‘Quite so. I went back with the Baron and Baroness. We left the Mithraeum by a doorway behind the figure of the god, turned right twice and followed the cloister, if that’s what it should be called, passing the well and the sarcophagus and arriving finally at the passage to the iron stairway.’ He turned to the Van der Veghels. ‘You agree?’

‘Certainly,’ said the Baroness. ‘That was the way. Stoppink sometimes to examine—’ She broke off and turned in agitation to her husband, laying her hands on his arm. She spoke to him in their own language, her voice trembling. He stooped over her, solicitous and concerned, gathered her hands in his and said gently: ‘In English, my dear, should we not? Let me explain.’ He turned to Alleyn. ‘My wife is disturbed and unhappy,’ he said. ‘She has remembered, as no doubt you will remember, Mr Alleyn—or, no! You had already turned into the passage, I think. But my wife took a photograph of the sarcophagus.’

‘It is so dreadful to think,’ the Baroness lamented. ‘Imagink! This wretched woman—her body—it may have been—no, Gerrit, it is dreadful.’

‘On the contrary, Baroness,’ Alleyn said. ‘It may be of great assistance to the investigation. Of course, one understands that the implications are distasteful—

‘Distasteful!’

‘Well—macabre—dreadful, if you like. But your photograph may at least prove that the sarcophagus had not been interfered with at that juncture.’

‘It had not. You yourself must have seen—

’In that lighting it looked perfectly all right but a flashlamp might bring out some abnormality, you know.’

‘What was it like,’ Grant said, ‘when you examined it, as I gather you did, with Valdarno?’

‘There was—a slight displacement,’ Alleyn said. ‘If the Baroness’s photograph shows none it will establish that the murder was committed after we left the Mithraeum.’

‘And after we had all left the building?’ Grant asked.

‘Not quite that, perhaps, but it might come to that. May we just define the rest of the party’s movements. Yours, for instance.’

‘I had offered to stay in the Mithraeum in case anybody wanted information about the rest of the insula. Miss Jason remained with me for, I suppose, ten minutes or so and we then made our way up by the shortest route: the main exit from the Mithraeum, through the ante-chamber and then down the short passage to the stairway. We didn’t pass the well and sarcophagus, of course, and we met nobody.’

‘Hear anybody? Voices?’

‘No. I don’t think so.’

‘Wait a bit,’ Sophy said.

‘Yes, Miss Jason?’

‘I don’t suppose it matters but she appealed to Grant. ‘Do you remember? Just as we were leaving the Mithraeum there was a sound of voices. All mixed up and booming because of the echo.’

‘Was there? I’ve forgotten.’

‘Men’s or women’s voices?’ Alleyn asked.