Clutch of Constables by Ngaio Marsh Page B

remarking that he had just popped over from Toll’ark in case there had been any developments. She told him (speaking against the beat of her headache and with the sick dazzle in her vision making nonsense of his face) about Mr Lazenby and the page from the diary and about the odd behaviour of Mr Pollock and Miss Rickerby-Carrick. And again, on describing them, these items shrank into insignificance.
    Mr Tillottson with his hands in his pockets, sitting easily on the corner of the local Sergeant’s desk said with great geniality that there didn’t seem to be much in any of
that
lot did there, and she agreed, longing to be rid of the whole thing and in bed.
    “Yerse,” Mr Tillottson said. “So that’s the story.” And he added with the air of making conversation: “And this chap Lazenby had his hair all over his right eye like a hippy? Funny idea in a clergyman. But it was wet, of course.”
    “Over his left eye,” Troy corrected as a sharp stab of pain shot through her own.
    “His
left
eye, was it?” said Mr Tillottson casually. “Yes. Fancy. And you never got a look at it. The eye I mean?”
    “Well, no. He turned his back when he put on his dark spectacles.”
    “P’raps he’s got some kind of disfigurement,” Mr Tillottson airily speculated. “You never know, do you? Jim Tretheway’s a very pleasant kind of chap, isn’t he? And his wife’s smashing, don’t you think, Mrs Alleyn? Very nice couple the Tretheways.”
    “Very,” Troy agreed and stood up to a lurching spasm of migraine.
    They shook hands again and Mr Tillottson produced, apparently as an afterthought, the suggestion that she should drop in at “their place in Longminster” where she would find Superintendent Bonney a most sympathetic person: “a lovely chap” was how Mr Tillottson described him.
    “I honestly don’t think I need trouble him,” Troy said. She was beginning to feel sick.
    “Just to keep in touch, Mrs Alleyn,” he said and made a little sketch plan of Longminster, marking the police-station with a cross. “Go to the point marked X,” he said facetiously. “We may have a bit of news for you,” he playfully added. “There’s been a slight change in your good man’s itinerary. We’ll be pleased to let you know.”
    “Rory!” Troy exclaimed. “Is he coming back earlier?”
    “I understand it’s not quite settled yet, Mrs Alleyn.”
    “Because if he is—”
    “Oh, it wouldn’t be anything you might call immediate. If you’d just look in on our chaps at Longminster we’d be much obliged. Very kind of you.”
    By this time Troy could have hurled the local Sergeant’s ink-pot at Mr Tillottson but she took her leave with circumspection and made her way through nauseating sunbursts back to the river. Before she reached it her migraine attained its climax. She retired behind a briar bush and emerged, shaken but on the mend.
    Her doctor had advanced the theory that these occasional onsets were associated with nervous tension and for the first time she began to think he might be right.
    She would quite have liked to look at the ruins which were visible from her porthole, doing their stuff against the beginning of a spectacular sunset but the attack had left her tired and sleepy and she settled for an early night.
    There seemed to be no other passengers aboard the
Zodiac
. Troy took a shower and afterwards knelt in her dressing-gown on the bed and watched the darkling landscape across which, presently, her companions began to appear. There on the rim of a hillside rising to the ruins was Caley Bard in silhouette with his butterfly net. He gave a ridiculous balletic leap as he made a sweep with it. He was followed by Miss Rickerby-Carrick in full cry. Troy saw them put their heads together over the net and thought: “She’s driving him crackers.” At that moment Dr Natouche came down the lane and Miss Rickerby-Carrick evidently spied him. She seemed to take a hasty farewell of Bard and, in her