Clutch of Constables

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 the Skipper almost hammered so by the passage of history. Red roses and white. Cavaliers and Roundheads. Priests and barons. The Percies of the North. The Jockeys of Norfolk. The lot: all galumphing over the landscape through the centuries. Did you know that Constable stayed here one summer and painted? Church spires turn up with minimal villages and of course, the locks. Do you remember the lock in Our Mutual Friend: a great slippery drowning-box? I keep thinking of it although the weirs are more noisily alarming.

‘It seems we are going towards the sea in our devious fashion and so we sink in locks.

‘As for the company: I’ve tried to introduce them to you. We’re no more oddly-assorted, I suppose, than any other eight people that might take it into their heads to spend five days out of time on The River. Apart from Miss Rickerby-Carrick who sends me up the wall (you know how beastly I am about ostentatious colds-in-the-head) and Dr Natouche who is black, there’s nothing at all remarkable about us.

‘I’m not the only one who finds poor Miss R-C. difficult. Her sledge-hammer tact crashes over Dr N like a shower of brickbats, so anxious is she to be unracial. I saw him flinch two minutes ago under a frontal assault. Mr Bard said just now that a peep into her subconscious would be enough to send him round more bends than the Zodiac negotiates in a summer season. If only she’d just pipe down every now and then. But no, she doesn’t know how to. She has a bosom friend in Birmingham called – incredibly I forget what – Mavis something – upon whom we get incessant bulletins. What Mavis thinks, what she says, how she reacts, how she has recovered (with set-backs) from Her Operation (coyly left unspecified). We all, I am sure, now dread the introduction of the phrase: “My special chum, Mavis.” All the same, I don’t think she’s a stupid woman. Just an inksey-tinksey bit dotty. The Americans clearly think her as crazy as a coot but typically British. This is maddening. She keeps a diary and keeps is the operative word: she carries it about with her and jots. I am ashamed to say it arouses my curiosity. What can she be writing in it? How odious I sound.

‘I don’t like Mr Pollock much. He is so very sharp and pale and he so obviously thinks us fools (I mean Mr Bard and me and, of course, poor Miss R-C.) for not sharing his dislike of coloured people. Of course one does see that if they sing calypsos all night in the no doubt ghastly tenements he exorbitantly lets to them and if they roar insults and improper suggestions at non-black teenagers, it doesn’t send up the tone. But don’t non-black tenants ever send the tone down, for pity’s sake? And what on earth has all this got to do with Dr Natouche whose tone is superb? I consider that one of the worst features of the whole black-white thing is that nobody can say: “I don’t much like black people” as they might say: “I don’t like the Southern Scot or the Welsh or antipodeans or the Midland English or Americans or the League of British Loyalists or The Readers’ Digest.” I happen to be attracted to the dark-skinned (Dr Natouche is remarkably attractive) but until people who are or who are not attracted can say so unselfconsciously it’ll go on being a muddle. I find it hard to be civil to Mr Pollock when he makes his common little racial gestures.

‘He’s not alone in his antipathy. Antipathy? I suppose that’s the right word but I almost wrote “fear”. It seems to me that Pollock and the Hewsons and even Mr Lazenby, for all his parsonic forbearance, eye Dr Natouche with something very like fear.

‘We are about to enter our second lock – the Ramsdyke, I think. More later.

‘Later (about 30 minutes). Ramsdyke. An incident. We were all on deck and the lock people and our Tom were doing their things with paddles and gates and all, and I noticed on the far bank from the lockhouse a nice lane, a pub, some wonderful elms, a ford and a pond. I called out to nobody in particular:

‘“Oh, look – The place is swarming with Constables! Everywhere you look. A perfect clutch of them!”

‘Rory, it was as if someone had plopped a dirty great weight overboard into the lock. Everybody went dead still and listened. At least – this is hard to describe – someone did in particular but I don’t know which because nobody moved. Then Dr Natouche in mild surprise said: “The Police, Mrs Alleyn? Where? I don’t see them,” and I explained and he, for the first time, gave a wonderful roar of laughter. Pollock gaped at me, Caley Bard said he’d thought for a moment his sins had caught up with him, Mr Lazenby said what a droll mistake to be sure and the Hewsons looked baffled. Miss Rickerby-C. (her friends call her, for God’s sake, Hay) waited for the penny to drop and then laughed like a hyena. I still don’t know which of them (or whether it was more than one of them) went so very quiet and still and what’s more I got the idiotic notion that my explanation had been for – someone – more disturbing than the original remark. And on top of all this, I can not get rid of the feeling that I’m involved in some kind of performance. Like one of those dreams actors say they get when they find themselves on an unknown stage where a play they’ve never heard of is in action.

‘Silly? Or not silly? Rum? Or not rum?

