Ngaio Marsh - When in Rome

“How are you sure it’s himself?”

“By the shoe and the trouser leg and because—” Alleyn hesitated.

“What are you trying to tell us?”

“—It was just possible to see his face.”

“There’s a terrible thing for you! And so drowned?”

“That,” Alleyn said, “will no doubt appear in due course.”

“Are you telling us there’s been — what are you telling us? — a double murder?”

“It depends upon what you mean by that, Father.”

“I mean does someone have that sin upon his soul to have killed Violetta and Sebastian Mailer, the both of them?”

“Or did Mailer kill Violetta and was then himself killed?”

“Either way, there’s a terrible thing!” Father Denys repeated. “God forgive us all. A fearful, fearful thing.”

“And I do think we should ring the Vice-Questore.”

“Bergarmi, is it? Yes, yes, yes. We’ll do so.” On the return journey, now so very familiar, they passed by the well-head on the middle level. Alleyn stopped and looked at the railings. As in the basilica they were made of more finished wood than those in the insula. Four stout rails, well polished, about ten inches apart.

“Have you ever had any trouble in the past? Any accidents?” Alleyn asked.

Never, they said. Children were not allowed unaccompanied anywhere in the building and people obeyed the notice not to climb the railings. “Just a moment, Father.”

Alleyn walked over to the well. “Somebody’s ignored the notice,” he said and pointed to two adjacent marks across the top of the lowest rail. “Somebody who likes brown polish on the under instep of his shoes. Wait a moment, Father, will you?”

He squatted painfully by the rails and used his torch. The smears of brown polish were smudged across with equidistant tracks almost as if somebody had tried to erase them with an india rubber.

“If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’ve got a fancy to take a shot of this.” And did so with his particular little camera.

“Will you look at that, now!” exclaimed Father Denys.

“It won’t amount to a row of beans, as likely as not. Shall we go on?”

Back in the vestibule he rang up the Questura and got through to Bergarmi. He had to go warily. As he expected, the Vice-Questore immediately said that the Dominicans should have reported the trouble to him. Alleyn made the most of Father Denys’s reluctance to bother the police with what might well turn out to be the trivial matter of a couple of dead rats. Bergarmi gave this a sardonic reception, muttering: “ Topi, topi ,” as if he used an incredulous slang equivalent of “Rats!” This Alleyn felt to be a little unfair but he pressed on with his report.

“You’ll have a difficult job getting the body out,” he said, “but of course you have all the resources and the expertise.”

“You have communicated this matter, Superintendent Alleyn, to Il Questore Valdarno?”

“No. I thought it best to report at once to you.”

This went down much better. “In which respect,” Bergarmi conceded, “you have acted with propriety. We shall deal with this matter immediately. The whole complexion of the affair alters. I myself will inform Il Questore. In the meantime I will speak, if you please, with the Padre.”

While Father Denys talked volubly with Bergarmi, Alleyn washed his hands in a cubbyhole, found them to be rather more knocked about than he had realized, changed back into his own clothes and took stock of the situation.

The complexion had indeed changed. What, he sourly asked himself, was the position of a British investigator in Rome when a British subject of criminal propensities had almost certainly been murdered, possibly by another Briton, not impossibly by a Dutchman, not quite inconceivably by an Italian, on property administered by an Irish order of Dominican monks?

“This is one,” he thought, “to be played entirely by ear and I very much wish I was shot of it.”

He had an egg-shaped lump on the back of his head. He was bruised, sore and even a bit shaky, which made him angry with himself. “I could do with black coffee,” he thought.

Father Denys came back, caught sight of Alleyn’s hands and immediately produced a first aid box. He insisted on putting dressings over the raw patches.

“You’d be the better for a touch of the creature,” he said, “and we’ve nothing of the kind to offer. There’s a caffè over the way. Go there, now, and take a drop of something. The pollis will be a while yet, for that fellow Bergarmi is all for getting on to the Questore before he stirs himself. Are you all right, now?”

“I’m fine but I think it’s a marvellous suggestion.”

“Away with you.”

The caffè was a short distance down the street: a very modest affair with a scatter of workaday patrons who looked curiously at him. He had coffee and brandy and forced himself to eat a couple of large buns that turned out to be delicious.

“Well,” he thought, “it was on the cards. From the beginning it was on the cards and I’m glad I said as much to Valdarno.”

He began a careful re-think. “Suppose,” he thought, “as a starting point, I accept that the noise we heard while the Baroness was setting up that ludicrous group photograph was, in fact, the sound of the sarcophagus lid thumping down on its edge, and I must say it sounded exactly like it. This would mean presumably that Violetta had just been killed and was about to be safely stowed. By Mailer? If by Mailer then he himself survived to be killed, again presumably — no, almost certainly — before we all reassembled. The only members of the party who were alone were Sweet and young Dorne, who found their way up independently, and Lady B., who was parked in the atrium.

“The Van der Veghels were with me. Sophy Jason was with Barnaby Grant. We met nobody on our way up and they say as much for themselves.

“Query. If Mailer killed Violetta while we were all having our photographs taken, why did he — not a robust man — go through the elaborate and physically exhausting job of putting the body in the sarcophagus and replacing the lid instead of doing what was subsequently done to him — dispatching it down the well?

“I have no answer.

“On the other hand, suppose one person killed both of them. Why? I am dumb, but suppose it was so? Why for pity’s sake, make a sarcophagus job of Violetta and a well job of Mailer? Just for the hell of it?

“But. But, I suppose, on the third hand, Mailer killed Violetta and hadn’t time to do anything further about it before he himself was knocked off and pushed down the well? How will this fadge? Rather better I fancy. And why does his killer take the trouble to box Violetta up? That’s an easier one. Much easier.

“I suppose there’s a fourth hand. We approach Indian god status. Suppose Violetta killed Mailer and heaved him overboard and was then — no, that I refuse to entertain.

“How long were we all boxed up together under the blank eyes of Mithras? Sweet arrived first and, about five minutes later, young Dorne. Then there was the business of the photographs. The discussion, the groping and the grouping. Sophy and I being funnymen and Grant cursing us. He had just said: ‘Serve you bloody well right,’ to Sophy, who was having trouble with the Major, when the lid, if it was the lid, thudded. After that came the failure of the flashlight, the interminable wait while the Baroness set herself up again. At least ten minutes I would think. Then Dorne took his photo of Mithras. Then the Baroness loosed off, this time successfully. Then she took two more shots, not without further re-arrangements and palaver. Another four minutes? All of that. And finally the Baron changed places with the Baroness and blazed away on his own account. Then Grant read his piece. Another five minutes. And then the party broke up. After that Dorne and Sweet are again odd men out. So it looks as if we were all together in that bloody basement for about twenty-five minutes, give or take the odd five. So everybody’s got an alibi for the salient time. Everybody? No. No, not quite. Not — Sit still, my soul. Hold on to your hats, boys—”