Singing in the Shrouds

CHAPTER 5 Before Las Palmas

Alleyn sat in the pilot’s cabin looking at his file of the case in question. Captain Bannerman was on the bridge outside. At regular intervals he marched past Alleyn’s porthole. The weather, as Mr. McAngus had predicted, was getting warmer and in two days Cape Farewell would sight Las Palmas. She steamed now through a heavy swell. A tendency to yawn, doze, and swap panaceas against seasickness had broken out among the passengers.

A detailed description of the room followed. He skipped it and read on.

Alleyn sighed and looked up. Captain Bannerman bobbed past the porthole. The ship was heaved upward and forward, the horizon tilted, rose and sank.

Alleyn shook his head, pulled towards him a half-finished letter to his wife, and after a moment continued it.

There was a tap at the door, and on Alleyn’s call, the wireless cadet, a wan youth, came in with a radiogram.

“In code, Mr. Broderick,” he said.

When he had gone Alleyn decoded the message and after an interval continued his letter.

Alleyn’s suggestion that he should give a dinner party was made, in the first instance, to Captain Bannerman. “It may be unorthodox,” Alleyn said, “but there’s just a chance that it may give us a lead about these people.”

“I can’t say I see how you work that out.”

“I hope you will, though, in a minute. And, by the bye, I’ll want your collaboration, sir, if you’ll agree to give it.”

“Me! Now then, now then, what is all this?”

“Let me explain.”

Captain Bannerman listened with an air of moody detachment. When Alleyn had finished the captain slapped his palms on his knees and said, “It’s a damn crazy notion, but if it proves once and for all that you’re on a wild goose chase, it’ll be worth the trouble. I won’t say no. Now!”

Fortified by this authority Alleyn interviewed the chief steward, who expressed astonishment. Any parties that were given aboard this ship, the chief steward explained, were traditionally cocktail parties, for which Dennis, always helpful, made very dainty little savouries and records were played over the loudspeaker.

However, before Alleyn’s vast prestige as a supposed V.I.P. and relation of the managing director, objections dissolved. Dennis became flushed with excitement, the stewards were gracious, and the chef, a Portuguese whose almost moribund interest in his art revived under a whacking great tip, was enthusiastic.

Tables were run together and decorated, wine was chosen, and at the appointed hour the nine passengers, the mate, the chief engineer, Alleyn and Tim Makepiece, having first met for drinks in the lounge, were assembled in the dining-room at a much later hour than was usually observed for dinner at sea.

Alleyn sat at one end of the table with Mrs. Cuddy on his right and Miss Abbott on his left. The captain sat at the other between Mrs. Dillington-Blick and Brigid — an arrangement that broke down his last resistance to so marked a departure from routine and fortified him against the part he had undertaken to play.

Alleyn was a good host; his professional knack of getting other people to talk, coupled with the charm to which his wife never alluded without using the adjective indecent, generated an atmosphere of festivity. He was enormously helped by Mrs. Dillington-Blick, whose genuine enthusiasm and plunging neckline were, in their separate modes, provocative of jollity. She looked so dazzling that she sounded brilliant. Father Jourdain, who sat next to her, was admirable. Aubyn Dale, resplendent in a velvet dinner jacket, coruscated with bonhomie and regaled his immediate neighbours with stories of practical jokes that he had successfully inflicted upon his chums, as he called them, in the world of admass. These anecdotes met with a gay response in Mrs. Dillington-Blick.

Mr. McAngus wore a hyacinth in his buttonhole. Tim Makepiece was obviously enjoying himself and Brigid had an air of being astonished at her own gaiety. Mr. Merryman positively blossomed or, at any rate, sprouted a little under the influence of impeccably chosen wines and surprisingly good food, while Miss Abbott relaxed and barked quite jovially across the table at Mr. Cuddy. The two officers rapidly eased off their guarded good manners.

The Cuddys were the tricky ones. Mrs. Cuddy looked as if she wasn’t going to give herself away if she knew it and Mr. Cuddy’s smile suggested that he enjoyed secret information about something slightly discreditable to everyone else. They exchanged looks occasionally.

However, as the Montrachet was followed by Perrier-Jouet in a lordly magnum, even the Cuddys shed some of their caginess. Mrs. Cuddy, having assured Alleyn that they never touched anything but a drop of port wine on anniversaries, was persuaded to modify her austerity and did so with abandon. Mr. Cuddy cautiously sipped and asked sharp questions about the wine, pointing out with tedious iteration that it was all above his head, he being a very simple-living person and not used to posh meals. Alleyn was unable to like Mr. Cuddy very much.

