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Clutch of Constables
Ngaio Marsh


A classic Ngaio Marsh novel which features blood-curdling murders in the confines of a riverboat, the Zodiac, cruising through Constable country.’He looks upon the murders that he did in fact perform as tiresome and regrettable necessities,’ reflected Chief Superintendent Roderick Alleyn on the international crook known as ‘the Jampot’.But it was Alleyn’s wife Troy who knew ‘the Jampot’ best: she had shared close quarters with him on the tiny pleasure steamer Zodiac on a cruise along the peaceful rivers of ‘Constable country’. And it was she who knew something was badly wrong even before Alleyn was called in to solve the two murders on board…








Ngaio Marsh




Clutch of Constables










Copyright (#ulink_f4060686-eb15-51cb-8ae2-525189067f6e)


HARPER

an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009

Clutch of Constables first published in Great Britain by Collins 1968

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

Copyright © Ngaio Marsh Ltd 1968

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780006512592

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2010 ISBN: 9780007344819

Version: 2018-11-21




Dedication (#ulink_914ef549-ab94-5945-8aa0-5562477fdaab)


For Audrey and Guy with love




Contents


Cover (#u0048917a-a463-5296-8431-a35beeda2863)

Title Page (#u0948f514-cf5b-5fa7-9e1f-cfbf9105cc85)

Copyright (#u175879e3-1986-547c-aa2d-5b3bfaa52ae6)

Dedication (#u0d2f7f5c-d7d6-5ef4-8f70-b10aff2b97d2)

Map (#u395ffe66-abed-5eae-9cf5-558cee168b31)

Cast of Characters (#uf214f6b3-d4e7-5f9b-8053-048c71cbdb59)

1 Apply Within (#uabd9e47c-3d0d-5531-bb64-c58e1fcec242)

2 The Wapentake (#u050b98ac-3381-5f9b-887d-15e578e6df27)

3 Tollardwark (#u1308f5d7-70c9-54d2-a1ad-b334398aaf76)

4 Crossdyke (#litres_trial_promo)

5 Longminster (#litres_trial_promo)

6 Ramsdyke (#litres_trial_promo)

7 Routine (#litres_trial_promo)

8 Routine Continued (#litres_trial_promo)

9 The Creeper (#litres_trial_promo)

10 Closed File (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Map (#ulink_25a412ab-142f-5408-97ce-602470bfff32)










Cast of Characters (#ulink_83b9e827-8080-5782-8620-3859e3e2d1c9)








CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_9422e03b-46a7-55a8-834b-f9f55d2ff089)

Apply Within (#ulink_9422e03b-46a7-55a8-834b-f9f55d2ff089)


‘There was nothing fancy about the Jampot,’ Alleyn said. ‘The word “Jobs” is entirely appropriate to his activities. He planned carefully, left as little as possible to chance, took a satisfaction in his work and accepted, without dwelling upon them, the occupational hazards which it involved. Retention or abolishment of capital punishment made no difference at all to his professional behaviour: I daresay he looks upon the murders that he did in fact perform, as tiresome and regrettable necessities.

‘His talents were appropriate to his employment. They included manual dexterity, a passion for accuracy, a really exceptional intelligence of mathematical precision and a useful imagination offset by a complete blank where nervous anxiety might be expected. Above all he was a superb mimic. Mimics are born not made. From his childhood the Jampot showed an uncanny talent in reflecting not only the mannerisms, speech habits and social behaviour of an extraordinary diversity of persons but of knowing, apparently by instinct, how they would react to given circumstances. Small wonder,’ Alleyn said, ‘that he led us up the garden path for so long. He was a masterpiece.’

He looked round his audience. Six rows of sharp-cropped heads. Were the dumb-looking ones as dumb as their wrinkled foreheads, lacklustre eyes and slackish mouths seemed to suggest? Was the forward-leaning one in the second row, who had come up from the uniformed branch with an outstanding report, as good as his promise? Protectors of the people, Alleyn thought. If only the people would recognize them as such. He went on.

‘I’ve chosen the Jampot for your consideration,’ he said, ‘because he’s a kind of bonus in crime. He combines in himself the ingredients that you find singly in other homicides and hands you the lot in a mixed grill. His real name, believe it or not, is Foljambe.’

The forward-leaning, sandy-coloured recruit gave a laugh which he stifled. Several of his companions grinned doubtfully and wiped their mouths. Two looked startled and the rest uneasy.

‘At all events,’ Alleyn said, ‘that’s what he says it is and as he hasn’t got any other name, Foljambe let the Jampot be.

‘He was born in Johannesburg, received a good education and is said to have read medicine for two years but would appear to have been from birth what used to be known as a “wrong-un”. His nickname was given him by his South African associates in crime and has been adopted by the police on both sides of the Atlantic. In Paris, I understand he is known as Le Folichon or “the frisky bloke”.

‘I’d like to pick up his story at the time of his highly ingenious escape from gaol which took place on the 7th May the year before last in Bolivia …’

One or two of his hearers wrote this down. He was giving an address by invitation to a ten-week course at the Police College.

‘By an outlandish coincidence,’ Alleyn said and his deep voice took on the note of continuous narrative, ‘I was personally involved in this affair: by personally, I mean, as a private individual as well as a policeman. It so happened that my wife –’

I

‘– above all it must be said of this most distinguished exhibition, that while in scope it is retrospective it is by no means definitive. The painter, one feels, above all her contemporaries, will continue to explore and penetrate: for her own and our sustained enjoyment.’

The painter in question muttered: ‘O Lord, O Lord,’ and laid aside the morning paper as stealthily as if she had stolen it. She left the dining-room, paid her bill, arranged to pick up her luggage in time to catch the London train and went for a stroll.

Her hotel was not far from the river. Summer sunshine defined alike ranks of unbudgingly Victorian mercantile buildings broken at irregular intervals by vast up-ended waffle-irons. Gothic spires, and a ham-fisted Town Hall poked up through the early mist. She turned her back on them and made downhill for the river.

As she drew near to it the character of the streets changed. They grew narrower and were cobbled. She passed a rope-walk and a shop called ‘Rutherfords, Riverview Chandlers’, a bakery smelling of new bread, a pawnbroker’s and a second-hand machine-parts shop. The river itself now glinted through gaps in the buildings and at the end of passages. When she finally came within full view of it she thought it beautiful. Not picturesque or grandiloquent but alive and positive, curving in and out of the city with historical authority. It was, she thought, a thing in its own right and the streets and wharves that attended upon it belonged to it and to themselves. ‘Wharf Lane’ she read, and took her way down it to the front. Rivercraft of all kinds were moored along the foreshore.

Half-way down the lane she came upon the offices of The Pleasure Craft and Riverage Company. In their window were faded notices of sailing dates and various kinds of cruises. While she was reading these a man in shirt sleeves, looking larger than life in the confined space, edged his way towards the window and attached to its surface with sticky paper, a freshly-written card.

He caught sight of her, gave her a tentative smile and backed out of the window.

She read the card.

‘M.V. Zodiac. Last minute cancellation.

A single-berth cabin is available for

this day’s sailing. Apply within.’

Placed about the window were photographs of M.V. Zodiac in transit and of the places she visited. In the background hung a map of the river and the canals that articulated with it: Ramsdyke. Bullsdyke. Crossdyke. A five day cruise from Norminster to Longminster and back was offered. Passengers slept and ate on board. The countryside, said a pamphlet that lay on the floor, was rich in historical associations. Someone with a taste for fanciful phrases had added: ‘For Five Days you Step out of Time.’

She had had a gruelling summer, working for her one-man show and was due in a few weeks to see it launched in Paris and afterwards New York. Her husband was in America and her son was taking a course at Grenoble. She thought of the long train journey south, the gritty arrival, the summer stifle of London and the empty stuffy house. It seemed to her, afterwards, that she behaved like a child in a fairytale. She opened the door and as she did so she heard something say within her head: ‘For five days I step out of time.’

II

‘There is,’ wrote Miss Rickerby-Carrick, ‘no bottom, none, to my unquenchable infamy.’

She glanced absently at the tip of her propelling pencil and, in falsetto, cleared her throat.

‘For instance,’ she wrote, ‘let us examine my philanthropy. Or rather, since I have no distaste for colloquialism, my dogoodery. No!’ she exclaimed aloud, ‘That won’t wash. That is a vile phrase, Dogoodery is a vile phrase.’ She paused again, greatly put out by the suspicion that these observations were not entirely original. She stared about her and caught the eye of a thin lady in dark blue linen who, like herself, sat on her own suitcase.

‘“Dogoodery”,’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick repeated. ‘Is that a facetious word? Do you find it so?’

‘Well – it depends, I suppose, on the context.’

‘You look startled.’

‘Do I?’ said Troy Alleyn, looking startled indeed. ‘Sorry. I was a thousand miles away.’

‘I wish I were. Or no,’ amended Miss Rickerby-Carrick. ‘Wrong again. Correction. I wish I were a thousand miles away from me. From myself. No kidding,’ she added. ‘To try out another colloquialism.’

She wrote again in her book.

Her companion looked attentively at her and might have been said, after her own fashion, also to make notes. She saw a figure, not exactly of fun, but of confusion. There was no co-ordination. The claret-coloured suit, the disheartened jumper, above all the knitted jockey-cap, all looked to have been thrown at their wearer and fortuitously to have stuck. She had a strange trick with her mouth, letting it fly apart over her teeth and turn up at the corners so that she seemed to grin when in fact she did nothing of the sort. The hand that clutched her propelling pencil was arthritic.

Overhead, clouds bowled slowly across a midsummer sky. A light wind fiddled with the river and one or two small boats bumped at their moorings. The pleasure craft Zodiac had not appeared but was due at noon.

‘My name,’ said Miss Rickerby-Carrick, ‘is Rickerby-Carrick. Hazel. “Spinster of this parish”. What’s yours?’

‘Alleyn.’

‘Mrs?’

‘Yes.’ After a moment’s hesitation Troy, since it was obviously expected of her, uncomfortably added her first name. ‘Agatha,’ she mumbled.

‘Agatharallen,’ said Miss Rickerby-Carrick sharply. ‘That’s funny. I thought you must be K. G. Z. Andropulos, Cabin 7.’

‘The cabin was taken by somebody called Andropulos, I believe, but the booking was cancelled at the last moment. This morning, in fact. I happened to be here on – on business and I saw it advertised in the Company’s window, so I took it,’ said Troy, ‘on impulse.’

‘Just like that. Fancy.’ A longish pause followed. ‘So we’re ship-mates? “Water-wanderers?”’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick concluded, quoting the brochure.

