Inspector Alleyn 3-Book Collection 9: Clutch of Constables, When in Rome, Tied Up in Tinsel

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 porthole. 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? Tillotson 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 realized 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.

Troy pushed back the red blanket, sat up on her bunk, put her feet on the deck and ran her fingers through her short hair. ‘Well, Mr Tillottson,’ she said, ‘what about this one?’

II

With the exception of Chief-Inspector Fox for whom she had a deep affection, Troy did not meet her husband’s colleagues with any regularity. Sometimes Alleyn would bring a few of them in for drinks and two or three times a year the Alleyns had easy-going evenings when their house, like Troy’s cabin in the Zodiac, was full of enormous men talking shop.

From these encounters she had, she thought, learnt to recognize certain occupational characteristics among officers of the Criminal Investigation Department.

They were men who, day in, day out, worked in an atmosphere of intense hostility. They were, they would have said, without illusions and unless a built-in scepticism, by definition includes a degree of illusion, she supposed they were right. Some of them, she thought, had retained a kind of basic compassion: they were shocked by certain crimes and angered by others. They honestly saw themselves as guardians of the peace however disillusioned they might be as to the character of the beings they protected. Some regarded modern psychiatric theories about crime with massive contempt. Others seemed to look upon the men and women they hunted with a kind of sardonic affection and would strike up what passed for friendships with them. Many of them, like Fox, were of a very kindly disposition yet, as Alleyn once said of them, if pity entered far into the hunter his occupation was gone. And he had quoted Mark Antony who talked about ‘pity choked with custom of fell deeds’. Some of the men she met were bitter and with reason, about public attitudes towards the police. ‘A character comes and robs their till or does their old Mum or interferes with their kid sister,’ Mr Fox once remarked, ‘and they’re all over you. Next day they’re among the pigeons in Trafalgar Square advising the gang our chaps are trying to deal with to put in the boot. You could say it’s a lonely sort of job.’

Very few of Alleyn’s colleagues, Troy thought, were natural bullies but it was to be expected that the Service would occasionally attract such men and that its disciplines would sometimes fail to control them.

At which point in her consideration of the genus of CID Troy was invariably brought up short by the reflection that her husband fitted into none of these categories. And she would give up generalization as a bad job.

Now, however, she found herself trying to place Superintendent Tillottson and was unable to do so.

How tough was Mr Tillottson? How intelligent? How impenetrable? And what on earth did he now make of the cruise of the Zodiac? If he carried on in his usual way, ironing-out her remarks into a featureless expanse of words, she would feel like hitting him.

So. ‘What do you make of this one?’ she asked and heard his ‘Well, now, Mrs Alleyn –’ before he said it.

‘Well, now, Mrs Alleyn,’ said Mr Tillottson and she cut in.

‘Has she been murdered? Or can’t you say until after the autopsy?’

‘We can’t say,’ he admitted, looking wary, ‘until after the inquest. Not on – er – on – er –’

‘The external appearance of her body?’

‘That is so, Mrs Alleyn. That is correct, yes.’

‘Have you heard that last night the Skipper got a telegram purporting to come from her? From Carlisle? Intimating she was on her way to the Highlands?’

‘We have that information, Mrs Alleyn. Yes.’

‘Well, then?’

Mr Tillottson coined a phrase: ‘It’s quite a little problem.’ he said.

‘You,’ Troy said with feeling, ‘are telling me.’ She indicated the stool. ‘Do sit down, Mr Tillottson,’ she said.

He thanked her and did so, obliterating the stool.

‘I suppose,’ she continued. ‘You want a statement from me, don’t you?’