When in Rome (25 page)

‘Let us take it as read.’

Alleyn collected the Baroness’s photographs, prints and negatives. ‘You will take these, won’t you?’ he said. ‘There is nothing in the earlier ones to distress your wife.’ He gave them to him. The picture in profile of the Van der Veghels’ heads was on top.

‘It’s a striking picture,’ Alleyn said lightly, ‘Isn’t it?’

The Baron stared at it and then looked up at him.

‘We think alike, too,’ he said. ‘My wife and I. You may have noticed it.’

‘Yes,’ said Alleyn. ‘I noticed.’

‘When such a bond occurs, and I think it occurs very seldom, it cannot be—I am lost for the English word.’

‘Gainsaid?’

‘Perhaps. It cannot be interrupted. You have it in your literature. In your
Wutherink Heights
you have it.’

It was not easy, Alleyn thought, to clothe the Van der Veghels in the mantles of Heathcliff and Cathy, but all the same, it was not altogether a ludicrous association.

The Baron finished his drink and with a well-managed air of briskness, lightly slapped his knees and stood up.

‘And now I go,’ he said. ‘It is unlikely we meet again, unless at whatever formalities the authorities may require of us. I believe that I am your debtor, Mr Alleyn, to—to an indefinable extent. You would not wish me to say more, I think.’

‘Not another syllable.’

‘As I supposed. May we—?’

For the only time during their brief acquaintance Alleyn saw the Baron Van der Veghel really uncertain of himself. He looked at his enormous hand and then doubtfully at Alleyn.

‘But of course,’ Alleyn said and his own hand was briefly engulfed. ‘I am truly grateful,’ said the Baron.

Alleyn watched him go, bouncily as ever, to the lift.

By and large, he thought to himself, that was the nicest murderer I have met.

‘The case was clinched,’ Alleyn wrote, ‘when I saw young Dorne’s snapshot. No Baron.

‘It’d been a possibility all along. While we were lined up in that preposterous group scarcely able to see each other he hadn’t spoken.
She
talked to
him.
When she told him to stand farther back and not to speak he wasn’t there. While she fussed about hunting for her second flashlamp—and of course the first dud was a put-up affair—he was off by the passage behind that smirking little god. He had his date with Mailer. He had to hand over the money. Mailer was to dispose of it—in the car I expect—and had stayed behind for that purpose.

‘At the moment when we all heard Violetta’s voice, Van der Veghel was in the passage. I don’t believe he witnessed the murder. I think he came upon Mailer with Violetta dead at his feet. I think Mailer bolted and Van der Veghel chased him up the iron stairs to the next landing. There was a struggle. Mailer was knocked out and throttled and tipped over the well-head. The body fell like a plummet into the well below and in doing so a coat sleeve brushed the inner side of the rail and was torn.

‘Van der Veghel climbed the rail at the upper well in order to look down and discover whether his victim had, in fact, made a straight fall into the depths. In doing so the rubber studs on his shoes scored through the brown boot polish that may well have been left there by the abominable Sweet on his way back from dumping Lady B. in the atrium. His brogues were polished underneath the instep, à
la
the
batman he never had. Sweet may have caught sight of Violetta or Mailer or both and snooped.

‘My contention is that Van der Veghel, when he looked down, saw that Mailer’s body had gone and that Violetta’s lay where Mailer had left it. He returned and he stowed it in the sarcophagus, deliberately leaving a bit of her shawl exposed.

‘He wanted Violetta to be found.

‘He wanted the police to know Mailer had killed her. He wanted them to believe Mailer had bolted with her death on his head.

‘The whole business would, as one says, take less time to happen than it has taken to set it down. Eight minutes at the most, I’d say, and the Baroness was a great deal longer than that, setting up her group, fiddling and faddling, changing her “bulps”, taking a second shot. He was back, on his nimble rubber-studded shoes, well in time to take his own shots of the group. When he removed the film from the Baroness’s camera, he was careful to expose the greater part of it. He didn’t know about young Dorne’s shot.

