"She said it was too complicated to explain."

"Ah!" I cried bitterly. I had never been married but I was an expert in divorce. "Adultery! I've heard of women being exiled to islands for immoral behaviour, but exile to Britain seems a bit bleak!"

Sosia Camillina looked curious. "How can you tell?"

"I've been there."

Because of the rebellion I sounded terse. She would have been six years old at the time. She did not remember the great British Revolt and I was not starting history lessons now.

Suddenly she demanded: "Why did your friend call you a tricky character?"

"I'm a republican. Petronius Longus thinks that's dangerous."

"Why are you a republican?"

"Because every free man should have a voice in the government of the city where he has to live. Because the senate should not hand control of the Empire for life to one mortal, who may turn out insane or corrupt or immoral and probably will. Because I hate to see Rome degenerate into a madhouse controlled by a handful of aristocrats manipulated by their cynical ex-slaves, while the mass of its citizens cannot earn a decent living..." Impossible to tell what she made of all that. Her next inquiry was stubbornly practical.

"Do private informers earn a decent living?"

Taking every legal opportunity, they grab enough to keep alive. On good days," I said, "there may be tucker on the table to give us the energy to rave at the injustice of the world I was well away now. I had matched Petronius levelly with the wine.

"Do you think the world is unjust?"

"I know it, lady!"

Sosia stared at me gravely, as if she were saddened that the world had treated me so hard. I stared back. I was none too overjoyed myself.

I felt tired. I went out into the living room and after a moment the girl came too.

"I need to go to the lavatory again."

I was seized by the wild anxiety of a man who brings home a puppy because it looks so sweet, then realizes that on the sixth floor he has problems. No need to panic. My apartment was spartan, but my way of life hygienic.

"Well," I teased. "There are several alternatives. You can pop downstairs and try to persuade Lenia to open up the laundry after hours. Or you can run along the street to the big public convenience but don't forget to take your copper to get in because six flights is a long way to come back for it"

"I suppose," snapped Sosia haughtily, "you and your men friends pee off the balcony?"

I looked shocked. I was, mildly. "Don't you know there are laws against that?"

"I had not imagined," sneered Sosia, "you would worry about the public nuisance laws!" She was getting the measure of the establishment I ran. She had already got the measure of me.

I crooked my finger. She followed me back into the bedroom where I introduced her to the arrangements which I modestly used myself.

Thank you," she said.

"Don't mention it," I returned.

I peed off the balcony just to prove my independence.

This time when she came back I was brooding. I seemed to be struggling more than usual with the background to this kidnap. I could not decide whether I had missed the point, or whether in fact I knew all there was to know. I wondered if the senator she belonged to was politically active. Sosia might have been snatched to influence his vote. Oh gods, surely not! She was far too beautiful. There must be more involved than that.

"Are you taking me home?"

Too late. Too risky. I'm too drunk." I turned away, wandered across the bedroom and collapsed onto my bed. She stood in the doorway like a leftover fish bone "Where am I going to sleep?"

I was almost as drunk as Petronius. I was lying flat on my back, nursing my notebooks. I was incapable of anything more than feeble gestures and silliness.

"Against my heart, little goddess!" I exclaimed, then flung my arms wide, very carefully, one at a time.

She was frightened.

"All right!" she retorted. She was a stalwart little piece.

I grinned at her weakly, then flopped back into my previous position. I was pretty frightened myself.

I was right though. It was too great a risk to step out of doors with anyone so precious. Not after nightfall. Not in Rome. Not through those pitch-black streets full of burglars and buggery. She was safer with me.

Was she safe? somebody asked me afterwards. I avoided answering. To this day I don't know, really, whether Sosia Camillina was safe with me that night or not.

To Sosia I said gruffly, "Guests take the reading couch. Blankets in the wooden box."

I watched her construct an elaborate cocoon. She made a terrible job of it. Like a tentful of legionary recruits, eight lackadaisical lads wearing scratchy new tunics who had never made up a camp bed before. She fidgeted round the couch for ages, tucking in far too many covers far too tight.

"I need a pillow," she complained finally in a small, serious voice, like a child who could only sleep if she followed a fixed nightly routine. I was blissful with wine and excitement; I did not care whether I had a pillow or not. I hooked one hand behind my head then flung her mine, wide, but she caught it.

Sosia Camillina inspected my pillow as though it might harbour fleas. Another charge of resentment against the nobility. Possibly it did, but any wildlife was tightly sewn inside a cheerful red and purple cover inflicted on me by my mama. I did not care to have snooty chits of girls casting aspersions on my household goods.

"It's perfectly clean! Use it and be grateful."

She laid the pillow very neatly at the end of her bed. I blew out the light. Private informers can be gentlemen when they are too drunk for anything else.

I slept like a babe. I have no idea whether my visitor did the same. Probably not.

