air full of pleasant scents from the lock-keeper’s garden: stocks, tobacco flowers, newly watered earth and at the back of these the cold dank smell of The River. These scents, she thought, made up one of the three elements of night; the next was composed of things that were to be seen before the moon rose: ambiguous pools of darkness, lighted windows, stars, the shapes of trees and the dim whiteness of a bench hard by their moorings. Troy sat there for a time to listen to the third element of night: an owl somewhere in a spinney downstream, the low, intermittent colloquy of moving water, indefinable stirrings, the small flutters and bumps made by flying insects and the homely sound of people talking quietly in the lockhouse and in the saloon of the Zodiac.
A door opened and the three Tretheways who had been spending the evening with the lock-keeper’s family, exchanged goodnights and crunched down the gravel path towards Troy.
‘Lovely evening, Mrs Alleyn,’ Mrs Tretheway said. The Skipper asked if she was enjoying the cool air and as an afterthought added: ‘Telegram from Miss Rickerby-Carrick, by the way, Mrs Alleyn. From Carlisle.’
‘Oh!’ Troy cried, ‘I am glad. Is she all right?’
‘Seems so. Er – what does she say exactly, dear? Just a minute.’
A rustle of paper. Torchlight darted about the Tretheways’ faces and settled on a yellow telegram in a brown hand. ‘ “Sorry abrupt departure collected by mutual friends car urgent great friend seriously ill Inverness awfully sad missing cruise cheerio everybody Hay Rickerby-Carrick”.’
‘There! She’s quite all right, you see,’ Mrs Tretheway said comfortably. ‘It’s the friend. Just like they said on the phone at Crossdyke.’
‘So it wasn’t a taxi firm that rang through to Crossdyke,’ Troy pointed out. ‘It must have been her friends in the car.’
‘Unless they were in a taxi and asked the office to ring. Anyway,’ Mrs Tretheway repeated, ‘it’s quite all right.’
‘Yes. It must be.’ Troy said.
But when she was in bed that night she couldn’t help thinking there was still something that didn’t quite satisfy her about the departure of Miss Rickerby-Carrick.
‘Tomorrow,’ she thought, ‘I’ll ask Dr Natouche what he thinks.’
Before she went to sleep she found herself listening for the sound she had heard – where? At Tollardwark? At Crossdyke? She wasn’t sure – the distant sound of a motorbicycle. And although there was no such sound to be heard that night she actually dreamt she had heard it.
V
Troy thought: ‘Tomorrow we step back into time.’ The return journey had taken on something of the character of a recurrent dream: spires, fens, individual trees, locks; even a clod of tufted earth that had fallen away from a bank and was half drowned or a broken branch that dipped into the stream and moved with its flow: these were familiar landmarks that they might have passed, not once, but many times before.
At four in the afternoon the Zodiac entered the straight reach of The River below Ramsdyke Lock. Already, drifts of detergent foam had begun to float past her. Wisps of it melted on her deck. Ahead of her the passengers could see an unbroken whiteness that veiled The River like an imponderable counterpane. They could hear the voice of Ramsdyke weir and see a foaming pother where the corrupted fall met the lower reach.
Troy leant on the starboard taffrail and watched their entry into this frothy region. She remembered how she and Dr Natouche and Caley Bard and Hazel Rickerby-Carrick had discussed reality and beauty. Fragments of conversation drifted across her recollection. She could almost re-hear the voices.
‘– in the Eye of the Beholder –’
‘– a fish tin with a red label. Was it the less beautiful –’
‘– if a dead something popped up through that foam –’
‘– a dead something –’
‘– a dead something –’
‘– a fish – a cat –’
‘– through that foam –’
‘– a dead something –’
Hazel Rickerby-Carrick’s face, idiotically bloated, looked up: not at Troy, not at anything. Her mouth, drawn into an outlandish rictus, grinned through discoloured froth. She bobbed and bumped against the starboard side. And what terrible disaster had corrupted her river-weed hair and distended her blown cheeks?
The taffrail shot upwards and the trees with it. The voice of the weir exploded with a crack in Troy’s head and nothing whatever followed it. Nothing.
‘From this point,’ Alleyn said, ‘the several elements, if I can put it like that, converge.
‘The discovery of this woman’s body suddenly threw a complex of apparently unrelated incidents into an integrated whole. You grind away at routine, you collect a vast amount of data ninety-percent of which is useless and then – something happens and Bingo – the other ten-percent sits up like Jacky and Bob’s your uncle.’
He paused, having astonished himself by this intemperate excursion into jokeyness. He met broad grins from his audience and a startled glance from the man in the second row.
‘“O God, your only jig-maker”,’ thought Alleyn and resumed in a more orthodox style.
‘It struck me that there might be some interest – possibly some value – in putting this case before you as it appeared to my wife and as she put it to the county police and in her letters to me. And I wonder if at this juncture you feel you could sort out the evidential wheat from the chaff.
‘What, in fact, do you think we ought to have concentrated upon when Inspector Fox and I finally arrived on the scene?’
Alleyn fancied he could detect a certain resentment in the rest of the class when the man in the second row put up his hand.
I
Troy could hear an enormous unlocalized voice in an echo chamber. It approached and enveloped her. It was unalarming.
She emerged with a sickening upward lurch from somewhere that had been like death and for an unappreciable interval was flooded by a delicious surge of recovery. She felt grateful and opened her eyes.
A black face and white teeth were close before her. A recognizable arm supported her.
‘You fainted. You are all right. Don’t worry.’
‘I never faint.’
‘No?’
Fingers on her wrist.
‘Why
