Clutch of Constables

Chapter 5 – Longminster

“I suppose one of his greatest assets,” Alleyn said, “is his ability to instil confidence in the most unlikely people. An infuriated Bolivian policeman is supposed to have admitted that before he could stop himself he found he was telling the Jampot about his own trouble with a duodenal ulcer. This may not be a true story. If not, it was invented to illustrate the more winning facets in the Foljambe façade. The moral is: that it takes all sorts to make a thoroughly bad lot and it sometimes takes a conscientious police officer quite a long time to realise this simple fact of unsavoury life. You can’t type criminals. It’s just as misleading to talk about them as if they never behave out of character as it is to suppose the underworld is riddled with charmers who only cheat or kill by some kind of accident.

“Foljambe has been known to behave with perfect good-nature and also with ferocity. He is attracted by beauty at a high artistic level. His apartment in Paris is said to have been got up in the most impeccable taste. He likes money better than anything else in life and he enjoys making it by criminal practices. If he was left a million pounds it’s odds on he’d continue to operate the rackets. If people got in his way he would continue to remove them.

“I’ve told you that my wife’s letters missed me in New York and were forwarded to San Francisco. By the time they reached me her cruise in the Zodiac had only two nights to go. As you know I rang the Department and learnt that Mr Fox was in France, following what was hoped to be a hot line on Foljambe. I got through to Mr Tillottson who in view of this development was inclined to discount the Zodiac altogether. I was not so inclined.

“Those of you who are married,” Alleyn said, “will understand my position. In the Force our wives are not called upon to serve in female James-Bondage and I imagine most of you would agree that any notion of their involvement in our work would be outlandish, ludicrous and extremely unpalatable. My wife’s letters, though they made very little of her misgivings, were disturbing enough for me to wish her out of the Zodiac. I thought of asking Tillottson to get her to ring me up but I had missed her at Crossdyke and if I waited until she reached Longminster I myself would miss my connection from San Francisco. And if, by any fantastic and most improbable chance one of her fellow-passengers in some way tied in with the Andropulos-Jampot show, the last thing we would want to do was to alert him by sending police messages to lock-keepers asking her to leave the cruise. My wife is a celebrated painter who is known, poor thing, to be married to a policeman.”

The Scot in the second row smirked.

“Well,” Alleyn said, “in the upshot I told Tillottson I thought my present job might finish earlier than expected and I would get back as soon as I could. I would remind you that at this stage I had no knowledge of the disappearance of Miss Rickerby-Carrick. If I had heard that bit I would have taken a very much stronger line.

“As it was I told Tillotson—”

-1-

There was no denying it, the cruise was much more enjoyable without Miss Rickerby-Carrick.

From Crossdyke to Longminster the sun shone upon fields, spinneys, villages and locks. It was the prettiest of journeys. Everybody seemed to expand. The Hewsons’ cameras clicked busily. Mr Lazenby and Mr Pollock discovered a common interest in stamps and showed each other the contents of sad-looking envelopes. Caley Bard told Troy a great deal about butterflies but she refused, nevertheless, to look at the Death’s Head he had caught last evening on Crossdyke Hill. “Well,” he said gaily, “Don’t look at it if it’s going to set you against me. Why can’t you be more like Hay? She said she belonged to the S.P.C.A. but lepidoptera didn’t count.”

“Do you call her Hay?”

“No. Do you?”

“No, but she asked me to.”

“Stand-offish old you, as usual,” he said and for no reason at all Troy burst out laughing. Her own apprehensions and Dr Natouche’s anxiety had receded in the pleasant atmosphere of the third day’s cruise.

Even Dr Natouche turned out to have a hobby. He liked to make maps. If anyone as tranquil and grave as Dr Natouche could be said to exhibit coyness, he did so when questioned by Troy and Bard about his cartography. He was, he confessed, attempting a chart of their cruise: it could not be called a true chart because it was not being scientifically constructed but he hoped to make something of it when he had consulted Ordnance maps. Troy wondered if persons of Dr Natouche’s complexion ever blushed and was sure, when he was persuaded to show them his little drawing, that he felt inclined to do so.

It was executed in very hard lead-pencil and was in the style of the sixteenth-century English cartographers with tiny drawings of churches and trees in their appropriate places and with extremely minute lettering.

Troy exclaimed with pleasure and said: “That we should have two calligraphers on board! Mr Pollock, do come and look at this.”

