Arguing was about as useful as demanding a recount of your change in a busy lunchtime food bar. I forced myself to simmer down. Laeta saw he had nearly pushed me too far. He caved in. 'So sorry to keep you waiting, Falco. Nothing changes here. Too much to do and too little time to do it – and a panic on, naturally.'

'I wonder what that can be!' I implied I had private information about it. I didn't. 'I'll come to that -' 'Keep it brisk then.' 'Titus Caesar suggested I talk to you -' 'And how is the princely Titus?' 'Oh – wonderful, wonderful.' 'Still screwing beautiful Queen Berenice? Or have you dreamed up some stratagem to whisk her back to her desert and avert embarrassment?'

Nursemaids must give a potion in babies' little pottery feeding bottles, one that makes aristocratic Roman males hanker after exotic women. Cleopatra had worked her way through enough Roman top brass. Now Titus Caesar, like me a handsome lad in his thirties, was an amiable prince who ought to be marrying a fifteen-year-old pretty patrician with good hips so he could father the next generation of Flavian emperors; instead, he preferred to dally on purple cushions with the voluptuous Queen of Judaea. It was true love, they said. Well, it must certainly be love on his part; Berenice was hot stuff, but older than him, and had a terrible reputation for incest (which Rome could cope with) and political interference (which was bad news). Conservative Rome would never accept this hopeful dame as an imperial consort. Astute in all other matters, Titus stuck with his no brain love affair like some bloody-minded teenager who had been instructed to stop smooching the kitchen maid.

Bored with waiting for an answer, I had lost myself in these gloomy thoughts. Without any obvious signal, Laeta's minions had all melted away. He and I were now alone and he had the air of a sword swallower at the high point of a trick: 'Look at me; this is terribly dangerous! I am about to disembowel myself…' 'And there's Veleda,' said Claudius Laeta in his polite bureaucratic accent. I stopped daydreaming.