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

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.

      She began to wonder if it would be possible to make a very formalized drawing – dark and thronged with seated, lawgiving shapes. A puff of warm air moved the grass and the hair of her head and up the sloping field came Dr Natouche.

      He was bareheaded and had changed his tweed jacket for a yellow sweater. When he saw Troy he checked and stood still, formidable because of his height and colour against the mild background of the waterways. Troy waved to him. ‘Come up,’ she called. ‘Here’s the wapentake.’

      ‘Thank you.’

      He came up quickly, entered the hollow and looked about him. ‘I have read the excellent account in our little book,’ he said. ‘So here they sat, those old chaps.’ The colloquialism came oddly from him.

      ‘You sit here, too,’ Troy suggested, wanting to see his head and his torso, in its yellow sweater, against the moss and fern.

      He did so, squaring himself and resting his hands on his knees. His teeth and the whites of his eyes were high accents in the picture he presented for Troy. ‘You ask for the illustration of an incongruity,’ he said.

      ‘You would be nice to paint. Do you really feel incongruous? I mean is this sort of thing quite foreign to you?’

      ‘Not altogether. No.’

      They said nothing for a time and Troy did not think there was any awkwardness in their silence.

      A lark sang madly overhead and the sound of quiet voices floated up from the lock. Above the embankment they could see the top of Zodiac’s wheelhouse. Now it began very slowly to sink. They heard Miss Rickerby-Carrick shout and laugh.

      A motorcycle engine crescendoed out of the distance, clattered and exploded down the lane and then reduced its speed and noise and stopped.

      ‘One would think it was those two again,’ said Troy.

      Dr Natouche rose. ‘It is,’ he said, ‘I can see them. Actually, it is those two. They are raising their hands.’

      ‘How extraordinary,’ she said idly. ‘Why should they turn up?’

      ‘They may be staying in the district. We haven’t come very far, you know.’

      ‘I keep forgetting. One’s values change on The River.’

      Troy broke off a fern frond and turned it between her fingers. Dr Natouche sat down again.

      ‘My father was an Ethiopian,’ he said presently. ‘He came to this country with a Mission fifty years ago and married an Englishwoman. I was born and educated in England.’

      ‘Have you never been to your own country?’

      ‘Once. But I was alien there. And like my father, I married an Englishwoman. I am a widower. My wife died two months ago.’

      ‘Was that why you came on this cruise?’

      ‘We were to have come together.’

      ‘I see,’ Troy said.

      ‘She would have enjoyed it. It was something we could have done,’ he said.

      ‘Have you found many difficulties about being as you are? Black?’

      ‘Of course. How sensible of you to ask, Mrs Alleyn. One knows everybody thinks such questions.’

      ‘Well,’ Troy said, ‘I’m glad it was all right to ask.’

      ‘I am perfectly at ease with you,’ Dr Natouche stated rather, Troy felt, as he might have told a patient there was nothing the matter with her and really almost arousing a comparable pleasure. ‘Perfectly,’ he repeated after a pause: ‘I don’t think, Mrs Alleyn, you could ever say anything to me that would change that condition.’

      Miss Rickerby-Carrick appeared at the top of the embankment. ‘Hoo-hoo!’ she shouted. ‘What’s it like up there?’

      ‘Very pleasant,’ Troy said.

      ‘Jolly good.’

      She floundered up the field towards them, blowing her nose as she came. Troy was suddenly very sorry for her. Were there, she asked herself, in Birmingham, where Miss Rickerby-Carrick lived, people, apart from Mavis, who actually welcomed her company?

      Dr Natouche fetched a sigh and stood up. ‘I see a gate over there into the lane,’ he said. ‘I think there is time to walk back that way if you would care to do so.’

      ‘You go,’ Troy muttered. ‘I’d better wait for her.’

      ‘Really?