Hall of Civic Authority, a Free Library. The ADC received his civilities with perfect complacency.
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘They are very fine. All new. All since The Presidency. It is very remarkable.’
The traffic was heavy but it was noticeable that it opened before their escort as the Red Sea before Moses. They were stared at, but from a distance. Once, as they made a right hand turn and were momentarily checked by an oncoming car, their chauffeur, without turning his head, said something to the driver that made him wince.
When Alleyn, who was married to a painter, looked at the current scene, wherever it might be, he did so with double vision. As a stringently trained policeman he watched, automatically, for idiosyncrasies. As a man very sensitively tuned to his wife’s way of seeing, he searched for consonancies. Now, when confronted by a concourse of round, black heads that bobbed, shifted, clustered and dispersed against that inexorable glare, he saw this scene as his wife might like to paint it. He noticed that, in common with many of the older buildings, one in particular was in process of being newly painted. The ghost of a former legend showed faintly through the mask – SANS RIT IMPO T NG TR DI G CO. He saw a shifting, colourful group on the steps of this building and thought how, with simplification, re-arrangement and selection Troy would endow them with rhythmic significance. She would find, he thought, a focal point, some figure to which the others were subservient, a figure of the first importance.
And then, even as this notion visited him, the arrangement occurred. The figures reformed like fragments in a kaleidoscope and there was the focal point, a solitary man, inescapable because quite still, a grotesquely fat man, with long blond hair, wearing white clothes. A white man.
The white man stared into the car. He was at least fifty yards away but for Alleyn it might have been so many feet. They looked into each other’s faces and the policeman said to himself: ‘That chap’s worth watching. That chap’s a villain.’
Click, went the kaleidoscope. The fragments slid apart and together. A stream of figures erupted from the interior, poured down the steps and dispersed. When the gap was uncovered the white man had gone.
IV
‘It’s like this, sir,’ Chubb had said rapidly. ‘Seeing that No. 1 isn’t a full-time place being there’s two of us, we been in the habit of helping out on a part-time basis elsewhere in the vicinity. Like, Mrs Chubb does an hour every other day for Mr Sheridan in the basement and I go to the Colonel’s – that’s Colonel and Mrs Cockburn-Montfort in the Place – for two hours of a Friday afternoon, and every other Sunday evening we baby-sit at 17 The Walk. And –’
‘Yes. I see,’ said Mr Whipplestone, stemming the tide.
‘You won’t find anything scamped or overlooked, sir,’ Mrs Chubb intervened. ‘We give satisfaction, sir, in all quarters, really we do. It’s just An Arrangement, like.’
‘And naturally, sir, the wages are adjusted. We wouldn’t expect anything else, sir, would we?’
They had stood side by side with round anxious faces, wide-open eyes and gabbling mouths. Mr Whipplestone had listened with his built-in air of attentive detachment and had finally agreed to the proposal that the Chubbs were all his for six mornings, breakfast, luncheon and dinner: that provided the house was well kept up they might attend upon Mr Sheridan or anybody else at their own and his convenience, that on Fridays Mr Whipplestone would lunch and dine at his club or elsewhere and that, as the Chubbs put it, the wages ‘was adjusted accordingly’.
‘Most of the residents,’ explained Chubb when they had completed these arrangements and got down to details, ‘has accounts at the Napoli, sir. You may prefer to deal elsewhere.’
‘And for the butchery,’ said Mrs Chubb, ‘there’s –’
They expounded upon the amenities in the Capricorns.
Mr Whipplestone said: ‘That all sounds quite satisfactory. Do you know, I think I’ll make a tour of inspection.’ And he did so.
The Napoli is one of the four little shops in Capricorn Mews. It is ‘shop’ reduced to its absolute minimum; a slit of a place where the customers stand in single file and then only eight at a squeeze. The proprietors are an Italian couple, he dark and anxious, she dark and buxom and jolly. Their assistant is a large and facetious cockney.
It is a nice shop. They cure their own bacon and hams. Mr Pirelli makes his own pâté and a particularly good terrine. The cheeses are excellent. Bottles of dry Orvieto are slung overhead and other Italian wines crowd together inside the door. There are numerous exotics in line on the shelves. The Capricornians like to tell each other that the Napoli is ‘a pocket Fortnum’s’. Dogs are not allowed but a row of hooks has been thoughtfully provided in the outside wall and on most mornings there is a convocation of mixed dogs attached to them.
Mr Whipplestone skirted the dogs, entered the shop and bought a promising piece of Camembert. The empurpled army man, always immaculately dressed and gloved, whom he had seen in the street was in the shop and was addressed by Mr Pirelli as ‘Colonel’. (Montfort? wondered Mr Whipplestone.) The Colonel’s lady was with him. An alarming lady, the fastidious Mr Whipplestone thought, with the face of a dissolute clown and wildly overdressed. They both wore an air of overdone circumspection that Mr Whipplestone associated with the hazards of a formidable hangover. The lady stood stock still and bolt-upright behind her husband but as Mr Whipplestone approached the counter, she side-stepped and barged into him, driving her pin heel into his instep.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he cried in pain and lifted his hat.
‘Not a bit,’ she said thickly and gave him what could only be described as a half-awakened leer.
Her husband turned and seemed to sense a need for conversation. ‘Not much room for manoeuvrin’,’ he shouted. ‘What?’
‘Quite,’ said Mr Whipplestone.
He opened an account, left the shop and continued his explorations.
He arrived at the scene of his encounter with the little black cat. A large van was backing into the garage. Out of the tail of his eye he thought he saw briefly a darting shadow and when the van stopped he could have fancied, almost, that he heard a faint, plaintive cry. But there was nothing to support these impressions and he hurried on, oddly perturbed.
At the far end of the Mews, by the entrance to the passageway is a strange little cavern, once a stable, which has been converted into a shop. Here, at this period, a baleful fat lady made images of pigs either as doorstops or with roses and daises on their sides and a hole in their backs for cream or flowers as the fancy might take you. They varied in size but never in design. The kiln was at the back of the cavern and as Mr Whipplestone looked in the fat lady stared at him out of her shadows. Above the entrance was a notice: ‘X. & K. Sanskrit. Pigs.’
‘Commercial candour!’ thought Mr Whipplestone, cracking a little joke for himself. To what nationality he wondered could someone called Sanskrit possibly belong? Indian, he supposed, And ‘X’? Xavier perhaps. ‘To make a living,’ he wondered, ‘out of the endless reduplication of pottery pigs? And why on earth does this extraordinary name seem to ring a bell?’
Conscious that the fat lady in the shadows still looked at him, he moved on into Capricorn Place and made his way to a rosy brick wall at the far end. Through an opening in this wall one leaves the Capricorns and arrives at a narrow lane passing behind the Basilica precincts and an alleyway ending in the full grandeur of Palace Park Gardens. Here the Ng’ombwana Embassy rears its important
