Clutch of Constables by Ngaio Marsh Read Free Book Online Page A

behind her, answered him.
    “Surely,” Dr Natouche said, “not so much in the eye as in the mind. I remember that on a walk—through a wood, you know—I looked into a dell and saw, deep down, an astonishing spot of scarlet. I thought: Ah! A superb fungus secretly devouring the earth and the air. You know? One of those savage fungi that one thinks of as devils? I went down to look more closely at it and found it was a discarded fish-tin with a red label. Was it the less beautiful for my discovery?”
    He had turned to Troy. “Not to my way of looking,” she said. “It was a good colour and it had made its effect.”
    “We are back aren’t we,” Caley Bard said, “at that old Florentine person with the bubucular nose. We are to assume that the painter doted on every blackhead, crevasse and bump.”
    “Yes,” Troy said. “You are.”
    “So that if a dead something—a fish or a cat—popped up through that foam, for instance, and its colour and shape made a pleasing mélange with its surroundings, it would be a paintable subject and therefore beautiful?”
    “You take,” she said dryly, “the very words from my mouth.”
    Mr Bard looked at her mouth for a second or two.
    “And what satisfaction,” he said under his breath, “is there in that?” He turned away and Troy thought, almost at once, that she must have misheard him.
    Miss Rickerby-Carrick flapped into the conversation like a wet sheet. “Oh
don’t
stop. Go on. Do, do, go on. I don’t want to lose a word of this,” she cried. “Because it makes a point that I’m most awfully keen on. Beauty is everywhere. In everything,” she shouted and swept her arm past Mr Lazenby’s spectacles. “ ‘Beauty is Truth; Truth, Beauty’,” she quoted. “That’s all we need to know.”
    “That’s a very, very profound observation, Miss Rickerby-Carrick,” Mr Hewson observed kindly.
    “I just don’t go along with it,” his sister said. “I’ve seen a whole lot of Truth that wasn’t beautiful. A whole heap of it.”
    Mr Pollock, who had been utterly silent for a very long time now heaved an enormous sigh and as if infected by his gloom the other passengers also fell silent.
    Somebody — Mr Lazenby? — had left the morning’s newspaper on the settle, the paper in which her own photograph had appeared. Troy, who did not eat with her tea, picked it up and seeing nothing to interest her, idly turned over a page.
    “Man found strangled.
    “The body of a man who had been strangled was found at 8pm last night in a flat in Cyprus Street, Soho. He is believed to have been a picture-dealer and the police who are making inquiries give his name as K. G. Z. Andropulos.”
    The passenger list was still on the table. Troy looked at the name Caley Bard had crossed out in favour of her own.
    She rose with so abrupt a movement that one or two of her companions glanced up at her. She dropped the newspaper on the seat and went down to her cabin. After some thought, she said to herself: “If nobody has read it there’s no reason why I should point it out. It’s a horrible bit of news.”
    And then she thought that if, as seemed probable, the paragraph had in fact not been noticed, it might be as well to get rid of the paper, the more especially since she would like to repress her own photograph before it went into general circulation. She could imagine Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s ejaculations: “And there you both are, you and the murdered man who was to have your berth. Fancy!” She hunted out her sketchbook and returned to the saloon.
    The newspaper was nowhere to be seen.
     
    -3-
    Troy waited for a minute or two in the saloon to collect her thoughts. Her fellow-passengers were still at tea and apparently quite undisturbed. She went up on deck. The Skipper was at the wheel.
    “Everything all right, Mrs Alleyn?” he asked.
    “Yes, thank you. Yes. Everything,” said Troy and found herself a chair.
    Most of the detergent foam had been left behind by now.