Clutch of Constables

‘Come,’ Mr Bard exclaimed. ‘Here’s a sensible and heartening start. A handful of nice little facts and a fillip to the imagination. Splendid. Mrs Alleyn, you have finished your luncheon. Do come on deck and witness the departure.’

‘I think we should all go up,’ Troy said.

‘Oh ra-ther!’ cried Miss Rickerby-Carrick. ‘Come on, chaps!’

She blew her nose vigorously and made a dash for the companion-way. There was a printed warning at the top: ‘Please note deeper step’ but she disregarded it, plunged headlong through the half-door at the top and could be heard floundering about with startled cries on the other side. Troy overheard Mr Hewson say to Miss Hewson: ‘To me she seems kind of fabulous,’ and Miss Hewson reply: ‘Maybe she’s one of the Queen’s Beasts’ and they both looked dryly humorous. Illogically Troy felt irritated with them and exasperated by Miss Rickerby-Carrick who was clearly going to get on everybody’s nerves. Mr Pollock for instance, after contemplating her precipitate exit, muttered: ‘Isn’t it marvellous!’ and Mr Bard, for Troy’s benefit, briefly cast up his eyes and followed the others to the upper deck. Mr Lazenby, who was still at his luncheon, waved his fork to indicate that he would follow later.

Dr Natouche rose and looked out of the saloon windows at the wharf. Troy thought: ‘How very tall he is.’ Taller, she decided, than her husband, who was over six feet. ‘He’s waiting,’ she thought, ‘for all of us to go up first,’ and she found herself standing by him.

‘Have you ever done this before, Dr Natouche?’ she asked. ‘Taken a waterways cruise?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Never before. It is a new experience.’

‘For me too. I came on an impulse.’

‘Indeed? You felt the need of a break perhaps after the strain of your public activities.’

‘Yes,’ Troy agreed, unaccountably pleased that he did, after all, know of her show and had recognized her. Without so much as noticing that she felt none of her usual awkwardness she said: ‘They are a bit of a hurdle, these solemn affairs.’

Dr Natouche said: ‘Some of your works are very beautiful. It gave me great pleasure in London to see them.’

‘Did it? I’m glad.’

‘They are casting off, if that is the right phrase. Would you like to go up?’

Troy went up on deck. Tom, the boy, had loosed the mooring lines and laid them out smartly. The Skipper was at the wheel. The Zodiac’s engines throbbed. She moved astern, away from her wharf and out into the main stream.

The motorcyclists were still in the lane. Troy saw young Tom signal, not very openly, to them and they slightly raised their hands in return. The girl straddled her seat, the boy kicked and their engine broke out in pandemonium. The machine, curved, belched and racketed up the lane out of sight.

Dr Natouche appeared and then Mr Lazenby. The eight passengers stood along the rails and watched the riverbanks take on a new perspective and become remote. Spires and waffle-irons, glass boxes, mansard roofs and the squat cupola of the Norminster Town Hall were now merely there to be stared at with detachment. They shifted about, very slowly, and looked over one another’s shoulders and grew smaller. The Zodiac, now in mid-stream, set her course for Ramsdyke Lock.

CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_9ab9a617-6dbd-52ae-9823-caab2d16c392)

The Wapentake (#ulink_9ab9a617-6dbd-52ae-9823-caab2d16c392)

‘He had been operating,’ Alleyn said, ‘in a very big way in the Middle East. All among the drug barons with one of whom he fell out and who is thought to have grassed on him. From drugs he turned to the Old Master racket and was certainly behind several very big jobs in Paris. Getting certificates for good fakes from galleries and the widows of celebrated painters. He then crossed to New York where he worked off the fruits of this ploy until Interpol began to make interested noises. By the way, it may be noted that at this juncture he had not got beyond a Blue Circular which means of course –’

The boots of the intelligent-looking sandy man in the second row scraped the floor. He made a slight gesture and looked eager.

‘I see you know,’ Alleyn said.

‘Ay, sir, I do. A Blue International Circular signifies that Interpol cannot place the identity of the creeminal.’

‘That’s it. However, they were getting warmer and in 1965 the Jampot found it necessary to transfer to Bolivia where for once he went too far and was put in gaol. Something to do with masquerading in female attire with criminal intent. From there, as I’ve said, he escaped, in May of last year, and sometime later arrived with an efficiently cooked-up passport in a Spanish freighter in England. At that juncture the Yard had no specific charge against him although he featured heavily in the discussions we were holding in San Francisco. He must have already been in touch with the British group he subsequently directed, and one of them booked him in for a late summer cruise in the Zodiac. The object of this manoeuvre will declare itself as we go along.

