Clutch of Constables ra-25

by Ngaio Marsh

  “You must tell the police,” Troy said. “At once. At once.”

  Caley Bard said: “Yes, of course. I’m sure the Skipper will know what to do.”

  “Tell him. It mustn’t be—lost—it mustn’t be—” she clenched her hands under the blanket. “Superintendent Tillottson at Tollardwark. Tell the Skipper.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Dr Natouche offered and Caley Bard said: “There now! Don’t fuss. And do, like a good girl, stop bossing.”

  Troy caught the familiar bantering tone and was comforted by it. She and Bard exchanged pallid grins.

  “I’ll be off,” he said.

  Dr Natouche said: “And I. I may be wanted. I think you should stay where you are, Mrs Alleyn.”

  He had moved away when Troy, to her own astonishment, heard herself say. “Dr Natouche!” and when he turned with his calmly polite air, “I—I should like to consult you, please, when you are free. Professionally.”

  “Of course,” he said. “In the meantime these ladies will take care of you.”

  They did. They ministered with hot-water bottles and with scalding tea. Troy only now realised that she was shivering like a puppy.

  Miss Hewson was full of consolatory phrases and horrified speculation.

  “Gee,” she gabbled, “isn’t this just awful? That poor girl and all of us asleep in our beds. What do you figure, Mrs Tretheway? She was kind of sudden in her reflexes wasn’t she? Now, could it add up this way? She was upset by this news about her girl-friend and she got up and dressed and packed her grip and wrote her little note on the newspaper and lit off for—for wherever she fixed to meet up with her friends and in the dark she—”

  Miss Hewson stopped as if jerked to a halt by her listeners’ incredulity.

  “Well—gee—well, maybe not,” she said. “O.K., O.K. Maybe not.”

  Mrs. Tretheway said: “I don’t fancy we do any good by wondering. Not till they know more. Whatever way it turns out, and it looks to me to be a proper mess, it’ll bring nothing but worry to us in the Zodiac: I know that much.”

  She took the empty cup from Troy. “You’d best be left quiet,” she said. “We’ll look in and see how you prosper.”

  When they had gone Troy lay still and listened. The shivering had stopped. She felt at once drowsy, and horrified that she should be so.

  By looking up slantways through her open porthole she could see a tree top. It remained where it was for the most part, only sliding out of its place and returning as the Zodiac moved with The River. She heard footfalls overhead and subdued voices and after an undefined interval, a police siren. It came nearer and stopped. More and heavier steps on deck. More and newer voices, very subdued. This continued for some time. She half-dozed, half-woke.

  She was roused by something outside that jarred against the port wall of the Zodiac and by the clunk of oars in their row-locks and the dip and drip of the blades.

  “Easy as you go, then,” said a voice very close at hand. “Shove off a bit.” The top of a helmet moved across the port-hole. “That’s right. Just a wee bit over. Hold her at that, now. Careful now.”

  Superintendent Tillottson. On the job.

  Troy knew with terrible accuracy what was being done on the other side of the cabin wall. She was transfixed in her own vision and hag-ridden by a sick idea that there was some obligation upon her to stand on her bunk and look down into nightmare. She knew this idea was a fantasy but she was deadly afraid that she would obey its compulsion.

  “All right. Give way and easy. Easy as you go.”

  “I can’t.”

  “What? What?”

  “It’s foul of something.”

  “Here. Hold on.”

  “Look there, Super. Look.”

  “All right, all right. Hold steady again and I’ll see.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “A line. Cord. Round the waist and made fast to something.”

  “Will we cut it?”

  “Wait while I try a wee haul. Hold steady, I said. Now then.”

  An interval with heavy breathing.

  “Coming up. Here she comes.”

  “Suitcase?”

  “That’s right. Now. Bear a hand to ship it. It’s bloody heavy. God, don’t do that, man. We don’t want any more disfigurement.”

  A splash and then a thud.

  “Fair enough. Now, you can give way. Signal the ambulance, Sarge. Handsomely, now.”

  The rhythmic clunk, dip and drip: receding.

