“Ah, no! No. It’s only that Miss Rickerby-Carrick has a very high opinion of you and I thought perhaps she intended—” He hesitated and then said firmly. “I think I must explain that this lady spoke to me last evening. About her insomnia. She had been given some tablets — American proprietary product — by Miss Hewson and she asked me what I thought of these tablets.”
“She offered me one.”
“Yes? I said that they were unknown to me and suggested that she should consult her own doctor if her insomnia was persistent. In view of her snoring performance on the previous night I felt it might, at least in part, be an imaginary condition. My reason for troubling you with the incident is this. I formed the opinion that Miss Rickerby-Carrick was overwrought, that she was experiencing some sort of emotional and nervous crisis. It was very noticeable—very marked. I felt some concern. You understand that she did not consult me on the score of this condition: if she had it would be improper for me to speak to you about it. I think she may have been on the point of doing so when she suddenly broke off, said something incoherent and left me.”
“Do you think she’s actually — well — mentally unbalanced?”
“That is a convenient phrase without real definition. I think she is disturbed—which is another such phrase. It is because I think so that I am a little worried about this departure in the middle of the night. Unnecessarily so, I dare say.”
“You heard the telephone message, just now?”
“Yes. A friend’s illness.”
“Can it,” Troy exclaimed, “be Mavis?”
She and Dr Natouche stared speculatively at each other. She saw the wraith of a smile on his mouth.
“No. Wait a bit,” Troy went on. “She walked up to the village with Mr Lazenby and me. My head was swinging with migraine and I scarcely listened. He might remember. Of course she talked incessantly about Mavis. I think she said Mavis is in the Highlands. I’m sure she did. Do you suppose Miss Rickerby-Carrick has shot off by taxi to the Highlands in the dead of night?”
“Perhaps only to Longminster and thence by train?”
“Who can tell! Did nobody hear anything?” Troy wondered. “I mean, somebody must have come on board with this news and roused her up. It would be a disturbance.”
“Here? At the stern? It’s far removed from our cabins.”
“Yes,” Troy said, “but how would they know she was back here?”
“She told me she would take her tablet and sleep on deck.”
Troy stooped down and after a moment, picked up a blotched, red scrap of cloth.
“What’s that?” she asked.
The long fingers that looked as if they had been imperfectly treated with black cork, turned it over and laid it in the pinkish palm. “Isn’t it from the cover of her diary?” Troy said.
“I believe you’re right.” He was about to drop it overboard but she said: “No—don’t.”
“No?”
“Well — only because—” Troy gave an apologetic laugh. “I’m a policeman’s wife,” she said. “Put it down to that.”
He 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 realise 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 told Tillotson—”
-1-
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 S.P.C.A. but lepidoptera didn’t count.”