‘She told me she would take her tablet and sleep on deck.’

Troy stooped down and after a moment, picked up a blotched, red scrap of cloth.

‘What’s that?’ she asked.

The long fingers that looked as if they had been imperfectly treated with black cork, turned it over and laid it in the pinkish palm. ‘Isn’t it from the cover of her diary?’ Troy said.

‘I believe you’re right.’

He was about to drop it overboard but she said: ‘No—don’t.’

‘No?’

‘Well—only because—’ Troy gave an apologetic laugh. ‘I’m a policeman’s wife,’ she said. ‘Put it down to that.’

He took out a pocket-book and slipped the scrap of cloth into it.

‘I expect we’re making a song about nothing,’ Troy said.

Suddenly she felt an almost overwhelming impulse to tell Dr Natouche about her misgivings and the incidents that had prompted them. She had a vivid premonition of how he would look as she confided her perplexity. His head would be courteously inclined and his expression placid and a little withdrawn—a consulting-room manner of the most reassuring kind. It really would be a great relief to confide in Dr Natouche. An opening phrase had already shaped itself in her mind when she remembered another attentive listener.

‘And by-the-way, Mrs Alleyn,’ Superintendent Tillottson had said in his infuriatingly bland manner, ‘We won’t mention this little matter to anybody, shall we? Just a routine precaution.’

So she held her tongue.

CHAPTER 5
Longminster

‘I suppose one of his greatest assets,’ Alleyn said, ‘is his ability to instil confidence in the most unlikely people. An infuriated Bolivian policeman is supposed to have admitted that before he could stop himself he found he was telling the Jampot about his own trouble with a duodenal ulcer. This may not be a true story. If not, it was invented to illustrate the more winning facets in the Foljambe façade. The moral is: that it takes all sorts to make a thoroughly bad lot and it sometimes takes a conscientious police officer quite a long time to realize this simple fact of unsavoury life. You can’t type criminals. It’s just as misleading to talk about them as if they never behave out of character as it is to suppose the underworld is riddled with charmers who only cheat or kill by some kind of accident.

‘Foljambe has been known to behave with perfect good-nature and also with ferocity. He is attracted by beauty at a high artistic level. His apartment in Paris is said to have been got up in the most impeccable taste. He likes money better than anything else in life and he enjoys making it by criminal practices. If he was left a million pounds it’s odds on he’d continue to operate the rackets. If people got in his way he would continue to remove them.