'Who's asking?' I prompted. By then I had warmed up enough in the late-afternoon sunshine not to care.

'A runabout from the house of Hortensius Novus.'

He had a faintly foreign accent, but it lay a long way back behind the common lilt all prisoners of war seem to contract in the slave market. I guessed he had picked up his Latin as a small child; probably by now he could hardly remember his native tongue. His eyes were blue; he looked like a Celt to me.

'You have a name?'

'Hyacinthus!'

He said it with a level stare that dared me to scoff. If he was a slave he had enough problems without enduring ribaldry from every new acquaintance just because some overseer with a filthy hangover had stuck him with the name of a Greek flower.

'Pleased to meet you, Hyacinthus.' I refused to present a target for the aggressive retort he held ready. 'I've never heard of your master Hortensius. What's his problem?'

'If you asked him, he'd say nothing.'

People often talk in riddles when they commission an informer. Very few clients seem capable of asking straight out, What are your rates for proving that my wife sleeps with my driver?

'So why has he sent you?' I asked the runabout patiently.

'His relations have sent me,' Hyacinthus corrected me. 'Hortensius Novus has no idea I'm here.'

That convinced me the case involved denaru, so I waved Hyacinthus to my bench: a hint of cash worth being secretive about always perks me up.

'Thanks, Falco; you're a regular general!' Hyacinthus assumed my invitation to sit included my winejar too; to my annoyance he dodged back indoors and found a beaker for himself. As he made himself at home under my rose pergola he demanded, 'This your idea of a gracious setting for interviewing clients?'