Pollock who had been talking to the Hewsons, hesitated, and then limped over and looked at the map but not at Dr Natouche.

“Very nice,” he said and returned to the Hewsons.

Troy had made a boldish move. Pollock, since the beginning of the cruise had only just kept on the hither side of insulting Dr Natouche. He had been prevented, not by any tactics that she and Caley Bard employed but rather by the behaviour of Dr Natouche himself who skilfully avoided giving Pollock any chance to exhibit ill-will. Somehow it came about that at meal-times Dr Natouche was as far removed as possible from Mr Pollock. On deck, Dr Natouche had conveyed himself to the area farthest aft, which Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s mattress, deflated to the accompaniment of its own improper noises, by the boy Tom, had previously occupied.

So Dr Natouche had offered no opportunity for Mr Pollock to insult him and Mr Pollock had retired, as Caley Bard pointed out to Troy, upon a grumpy alliance with the Hewsons with whom he could be observed in ridiculously furtive conference, presumably about racial relations.

To these skirmishes and manoeuvres Mr Lazenby appeared to be oblivious. He swapped philatelic gossip with Mr Pollock, he discussed the tendencies of art in Australia with Troy when she was unable to escape him, and he made jovial, unimportant small-talk with Dr Natouche.

Perhaps the most effective deterrent to any overt display of racialism from Mr Pollock was an alliance he had formed with the Tretheways.

To Troy, it appeared that Mr Pollock, in common, she thought, with every other male in the Zodiac, was extremely conscious of Mrs Tretheway’s allure. That was not surprising. What did surprise was Mrs Tretheway’s fairly evident response to Mr Pollock’s offering of homage. Evidently, she found him attractive but not apparently to an extent that might cause the Skipper any concern since Troy heard them all planning to meet at a pub in Longminster. They were going to have a bit of an evening, they agreed.

Troy herself was in something of a predicament. She could not, without making a ridiculous issue of it, refuse either to lunch or dine with Caley Bard in Longminster and indeed she had no particular desire to refuse since she enjoyed his company and took his cock-eyed and purely verbal advances with the liberal pinch of salt that she felt sure he expected. So she agreed to dine with him but said she had appointments during the earlier part of the day.

Somehow or another, she must yet again visit a police-station and commune with Superintendent Bonney whose personality, according to Superintendent Tillottson, she would find so very congenial. She could not help but feel that the legend of the lost fur had begun to wear thin but she supposed, unless some likelier device occurred to her, that she must continue to employ it. She told Caley Bard she’d have to make a final inquiry as they’d promised to let the Longminster police know if the wretched fur turned up and she also hinted at visits to the curator of the local gallery and a picture-dealer of some importance.

“All right,” he said, “I’ll accept your feeble excuses for the day and look forward to dinner. After all you are famous and allowances must be made.”

“They are not feeble excuses,” Troy shouted. Afterwards she determined at least to call on the curator and thus partially salve her conscience. She had arrived at this stage of muddled thinking when Dr Natouche approached her with an extremely formal invitation.

“You have almost certainly made your own arrangements for today,” he said. “In case you have not I must explain that I have invited a friend and his wife to luncheon at the Longminster Arms. He is Sir Leslie Fergus, a biochemist of some distinction, now dedicated to research. We were fellow-students. I would, of course, be delighted if by any fortunate chance you were able to come.”

Troy saw that, unlike Caley Bard who had cheerfully cornered and heckled her, Dr Natouche was scrupulous to leave her the easiest possible means of escape. She said at once that she would be delighted to lunch at the Longminster Arms.

“I am so pleased,” said Dr Natouche with his little bow and withdrew.

“Well!” ejaculated Caley who had unblushingly listened to this exchange. “You are a sly-boots!”

“I don’t know why you should say that.”

“You wouldn’t lunch with me.”

“I’m dining with you,” Troy said crossly.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m being a bore and unfunny. I won’t do it again. Thank you for dining. I hope it’ll be fun and I hope your luncheon is fabulous.”

She now began to have misgivings about Caley Bard’s dead set at her.

“At my age,” Troy thought, “this sort of thing can well become ridiculous. Am I in for a tricky party, I wonder.”

The day, however, turned out to be a success. They reached Longminster at 10.30. Mr Lazenby and Mr Pollock were going straight to the Minster itself and from there planned to follow the itinerary set out in the Zodiac’s leaflet. The Hewsons, who had intended to join them were thrown into a state of ferment when the Skipper happened to remark that it would be half-day closing in Tollardwark on the return journey. They would arrive there at noon.

