Clutch of Constables by Ngaio Marsh

under the Fish with the Glittering Tails. She observed the Skipper at his wheel, noted the ripple of muscles under his immaculate shirt and the close-clipped curly poll beneath his cap. The excessive masculinity, she decided, belonged to the Ram and Tom-of-all-work could be the Man who carried the Watering-Pot. And having run out of passengers she raised one of the Lion’s eyebrows and thus gave him a look of her husband. “Which leaves me for the Goat,” thought Troy, “and very suitable too, I daresay.”
    One by one the passengers, with the exception of Dr Natouche, came on deck. In their several fashions and with varying degrees of success, they displayed tact towards Troy. The Hewsons smiled at each other and retired, with brochures and
Readers’ Digests
, to their chairs. Mr Lazenby turned his dark spectacles towards Troy, nodded three times and passed majestically by. Mr Pollock behaved as if she wasn’t there until he was behind her and then, she clearly sensed, had a good long stare over her shoulder at what she was doing.
    Miss Rickerby-Carrick was wonderful. When she had floundered, with her customary difficulty, through the half-door at the top of the companionway, she paused to converse with the Skipper but as she talked to him she rolled her eyes round until they could take in Troy. Presently she left him and archly biting her underlip advanced on tip-toe. She bent and whispered, close to Troy’s ear: “Don’t put me in it,” and so passed on gaily to her deckchair.
    The general set-up having now become quietly ridiculous, Troy swung round to find Mr Pollock close behind her.
    His eyes were half-closed and he looked at her drawing, unmistakably with the air of someone who knew.
    For a moment they faced each other. He turned away, swinging his heavy foot. Caley Bard, with a startling note of anger in his voice, said: “Have you been given an invitation to a Private View, Mr Pollock?”
    A silence followed. At last Mr Pollock said in a stifled voice: “It’s very nice. Lovely,” and retired to the far end of the deck.
    Troy shut her sketchbook and with a view to papering over what seemed to be some kind of crisis, made conversation with everybody about the landscape.
    The
Zodiac
reached Tollard Lock at 6.15 and tied up for the night.

Chapter 3 – Tollardwark
    “At that time,” Alleyn said, “I was on my way to Chicago and from there to San Francisco. We were setting up a joint plan of action with U.S.A. to cope with an international blow-up in the art-forgery world. We were pretty certain, though not positive, that the Jampot was well in the phoney picture trade and that the same group was combining it with a two-way drug racket. My wife’s letters to me from her river cruise missed me in New York and were forwarded to Chicago and thence to San Francisco.
    “On reading them I put through a call to the Yard.”
     
    -1-
    Monday.
    Tollardwark.
    10.15 p.m.
     
    “… This will probably arrive with the letter I posted this morning at Ramsdyke. I’m writing in my cabin having returned from Tollardwark where we spend our first night and I’m going to try and set out the sequence of events as you would do it—economically but in detail. I’m almost certain that when they are looked at as a whole they will be seen to add up to nothing in particular.
    “Indeed, I only tell you about these silly little incidents, my darling, because I know you won’t make superior noises, and because in a cock-eyed sort of way I suppose they may be said to tie in with what you’re up to at the moment. I know, very well, that they may amount to nothing.
    “You remember the silly game people used to play: making up alphabetical rhymes of impending disaster? “T is for Tiger decidedly plumper. What’s that in his mouth? Oh it’s Agatha’s jumper”?
    “There are moments on this otherwise enchanting jaunt when
your
Agatha almost catches the sound of something champing in the jungle.
    “It really began tonight