

‘I cannot say. We may find her.’

‘You can forget trust if you lie to me as plainly as that,’ she said.

‘There is not much hope,’ he admitted. ‘We might be able to catch them.’

‘And I might one day forget that you are a pig as well as a good man.’ She waved him down when he tried to speak. ‘I did not like the woman. How could I? Husbands stray and that is the way of the world. I do not take it personally. How could I after last night?’ There was a thin smile. ‘Nor did she commend herself to me in any other way. Just a foolish little whore who flung herself at men – even you if I remember that dinner last month.’

That was a surprise, for he had not thought anyone had noticed.

‘It does not matter.’ Lepidina’s voice was sad. ‘She was a guest in my house and that does matter. Murderers came over my threshold and they killed this child and abducted her owner. Perhaps they have killed her too.’