Ngaio Marsh - When in Rome

“The man Mailer,” he said, “has been murdered. He has been found at the bottom of the well.”

At that moment all the clocks in Rome began to strike nine and Sophy was appalled to hear a voice in her head saying: “ Ding, dong bell, Mailer’s in the well .”

“No doubt,” the Baron said, “you will receive a message. As we did. This, of course, changes everything. My wife is so much upset. We have found where is a Protestant church and I have taken her there for some comfort. My wife is a most sensitive subject. She senses,” the Baron explained, “that there has been a great evil amongst us. That there is still this evil. As I do. How can one escape such a feeling?”

“Not very readily,” Grant conceded, “particularly now when I suppose we are all much more heavily involved.”

The Baron glanced anxiously at Sophy. “Perhaps,” he said, “we should—”

“Well, of course we’re involved, Baron,” she said.

Clearly, the Baron held that ladies were to be protected. “He goes through life,” she thought, “tenderly building protective walls round that huge, comical sex-pot of his and he’s got plenty of concern left over for extra-mural sympathy. Who says the age of chivalry is dead? He’s rather a dear, is the Baron.” But beneath her amusement, flowing under it and chilling it, ran a trickle of consciousness: “I’m involved in a murder,” thought Sophy.

She had lost track of the Baron’s further remarks but gathered that he had felt the need for discussion with another man. Having left the Baroness to pursue whatever Spartan devotions accorded with her need, he had settled upon Grant as a confidant.

Deeply perturbed though she was, Sophy couldn’t help feeling an indulgent amusement at the behaviour of the two men. It was so exclusively masculine. They had moved away to the far side of the garden. Grant, with his hands in his pockets, stared between his feet and then lifted his head and contemplated the horizon. The Baron folded his arms, frowned portentously and raised his eyebrows almost to the roots of his hair. They both pursed their lips, muttered, nodded. There were long pauses.

How different, Sophy thought, from the behaviour of women. “We would exclaim, gaze at each other, gabble, ejaculate, tell each other how we felt and talk about instinctive revulsions and how we’d always known, right along, that there was something .”

And she suddenly thought it would be satisfactory to have such a talk with the Baroness though not on any account with Lady Braceley.

They turned back to her, rather like doctors after a consultation.

“We have been saying, Miss Jason,” said the Baron, “that as far as we ourselves are concerned there can be only slight formalities. Since we were in company from the time he left us, both in the Mithraeum and when we returned (you with Mr. Grant and my wife and I with Mr. Alleyn) until we all met in the church portico. We cannot be thought of either as witnesses or as — as—”

“Suspects?” Sophy said.

“So. You are right to be frank, my dear young lady,” said the Baron, looking at Sophy with solemn and perhaps rather shocked approval.

Grant said: “Well, of course she is. Let’s all be frank about it, for heaven’s sake. Mailer was a bad lot and somebody has killed him. I don’t suppose any of us condones the taking of life under any circumstances whatever and it is, of course, horrible to think of the explosion of hatred or alternatively the calculated manoeuvring, that led to his death. But one can scarcely be expected to mourn for him.” He looked very hard at Sophy. “I don’t,” he said. “And I won’t pretend I do. It’s a bad man out of the way.”

The Baron waited for a moment and said quietly: “You speak, Mr. Grant, with conviction. Why do you say so positively that this was a bad man?”

Grant had gone very white but he answered without hesitation. “I have first-hand knowledge,” he said. “He was a blackmailer. He blackmailed me. Alleyn knows this and so does Sophy. And if me, why not others?”

“Why not,” Van der Veghel said. “Why not, indeed.” He hit himself on the chest and Sophy wondered why the gesture was not ridiculous. “I too,” he said. “I who speak to you. I too.” He waited for a moment. “It has been a great relief to me to say this,” he said. “A great relief. I shall not regret it, I think.”

“Well,” Grant said, “it’s lucky we are provided with alibis. I suppose a lot of people would say we have spoken like fools.”

“It is appropriate sometimes to be a fool. The belief of former times that there is God’s wisdom in the utterances of fools was founded in truth,” the Baron proclaimed. “No. I do not regret.”

A silence fell between them and into it there was insinuated the sound of a distant crowd and a shrilling of whistles. A police car shot down the street with its siren blasting.

“And now, my dear Baron,” said Grant, “having to some extent bared our respective bosoms, perhaps we had better, with Sophy’s permission, consider our joint situation.”

“With the greatest pleasure,” said the Baron politely.

Alleyn found a change in the atmosphere of Il Questore Valdarno’s splendid office and in the attitude of Valdarno himself. It was not that he was exactly less cordial but rather that he was more formally so. He was very formal indeed and overpoweringly polite. He was also worried and preoccupied and was constantly interrupted by telephone calls. Apparently the demonstrations were hotting up in Navona.

Valdarno made it perfectly clear that the discovery of Mailer’s body altered the whole complexion of the case: that while he had no intention of excluding Alleyn from the investigation and hoped he would find some interest in the proceedings, they would be absolutely in the hands of the Roman Questura which, he added with an unconvincing air of voicing an afterthought, was under the direct control of the Minister of the Interior. Valdarno was very urbane. Alleyn had his own line of urbanity and retired behind it and between them, he thought, they got exactly nowhere.

Valdarno thanked Alleyn with ceremony for having gone down the well and for being so kind as to photograph the body in situ . He contrived to suggest that this proceeding had, on the whole, been unnecessary if infinitely obliging.

The travellers, he said, were summoned to appear at 10:30. Conversation languished but revived with the arrival of Bergarmi, who had the results of the postmortems. Violetta had been hit on the back of the head and manually strangled. Mailer had probably been knocked out before being strangled and dropped down the well, though the bruise on his jaw might have been caused by a blow against the rails or the wall on his way down. He had drowned. The fragment of material Alleyn had found on the inner side of the top rail matched the black alpaca of his jacket and there was a corresponding tear in the sleeve.

At this point Valdarno, with stately punctilio, said to Bergarmi they must acknowledge at once that Signor Alleyn had advanced the theory of Mailer’s possible disappearance down the well and that he himself had not accepted it. They both bowed, huffily, to Alleyn.

“It is of the first importance,” Valdarno continued, “to establish whether the sound which was heard by these persons when they were in the Mithraeum was in fact the sound made by the lid of the sarcophagus falling upon its edge to the floor where, it is conjectured, it remained, propped against the casket while the body of the woman was disposed of. Your opinion, Signore, is that it was so?”

“Yes,” Alleyn said. “You will remember that when we removed the lid it made a considerable noise. Two minutes or more before that, we heard a confused sound that might have been that of a woman’s voice. It was greatly distorted by echo and stopped abruptly.”