Clutch of Constables

Chapter 4 – Crossdyke

“As I told you,” Alleyn said. “I rang up the Yard from San Francisco. Inspector Fox, who was handling the Andropulos Case, was away, but after inquiries I got through to Superintendent Tillottson at Tollardwark. He gave me details of his talks with my wife. One detail worried me a good deal more than it did him.”

Alleyn caught the inevitable glint of appreciation from the man in the second row.

“Exactly,” he said. “As a result I talked to the Yard again and was told there was no doubt that Foljambe had got himself to England and that he was lying doggo. Information received suggested that Andropulos had tried a spot of blackmail and had been fool enough to imply that he’d grass on the Jampot if the latter didn’t come across with something handsome. Andropulos had in fact talked to one of our chaps in the way they do when they can’t make up their minds to tell us something really useful. It was pretty obvious he was hinting at the Jampot.

“So he was murdered for his pains.

“The method used had been that of sudden and violent pressure on the carotids from behind and that method carries the Jampot’s signature. It is sometimes preceded by a karate chop which would probably do the trick anyway, but it’s his little fancy to make assurance double-sure.” The Scot in the second row gave a smirk to indicate his recognition of the quotation. “If I’m not careful,” Alleyn thought, “I’ll be playing up to that chap.”

“There had,” he said, “been two other homicides, one in Ismalia and one in Paris where undoubtedly Foljambe had been the expert. But not a hope of cracking down on him. The latest line suggested that he had lit off for France. An envelope of the sort used by a well-known travel-agency had been dropped on the floor near Andropulos’s body and it had a note of the price of tickets and times of departure from London scribbled on the back. It had, as was afterwards realised, been planted by the Jampot and had successfully decoyed Mr Fox across the Channel. A typical stroke. I’ve already talked about his talent—it amounts to genius—for type-casting himself. I don’t think I mentioned that when he likes to turn it on he has a strong attraction for many, but not all, women. His ear for dialects of every description is phenomenal, of course, but he not only speaks whatever it may be—Oxbridge, superior grammar, Australasian, barrow-boy or Bronx, but he really seems to think along the appropriate wave-lengths. Rather as an actor gets behind the thought-pattern of the character he plays. He can act stupid, by the way, like nobody’s business. He is no doubt a great loss to the stage. He is gregarious, which you’d think would be risky and he has a number of unexpected, off-beat skills that occasionally come in very handy indeed.

“Well: you’ll appreciate the situation. Take a look at it. Andropulos has been murdered, almost certainly by the Jampot and the Jampot’s at large. Andropulos, scarcely a candidate, one would have thought, for the blameless delights of British Inland Waterways was to have been a passenger in the Zodiac. My wife now has his cabin. There’s no logical reason in the wide world why his murderer should be her fellow-passenger: indeed the idea at first sight is ludicrous, and yet and yet—my wife tells me that her innocent remark about ‘Constables’ seemed to cast an extraordinary gloom upon someone or other in the party, that the newspaper report of Andropulos’s murder has been suppressed by someone in the Zodiac, that she’s pretty sure an Australian padre who wears dark glasses and conceals his right eye has purloined a page of a farcical spinster’s diary, that she half-suspects him of listening in to her telephone conversation with Mr Fox and that she herself can’t escape a feeling of impending disaster. And there’s one other feature of this unlikely set-up that, however idiotically, strikes me as being more disturbing than all the rest put together. I wonder if any of you—”

But the man in the second row already had his hand up.

“Exactly,” Alleyn said when the phenomenon had delivered himself of the correct answer in a strong Scots accent. “Quite so. And you might remember that I am five thousand odd miles away in San Francisco on an extremely important conference. What the hell do I do?”

After a moment’s thought the hand went up again.

“All right, all right,” Alleyn said. “You tell me.”

-1-

Hazel Rickerby-Carrick sat in her cabin turning over with difficulty the disastrous pages of her diary.

They were not actually pulp; they were stuck together, buckled, blistered and disfigured. They had half-parted company with the spine and the red covers had leaked into them. The writing, however, had not been irrevocably lost.

