Clutch of Constables

‘Oh!’ cried Miss Rickerby-Carrick in ecstasy. ‘Isn’t it lovely! Oh, do look! Look, look, look!’ she insisted, first to one and then to another of her fellow-passengers. ‘Who would have thought our quiet old river could froth up and behave like a fairytale? Like a dream isn’t it? Isn’t it?’

‘More like washing-day I’m afraid, Miss Rickerby-Carrick,’ said Mrs Tretheway looking over the half-door. ‘It’s detergent. There’s a factory beyond those trees. Tea is ready in the saloon,’ she added.

‘Oh, no!’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick lamented. A flying wisp of detergent settled on her nose. ‘Oh, dear!’ she said crossly and went down to the saloon, followed by the others.

‘How true it is,’ Caley Bard remarked, ‘that beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder.’

He spoke to Troy but Dr Natouche, who was behind her, answered him.

‘Surely,’ Dr Natouche said, ‘not so much in the eye as in the mind. I remember that on a walk – through a wood, you know – I looked into a dell and saw, deep down, an astonishing spot of scarlet. I thought: Ah! A superb fungus secretly devouring the earth and the air. You know? One of those savage fungi that one thinks of as devils? I went down to look more closely at it and found it was a discarded fish-tin with a red label. Was it the less beautiful for my discovery?’

He had turned to Troy. ‘Not to my way of looking,’ she said. ‘It was a good colour and it had made its effect.’

‘We are back aren’t we,’ Caley Bard said, ‘at that old Florentine person with the bubucular nose. We are to assume that the painter doted on every blackhead, crevasse and bump.’

‘Yes,’ Troy said. ‘You are.’

‘So that if a dead something – a fish or a cat – popped up through that foam, for instance, and its colour and shape made a pleasing mélange with its surroundings, it would be a paintable subject and therefore beautiful?’

‘You take,’ she said dryly, ‘the very words from my mouth.’

Mr Bard looked at her mouth for a second or two.

‘And what satisfaction,’ he said under his breath, ‘is there in that?’ He turned away and Troy thought, almost at once, that she must have misheard him.

Miss Rickerby-Carrick flapped into the conversation like a wet sheet. ‘Oh don’t stop. Go on. Do, do, go on. I don’t want to lose a word of this,’ she cried. ‘Because it makes a point that I’m most awfully keen on. Beauty is everywhere. In everything,’ she shouted and swept her arm past Mr Lazenby’s spectacles. ‘“Beauty is Truth; Truth, Beauty”,’ she quoted. ‘That’s all we need to know.’

‘That’s a very, very profound observation, Miss Rickerby-Carrick,’ Mr Hewson observed kindly.

‘I just don’t go along with it,’ his sister said. ‘I’ve seen a whole lot of Truth that wasn’t beautiful. A whole heap of it.’

Mr Pollock, who had been utterly silent for a very long time now heaved an enormous sigh and as if infected by his gloom the other passengers also fell silent.

Somebody – Mr Lazenby? – had left the morning’s newspaper on the settle, the paper in which her own photograph had appeared. Troy, who did not eat with her tea, picked it up and seeing nothing to interest her, idly turned over a page.

‘Man found strangled.

‘The body of a man who had been strangled was found at 8 p.m. last night in a flat in Cyprus Street, Soho. He is believed to have been a picture-dealer and the police who are making inquiries give his name as K.G.Z. Andropulos.’

The passenger list was still on the table. Troy looked at the name Caley Bard had crossed out in favour of her own.

She rose with so abrupt a movement that one or two of her companions glanced up at her. She dropped the newspaper on the seat and went down to her cabin. After some thought, she said to herself: ‘If nobody has read it there’s no reason why I should point it out. It’s a horrible bit of news.’

And then she thought that if, as seemed probable, the paragraph had in fact not been noticed, it might be as well to get rid of the paper, the more especially since she would like to repress her own photograph before it went into general circulation. She could imagine Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s ejaculations: ‘And there you both are, you and the murdered man who was to have your berth. Fancy!’ She hunted out her sketchbook and returned to the saloon.

The newspaper was nowhere to be seen.

III

Troy waited for a minute or two in the saloon to collect her thoughts. Her fellow-passengers were still at tea and apparently quite undisturbed. She went up on deck. The Skipper was at the wheel.

‘Everything all right, Mrs Alleyn?’ he asked.