  Troy thought with horror: “They’re towing her. It’s Our Mutual Friend again. Through the detergent foam. They’ll lift her out, dripping foam, and put her on a stretcher and into an ambulance and drive her away. There’ll be an autopsy and an inquest and I’ll have to say what I saw and, please God, Rory will be back.”

  The Zodiac trembled. Trees and blue sky with a wisp of cloud, moved across the porthole. For a minute or so they were under way and then she felt the slight familiar shock when the craft came up to her mooring.

  Miss Hewson opened the door and looked in. She held a little bottle rather coyly between thumb and forefinger and put her head on one side like her brother.

  “Wide awake?” she said. “I guess so. Now, look what I’ve brought!”

  She tiptoed the one short pace between the door and the bunk and stooped. Her face really was like a bun, Troy thought, with currants for eyes and holes for nostrils and a bit of candy-peel for a mouth. She shrank back a little from Miss Hewson’s face.

  “I just knew how you’d be. All keyed-up like nobody’s business. And I brought you my Trankwitones. You needn’t feel any hesitation about using them, dear. They’re recommended by pretty well every darn’ doctor in the States and they just act—”

  The voice droned on. Miss Hewson was pouring water into Troy’s glass.

  “Miss Hewson, you’re terribly kind but I don’t need anything like that. Really. I’m perfectly all right now and very much ashamed of myself.”

  “Now, listen dear—”

  “No, truly. Thank you very much but I’d rather not.”

  “You know something? Mama’s going to get real tough with baby—”

  “But, Miss Hewson, I promise you I don’t want—”

  “May I come in?” said Dr Natouche. Miss Hewson turned sharply and for a moment they faced each other.

  “I think,” he said, and it was the first time Troy had heard him speak to her, “that Mrs Alleyn is in no need of sedation, Miss Hewson.”

  “Well, I’m surely not aiming — I just thought if she could get a little sleep — I—”

  “That was very kind but there is no necessity for sedation.”

  “Well—I certainly wouldn’t want to—”

  “I’m sure you wouldn’t. If I may just have a word with my patient.”

  “Your patient! Pardon me. I was not aware — well, pardon me, Doctor,” said Miss Hewson with a spurt of venom in her voice and slammed the door on her exit.

  Troy said hurriedly: “I want to talk to you. It’s about what we discussed before. About Miss Rickerby-Carrick. Dr Natouche, have you seen—”

  “Yes,” he said. “They asked me to make an examination—a very superficial examination, of course.”

  “I could hear them: outside there. I could hear what they found. She’s been murdered, hasn’t she? Hasn’t she?”

  He leant over the bunk and shut the port-hole. He drew up the little stool and sat on it, leaning towards her. “I think,” he said as softly as his huge voice permitted, “we should be careful.” His fingers closed professionally on Troy’s wrist.

  “You could lock the door,” she said.

  “So I could.” He did so and turned back to her.

  “Until the autopsy,” he murmured, “it will be impossible to say whether she was drowned or not. Externally, in most respects, it would appear that she was. It can be argued, and no doubt it will be argued, that she committed suicide by weighting her suitcase and tying it to herself and perhaps thr
owing herself into The River from the weir bridge.”

  “If that was so, what becomes of the telephone call and the telegram from Carlisle?”

  “I cannot think of any answer consistent with suicide.”

  “Murder, then?”

  “It would seem so.”

  “I am going to tell you something. It’s complicated and a bit nebulous but I want to tell you. First of all — my cabin. You know it was booked—”

  “To somebody called Andropulos? I saw the paragraph in the paper. I did not speak of it as I thought it would be unpleasant for you.”

  “Did any of the others?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “I’ll make this as quick and as clear as I can — It has to do with a case of my husband’s. There’s a man called Foljambe—”

  A crisp knock on her door and Superintendent Tillottson’s voice: “Mrs Alleyn? Tillottson here. May I come in.”

  Troy and Dr Natouche stared at each other. She whispered: “He’ll have to,” and called out: “Come in, Mr Tillottson.” At the same time Dr Natouche opened the door.