VI.

The senator Decimus Camillas Verus lived in the Capena Gate Sector. The Capena Gate was the district next but one to mine, so I walked. On the way I passed my youngest sister Maia and at least two little roughnecks off our family tree.

Some informers give the impression we are solitary men. Perhaps that was where I went wrong. Every time I was surreptitiously trailing some adulterous clerk in a shiny tunic, I looked up to find one of these midgets wiping his nose on his arm and bawling my name across the street. I was a hobbled donkey in Rome. I must have been related to most people between the Tiber and the Ardeatine Gate. I had five sisters, the poor girl my brother Festus never found the time to marry, thirteen nephews and four nieces, with several more visibly on the way. That excludes what lawyers call my heirs of the fourth and fifth degree: my mother's brothers, and my father's sisters, and all the second cousins of the first marriage children of the stepfathers of my grandfather's aunts.

I had a mother too, though I tried to ignore that.

I waved back at the roughnecks. I keep them sweet. One or two of them are. Anyway, I use these artful urchins to trail the adulterers when I slope off to the races instead.

Decimus Camillus owned a freehold mansion on his own square of land among quiet domestic streets. He had purchased the right to draw water direct from the old Appian aqueduct nearby. He felt no financial necessity to lease his frontage out as shops, nor his upper storey as lodging rooms, though he did share his desirable plot with the owner of an identical house next door. From which I deduced that this senator was by no means extravagantly rich. Like the rest of us, the poor muffin was struggling to keep up the way of life appropriate to his rank. The difference between him and most of us being that to qualify for the senate Decimus Camillus Verus must be a millionaire.

Since I was visiting a million sesterces I risked my throat under a barber's razor. I wore a worn white toga with the holes folded out of sight, a short clean tunic, my best belt with the Celtic buckle, and brown boots. A free citizen, his importance signalled by the length of his train of slaves in my case, none.

There were spanking new escutcheon plates on the senator's door locks but a hangdog porter with a badly bruised cheekbone looked through his grille and opened up as soon as I pulled at the rope on the big copper bell. They were expecting someone. Probably the same someone who socked the porter yesterday and carried off the girl.

We crossed a black and white tiled hall, with a spluttery fountain and faded cinnabar paint. Camillus was a diffident man in his fifties who lurked in a library among a mass of paperwork, a bust of the Emperor, and one or two decent bronze lamps. He looked normal, but he wasn't. For one thing, he was polite.

"Good morning. How can I help you?"

The name's Didius Falco. Credentials, sir." I bowled him one of Sosia's bracelets. It was British jet, the stuff they ship down from the northeast coast, carved in interlocking pieces like whale's teeth. She had told me her cousin sent it. I knew the style from my army days, but they were rare in Rome.

He inspected it gently.

"May I ask where you obtained this?"

"Off the arm of a decorative party I rescued yesterday from two thieving hulks."

Ts she hurt?"

"No, sir."

He had heavy eyebrows above decently spaced eyes that looked at me directly. His hair bristled straight up from his head even though it was not particularly short, giving him a cheerful, boyish look. I saw him brace himself to ask what I wanted. I put on my helpful face.

"Senator, would you like me to bring her back?"

"What are your terms?"

"Any idea who took her, sir?"

"None." If I had realized he was lying, I should have admired the brisk way the man spoke. As it was, I liked his insistence. Your terms please?"

"Just professional curiosity. I've tucked her away somewhere safe. I'm a private informer. A watch captain called Petronius Longus in the Thirteenth will vouch for me"

He reached for his ink pot and made some notes across the corner of a letter he had been reading. I liked that too. He intended to check.

I suggested, without pressure, that if he was grateful he might hire me to help. He looked thoughtful. I outlined my rates, adding something for his rank since it would all take slightly longer if I had to keep calling him "sir'. He showed some reluctance, which I reckoned was because he did not want me hanging round the girl, but eventually we agreed I would advise him on household security and keep an ear to the ground about the kidnappers.

"You may be right about keeping Sosia Camillina out of sight," he said. "Is your hideout respectable?"

"Supervised by my own mother, sir!" True: she scoured my rooms regularly for evidence of loose women. Sometimes she found it, sometimes I hustled them out in time.

This senator was no idiot. He decided someone had to come back with me to make sure the wench was safe. I advised him against that. I had seen some greasy meatballs in the cook shop opposite, watching visitors to his home. There was nothing to say they were connected with Sosia, they could have been casual burglars who had picked an unlucky day to size up a future break-in. Since he was walking me round his property anyway, we went to look.

On the front door they had a sound wooden lock with a six inch, three-toothed iron rotary key, plus four brass bolts, an inspection grille with a natty little slider, and a great holm oak beam inside to sling across on two well-bedded cradles at night. The door porter lived in a cubbyhole at the side.

