Clutch of Constables Read online

  ‘Rory—would it be easier? It would, wouldn’t it? For you? For both of us?’

  ‘Yes, darling, it would.’

  ‘Well, then?’

  She saw Alleyn give Natouche one utterly non-committal look of which the doctor appeared to be perfectly unaware. ‘I think you are right,’ Alleyn said. ‘I have been in two minds about it but I think you are right. How far is it by road to Norminster?’

  ‘Six miles and three-eighths,’ Natouche said.

  ‘How very well-informed!’

  ‘Dr Natouche is a map-maker,’ Troy said. ‘You must see what he’s doing.’

  ‘Love to,’ Alleyn agreed politely. ‘Where did you stay in Norminster, Troy? The Percy, was it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘I’ll ring it up from the lockhouse. If they’ve got a room I’ll send for a taxi. We’ll obey doctor’s orders.’

  ‘All right. But—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll feel as if I’m ratting. So will they.’

  ‘Let them.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Would you go down and pack, then?’

  ‘Yes. All right.’ They could say nothing to each other, Troy thought, but ‘all right’.

  She went down to her cabin.

  Natouche said: ‘I hope you didn’t mind my making this suggestion. Your wife commands an unusual degree of self-discipline, I think, but she really has had as much as she should be asked to take. I may say that some of the passengers would not be inclined to make matters any easier for her if she stayed.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘They are, I think, a little suspicious of the lost fur.’

  ‘I can’t blame them,’ Alleyn said dryly.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Natouche continued, ‘I should say this. If you find, as I think you will, that Miss Rickerby-Carrick was murdered I fully realize that I come into the field of suspects. Of course I do. I only mention this in case you should think that I try to put myself in an exclusive position by speaking as a doctor in respect of your wife.’

  ‘Do you suppose,’ Alleyn asked carefully, ‘that any of the others think it may be a case of homicide?’

  ‘They do not confide in me, but I should undoubtedly think so. Yes.’

  ‘And they suspect that they will come into the field of inquiry?’

  ‘They would be extremely stupid if they did not expect to do so,’ he said. ‘And by and large I don’t find they are stupid people. Although at least three of them will certainly begin to suspect me of killing Miss Rickerby-Carrick.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Briefly: because I am an Ethiopian and they would prefer that I, rather than a white member of the company, should be found guilty.’

  Alleyn listened to the huge voice, looked at the impassive face and wondered if this was a manifestation of inverted racialism or of sober judgment.

  ‘I hope you’re mistaken,’ he said.

  ‘And so, of course, do I,’ said Dr Natouche.

  ‘By the way, Troy tells me you found a scrap of material on deck.’

  ‘Ah, yes. You would like to see it? It’s here.’

  He took out his pocket-book and extracted an envelope. ‘Shall I show you where it was?’ he asked.

  ‘Please.’

  They went to the after-end of the deck.

  ‘The mattress was inflated,’ Natouche explained, ‘and lying where it had been when she used it. Mrs Alleyn noticed this fragment. It was caught under the edge of the pillow pocket. You will see that it is stained, presumably with river water. It seemed to me that Miss Rickerby-Carrick had probably taken her diary with her when she came up here to bed and that this piece of the cover, if it is that, became detached. The book was of course, saturated. I noted the cloth of its cover was torn when Lazenby rescued it. Your wife thought we should keep the fragment.’

  ‘Yes, she told me. Thank you. I must get on with my unlovely job. I am very much obliged to you, Dr Natouche, for having taken care of Troy.’

  ‘Please! I was most honoured that she placed a little confidence in me. I think,’ he added, ‘that I shall stroll up to the wapentake. If you’ll excuse me.’

  Alleyn watched him take an easy stride from the gunwale of the Zodiac to the grassy bank and noticed the perfect co-ordination of movement and the suggestion of unusual strength. Alleyn was visited by an odd notion: ‘Suppose’ he thought, ‘he just went on. Suppose he became an Ethiopian in a canary-coloured sweater striding over historic English fens and out of our field of inquiry. Ah well, he’s extremely conspicuous, after all.’

