Clutch of Constables ra-25

by Ngaio Marsh

  On nobody.

  The passage was empty. She thought afterwards that as she opened her own door another one had quietly closed.

  She waited but there was no stirring or sound anywhere and, wondering if after all she had dreamt the scratching at her door, she went back to bed and at once fell fathoms deep into oblivion that at some unidentifiable level was disturbed by the sound of an engine.

  -3-

  She half-awoke to broad daylight and the consciousness of a subdued fuss: knocking and voices, footsteps in the passage and movements next door in Cabin 8. While she lay, half-detached and half-resentful of these disturbances, there was a tap on her own door and a rattle of the handle.

  Troy, now fully awake, called out, “Sorry. Just a moment,” and unlocked her door.

  Mrs Tretheway came in with tea.

  “Is anything wrong?” Troy asked.

  Mrs Tretheway’s smile broke out in glory all over her face. “Well,” she said, “not to say wrong. It’s how you look at it, I suppose, Mrs Alleyn. The fact is Miss Rickerby-Carrick seems to have left us.”

  “Left us? Gone?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you mean—?”

  “It must have been very early. Before any of us were about and our Tom was up at six.”

  “But—”

  “She’s packed her suitcase and gone.”

  “No message?”

  “Well now — yes — scribbled on a bit of newspaper. ‘Called away. So sorry. Urgent. Will write’.”

  “How very extraordinary.”

  “My husband reckons somebody must have come in the night. Some friend with a car or else she might have rung Toll’ark or Longminster for a taxi. The telephone booth at the lockhouse is open all night.”

  “Well,” Troy muttered, “she is a rum one and no mistake.”

  Mrs Tretheway beamed. “It may be all for the best,” she remarked. “It’s a lovely day, anyhow,” and took her departure.

  When Troy arrived in the saloon she found her fellow-passengers less intrigued than might have been expected and she supposed that they had already exhausted the topic of Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s flight.

  Her own entrance evidently revived it a little and there was a short barrage of rather flaccid questions: had Miss Rickerby-Carrick “said anything” to Troy? She hadn’t “said anything” to anyone else.

  “Shall we rather put it,” Caley Bard remarked sourly, “that she hadn’t said anything of interest. Full stop. Which God knows, by and large, is only too true of all her conversation.”

  “Now, Mr Bard, isn’t that just a little hard on the poor girl?” Miss Hewson objected.

  “I don’t know why we must call her ‘poor’,” he rejoined.

  “Of course you do,” Troy said. “One can’t help thinking of her as ‘poor Miss Rickerby-Carrick’ and that makes her all the more pitiful.”

  “What a darling you are,” he said judicially.

  Troy paid no attention to this. Dr Natouche who had not taken part in the conversation, looked directly at her and gave her a smile of such clear understanding that she wondered if she had blushed or turned pale.

  Mr Lazenby offered one or two professional aphorisms to the effect that Miss Rickerby-Carrick was a dear soul and kindness itself. Mr Hewson looked dry and said she was just a mite excitable. Mr Pollock agreed with this. “Talk!” he said. “Oh dear!”

  “They are all delighted,” Troy thought.

  On that note she left them and went up on deck. The Zodiac was still at Crossdyke, moored below the lock, but Tom and his father were making their customary preparations for departure.

  They had cast off and the engine had started when Troy heard the telephone ringing in the lock-keeper’s office. A moment later his wife came out and ran along the tow-path towards them.

  “Skipper! Hold on! Message for you.”

  “O.K. Thanks.”

  The engine fussed and stopped and the Zodiac moved back a little towards the wharf. The lock-keeper came out and arched his hands round his mouth. “Car Hire and Taxi Service, Longminster.” He called. “Message for you, Skipper. Miss something-or-another Carrick asked them to ring. She’s been called away to a sick friend. Hopes you’ll understand. O.K.?”

  “O.K.”

  “Ta-ta, then.”

  “So long, then, Jim. Thanks.”

