Julius Frontinus was in his first year of office here. When the message came, he was eating breakfast during an early morning meeting with his right hand man. We all shared the official residence so I was there too. 'Gaius, go and see if you recognise the victim,' Frontinus told Hilaris, who had been in Britain all those decades and so knew absolutely everyone. Since the governor had previously worked with me on a murder hunt in Rome, he then added: 'Sounds your sort of thing, Falco. You should trot along there too.'

So here I was. I had been dispatched to the crime scene as an expert in unnatural death. But I was a thousand miles from my own patch. How would I know the motive for a local British murder, or where to start looking for the killer? I was on holiday, intending to claim that I had nothing to contribute. My own official mission in Britain was finished; afterwards I had brought Helena to Londinium to see her relatives, but we were pretty well en route for home now.

Then when the centurion presented the sodden body, Hilaris went quiet and I too felt queasy. I knew at once that I might have had a direct involvement in how the victim came to be here.

So far, only I knew that.

III

'Wonder who he is?' The centurion nudged the corpse with the side of his boot – avoiding the tip, where he might have touched dead flesh with his big bare toes. 'Who he was? he laughed sardonically.

The dead man had been tall and well fed. The straggles of long hair that clung to his head and neck, tangling in the edges of his woollen tunic, were once wild and red-gold. The eyes, now closed, had been bright with curiosity and used to delight in dangerous mischief.