‘At this point I’d like you to take particular note of a disadvantage under which the Jampot laboured. In doing this I am indulging in hindsight. At the time we are speaking about we had no clear indication of what he looked like and our only photograph was a heavily bearded job supplied by the Bolivian police. The ears are hidden by flowing locks, the mouth by a luxuriant moustache and the jaw and chin by rich and carefully tended whiskers.

‘We now know, of course, that there was, in his appearance, something that set him apart, that made him physically speaking, an odd man out. Need I,’ Alleyn asked, ‘remind you what this was –?’

The intelligent-looking man seated in the second row made a slight gesture. ‘Exactly,’ Alleyn said and enlarged upon it to the class.

‘I’m able,’ he went on, ‘to give you a pretty full account of this apparently blameless little cruise because my wife wrote at some length about it. In her first letter she told me –’

I

‘And there you are.’ Troy wrote. ‘All done on the spur of the moment and I think I’m going to be glad I saw that notice in The Pleasure Craft Company’s office window.

‘It’s always been you that writes in cabins and on trains and in hotel bedrooms and me that sits at the receiving end and now here we are, both at it. The only thing I mind is not getting your letters for the next five days. I’ll post this at Ramsdyke Lock and with a bit of luck it should reach you in New York when I’m at Longminster on the turning point of my little journey. At that rate it’ll travel about two thousand times as fast as I do so whar’s your relativity, noo? I’m writing it on my knee from a deck chair. I can’t tell you how oddly time behaves on The River, how fantastically remote we are from the country that lies so close on either hand. There go the cars and lorries, streaking along main arteries and over bridges and there are the sound-breakers belching away overhead but they belong to another world. Truly.

‘Our world is watery: details of eddies and reeds and wet banks. Beyond it things move in a very rum and baffling kind of way. You know how hopeless I am about direction. Well, what goes on over there beyond our banks, completely flummuckses me. There’s a group of vast power-houses that has spent the greater part of the afternoon slowly moving from one half of our world to the other. They retire over our horizon on the port side and just as one thinks that’s the last of them: there they are moving in on the starboard. Sometimes we approach them and sometimes we retreat and at one dramatic phase we sailed close-by and there were Lilliputians half-way up one of them, being busy. Yes: OK darling, I know rivers wind.

‘Apart from the power-houses the country beyond The River is about as empty as anywhere in England: flat, flat, flat and according to the Skipper almost hammered so by the passage of history. Red roses and white. Cavaliers and Roundheads. Priests and barons. The Percies of the North. The Jockeys of Norfolk. The lot: all galumphing over the landscape through the centuries. Did you know that Constable stayed here one summer and painted? Church spires turn up with minimal villages and of course, the locks. Do you remember the lock in Our Mutual Friend: a great slippery drowning-box? I keep thinking of it although the weirs are more noisily alarming.

‘It seems we are going towards the sea in our devious fashion and so we sink in locks.

‘As for the company: I’ve tried to introduce them to you. We’re no more oddly-assorted, I suppose, than any other eight people that might take it into their heads to spend five days out of time on The River. Apart from Miss Rickerby-Carrick who sends me up the wall (you know how beastly I am about ostentatious colds-in-the-head) and Dr Natouche who is black, there’s nothing at all remarkable about us.

‘I’m not the only one who finds poor Miss R-C. difficult. Her sledge-hammer tact crashes over Dr N like a shower of brickbats, so anxious is she to be unracial. I saw him flinch two minutes ago under a frontal assault. Mr Bard said just now that a peep into her subconscious would be enough to send him round more bends than the Zodiac negotiates in a summer season. If only she’d just pipe down every now and then. But no, she doesn’t know how to. She has a bosom friend in Birmingham called – incredibly I forget what – Mavis something – upon whom we get incessant bulletins. What Mavis thinks, what she says, how she reacts, how she has recovered (with set-backs) from Her Operation (coyly left unspecified). We all, I am sure, now dread the introduction of the phrase: “My special chum, Mavis.” All the same, I don’t think she’s a stupid woman. Just an inksey-tinksey bit dotty. The Americans clearly think her as crazy as a coot but typically British. This is maddening. She keeps a diary and keeps is the operative word: she carries it about with her and jots. I am ashamed to say it arouses my curiosity. What can she be writing in it? How odious I sound.

‘I don’t like Mr Pollock much. He is so very sharp and pale and he so obviously thinks us fools (I mean Mr Bard and me and, of course, poor Miss R-C.) for not sharing his dislike of coloured people. Of course one does see that if they sing calypsos all night in the no doubt ghastly tenements he exorbitantly lets to them and if they roar insults and improper suggestions at non-black teenagers, it doesn’t send up the tone. But don’t non-black tenants ever send the tone down, for pity’s sake? And what on earth has all this got to do with Dr Natouche whose tone is superb? I consider that one of the worst features of the whole black-white thing is that nobody can say: “I don’t much like black people” as they might say: “I don’t like the Southern Scot or the Welsh or antipodeans or the Midland English or Americans or the League of British Loyalists or The Readers’ Digest.” I happen to be attracted to the dark-skinned (Dr Natouche is remarkably attractive) but until people who are or who are not attracted can say so unselfconsciously it’ll go on being a muddle. I find it hard to be civil to Mr Pollock when he makes his common little racial gestures.

