To Grant’s evident dismay Baron Van der Veghel had produced out of his vast canvas satchel, a copy of Simon.

‘We must,’ he announced, ‘hear again the wonderful passage. See, Mr Grant, here is the book. Will the author not read it for us? How this English Simon finds in himself some equivalent to the Mithraic powers. Yes?’

‘Ah no!’ Grant ejaculated. ‘Please!’ He looked quickly about and beyond the group of six listeners as if to assure himself that there were no more. ‘That’s not in the bargain,’ he said. ‘Really.’ And Alleyn saw him redden. ‘In any case,’ said Grant, ‘I read abominably. Come and look at Mithras himself.’

And at the far end of the chamber, there was the god in a grotto, being born out of a stony matrix: a sturdy person with a Phrygian cap on his long curls and a plumpish body: neither child nor man.

Alleyn said, ‘They made sacrifices, didn’t they? In here.’

‘Of course. On the altar,’ Grant said quickly. ‘Can you imagine! A torch-lit scene, it would be, and the light would flicker across those stone benches and across the faces of initiates, attenuated and wan from their ordeal. The altar fire raises a quivering column of heat, the sacrificial bull is lugged in: perhaps they hear it bellowing in the passages. There is a passage, you know, running right round the chamber. Probably the bull appears from a doorway behind Mithras. Perhaps it’s garlanded. The acolytes drag it in and the priest receives it. Its head is pulled back, the neck exposed and the knife plunged in. The reek of fresh blood and the stench of the burnt offering fills the Mithraeum. I suppose there are chanted hymns.’

Sophy said drily, ‘You gave us to understand that the Mithraic cult was a thoroughly nice and, did you say, gentle religion.’

‘It was highly moral and comparatively gentle. Loyalty and fidelity were the ultimate virtues. Sacrifice was a necessary ingredient.’

‘Same idea,’ Major Sweet predictably announced, ‘behind the whole boiling. Sacrifice. Blood. Flesh. Cannibalism. More refinement in one lot, more brutality in another. Essentially the same.’

‘You don’t think,’ Alleyn mildly suggested, ‘that this might indicate pot-shots at some fundamental truth?’

‘Only fundamental truth it indicates—humans are carnivores,’ shouted the Major in triumph. ‘Yak-yak-yak,’ he added and was understood to be laughing.

‘It is so unfortunate,’ said Baron Van der Veghel, ‘that Lady Braceley and Mr Dorne are missing all this. And where is Mr Mailer?’

‘Did you see them?’ Alleyn asked Major Sweet.

‘I did not. I put her in the—what d’you call it? Garden? Courtyard?’

‘Atrium?’

‘Whatever it is. On the bench. She didn’t much like it, but still…Silly woman.’

‘What about young Dorne?’ Alleyn said.

‘Didn’t see ‘im. Frightful specimen.’

‘And Mailer?’

‘No. Damn casual treatment, I call it. What do we do now?’