Clutch of Constables (13 page)

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.

“From this point,” Alleyn said, “the several elements, if I can put it like that, converge.

“The discovery of this woman’s body suddenly threw a complex of apparently unrelated incidents into an integrated whole. You grind away at routine, you collect a vast amount of data ninety-per-cent of which is useless and then—something happens and Bingo—the other ten-per-cent sits up like Jacky and Bob’s your uncle.”

He paused, having astonished himself by this intemperate excursion into jokeyness. He met broad grins from his audience and a startled glance from the man in the second row.

“ ‘O God, your only jig-maker’,” thought Alleyn and resumed in a more orthodox style.

“It struck me that there might be some interest—possibly some value—in putting this case before you as it appeared to my wife and as she put it to the county police and in her letters to me. And I wonder if at this juncture you feel you could sort out the evidential wheat from the chaff.

“What, in fact, do you think we ought to have concentrated upon when Inspector Fox and I finally arrived on the scene?”

Alleyn fancied he could detect a certain resentment in the rest of the class when the man in the second row put up his hand.

-1-

Troy could hear an enormous unlocalised voice in an echo chamber. It approached and enveloped her. It was unalarming.

She emerged with a sickening upward lurch from somewhere that had been like death and for an unappreciable interval was flooded by a delicious surge of recovery. She felt grateful and opened her eyes.

A black face and white teeth were close before her. A recognisable arm supported her.

“You fainted. You are all right. Don’t worry.”

“I never faint.”

“No?”

Fingers on her wrist.

“Why did it happen, I wonder,” said Dr Natouche. “When you feel more like yourself we will make you comfortable. Will you try a little water?”

Her head was supported. A rim of cold glass pressed her underlip.

“Here are Miss Hewson and Mrs Tretheway, to help you.”

Their faces swam towards her and steadied.

Everything had steadied. The passengers stared at her with the greatest concern. Six faces behind Dr Natouche and Mrs Tretheway: Miss Hewson with the look of a startled bun, her brother with his hearing-aid and slanted head, Mr Lazenby’s black glasses, Mr Pollock’s ophthalmic stare, like close-ups in a suspense film. And beyond them the Skipper at the wheel.

“Feeling better, honey?” asked Miss Hewson, and then: “Don’t look that way, dear. What is it? What’s happened?”

“She’s frightened,” said Mrs Tretheway.

“Oh God, God, God!” Troy said and her voice sounded in her own ears like that of a stranger. “Oh God, I’ve remembered.”

She turned and clung to Dr Natouche, “They must stop,” she stammered. “Stop. Make them stop. It’s Hazel Rickerby-Carrick. There. Back there. In The River.”

They broke into commotion. Caley Bard shouted: “You heard what she said. Skipper!”

The
Zodiac
stopped.

Caley Bard knelt beside her. “All right, my dear!” he said. “We’ve stopped. Don’t be frightened. Don’t worry. We’ll attend to it.” And to Dr Natouche: “Can’t we take her down?”

“I think so. Mrs Alleyn, if we help you, do you think you can manage the stairs? It will be best. We will take it very steadily.”

“I’m all right,” Troy said. “Please don’t worry. I’m perfectly all right. It’s not me. Didn’t you hear what I said? Back there—in The River.”

“Yes, yes. The Captain is attending to it!”

“Attending to it!” An ungainly laugh bubbled in Troy’s throat. “To that! I should hope so! Look, don’t fuss about me. I’m all right.”

But when they helped her to her feet she was very shaky. Dr Natouche went backwards before her down the companionway and Caley Bard came behind. The two women followed making horrified comments.

In the passage her knees gave way. Dr Natouche carried her into her cabin and put her on her bunk as deftly as if she was a child. The others crowded in the doorway.

“I’m all right,” she kept repeating. “It’s ridiculous, all this, No—please.”

He covered her with the cherry red blanket and said to Mrs Tretheway: “A hot-water bottle and tea would not be amiss.”

The ladies bustled away in confusion. He stooped his great body over Troy: “You’re shocked, Mrs Alleyn. I hope you will let me advise you.”

Troy began to tell them what she had seen. She took a firm hold of herself and spoke lucidly and slowly as if they were stupid men.

“You must tell the police,” Troy said. “At once. At once.”

