Magnus gave me a long hard stare. Then he simply stood up and said he was going back to work. I let him go. I could not arrest him but I did not apologise for implying he was the murderer.

XLII

As soon as the surveyor left, I dropped the charade. I sat quiet. Too quiet, anyone who knew me would have said. The clerk had worked with me, though not long enough or closely enough. Even so, apprehension pinned him to his stool.

"That tooth of yours still playing up, Falco?" he asked in a nervous voice. It could be a joke, real sympathy, or a frightened mixture of both.

Too busy to deal with it, I had forgotten my aching tooth until that moment. Informers don't collapse at mere agonising pain. We are always too busy, too desperate to finish the case.

"Where were you last night, Gaius?" It sounded like a neutral question.

"What?"

"Place yourself for me." He had attended my project meeting this morning. He had filed a witness statement but I had had no time yet to look at it.

T… went into Novio."

I scrutinised the bastard with a thin half smile.

"You went into Novio?" Repeating it, I sounded like a careworn lawyer dragging out his weakest rhetorical manoeuvre. I was hoping that the witness would cave in out of sheer anxiety. In life they never do.

"Novio, Falco."

"What was that for?"

"A night out. Just a night in town." I still gazed at him. "Stupenda was dancing," Gaius maintained. A nice touch. Detail always makes a falsehood sound more reliable.

"Any good?"

"She was brilliant."

I stood up. "Get on with your work."

Ts something wrong, Falco?"

"Nothing that I don't expect every day." I let him see my lip curl.

I had liked Gains. He had made a good show of harbouring the right attitude. But it had been an act. "In my job," I elaborated grimly, "I run into lies, fraud, conspiracy and filth. I expect it, Gaius. I encounter mad people who kill their mothers for asking them to wipe their feet on the doormat. I deal with lowlife muggers who steal half a denarius from blind army veterans in order to buy a drink from a thirteen-year old barmaid whom they subsequently rape…"

The clerk was now looking as puzzled as he was petrified.

"Get on with your work," I repeated. "Let me know when you decide to revise your story. In the meantime, don't distress yourself about my feelings. Your contribution to this enquiry, Gaius, is just a routine pile of mule shit though I can say that being betrayed by my own office backer-up hits a new low for me."

I left him, striding out as if I had to go and hold a bridge against a wild horde of barbarians.

He did not know that I had been in Novio myself last night, also hoping to see Stupenda. Which of course I had not done because last night in Noviomagus Regnensis, the woman called Stupenda did not dance.

XLIII

pounds A vf" aybe this clerk got his nights mixed up," Aelianus suggested. 1VJ-Whatever draught the medical orderly supplied had perked him up enough to take an interest.

I disagreed. "Be practical. You don't confuse yourself over yesterday, especially when being in the wrong place could make you the killer."

"Might he have been a bit fuddled? Does Gaius drink a lot?"

"Doubt it. I've seen him pour away half a cup of mulsu m just because a fly looked in the cup."

We were in my suite, the invalid sprawled on a padded couch. Aelianus had created a crude sketch of the new palace on which to mark witness positions in red ink, together with a box (headed by a lopsided graffiti wine cup where he listed those who claimed they went to town last night.

"They are all involved," I raved. "So tell me your results, Aulus. Can we prove anything?"

"Not yet. Some seedy character called Falco has failed to report in."

"Novio," I muttered. "Vouched for by your dear brother, plus a retainer of the King's. Come to that, you know perfectly well I refused dinner and trotted off on a pony… Is there any of your medicine left?" My tooth was on fire.

"No, Larius swigged it." Larius was now flaked out in a wicker chair that Helena normally used, white in the gills and semiconscious. "Exhausted by his wild life," Aelianus opined piously. "Or poisoned off."

My elder daughter Julia was using her little wheeled cart to play chariots around Larius, with him as a circus spina. The baby slept, for once, in her two-handled travelling basket. There were faint indications that Favonia's loincloth needed changing, but I was managing not to notice. Fathers learn to live with guilt.

"So what do we have, Aulus?"

"These tablets are a joke. Believe them, and the site was deserted

and nobody could have done it. It's amazing the corpse was ever discovered. Most of the project team claim they were in town."

"Gaius?"

"Yes, he says he was in town."

"With any of the others?"

"Not specific. He's put down Magnus as a witness."

"What did Magnus write?"

"In Novio too. Gaius is supposed to vouch for him."

That's wrong. Magnus just told me he was in his quarters."

"Must have forgotten his official excuse under the stress of your questioning!"

"Don't be rude," I rebuked him mildly. "So, was anybody left here?"

"The two junior architects, vouching for each other."

"Strephon and Plancus heart-searching, swigging and snoring. I am inclined to believe them. It's too touching to be a bluff."

"Also the clerk of works."

"Cyprianus, mooching round the site on his own, hoping to forestall trouble then heading for the baths and an unpleasant discovery. I think I trust him. He has family on site; if he was building a false alibi, he would make them say he was at home."

Aelianus dipped his pen and marked a blob at the baths for Cyprianus. "Isn't the person who claims to find a corpse sometimes the obvious suspect?"

"Rightly so, half the time." I considered the man's demeanour when he came to find me. "Cyprianus was in shock when he rushed here with the news. He seemed genuine. He was sickened by the gouged eye. It looked like genuine surprise."

"Still, it could be a ruse," Aelianus replied. He had second thoughts: "But if he had been the killer, would he have run out naked?"

"I see why you ask." Inactivity was doing Aelianus good. A bandage on his leg seemed to improve his brain. He surprised me with his logic, in fact. "The killer stayed calm. He cleaned and replaced one of the weapons in Magnus' satchel…"

We both paused.

"He took it out; he put it back. Curious," I said.

Aelianus mimed the actions. "The instrument satchel must have stayed on the clothes peg throughout the killing…"

'… So where was Magnus?"

He could be the killer. Then there were two possibilities that left him innocent. "Either he was in the tepidarium taking a slow cold plunge and oiling up- or he was fooling about with Gaius."

"Likely?"

"Neither seems the type."

"How can you tell?" asked Aelianus. "I've known people who poked anything handy, whatever the sex." It was Roman tradition, especially in high places. But it raised interesting questions about some of his own friends.

Reluctantly, I tackled the other possibility: "Why ever Magnus went to the baths, he could still have been one of the killers." I screwed up my face, still resisting the thought. "I caught him out when I showed him the string this morning. He owned up to it openly. But if he had knoum it was used to strangle Pomponius, he would at least have played down his ownership."

"Let's face it, Falco Magnus would have known better than to leave something that could be identified as his property on the body."

"Too disgusted to remove it?" I argued.