Clutch of Constables (9 page)

“Well!” said Caley Bard. “Who says the Church is effete?”

There was a general appreciative murmur in which Troy did not join.

Had she or had she not seen for a fractional moment, in Mr Lazenby’s left hand, a piece of wet paper with the marks of a propelling pencil across it?

While Troy still mused over this, Miss Rickerby-Carrick who squatted on the deck examining with plaintive cries the ruin of her journal, suddenly exclaimed with much greater emphasis.

The others broke off and looked at her with that particular kind of patient endurance that she so pathetically inspired.

This time, however, there was something in her face that none of them had seen before: a look, not of anxiety or excitement but, for a second or two Troy could have sworn, of sheer panic. The dun skin had bleached under its freckles and round the jawline. The busy mouth was flaccid. She stared at her open diary. Her hands trembled. She shut the drenched book and steadied them by clutching it.

Miss Hewson said: “Miss Rickerby-Carrick, are you O.K.?”

She nodded once or twice, scrambled to her feet and incontinently bolted across the deck and down the companionway to the cabins.

“And
now
,” Troy said to herself. “What about
that
one? Am I still imagining?”

Again she had sensed a kind of stillness, of immense constraint and again she was unable to tell from whom it emanated.

“Like it or lump it,” Troy thought, “Superintendent Tillottson’s going to hear about that lot and we’ll see what he makes of it. In the meantime—”

In the meantime, she went to her cabin and wrote another letter to her husband.

Half an hour later the
Zodiac
tied up for the afternoon and night at Crossdyke.

“As I told you,” Alleyn said. “I rang up the Yard from San Francisco. Inspector Fox, who was handling the Andropulos Case, was away, but after inquiries I got through to Superintendent Tillottson at Tollardwark. He gave me details of his talks with my wife. One detail worried me a good deal more than it did him.”

Alleyn caught the inevitable glint of appreciation from the man in the second row.

“Exactly,” he said. “As a result I talked to the Yard again and was told there was no doubt that Foljambe had got himself to England and that he was lying doggo. Information received suggested that Andropulos had tried a spot of blackmail and had been fool enough to imply that he’d grass on the Jampot if the latter didn’t come across with something handsome. Andropulos had in fact talked to one of our chaps in the way they do when they can’t make up their minds to tell us something really useful. It was pretty obvious he was hinting at the Jampot.

“So he was murdered for his pains.

“The method used had been that of sudden and violent pressure on the carotids from behind and that method carries the Jampot’s signature. It is sometimes preceded by a karate chop which would probably do the trick anyway, but it’s his little fancy to make assurance double-sure.” The Scot in the second row gave a smirk to indicate his recognition of the quotation. “If I’m not careful,” Alleyn thought, “I’ll be playing up to that chap.”

“There had,” he said, “been two other homicides, one in Ismalia and one in Paris where undoubtedly Foljambe had been the expert. But not a hope of cracking down on him. The latest line suggested that he had lit off for France. An envelope of the sort used by a well-known travel-agency had been dropped on the floor near Andropulos’s body and it had a note of the price of tickets and times of departure from London scribbled on the back. It had, as was afterwards realised, been planted by the Jampot and had successfully decoyed Mr Fox across the Channel. A typical stroke. I’ve already talked about his talent—it amounts to genius—for type-casting himself. I don’t think I mentioned that when he likes to turn it on he has a strong attraction for many, but not all, women. His ear for dialects of every description is phenomenal, of course, but he not only speaks whatever it may be—Oxbridge, superior grammar, Australasian, barrow-boy or Bronx, but he really seems to think along the appropriate wave-lengths. Rather as an actor gets behind the thought-pattern of the character he plays. He can act stupid, by the way, like nobody’s business. He is no doubt a great loss to the stage. He is gregarious, which you’d think would be risky and he has a number of unexpected, off-beat skills that occasionally come in very handy indeed.