Miss Hewson broke out in lamentation. The junk shops where she was persuaded she would find the most exciting and delectable bargains! Shut! Now wasn’t that just crazy planning on somebody’s part? To spend the afternoon in a closed town? In vain did the Tretheways explain that the object of the stay was a visit by special bus to a historic Abbey six miles out of Tollardwark. The Hewsons said in unison that they’d seen enough abbeys to last them the rest of their lives. What they desired was a lovely long shop-crawl. Why Miss Hewson had seen four of the cutest little old shops—one in particular—she appealed to Troy to witness how excited she had been.

They went on and on until at last Caley Bard, in exasperation, suggested that as it was only a few miles by road back to Tollardwark they might like to spend the day there. Mrs Tretheway said there were buses and the road was a very attractive one, actually passing the Abbey. The Skipper said there were good car-hire services, as witness the one that had rung through with Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s message.

The Hewsons went into a huffy conference from which they emerged with their chagrin somewhat abated. They settled on a car. They would spend half the day in Tollardwark and half in Longminster. One could see, Troy thought, the timeless charm of the waterways evaporating in the Hewsons’ esteem. They departed, mollified and asking each other if it didn’t seem kind of dopey to spend two days getting from one historic burg to another when you could take them both in between breakfast and dinner with time left over for shopping.

Caley Bard announced that he was going to have his hair cut and then go to the museum where the lepidoptera were said to be above average. Dr Natouche told Troy that he would expect her at one o’clock and the two men walked off together.

Troy changed into a linen suit, consulted Mr Tillottson’s map and found her way to the Longminster central police-station and Superintendent Bonney.

Afterwards she was unable to make up her mind whether or not she had been surprised to find Mr Tillottson there.

He explained that he happened to be in Longminster on a routine call. He did not suggest that he had timed his visit to coincide with Troy’s. He merely shook hands again with his customary geniality and introduced her to Superintendent Bonney.

Mr Bonney was another large man but in his case seniority would have seemed to have run to bone rather than flesh. His bones were enormous. They were excessive behind his ears, under and above his eyes and at his wrists. His jaws were cadaverous and when he smiled, even his gums were knobbly. Troy would not have fallen in with Mr Tillottson’s description of his colleague as a lovely chap.

They were both very pleasant. Troy’s first question was as to her husband’s return. Was there any chance, did they think, that it might be earlier because if so—

They said, almost in unison, that Alleyn had rung through last evening: that he would have liked to talk to her this morning but would have missed his connection to New York. And that he hoped he might be home early next week but that depended upon a final conference. He sent his love, they said, beaming at her, and if she was still uneasy she was to abandon ship. “Perhaps a telegram from a sick friend—” Mr Tillottson here suggested and Troy felt a strong inclination to laugh in his face and ask him if it should be signed “Mavis”.

She told them about Miss Rickerby-Carrick.

They listened with great attention saying: “Yerse. Yerse.” and “Is that a fact?” and “Fancy that, now.” When she had finished Mr Bonney glanced at his desk pad where he had jotted down a note or two.

“The Longminster Car Hire and Taxi Service, eh?” he said. “Now, which would that be, I wonder, Bert? There’s Ackroyd’s and there’s Rutherford’s.”

“We might make a wee check, Bob,” Mr. Tillottson ventured.

“Yerse,” Mr Bonney agreed. “We might at that.”

He made his calls while Troy, at their request, waited.

“Ackroyd’s Car Hire Service? Just a little item about a telephone call. Eighty-thirty or thereabouts to Crossdyke Lockhouse. Message from a fare phoned by you to the Lock for Tretheway, Skipper, M.V. Zodiac. Could you check for us? Much obliged.” A pause while Mr Bonney stared without interest at Mr Tillottson and Mr Tillottson stared without interest at nothing in particular.

“I see. No note of it? Much obliged. Just before you go: Fare from Crossdyke Lock, picked up sometime during the night. Lady. Yerse. Well, any trips to Crossdyke? Could you check?” Another pause. “Much obliged. Ta,” said Mr Bonney and replaced the receiver.

He repeated this conversation almost word for word on three more calls.

In each instance, it seemed, a blank.

“No trips to Crossdyke,” said Mr Bonney, “between 6.45 last evening and 11 a.m. today.”

