Clutch of Constables by Ngaio Marsh

with you? I’ve got something—” she looked over her shoulder and up and down the deck though she must have known as well as Troy that the others were all below. “I want to ask your advice. It’s awfully important. Really. I promise,” she whispered.
    “Well — yes. All right, if you really think—”
    “
Please
. I’ll just get my cardi. I won’t be a tick. Only as far as the village. Before the others start—it’s awfully important. Honest injun.
Please
.”
    She advanced her crazy-looking face so close that Troy took an involuntary step backward.
    “Be kind!” Miss Rickerby-Carrick whispered. “Let me tell you. Let me!”
    She stood before Troy: a grotesque, a dreadfully vulnerable person. And the worst of it was, Troy thought, she herself was now so far caught up in a web of intangible misgivings that she could not know, could not trust herself to judge, whether the panic she thought she saw in those watery eyes was a mere reflection of the ill-defined anxiety which was building itself up around her own very real delight in the little cruise of the
Zodiac
. Or whether Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s unmistakable
schwarm
was about to break out in a big way.
    “Oh please!” she repeated, “for God’s sake! Please.”
    “Well, of course,” Troy said, helplessly. “Of course.”
    “Oh, you
are
a darling,” exclaimed Miss Rickerby-Carrick and bolted for the companionway. She collided with Mr Pollock and there was much confusion and incoherent apology before she retired below and he emerged on deck.
    He had brought back to Troy the Signs of the Zodiac with the lettering completed. It was beautifully done, right in scale and manner and execution and Troy told him so warmly. He said in his flat voice with its swallowed consonants and plummy vowels that she need think nothing of it, the obligation was all his and he hung about in his odd way offering a few scraps of disjointed information to the effect that he’d gone from the signwriting into the printing trade but there hadn’t been any money in that. He made remarks that faded out after one or two words and gave curious little sounds that were either self-conscious laughs or coughs.
    “Do you paint?” Troy asked. “As well as this? Or draw?”
    He hastened to assure her that he did not. “Me? A flippin’ awtist? Do you mind!”
    “I thought from the way you looked at this thing—”
    “Then you thought wrong,” he said with an unexpected slap of rudeness.
    Troy stared at him and he reddened. “Pardon my French,” he said, “I’m naturally crude. I do not paint. I just take a fancy to look.”
    “Fair enough,” Troy said pacifically.
    He gave her a shamefaced grin and said oh well he supposed he’d better do something about the nightlife of Crossdyke. As he was evidently first going below Troy asked him to keep the drawing for the time being.
    He paused at the companionway for Miss Rickerby-Carrick. She erupted with monotonous precipitancy through the half-door, saw Mr Pollock who had the Zodiac drawing open in his hands, looked at it as if it was a bomb and hurried on to Troy.
    “Do let’s go,” she said. “Do come on.”
    They took their long strides from the gunwale to the bank, a simple exercise inevitably made complex by Miss Rickerby-Carrick, who, when she had recovered herself, seized Troy’s arm and began to gabble.
    “At once. I’ll tell you at once before anyone can stop me. It’s about—about—” She drove her free hand through her dishevelled hair and began distractedly to whisper and stammer quite incomprehensibly.
    “—about last evening — And — And — Oh God! — And—”
    “About
what
?”
    “And — wait — And—”
    But it was not to be. She had taken a deep breath, screwed up her eyes and opened her mouth, almost as if she were about to sneeze, when they were hailed from the rear.
    “Hi! Wait a bit! What are you two up to?”
    It was Mr Lazenby. He leapt nimbly ashore and came alongside Troy. “We