by Ngaio Marsh
“I’m obliged to you, Brother Dominic,” said Alleyn.
“Let you put them on.”
Alleyn did so. Brother Dominic fussed about him. He fixed the head-lamp and with great efficiency made fast one end of the rope round Alleyn’s chest and under his shoulders.
Alleyn transferred a minuscule camera from his homicide kit to the pocket of his overalls. After looking about for a minute, Brother Dominic asked Alleyn to help him place the lid of the sarcophagus at right angles across the coffin. It was massive but Brother Dominic was a strong man and made little of it. He passed the slack of the rope twice round the lid, crossing it in the manner of sailors when they wear a rope in lowering a heavy load.
“We could take your weight neat between us,” he said, “but this will be the better way. Where’s Father?”
“In the Mithraeum. Saying his prayers, I think.”
“He would be that.”
“Here he is.”
Father Denys returned looking anxious.
“I hope we are right about this,” he said. “Are you sure it’s safe, now, Dominic?”
“I am, Father.”
“Mr. Alleyn, would you not let me place a — a handkerchief over your — eh?”
He hovered anxiously and finally did tie his own large cotton handkerchief over Alleyn’s nose and mouth.
The two Dominicans tucked back their sleeves, wetted their palms and took up the rope, Brother Dominic on Alleyn’s side of the sarcophagus lid and Father Denys on the far side, close to the turn. “That’s splendid,” Alleyn said. “I hope I won’t have to trouble you. Here I go.”
“God bless you,” they said in their practical way.
He had another look at the wall. The iron pegs went down at fairly regular intervals on either side of one corner. The well itself was six feet by three. Alleyn ducked under the bottom rail, straddled the corner with his back to the well, knelt, took his weight on his forearms, wriggled backwards and groped downwards with his right foot.
“Easy now, easy,” said both the Dominicans. He looked up at Brother Dominic’s sandalled feet, at his habit and into his long-lipped Irish face. “I have you held,” said Brother Dominic and gave a little strain on the rope to show that it was so.
Alleyn’s right foot found a peg and rested on it. He tested it, letting himself down little by little. He felt a gritting sensation and a slight movement under his foot but the peg took his weight.
“Seems O.K.,” he said through Father Denys’s handkerchief.
He didn’t look up again. His hands, one after the other, relinquished the edge and closed, right and then left, round pegs. One of them tilted, jarred and ground its way out of its centuries-old housing. It was loose in his hand and he let it fall. So long, it seemed, before he heard it hit the water. Now he had only one handhold and his feet but the rope sustained him. He continued down. His face was close to the angle made by the walls and he must be careful lest he knock his headlamp against stone. It cast a circle of light that made sharp and intimate the pitted surface of the rock. Details of colour, irregularities and growths of some minute lichen passed upwards through the light as he himself so carefully sank.
Already the region above seemed remote and the voices of the Dominicans disembodied. His world was now filled with the sound of running water. He would have smelt water, he thought, if it had not been for that other growing and deadly smell. How far had he gone? Why hadn’t he asked Brother Dominic for the actual depth of the well? Thirty feet? More? Would the iron pegs have rusted and rotted in the damper air?
The peg under his left foot gave way. He shouted a warning and his voice reverberated and mingled with Brother Dominic’s reply. Then his right foot slipped. He hung by his hands and by the rope. “Lower away,” he called, released his hold, dangled and dropped in short jerks fending himself clear of the two walls. The voice of the stream was all about him.
A sudden icy cold shock to his feet came as a surprise. They were carried aside. At the same moment he saw and grabbed two pegs at shoulder level. “Hold it! Hold it! I’m there.”
He was lowered another inch before the rope took up. He scrabbled with his feet against the pressure of the stream. The backs of his legs hit against something hard and firm. He explored with his feet, lifted them clear of the water and found in a moment with a kind of astonishment that he was standing on bars that pressed into his feet
The grille.
A broken grille, the monks had said.
