The green dress lay folded on a coffer; her sandals were tumbled askew on a bedside rug. Helena had changed into something darker and warmer with woollen sleeves to the wrist; her hair was plaited on one shoulder. She looked neat, grave, and impenetrably tired.
She had come home so late she had her dinner on a tray. She sat facing the door, so when I batted in through the curtain her shocked eyes watched me frantically absorb the scene.
There was a man with her.
He was sprawled in a chair with one knee over its arm, casually scoffing nuts. Helena seemed more sullen than usual as she chewed at a chicken wing, though she was getting on with it as if the presence of this person in her bedroom was commonplace.
'Hello,' I stormed angrily. 'You must be Barnabas! I owe you half a million bits of gold-'
He looked up.
It was certainly the man who had attacked me in the warehouse, and probably the one I had glimpsed harassing Petro in the ox cart on the Capua Road. Then I stared at him harder. After three months of chasing the man in the green cloak, I finally discovered who he really was. The freedman's old mother in Calabria had been right: Barnabas was dead.
I knew this man. He was Helena Justina's ex-husband; his name was Atius Pertinax.
According to the Daily Gazette, he was dead too.
He looked healthy for a man who had been murdered three months before. But if I had any choice in the matter, dead was how Atius Pertinax would soon be. Next time I would arrange it myself. And make it permanent.
He wore a very plain tunic and a new jaw-line beard, but I knew him all right. He was twenty-eight or nine. Light hair and a spare build. He had pale eyes I had forgotten and a sour expression which I never would forget. Permanent bad temper tightened the muscles round his eyes and made his jaw clench.
I had met him once. Not when I tailed him to the Transtiberina; the year before. I could still feel his soldiers pulping my body and hear his voice calling me savage names. I could still see his pasty legs below a senatorial toga, striding from my apartment where he had left me lying beside a broken bench, helplessly spitting blood on my own floor.
He was a traitor and a thief; a bully; a murderer. Yet Helena Justina was letting him lounge in her bedroom like a lord. Well he must have sat with her like this a thousand times, in that grand, tasteful, blue-and-grey room he allowed her in their house…
'My mistake. Your name's not Barnabas!'
'Is it not?' he dared. I could see him still wondering how to react to my sudden arrival.
'No,' I responded quietly. 'But officially Gnaeus Atius Pertinax Caprenius Marcellus is mouldering in his funeral urn-'
'Now you see the problem!' Helena exclaimed.