Clutch of Constables (20 page)

“I agree. Playing it by ear, they were, I don’t mind betting.”

“All right, then. Why? People only go on in that style because they’ve got something to hide. What would they have to hide about this picture? I can only think of one answer. What about you, Mr Alleyn?”

“That it’s a racket and they’re in on it.”

“Just so. The thing’s a forgery and they know it. From that it’s a short step to supposing Jo Bagg never had it. The Hewsons brought it with them and planted it in the cupboard when the Baggs weren’t looking.”

“I don’t think so, Br’er Fox. Not from the account Bagg gave of the sale.”

“No? I wasn’t there, of course, when he gave it,” Fox admitted.

“How do you like the possibility of the motor-cyclists planting it? They were hanging about Bagg’s yard on Tuesday and the screech of the cupboard door seems to have drawn old Mrs B.’s baleful attention to them.”

“Could be. Could well be. Come to that, they might be salting the district with carefully planted forgeries.”

“They might, at that. Look at these, Fox.”

Alleyn had drawn out of a pocket in Miss Hewson’s dressing-case, a folder of colour photographs and film. He laid the prints out on the lid of the suitcase. Three of them were of Ramsdyke Lock. He put the painting on the deck beside them.

“Same thing,” Fox said.

“Yes. Taken from precisely the same spot and by the look of the trees, in spring. Presumably on the previous visit that old Mrs Bagg went on about. But look. There’s that difference we noticed.”

“The trees. Yes. Yes. In the painting they’re smaller and—well—different.”

“Very thorough. Wouldn’t do, you see, to have them is they are now. They had to go back to the Constable era. I wouldn’t mind betting,” Alleyn said. “That those trees have been copied from an actual Constable or a reproduction of one.”

“Who by?”

Alleyn didn’t reply at once. He restored the photographs to the dressing-case and after another long look at the picture, rolled it carefully and tied it up. “We’ll take possession of this,” he said, “and thus justify the Hewsons’ worst forebodings. I’ll write a receipt. Everything in order here? We’ll move on, Br’er Fox, to the other locked cabin: I simply can’t wait to call, in his absence, on Mr Pollock.”

-4-

Thompson and Bailey had arrived. They went quietly round the cabins collecting prints from tooth glasses and were then to move to the sites of the motor-bicycle traces. Tillottson was in his station in Tollardwark hoping for news of the cyclists and, optimistically, for reports from America and Australia to come through London. Meanwhile the appropriate department was setting up an exhaustive check on the deceased and on the two passengers, Natouche and Caley Bard, who lived in England. Caley had given a London address and his occupation as: “Crammer of ill-digested raw-material into the maws of unwilling adolescents.” In other words, he was a free-lance coach to a tutorial firm of considerable repute.

Troy was in bed and asleep at the Percy Arms in Norminster and Alleyn and Fox had completed their search of the cabins.

“A poor, thin time we’ve had of it,” Alleyn said. “Except for that one small thing.”

“The Pollock exhibit?”

“That’s right.”

In Mr Pollock’s cabin they had found in the breast pocket of his deplorable suit a plastic wallet containing a print of the Hewson photograph of Ramsdyke Lock and several envelopes displaying trial sketches for the words with which he had subsequently embellished Troy’s picture. He had evidently taken a lot of trouble over them, interrupting himself from time to time to doodle. It was his doodling that Alleyn had found interesting.

“Very neat, very detailed, very meticulous,” he had muttered. “Not the doodles of a non-draughtsman. No. I wonder what the psychiatric experts have to say under this heading. Someone ought to write a monograph: ‘Doodling and the Unconscious’ or: ‘How to—’.” And he had broken off in the middle of the sentence to stare at the last of Mr Pollock’s trial efforts. He held it out to Fox to examine.

“The Crab is Followed—” Mr Pollock had printed and then repeated, with slight changes, several of the letters. But down one side of the envelope he had made a really elaborate doodle.

It was a drawing of a tree, for all the world twin to the elm that overhung the village pond in Miss Hewson’s oil painting.

“Very careless,” Alleyn had said as he put it in his pocket. “I’m surprised at him.”

When they returned to the saloon they found the Hewsons, and Mr Pollock and Mr Lazenby, still up and still playing Scrabble. Caley Bard and Dr Natouche were reading. Mrs Tretheway had gone to bed.

Bailey and Thompson passed through, carrying their gear. The passengers watched them in silence.

