Clutch of Constables ra-25

by Ngaio Marsh

  Miss Hewson spread them out on the deck with cries of triumph to which she received but tepid response. Her brother sank into a chair and closed his eyes.

  “Is that a painting?” Troy asked. It had enclosed the roll and its outer surface was so encrusted with occulted dirt that the grain of the canvas was only just perceptible.

  It was lying curled up on what was presumably its face. Troy stooped and turned it over.

  It was a painting in oil: about 18 by 12 inches. She knelt down and tapped its edge on the deck, releasing a further accretion of dust. She spread it out.

  “Anything?” asked Bard, leaning down.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Shall I get a damp cloth or something?”

  “Yes, do. If the Hewsons don’t mind.”

  Miss Hewson was in ecstasies over a Victorian scrap depicting an innocent child surrounded by rosebuds. She said: “Sure, sure. Go right ahead.” Mr Hewson was asleep.

  Troy wiped the little painting over with an exquisite handkerchief her husband had bought her in Bruges. Trees. A bridge. A scrap of golden sky.

  “Exhibit I. My very, very own face-flannel,” said Bard, squatting beside her. “Devotion could go no further. I have added (Exhibit 2) a smear of my very, very own soap. It’s called Spruce.”

  The whole landscape slowly emerged: defaced here and there by dirt and scars in the surface, but not, after all, in bad condition.

  In the foreground: water-and a lane that turned back into the middle-distance. A pond and a ford. A child in a vermilion dress with a hay-rake. In the middle-distance, trees that reflected in countless leafy mirrors, the late afternoon sun. In the background: a rising field, a spire, a generous and glowing sky.

  “It’s sunk,” Troy muttered. “We could oil it out.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Wait a bit. Dry the surface, can you?”

  She went to her cabin and came back with linseed oil on a bit of paint-rag. “This won’t do any harm,” she said. “Have you got the surface dry? Good. Now then.”

  And in a minute the little picture was clearer and cleaner and speaking bravely for itself.

  “ ‘Constables’,” Caley Bard quoted lightly, “ ‘all over the place’. Or did you say ‘swarming’.”

  Troy looked steadily at him for a moment and then returned to her oiling. Presently she gave a little exclamation and at the same moment Dr Natouche’s great voice boomed out: “It is a picture of Ramsdyke. That is the lock and the lane and, see, there is the ford and the church spire above the hill.”

  The others, who had been clustered round Miss Hewson’s treasures on the table, all came to look at the painting.

  Troy said: “Shall we put it in a better light?”

  They made way for her. She stood on the window seat and held the painting close to a wall lamp. She examined the back of the canvas and then the face again.

  “It’s a good picture,” Mr Lazenby pronounced. “Old fashioned of course. Early Victorian. But it certainly looks a nice bit of work, don’t you think, Mrs Alleyn?”

  “Yes,” Troy said. “Yes. It does. Very nice.”

  She got down from the seat.

  “Miss Hewson,” she said, “I was in the gallery here this morning. They’ve got a Constable. One of his big, celebrated worked-up pieces. I think you should let an expert see this thing because—well because as Mr Lazenby says it’s a very good work of its period and because it might have been painted by the same hand and because—well, if you look closely you will see—it is signed in precisely the same manner.”

  -4-

  “For pity’s sake,” Troy said, “don’t take my word for anything. I’m not an expert. I can’t tell, for instance, how old the actual canvas may be though I do know it’s not contemporary and I do know it’s the way he signed his major works. ‘John Constable. R.A.f.’ and the date, 1830, which, I think, was soon after he became an R.A.

  “R.A.?” asked Miss Hewson.

  “Royal Academician.”

  “Hear that, Earl? what’s the ‘f’ signify, Mrs Allyn?”

  “Fecit.”

  There was a considerable pause.

  “Fake it!” Miss Hewso said in a strangled voice. “Did you say ‘fake’?”

  Dr Natouche made a curious little sound in his throat. Mr Lazenby seemed to choke back some furious ejaculation. Troy, with Caley’s devilish eye upon her, explained. There was a further silence.

  It’s bloody hot down here,” said Mr Pollock.

  “Tell us more,” Caley invited Troy.