The surface of the stream must be almost level with the bottom of the well and about an inch below the grille which projected from its wall. Supporting himself in the angle of the walls Alleyn contrived to turn himself about so that he now faced outwards. His head-lamp showed the two opposite walls. He leant back into the angle, braced himself and shouted: “Slack off a little.”
“Slack off, is it,” said the disembodied voice.
He leant forward precariously as the rope gave, shouted “Hold it,” and lowered his head so that his lamp illuminated the swift-flowing black waters, the fragment of grille that he stood upon and his drenched feet, planted apart and close to its broken fangs.
And between his feet? A third foot ensnared upside down in the broken fangs: a foot in a black leather shoe.
His return to the surface was a bit of a nightmare. Superintendents of the C.I.D., while they like to keep well above average in physical fitness and have behind them a gruelling and comprehensive training to this end, are not in the habit of half scrambling and half dangling on the end of a rope in a well. Alleyn’s palms burnt, his joints were banged against rock walls and once he got a knock on the back of his head that lit up stars and made him dizzy. Sometimes he climbed up by such iron pegs as remained intact. Sometimes he walked horizontally up the wall while he. and the monks hauled in. “They do these things better,” he reflected, “in crime films.”
When he had finally been landed, the three of them sat on the floor and breathed hard: as odd a little group, it occurred to Alleyn, as might be imagined.
“You were superb,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Ah, sure, it was nothing at all,” Father Denys panted. “Aren’t we used to this type of thing in the excavating? It’s yourself should have the praise.”
They shared that peculiar sense of fellowship and gratification which is the reward of such exercises.
“Well,” Alleyn said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to ring the Questura, Father. Our man’s down there and he’s dead.”
“The man Mailer?” Father Denys said when they had crossed themselves. “God have mercy on his soul.”
“Amen,” said Brother Dominic.
“What’s the way of it, Mr. Alleyn?”
“As I see it he probably fell through the well head-first and straight into the stream, missing the broken grille which, by the way, only extends a few inches from the wall. The stream swept him under the grille, but one foot, the right, was trapped between two of the broken fangs. And there he is, held in the current.”
“How are you sure it’s himself?”
“By the shoe and the trouser leg and because—” Alleyn hesitated.
“What are you trying to tell us?”
“—It was just possible to see his face.”
“There’s a terrible thing for you! And so drowned?”
“That,” Alleyn said, “will no doubt appear in due course.”
“Are you telling us there’s been — what are you telling us? — a double murder?”
“It depends upon what you mean by that, Father.”
“I mean does someone have that sin upon his soul to have killed Violetta and Sebastian Mailer, the both of them?”
“Or did Mailer kill Violetta and was then himself killed?”
“Either way, there’s a terrible thing!” Father Denys repeated. “God forgive us all. A fearful, fearful thing.”
“And I do think we should ring the Vice-Questore.”
“Bergarmi, is it? Yes, yes, ye
s. We’ll do so.” On the return journey, now so very familiar, they passed by the well-head on the middle level. Alleyn stopped and looked at the railings. As in the basilica they were made of more finished wood than those in the insula. Four stout rails, well polished, about ten inches apart.
“Have you ever had any trouble in the past? Any accidents?” Alleyn asked.
Never, they said. Children were not allowed unaccompanied anywhere in the building and people obeyed the notice not to climb the railings. “Just a moment, Father.”
Alleyn walked over to the well. “Somebody’s ignored the notice,” he said and pointed to two adjacent marks across the top of the lowest rail. “Somebody who likes brown polish on the under instep of his shoes. Wait a moment, Father, will you?”
He squatted painfully by the rails and used his torch. The smears of brown polish were smudged across with equidistant tracks almost as if somebody had tried to erase them with an india rubber.
“If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’ve got a fancy to take a shot of this.” And did so with his particular little camera.
“Will you look at that, now!” exclaimed Father Denys.
“It won’t amount to a row of beans, as likely as not. Shall we go on?”