‘In the Zodiac? Yes,’ Troy agreed and hoped she sounded friendly enough. Miss Rickerby-Carrick crinkled her eyes and stripped her teeth. ‘Jolly good show,’ she said. She gazed at Troy for some time and then returned to her writing. An affluent-looking car drove half-way down the cobbled passage. Its uniformed driver got out, walked to the quay, looked superciliously at nothing in particular, returned, spoke through the rear window to an indistinguishable occupant and resumed his place at the wheel.

‘When I examine in depth the motives by which I am activated,’ wrote Miss Rickerby-Carrick in her book. ‘I am appalled. For instance. I have a reputation, within my circle (admittedly a limited one) for niceness, for kindness, for charity. I adore my reputation. People come to me in their trouble. They cast themselves upon my bosom and weep. I love it. I’m awfully good at being good. I think to myself that they must all tell each other how good I am. “Hay Rickerby-Carrick,” I know they say, “She’s so good.” And so I am. I am. I put myself out in order to keep up my reputation. I make sacrifices. I am unselfish in buses, upstanding in tubes and I relinquish my places in queues. I visit the aged, I comfort the bereaved and if they don’t like it they can lump it. I am filled with amazement when I think about my niceness. O misery, misery, misery me,’ she wrote with enormous relish.

Two drops fell upon her open notebook. She gave a loud, succulent and complacent sniff.

Troy thought: ‘Will she go on like this for five days? Is she dotty? O God, has she got a cold!’

‘Sorry,’ said Miss Rickerby-Carrick. ‘I’ve god a bid of cold. Dur,’ she added making a catarrhal clicking sound and allowing her mouth to fall slightly open. Troy began to wonder if there was a good train to London before evening.

‘You wonder,’ said Miss Rickerby-Carrick in a thick voice, ‘why I sit on my suitcase and write. I have lately taken to a diary. My self-propelling confessional, I call it.’

‘Do you?’ Troy said helplessly.

Down the cobbled lane walked a pleasant-looking man in an ancient knickerbocker suit of Donegal tweed and a cloth cap. He carried, beside a rucksack, a square box on a shoulder-strap and a canvas-covered object that might, Troy thought, almost be a grossly misshapen tennis racquet. He took off his cap when he saw the ladies and kept it off. He was of a sandy complexion with a not unattractive cast in one of his blue eyes, a freckled countenance and a tentative smile.

‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘We must be fellow-travellers.’

Troy agreed. Miss Rickerby-Carrick, blurred about the eyes and nose, nodded, smiled and sniffed. She was an industrious nodder.

‘No signs of the Zodiac as yet,’ said the newcomer. ‘Dear me,’ he added, ‘that’s a pit-fall of a joke isn’t it? We shall all be making it as punctually as the tides, I daresay.’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick after a moment’s thought, was consumed with laughter. He looked briefly at her and attentively at Troy. ‘My name’s Caley Bard,’ he said.

‘I’m Troy Alleyn and this is Miss Rickerby-Carrick.’

‘You said you were Agatha,’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick pointed out. ‘You said Agatharallen,’ and Troy felt herself blushing.

‘So I am,’ she muttered, ‘the other’s just a sort of a joke – my husband –’ her voice died away. She was now extremely conscious of Mr Bard’s scrutiny and particularly aware of its dwelling speculatively on the veteran paintbox at her feet. All he said, however, was, ‘Dear me,’ in a donnish tone. When she looked her apprehension he tipped her a wink. This was disconcerting.

She was relieved by the arrival on an apocalyptic motorbicycle of a young man and his girl. The noonday sun pricked at their metal studs and turned the surface of their leather suits and calf-high boots into toffee. From under crash helmets, hair, veiled in oil and dust, fell unevenly to their shoulders. Their machine belched past the stationary chauffeur-driven car and came to a halt. They put their booted feet to the ground and lounged, chewing, against their bicycle. ‘There is nothing,’ Troy thought, ‘as insolent as a gum-chewing face,’ and at the same time she itched to make a sharp, black drawing of the riders.

‘Do you suppose –?’ she ventured in a low voice.

‘I hardly think water-wandering would present a very alluring prospect,’ Mr Bard rejoined.

‘In any case, they have no luggage.’

‘They may not need any. They may bed down as they are.’

‘Oh, do you think so? All those steel knobs.’

‘There is that, of course,’ Mr Bard agreed.

The young people lit cigarettes, inhaled deeply, stared at nothing and exhaled vapour. They had not spoken.

Miss Rickerby-Carrick gazed raptly at them and then wrote in her book.

‘– “two of our Young Independents”,’ she noted. ‘Is it to gladiators that one should compare them? Would they like it if one did? Would I be able to get on with them? Would they like me? Would they find me sympatica or is it sympatico? Alas, there I go again. Incorrigible, hopeless old Me!’

She stabbed down an ejaculation mark, clicked off her pencil with an air of quizzical finality, and said to Troy: ‘How did you get here? I came by bus: from good old Brummers.’

‘I drove,’ Mr Bard said. ‘From London and put up at a pub. Got here last night.’

‘I did too,’ said Troy. ‘But I came by train.’

‘There’s a London train that connects this morning,’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick observed. ‘Arrives 11.45.’

‘I know. But I – there was – I had an engagement,’ Troy mumbled.

‘Such as going to the pictures?’ Mr Bard airily suggested to nobody in particular. ‘Something of that sort?’ Troy looked at him but he was staring absently at the river. ‘I went to the pictures,’ he said. ‘But not last night. This morning. Lovely.’

‘The pictures!’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick exclaimed. ‘This morning! Do you mean the cinema?’

But before Mr Bard could explain himself if indeed he intended to do so, two taxis, one after the other, came down the cobbled lane and discharged their passengers.

‘There! The London train must be in,’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick observed with an air of triumph.

The first to alight was an undistinguished man of about forty. Under a belted raincoat he wore a pinstriped suit which, revealed, would surely prove abominable. His shirt was mauve and his tie a brightish pink. His hair was cut short back-and-sides. He had a knobbly face and pale eyes. As he approached, carrying his fibre suitcase and wearing a jaunty air, Troy noticed that he limped, swinging a built-up boot. ‘Morning all,’ he said. ‘Lovely day, innit?’

Troy and Mr Bard agreed and Miss Rickerby-Carrick repeated: ‘Lovely! Lovely!’ on an ecstatic note.

‘Pollock’s the name,’ said the new arrival, easily. ‘Stan.’ They murmured.

Mr Bard introduced himself and the ladies. Mr Pollock responded with sideway wags of his head.

‘That’s the ticket,’ he said. ‘No deception practised.’

Miss Rickerby-Carrick said: ‘Isn’t this going to be fun,’ in a wildish tone that modulated into one of astonishment. Her gaze had shifted to the passenger from the second taxi who, with his back to the group, was settling his fare. He was exceedingly tall and very well-dressed at High Establishment level. Indeed his hat, houndstooth checked overcoat and impeccable brogues were in such a grand conservative style that it surprised – it almost shocked – Troy to observe that he seemed to be wearing black gloves like a Dickensian undertaker. Some yards distant, his bell-like voice rang out enormously. ‘Thank you. Good morning to you. Good morning.’

He lifted his suitcase and turned. His hat tilted a little forward: the brim shadowed his face but could not be seen to do so as the face itself was darker than a shadow: the latest arrival was a coloured man.

Miss Rickerby-Carrick gave out an ejaculation. Mr Bard after the briefest glance continued talking to Troy. Mr Pollock stared, faintly whistled and then turned aside with a shuttered face. The motorcyclists for some private reason broke into ungentle laughter.

The newcomer advanced, lifted his hat generally and moved through the group to the wharf’s edge where he stood looking upstream towards the bend in the river: an incongruous but impressive and elegant figure against a broken background of rivercraft, sliding water and buildings advertising themselves in a confusion of signs.

Troy said quickly: ‘That makes five of us, doesn’t it? Three more to come.’

‘One of whom occupies that very affluent-looking car, no doubt,’ said Mr Bard. ‘I tried to peer in as I came past but an open newspaper defeated me.’

‘Male or female, did you gather?’

‘Oh the former, the former. A large manicured hand. The chauffeur is one of the stony kind. Now what is your guess? We have a choice of two from our passenger list, haven’t we? Which do you think?’ He just indicated the figure down by the river. ‘Dr Natouche? Mr J. de B. Lazenby? Which is which?’

‘I plump for J. de B. L. in the car,’ Troy said. ‘It sounds so magnificent.’

‘Do you? No: my fancy lies in the contrary field. I put Dr Natouche in the car. A specialist in some esoteric upper reaches of the more impenetrable branches of medicine. An astronomical consulting fee. And I fetch our friend on the wharf from Barbados. He owns a string of hotels and is called Jasper de Brabazon Lazenby. Shall we have a bet on it?’

‘Well,’ Troy said, ‘propose your bet.’

‘If I win you have a drink with me before luncheon. If you win, I pay for the drinks.’

‘Now then!’ Troy exclaimed.

Mr Bard gave a little inward laugh.

‘We shall see,’ he said. ‘I think that I might –’ He smiled at Troy and without completing his sentence walked down to the quay.

‘Are you,’ Troy could just hear him say, ‘joining us? I’m sure you must be.’

‘In the Zodiac?’ the great voice replied. ‘Yes. I am a passenger.’

‘Shall we introduce ourselves?’

The others all strained to hear the exchange of names.

‘Natouche.’

‘Dr Natouche?’

‘Quite so.’

Mr Bard sketched the very vaguest and least of bows in Troy’s direction.

‘I’m Caley Bard,’ he said.

‘Ah. I too have seen the passenger list. Good morning, sir.’

‘Do,’ said Caley Bard, ‘come and meet the others. We have been getting to know each other.’

‘Thank you. If you wish.’

They turned together. Mr Bard was a tall man but Dr Natouche diminished him. Behind them the river, crinkled by a breeze and dappled with discs of sunlight, played tricks with the two approaching figures. It exaggerated their size, rimmed them in a pulsing nimbus and distorted their movement. As they drew nearer, the pale man and the dark, Troy, bemused by this dazzle, thought: ‘There is no reason in the wide world why I should feel apprehensive. It will be all right unless Mr Pollock is bloody-minded or the Rickerby-Carrick hideously effusive. It must be all right.’ She glanced up the lane and there were the cyclists, stock-still except for their jaws: staring, staring.

She held out her hand to Dr Natouche who was formal and bowed slightly over it. His head, uncovered, showed grey close-cut fuzz above the temples. His skin was not perfectly black but warmly dark with grape-coloured shadows. The bone structure of his face was exquisite.

‘Mrs Alleyn,’ said Dr Natouche.

Miss Rickerby-Carrick was, as Troy had feared she would be, excessive. She shook Dr Natouche’s hand up and down and laughed madly: ‘Oh – ho – ho,’ she laughed, ‘how perfectly splendid.’

Mr Pollock kept his hands in his pockets and limped aside thus avoiding an introduction.

