Clutch of Constables

Chapter 2 – The Wapentake

“He had been operating,” Alleyn said, “in a very big way in the Middle East. All among the drug barons with one of whom he fell out and who is thought to have grassed on him. From drugs he turned to the Old Master racket and was certainly behind several very big jobs in Paris. Getting certificates for good fakes from galleries and the widows of celebrated painters. He then crossed to New York where he worked off the fruits of this ploy until Interpol began to make interested noises. By the way, it may be noted that at this juncture he had not got beyond a Blue Circular which means of course—”

The boots of the intelligent-looking sandy man in the second row scraped the floor. He made a slight gesture and looked eager.

“I see you know,” Alleyn said.

“Ay, Sir, I do. A Blue International Circular signifies that Interpol cannot place the identity of the creeminal.”

“That’s it. However, they were getting warmer and in 1965 the Jampot found it necessary to transfer to Bolivia where for once he went too far and was put in gaol. Something to do with masquerading in female attire with criminal intent. From there, as I’ve said, he escaped, in May of last year, and sometime later arrived with an efficiently cooked-up passport in a Spanish freighter in England. At that juncture the Yard had no specific charge against him although he featured heavily in the discussions we were holding in San Francisco. He must have already been in touch with the British group he subsequently directed, and one of them booked him in for a late summer cruise in the Zodiac. The object of this manoeuvre will declare itself as we go along.

“At this point I’d like you to take particular note of a disadvantage under which the Jampot laboured. In doing this I am indulging in hindsight. At the time we are speaking about we had no clear indication of what he looked like and our only photograph was a heavily bearded job supplied by the Bolivian police. The ears are hidden by flowing locks, the mouth by a luxuriant moustache and the jaw and chin by rich and carefully tended whiskers.

“We now know, of course, that there was, in his appearance, something that set him apart, that made him physically speaking, an odd man out. Need I,” Alleyn asked, “remind you what this was—?”

The intelligent-looking man seated in the second row made a slight gesture. “Exactly,” Alleyn said and enlarged upon it to the class.

“I’m able,” he went on, “to give you a pretty full account of this apparently blameless little cruise because my wife wrote at some length about it. In her first letter she told me—”

-1-

-2-

Troy enjoyed coming into the locks. Ramsdyke, as she observed in her letter, was a charming one: a seemly house, a modest plot, the towpath, a bridge over The River and the Ramsdyke itself, a neat wet line, Roman-ruled across the fens. On the farther side was the ‘Constable’ view and farther down-stream a weir. The Zodiac moved quietly into the lock but before she sank with its waters Troy jumped ashore, posted her letter and followed the direction indicated by the Skipper’s tattooed arm and pointed finger. He called after her ‘Twenty minutes’ and she waved her understanding, crossed the towpath, and climbed a grassy embankment.

She came into a field bordered by sod and stone walls and, on the left, beyond the wall, by what seemed to be a narrow road leading down to the bridge. This was the Dyke Way of the brochures. Troy remembered that it came from the village of Wapentake, which her map showed as lying about a mile and a half from the lock. She walked up the field. It rose gently and showed, above its crest, trees and a distant spire.

The air smelt of earth and grass and, delicately, of wood-smoke. It seemed lovely to Troy. She felt a great uplift of spirit and was so preoccupied with her own happiness that she came upon the meeting place of the wapentake, just where the Skipper had said it would be, before she was aware of it.

It was a circular hollow, sometimes called, the brochure said, a Pot, and it was lined with grass, mosses and fern. Here the Plantagenet knights-of-the-shire had sat at their fortnightly Hundreds, dealing out justice as they saw it in those days and as the growing laws directed them. Troy wondered if, when the list was a heavy one, they stayed on into the evening and night and if torches were lit.

Below the wapentake hollow and quite close to the lock, another, but a comparatively recent depression had been cut into the hillside: perhaps to get a load of gravel of which there seemed to be a quantity in the soil, or perhaps by archaeological amateurs. An overhanging shelf above this excavation had been roughly shored up by poles with an old door for roof. The wood had weathered and looked to be rotting. “A bit of an eyesore,” thought Troy.

