Heaven knows what the bearers thought. Well, knowing the things that bearers regularly see, I can guess what they thought.

We climbed up, then strolled side by side. In early April, just before dinner, we were virtually alone. It was all there. Nothing like it in the world. Six-storey apartment blocks thrust upwards from the narrow streets, confronting palaces and private homes with brotherly disregard for social niceties. Mushroom-beige light flaked the roofs of the temples or shimmered in the fountain sprays. Even in April the air felt warm after the British wetness and cold. As we walked along peacefully, Helena and I counted off the Seven Hills together. While we came west along the Esquiline ridge, we had an evening wind in our faces. It bore tantalizing traces of rich meat dumplings gurgling in dark gravies in five hundred dubious cook shops oysters simmering with coriander in white wine sauce, pork braising with fennel, peppercorns and pine nuts in the busy kitchen of some private mansion immediately below. Up to our high spot rose a distant murmur of the permanent hubbub below: touts and orators, crashing loads, donkeys and doorbells, the crunch of a marching Guards detachment, the swarming cries of humanity more densely packed than anywhere in the Empire or the known world beyond.

I stopped. I turned my face towards the Capitol, smiling, with Helena so close that her long mantle clapped against my side. I experienced a sense of approaching climax. Somewhere in this metropolis lurked the men I sought. It remained only to find proof that would satisfy the Emperor, then discover the whereabouts of the stolen silver pigs. I was half way to the answer; the end lay here and my confidence was up. Finally, while I absorbed the familiar scene of home, knowing that at least in Britain I had done all a man could, the desolation which had gripped me in its vice since Sosia died finally relaxed.

Turning back to Helena Justina, I found her watching me. She had her own misery under control now. There was nothing really wrong with her: she was a girl who had made herself unhappy for a time. Plenty of people do that. Some people do it all their lives; some people seem to enjoy unhappiness. Not Helena. She was too straightforward and too honest with herself. Left alone, she had a deeply tranquil face and a gentle soul. I felt sure she would recover her patience with herself. Not with me perhaps, but if she hated me I could hardly quibble, since when I met her I had hated myself.

"I shall miss you," she mocked.

"Like a blister when the pain stops!"

"Yes."

We laughed.

"Some of my ladies ask to see me again!" I teased her suggestively.

"Why?" Helena flung back in her fierce way, bright-eyed. "Do you cheat them so obviously when you send in your bill?"

She had lost a few pounds lately but she still had a bonny figure and I still quite liked the way she did her hair. So I grinned, "Only if I want to see them!"

And she scoffed back, "I shall warn my accountant to jump hard on mistakes!"

Her father and her uncle had lost their bet. It would never last, but at that moment we were friends.

She looked nicely dishevelled and pink; I could safely hand her over to her relations looking like that. They would think the worst of me, but that was better than the truth.

There are two reasons for taking a girl on the Embankment. One is to breathe fresh air. We had done that. I thought about the other reason, then thought better of it. Our long journey was over. I took her home.

PART III.

ROME.

Spring, AD 71

XXXVIII.

A reception party was waiting for us in her father's street.

We had arrived without incident in the Capena Gate Sector, jiggled down a few side streets then lurched towards the senator's house. The chairs stopped. We were both climbing out. Helena gasped. I turned: four or five slave market rejects were rushing us. Each had a pointed hat pulled down more securely over his face than his smallpox scars required, and one hand buried under his cloak as if whatever was hidden there would not be a satchel of bread rolls and country cheese.

"Hercules, lady! Bang the bell until someone comes!"

Helena flew to her father's door as I rapidly unhooked a sedan chair's carrying rod.

I glanced around. Passers-by were melting off the pavements into goldsmiths and flower shops, open for the evening trade with lanterns on their porticos. The area was far too select to expect help. The strollers were vanishing like bursting bubbles on the Tiber in flood.

The rejects were brisk, but not as brisk as me. Under the cloaks they were carrying thorn wood cudgels, but after three months in a lead mine I had more pent-up aggression than they may have realized. I could do a lot of damage whirling an eight-foot pole.

Eventually Camillus burst out with his slaves in response to her ladyship's spirited bell jangling. The rejects abruptly scattered. They left a trail of blood and one man dead. He had lunged at Helena. I hauled her sideways, pulling out the knife I stash down my boot, then stamped his shin like a soldier and stabbed upwards as he came. It would never have stopped anyone who had an army training, but plainly he had not; I finished him.