Since there seemed to be nothing else to talk about Troy hurriedly asked Dr Natouche if he had come by the London train. He said he had driven up from Liverpool, added a few generalities, gave her a smile and a slight inclination of his head, returned to the river and walked for some little distance along the wharves.

‘Innit marvellous?’ Mr Pollock asked of nobody in particular. ‘They don’t tell you so you can’t complain.’

‘They?’ wondered Miss Rickerby-Carrick. ‘Tell you? I don’t understand?’

‘When you book in.’ He jerked his head towards Dr Natouche. ‘What to expect.’

‘Oh, but you mustn’t!’ she whispered. ‘You mustn’t feel like that. Truly.’

‘Meant to be class, this carry-on? Right? That’s what they tell you. Right? First class. Luxury accommodation. Not my idea of it. Not with that type of company. If I’d known one of that lot was included I wouldn’t have come at it. Straight, I wouldn’t.’

‘How very odd of you,’ said Mr Bard lightly.

‘That’s your opinion,’ Mr Pollock angrily rejoined. He turned towards Troy, hoping perhaps for an ally. ‘I reckon it’s an insult to the ladies,’ he said.

‘Oh, go along with you,’ Troy returned as good-naturedly as she could manage, ‘it’s nothing of the sort. Is it, Miss Rickerby-Carrick?’

‘Oh no. No. Indeed, no.’

‘I know what I’m talking about,’ Mr Pollock loudly asserted. Troy looked nervously at the distant figure on the riverage. ‘I own property. Once that sort settles in a district – look – it’s a slum. Easy as that.’

‘Mr Pollock, this man is a doctor,’ Troy said.

‘You’re joking? Doctor? Of what?’

‘Of medicine,’ Mr Bard said. ‘You should consult your passenger list, my dear fellow. He’s an MD.’

‘You can tell people you’re anything,’ Mr Pollock darkly declared. ‘Anything. I could tell them I was a bloody earl. Pardon the French, I’m sure.’ He glared at Troy who was giggling. The shadow of a grin crept into his expression. ‘Not that they’d credit it,’ he added. ‘But still.’

The young man on the motorcycle sounded a derisive call on his siren. ‘Taa t’–ta ta ta. Ta-Taa.’ He and his girlfriend were looking towards the bend in the river.

A rivercraft had come into view. She was painted a dazzling white. A scarlet and green houseflag was mounted at her bows and the red ensign at her stern. Sunlight splashed her brass-work, red curtains glowed behind her saloon windows. As she drew towards her moorings her name could be seen, painted in gold letters along her bows.

M.V. Zodiac.

The clock in a church tower above the river struck twelve.

‘Here she is,’ Mr Bard said. ‘Dead on time.’

III

The Zodiac berthed and was made fast very smartly by a lad of about fifteen. Her skipper left the wheelhouse and said goodbye to his passengers who could be heard to thank him, saying they wished the voyage had been longer. They passed through the waiting group. A woman, catching Troy’s eye said: ‘You’re going to love it.’ And a man remarked to his wife: ‘Well, back to earth, worse luck,’ with what seemed almost excessive regret after a five day jaunt.

When they had all gone the new passengers moved down to the Zodiac and were greeted by the skipper. He was a pleasant-looking fellow, very neat in his white duck shirt and dark blue trousers and tie. He wore the orthodox peaked cap.

‘You’d all like to come aboard,’ he said. ‘Tom!’ The boy began to collect the luggage and pile it on the deck. The skipper offered a hand to the ladies. Miss Rickerby-Carrick made rather heavy-going of this business. ‘Dear me!’ she said, ‘Oh. Oh, thank you,’ and leapt prodigiously.

She had a trick of clutching with her left hand at her dun-coloured jumper: almost, Troy thought, as if she carried her money in a bag round her neck and wanted continuously to assure herself it was still there.

From amidships and hard-by the wheelhouse the passengers descended, by way of a steep little flight of steps and a half-gate of the loosebox kind, into the saloon. From there a further downward flight ended in a passage through the cabin quarters. Left of this companion-way a hatch from the saloon offered a bird’s-eye view into the cuddy which was at lower-deck level. Down there a blonde woman assembled dishes of cold meats and salads. She wore a starched apron over a black cotton dress. Her hair, pale as straw, was drawn back from a central parting into a lustrous knob. As Troy looked down at it the woman turned and tilted her head. She smiled dazzlingly and said: ‘Good morning. Lunch in half an hour. The bar will be open in a few minutes.’ The bar, Troy saw, was on the port side of the saloon, near the entry.

The boy came down with Troy’s suitcase and paintbox. He said: ‘This way, please,’ and she followed him to the lower deck and to her cabin.

No. 7 was the third on the starboard side, and was exactly twice the size of its bunk. It had a cupboard, a washbasin and a porthole near the ceiling. The counterpane and curtains were cherry-red and in a glass on the bedside shelf there was a red geranium mixed with a handful of fern and hedgerow flowers. This pleased Troy greatly. The boy put her suitcase on the bunk and her paintbox under it. For some reason she felt diffident about tipping him. She hesitated but he didn’t. He gave her a smile that was the very print of the woman’s and was gone. ‘He’s her son,’ thought Troy, ‘and perhaps they’re a family. Perhaps the Skipper’s his father.’

She unpacked her suitcase and stowed it under her bunk, washed her hands and was about to return to the saloon when, hearing voices outside, she knelt on her bunk and looked through the porthole. It was at dockside level and there, quite close at hand, were the shiny leggings and polished boots of the smart chauffeur, his brown breeches and his gloved hands each holding a suitcase. They moved out of sight, towards the boarding plank, no doubt, and were followed by shoes and clerical grey trousers. These legs paused and formed a truncated triangular frame through which Troy saw, as if in an artfully directed film, the distant black-leathered cyclists, still glinting, chewing and staring in the cobbled lane. She had the oddest notion that they stared at her, though that, as she told herself, was ridiculous. They had just been joined by the boy from the Zodiac when all of them were blotted out by a taxi that shot into her field of vision and halted. The framing legs moved away. The door of the taxi began to open but Troy’s attention was abstracted by a loud rap on her cabin door. She sat down hurriedly on her bunk and said: ‘Come in.’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s active face appeared round the door.

‘I say,’ she said. ‘Bliss! A shower and two loos! Aren’t we lucky!’

Before Troy could reply she had withdrawn. There were sounds within the craft of new arrivals.

‘Thank you very much … Er – here –’ the voice was lowered to an indistinguishable murmur. A second voice said: ‘Thank you, sir.’ A door was shut. Boots tramped up the companion-way and across the deck overhead. ‘The chauffeur,’ Troy thought, ‘and Mr. J. de B. Lazenby.’ She waited for a moment listening to the movements of the other passengers. There was a further confusion of arrival and a bump of luggage. A woman’s voice said: ‘That’s correct, stooard, we do have quite a bit of photographic equipment. I guess I’ll use Number 3 as a regular stateroom and Number 6 can accommodate my brother and the overflow. OK? OK, Earl?’

‘Sure. Sure.’

The cabin forward of Troy’s was No. 6. She heard sounds of the bestowal of property and a number of warnings as to its fragility, all given with evident good humour. The man’s voice said repeatedly: ‘Sure. Sure. Fine. Fine.’ There was an unsuccessful attempt to tip the boy. ‘Thanks all the same,’ Troy heard him say. He departed. There followed a silence and an ejaculation from the lady. ‘Do you look like I feel?’ and the man’s answer: ‘Forget it. We couldn’t know.’

Troy consulted her passenger list. Mr Earl J. and Miss Sally-Lou Hewson had arrived. She stowed away her baggage and then went up to the saloon.

They were all there except the three latest arrivals. Dr Natouche sat by himself reading a newspaper with a glass of beer to hand. Miss Rickerby-Carrick, in conversation with Mr Pollock, occupied a seat that ran round the forward end of the saloon under the windows. Mr Caley Bard who evidently had been waiting for Troy, at once reminded her that she was to have a drink with him. ‘Mrs Tretheway,’ he said, ‘mixes a superb Martini.’

She was behind the little bar, displayed in the classic manner within a frame of bottles and glasses many of which were splintered by sunlight. She herself had a kind of local iridescence: she looked superb. Mr Pollock kept glancing at her with a half-smile on his lips and then turning away again. Miss Rickerby-Carrick gazed at her with a kind of anguished wonder. Mr Bard expressed his appreciation in what Troy was to learn was a very characteristic manner.

‘The Bar at the Folies Bergère may as well shut up shop,’ he said to Troy. ‘Manet would have changed his drinking habits. You, by the way, could show him where he gets off.’ And he gave Troy a little bow and a very knowing smile. ‘You ought to have a go,’ he suggested. ‘Don’t,’ she said hurriedly. ‘Please.’ He laughed and leant across the bar to pay for their drinks. Mrs Tretheway gave Troy a woman-to-woman look that included her fabulous smile.

Even Dr Natouche lowered his paper and contemplated Mrs Tretheway with gravity for several seconds.

At the back of the bar hung a framed legend, rather shakily typed.

THE SIGNS OF THE ZODIAC

The Hunt of the Heavenly Host begins

With the Ram, the Bull and the Heavenly Twins.

The Crab is followed by the Lion

The Virgin and the Scales,

The Scorpion, Archer and He-Goat,

The Man that carries the Watering-pot

And the Fish with the Glittering Tails.

‘Isn’t that charming?’ Mr Bard asked Troy. ‘Don’t you think so?’

‘The magic of the proper name,’ Troy agreed. ‘Especially those names. It always does the trick, doesn’t it?’

Mrs Tretheway said, ‘A chap that cruised with us gave it to me. He said it was out of some kid’s book.’

‘It’s got the right kind of dream-sound for that,’ Troy said. She thought she would like to make a picture of the Signs and put the rhyme in the middle. Perhaps before the cruise was over –

‘To make it rhyme,’ Mrs Tretheway pointed out, ‘you have to say “pote”. “The Man that carries the Watering-pote”.’

She pushed their drinks across the bar. The back of her hand brushed Mr Bard’s fingers.

‘You’ll join us, I hope,’ he said.

‘Another time, thanks all the same. I’ve got to look after your lunch. It’s cold – what do they call it – smorgasbord, for today. If everybody would help themselves when they’re ready.’

She went over to the hatch into the cuddy. Tom, the boy, had gone below and handed up the dishes to his mother who set them out on the tables that had been pushed together and covered with a white cloth.

‘Whenever you’re ready,’ Mrs Tretheway repeated. ‘Please help yourselves,’ and returned to the bar where she jangled a handbell.

Without consulting Troy, Mr Bard ordered two more dry Martinis. This was not Troy’s favourite drink and in any case the first had been extremely strong.

‘No, really, thank you,’ she said. ‘Not for me. I’m for my lunch.’