Nevertheless, it was he who provided a means of introducing the topic that Alleyn had planned to exploit. There were no flowers on the table. They had been replaced by large bowls of fruit and shaded lamps, in deference, Alleyn pointed out, to Mr. Cuddy’s idiosyncrasy. It was an easy step from here to the Flower Murderer. “Flowers,” Alleyn suggested, “must have exactly the opposite effect on him to the one they have on you, Mr. Cuddy. A morbid attraction. Wouldn’t you say so, Makepiece?”

“It might be so,” Tim agreed cheerfully. “From the standpoint of clinical psychiatry there is probably an unconscious association—”

He was young enough and had drunk enough good wine to enjoy airing his shop and, it seemed, essentially modest enough to pull himself up after a sentence or two. “But really very little is known about these cases,” he said apologetically. “I’m probably talking through my hat.”

But he had served Alleyn’s purpose, and the talk was now concentrated on the Flower Murderer. Theories were advanced. Famous cases were quoted. Arguments abounded. Everybody seemed to light up pleasurably on the subject of the death by strangulation of Beryl Cohen and Marguerite Slatters. Even Mr. Merryman became animated and launched a full-scale attack on the methods of the police, who, he said, had obviously made a complete hash of their investigation. He was about to embroider his theme when the captain withdrew his right hand from under the tablecloth without looking at Mrs. Dillington-Blick, raised his glass of champagne and proposed Alleyn’s health. Mrs. Cuddy shrilly and unexpectedly shouted “Speech, speech!” and was supported by the captain, Aubyn Dale, the officers and her husband. Father Jourdain murmured, “By all means, speech.” Mr. Merryman looked sardonic and the others, politely apprehensive, tapped the table.

Alleyn stood up. His great height, and the circumstance of his face being lit from below like an actor’s in the days of footlights, may have given point to the silence that fell upon the room. The stewards had retired into the shadows, there was a distant rattle of crockery. The anonymous throb of the ship’s progress re-established itself.

“It’s very nice of you,” Alleyn said, “but I’m no hand at all at speeches and would make a perfect ass of myself if I tried, particularly in this distinguished company — The Church! Television! Learning! No, no. I shall just thank you all for making this, I hope I may say, such a good party and sit down.” He made as if to do so when to everybody’s amazement, and judging by his extraordinary expression, his own as well, Mr. Cuddy suddenly roared out in the voice of a tone-deaf bull, “For — or—”

The sound he made was so destitute of anything remotely resembling any air that for a moment everybody was at a loss to know what ailed him. Indeed it was not until he had got as far as “jolly good fellow,” that his intention became clear and an attempt was made by Mrs. Cuddy, the captain and the officers to support him. Father Jourdain then good-humouredly struck in, but even his pleasant tenor could make little headway against the deafening atonalities of Mr. Cuddy’s ground swell. The tribute ended in confusion and a deadly little silence.

Alleyn hastened to fill it. He said, “Thank you very much,” and caught Mr. Merryman’s eye.

“You were saying,” he prompted, “that the police have made a hash of their investigations. In what respect, exactly?”

“In every possible respect, my dear sir. What have they done? No doubt they have followed the procedure they bring to bear upon other cases which they imagine are in the same category. This procedure having failed they are at a loss. I have long suspected that our wonderful police methods so monotonously extolled by a too-complacent public are in reality cumbersome, inflexible, and utterly without imaginative direction. The murderer has not obliged them by distributing pawn tickets, driving licences or visiting cards about the scenes of his activities and they are left therefore gaping.”

“Personally,” Alleyn said, “I can’t imagine how they even begin to tackle their job. I mean, what do they do?”

“You may well ask!” cried Mr. Merryman, now pleasurably uplifted. “No doubt they search the ground for something they call, I understand, occupational dust, in the besotted hope that their man is a bricklayer, knife-grinder, or flour-miller. Finding none, they accost numbers of blameless individuals who have been seen in the vicinity and weeks after the event ask them to produce alibis. Alibis!” Mr. Merryman exclaimed and threw up his hands.

Mrs. Dillington-Blick, opening her eyes very wide, said, “What would you do, Mr. Merryman, if you were the police?”

There was a fractional pause, after which Mr. Merryman said with hauteur that as he was not in fact a detective the question was without interest.