“Well, well,” said Mr Tillottson, “that’s quite interesting, Bob, isn’t it?”

All Troy’s apprehensions that with the lightened atmosphere of the morning had retired to an uneasy hinterland now returned in force.

“But that means whoever rang gave a false identity,” she said.

Mr Tillottson said it looked a wee bit like that but they’d have to check with the lock-keeper at Crossdyke. He might have mistaken the message. It might have been, he suggested, Miss Rickerby-Carrick herself saying she was hiring a car.

“That’s true!” Troy agreed.

“What sort of a voice, now, would she have, Mrs Alleyn?”

“She’s got a heavy cold and she sounds excitable. She gabbles and she talks in italics.”

“She wouldn’t be what you’d call at all eccentric?”

“She would. Very eccentric.”

Mr Tillottson said ah, well, now, there you were, weren’t you? Mr Bonney asked what age Miss Rickerby-Carrick might be and when Troy hazarded, “fortyish,” began to look complacent. Troy mentioned Mavis of Birmingham now in the Highlands and when they asked Mavis who, and where in the Highlands was obliged to say she’d forgotten. This made her feel foolish and remember some of her husband’s strictures upon purveyors of information received.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “to be so perfectly hopeless.”

They soothed her. Why should she remember these trifles? They would, said Mr Tillottson, have a wee chin-wag with the lock-keeper at Crossdyke just to get confirmation of the telephone call. They would ring the telephone department and they would make further inquiries to find out just how Miss Rickerby-Carrick got herself removed in the dead of night. If possible they would discover her destination.

Their manner strongly suggested that Troy’s uneasiness rather than official concern was the motive for these inquiries.

“They think I’ve got a bee in my bonnet,” she told herself. “If I wasn’t Rory’s wife they wouldn’t be bothered with me.”

She took what she felt had now become her routine leave of Superintendents in North Country police-stations and, once more reassured by Mr Tillottson, prepared to enjoy herself in Longminster.

-2-

She spent the rest of the morning looking at the gallery and the Minster and wandering about the city which was as beautiful as its reputation.

At noon she began to ask her way to the Longminster Arms. After a diversion into an artist-colourman’s shop where she found a very nice old frame of the right size for her Signs of the Zodiac, she arrived at half past twelve. Troy was one of those people who can never manage to be unpunctual and was often obliged to go for quite extensive walks round blocks in order to be decently late or at least not indecently early.

However, she didn’t mind being early for her luncheon with Dr Natouche and his friends. She tidied up and found her way into a pleasant drawing-room where there were lots of magazines.

In one of them she at once became absorbed. It printed a long extract from a book written some years ago by a white American who had had his skin pigmentation changed by what, it appeared, was a dangerous but entirely effective process. For some months this man had lived as one of themselves among the Negroes of the Deep South. The author did not divulge the nature of this transformation process and Troy found herself wondering if Dr Natouche would be able to tell what it was. Could she ask him? Remembering their conversation in the wapentake, she thought she could.

She was still pondering over this and had turned again to the article when she became aware of a presence and found that Dr Natouche stood beside her, quite close, with his gaze on the printed page. Her diaphragm contracted with a jolt and the magazine crackled in her hands.

“I am so very sorry,” he said. “I startled you. It was stupid of me. The carpet is thick and you were absorbed.”

He sat down opposite to her and with a look of great concern said: “I have been unforgivably clumsy.”

“Not a bit of it,” Troy rejoined. “I don’t know why I should be so jumpy. But as you say, I was absorbed. Have you read this thing, Dr Natouche?”

He had lifted his finger to a waiter who approached with a perfectly blank face. “We shall not wait for the Ferguses,” Dr Natouche said. “You must be given a restorative. Brandy? And soda? Dry Ginger? Yes? Two, if you please and may I see the wine list?”

His manner was grand enough to wipe the blank look off any waiter’s face.

When the man had gone Dr Natouche said: “But I have not answered your question. Yes, I have read this book. It was a courageous action.”

“I wondered if you would know exactly what was done to him. The process, I mean.”

“Your colour is returning,” he said after a moment. “And so, of course, did his. It was not a permanent change. No, I do not know what was done. Sir Leslie might have an idea, it is more in his line than mine. We must ask him.”

“I would have thought—”

“Yes?” he said, when she stopped short.

“You said, when we were at the wapentake, that you didn’t think I could say anything to—I don’t remember the exact phrase—”

“To hurt or offend me? Something like that was it? It is true.”

