Clutch of Constables Read online

  The saloon in that most pleasant of water-wanderers, the Zodiac, wore its usual after-dark aspect. Its cherry-coloured window curtains were drawn and its lamps were lit. It was cosy. The more so, perhaps, because the river mist known as the Creeper had now shut the craft off from her surroundings.

  The six remaining passengers occupied themselves in much the same way as they had done before Hazel Rickerby-Carrick disappeared in the night. The Hewsons, Mr Lazenby and Mr Pollock played Scrabble. Caley Bard read. Dr Natouche, a little removed, as always, put some finishing touches to his map of the The River. Behind the bar, Mrs Tretheway read a magazine. The Skipper was ashore and the boy Tom was in bed.

  Troy’s Zodiac picture with its vivid impersonations of the passengers was now framed and had replaced its begetter above the bar. There they all were, preposterously masquerading as Heavenly bodies, skipping round Mr Pollock’s impeccable lettering.

  The Hunt of the Heavenly Host begins With the Ram, the Bull and the Heavenly Twins. The Crab is followed by the Lion The Virgin and the Scales, The Scorpion, Archer and He-Goat, The Man that carries the Watering-pot And the Fish with the Glittering Tails.

  The Virgin was gone for good and the Goat, as Troy had thought of herself, was removed to Norminster but there, Alleyn thought, were all the others, mildly employed, with a killer and a single detached person among them.

  When Alleyn and Fox arrived in the saloon, the Scrabble players became quieter still. Miss Hewson’s forefinger, pushing a lettered tile into place, stopped and remained, pointed down, like an admonitory digit on a monument. Pollock’s head, bent over the Scrabble-board, was not raised though his eyes were and looked at Alleyn from under his brows, showing rims of white. Lazenby, who had been attending to the score, let his pencil remain in suspended action. Hewson, pipe gripped in teeth, held the head of a match against the box but did not strike it.

  For a few seconds this picture was presented like an unheralded still at the cinema; then it animated as if there had been no hitch in its mild progression.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Alleyn said, ‘that we have to make nuisances of ourselves again but there it is. In police work it’s a case of set a nuisance to catch a nuisance.’

  ‘Well!’ Caley Bard ejaculated. ‘I must say that as reassuring remarks go, I don’t think much of that one. If it was meant to reassure.’

  ‘It was meant as a sort of apology,’ Alleyn said, ‘but I see your point. Please don’t let us disturb anybody. We’ve come to tidy up a loose end of routine and I’m afraid we shall have to ask you all to be very patient and stay out of your cabins until we’ve done so. We won’t be long about it, I hope.’

  After a considerable silence Mr Hewson predictably said: ‘Yeah?’ and leant back in his chair with his thumbs in the arm-holes of his waistcoat. He turned his left ear with its hearing-aid towards Alleyn.

  ‘Stay out of our cabins,’ he quoted with what seemed to be intended as a parody of Alleyn’s voice. ‘Is that so? Now, would that be a kind of polite indication of a search, Superintendent?’

  ‘I’m glad it sounded polite,’ Alleyn rejoined cheerfully. ‘Yes. It would.’

  ‘You got a warrant?’ Pollock asked.

  ‘Yes, indeed. Would you like to see it?’

  ‘Of course we don’t want to see it,’ Caley Bard wearily interjected. ‘Don’t be an ass, Pollock.’

  Pollock muttered: ‘I’m within my rights, aren’t I?’

  Alleyn said: ‘Miss Hewson, I’ll start with your cabin, if that suits you, and as soon as I’ve finished, you will be free to use it. At the same time Inspector Fox will take a look at yours, Mr Hewson.’

  ‘A second look,’ Mr Hewson sourly amended.

  ‘That’s right,’ Alleyn said. ‘So it is. A formality, you might call it.’

  ‘You might,’ Mr Hewson conceded. ‘I wouldn’t.’

  Miss Hewson said: ‘Gee, Earl, if I hadn’t clean forgotten! Gee, how crazy can you get? Look, Mr Alleyn: look, Superintendent, I got to “fess up” right now, about that problem-picture. There’s been a kind of misunderstanding between Brother and me. He calculated I’d sent it off and I calculated he had.’

  ‘Just the darndest thing,’ Mr Hewson put in with a savage glance at his sister.