‘Yes, thank you. Yes. Everything,’ said Troy and found herself a chair.

Most of the detergent foam had been left behind by now. The Zodiac sailed towards evening through clear waters, low fields and occasional groups of trees.

Troy began to draw the Signs of the Zodiac, placing them in a ring and giving them a wonderfully strange character. Mrs Tretheway’s rhyme could go in the middle and later on there would be washes of colour.

She was vaguely aware of a sudden burst of conversation in the saloon. After a time a shadow fell across her hand and there was Caley Bard again. Troy didn’t look up. He moved to the opposite side and stood with his back towards her, leaning on the taffrail.

‘I’m afraid,’ he said presently, ‘that they’ve rumbled you. Lazenby spotted the photograph in this morning’s paper. I wouldn’t have told them.’

‘I believe you.’

‘The Rickerby-Carrick is stimulated, I fear.’

‘Hell.’

‘And the Hewsons are gratified because they’ve read an article about you in Life Magazine so they know you’re OK and famous. They just can’t think how they missed recognizing you.’

‘Too bad.’

‘Pollock, surprisingly, seemed to be not unaware of your great distinction. Lazenby himself says you are regarded in Australia as being the equal of Drysdale and Dobell.’

‘Nice of him.’

‘There’s this about it; you’ll be able to do what you are doing now, without everybody exclaiming and breathing down your neck. Or I hope you will.’

‘I won’t be doing anything that matters,’ Troy mumbled.

‘How extraordinary!’ he said lightly.

‘What?’

‘That you should be so shy about your work. You!’

‘Well, I can’t help it. Do pipe down like a good chap.’

She heard him chuckle and drag a deck chair into position. Presently she smelt his pipe. ‘Evidently,’ she thought, ‘they haven’t spotted the Andropulos bit in the paper.’ She considered this for a moment and then added: ‘Or have they?’

The River now described a series of loops so extreme, and so close together that the landscape seemed to turn about the Zodiac like a diorama. Wapentake church spire advanced and retreated and set to partners with a taller spire in the market town of Tollardwark which they approached with the utmost slyness, now leaving it astern and now coming round a bend and making straight for it. The water darkened with the changing sky. Along its banks and in its backwaters and eddies the creatures that belonged to The River began to come out on their evening business: water-rats, voles, toads and leaping fish as well as the insects: dragonflies in particular. Once, looking up from her drawing, Troy caught sight of a pair of ears against the sky and thought: ‘There goes Wat, the hare.’ A company of ducks in close formation paddled past the Zodiac. Where trees stood along the banks the air pulsated with high, formless, reiterative bird-chattering.

Troy thought: ‘Cleopatra on the River Cydnus wasn’t given more things to hear and look at.’

At intervals she stopped drawing in order to observe, but the Signs of the Zodiac grew under her hand. She amused herself by mentally allotting one to each of her fellow-passengers. The Hewsons, of course, belonged to the Heavenly Twins and Mr Pollock, because his club foot affected his gait, would be the Crab. Miss Rickerby-Carrick might be assigned to Taurus because she ran like a Bull at every Gate, but almost certainly, thought Troy, Virgo was entirely appropriate. So she gave a pair of bovine horns to the rampaging motorcyclist. Because of a certain sting in the tail of many of his observations, she decided upon Scorpio for Caley Bard. And Mr Lazenby? Well: he seemed to be extremely ill-sighted, his dark spectacles gave him a blind look like Justice, and Justice carries Scales. Libra for him. As for Dr Natouche, he must be a splendour in the firmament: Sagittarius the Archer with open shoulders and stretched bow. She began to draw The Archer in his image. Mrs Tretheway didn’t seem to fit anywhere except perhaps, as they had a sexy connotation, under the Fish with the Glittering Tails. She observed the Skipper at his wheel, noted the ripple of muscles under his immaculate shirt and the close-clipped curly poll beneath his cap. The excessive masculinity, she decided, belonged to the Ram and Tom-of-all-work could be the Man who carried the Watering-pot. And having run out of passengers she raised one of the Lion’s eyebrows and thus gave him a look of her husband. ‘Which leaves me for the Goat,’ thought Troy, ‘and very suitable too, I daresay.’