When they had gone Alleyn said: “We’ve done our stuff down there and the cabins are all yours. I’m very sorry if we’ve kept you up too late. Here are the keys.” He laid them on the table. ”And here,” he said, holding up the rolled canvas, “is your picture, Miss Hewson. We would like to take charge of it for a short time, if you please. I’ll give you this receipt. I assure you the canvas will come to no harm.”

Miss Hewson had turned, as Fox liked to say, as white as a turnip and really her skin did have something of the aspect of that unlovely root. She looked from Alleyn to her brother and then wildly round the group of passengers as if appealing against some terrible decision. She rose to her feet, pulled at her underlip with uncertain fingers and had actually made a curious little whining sound when her brother said: “Take it easy, Sis. You don’t have to act this way. It’s O.K.: take it easy.”

Mr Hewson had very large, pale hands. Alleyn saw his left hand clench and his right hand close round his sister’s forearm. She gave a short cry of pain, sank back in her chair and shot what seemed to be a look of terror at her brother.

“My sister’s a super-sensitive girl, Superintendent,” Mr Hewson said. “She gets nervous very, very easy.”

“I hope there is no occasion for her to do so now,” Alleyn said. “I understand this is not your first visit to this district, Mr Hewson. You were here in the spring, weren’t you?”

Dr Natouche lowered his book and for the first time seemed to listen to what was being said; Caley Bard gave an exclamation of surprise. Miss Hewson mouthed inaudibly and fingered her arm and Mr Lazenby said, “Really? Is that so? Your second visit to The River? I didn’t realise,” as if they were all making polite conversation.

“That is so,” Mr Hewson said. “A flying visit. We were captivated and settled to return.”

“When did you book your passages in the
Zodiac
?” Alleyn asked.

A silence, broken at last by Mr Hewson.

“Pardon me, I should have put that a little differently, I guess. We made our reservations before we left the States. I should have said we were enchanted to learn when we got here that the
Zodiac
cruise would cover this same territory.”

“On your previous visit, did you take many photographs?”

“Some. Yes, sir: quite some.”

“Including several shots here at Ramsdyke, of exactly the same subject as the one in this picture?”

Mr Hewson said: “Maybe. I wouldn’t remember off hand. We certainly do get around to taking plenty of pictures.”

“Have you seen this particular photograph, Mr Pollock?”

Mr Pollock lounged back in his seat, put his hands in his trouser pockets and assumed a look of cagey impertinence with which Alleyn was very familiar.

“Couldn’t say, I’m sure,” he said.

“Surely you’d remember. The photograph that is taken from the same place as the painting?”

“Haven’t the vaguest.”

“You mean you haven’t seen it?”

“Know what?” Mr Pollock said. “I don’t get all this stuff about photos. It doesn’t mean a thing to me. It’s silly.”

Mr Pollock’s tree doodle and the Hewsons’ photograph of Ramsdyke Lock dropped on the table in front of him.

“These were in the pocket of your suit.”

“What of it?”

“The drawing is a replica of a tree in the painting.”

“Fancy that.”

“When did you make this drawing?”

For the first time he hesitated but said at last. “After I seen the picture. It’s kind of recollection. I was doodling.”

“While you practised your lettering?”

“That’s right.
No
!” he said quickly. “After.”

“It would have to be after, wouldn’t it? Because you’d done the lettering on the
Zodiac
drawing before you saw the picture. A day or more before. Hadn’t you?”

“That’s your idea: I didn’t say so.”

“Mr Pollock: I suggest that your first answer is the true one. I suggest that you did in fact ‘doodle’ this very accurate drawing when you were practising your lettering a couple of days ago and that you did it, subconsciously or not, out of your knowledge of the picture. Your very vivid and accurate recollection of the picture with which you were already as familiar as if—” Alleyn paused. Mr Pollock had gone very still. “—as if you yourself had painted it,” said Alleyn.

Dr Natouche rose, murmured, “Excuse me, please,” and went up on deck.

“You don’t have to insult me,” Pollock said, “in front of that nigger.”

Caley Bard walked over and looked at him as if he was something nasty he’d caught in his butterfly net.

“You
bloody
little tit,” he said. “Will you shut up, you perfectly bloody little tit?”

Pollock stared at him with a kind of shrinking defiance that was extremely unpleasant to see.

