Clutch of Constables (12 page)

“Ackroyd’s Car Hire Service? Just a little item about a telephone call. Eighty-thirty or thereabouts to Crossdyke Lockhouse. Message from a fare phoned by you to the Lock for Tretheway, Skipper, M.V.
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. Could you check for us? Much obliged.” A pause while Mr Bonney stared without interest at Mr Tillottson and Mr Tillottson stared without interest at nothing in particular.

“I see. No note of it? Much obliged. Just before you go: Fare from Crossdyke Lock, picked up sometime during the night. Lady. Yerse. Well,
any
trips to Crossdyke? Could you check?” Another pause. “Much obliged. Ta,” said Mr Bonney and replaced the receiver.

He repeated this conversation almost word for word on three more calls.

In each instance, it seemed, a blank.

“No trips to Crossdyke,” said Mr Bonney, “between 6.45 last evening and 11 a.m. today.”

“Well, well,” said Mr Tillottson, “that’s quite interesting, Bob, isn’t it?”

All Troy’s apprehensions that with the lightened atmosphere of the morning had retired to an uneasy hinterland now returned in force.

“But that means whoever rang gave a false identity,” she said.

Mr Tillottson said it looked a wee bit like that but they’d have to check with the lock-keeper at Crossdyke. He might have mistaken the message. It might have been, he suggested, Miss Rickerby-Carrick herself saying she was hiring a car.

“That’s true!” Troy agreed.

“What sort of a voice, now, would she have, Mrs Alleyn?”

“She’s got a heavy cold and she sounds excitable. She gabbles and she talks in italics.”

“She wouldn’t be what you’d call at all eccentric?”

“She would. Very eccentric.”

Mr Tillottson said ah, well, now, there you were, weren’t you? Mr Bonney asked what age Miss Rickerby-Carrick might be and when Troy hazarded, “fortyish,” began to look complacent. Troy mentioned Mavis of Birmingham now in the Highlands and when they asked Mavis who, and where in the Highlands was obliged to say she’d forgotten. This made her feel foolish and remember some of her husband’s strictures upon purveyors of information received.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “to be so perfectly hopeless.”

They soothed her. Why should she remember these trifles? They would, said Mr Tillottson, have a wee chin-wag with the lock-keeper at Crossdyke just to get confirmation of the telephone call. They would ring the telephone department and they would make further inquiries to find out just how Miss Rickerby-Carrick got herself removed in the dead of night. If possible they would discover her destination.

Their manner strongly suggested that Troy’s uneasiness rather than official concern was the motive for these inquiries.

“They think I’ve got a bee in my bonnet,” she told herself. “If I wasn’t Rory’s wife they wouldn’t be bothered with me.”

She took what she felt had now become her routine leave of Superintendents in North Country police-stations and, once more reassured by Mr Tillottson, prepared to enjoy herself in Longminster.

-2-

She spent the rest of the morning looking at the gallery and the Minster and wandering about the city which was as beautiful as its reputation.

At noon she began to ask her way to the Longminster Arms. After a diversion into an artist-colourman’s shop where she found a very nice old frame of the right size for her Signs of the
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, she arrived at half past twelve. Troy was one of those people who can never manage to be unpunctual and was often obliged to go for quite extensive walks round blocks in order to be decently late or at least not indecently early.

However, she didn’t mind being early for her luncheon with Dr Natouche and his friends. She tidied up and found her way into a pleasant drawing-room where there were lots of magazines.

In one of them she at once became absorbed. It printed a long extract from a book written some years ago by a white American who had had his skin pigmentation changed by what, it appeared, was a dangerous but entirely effective process. For some months this man had lived as one of themselves among the Negroes of the Deep South. The author did not divulge the nature of this transformation process and Troy found herself wondering if Dr Natouche would be able to tell what it was. Could she ask him? Remembering their conversation in the wapentake, she thought she could.

She was still pondering over this and had turned again to the article when she became aware of a presence and found that Dr Natouche stood beside her, quite close, with his gaze on the printed page. Her diaphragm contracted with a jolt and the magazine crackled in her hands.

“I am so very sorry,” he said. “I startled you. It was stupid of me. The carpet is thick and you were absorbed.”

He sat down opposite to her and with a look of great concern said: “I have been unforgivably clumsy.”

“Not a bit of it,” Troy rejoined. “I don’t know why I should be so jumpy. But as you say, I was absorbed. Have you read this thing, Dr Natouche?”

He had lifted his finger to a waiter who approached with a perfectly blank face. “We shall not wait for the Ferguses,” Dr Natouche said. “You must be given a restorative. Brandy? And soda? Dry Ginger? Yes? Two, if you please and may I see the wine list?”

His manner was grand enough to wipe the blank look off any waiter’s face.

When the man had gone Dr Natouche said: “But I have not answered your question. Yes, I have read this book. It was a courageous action.”

“I wondered if you would know exactly what was done to him. The process, I mean.”

“Your colour is returning,” he said after a moment. “And so, of course, did his. It was not a permanent change. No, I do not know what was done. Sir Leslie might have an idea, it is more in his line than mine. We must ask him.”

“I would have thought—”

“Yes?” he said, when she stopped short.

“You said, when we were at the wapentake, that you didn’t think I could say anything to—I don’t remember the exact phrase—”

“To hurt or offend me? Something like that was it? It is true.”