One by one the passengers, with the exception of Dr Natouche, came on deck. In their several fashions and with varying degrees of success, they displayed tact towards Troy. The Hewsons smiled at each other and retired, with brochures and Readers’ Digests, to their chairs. Mr Lazenby turned his dark spectacles towards Troy, nodded three times and passed majestically by. Mr Pollock behaved as if she wasn’t there until he was behind her and then, she clearly sensed, had a good long stare over her shoulder at what she was doing.

Miss Rickerby-Carrick was wonderful. When she had floundered, with her customary difficulty, through the half-door at the top of the companion-way, she paused to converse with the Skipper but as she talked to him she rolled her eyes round until they could take in Troy. Presently she left him and archly biting her underlip advanced on tip-toe. She bent and whispered, close to Troy’s ear: ‘Don’t put me in it,’ and so passed on gaily to her deck chair.

The general set-up having now become quietly ridiculous, Troy swung round to find Mr Pollock close behind her.

His eyes were half-closed and he looked at her drawing, unmistakably with the air of someone who knew. For a moment they faced each other. He turned away, swinging his heavy foot.

Caley Bard, with a startling note of anger in his voice, said: ‘Have you been given an invitation to a Private View, Mr Pollock?’

A silence followed. At last Mr Pollock said in a stifled voice: ‘It’s very nice. Lovely,’ and retired to the far end of the deck.

Troy shut her sketchbook and with a view to papering over what seemed to be some kind of crisis, made conversation with everybody about the landscape.

The Zodiac reached Tollard Lock at 6.15 and tied up for the night.

CHAPTER 3

Tollardwark

‘At that time,’ Alleyn said, ‘I was on my way to Chicago and from there to San Francisco. We were setting up a joint plan of action with USA to cope with an international blow-up in the art-forgery world. We were pretty certain, though not positive, that the Jampot was well in the phoney picture trade and that the same group was combining it with a two-way drug racket. My wife’s letters to me from her river cruise missed me in New York and were forwarded to Chicago and thence to San Francisco.

‘On reading them I put through a call to the Yard.’

I

Monday.

Tollardwark.

10.15 p.m.

‘… This will probably arrive with the letter I posted this morning at Ramsdyke. I’m writing in my cabin having returned from Tollardwark where we spend our first night and I’m going to try and set out the sequence of events as you would do it – economically but in detail. I’m almost certain that when they are looked at as a whole they will be seen to add up to nothing in particular.

‘Indeed, I only tell you about these silly little incidents, my darling, because I know you won’t make superior noises, and because in a cock-eyed sort of way I suppose they may be said to tie in with what you’re up to at the moment. I know, very well, that they may amount to nothing.

‘You remember the silly game people used to play: making up alphabetical rhymes of impending disaster? “T is for Tiger decidedly plumper. What’s that in his mouth? Oh it’s Agatha’s jumper.”

‘There are moments on this otherwise enchanting jaunt when your Agatha almost catches the sound of something champing in the jungle.

‘It really began tonight at Tollardwark –’

II

They had berthed on the outskirts of the little market town and after dinner the passengers explored it. Troy sensed frontal attacks from Miss Rickerby-Carrick and possibly Caley Bard so, having a plan of her own, she slipped away early. There was an office on the wharf with a telephone booth at the disposal of the passengers. As it was open and nobody seemed to be about, she went straight in.

There was one thing about that number, Troy thought, you did get through quickly. In seconds she was saying: ‘Is Inspector Fox in the office? Could I speak to him? It’s Mrs Roderick Alleyn,’ and almost immediately: ‘Br’er Fox? Troy Alleyn. Listen. I expect you all know, but in case you don’t: It’s about the Soho thing in this morning’s paper. The man was to have been a passenger in the –’ She got it out as tidily and succinctly as she could, but she had only given the briefest outline when he cut in.

‘Now, that’s very kind of you, Mrs Alleyn,’ the familiar paddy voice said. ‘That’s very interesting. I happen to be working on that job. And you’re speaking from Tollardwark? And you’ve got the vacant cabin? And you’re talking from a phone box? From where?… I see … Yes.’ A pause. ‘Yes. We heard yesterday from New York and he’s having a very pleasant time.’

‘What?’ Troy ejaculated. ‘Who? You mean Rory?’