It is illegal to carry a weapon in Rome. Still, I was defending a senator's daughter; no prosecution lawyer could make a magistrate convict. Besides, I hadn't endured her for fourteen hundred miles to give her up on the home doorstep and throw away my double fee.

Camillus Verus, sword in hand, breathed heavily and surveyed the lively scene. Chaos welled round us, seeping down the street. Dusk made everything seem more ominous.

"Lost them! Out of touch, but I nicked one"

"Not bad, sir. I'll introduce you at my fencing gym!"

"Falco, you look a bit sick."

"Overwhelmed by the warmth of our welcome..."

Killing people has a bad effect on me.

Both the senator and his wife, who came flittering out among her flock of slab-faced maids, were waiting to embrace their noble child. Once I grabbed her I had forgotten to let go. (A good rule with women, though difficult to follow up in a crowd.) It was probably the first time her honourable parents saw Helena Justina white-faced and silent, crushed to the palpitating chest of a badly shaved, mad-eyed ruffian waving a bloody knife. I released her with a hasty gesture into the arms of her papa.

He was so shocked at having nearly lost her that for a moment he lost all powers of speech.

I sat quaking on the edge of a great flower tub while Helena Justina was passed about. Since no one liked to scold me for their fright, everyone scolded her. She seemed too stunned to object. I watched, so used to my role as her protector that I felt awkward hanging back here.

"Well done, Falco!" Her father strode across and hauled me to my feet. Then he asked, in the voice of a man who had money riding on my reply, "Everything go well on your trip?"

"Oh, the quietness of the journey matched the thin pay!"

Helena shot me a tricky look. I gazed at the evening sky like a man who was simply very tired.

Decimus sent a message to the magistrate about the man I had killed, and in sharp order the body was tidied off his frontage at public expense. I heard no more about the incident.

No doubt what these villains wanted: when they all suddenly ran, our baggage skipped off with them.

I organized a search party and the Camillus slaves soon trundled back with our stuff, which they found abandoned only two streets away. I set a candelabrum on the cool tiled floor of the senator's hall. I was on my knees, spreading open each pack for a systematic check; Helena crouched alongside, helping me. While I searched we spoke to each other in the low voices of people who had travelled together for weeks. Her mother looked uneasy, though we were too busy to deal with that. Everyone we met on the journey had livened up their own dull days by imagining some scandal; both of us were used to ignoring it. Even so, I sensed Julia Justa now viewed me as an embarrassment. I had to smile to myself: my proud young lady's elegant mother harried her as much as mine did me.

These are hardly disturbed; there's very little gone," I told Helena Justina, consulting her like my partner in the case.

"My uncle's letter"

"Not fatal. Pointless in fact he can write again."

Something else. Something that had belonged to me.

At the moment when I realized, Helena must have seen my face. I knew from her look my own expression had become positively grey.

"Oh Falco -"

I touched her wrist. "Lass, it doesn't matter."

"But it does!"

I simply shook my head.

They had taken the jet bracelet, the one Helena gave to Sosia and Sosia gave to me.

XXXIX.

The senator decided to go to the Palace that night. He would report all we knew, not least how we suspected that Domitian was involved. For me, nothing to do until further instructions; I could manage that.

They offered me dinner and a night in a feather bed, but I went home. For various reasons I wanted time on my own.

The laundry was closed so I left the adventure of greeting Lenia until next day. Six flights of stairs are an indecent obstacle to a travel-weary man. Trudging upwards, I decided to move house. When I reached my apartment, I grew stubborn and decided to stay.

Nothing had changed. There was an outer room in which a dog might just turn round if he was a thin dog with his tail between his legs. A wonky table, a slanty bench, shelf of pots, bank of bricks, gridiron, wine jars (filthy), rubbish basket (overflowing)...

But my table was standing in the wrong place. The cooking bricks were blackened with soot. Some soulless bastard was starving a sparrow in a cage: someone else was living in my house.

I smelt him first. The air throbbed with the dusky reek of used woollen tunics, unwashed for a month. There was a cheesy scarlet dinner-robe I failed to recognize, and a pair of slippers whose whiff rushed to greet me from the far side of the room. Despite Decimus paying full whack to Smaractus, my disreputable landlord had let a hot-wine waiter with every kind of body odour invade my office as a subtenant while I was away.

He was out. At that moment, it was lucky for him.