  ‘Certainly is,’ she agreed. ‘And so what do you know? There it is just exactly where it’s been all this time. In the bottom of a grip in my stateroom.’

  ‘Fancy,’ said Alleyn. ‘I shall enjoy taking a second look. Last time I saw it, it was in an otherwise empty case in the deceased’s cabin, which, by the way, I locked.’

  A fairly long silence was decorated with a stifled giggle from Caley Bard.

  Miss Hewson said breathlessly: ‘Well, pardon me, again. I guess I’m kind of nervously exhausted. I meant to say the spare cabin.’

  Mr Hewson said angrily, ‘OK. OK. So it wasn’t posted. So we acted like it was. Why? I’ll tell you precisely why, Superintendent. This picture’s a work of art. Ask your lady-wife. And this work of art maybe was executed by this guy Constable which would make it a very, very interesting proposition commercially. And we paid out real money, real British money, if that’s not a contradiction in terms, for this work of art and we don’t appreciate the idea of having it removed from our possession by anybody. Repeat: anybody. Period. Cops or whoever. Period. So whadda-we-do?’ Mr Hewson asked at large and answered himself with perhaps a slight loss of countenance. ‘We anticipate,’ he said, ‘the event. We make like this picture’s already on its way.’

  ‘And so I’m sure it would be,’ Alleyn said cheerfully, ‘if it wasn’t for a large and conspicuous constable on duty outside the Ramsdyke Lock post-office.’

  Mr Hewson’s face became slightly pink but his gaze which was directed at Alleyn did not shift. His sister coughed with refinement, said: ‘Pardon me,’ and looked terrified.

  ‘You can’t win,’ Mr Pollock observed to nobody in particular and added after a moment’s reflection: ‘It’s disgusting.’

  ‘If we’re not going to keep you up till all hours,’ Alleyn said, ‘we’d better begin. Anybody really want to see the search-warrant, by the way?’

  ‘I certainly do,’ Mr Hewson announced. ‘It may be a very crude notion but I certainly do want that thing.’

  ‘But not at all,’ Alleyn rejoined. ‘Very sensible of you. Here it is.’

  Fox displayed the warrant and the Hewsons and Mr Pollock looked upon it with distaste. Mr Lazenby said generally that it was a fair go and he had no complaints. Caley Bard tipped Alleyn one of his cock-eyed winks but offered no comment and Dr Natouche interrupted his work on the map to produce the key of his cabin and lay it on the table. This action seemed to rattle everybody but Caley Bard who merely remarked that his own cabin was unlocked.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ Alleyn said. ‘We do carry one or two of those open-sesame jobs but this will be quicker.’ He picked up the key. ‘Any more?’ he asked.

  ‘You know something?’ Mr Hewson said. ‘If you hadn’t gotten those other honest-to-God cops around I’d say you were some kind of phoney laugh with the pay-off line left out.’

  ‘You would?’ Alleyn said absently. ‘Sorry. There’s no joke anywhere that I can see, I promise you that.’

  It turned out that the only other locked cabin apart from Natouche’s and the Hewsons’ was Mr Pollock’s. He handed over his key with as bad a grace as he could muster, turned his back on the company and sucked his teeth.

  Before he left, Alleyn walked over to the corner table where Dr Natouche still concerned himself with his map of the waterways. He drew back, rested his dark hands and looked placidly at what he had done. ‘I am an amateur of maps,’ he said, perhaps by way of excuse.

  If this was a true example of his work he was right. The chart with its little tentative insets and its meticulous lettering was indeed the work of a devoted amateur. It was so fine and so detailed that it almost needed a lens to examine it. Alleyn followed the line of The River to Longminster. There he saw,
predictably, the Minster itself but there, too, was an inn-sign and beside it a thin, gallant and carefully drawn female figure with a dark cropped head.

  He looked down at Dr Natouche’s head with its own shortcropped fuzz and at the darkish scalp beneath. The two men did not speak to each other.

  Alleyn and Fox embarked on their search.

  They found the ‘Constable’ still in place, took possession of it, moved into Miss Hewson’s cabin and methodically emptied the drawers and luggage.

  ‘Funny,’ Mr Fox remarked, laying out a rather dreary nightgown with infinite care upon Miss Hewson’s bed. ‘I always expect American ladies’ lingerie to be more troublante than this type of stuff.’

