After that I felt better. Now it was Home.

Prominent on the table, where not even I could miss it, stood a ceramic Greek bowl which I had bought off an antiques stall for two coppers and a cheeky smile; it was half full of scratched bone counters, some with extremely odd streaks of colour. I chortled. The last time I saw these was at a ghastly family party where my little niece Marcia had seized them to play with and swallowed most of them: my betting tags.

When a child has eaten something you prefer not to lose, there is only one way- if you are fond of the child- to recover it. I knew the disgusting procedure from the time my brother Festus swallowed our mother's wedding ring and pressured me to help him find it. (Until he was killed in Judaea, which put an end to my fraternal duties, there was a tradition in our family that Festus was the one who was always in trouble, while I was the fool he always persuaded to dig him out of it.) Gulping down family valuables must be an inherited trait; I had just spent three days in prison wishing constipation on my feckless brother's sweet but feckless child...

No need to worry. Some hard-headed relation- my sister Maia probably, the only one who could organise - had gallantly retrieved these tags. To celebrate, I pulled up a floorboard where I had half a wine jar hidden away from visitors and sat out on my balcony with my feet up on the parapet while I applied all my attention to a restorative drink.

As soon as I was comfortable, a visitor arrived.

I heard him come in, gasping for air after the long climb. I kept quiet, but he found me anyway. He pushed through the folding door and accosted me chirpily. 'You Falco?'

'Could be.'

He had arms as thin as pea-sticks. A triangular face came down to a point at a dot of a chin. Above it ran a narrow black moustache, almost ear to ear. The moustache was what you noticed. It bisected a face that was too old for his adolescent body, as if he were a refugee from a province racked by twenty years of famine and tribal strife. The true cause was nothing so dramatic. He was just a slave.