“Do they let her have ingredients for the pretend salt cakes?”

“No. The Flamen does not like it.” Surprise!

I squatted down on my heels in front of the shrine. A lattice wall and a bank of oleander bushes hid me from most of the rest of the garden. Unless the nurse had stuck very close to her, Gaia could easily have stopped playing and sneaked off.

I heaved myself upright. Ignoring the two slaves, I set off to the nearest doorway out of the colonnade. I passed salons and anterooms bare of furniture. This was the least used part of the house. More what a child would like. Private. Unobserved. With that everattractive atmosphere of a place nobody was supposed to go into without permission. But there was no sign of Gaia.

I kept walking.

On the plan, three sides of this house had streets marked beside them. There were shops and lockups leased to artisans; I would check later that they were all quite separate, with no access from the house, though I was certain the ex-Flamen would have insisted upon it. The fourth side had nothing shown, though the house extended slightly in two small wings.

As I thought. There was a rectangular outdoor area between the wings. It was larger than it looked on the plan. “You could have told me there was another garden!”

“Gaia is not allowed to come here,” protested the nurse sullenly.

“Are you sure she obeys?”

Work was being carried out here too. When the Laelii took over, this part must have been a wilderness. It was supposed to form a small potager with square beds where lines of vegetable and salad crops could be grown for the house. Untended for years, giant parsley and asparagus fern were running riot. Some patches of ground had been cleared; one was now cleanly dug over, others still had stumps of perennial weeds sticking up. The whole central area ought to be shaded by a complex series of pergolas, supporting old vines.

There a disaster greeted me. “Oh Jupiter, that’s some hard pruning!”

The vines had been sliced right off a foot from the ground. Unbelievable. From the debris, I could see they had been until recently mature, healthy climbers, once well trained; new bunches had already formed among the bright green leaves. It was too late anyway to be cutting back vines, and the entire crop had now been lost. Mounds of limp vegetation were heaped everywhere. To me, with country ancestors, it was heartbreaking. I stepped out into the desecration, then could not bear to go on.

My mind was running on two different tracks. The Laelii would have to allocate slaves to help me here. All of this rubbish would have to be lifted, the mounds cleared right back to bare earth and the tangled branches forked over… But destroying those vines had been unforgivable.

“Did Numentinus order this?” Sensing my outrage, the slaves merely nodded. “Dear gods!”

“He cannot walk under vines.”

“He can now! He stopped being the Flamen Dialis last year.”

I forced myself to restrain my anger and returned temporarily to the house.

XXXVI

STATILIA LAELIA AND Ariminius Modullus, the ex-Flamen’s daughter and her husband the Pomonalis, were together when I saw them.

I had managed to control my angry breathing by the time I was led into their presence. They were seated side by side on a couch, rather too deliberately for it to be natural. They seemed relaxed. That’s about as relaxed as if they had both swallowed burning hot broth and had no water to cool their scorched mouths. If I had been sure a crime had been committed, they would immediately have become suspects.

I had only seen Ariminius from behind, when he came to Fountain Court, but I recognized his voice, affecting light conversation; at once, those slightly crude vowels I had overheard at my apartment jarred again. Face-to-face, he turned out to be an unassuming type with rather straight, untidy eyebrows and a mole near his nose. He was not wearing a flamen’s pointed hat this time; he at least knew how to be normal when he was at home.

To my surprise, I did recognize his wife: she was the woman I had glimpsed briefly in the atrium when I first came here with Maia, the one who had been gathered up by a train of slaves and borne off before I could speak to her. The slaves were all here today again, clustered protectively around her even when her husband was present to supervise. Perhaps she was a nervous type. (Nervous of what?) Or was a flamen’s daughter customarily afforded fierce chaperonage from men?

Statilia Laelia bore little resemblance to her brother Scaurus, except in manner. She had the same vague outlook as though nothing much would excite her and she would never exert herself in a cause. She was sitting with one knee crossed over the other, and did not shift from that position. She wore a plain white gown, with neither braid nor jewelry. Her hair was tied back but otherwise hung loose; frankly it looked less than clean, yet she wound strands of it between her fingers, near her mouth, all the time. Her lower lip tended to sag open slightly; when she did close up, her mouth was a tight little button.

“Thank you both for seeing me; I hope not to trouble you long.” I was slick with the smarm today. I appalled myself. “I have managed to trace little Gaia’s movements up until she was supposed to be playing in the peristyle garden. I believe her mother saw her there and said she could be left unsupervised, so that’s a definite placing. Can either of you help me with what happened afterwards?”

They shook their heads. “I was out, attending to business,” said Ariminius, firmly separating himself from the problem. “You did not see Gaia after breakfast, did you, my love?” Laelia shook her head and twisted her hair some more.

The endearment had sounded formal. I wondered what kind of relationship they really had. Laelia seemed a limp specimen, but I was never fooled by such couples. They were probably at it like rabbits all the time. The fact they had no children meant nothing. I knew that was from choice. Alongside Ariminius’ ghastly pot of crocus hair pomade in their bedroom, I had found a jar of the distinctive alum wax contraceptive that Helena and I used. It had been nearly empty, but an identical heavy jar with a film of clear wax sealing it had stood right alongside. They were not intending to run out.

“Thanks.” I decided to treat Ariminius as a sensible contact with whom I could share my thoughts. “Look, I don’t think Gaia stayed in the peristyle. She’s not there now anyway; nowhere to hide. You have an area of rough ground behind the house, which I need to search. Can you let me borrow some sturdy slaves to turn over the weed piles and forage through the undergrowth?”

“Oh, Gaia would not have gone there!” twittered Laelia.

“Maybe not. I have to search to be sure.”

“We can give you all the help you need. The outlook is bad, isn’t it?” asked Ariminius, looking at me searchingly. “Tell us the truth, Falco. You think she may be…” He could not say it.

“You’re right. The situation is desperate. When a child has been missing for a day and night, the odds double that she will not be found alive.”

“She would roam all over the place,” he told me, in a brisk, low voice. He was plainly ignoring Numentinus’ wish to be circumspect. Laelia did not protest but shrank into his shadow, not contributing either. Whereas Gaia’s mother had at least been driven by her fear for her child, Laelia was obeying family commands to stay silent-though she watched me closely. I felt her observation was almost malicious. She was curious what I would find out-and had a nasty little smile as she waited to see me thwarted.

“I can imagine what it was like living on the Palatine with an adventurous infant,” I commented to Ariminius.

“At least here the house is contained. Three sides face the street with secure doors and windows, and the area you mentioned at the back of the building has a high wall all around it.”