“Well: you’ll appreciate the situation. Take a look at it. Andropulos has been murdered, almost certainly by the Jampot and the Jampot’s at large. Andropulos, scarcely a candidate, one would have thought, for the blameless delights of British Inland Waterways was to have been a passenger in the Zodiac. My wife now has his cabin. There’s no logical reason in the wide world why his murderer should be her fellow-passenger: indeed the idea at first sight is ludicrous, and yet and yet—my wife tells me that her innocent remark about ‘Constables’ seemed to cast an extraordinary gloom upon someone or other in the party, that the newspaper report of Andropulos’s murder has been suppressed by someone in the Zodiac, that she’s pretty sure an Australian padre who wears dark glasses and conceals his right eye has purloined a page of a farcical spinster’s diary, that she half-suspects him of listening in to her telephone conversation with Mr Fox and that she herself can’t escape a feeling of impending disaster. And there’s one other feature of this unlikely set-up that, however idiotically, strikes me as being more disturbing than all the rest put together. I wonder if any of you—”

But the man in the second row already had his hand up.

“Exactly,” Alleyn said when the phenomenon had delivered himself of the correct answer in a strong Scots accent. “Quite so. And you might remember that I am five thousand odd miles away in San Francisco on an extremely important conference. What the hell do I do?”

After a moment’s thought the hand went up again.

“All right, all right,” Alleyn said. “You tell me.”

-1-

Hazel Rickerby-Carrick sat in her cabin turning over with difficulty the disastrous pages of her diary.

They were not actually pulp; they were stuck together, buckled, blistered and disfigured. They had half-parted company with the spine and the red covers had leaked into them. The writing, however, had not been irrevocably lost.

She separated the entries for the previous day and for that afternoon. “I’m at it again,” she read dismally. “Trying too hard, as usual. It goes down all right with Mavis, of course, but not with these people: not with Troy Alleyn. If only I’d realised who she was from the first! Or if only I’d heard she was going to be next door in Cabin 7: I could have gone to the Exhibition. I could have talked about her pictures. Of course, I don’t pretend to know anything about—” Here she had had second thoughts and had abstained from completing the aphorism. She separated the sopping page from its successor using a nail-file as a sort of slice. She began to read the final entry. It was for that afternoon, before the diary went overboard.

She had reached the bottom of the page. She picked at it gingerly, slid the nail-file under it, crumpled it and turned it.

The following pages containing her last entry were gone. The inner margins where they were bound together had to some extent escaped a complete soaking. She could see by the fragments that remained that they had been pulled away. “But after all, that’s nothing to go by,” she thought, “because when he dived, Mr Lazenby may have grabbed. The book was open. It was open and lying on its face when it sank. That’s it. That’s got to be it.”

Miss Rickerby-Carrick remained perfectly still for some minutes. Once or twice she passed her arthritic fingers across her eyes and brow almost as if she tried to exorcise some devil of muddlement within.

“He’s a clergyman,” she thought, “a clergyman! He’s been staying with a bishop. I could ask him. Why not? What could he say? Or do? But I’ll ask Troy Alleyn. She’ll jolly well have to listen. It’ll interest her. Her
husband
!” she suddenly remembered. “Her husband’s a famous detective. I
ought
to tell Troy Alleyn: and then she may like me to call her Troy. We may get quite chummy,” thought poor Hazel Rickerby-Carrick without very much conviction.

She put the saturated diary open on her bedside shelf where a ray of afternoon sunlight reached it through the porthole.

A nervous weakness had come upon her. She suffered a terrible sense of constraint as if not only her head was iron-bound but as if the tiny cabin contracted about her. “I shan’t sleep in here,” she thought. “I shan’t get a wink or if I do there’ll be beastly dreams and I’ll make noises and they’ll hate me.” And as she fossicked in an already chaotic drawer for Troy’s aspirin she was visited by her great idea. She would sleep on deck. She would wait until the others had settled down and then she would take her Li-lo from its jolly old hidey-hole behind the tarpaulin and blow it up and sleep, as she phrased it to herself, ‘under the wide and starry sky’. And perhaps—perhaps.

“I’ve always been one to go straight at a thing and tackle it,” she thought and finding Troy’s aspirins with the top off inside her sponge bag, she took a couple, lay on her bunk and made several disastrous plans.

-2-

For Troy, the evening at Crossdyke began farcically. The passengers were given an early dinner to enable them to explore the village and the nearby ruin of a hunting lodge where King John had stayed during his misguided antics in the north.

