“Not so’s you’d notice,” Fox said heavily. “But let it pass. Yes, Mr Alleyn. I reckon it’s the Jampot on this job.”
“Why,” Tillottson asked, “are you so sure, Teddy?”
“Well, take a look at it, Bert. Take a look at the lot Mr Alleyn’s just handed us. Three items point to it, you know, now don’t they?”
Yerse,” Mr Tillottson concurred after a long pause. ”I get you. Yerse.”
Alleyn was bent over the diary. His long forefinger touched the rag of paper that was the remnant of the last entry. He slipped his nail under it and disclosed another and then another torn marginal strip still caught in the binding. “Three pages gone,” he said, “and it’s not unreasonable to suppose they would have told us what she overheard from her dark entry in Tollardwark. Wrenched out in a hurry, and, I suppose, either burnt or thrown overboard. The latter almost certainly. They were wet and pulpy. Torn out whether purposely or accidentally, and into The River with them.”
“That’ll be the story,” Fox agreed heavily. “And the inference is — by Lazenby.”
“If Troy’s right. She’s not certain.”
Mr Tillottson who had been in a hard, abstracted stare since his last utterance now said: “So it’s a field of five — six if you count the Skipper and that’d be plain ridiculous. I’ve known Jim Tretheway these five years, decent wee man.”
“He’s not all that wee,” Fox said mildly.
“The Doctor, Mr Bard, Mr Hewson, the Reverend and Pollock. And if you’re right one of them’s the toughest proposition in what they call the international crime world. You wouldn’t credit it, though, would you? Here!” Mr Tillottson said, struck by a new thought. “You wouldn’t entertain the idea of the whole boiling being in cahoots, would you? If so: why? Why go river-cruising if they’re a pack of villains in a great big international racket. Not for kicks you’d think, now, would you?”
“Of the lot that remains on board, excluding the Tretheways,” Alleyn said, “I incline to think there’s only one non-villain. I’ll give you my reasons, such as they are, and I fully admit they wouldn’t take first prize in the inescapable logic stakes. But still. Here they are.”
His colleagues listened in massive silence. Fox sighed heavily when he had finished. “And that,” he said, “followed out, leaves us with only one guess for the identity of the Jampot. Or does it?”
“I think it does. If, if, if and it’s a hell of a big if.”
“I’ll back it,” Fox said. “What’s our next bit of toil?”
“We don’t wait for the report on the p.m. I think, Br’er Fox, we cut in and use our search-warrant. What’s the time? Five past nine. If they’ve gone to bed it’s just too bad. Back to Ramsdyke Lock with us. Did you pick up a bit of nosh, by the way?”
Pickle and beef sandwiches and a couple of half-pints.”
“We’ll sink them on the trip. Hark bloody forrard away.”
-3-
If events do, as some would have us believe, stamp an intangible print upon their surroundings, this phenomenon is not instantaneous. Murder doesn’t scream instantly from the walls of a room that may be drenched in blood. Clean the room up and it is just a room again. If violence of behaviour or of emotion does, in fact, project itself upon its immediate surroundings, like light upon photographic film, the process seems to be cumulative rather than immediate. It may be a long time after the event that people begin to think: this is an unhappy house. Or room. Or place. Or craft.
The saloon in that most pleasant of water-wanderers, the Zodiac, wore its usual after-dark aspect. Its cherry-coloured window-curtains were drawn and its lamps were lit. It was cosy. The more so, perhaps, because the river mist known as the Creeper had now shut the craft off from her surroundings.
The six remaining passengers occupied themselves in much the same way as they had done before Hazel Rickerby-Carrick disappeared in the night. The Hewsons, Mr Lazenby and Mr Pollock played Scrabble. Caley Bard read. Dr Natouche, a little removed, as always, put some finishing touches to his map of the The River. Behind the bar, Mrs Tretheway read a magazine. The Skipper was ashore and the boy Tom was in bed.
Troy’s Zodiac picture with its vivid impersonations of the passengers was now framed and had replaced its begetter above the bar. There they all were, preposterously masquerading as Heavenly bodies, skipping round Mr Pollock’s impeccable lettering.
The Hunt of the Heavenly Host begins
With the Ram, the Bull and the Heavenly Twins.
The Crab is followed by the Lion
The Virgin and the Scales,
The Scorpion, Archer and He-Goat,
The Man that carries the Watering-Pot
And the Fish with the Glittering Tails.
The Virgin was gone for good and the Goat, as Troy had thought of herself, was removed to Norminster but there, Alleyn thought, were all the others, mildly employed, with a killer and a single detached person among them.
When Alleyn and Fox arrived in the saloon, the Scrabble players became quieter still. Miss Hewson’s forefinger, pushing a lettered tile into place, stopped and remained, pointed down, like an admonitory digit on a monument. Pollock’s head, bent over the Scrabble-board, was not raised though his eyes were and looked at Alleyn from under his brows, showing rims of white. Lazenby, who had been attending to the score, let his pencil remain in suspended action. Hewson, pipe gripped in teeth, held the head of a match against the box but did not strike it.
For a few seconds this picture was presented like an unheralded still at the cinema; then it animated as if there had been no hitch in its mild progression.
“I’m sorry,” Alleyn said, “that we have to make nuisances of ourselves again but there it is. In police work it’s a case of set a nuisance to catch a nuisance.”
“Well!” Caley Bard ejaculated. “I must say that as reassuring remarks go, I don’t think much of that one. If it was meant to reassure.”
“It was meant as a sort of apology,” Alleyn said, “but I see your point. Please don’t let us disturb anybody. We’ve come to tidy up a loose end of routine and I’m afraid we shall have to ask you all to be very patient and stay out of your cabins until we’ve done so. We won’t be long about it, I hope.”
After a considerable silence Mr Hewson predictably said: “Yeah?” and leant back in his chair with his thumbs in the arm-holes of his waistcoat. He turned his left ear with its hearing aid towards Alleyn. “ ‘Stay out of our cabins,’ ” he quoted with what seemed to be intended as a parody of Alleyn’s voice. “Is that so? Now, would that be a kind of polite indication of a search, Superintendent?
“I’m glad it sounded polite,” Alleyn rejoined cheerfully. “Yes. It would.”
“You got a warrant?” Pollock asked.
“Yes, indeed. Would you like to see it?”
“Of course we don’t want to see it,” Caley Bard wearily interjected. “Don’t be an ass, Pollock.”
Pollock muttered: “I’m within my rights, aren’t I?”
Alleyn said: “Miss Hewson, I’ll start with your cabin, if that suits you, and as soon as I’ve finished, you will be free to use it. At the same time Inspector Fox will take a look at yours, Mr Hewson.”
“A second look,” Mr Hewson sourly amended.
“That’s right,” Alleyn said. “So it is. A formality, you might call it.”
“You might,” Mr Hewson conceded. “I wouldn’t.”