The captain said, “What’s wrong with alibis? If a chap’s got an alibi he’s out of it, isn’t he? So far so good.”

“Alibis,” Mr. Merryman said grandly, “are in the same category as statistics; in the last analysis they prove nothing.”

“Oh, come now!” Father Jourdain protested. “If I’m saying compline in Kensington with the rest of my community at the time a crime is committed in Bermondsey, I’m surely incapable of having committed it.”

Mr. Merryman had begun to look very put out and Alleyn came to his rescue.

“Surely,” he said, “a great many people don’t even remember exactly what they were doing on a specific evening at a specific time. I’m jolly certain I don’t.”

“Suppose, for instance, now — just for the sake of argument,” Captain Bannerman said, and was perhaps a trifle too careful not to look at Alleyn, “that all of us had to produce an alibi for one of these crimes. By gum, I wonder if we could do it. I wonder.”

Father Jourdain, who had been looking very steadily at Alleyn, said, “One might try.”

“One might,” Alleyn rejoined. “One might even have a bet on it. What do you say, Mr. Merryman?”

“Normally,” Mr. Merryman declared, “I am not a betting man. However, dissipat Evius curas edaces. I would be prepared to wager some trifling sum upon the issue.”

“Would you?” Alleyn asked. “Really? All right, then. Propose your bet, sir.”

Mr. Merryman thought for a moment. “Coom on, now,” urged the captain.

“Very well. Five shillings that the majority here will be unable to produce, on the spot, an acceptable alibi for any given date.”

“I’ll take you!” Aubyn Dale shouted. “It’s a bet!”

Alleyn, Captain Bannerman and Tim Makepiece also said they would take Mr. Merryman’s bet.

“And if there’s any argument about the acceptability of the alibi,” the captain announced, “the non-betters can vote on it. How’s that?”

Mr. Merryman inclined his head.

Alleyn asked what was to be the given date and the captain held up his hand. “Let’s make it,” he suggested, “the first of the flower murders?”

There was a general outbreak of conversation, through which Mr. Cuddy could be heard smugly asserting that he couldn’t understand anybody finding the slightest difficulty over so simple a matter. An argument developed between him and Mr. Merryman and was hotly continued over coffee and liqueurs in the lounge. Gently fanned by Alleyn, it spread through the whole party. He felt that the situation had ripened and should be harvested before anybody, particularly the captain and Aubyn Dale, had anything more to drink.

“What about this bet?” he asked in a temporary lull. “Dale has taken Mr. Merryman. We’ve all got to find alibis for the first flower murder. I don’t even remember when it was. Does anybody remember? Mr. McAngus?”

Mr. McAngus at once launched himself upon the uncertain bosom of associated recollections. He was certain, he declared, that he read about it on the morning when his appendix, later to perforate, subjected him to a preliminary twinge. This, he was persuaded, had been on Friday, the sixteenth of January. And yet — was it? His voice sank to a whisper. He began counting on his fingers and wandered disconsolate amidst the litter of parentheses.

Father Jourdain said, “I believe, you know, that it was the night of the fifteenth.”

“…and only five days afterwards,” Mr. McAngus could be heard droning pleasurably, “I was whisked into Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, where I hung between life and death—”

“Cohen!” Aubyn Dale shouted. “Her name was Beryl Cohen. Of course!”

“Hop Lane, Paddington,” Tim Makepiece added with a grin. “Between ten and eleven.”

The captain threw an altogether much too conspiratorial glance at Alleyn. “Coom on!” he said. “There you are! We’re off! Ladies first.”

Mrs. Dillington-Blick and Brigid at once protested that they hadn’t a hope of remembering what they did on any night in question. Mrs. Cuddy said darkly and confusedly that she preferred to support her husband and refused to try.

“You see!” Mr. Merryman gleefully ejaculated. “Three failures at once.” He turned to Father Jourdain. “And what can the Church produce?”

Father Jourdain said quietly that he was actually in the neighbourhood of the crime on that night. He had been giving a talk at a boys’ club in Paddington. “One of the men there drove me back to the community. I remember thinking afterwards that we must have been within a stone’s throw of Hop Lane.”

“Fancy!” Mrs. Cuddy interposed with ridiculous emphasis. “Fred! Fancy!”

“Which would, I suppose,” Father Jourdain continued, “constitute my alibi, wouldn’t it?” He turned to Alleyn.

“I must say I’d have thought so.”