“I was going to ask, then, if the change of pigmentation would be enough to convince people, supposing the features were still markedly European. And then I saw that your features, Dr Natouche, are not at all—”

“Negroid?”

“Yes. But perhaps Ethiopians—one is so ignorant.”

“You must remember I am a half-caste. My facial structures are those of my mother, I believe.”

“Yes, of course,” Troy said. “Of course.”

The waiter brought their drinks and the wine list and menu and hard on his heels came Sir Leslie and Lady Fergus.

They were charming and the luncheon party was a success but somehow neither Troy nor her host got round to asking Sir Leslie if he could shed any light on the darkening by scientific methods of the pigmentation of the skin.

-3-

Troy returned to the Zodiac, rested, changed and was taken in a taxi by Caley Bard to dinner with champagne at another hotel.

“I’m not ’alf going it,” she thought and wondered what her husband would have to say about these jaunts.

When they had dined she and Bard walked about Longminster and finally strolled back to The River at half past ten. The Zodiac was berthed romantically in a bend of The River from which one could see the Long Minster itself against the stars. The lights of the old city quavered and zigzagged with those of other craft in the black night waters. Troy and Bard could hear quiet voices in the saloon but they loitered on the deserted deck and before she could do anything about it Bard had kissed Troy.

“You’re adorable,” he said.

“Ah, get along with you. Good night, and thank you for a nice party.”

“Don’t go away.”

“I think I must.”

“Couldn’t we have a lovely, fairly delicate little affair? Please?”

“We could not,” said Troy.

“I’ve fallen for you in a bloody big way. Don’t laugh at me.”

“I’m not. But I’m not going to pursue the matter. Don’t you, either.”

“Well, I can’t say you’ve led me on. You don’t know a garden path when you see one.”

“I wouldn’t say as much for you.”

“I like that! What cheek!”

“Look,” Troy said, “who’s here.”

It was the Hewsons. They had arrived on the wharf in a taxi and were hung about with strange parcels. Miss Hewson seemed to be in a state of exalted fatigue and her brother in a state of exhausted resignation.

“Boy, oh boy!” he said.

They had to be helped on board with their unwieldy freight and when this exercise had been accomplished, it seemed only decent to get them down the companionway into the saloon. Here the other passengers were assembled and about to go to bed. They formed themselves into a sort of chain gang and by this means assembled the Hewsons’ purchases on three of the tables. Newspaper was spread on the deck.

“We just ran crazy,” Miss Hewson panted. “We just don’t know what’s with us when we get loose on an antique spree, do we, Earl?”

“You said it, dear,” her brother conceded.

“Where,” asked Mr Pollock, “will you put it?” Feeling, perhaps, that his choice of words was unfortunate, he threw a frightened glance at Mr Lazenby.

“Well! Now!” Miss Hewson said. “We don’t figure we have a problem there, do we, dear? We figure if we talk pretty to the Skipper and Mrs Tretheway we might be allowed to cache it in Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s stateroom. We just kind of took a calculated risk on that one didn’t we, dear?”

“Sure did, honey.”

“The Tretheways,” Pollock said, “have gone to bed.”

“Looks like we’ll have to step up the calculated risk, some,” Mr Hewson said dryly.

Mr Lazenby was peering with undisguised curiosity at their booty and so were Troy and Bard. There was an inlaid rose-wood box, a newspaper parcel from which horse-brasses partly emerged, a pair of carriage-lamps and, packed piecemeal into an open beer-carton, a wag-at-the-wall Victorian clock.

Propped against the table was a really filthy roll of what appeared through encrustations of mud to be a collection of prints tied together with an ancient piece of twine.

It was over this trove that Miss Hewson seemed principally to gloat. She had found it, she explained, together with their other purchases, in the yard of the junk shop where Troy had seen them that first night in Tollardwark. Something had told Miss Hewson she would draw a rich reward if she could explore that yard and sure enough, jammed into a compartment in an Edwardian sideboard, all doubled up, as they could see if they looked, there it was.