  She glared at him and continued. “Of course the thing may be a copy of an original Constable. I don’t think there’s an established work of his that has Ramsdyke Lock as its subject. That doesn’t say he didn’t paint Ramsdyke Lock when he was in these parts.”

  “And it doesn’t say,” Mr Lazenby added, “that this isn’t the Ramsdyke Lock he painted.”

  Miss Hewson, who seemed never to have heard of Constable until Troy made her remark at Ramsdyke, now became madly excited. She pointed out the excellencies of the picture and how you could just fancy yourself walking up that little old-world lane into the sunset.

  Mr Hewson woke up and after listening, in his dead-pan, honest-to-God, dehydrated manner to his sister’s ravings asked Troy what, supposing this item was in fact the genuine product of this guy, it might be worth in real money.

  Troy said she didn’t know—a great deal. Thousands of pounds. It depended upon the present demand for Constables.

  “But don’t for Heaven’s sake go by anything I say. As for forgeries, I am reminded—” She stopped. “I suppose it doesn’t really apply,” she said. “You’d hardly expect to find an elaborate forgery in a junk-shop yard at Tollardwark, would you?”

  “But you were going to tell us a story,” Bard said. “Mayn’t we have it?”

  “It was only that Rory, my husband, had a case quite recently in which a young man, just for the hell of it, forged an Elizabethan glove and did it so well that the top experts were diddled.”

  “As you say, Mrs Alleyn,” said Mr Lazenby, “it doesn’t really apply. But about forgeries. I always ask myself—”

  They were off on an argument that can be depended upon to ruffle more tempers in quicker time than most others. If a forgery was “that good” it could take in the top experts, why wasn’t it just as good in every respect as the work of the painter to whom it was falsely attributed?

  To and fro went the declarations and aphorisms. Caley Bard was civilised under the heading of “the total oeuvre,” Mr Hewson said, wryly and obscurely, that every man had his price, Mr Lazenby upheld a professional view: the forgery was worthless because it was based upon a lie and clerical overtones informed his antipodean delivery. Mr Pollock’s manner was, as usual, a little off-beat. Several times, he interjected: “Oy, chum, half a tick—” only to subside in apparent embarrassment when given the floor. Miss Hewson merely stated, as if informed by an oracle, that she just knoo she’d got a genuine old master.

  Dr Natouche excused himself and went below.

  And Troy looked at the little picture and was visited once again by the notion that she was involved in some kind of masquerade, that the play, if there was a play, moved towards its climax, if there was a climax, that the tension, if indeed there was any tension, among her fellow-passengers, had been exacerbated by the twist of some carefully concealed screw.

  She looked up. Mr Lazenby’s dark glasses were turned on her, Mr Pollock’s somewhat prominent eyes looked into hers and quickly away, Miss Hewson smiled ever so widely at her and Mr Hewson’s dead-pan grin seemed to be plastered over his mouth like a gag.

  Troy said good night to them all and went to bed.

  The Zodiac left for the return journey before any of the passengers were up.

  They had a long morning’s cruise, passing through Crossdyke and arriving at Tollardwark at noon.

  That evening the Hewsons, Mr Pollock and Mr Lazenby played Scrabble. Dr
Natouche wrote letters and Caley Bard suggested a walk but Troy said that she too had letters to write. He pulled a face at her and settled with a book.

  Troy supposed that Superintendent Tillottson was in Tollardwark and wondered if he expected her to call. She saw no reason to do so and was sick of confiding nebulous and unconvincing sensations. Nothing of interest to Mr Tillottson, she thought, had occurred over the past thirty-six hours. He could hardly become alerted by the discovery of a possible “Constable”: indeed he could be confidently expected if told about it to regard her with weary tolerance. Still less could she hope to interest him in her own fanciful reactions to an unprovable impression of some kind of conspiracy.

  He had promised to let her know by a message to Tollard Lock if there was further news of Alleyn’s return. No, there was really no need at all to call on Superintendent Tillottson.

  She wrote a couple of short letters to save her face with Caley and at about half past nine went ashore to post them at the box outside the lockhouse.

