Ngaio Marsh - When in Rome

Alleyn looked at him. “You can’t always have been as bad as this,” he said. “Or are you simply a born, stupid, unalterable monster. How big a hand has Mailer taken, with his H. and C. and his thoughtful ever-ready ampoule of distilled water, in the making of the product?”

Kenneth’s smile still hung about his mouth even as he began to whimper.

“Shut up,” Alleyn said mildly. “Don’t do that. Pull yourself together if you can.”

“I’m a spoilt boy. I know that. I never had a chance. I was spoilt.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-three. Someone like you could have helped me. Truly.”

“Did you get any idea of why Mailer didn’t go into the Mithraeum with you? Was he expecting to meet the woman?”

“No. No, I’m sure he wasn’t,” Kenneth said eagerly, gazing at Alleyn. “I’m telling the truth,” he added with a dreadful imitation of a chidden little boy. “I’m trying to be good. And I’ll tell you something else. To show.”

“Go on.”

“He told me why he wouldn’t come in.”

“Why?”

“He had a date. With someone else.”

“Who?”

“He didn’t say. I’d tell you if I knew. He didn’t say. But he had a date. Down there in that place. He told me.”

The telephone rang.

When Alleyn answered it he received an oddly familiar sensation: an open silence broken by the distant and hollow closure of a door, a suggestion of space and emptiness. He was not altogether surprised when a rich voice asked: “Would this be Mr. Alleyn?”

“It would, Father.”

“You mentioned this morning where you were to be found. Are you alone, now?”

“No.”

“No. Well, we’ll say no more under that heading. I’ve called upon you, Mr. Alleyn, in preference to anybody else, on account of a matter that has arisen. It may be no great matter and it may be all to the contrary.”

“Yes?”

“If it’s not putting too much upon you I’d be very greatly obliged if you’d be kind enough to look in at the basilica.”

“Of course. Is it—?”

“Well, now, it may be. It may be and then again it may not and to tell you the truth I’m loath to call down a great concourse of the pollis upon me and then it turning out to be a rat.”

“A rat, Father Denys?”

“Or rats. The latter is more like it. Over the head of the strenth.”

“The strength, did you say?”

“I did that. The strenth. Of the aroma.”

“I’ll be with you,” Alleyn said, “in fifteen minutes.”

His professional homicide kit was in the bottom of his wardrobe. He took it with him.

San Tommaso in Pallaria looked different after sunset. Its façade was dark against a darkening sky and its windows only faintly illuminated from within. Its entrance where Violetta had cursed Sebastian Mailer was quite given over to shadows and its doors were shut.

Alleyn was wondering how he would get in when Father Denys moved out of the shadows.

“Good evening and God bless you,” he said.

He opened a little pass door in the great entry and led the way in.

The smell of incense and hot candles seemed more noticeable in the dark. Galaxies of small flaming spearheads burned motionless before the saints. A ruby lamp glowed above the high altar. It was a place fully occupied within itself. A positive place.

Brother Dominic came out of the sacristy and they walked into the vestibule with its shrouded stalls. The lights were on in there and it felt stuffy.

“It’s like enough a fool’s errand I’ve brought you on and you maybe not eaten yet,” said Father Denys. “I may tell you it’s not been done without the authority of my superior.”

“I’m entirely at your service, Father.”

“Thank you, my son. We’ve had this sort of trouble before, d’ye see, over the head of the excavations and all. Rat trouble. Though Brother Dominic’s been after them in a very big way and it was our belief they were exterminated. And wouldn’t we look the fools if we’d stirred up Signor Bergarmi and his body of men and they fully occupied with their task?”

“Shall we have a look where the trouble seems to be?”

“A look, is it? A smell, more likely. But come along, come along.”

As he made that downward journey for the third time, it seemed to Alleyn that in its quiet way it was one of the strangest he had ever taken. A monk, a lay brother and himself, descending, if one cared to be fanciful, through a vertical section of the past.

When they reached the cloisters on the second level, Brother Dominic, who had not yet uttered a word, turned on the fluorescent lights and back into their immovable liveliness sprang the Apollo and the Mercury.

Down the iron spiral: two pairs of sandals and one pair of leather soles with the ever mounting sound of flowing water. The bottom level and a right turn. This was where Kenneth Dorne had parted company with Sebastian Mailer. On their left was the little anteroom into the Mithraeum. Ahead — the lights came on — ahead, the sarcophagus and the railed well.

They walked towards them.

The lid had not been replaced. It stood on its side, leaning against the empty stone coffin where Violetta had been urgently housed.

Father Denys put his hand on Alleyn’s arm.

“Now,” he said and they stopped.

“Yes,” Alleyn said.

It declared itself: sweetish, intolerable, unmistakable.

He went on alone, leant over the top rail where yesterday he had found a fragment of cloth and looked into the well, using the torch they had given him.

It showed walls in a sharp perspective and at the bottom an indefinable darkness.

“The other day,” he said, “when I looked down, there was a sort of glint. I took it to be a chance flicker of light on the moving stream.”

“It could be that.”

“What is there — down below?”

“The remains of a stone grille. As old,” Father Denys said, “as the place itself. Which is seventeen hundred years. We’ve lowered a light and it revealed nothing that you could call of any consequence but it was too far beneath to be of any great help.”

“The grille is above the surface of the stream?”

“It is. A few inches at the downstream end of the well. And it’s the remains only. A fragment you may say.”

“Could something have been carried down by the stream and got caught up in it?”

“It’s never been known in the history of this place. The water is pure. Every so often we let down a wee tin and haul up a sample for the testing. There’s never been the hint of contamination in it.”

“Can one get down there?”

“Well — now—”

“I think I can see footholds and — yes—”

Brother Dominic spoke. “You can,” he said.

“Aren’t there iron pegs?”

“There are.”

“And they rotten no doubt,” Father Denys urged, “and falling out like old teeth at the first handling.”

“Have you a rope, Father?”

“Sure, we have them for the excavations. You’re not thinking—”

“I’ll go down if you’ll give me a hand.”

“Dominic, let you fetch a rope?”

“And a head-lamp and overalls,” Brother Dominic enumerated with a glance at Alleyn’s impeccable suit. “We have them all got. I’ll fetch them, Father.”

“Do so.”

“It’s unwholesome here,” Father Denys said when Brother Dominic had gone. “Let us move away for the time being.”

They entered the Mithraeum. Father Denys had switched on the lighting used in visiting hours. The altar glowed. At the far end, the god, lit from beneath, stared out of blank eyes at nothing. They sat on one of the stone benches where in the second century his initiates had sat, wan with their ordeal, their blanched faces painted by the altar fires.