I turfed his stuff onto the balcony, kicked his slippers across the landing outside the front door, fed his sparrow, then rearranged the squalor to suit me. I ate the anchovy eggs he had left in my favourite bowl; they tasted three days old. When he turned up he had greasy hair, bad teeth and a tendency to fart when he was frightened, which soon occurred whenever I glanced his way. That was quite often; he was the type you keep your eye on all the time.

I informed this wretch that whatever he was paying Smaractus, he ought to be paying me so either he could sleep outside with the stars until he found another room or I would throw him straight out now. He chose the balcony.

"You've eaten my eggs!"

"Bad luck," I said, scowling. He was not to know I was scowling because that expression had reminded me of someone else.

I won't say I missed her. Filthy-tempered women who reckon their lives are tragedies are two a penny where I live. What I missed was the warm sense of earning money just by keeping her company. I missed taking responsibility for another human being. I even missed the pulse of excitement wondering whatever the daft girl would do to irritate me next.

News still travelled fast in the Aventine. Petronius Longus banged in a good hour before I expected him; his familiar solid presence and that familiar modest grin. He had grown a beard. It looked terrible. I told him; he said nothing, but I knew next time I saw him he would have shaved.

The hot-wine waiter had discovered and drunk my cellar (though he denied it, since lying is what hot-wine waiters do best). Luckily Petro had lugged up an amphora of his favourite Campagnan. He perched on a bench, leaning back against the wall with his long legs stretched to the table and his booted heels up on its edge, balancing his cup on his stomach comfortably. It seemed a long time since I had last seen Petronius making himself at home. Taking one look at my gaunt face and frame, he merely asked, "Rough?"

Nursing my ribcage, I summed up the past four months for him: "Rough!"

He was perfectly prepared to endure the whole story, but knew what I needed at that moment was a long stiff drink alongside a quiet friend. His brown eyes gleamed. "And how was the lady client?"

Petronius has always been fascinated by the flocks of ardent women he visualizes besieging me. Usually I oblige him with salacious details even if I have to make them up. He could tell I was exhausted when all I managed was, "Nothing to brag about. Just an ordinary girl."

Give you any trouble?" he queried longingly. I forced a sad smile. "Oh, I soon sorted her out." He didn't believe me; I didn't believe myself. We drank all his red Campagnan, without water, then I think I fell asleep.

XL.

Helena Justina visited my office the next day. It was extremely embarrassing because I had a young lady in a short ruby tunic sprawled across my lap with her legs in the air; this chancy miss was sharing my breakfast and being rather silly about it too. The miss was pretty, the scene intimate, and Helena the last person I expected to see.

Helena Justina looked neat and cool in floating white, and I felt distinctly awkward that that light-robed stately creature had struggled up six flights to my grim hole before I had had a shave.

"I would have run down"

"Not at all. I was longing to see you enthroned in your kingdom!" She surveyed me fastidiously, sniffing at the sordid air. The place looks clean. Does somebody look after you? I expected gloomy great swags of spiders' web and evidence of rats."

Somebody my mama had bustled round earlier, so the spiders had temporarily hopped it under the rafters with the pigeons. I tried not to think about the rats.

I shifted my giggly armful sideways onto the bench.

"Go and wait on the balcony."

"That man's there! He stinks!"

The waiter; he would have to go. I sighed. Her ladyship gave me a maddening smile.

"M Didius Falco: half-asleep and cradling a wine cup Bit early, Falco, even for you?"

"Hot milk," I croaked.

It sounded as if I was lying, so Helena leaned over the table to see: it was hot milk.

The senator's daughter, amid her usual impolite aura of perfumed condescension, sat on the chair I keep for clients and stared at my squirming companion. I gave in.

This is Marcia, my favourite little friend." Marcia, my favourite friend, aged three, cuddled up possessively and glared over my arm in a gruff way that probably reminded Helena of me. I gripped the neck of her tunic, hoping to keep her under some kind of control.

Then to my horror the senator's daughter held out her arms to Marcia and heaved her over the table with the confidence of a person who has always been good with children until then. I thought of that clean, well-behaved little maiden I had seen on her lap in Londinium, and cursed inwardly. Marcia flopped like a sack in her arms looking thoughtful, gazed up at her, deliberately dribbled, then blew bubbles with the spit.

"Behave," I instructed feebly. "Wipe your face."

Marcia wiped her face on the nearest material, which was the embroidered end of Helena Justina's long white scarf.