“You bloody little tit,” he said. “Will you shut up, you perfectly bloody little tit?”
Pollock stared at him with a kind of shrinking defiance that was extremely unpleasant to see.
“Sorry,” Caley said to Alleyn and returned to his seat.
“—as if you yourself had painted it,” Alleyn repeated. “Did you paint it, Mr Pollock?”
“No. And that’s it. No.”
And that was it as far as Mr Pollock was concerned. He might have gone stone deaf and blind for all the response he made to anything else that was said to him.
“It’s very hot in here,” said Mr Lazenby.
It was indeed. The summer night had grown sultry. There were rumours of thunder in the air and sheet-lightning made occasional irrelevant gestures somewhere a long way beyond Norminster.
Mr Lazenby pulled the curtain back from one of the windows and exposed a white blank. The Creeper had risen.
“Very close,” Mr Lazenby said and ran his finger under his dog-collar. “I think,” said he in his slightly parsonic, slightly Australian accents, “that we’re entitled to an explanation, Superintendent. We’ve all experienced a big shock, you know. We’ve found ourselves alongside a terrible tragedy in the death and subsequent discovery of this poor girl. I’m sure there’s not one of us doesn’t want to see the whole thing cleared up and settled. If you reckon all this business about a painting picked up in a yard has something to do with the death of the poor girl, welclass="underline" good on you. Go ahead. But, fair dinkum. I don’t myself see how there can be the remotest connection.”
“With which observation,” Mr Hewson said loudly, “I certainly concur. Yes, sir.”
“The connection,” Alleyn said, “if there is one, will I hope declare itself as the investigation develops. In the meantime, if you don’t mind, we’ll push along with preliminaries. Will you cast your minds back to Monday night when you all explored Toll’ark?”
The group at the table eyed him warily. From behind his book Caley said: “O.K. I’ve cast mine, such as it is, back.”
“Good. What did you do in Toll’ark?”
“Thwarted of my original intention which was to ask your wife if she’d explore the antiquities with me, I sat in the Northumberland Arms drinking mild-and-bitter and listening to the dullest brand of Mummerset-type gossip it would be possible to conceive. When the pub closed I returned, more pensive than pickled, to our gallant craft.”
“By which route?”
“By a precipitous, rather smelly and cobbled alley laughingly called Something Street—wait—It was on a shop wall. I’ve got it. Weyland Street.”
“Meet any of the other passengers?”
“I don’t think so. Did we?” Caley asked them.
They slightly shook their heads.
“You, Mr Lazenby, attended compline in the church. Did you return alone to the Zodiac?”
“No,” he said easily. “Not all the way. I ran into Stan and we went back together. Didn’t we, Stan?”
Mr Pollock, answering to his first name, nodded glumly.
“We know that Mr and Miss Hewson, followed by my wife and then by Dr Natouche returned to The River by way of Ferry Lane where they all met, outside Bagg’s second-hand premises. We also know,” Alleyn said, “that Miss Rickerby-Carrick returned alone, presumably not by Ferry Lane. As Weyland Street is the only other direct road down to The River it seems probable that she took that way home. Did either of you see her?”
“No,” Pollock said instantly and very loudly.
“No,” Lazenby agreed.
“Mr Lazenby,” Alleyn said, taking a sudden and outrageous risk, “what did you do with the papers you tore out of Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s diary?”
A gust of misted air moved the curtain over an open window on the starboard side and the trees above Ramsdyke Lock soughed and were silent again.
“I don’t think that’s a very nice way of talking,” said Mr Lazenby.
Miss Hewson had begun quietly to cry.
“There are ways and ways of putting things,” Mr Lazenby continued, “and that way was offensive.”
“Why?” Alleyn asked. “Do you say you didn’t tear them out?”
“By a mishap, I may have done something of the sort. Naturally. I rescued the diary from a watery grave,” he said, attempting some kind of irony.
“Which was more than anybody did for its owner,” Caley Bard remarked. They looked at him with consternation.
“It was a very, very prompt and praiseworthy undertaking,” said Mr Hewson stuffily. “She was very, very grateful to the Reverend. It was the Action of a Man. Yes, sir. A Man.”
“As we could see for ourselves,” Caley remarked and bowed slightly to Mr Lazenby.
“It was nothing, really,” Mr Lazenby protested. “I’m a Sydneysider, don’t forget and I was in my bathers.”
“As I have already indicated,” Caley said.
“The pages,” Alleyn said, “were in your left hand when you sat on the bank just before the Zodiac picked you up. You had turned the leaves of the diary over while you waited.”
Mr Pollock broke his self-imposed silence. “Anybody like to make a guess where all this information came from?” he asked. “Marvellous, isn’t it? Quite a family affair.”
“Shut up,” Caley said and turned to Alleyn. “You’re right, of course, about this. I remember—I expect we all do—that the Padre had got a loose page in his hand. But, Alleyn, I do think there’s a very obvious explanation—the one that he has in fact given you. The damn’ diary was soaked to a sop and probably disintegrated in his hands.”
“It’s not in quite as bad shape as that.”
“Well—all right. But it had opened in the water, you know. And when he grabbed it, surely he might have loosened a couple of pages or more.”
“But,” Alleyn said mildly, “I haven’t for a moment suggested anything else. I only asked Mr Lazenby what he did with the loose page or pages.”
“Mr Bard is right. I did not tear them out. They came out.”
“Cometer pieces in ’is ’ands, like,” Caley explained.
“Very funny,” said Mr Pollock. “I don’t think.”
“I do not know,” Mr Lazenby announced with hauteur, “what I did with any pieces of pulpy paper that may or may not have come away in my hand. I remember nothing about it.”
“Did you read them?”
“That suggestion, Superintendent, is unworthy of you.”
Alleyn said: “Last Monday night on your way to the Zodiac you and Mr Pollock stopped near a dark entry in Weyland Street. What did you talk about?”
And now, he saw with satisfaction, they were unmistakably rattled. “They’re asking themselves,” he thought, “just how much I am bluffing. They know Troy couldn’t have told me about this one. They’re asking themselves where I could have picked it up and the only answer is the Rickerby-Carrick diary. I’ll stake my oath, Lazenby read whatever was on the missing pages and Pollock knows about it. What’s more they probably know the diary was in the suitcase and that we must have seen it. They’re dead scared we’ve found something which I wish to hell we had. If they’re as fly as I believe they are, there’s only one line for them to take and I hope they don’t take it.”
They took it, however. “I’m not making any more bloody statements,” Mr Pollock suddenly shouted, “till I’ve seen a lawyer and that’s my advice to all and sundry.”
“Dead right,” Mr Lazenby applauded. “Good on you.” And feeling perhaps that his style was inappropriate, he added, “We shall be absolutely within our rights to adopt this attitude. In my opinion it is entirely proper for us to do so.”