Clutch of Constables (The Ngaio Marsh Collection) by Ngaio Marsh

Author:Ngaio Marsh [Marsh, Ngaio]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Series - Ngaio Marsh, Crime
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 2010-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

II

With the exception of Chief-Inspector Fox for whom she had a deep affection, Troy did not meet her husband’s colleagues with any regularity. Sometimes Alleyn would bring a few of them in for drinks and two or three times a year the Alleyns had easy-going evenings when their house, like Troy’s cabin in the Zodiac, was full of enormous men talking shop.

From these encounters she had, she thought, learnt to recognize certain occupational characteristics among officers of the Criminal Investigation Department.

They were men who, day in, day out, worked in an atmosphere of intense hostility. They were, they would have said, without illusions and unless a built-in scepticism, by definition includes a degree of illusion, she supposed they were right. Some of them, she thought, had retained a kind of basic compassion: they were shocked by certain crimes and angered by others. They honestly saw themselves as guardians of the peace however disillusioned they might be as to the character of the beings they protected. Some regarded modern psychiatric theories about crime with massive contempt. Others seemed to look upon the men and women they hunted with a kind of sardonic affection and would strike up what passed for friendships with them. Many of them, like Fox, were of a very kindly disposition yet, as Alleyn once said of them, if pity entered far into the hunter his occupation was gone. And he had quoted Mark Antony who talked about ‘pity choked with custom of fell deeds’. Some of the men she met were bitter and with reason, about public attitudes towards the police. ‘A character comes and robs their till or does their old Mum or interferes with their kid sister,’ Mr Fox once remarked, ‘and they’re all over you. Next day they’re among the pigeons in Trafalgar Square advising the gang our chaps are trying to deal with to put in the boot. You could say it’s a lonely sort of job.’

Very few of Alleyn’s colleagues, Troy thought, were natural bullies but it was to be expected that the Service would occasionally attract such men and that its disciplines would sometimes fail to control them.

At which point in her consideration of the genus of CID Troy was invariably brought up short by the reflection that her husband fitted into none of these categories. And she would give up generalization as a bad job.

Now, however, she found herself trying to place Superintendent Tillottson and was unable to do so.

How tough was Mr Tillottson? How intelligent? How impenetrable? And what on earth did he now make of the cruise of the Zodiac? If he carried on in his usual way, ironing-out her remarks into a featureless expanse of words, she would feel like hitting him.

So. ‘What do you make of this one?’ she asked and heard his ‘Well, now, Mrs Alleyn—’ before he said it.

‘Well, now, Mrs Alleyn,’ said Mr Tillottson and she cut in.

‘Has she been murdered? Or can’t you say until after the autopsy?’

‘We can’t say,’ he admitted, looking wary, ‘until after the inquest.

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