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 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 cubby-hole, 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 cratur,’ 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.