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 inkpot 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 precipitancy, became almost airborne as she plunged downhill in pursuit of the Doctor. Troy heard her hail him.
‘Doctor! Doctor Na-tooo-sh.’
He paused, turned and waited. He was incapable, Troy thought, of looking anything but dignified. Miss Rickerby-Carrick closed in. She displayed her usual vehemence. He listened with that doctor’s air which is always described as being grave and attentive.
‘Can she be consulting him?’ Troy wondered. ‘Or is she perhaps confiding in him instead of me.’
Now, she was showing him something in the palm of her hand. Could it be a butterfly, Troy wondered. He bent his head to look at it. Troy saw him give a little nod. They walked slowly towards the Zodiac and as they approached, the great booming voice became audible.
‘– your own medical man … something to help you … quite possibly … indeed.’
She is consulting him, thought Troy.
They moved out of her field of vision and now there emerged from the ruins the rest of the travellers: the Hewsons, Mr Lazenby and Mr Pollock. They waved to Caley Bard and descended the hill in single file, like cut-out figures in black paper against a fading green sky. Commedia dell’ arte again, Troy thought.
The evening was very warm. She lay down on her bunk. There was little light in the cabin and she left it so, fearing that Miss Rickerby-Carrick would call to inquire. She even locked her door, and, obscurely, felt rather mean for doing so. The need for sleep that always followed her migraines must now be satisfied and Troy began to dream of voices and of a mouselike scratching at somebody’s door. It persisted, it established itself over her dream and nagged her back into wakefulness. She struggled with herself, suffered an angry spasm of conscience and finally in a sort of bemused fury, got out of bed and opened the door.
On nobody.
The passage was empty. She thought afterwards that as she opened her own door another one had quietly closed.
She waited but there was no stirring or sound anywhere and, wondering if after all she had dreamt the scratching at her door, she went back to bed and at once fell fathoms deep into oblivion that at some unidentifiable level was disturbed by the sound of an engine.
III
She half-awoke to broad daylight and the consciousness of a subdued fuss: knocking and voices, footsteps in the passage and movements next door in Cabin 8. While she lay, half-detached and half-resentful of these disturbances, there was a tap on her own door and a rattle of the handle.
Troy, now fully awake, called out, ‘Sorry. Just a moment,’ and unlocked her door.
Mrs Tretheway came in with tea.
‘Is anything wrong?’ Troy asked.
Mrs Tretheway’s smile broke out in glory all over her face. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘not to say wrong. It’s how you look at it, I suppose, Mrs Alleyn. The fact is Miss Rickerby-Carrick seems to have left us.’
‘Left us? Gone?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Do you mean –?’
‘It must have been very early. Before any of us were about and our Tom was up at six.’
‘But –’
‘She’s packed her suitcase and gone.’
‘No message?’
‘Well now – yes – scribbled on a bit of newspaper. “Called away. So sorry. Urgent. Will write”.’
‘How very extraordinary.’
‘My husband reckons somebody must have come in the night. Some friend with a car or else she might have rung Toll’ark or Longminster for a taxi. The telephone booth at the lockhouse is open all night.’
‘Well,’ Troy muttered, ‘she is a rum one and no mistake.’
Mrs Tretheway beamed. ‘It may be all for the best,’ she remarked. ‘It’s a lovely day, anyhow,’ and took her departure.
When Troy arrived in the saloon she found her fellow-passengers less intrigued than might have been expected and she supposed that they had already exhausted the topic of Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s flight.
Her own entrance evidently revived it a little and there was a short barrage of rather flaccid questions: had Miss Rickerby-Carrick ‘said anything’ to Troy? She hadn’t ‘said anything’ to anyone else.
‘Shall we rather put it,’ Caley Bard remarked sourly, ‘that she hadn’t said anything of interest. Full stop. Which God knows, by and large, is only too true of all her conversation.’
‘Now, Mr Bard, isn’t that just a little hard on the poor girl?’ Miss Hewson objected.