She separated the entries for the previous day and for that afternoon. “I’m at it again,” she read dismally. “Trying too hard, as usual. It goes down all right with Mavis, of course, but not with these people: not with Troy Alleyn. If only I’d realised who she was from the first! Or if only I’d heard she was going to be next door in Cabin 7: I could have gone to the Exhibition. I could have talked about her pictures. Of course, I don’t pretend to know anything about—” Here she had had second thoughts and had abstained from completing the aphorism. She separated the sopping page from its successor using a nail-file as a sort of slice. She began to read the final entry. It was for that afternoon, before the diary went overboard.

She had reached the bottom of the page. She picked at it gingerly, slid the nail-file under it, crumpled it and turned it.

The following pages containing her last entry were gone. The inner margins where they were bound together had to some extent escaped a complete soaking. She could see by the fragments that remained that they had been pulled away. “But after all, that’s nothing to go by,” she thought, “because when he dived, Mr Lazenby may have grabbed. The book was open. It was open and lying on its face when it sank. That’s it. That’s got to be it.”

Miss Rickerby-Carrick remained perfectly still for some minutes. Once or twice she passed her arthritic fingers across her eyes and brow almost as if she tried to exorcise some devil of muddlement within.

“He’s a clergyman,” she thought, “a clergyman! He’s been staying with a bishop. I could ask him. Why not? What could he say? Or do? But I’ll ask Troy Alleyn. She’ll jolly well have to listen. It’ll interest her. Her husband!” she suddenly remembered. “Her husband’s a famous detective. I ought to tell Troy Alleyn: and then she may like me to call her Troy. We may get quite chummy,” thought poor Hazel Rickerby-Carrick without very much conviction.

She put the saturated diary open on her bedside shelf where a ray of afternoon sunlight reached it through the porthole.

A nervous weakness had come upon her. She suffered a terrible sense of constraint as if not only her head was iron-bound but as if the tiny cabin contracted about her. “I shan’t sleep in here,” she thought. “I shan’t get a wink or if I do there’ll be beastly dreams and I’ll make noises and they’ll hate me.” And as she fossicked in an already chaotic drawer for Troy’s aspirin she was visited by her great idea. She would sleep on deck. She would wait until the others had settled down and then she would take her Li-lo from its jolly old hidey-hole behind the tarpaulin and blow it up and sleep, as she phrased it to herself, ‘under the wide and starry sky’. And perhaps—perhaps.

“I’ve always been one to go straight at a thing and tackle it,” she thought and finding Troy’s aspirins with the top off inside her sponge bag, she took a couple, lay on her bunk and made several disastrous plans.

-2-

For Troy, the evening at Crossdyke began farcically. The passengers were given an early dinner to enable them to explore the village and the nearby ruin of a hunting lodge where King John had stayed during his misguided antics in the north.

Troy, who had the beginning of a squeamish headache, hoped to get a still earlier start than she had achieved at Tollardwark and to make her call at the police station before any of her fellow-passengers appeared on the scene. Her story of the lost fur was now currency in the ship and would explain the visit if explanation was needed but she hoped to avoid making one.

Throughout dinner Miss Rickerby-Carrick gazed intently at Troy, who found herself greatly put-out by this attention: the more so because what her husband once described as her King-Size Bowels of Compassion had been roused by Miss Rickerby-Carrick. The more exasperating she became, the more infuriatingly succulent her cold, the more embarrassingly fixed her regard, the sorrier Troy felt for her and the less she desired her company. Either, she thought, the wretched woman was doing a sort of dismal lion-hunt, or, hideous notion, had developed a schwarm for Troy herself. Or was it possible, she suddenly wondered, that this extraordinary lady had something of moment to communicate.

Miss Rickerby-Carrick commanded rather less tact than a bull-dozer and it must be clear, Troy thought, to everybody in the saloon that a happening was on the brew.

Determined to look anywhere but at her tormentor, Troy caught the ironical, skew-eyed glance of Caley Bard. He winked and she lowered her gaze. Mr Pollock stared with distaste at Miss Rickerby-Carrick and the Hewsons caught each other’s glances and assumed a mask-like air of detachment. Mr Lazenby and Dr Natouche swopped bits of medieval information about the ruins.

