‘I don’t want to make a nuisance of myself, Father, and I don’t for a moment suggest your search wasn’t thorough but would you mind if I—

‘I would not but I can’t permit it. It’s the rule of the place, d’ye see. No visitors beneath under any pretext after closure.’

‘Yes, I see. Then I wonder—is there a telephone I could use?’

‘There is and welcome. In here. You can go, now,’ he said over his shoulder to his assistants and repeated it in Italian.

He opened a door into a store-cupboard, pointed to a telephone and switched on a light.

There wasn’t much room or air when the door was shut. Alleyn backed gingerly into an open box of holy trinkets, eased himself into a crouch supported by the edge of a shelf, examined his memory and dialled the resulting number.

Il Questore Valdarno had not left his office. He listened to Alleyn’s story with an animation that was almost tangible but with few interruptions. When Alleyn had finished Valdarno said in English: ‘He has run.’

‘Run?’

‘Flown. He has recognized you and decamped.’

‘They seemed pretty sure, here, that he couldn’t have got past them.’

‘Ah, ah, ah,’ said the Questore contemptuously, ‘who are they? a monk and two pale shop boys. Against this expert! Pah! He has run away at the double-up behind the show-cases.’

‘Speaking of postcards, there was a savage elderly postcard lady in the entrance who made a scene with Mailer.’

‘A scene? How?’

‘Yelling abuse at him. It was not in the sort of Italian we learnt in my Diplomatic days but the general drift was invective and fury.’

Alleyn could almost hear the Questore’s shrug.

‘He has done something to annoy her, perhaps,’ he suggested in his melancholy voice.

‘She spat at him.’

‘Ah,’ sighed the Questore. ‘He had irritated her.’

‘No doubt,’ Alleyn faintly agreed. ‘She’s called Violetta,’ he added.

‘Why do you concern yourself with this woman, my dear colleague?’

‘Well, if I understood her at all, she threatened to kill him.’

‘Evidently a short-tempered woman. Some of these street-vendors are in fact badly-behaved persons.’

‘I thought he was greatly disturbed by the encounter. He made light of it but he turned very white.’

‘Ah.’ There was a brief silence. ‘She sells postcards outside S. Tommaso?’

‘Yes. One of our party thought she saw her shadow on the wall of a passage down in the Mithraeum.’

‘They are not permitted to enter.’

‘So I gathered.’

‘I will have inquiries made. I will also have the airports, omnibus and railway stations watched. I feel there is a strong probability Mailer has recognized you and will attempt an escape.’

‘I am deeply obliged to you, Signor Questore.’

‘Please!’

‘But I confess the chances of his recognizing me—we have never met—do seem a bit thin.’