Ngaio Marsh - Clutch of Constables

Suddenly the little cabin was crammed with enormous men. Superintendent Tillottson and Doctor Natouche were both over six feet tall and comparably broad. She began to introduce these mammoths to each other and then realised they had been introduced already in hideous formality by Hazel Rickerby-Carrick. She could not help looking at Mr Tillottson’s large pink hands which were a little puckered as if he had been doing the washing. She was very glad he did not offer one to her, after his hearty fashion, for shaking.

She said: “Dr Natouche is looking after me on account of my making a perfect ass of myself.”

Mr Tillottson said, with a sort of wide spread of blandness, that this was very nice. Dr Natouche then advised Troy to take things easy and left them.

Troy pushed back the red blanket, sat up on her bunk, put her feet on the deck and ran her fingers through her short hair. “Well, Mr Tillottson,” she said, “what about this one?”

-2-

With the exception of Chief-Inspector Fox for whom she had a deep affection, Troy did not meet her husband’s colleagues with any regularity. Sometimes Alleyn would bring a few of them in for drinks and two or three times a year the Alleyns had easy-going evenings when their house, like Troy’s cabin in the Zodiac , was full of enormous men talking shop.

From these encounters she had, she thought, learnt to recognise certain occupational characteristics among officers of the Criminal Investigation Department.

They were men who, day in, day out, worked in an atmosphere of intense hostility. They were, they would have said, without illusions and unless a built-in scepticism, by definition includes a degree of illusion, she supposed they were right. Some of them, she thought, had retained a kind of basic compassion: they were shocked by certain crimes and angered by others. They honestly saw themselves as guardians of the peace however disillusioned they might be as to the character of the beings they protected. Some regarded modern psychiatric theories about crime with massive contempt. Others seemed to look upon the men and women they hunted with a kind of sardonic affection and would strike up what passed for friendships with them. Many of them, like Fox, were of a very kindly disposition yet, as Alleyn once said of them, if pity entered far into the hunter his occupation was gone. And he had quoted Mark Antony who talked about “pity choked with custom of fell deeds”. Some of the men she met were bitter and with reason, about public attitudes towards the police. “A character comes and robs their till or does their old Mum or interferes with their kid sister,” Mr Fox once remarked, “and they’re all over you. Next day they’re among the pigeons in Trafalgar Square advising the gang our chaps are trying to deal with to put in the boot. You could say it’s a lonely sort of job.”

Very few of Alleyn’s colleagues, Troy thought, were natural bullies but it was to be expected that the Service would occasionally attract such men and that its disciplines would sometimes fail to control them. At which point in her consideration of the genus of CID Troy was invariably brought up short by the reflection that her husband fitted into none of these categories. And she would give up generalisation as a bad job.

Now, however, she found herself trying to place Superintendent Tillottson and was unable to do so.

How tough was Mr Tillottson? How intelligent? How impenetrable? And what on earth did he now make of the cruise of the Zodiac ? If he carried on in his usual way, ironing-out her remarks into a featureless expanse of words, she would feel like hitting him.

So. “What do you make of this one?” she asked and heard his ‘Well, now, Mrs Alleyn—’ before he said it.

“Well, now, Mrs Alleyn,” said Mr Tillottson and she cut in.

“Has she been murdered? Or can’t you say until after the autopsy?”

“We can’t say,” he admitted, looking wary, “until after the inquest. Not on — er — on — er—”

“The external appearance of her body?”

“That is so, Mrs Alleyn. That is correct, yes.”

“Have you heard that last night the Skipper got a telegram purporting to come from her? From Carlisle? Intimating she was on her way to the Highlands?”

“We have that information, Mrs Alleyn. Yes.”

“Well, then?”

Mr Tillottson coined a phrase: “It’s quite a little problem.” he said.

“You,” Troy said with feeling, “are telling me.”

She indicated the stool. “Do sit down, Mr Tillottson,” she said.

He thanked her and did so, obliterating the stool.

“I suppose,” she continued. “You want a statement from me, don’t you?”

He became cautiously playful. “I see you know all about routine, Mrs Alleyn. Well, yes, if you’ve no objection, just a wee statement. Seeing you, as you might say—”

“Discovered the body?”

“That is so, Mrs Alleyn.”

Troy said rapidly: “I was on deck on the port side at the after-end, I think you call it. I leant on the rail and looked at the water which was covered with detergent foam. We were, I suppose, about two chains below Ramsdyke weir and turning towards the lock. I saw it—I saw her face—through the foam. At first I only thought—I thought—”

“I’m sure it was very unpleasant.”

She felt that to concede this understatement would be to give ground before Mr Tillottson.

“I thought it was something else: a trick of light and colour. And then the foam broke and I saw. That’s all really. I don’t think I called out. I’m not sure. Very stupidly, I fainted. Mr Tillottson,” Troy hurried on, “we know she left the Zodiac some time during the night before last at Crossdyke. She slept on deck, that night.”

“Yes?” he asked quickly. “On deck? Sure?”

“Didn’t you know?”

“I haven’t had the opportunity as yet, to get what you’d call the full picture.”

“No, of course not. She told Dr Natouche she meant to sleep on deck. She complained of insomnia. And I think she must have done so because he and I found a bit of cloth from the cover of her diary — you know I told you how it went over-board — on her Li-lo mattress.”

“Not necessarily left there during the night, though, would you say?”

“Perhaps not. It was discoloured. I think Dr Natouche has kept it.”

“Has he? Now why would the doctor do that, I wonder.”

“Because I asked him to.”

“You did!”

“We were both a bit worried about her. Well, you know I was, don’t you? I told you.”

Mr. Tillottson at once looked guarded. “That’s so, Mrs Alleyn,” he said. “You did mention it. Yerse.”

“There’s one thing I want you to tell me. I daresay I’ve got no business to pester you but I hope you won’t mind too much.”

“Well, of course not. Naturally not, I’m sure.”

“It’s just this. If it is found to be homicide you won’t will you, entertain any idea of her having been set upon by thugs when she went ashore in the night? That can’t be the case, possibly, can it?”

“We always like to keep an open mind.”

“Yes, but you can’t, can you, keep an open mind about that one? Because if she was killed by some unknown thug, who on earth sent the telegram from Carlisle?”

“We’ll have to get you in the Force, Mrs Alleyn. I can see that,” he joked uneasily.

“I know I’m being a bore.”

“Not at all.”

“But you see,” Troy couldn’t resist adding, “it’s because of all those silly little things I told you about at the police stations. They don’t sound quite so foolish, now. Or do they?”

“Er — no. No. You may be quite sure, Mrs Alleyn, that we won’t neglect any detail, however small.”