in my left “sneaker” and it hurt so I went into a dark shop-entry where I could lean against a door and take it off. And it was while I was there that those others came down the street. I would have hailed them: I was just going to do it when they stopped. I didn’t recognize the voices at once because they spoke very low. In fact the one of them who whispered, I never recognized. But the others! Could they have said what I’m sure they did? The first words froze me. But literally. Froze me. I was riveted. Horror-stricken. I can hear them now. It –’
She had reached the bottom of the page. She picked at it gingerly, slid the nail-file under it, crumpled it and turned it.
The following pages containing her last entry were gone.
The inner margins where they were bound together had to some extent escaped a complete soaking. She could see by the fragments that remained that they had been pulled away. ‘But after all, that’s nothing to go by,’ she thought, ‘because when he dived, Mr Lazenby may have grabbed. The book was open. It was open and lying on its face when it sank. That’s it. That’s got to be it.’
Miss Rickerby-Carrick remained perfectly still for some minutes. Once or twice she passed her arthritic fingers across her eyes and brow almost as if she tried to exorcize some devil of muddlement within.
‘He’s a clergyman,’ she thought, ‘a clergyman! He’s been staying with a bishop. I could ask him. Why not? What could he say? Or do? But I’ll ask Troy Alleyn. She’ll jolly well have to listen. It’ll interest her. Her husband!’ she suddenly remembered. ‘Her husband’s a famous detective. I ought to tell Troy Alleyn: and then she may like me to call her Troy. We may get quite chummy,’ thought poor Hazel Rickerby-Carrick without very much conviction.
She put the saturated diary open on her bedside shelf where a ray of afternoon sunlight reached it through the porthole.
A nervous weakness had come upon her. She suffered a terrible sense of constraint as if not only her head was iron-bound but as if the tiny cabin contracted about her. ‘I shan’t sleep in here,’ she thought. ‘I shan’t get a wink or if I do there’ll be beastly dreams and I’ll make noises and they’ll hate me.’ And as she fossicked in an already chaotic drawer for Troy’s aspirin she was visited by her great idea. She would sleep on deck. She would wait until the others had settled down and then she would take her Li-lo from its jolly old hidey-hole behind the tarpaulin and blow it up and sleep, as she phrased it to herself, ‘under the wide and starry sky’. And perhaps – perhaps.
‘I’ve always been one to go straight at a thing and tackle it,’ she thought and finding Troy’s aspirins with the top off inside her sponge-bag, she took a couple, lay on her bunk and made several disastrous plans.
II
For Troy, the evening at Crossdyke began farcically. The passengers were given an early dinner to enable them to explore the village and the nearby ruin of a hunting lodge where King John had stayed during his misguided antics in the north.
Troy who had the beginning of a squeamish headache hoped to get a still earlier start than she had achieved at Tollardwark and to make her call at the police station before any of her fellow-passengers appeared on the scene. Her story of the lost fur was now currency in the ship and would explain the visit if explanation was needed but she hoped to avoid making one.
Throughout dinner Miss Rickerby-Carrick gazed intently at Troy who found herself greatly put-out by this attention: the more so because what her husband once described as her King-Size Bowels of Compassion had been roused by Miss Rickerby-Carrick. The more exasperating she became the more infuriatingly succulent her cold, the more embarrassingly fixed her regard, the sorrier Troy felt for her and the less she desired her company. Either, she thought, the wretched woman was doing a sort of dismal lion-hunt, or, hideous notion, had developed a schwarm for Troy herself. Or was it possible, she suddenly wondered, that this extraordinary lady had something of moment to communicate.
Miss Rickerby-Carrick commanded rather less tact than a bulldozer and it must be clear, Troy thought, to everybody in the saloon that a happening was on the brew.
Determined to look anywhere but at her tormentor, Troy caught the ironical, skew-eyed glance of Caley Bard. He winked and she lowered her gaze. Mr Pollock stared with distaste at Miss Rickerby-Carrick and the Hewsons caught each other’s glances and assumed a mask-like air of detachment. Mr Lazenby and Dr Natouche swopped bits of medieval information about the ruins.
Troy went straight on deck when she had finished her dinner and was about to go ashore when up came Miss Rickerby-Carrick from below, hailing her in a curious kind of soft-pedalled shout.
‘Mrs Alleyn! I say! Mrs Alleyn!’
Troy paused.
‘Look!’ said Miss Rickerby-Carrick coming close to her and whispering. ‘I – are you going up to the village? Can I come 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 companion-way.
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
