When in Rome

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, yes. 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?”