Colour Scheme
Often regarded as her most interesting book and set on New Zealand’s North Island, Ngaio Marsh herself considered this to be her best-written novel.It was a horrible death – Maurice Questing was lured into a pool of boiling mud and left there to die.Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn, far from home on a wartime quest for German agents, knew that any number of people could have killed him: the English exiles he’d hated, the New Zealanders he’d despised or the Maoris he’d insulted. Even the spies he’d thwarted – if he wasn’t a spy himself…
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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
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 Questingâs 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 find Mr Maurice Questing sitting in it, his unattractive outline rimmed with effervescence. Mr Questing had laughed offensively and announced his intention of remaining in the pool for twenty minutes. He had pointed out the less hot but unoccupied baths. Dr Ackrington, standing on the hardened bluish mud banks that surrounded the pool, embarked on as violent a quarrel as he could bring about with a naked smiling antagonist who returned no answer to the grossest insults. He then went back to his room, dressed and, finding nobody upon whom to pour out his wrath, drove his car ruthlessly up the sharp track from Wai-ata-tapu Hot Springs to the main road for Harpoon. He left behind an atmosphere well suited to his mood, since the air, as always, reeked of sulphurous vapours.
Arrived at the club, he collected his letters and turned into the writing-room. The windows looked across the Harpoon Inlet whose waters on this midsummer morning were quite unscored by ripples and held immaculate the images of sky and white sand, and of the crimson flowering trees that bloom at this time of year in the Northland of New Zealand. A shimmer of heat rose from the pavement outside the club and under its influence the form of trees, hills and bays seemed to shake a little as if indeed the strangely primitive landscape were still taking shape and were rather a half-realised idea than a concrete accomplishment of nature.
It was a beautiful prospect but Dr Ackrington was not really moved by it. He reflected that the day would be snortingly hot and opened his letters. Only one of them seemed to arrest his attention. He spread it out before him on the writing-table and glared at it, whistling slightly between his teeth.