  Suddenly the little cabin was crammed with enormous men. Superintendent Tillottson and Doctor Natouche were both over six feet tall and comparably broad. She began to introduce these mammoths to each other and then realised they had been introduced already in hideous formality by Hazel Rickerby-Carrick. She could not help looking at Mr Tillottson’s large pink hands which were a little puckered as if he had been doing the washing. She was very glad he did not offer one to her, after his hearty fashion, for shaking.

  She said: “Dr Natouche is looking after me on account of my making a perfect ass of myself.”

  Mr Tillottson said, with a sort of wide spread of blandness, that this was very nice. Dr Natouche then advised Troy to take things easy and left them.

  Troy pushed back the red blanket, sat up on her bunk, put her feet on the deck and ran her fingers through her short hair. “Well, Mr Tillottson,” she said, “what about this one?”

  -2-

  With the exception of Chief-Inspector Fox for whom she had a deep affection, Troy did not meet her husband’s colleagues with any regularity. Sometimes Alleyn would bring a few of them in for drinks and two or three times a year the Alleyns had easy-going evenings when their house, like Troy’s cabin in the Zodiac, was full of enormous men talking shop.

  From these encounters she had, she thought, learnt to recognise certain occupational characteristics among officers of the Criminal Investigation Department.

  They were men who, day in, day out, worked in an atmosphere of intense hostility. They were, they would have said, without illusions and unless a built-in scepticism, by definition includes a degree of illusion, she supposed they were right. Some of them, she thought, had retained a kind of basic compassion: they were shocked by certain crimes and angered by others. They honestly saw themselves as guardians of the peace however disillusioned they might be as to the character of the beings they protected. Some regarded modern psychiatric theories about crime with massive contempt. Others seemed to look upon the men and women they hunted with a kind of sardonic affection and would strike up what passed for friendships with them. Many of them, like Fox, were of a very kindly disposition yet, as Alleyn once said of them, if pity entered far into the hunter his occupation was gone. And he had quoted Mark Antony who talked about “pity choked with custom of fell deeds”. Some of the men she met were bitter and with reason, about public attitudes towards the police. “A character comes and robs their till or does their old Mum or interferes with their kid sister,” Mr Fox once remarked, “and they’re all over you. Next day they’re among the pigeons in Trafalgar Square advising the gang our chaps are trying to deal with to put in the boot. You could say it’s a lonely sort of job.”

  Very few of Alleyn’s colleagues, Troy thought, were natural bullies but it was to be expected that the Service would occasionally attract such men and that its disciplines would sometimes fail to control them. At which point in her consideration of the genus of CID Troy was invariably brought up short by the reflection that her husband fitted into none of these categories. And she would give up generalisation as a bad job.

  Now, however, she found herself trying to place Superintendent Tillottson and was unable to do so.

  How tough was Mr Tillottson? How intelligent? How impenetrable? And what on earth did he now make of the cruise of the Zodiac? If he carried on in his usual way, ironing-out her remarks into a featureless expanse of words, she would feel like hitting him.

  So. “What do you make of this one?” she asked and heard his ‘Well, now, Mrs Alleyn—’ before he said it.

  “Well, now, Mrs Alleyn,” said Mr Tillottson and she cut in.

  “Has she been murdered? Or can’t you say until after the autopsy?”

  “We can’t say,” he admitted, looking wary, “until after the inquest. Not on — er — on — er—”

  “The external appearance of her body?”

  “That is so, Mrs Alleyn. That is correct, yes.”

  “Have you heard that last night the Skipper got a telegram purporting to come from her? From Carlisle? Intimating she was on her way to the Highlands?”

  “We have that information, Mrs Alleyn. Yes.”

  “Well, then?”

  Mr Tillottson coined a phrase: “It’s quite a little problem.” he said.

  “You,” Troy said with feeling, “are telling me.”

  She indicated the stool. “Do sit down, Mr Tillottson,” she said.

  He thanked her and did so, obliterating the stool.

  “I suppose,” she continued. “You want a statement from me, don’t you?”