‘That’s right, Mrs Alleyn. Very nice indeed to have heard from you. We’ll let you know, of course, if there’s any change of plan. I think it might be as well if you didn’t say very much at your end,’ Mr Fox blandly continued. ‘I expect I’m being unduly cautious, indeed I’m sure I am, but if you can do so without drawing attention to it, I wonder if you could drop in at our place in Tollardwark in about half an hour or so? It could be, if necessary, to ask if that fur you lost at your exhibition has been found. Very nice to hear from you. My godson well? Goodbye, then.’

Troy hung up abruptly and turned. Through the obscured-glass door panel which had a hole in one corner, she saw a distorted figure move quickly backwards. She came out and found Mr Lazenby standing by the outside entrance.

‘You’ve finished your call, Mrs Alleyn?’ he jovially asked. ‘Good-oh. I’ll just make mine then. Bishopscourt at Norminster. I spent the week there and this will let me off my bread-and-butter stint. You don’t know the Bishop, I suppose? Of Norminster? No? Wonderfully hospitable old boy. Gave the dim Aussie parson a memorable time. Car, chauffeur, the lot. Going to explore?’

Yes, Troy said, she thought she would explore. Mr Lazenby replied that he understood from the Bishop that the parish church was most interesting. And he went into the telephone booth.

Troy, strangely perturbed, walked up a narrow, cobbled street into the market square of Tollardwark.

She found it enchanting. It had none of the self-consciousness that settles upon too many carefully preserved places in the Home Counties, although, so the Zodiac brochure said, it had in fact been lovingly rescued from the clumsy botching of Victorian meddlers. But no care, added the brochure, could replace in their niches the delicate heads, hands, leaves and curlicues knocked off by Cromwell’s clean-living wreckers. But the fourteenth-century inn had been wakened from neglect, a monstrous weather-cock removed from the crest of the Eleanor Cross and Lady Godiva’s endowed church of St Crispin-in-the-Fields was in good heart. As if to prove this, it being practice-night for the bell-ringers, cascades of orderly rumpus were shaken out of the belfry as Troy crossed the square.

There were not many people about. She felt some hesitation in asking her way to the police station. She walked round the square and at intervals caught sight of her fellow-passengers. There, down a very dark alley were Mr and Miss Hewson, peering in at an unlit Tudor window in a darkened shop. Mr Pollock was in the act of disappearing round a corner near the church where, moving backwards through a lychgate, was Miss Rickerby-Carrick. It struck Troy that the whole set had an air of commedia dell’ arte about them and that the Market Square might be their painted backdrop. She was again plagued by the vague feeling that somewhere, somehow a masquerade of sorts was being acted out and that she was involved in it. ‘The people of the Zodiac,’ she thought, ‘all moving in their courses and I with them, but for the life of me I don’t know where we’re going.’

She suspected that Caley Bard had thought it would be pleasant if they explored Tollardwark together and she was not surprised to see him across the square, turning, with a disconsolate air, into the Northumberland Arms. She would have enjoyed his company, other things being equal. She had almost completed her walk round the Market Square and wondered which of the few passers-by she should accost when she came to the last of the entrances into the square and looking down it, she saw the familiar blue lamp.

The door swung-to behind her, shutting out the voices of the bells, and she was in another world smelling of linoleum, disinfectant and uniforms. The Sergeant on duty said at once: ‘Mrs Alleyn would it be? I thought so. The Superintendent’s expecting you, Mrs Alleyn. ‘I’ll just – oh, here you are, sir. Mrs Alleyn.’

He was the predictable large, hard-muscled man just beginning to run to overweight, with extremely bright eyes and a sort of occupational joviality about him.

He shook Troy warmly by the hand. ‘Tillottson,’ he said. ‘Nice to meet you, Mrs Alleyn,’ and took her into his office.

‘Very pleased,’ said Superintendent Tillottson, ‘to meet Roderick Alleyn’s good lady. His textbook’s known as the Scourge of the Service in these parts and I wouldn’t mind if you passed that on to him.’

He laughed very heartily at this joke, placed the palms of his hands on his desk and said: ‘Yes. Well now, I’ve been talking to Mr Fox at Head Office, Mrs Alleyn, and he suggested it might be quite an idea if we had a little chat. So, if it’s not putting you to too much trouble –’

He led Troy, very adroitly, through the past eight hours and she was surprised that he should be so particular as to details. Evidently he was aware of this reaction because when she had finished he said he supposed she would like to know what it was all about and proceeded to give her a neat report.