Troy went straight on deck when she had finished her dinner and was about to go ashore when up came Miss Rickerby-Carrick from below, hailing her in a curious kind of soft-pedalled shout. “Mrs Alleyn! I say! Mrs Alleyn!” Troy paused. “Look!” said Miss Rickerby-Carrick coming close to her and whispering. “I — are you going up to the village? Can I come with you? I’ve got something—” she looked over her shoulder and up and down the deck though she must have known as well as Troy that the others were all below. “I want to ask your advice. It’s awfully important. Really. I promise,” she whispered.

“Well — yes. All right, if you really think—”

“Please. I’ll just get my cardi. I won’t be a tick. Only as far as the village. Before the others start—it’s awfully important. Honest injun. Please.”

She advanced her crazy-looking face so close that Troy took an involuntary step backward.

“Be kind!” Miss Rickerby-Carrick whispered. “Let me tell you. Let me!”

She stood before Troy: a grotesque, a dreadfully vulnerable person. And the worst of it was, Troy thought, she herself was now so far caught up in a web of intangible misgivings that she could not know, could not trust herself to judge, whether the panic she thought she saw in those watery eyes was a mere reflection of the ill-defined anxiety which was building itself up around her own very real delight in the little cruise of the Zodiac. Or whether Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s unmistakable schwarm was about to break out in a big way.

“Oh please!” she repeated, “for God’s sake! Please.”

“Well, of course,” Troy said, helplessly. “Of course.”

“Oh, you are a darling,” exclaimed Miss Rickerby-Carrick and bolted for the companionway. She collided with Mr Pollock and there was much confusion and incoherent apology before she retired below and he emerged on deck.

He had brought back to Troy the Signs of the Zodiac with the lettering completed. It was beautifully done, right in scale and manner and execution and Troy told him so warmly. He said in his flat voice with its swallowed consonants and plummy vowels that she need think nothing of it, the obligation was all his and he hung about in his odd way offering a few scraps of disjointed information to the effect that he’d gone from the signwriting into the printing trade but there hadn’t been any money in that. He made remarks that faded out after one or two words and gave curious little sounds that were either self-conscious laughs or coughs.

“Do you paint?” Troy asked. “As well as this? Or draw?”

He hastened to assure her that he did not. “Me? A flippin’ awtist? Do you mind!”

“I thought from the way you looked at this thing—”

“Then you thought wrong,” he said with an unexpected slap of rudeness.

Troy stared at him and he reddened. “Pardon my French,” he said, “I’m naturally crude. I do not paint. I just take a fancy to look.”

“Fair enough,” Troy said pacifically.

He gave her a shamefaced grin and said oh well he supposed he’d better do something about the nightlife of Crossdyke. As he was evidently first going below Troy asked him to keep the drawing for the time being.

He paused at the companionway for Miss Rickerby-Carrick. She erupted with monotonous precipitancy through the half-door, saw Mr Pollock who had the Zodiac drawing open in his hands, looked at it as if it was a bomb and hurried on to Troy.

“Do let’s go,” she said. “Do come on.”

They took their long strides from the gunwale to the bank, a simple exercise inevitably made complex by Miss Rickerby-Carrick, who, when she had recovered herself, seized Troy’s arm and began to gabble.

“At once. I’ll tell you at once before anyone can stop me. It’s about—about—” She drove her free hand through her dishevelled hair and began distractedly to whisper and stammer quite incomprehensibly.

“—about last evening — And — And — Oh God! — And—”

“About what?”

“And — wait — And—”

But it was not to be. She had taken a deep breath, screwed up her eyes and opened her mouth, almost as if she were about to sneeze, when they were hailed from the rear.

“Hi! Wait a bit! What are you two up to?”

It was Mr Lazenby. He leapt nimbly ashore and came alongside Troy. “We can’t have these exclusive ladies’ excursions,” he said roguishly. “You’ll have to put up with a mere man as far as the village.”

Troy looked up at him and he shook a playful finger at her. “He’s rescued me,” she thought and with what she herself felt to be a perverse change of mood suddenly wanted to hear Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s confidences. “Perhaps,” Troy thought, “she’ll tell us both.”

