Ngaio Marsh - When in Rome

Alleyn thought he would like to ask Father Denys what he made of the Mithraic cult but when he turned to speak to him found that he was withdrawn into himself. His hands were pressed together and his lips moved.

Alleyn waited for a minute and then, hearing the returning slap of sandals in the cloister, went quietly out by the doorway behind the god. This was the passage by which he and the Van der Veghels had left the Mithraeum. It was very dark indeed and the Baroness had exclaimed at it.

Two right turns brought him back into sight of the well and there was Brother Dominic with ropes, an old-fashioned head-lamp of the sort miners use, a suit of workmen’s overalls and a peculiar woolly cap.

“I’m obliged to you, Brother Dominic,” said Alleyn.

“Let you put them on.”

Alleyn did so. Brother Dominic fussed about him. He fixed the head-lamp and with great efficiency made fast one end of the rope round Alleyn’s chest and under his shoulders.

Alleyn transferred a minuscule camera from his homicide kit to the pocket of his overalls. After looking about for a minute, Brother Dominic asked Alleyn to help him place the lid of the sarcophagus at right angles across the coffin. It was massive but Brother Dominic was a strong man and made little of it. He passed the slack of the rope twice round the lid, crossing it in the manner of sailors when they wear a rope in lowering a heavy load.

“We could take your weight neat between us,” he said, “but this will be the better way. Where’s Father?”

“In the Mithraeum. Saying his prayers, I think.”

“He would be that.”

“Here he is.”

Father Denys returned looking anxious.

“I hope we are right about this,” he said. “Are you sure it’s safe, now, Dominic?”

“I am, Father.”

“Mr. Alleyn, would you not let me place a — a handkerchief over your — eh?”

He hovered anxiously and finally did tie his own large cotton handkerchief over Alleyn’s nose and mouth.

The two Dominicans tucked back their sleeves, wetted their palms and took up the rope, Brother Dominic on Alleyn’s side of the sarcophagus lid and Father Denys on the far side, close to the turn. “That’s splendid,” Alleyn said. “I hope I won’t have to trouble you. Here I go.”

“God bless you,” they said in their practical way.

He had another look at the wall. The iron pegs went down at fairly regular intervals on either side of one corner. The well itself was six feet by three. Alleyn ducked under the bottom rail, straddled the corner with his back to the well, knelt, took his weight on his forearms, wriggled backwards and groped downwards with his right foot.

“Easy now, easy,” said both the Dominicans. He looked up at Brother Dominic’s sandalled feet, at his habit and into his long-lipped Irish face. “I have you held,” said Brother Dominic and gave a little strain on the rope to show that it was so.

Alleyn’s right foot found a peg and rested on it. He tested it, letting himself down little by little. He felt a gritting sensation and a slight movement under his foot but the peg took his weight.

“Seems O.K.,” he said through Father Denys’s handkerchief.

He didn’t look up again. His hands, one after the other, relinquished the edge and closed, right and then left, round pegs. One of them tilted, jarred and ground its way out of its centuries-old housing. It was loose in his hand and he let it fall. So long, it seemed, before he heard it hit the water. Now he had only one handhold and his feet but the rope sustained him. He continued down. His face was close to the angle made by the walls and he must be careful lest he knock his headlamp against stone. It cast a circle of light that made sharp and intimate the pitted surface of the rock. Details of colour, irregularities and growths of some minute lichen passed upwards through the light as he himself so carefully sank.

Already the region above seemed remote and the voices of the Dominicans disembodied. His world was now filled with the sound of running water. He would have smelt water, he thought, if it had not been for that other growing and deadly smell. How far had he gone? Why hadn’t he asked Brother Dominic for the actual depth of the well? Thirty feet? More? Would the iron pegs have rusted and rotted in the damper air?

The peg under his left foot gave way. He shouted a warning and his voice reverberated and mingled with Brother Dominic’s reply. Then his right foot slipped. He hung by his hands and by the rope. “Lower away,” he called, released his hold, dangled and dropped in short jerks fending himself clear of the two walls. The voice of the stream was all about him.

A sudden icy cold shock to his feet came as a surprise. They were carried aside. At the same moment he saw and grabbed two pegs at shoulder level. “Hold it! Hold it! I’m there.”

He was lowered another inch before the rope took up. He scrabbled with his feet against the pressure of the stream. The backs of his legs hit against something hard and firm. He explored with his feet, lifted them clear of the water and found in a moment with a kind of astonishment that he was standing on bars that pressed into his feet

The grille.

A broken grille, the monks had said.

The surface of the stream must be almost level with the bottom of the well and about an inch below the grille which projected from its wall. Supporting himself in the angle of the walls Alleyn contrived to turn himself about so that he now faced outwards. His head-lamp showed the two opposite walls. He leant back into the angle, braced himself and shouted: “Slack off a little.”

“Slack off, is it,” said the disembodied voice.

He leant forward precariously as the rope gave, shouted “Hold it,” and lowered his head so that his lamp illuminated the swift-flowing black waters, the fragment of grille that he stood upon and his drenched feet, planted apart and close to its broken fangs.

And between his feet? A third foot ensnared upside down in the broken fangs: a foot in a black leather shoe.

His return to the surface was a bit of a nightmare. Superintendents of the C.I.D., while they like to keep well above average in physical fitness and have behind them a gruelling and comprehensive training to this end, are not in the habit of half scrambling and half dangling on the end of a rope in a well. Alleyn’s palms burnt, his joints were banged against rock walls and once he got a knock on the back of his head that lit up stars and made him dizzy. Sometimes he climbed up by such iron pegs as remained intact. Sometimes he walked horizontally up the wall while he. and the monks hauled in. “They do these things better,” he reflected, “in crime films.”

When he had finally been landed, the three of them sat on the floor and breathed hard: as odd a little group, it occurred to Alleyn, as might be imagined.

“You were superb,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Ah, sure, it was nothing at all,” Father Denys panted. “Aren’t we used to this type of thing in the excavating? It’s yourself should have the praise.”

They shared that peculiar sense of fellowship and gratification which is the reward of such exercises.

“Well,” Alleyn said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to ring the Questura, Father. Our man’s down there and he’s dead.”

“The man Mailer?” Father Denys said when they had crossed themselves. “God have mercy on his soul.”

“Amen,” said Brother Dominic.

“What’s the way of it, Mr. Alleyn?”

“As I see it he probably fell through the well head-first and straight into the stream, missing the broken grille which, by the way, only extends a few inches from the wall. The stream swept him under the grille, but one foot, the right, was trapped between two of the broken fangs. And there he is, held in the current.”