  He became cautiously playful. “I see you know all about routine, Mrs Alleyn. Well, yes, if you’ve no objection, just a wee statement. Seeing you, as you might say—”

  “Discovered the body?”

  “That is so, Mrs Alleyn.”

  Troy said rapidly: “I was on deck on the port side at the after-end, I think you call it. I leant on the rail and looked at the water which was covered with detergent foam. We were, I suppose, about two chains below Ramsdyke weir and turning towards the lock. I saw it—I saw her face—through the foam. At first I only thought—I thought—”

  “I’m sure it was very unpleasant.”

  She felt that to concede this understatement would be to give ground before Mr Tillottson.

  “I thought it was something else: a trick of light and colour. And then the foam broke and I saw. That’s all really. I don’t think I called out. I’m not sure. Very stupidly, I fainted. Mr Tillottson,” Troy hurried on, “we know she left the Zodiac some time during the night before last at Crossdyke. She slept on deck, that night.”

  “Yes?” he asked quickly. “On deck? Sure?”

  “Didn’t you know?”

  “I haven’t had the opportunity as yet, to get what you’d call the full picture.”

  “No, of course not. She told Dr Natouche she meant to sleep on deck. She complained of insomnia. And I think she must have done so because he and I found a bit of cloth from the cover of her diary — you know I told you how it went over-board — on her Li-lo mattress.”

  “Not necessarily left there during the night, though, would you say?”

  “Perhaps not. It was discoloured. I think Dr Natouche has kept it.”

  “Has he? Now why would the doctor do that, I wonder.”

  “Because I asked him to.”

  “You did!”

  “We were both a bit worried about her. Well, you know I was, don’t you? I told you.”

  Mr. Tillottson at once looked guarded. “That’s so, Mrs Alleyn,” he said. “You did mention it. Yerse.”

  “There’s one thing I want you to tell me. I daresay I’ve got no business to pester you but I hope you won’t mind too much.”

  “Well, of course not. Naturally not, I’m sure.”

  “It’s just this. If it is found to be homicide you won’t will you
, entertain any idea of her having been set upon by thugs when she went ashore in the night? That can’t be the case, possibly, can it?”

  “We always like to keep an open mind.”

  “Yes, but you can’t, can you, keep an open mind about that one? Because if she was killed by some unknown thug, who on earth sent the telegram from Carlisle?”

  “We’ll have to get you in the Force, Mrs Alleyn. I can see that,” he joked uneasily.

  “I know I’m being a bore.”

  “Not at all.”

  “But you see,” Troy couldn’t resist adding, “it’s because of all those silly little things I told you about at the police stations. They don’t sound quite so foolish, now. Or do they?”

  “Er — no. No. You may be quite sure, Mrs Alleyn, that we won’t neglect any detail, however small.”

  “Of course. I know.”

  “I might just mention, Mrs Alleyn, that since we had our last chat we’ve re-checked on the whereabouts of the passengers over last week-end. They’re O.K. The Hewson couple were in Stratford-upon-Avon. Mr Pollock did stay in Birmingham. Dr Natouche was in Liverpool, and—”

  “But — that’s all before the cruise began!”

  “Yerse,” he said and seemed to be in two minds what to say next. “Still,” he said, “as far as it goes, there it is,” and left it at that.

  “Please, Mr Tillottson, there’s only one more thing. Had she—did you find anything round her neck. A cord or tape with a sort of little bundle on it. Sewn up, I fancy, in chamois leather?”

  “No,” he said sharply. “Nothing like that. Did she wear something of that nature?”

  “Yes,” Troy said. “She did. It was—I know this sounds fantastic but it’s what she told me—it was an extremely valuable Fabergé jewel representing the signs of the zodiac and given to her grandfather who was a surgeon, by, believe it or not, the Czar of Russia. She told me she never took it off. Except one supposes when she—” Troy stopped short.

  “Did she talk about it to anyone else, Mrs Alleyn?”

  “I understood she’d told Miss Hewson about it.”

  “There you are! The foolishness of some ladies.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, now,” he said. “This is interesting. This is quite interesting, Mrs Alleyn.”