But she didn’t. By means of sundry hard-fingered squeezes and tweaks she conveyed her chagrin. At the same time Mr Lazenby went through much the same routine with Troy’s left arm and she began to feel like Alice between the Queens.

She produced, once more, her story of the lost fur and said she was going to inquire at the local police-station.

“I suppose,” Miss Rickerby-Carrick observed, “they make great efforts for you. Because — I mean — your husband — and everything.”

“Ah!” Mr Lazenby archly mocked. “How right you are! Police protection every inch of the way. Big drama. You heard her say yesterday, Miss Rickerby-Carrick. The landscape’s swarming with Constables.”

The hand within Troy’s right arm began to tremble. “She meant the painter,” whispered Miss Rickerby-Carrick.

“That’s only her cunning. She’s sly as you make ‘em, you may depend upon it. We’re none of us safe.”

The fingers on Troy’s right arm became more agitated while those on her left gave it a brief conspiratorial squeeze. “Arms,” Troy thought. “Last night Dr Natouche and tonight, these two, and I’m not the sort to link arms.” But she was aware that while these contacts were merely irksome, last night’s had both disturbed and reassured her.

She freed herself as casually as she could and talking disjointedly they walked into the village where they were overtaken by Caley Bard, complete with butterfly-net and collector’s box. All desire for the Rickerby-Carrick disclosures had left Troy. She scarcely listened to madly divergent spurts of information: “… my friend, Mavis… you would love her… such a brilliant brain… art… science… butterflies even, Mr Bard… though not for me — Lamborine—… my friend, Mavis… Highlands… how I wish she was here… Mavis…”

The undisciplined voice gushed and dwindled, gabbled and halted. Troy had an almost overwhelming urge to be alone with her headache.

They came up with the cottage police-station. A small car and a motor-cycle stood outside.

“Shall we wait for you?” Bard asked. “Or not?”

“Not, please, I may be quite a time. They’ll probably want to telephone about it. As a matter of fact,” Troy said, “I believe when I’ve finished here I’ll just go back to the Zodiac. For some reason I’ve got a bit of a headache.”

It was an understatement. Her headache was ripening. She was subject to occasional abrupt onsets of migraine and even now a thing like a starburst pulsed in one corner of her field of vision and her temples had begun to throb.

“You poor darling,” cried Miss Rickerby-Carrick. “Shall I come back with you? Would you like a sleeping-pill? Miss Hewson’s got some. She’s given me two for tonight. Shall I wait for you? Yes?”

“But of course we’ll wait,” Mr Lazenby fluted.

Caley Bard said that he was sure Troy would rather be left to herself and proposed that he and Mr Lazenby and Miss Rickerby-Carrick should explore the village together and then he would teach them how to lepidopterise. Troy felt this was a truly noble action.

“Don’t let those bobbies worry you,” he said. “Take care of yourself, do. Hope you recover your morsel of mink.”

“Thank you,” Troy said and tried to convey her sense of obligation without alerting Miss Rickerby-Carrick whose mouth was stretched in an anxious grin. She parted with them and went into the police-station where at once time slipped a cog and she was back in last evening for there was Superintendent Tillottson blandly remarking that he had just popped over from Toll’ark in case there had been any developments. She told him (speaking against the beat of her headache and with the sick dazzle in her vision making nonsense of his face) about Mr Lazenby and the page from the diary and about the odd behaviour of Mr Pollock and Miss Rickerby-Carrick. And again, on describing them, these items shrank into insignificance.

Mr Tillottson with his hands in his pockets, sitting easily on the corner of the local Sergeant’s desk said with great geniality that there didn’t seem to be much in any of that lot did there, and she agreed, longing to be rid of the whole thing and in bed.

“Yerse,” Mr Tillottson said. “So that’s the story.” And he added with the air of making conversation: “And this chap Lazenby had his hair all over his right eye like a hippy? Funny idea in a clergyman. But it was wet, of course.”

“Over his left eye,” Troy corrected as a sharp stab of pain shot through her own.

“His left eye, was it?” said Mr Tillottson casually. “Yes. Fancy. And you never got a look at it. The eye I mean?”

“Well, no. He turned his back when he put on his dark spectacles.”

