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

took out a pocket-book and slipped the scrap of cloth into it.

      ‘I expect we’re making a song about nothing,’ Troy said.

      Suddenly she felt an almost overwhelming impulse to tell Dr Natouche about her misgivings and the incidents that had prompted them. She had a vivid premonition of how he would look as she confided her perplexity. His head would be courteously inclined and his expression placid and a little withdrawn – a consulting-room manner of the most reassuring kind. It really would be a great relief to confide in Dr Natouche. An opening phrase had already shaped itself in her mind when she remembered another attentive listener.

      ‘And by-the-way, Mrs Alleyn,’ Superintendent Tillottson had said in his infuriatingly bland manner, ‘We won’t mention this little matter to anybody, shall we? Just a routine precaution.’

      So she held her tongue.

       CHAPTER 5

       Longminster

      ‘I suppose one of his greatest assets,’ Alleyn said, ‘is his ability to instil confidence in the most unlikely people. An infuriated Bolivian policeman is supposed to have admitted that before he could stop himself he found he was telling the Jampot about his own trouble with a duodenal ulcer. This may not be a true story. If not, it was invented to illustrate the more winning facets in the Foljambe façade. The moral is: that it takes all sorts to make a thoroughly bad lot and it sometimes takes a conscientious police officer quite a long time to realize this simple fact of unsavoury life. You can’t type criminals. It’s just as misleading to talk about them as if they never behave out of character as it is to suppose the underworld is riddled with charmers who only cheat or kill by some kind of accident.

      ‘Foljambe has been known to behave with perfect good-nature and also with ferocity. He is attracted by beauty at a high artistic level. His apartment in Paris is said to have been got up in the most impeccable taste. He likes money better than anything else in life and he enjoys making it by criminal practices. If he was left a million pounds it’s odds on he’d continue to operate the rackets. If people got in his way he would continue to remove them.

      ‘I’ve told you that my wife’s letters missed me in New York and were forwarded to San Francisco. By the time they reached me her cruise in the Zodiac had only two nights to go. As you know I rang the Department and learnt that Mr Fox was in France, following what was hoped to be a hot line on Foljambe. I got through to Mr Tillottson who in view of this development was inclined to discount the Zodiac altogether. I was not so inclined.

      ‘Those of you who are married,’ Alleyn said, ‘will understand my position. In the Force our wives are not called upon to serve in female James-Bondage and I imagine most of you would agree that any notion of their involvement in our work would be outlandish, ludicrous and extremely unpalatable. My wife’s letters, though they made very little of her misgivings, were disturbing enough for me to wish her out of the Zodiac. I thought of asking Tillottson to get her to ring me up but I had missed her at Crossdyke and if I waited until she reached Longminster I myself would miss my connection from San Francisco. And if, by any fantastic and most improbable chance one of her fellow-passengers in some way tied in with the Andropulos-Jampot show, the last thing we would want to do was to alert him by sending police messages to lock-keepers asking her to leave the cruise. My wife is a celebrated painter who is known, poor thing, to be married to a policeman.’

      The Scot in the second row smirked.

      ‘Well,’ Alleyn said, ‘in the upshot I told Tillottson I thought my present job might finish earlier than expected and I would get back as soon as I could. I would remind you that at this stage I had no knowledge of the disappearance of Miss Rickerby-Carrick. If I had heard that bit I would have taken a very much stronger line.

      ‘As it was –’

       I

      There was no denying it, the cruise was much more enjoyable without Miss Rickerby-Carrick.

      From Crossdyke to Longminster the sun shone upon fields, spinneys, villages and locks. It was the prettiest of journeys. Everybody seemed to expand. The Hewsons’ cameras clicked busily. Mr Lazenby and Mr Pollock discovered a common interest in stamps and showed each other the contents of sad-looking envelopes. Caley Bard told Troy a great deal about butterflies but she refused, nevertheless, to look at the Death’s Head he had caught last evening on Crossdyke Hill. ‘Well,’ he said gaily, ‘don’t look at it if it’s going to set you against me. Why can’t you be more like Hay? She said she belonged to the SPCA but lepidoptera didn’t count.’

      ‘Do you call her Hay?’

      ‘No. Do you?’

      ‘No, but she asked me to.’

      ‘Stand-offish old you, as usual,’ he said and for no reason at all Troy burst out laughing. Her own apprehensions and Dr Natouche’s anxiety had receded in the pleasant atmosphere of the third day’s cruise.

      Even Dr Natouche turned out to have a hobby. He liked to make maps. If anyone as tranquil and grave as Dr Natouche could be said to exhibit coyness, he did so when questioned by Troy and Bard about his cartography. He was, he confessed, attempting a chart of their cruise: it could not be called a true chart because it was not being scientifically constructed but he hoped to make something of it when he had consulted Ordnance maps. Troy wondered if persons of Dr Natouche’s complexion ever blushed and was sure, when he was persuaded to show them his little drawing, that he felt inclined to do so.

      It was executed in very hard lead-pencil and was in the style of the sixteenth-century English cartographers with tiny drawings of churches and trees in their appropriate places and with extremely minute lettering.

      Troy exclaimed with pleasure and said: ‘That we should have two calligraphers on board! Mr Pollock, do come and look at this.’

      Pollock who had been talking to the Hewsons, hesitated, and then limped over and looked at the map but not at Dr Natouche.

      ‘Very nice,’ he said and returned to the Hewsons.

      Troy had made a boldish move. Pollock, since the beginning of the cruise had only just kept on the hither side of insulting Dr Natouche. He had been prevented, not by any tactics that she and Caley Bard employed but rather by the behaviour of Dr Natouche himself who skilfully avoided giving Pollock any chance to exhibit ill-will. Somehow it came about that at mealtimes Dr Natouche was as far removed as possible from Mr Pollock. On deck, Dr Natouche had conveyed himself to the area farthest aft, which Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s mattress, deflated to the accompaniment of its own improper noises, by the boy Tom, had previously occupied.

      So Dr Natouche had offered no opportunity for Mr Pollock to insult him and Mr Pollock had retired, as Caley Bard pointed out to Troy, upon a grumpy alliance with the Hewsons with whom he could be observed in ridiculously furtive conference, presumably about racial relations.

      To these skirmishes and manoeuvres Mr Lazenby appeared to be oblivious. He swapped philatelic gossip with Mr Pollock, he discussed the tendencies of art in Australia with Troy when she was unable to escape him, and he made jovial, unimportant small-talk with Dr Natouche.

      Perhaps the most effective deterrent to any overt display of racialism from Mr Pollock was an alliance he had formed with the Tretheways.

      To Troy, it appeared that Mr Pollock, in common, she thought, with every other male in the Zodiac, was extremely conscious of Mrs Tretheway’s allure. That was not surprising. What did surprise was Mrs Tretheway’s fairly evident response to Mr Pollock’s offering of homage. Evidently, she found him attractive but not apparently to an extent that might cause the Skipper any concern since Troy heard them all planning to meet at a pub in Longminster. They were going to have a bit of an evening, they agreed.

      Troy