Helena was twenty-eight, her brothers slightly younger. She was the partner of my life and work, that being the only way I could persuade her into my life and bed. Her brothers nowadays formed the junior sector of Falco and Associates, a little-known firm of private informers who specialised in background investigations of the family type (bridegrooms, widows and other cheating, lying, money-grubbing swine just like your own relatives). We could do art theft recovery, though that had been slack lately. We would hunt for missing persons, persuading rich teenagers to return home – sometimes even before they had been ravaged by their unsuitable lovers – or we would track down moonlit-flitters before they had unloaded their wagons at their next rental (although for reasons associated with my pauper past, we tended to be kind to debtors). We specialised in widows and their endless legacy problems, because ever since I was a light-hearted bachelor, I had done so; now I just reassured Helena they were my clients' half-mad aunts. I, the senior and more skilled partner, was also an imperial agent, a subject on which I was supposed to keep my mouth shut. So I shall do so.

Breakfast was where we all met up. In the manner of traditional Roman marriages, Helena Justina would consult me, the respected head of our household, about domestic issues. When she had finished telling me what was wrong, what part she felt I had played in causing it, and how she proposed to remedy the matter, I would gently concur with her wisdom and leave her to get on with it. Then her brothers would arrive to take orders from me on our current cases. Well, that was how I saw it.

The two Camilli, Aelianus and Justinus, had never been too friendly together. Matters had deteriorated when Justinus ran off with Aelianus' rich betrothed, thus persuading Aelianus that he wanted her after all (whereas he had been lukewarm about Claudia until he lost her) while Justinus soon saw that he had made a big mistake. However, Justinus had married the lass, for Claudia Rufina would one day possess a great deal of money and he was intelligent.