‘Ach, yes’ cried the Baroness. ‘No more delays, isn’t it? Already our plans for today look silly. Instead of fountinks at the Villa d’Este here is a stuffed room. Come! On!’

Thus encouraged, Alleyn set about his task. His situation was an odd one, removed as he was from immediate reliance upon the CID and from the sense of being an integral part of its structure. This was an ‘away match’ and presented its own problems, not the least of which was to define his area of investigation. Originally this had simply been that which covered Mailer’s presumed activities in the international drug racket and possible association with the key figure—the fabulous Otto Ziegfeldt. Now, with the discovery of Violetta, staring and frightful, in a stone coffin that had held who could guess what classic bones and flesh, the case had spilled into a wider and more ambiguous affair. The handling of it became very tricky indeed.

He began: ‘I think we’d better settle the question of when each of us last saw Sebastian Mailer. For my part, it was when we were on the middle level and just after Major Sweet and Lady Braceley had left to go up to the atrium. Mr Grant, Miss Jason and the Baron and Baroness were with me and we all went down to the Mithraic dwelling together. Major Sweet and Mr Dorne joined us there separately, some five to ten—or fifteen minutes later. May I begin by asking you, Lady Braceley, if you saw anything of Mailer or of Violetta after you left us?’

Not only, Alleyn thought, was she in the grip of a formidable hangover but she was completely nonplussed at finding herself in a situation that could not be adjusted to a nineteen-twentyish formula for triteness. She turned her lacklustre gaze from one man to another, ran her tongue round her lips and said, ‘No. No, of course I didn’t. No.’

‘And you, Major? On your way down? Did you see either of them?’

‘I did not.’

‘You stayed for a minute of two with Lady Braceley and then came down to the Mithraeum?’

‘Yes.’

‘And met nobody on the way.’

‘Nobody.’

Alleyn said casually, ‘There must at that time have been besides yourself, three persons at large between the top level—the basilica, and the bottom one—the Mithraeum. Mailer himself, Violetta and Mr Kenneth Dorne. You neither saw nor heard any of them?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘Mr Dorne, when exactly did you leave us?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

‘Perhaps,’ Alleyn said with undiminished good humour, ‘we can help you. You were with us in the middle level cloisters when Mailer made his joke about Apollo being a latter-day Lazarus.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because you giggled at it.’

‘Marvellous,’ said Kenneth.

‘It was not a nice joke,’ the Baroness said. ‘We did not find it amusink, did we, Gerrit?’

‘No, my dear.’

‘It was a silly one.’

‘So.’