Mr. Merryman, whose view of alibis seemed to be grounded in cantankerousness rather than logic, pointed out that it would all have to be proved and that in any case the result would be inconclusive.

“Oh,” Father Jourdain said tranquilly, “I could prove my alibi quite comfortably. And conclusively,” he added.

“More than I could,” Alleyn rejoined. “I fancy I was at home that night, but I’m blowed if I could prove it.”

Captain Bannerman loudly announced that he had been in Liverpool with his ship and could prove it up to the hilt.

“Now then!” he exhorted, absent-mindedly seizing Mrs. Dillington-Blick by the elbow. “What’s everybody else got to say for themselves? Any murderers present?” He laughed immoderately at this pleasantry and stared at Alleyn, who became a prey to further grave misgivings. “What about you, Mr. Cuddy? You, no doubt, can account for yourself?”

The passengers’ interest had been satisfactorily aroused. If only, Alleyn thought, Captain Bannerman would pipe down, the conversation might go according to plan. Fortunately, at this juncture, Mrs. Dillington-Blick murmured something that caught the captain’s ear. He became absorbed and everybody else turned their attention upon Mr. Cuddy.

Mr, Cuddy adopted an attitude that seemed to be coloured by gratification at finding himself the centre of interest and a suspicion that in some fashion he was being got at by his fellow passengers. He was maddening but, in a backhanded sort of way, rewarding. The fifteenth of January, he said, consulting a pocketbook and grinning meaninglessly from ear to ear, was a Tuesday, and Tuesday was his lodge night. He gave the address of his lodge (Tooting), and on being asked by Mr. Merryman if he had, in fact, attended that night, appeared to take umbrage and was silent.

“Mr. Cuddy,” his wife said, “hasn’t missed for twenty years. They made him an Elder Bison for it and gave him ever such a nice testimonial.”

Brigid and Tim Makepiece caught each other’s eyes and hurriedly turned aside.

Mr. Merryman, who had listened to Mr. Cuddy with every mark of the liveliest impatience, began to question him about the time he had left his lodge, but Mr. Cuddy grew lofty and said he wasn’t feeling quite the thing, which judging by his ghastly colour was true enough. He retired, accompanied by Mrs. Cuddy, to the far end of the lounge. Evidently Mr. Merryman looked upon his withdrawal as a personal triumph for himself. He straightened his shoulders and seemed to inflate.

“The discussion,” he said, looking about him, “is not without interest. So far we have been presented with two allegedly provable alibis”— he made a facetious bob at the captain and Father Jourdain —“and otherwise, if the ladies are to be counted, with failures.”

“Yes, but look here,” Tim said, “a little further examination—”

Mr. Merryman blandly and deliberately misunderstood him. “By all means!” he ejaculated. “Precisely. Let us continue. Miss Abbott—”

“What about yourself?” Mr. Cuddy suddenly bawled from the far end of the room.

“Ah!” Mrs. Cuddy rejoined and produced a Rabelaisian laugh. “Ho, ho, ho,” she said, without moving a muscle of her face. “What about yourself, Mr. Merryband?”

“Steady, Ethel,” Mr. Cuddy muttered.

“Good God!” Tim muttered to Brigid. “She’s tiddly!”

“She was tossing down bumpers at dinner — probably for the first time in her life.”

“That’s it. Tiddly. How wonderful!”

“Ho, ho, ho!” Mrs. Cuddy repeated. “Where was Merryband when the lights went out?”

“Eth!”

“Fair enough,” Aubyn Dale exclaimed. “Come along, Mr. Merryman. Alibi, please.”

“With all the pleasure in life,” Mr. Merryman said. “I have none. I join the majority. On the evening in question,” he continued didactically, as if he expected them all to start taking dictation, “I attended a suburban cinema. The Kosy, spelt (abominable vulgarism) with a ‘K.’ In Bounty Street, Chelsa. By a diverting coincidence the film was The Lodger. I am totally unable to prove it,” he ended triumphantly.

“Very fishy!” Tim said, shaking his head owlishly. “Oh, very fishy indeed, I fear, sir!”

Mr. Merryman gave a little crowing laugh.

“I know!” Mr. McAngus abruptly shouted. “I have it! Tuesday! Television!” And at once added, “No, no, wait a moment. What did you say the date was?”

Alleyn told him and he became silent and depressed.

“What about Miss Abbott, now?” Captain Bannerman asked. “Can Miss Abbott find an alibi? Come along, Miss Abbott. January fifteenth.”

