Lindsey Davis - Alexandria

All of the attendees seemed demoralised. Some looked shifty too. For a great and historic institution to be so badly run and so low in spirits was doleful.

There was only one way for Helena and me to recover. We went to the zoo.

By arrangement we met Albia, who was being towed through the gardens by]ulia and Favonia.

'Aulus has gone to play as a student.'

'Good for him!' enthused his sister, heaving Favonia on to one hip in the hope that close proximity would help with controlling her.

'He's a tough boy,' I reassured Albia. I put Julia into a sophisticated wrestling hold. She made a good effort at the extrication move, but as she was still not quite five, I managed to win by sheer strength. 'Aulus won't let a little spot of education ruin him.'

Helena flapped at me with her free wrist, bangles jingling. 'He's ferreting around on your behalf, I take it?'

'Under cover with the scroll beetles. We can't all take our ease, staring at elephants.'

The zoo did have elephants, a couple of them cute babies. There were aviaries and insect houses. They had Barbary lions, leopards, a hippopotamus, antelopes, giraffes, chimpanzees – 'He's got a horrible bottom!' – and, most marvellous of all, an absolutely enormous, highly pampered crocodile. Albia was honestly entranced by everything. My infants pretended to be offhand throughout, though the marked improvement in their behaviour as they stared at the animals told its own story. Julia's favourite was the smallest baby elephant, who tossed grass with a bad aim and trumpeted. Favonia lost her heart to the crocodile. 'I hope it doesn't indicate her future choice in men,' murmured Helena. 'He must be thirty feet long! Favonia, if he munched you, it would just be like eating a sweetie for him.'

We were still stuck looking down into the crocodile pit, unable to tear our lovelorn Favonia away, when the Zoo Keeper came by. 'His name is Sobek,' he told my daughter gravely. 'A god's name.'

'Will he eat me?' Favonia demanded, then shouted the answer to her own question, 'No!'

Setting down the child, Helena murmured, 'Only two, and already distrusting everything her mother tells her!'

Philadelphion went into an educational lecture. 'We try to make him eat only fish and meat. People bring him cake, but that is bad for him. He is fifty years old and we want him to live healthily to a hundred.'

Noting his patience, Helena asked, 'Do you have a family?'

'Back home in my village. Two sons.' So he had a Greek name, but was not Greek. Had he changed it for professional reasons? Uncle Fulvius had told me that the different nationalities lived peaceably together, most of the time, but at the Museion it was clear which culture ruled.

'Your wife looks after them?' It sounded like chit-chat, but Helena was probing. Philadelphion duly nodded.

Favonia and Julia both tried to climb the fence on the edge of the crocodile's deep pit while we urgently instructed them to get down. 'Will Sobek escape?' squealed Julia. She must have noticed that inside the fence the zoo staff had a long access ramp to the deep pit, protected by metal gates.

'No, no,' Philadelphion assured us. As my two excitable girlies bounced about on the fence, he helped me lift them down. 'There are two gates between Sobek and the outside. Only I and members of my staff have keys.'

Helena told him how we had once met a traveller who told us about the crocodile at Heliopolis, a tame beast in a temple, which was covered with jewels and regularly fed sweetmeats by pilgrims until he had become so fat he could hardly waddle.

'Also called Sobek,' Philadelphion replied. 'But we keep ours in more natural conditions for the purposes of science.' He wooed the girls' attention with facts about how fast the gigantic crocodile could run, what good mothers the females were, how rapidly the babies grew once they broke out of their eggs and how Sobek knew his wild companions lived on the shores of Lake Mareotis.' He yearns for them. Crocodiles are sociable. They live and hunt together in large groups. They will co-operate to herd fishes against the shore so they can catch them -'

'Will he run back to the lake if anybody lets him out?'

'No one will be so silly as to let him out,' Helena told Julia.

In his pit, Sobek lay down on his belly with his powerful legs crouching, as he basked with his snout up at right angles against a wall. His body was in shades of grey, his underbelly yellower; his great powerful tail had darker bands around it. All were covered with scaly hide, patterned in rectangles, with crenulations running along his spine and tail. He looked as if he knew what we were thinking.

Philadelphion took us into his office, where they had babies, a couple of months old, which had been snatched as eggs while their scaly mother left their nest to cool off. The children were thrilled by the little squeaking monsters. The smiling staff, Chaereas and Chaeteas from the necropsy yesterday, supervised very closely. 'Even this young they could bite you badly. Their jaws are tremendously powerful,' warned Philadelphion. Julia snatched her arm, with its colourful bead bracelets, back close to her body; Favonia waved a hand at the little snappers, daring them to grab her. 'Yet crocodiles have weak jaw muscles in some ways. They cannot chew; only rip off pieces of meat then swallow lumps whole. A man can sit astride even a large one like Sobek, and hold his mouth closed from behind. But a Nile crocodile is extremely strong; he would writhe and twist his body, rolling over and over again, to throw the man off or drag him under water and drown him.'

'Then would he eat the man?'

'He might try to, Julia.'

Two little human jaws dropped, showing a variety of white baby teeth.

Philadelphion suggested that Chaereas and Chaeteas who were, as he drily remarked, good with young animals, should look after the girls so he and I could talk. Whether he intended to include Helena was uncertain, though not to her. She came to play with the boys.

Albia stayed behind to practise her Greek on the staff. She probably thought they were gentle, helpful, harmless fellows. Unlike me, she had not seen Chaereas and Chaeteas hauling on the dead Librarian's dead flesh to expose his ribcage yesterday.

Mint tea was served. I jumped straight in and asked Philadelphion if he had had any success with identifying the leaves Theon ate.

'I consulted a botanist, Falco. His tentative identification is oleander.'

'Poisonous?'

'Very'

Helena Justina sat up. 'Marcus, the garlands!' She explained to Philadelphion: 'Our host, Cassius, had special garlands made for the dinner party; they had oleander wound in them.' She must have noticed the varieties; I can't say I did at the time.

Philadelphion raised his eyebrows in an elegant gesture. 'My colleague told me it would certainly be possible to murder someone with this plant, though you would somehow have to persuade them to ingest it. He thought the taste would be very bitter.'

'Try it?'

'Not brave enough! Taken in sufficient quantities – not unmanageable amounts – it acts within an hour. It works well. I am told it is a favourite choice of suicides.'

'Was Theon's dinner garland found with his body?' I asked.

Philadelphion shook his head. 'Perhaps – but not sent to the necropsy.'

'Someone cleaned up Theon's room and may have thrown it out. Know anything about that?' Again he signalled a negative.

I could see one flaw. Neither Theon, if he felt despairing, nor a potential murderer could have known in advance what foliage would be in our garlands. Cassius had made his selection only the afternoon before the dinner. 'Would Theon know anything about plants? Would he recognise these leaves or be aware of their toxicity?'