Caley Bard said: “Yes, of course. I’m sure the Skipper will know what to do.”

“Tell him. It mustn’t be—lost—it mustn’t be—” she clenched her hands under the blanket. “Superintendent Tillottson at Tollardwark. Tell the Skipper.”

“I’ll tell him,” Dr Natouche offered and Caley Bard said: “There now! Don’t fuss. And do, like a good girl, stop bossing.”

Troy caught the familiar bantering tone and was comforted by it. She and Bard exchanged pallid grins.

“I’ll be off,” he said.

Dr Natouche said: “And I. I may be wanted. I think you should stay where you are, Mrs Alleyn.”

He had moved away when Troy, to her own astonishment, heard herself say. “Dr Natouche!” and when he turned with his calmly polite air, “I—I should like to consult you, please, when you are free. Professionally.”

“Of course,” he said. “In the meantime these ladies will take care of you.”

They did. They ministered with hot-water bottles and with scalding tea. Troy only now realised that she was shivering like a puppy.

Miss Hewson was full of consolatory phrases and horrified speculation.

“Gee,” she gabbled, “isn’t this just awful? That poor girl and all of us asleep in our beds. What do you figure, Mrs Tretheway? She was kind of sudden in her reflexes wasn’t she? Now, could it add up this way? She was upset by this news about her girl-friend and she got up and dressed and packed her grip and wrote her little note on the newspaper and lit off for—for wherever she fixed to meet up with her friends and in the dark she—”

Miss Hewson stopped as if jerked to a halt by her listeners’ incredulity.

“Well—gee—well, maybe not,” she said. “O.K., O.K. Maybe not.”

Mrs. Tretheway said: “I don’t fancy we do any good by wondering. Not till they know more. Whatever way it turns out, and it looks to me to be a proper mess, it’ll bring nothing but worry to us in the
Zodiac
: I know that much.”

She took the empty cup from Troy. “You’d best be left quiet,” she said. “We’ll look in and see how you prosper.”

When they had gone Troy lay still and listened. The shivering had stopped. She felt at once drowsy, and horrified that she should be so.

By looking up slantways through her open porthole she could see a tree top. It remained where it was for the most part, only sliding out of its place and returning as the
Zodiac
moved with The River. She heard footfalls overhead and subdued voices and after an undefined interval, a police siren. It came nearer and stopped. More and heavier steps on deck. More and newer voices, very subdued. This continued for some time. She half-dozed, half-woke.

She was roused by something outside that jarred against the port wall of the
Zodiac
and by the clunk of oars in their row-locks and the dip and drip of the blades.

“Easy as you go, then,” said a voice very close at hand. “Shove off a bit.” The top of a helmet moved across the port-hole. “That’s right. Just a wee bit over. Hold her at that, now. Careful now.”

Superintendent Tillottson. On the job.

Troy knew with terrible accuracy what was being done on the other side of the cabin wall. She was transfixed in her own vision and hag-ridden by a sick idea that there was some obligation upon her to stand on her bunk and look down into nightmare. She knew this idea was a fantasy but she was deadly afraid that she would obey its compulsion.

“All right. Give way and easy. Easy as you go.”

“I can’t.”

“What?
What
?”

“It’s foul of something.”

“Here. Hold on.”

“Look there, Super. Look.”

“All right, all right. Hold steady again and I’ll see.”

“What is it, then?”

“A line. Cord. Round the waist and made fast to something.”

“Will we cut it?”

“Wait while I try a wee haul.
Hold steady
, I said. Now then.”

An interval with heavy breathing.

“Coming up. Here she comes.”

“
Suitcase
?”

“That’s right. Now. Bear a hand to ship it. It’s bloody heavy. God, don’t do that, man. We don’t want any more disfigurement.”

A splash and then a thud.

“Fair enough. Now, you can give way. Signal the ambulance, Sarge. Handsomely, now.”

The rhythmic clunk, dip and drip: receding.

Troy thought with horror: “They’re towing her. It’s
Our Mutual Friend
again. Through the detergent foam. They’ll lift her out, dripping foam, and put her on a stretcher and into an ambulance and drive her away. There’ll be an autopsy and an inquest and I’ll have to say what I saw and, please God, Rory will be back.”