  Alleyn stared at him. ‘I am speechless,’ he said.

  ‘Why do you make out they were so anxious we wouldn’t get a look at that picture?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Well,’ Fox said. ‘I’ve been trying to set up a working theory. Suppose it was all on the level. Suppose this picture was in the cupboard when this Jo Bagg bought the sideboard.’

  ‘Which it wasn’t, if his story’s right.’

  ‘Quite so. Suppose, then, it’d been on the premises and somebody shoved it in the cupboard and the Baggs hadn’t taken any notice of it and suppose the Hewsons just happened to pick it up like they said and pay for it all fair and above board. In that case what’s wrong with letting us have a look at it? They showed it off willingly enough last night, by all accounts. He kind of hinted they were afraid we might confiscate. They may have been looking at British telly exports in the States, of course, and taken some fanciful notion of how we go to work but personally I didn’t think their yarn stood up.’

  ‘I agree. Playing it by ear, they were, I don’t mind betting.’

  ‘All right, then. Why? People only go on in that style because they’ve got something to hide. What would they have to hide about this picture? I can only think of one answer. What about you, Mr Alleyn?’

  ‘That it’s a racket and they’re in on it.’

  ‘Just so. The thing’s a forgery and they know it. From that it’s a short step to supposing Jo Bagg never had it. The Hewsons brought it with them and planted it in the cupboard when the Baggs weren’t looking.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Br’er Fox. Not from the account Bagg gave of the sale.’

  ‘No? I wasn’t there, of course, when he gave it,’ Fox admitted.

  ‘How do you like the possibility of the motorcyclists planting it? They were hanging about Bagg’s yard on Tuesday and the screech of the cupboard door seems to have drawn old Mrs B.’s baleful attention to them.’

  ‘Could be. Could well be. Come to that, they might be salting the district with carefully planted forgeries.’

  ‘They might, at that. Look at these, Fox.’

  Alleyn had drawn out of a pocket in Miss Hewson’s dressing-case, a folder of colour photographs and film. He laid the prints out on the lid of the suitcase. Three of them were of Ramsdyke Lock. He put the painting on the deck beside them.

  ‘Same thing,’ Fox said.

  ‘Yes. Taken from precisely the same spot and by the look of the trees, in spring. Presumably on the previous visit that old Mrs Bagg went on about. But look. There’s that difference we noticed.’

  ‘The trees. Yes. Yes. In the painting they’re smaller and—well—different.’

  ‘Very thorough. Wouldn’t do, you see, to have them as they are now. They had to go back to the Constable era. I wouldn’t mind betting,’ Alleyn said. ‘That those trees have been copied from an actual Constable or a reproduction of one.’

  ‘Who by?’

  Alleyn didn’t reply at once. He restored the photographs to the dressing-case and after another long look at the picture, rolled it carefully and tied it up. ‘We’ll take possession of this,’ he said, ‘and thus justify the Hewsons’ worst forebodings. I’ll write a receipt. Everything in order here? We’ll move on, Br’er Fox, to the other locked cabin: I simply can’t wait to call, in his absence, on Mr Pollock.’

  IV

  Thompson and Bailey had arrived. They went quietly round the cabins collecting prints from tooth glasses and were then to move to the sites of the motorbicycle traces. Tillottson was in his station in Tollardwark hoping for news of the cyclists and, optimistically, for reports from America and Australia to come through London. Meanwhile the appropriate department was setting up an exhaustive check on the deceased and on the two passengers, Natouche and Caley Bard, who lived in England. Caley had given a London address and his occupation as: ‘Crammer of ill-digested raw-material into the maws of unwilling adolescents.’ In other words, he was a freelance coach to a tutorial firm of considerable repute.

  Troy was in bed and asleep at the Percy Arms in Norminster and Alleyn and Fox had completed their search of the cabins.

  ‘A poor, thin time we’ve had of it,’ Alleyn said. ‘Except for that one small thing.’

  ‘The Pollock exhibit?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  In Mr Pollock’s cabin they had found in the breast pocket of his deplorable suit a plastic wallet containing a print of the Hewson photograph of Ramsdyke Lock and several envelopes displaying trial sketches for the words with which he had subsequently embellished Troy’s picture. He had evidently taken a lot of trouble over them, interrupting himself from time to time to doodle. It was his doodling that Alleyn had found interesting.

