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you.’
    I did, and stopped short at the entrance. What I hadn’t been expecting was that Caesius himself would still be in residence, laid out on a funeral couch in his magistrate’s mantle and with a pan of incense burning beside him.
    Under these circumstances you have to observe the niceties. I took the pair of shears from the small table at the couch’s foot, snipped off a lock of my own hair, put it in the waiting basket at the corpse’s feet, and added a pinch of incense to the pan.
    Then I took a closer look at him.
    Sixty was about right, maybe a bit over. He’d been a good-looking man, Caesius, with a strong face – it still had crumbs of dry plaster on the sideburns from when they’d taken the death-mask – and a full head of silvered hair. No sign of the wound that had killed him; that’d be on the back of the head, and the undertakers would’ve cleaned it up and made sure it wasn’t immediately visible when they laid him out. The gold coins covering his eyes glinted at me in the sunlight filtering through the gap above the ornamental pool.
    ‘A fine-looking man, wasn’t he, sir?’
    I turned. Anthus, obviously. Small and stooped, about the same age as his master.
    ‘Yeah. Yeah, he must’ve been,’ I said. ‘When’s the funeral?’
    ‘This afternoon. The senate is giving it at public expense.’ There was no mistaking the pride in the old guy’s voice. ‘That doesn’t often happen, as you know. The master would’ve been very gratified, and appreciated the honour very deeply. You’ll be attending yourself, sir, of course.’
    I hadn’t planned on it, but I couldn’t well say no, not to the guy’s face. I wasn’t wearing a mourning mantle, sure, and there wasn’t time to go back to Castrimoenium to change, but under the circumstances I didn’t think that’d matter much if I stuck to the sidelines. No doubt it being a public funeral there’d be quite a crowd there just to watch.
    A public funeral explained why the body was still here, too. These things take time to organize.
    ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah, I’ll be going.’
    ‘The ceremony begins an hour after noon. Processing from here, sir, naturally, but I should simply wait in the market square if I were you. That’s where they’ll be delivering the eulogy.’ A glance at my mantle-less tunic and still-very-damp and far-from-new cloak; under normal circumstances the guy would probably have added a Bathyllus-type sniff, but as it was I got off easy. ‘Now. Young Titus said that you were investigating the master’s death on behalf of the senate. How can I be of assistance?’
    ‘Just a few questions, pal, and a bit of background information.’
    ‘Anything. Anything at all. Ask away, please, and I’ll do the best I can.’
    ‘Ah … do you think we could go somewhere, uh …?’ I gestured at the corpse, not sure how to finish the question.
Quieter
or
less public
didn’t quite seem to fit the bill, somehow.
    ‘More convenient.’ He nodded. ‘Yes, of course. The master’s study, perhaps. If you’d like to follow me.’
    I did. He led me through to the study, behind an ornately panelled wooden door.
    ‘Here we are, sir,’ he said. ‘Do sit down on the couch. I’ll stand, myself, if you don’t mind.’
    I’d expected the usual books, and there were a few of these, right enough, in a book-cubby beside the window, plus the other normal items of study furniture such as the expensive-looking rosewood desk and an iron strongbox, but most of the walls were lined with open cupboards whose shelves were almost full of artwork: pots, figurines, small bronzes. Old Greek, mostly, and pretty good stuff, from what I could tell. On the writing desk itself, there was a lovely marble group of the Abduction of Ganymede that must’ve set the guy back a good slice of his yearly income.
    Anthus saw me looking.
    ‘It was the master’s hobby, sir,’ he said. ‘Almost his obsession. He was a keen collector, as you can see, for many