Ngaio Marsh - Clutch of Constables

“You poor darling,” cried Miss Rickerby-Carrick. “Shall I come back with you? Would you like a sleeping-pill? Miss Hewson’s got some. She’s given me two for tonight. Shall I wait for you? Yes?”

“But of course we’ll wait,” Mr Lazenby fluted.

Caley Bard said that he was sure Troy would rather be left to herself and proposed that he and Mr Lazenby and Miss Rickerby-Carrick should explore the village together and then he would teach them how to lepidopterise. Troy felt this was a truly noble action.

“Don’t let those bobbies worry you,” he said. “Take care of yourself, do. Hope you recover your morsel of mink.”

“Thank you,” Troy said and tried to convey her sense of obligation without alerting Miss Rickerby-Carrick whose mouth was stretched in an anxious grin. She parted with them and went into the police-station where at once time slipped a cog and she was back in last evening for there was Superintendent Tillottson blandly remarking that he had just popped over from Toll’ark in case there had been any developments. She told him (speaking against the beat of her headache and with the sick dazzle in her vision making nonsense of his face) about Mr Lazenby and the page from the diary and about the odd behaviour of Mr Pollock and Miss Rickerby-Carrick. And again, on describing them, these items shrank into insignificance.

Mr Tillottson with his hands in his pockets, sitting easily on the corner of the local Sergeant’s desk said with great geniality that there didn’t seem to be much in any of that lot did there, and she agreed, longing to be rid of the whole thing and in bed.

“Yerse,” Mr Tillottson said. “So that’s the story.” And he added with the air of making conversation: “And this chap Lazenby had his hair all over his right eye like a hippy? Funny idea in a clergyman. But it was wet, of course.”

“Over his left eye,” Troy corrected as a sharp stab of pain shot through her own.

“His left eye, was it?” said Mr Tillottson casually. “Yes. Fancy. And you never got a look at it. The eye I mean?”

“Well, no. He turned his back when he put on his dark spectacles.”

“P’raps he’s got some kind of disfigurement,” Mr Tillottson airily speculated. “You never know, do you? Jim Tretheway’s a very pleasant kind of chap, isn’t he? And his wife’s smashing, don’t you think, Mrs Alleyn? Very nice couple the Tretheways.”

“Very,” Troy agreed and stood up to a lurching spasm of migraine.

They shook hands again and Mr Tillottson produced, apparently as an afterthought, the suggestion that she should drop in at “their place in Longminster” where she would find Superintendent Bonney a most sympathetic person: “a lovely chap” was how Mr Tillottson described him.

“I honestly don’t think I need trouble him,” Troy said. She was beginning to feel sick.

“Just to keep in touch, Mrs Alleyn,” he said and made a little sketch plan of Longminster, marking the police-station with a cross. “Go to the point marked X,” he said facetiously. “We may have a bit of news for you,” he playfully added. “There’s been a slight change in your good man’s itinerary. We’ll be pleased to let you know.”

“Rory!” Troy exclaimed. “Is he coming back earlier?”

“I understand it’s not quite settled yet, Mrs Alleyn.”

“Because if he is—”

“Oh, it wouldn’t be anything you might call immediate. If you’d just look in on our chaps at Longminster we’d be much obliged. Very kind of you.”

By this time Troy could have hurled the local Sergeant’s ink-pot at Mr Tillottson but she took her leave with circumspection and made her way through nauseating sunbursts back to the river. Before she reached it her migraine attained its climax. She retired behind a briar bush and emerged, shaken but on the mend.

Her doctor had advanced the theory that these occasional onsets were associated with nervous tension and for the first time she began to think he might be right.

She would quite have liked to look at the ruins which were visible from her porthole, doing their stuff against the beginning of a spectacular sunset but the attack had left her tired and sleepy and she settled for an early night.

There seemed to be no other passengers aboard the Zodiac . Troy took a shower and afterwards knelt in her dressing-gown on the bed and watched the darkling landscape across which, presently, her companions began to appear. There on the rim of a hillside rising to the ruins was Caley Bard in silhouette with his butterfly net. He gave a ridiculous balletic leap as he made a sweep with it. He was followed by Miss Rickerby-Carrick in full cry. Troy saw them put their heads together over the net and thought: “She’s driving him crackers.” At that moment Dr Natouche came down the lane and Miss Rickerby-Carrick evidently spied him. She seemed to take a hasty farewell of Bard and, in her precipitancy, became almost air-borne as she plunged downhill in pursuit of the Doctor. Troy heard her hail him.

“Doctor! Doctor Na-tooo-sh.”

He paused, turned and waited. He was incapable, Troy thought, of looking anything but dignified. Miss Rickerby-Carrick closed in. She displayed her usual vehemence. He listened with that doctor’s air which is always described as being grave and attentive.

“Can she be consulting him?” Troy wondered. “Or is she perhaps confiding in him instead of me.”

Now, she was showing him something in the palm of her hand. Could it be a butterfly, Troy wondered. He bent his head to look at it. Troy saw him give a little nod. They walked slowly towards the Zodiac and as they approached, the great booming voice became audible.

“—your own medical man… something to help you… quite possibly… indeed.”

She is consulting him, thought Troy.

They moved out of her field of vision and now there emerged from the ruins the rest of the travellers: the Hewsons, Mr Lazenby and Mr Pollock. They waved to Caley Bard and descended the hill in single file, like cut-out figures in black paper against a fading green sky. Commedia dell’arte again, Troy thought.

The evening was very warm. She lay down on her bunk. There was little light in the cabin and she left it so, fearing that Miss Rickerby-Carrick would call to inquire. She even locked her door, and, obscurely, felt rather mean for doing so. The need for sleep that always followed her migraines must now be satisfied and Troy began to dream of voices and of a mouselike scratching at somebody’s door. It persisted, it established itself over her dream and nagged her back into wakefulness. She struggled with herself, suffered an angry spasm of conscience and finally in a sort of bemused fury, got out of bed and opened the door.

On nobody.

The passage was empty. She thought afterwards that as she opened her own door another one had quietly closed.

She waited but there was no stirring or sound anywhere and, wondering if after all she had dreamt the scratching at her door, she went back to bed and at once fell fathoms deep into oblivion that at some unidentifiable level was disturbed by the sound of an engine.

-3-

She half-awoke to broad daylight and the consciousness of a subdued fuss: knocking and voices, footsteps in the passage and movements next door in Cabin 8. While she lay, half-detached and half-resentful of these disturbances, there was a tap on her own door and a rattle of the handle.

Troy, now fully awake, called out, “Sorry. Just a moment,” and unlocked her door.

Mrs Tretheway came in with tea.

“Is anything wrong?” Troy asked.

Mrs Tretheway’s smile broke out in glory all over her face. “Well,” she said, “not to say wrong. It’s how you look at it, I suppose, Mrs Alleyn. The fact is Miss Rickerby-Carrick seems to have left us.”