She didn’t answer at once but sat, unsmiling and staring straight before her. A silence fell upon the little company.

“I was in my flat,” she said at last, and gave the address. There was something uncomfortable in her manner. Alleyn thought, “Damn! The unexpected. In a moment somebody will change the conversation.”

Aubyn Dale was saying waggishly, “Not good enough! Proof, Miss Abbott, proof.”

“Did anybody ring up or come in?” Brigid prompted with a friendly smile for Miss Abbott.

“My friend — the person I share my flat with — came in at ten-thirty-five.”

“How clever to remember!” Mrs. Dillington-Blick murmured and managed to suggest that she herself was enchantingly feckless.

“And before that?” Mr. Merryman demanded.

A faint dull red settled above Miss Abbott’s cheekbones. “I watched television,” she said.

“Voluntarily?” Mr. Merryman asked in astonishment.

To everybody’s surprise Miss Abbott shuddered. She wetted her lips. “It passed… it… sometimes helped to pass the time—”

Tim Makepiece, Father Jourdain, and Brigid, sensing her discomfiture, tried to divert Mr. Merryman’s attention, but he was evidently one of those people who are unable to abandon a conversation before they have triumphed. “ ‘Pass the time,’ ” he ejaculated, casting up his eyes. “Was ever there a more damning condemnation of this bastard, this emasculate, this enervating peepshow. What was the programme?”

Miss Abbott glanced at Aubyn Dale, who was looking furiously at Mr. Merryman. “In point of fact—” she began.

Dale waved his hands. “Ah-ah! I knew it. Alas, I knew it! Nine to nine-thirty. Every Tuesday night, God help me. I knew.” He leaned forward and addressed himself to Mr. Merryman. “My session, you know. The one you dislike so much. The Jolyon swimsuit programme—Pack Up Your Troubles, which, oddly enough, appears to create a slightly different reaction in its all-time-high viewing audience. Very reprehensible, no doubt, but there it is. They seem quite to like it.”

“Hear, hear!” Mrs. Cuddy shouted vaguely from the far end of the lounge and stamped approval.

“Pack up your troubles,” Mrs. Dillington-Blick ejaculated. “Of course!”

“Madam,” Mr. Merryman continued, looking severely at Miss Abbott. “Will you be good enough to describe the precise nature of the predicaments that were aired by the — really, I am at a loss for the correct term to describe these people’the protagonist will no doubt enlighten me—”

“The subjects?” Father Jourdain suggested.

“The victims?” Tim amended.

“Or the guests? I like to think of them as my guests,” said Aubyn Dale.

Mrs. Cuddy said rather wildly, “That’s a lovely, lovely way of putting it!”

(“Steady, Eth!”)

Miss Abbott, who had been twisting her large hands together, said, “I remember nothing about the programme. Nothing.”

She half rose from her seat and then seemed to change her mind and sank back. “Mr. Merryman, you’re not to badger Miss Abbott,” Brigid said quickly and turned to Aubyn Dale. “You, at any rate, have got your alibi, it seems.”

“Oh, yes!” he rejoined. He finished his double brandy and, in his turn, slipped his hand under Mrs. Dillington-Blick’s forearm. “God, yes! I’ve got the entire Jolyon swimsuit admass between me and Beryl Cohen. Twenty million viewers can’t be wrong! In spite of Mr. Merryman.”

Alleyn said lightly, “But isn’t the programme over by nine-thirty? What about the next half-hour?”

“Taking off the war-paint, dear boy, and meeting the chums in the jolly old local.”

It had been generally agreed that Aubyn Dale’s alibi was established when Mr. McAngus said diffidently, “Do you know — I may be quite wrong — but I had a silly notion someone said that particular session was done at another time, I mean, if of course it was that programme.”

“Ah?” Mr. Merryman ejaculated, pointing at him as if he’d held his hand up. “Explain yourself. Filmed? Recorded?”

“Yes. But, of course I may be—”

But Mr. Merryman pounced gleefully on Aubyn Dale. “What do you say, sir? Was the session recorded?”

Dale collected everybody else’s attention as if he invited them to enjoy Mr. Merryman with him. He opened his arms and enlarged his smile and he patted Mr. McAngus on the head.

“Clever boy,” he said. “And I thought I’d got away with it. I couldn’t resist pulling your leg, Mr. Merryman. You will forgive me, won’t you?”