“P’raps he’s got some kind of disfigurement,” Mr Tillottson airily speculated. “You never know, do you? Jim Tretheway’s a very pleasant kind of chap, isn’t he? And his wife’s smashing, don’t you think, Mrs Alleyn? Very nice couple the Tretheways.”

“Very,” Troy agreed and stood up to a lurching spasm of migraine.

They shook hands again and Mr Tillottson produced, apparently as an afterthought, the suggestion that she should drop in at “their place in Longminster” where she would find Superintendent Bonney a most sympathetic person: “a lovely chap” was how Mr Tillottson described him.

“I honestly don’t think I need trouble him,” Troy said. She was beginning to feel sick.

“Just to keep in touch, Mrs Alleyn,” he said and made a little sketch plan of Longminster, marking the police-station with a cross. “Go to the point marked X,” he said facetiously. “We may have a bit of news for you,” he playfully added. “There’s been a slight change in your good man’s itinerary. We’ll be pleased to let you know.”

“Rory!” Troy exclaimed. “Is he coming back earlier?”

“I understand it’s not quite settled yet, Mrs Alleyn.”

“Because if he is—”

“Oh, it wouldn’t be anything you might call immediate. If you’d just look in on our chaps at Longminster we’d be much obliged. Very kind of you.”

By this time Troy could have hurled the local Sergeant’s ink-pot at Mr Tillottson but she took her leave with circumspection and made her way through nauseating sunbursts back to the river. Before she reached it her migraine attained its climax. She retired behind a briar bush and emerged, shaken but on the mend.

Her doctor had advanced the theory that these occasional onsets were associated with nervous tension and for the first time she began to think he might be right.

She would quite have liked to look at the ruins which were visible from her porthole, doing their stuff against the beginning of a spectacular sunset but the attack had left her tired and sleepy and she settled for an early night.

There seemed to be no other passengers aboard the Zodiac. Troy took a shower and afterwards knelt in her dressing-gown on the bed and watched the darkling landscape across which, presently, her companions began to appear. There on the rim of a hillside rising to the ruins was Caley Bard in silhouette with his butterfly net. He gave a ridiculous balletic leap as he made a sweep with it. He was followed by Miss Rickerby-Carrick in full cry. Troy saw them put their heads together over the net and thought: “She’s driving him crackers.” At that moment Dr Natouche came down the lane and Miss Rickerby-Carrick evidently spied him. She seemed to take a hasty farewell of Bard and, in her precipitancy, became almost air-borne as she plunged downhill in pursuit of the Doctor. Troy heard her hail him.

“Doctor! Doctor Na-tooo-sh.”

He paused, turned and waited. He was incapable, Troy thought, of looking anything but dignified. Miss Rickerby-Carrick closed in. She displayed her usual vehemence. He listened with that doctor’s air which is always described as being grave and attentive.

“Can she be consulting him?” Troy wondered. “Or is she perhaps confiding in him instead of me.”

Now, she was showing him something in the palm of her hand. Could it be a butterfly, Troy wondered. He bent his head to look at it. Troy saw him give a little nod. They walked slowly towards the Zodiac and as they approached, the great booming voice became audible.

“—your own medical man… something to help you… quite possibly… indeed.”

She is consulting him, thought Troy.

They moved out of her field of vision and now there emerged from the ruins the rest of the travellers: the Hewsons, Mr Lazenby and Mr Pollock. They waved to Caley Bard and descended the hill in single file, like cut-out figures in black paper against a fading green sky. Commedia dell’arte again, Troy thought.

The evening was very warm. She lay down on her bunk. There was little light in the cabin and she left it so, fearing that Miss Rickerby-Carrick would call to inquire. She even locked her door, and, obscurely, felt rather mean for doing so. The need for sleep that always followed her migraines must now be satisfied and Troy began to dream of voices and of a mouselike scratching at somebody’s door. It persisted, it established itself over her dream and nagged her back into wakefulness. She struggled with herself, suffered an angry spasm of conscience and finally in a sort of bemused fury, got out of bed and opened the door.

On nobody.

The passage was empty. She thought afterwards that as she opened her own door another one had quietly closed.

