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

you’ll appreciate the situation. Take a look at it. Andropulos has been murdered, almost certainly by the Jampot and the Jampot’s at large. Andropulos, scarcely a candidate, one would have thought, for the blameless delights of British Inland Waterways was to have been a passenger in the Zodiac. My wife now has his cabin. There’s no logical reason in the wide world why his murderer should be her fellow-passenger: indeed the idea at first sight is ludicrous, and yet and yet – my wife tells me that her innocent remark about “Constables” seemed to cast an extraordinary gloom upon someone or other in the party, that the newspaper report of Andropulos’s murder has been suppressed by someone in the Zodiac, that she’s pretty sure an Australian padre who wears dark glasses and conceals his right eye has purloined a page of a farcical spinster’s diary, that she half-suspects him of listening-in to her telephone conversation with Mr Fox and that she herself can’t escape a feeling of impending disaster. And there’s one other feature of this unlikely set-up that, however idiotically, strikes me as being more disturbing than all the rest put together. I wonder if any of you –’

      But the man in the second row already had his hand up.

      ‘Exactly,’ Alleyn said when the phenomenon had delivered himself of the correct answer in a strong Scots accent. ‘Quite so. And you might remember that I am five thousand odd miles away in San Francisco on an extremely important conference.

      ‘What the hell do I do?’

      After a moment’s thought the hand went up again.

      ‘All right, all right,’ Alleyn said. ‘You tell me.’

       I

      Hazel Rickerby-Carrick sat in her cabin turning over with difficulty the disastrous pages of her diary.

      They were not actually pulp; they were stuck together, buckled, blistered and disfigured. They had half-parted company with the spine and the red covers had leaked into them. The writing, however, had not been irrevocably lost.

      She separated the entries for the previous day and for that afternoon.

      ‘I’m at it again,’ she read dismally. ‘Trying too hard, as usual. It goes down all right with Mavis, of course, but not with these people: not with Troy Alleyn. If only I’d realized who she was from the first! Or if only I’d heard she was going to be next door in Cabin 7: I could have gone to the Exhibition. I could have talked about her pictures. Of course, I don’t pretend to know anything about –’ Here she had had second thoughts and had abstained from completing the aphorism. She separated the sopping page from its successor using a nail-file as a sort of slice. She began to read the final entry. It was for that afternoon, before the diary went overboard.

      ‘– I’m going to write it down. I’ve got my diary with me: here, now. I’m lying on my Li-lo on deck (at the “blunt end”!!!) behind a pile of chairs covered with a tarpaulin. I’m having a sun-tan. I suppose I’m a goose to be so shy. In this day and age! What one sees! And of course it’s much healthier and anyway the body is beautiful: beautiful. Only mine isn’t so very. What I’m going to write now, happened last night. In Tollardwark. It was so frightful and so strange and I don’t know what I ought to do about it. I think what I’ll do is I’ll tell Troy Alleyn. She can’t say it’s not extraordinary because it is.

      ‘I’d come out of church and I was going back to the Zodiac. I was wearing what the Hewsons call “sneakers”. Rubber soles. And that dark maroon jersey thing so I suppose I was unnoticed because it was awfully dark. Absolutely pitchers. Well, I’d got a pebble or something in my left “sneaker” and it hurt so I went into a dark shop-entry where I could lean against a door and take it off. And it was while I was there that those others came down the street. I would have hailed them: I was just going to do it when they stopped. I didn’t recognize the voices at once because they spoke very low. In fact the one of them who whispered, I never recognized. But the others! Could they have said what I’m sure they did? The first words froze me. But literally. Froze me. I was riveted. Horror-stricken. I can hear them now. It –’

      She had reached the bottom of the page. She picked at it gingerly, slid the nail-file under it, crumpled it and turned it.

      The following pages containing her last entry were gone.

      The inner margins where they were bound together had to some extent escaped a complete soaking. She could see by the fragments that remained that they had been pulled away. ‘But after all, that’s nothing to go by,’ she thought, ‘because when he dived, Mr Lazenby may have grabbed. The book was open. It was open and lying on its face when it sank. That’s it. That’s got to be it.’

      Miss Rickerby-Carrick remained perfectly still for some minutes. Once or twice she passed her arthritic fingers across her eyes and brow almost as if she tried to exorcize some devil of muddlement within.

      ‘He’s a clergyman,’ she thought, ‘a clergyman! He’s been staying with a bishop. I could ask him. Why not? What could he say? Or do? But I’ll ask Troy Alleyn. She’ll jolly well have to listen. It’ll interest her. Her husband!’ she suddenly remembered. ‘Her husband’s a famous detective. I ought to tell Troy Alleyn: and then she may like me to call her Troy. We may get quite chummy,’ thought poor Hazel Rickerby-Carrick without very much conviction.

      She put the saturated diary open on her bedside shelf where a ray of afternoon sunlight reached it through the porthole.

      A nervous weakness had come upon her. She suffered a terrible sense of constraint as if not only her head was iron-bound but as if the tiny cabin contracted about her. ‘I shan’t sleep in here,’ she thought. ‘I shan’t get a wink or if I do there’ll be beastly dreams and I’ll make noises and they’ll hate me.’ And as she fossicked in an already chaotic drawer for Troy’s aspirin she was visited by her great idea. She would sleep on deck. She would wait until the others had settled down and then she would take her Li-lo from its jolly old hidey-hole behind the tarpaulin and blow it up and sleep, as she phrased it to herself, ‘under the wide and starry sky’. And perhaps – perhaps.

      ‘I’ve always been one to go straight at a thing and tackle it,’ she thought and finding Troy’s aspirins with the top off inside her sponge-bag, she took a couple, lay on her bunk and made several disastrous plans.

       II

      For Troy, the evening at Crossdyke began farcically. The passengers were given an early dinner to enable them to explore the village and the nearby ruin of a hunting lodge where King John had stayed during his misguided antics in the north.

      Troy who had the beginning of a squeamish headache hoped to get a still earlier start than she had achieved at Tollardwark and to make her call at the police station before any of her fellow-passengers appeared on the scene. Her story of the lost fur was now currency in the ship and would explain the visit if explanation was needed but she hoped to avoid making one.

      Throughout dinner Miss Rickerby-Carrick gazed intently at Troy who found herself greatly put-out by this attention: the more so because what her husband once described as her King-Size Bowels of Compassion had been roused by Miss Rickerby-Carrick. The more exasperating she became the more infuriatingly succulent her cold, the more embarrassingly fixed her regard, the sorrier Troy felt for her and the less she desired her company. Either, she thought, the wretched woman was doing a sort of dismal lion-hunt, or, hideous notion, had developed a schwarm for Troy herself. Or was it possible, she suddenly wondered, that this extraordinary lady had something of moment to communicate.

      Miss Rickerby-Carrick commanded rather less tact than a bulldozer and it must be clear, Troy thought, to everybody in the saloon that a happening was on the brew.

      Determined to look anywhere but at her tormentor, Troy caught the ironical, skew-eyed glance of Caley Bard. He winked and she lowered her gaze. Mr Pollock stared with distaste at Miss Rickerby-Carrick and the Hewsons caught each other’s glances and assumed a mask-like air of detachment. Mr Lazenby and Dr Natouche swopped bits of medieval information about the ruins.

      Troy