One by one the passengers, with the exception of Dr Natouche, came on deck. In their several fashions and with varying degrees of success, they displayed tact towards Troy. The Hewsons smiled at each other and retired, with brochures and Readers’ Digests, to their chairs. Mr Lazenby turned his dark spectacles towards Troy, nodded three times and passed majestically by. Mr Pollock behaved as if she wasn’t there until he was behind her and then, she clearly sensed, had a good long stare over her shoulder at what she was doing.

Miss Rickerby-Carrick was wonderful. When she had floundered, with her customary difficulty, through the half-door at the top of the companion-way, she paused to converse with the Skipper but as she talked to him she rolled her eyes round until they could take in Troy. Presently she left him and archly biting her underlip advanced on tip-toe. She bent and whispered, close to Troy’s ear: ‘Don’t put me in it,’ and so passed on gaily to her deck chair.

The general set-up having now become quietly ridiculous, Troy swung round to find Mr Pollock close behind her.

His eyes were half-closed and he looked at her drawing, unmistakably with the air of someone who knew. For a moment they faced each other. He turned away, swinging his heavy foot.

Caley Bard, with a startling note of anger in his voice, said: ‘Have you been given an invitation to a Private View, Mr Pollock?’

A silence followed. At last Mr Pollock said in a stifled voice: ‘It’s very nice. Lovely,’ and retired to the far end of the deck.

Troy shut her sketchbook and with a view to papering over what seemed to be some kind of crisis, made conversation with everybody about the landscape.

The Zodiac reached Tollard Lock at 6.15 and tied up for the night.

CHAPTER 3
Tollardwark

‘At that time,’ Alleyn said, ‘I was on my way to Chicago and from there to San Francisco. We were setting up a joint plan of action with USA to cope with an international blow-up in the art-forgery world. We were pretty certain, though not positive, that the Jampot was well in the phoney picture trade and that the same group was combining it with a two-way drug racket. My wife’s letters to me from her river cruise missed me in New York and were forwarded to Chicago and thence to San Francisco.

‘On reading them I put through a call to the Yard.’

I

Monday.

Tollardwark.

10.15 p.m.

‘…This will probably arrive with the letter I posted this morning at Ramsdyke. I’m writing in my cabin having returned from Tollardwark where we spend our first night and I’m going to try and set out the sequence of events as you would do it—economically but in detail. I’m almost certain that when they are looked at as a whole they will be seen to add up to nothing in particular.