'Where's Maia?' I asked. 'I thought she was helping to nurse him?'

'She probably wanted to bathe,' Helena said.

'Not today. You've forgotten the corpse. I had the bath house closed.'

Helena looked up sharply. 'Maia will be annoyed!' I could see she was concerned about the safety aspects, with a killer haunting the place.

'It's all right. Alexas and I are just going there.'

'Ask Alexas to look at your tooth, Falco.'

'Problem, Falco?' he asked helpfully. I showed him. He reckoned the fiery molar needed to be removed. I decided I would live with it.

'You'll have less pain if it's taken out, Falco.'

'It may be just a flare up.'

'When the pain takes over your life, you'll think again.'

'Is there a decent tooth-puller in this area?' Helena was determined I should act. I must be more irritable than I had realised.

Tm not complaining,' I muttered.

'No, you're trying to winkle it out yourself,' Helena accused me. I wondered how she knew.

'Well, let me know when you want help and I can find you someone local with a set of pincers,' Alexas volunteered. 'Or Helena Justina, you can take him to Londinium and spend a lot of money.'

'For the same brutal job!' I grumbled. Alexas grasped he had a difficult patient and offered to grind me a herbal painkiller instead.

I dragged him oft for our unsavoury task. Passing another room in my suite, I spotted our nursemaid obviously about to try on one of Maia's dresses in my sister's absence.

'It suits the real owner better,' I announced loudly from the doorway. 'Put it back in the chest and mind my daughters, please, Hyspale!'

Hyspale turned round to the doorway, still unashamedly holding the red dress against her body. She would probably have uttered some surly rejoinder, but saw I had a male stranger with me, so that caught her interest. I informed her the medical orderly was married with three sets of twins- at which the simpering chit had the cheek to tell Alexas that she loved children.

'If you want her, she's yours,' I offered as we headed down the corridor.

He looked rightly scared.

With a sense that everything around me was going wrong, I set off through the internal corridor to the royal bath house. Alexas took a detour through the garden, looking for his stretcher-bearers, he said. He seemed to be avoiding this corpse with every possible excuse; it was odd, because when he showed me the body of Valla, the dead roofer, way back on my first day here, he had been perfectly composed.

I went on ahead to the baths, where a shock awaited. I could appoint myself the project manager and imagine that I now ran this site- but Fate took a different view. My precautions had been thwarted.

The entrance should have stayed roped off. My instructions last night had been clear. The rope was there all right. But it had been slung aside in an untidy heap, on top of which lay two battered tool baskets that contained a few chipped chisels, flagons and half-eaten loaves. Squatting in the doorway were a pair of slack-mouthed hopeless workmen. They were holding a wooden spar across the threshold, which gave the impression they were levelling or measuring. They did neither. One was deep in argument about some left-footed gladiator, while the other stared into space.

'This had better be good!' I roared at them. My imitation of Mars the Avenger had all the effect of a warm-up act at a run-down theatre in the offseason.

'Keep your curls in, tribune.'

'You moved that rope?'

'What rope? You don't mean this one?'

'Oh yes I do. But you're right- why not untie the thing? It will be a lot easier to use the rope to hang the pair of you!'

They exchanged glances. They were treating me like any wild eyed client at the end of his tether- with utter indifference.

'What are your names?'

Tin Septimus and he's Tiberius,' the spokesman informed me, implying that such a question was bad manners. I took out a tablet and pointedly wrote down the names.

'Stand up.' They humoured me. 'What are you doing here?'

'Spot of work required, tribune.'

'I don't see you doing it!' I snarled. 'You're loitering at a crime scene, interfering with my security measures, allowing un authorised access and irritating all Hades out of me.'

They pretended to look impressed. Big words and a bad temper were a novelty. I had plenty more of both to call on. And they had plenty of stubborn defiance.

'Have you entered the baths since you took off the rope?'

'No, tribune.'

'You had better hope I believe that.' I did not, but there was no point nit-picking. 'Has anyone else been in?'

'Oh no, tribune. Not with us sat here.'

Wrong. At that moment my own sister marched out from the changing room behind them. She was carrying her personal oil flask and scraper and was livid. 'This is a complete disgrace- there is no hot water and no heat at all in the steam rooms!'

'My orders, Maia.'

'Well, I might have known!'

'There's a dead man in the hot rooms not to mention a killer preying on lone bathers. Did you go in past these two brazen layabouts?'

'Well, I stepped over them,' Maia sneered.

Septimus and Tiberius just smirked.

Maia was storming off, but I held her back. 'Is anyone else inside?' I asked.

A guarded look crossed her face. 'Not now.'

'What do you mean? Was there someone?'

'I thought I heard movement.'

'Who?'

'No idea, Marcus. I was undressed as tar as my under tunic just exploring the cold room- what a waste of time! I didn't know who had turned up, so I kept quiet.' Maia knew what I thought about her visiting a mixed baths alone. She didn't care. Being Maia, she might have enjoyed the fris son of risk.

'Next time, drag Hyspale along to stand guard. You may like being leered at by lads looking for women in wet breast-bands but being spied on by a strangler would be a different beaker of maggots.'

'I might just have heard these two messing about,' Maia returned, cheerfully implicating the workmen.

'Oh surely not,' I responded sarcastically. 'Septimus and Tiberius would never spy on a lady, would you, lads?'

They gazed at me, not even bothering to lie. Given the dopey way they were hanging about in the entrance when I turned up, playing at voyeurs probably never occurred to them. Besides, my sister exuded the air of a woman who would savage peephole spies.

With a whisk of her skirts, Maia darted away back towards our suite. I let her go. I could ask more questions later, with Helena in support.

Alexas finally turned up. When he saw the two workmen, I thought he looked slightly awkward. They were quite unabashed and greeted him by name.

'You know these scoundrels?' I demanded angrily.

'They work for my uncle.' Septimus and Tiberius 'watched our confrontation with the bright eyes of happy troublemakers.

'Your uncle is the King's bath-house contractor?'

'Afraid so.' Alexas sounded rueful. Well, I knew all about awkward relatives.

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