Clutch of Constables. Ngaio Marsh

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       CHAPTER 2

       The Wapentake

      ‘He had been operating,’ Alleyn said, ‘in a very big way in the Middle East. All among the drug barons with one of whom he fell out and who is thought to have grassed on him. From drugs he turned to the Old Master racket and was certainly behind several very big jobs in Paris. Getting certificates for good fakes from galleries and the widows of celebrated painters. He then crossed to New York where he worked off the fruits of this ploy until Interpol began to make interested noises. By the way, it may be noted that at this juncture he had not got beyond a Blue Circular which means of course –’

      The boots of the intelligent-looking sandy man in the second row scraped the floor. He made a slight gesture and looked eager.

      ‘I see you know,’ Alleyn said.

      ‘Ay, sir, I do. A Blue International Circular signifies that Interpol cannot place the identity of the creeminal.’

      ‘That’s it. However, they were getting warmer and in 1965 the Jampot found it necessary to transfer to Bolivia where for once he went too far and was put in gaol. Something to do with masquerading in female attire with criminal intent. From there, as I’ve said, he escaped, in May of last year, and sometime later arrived with an efficiently cooked-up passport in a Spanish freighter in England. At that juncture the Yard had no specific charge against him although he featured heavily in the discussions we were holding in San Francisco. He must have already been in touch with the British group he subsequently directed, and one of them booked him in for a late summer cruise in the Zodiac. The object of this manoeuvre will declare itself as we go along.

      ‘At this point I’d like you to take particular note of a disadvantage under which the Jampot laboured. In doing this I am indulging in hindsight. At the time we are speaking about we had no clear indication of what he looked like and our only photograph was a heavily bearded job supplied by the Bolivian police. The ears are hidden by flowing locks, the mouth by a luxuriant moustache and the jaw and chin by rich and carefully tended whiskers.

      ‘We now know, of course, that there was, in his appearance, something that set him apart, that made him physically speaking, an odd man out. Need I,’ Alleyn asked, ‘remind you what this was –?’

      The intelligent-looking man seated in the second row made a slight gesture. ‘Exactly,’ Alleyn said and enlarged upon it to the class.

      ‘I’m able,’ he went on, ‘to give you a pretty full account of this apparently blameless little cruise because my wife wrote at some length about it. In her first letter she told me –’

       I

      ‘And there you are.’ Troy wrote. ‘All done on the spur of the moment and I think I’m going to be glad I saw that notice in The Pleasure Craft Company’s office window.

      ‘It’s always been you that writes in cabins and on trains and in hotel bedrooms and me that sits at the receiving end and now here we are, both at it. The only thing I mind is not getting your letters for the next five days. I’ll post this at Ramsdyke Lock and with a bit of luck it should reach you in New York when I’m at Longminster on the turning point of my little journey. At that rate it’ll travel about two thousand times as fast as I do so whar’s your relativity, noo? I’m writing it on my knee from a deck chair. I can’t tell you how oddly time behaves on The River, how fantastically remote we are from the country that lies so close on either hand. There go the cars and lorries, streaking along main arteries and over bridges and there are the sound-breakers belching away overhead but they belong to another world. Truly.

      ‘Our world is watery: details of eddies and reeds and wet banks. Beyond it things move in a very rum and baffling kind of way. You know how hopeless I am about direction. Well, what goes on over there beyond our banks, completely flummuckses me. There’s a group of vast power-houses that has spent the greater part of the afternoon slowly moving from one half of our world to the other. They retire over our horizon on the port side and just as one thinks that’s the last of them: there they are moving in on the starboard. Sometimes we approach them and sometimes we retreat and at one dramatic phase we sailed close-by and there were Lilliputians half-way up one of them, being busy. Yes: OK darling, I know rivers wind.

      ‘Apart from the power-houses the country beyond The River is about as empty as anywhere in England: flat, flat, flat and according to СКАЧАТЬ