  ‘Very neat, very detailed, very meticulous,’ he had muttered. ‘Not the doodles of a non-draughtsman. No. I wonder what the psychiatric experts have to say under this heading. Someone ought to write a monograph: “Doodling and the Unconscious” or: “How to—”.’ And he had broken off in the middle of the sentence to stare at the last of Mr Pollock’s trial efforts. He held it out to Fox to examine.

  ‘The Crab is Followed—’ Mr Pollock had printed and then repeated, with slight changes, several of the letters. But down one side of the envelope he had made a really elaborate doodle.

  It was a drawing of a tree, for all the world twin to the elm that overhung the village pond in Miss Hewson’s oil painting.

  ‘Very careless,’ Alleyn had said as he put it in his pocket. ‘I’m surprised at him.’

  When they returned to the saloon they found the Hewsons, and Mr Pollock and Mr Lazenby, still up and still playing Scrabble. Caley Bard and Dr Natouche were reading. Mrs Tretheway had gone to bed.

  Bailey and Thompson passed through, carrying their gear. The passengers watched them in silence.

  When they had gone Alleyn said: ‘We’ve done our stuff down there and the cabins are all yours. I’m very sorry if we’ve kept you up too late. Here are the keys.’ He laid them on the table. ‘And here,’ he said, holding up the rolled canvas, ‘is your picture, Miss Hewson. We would like to take charge of it for a short time, if you please. I’ll give you this receipt. I assure you the canvas will come to no harm.’

  Miss Hewson had turned, as Fox liked to say, as white as a turnip and really her skin did have something of the aspect of that unlovely root. She looked from Alleyn to her brother and then wildly round the group of passengers as if appealing against some terrible decision. She rose to her feet, pulled at her underlip with uncertain fingers and had actually made a curious little whining sound when her brother said: ‘Take it easy, Sis. You don’t have to act this way. It’s OK: take it easy.’

  Mr Hewson had very large, pale hands. Alleyn saw his left hand clench and his right hand close round his sister’s forearm. She gave a short cry of pain, sank back in her chair and shot what seemed to be a look of terror at her brother.

  ‘My sister’s a super-sensitive girl, Superintendent,’ Mr Hewson said. ‘She gets nervous very, very easy.’

  ‘I hope there is no occasion for her to do so now,’ Alleyn said. ‘I understand this is not your first visit to this district, Mr Hewson. You were here in the spring, weren’t you?’

  Dr Natouche lowered his book and for the first time seemed to listen
to what was being said; Caley Bard gave an exclamation of surprise. Miss Hewson mouthed inaudibly and fingered her arm and Mr Lazenby said, ‘Really? Is that so? Your second visit to The River? I didn’t realize,’ as if they were all making polite conversation.

  ‘That is so,’ Mr Hewson said. ‘A flying visit. We were captivated and settled to return.’

  ‘When did you book your passages in the Zodiac?’ Alleyn asked.

  A silence, broken at last by Mr Hewson.

  ‘Pardon me, I should have put that a little differently, I guess. We made our reservations before we left the States. I should have said we were enchanted to learn when we got here that the Zodiac cruise would cover this same territory.’

  ‘On your previous visit, did you take many photographs?’

  ‘Some. Yes, sir: quite some.’

  ‘Including several shots here at Ramsdyke, of exactly the same subject as the one in this picture?’

  Mr Hewson said: ‘Maybe. I wouldn’t remember off hand. We certainly do get around to taking plenty of pictures.’

  ‘Have you seen this particular photograph, Mr Pollock?’

  Mr Pollock lounged back in his seat, put his hands in his trouser pockets and assumed a look of cagey impertinence with which Alleyn was very familiar.

  ‘Couldn’t say, I’m sure,’ he said.

  ‘Surely you’d remember. The photograph that is taken from the same place as the painting?’

  ‘Haven’t the vaguest.’

  ‘You mean you haven’t seen it?’

  ‘Know what?’ Mr Pollock said. ‘I don’t get all this stuff about photos. It doesn’t mean a thing to me. It’s silly.’

  Mr Pollock’s tree doodle and the Hewsons’ photograph of Ramsdyke Lock dropped on the table in front of him.

  ‘These were in the pocket of your suit.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘The drawing is a replica of a tree in the painting.’