Little heaps of rubble, tools and rope, tidily disposed, stood at entrances to passages that were still being explored. The Agenti poked into all these and re-emerged dusting their knees and shoulders. Brother Dominic looked on with his hands in his sleeves and an expression of disfavour on his face. The Questore lost no opportunity of telling Alleyn in a stagy aside that this, undoubtedly, was merely a routine search and they might expect nothing from it.

Alleyn asked him if any results had come through from Mailer’s flat and learnt that somebody had telephoned immediately after he himself had done so, that the man seemed to be in some agitation, refused to give his name and rang again several times enabling the number to be traced. It was that of La Gioconda. Marco, without a doubt.

‘And the woman, Violetta?’

Certainly. Naturally the matter of the woman Violetta had been followed up. Curiously, it must be admitted, she had not returned to her lodging and so far had not been found.

‘It is possible,’ Valdarno said, ‘that they are together.’

‘You think so?’

‘One cannot tell. She may be implicated. He may have informed her of your identity and frightened her into taking flight. This is mere speculation, my dear Superintendent, and I know your views. I have read your book. In English, I have read it.’

‘Well, I’ll break my rule and indulge in a bit of speculation on my own account. It occurs to me there is another possible explanation for their double disappearance.’

‘Indeed? Please tell me of it.’

Alleyn did so. Valdarno stared straight in front of him and nursed his splendid moustache. When Alleyn had finished, he turned an incredulous gaze upon him and then decided to be arch. He shook his finger at Alleyn. ‘Ah-ah-ah, you pull my leg,’ he said.

‘I don’t, you know.’

‘No? Well,’ said the Questore, thinking it over, ‘we shall see. Yet I fear,’ he added, giving Alleyn a comradely clap on the shoulder, ‘that we shall see—nothing in particular.’

They moved laboriously onwards and down. To the church on the second level. To the first smiling Apollo and the tall woman with the broken child, to the white Apollo with a crown of leaves, to the Mercury behind whom Baron Van der Veghel had so playfully hidden. The men flashed torchlights into the recesses and niches. Alleyn looked into them a little more closely. Behind the white Apollo he found a screwed-up piece of glossy blue paper which he retrieved and wrapped in his handkerchief, sharply observed by Valdarno, to whom he scrupulously confided his reasons for doing so. Behind the Mercury he found a sealing tab from an undeveloped film, left there no doubt by Baron Van der Veghel when he played his little joke and frightened Lady Braceley into fits.