“Speaking of postcards, there was a savage elderly postcard lady in the entrance who made a scene with Mailer.”

“A scene? How?”

“Yelling abuse at him. It was not in the sort of Italian we learnt in my diplomatic days but the general drift was invective and fury.”

Alleyn could almost hear the Questore’s shrug.

“He had done something to annoy her, perhaps,” he suggested in his melancholy voice.

“She spat at him.”

“Ah,” sighed the Questore. “He had irritated her.”

“No doubt,” Alleyn faintly agreed. “She’s called Violetta,” he added.

“Why do you concern yourself with this woman, my dear colleague?”

“Well, if I understood her at all, she threatened to kill him.”

“Evidently a short-tempered woman. Some of these street vendors are in fact badly behaved persons.”

“I thought he was greatly disturbed by the encounter. He made light of it but he turned very white.”

“Oh.” There was a brief silence. “She sells postcards outside San Tommaso?”

“Yes. One of our party thought she saw her shadow on the wall of a passage down in the Mithraeum.”

“They are not permitted to enter.”

“So I gathered.”

“I will have enquiries made. I will also have the airports, omnibus and railway stations watched. I feel there is a strong probability Mailer has recognized you and will attempt an escape.”

“I am deeply obliged to you, Signor Questore.”

“Please!”

“But I confess the chances of his recognizing me — we have never met — do seem a bit thin.”

“Some contact of his, an English contact, may have seen you and informed him. It is most possible.”

“Yes,” Alleyn said, “it’s possible of course.”

“We shall see. In the meantime, my dear superintendent, may I have a little speech with this Dominican?”

“I’ll call him.”

“And we keep in close touch, isn’t it?”

“Of course.”

“With my compliments, then—” said Il Questore Valdarno sadly.

Alleyn returned to the shop and delivered his message.

“Il Questore Valdarno, is it?” said Father Denys. “You didn’t let on this was a pollis affair but it doesn’t surprise me at all. Wait, now, and I’ll talk to ’um.”

He did so in voluble Italian and returned looking perturbed. “It’s a queer business,” he said, “and I don’t say I fancy the turn it’s taking. He wants to send in some of his fellows to search below and is going to talk to my superior about it. I told ’um we’d overlooked every inch of the place but that doesn’t satisfy the man. He says will I tell you you’re welcome to join in. Eight sharp in the morning.”

“Not tonight?”

“Ah, why would it be tonight and himself if he’s below, which he’s not, locked up like a fish in a tin.” Father Denys looked pretty sharply at Alleyn. “You’re not the cut of a policeman, yourself,” he said. “None of my business, of course.”

“Do I look like a harmless visitor? I hope I do. Tell me, do you know anything about the woman called Violetta who sells postcards here?”

Father Denys clapped his hand to his forehead. “Violetta, is it!” he ejaculated. “A terrible pest, that one, God forgive me, for she’s touched in her wits, poor creature. Sure, this other business put her clean out of my mind. Come into the atrium till I tell you. We’ll lock up this place.”

He did lock up the vestibule and pretty securely, too, fetching a great key out of a pocket in his habit. Nobody else had that one or a key to the iron grille, he said, except Brother Dominic who opened up in the morning.

The basilica was now deserted and the time six o’clock. All the bells in Rome rang the Ave Maria and Father Denys took time off to observe it. He then led the way into the atrium and settled beside Alleyn on a stone bench, warm with the westering sun. He was a cosy man and enjoyed a gossip.

Violetta, he said, had sold postcards in the entrance to San Tommaso for some months. She was a Sicilian of dubious origins, was not as old as Alleyn may have supposed, and when she first appeared carried upon her the remnants of ferocious good looks. Her story, which she never ceased to pour out, was that her husband had deserted her and in doing so had betrayed her to the police.

“For doing what?” Alleyn asked.

“Ah, she never lets on exactly. Something to do with passing prohibited articles. Likely enough stolen, though she makes out she’d no notion what mischief was in it till the pollis came down upon her and destroyed her. She’s very wild in her conversation and the saints themselves wouldn’t know which was fact and which was fantasy.”

She had behaved herself reasonably well, however, reserving her outbursts for the Dominicans and sticking to her legal postcard vending territory until about two days ago, when he had found her squatting in a corner of the porch letting out the most frightful animadversions in a hissing torrent and shaking her fists. She literally foamed at the mouth and was quite incoherent, but after Father Denys had rebuked her for blasphemy and, Alleyn gathered, sorted her out in a pretty big way, she became slightly more comprehensible. Her rage, it emerged, had been directed at a person who had visited the sacristy to discuss arrangements for sightseeing trips by a newly formed enterprise called—

“Don’t tell me,” Alleyn said as Father Denys paused for dramatic effect. “Let me guess. Called ‘Il Cicerone.’ ”

“Right for you.”

“In the person of Mr. Sebastian Mailer?”

“Right again,” cried Father Denys, clapping his hands together. “And the poor creature’s husband or if he’s not he ought to be God help him.”

It was past five o’clock on that very warm afternoon when two cars arrived at the Palatine Hill. The air smelt of sunny earth, grass, myrtle and resin. In lengthening shadows poppies made little scarlet exclamations and legions of acanthus marched down the contours of the hill. The skies had deepened behind broken columns and arches: the bones of classic Rome.

Giovanni, the driver, had responded with gusto to the role of guide. He said that he had no notion of what had befallen Mr. Mailer but suggested that a sudden onslaught of the affliction known to tourists as Roman Tummy might have overtaken him. By its nature, Giovanni delicately reminded them, it neccessitated an immediate withdrawal. He then led his party across the ruins of Domus Augustana and down a little flight of steps towards a grove of pines. Back again and here and there he led them, giving names to ruins and with sweeps of his arms laying Rome at their feet.

Sophy looked and dreamed and ached with pleasure and did not listen very closely to Giovanni. She was suddenly tired and vaguely happy. Barnaby Grant walked beside her in companionable silence, the Van der Veghels thundered about with cries of appreciation, a thousand enquiries and much photography. Lady Braceley, arm-in-arm with Kenneth and the reluctant Major, trailed and hobbled in the rear and could be heard faintly lamenting the rough going.

“I’ve a low saturation point for sights,” Sophy remarked. “Or rather for information about sights. I stop listening.”

“Well,” Grant said kindly, “at least you admit it.”

“I’d have you know it doesn’t mean that I’m insensible to all this.”

“All right. I didn’t suppose you were.”

“On the contrary, I’m knocked dumb. Or nearly dumb,” Sophy amended. “You may say: visually speechless.”

He looked at her with amusement. “I daresay you’re hungry,” he offered.

“And I daresay you’re right,” she agreed in surprise. “Thirsty, anyway.”

“Look, we’re settling for our tea.”

They had come to a terrain called the Belvedere and looked beyond the tops of a pine grove to the monstrous splendour of the Colosseum. Spires, roofs, gardens, an obelisk, insubstantial in the late afternoon haze, swam into the distance and dissolved against the Alban Hills.

Giovanni and his assistant, having found a place by a fallen column, spread rugs and cloths and opened hampers.