`This had better be good.' `Oh, it's hilarious.'

`You do know where she is, then?'

`At home, I believe.'

`She's gone off us?' That would be too much to hope for. Silvia had never liked me. She thought me a bad influence on Petronius. What libel. He had always been perfectly capable of getting into trouble by himself. Still, we all rubbed along, even though neither Helena nor I could stand too much of Silvia.

`She's gone off me,' he explained.

A workman was approaching. Typical. He wore a one-sleeved tunic hitched over his belt and was carrying an old bucket. He was coming to clean the fountain, which looked a long job. Naturally he turned up at the end of the working day. He would leave the job unfinished and never come back.

`Lucius, my boy,' I tackled Petro sternly, since we might soon have to abandon our roost if this fellow did persuade the fountain to fill up, `I can think of various reasons – most of them female why Silvia would fall out with you. Who is it?'

`Milvia.'

I had been joking. Besides, I thought he had stopped flirting with Balbina Milvia months ago. If he had had any sense he would never have started – though when did that ever stop a man chasing a girl?

'Milvia's very bad news, Petro.'

`So Silvia informs me.'

Balbina Milvia was about twenty. She was astoundingly pretty, dainty as a rosebud with the dew in it, a dark, sweet little piece of trouble whom Petro and I had met in the course, of our work. She had an innocence that was begging to be enlightened, and was married to a man who neglected her. She was also the daughter of a vicious gangster a mobster whom Petronius had convicted and I had helped finally to put away. Her husband Florius was now developing half-hearted, plans to move in on the family rackets. Her mother Flaccida was scheming to beat him to the profits, a hard-faced bitch whose idea of a quiet hobby was arranging the deaths of men who crossed her. Sooner or later that was bound to include her son-in-law Florius.