AN ABRUPT KNOCK on the door woke Titus Flavius Sabinus with a start; his eyes flicked open. Momentarily unsure of his whereabouts, he jerked his head up off the desk and looked around the room. The muted light of the fading sun seeping in through a narrow open window was enough for him to be able to make out the unfamiliar surroundings: his study in the tower of the Antonia Fortress. Outside the window the Temple soared to the sky, dominating the view. Its high, white marble-clad walls glowed an evening red and the gold leaf that adorned its roof glistered with sunset. Such was the scale of the Jews’ most holy building that it dwarfed the huge columns supporting the expansive quadrangle that surrounded it; they in turn made the multitude of figures, scuttling between them and back and forth across the vast courtyard that the colonnade encompassed, seem no larger than ants.

The tang of blood from thousands of lambs being slaughtered within the Temple complex for the Passover meal that evening infused the room’s chill air. Sabinus shivered; he had become cold during his brief sleep.

The knock was repeated more insistently.

‘Quaestor, are you in there?’ a voice shouted from the other side of the door.

‘Yes, enter,’ Sabinus called back, quickly arranging the scrolls on the desk to suggest that he had been immersed in diligent work rather than taking a late afternoon nap to recover from his two-day journey to Jerusalem