‘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.

IV

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 post-mortems. 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. 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 Valdarmo, with stately punctilio, said to Bergarmi that 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 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?’