Mr Tillottson said it looked a wee bit like that but they’d have to check with the lock-keeper at Crossdyke. He might have mistaken the message. It might have been, he suggested, Miss Rickerby-Carrick herself saying she was hiring a car.
‘That’s true!’ Troy agreed.
‘What sort of a voice, now, would she have, Mrs Alleyn?’
‘She’s got a heavy cold and she sounds excitable. She gabbles and she talks in italics.’
‘She wouldn’t be what you’d call at all eccentric?’
‘She would. Very eccentric.’
Mr Tillottson said ah, well, now, there you were, weren’t you? Mr Bonney asked what age Miss Rickerby-Carrick might be and when Troy hazarded, ‘fortyish’, began to look complacent. Troy mentioned Mavis of Birmingham now in the Highlands and when they asked Mavis who, and where in the Highlands was obliged to say she’d forgotten. This made her feel foolish and remember some of her husband’s strictures upon purveyors of information received.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘to be so perfectly hopeless.’
They soothed her. Why should she remember these trifles? They would, said Mr Tillottson, have a wee chin-wag with the lock-keeper at Crossdyke just to get confirmation of the telephone call. They would ring the telephone department and they would make further inquiries to find out just how Miss Rickerby-Carrick got herself removed in the dead of night. If possible they would discover her destination.
Their manner strongly suggested that Troy’s uneasiness rather than official concern was the motive for these inquiries.
‘They think I’ve got a bee in my bonnet,’ she told herself. ‘If I wasn’t Rory’s wife they wouldn’t be bothered with me.’
She took what she felt had now become her routine leave of Superintendents in North Country police stations and, once more reassured by Mr Tillottson, prepared to enjoy herself in Longminster.
II
She spent the rest of the morning looking at the gallery and the Minster and wandering about the city which was as beautiful as its reputation.
At noon she began to ask her way to the Longminster Arms. After a diversion into an artist-colourman’s shop where she found a very nice old frame of the right size for her Signs of the Zodiac, she arrived at half past twelve. Troy was one of those people who can never manage to be unpunctual and was often obliged to go for quite extensive walks round blocks in order to be decently late or at least not indecently early.
However, she didn’t mind being early for her luncheon with Dr Natouche and his friends. She tidied up and found her way into a pleasant drawing-room where there were lots of magazines.
In one of them she at once became absorbed. It printed a long extract from a book written some years ago by a white American who had had his skin pigmentation changed by what, it appeared, was a dangerous but entirely effective process. For some months this man had lived as one of themselves among the Negroes of the Deep South. The author did not divulge the nature of this transformation process and Troy found herself wondering if Dr Natouche would be able to tell what it was. Could she ask him? Remembering their conversation in the wapentake, she thought she could.
She was still pondering over this and had turned again to the article when she became aware of a presence and found that Dr Natouche stood beside her, quite close, with his gaze on the printed page.
Her diaphragm contracted with a jolt and the magazine crackled in her hands.
‘I am so very sorry,’ he said. ‘I startled you. It was stupid of me. The carpet is thick and you were absorbed.’
He sat down opposite to her and with a look of great concern said: ‘I have been unforgivably clumsy.’
‘Not a bit of it,’ Troy rejoined. ‘I don’t know why I should be so jumpy. But as you say, I was absorbed. Have you read this thing, Dr Natouche?’
He had lifted his finger to a waiter who approached with a perfectly blank face.
‘We shall not wait for the Ferguses,’ Dr Natouche said. ‘You must be given a restorative. Brandy? And soda? Dry Ginger? Yes? Two, if you please and may I see the wine list?’
His manner was grand enough to wipe the blank look off any waiter’s face.
When the man had gone Dr Natouche said: ‘But I have not answered your question. Yes, I have read this book. It was a courageous action.’
‘I wondered if you would know exactly what was done to him. The process, I mean.’
‘Your colour is returning,’ he said after a moment. ‘And so, of course, did his. It was not a permanent change. No, I do not know what was done. Sir Leslie might have an idea, it is more in his line than mine. We must ask him.’
‘I would have thought –’
‘Yes?’ he said, when she stopped short.
‘You said, when we were at the wapentake, that you didn’t think I could say anything to – I don’t remember the exact phrase –’
‘To hurt or offend me? Something like that was it? It is true.’
‘I was going to ask, then, if the change of pigmentation would be enough to convince people, supposing the features were still markedly European. And then I saw that your features, Dr Natouche, are not at all –’
‘Negroid?’
‘Yes. But perhaps Ethiopians – one is so ignorant.’
‘You must remember I am a half-caste. My facial structures are those of my mother, I believe.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Troy said. ‘Of course.’
The waiter brought their drinks and the wine list and menu and hard on his heels came Sir Leslie and Lady Fergus.
They were charming and the luncheon party was a success but somehow neither Troy nor her host got round to asking Sir Leslie if he could shed any light on the darkening by scientific methods of the pigmentation of the skin.
III
Troy returned to the Zodiac, rested, changed and was taken in a taxi by Caley Bard to dinner with champagne at another hotel.
‘I’m not ‘alf going it,’ she thought and wondered what her husband would have to say about these jaunts.
When they had dined she and Bard walked about Longminster and finally strolled back to The River at half past ten.
The Zodiac was berthed romantically in a bend of The River from which one could see the Long Minster itself against the stars. The lights of the old city quavered and zig-zagged with those of other craft in the black night waters. Troy and Bard could hear quiet voices in the saloon but they loitered on the deserted deck and before she could do anything about it Bard had kissed Troy.
‘You’re adorable,’ he said.
‘Ah, get along with you. Goodnight, and thank you for a nice party.’
‘Don’t go away.’
‘I think I must.’
‘Couldn’t we have a lovely, fairly delicate little affair? Please?’
‘We could not,’ said Troy.
‘I’ve fallen for you in a bloody big way. Don’t laugh at me.’
‘I’m not. But I’m not going to pursue the matter. Don’t you, either.’
‘Well, I can’t say you’ve led me on. You don’t know a garden path when you see one.’
‘I wouldn’t say as much for you.’