  He looked downstream towards the weir and could see Fox and the local sergeant moving about the tow-path. Fox stooped over a wayside patch of bramble and presently righted himself with an air that Alleyn even at that distance, recognized as one of mild satisfaction. He turned, saw Alleyn and raised a hand, thumb up.

  Alleyn went ashore, telephoned the Percy Hotel at Norminster, booked a room and ordered a taxi for Troy. When he returned to the Zodiac he found it deserted except for Troy who had packed her bags and was waiting for him in her cabin.

  Half an hour later he put her in her taxi and she drove away from Ramsdyke. Her fellow-passengers, except for Dr Natouche, were sitting round an outdoor table at the pub. The Hewsons, Mr Lazenby and Mr Pollock had their heads together. Caley Bard slouched back dejectedly in his chair and gazed into a beer pot.

  She asked the driver to stop and got out. As she approached the men stood up, Caley Bard at once, the others rather mulishly.

  Troy said: ‘I’ve been kicked out. Rory thinks I’ll be an embarrassment to the Force if I stay and I think he’s got something so I’m going to Norminster.’

  Nobody spoke.

  ‘I would rather have stayed,’ she said, ‘but I do see the point and I hope very much that all of you do, too. Wives are not meant to muscle-in on police routine.’

  Caley Bard put his arm across her shoulders and gave her a little shake. ‘Of course we do,’ he said. ‘Don’t be a donkey. Off you go to Norminster and good riddance.’

  ‘Well!’ Troy said, ‘that is handsome of you.’

  Mr Lazenby said: ‘This is the course I suggested, if you remember, Mrs Alleyn. I said I thought you would be well advised to leave the Zodiac.’

  ‘So you did,’ Troy agreed.

  ‘For your sake, you know. For your sake.’

  ‘For whatever reason, you were right.’

  Pollock said something under his breath to Mr Hewson who received it with a wry grin that Troy found rather more disagreeable than a shouted insult would have been. Miss Hewson laughed.

  ‘Well,’ Troy said. ‘We’ll all meet, I suppose. At the inquest. I just felt I’d like to explain. Goodbye.’

  She went back to the taxi. Caley Bard caught her up. ‘I don’t know if your old man thinks this is a case of murder,’ he said, ‘but you can take it from me I’d cheerfully lay that lot out. For God’s sake don’t let it hurt you. It’s not worth a second thought.’

  ‘No,’ Troy said. ‘Of course not. Goodbye.’

  The car drove through the Constable landscape up the hill. When they got to the crest they found a policeman on duty at the entry to the main road. Troy looked back. There, down below, was The River with the Zodiac at her moorings. Fox had moved from the weir and Alleyn and Tillottson had met him. They seemed to examine something that Fox held in his hand. As if he felt her gaze upon him, Alleyn lifted his head and, across the Constable picture, they looked at each other and waved their hands.

  Above The River on the far side was the wapentake and alone in its hollow like a resident deity sat a figure in a yellow sweater with a black face and hands.

  It would be getting dark soon and the passengers would stroll back to the ship. For the last time they would go to bed in their cabins. The River and trees and fields would send up their night-time voices and scents and the countryside after its quiet habit, move into night. The sea
sonal mist which the Skipper had told them was called locally, The Creeper, had increased and already The River looked like a stream of hot water threading the low country.

  How strange, Troy thought, as they drove away that she should so sharply regret leaving The River. For a moment she entertained a notion that because of the violence that threaded its history there was something unremarkable, even appropriate, in the latest affront to The River. Poor Hazel Rickerby-Carrick, she thought, has joined a long line of drowned faces and tumbled limbs: Plantagenets and Frenchmen, Lancastrians and Yorkists, cropped, wigged and ringleted heads: bloated and desecrated bodies. They had drenched the fields and fed The River. The landscape had drawn them into itself and perhaps grown richer for them.

  ‘I shall come back to the waterways,’ Troy thought. She and Alleyn and their son and his best girl might hire a longboat and cruise, not here, not between Tollardwark and Ramsdyke, but farther south or west where there was no detergent on the face of the waters. But it was extremely odd all the same, that she should want to do so.