  The Skipper returned to his wheelhouse doing ‘thumbs up’ to Troy on the way. The Zodiac moved out into mid-stream, bound for Longminster.

  Dr Natouche had come on deck during this exchange. He said: “Mrs Alleyn, may I have one word with you?”

  “Yes, of course,” Troy said. “Where? Is it private?”

  “It is, rather. Perhaps if we moved aft.”

  They moved aft round the tarpaulin-covered heap of extra chairs. There, lying on the deck, was an inflated, orange-coloured Li-lo mattress.

  Dr Natouche, stooped, looked down at it and up at Troy. “Miss Rickerby-Carrick slept here last night, I think,” he said.

  “She did?”

  “Yes. That, at least, was her intention.”

  Troy waited.

  “Mrs Alleyn, you will excuse me, I hope, for asking this question. You will, of course, not answer it if you do not wish. Did Miss Rickerby-Carrick speak to you after she returned to the ship last evening?”

  “No. I went very early to my cabin. I’d had a go of migraine.”

  “I thought you seemed to be not very well.”

  “It was soon over. I think she may have — sort of scratched — at my door. I fancy she did but I was asleep and by the time I opened my door there was nobody.”

  “I see. She intimated to me that she had something to tell you.”

  “I know. Oh, dear!” Troy said. “Should I have gone to her cabin, do you think?”

  “Ah, no! No. It’s only that Miss Rickerby-Carrick has a very high opinion of you and I thought perhaps she intended—” He hesitated and then said firmly. “I think I must explain that this lady spoke to me last evening. About her insomnia. She had been given some tablets — American proprietary product — by Miss Hewson and she asked me what I thought of these tablets.”

  “She offered me one.”

  “Yes? I said that they were unknown to me and suggested that she should consult her own doctor if her insomnia was persistent. In view of her snoring performance on the previous night I felt it might, at least in part, be an imaginary condition. My reason for troubling you with the incident is this. I formed the opinion that Miss Rickerby-Carrick was overwrought, that she was experiencing some sort of emotional and nervous crisis. It was very noticeable—very marked. I felt some concern. You understand that she did not consult me on the score of this condition: if she had it would be improper for me to speak to you about it. I think she may have been on the point of doing so when she suddenly broke off, said something incoherent and left me.”

  “Do you think she’s actually — well — mentally unbalanced?”

  “That is a convenient phrase without real definition. I think she is disturbed—which is another such phrase. It is because I think so that I am a little worried about this departure in the middle of the night. Unnecessarily so, I dare say.”

  “You heard the telephone message, just now?”

  “Yes. A friend’s illness.”

  “Can it,” Troy exclaimed, “be Mavis?”

  She and Dr Natouche stared speculatively at each other. She saw the wraith of a smile on his mouth.

  “No. Wait a bit,” Troy went on. “She walked up to the village with Mr Lazenby and me. My head was swinging with migraine and I scarcely listened. He might remember. Of course she talked incessantly about Mavis. I think she said Mavis is in the Highlands. I’m sure she did. Do you suppose Miss Rickerby-Carrick has shot off by taxi to the Highlands in the dead of night?”

  “Perhaps only to Longminster and thence by train?”

  “Who can tell! Did nobody hear anything?” Troy wondered. “I mean, somebody
must have come on board with this news and roused her up. It would be a disturbance.”

  “Here? At the stern? It’s far removed from our cabins.”

  “Yes,” Troy said, “but how would they know she was back here?”

  “She told me she would take her tablet and sleep on deck.”

  Troy stooped down and after a moment, picked up a blotched, red scrap of cloth.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  The long fingers that looked as if they had been imperfectly treated with black cork, turned it over and laid it in the pinkish palm. “Isn’t it from the cover of her diary?” Troy said.

  “I believe you’re right.” He was about to drop it overboard but she said: “No—don’t.”

  “No?”

  “Well — only because—” Troy gave an apologetic laugh. “I’m a policeman’s wife,” she said. “Put it down to that.”