‘Well,’ he said. ‘P’rhaps you’re right. We’ll postpone until dinner time. Let moderation be our cry.’

It now occurred to Troy that Mr Bard was making a dead set at her. Gratifying though this might or might not be, it did not fit in with her plan for a five days’ anonymous dawdle along the British Inland Waterways. Mr Bard, it was evident, had twigged Troy. He had this morning visited her one-man show for the opening of which, last evening, she had come up from London. He had been cunning enough to realize that she wanted to remain unrecognized. Evidently he was disposed to torment her about this and to set up a kind of alliance on the strength of it. Mr Bard was a tease.

There was a place beside Dr Natouche at the end of a circular seat that ran under the forward windows of the saloon. Troy helped herself to cold meat and salad and sat beside him. He half-rose and made her a little bow. ‘I hope you are pleased with the accommodation,’ he said. ‘I find it perfectly satisfactory.’

There was an extraordinary quality in Dr Natouche, Troy suddenly decided. It was a quality that made one intensely aware of him, as if with the awareness induced by some drug: aware of his thin, charcoal wrist emerging from a white silk cuff, of the movements of his body under his clothes, of his quiet breathing, of his smell which was of wood: cedarwood or even sandalwood.

He had neatly folded his newspaper and laid it beside his plate. Troy, glancing at it, saw herself having her hand shaken by the Personage who had opened her show. Was it possible that Dr Natouche had not recognized this photograph? ‘I really don’t know,’ she thought, ‘why I fuss about it. If I were a film star it would be something to take-on about but who cares for painters? The truth of the matter is,’ Troy thought, ‘I never know what to say when people who don’t paint talk to me about my painting. I get creaky with shyness and hear myself mumbling and am idiotic.’

Dr Natouche, however, did not talk about painting. He talked about the weather and the days to come and he sounded a little like one of The Pleasure Craft and Riverage Company’s pamphlets. ‘There will be a great deal of historic interest,’ he said, calmly.

He had moved away from Troy to give her plenty of room. She was as conscious of the distance between them as if she had measured it in inches.

‘All the arrangements are charming,’ concluded Dr Natouche.

Mr and Miss Hewson now appeared. They seemed to be the dead norm of unpretentious American tourists. Miss Hewson was fairish, shortish and compact in shape. Her brother was tall, thin and bespectacled and wore a hearing-aid. They both looked hygienic and practical.

‘Well, now,’ Miss Hewson said, ‘if we aren’t just the slowest things to settle. Pardon us, folks.’

Mrs Tretheway from behind the bar introduced them to the assembled company and in a pleasant, sensible fashion they repeated each name as they heard it while the British murmured and smiled. Dr Natouche reciprocated in this ritual and Troy wondered if he too was an American but could hear no trace of it in his voice. West Indian? African? Pakistan?

‘One to come,’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick presently announced, excitedly tossing salad into her mouth. ‘You’re not the last.’ She had been talking energetically to the Hewsons who looked dazed and baffled. She indicated a copy of the passenger list that had been put on the table. Troy had already noticed that the name K.G.Z. Andropulos had been struck out opposite Cabin 7 and that her own had not been substituted. Mr Bard with one of his off-beat glances at her, now reached out for the card and made good this omission. ‘We may as well,’ he said, ‘be all shipshape and Bristol fashion.’ Troy saw that he had spelt her surname correctly but obligingly prefaced it merely by the initials A.T. She couldn’t help giving him a look in return and he tipped her another of his squinny winks.

Miss Rickerby-Carrick began playfully to whisper: ‘What do you think? Shall we guess? What will he be?’ She pointed to Mr J. de B. Lazenby’s name on the card and looked archly round the company.

They were spared the necessity of reply by the entrance of Mr Lazenby himself.

In a way, Troy felt, it was something of an anti-climax. Mr Lazenby was a clergyman.

It was also a surprise. One did not, somehow, associate the clergy, except in the upper reaches of their hierarchy, with expensive cars and uniformed chauffeurs. Mr Lazenby gave out no particular air of affluence. He was tall, rather pink and thinly crested and he wore dark glasses, an immaculate clerical grey suit, a blue pullover and the regulation dog-collar.

Mrs Tretheway from behind the bar, where to Troy’s fancy, she had become a kind of oracle, pronounced his name and added sensibly that he would no doubt find out in due course who everybody was.

‘Surely, surely,’ said Mr Lazenby in a slightly antipodean, faintly parsonic voice.

‘But,’ cried Miss Rickerby-Carrick, ‘it doesn’t say in the passenger list. It doesn’t say Rev … Now, why is that?’

‘I expect,’ said Mr Lazenby who was helping himself to luncheon, ‘it was because I applied for my reservation by letter. From Melbourne. I didn’t, I think, declare my cloth.’

He smiled at her, composed himself, bent his head for a moment, scratched a miniature cross on his jumper and sat down by Mr Pollock. ‘This looks delicious,’ he said.

‘Very tasty,’ said Mr Pollock woodenly and helped himself to pickles.

Luncheon went forward in little desultory gusts of conversation. Items of information were exchanged. The Hewsons had come up from the Tabard Inn at Stratford-upon-Avon where on Saturday night they had seen a performance of Macbeth which they had thought peculiar. Mr Lazenby had been staying with the Bishop of Norminster. Mr Pollock had caught the London train in Birmingham where he had lodged at the Osborn Hotel. Dr Natouche and Miss Rickerby-Carrick had come from their respective homes. Miss Hewson guessed that she and her brother were not the only non-Britishers aboard, addressing her remark to Mr Lazenby but angling, Troy thought, for a reaction from Dr Natouche who did not, however, respond. Mr Lazenby expounded to the Hewsons on Australia and the Commonwealth. He also turned slightly towards Dr Natouche though it was impossible to see, so dark were his spectacles, whether he really looked at him.

‘Well, now,’ Miss Hewson said, ‘I just don’t get this Commonwealth. It’s the British Commonwealth but you’re not a Britisher and you got the British Queen but you don’t go around saying you’re a monarchy. I guess the distinctions are too refined for my crass American appreciation. What do you say, dear?’ she asked Mr Hewson.

‘Pardon me, dear?’

Miss Hewson articulated carefully into her brother’s hearing-aid and he began to look honest-to-God and dryly humorous.

Miss Rickerby-Carrick broke into the conversation with confused cries of regret for the loss of Empire and of admiration for the Monarchy. ‘I know one’s not meant to talk like this,’ she said with conspiratorial glances at Troy, Mr Pollock and Mr Bard. ‘But sometimes one can’t help it. I mean I’m absolutely all for freedom and civil rights and integ –’ she broke off with an air of someone whose conversation has bolted with her, turned very red and madly leant towards Dr Natouche. ‘Do forgive me,’ she gabbled. ‘I mean, of course, I don’t know. I mean, am I right in supposing –?’

Dr Natouche folded his hands, waited a moment and then said: ‘Are you wondering if I am a British subject? I am. As you see, I belong to a minority group. I practise in Liverpool.’ His voice was superbly tranquil and his manner entirely withdrawn.

The silence that followed his little speech was broken by the Skipper who came crabwise down the companion-way.

‘Well, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I hope you are comfortably settled. We’ll be on our way in a few minutes. You will find a certain amount of information in the brochures supplied. We don’t go in for mikes and loudspeakers in the Zodiac but I’m very much at your service to answer questions if I can. The weather forecast is good although at this time of year we sometimes get the Creeper, which is a local name for River fog. It usually comes up at night and can be heavy. During the afternoon we follow the upper reaches of The River through low-lying country to Ramsdyke Lock. We wind about and about quite a lot which some people find confusing. You may have noticed, by the way, that in these parts we don’t talk about The River by name. To the locals it’s always just The River. It was over this country that Archbishop Langton chased King John. But long before that the Romans made the Ramsdyke canal as an addition to The River itself. The waterways were busy in Roman times. We take a little while going through the lock at Ramsdyke and you might fancy a stroll up the field and a look at a hollow alongside the Dyke Way. The wapentake courts were held there in Plantagenet times. Forerunners of our Judges’ Circuits. You can’t miss the wapentake hollow. Matter of five minutes’ walk. Thank you.’

He gave a crisp little nod and returned to the upper deck. An appreciative murmur broke out among the passengers.

‘Come,’ Mr Bard exclaimed. ‘Here’s a sensible and heartening start. A handful of nice little facts and a fillip to the imagination. Splendid. Mrs Alleyn, you have finished your luncheon. Do come on deck and witness the departure.’

‘I think we should all go up,’ Troy said.

‘Oh ra-ther!’ cried Miss Rickerby-Carrick. ‘Come on, chaps!’

She blew her nose vigorously and made a dash for the companion-way. There was a printed warning at the top: ‘Please note deeper step’ but she disregarded it, plunged headlong through the half-door at the top and could be heard floundering about with startled cries on the other side. Troy overheard Mr Hewson say to Miss Hewson: ‘To me she seems kind of fabulous,’ and Miss Hewson reply: ‘Maybe she’s one of the Queen’s Beasts’ and they both looked dryly humorous. Illogically Troy felt irritated with them and exasperated by Miss Rickerby-Carrick who was clearly going to get on everybody’s nerves. Mr Pollock for instance, after contemplating her precipitate exit, muttered: ‘Isn’t it marvellous!’ and Mr Bard, for Troy’s benefit, briefly cast up his eyes and followed the others to the upper deck. Mr Lazenby, who was still at his luncheon, waved his fork to indicate that he would follow later.

Dr Natouche rose and looked out of the saloon windows at the wharf. Troy thought: ‘How very tall he is.’ Taller, she decided, than her husband, who was over six feet. ‘He’s waiting,’ she thought, ‘for all of us to go up first,’ and she found herself standing by him.

‘Have you ever done this before, Dr Natouche?’ she asked. ‘Taken a waterways cruise?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Never before. It is a new experience.’

‘For me too. I came on an impulse.’

‘Indeed? You felt the need of a break perhaps after the strain of your public activities.’

‘Yes,’ Troy agreed, unaccountably pleased that he did, after all, know of her show and had recognized her. Without so much as noticing that she felt none of her usual awkwardness she said: ‘They are a bit of a hurdle, these solemn affairs.’

Dr Natouche said: ‘Some of your works are very beautiful. It gave me great pleasure in London to see them.’

‘Did it? I’m glad.’

‘They are casting off, if that is the right phrase. Would you like to go up?’

Troy went up on deck. Tom, the boy, had loosed the mooring lines and laid them out smartly. The Skipper was at the wheel. The Zodiac’s engines throbbed. She moved astern, away from her wharf and out into the main stream.

The motorcyclists were still in the lane. Troy saw young Tom signal, not very openly, to them and they slightly raised their hands in return. The girl straddled her seat, the boy kicked and their engine broke out in pandemonium. The machine, curved, belched and racketed up the lane out of sight.

