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

‘I say, do call me Hay.’

‘Yes – well – thank you. I was going to say that I don’t think Dr Natouche would enjoy special efforts. Really, I don’t.’

‘You seem to get on with him like a house on fire,’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick pointed out discontentedly.

‘Do I? Well, I find him an interesting man.’

‘There you are, you see!’ she cried, proclaiming some completely inscrutable triumph, and a longish silence ensued.

They heard the motorcycle start up and cross the bridge and listened to the diminishment of sound as it made off in the direction of Norminster.

One by one the other passengers straggled up the field. Mr Pollock behind the rest, swinging his built-up boot. The Hewsons were all set-about with cameras while Caley Bard had a box slung from his shoulder and carried a lepidopterist’s net.

So that, Troy thought, was what it was. When everybody was assembled the Hewsons took photographs of the wapentake by itself and with their fellow-travellers sitting self-consciously round it. Mr Lazenby compared it without, Troy felt, perceptible validity, to an aboriginal place of assembly in the Australian outback. Mr Pollock read his brochure and then stared with a faint look of disgust at the original.

Caley Bard joined Troy. ‘So this is where you lit off to,’ he murmured. ‘I got bailed up by that extraordinary lady. She wants to get up a let’s-be-sweet-to-Natouche movement.’

‘I know. What did you say?’

‘I said that as far as I am concerned, I consider I’m as sweet to Natouche as he can readily stomach. Now, tell me all about the wapentake. I’m allergic to leaflets and I’ve forgotten what the Skipper said. Speak up, do.’

Troy did not bother to react to this piece of cheek. She said: ‘So you’re a lepidopterist?’

‘That’s right. An amateur. Do you find it a sinister hobby? It has rather a sinister reputation, I fear. There was that terrifying film and then didn’t somebody in The Hound of the Baskervilles flit about Dartmoor with a deceiving net and killing-bottle?’

‘There’s Nabokov on the credit side.’

‘True. But you don’t fancy it, all the same,’ he said. ‘That I can see, very clearly.’

‘I like them better alive and on the wing. Did you notice those two motorcyclists? They seem to be haunting us.’

‘Friends of young Tom, it appears. They come from Tollardwark where we stay tonight. Did you know it’s pronounced Toll’ark? It will take us an hour or more to get there by water but by road it’s only a short walk from Ramsdyke. There’s confusion for you!’

‘I wouldn’t want to walk: I’ve settled into the River-time-space-dimension.’

‘Yes, I suppose it would be rather spoiling to break out of it. Hallo, that’ll be for us.’

The Zodiac had given three short hoots. They returned hurriedly and found her waiting downstream from the lock.

There was a weir at Ramsdyke, standing off on their port side. Below the green slide of the fall, the whole surface of the river was smothered in foam: foam in islands and in pinnacles, iridescent foam that twinkled and glinted in the late afternoon sunlight, that shredded away from its own crests, floated like gossamer and broke into nothing.

‘Oh!’ cried Miss Rickerby-Carrick in ecstasy. ‘Isn’t it lovely! Oh, do look! Look, look, look!’ she insisted, first to one and then to another of her fellow-passengers. ‘Who would have thought our quiet old river could froth up and behave like a fairytale? Like a dream isn’t it? Isn’t it?’

‘More like washing-day I’m afraid, Miss Rickerby-Carrick,’ said Mrs Tretheway looking over the half-door. ‘It’s detergent. There’s a factory beyond those trees. Tea is ready in the saloon,’ she added.

‘Oh, no!’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick lamented. A flying wisp of detergent settled on her nose. ‘Oh, dear!’ she said crossly and went down to the saloon, followed by the others.

‘How true it is,’ Caley Bard remarked, ‘that beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder.’

He spoke to Troy but Dr Natouche, who was behind her, answered him.

‘Surely,’ Dr Natouche said, ‘not so much in the eye as in the mind. I remember that on a walk – through a wood, you know – I looked into a dell and saw, deep down, an astonishing spot of scarlet. I thought: Ah! A superb fungus secretly devouring the earth and the air. You know? One of those savage fungi that one thinks of as devils? I went down to look more closely at it and found it was a discarded fish-tin with a red label. Was it the less beautiful for my discovery?’

He had turned to Troy. ‘Not to my way of looking,’ she said. ‘It was a good colour and it had made its effect.’

‘We are back aren’t we,’ Caley Bard said, ‘at that old Florentine person with the bubucular nose. We are to assume that the painter doted on every blackhead, crevasse and bump.’

‘Yes,’ Troy said. ‘You are.’

‘So that if a dead something – a fish or a cat – popped up through that foam, for instance, and its colour and shape made a pleasing mélange with its surroundings, it would be a paintable subject and therefore beautiful?’

‘You take,’ she said dryly, ‘the very words from my mouth.’

Mr Bard looked at her mouth for a second or two.

‘And what satisfaction,’ he said under his breath, ‘is there in that?’ He turned away and Troy thought, almost at once, that she must have misheard him.

Miss Rickerby-Carrick flapped into the conversation like a wet sheet. ‘Oh don’t stop. Go on. Do, do, go on. I don’t want to lose a word of this,’ she cried. ‘Because it makes a point that I’m most awfully keen on. Beauty is everywhere. In everything,’ she shouted and swept her arm past Mr Lazenby’s spectacles. ‘“Beauty is Truth; Truth, Beauty”,’ she quoted. ‘That’s all we need to know.’

‘That’s a very, very profound observation, Miss Rickerby-Carrick,’ Mr Hewson observed kindly.

‘I just don’t go along with it,’ his sister said. ‘I’ve seen a whole lot of Truth that wasn’t beautiful. A whole heap of it.’

Mr Pollock, who had been utterly silent for a very long time now heaved an enormous sigh and as if infected by his gloom the other passengers also fell silent.

Somebody – Mr Lazenby? – had left the morning’s newspaper on the settle, the paper in which her own photograph had appeared. Troy, who did not eat with her tea, picked it up and seeing nothing to interest her, idly turned over a page.

‘Man found strangled.

‘The body of a man who had been strangled was found at 8 p.m. last night in a flat in Cyprus Street, Soho. He is believed to have been a picture-dealer and the police who are making inquiries give his name as K.G.Z. Andropulos.’

The passenger list was still on the table. Troy looked at the name Caley Bard had crossed out in favour of her own.

She rose with so abrupt a movement that one or two of her companions glanced up at her. She dropped the newspaper on the seat and went down to her cabin. After some thought, she said to herself: ‘If nobody has read it there’s no reason why I should point it out. It’s a horrible bit of news.’

And then she thought that if, as seemed probable, the paragraph had in fact not been noticed, it might be as well to get rid of the paper, the more especially since she would like to repress her own photograph before it went into general circulation. She could imagine Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s ejaculations: ‘And there you both are, you and the murdered man who was to have your berth. Fancy!’ She hunted out her sketchbook and returned to the saloon.

The newspaper was nowhere to be seen.

III

Troy waited for a minute or two in the saloon to collect her thoughts. Her fellow-passengers were still at tea and apparently quite undisturbed. She went up on deck. The Skipper was at the wheel.

‘Everything all right, Mrs Alleyn?’ he asked.

‘Yes, thank you. Yes. Everything,’ said Troy and found herself a chair.

Most of the detergent foam had been left behind by now. The Zodiac sailed towards evening through clear waters, low fields and occasional groups of trees.