“Sorry,” Caley said to Alleyn and returned to his seat.

“—as if you yourself had painted it,” Alleyn repeated. “Did you paint it, Mr Pollock?”

“No. And that’s it. No.”

And that
was
it as far as Mr Pollock was concerned. He might have gone stone deaf and blind for all the response he made to anything else that was said to him.

“It’s very hot in here,” said Mr Lazenby.

It was indeed. The summer night had grown sultry. There were rumours of thunder in the air and sheet-lightning made occasional irrelevant gestures somewhere a long way beyond Norminster.

Mr Lazenby pulled the curtain back from one of the windows and exposed a white blank. The Creeper had risen.

“Very close,” Mr Lazenby said and ran his finger under his dog-collar. “I think,” said he in his slightly parsonic, slightly Australian accents, “that we’re entitled to an explanation, Superintendent. We’ve all experienced a big shock, you know. We’ve found ourselves alongside a terrible tragedy in the death and subsequent discovery of this poor girl. I’m sure there’s not one of us doesn’t want to see the whole thing cleared up and settled. If you reckon all this business about a painting picked up in a yard has something to do with the death of the poor girl, well: good on you. Go ahead. But, fair dinkum. I don’t myself see how there can be the remotest connection.”

“With which observation,” Mr Hewson said loudly, “I certainly concur. Yes,
sir
.”

“The connection,” Alleyn said, “if there is one, will I hope declare itself as the investigation develops. In the meantime, if you don’t mind, we’ll push along with preliminaries. Will you cast your minds back to Monday night when you all explored Toll’ark?”

The group at the table eyed him warily. From behind his book Caley said: “O.K. I’ve cast mine, such as it is, back.”

“Good. What did you do in Toll’ark?”

“Thwarted of my original intention which was to ask your wife if she’d explore the antiquities with me, I sat in the Northumberland Arms drinking mild-and-bitter and listening to the dullest brand of Mummerset-type gossip it would be possible to conceive. When the pub closed I returned, more pensive than pickled, to our gallant craft.”

“By which route?”

“By a precipitous, rather smelly and cobbled alley laughingly called Something Street—wait—It was on a shop wall. I’ve got it. Weyland Street.”

“Meet any of the other passengers?”

“I don’t think so. Did we?” Caley asked them.

They slightly shook their heads.

“You, Mr Lazenby, attended compline in the church. Did you return alone to the
Zodiac
?”

“No,” he said easily. “Not all the way. I ran into Stan and we went back together. Didn’t we, Stan?”

Mr Pollock, answering to his first name, nodded glumly.

“We know that Mr and Miss Hewson, followed by my wife and then by Dr Natouche returned to The River by way of Ferry Lane where they all met, outside Bagg’s second-hand premises. We also know,” Alleyn said, “that Miss Rickerby-Carrick returned alone, presumably not by Ferry Lane. As Weyland Street is the only other direct road down to The River it seems probable that she took that way home. Did either of you see her?”

“No,” Pollock said instantly and very loudly.

“No,” Lazenby agreed.

“Mr Lazenby,” Alleyn said, taking a sudden and outrageous risk, “what did you do with the papers you tore out of Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s diary?”

A gust of misted air moved the curtain over an open window on the starboard side and the trees above Ramsdyke Lock soughed and were silent again.

“I don’t think that’s a very nice way of talking,” said Mr Lazenby.

Miss Hewson had begun quietly to cry.

“There are ways and ways of putting things,” Mr Lazenby continued, “and that way was offensive.”

“Why?” Alleyn asked. “Do you say you didn’t tear them out?”

“By a mishap, I may have done something of the sort. Naturally. I rescued the diary from a watery grave,” he said, attempting some kind of irony.

“Which was more than anybody did for its owner,” Caley Bard remarked. They looked at him with consternation.

“It was a very, very prompt and praiseworthy undertaking,” said Mr Hewson stuffily. “She was very, very grateful to the Reverend. It was the Action of a Man. Yes, sir. A Man.”

“As we could see for ourselves,” Caley remarked and bowed slightly to Mr Lazenby.

“It was nothing, really,” Mr Lazenby protested. “I’m a Sydneysider, don’t forget and I
was
in my bathers.”

“As I have already indicated,” Caley said.

“The pages,” Alleyn said, “were in your left hand when you sat on the bank just before the
Zodiac
picked you up. You had turned the leaves of the diary over while you waited.”