Ngaio Marsh - Clutch of Constables

“You hear that?” he said. “You understand what’s been said? You know what you’ve allowed to be done, you disgusting chap?”

Alleyn said: “All right, Cape, you’ll have to take what’s coming, won’t you?”

He squatted back on his heels. “This is no good,” he said and turned to the two constables: “Go down to the lockhouse and get spades. There’s not a hope, now, but we’ve got to act as if there was. And bring something — pieces of wood — galvanised iron — anything to cover these prints. Quick as you can. Thompson, have you got a flash? All right. Go ahead.”

Sergeant Thompson moved in with the hand-held camera he used in emergencies. His light flashed intermittently. The wretched Cape and his opposite number thundered downhill.

“We’d better continue to go through the motions,” Alleyn said: “As I recollect there were two props. One may have been used to knock away the other. He’d have a second or two to jump clear. Or there may have been a spare timber lying around.”

Fox said: “What’s the form, Mr Alleyn? About that lot down there in the lock? There’s nobody missing?” He jerked his head at the rubble. ”Apart from her?”

“The Skipper says not but we’ll have to see them. Look Bert, will you go down there? Ring your local police surgeon. My compliments and he’ll be needed again, with the ambulance and the usual equipment. Give him the story and tell him it’s suspected homicide. Then get yourself aboard the Zodiac . We won’t raise her until we’ve checked and then only when we can muster a closer guard. We’ve got a tough little clutch of villains down there and the big double-barrel himself.”

“I’ll go, then. And if they are all there?”

“Call off the general search and bring the men in to Ramsdyke.”

“See you in a wee while, then,” Tillottson said.

Bailey and Thompson went back to the car to fetch their heavy gear and Alleyn and Fox were left together: a tall elegant figure and a large thickset one incongruously moonlit in the wapentake field and scraping like dogs with their forepaws at gravelly rubble.

“This is quite a big case,” Fox remarked.

“You are the king of meiosis. Take an international triple murderer fresh from his latest kill, and pen him up with his associates in a pleasure craft at the bottom of a lock. Flavour with at least three innocent beings and leave to explode. And you call it quite a big case.”

“I suppose,” Fox said, disregarding this, “it was all done under—” He stopped short. “How do you work it out?” he said. “A put-up job, the whole thing? What?”

“She was blowing up for trouble when we had that last interview. She may have threatened to grass on them. Perhaps, the Jampot saw how she shaped up, and offered to get her away. Or—,” Alleyn panted as he shifted a largish boulder, “or she may simply have bolted. Whichever way it was, she raised a rumpus—screeching and on-going. When that ass Cape flung himself aboard, off she lit in the fog, pursued I don’t mind betting by the Jampot. In a matter of minutes they were over the embankment and into the pit. And that was it.”

“I like that one best.”

“It has a Foljambe smack about it, you think?”

“Suppose,” Fox said, “she’s not here. Suppose she and whoever-it-was came up here this afternoon and she poked into this excavation and came out again and it collapsed later?”

“No prints to suggest a return. And why did whoever-it-was try to obliterate his own prints?”

“There’s that, of course. And you make out that while the commotion in the Zodiac still continued he went straight back and was all present and correct when that silly chump Cape and the Skipper started counting heads in the saloon?”

“That’s it.” They worked for some time in silence.

“I don’t know,” Fox said presently. “I don’t somehow feel too certain she’s here.”

“Don’t you?” Alleyn said with a change of voice.

Fox let out an oath and drew back his hand.

From under a counterpane of soil that might have been withdrawn by a sleeping hand, a foot stuck up, rigid in its well-made American walking shoe.

The two constables came up the hill, swinging a lantern and carrying shovels. Bailey and Thompson returned with their gear. In a very little while they had uncovered Miss Hewson. Her print dress was up round her neck and contained her arms: Her body and legs clad in their sensible undergarments were shockingly displayed and so was her face: open eyes and open mouth filled with sandy soil and the cheekbones cut about with gravel.

“But not congested,” Fox said and added loudly: “That’s not a suffocated face. Is it?”

“Oh, no,” Alleyn said. “No. Did you expect it would be, Br’er Fox? It’s hopeless but we’ll try artificial respiration.”

One of the local men took off his helmet and knelt down.

“The old carotid job?” Fox mused.

“That’s what I expect. We’ll see what the doctor says.”

Fox made a movement of his head towards the hidden Zodiac .

“Not, of course—him?”

“No. No. And yet—After all, why not? Why not, indeed.” He thought for a moment. “Perhaps better not,” he said and turned to Bailey and Thompson. “The lot,” he said. “Get going.”

He and Fox moved to where the roof had originally overhung the excavation. Here they looked down on the whole subsidence. Tiny runnels of friable soil trickled and started at their foot-fall. They found no footprints or traces of obliteration.

Alleyn said: “I think you’d better take over here, Br’er Fox, if you will. Meet the doctor when he comes and when he’s finished bring him down to the lock.”

As he went down the hill Thompson’s flash-lamp blinked and blinked again.

The River was still misted but when Alleyn looked into the lock, there was the roof of the Zodiac ’s wheel-house, her deck and the tarpaulin cover, the top of a helmet, shoulders, a stomach and a pair of regulation boots.

Light from the saloon shone on the wet walls of the lock. He could hear voices.

“Hallo,” he said. The constable looked up and saluted. He was the man who had been on duty by the pub.

“There’s a ladder at the lockhouse, sir,” he said.

“I’ll drop, thank you.”

He managed this feat and for what turned out to be the last time, met the Zodiac passengers in the Zodiac saloon.

-4-

They were in what Fox liked to call déshabillé and looking none the better for it with the exception of Dr Natouche who wore a dressing-gown of sombre grandeur, scarlet kid slippers and a scarf that bore witness as did none of his other garments, to an exotic taste for colour. He was, indeed, himself an exotic, sitting apart at a corner table, upright, black and without expression. Troy would have liked to paint him, Alleyn thought, as he was now. What a pity she couldn’t.

The Skipper also sat apart, looking watchful. Mr Tillottson was back at his former table and the passengers were in the semi-circular seat under the windows. Hewson at once began a heated protest. His sister! Where was his sister! What was the meaning of all this! Did Alleyn realise that he and his sister were American citizens and as such were entitled to protest to their Ambassador in London? Did he appreciate—

Alleyn let it run for a minute and then clamped down.

“I think,” he said, “that we do have a rough idea of the situation, Mr Hewson. We’re in touch with the Federal Bureau in New York. They’ve been very helpful.”

Hewson changed colour, opened his mouth and shut it again.

Alleyn said: “Do you really not know where your sister has gone?”