“I’m a hound when I get started,” Miss Hewson said proudly. “I open up everything that has a door or a lid. And you know something? This guy who owns this dump allowed he never knew he had this roll. He figured it must have been in this terrible little cupboard at the time of the original purchase. And you know something? He said he didn’t care if he didn’t see the contents and when Earl and I opened it up he gave it a kind of weary glance and said was it worth ten bob? Was it worth one dollar twenty! Boy, I guess when the Ladies Handicraft Guild, back in Apollo, see the screen I get out of this lot, they’ll go crazy. Now, Mrs Alleyn,” Miss Hewson continued, “you’re artistic. Well, I mean — well, you know what I mean. Now, I said to Brother, I can’t wait till I show Mrs Alleyn and get me an expert opinion. I said: we go right back and show Mrs Alleyn—”

As she delivered this speech in a high gabble, Miss Hewson doubled herself up and wrestled with the twine that bound her bundle. Dust flew about and flakes of dry mud dropped on the deck. After a moment her brother produced a pocket knife and cut the twine.

The roll opened up abruptly in a cloud of dust and fell apart on the newspaper. Scraps. Oleographs. Coloured supplements from Pears’ Annual. Half a dozen sepia photographs, several of them torn. Four flower pieces. A collection of Edwardian prints from dressmaker’s journals. Part of a child’s scrapbook. Three lamentable water-colours.

Miss Hewson spread them out on the deck with cries of triumph to which she received but tepid response. Her brother sank into a chair and closed his eyes.

“Is that a painting?” Troy asked. It had enclosed the roll and its outer surface was so encrusted with occulted dirt that the grain of the canvas was only just perceptible.

It was lying curled up on what was presumably its face. Troy stooped and turned it over.

It was a painting in oil: about 18 by 12 inches. She knelt down and tapped its edge on the deck, releasing a further accretion of dust. She spread it out.

“Anything?” asked Bard, leaning down.

“I don’t know.”

“Shall I get a damp cloth or something?”

“Yes, do. If the Hewsons don’t mind.”

Miss Hewson was in ecstasies over a Victorian scrap depicting an innocent child surrounded by rosebuds. She said: “Sure, sure. Go right ahead.” Mr Hewson was asleep.

Troy wiped the little painting over with an exquisite handkerchief her husband had bought her in Bruges. Trees. A bridge. A scrap of golden sky.

“Exhibit I. My very, very own face-flannel,” said Bard, squatting beside her. “Devotion could go no further. I have added (Exhibit 2) a smear of my very, very own soap. It’s called Spruce.”

The whole landscape slowly emerged: defaced here and there by dirt and scars in the surface, but not, after all, in bad condition.

In the foreground: water-and a lane that turned back into the middle-distance. A pond and a ford. A child in a vermilion dress with a hay-rake. In the middle-distance, trees that reflected in countless leafy mirrors, the late afternoon sun. In the background: a rising field, a spire, a generous and glowing sky.

“It’s sunk,” Troy muttered. “We could oil it out.”

“What does that mean?”

“Wait a bit. Dry the surface, can you?”

She went to her cabin and came back with linseed oil on a bit of paint-rag. “This won’t do any harm,” she said. “Have you got the surface dry? Good. Now then.”

And in a minute the little picture was clearer and cleaner and speaking bravely for itself.

“ ‘Constables’,” Caley Bard quoted lightly, “ ‘all over the place’. Or did you say ‘swarming’.”

Troy looked steadily at him for a moment and then returned to her oiling. Presently she gave a little exclamation and at the same moment Dr Natouche’s great voice boomed out: “It is a picture of Ramsdyke. That is the lock and the lane and, see, there is the ford and the church spire above the hill.”

The others, who had been clustered round Miss Hewson’s treasures on the table, all came to look at the painting.

Troy said: “Shall we put it in a better light?”

They made way for her. She stood on the window seat and held the painting close to a wall lamp. She examined the back of the canvas and then the face again.

“It’s a good picture,” Mr Lazenby pronounced. “Old fashioned of course. Early Victorian. But it certainly looks a nice bit of work, don’t you think, Mrs Alleyn?”

“Yes,” Troy said. “Yes. It does. Very nice.”

She got down from the seat.

“Miss Hewson,” she said, “I was in the gallery here this morning. They’ve got a Constable. One of his big, celebrated worked-up pieces. I think you should let an expert see this thing because—well because as Mr Lazenby says it’s a very good work of its period and because it might have been painted by the same hand and because—well, if you look closely you will see—it is signed in precisely the same manner.”

-4-

“For pity’s sake,” Troy said, “don’t take my word for anything. I’m not an expert. I can’t tell, for instance, how old the actual canvas may be though I do know it’s not contemporary and I do know it’s the way he signed his major works. ‘John Constable. R.A.f.’ and the date, 1830, which, I think, was soon after he became an R.A.

