Taller than both men in the room he carried himself as though he was the lord and Lucius the slave. His skin was discoloured around his neck, stained by the metal of the slave collar he had worn for many years, but even that did nothing to dent his natural dignity. Loosely dressed in a light tunic, the muscles of his body rippled on arms and breast and he showed no sign at all that the cold of the open atrium had affected him.

Gafon knew enough about fighting men to recognise a boxer when he saw one. It was in the face certainly; the nose which had once been straight and handsome flattened by numerous blows; the scar tissue on the brow and the raised knuckles on the large hands. This man would have acted as bodyguard as well as a body slave, protecting Lucius from assault in the troubled city streets. But Gafon was also struck by a similarity of features in both men. Lucius was like an aesthetic older relation of the sturdier slave. His hair was receding now and no doubt his fine dark brown mop had once been as thick as that of the servant, but it was around the eyes of both men that the similarity was most marked; deep brown yet penetrating pupils under marked eyebrows.

‘That will be all,’ Lucius said to Gafon, as soon as the assassin had managed to get a good look at his victim. ‘Wait outside the door.’

Gafon obeyed, masking his surprise that one so close to Lucius had betrayed him. But it made sense, for the boxer would be with his master more than any other person, both inside the Falerii house and out on the streets. Who would know more about his movements, whom he visited, the senators he spoke with. Given that most men where blind to the presence of a slave, and would talk freely when he was close, what plans he hatched with people whom Tiberius Livonius might assume were on his side.

Behind the closed door the slave was receiving from his master’s hand a scroll stating that he had been the property of the Falerii family but was now, by order of the head of that household, free.