She waited but there was no stirring or sound anywhere and, wondering if after all she had dreamt the scratching at her door, she went back to bed and at once fell fathoms deep into oblivion that at some unidentifiable level was disturbed by the sound of an engine.

-3-

She half-awoke to broad daylight and the consciousness of a subdued fuss: knocking and voices, footsteps in the passage and movements next door in Cabin 8. While she lay, half-detached and half-resentful of these disturbances, there was a tap on her own door and a rattle of the handle.

Troy, now fully awake, called out, “Sorry. Just a moment,” and unlocked her door.

Mrs Tretheway came in with tea.

“Is anything wrong?” Troy asked.

Mrs Tretheway’s smile broke out in glory all over her face. “Well,” she said, “not to say wrong. It’s how you look at it, I suppose, Mrs Alleyn. The fact is Miss Rickerby-Carrick seems to have left us.”

“Left us? Gone?”

“That’s right.”

“Do you mean—?”

“It must have been very early. Before any of us were about and our Tom was up at six.”

“But—”

“She’s packed her suitcase and gone.”

“No message?”

“Well now — yes — scribbled on a bit of newspaper. ‘Called away. So sorry. Urgent. Will write’.”

“How very extraordinary.”

“My husband reckons somebody must have come in the night. Some friend with a car or else she might have rung Toll’ark or Longminster for a taxi. The telephone booth at the lockhouse is open all night.”

“Well,” Troy muttered, “she is a rum one and no mistake.”

Mrs Tretheway beamed. “It may be all for the best,” she remarked. “It’s a lovely day, anyhow,” and took her departure.

When Troy arrived in the saloon she found her fellow-passengers less intrigued than might have been expected and she supposed that they had already exhausted the topic of Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s flight.

Her own entrance evidently revived it a little and there was a short barrage of rather flaccid questions: had Miss Rickerby-Carrick “said anything” to Troy? She hadn’t “said anything” to anyone else.

“Shall we rather put it,” Caley Bard remarked sourly, “that she hadn’t said anything of interest. Full stop. Which God knows, by and large, is only too true of all her conversation.”

“Now, Mr Bard, isn’t that just a little hard on the poor girl?” Miss Hewson objected.

“I don’t know why we must call her ‘poor’,” he rejoined.

“Of course you do,” Troy said. “One can’t help thinking of her as ‘poor Miss Rickerby-Carrick’ and that makes her all the more pitiful.”

“What a darling you are,” he said judicially.

Troy paid no attention to this. Dr Natouche who had not taken part in the conversation, looked directly at her and gave her a smile of such clear understanding that she wondered if she had blushed or turned pale.

Mr Lazenby offered one or two professional aphorisms to the effect that Miss Rickerby-Carrick was a dear soul and kindness itself. Mr Hewson looked dry and said she was just a mite excitable. Mr Pollock agreed with this. “Talk!” he said. “Oh dear!”

“They are all delighted,” Troy thought.

On that note she left them and went up on deck. The Zodiac was still at Crossdyke, moored below the lock, but Tom and his father were making their customary preparations for departure.

They had cast off and the engine had started when Troy heard the telephone ringing in the lock-keeper’s office. A moment later his wife came out and ran along the tow-path towards them.

“Skipper! Hold on! Message for you.”

“O.K. Thanks.”

The engine fussed and stopped and the Zodiac moved back a little towards the wharf. The lock-keeper came out and arched his hands round his mouth. “Car Hire and Taxi Service, Longminster.” He called. “Message for you, Skipper. Miss something-or-another Carrick asked them to ring. She’s been called away to a sick friend. Hopes you’ll understand. O.K.?”

“O.K.”

“Ta-ta, then.”

“So long, then, Jim. Thanks.”

The Skipper returned to his wheelhouse doing ‘thumbs up’ to Troy on the way. The Zodiac moved out into mid-stream, bound for Longminster.

Dr Natouche had come on deck during this exchange. He said: “Mrs Alleyn, may I have one word with you?”

“Yes, of course,” Troy said. “Where? Is it private?”

“It is, rather. Perhaps if we moved aft.”

They moved aft round the tarpaulin-covered heap of extra chairs. There, lying on the deck, was an inflated, orange-coloured Li-lo mattress.

