Maia was less sympathetic. "Now you know how Helena feels when you just stay out and don't tell her why," she reproved me. "Still, he's a man. He is thoughtless and selfish. That's all we can expect." She had dumped him, so presumably she did not care, but her children had grown enormously fond of Petro on their long trip across Europe together; they were giving their mother a bad time, mithering over where he was. Maia had no answers-a situation that never suited her.
"Am I to set him a place tonight at dinner, I wonder?" asked Aelia Camilla, more anxious and puzzled than annoyed. She was a decent woman.
"No, don't. In fact," scoffed Maia, "don't set him a place even if he suddenly comes back!"
Petronius did not return.
VI
Abandoned by Petronius, that afternoon I settled down to work. Being asked to investigate the Verovolcus case would keep me trapped in Londinium even longer than I wanted, but I could not refuse the procurator and governor.
The governor, for one, thought it amusing to see me lumbered. Sextus Julius Frontinus was in his forties, a dedicated ex-consul whom I had met a couple of years before in Rome. We had worked together to solve a cruel series of female fatalities. Most consuls stink; he seemed different and I took to him. Frontinus had all the making of an old-time Roman in power: soldierly, cultured, intrigued by administrative problems of all kinds, decent, absolutely straight. He had asked for me by name as his trouble-solver on the Togidubnus palace audit. My success there made me even more popular.
"If anyone can decipher what happened to the King's crony it's you, Falco."