Ngaio Marsh - Clutch of Constables

“Lazenby is a one-eyed man and conceals the condition. Troy, who can give no valid reason, thinks he’s not a parson, an opinion that evidently is not shared by the Bishop of Norminster who had him to stay and sent him in the episcopal car to the Zodiac . He says he’s an Australian. We send his prints and a description to the Australian police. We also send the Hewsons’ over to the FBI in New York.”

Fox made a note of it.

“The Hewsons,” Alleyn continued, “are expensively equipped photographers.

“Pollock irritates Caley Bard. Miss Rickerby-Carrick irritates everybody. Caley Bard irritates the Hewsons, Pollock, and possibly, Lazenby.

“Pollock and the Hewsons are racially prejudiced against Natouche. Bard and Lazenby are not.

“A preliminary examination of the body in question supports the theory that she was killed by an attack from behind on the carotids.

“Andropulos would have been a passenger in the Zodiac if Foljambe hadn’t killed him—by sudden and violent pressure from behind on the carotids.”

Alleyn broke off, stared absently at the diary, waited for a moment and then said: “Some of these items are certainly of the first importance, others may be of none at all. Taken as a whole do you think they point to any one general conclusion?”

“Yes,” Fox said. “I do. I certainly do.”

“What?” Tillottson asked.

“Conspiracy.”

“I agree with you,” said Alleyn. “Between whom?”

“You mean—what’s the gang?”

“Yes.”

“Ah. Now.” Fox dragged his great palm across his mouth. “Why don’t we say it?” he asked.

“Say what? That the real question is not only one of conspiracy but of who’s running the show? And more particularly: is it the Jampot?”

“That’s right. That’s it. Cherchez,” said Mr Fox with his customary care, “le Folichon. Où,” he added, “le Pot à Confiture, which is what they’re beginning to call him in the Sûreté.

“You made your mark, evidently, in Paris.”

“Not so’s you’d notice,” Fox said heavily. “But let it pass. Yes, Mr Alleyn. I reckon it’s the Jampot on this job.”

“Why,” Tillottson asked, “are you so sure, Teddy?”

“Well, take a look at it, Bert. Take a look at the lot Mr Alleyn’s just handed us. Three items point to it, you know, now don’t they?”

Yerse,” Mr Tillottson concurred after a long pause. ”I get you. Yerse.”

Alleyn was bent over the diary. His long forefinger touched the rag of paper that was the remnant of the last entry. He slipped his nail under it and disclosed another and then another torn marginal strip still caught in the binding. “Three pages gone,” he said, “and it’s not unreasonable to suppose they would have told us what she overheard from her dark entry in Tollardwark. Wrenched out in a hurry, and, I suppose, either burnt or thrown overboard. The latter almost certainly. They were wet and pulpy. Torn out whether purposely or accidentally, and into The River with them .”

“That’ll be the story,” Fox agreed heavily. “And the inference is — by Lazenby.”

“If Troy’s right. She’s not certain.”

Mr Tillottson who had been in a hard, abstracted stare since his last utterance now said: “So it’s a field of five — six if you count the Skipper and that’d be plain ridiculous. I’ve known Jim Tretheway these five years, decent wee man.”

“He’s not all that wee,” Fox said mildly.

“The Doctor, Mr Bard, Mr Hewson, the Reverend and Pollock. And if you’re right one of them’s the toughest proposition in what they call the international crime world. You wouldn’t credit it, though, would you? Here!” Mr Tillottson said, struck by a new thought. “You wouldn’t entertain the idea of the whole boiling being in cahoots, would you? If so: why? Why go river-cruising if they’re a pack of villains in a great big international racket. Not for kicks you’d think, now, would you?”

“Of the lot that remains on board, excluding the Tretheways,” Alleyn said, “I incline to think there’s only one non-villain. I’ll give you my reasons, such as they are, and I fully admit they wouldn’t take first prize in the inescapable logic stakes. But still. Here they are.”

His colleagues listened in massive silence. Fox sighed heavily when he had finished. “And that,” he said, “followed out, leaves us with only one guess for the identity of the Jampot. Or does it?”

“I think it does. If, if, if and it’s a hell of a big if.”

“I’ll back it,” Fox said. “What’s our next bit of toil?”

“We don’t wait for the report on the p.m. I think, Br’er Fox, we cut in and use our search-warrant. What’s the time? Five past nine. If they’ve gone to bed it’s just too bad. Back to Ramsdyke Lock with us. Did you pick up a bit of nosh, by the way?”

Pickle and beef sandwiches and a couple of half-pints.”

“We’ll sink them on the trip. Hark bloody forrard away.”

-3-

If events do, as some would have us believe, stamp an intangible print upon their surroundings, this phenomenon is not instantaneous. Murder doesn’t scream instantly from the walls of a room that may be drenched in blood. Clean the room up and it is just a room again. If violence of behaviour or of emotion does, in fact, project itself upon its immediate surroundings, like light upon photographic film, the process seems to be cumulative rather than immediate. It may be a long time after the event that people begin to think: this is an unhappy house. Or room. Or place. Or craft.

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.