Dr Natouche appeared and then Mr Lazenby. The eight passengers stood along the rails and watched the riverbanks take on a new perspective and become remote. Spires and waffle-irons, glass boxes, mansard roofs and the squat cupola of the Norminster Town Hall were now merely there to be stared at with detachment. They shifted about, very slowly, and looked over one another’s shoulders and grew smaller. The Zodiac, now in mid-stream, set her course for Ramsdyke Lock.




CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_9ab9a617-6dbd-52ae-9823-caab2d16c392)

The Wapentake (#ulink_9ab9a617-6dbd-52ae-9823-caab2d16c392)


‘He had been operating,’ Alleyn said, ‘in a very big way in the Middle East. All among the drug barons with one of whom he fell out and who is thought to have grassed on him. From drugs he turned to the Old Master racket and was certainly behind several very big jobs in Paris. Getting certificates for good fakes from galleries and the widows of celebrated painters. He then crossed to New York where he worked off the fruits of this ploy until Interpol began to make interested noises. By the way, it may be noted that at this juncture he had not got beyond a Blue Circular which means of course –’

The boots of the intelligent-looking sandy man in the second row scraped the floor. He made a slight gesture and looked eager.

‘I see you know,’ Alleyn said.

‘Ay, sir, I do. A Blue International Circular signifies that Interpol cannot place the identity of the creeminal.’

‘That’s it. However, they were getting warmer and in 1965 the Jampot found it necessary to transfer to Bolivia where for once he went too far and was put in gaol. Something to do with masquerading in female attire with criminal intent. From there, as I’ve said, he escaped, in May of last year, and sometime later arrived with an efficiently cooked-up passport in a Spanish freighter in England. At that juncture the Yard had no specific charge against him although he featured heavily in the discussions we were holding in San Francisco. He must have already been in touch with the British group he subsequently directed, and one of them booked him in for a late summer cruise in the Zodiac. The object of this manoeuvre will declare itself as we go along.

‘At this point I’d like you to take particular note of a disadvantage under which the Jampot laboured. In doing this I am indulging in hindsight. At the time we are speaking about we had no clear indication of what he looked like and our only photograph was a heavily bearded job supplied by the Bolivian police. The ears are hidden by flowing locks, the mouth by a luxuriant moustache and the jaw and chin by rich and carefully tended whiskers.

‘We now know, of course, that there was, in his appearance, something that set him apart, that made him physically speaking, an odd man out. Need I,’ Alleyn asked, ‘remind you what this was –?’

The intelligent-looking man seated in the second row made a slight gesture. ‘Exactly,’ Alleyn said and enlarged upon it to the class.

‘I’m able,’ he went on, ‘to give you a pretty full account of this apparently blameless little cruise because my wife wrote at some length about it. In her first letter she told me –’

I

‘And there you are.’ Troy wrote. ‘All done on the spur of the moment and I think I’m going to be glad I saw that notice in The Pleasure Craft Company’s office window.

‘It’s always been you that writes in cabins and on trains and in hotel bedrooms and me that sits at the receiving end and now here we are, both at it. The only thing I mind is not getting your letters for the next five days. I’ll post this at Ramsdyke Lock and with a bit of luck it should reach you in New York when I’m at Longminster on the turning point of my little journey. At that rate it’ll travel about two thousand times as fast as I do so whar’s your relativity, noo? I’m writing it on my knee from a deck chair. I can’t tell you how oddly time behaves on The River, how fantastically remote we are from the country that lies so close on either hand. There go the cars and lorries, streaking along main arteries and over bridges and there are the sound-breakers belching away overhead but they belong to another world. Truly.

‘Our world is watery: details of eddies and reeds and wet banks. Beyond it things move in a very rum and baffling kind of way. You know how hopeless I am about direction. Well, what goes on over there beyond our banks, completely flummuckses me. There’s a group of vast power-houses that has spent the greater part of the afternoon slowly moving from one half of our world to the other. They retire over our horizon on the port side and just as one thinks that’s the last of them: there they are moving in on the starboard. Sometimes we approach them and sometimes we retreat and at one dramatic phase we sailed close-by and there were Lilliputians half-way up one of them, being busy. Yes: OK darling, I know rivers wind.

‘Apart from the power-houses the country beyond The River is about as empty as anywhere in England: flat, flat, flat and according to the Skipper almost hammered so by the passage of history. Red roses and white. Cavaliers and Roundheads. Priests and barons. The Percies of the North. The Jockeys of Norfolk. The lot: all galumphing over the landscape through the centuries. Did you know that Constable stayed here one summer and painted? Church spires turn up with minimal villages and of course, the locks. Do you remember the lock in Our Mutual Friend: a great slippery drowning-box? I keep thinking of it although the weirs are more noisily alarming.

‘It seems we are going towards the sea in our devious fashion and so we sink in locks.

‘As for the company: I’ve tried to introduce them to you. We’re no more oddly-assorted, I suppose, than any other eight people that might take it into their heads to spend five days out of time on The River. Apart from Miss Rickerby-Carrick who sends me up the wall (you know how beastly I am about ostentatious colds-in-the-head) and Dr Natouche who is black, there’s nothing at all remarkable about us.

‘I’m not the only one who finds poor Miss R-C. difficult. Her sledge-hammer tact crashes over Dr N like a shower of brickbats, so anxious is she to be unracial. I saw him flinch two minutes ago under a frontal assault. Mr Bard said just now that a peep into her subconscious would be enough to send him round more bends than the Zodiac negotiates in a summer season. If only she’d just pipe down every now and then. But no, she doesn’t know how to. She has a bosom friend in Birmingham called – incredibly I forget what – Mavis something – upon whom we get incessant bulletins. What Mavis thinks, what she says, how she reacts, how she has recovered (with set-backs) from Her Operation (coyly left unspecified). We all, I am sure, now dread the introduction of the phrase: “My special chum, Mavis.” All the same, I don’t think she’s a stupid woman. Just an inksey-tinksey bit dotty. The Americans clearly think her as crazy as a coot but typically British. This is maddening. She keeps a diary and keeps is the operative word: she carries it about with her and jots. I am ashamed to say it arouses my curiosity. What can she be writing in it? How odious I sound.

‘I don’t like Mr Pollock much. He is so very sharp and pale and he so obviously thinks us fools (I mean Mr Bard and me and, of course, poor Miss R-C.) for not sharing his dislike of coloured people. Of course one does see that if they sing calypsos all night in the no doubt ghastly tenements he exorbitantly lets to them and if they roar insults and improper suggestions at non-black teenagers, it doesn’t send up the tone. But don’t non-black tenants ever send the tone down, for pity’s sake? And what on earth has all this got to do with Dr Natouche whose tone is superb? I consider that one of the worst features of the whole black-white thing is that nobody can say: “I don’t much like black people” as they might say: “I don’t like the Southern Scot or the Welsh or antipodeans or the Midland English or Americans or the League of British Loyalists or The Readers’ Digest.” I happen to be attracted to the dark-skinned (Dr Natouche is remarkably attractive) but until people who are or who are not attracted can say so unselfconsciously it’ll go on being a muddle. I find it hard to be civil to Mr Pollock when he makes his common little racial gestures.

‘He’s not alone in his antipathy. Antipathy? I suppose that’s the right word but I almost wrote “fear”. It seems to me that Pollock and the Hewsons and even Mr Lazenby, for all his parsonic forbearance, eye Dr Natouche with something very like fear.

‘We are about to enter our second lock – the Ramsdyke, I think. More later.

‘Later (about 30 minutes). Ramsdyke. An incident. We were all on deck and the lock people and our Tom were doing their things with paddles and gates and all, and I noticed on the far bank from the lockhouse a nice lane, a pub, some wonderful elms, a ford and a pond. I called out to nobody in particular:

‘“Oh, look – The place is swarming with Constables! Everywhere you look. A perfect clutch of them!”

‘Rory, it was as if someone had plopped a dirty great weight overboard into the lock. Everybody went dead still and listened. At least – this is hard to describe – someone did in particular but I don’t know which because nobody moved. Then Dr Natouche in mild surprise said: “The Police, Mrs Alleyn? Where? I don’t see them,” and I explained and he, for the first time, gave a wonderful roar of laughter. Pollock gaped at me, Caley Bard said he’d thought for a moment his sins had caught up with him, Mr Lazenby said what a droll mistake to be sure and the Hewsons looked baffled. Miss Rickerby-C. (her friends call her, for God’s sake, Hay) waited for the penny to drop and then laughed like a hyena. I still don’t know which of them (or whether it was more than one of them) went so very quiet and still and what’s more I got the idiotic notion that my explanation had been for – someone – more disturbing than the original remark. And on top of all this, I can not get rid of the feeling that I’m involved in some kind of performance. Like one of those dreams actors say they get when they find themselves on an unknown stage where a play they’ve never heard of is in action.

‘Silly? Or not silly? Rum? Or not rum?

‘I’ll write again at Tollardwark. The show looked all right: well hung and lit. The Gallery bought the black and pink thing and seven smaller ones sold the first night. Paris on the 31st and New York in November. Darling, if, and only if, you have a moment I would be glad if you could bear to call at the Guggenheim just to say –’

II

Troy enjoyed coming into the locks. Ramsdyke, as she observed in her letter, was a charming one: a seemly house, a modest plot, the tow-path, a bridge over The River and the Ramsdyke itself, a neat wet line, Roman-ruled across the fens. On the farther side was the ‘Constable’ view and farther downstream a weir. The Zodiac moved quietly into the lock but before she sank with its waters Troy jumped ashore, posted her letter and followed the direction indicated by the Skipper’s tattooed arm and pointed finger. He called after her ‘Twenty minutes’ and she waved her understanding, crossed the tow-path, and climbed a grassy embankment.

She came into a field bordered by sod and stone walls and, on the left, beyond the wall, by what seemed to be a narrow road leading down to the bridge. This was the Dyke Way of the brochures. Troy remembered that it came from the village of Wapentake, which her map showed as lying about a mile and a half from the lock. She walked up the field. It rose gently and showed, above its crest, trees and a distant spire.

The air smelt of earth and grass and, delicately, of wood-smoke. It seemed lovely to Troy. She felt a great uplift of spirit and was so preoccupied with her own happiness that she came upon the meeting place of the wapentake, just where the Skipper had said it would be, before she was aware of it.

It was a circular hollow, sometimes called, the brochure said, a Pot, and it was lined with grass, mosses and fern. Here the Plantagenet knights-of-the-shire had sat at their fortnightly Hundreds, dealing out justice as they saw it in those days and as the growing laws directed them. Troy wondered if, when the list was a heavy one, they stayed on into the evening and night and if torches were lit.

