Colour Scheme. Ngaio Marsh
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NGAIO MARSH
COLOUR SCHEME
Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Collins 1943
Copyright © Ngaio Marsh Ltd 1943
Ngaio Marsh asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of these works
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 978000651238
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007344574
Version: 2017-05-04
To the family at Tauranga
CONTENTS
1 The Claires and Dr Ackrington
2 Mr Questing Goes Down for the First Time
5 Mr Questing Goes Down for the Second Time
9 Mr Questing Goes Down for the Third Time
10 Entrance of Sergeant Webley
Dr James Ackrington, MD, FRCS, FRCP
Barbara Claire, his niece
Mrs Claire, his sister
Colonel Edward Claire, his brother-in-law
Simon Claire, his nephew
Huia, maid at Wai-ata-tapu
Geoffrey Gaunt, a visiting celebrity
Dikon Bell, his secretary
Alfred Colly, his servant
Maurice Questing, man of business
Rua Te Kahu, a chief of the Te Rarawas
Herbert Smith, roustabout at Wai-ata-tapu
Eru Saul, a half-caste
Septimus Falls
The Princess Te Papa (Mrs Te Papa), of the Te Rarawas
Detective-Sergeant Webley, of the Harpoon Constabulary
A Superintendent of Police
When Dr James Ackrington limped into the Harpoon Club on the afternoon of Monday, January the thirteenth, he was in a poisonous temper. A sequence of events had combined to irritate and then to inflame him. He had slept badly. He had embarked, he scarcely knew why, on a row with his sister, a row based obscurely on the therapeutic value of mud pools and the technique of frying eggs. He had asked for the daily paper of the previous Thursday only to discover that it had been used to wrap up Mr Maurice Questing’s picnic lunch. His niece Barbara, charged with this offence, burst out into one of her fits of nervous laughter and recovered the paper, stained with ham fat and reeking with onions. Dr Ackrington, in shaking it angrily before her, had tapped his sciatic nerve smartly against the table. Blind with pain and white with rage, he stumbled to his room, undressed, took a shower, wrapped himself in his dressing-gown and made his way to the hottest of the thermal baths, only to