“I was going to ask, then, if the change of pigmentation would be enough to convince people, supposing the features were still markedly European. And then I saw that your features, Dr Natouche, are not at all—”

“Negroid?”

“Yes. But perhaps Ethiopians—one is so ignorant.”

“You must remember I am a half-caste. My facial structures are those of my mother, I believe.”

“Yes, of course,” Troy said. “Of course.”

The waiter brought their drinks and the wine list and menu and hard on his heels came Sir Leslie and Lady Fergus.

They were charming and the luncheon party was a success but somehow neither Troy nor her host got round to asking Sir Leslie if he could shed any light on the darkening by scientific methods of the pigmentation of the skin.

-3-

Troy returned to the
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, rested, changed and was taken in a taxi by Caley Bard to dinner with champagne at another hotel.

“I’m not ’alf going it,” she thought and wondered what her husband would have to say about these jaunts.

When they had dined she and Bard walked about Longminster and finally strolled back to The River at half past ten. The
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was berthed romantically in a bend of The River from which one could see the Long Minster itself against the stars. The lights of the old city quavered and zigzagged with those of other craft in the black night waters. Troy and Bard could hear quiet voices in the saloon but they loitered on the deserted deck and before she could do anything about it Bard had kissed Troy.

“You’re adorable,” he said.

“Ah, get along with you. Good night, and thank you for a nice party.”

“Don’t go away.”

“I think I must.”

“Couldn’t we have a lovely, fairly delicate little affair? Please?”

“We could not,” said Troy.

“I’ve fallen for you in a bloody big way. Don’t laugh at me.”

“I’m not. But I’m not going to pursue the matter. Don’t you, either.”

“Well, I can’t say you’ve led me on. You don’t know a garden path when you see one.”

“I wouldn’t say as much for you.”

“I like that! What cheek!”

“Look,” Troy said, “who’s here.”

It was the Hewsons. They had arrived on the wharf in a taxi and were hung about with strange parcels. Miss Hewson seemed to be in a state of exalted fatigue and her brother in a state of exhausted resignation.

“Boy, oh boy!” he said.

They had to be helped on board with their unwieldy freight and when this exercise had been accomplished, it seemed only decent to get them down the companionway into the saloon. Here the other passengers were assembled and about to go to bed. They formed themselves into a sort of chain gang and by this means assembled the Hewsons’ purchases on three of the tables. Newspaper was spread on the deck.

“We just ran crazy,” Miss Hewson panted. “We just don’t know what’s with us when we get loose on an antique spree, do we, Earl?”

“You said it, dear,” her brother conceded.

“Where,” asked Mr Pollock, “will you put it?” Feeling, perhaps, that his choice of words was unfortunate, he threw a frightened glance at Mr Lazenby.

“Well! Now!” Miss Hewson said. “We don’t figure we have a problem there, do we, dear? We figure if we talk pretty to the Skipper and Mrs Tretheway we might be allowed to cache it in Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s stateroom. We just kind of took a calculated risk on that one didn’t we, dear?”

“Sure did, honey.”

“The Tretheways,” Pollock said, “have gone to bed.”

“Looks like we’ll have to step up the calculated risk, some,” Mr Hewson said dryly.

Mr Lazenby was peering with undisguised curiosity at their booty and so were Troy and Bard. There was an inlaid rose-wood box, a newspaper parcel from which horse-brasses partly emerged, a pair of carriage-lamps and, packed piecemeal into an open beer-carton, a wag-at-the-wall Victorian clock.

Propped against the table was a really filthy roll of what appeared through encrustations of mud to be a collection of prints tied together with an ancient piece of twine.

It was over this trove that Miss Hewson seemed principally to gloat. She had found it, she explained, together with their other purchases, in the yard of the junk shop where Troy had seen them that first night in Tollardwark. Something had told Miss Hewson she would draw a rich reward if she could explore that yard and sure enough, jammed into a compartment in an Edwardian sideboard, all doubled up, as they could see if they looked, there it was.

“I’m a hound when I get started,” Miss Hewson said proudly. “I open up everything that has a door or a lid. And you know something? This guy who owns this dump allowed he never knew he had this roll. He figured it must have been in this terrible little cupboard at the time of the original purchase. And you know something? He said he didn’t care if he didn’t see the contents and when Earl and I opened it up he gave it a kind of weary glance and said was it worth ten bob? Was it worth one dollar twenty! Boy, I guess when the Ladies Handicraft Guild, back in Apollo, see the screen I get out of this lot, they’ll go crazy. Now, Mrs Alleyn,” Miss Hewson continued, “you’re artistic. Well, I mean — well, you know what I mean. Now, I said to Brother, I can’t wait till I show Mrs Alleyn and get me an expert opinion. I said: we go right back and show Mrs Alleyn—”

As she delivered this speech in a high gabble, Miss Hewson doubled herself up and wrestled with the twine that bound her bundle. Dust flew about and flakes of dry mud dropped on the deck. After a moment her brother produced a pocket knife and cut the twine.

The roll opened up abruptly in a cloud of dust and fell apart on the newspaper. Scraps. Oleographs. Coloured supplements from Pears’ Annual. Half a dozen sepia photographs, several of them torn. Four flower pieces. A collection of Edwardian prints from dressmaker’s journals. Part of a child’s scrapbook. Three lamentable water-colours.

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’.”