‘I’ll write again at Tollardwark. The show looked all right: well hung and lit. The Gallery bought the black and pink thing and seven smaller ones sold the first night. Paris on the 31st and New York in November. Darling, if, and only if, you have a moment I would be glad if you could bear to call at the Guggenheim just to say –’

II

Troy enjoyed coming into the locks. Ramsdyke, as she observed in her letter, was a charming one: a seemly house, a modest plot, the tow-path, a bridge over The River and the Ramsdyke itself, a neat wet line, Roman-ruled across the fens. On the farther side was the ‘Constable’ view and farther downstream a weir. The Zodiac moved quietly into the lock but before she sank with its waters Troy jumped ashore, posted her letter and followed the direction indicated by the Skipper’s tattooed arm and pointed finger. He called after her ‘Twenty minutes’ and she waved her understanding, crossed the tow-path, and climbed a grassy embankment.

She came into a field bordered by sod and stone walls and, on the left, beyond the wall, by what seemed to be a narrow road leading down to the bridge. This was the Dyke Way of the brochures. Troy remembered that it came from the village of Wapentake, which her map showed as lying about a mile and a half from the lock. She walked up the field. It rose gently and showed, above its crest, trees and a distant spire.

The air smelt of earth and grass and, delicately, of wood-smoke. It seemed lovely to Troy. She felt a great uplift of spirit and was so preoccupied with her own happiness that she came upon the meeting place of the wapentake, just where the Skipper had said it would be, before she was aware of it.

It was a circular hollow, sometimes called, the brochure said, a Pot, and it was lined with grass, mosses and fern. Here the Plantagenet knights-of-the-shire had sat at their fortnightly Hundreds, dealing out justice as they saw it in those days and as the growing laws directed them. Troy wondered if, when the list was a heavy one, they stayed on into the evening and night and if torches were lit.

Below the wapentake hollow and quite close to the lock, another, but a comparatively recent depression had been cut into the hillside: perhaps to get a load of gravel of which there seemed to be a quantity in the soil, or perhaps by archaeological amateurs. An overhanging shelf above this excavation had been roughly shored up by poles with an old door for roof. The wood had weathered and looked to be rotting. ‘A bit of an eyesore,’ thought Troy.

She went into the wapentake and sat there, and fancied she felt beneath her some indication of a kind of bench that must have been chopped out of the soil, she supposed, seven centuries ago. ‘I’m an ignoramus about history,’ Troy thought, ‘but I do like to feel it in my bones,’ and she peopled the wapentake with heads like carven effigies, with robes in the colours of stained glass and with glints of polished steel.

She began to wonder if it would be possible to make a very formalized drawing – dark and thronged with seated, lawgiving shapes. A puff of warm air moved the grass and the hair of her head and up the sloping field came Dr Natouche.

He was bareheaded and had changed his tweed jacket for a yellow sweater. When he saw Troy he checked and stood still, formidable because of his height and colour against the mild background of the waterways. Troy waved to him. ‘Come up,’ she called. ‘Here’s the wapentake.’

‘Thank you.’

He came up quickly, entered the hollow and looked about him. ‘I have read the excellent account in our little book,’ he said. ‘So here they sat, those old chaps.’ The colloquialism came oddly from him.

‘You sit here, too,’ Troy suggested, wanting to see his head and his torso, in its yellow sweater, against the moss and fern.

He did so, squaring himself and resting his hands on his knees. His teeth and the whites of his eyes were high accents in the picture he presented for Troy. ‘You ask for the illustration of an incongruity,’ he said.

‘You would be nice to paint. Do you really feel incongruous? I mean is this sort of thing quite foreign to you?’

‘Not altogether. No.’

They said nothing for a time and Troy did not think there was any awkwardness in their silence.

A lark sang madly overhead and the sound of quiet voices floated up from the lock. Above the embankment they could see the top of Zodiac’s wheelhouse. Now it began very slowly to sink. They heard Miss Rickerby-Carrick shout and laugh.

A motorcycle engine crescendoed out of the distance, clattered and exploded down the lane and then reduced its speed and noise and stopped.

‘One would think it was those two again,’ said Troy.

Dr Natouche rose. ‘It is,’ he said, ‘I can see them. Actually, it is those two. They are raising their hands.’

‘How extraordinary,’ she said idly. ‘Why should they turn up?’

‘They may be staying in the district. We haven’t come very far, you know.’

‘I keep forgetting. One’s values change on The River.’

Troy broke off a fern frond and turned it between her fingers. Dr Natouche sat down again.

‘My father was an Ethiopian,’ he said presently. ‘He came to this country with a Mission fifty years ago and married an Englishwoman. I was born and educated in England.’

‘Have you never been to your own country?’

‘Once. But I was alien there. And like my father, I married an Englishwoman. I am a widower. My wife died two months ago.’

‘Was that why you came on this cruise?’

‘We were to have come together.’

‘I see,’ Troy said.

‘She would have enjoyed it. It was something we could have done,’ he said.

‘Have you found many difficulties about being as you are? Black?’

‘Of course. How sensible of you to ask, Mrs Alleyn. One knows everybody thinks such questions.’

‘Well,’ Troy said, ‘I’m glad it was all right to ask.’

