“Oh baby! I’ll say I’ve left hoff a stone back there in that one-eyed lil’ burg. “And am I hart?” the success of the ship was saying to a group of young men. He no longer wanted to look at the wharf, and turned away. When he opened them the space between vessel and land had widened.

Alleyn shut his eyes and found the whole impression vivid under the closed lids. Already the picture was remote, the sounds would soon fade out. The round voices of the Fijians, loud and deep, as though they spoke through resounding tubes, pierced the moist air and made it vibrant.Įverything shifted a little, stepped back a pace. The darkness of everything and the violence of colour - it was a pattern of wet brown, acid green, magenta and indigo. The clouds themselves were indigo at the edges, heavy with the ominous depression of unshed rain. Those hills, sharply purple at their base, lost outline behind a sulky company of clouds, to jag out, fantastically peaked, against a motionless and sombre sky. He widened his circle, taking in more figures - the Indian woman in the shrill pink sari, sitting by the green bananas wet roofs on the wharf and damp roads, wandering aimlessly towards mangrove swamps and darkened hills. The smell must not be forgotten - frangipanni, coco-nut oil, and sodden wood. How much of the scene could he fix in his memory before the ship sailed? The sound, too - he must get that - the firm slap of bare feet on wet boards, the languid murmur of voices and the snatches of song drifting from a group of native girls near those clumps of fierce magenta coral. The design made by the feet on wet planks. Then the brown face beneath, with liquid blue half-tones reflected from the water, then the oily dark torso, foreshortened, the white loincloth, and the sharp legs. The hair was vivid magenta against the arsenic green of a pile of fresh bananas.

Idly at first, and then with absurd concentration, he began to memorise, starting with a detail. “We called at Suva.” He had a sudden desire to run a mental ring round the scene beneath him, to isolate it, and make it clear for ever in his mind. In a minute or two now they would slide away, lose significance, and become a vague memory. Ampthill, police surgeon at Bossicote, Bucks.Īlleyn leant over the deck-rail, looking at the wet brown wharf and the upturned faces of the people. Superintendent Blackman, of the Buckingham Constabulary Force.ĭetective-Sergeant Bailey, C.I.D., a fingerprint expert.ĭetective-Sergeant Thompson, C.I.D., a photographic expert.ĭr. Valmai Seacliff, a student with sex-appeal. Basil Pilgrim, a student from the nobility. Lady Alleyn, of Danes Lodge, Bossicote, Bucks mother of Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn. Katti Bostock, well-known painter of plumbers and Negro musicians. Chief Detective-Inspector Roderick Alleyn, C.I.D.Īgatha Troy, R.A., of Tatler’s End House, Bossicote, Bucks.

Ngaio marsh agatha troy