Clutch of Constables (10 page)

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.