'The other night,' I recalled, ignoring the rhetoric, 'I saw someone with a donkey approaching a man near the Capena Gate. A vagrant lying in a doorway. A dead man.'

'I go to that area,' Zosime admitted stiffly. She would not acknowledge the incident with the corpse. She had the same build as the hooded person I had seen, however. I wished now that I had waited to see what that person did when they found the body. 'If he was definitely dead, he had passed beyond our temple's help. We do arrange funerals for patients who die while they are with us on the Island, but I am discouraged from bringing home corpses.' The way she said 'discouraged' implied rows with the temple management. I could envisage Zosime as a troublesome employee. I sensed a history of conflict at the temple about her night-time good works. People there, especially her superiors who were trying to balance budgets, might disapprove of actively seeking extra patients – patients who, by definition, had no money themselves and no affectionate family or masters to weigh in with funds for treatment. 'Are you absolutely sure, Falco? Was the man you saw merely motionless, asleep – ' 'Oh I know death, Zosime.' She gave me a level stare. 'I imagine you do.' It was not a compliment.

XXX

Distant noises intruded. Screams of delight announced that Helena's father, the senator, must have arrived and was being mobbed by my daughters. Camillus Verus understood how to be a grandfather: with uncritical love and many presents. He never knew quite what to make of Favonia, a gruff, private child who lived in her own world, but Julia, who had a more open character, had been his delight since birth. Every time he came he taught her a new letter of the alphabet. That was handy. In ten years, when she became besotted with love-poets and silly novels, I could blame him.

I let Zosime go, still feeling that she knew much more than she was telling. It was good to see my father-in-law but we kept lunch short. He had come straight from his captive son and had yet to report on the visit to Julia Justa and Claudia.

'There's not much to say. My boys never find a problem with leisure, enforced or otherwise. The prisoner is lolling around on cushions, reading. He wants me to send Greek plays.' Justinus had had a passion for an actress once. We had all been perturbed, though compared with the mess he was in now, that seemed a normal vice. I did wonder if the current devotion to literature was a bluff, to lull the Spy into a false sense of security, but in fact all the Camilli were well-read. 'His host doesn't have much of a library. Must get bribed with other commodities… I didn't see Anacrites, fortunately.' 'For you?' 'For him!' growled Decimus. 'Maybe we should try bribing him?' Helena suggested, taking up her father's unexpectedly cynical attitude. 'No; we'll stick with the Roman virtues: patience, fortitude – and waiting for a good chance to beat him up on some dark night.' That was supposed to be my line. It was interesting how Anacrites could so easily reduce even a decent, liberal man to a cruder morality. Helena and I had plans too, and as soon as we could politely leave her father (who was enjoying his grandchildren to the extent of getting down on all fours to play elephants), we set off for the Quadrumatus villa.

'Did your father play elephants with you and your brothers, Helena?'

'Only if Mama was safely out of the house at a long meeting with the devotees of the Good Goddess.' Julia Justa supported the great female cult where men were ritually banned, and at home she kept the senator in his place. Or so he made out. Certainly his wife was a matron of the immaculate, stately kind. 'When Papa was at the Senate,' Helena then confounded me, 'Mama sometimes joined us in a romp.'

I blinked. This was hard to imagine. It showed the difference between a senator's household and the low-class home I grew up in. My mother had never had time or energy for play; she worked too hard keeping the family alive and together. My father had been one for a rough-and-tumble – but that ended abruptly when he left us.

I wondered how things worked at the Quadrumatus house. They were so rich, they probably assembled fifteen slaves just to supervise two four-year-olds throwing a beanbag around.

This sounds like daydreaming, but it could be relevant to Scaeva's death. In such a household, a young man would never be alone. Cleaners, secretaries, valets, major-domos would dog him at every step. Supposing Scaeva sought a meeting with Veleda, he would have had it among slaves bringing him snacks and drinks, water-bowls and towels, letters and invitations. Any tryst would have been watched by flower-arrangers stuffing vases with perfect winter blooms – and of course by the flute-player. If Gratianus Scaeva ever wanted a really intimate assignation, he would have had to draw attention to it by a demand for privacy.

No wonder his brother-in-law, Quadrumatus, had assured me Scaeva was so well behaved. Nobody could carry off a flirtation in such conditions. It would have driven me mad.

Perhaps Scaeva had been frustrated himself. Maybe when he called in his doctor, Mastarna, allegedly with recurrent catarrh, his sickness was really an expression of unhappiness with his love life.

'He was twenty-five!' Helena scoffed when I voiced this subtle theory. 'If he was desperate, he could have met massage girls at the baths. Or got married! Besides,' she said, 'a man like that sleeps openly with a slave girl, or several- and he doesn't think it affects his reputation one way or another.' I gave her a look. 'Surely that depends on how good the slave girl says he is afterwards?'

'She'll just say how generous his love token was, or wasn't,' Helena disagreed. She thought of something. 'Perhaps the flute boy was his lover?'

'That would give him a reputation some would disapprove of!' But it was a good point. 'Suppose the flute boy had been Scaeva's lover; he turned up for an afternoon tootle, saw the gorgeous Veleda in his master's arms – and sliced his head off in a fit of jealous rage.'

'Is she gorgeous?' I pretended to be deaf 'Sliced his head off with what?' Helena then asked. 'You said no weapon was found at the scene?' 'A sharp knife he used for flute-whittling?' 'Musicians in wealthy households do not have to make their own instruments, Marcus. A tiptop tibia would be purchased for him. All he would ever have to do is tune it.' 'Which is done how?' I demanded. 'By blowing a few measures to warm it with your breath. Or if it's really sharp or flat, you shorten or lengthen the pipes. Some unscrew. You adjust them to the right length, then the break can be wound with waxed thread to make the pipe airtight.'

If Helena Justina had been a plebeian, this would have told me she had once been the girlfriend of some funeral-parlour bandsman. As it was, I spared myself any jealousy and assumed she had been reading an encyclopaedia. That was also better than thinking she herself was a nymph with musical talents. I knew a girl once who played the panpipes. Horrendous. I dumped that one very quickly.

So I heard the arcane flute information calmly. Helena smiled at me. Deliberately, she failed to explain how she knew it. When we arrived at the villa, Helena gazed around, first noting the lavish gardens then the endless indoor rooms. I could see her imagining how this luxury would have appeared to Veleda.

Her presence had got us past the door porter without trouble. I picked up with the steward and asked him bluntly which girl in the house had been Scaeva's playfellow? He said straight away it was a seamstress. He fetched her; she glanced at him for permission, but admitted she and Gratianus Scaeva had had a regular arrangement, except when she was indisposed for female reasons, when she had generally passed him on to her friend from the pot-store, but if her friend was indisposed too, the young master usually went to see the stable-hands, one of whom had a 'niece' who put herself about happily, or if she was busy, she had a willing sister who lived with the pigman -