  II

  While Fox and Tillottson stooped over footprints on the bank at Crossdyke and Sergeants Bailey and Thompson sped northwards, Alleyn explored the contents of Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s cabin.

  The passengers were still up at the pub and if Dr Natouche had returned he had not come below. The Tretheways were sitting in a family huddle near the bar. Out in the darkling landscape the Creeper rose stealthily and police constables patrolled the exits from Ramsdyke into the main roads and the tow-path near the Zodiac.

  The cabin, of course, had been swept out and the berth stripped of its bed-clothes. The Hewsons had made use of it not only for their purchases but for their camera equipment and some of their luggage.

  Alleyn found that their cameras—they had three—were loaded with partially used film. They were expensive models, one of them being equipped with a phenomenally powerful lens of the sort used by geologists when recording rock-faces.

  Their booty from Tollardwark was bestowed along the floor, most of it in a beer-carton; the prints and scraps had been re-rolled, pretty roughly, into a bundle tied up with the original string.

  The painting of Ramsdyke Lock was laid between sheets of newspaper in an empty suitcase.

  He took it out and put it on the bunk.

  Troy and Caley Bard had made a fairly thorough job of their cleaning and oiling but there were still some signs of dirt caught under the edge of brush strokes, but not, he thought, incorporated in the paint. It was a glowing picture and as Troy had said, it was well-painted. Alleyn was not an expert in picture forgery but he knew that the processes were refined, elaborate and highly scientific, involving in the case of seventeenth-century reproductions the use of specially manufactured pigments, of phenolformaldehyde and an essential oil, of baking and of old paintings scraped down to the ground layer. With nineteenth-century forgeries these techniques might not be necessary. Alleyn knew that extremely indifferent forgeries had deceived the widows and close associates of celebrated painters and even tolerable authorities. He had heard talk of ‘studio sweepings’ and arguments that not every casual, unsigned authentic sketch bore the over-all painterly ‘signature’ of the master. One much-practised trick, of course, was to paint the forgery over an old work. An X-ray would show if this had been done.

  Outside, presenting itself for comparison, was the subject of the picture: Ramsdyke Lock, the pond, the ford, the winding lane, the hazy distance. Nothing could be handier, he thought, and he did in fact compare them.

  He made an interesting discovery.

  The trees in the picture were in the right places, they were elms, they enclosed the middle-distance just as the real elms did in the now darkling landscape outside. Undoubtedly, it was a picture of Ramsdyke Lock.

  But they were not precisely the same elms.

  The masses of foliage, painted with all the acute observation of Constable’s school, were of a different relationship, one to another. Would this merely go to show that, when the picture was painted the trees were a great deal smaller? No, he thought not. These were smaller but the major branches sprang from their trunks at different intervals. But might not this be a deliberate alteration made by the artist for reasons of composition? He remembered Troy saying that the painter has as much right to prune or transplant a tree as the clot who had planted it in the wrong place.

  All the same…

  Voices and footfalls on the upper deck announced the return of the passengers. Alleyn restored the painting to its suitcase and the suitcase to its position against the wall. He opened the cabin door, shut his working-kit, took out his pocket-lens, squatted at the head of the bunk and waited.

  Not for long. The passengers came below: Mr Lazenby first. He paused, looked in and fluted: ‘Busy, Superintendent?’

  ‘Routine, sir.’

  ‘Ah! Routine!’ Lazenby playfully echoed. That’s what you folk always say, isn’t it, Superintendent? Routine!’

  ‘I sometimes think it’s all we ever do, Mr Lazenby.’

  ‘Really? Well, I suppose I mustn’t ask what it’s all about. Poor girl. Poor girl. She was not a happy girl, Mr Alleyn.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Emotionally unstable. A type that we parsons are all too familiar with, you know. Starved of true, worthwhile relationships, I suspect, and at a difficult, a trying time of life. Poor girl.’

  ‘Do I take it, you believe this to be a case of suicide, Mr Lazenby?’

  ‘I have grave misgivings that it may be so.’

  ‘And the messages received after her death?’