  He took out a pocket-book and slipped the scrap of cloth into it.

  “I expect we’re making a song about nothing,” Troy said.

  Suddenly she felt an almost overwhelming impulse to tell Dr Natouche about her misgivings and the incidents that had prompted them. She had a vivid premonition of how he would look as she confided her perplexity. His head would be courteously inclined and his expression placid and a little withdrawn—a consulting-room manner of the most reassuring kind. It really would be a great relief to confide in Dr Natouche. An opening phrase had already shaped itself in her mind when she remembered another attentive listener.

  “And by-the-way, Mrs Alleyn,” Superintendent Tillottson had said in his infuriatingly bland manner, “We won’t mention this little matter to anybody, shall we? Just a routine precaution.”

  So she held her tongue.

  Chapter 5 – Longminster

  “I suppose one of his greatest assets,” Alleyn said, “is his ability to instil confidence in the most unlikely people. An infuriated Bolivian policeman is supposed to have admitted that before he could stop himself he found he was telling the Jampot about his own trouble with a duodenal ulcer. This may not be a true story. If not, it was invented to illustrate the more winning facets in the Foljambe façade. The moral is: that it takes all sorts to make a thoroughly bad lot and it sometimes takes a conscientious police officer quite a long time to realise this simple fact of unsavoury life. You can’t type criminals. It’s just as misleading to talk about them as if they never behave out of character as it is to suppose the underworld is riddled with charmers who only cheat or kill by some kind of accident.

  “Foljambe has been known to behave with perfect good-nature and also with ferocity. He is attracted by beauty at a high artistic level. His apartment in Paris is said to have been got up in the most impeccable taste. He likes money better than anything else in life and he enjoys making it by criminal practices. If he was left a million pounds it’s odds on he’d continue to operate the rackets. If people got in his way he would continue to remove them.

  “I’ve told you that my wife’s letters missed me in New York and were forwarded to San Francisco. By the time they reached me her cruise in the Zodiac had only two nights to go. As you know I rang the Department and learnt that Mr Fox was in France, following what was hoped to be a hot line on Foljambe. I got through to Mr Tillottson who in view of this development was inclined to discount the Zodiac altogether. I was not so inclined.

  “Those of you who are married,” Alleyn said, “will understand my position. In the Force our wives are not called upon to serve in female James-Bondage and I imagine most of you would agree that any notion of their involvement in our work would be outlandish, ludicrous and extremely unpalatable. My wife’s letters, though they made very little of her misgivings, were disturbing enough for me to wish her out of the Zodiac. I thought of asking Tillottson to get her to ring me up but I had missed her at Crossdyke and if I waited until she reached Longminster I myself would miss my connection from San Francisco. And if, by any fantastic and most improbable chance one of her fellow-passengers in some way tied in with the Andropulos-Jampot show, the last thing we would want to do was to alert him by sending police messages to lock-keepers asking her to leave the cruise. My wife is a celebrated painter who is known, poor thing, to be married to a policeman.”

  The Scot in the second row smirked.

  “Well,” Alleyn said, “in the upshot I told Tillottson I thought my present job might finish earlier than expected and I would get back as soon as I could. I would remind you that at this stage I had no knowledge of the disappearance of Miss Rickerby-Carrick. If I had heard that bit I would have taken a very much stronger line.

  “As it was I told Tillotson—”

  -1-

  There was no denying it, the cruise was much more enjoyable without Miss Rickerby-Carrick.

  From Crossdyke to Longminster the sun shone upon fields, spinneys, villages and locks. It was the prettiest of journeys. Everybody seemed to expand. The Hewsons’ cameras clicked busily. Mr Lazenby and Mr Pollock discovered a common interest in stamps and showed each other the contents of sad-looking envelopes. Caley Bard told Troy a great deal about butterflies but she refused, nevertheless, to look at the Death’s Head he had caught last evening on Crossdyke Hill. “Well,” he said gaily, “Don’t look at it if it’s going to set you against me. Why can’t you be more like Hay? She said she belonged to the S.P.C.A. but lepidoptera didn’t count.”

