'Did you see them doing it?'

'Of course not. I was packing mine.'

According to this weak theory the entire group would have alibis. I did not bother to ask where he thought Davos, Philocrates and Congrio might have been. If I wanted to be bamboozled, I could ask the suspects individually in the hope that the murderer at least would be inventive in his lies. 'Where were you staying?'

'The others were in an indifferent rooming house. Phrygia and I had found a slightly better place.' It fitted. They always liked to pretend we were one big share-alike family; but they preferred to have their comforts. I wondered if Heliodorus had ragged them about this snobbery.

I remembered Grumio saying something. 'According to Grumio, all a clown needs are a cloak, a strigil and oil flask, and a wallet for his takings. On that basis, a clown's trappings could be flung together pretty rapidly.'

'Grumio's all fantasy,' Chremes mourned, shaking his head. 'It makes him a wonderful artiste, but you have to know it's just talk.'

Phrygia was losing patience with me. 'So where is all this getting you, Falco?'

'It's filling in the picture helpfully.' I could take a hint. I had been munching their wonderful titbits until I could hold no more. It was time to go home and make my tent companions jealous by happily belching and describing the goodies. 'That was quite a feast! I'm grateful:'

I made the usual offers of they must come over to us sometime (with the usual underlying suggestion that all they might get would be two winkles on a lettuce leaf), then I turned to leave.

'Oh, just tell me one more thing. What happened to the playwright's personal property after he died?' I knew Heliodorus must have owned more than Helena and I had acquired with the play box.

'There wasn't much,' said Chremes. 'We picked out anything of value – a ring and a couple of inkstands – then I gave his few rags to Congrio.'

'What about his heirs?'

Phrygia laughed her dismissive laugh. 'Falco, nobody in a travelling theatre company has heirs!'

Chapter XLIV

Davos stood behind the tree under which he had pitched his tent. He was doing what a man does when it's night, when he thinks there is nobody about, and he can't be bothered to walk further off into open countryside. The camp had fallen silent; so had the distant town. He must have heard my feet crunching up the stony track. After quaffing my share of my amphora, I was in dire need of relief myself, so I greeted him, walked up alongside, and helped water his tree.

'I'm very impressed with your Hercules.'

'Wait until you see my bloody Zeus!'

'Not in the same play?'

'No, no. Once Chremes thinks of one "Frolicking Gods" farce, we tend to get given a run of them.'

A huge moon had risen over the uplands. The Syrian moon seemed bigger, and the Syrian stars more numerous, than those we had back home in Italy. This, with the restless wind that always hummed around Abila, gave me a sudden, poignant feeling of being lost in a very remote place. To avoid it, I kept talking. 'I've just been for a meal with our gregarious actor-manager and his loving spouse.'

'They normally put on a good spread.'

'Wonderful hospitality: Do they do this often?'

Davos chuckled. He was not a snob. 'Only for the right strata of society!'

'Aha! I'd never been invited before. Have I come up in the world, or was I just lumbered originally with the backwash of disapproval for my scribbling predecessor?'

'Heliodorus? He was asked, once, I believe. He soon lost his status. Once Phrygia got the measure of him, that was the end of it.'

'Would that be when he claimed to know where her offspring might be?'

Davos gave me a sharp look when I mentioned this. Then he commented, 'She's stupid to look!'

I rather agreed with that. 'The child's probably dead, or almost certainly won't want to know.'

Davos, in his dour way, said nothing.

We finished the horticulture, tightened our belts in the time-honoured manner, casually stuck our thumbs in them, and sauntered back to the track. A stagehand came by, saw us looking innocent, immediately guessed what we must have been doing, got the idea himself, and vanished sideways behind somebody else's tent looking for the next tree. We had started a craze.

Without comment, Davos and I waited to see what would happen, since the next tent was clearly occupied and a desperate pee tends to be audible. A muffled voice soon shouted in protest. The stagehand scuttled guiltily on his way. Silence fell again.

We stood on the path while the breeze bustled around us. A tent roof flapped. Somewhere in the town a dog howled mournfully. Both of us raised our faces to the wind, absorbing the night's atmosphere contemplatively. Davos was not normally one to chat, but we were two men with some mutual respect who had met at night, neither ready for sleep. We spoke together quietly, in a way that at other times might have been impossible. 'I'm trying to fill in missing facts,' I said. 'Can you remember what you were doing in Petra when Heliodorus wandered up to the High Place?'

'I most certainly do remember: loading the bloody waggons. We had no stagehands with us, if you recall. Chremes had issued his orders like a lord, then taken himself off to fold up his underwear.'

'Were you loading up alone?'

'Assisted in his pitiful manner by Congrio.'

'He can't help being a flyweight.'

Davos relented. 'No, he did his best, for what it was worth. What really got up my nose was being supervised by Philocrates. Instead of shifting bales with us, he took the opportunity to lean against a pillar looking attractive to the women and passing the kind of remarks that make you want to spew.'

'I can imagine. He drove me wild once by standing about like a demigod while I was trying to hitch my damned ox: Was he there all the time?'

'Until he fixed himself a bit of spice and went up among the tombs with the skirt.' The frankincense merchant's wife; he had mentioned her to Helena.

'So how long did the lading take you?'

'All bloody afternoon. I'm telling you, I was doing it as a one-man job. I still hadn't finished the stage effects – those two doorways are a trial to lift on your own – when your girl came down the hill and word whizzed round that somebody was dead. By then the rest of our party had assembled to watch me struggling. We were supposed to be all ready for the off, and people were starting to wonder where Heliodorus was. Someone asked Helena what the corpse looked like, so then we guessed who it must be.'

'Any idea where the Twins were while you were piling up the waggons?'

'No.'

He made no attempt to offer possibilities. Whether they were under suspicion or in the clear, Davos left it up to me to judge them. But I did gather that if they were accused, he would not care. Another case of professional jealousy among the players, presumably.

Probably the Twins would give each other alibis. That would land me in the usual situation: none of the known suspects actually available to do the deed. I sighed gently.

'Davos, tell me again about the night Musa was shoved off the embankment at Bostra. You must have been walking behind him?'

'I was right at the back of the queue.'

'Last in line?'

'Correct. To tell the truth, it was such a god-awful night I was losing interest in drinking in some dive with the Twins, knowing we would have to walk back through that weather just when we had got dry and warm again. I was planning to peel off unnoticed and scamper back to my own tent. I had been dropping behind stealthily. Two minutes more and I would never have heard your Nabataean shout.'

'Could you see who was near Musa when he was pushed?'