“R.A.?” asked Miss Hewson.

“Royal Academician.”

“Hear that, Earl? what’s the ‘f’ signify, Mrs Allyn?”

“Fecit.”

There was a considerable pause.

“Fake it!” Miss Hewso said in a strangled voice. “Did you say ‘fake’?”

Dr Natouche made a curious little sound in his throat. Mr Lazenby seemed to choke back some furious ejaculation. Troy, with Caley’s devilish eye upon her, explained. There was a further silence.

It’s bloody hot down here,” said Mr Pollock.

“Tell us more,” Caley invited Troy.

She glared at him and continued. “Of course the thing may be a copy of an original Constable. I don’t think there’s an established work of his that has Ramsdyke Lock as its subject. That doesn’t say he didn’t paint Ramsdyke Lock when he was in these parts.”

“And it doesn’t say,” Mr Lazenby added, “that this isn’t the Ramsdyke Lock he painted.”

Miss Hewson, who seemed never to have heard of Constable until Troy made her remark at Ramsdyke, now became madly excited. She pointed out the excellencies of the picture and how you could just fancy yourself walking up that little old-world lane into the sunset.

Mr Hewson woke up and after listening, in his dead-pan, honest-to-God, dehydrated manner to his sister’s ravings asked Troy what, supposing this item was in fact the genuine product of this guy, it might be worth in real money.

Troy said she didn’t know—a great deal. Thousands of pounds. It depended upon the present demand for Constables.

“But don’t for Heaven’s sake go by anything I say. As for forgeries, I am reminded—” She stopped. “I suppose it doesn’t really apply,” she said. “You’d hardly expect to find an elaborate forgery in a junk-shop yard at Tollardwark, would you?”

“But you were going to tell us a story,” Bard said. “Mayn’t we have it?”

“It was only that Rory, my husband, had a case quite recently in which a young man, just for the hell of it, forged an Elizabethan glove and did it so well that the top experts were diddled.”

“As you say, Mrs Alleyn,” said Mr Lazenby, “it doesn’t really apply. But about forgeries. I always ask myself—”

They were off on an argument that can be depended upon to ruffle more tempers in quicker time than most others. If a forgery was “that good” it could take in the top experts, why wasn’t it just as good in every respect as the work of the painter to whom it was falsely attributed?

To and fro went the declarations and aphorisms. Caley Bard was civilised under the heading of “the total oeuvre,” Mr Hewson said, wryly and obscurely, that every man had his price, Mr Lazenby upheld a professional view: the forgery was worthless because it was based upon a lie and clerical overtones informed his antipodean delivery. Mr Pollock’s manner was, as usual, a little off-beat. Several times, he interjected: “Oy, chum, half a tick—” only to subside in apparent embarrassment when given the floor. Miss Hewson merely stated, as if informed by an oracle, that she just knoo she’d got a genuine old master.

Dr Natouche excused himself and went below.

And Troy looked at the little picture and was visited once again by the notion that she was involved in some kind of masquerade, that the play, if there was a play, moved towards its climax, if there was a climax, that the tension, if indeed there was any tension, among her fellow-passengers, had been exacerbated by the twist of some carefully concealed screw.

She looked up. Mr Lazenby’s dark glasses were turned on her, Mr Pollock’s somewhat prominent eyes looked into hers and quickly away, Miss Hewson smiled ever so widely at her and Mr Hewson’s dead-pan grin seemed to be plastered over his mouth like a gag.

Troy said good night to them all and went to bed.

The Zodiac left for the return journey before any of the passengers were up.

They had a long morning’s cruise, passing through Crossdyke and arriving at Tollardwark at noon.

That evening the Hewsons, Mr Pollock and Mr Lazenby played Scrabble. Dr Natouche wrote letters and Caley Bard suggested a walk but Troy said that she too had letters to write. He pulled a face at her and settled with a book.

Troy supposed that Superintendent Tillottson was in Tollardwark and wondered if he expected her to call. She saw no reason to do so and was sick of confiding nebulous and unconvincing sensations. Nothing of interest to Mr Tillottson, she thought, had occurred over the past thirty-six hours. He could hardly become alerted by the discovery of a possible “Constable”: indeed he could be confidently expected if told about it to regard her with weary tolerance. Still less could she hope to interest him in her own fanciful reactions to an unprovable impression of some kind of conspiracy.