Dr Natouche, stooped, looked down at it and up at Troy. “Miss Rickerby-Carrick slept here last night, I think,” he said.

“She did?”

“Yes. That, at least, was her intention.”

Troy waited.

“Mrs Alleyn, you will excuse me, I hope, for asking this question. You will, of course, not answer it if you do not wish. Did Miss Rickerby-Carrick speak to you after she returned to the ship last evening?”

“No. I went very early to my cabin. I’d had a go of migraine.”

“I thought you seemed to be not very well.”

“It was soon over. I think she may have — sort of scratched — at my door. I fancy she did but I was asleep and by the time I opened my door there was nobody.”

“I see. She intimated to me that she had something to tell you.”

“I know. Oh, dear!” Troy said. “Should I have gone to her cabin, do you think?”

“Ah, no! No. It’s only that Miss Rickerby-Carrick has a very high opinion of you and I thought perhaps she intended—” He hesitated and then said firmly. “I think I must explain that this lady spoke to me last evening. About her insomnia. She had been given some tablets — American proprietary product — by Miss Hewson and she asked me what I thought of these tablets.”

“She offered me one.”

“Yes? I said that they were unknown to me and suggested that she should consult her own doctor if her insomnia was persistent. In view of her snoring performance on the previous night I felt it might, at least in part, be an imaginary condition. My reason for troubling you with the incident is this. I formed the opinion that Miss Rickerby-Carrick was overwrought, that she was experiencing some sort of emotional and nervous crisis. It was very noticeable—very marked. I felt some concern. You understand that she did not consult me on the score of this condition: if she had it would be improper for me to speak to you about it. I think she may have been on the point of doing so when she suddenly broke off, said something incoherent and left me.”

“Do you think she’s actually — well — mentally unbalanced?”

“That is a convenient phrase without real definition. I think she is disturbed—which is another such phrase. It is because I think so that I am a little worried about this departure in the middle of the night. Unnecessarily so, I dare say.”

“You heard the telephone message, just now?”

“Yes. A friend’s illness.”

“Can it,” Troy exclaimed, “be Mavis?”

She and Dr Natouche stared speculatively at each other. She saw the wraith of a smile on his mouth.

“No. Wait a bit,” Troy went on. “She walked up to the village with Mr Lazenby and me. My head was swinging with migraine and I scarcely listened. He might remember. Of course she talked incessantly about Mavis. I think she said Mavis is in the Highlands. I’m sure she did. Do you suppose Miss Rickerby-Carrick has shot off by taxi to the Highlands in the dead of night?”

“Perhaps only to Longminster and thence by train?”

“Who can tell! Did nobody hear anything?” Troy wondered. “I mean, somebody must have come on board with this news and roused her up. It would be a disturbance.”

“Here? At the stern? It’s far removed from our cabins.”

“Yes,” Troy said, “but how would they know she was back here?”

“She told me she would take her tablet and sleep on deck.”

Troy stooped down and after a moment, picked up a blotched, red scrap of cloth.

“What’s that?” she asked.

The long fingers that looked as if they had been imperfectly treated with black cork, turned it over and laid it in the pinkish palm. “Isn’t it from the cover of her diary?” Troy said.

“I believe you’re right.” He was about to drop it overboard but she said: “No—don’t.”

“No?”

“Well — only because—” Troy gave an apologetic laugh. “I’m a policeman’s wife,” she said. “Put it down to that.”

He took out a pocket-book and slipped the scrap of cloth into it.

“I expect we’re making a song about nothing,” Troy said.

Suddenly she felt an almost overwhelming impulse to tell Dr Natouche about her misgivings and the incidents that had prompted them. She had a vivid premonition of how he would look as she confided her perplexity. His head would be courteously inclined and his expression placid and a little withdrawn—a consulting-room manner of the most reassuring kind. It really would be a great relief to confide in Dr Natouche. An opening phrase had already shaped itself in her mind when she remembered another attentive listener.

“And by-the-way, Mrs Alleyn,” Superintendent Tillottson had said in his infuriatingly bland manner, “We won’t mention this little matter to anybody, shall we? Just a routine precaution.”

So she held her tongue.