She went into the wapentake and sat there, and fancied she felt beneath her some indication of a kind of bench that must have been chopped out of the soil, she supposed, seven centuries ago. “I’m an ignoramus about history,” Troy thought, “but I do like to feel it in my bones,” and she peopled the wapentake with heads like carven effigies, with robes in the colours of stained glass and with glints of polished steel.

She began to wonder if it would be possible to make a very formalised drawing—dark and thronged with seated, lawgiving shapes. A puff of warm air moved the grass and the hair of her head and up the sloping field came Dr Natouche.

He was bareheaded and had changed his tweed jacket for a yellow sweater. When he saw Troy he checked and stood still, formidable because of his height and colour against the mild background of the waterways. Troy waved to him. “Come up,” she called. “Here’s the wapentake.”

“Thank you.”

He came up quickly, entered the hollow and looked about him. “I have read the excellent account in our little book,” he said. “So here they sat, those old chaps.” The colloquialism came oddly from him.

“You sit here, too,” Troy suggested, wanting to see his head and his torso, in its yellow sweater, against the moss and fern.

He did so, squaring himself and resting his hands on his knees. His teeth and the whites of his eyes were high accents in the picture he presented for Troy. “You ask for the illustration of an incongruity,” he said.

“You would be nice to paint. Do you really feel incongruous? I mean is this sort of thing quite foreign to you?”

“Not altogether. No.”

They said nothing for a time and Troy did not think there was any awkwardness in their silence.

A lark sang madly overhead and the sound of quiet voices floated up from the lock. Above the embankment they could see the top of Zodiac’s wheel house. Now it began very slowly to sink. They heard Miss Rickerby-Carrick shout and laugh.

A motor-cycle engine crescendoed out of the distance, clattered and exploded down the lane and then reduced its speed and noise and stopped.

“One would think it was those two again,” said Troy.

Dr Natouche rose. “It is,” he said, “I can see them. Actually, it is those two. They are raising their hands.”

“How extraordinary,” she said idly. “Why should they turn up?”

“They may be staying in the district. We haven’t come very far, you know.”

“I keep forgetting. One’s values change on The River.” Troy broke of a fern frond and turned it between her fingers. Dr Natouche sat down again.

“My father was an Ethiopian,” he said presently. “He came to this country with a Mission fifty years ago and married an Englishwoman. I was born and educated in England.”

“Have you never been to your own country?”

“Once. But I was alien there. And like my father, I married an Englishwoman. I am a widower. My wife died two months ago.”

“Was that why you came on this cruise?”

“We were to have come together.”

“I see,” Troy said.

“She would have enjoyed it. It was something we could have done,” he said.

“Have you found many difficulties about being as you are? Black?”

“Of course. How sensible of you to ask, Mrs Alleyn. One knows everybody thinks such questions.”

“Well,” Troy said, “I’m glad it was all right to ask.”

“I am perfectly at ease with you,” Dr Natouche stated rather, Troy felt, as he might have told a patient there was nothing the matter with her and really almost arousing a comparable pleasure. “Perfectly,” he repeated after a pause: “I don’t think, Mrs Alleyn, you could ever say anything to me that would change that condition.”

Miss Rickerby-Carrick appeared at the top of the embankment. “Hoo-hoo!” she shouted. “What’s it like up there?”

“Very pleasant,” Troy said.

“Jolly good.” She floundered up the field towards them, blowing her nose as she came. Troy was suddenly very sorry for her. Were there, she asked herself, in Birmingham, where Miss Rickerby-Carrick lived, people, apart from Mavis, who actually welcomed her company?

Dr Natouche fetched a sigh and stood up. “I see a gate over there into the lane,” he said. “I think there is time to walk back that way if you would care to do so.”

“You go,” Troy muttered. “I’d better wait for her.”

“Really? Very well.”