‘I am perfectly at ease with you,’ Dr Natouche stated rather, Troy felt, as he might have told a patient there was nothing the matter with her and really almost arousing a comparable pleasure. ‘Perfectly,’ he repeated after a pause: ‘I don’t think, Mrs Alleyn, you could ever say anything to me that would change that condition.’

Miss Rickerby-Carrick appeared at the top of the embankment. ‘Hoo-hoo!’ she shouted. ‘What’s it like up there?’

‘Very pleasant,’ Troy said.

‘Jolly good.’

She floundered up the field towards them, blowing her nose as she came. Troy was suddenly very sorry for her. Were there, she asked herself, in Birmingham, where Miss Rickerby-Carrick lived, people, apart from Mavis, who actually welcomed her company?

Dr Natouche fetched a sigh and stood up. ‘I see a gate over there into the lane,’ he said. ‘I think there is time to walk back that way if you would care to do so.’

‘You go,’ Troy muttered. ‘I’d better wait for her.’

‘Really? Very well.’

He stayed for a moment or two, politely greeted Miss Rickerby-Carrick and then strode away.

‘Isn’t he a dear?’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick panted. ‘Don’t you feel he’s somebody awfully special?’

‘He seems a nice man,’ Troy answered and try as she might, she couldn’t help flattening her voice.

‘I do think we all ought to make a special effort. I get awfully worked-up about it. When people go on like Mr Pollock, you know. I tackled Mr Pollock about his attitude. I do that, you know, I do tackle people. I said: “Just because he’s got another pigmentation,” I said, “why should you think he’s different.” They’re not different. You do agree, don’t you?’

‘No,’ Troy said. ‘I don’t. They are different. Profoundly.’

‘Oh! How can you say so?’

‘Because I think it’s true. They are different in depth from Anglo-Saxons. So are Slavs. So are Latins.’

‘Oh! If you mean like that,’ she said, and broke into ungainly laughter. ‘Oh, I see. Oh, yes. Then you do agree that we should make a special effort.’

‘Look, Miss Rickerby-Carrick –’

‘I say, do call me Hay.’

‘Yes – well – thank you. I was going to say that I don’t think Dr Natouche would enjoy special efforts. Really, I don’t.’

‘You seem to get on with him like a house on fire,’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick pointed out discontentedly.

‘Do I? Well, I find him an interesting man.’

‘There you are, you see!’ she cried, proclaiming some completely inscrutable triumph, and a longish silence ensued.

They heard the motorcycle start up and cross the bridge and listened to the diminishment of sound as it made off in the direction of Norminster.

One by one the other passengers straggled up the field. Mr Pollock behind the rest, swinging his built-up boot. The Hewsons were all set-about with cameras while Caley Bard had a box slung from his shoulder and carried a lepidopterist’s net.

So that, Troy thought, was what it was. When everybody was assembled the Hewsons took photographs of the wapentake by itself and with their fellow-travellers sitting self-consciously round it. Mr Lazenby compared it without, Troy felt, perceptible validity, to an aboriginal place of assembly in the Australian outback. Mr Pollock read his brochure and then stared with a faint look of disgust at the original.

Caley Bard joined Troy. ‘So this is where you lit off to,’ he murmured. ‘I got bailed up by that extraordinary lady. She wants to get up a let’s-be-sweet-to-Natouche movement.’

‘I know. What did you say?’

‘I said that as far as I am concerned, I consider I’m as sweet to Natouche as he can readily stomach. Now, tell me all about the wapentake. I’m allergic to leaflets and I’ve forgotten what the Skipper said. Speak up, do.’

Troy did not bother to react to this piece of cheek. She said: ‘So you’re a lepidopterist?’

‘That’s right. An amateur. Do you find it a sinister hobby? It has rather a sinister reputation, I fear. There was that terrifying film and then didn’t somebody in The Hound of the Baskervilles flit about Dartmoor with a deceiving net and killing-bottle?’

‘There’s Nabokov on the credit side.’

‘True. But you don’t fancy it, all the same,’ he said. ‘That I can see, very clearly.’

‘I like them better alive and on the wing. Did you notice those two motorcyclists? They seem to be haunting us.’

‘Friends of young Tom, it appears. They come from Tollardwark where we stay tonight. Did you know it’s pronounced Toll’ark? It will take us an hour or more to get there by water but by road it’s only a short walk from Ramsdyke. There’s confusion for you!’

‘I wouldn’t want to walk: I’ve settled into the River-time-space-dimension.’

‘Yes, I suppose it would be rather spoiling to break out of it. Hallo, that’ll be for us.’

The Zodiac had given three short hoots. They returned hurriedly and found her waiting downstream from the lock.

There was a weir at Ramsdyke, standing off on their port side. Below the green slide of the fall, the whole surface of the river was smothered in foam: foam in islands and in pinnacles, iridescent foam that twinkled and glinted in the late afternoon sunlight, that shredded away from its own crests, floated like gossamer and broke into nothing.