Back in the vestibule he rang up the Questura and got through to Bergarmi. He had to go warily. As he expected, the Vice-Questore immediately said that the Dominicans should have reported the trouble to him. Alleyn made the most of Father Denys’s reluctance to bother the police with what might well turn out to be the trivial matter of a couple of dead rats. Bergarmi gave this a sardonic reception, muttering: “Topi, topi,” as if he used an incredulous slang equivalent of “Rats!” This Alleyn felt to be a little unfair but he pressed on with his report.
“You’ll have a difficult job getting the body out,” he said, “but of course you have all the resources and the expertise.”
“You have communicated this matter, Superintendent Alleyn, to Il Questore Valdarno?”
“No. I thought it best to report at once to you.”
This went down much better. “In which respect,” Bergarmi conceded, “you have acted with propriety. We shall deal with this matter immediately. The whole complexion of the affair alters. I myself will inform Il Questore. In the meantime I will speak, if you please, with the Padre.”
While Father Denys talked volubly with Bergarmi, Alleyn washed his hands in a cubbyhole, found them to be rather more knocked about than he had realized, changed back into his own clothes and took stock of the situation.
The complexion had indeed changed. What, he sourly asked himself, was the position of a British investigator in Rome when a British subject of criminal propensities had almost certainly been murdered, possibly by another Briton, not impossibly by a Dutchman, not quite inconceivably by an Italian, on property administered by an Irish order of Dominican monks?
“This is one,” he thought, “to be played entirely by ear and I very much wish I was shot of it.”
He had an egg-shaped lump on the back of his head. He was bruised, sore and even a bit shaky, which made him angry with himself. “I could do with black coffee,” he thought.
Father Denys came back, caught sight of Alleyn’s hands and immediately produced a first aid box. He insisted on putting dressings over the raw patches.
“You’d be the better for a touch of the creature,” he said, “and we’ve nothing of the kind to offer. There’s a caffè over the way. Go there, now, and take a drop of something. The pollis will be a while yet, for that fellow Bergarmi is all for getting on to the Questore before he stirs himself. Are you all right, now?”
“I’m fine but I think it’s a marvellous suggestion.”
“Away with you.”
The caffè was a short distance down the street: a very modest affair with a scatter of workaday patrons who looked curiously at him. He had coffee and brandy and forced himself to eat a couple of large buns that turned out to be delicious.
“Well,” he thought, “it was on the cards. From the beginning it was on the cards and I’m glad I said as much to Valdarno.”
He began a careful re-think. “Suppose,” he thought, “as a starting point, I accept that the noise we heard while the Baroness was setting up that ludicrous group photograph was, in fact, the sound of the sarcophagus lid thumping down on its edge, and I must say it sounded exactly like it. This would mean presumably that Violetta had just been killed and was about to be safely stowed. By Mailer? If by Mailer then he himself survived to be killed, again presumably — no, almost certainly — before we all reassembled. The only members of the party who were alone were Sweet and young Dorne, who found their way up independently, and Lady B., who was parked in the atrium.
“The Van der Veghels were with me. Sophy Jason was with Barnaby Grant. We met nobody on our way up and they say as much for themselves.
“Query. If Mailer killed Violetta while we were all having our photographs taken, why did he — not a robust man — go through the elaborate and physically exhausting job of putting the body in the sarcophagus and replacing the lid instead of doing what was subsequently done to him — dispatching it down the well?
“I have no answer.
“On the other hand, suppose one person killed both of them. Why? I am dumb, but suppose it was so? Why for pity’s sake, make a sarcophagus job of Violetta and a well job of Mailer? Just for the hell of it?
“But. But, I suppose, on the third hand, Mailer killed Violetta and hadn’t time to do anything further about it before he himself was knocked off and pushed down the well? How will this fadge? Rather better I fancy. And why does his killer take the trouble to box Violetta up? That’s an easier one. Much easier.
“I suppose there’s a fourth hand. We approach Indian god status. Suppose Violetta killed Mailer and heaved him overboard and was then — no, that I refuse to entertain.