Below the wapentake hollow and quite close to the lock, another, but a comparatively recent depression had been cut into the hillside: perhaps to get a load of gravel of which there seemed to be a quantity in the soil, or perhaps by archaeological amateurs. An overhanging shelf above this excavation had been roughly shored up by poles with an old door for roof. The wood had weathered and looked to be rotting. ‘A bit of an eyesore,’ thought Troy.

She went into the wapentake and sat there, and fancied she felt beneath her some indication of a kind of bench that must have been chopped out of the soil, she supposed, seven centuries ago. ‘I’m an ignoramus about history,’ Troy thought, ‘but I do like to feel it in my bones,’ and she peopled the wapentake with heads like carven effigies, with robes in the colours of stained glass and with glints of polished steel.

She began to wonder if it would be possible to make a very formalized drawing – dark and thronged with seated, lawgiving shapes. A puff of warm air moved the grass and the hair of her head and up the sloping field came Dr Natouche.

He was bareheaded and had changed his tweed jacket for a yellow sweater. When he saw Troy he checked and stood still, formidable because of his height and colour against the mild background of the waterways. Troy waved to him. ‘Come up,’ she called. ‘Here’s the wapentake.’

‘Thank you.’

He came up quickly, entered the hollow and looked about him. ‘I have read the excellent account in our little book,’ he said. ‘So here they sat, those old chaps.’ The colloquialism came oddly from him.

‘You sit here, too,’ Troy suggested, wanting to see his head and his torso, in its yellow sweater, against the moss and fern.

He did so, squaring himself and resting his hands on his knees. His teeth and the whites of his eyes were high accents in the picture he presented for Troy. ‘You ask for the illustration of an incongruity,’ he said.

‘You would be nice to paint. Do you really feel incongruous? I mean is this sort of thing quite foreign to you?’

‘Not altogether. No.’

They said nothing for a time and Troy did not think there was any awkwardness in their silence.

A lark sang madly overhead and the sound of quiet voices floated up from the lock. Above the embankment they could see the top of Zodiac’s wheelhouse. Now it began very slowly to sink. They heard Miss Rickerby-Carrick shout and laugh.

A motorcycle engine crescendoed out of the distance, clattered and exploded down the lane and then reduced its speed and noise and stopped.

‘One would think it was those two again,’ said Troy.

Dr Natouche rose. ‘It is,’ he said, ‘I can see them. Actually, it is those two. They are raising their hands.’

‘How extraordinary,’ she said idly. ‘Why should they turn up?’

‘They may be staying in the district. We haven’t come very far, you know.’

‘I keep forgetting. One’s values change on The River.’

Troy broke off a fern frond and turned it between her fingers. Dr Natouche sat down again.

‘My father was an Ethiopian,’ he said presently. ‘He came to this country with a Mission fifty years ago and married an Englishwoman. I was born and educated in England.’

‘Have you never been to your own country?’

‘Once. But I was alien there. And like my father, I married an Englishwoman. I am a widower. My wife died two months ago.’

‘Was that why you came on this cruise?’

‘We were to have come together.’

‘I see,’ Troy said.

‘She would have enjoyed it. It was something we could have done,’ he said.

‘Have you found many difficulties about being as you are? Black?’

‘Of course. How sensible of you to ask, Mrs Alleyn. One knows everybody thinks such questions.’

‘Well,’ Troy said, ‘I’m glad it was all right to ask.’

‘I am perfectly at ease with you,’ Dr Natouche stated rather, Troy felt, as he might have told a patient there was nothing the matter with her and really almost arousing a comparable pleasure. ‘Perfectly,’ he repeated after a pause: ‘I don’t think, Mrs Alleyn, you could ever say anything to me that would change that condition.’

Miss Rickerby-Carrick appeared at the top of the embankment. ‘Hoo-hoo!’ she shouted. ‘What’s it like up there?’

‘Very pleasant,’ Troy said.

‘Jolly good.’

She floundered up the field towards them, blowing her nose as she came. Troy was suddenly very sorry for her. Were there, she asked herself, in Birmingham, where Miss Rickerby-Carrick lived, people, apart from Mavis, who actually welcomed her company?

Dr Natouche fetched a sigh and stood up. ‘I see a gate over there into the lane,’ he said. ‘I think there is time to walk back that way if you would care to do so.’

‘You go,’ Troy muttered. ‘I’d better wait for her.’

‘Really? Very well.’

He stayed for a moment or two, politely greeted Miss Rickerby-Carrick and then strode away.

‘Isn’t he a dear?’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick panted. ‘Don’t you feel he’s somebody awfully special?’

‘He seems a nice man,’ Troy answered and try as she might, she couldn’t help flattening her voice.

‘I do think we all ought to make a special effort. I get awfully worked-up about it. When people go on like Mr Pollock, you know. I tackled Mr Pollock about his attitude. I do that, you know, I do tackle people. I said: “Just because he’s got another pigmentation,” I said, “why should you think he’s different.” They’re not different. You do agree, don’t you?’

‘No,’ Troy said. ‘I don’t. They are different. Profoundly.’

‘Oh! How can you say so?’

‘Because I think it’s true. They are different in depth from Anglo-Saxons. So are Slavs. So are Latins.’

‘Oh! If you mean like that,’ she said, and broke into ungainly laughter. ‘Oh, I see. Oh, yes. Then you do agree that we should make a special effort.’

‘Look, Miss Rickerby-Carrick –’

‘I say, do call me Hay.’

‘Yes – well – thank you. I was going to say that I don’t think Dr Natouche would enjoy special efforts. Really, I don’t.’

‘You seem to get on with him like a house on fire,’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick pointed out discontentedly.

‘Do I? Well, I find him an interesting man.’

‘There you are, you see!’ she cried, proclaiming some completely inscrutable triumph, and a longish silence ensued.

They heard the motorcycle start up and cross the bridge and listened to the diminishment of sound as it made off in the direction of Norminster.

One by one the other passengers straggled up the field. Mr Pollock behind the rest, swinging his built-up boot. The Hewsons were all set-about with cameras while Caley Bard had a box slung from his shoulder and carried a lepidopterist’s net.

So that, Troy thought, was what it was. When everybody was assembled the Hewsons took photographs of the wapentake by itself and with their fellow-travellers sitting self-consciously round it. Mr Lazenby compared it without, Troy felt, perceptible validity, to an aboriginal place of assembly in the Australian outback. Mr Pollock read his brochure and then stared with a faint look of disgust at the original.

Caley Bard joined Troy. ‘So this is where you lit off to,’ he murmured. ‘I got bailed up by that extraordinary lady. She wants to get up a let’s-be-sweet-to-Natouche movement.’

‘I know. What did you say?’

‘I said that as far as I am concerned, I consider I’m as sweet to Natouche as he can readily stomach. Now, tell me all about the wapentake. I’m allergic to leaflets and I’ve forgotten what the Skipper said. Speak up, do.’

Troy did not bother to react to this piece of cheek. She said: ‘So you’re a lepidopterist?’

‘That’s right. An amateur. Do you find it a sinister hobby? It has rather a sinister reputation, I fear. There was that terrifying film and then didn’t somebody in The Hound of the Baskervilles flit about Dartmoor with a deceiving net and killing-bottle?’

‘There’s Nabokov on the credit side.’

‘True. But you don’t fancy it, all the same,’ he said. ‘That I can see, very clearly.’

‘I like them better alive and on the wing. Did you notice those two motorcyclists? They seem to be haunting us.’

‘Friends of young Tom, it appears. They come from Tollardwark where we stay tonight. Did you know it’s pronounced Toll’ark? It will take us an hour or more to get there by water but by road it’s only a short walk from Ramsdyke. There’s confusion for you!’

‘I wouldn’t want to walk: I’ve settled into the River-time-space-dimension.’

‘Yes, I suppose it would be rather spoiling to break out of it. Hallo, that’ll be for us.’

The Zodiac had given three short hoots. They returned hurriedly and found her waiting downstream from the lock.

There was a weir at Ramsdyke, standing off on their port side. Below the green slide of the fall, the whole surface of the river was smothered in foam: foam in islands and in pinnacles, iridescent foam that twinkled and glinted in the late afternoon sunlight, that shredded away from its own crests, floated like gossamer and broke into nothing.

‘Oh!’ cried Miss Rickerby-Carrick in ecstasy. ‘Isn’t it lovely! Oh, do look! Look, look, look!’ she insisted, first to one and then to another of her fellow-passengers. ‘Who would have thought our quiet old river could froth up and behave like a fairytale? Like a dream isn’t it? Isn’t it?’

‘More like washing-day I’m afraid, Miss Rickerby-Carrick,’ said Mrs Tretheway looking over the half-door. ‘It’s detergent. There’s a factory beyond those trees. Tea is ready in the saloon,’ she added.

‘Oh, no!’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick lamented. A flying wisp of detergent settled on her nose. ‘Oh, dear!’ she said crossly and went down to the saloon, followed by the others.

‘How true it is,’ Caley Bard remarked, ‘that beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder.’

He spoke to Troy but Dr Natouche, who was behind her, answered him.

‘Surely,’ Dr Natouche said, ‘not so much in the eye as in the mind. I remember that on a walk – through a wood, you know – I looked into a dell and saw, deep down, an astonishing spot of scarlet. I thought: Ah! A superb fungus secretly devouring the earth and the air. You know? One of those savage fungi that one thinks of as devils? I went down to look more closely at it and found it was a discarded fish-tin with a red label. Was it the less beautiful for my discovery?’

He had turned to Troy. ‘Not to my way of looking,’ she said. ‘It was a good colour and it had made its effect.’

‘We are back aren’t we,’ Caley Bard said, ‘at that old Florentine person with the bubucular nose. We are to assume that the painter doted on every blackhead, crevasse and bump.’

‘Yes,’ Troy said. ‘You are.’

‘So that if a dead something – a fish or a cat – popped up through that foam, for instance, and its colour and shape made a pleasing mélange with its surroundings, it would be a paintable subject and therefore beautiful?’

‘You take,’ she said dryly, ‘the very words from my mouth.’

Mr Bard looked at her mouth for a second or two.

‘And what satisfaction,’ he said under his breath, ‘is there in that?’ He turned away and Troy thought, almost at once, that she must have misheard him.

Miss Rickerby-Carrick flapped into the conversation like a wet sheet. ‘Oh don’t stop. Go on. Do, do, go on. I don’t want to lose a word of this,’ she cried. ‘Because it makes a point that I’m most awfully keen on. Beauty is everywhere. In everything,’ she shouted and swept her arm past Mr Lazenby’s spectacles. ‘“Beauty is Truth; Truth, Beauty”,’ she quoted. ‘That’s all we need to know.’

‘That’s a very, very profound observation, Miss Rickerby-Carrick,’ Mr Hewson observed kindly.

‘I just don’t go along with it,’ his sister said. ‘I’ve seen a whole lot of Truth that wasn’t beautiful. A whole heap of it.’

