Alleyn caught the inevitable glint of appreciation from the man in the second row.
“Exactly,” he said. “As a result I talked to the Yard again and was told there was no doubt that Foljambe had got himself to England and that he was lying doggo. Information received suggested that Andropulos had tried a spot of blackmail and had been fool enough to imply that he’d grass on the Jampot if the latter didn’t come across with something handsome. Andropulos had in fact talked to one of our chaps in the way they do when they can’t make up their minds to tell us something really useful. It was pretty obvious he was hinting at the Jampot.
“So he was murdered for his pains.
“The method used had been that of sudden and violent pressure on the carotids from behind and that method carries the Jampot’s signature. It is sometimes preceded by a karate chop which would probably do the trick anyway, but it’s his little fancy to make assurance double-sure.” The Scot in the second row gave a smirk to indicate his recognition of the quotation. “If I’m not careful,” Alleyn thought, “I’ll be playing up to that chap.”
“There had,” he said, “been two other homicides, one in Ismalia and one in Paris where undoubtedly Foljambe had been the expert. But not a hope of cracking down on him. The latest line suggested that he had lit off for France. An envelope of the sort used by a well-known travel-agency had been dropped on the floor near Andropulos’s body and it had a note of the price of tickets and times of departure from London scribbled on the back. It had, as was afterwards realised, been planted by the Jampot and had successfully decoyed Mr Fox across the Channel. A typical stroke. I’ve already talked about his talent—it amounts to genius—for type-casting himself. I don’t think I mentioned that when he likes to turn it on he has a strong attraction for many, but not all, women. His ear for dialects of every description is phenomenal, of course, but he not only speaks whatever it may be—Oxbridge, superior grammar, Australasian, barrow-boy or Bronx, but he really seems to think along the appropriate wave-lengths. Rather as an actor gets behind the thought-pattern of the character he plays. He can act stupid, by the way, like nobody’s business. He is no doubt a great loss to the stage. He is gregarious, which you’d think would be risky and he has a number of unexpected, off-beat skills that occasionally come in very handy indeed.
“Welclass="underline" 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.”
-1-
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 realised 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 beautifuclass="underline" 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 recognise the voices at once because they spoke very low. In fact the one of them who whispered, I never recognised. 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 exorcise 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.