  ‘I don’t profess to have any profound knowledge of these matters, Superintendent, but as a parson, they do come my way. These poor souls can behave very strangely, you know. She might even have arranged the messages, hoping to create a storm of interest in herself.’

  ‘That’s a very interesting suggestion, sir.’

  ‘I throw it out,’ Mr Lazenby said with a modest gesture, ‘for what it’s worth. I mustn’t be curious,’ he added, ‘but—you hope to find some—er help—in here? Out of, as it were, Routine?’

  ‘We’d be glad to know whether or not she returned to her cabin during the night,’ Alleyn said. ‘But, to tell you the truth, there’s nothing to show, either way.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Lazenby, ‘good on you, anyhow. I’ll leave you to it.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Alleyn said, and when Mr Lazenby had gone, whistled, almost inaudibly, the tune of ‘Yes, we have no bananas’, which for some reason seemed to express his mood.

  He was disturbed, almost immediately, by the arrival of the Hewsons and Mr Pollock.

  Miss Hewson came first. She checked in the open doorway and looked, as far as an inexpressive face allowed her to do so, absolutely furious. Alleyn rose.

  ‘Pardon me. I had gotten an impression that this stateroom had been allocated to our personal use,’ said Miss Hewson.

  Alleyn said he was sure she would find that nothing had been disturbed.

  Mr Hewson, looking over his sister’s shoulder like a gaunt familiar spirit said he guessed that wasn’t the point and Mr Pollock, obscured, could be heard to say something about search-warrants.

  Alleyn repeated his story. Without committing himself in so many words he contrived to suggest that his mind was running along the lines of suicide as indicated by Mr Lazenby. He sensed an easing off in antagonism among his hearers. The time had come for what Troy was in the habit of referring to as his unbridled comehithery, which was unfair of Troy. He talked about the Hewsons’ find and said his wife had told him it might well prove to be an important Constable.

  He said, untruthfully, that he had had no police experience in the realms of art-forgery. He believed, he said, and he had, in fact, been told by a top man, that it was most important for the canvas to be untouched until the experts looked at it. He wasn’t sure that his wife and Mr Bard hadn’t been naughty to oil the surface.

  He would love to see the pictur
e. He said if he could afford it he would be a collector. He had the mania. He gushed.

  As soon as he broached the matter of the picture Alleyn was quite sure that the Hewsons did not want him to see it. They listened to him and eyed him and said next to nothing. Mr Pollock, still in the background, hung off and on and could be heard to mutter.

  Finally, Alleyn fired point-blank. ‘Do show me your “Constable”,’ he said. ‘I’m longing to see it.’

  Miss Hewson with every appearance of the deepest reluctance seemed to be about to move into the cabin when her brother suddenly ejaculated—

  ‘Now, isn’t this just too bad! Sis, what do you know!’

  From the glance she shot at him, Alleyn would have thought that she hadn’t the remotest idea what he was driving at. She said nothing.

  Mr Hewson turned to Alleyn with a very wide smile.

  ‘Just too bad,’ he repeated. ‘Just one of those darn’ things! It sure would’ve been a privilege to have your opinion, Superintendent, but you know what? We packaged up that problem picture and mailed it right back to our London address not more’n half an hour before we quit Crossdyke.’

  ‘Did you really? I am disappointed,’ said Alleyn.

  III

  ‘Funny way to carry on,’ said Tillottson.

  ‘So funny that I’ve taken it upon myself to lock the cabin door, keep the key and make sure there is not a duplicate. And if the Hewsons don’t fancy that one they can lump it. What’s more I’m going to rouse up Mr Jno. Bagg, licensed dealer of Tollardwark. I think you’d better come, too, Bert,’ said Alleyn who had arrived at Mr Tillottson’s first name by way of Fox.

  ‘Him! Why?’

  ‘I’ll explain on the way. Warn them at the lock, will you, Bert, to hold anything from the Zodiac that’s handed in for posting. After all, they could pick that lock. And tell your chaps to watch like lynxes for anything to go overboard. It’s too big,’ he added, ‘for them to shove it down the loo and if they dropped it out of a porthole I think it’d float. But tell your chaps to watch. We’ll take your car, shall we?’