  The night was warm and still and the air full of pleasant scents from the lock-keeper’s garden: stocks, tobacco flowers, newly watered earth and at the back of these the cold dank smell of The River. These scents, she thought, made up one of the three elements of night; the next was composed of things that were to be seen before the moon rose: ambiguous pools of darkness, lighted windows, stars, the shapes of trees and the dim whiteness of a bench hard by their moorings. Troy sat there for a time to listen to the third element of night: an owl somewhere in a spinney downstream, the low, intermittent colloquy of moving water, indefinable stirrings, the small flutters and bumps made by flying insects and the homely sound of people talking quietly in the lockhouse and in the saloon of the Zodiac.

  A door opened and the three Tretheways who had been spending the evening with the lock-keeper’s family, exchanged good nights and crunched down the gravel path towards Troy.

  “Lovely evening, Mrs Alleyn,” Mrs Tretheway said. The Skipper asked if she was enjoying the cool air and as an after-thought added: “Telegram from Miss Rickerby-Carrick, by the way, Mrs Alleyn. From Carlisle.”

  “Oh!” Troy cried, “I am glad. Is she all right?”

  “Seems so. Er — what does she say exactly, dear? Just a minute.”

  A rustle of paper. Torchlight darted about the Tretheways’ faces and settled on a yellow telegram in a brown hand. “ ‘Sorry abrupt departure collected by mutual friends car urgent great friend seriously ill Inverness awfully sad missing cruise cheerio everybody Hay Rickerby-Carrick’.”

  “There! She’s quite all right, you see,” Mrs Tretheway said comfortably. “It’s the friend. Just like they said on the phone at Crossdyke.”

  “So it wasn’t a taxi firm that rang through to Crossdyke,” Troy pointed out. “It must have been her friends in the car.”

  “Unless they were in a taxi and asked the office to ring. Anyway,” Mrs Tretheway repeated, “it’s quite all right.”

  “Yes. It must be.” Troy said.

  But when she was in bed that night she couldn’t help thinking there was still something that didn’t quite satisfy her about the departure of Miss Rickerby-Carrick.

  “Tomorrow,” she thought, “I’ll ask Dr Natouche what he thinks.” Before she went to sleep she found herself listening for the sound she had heard—where? At Tollardwark? At Crossdyke? She wasn’t sure—the distant sound of a motor bicycle. And although there was no such sound to be heard that night she actually dreamt she had heard it.

  -5-

  Troy thought: “Tomorrow we step back into time.” The return journey had taken on something of the character of a recurrent dream: spires, fens, individual trees, locks; even a clod of tufted earth that had fallen away from a bank and was half drowned or a broken branch that dipped into the stream and moved with its flow: these were familiar landmarks that they might have passed, not once, but many times before.

  At four in the afternoon the Zodiac entered the straight reach of The River below Ramsdyke Lock. Already, drifts of detergent foam had begun to float past her. Wisps of it melted on her deck. Ahead of her the passengers could see an unbroken whiteness that veiled The River like an imponderable counterpane. They could hear the voice of Ramsdyke weir and see a foaming pother where the corrupted fall met the lower reach.

  Troy leant on the starboard taffrail and watched their entry into this frothy region. She remembered how she and Dr Natouche and Caley Bard and Hazel Rickerby-Carrick had discussed reality and beauty. Fragments of conversation drifted across her recollection. She could almost re-hear the voices.

  “—in the Eye of the Beholder—”

  “—a fish tin with a red label. Was it the less beautiful—”

  “—if a dead something popped up through that foam—”

  “—a dead something—”

  “—a dead something—”

  “—a fish-a cat—”

  “—through that foam—”

  “—a dead something—”

  Hazel Rickerby-Carrick’s face, idiotically bloated, looked up: not at Troy, not at anything. Her mouth, drawn into an outlandish rictus, grinned through discoloured froth. She bobbed and bumped against the starboard side. And what terrible disaster had corrupted her riverweed hair and distended her blown cheeks?

  The taffrail shot upwards and the trees with it. The voice of the weir exploded with a crack in Troy’s head and nothing whatever followed it. Nothing.

  Chapter 6 – Ramsdyke

  “From this point,” Alleyn said, “the several elements, if I can put it like that, converge.