‘This character, this K.G.Z. Andropulos, was mixed up in quite a bit of trouble: trouble to the Yard, Mrs Alleyn, before and after the Yard got alongside him. He was, as you may have supposed, of Greek origin and he’s been involved in quite a number of lines: a bit of drug-running here, a bit of receiving there, some interest in the antique lay, a picture-dealing business in Cyprus Street, Soho, above which he lived in the flat where his body was found yesterday evening. He wasn’t what you’d call a key-figure but he became useful to the Yard by turning informer from spite having fallen out with a much bigger man than himself. A very big man indeed in the international underworld, as people like to call it, a character called Foljambe and known as the Jampot, in whom we are very, very interested.’

‘I’ve heard about him,’ Troy said. ‘From Rory.’

‘I’ll be bound. Now, it’s a guinea to a gooseberry, to our way of thinking, that this leading character – this Jampot – is behind the business in Cyprus Street and therefore the Department is more than ordinarily concerned to get to the bottom of it and anything that connects with Andropulos, however slightly, has to be followed up.’

‘Even to Cabin 7 in the rivercraft Zodiac?’

‘That’s right. We’d like to know, d’you see, Mrs Alleyn, just why this chap Andropulos took the freakish notion to book himself in and when he did it. And, very particularly, we’d like to know whether any of the other passengers had any kind of link with him. Now Teddy Fox –’

‘Who!’ Troy exclaimed.

‘Inspector Fox, Mrs Alleyn. He and I were in the uniformed branch together. Edward Walter Fox, he is.’

‘I suppose I knew,’ Troy mused. ‘Yes, of course I knew. We always call him Br’er Fox. He’s a great friend.’

‘So I understood. Yes. Well, he’s a wee bit concerned about you going with this lot in the Zodiac. He’s wondering what the Chief-Super – your good man, Mrs Alleyn – would make of it. He’s on his way to this conference in Chicago and Ted Fox wonders if he shouldn’t try and talk to him.’

‘Oh, no!’ Troy ejaculated. ‘Surely not.’

‘Well now, frankly it seems a bit far-fetched to me but there it is. Ted Fox cut you short, in a manner of speaking, when you rang him from the Waterways office down there and he did so on the general principle that you can’t be too careful on the public phone. He’s a careful sort of character himself, as you probably know, and, by gum, he’s thorough.’

‘He is, indeed.’

‘Yes. That’s so. Yes. Now Ted’s just been called out of London, following a line on the Andropulos business. It may take him across the Channel. In the meantime he’s asked me to keep an eye on your little affair. So what we’d like to do is take a wee look at the passenger list. In the meantime I just wonder about these two incidents you’ve mentioned. Now, what are they? First of all you get the impression that someone, you’re not sure who, got a fright or a shock or a peculiar reaction when you said there were Constables all over the place. And second: you see this bit about Andropulos in the paper, you drop the paper on the seat and go to your cabin. You get the idea it might be pleasanter for all concerned not to spread the information that an intended passenger has been murdered. You go back for the purpose of confiscating the paper and find it’s disappeared. Right? Yes. Now, for the first of these incidents, I just wonder if it wouldn’t be natural for any little gathering of passengers waiting in a quiet lock in peaceful surroundings to get a bit of a jolt when somebody suddenly says there are police personnel all over the place. Swarming, I think you said was the expression you used. And clutch. Swarming with a clutch of Constables. You meaning the artist. They assuming the police.’

‘Well – yes. But they didn’t all exclaim at once. They didn’t all say: “Where, where, what do you mean, policemen?” or things like that. Miss Rickerby-Carrick did and I think Miss Hewson did a bit and I rather fancy Mr Caley Bard said something like: “What can you mean?” But I felt terribly strongly that someone had had a shock. I – Oh,’ Troy said impatiently, ‘how silly that sounds! Pay no attention to it. Really.’

‘Shall we take a wee look at the second item, then? The disappearance of the newspaper? Isn’t it possible, Mrs Alleyn, that one of them saw you were put out and when you went to your cabin picked up the paper to see what could have upset you? And found the paragraph? And had the same reaction as you did: don’t put it about in case it upsets people? Or maybe, didn’t notice your reaction but read the paragraph and thought it’d be nice if you didn’t know you’d got a cabin that was to have been given to a murder victim? Or they might all have come to that conclusion? Or, the simplest of all, the staff might just have tidied the paper away?’