Inspector Alleyn 3-Book Collection 10: Last Ditch, Black As He’s Painted, Grave Mistake. Ngaio Marsh
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put it to you that their job, a highly specialized and immensely difficult one, is going to be a hundred per cent more tricky if you decline to co-operate. If, for instance, on an impulse you change your route to some reception or walk out of your embassy without telling anybody and take a constitutional in Kensington Gardens all by yourself. To put it badly and brutally, if you are killed somebody in the Special Branch is going to be axed, the Department’s going to fall into general disrepute at the highest and lowest levels, and a centuries-old reputation of immunity from political assassination in England is gone for good. You see, I’m speaking not only for the police.’
‘The police, as servants of the people,’ The Boomer began and then, Alleyn thought, very probably blushed.
‘Were you going to say we ought to be kept in our place?’ he mildly asked.
The Boomer began to walk about the room. Alleyn stood up.
‘You have a talent,’ The Boomer suddenly complained, ‘for putting one in the wrong. I remember it of old at Davidson’s.’
‘What an insufferable boy I must have been,’ Alleyn remarked. He was getting very bored with Davidson’s and really there seemed to be nothing more to say. ‘I have taken up too much of your Excellency’s time,’ he said. ‘Forgive me,’ and waited to be dismissed.
The Boomer looked mournfully upon him. ‘But you are lunching,’ he said. ‘We have agreed. It is arranged that you shall lunch.’
‘That’s very kind, your Excellency, but it’s only eleven o’clock. Should I make myself scarce in the meantime?’
To his intense dismay he saw that the bloodshot eyes had filled with tears. The Boomer said, with immense dignity: ‘You have distressed me.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I was overjoyed at your coming. And now it is all spoilt and you call me Excellency.’
Alleyn felt the corners of his mouth twitch and at the same time was moved by a contradictory sense of compassion. This emotion, he realized, was entirely inappropriate. He reminded himself that the President of Ng’ombwana was far from being a sort of inspired innocent. He was an astute, devoted and at times ruthless dictator with, it had to be added, a warm capacity for friendship. He was also extremely observant. ‘And funny,’ Alleyn thought, controlling himself. ‘It’s quite maddening of him to be funny as well.’
‘Ah!’ the President suddenly roared out, ‘you are laughing! My dear Rory, you are laughing,’ and himself broke into that Homeric gale of mirth. ‘No, it is too much! Admit! It is too ridiculous! What is it all about? Nothing! Listen, I will be a good boy. I will behave. Tell your solemn friends in your Special Branch that I will not run away when they hide themselves behind inadequate floral decorations and dress themselves up as nonentities with enormous boots. There now! You are pleased? Yes?’
‘I’m enchanted,’ Alleyn said, ‘if you really mean it.’
‘But I do. I do. You shall see. I will be decorum itself. Within,’ he added, ‘the field of their naive responsibilities. Within the UK in fact. OK? Yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘And no more Excellencies. No? Not,’ The Boomer added without turning a hair, ‘when we are tête-à-tête. As at present.’
‘As at present,’ Alleyn agreed and was instantly re-involved in an exuberance of hand-shaking.
It was arranged that he would be driven round the city for an hour before joining the President for luncheon. The elegant ADC reappeared. When they walked back along the corridor, Alleyn looked through its french windows into the acid-green garden. It was daubed superbly with flamboyants and veiled by a concourse of fountains. Through the iridescent rise and fall of water there could be perceived, at intervals, motionless figures in uniform.
Alleyn paused. ‘What a lovely garden,’ he said.
‘Oh yes?’ said the ADC, smiling. Reflected colour and reflected lights from the garden glanced across his polished charcoal jaw and cheekbones. ‘You like it? The President likes it very much.’
He made as if to move. ‘Shall we?’ he suggested.
A file of soldiers, armed, and splendidly uniformed, crossed the garden left, right, left, right, on the far side of the fountains. Distorted by prismatic cascades, they could dimly be seen to perform a correct routine with the men they had come to replace.
‘The changing of the guard,’ Alleyn said lightly.
‘Exactly. They are purely ceremonial troops.’
‘Yes?’
‘As at your Buckingham Palace,’ explained the ADC.
‘Quite,’ said Alleyn.
They passed through the grandiloquent hall and the picturesque guard at the entrance.
‘Again,’ Alleyn ventured, ‘purely ceremonial?’
‘Of course,’ said the ADC.
They were armed, Alleyn noticed, if not to the teeth, at least to the hips, with a useful-looking issue of sophisticated weapons. ‘Very smartly turned out,’ he said politely.
‘The President will be pleased to know you think so,’ said the ADC and they walked into a standing bath of heat and dazzlement.
The Presidential Rolls heavily garnished with the Ng’ombwanan arms and flying, incorrectly since he was not using it, the Presidential standard, waited at the foot of the steps. Alleyn was ushered into the back seat while the ADC sat in front. The car was air-conditioned and the windows shut and, thought Alleyn, ‘If ever I rode in a bullet-proof job – and today wouldn’t be the first time – this is it.’ He wondered if, somewhere in Ng’ombwana security circles there was an influence a great deal more potent than that engendered by the industrious evocation of Davidson’s.
They drove under the escort of two ultra-smart, lavishly accoutred motor-cyclists. ‘Skinheads, bikies, traffic cops, armed escorts,’ he speculated, ‘wherever they belch and rev and bound, what gives the species its peculiar air of menacing vulgarity?’
The car swept through crowded, mercilessly glaring streets. Alleyn found something to say about huge white monstrosities – a Palace of Culture, a Palace of Justice, a Hall of Civic Authority, a Free Library. The ADC received his civilities with perfect complacency.
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘They are very fine. All new. All since The Presidency. It is very remarkable.’
The traffic was heavy but it was noticeable that it opened before their escort as the Red Sea before Moses. They were stared at, but from a distance. Once, as they made a right hand turn and were momentarily checked by an oncoming car, their chauffeur, without turning his head, said something to the driver that made him wince.
When Alleyn, who was married to a painter, looked at the current scene, wherever it might be, he did so with double vision. As a stringently trained policeman he watched, automatically, for idiosyncrasies. As a man very sensitively tuned to his wife’s way of seeing, he searched for consonancies. Now, when confronted by a concourse of round, black heads that bobbed, shifted, clustered and dispersed against that inexorable glare, he saw this scene as his wife might like to paint it. He noticed that, in common with many of the older buildings, one in particular was in process of being newly painted. The ghost of a former legend showed faintly through the mask – SANS RIT IMPO T NG TR DI G CO. He saw a shifting, colourful group on the steps of this building and thought how, with simplification, re-arrangement and selection Troy would endow them with rhythmic significance. She would find, he thought, a focal point, some figure to which the others were subservient, a figure of the first importance.
And then, even as this notion visited him, the arrangement occurred. The figures reformed like fragments in a kaleidoscope and there was the focal point, a solitary man, inescapable because quite still, a grotesquely fat man, with long blond hair, wearing white clothes. A white man.
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