“How long were we all boxed up together under the blank eyes of Mithras? Sweet arrived first and, about five minutes later, young Dorne. Then there was the business of the photographs. The discussion, the groping and the grouping. Sophy and I being funnymen and Grant cursing us. He had just said: ‘Serve you bloody well right,’ to Sophy, who was having trouble with the Major, when the lid, if it was the lid, thudded. After that came the failure of the flashlight, the interminable wait while the Baroness set herself up again. At least ten minutes I would think. Then Dorne took his photo of Mithras. Then the Baroness loosed off, this time successfully. Then she took two more shots, not without further re-arrangements and palaver. Another four minutes? All of that. And finally the Baron changed places with the Baroness and blazed away on his own account. Then Grant read his piece. Another five minutes. And then the party broke up. After that Dorne and Sweet are again odd men out. So it looks as if we were all together in that bloody basement for about twenty-five minutes, give or take the odd five. So everybody’s got an alibi for the salient time. Everybody? No. No, not quite. Not — Sit still, my soul. Hold on to your hats, boys—”
A great rumpus of sirens broke out in the distance, drew rapidly nearer and exploded into the little street. The police. The Squadra Omicidi in strength. Three large cars and a van, eight Agenti and four practical-looking characters in overalls.
Alleyn paid his bill and returned to the church, stiffer now about the shoulders and ribs and painful as to the head but in other respects his own man again.
A large amount of equipment was being unloaded: two pairs of waders, ropes, pulleys, an extension ladder, a winch, a stretcher. Il Vice-Questore Bergarmi watched the operations with an air of tetchy disdain. He greeted Alleyn ceremoniously and with a fine salute.
Patrons from the little caffè, some groups of youths and a car or two quickly collected and were bossed about by two of the Agenti who were otherwise unoccupied. Brother Dominic came out, surveyed the assembly and opened the main doors.
“Il Questore Valdarno, Signor Alleyn,” said Bergarmi fairly stiffly, “sends his compliments. He w
ishes me to express his hopes that you will continue to interest yourself in our investigations.”
“I am very much obliged to him,” Alleyn replied, groping about in his Italian for the correct phrases, “and will be glad to do so without, I trust, making a nuisance of myself.”
“Mente affalto,” Bergarmi replied. Which was as much, Alleyn thought, as to say, “Don’t let that worry you,” or even, “Forget it.” Somehow it sounded a good deal less cordial.
It was after ten o’clock when Bergarmi’s men landed Sebastian Mailer’s body in the insula.
It lay on a stretcher not far from the sarcophagus, an inconsequential sequel to a flabby, fat man. It wore a ghastly resemblance to Violetta. This was because Mr. Mailer, also, had been strangled.
His body had been knocked about; both before and after death, said the medical man — presumably a police surgeon — called in to make an immediate examination. Its face had been scored by fangs of the broken grille. There was a heavy livid mark across the neck quite apart from the typical stigmata of manual strangulation. Alleyn watched the routine procedure and spoke when he was spoken to. There was a certain hauteur in the attitudes of the investigating officers.
“We shall, of course, perform an autopsy,” said the doctor. “He was a man of full habit. No doubt we shall find he was killed not so very long after he had eaten. Ecco! We find certain manifestations. You may cover the cadaver.” They did so. “And remove it,” added the doctor. “Unless, of course—” he bowed to Alleyn who had moved forward—“the Signor Superintendent wishes—?”
Alleyn said: “Thank you. I am sure, gentlemen, you have already taken every possible photograph required for the investigation, but unfortunately as we all know, under such difficult conditions there can be accidents. When I found the body I did get a shot of it in situ.” He produced his very special minuscule camera. “It seems to have survived a rather rough passage,” he said. “If by any chance you would like a print I shall of course be delighted to give you one.”
He knew at once by a certain momentary stillness that no photographs had been taken down below by the recovery team. He hurried on. “Perhaps I may be allowed to finish my film and then — a further favour, Signor Bergarmi — perhaps your laboratories would be kind enough to develop it.”