`You are getting the hang of this,' Constrictus said. Now he was being cheeky to me; well, I could handle that.

`I can follow a plot. I wonder which of the others I shall have to prod to be told the dirt on you? Or would you rather give me your own version?'

`It's no secret.' Once again, the poet's voice had a raw note. Despite having previously claimed that their meeting had been amicable, he now told me the truth: `I was too old. Chrysippus wants new blood, he told me yesterday. Unless I came up with something special very quickly, he was intending to cease supporting me.'

`That's hard.'

`Fate, Falco. It was bound to happen one day. Successful poets gather together a pension, leave Rome, and retire to be famous men in their hometowns where – touched by the Golden City's magic – they will shine out among the rural dross. They go while they can still enjoy it; by my age, a successful man has left. An unsuccessful one can only hope to offend the Emperor by some sexual scandal, then be exiled to prison on the edge of the Empire where they keep him alive with daily porridge just so his whimpering letters home will demonstrate the triumph of morality… Vespasian's womenfolk have yet to start having rampant affairs with poets.' He flexed an arthritic knuckle. `I'll be beyond servicing the bitches if they hang about much longer.'

`I'll put the word out at the Golden House that here's a love poet who wants to be part of a salon scandal…' To be left without funding at his age could be no joke. `How will your finances stand up?' I asked.

He knew why I was asking. A man plunged into sudden abject poverty could well have turned violent when the unsympathetic patron sat in his elegant Greek library telling him the news. Constrictus enjoyed informing me he was reprieved from that suspicion: `I have a small legacy from my grandmother to live on, actually.'

`Nice.'

`Such a relief'

`Absolves you from suspicion too.'

`And it's so convenient!' he agreed.

Too convenient?

When I pressed him about timings, he was the first person to tell me that when he left the library yesterday, he saw the lunch tray waiting for Chrysippus, in the Latin room's lobby. It seemed he might well have been the last to visit before the murderer. Honest of him to admit it. Honest – or just blatant?

I made him look at the side table with the Phrygian purple upstands. `When did you last taste nettle flan?'

`I beg your pardon?'

`Did you go up to that buffet table, Constrictus? Did you help yourself from the tray?'

`No, I did not!' He laughed. `I would have been afraid somebody sensible had poisoned his food. Anyway, there's a decent popina in the Clivus outside. I went out for air, and had a bite there.'

`See any of the others?'

`Not the morning he died.' He stared at me, much more daring than the rest. `Naturally most of us met up in the afternoon, after we heard what had happened, and discussed what we would say to you!'

`Yes; I had already worked out that you did that,' I answered quietly.

I let him go. He wanted to be too clever. I had liked him, which was more than I could say for the historian, the ideal republican, or the satirist – yet I trusted none of them.

There was now only one remaining on my list of visitors, Urbanus, the dramatist. Time was running out; I couldn't wait on his convenience. I took the address Passus had obtained for me and went to his apartment. He was not in. At the theatre probably, or in some drinking-house full of actors and understudies. I could not be bothered to try searching, or to wait for him to wander home.

XXVI

THE CONVERSATION I had held earlier with Pa about keeping daybooks had stayed with me. I decided I would call in the records of the Aurelian Bank.

Big ideas! I then decided it might be asking for trouble. That did not stop me. Since I was working for the vigiles and they would be held accountable for my excesses of enthusiasm, I reckoned it could be done officially.

In July and August in Rome when you have a major project on, you must accomplish all you can in the evening. Daytime is too hot for work like mine. Even if I decided to endure the sun, nobody else would be available. So that evening, although I had every excuse to toddle home to Helena, I put in one more effort and went to see Petronius at the vigiles' patrol-house, to discuss banking.

It happened that Petro was there. When I arrived he and Sergius, the punishment man, were teasing a statement out of a recalcitrant victim by the subtle technique of bawling fast questions while flicking him insistently with the end of a hard whip. I winced, and sat out on a bench in the warm evening sun until they tired and shoved their victim into the holding-cell.

`What's he done?'

`He doesn't want to tell us.' That had been obvious.

`What do you think he's done?'

Run a tunic-stealing racket at the Baths of Calliope.'

`Surely that's too routine to justify the heavy hand?'

`And he poisoned the dog Calliope had brought in to stand guard over the clothes pegs in the changing room.'

`Killed a doggie? Now that's wicked.'

`She bought the dog from my sister,' Sergius broke in angrily. `My sister took a lot of back-chat for supplying a sick animal.' He went back inside to shout insults through the cell door. I told Petro I still thought they were being too rough on the suspect.

`No, he's lucky,' Petronius assured me. `Being beaten by Sergius is nothing. The alternative was letting Sergius' sister get to him. She is twice as big' – that must be quite a size, I thought – `and she's horrible.'

`Oh, fair enough.'

I discussed a plan I had for demanding sight of the banker's records, or at least the most recent. Petro raised objections initially, then his natural impulse to be awkward with financiers took charge. He agreed to make available a couple of lads in red tunics, to be my official escort, and with the provision of a suitable docket from his clerk I could approach the bank and see what happened. The vigiles clerk was a creative type. He devised a grand document, written in peculiar and extravagant language, which served as a warrant to impound the goods.

We took this to the Forum, to the Aurelian change-table. Petronius in fact came along with us. Eager for a field trip, so did the clerk. Impressed by our own bravado, we carried the day: the cashier reluctantly agreed to show us where the freedman Lucrio lived. Lucrio possessed all the relevant records, apparently. At his apartment, a discreet but obviously spacious ground-floor spread, we were told he had gone out to dinner. We could sense resistance but without their master to give orders, the household staff caved in. A slave reluctantly showed us where the records were kept, and we carried off in a handcart the tablets and sewn-together codices that looked the most up to date. We left a nice note to say we had removed them, naturally.

We towed the material back to the patrol-house. It had to be kept secure, for all sorts of reasons. Since Rubella, the tribune, was still on leave in Campania, we dumped everything in his office. Then I went out and thanked the escort. They shambled off, grinning. Ex-slaves, each doing a six-year stint in fire-fighting as a route to respectability, they were glad of some fun, especially if they could achieve it without any headbutts, bruises or burns.

`I'll have a quick squint now, then I'll be along tomorrow to start scrutiny in detail,' I said to Petro, who was himself preparing for a night out on the streets of the Thirteenth District (the patrol-house was in the Twelfth).

Having glanced quickly at the unfathomable tablets, Petronius now looked at me as though I were mad. `Are you sure about this?' `A doddle,' I assured him breezily.