Troy, who had the beginning of a squeamish headache, hoped to get a still earlier start than she had achieved at Tollardwark and to make her call at the police station before any of her fellow-passengers appeared on the scene. Her story of the lost fur was now currency in the ship and would explain the visit if explanation was needed but she hoped to avoid making one.

Throughout dinner Miss Rickerby-Carrick gazed intently at Troy, who found herself greatly put-out by this attention: the more so because what her husband once described as her King-Size Bowels of Compassion had been roused by Miss Rickerby-Carrick. The more exasperating she became, the more infuriatingly succulent her cold, the more embarrassingly fixed her regard, the sorrier Troy felt for her and the less she desired her company. Either, she thought, the wretched woman was doing a sort of dismal lion-hunt, or, hideous notion, had developed a
schwarm
for Troy herself. Or was it possible, she suddenly wondered, that this extraordinary lady had something of moment to communicate.

Miss Rickerby-Carrick commanded rather less tact than a bull-dozer and it must be clear, Troy thought, to everybody in the saloon that a happening was on the brew.

Determined to look anywhere but at her tormentor, Troy caught the ironical, skew-eyed glance of Caley Bard. He winked and she lowered her gaze. Mr Pollock stared with distaste at Miss Rickerby-Carrick and the Hewsons caught each other’s glances and assumed a mask-like air of detachment. Mr Lazenby and Dr Natouche swopped bits of medieval information about the ruins.

Troy went straight on deck when she had finished her dinner and was about to go ashore when up came Miss Rickerby-Carrick from below, hailing her in a curious kind of soft-pedalled shout. “Mrs Alleyn! I say! Mrs Alleyn!” Troy paused. “Look!” said Miss Rickerby-Carrick coming close to her and whispering. “I — are you going up to the village? Can I come with you? I’ve got something—” she looked over her shoulder and up and down the deck though she must have known as well as Troy that the others were all below. “I want to ask your advice. It’s awfully important. Really. I promise,” she whispered.

“Well — yes. All right, if you really think—”

“
Please
. I’ll just get my cardi. I won’t be a tick. Only as far as the village. Before the others start—it’s awfully important. Honest injun.
Please
.”

She advanced her crazy-looking face so close that Troy took an involuntary step backward.

“Be kind!” Miss Rickerby-Carrick whispered. “Let me tell you. Let me!”

She stood before Troy: a grotesque, a dreadfully vulnerable person. And the worst of it was, Troy thought, she herself was now so far caught up in a web of intangible misgivings that she could not know, could not trust herself to judge, whether the panic she thought she saw in those watery eyes was a mere reflection of the ill-defined anxiety which was building itself up around her own very real delight in the little cruise of the
Zodiac
. Or whether Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s unmistakable
schwarm
was about to break out in a big way.

“Oh please!” she repeated, “for God’s sake! Please.”

“Well, of course,” Troy said, helplessly. “Of course.”

“Oh, you
are
a darling,” exclaimed Miss Rickerby-Carrick and bolted for the companionway. She collided with Mr Pollock and there was much confusion and incoherent apology before she retired below and he emerged on deck.

He had brought back to Troy the Signs of the Zodiac with the lettering completed. It was beautifully done, right in scale and manner and execution and Troy told him so warmly. He said in his flat voice with its swallowed consonants and plummy vowels that she need think nothing of it, the obligation was all his and he hung about in his odd way offering a few scraps of disjointed information to the effect that he’d gone from the signwriting into the printing trade but there hadn’t been any money in that. He made remarks that faded out after one or two words and gave curious little sounds that were either self-conscious laughs or coughs.

“Do you paint?” Troy asked. “As well as this? Or draw?”

He hastened to assure her that he did not. “Me? A flippin’ awtist? Do you mind!”

“I thought from the way you looked at this thing—”

“Then you thought wrong,” he said with an unexpected slap of rudeness.

Troy stared at him and he reddened. “Pardon my French,” he said, “I’m naturally crude. I do not paint. I just take a fancy to look.”

“Fair enough,” Troy said pacifically.

He gave her a shamefaced grin and said oh well he supposed he’d better do something about the nightlife of Crossdyke. As he was evidently first going below Troy asked him to keep the drawing for the time being.