‘And the Baroness? I could have driven him harder here. I could have forced him to confirm what I believe to be her part in the performance. I think she knew they were being blackmailed by Mailer and I think her husband asked her to hold up the proceedings while he kept his assignation and paid over the cash. I don’t believe she knows he killed Mailer and I don’t believe it would make a scrap of difference to their passionate, their overwhelming union if she did.

‘And finally—the material for blackmail? Troy, my darling, the chances of distantly related persons bearing a startling physical resemblance to each other are not impossible. But they
are
extremely remote. In our job we are taught that the ear gives one of the most valuable proofs of identification. The Van der Veghels’ ears are, if not identical as near as damn it, and very, very strange, great ears they are.

‘Fox, with his genius for inspiring gossip, has gleaned from a London representative of Adriaan and Welker that the late Baron was what he describes as a bit of a lad with a European reputation as such. The Baroness is said to belong to an expatriate branch of the family. She doesn’t accompany her husband on his visits to The Hague and is understood to be an invalid. She! The Baroness! An invalid!

‘I’ve gone on about their strangeness, haven’t I? Their resemblance, not only to each other but to the Etruscan antiquities to which they are so much attracted? I see them as larger than life: classical figures springing about behind, of all things, a nonconformist façade. And I think that very probably they are half-siblings.

‘None of this would be provable in a court of law. Even the Baron’s absence from young Dorne’s snapshot could be accounted for. He would say that he had moved out of shot at that juncture and none of us could swear he hadn’t.

‘Giovanni? Giovanni had been double-crossed and milched and threatened by the unspeakable Sweet. He was and is greedy to get his own back upon Sweet alive or dead and he grabbed at the chance to concoct his tarradiddle about Sweet’s agitation and suspicious behaviour. The only bit of it that holds up is his account of Sweet standing on the rails at the middle level. Apparently he did just that.

‘And the upshot? The Roman police force will present a file in which the available evidence will point to Sweet. I haven’t held anything back from them. I haven’t shoved my own reading of the case under their noses. They are an able body of men and the affair is their affair. I’ve got the information I was sent to get and will be closeted with the Interpol chap tomorrow. Mailer and Sweet were both wanted in England and if they had lived I would have applied for extradition and brought them back.

‘I shall always think of the Baron as an antique person in a sudden antique rage, falling upon his enemy like lightning. His consort and his union had been threatened and that was his answer. When in Rome he did as the ancient Romans. I am afraid he does not in the least regret it and I’m afraid I really can’t say that I do.

‘The Embassy here has offered to send my report back in the Diplomatic Bag. I’ll enclose this with it. And so, my dear love…

‘What will you do?’ Barnaby Grant asked Sophy Jason, ‘now that it’s all over? Will you pick up your guide book and go on your way rejoicing?’

‘Go on my way—yes, I think so.’

‘To Florence?’

‘To Perugia first.’

‘And you will receive visitors in Perugia if they should happen to appear?’

‘I’m not going into purdah in Perugia.’

‘The odd thing is, Sophy, that I’m booked in at the Rosetta from next Monday.’

‘Are you, now? Since when?’

‘Well—since we danced together in Rome.’

Sophy said, ‘It will be lovely to meet you again in Perugia.’

‘You don’t mind?’

‘No. I shall look forward to it.’

‘Don’t be so brisk. Can’t you throw me a nice, equivocal leer? Can’t you stint like Juliet and say aye?’

She burst out laughing.

‘Sophy, I think I love you.’

‘Do you, Barnaby? Don’t let’s say anything about it until you’re sure.’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘isn’t Rome lovely? The bells ring, the swallows rush about, the saints look down and the fountains play.’

‘And in the Villa Giulia the Etruscans smile.’

‘And the gardens smell of jasmine. Isn’t Rome lovely?’

‘Lovely!’ she agreed. ‘But all the same, strange things can happen under her skin.’

‘And always have,’ said Barnaby.

HARPER

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Published by
HarperCollinsPublishers
2009

FIRST EDITION

When In Rome
first published in Great Britain by Collins 1970

Ngaio Marsh asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of these works

Copyright © Ngaio Marsh Ltd 1970

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