Ngaio Marsh - Clutch of Constables

“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 coordination 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, recognised 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. Good-bye.”

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. Good-bye.”

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 seasonal 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.

-2-

While Fox and Tillottson stooped over footprints on the bank at Crossdyke and Sergeants Bailey and Thompson sped north-wards, 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.