When in Rome ra-26 Page 23

  The Baron chose brandy-punch and while it was coming enlarged upon their visit to the water-gardens at the Villa d’Este. “We have been there before, of course,” he said, “but with each visit the wonder grows. My wife said today that now she summons up, always at the same vista, a scarlet cardinal and his guests. She sees them through the mists of the fountains.”

  “She has second-sight,” Alleyn said lightly. Seeing the Baron was puzzled, he explained.

  “Ach — no. No, we do not believe such phenomena. No, it is her imagination which is so very vivid. She is most sensitive to her surroundings but she does not see ghosts, Mr. Alleyn.”

  The drinks arrived. Alleyn attended to them and then said: “Would you like to look at your photographs? I’m afraid you will be disappointed.”

  He had left all the prints except Kenneth’s on the bed.

  When the Baron saw Violetta and Mailer, which he did at once, he said: “Oh, no! This is too horrible! Please!”

  “I’m so sorry,” Alleyn said and swept them away. “Here are your wife’s photographs. The early ones, you see, are very good. It is when we come to San Tommaso that the trouble begins.”

  “I cannot understand this,” the Baron said. He stopped, peered at them and took them up, one by one. “My wife’s camera is in good condition: it has never happened before. The film was correctly rolled off before it was removed. Where are the negatives?”

  “Here they are.”

  He held them in turn up to the light. “I am sorry,” he said. “And I confess I am puzzled. Forgive me but — the man who processed the film — you said he was a police photographer?”

  “I honestly don’t think for a moment that he was careless.”

  “My wife,” said the Baron, “will be relieved after all. She wanted no record of the visit to that place.”

  “No.”

  “But I am sorry. You wished for the photograph of the sarcophagus, I believe.”

  “The police attach little importance to it. But there is, after all, a record of the group in the Mithraeum.”

  He dropped Kenneth’s print on the bed.

  The Baron stooped over it.

  The room was quiet. The windows were shut and the great composite voice of Rome not obtrusive. A flight of swallows flashed past almost too rapidly for recognition.

  “Yes,” said the Baron. He straightened up and looked at Alleyn. “It is a clear picture,” he said.

  “Isn’t it?”

  The Baron sat down with his back to the windows. He drank a little of his cold brandy-punch. “This is an excellent concoction,” he said. “I am enjoying it.”

  “Good. I wonder if you would do me a favour.”

  “A favour? But certainly, if it is possible.”

  “I have a copy of a letter. It’s written in a language that I don’t know. I think it may be in Dutch. Will you look at it for me?”

  “Of course.”

  Alleyn gave it to him. “You will see,” he said, “that the original was written — typed, actually — on the letter paper of your publishing firm — of Adriaan and Welker. Will you read it?”

  There was a long silence and then the Baron said: “You ask me here to drink with you. You show me — these things. Why do you behave in this way? Perhaps you have a microphone concealed in the room and a tape recorder as in some ridiculous crime film?”

  “No. I am not acting for the police. My job here is finished. No doubt I should have taken this letter to them but they will find the original when they search Mailer’s rooms. I doubt if they will take very much interest in it but of course I have not read it and may be wrong. They know very well that he was a blackmailer. I have seen that your wife’s name appears in the letter. I am behaving reprehensively in this matter, I daresay, but I don’t think you have any reason to throw your brandy-punch in my face, Baron. It was offered in what may fairly be called good faith.”

  The Baron moved slightly. The light from the window crossed his face and in a moment the white Apollo, the glancing Mercury, the faintly smiling Husband of the Villa Giulia seemed in turn to look through his mask. “I must believe you,” he said. “What else can I do?”

  “If you like you can go away leaving me to deal with — for example — Kenneth Dorne and his photography.”

  “Whatever I do,” said the Baron, “it is clear that I put myself in your hands. I have no choice, I think.”

