Colour Scheme. Ngaio Marsh

      

      NGAIO MARSH

      COLOUR SCHEME

       COPYRIGHT

      Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by Collins 1943

      Copyright © Ngaio Marsh Ltd 1943

      Ngaio Marsh asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of these works

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

      Source ISBN: 978000651238

      Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007344574

      Version: 2017-05-04

       DEDICATION

       To the family at Tauranga

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Cast of Characters

1 The Claires and Dr Ackrington

2 Mr Questing Goes Down for the First Time

3 Gaunt at the Springs

4 Red for Danger

       5 Mr Questing Goes Down for the Second Time

       6 Arrival of Septimus Falls

       7 Torpedo

       8 Concert

       9 Mr Questing Goes Down for the Third Time

       10 Entrance of Sergeant Webley

       11 The Theory of a Put-Up Job

       12 Skull

       13 Letter from Mr Questing

       14 Solo by Septimus Falls

       15 The Last of Septimus Falls

       Keep Reading

       Also by the Author

       About the Publisher

       CAST OF CHARACTERS

      Dr James Ackrington, MD, FRCS, FRCP

      Barbara Claire, his niece

      Mrs Claire, his sister

      Colonel Edward Claire, his brother-in-law

      Simon Claire, his nephew

      Huia, maid at Wai-ata-tapu

      Geoffrey Gaunt, a visiting celebrity

      Dikon Bell, his secretary

      Alfred Colly, his servant

      Maurice Questing, man of business

      Rua Te Kahu, a chief of the Te Rarawas

      Herbert Smith, roustabout at Wai-ata-tapu

      Eru Saul, a half-caste

      Septimus Falls

      The Princess Te Papa (Mrs Te Papa), of the Te Rarawas

      Detective-Sergeant Webley, of the Harpoon Constabulary

      A Superintendent of Police

       CHAPTER ONE

       The Claires and Dr Ackrington

      When Dr James Ackrington limped into the Harpoon Club on the afternoon of Monday, January the thirteenth, he was in a poisonous temper. A sequence of events had combined to irritate and then to inflame him. He had slept badly. He had embarked, he scarcely knew why, on a row with his sister, a row based obscurely on the therapeutic value of mud pools and the technique of frying eggs. He had asked for the daily paper of the previous Thursday only to discover that it had been used to wrap up Mr Maurice Questing’s picnic lunch. His niece Barbara, charged with this offence, burst out into one of her fits of nervous laughter and recovered the paper, stained with ham fat and reeking with onions. Dr Ackrington, in shaking it angrily before her, had tapped his sciatic nerve smartly against the table. Blind with pain and white with rage, he stumbled to his room, undressed, took a shower, wrapped himself in his dressing-gown and made his way to the hottest of the thermal baths, only to