  “The discovery of this woman’s body suddenly threw a complex of apparently unrelated incidents into an integrated whole. You grind away at routine, you collect a vast amount of data ninety-per-cent of which is useless and then—something happens and Bingo—the other ten-per-cent sits up like Jacky and Bob’s your uncle.”

  He paused, having astonished himself by this intemperate excursion into jokeyness. He met broad grins from his audience and a startled glance from the man in the second row.

  “ ‘O God, your only jig-maker’,” thought Alleyn and resumed in a more orthodox style.

  “It struck me that there might be some interest—possibly some value—in putting this case before you as it appeared to my wife and as she put it to the county police and in her letters to me. And I wonder if at this juncture you feel you could sort out the evidential wheat from the chaff.

  “What, in fact, do you think we ought to have concentrated upon when Inspector Fox and I finally arrived on the scene?”

  Alleyn fancied he could detect a certain resentment in the rest of the class when the man in the second row put up his hand.

  -1-

  Troy could hear an enormous unlocalised voice in an echo chamber. It approached and enveloped her. It was unalarming.

  She emerged with a sickening upward lurch from somewhere that had been like death and for an unappreciable interval was flooded by a delicious surge of recovery. She felt grateful and opened her eyes.

  A black face and white teeth were close before her. A recognisable arm supported her.

  “You fainted. You are all right. Don’t worry.”

  “I never faint.”

  “No?”

  Fingers on her wrist.

  “Why did it happen, I wonder,” said Dr Natouche. “When you feel more like yourself we will make you comfortable. Will you try a little water?”

  Her head was supported. A rim of cold glass pressed her underlip.

  “Here are Miss Hewson and Mrs Tretheway, to help you.”

  Their faces swam towards her and steadied.

  Everything had steadied. The passengers stared at her with the greatest concern. Six faces behind Dr Natouche and Mrs Tretheway: Miss Hewson with the look of a startled bun, her brother with his hearing-aid and slanted head, Mr Lazenby’s black glasses, Mr Pollock’s ophthalmic stare, like close-ups in a suspense film. And beyond them the Skipper at the wheel.
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  “Feeling better, honey?” asked Miss Hewson, and then: “Don’t look that way, dear. What is it? What’s happened?”

  “She’s frightened,” said Mrs Tretheway.

  “Oh God, God, God!” Troy said and her voice sounded in her own ears like that of a stranger. “Oh God, I’ve remembered.”

  She turned and clung to Dr Natouche, “They must stop,” she stammered. “Stop. Make them stop. It’s Hazel Rickerby-Carrick. There. Back there. In The River.”

  They broke into commotion. Caley Bard shouted: “You heard what she said. Skipper!”

  The Zodiac stopped.

  Caley Bard knelt beside her. “All right, my dear!” he said. “We’ve stopped. Don’t be frightened. Don’t worry. We’ll attend to it.” And to Dr Natouche: “Can’t we take her down?”

  “I think so. Mrs Alleyn, if we help you, do you think you can manage the stairs? It will be best. We will take it very steadily.”

  “I’m all right,” Troy said. “Please don’t worry. I’m perfectly all right. It’s not me. Didn’t you hear what I said? Back there—in The River.”

  “Yes, yes. The Captain is attending to it!”

  “Attending to it!” An ungainly laugh bubbled in Troy’s throat. “To that! I should hope so! Look, don’t fuss about me. I’m all right.”

  But when they helped her to her feet she was very shaky. Dr Natouche went backwards before her down the companionway and Caley Bard came behind. The two women followed making horrified comments.

  In the passage her knees gave way. Dr Natouche carried her into her cabin and put her on her bunk as deftly as if she was a child. The others crowded in the doorway.

  “I’m all right,” she kept repeating. “It’s ridiculous, all this, No—please.”

  He covered her with the cherry red blanket and said to Mrs Tretheway: “A hot-water bottle and tea would not be amiss.”

  The ladies bustled away in confusion. He stooped his great body over Troy: “You’re shocked, Mrs Alleyn. I hope you will let me advise you.”

  Troy began to tell them what she had seen. She took a firm hold of herself and spoke lucidly and slowly as if they were stupid men.