  He got up and walked about the room, still with some trace of elasticity in his tread. At last he said: “It seems to me there would be little point in my refusing to give you the content of this letter since you tell me, and I believe you, that the original is extant. You can get a translation easily enough. In effect it appears that someone — you will have seen the name — calling himself Silas J. Sebastian had written to my firm asking if they could give him any information about my wife. Apparently the writer had said he represented an American magazine and was organizing a series of articles on the incursions into the business world of persons of the old nobilities. From the point of view of their wives. The writer, it appears, went on to say that he had a personal interest in my wife as he believed they were distantly related. Evidently he asked for my wife’s maiden name. This letter is an answer to their enquiry.”

  “Yes?”

  “It says—” The Baron seemed to flinch from his intention. He shut his eyes for a moment and then examined the letter as if he saw it for the first time. Presently in an extraordinarily prim voice that seemed not to belong to him he said: “In accordance with my standing instructions it states that the Baroness Van der Veghel is a permanent invalid and lives in retirement.”

  “When did you first encounter Sebastian Mailer?”

  “Eighteen months ago. In Geneva.”

  “And a few weeks later he wrote his letter. He didn’t trouble to find himself an entirely dissimilar pseudonym.”

  “No doubt he felt sure of himself.”

  “After all,” Alleyn said, “this letter might be a standard reply to choke off boring enquiries.”

  “He did not think so. He pursued the matter,” said the Baron. “He extended his investigations.”

  “To—?”

  “I regret: I must decline to answer.”

  “Very well. Let us accept that he found his material. Will you tell me this much? When you met him again, in Rome, the other day, had you any idea—?”

  “None! My God, none! Not until—”

  “Until?”

  “A week before the — before San Tommaso.”

  “And then the blackmailing process began?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you prepared to pay?”

  “Mr. Alleyn, I had no choice. I flew to Geneva and obtained the money in notes of small denomination.”

  “You presented a brave front,” Alleyn said, “on that expedition. You and your wife. So much enthusiasm for the antiquities! Such joie de vivre!”

  The Baron Van der Veghel looked steadily at Alleyn for some few moments and then he said: “You yourself have a distinguished and brilliant wife, I think? We have admired her work very greatly. She is a superb painter.”

  Alleyn said nothing.

  “You must know, then, Mr. Alleyn, that a preoccupation with the arts is not to be tampered with — my English is unable to explain me, I think — it is not to be cut off and turned on like taps. Beauty and, for us, antique beauty in especial — is absolute. No misfortune or anxiety can colour our feeling for it. When we see it we salute it and are greatly moved. The day before yesterday at San Tommaso I was furnished with the money demanded of me as a price of silence. I was prepared to hand it over. The decision had been taken, I have to confess that a lightness of spirit came over me and a kind of relief. The beauty of the Etruscan works in that underworld did much to enhance this feeling.”

  “And also, it was advisable, wasn’t it, to keep up appearances?”

  “That, too,” said the Baron steadily. “I admit. That too. But it was not diffic
ult. There were the Etruscans to support me. I may tell you that I believe our family, which is of great antiquity, arose in classical times in the lands between the Tiber and the Arno.”

  “Your wife told me so. Did you hand over the money?”

  “No. There was no opportunity. As you know, he had gone.”

  “A further and very understandable relief.”

  “Of course.”

  “You were not his only victim in that party, you know.”

  “I am not surprised.”

  Alleyn took his glass. “Let me give you a drink.”

  “It will not increase my indiscretion,” said the Baron. “But thank you.”

  When Alleyn had given it to him he said: “You may not believe me when I say that it would solace me if I could tell you what it was that he had discovered. I cannot. But on my honour I wish that I could. I wish it with all my heart, Mr. Alleyn.”

  “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.”

  10

  when in rome

  “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 further 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 wellhead. 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 shot 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 non-conformist 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, falli
ng 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 guidebook and go on your way rejoicing?”

  “Go on my way — yes, I think so.”

  “To Florence?”

  “To Perugia first.”

  “And will you 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.

  The End

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: 6a37897e-e2c7-469c-bc16-330c408a3cad

  Document version: 1

  Document creation date: 12 June 2010