highly self-righteous. I suspected it was a deliberate pose. He hadn't really changed.
'Quintus, don't ask me any favours to do with entertainers! I'm in enough trouble with your family.'
Justinus slipped into his infectious grin. `That's true – and heading for more! If I see you I am to invite you and Helena to dinner on her birthday. Tomorrow,' he spelt out annoyingly. That reminded me about my lost birthday present problem, and I cursed to myself. `What you don't know', continued Helena's favourite brother, `is that someone else has come home from abroad. Somebody who doesn't take kindly to having his sister living with an informer, and who keeps describing in tortuous detail what he would like to do to you.'
`Aelianus?'
`Aelianus.' The other brother, whom I had never met but already disliked. His views on me were plain too; he had written them to his sister with great acrimony. The distress he had caused Helena was more than I could think about.
`Looks as if we're heading for a wonderful evening!' I commented.
Quintus Camillus Justinus, an odd soul who happened to believe I was quite good for his sister, gave me a formal salute. `You can, of course, rely on my unstinted support, Marcus Didius!'
`Oh thanks!' I said.
He would make a good politician: it was a blatant bribe. So now I had to find time to introduce a senator's son to an actress, then watch him ruin his previously immaculate reputation in a scandalous love affair. No doubt afterwards I would be expected to help this young man tour the city trying to win votes.
Petronius and I were admitted to the Nonnius house by the porter as soon as we shouted our arrival. He seemed relieved that we had turned up to take charge. He came out to greet us carrying a temporary screen and watched us examine the front door, which had been battered open last night so efficiently that little of it now remained. `They came in a cart with a ram on it. A pointed tree trunk mounted on a frame. They pulled it back on a sling, then let go – it crashed right through.'
Petro and I winced. This was real siege warfare. No house in Rome would be safe from such artillery – and only a daring gang would risk taking that kind of illegal weapon openly through the streets.
The house was silent now. Nonnius had been unmarried and had no known relatives. With him gone, domestic management would come to a full stop.
We walked about unhindered, finding few of the slaves who had been in evidence the last time I visited. Maybe some had run away, either eager to be free or simply terrified. In strict law, when a man was murdered, his slaves were subjected to statutory torture to make them identify his murderer. Any who had denied him assistance would be punished severely. If he was murdered in his own house, his slaves were bound to be the first suspects.
The porter was the most helpful. He freely confessed that strange men had come to the house after dark, had broken down the door suddenly and violently, and rushed past him. He had hidden in his cubicle. Sometime later the men had left. A long time after that he had ventured out. He learned from the others that Nonnius had been dragged away.
None of the other slaves would admit to having seen what was done to their master. At last we found the little Negro who had been his personal attendant; the child was still hiding under a bedroom couch, crazy with fear. He must know the truth, but we got nothing from him but whimpering. Some of the cohort had turned up by then, brought here by Fusculus. Petronius, not unkindly, put the child in the charge of one of them and ordered him to be brought to the station house.
`Put a blanket or something around him!' Petro's lip curled in distaste at the little black boy's fluttery skirt and bare, gilded chest. `Try and convince him we're not going to beat him up.'
`Growing soft, chief?'
`He's palpitating like a run-down leveret. We'll get nothing if he drops dead on us. Now let's do a regular search.'
We drew some conclusions from the search. Nonnius had been in bed. Boots were in the bedroom, thrown in different directions, and tunics lay on a stool. The bed stood askew, as if it had been jerked violently; its coverlet had fallen half on the floor. We reckoned he had been surprised and snatched while asleep, or at least only partly awake. Whether he was alive or dead when they took him from the house was debatable, though Petronius decided on him being still alive. There was only a small amount of blood on the bedclothes and the floor – not enough to have been caused by the mass of wounds we had seen on the body.
We should probably only ever find out where they had taken him if somebody confessed. We might never know. What had happened to him in the hour or so that followed his abduction we could all imagine clearly. Most of us preferred not to think about it.
XXXI
AS WE WERE leaving the Nonnius mansion someone else made the mistake of trying to arrive. We were keyed up in investigating mode, and surrounded him. He was a lean fellow in a smart white tunic, carrying a leather satchel.
`May we look in the bag, sir?' The man handed it over to Fusculus with a rather dry expression. It was full of tweezers, spatulas and stoneware medicine jars. `What's your name?'
`Alexander. I am the householder's doctor.'
We relaxed, but our humour was harsh. `Well he won't need you now!'
`The patient has suffered a fatal dose of being beaten up.' `Terminal knife wounds.'
`Irreversible death.'
`I see,' commented the doctor, no doubt thinking of his lost fees.
Petronius, who had not spoken to him before this, said, `I respect your relationship with your patient, but you will understand my enquiries are very serious. Did Nonnius say anything to you in confidence that might tell us who may have done this?' To judge from his careful phrasing, Petro had had trouble extracting information from doctors.
`I don't believe he did.'
`Well you are free to go then.'
`Thank you.'
Something about the man's manner was oddly restrained. He seemed hardly surprised to have lost his patient in this appalling way. Perhaps that was because he knew what line of business Nonnius had been in. Or perhaps there was another cause.
`There was something peculiar there,' I suggested, as we all walked back to the patrol house.
`He's a doctor,' Petro assured me calmly. `They're always peculiar.'
If I had not known him better I might have thought something in Petro's own manner seemed oddly restrained too. In view of my special investigation for Titus, I wanted Petronius to behave in ways I understood.
At the station house Petro's young assistant, Porcius, was in deep trouble with a woman. Luckily for him she was extremely old and not worth creating a fuss about. It was another stolen-bedcover case; somebody was going around with a hook on a stick targeting ancient dames who were too bent to chase after a thief. Porcius was trying to write a report for this one; we could see he would be helpless for the rest of the morning. unless rescued.
`See the clerk,' Petro told her curtly.
`The clerk's a dozy mule!' She must have been here before. `This nice young man is looking after me.'
Porcius was a new recruit. He was desperate to arrest as many wrongdoers as possible, but had no idea of how to dodge time wasters. Petro was unimpressed. `This nice young man has more important things to do.'
`See the clerk, please,' muttered Porcius, looking embarrassed.
Indoors we found a nasty scene: a large boulder was lying in the centre of the floor, along with the broken shutter it had been thrown through last night and the wreckage of a stool. Petro sighed, and said to me, `As you see, sometimes the locals chuck worse things at us than cabbages.'
`They poked some brassica stalks through the cell air hole too,' Porcius told him. `People round here do seem
