Ariminius did not want to go down this route. “Partly.”

“So Terentia was present?”

“Terentia Paulla is always welcome.”

Why, then, had the slave with the sponge and bucket been instructed to say that Terentia never came anymore?

“This family conference must have been a lively occasion!” I remarked quietly. Laelia and Ariminius exchanged glances in which more was being said than I yet understood. “By the way,” I enquired casually, “what did your ever-so-friendly Uncle Tiberius actually die of?” When nobody answered I did not press the point, but asked, “Was his wife with him when he died?”

Ariminius looked me straight in the eye. “No, Falco,” he said gently, as if he knew why I was asking. “Terentia Paulla was dining with her old colleagues at the House of the Vestals that night.”

The ultimate unshakable alibi-had anybody needed one, of course.

I stared straight back at Ariminius. “Sorry,” I said, not bothering to explain why.

“You know nothing about it, Falco.” The Pomonalis suddenly sounded tired. “And this has nothing to do with finding Gaia.”

I pulled up.

He and his wife were involved in some deceit; I had no doubt of it. But he was right. A young child was in danger, and that took precedence. Finding Gaia was my job.

I asked Ariminius to supply me with slaves to assist, and then I set about completing a systematic search of the entire house and grounds.

XXXVII

IT MUST HAVE been early afternoon when we set out. With the help of a large contingent of slaves, the whole place was gone over within a few hours.

Ariminius Modullus hung about. I might have wondered if he knew something bad and was watching in case I got too close. I did not trust him, but he was straight about the search. He watched and listened when I first gave orders, then he joined in. He did seem to understand how urgent the situation was, yet in a perverse way he was starting to enjoy the action, as he collected a posse and began supporting my efforts to show them how they must look into every chest and hamper, then under, in, and behind anything that had even a crack of room to squeeze inside.

He liked having something to do. I always kept an eye out, but his cooperation took some of the strain off me. I was grateful. The responsibility of finding the child was a hard one. Not finding her would be a grim burden to live with. It would have been oppressive enough, even if I did not know she had asked for my help and I had refused her.

My bet was that since he married Laelia, Ariminius had sunk into apathy, living with such a strong figure as his father-in-law. By the end of the afternoon I actually went so far as to tell him, man to man, “Numentinus has no patriarchal authority over you. You may respect him and the honored position he used to hold in your priesthood-but you answer to your own father.”

“Grandfather, actually. He drools a bit, but he lets me do what I like.” He seemed almost human; still, before he joined the pointyheads, he had been as common as I used to be. We were both born plebs.

“My advice is to leave here when this episode is over, and become head of your own household.” When he looked uncertain, I remembered the drab side of being a plebeian and asked, “Is funding a problem?”

To my surprise he said at once, “No. I have money.”

“But living in the Flaminia was too attractive?”

He smiled wryly. “I was ambitious once! But I shall probably not be promoted above Flamen Pomonalis now.” He did not say, even with the ex-Flamen Dialis as my father-in-law.

“I suppose you get sneered at by your in-laws for that?”

At first he was not intending to answer, then he squeezed out an affirmative. “And there is my wife to consider.”

“But Statilia Laelia does not remain in her father’s patriarchal control now she is married.”

“Not legally!” he said, with feeling.

“If her husband left to live independently, she would go with himof course.”

Ariminius was silent. Interesting. “At the moment,” he then said, like a man who had thought this out already, “desertion would be a cruelty.” Desertion seemed a strong word to use for moving out of his father-in-law’s house-though Numentinus was no ordinary father-in-law. Then I wondered if he meant more; if he left, would he shed the whole pack of them, wife and all? Would he want to leave Laelia behind?

Before I could ask him, he added, as if wanting to close the subject, “It’s a difficult time, Falco.”

“Really? There is a family secret, I gather.”

“Nothing escapes you.”

“I get to the truth in the end. I am beginning to suspect that I know what your secret is. So are you going to enlighten me?”

“It is not for me to tell. But it has nothing whatsoever to do with the child,” said Ariminius.

“Flamen Pomonalis, you had better be right-or if anything has happened to her, it will be on your conscience!”

We had started with the kitchen garden at the back of the house. We scoured every patch of ground, while the men used forks and twopronged hoes to turn all the piles of rubbish. There had been a bonfire; I myself raked through its ashes while the slaves were making the final push into the area of wildest growth towards the far wall. I sent for a ladder (the builders had left plenty) and even climbed up and looked over that wall. There was a public bath beyond it, in a maze of streets. If Gaia had, somehow, scaled this barrier she would then have been away in the reaches of the Aventine that ran towards the Raudusculana Gate. But first she would have had a climbing feat ahead of her. Even I only managed to barge through the rampant undergrowth with a great many curses, scratches, and a badly torn tunic; it seemed impossible for a child. The height of the wall when balanced on a precarious ladder placed on very rough ground was too off-putting. Not that I ever rule out anything absolutely. If she thought she was fleeing for her life, desperation could make anything feasible.

Next we probed and picked over the house. I divided the workforce and placed half in command of Ariminius; I started at the top with my men, he started at the bottom with his, and after crossing halfway we knew that every cranny should have been investigated not just once but twice.

There were large salons and small cubicles. An area which must have been far older than the rest of the property had all the rooms running into each other in an old-fashioned sequence, then there were other wings where tasteful modern reception rooms led off frescoed corridors. A damp basement consisted of about fifty cells for slaves; that allowed rapid searching. All they had in them were a few meager treasures and hard pallets to sleep on. We lined up the slaves, army style, each outside his or her own compartment, while we searched. That gave me a chance to ask every one if they knew anything or had seen Gaia yesterday after her mother sent the nurse to other duties.

“What duties were they, incidentally?” I checked routinely with Ariminius, but he only shrugged and looked vague. Giving instructions to women was a woman’s business-or at least that was what he wanted me to think.

There are odd contents in most homes, though few so odd as I saw here. In the ex-Flamen’s bedroom, which was some way from the rest of his family, stood a casket of sacrificial cakes (in case of night starvation?) and the bed legs were smeared with clay-an accommodation that allowed a practicing Flamen Dialis to escape the ancient prescription that he must sleep upon the ground. It was no longer necessary for Numentinus. Retirement meant nothing to the old manthough this seemed an affectation in his new house.

I could not have lived here. What passed for refinement in their lives made me turn up my fine long Etruscan nose: the ex-Flamen’s library, for instance, contained nothing but scrolls of ritual nonsense, as oblique as the Sibylline Books. Throughout the house there were too many niches that had been set up as shrines, and the cloying stench of incense lingered everywhere. Looms for the women were lined up in a whole bank in a bare room, like the workshop of the most miserable tailor. The wine store was meager. Even Helena and I, at our lowest ebb financially, had paid more attention to the quality of what went in our oil lamps. Shabbiness is one thing; lack of interest is pitiful.