He had promised to let her know by a message to Tollard Lock if there was further news of Alleyn’s return. No, there was really no need at all to call on Superintendent Tillottson.

She wrote a couple of short letters to save her face with Caley and at about half past nine went ashore to post them at the box outside the lockhouse.

The night was warm and still and the air full of pleasant scents from the lock-keeper’s garden: stocks, tobacco flowers, newly watered earth and at the back of these the cold dank smell of The River. These scents, she thought, made up one of the three elements of night; the next was composed of things that were to be seen before the moon rose: ambiguous pools of darkness, lighted windows, stars, the shapes of trees and the dim whiteness of a bench hard by their moorings. Troy sat there for a time to listen to the third element of night: an owl somewhere in a spinney downstream, the low, intermittent colloquy of moving water, indefinable stirrings, the small flutters and bumps made by flying insects and the homely sound of people talking quietly in the lockhouse and in the saloon of the Zodiac.

A door opened and the three Tretheways who had been spending the evening with the lock-keeper’s family, exchanged good nights and crunched down the gravel path towards Troy.

“Lovely evening, Mrs Alleyn,” Mrs Tretheway said. The Skipper asked if she was enjoying the cool air and as an after-thought added: “Telegram from Miss Rickerby-Carrick, by the way, Mrs Alleyn. From Carlisle.”

“Oh!” Troy cried, “I am glad. Is she all right?”

“Seems so. Er — what does she say exactly, dear? Just a minute.”

A rustle of paper. Torchlight darted about the Tretheways’ faces and settled on a yellow telegram in a brown hand. “ ‘Sorry abrupt departure collected by mutual friends car urgent great friend seriously ill Inverness awfully sad missing cruise cheerio everybody Hay Rickerby-Carrick’.”

“There! She’s quite all right, you see,” Mrs Tretheway said comfortably. “It’s the friend. Just like they said on the phone at Crossdyke.”

“So it wasn’t a taxi firm that rang through to Crossdyke,” Troy pointed out. “It must have been her friends in the car.”

“Unless they were in a taxi and asked the office to ring. Anyway,” Mrs Tretheway repeated, “it’s quite all right.”

“Yes. It must be.” Troy said.

But when she was in bed that night she couldn’t help thinking there was still something that didn’t quite satisfy her about the departure of Miss Rickerby-Carrick.

“Tomorrow,” she thought, “I’ll ask Dr Natouche what he thinks.” Before she went to sleep she found herself listening for the sound she had heard—where? At Tollardwark? At Crossdyke? She wasn’t sure—the distant sound of a motor bicycle. And although there was no such sound to be heard that night she actually dreamt she had heard it.

-5-

Troy thought: “Tomorrow we step back into time.” The return journey had taken on something of the character of a recurrent dream: spires, fens, individual trees, locks; even a clod of tufted earth that had fallen away from a bank and was half drowned or a broken branch that dipped into the stream and moved with its flow: these were familiar landmarks that they might have passed, not once, but many times before.

At four in the afternoon the Zodiac entered the straight reach of The River below Ramsdyke Lock. Already, drifts of detergent foam had begun to float past her. Wisps of it melted on her deck. Ahead of her the passengers could see an unbroken whiteness that veiled The River like an imponderable counterpane. They could hear the voice of Ramsdyke weir and see a foaming pother where the corrupted fall met the lower reach.

Troy leant on the starboard taffrail and watched their entry into this frothy region. She remembered how she and Dr Natouche and Caley Bard and Hazel Rickerby-Carrick had discussed reality and beauty. Fragments of conversation drifted across her recollection. She could almost re-hear the voices.

“—in the Eye of the Beholder—”

“—a fish tin with a red label. Was it the less beautiful—”

“—if a dead something popped up through that foam—”

“—a dead something—”

“—a dead something—”

“—a fish-a cat—”

“—through that foam—”

“—a dead something—”

Hazel Rickerby-Carrick’s face, idiotically bloated, looked up: not at Troy, not at anything. Her mouth, drawn into an outlandish rictus, grinned through discoloured froth. She bobbed and bumped against the starboard side. And what terrible disaster had corrupted her riverweed hair and distended her blown cheeks?

The taffrail shot upwards and the trees with it. The voice of the weir exploded with a crack in Troy’s head and nothing whatever followed it. Nothing.