"Adequate?" remarked the senator.

I gave him a long look, including the dozy sprite they used as a doorman the slack-mouthed strip of wind who had let Sosia's abductors walk in.

"Oh yes, sir! A wonderful system, so let me offer some advice: use it!" I could see he took the point.

I made him peer through the grille to inspect the two loafers in the cook shop "Those peepers saw me come. I'll hop out over your back wall; give me a chance to survey the rear of the house. Send a slave to the local lockup and get them arrested for causing a breach of the peace."

"But they are not"

"They will be," I told him. "When the praetor's posse starts arresting them."

He was persuaded. The leaders of the Empire are so easily led.

The senator spoke to his doorman, who looked annoyed but mbled off on the errand. I made Camillus Verus show me his upstairs accommodation, then when we came down ten minutes later I looked out again and saw the two loafers from the cook shop with their arms up their backs, being marched off down the street by a brisk group of soldiers.

Reassuring to discover that when a citizen of substance complains to a magistrate the response is so prompt!

With all that cast iron work on the front door, at the back they had seven different entrances to the garden, with nary a decent lock among them. The kitchen door opened when I tried my own home latch-lifter. None of the windows had bars. A balcony around the upper storey offered access to the entire house. Their elegant smoky blue dining room possessed flimsy folding doors which I forced with an edging tile from a flowerbed, while the senator's secretary watched. He was a thin Greek slave with a hooked nose and the air of superiority with which Greek secretaries are embalmed at birth. I dictated instructions at length.

I decided I enjoyed dictating. I also enjoyed the look on the Greek's face when I grinned goodbye, clambered onto a sundial, found a toehold on a knot of ivy, and hoisted myself up the sheer dividing wall to see about the house next door.

"Who lives there?"

The master's younger brother."

As a younger brother myself I noted with pleasure that Camillus junior had sense. He had fixed up every window with solid slatted shutters, all painted in dark malachite green. Both houses had been faced in standard lava blocks, with their upper floors supported on skinny pillars hewn from a very ordinary grey stone. The architect had been lavish with his shaped terra cotta gable ends, but by the time he came to stock the grounds with the customary statues of graceful nymphs in their underwear, his contingency funds ran out. The gardens were furnished with meagre sticks of trellis, though their plants burgeoned with health. It was the same building contract on both sides of the wall. Hard to say why the senator's house bore an approachable, easygoing smile while his brother's felt formal and cold. I was glad Sosia lived in the house with the smile.

I gazed at the brother's house for a long time, not quite sure what I was looking for. Then, with a wave to the Greek, I walked along the top of the divider to the far end. I jumped nonchalantly off.

I got covered in dust and twisted my knee, landing in the alley behind the senator's garden wall. Hercules knows why I did it, there was an entry for delivery carts with a perfectly good gate.

VII.

As I walked towards home the streets became more clamorous, with traders' cries, hoofbeats and harness bells. A small black dog, his fur clinging in spiked clumps, barked madly at me as I passed a baker's shop. When I turned back to swear at him, my head bonked against a sequence of jugs that had been hung on a rope by a potter whose idea of advertisement was to show his work could take a bashing; luckily my head was also strong. In the Ostia Road I was buffeted by bodkin sellers and footmen in crimson livery, but I managed to get my own back by squashing the toes of several slaves. Three streets from home I glimpsed my mother buying artichokes with the purse-lipped look that means she is thinking about me. I ducked behind some barrels of winkles and then backtracked to avoid finding out whether this was true. She did not appear to have seen me. Things were going well: friends with a senator, open-ended contract, and best of all, Sosia.

I was brought up sharp from this reverie by two bullyboys whose greeting made me grunt with pain.

"Whoops!" (cried I). "Look lads, it's all been a mistake. Tell Smaractus my rent's with his accountant' I failed to recognize either, but Smaractus rarely keeps his gladiators long. If they can't run away they inevitably die in the ring. If they don't make it that far they perish from starvation, since Smaractus' idea of a training diet is a handful of pale yellow lentils in lashings of old bathwater. I assumed these were my landlord's latest bruisers from the gym.

My assumption was awry. By now my head was being gripped under the first bully boy elbow. The second put his face down to grin at me; I had a sideways view of the cheek guards of the latest design of helmet and a familiar scarlet neckerchief under his chin. These beggars were army. I considered coming the old soldier but in view of my legion's record, a dropout from the Second Augusta was unlikely to impress.

"Guilty conscience?" (cried the sideways face). "Something else to worry you Didius Falco, you're under arrest!"

Arrest by the boys in red felt familiar, like being tickled for cash by Smaractus. The biggest of these two big lads was attempting to squeeze out my tonsils with the racy efficiency of a cook's boy pod ding peas with his thumb. I would have asked him to stop but I was speechless with admiration for his technique...