  “Do you call her Hay?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “No, but she asked me to.”

  “Stand-offish old you, as usual,” he said and for no reason at all Troy burst out laughing. Her own apprehensions and Dr Natouche’s anxiety had receded in the pleasant atmosphere of the third day’s cruise.

  Even Dr Natouche turned out to have a hobby. He liked to make maps. If anyone as tranquil and grave as Dr Natouche could be said to exhibit coyness, he did so when questioned by Troy and Bard about his cartography. He was, he confessed, attempting a chart of their cruise: it could not be called a true chart because it was not being scientifically constructed but he hoped to make something of it when he had consulted Ordnance maps. Troy wondered if persons of Dr Natouche’s complexion ever blushed and was sure, when he was persuaded to show them his little drawing, that he felt inclined to do so.

  It was executed in very hard lead-pencil and was in the style of the sixteenth-century English cartographers with tiny drawings of churches and trees in their appropriate places and with extremely minute lettering.

  Troy exclaimed with pleasure and said: “That we should have two calligraphers on board! Mr Pollock, do come and look at this.”

  Pollock who had been talking to the Hewsons, hesitated, and then limped over and looked at the map but not at Dr Natouche.

  “Very nice,” he said and returned to the Hewsons.

  Troy had made a boldish move. Pollock, since the beginning of the cruise had only just kept on the hither side of insulting Dr Natouche. He had been prevented, not by any tactics that she and Caley Bard employed but rather by the behaviour of Dr Natouche himself who skilfully avoided giving Pollock any chance to exhibit ill-will. Somehow it came about that at meal-times Dr Natouche was as far removed as possible from Mr Pollock. On deck, Dr Natouche had conveyed himself to the area farthest aft, which Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s mattress, deflated to the accompaniment of its own improper noises, by the boy Tom, had previously occupied.

  So Dr Natouche had offered no opportunity for Mr Pollock to insult him and Mr Pollock had retired, as Caley Bard pointed out to Troy, upon a grumpy alliance with the Hewsons with whom he could be observed in ridiculously furtive conference, presumably about racial relations.

  To these skirmishes and manoeuvres Mr Lazenby appeared to be oblivious. He swapped philatelic gossip with Mr Pollock, he discussed the tendencies of art in Australia with Troy when she was unable to escape him, and he made jovial, unimportant small-talk with Dr Natouche.

  Perhaps the most effective deterrent to any overt display of racial
ism from Mr Pollock was an alliance he had formed with the Tretheways.

  To Troy, it appeared that Mr Pollock, in common, she thought, with every other male in the Zodiac, was extremely conscious of Mrs Tretheway’s allure. That was not surprising. What did surprise was Mrs Tretheway’s fairly evident response to Mr Pollock’s offering of homage. Evidently, she found him attractive but not apparently to an extent that might cause the Skipper any concern since Troy heard them all planning to meet at a pub in Longminster. They were going to have a bit of an evening, they agreed.

  Troy herself was in something of a predicament. She could not, without making a ridiculous issue of it, refuse either to lunch or dine with Caley Bard in Longminster and indeed she had no particular desire to refuse since she enjoyed his company and took his cock-eyed and purely verbal advances with the liberal pinch of salt that she felt sure he expected. So she agreed to dine with him but said she had appointments during the earlier part of the day.

  Somehow or another, she must yet again visit a police-station and commune with Superintendent Bonney whose personality, according to Superintendent Tillottson, she would find so very congenial. She could not help but feel that the legend of the lost fur had begun to wear thin but she supposed, unless some likelier device occurred to her, that she must continue to employ it. She told Caley Bard she’d have to make a final inquiry as they’d promised to let the Longminster police know if the wretched fur turned up and she also hinted at visits to the curator of the local gallery and a picture-dealer of some importance.