‘Because,’ he said, ‘I never left the top of the companion-way. I stood there, listening to the hullabaloo and not knowing what to do. I stayed there until after the Skipper arrived and after the constable came on board. He—’ he moved his head at Natouche—’Well, look at him. The size of him. He never passed me or went down the companion-way. Never. He wasn’t there.’

Natouche’s arms rose naked from the sleeves of his gown, his hands curled above his head and his teeth were bared. He looked like an effigy, carved from ebony. Before the curled hands could do their work, Alleyn and Tillottson grabbed him. They lurched against the bar. Troy’s Signs of the Zodiac fell from their firmament and Hewson screamed: ‘Get him! Get him! Get him!’

Above the uproar, voices shouted on deck. A rival commotion had broken out and even as Alleyn and Tillottson screwed the great arms behind the heavy back, somebody came tumbling down the companion-way, followed by Inspector Fox and two deeply perturbed constables.

He was a Dickensian little man: bald, bespectacled and irritated. He contemplated the outlandish scene with distaste and cried in a shrillish voice:

‘Once and for all, I demand to know the meaning of this masquerade.’

Fox arrived at his side and, seeing his principal engaged in strenuous activity, lent his aid. Natouche no longer struggled. He looked at the men who had subdued him as if he himself was in the ascendant.

Alleyn moved away from him and confronted the little man. ‘May I have your name, sir,’ he said.

‘My name!’ the little man ejaculated. ‘My name! Certainly you may have my name, sir. My name, sir, is Caley Bard.’

CHAPTER 10
Closed File

‘And that,’ Alleyn said, laying down his file, ‘was virtually the end of the Jampot. He is now, together with his chums, serving a life sentence and good behaviour is not likely to release him in the foreseeable future. I understand he finds it particularly irksome not to be able to lepidopterize on Dartmoor where, as we know from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, there are butterflies. Or perhaps none of you has read The Hound of the Baskervilles. All right, Carmichael, I dare say you have.