He stayed for a moment or two, politely greeted Miss Rickerby-Carrick and then strode away. “Isn’t he a dear?” Miss Rickerby-Carrick panted. “Don’t you feel he’s somebody awfully special?”

“He seems a nice man,” Troy answered and try as she might, she couldn’t help flattening her voice.

“I do think we all ought to make a special effort. I get awfully worked-up about it. When people go on like Mr Pollock, you know. I tackled Mr Pollock about his attitude. I do that, you know, I do tackle people. I said: ‘Just because he’s got another pigmentation,’ I said, ‘why should you think he’s different.’ They’re not different. You do agree, don’t you?”

“No,” Troy said. “I don’t. They are different. Profoundly.”

“Oh! How can you say so?”

“Because I think it’s true. They are different in depth from Anglo-Saxons. So are Slavs. So are Latins.”

“Oh! If you mean like that,” she said and broke into ungainly laughter. “Oh, I see. Oh, yes. Then you do agree that we should make a special effort.”

“Look, Miss Rickerby-Carrick—”

“I say, do call me Hay.”

“Yes—well—thank you. I was going to say that I don’t think Dr Natouche would enjoy special efforts. Really, I don’t.”

“You seem to get on with him like a house on fire,” Miss Rickerby-Carrick pointed out discontentedly.

“Do I? Well, I find him an interesting man.”

“There you are, you see!” she cried, proclaiming some completely inscrutable triumph, and a longish silence ensued. They heard the motor-cycle start up and cross the bridge and listened to the diminishment of sound as it made off in the direction of Norminster.

One by one the other passengers straggled up the field. Mr Pollock behind the rest, swinging his built-up boot. The Hewsons were all set-about with cameras while Caley Bard had a box slung from his shoulder and carried a lepidopterist’s net.

So that, Troy thought, was what it was. When everybody was assembled the Hewsons took photographs of the wapentake by itself and with their fellow-travellers sitting self-consciously round it. Mr Lazenby compared it without, Troy felt, perceptible validity, to an aboriginal place of assembly in the Australian out-back. Mr Pollock read his brochure and then stared with a faint look of disgust at the original.

Caley Bard joined Troy. “So this is where you lit off to,” he murmured. “I got bailed up by that extraordinary lady. She wants to get up a let’s-be-sweet-to-Natouche movement.”

“I know. What did you say?”

“I said that as far as I am concerned, I consider I’m as sweet to Natouche as he can readily stomach. Now, tell me all about the wapentake. I’m allergic to leaflets and I’ve forgotten what the Skipper said. Speak up, do.”

Troy did not bother to react to this piece of cheek. She said: “So you’re a lepidopterist?”

“That’s right. An amateur. Do you find it a sinister hobby? It has rather a sinister reputation, I fear. There was that terrifying film and then didn’t somebody in The Hound of the Baskervilles flit about Dartmoor with a deceiving net and killing-bottle?”

“There’s Nabokov on the credit side.”

“True. But you don’t fancy it, all the same,” he said. “That I can see, very clearly.”

“I like them better alive and on the wing. Did you notice those two motor-cyclists? They seem to be haunting us.”

“Friends of young Tom, it appears. They come from Tollardwark where we stay tonight. Did you know it’s pronounced Toll’ark? It will take us an hour or more to get there by water but by road it’s only a short walk from Ramsdyke. There’s confusion for you!”

“I wouldn’t want to walk: I’ve settled into the River—time—space—dimension.”

“Yes, I suppose it would be rather spoiling to break out of it. Hallo, that’ll be for us.” The Zodiac had given three short hoots. They returned hurriedly and found her waiting downstream from the lock.

There was a weir at Ramsdyke, standing off on their port side. Below the green slide of the fall, the whole surface of the river was smothered in foam: foam in islands and in pinnacles, iridescent foam that twinkled and glinted in the late afternoon sunlight, that shredded away from its own crests, floated like gossamer and broke into nothing.

“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 8pm 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.

-3-

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 O.K. and famous. They just can’t think how they missed recognising 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: dragon-flies 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 motor-cyclist. 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 companionway, 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 deckchair.

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.