I hopped back. I used an old nail to spring back the teeth of the lock on the warehouse door. I checked the sun-baked yard. Using the military pincers Frontinus had brought, I reapplied the gate chains like a responsible person. Then I left.

The smell of the corpse had infiltrated my clothes. Unable to bear it any longer, I went home to change.

I lived in the Thirteenth Sector. In empty streets it took ten minutes, though at this time of day forcing myself through the crowds occupied three times that. The hubbub seemed worse than usual. I reached home feeling deafened and desperate.

The Falco apartment was the best I could afford, so it was grim. I rented a filthy garret above the Eagle Laundry in a street called Fountain Court (which had never possessed a fountain, and wasn't a court). To reach this impressive location I had to turn off the comparative luxury of the paved Ostia Road, then squeeze down a series of twisting entries that grew narrower and more threatening at every step. The point where they diminished into nothing was Fountain Court. I flailed through several lines of damp togas that were blocking the laundry's frontage, then attacked the long haul up six flights of stairs to the sky-high hovel that served as my office and home.

Once aloft I knocked, for the hell of it and to warn off any wildlife frolicking in my absence, then I told myself to come in and unlatched the door.

I had two rooms, each a bare eight foot square. I paid extra for a rocky balcony but my landlord Smaractus allowed me a discount in the form of natural daylight through a hole in the roof (plus free access to water, whenever it rained). There were multimillionaires in Rome who housed their horses better, though thousands of anonymous individuals fared even worse.

My penthouse was for tenants who went out a lot. Yet for five years this squalid hole had seemed gracious enough, especially since when I was running around for clients I was rarely there. It had never been cheap; nowhere in Rome was. Some of my human neighbours were objectionable types, but an amiable gecko had recently taken up residence. I could entertain four people if I opened the door to the balcony, or five when one was a girl who would sit on my lap. I lived alone; financially I had no choice.