Alleyn consented. The man went into a sort of cubby-hole off the vestibule that was evidently his office. Alleyn heard a key turn. A drawer was shut. The porter returned with a sealed package neatly wrapped in glossy blue paper. The cost was exorbitant: about thirty per cent on the British black-market price. He paid and said agitatedly that he wanted to go at once. The man opened the door, took him down in the lift and let him out.

A car was drawn up in the alley and at its wheel, fast asleep, Giovanni’s second-in-command. Alleyn concluded that Giovanni found himself fully occupied elsewhere.

He walked to the corner, found the name of the main street—the Via Aldo—and took his bearings. He returned to the car, woke the driver and was driven to his hotel. He maintained his withdrawal symptoms for the driver’s benefit, made a muddle over finding his money and finally overtipped lavishly with a trembling hand.

After Toni’s Pad the hotel vestibule might have been in the Austrian Tyrol, so healthful did its quietude, its subdued luxury, its tinkling fountains and its emptiness appear. Alleyn went to his room, bathed, and for a minute or two stood on his small balcony and looked down at Rome. Eastward there was a faint pallor in the sky. In those churches, shut like massive lids over the ancient underworld, they would soon be lighting candles for the first offices of the day. Perhaps the lay brother at S. Tommaso in Pallaria was already awake and preparing to go slap-slap in his sandals through the empty streets with a key to the underworld in his habit.

Alleyn locked the cigarette and the package of cocaine and heroin in his briefcase and, telling himself to wake at seven o’clock, went to bed and to sleep.

IV

Much earlier in the night Barnaby Grant and Sophy Jason from the top of the Pensione Gallico had also looked at Rome.

‘It’s not very late,’ Grant had said. ‘Shall we go out on the roof-garden for a minute or two? Would you like a drink?’

‘I don’t want any more alcohol, thank you,’ Sophy said.

‘I’ve got some oranges. We could squeeze them out and add cold water, couldn’t we? Fetch your tooth mug.’

The roof-garden smelt of night-scented stocks, watered earth and fern. They made their orange drinks, pointed out the silhouettes of Rome against the sky and spoke very quietly because bedrooms opened on to the roof-garden. This gave their dialogue an air of conspiracy.

‘I wish I had one of them,’ Sophy said.

‘I did last time I was here. That one over there with the french windows.’

‘How lovely.’

‘I—suppose it was.’

‘Didn’t you like it?’

‘Something rather off-putting happened that time.’