Mr Pollock, who had been utterly silent for a very long time now heaved an enormous sigh and as if infected by his gloom the other passengers also fell silent.

Somebody – Mr Lazenby? – had left the morning’s newspaper on the settle, the paper in which her own photograph had appeared. Troy, who did not eat with her tea, picked it up and seeing nothing to interest her, idly turned over a page.

‘Man found strangled.

‘The body of a man who had been strangled was found at 8 p.m. last night in a flat in Cyprus Street, Soho. He is believed to have been a picture-dealer and the police who are making inquiries give his name as K.G.Z. Andropulos.’

The passenger list was still on the table. Troy looked at the name Caley Bard had crossed out in favour of her own.

She rose with so abrupt a movement that one or two of her companions glanced up at her. She dropped the newspaper on the seat and went down to her cabin. After some thought, she said to herself: ‘If nobody has read it there’s no reason why I should point it out. It’s a horrible bit of news.’

And then she thought that if, as seemed probable, the paragraph had in fact not been noticed, it might be as well to get rid of the paper, the more especially since she would like to repress her own photograph before it went into general circulation. She could imagine Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s ejaculations: ‘And there you both are, you and the murdered man who was to have your berth. Fancy!’ She hunted out her sketchbook and returned to the saloon.

The newspaper was nowhere to be seen.

III

Troy waited for a minute or two in the saloon to collect her thoughts. Her fellow-passengers were still at tea and apparently quite undisturbed. She went up on deck. The Skipper was at the wheel.

‘Everything all right, Mrs Alleyn?’ he asked.

‘Yes, thank you. Yes. Everything,’ said Troy and found herself a chair.

Most of the detergent foam had been left behind by now. The Zodiac sailed towards evening through clear waters, low fields and occasional groups of trees.

Troy began to draw the Signs of the Zodiac, placing them in a ring and giving them a wonderfully strange character. Mrs Tretheway’s rhyme could go in the middle and later on there would be washes of colour.

She was vaguely aware of a sudden burst of conversation in the saloon. After a time a shadow fell across her hand and there was Caley Bard again. Troy didn’t look up. He moved to the opposite side and stood with his back towards her, leaning on the taffrail.

‘I’m afraid,’ he said presently, ‘that they’ve rumbled you. Lazenby spotted the photograph in this morning’s paper. I wouldn’t have told them.’

‘I believe you.’

‘The Rickerby-Carrick is stimulated, I fear.’

‘Hell.’

‘And the Hewsons are gratified because they’ve read an article about you in Life Magazine so they know you’re OK and famous. They just can’t think how they missed recognizing you.’

‘Too bad.’

‘Pollock, surprisingly, seemed to be not unaware of your great distinction. Lazenby himself says you are regarded in Australia as being the equal of Drysdale and Dobell.’

‘Nice of him.’

‘There’s this about it; you’ll be able to do what you are doing now, without everybody exclaiming and breathing down your neck. Or I hope you will.’

‘I won’t be doing anything that matters,’ Troy mumbled.

‘How extraordinary!’ he said lightly.

‘What?’

‘That you should be so shy about your work. You!’

‘Well, I can’t help it. Do pipe down like a good chap.’

She heard him chuckle and drag a deck chair into position. Presently she smelt his pipe. ‘Evidently,’ she thought, ‘they haven’t spotted the Andropulos bit in the paper.’ She considered this for a moment and then added: ‘Or have they?’

The River now described a series of loops so extreme, and so close together that the landscape seemed to turn about the Zodiac like a diorama. Wapentake church spire advanced and retreated and set to partners with a taller spire in the market town of Tollardwark which they approached with the utmost slyness, now leaving it astern and now coming round a bend and making straight for it. The water darkened with the changing sky. Along its banks and in its backwaters and eddies the creatures that belonged to The River began to come out on their evening business: water-rats, voles, toads and leaping fish as well as the insects: dragonflies in particular. Once, looking up from her drawing, Troy caught sight of a pair of ears against the sky and thought: ‘There goes Wat, the hare.’ A company of ducks in close formation paddled past the Zodiac. Where trees stood along the banks the air pulsated with high, formless, reiterative bird-chattering.

Troy thought: ‘Cleopatra on the River Cydnus wasn’t given more things to hear and look at.’

At intervals she stopped drawing in order to observe, but the Signs of the Zodiac grew under her hand. She amused herself by mentally allotting one to each of her fellow-passengers. The Hewsons, of course, belonged to the Heavenly Twins and Mr Pollock, because his club foot affected his gait, would be the Crab. Miss Rickerby-Carrick might be assigned to Taurus because she ran like a Bull at every Gate, but almost certainly, thought Troy, Virgo was entirely appropriate. So she gave a pair of bovine horns to the rampaging motorcyclist. Because of a certain sting in the tail of many of his observations, she decided upon Scorpio for Caley Bard. And Mr Lazenby? Well: he seemed to be extremely ill-sighted, his dark spectacles gave him a blind look like Justice, and Justice carries Scales. Libra for him. As for Dr Natouche, he must be a splendour in the firmament: Sagittarius the Archer with open shoulders and stretched bow. She began to draw The Archer in his image. Mrs Tretheway didn’t seem to fit anywhere except perhaps, as they had a sexy connotation, under the Fish with the Glittering Tails. She observed the Skipper at his wheel, noted the ripple of muscles under his immaculate shirt and the close-clipped curly poll beneath his cap. The excessive masculinity, she decided, belonged to the Ram and Tom-of-all-work could be the Man who carried the Watering-pot. And having run out of passengers she raised one of the Lion’s eyebrows and thus gave him a look of her husband. ‘Which leaves me for the Goat,’ thought Troy, ‘and very suitable too, I daresay.’

One by one the passengers, with the exception of Dr Natouche, came on deck. In their several fashions and with varying degrees of success, they displayed tact towards Troy. The Hewsons smiled at each other and retired, with brochures and Readers’ Digests, to their chairs. Mr Lazenby turned his dark spectacles towards Troy, nodded three times and passed majestically by. Mr Pollock behaved as if she wasn’t there until he was behind her and then, she clearly sensed, had a good long stare over her shoulder at what she was doing.

Miss Rickerby-Carrick was wonderful. When she had floundered, with her customary difficulty, through the half-door at the top of the companion-way, she paused to converse with the Skipper but as she talked to him she rolled her eyes round until they could take in Troy. Presently she left him and archly biting her underlip advanced on tip-toe. She bent and whispered, close to Troy’s ear: ‘Don’t put me in it,’ and so passed on gaily to her deck chair.

The general set-up having now become quietly ridiculous, Troy swung round to find Mr Pollock close behind her.

His eyes were half-closed and he looked at her drawing, unmistakably with the air of someone who knew. For a moment they faced each other. He turned away, swinging his heavy foot.

Caley Bard, with a startling note of anger in his voice, said: ‘Have you been given an invitation to a Private View, Mr Pollock?’

A silence followed. At last Mr Pollock said in a stifled voice: ‘It’s very nice. Lovely,’ and retired to the far end of the deck.

Troy shut her sketchbook and with a view to papering over what seemed to be some kind of crisis, made conversation with everybody about the landscape.

The Zodiac reached Tollard Lock at 6.15 and tied up for the night.




CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_e8640eb9-b2ed-55e9-a88b-0786bc9a5f2f)

Tollardwark (#ulink_e8640eb9-b2ed-55e9-a88b-0786bc9a5f2f)


‘At that time,’ Alleyn said, ‘I was on my way to Chicago and from there to San Francisco. We were setting up a joint plan of action with USA to cope with an international blow-up in the art-forgery world. We were pretty certain, though not positive, that the Jampot was well in the phoney picture trade and that the same group was combining it with a two-way drug racket. My wife’s letters to me from her river cruise missed me in New York and were forwarded to Chicago and thence to San Francisco.

‘On reading them I put through a call to the Yard.’

I

Monday.

Tollardwark.

10.15 p.m.

‘… This will probably arrive with the letter I posted this morning at Ramsdyke. I’m writing in my cabin having returned from Tollardwark where we spend our first night and I’m going to try and set out the sequence of events as you would do it – economically but in detail. I’m almost certain that when they are looked at as a whole they will be seen to add up to nothing in particular.

‘Indeed, I only tell you about these silly little incidents, my darling, because I know you won’t make superior noises, and because in a cock-eyed sort of way I suppose they may be said to tie in with what you’re up to at the moment. I know, very well, that they may amount to nothing.

‘You remember the silly game people used to play: making up alphabetical rhymes of impending disaster? “T is for Tiger decidedly plumper. What’s that in his mouth? Oh it’s Agatha’s jumper.”

‘There are moments on this otherwise enchanting jaunt when your Agatha almost catches the sound of something champing in the jungle.

‘It really began tonight at Tollardwark –’

II

They had berthed on the outskirts of the little market town and after dinner the passengers explored it. Troy sensed frontal attacks from Miss Rickerby-Carrick and possibly Caley Bard so, having a plan of her own, she slipped away early. There was an office on the wharf with a telephone booth at the disposal of the passengers. As it was open and nobody seemed to be about, she went straight in.

There was one thing about that number, Troy thought, you did get through quickly. In seconds she was saying: ‘Is Inspector Fox in the office? Could I speak to him? It’s Mrs Roderick Alleyn,’ and almost immediately: ‘Br’er Fox? Troy Alleyn. Listen. I expect you all know, but in case you don’t: It’s about the Soho thing in this morning’s paper. The man was to have been a passenger in the –’ She got it out as tidily and succinctly as she could, but she had only given the briefest outline when he cut in.

‘Now, that’s very kind of you, Mrs Alleyn,’ the familiar paddy voice said. ‘That’s very interesting. I happen to be working on that job. And you’re speaking from Tollardwark? And you’ve got the vacant cabin? And you’re talking from a phone box? From where?… I see … Yes.’ A pause. ‘Yes. We heard yesterday from New York and he’s having a very pleasant time.’

‘What?’ Troy ejaculated. ‘Who? You mean Rory?’

‘That’s right, Mrs Alleyn. Very nice indeed to have heard from you. We’ll let you know, of course, if there’s any change of plan. I think it might be as well if you didn’t say very much at your end,’ Mr Fox blandly continued. ‘I expect I’m being unduly cautious, indeed I’m sure I am, but if you can do so without drawing attention to it, I wonder if you could drop in at our place in Tollardwark in about half an hour or so? It could be, if necessary, to ask if that fur you lost at your exhibition has been found. Very nice to hear from you. My godson well? Goodbye, then.’

Troy hung up abruptly and turned. Through the obscured-glass door panel which had a hole in one corner, she saw a distorted figure move quickly backwards. She came out and found Mr Lazenby standing by the outside entrance.

