Witnesses are fallible. Even the rare specimens of humanity who honestly want to help may fail to spot the vital scene taking place under their noses, or they misread its significance. Most of them simply forget what they saw.

Draft blackmail letters are never left lying around. Anyway, who needs a draft to say, Give me the money, or else?

If footprints turn up in a newly dug asparagus patch, they never belong to anyone with an easily identifiable limp.

Long-term bullied spouses do not devise schemes of fiendish complexity and then trip themselves up over some tiny detail. They just snap, then grab the heaviest household tool available. The sexually jealous boil over equally messily. The financially greedy may plot with some skill how to escape detection, but they tend to walk away with the money and are long gone, using a new identity, before you even start your detective work.

Murderers sometimes, somehow, do manage to approach their victims when no one is looking. They kill in silence, or when nobody notices the gurgles and thumps. They leave the scene unobserved. Then they sometimes keep quiet forever.

The fact is, many murderers get away with it.

I suppose the trusting among you still believe I am now going to say that Anacrites and I gave up-yet then stumbled by chance upon a clue?

Excuse me. Go back to the start of this scroll and read it again.

Thirty-six

HELLO. STILL WAITING for an unexpected development?

There was none. It happens. It happens all the time.

Thirty-seven

SINCE FALCO &PARTNER were unable to solve who had killed Rumex, we returned to our commission for the Censors. We were not men who became obsessed. I, Marcus Didius Falco, was an ex-army scout and an informer of eight years standing: a professional. Even my partner, who was an idiot, could recognize a dead end. We felt frustrated, but we handled it. After all, we had our fortunes to earn. That always helps maintain a rational attitude.

At the end of December was Saturnalia, my daughter's first. At seven months, Julia Junilla was still too young to understand what was going on. Far from clamoring to be King-for-the-Day, our prim miss hardly noticed the occasion, but Helena and I happily made fools of ourselves arranging presents, food, and fun. Julia endured it gravely, already aware that her parents were as crazed as a cheap pot. Since we had no slaves we made Nux take the role of lording it over us; Nux got the hang of being insubordinate very fast.

Saturninus and Calliopus both left Rome, ostensibly for the festival. When neither had returned after several weeks, I made enquiries and discovered both had now gone to Africa, taking their wives. Hunting, it was said. Lying low, we thought. I asked at the Palace if we could head off in pursuit but, unsurprisingly since there was no evidence against either man in the Rumex case, Vespasian sent word that we were to buckle down to our Census work.

"Ow!" said Anacrites. I just got on with it.

For three months we worked harder than either of us had ever done. We knew these enquiries were a finite gold mine. The Census was supposed to take a year, and it would be difficult to extend much beyond that unless we had exceptional grounds. We just made out our report on the evidence we had, and the culprit was told to cough up. This was a job where suspicion alone sufficed. Vespasian wanted the income. If our victim was important it was wise to be able to substantiate our accusations, but in the arena world "important" was a contradictory term. So we suggested figures, the Censors issued their demands, and most men did not bother to ask if they could appeal. In fact, the grace with which they accepted our findings told us we perhaps even underestimated their degree of fraud. Our consciences, therefore, remained clear.

Of course we did have consciences. And we hardly ever had to bend them into shape.

I received a letter from Camillus Justinus who had reached the city of Oea, thanks to the money I had sent. After some swift exploration, he confirmed that Calliopus had no "brother," though he did own a thriving business supplying beasts and gladiators for the local Games as well as exporting them; the arena was a highly popular sport in all parts of Tripolitania. Horribly Carthaginian. A religious rite, replacing actual human sacrifice, in honor of the harsh Punic Saturn-not a god to tangle with.

Justinus supplied enough details of the lanista's Tripolitanian landholdings for us to inflate our estimate of unpaid tax in his case by a satisfying whack. In return for these efforts I sent the fugitive lad my drawing of silphium, though no more money. If Justinus wanted to make a fool of himself in Cyrenaïca, nobody was going to blame me.

The day after the letter went off my mother was visiting; as she poked around in her usual fearless way she saw my rough for the sketch.

"You messed that up. It looks like a mildewed chive. It should be more like giant fennel."

"How do you know, Ma?" I was surprised anyone in the backstreets of the Aventine would be familiar with silphium.

"People used the chopped stem, like garlic; it wasn't a veg on its own. And the juice was a medicine. Your generation thinks we were all dumb clucks."

"No, Ma. I just think you lived on short rations and this is a highly prized luxury."

"Well, I know silphium. Scaro tried to grow it once."

My great-uncle Scaro, deceased whilst in pursuit of the perfect false teeth, had been a noble character; a complete liability, in fact. I had dearly loved the crazy experimentalist, but like all Ma's relations out on the Campania, his schemes were ludicrous. I had thought I knew the worst of them. Now I learned he had tried to break into the notoriously well-protected silphium trade. The merchants of Cyrenaïca may have cherished their ancient monopoly, but they reckoned without my family, it seemed.

"He would have been rich, if he'd managed it."

"Rich and daft," said Ma.

"Did he obtain seeds?"

"No, he pinched a cutting from somewhere."

"He was in Cyrenaïca? I never knew that."

"We all thought he had a girlfriend in Ptolemaïs. Not that Scaro ever admitted it."

"Dirty old rogue! But he can't have had much hope of a crop."

"Well your grandfather and his brother were always hunting myths." Ma said that as if she held Grandpa responsible for some aspects of my own character.

"Did nobody tell them silphium had never been domesticated?"

"Yes, they were told. They reckoned it was worth a try."

"So Great-Uncle Scaro sailed off like an overweight, slightly deaf Argonaut? All set on plundering the Gardens of the Hesperides? But silphium grows in the mountains-our market garden isn't a hillside in Cyrene! Was Scaro ever able to reproduce the right conditions?"

"What do you think?" answered Ma.

She changed the subject, now taking me to task for renting an office over at the Saepta Julia, too close to Pa's evil influence. Anacrites had obviously pretended that this was my idea, not his. He was a shameless liar; I tried to expose him to Ma, who just accused me of denigrating her precious Anacrites.

There was not much danger of Pa subverting my loyalty. I almost never saw him, which suited me. Working at full stretch, Anacrites and I were hardly ever in the office during the months after New Year. I was rarely at home, either. It was hard. The long hours took their toll on us, and also on Helena. When I saw her, I was too tired to say much or do much, even in bed. Sometimes I fell asleep in my dinner. Once when we were making love. (Only once, believe me.)