‘He’s not alone in his antipathy. Antipathy? I suppose that’s the right word but I almost wrote “fear”. It seems to me that Pollock and the Hewsons and even Mr Lazenby, for all his parsonic forbearance, eye Dr Natouche with something very like fear.

‘We are about to enter our second lock – the Ramsdyke, I think. More later.

‘Later (about 30 minutes). Ramsdyke. An incident. We were all on deck and the lock people and our Tom were doing their things with paddles and gates and all, and I noticed on the far bank from the lockhouse a nice lane, a pub, some wonderful elms, a ford and a pond. I called out to nobody in particular:

‘“Oh, look – The place is swarming with Constables! Everywhere you look. A perfect clutch of them!”

‘Rory, it was as if someone had plopped a dirty great weight overboard into the lock. Everybody went dead still and listened. At least – this is hard to describe – someone did in particular but I don’t know which because nobody moved. Then Dr Natouche in mild surprise said: “The Police, Mrs Alleyn? Where? I don’t see them,” and I explained and he, for the first time, gave a wonderful roar of laughter. Pollock gaped at me, Caley Bard said he’d thought for a moment his sins had caught up with him, Mr Lazenby said what a droll mistake to be sure and the Hewsons looked baffled. Miss Rickerby-C. (her friends call her, for God’s sake, Hay) waited for the penny to drop and then laughed like a hyena. I still don’t know which of them (or whether it was more than one of them) went so very quiet and still and what’s more I got the idiotic notion that my explanation had been for – someone – more disturbing than the original remark. And on top of all this, I can not get rid of the feeling that I’m involved in some kind of performance. Like one of those dreams actors say they get when they find themselves on an unknown stage where a play they’ve never heard of is in action.

‘Silly? Or not silly? Rum? Or not rum?

‘I’ll write again at Tollardwark. The show looked all right: well hung and lit. The Gallery bought the black and pink thing and seven smaller ones sold the first night. Paris on the 31st and New York in November. Darling, if, and only if, you have a moment I would be glad if you could bear to call at the Guggenheim just to say –’

II

Troy enjoyed coming into the locks. Ramsdyke, as she observed in her letter, was a charming one: a seemly house, a modest plot, the tow-path, a bridge over The River and the Ramsdyke itself, a neat wet line, Roman-ruled across the fens. On the farther side was the ‘Constable’ view and farther downstream a weir. The Zodiac moved quietly into the lock but before she sank with its waters Troy jumped ashore, posted her letter and followed the direction indicated by the Skipper’s tattooed arm and pointed finger. He called after her ‘Twenty minutes’ and she waved her understanding, crossed the tow-path, and climbed a grassy embankment.

She came into a field bordered by sod and stone walls and, on the left, beyond the wall, by what seemed to be a narrow road leading down to the bridge. This was the Dyke Way of the brochures. Troy remembered that it came from the village of Wapentake, which her map showed as lying about a mile and a half from the lock. She walked up the field. It rose gently and showed, above its crest, trees and a distant spire.

The air smelt of earth and grass and, delicately, of wood-smoke. It seemed lovely to Troy. She felt a great uplift of spirit and was so preoccupied with her own happiness that she came upon the meeting place of the wapentake, just where the Skipper had said it would be, before she was aware of it.

It was a circular hollow, sometimes called, the brochure said, a Pot, and it was lined with grass, mosses and fern. Here the Plantagenet knights-of-the-shire had sat at their fortnightly Hundreds, dealing out justice as they saw it in those days and as the growing laws directed them. Troy wondered if, when the list was a heavy one, they stayed on into the evening and night and if torches were lit.

Below the wapentake hollow and quite close to the lock, another, but a comparatively recent depression had been cut into the hillside: perhaps to get a load of gravel of which there seemed to be a quantity in the soil, or perhaps by archaeological amateurs. An overhanging shelf above this excavation had been roughly shored up by poles with an old door for roof. The wood had weathered and looked to be rotting. ‘A bit of an eyesore,’ thought Troy.

She went into the wapentake and sat there, and fancied she felt beneath her some indication of a kind of bench that must have been chopped out of the soil, she supposed, seven centuries ago. ‘I’m an ignoramus about history,’ Troy thought, ‘but I do like to feel it in my bones,’ and she peopled the wapentake with heads like carven effigies, with robes in the colours of stained glass and with glints of polished steel.