Alone, I approached a narrow opening that provided dark stairs upwards from the street. As she waved goodbye from outside one of the shops that flanked this entrance, Biltis called after me that Spindex was a disorderly, filthy type. `You'll find his room, easy -just follow the smell.'

I grunted and went up the cramped stone steps. This was not a tenement approach, but a narrow insert between commercial premises. I guessed Spindex had solitary attic lodgings on the third floor, beyond the living quarters that lay above owner-occupied shops, which would be accessed from within those shops. Only Spindex and his visitors ever came up this way.

Biltis was right, perhaps more right than she knew. The reek on the staircase was strong, growing worse every day no doubt. This smell was very particular; in my line of work, it was familiar. Filled with foreboding, I tramped up and found the apartment. I was sure before I even opened the door that Spindex would be there inside. And I knew he would be dead.

XXXI

BEING A funeral clown must have all the glamour and high rewards of being an informer. There was hardly any light on the stairs. I crashed into empty wine containers on the landing. Then I entered a meagre apartment. Two dark rooms – one for being awake in misery and one for sleeping with nightmares. No cooking or washing facilities. A high-up filthy window let in a square of murky sunlight. Either the occupant had been habitually untidy, or I was looking at evidence of a struggle. It was hard to tell which. Even at my lowest ebb in my bachelor days, I had never kept my room like this. I liked to tidy up sometimes, in case a woman could be inveigled in.

This was the horrid abode of a loner; he had never visited a laundry nor bought proper meals. Nor would he have kept records of his work; I knew before I started, there would be nothing here for me. I saw not a scroll or tablet in the place; Spindex must have kept everything in his head. Easy enough. Funerals are short-term projects, of course.

I passed a table, littered with the stale relics of a drinking session. Two dirty beakers lay on their sides; one of them had rolled to the floor. There were empty flagons everywhere, plus a half-filled one with its bung abandoned in a dish of dried-up olives. Their roughly chewed stones had been spat everywhere.

The clown's body was lying on a narrow bed in the second room. From the awkward posture, I thought he might have been dragged in and dumped there after death. It looked as though he had been strangled, but it was hard to be sure. Spindex had not been seen by the Tiasus crew for months; death must have occurred way back then. I did not linger. I called in the vigiles to deal with the remains. We were just within the boundary of the Fourth Cohort, as it happened.

Petronius Longus thanked me for the task with a growl of insincerity but promised to investigate as best he could. His men, braver than I was, came out from the apartment and confirmed that a tight ligature was buried in the fleshy neck of the corpse. Tough cord: cut and brought here for the purpose, probably. Our chances of learning who committed the crime were slim, given the time lapse.

Even while we still stood around cursing, the investigation team found out from local shopkeepers that their last awareness of the clown alive had been of him roaring back drunk from a bar, with somebody. They did not see the visitor. No one had heard the person leave.

Surprise!

The vigiles might or might not pursue this further. We had probably learned all we could hope for. The death of a low-grade entertainer, about whom nobody cares enough even to discover why he has gone missing from his work, carries little importance in Rome.

There was no point enquiring whether a funeral satirist had enemies. Petronius pointed out wryly that at least we knew most of the people Spindex brazenly mocked had predeceased him, so they were not suspects. Their relatives would be unlikely to complain, Petro believed. Everyone always knows already that the dead man was a serial seducer who lied to political colleagues, ran up hefty debts at a brothel, deliberately farted in the Basilica and was known by an obscene name behind his back. The fun is being at last free to enjoy it – with the stiffened dead lying there, unable to retaliate.

`Do you suppose, Falco, this clown was rubbed off the tablet because of something he knew?'

`Who can say? It could just have been a pointless row when he was sozzled.'

`So what do you think it was?'

`Oh – elimination due to something he knew.'

`Well thanks again! Do I stand any chance of learning what, or proving it?' wondered Petro.

`Do you ever, lad?'

That was too metaphysical, so we went for a drink. Long practice made this an essential part of enquiries. We asked the barkeeper if he had had Spindex among his customers. He said every barman this side of the Esquiline could boast that – until about three months ago. Could it be nearer four months? I asked, and he shrugged agreement. As I had thought, that would take us back to the time of the Metellus funeral. Of course a defence lawyer would call it mere coincidence.

Noticing the clown's absence from lolling on his bar counter, the barman had deduced that Spindex must be dead. He said it was nice to remember the old misery for a moment, and gave us a free beaker. `I can just see him crouched here, scratching at his fleas…'

I tried not to feel itchy.

`Did Spindex have a regular boozing partner?' asked Petro. We had told no one yet that Spindex had been murdered.

`Not often. He sometimes had his head together with another fellow, plotting scandal they could use at funerals.'

`Would they buy wine and take it back to the clown's lodgings?'

`Oh Spindex bought a take-out flagon every night. However late he finished here, he'd get in a spare. Sometimes he emptied it before he got home, so he'd go in another bar and buy another one.'

`But did he ever go home with his friend, the plotter?'

The barman gazed at Petronius for a while. `Was there a fight or something?'

`Do you have a reason to think that's likely?'

`I sell liquor – so I know life. So what happened to Spindex?'

`He had a fight or something,' confirmed Petronius tersely. The barman pulled a face, half surprised, half not surprised. Petro voiced the usual message: `If you hear anything, contact me, will you? You know the main station house. I work in the Thirteenth -' The Fourth Cohort covered two regions, controlled here in the Twelfth, but Petronius based himself in the out-station. I won't say it was to avoid the tribune – but Rubella worked from the main building and Petronius loathed him. `Any message gets passed over to me.'

I stretched, dropping coins in the gratuities bowl. `And we would dearly like to know who his fellow-plotter was. People may gossip.:

'Or they may not!' commented the barman.

Today had now turned unpleasant. Nothing new in that. As I walked home at dusk, I wondered if high-flyers like Silius and Paccius experienced such days. I doubted it. The reek of human putrefaction or the bleakness of a lonely man's sour existence played out in filthy rooms under the shadow of the dripping aqueducts were far removed from the `civilised' Basilica. Silius and Paccius were men who never really knew the grim side of life – or the sight of sordid death.

I went to the baths, but fragrant oil and hot water failed to expel the odours. Their foulness had ingrained itself in my clothes and skin; it remained a taste on my tongue as persistent as regurgitated acid. Only nuzzling the soft sweet neck of our baby once I was back at home gradually helped to take away the horror.

Yes, I was tough. But today I had seen too much. I spent a long time that night considering whether I wanted to be connected with this case any more. I lay awake, gripped by distaste for the whole affair. It took Helena justina, warm, calm, perfumed with cinnamon, a girl full of honour and resolute before any injustice, to convince me I must carry on to show that our client was innocent.