The
Zodiac
trembled. Trees and blue sky with a wisp of cloud, moved across the porthole. For a minute or so they were under way and then she felt the slight familiar shock when the craft came up to her mooring.

Miss Hewson opened the door and looked in. She held a little bottle rather coyly between thumb and forefinger and put her head on one side like her brother.

“Wide awake?” she said. “I guess so. Now, look what I’ve brought!”

She tiptoed the one short pace between the door and the bunk and stooped. Her face really was like a bun, Troy thought, with currants for eyes and holes for nostrils and a bit of candy-peel for a mouth. She shrank back a little from Miss Hewson’s face.

“I just knew how you’d be. All keyed-up like nobody’s business. And I brought you my Trankwitones. You needn’t feel any hesitation about using them, dear. They’re recommended by pretty well every darn’ doctor in the States and they just act—”

The voice droned on. Miss Hewson was pouring water into Troy’s glass.

“Miss Hewson, you’re terribly kind but I don’t need anything like that. Really. I’m perfectly all right now and very much ashamed of myself.”

“Now, listen dear—”

“No, truly. Thank you very much but I’d rather not.”

“You know something? Mama’s going to get real tough with baby—”

“But, Miss Hewson, I promise you I don’t want—”

“May I come in?” said Dr Natouche. Miss Hewson turned sharply and for a moment they faced each other.

“I think,” he said, and it was the first time Troy had heard him speak to her, “that Mrs Alleyn is in no need of sedation, Miss Hewson.”

“Well, I’m surely not aiming — I just thought if she could get a little sleep — I—”

“That was very kind but there is no necessity for sedation.”

“Well—I certainly wouldn’t want to—”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t. If I may just have a word with my patient.”

“Your patient! Pardon me. I was not aware — well, pardon me, Doctor,” said Miss Hewson with a spurt of venom in her voice and slammed the door on her exit.

Troy said hurriedly: “I want to talk to you. It’s about what we discussed before. About Miss Rickerby-Carrick. Dr Natouche, have you seen—”

“Yes,” he said. “They asked me to make an examination—a very superficial examination, of course.”

“I could hear them: outside there. I could hear what they found. She’s been murdered, hasn’t she? Hasn’t she?”

He leant over the bunk and shut the port-hole. He drew up the little stool and sat on it, leaning towards her. “I think,” he said as softly as his huge voice permitted, “we should be careful.” His fingers closed professionally on Troy’s wrist.

“You could lock the door,” she said.

“So I could.” He did so and turned back to her.

“Until the autopsy,” he murmured, “it will be impossible to say whether she was drowned or not. Externally, in most respects, it would appear that she was. It can be argued, and no doubt it will be argued, that she committed suicide by weighting her suitcase and tying it to herself and perhaps throwing herself into The River from the weir bridge.”

“If that was so, what becomes of the telephone call and the telegram from Carlisle?”

“I cannot think of any answer consistent with suicide.”

“Murder, then?”

“It would seem so.”

“I am going to tell you something. It’s complicated and a bit nebulous but I want to tell you. First of all — my cabin. You know it was booked—”

“To somebody called Andropulos? I saw the paragraph in the paper. I did not speak of it as I thought it would be unpleasant for you.”

“Did any of the others?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“I’ll make this as quick and as clear as I can — It has to do with a case of my husband’s. There’s a man called Foljambe—”

A crisp knock on her door and Superintendent Tillottson’s voice: “Mrs Alleyn? Tillottson here. May I come in.”

Troy and Dr Natouche stared at each other. She whispered: “He’ll have to,” and called out: “Come in, Mr Tillottson.” At the same time Dr Natouche opened the door.

Suddenly the little cabin was crammed with enormous men. Superintendent Tillottson and Doctor Natouche were both over six feet tall and comparably broad. She began to introduce these mammoths to each other and then realised they had been introduced already in hideous formality by Hazel Rickerby-Carrick. She could not help looking at Mr Tillottson’s large pink hands which were a little puckered as if he had been doing the washing. She was very glad he did not offer one to her, after his hearty fashion, for shaking.

She said: “Dr Natouche is looking after me on account of my making a perfect ass of myself.”

Mr Tillottson said, with a sort of wide spread of blandness, that this was very nice. Dr Natouche then advised Troy to take things easy and left them.