‘You’ve finished your call, Mrs Alleyn?’ he jovially asked. ‘Good-oh. I’ll just make mine then. Bishopscourt at Norminster. I spent the week there and this will let me off my bread-and-butter stint. You don’t know the Bishop, I suppose? Of Norminster? No? Wonderfully hospitable old boy. Gave the dim Aussie parson a memorable time. Car, chauffeur, the lot. Going to explore?’

Yes, Troy said, she thought she would explore. Mr Lazenby replied that he understood from the Bishop that the parish church was most interesting. And he went into the telephone booth.

Troy, strangely perturbed, walked up a narrow, cobbled street into the market square of Tollardwark.

She found it enchanting. It had none of the self-consciousness that settles upon too many carefully preserved places in the Home Counties, although, so the Zodiac brochure said, it had in fact been lovingly rescued from the clumsy botching of Victorian meddlers. But no care, added the brochure, could replace in their niches the delicate heads, hands, leaves and curlicues knocked off by Cromwell’s clean-living wreckers. But the fourteenth-century inn had been wakened from neglect, a monstrous weather-cock removed from the crest of the Eleanor Cross and Lady Godiva’s endowed church of St Crispin-in-the-Fields was in good heart. As if to prove this, it being practice-night for the bell-ringers, cascades of orderly rumpus were shaken out of the belfry as Troy crossed the square.

There were not many people about. She felt some hesitation in asking her way to the police station. She walked round the square and at intervals caught sight of her fellow-passengers. There, down a very dark alley were Mr and Miss Hewson, peering in at an unlit Tudor window in a darkened shop. Mr Pollock was in the act of disappearing round a corner near the church where, moving backwards through a lychgate, was Miss Rickerby-Carrick. It struck Troy that the whole set had an air of commedia dell’ arte about them and that the Market Square might be their painted backdrop. She was again plagued by the vague feeling that somewhere, somehow a masquerade of sorts was being acted out and that she was involved in it. ‘The people of the Zodiac,’ she thought, ‘all moving in their courses and I with them, but for the life of me I don’t know where we’re going.’

She suspected that Caley Bard had thought it would be pleasant if they explored Tollardwark together and she was not surprised to see him across the square, turning, with a disconsolate air, into the Northumberland Arms. She would have enjoyed his company, other things being equal. She had almost completed her walk round the Market Square and wondered which of the few passers-by she should accost when she came to the last of the entrances into the square and looking down it, she saw the familiar blue lamp.

The door swung-to behind her, shutting out the voices of the bells, and she was in another world smelling of linoleum, disinfectant and uniforms. The Sergeant on duty said at once: ‘Mrs Alleyn would it be? I thought so. The Superintendent’s expecting you, Mrs Alleyn. ‘I’ll just – oh, here you are, sir. Mrs Alleyn.’

He was the predictable large, hard-muscled man just beginning to run to overweight, with extremely bright eyes and a sort of occupational joviality about him.

He shook Troy warmly by the hand. ‘Tillottson,’ he said. ‘Nice to meet you, Mrs Alleyn,’ and took her into his office.

‘Very pleased,’ said Superintendent Tillottson, ‘to meet Roderick Alleyn’s good lady. His textbook’s known as the Scourge of the Service in these parts and I wouldn’t mind if you passed that on to him.’

He laughed very heartily at this joke, placed the palms of his hands on his desk and said: ‘Yes. Well now, I’ve been talking to Mr Fox at Head Office, Mrs Alleyn, and he suggested it might be quite an idea if we had a little chat. So, if it’s not putting you to too much trouble –’

He led Troy, very adroitly, through the past eight hours and she was surprised that he should be so particular as to details. Evidently he was aware of this reaction because when she had finished he said he supposed she would like to know what it was all about and proceeded to give her a neat report.

‘This character, this K.G.Z. Andropulos, was mixed up in quite a bit of trouble: trouble to the Yard, Mrs Alleyn, before and after the Yard got alongside him. He was, as you may have supposed, of Greek origin and he’s been involved in quite a number of lines: a bit of drug-running here, a bit of receiving there, some interest in the antique lay, a picture-dealing business in Cyprus Street, Soho, above which he lived in the flat where his body was found yesterday evening. He wasn’t what you’d call a key-figure but he became useful to the Yard by turning informer from spite having fallen out with a much bigger man than himself. A very big man indeed in the international underworld, as people like to call it, a character called Foljambe and known as the Jampot, in whom we are very, very interested.’

‘I’ve heard about him,’ Troy said. ‘From Rory.’

‘I’ll be bound. Now, it’s a guinea to a gooseberry, to our way of thinking, that this leading character – this Jampot – is behind the business in Cyprus Street and therefore the Department is more than ordinarily concerned to get to the bottom of it and anything that connects with Andropulos, however slightly, has to be followed up.’

‘Even to Cabin 7 in the rivercraft Zodiac?’

‘That’s right. We’d like to know, d’you see, Mrs Alleyn, just why this chap Andropulos took the freakish notion to book himself in and when he did it. And, very particularly, we’d like to know whether any of the other passengers had any kind of link with him. Now Teddy Fox –’

‘Who!’ Troy exclaimed.

‘Inspector Fox, Mrs Alleyn. He and I were in the uniformed branch together. Edward Walter Fox, he is.’

‘I suppose I knew,’ Troy mused. ‘Yes, of course I knew. We always call him Br’er Fox. He’s a great friend.’

‘So I understood. Yes. Well, he’s a wee bit concerned about you going with this lot in the Zodiac. He’s wondering what the Chief-Super – your good man, Mrs Alleyn – would make of it. He’s on his way to this conference in Chicago and Ted Fox wonders if he shouldn’t try and talk to him.’

‘Oh, no!’ Troy ejaculated. ‘Surely not.’

‘Well now, frankly it seems a bit far-fetched to me but there it is. Ted Fox cut you short, in a manner of speaking, when you rang him from the Waterways office down there and he did so on the general principle that you can’t be too careful on the public phone. He’s a careful sort of character himself, as you probably know, and, by gum, he’s thorough.’

‘He is, indeed.’

‘Yes. That’s so. Yes. Now Ted’s just been called out of London, following a line on the Andropulos business. It may take him across the Channel. In the meantime he’s asked me to keep an eye on your little affair. So what we’d like to do is take a wee look at the passenger list. In the meantime I just wonder about these two incidents you’ve mentioned. Now, what are they? First of all you get the impression that someone, you’re not sure who, got a fright or a shock or a peculiar reaction when you said there were Constables all over the place. And second: you see this bit about Andropulos in the paper, you drop the paper on the seat and go to your cabin. You get the idea it might be pleasanter for all concerned not to spread the information that an intended passenger has been murdered. You go back for the purpose of confiscating the paper and find it’s disappeared. Right? Yes. Now, for the first of these incidents, I just wonder if it wouldn’t be natural for any little gathering of passengers waiting in a quiet lock in peaceful surroundings to get a bit of a jolt when somebody suddenly says there are police personnel all over the place. Swarming, I think you said was the expression you used. And clutch. Swarming with a clutch of Constables. You meaning the artist. They assuming the police.’

‘Well – yes. But they didn’t all exclaim at once. They didn’t all say: “Where, where, what do you mean, policemen?” or things like that. Miss Rickerby-Carrick did and I think Miss Hewson did a bit and I rather fancy Mr Caley Bard said something like: “What can you mean?” But I felt terribly strongly that someone had had a shock. I – Oh,’ Troy said impatiently, ‘how silly that sounds! Pay no attention to it. Really.’

‘Shall we take a wee look at the second item, then? The disappearance of the newspaper? Isn’t it possible, Mrs Alleyn, that one of them saw you were put out and when you went to your cabin picked up the paper to see what could have upset you? And found the paragraph? And had the same reaction as you did: don’t put it about in case it upsets people? Or maybe, didn’t notice your reaction but read the paragraph and thought it’d be nice if you didn’t know you’d got a cabin that was to have been given to a murder victim? Or they might all have come to that conclusion? Or, the simplest of all, the staff might just have tidied the paper away?’

‘I feel remarkably foolish,’ Troy said. ‘How right you are. I wish I’d shut up about it and not bothered poor Br’er Fox.’

‘Oh no,’ Tillottson said quickly. ‘Not at all. No. We’re very glad to have this bit about the booking of Cabin 7. Very glad indeed. We’d very much like to know why Andropulos fancied a waterways cruise. Of course we’d have learnt about it before long but it can’t be too soon for us and we’re much obliged to you.’

‘Mr Tillottson, you don’t think, do you, that any of them could have had anything to do with that man? Andropulos? Why should they have?’

Tillottson looked fixedly at the top of his desk. ‘No,’ he said after a pause. ‘No reason at all. You stay at Toll’ark tonight, don’t you? Yes. Crossdyke tomorrow? And the following day and night at Longminster? Right? And I’ve got the passenger list from you and just to please Mr Fox we’ll let him have it and also do a wee bit of inquiring at our end. The clerical gentleman’s been staying with the Bishop at Norminster, you say? And he’s an Australian? Fine. And the lady with the double name comes from Birmingham? Mr S.H. Caley Bard lives in London, SW3 and collects butterflies. And – er – this Mr Pollock’s a Londoner but he came up from Birmingham where he stayed, you said –? Yes, ta. The Osborn. And the Americans were at the Tabard at Stratford. Just a tick, if you don’t mind.’

He went to the door and said: ‘Sarge. Rickerby-Carrick. Hazel: Miss. Birmingham. Natouche: Doctor. G.F. Liverpool. S.H. Caley Bard, SW3. London. Pollock, Saturday and Sunday, Osborn Hotel, Birmingham. Hewson. Americans. Two. Tabard. Stratford. Yes. Check, will you?’

‘I mustn’t keep you,’ Troy said and stood up.

‘If you don’t mind waiting, Mrs Alleyn. Just another tick.’

He consulted a directory and dialled a number. ‘Bishopscourt?’ he said. ‘Yes. Toll’ark Police Station here. Sorry to trouble you, but we’ve had an Australian passport handed in at our office. Name of Bollinger. I understand an Australian gentleman – oh. Oh, yes? Lazenby? All last week? I see. Not his, then. Very sorry to trouble you. Thank you.’




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Ngaio Marsh

Тип: электронная книга

Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература

Язык: на английском языке

Издательство: HarperCollins

Дата публикации: 16.04.2024

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О книге: A classic Ngaio Marsh novel which features blood-curdling murders in the confines of a riverboat, the Zodiac, cruising through Constable country.’He looks upon the murders that he did in fact perform as tiresome and regrettable necessities,’ reflected Chief Superintendent Roderick Alleyn on the international crook known as ‘the Jampot’.But it was Alleyn’s wife Troy who knew ‘the Jampot’ best: she had shared close quarters with him on the tiny pleasure steamer Zodiac on a cruise along the peaceful rivers of ‘Constable country’. And it was she who knew something was badly wrong even before Alleyn was called in to solve the two murders on board…

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