‘We ought to be nine couches, to be formal, but I’m settling for seven. Fulvius and I don’t believe in touting invitations around the baths, just to make up numbers. You attract fat bores with no morals, who will be sick in your peristyle. It goes without saying, they never ask you back ... I thought your father would be here with you, Falco?’

‘Did he write and tell you that? No chance, Cassius! He did suggest imposing himself - I forbade the devious old bastard to come.’

Cassius laughed, the way people do when they cannot believe you are serious. I glared. My father and I had spent half of my life estranged, and that was the half I liked. He worked in the antiques trade, in that specialism where ‘antique’ means ‘put together yesterday by a man with a squint in Bruttium’. My smooth-tongued father could make ‘doubtful provenance’ sound like a virtue. Buy from him and you would get a fake, but so flagrantly overpriced you could never admit to yourself that he diddled you. Ten to one a handle would fall off while you lugged the object home.

‘He is not coming. I am serious!’ I declared. Helena snorted. Cassius laughed again.

Despite greying hair, Cassius was sturdily built; he went weightlifting twice a week. If ever Fulvius got into bother, Cassius was supposed to fight their way out of it, though I had seen this bodyguard in action and had no faith in him. A handsome chunk, he was about fifteen years younger than my uncle, who must be ten years older than my parents; that put Fulvius well into his seventies, Cassius late-fifties.