Mr. Merryman did not reply. He merely stared very fixedly at Aubyn Dale, and as Brigid muttered to Tim, may have been restraining himself from saying he would see him in his study after prep.

Dale added to this impression by saying with uneasy boyishness, “I swear, by the way, I was just about to come clean. Naturally.”

“Then,” Alleyn said, “it was not a live transmission?”

“Not that one. Usually is, but I was meant to be on my way to the States, so we filmed it.”

“Indeed?” Mr. Merryman said. “And were you on your way to the United States, sir?”

“Actually, no. One of those things. There was a nonsense made over dates. I flew three days later. Damn nuisance. It meant I didn’t get back till the day before we sailed.”

“And your alibi?” Mr. Merryman continued ominously.

“Well… ah… well — don’t look at me, padre. I spent the evening with my popsey. Don’t ask me to elaborate, will you? No names, no packdrill.”

“And no alibi,” said Mr. Merryman neatly.

There was a moment’s uneasy suspense during which nobody looked at anybody else and then Mr. McAngus unexpectedly surfaced. “I remember it all quite perfectly,” he announced. “It was the evening before my first hint of trouble and I did watch television!”

“Programme?” Mr. Merryman snapped. Mr. McAngus smiled timidly at Aubyn Dale. “Oh,” he tittered, “I’m no end of a fan, you know.”

It turned out that he had, in fact, watched Pack Up Your Troubles. When asked if he could remember it, he said at once, “Very clearly.” Alleyn saw Miss Abbott close her eyes momentarily as if she felt giddy. “There was a lady,” Mr. MacAngus continued, “asking, I recollect, whether she ought to get married.”

“There almost always is,” Dale groaned and made a face of comic despair.

“But this was very complicated because, poor thing, she felt she would be deserting her great friend and her great friend didn’t know about it and would be dreadfully upset. There!” Mr. McAngus cried. “I’ve remembered! If only one could be sure which evening. The twenty-fifth, I ask myself? I mean the fifteenth, of course.”

Dale said, “I couldn’t tell you which programme but, ah, poor darling, I remember her. I think I helped her. I hope I did!”

“Perhaps,” Captain Bannerman suggested, “Miss Abbott remembers now you’ve mentioned it. That’d fix your alibi for you.”

“Do you, Miss Abbott?” Mr. McAngus asked anxiously.

Everybody looked at Miss Abbott and it was at once apparent to everybody but Mr. McAngus that she was greatly upset. Her lips trembled. She covered them with her hand in a rather dreadful parody of cogitation. She shook her head and her eyes overflowed.

“No?” Mr. McAngus said, wistfully oblivious and shortsightedly blinking, “Do try, Miss Abbott. She was a dark, rather heavy lady. I mean, of course, that was the impression one had. Because one doesn’t see the face and the back of the head is rather out of focus, isn’t it, Mr. Dale? But she kept saying (and I think they must distort the voice a little, too) that she knew her friend would be dreadfully hurt because apart from herself, she had so few to care for her.” He made a little bob at Aubyn Dale. “You were wonderful,” he said, “so tactful. About loneliness. I’m sure if you saw it, Miss Abbott, you must remember. Mr. Dale made such practical and helpful suggestions. I don’t remember exactly what they were but—”

Miss Abbott rounded on him and cried out with shocking violence, “For God’s sake stop talking. ‘Helpful suggestions’! What ‘suggestions’ can help in that kind of hell!” She looked round at them all with an expression of evident despair. “For some of us,” she said, “there’s no escape. We are our own slaves. No escape or release.”

“Nonsense!” Mr. Merryman said sharply. “There is always an escape and a release. It is a matter of courage and resolution.”

Miss Abbott gave a harsh sob. “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I’m not myself. I shouldn’t have had so much champagne.” She turned away.

Father Jourdain said quickly, “You know, Mr. McAngus, I’m afraid you haven’t quite convinced us.”

“And that’s the last alibi gone overboard,” said the captain. “Mr. Merryman wins.”

He made a great business of handing over his five shillings. Alleyn, Mr. McAngus, and Aubyn Dale followed suit.

They all began to talk at once, and with the exception of the Cuddys, avoided looking at Miss Abbott. Brigid moved in front of her and screened her from the others. It was tactfully done and Alleyn was confirmed in his view that Brigid was a nice child. Mrs. Dillington-Blick joined her and automatically a group assembled round Mrs. Dillington-Blick. So between Miss Abbott and the rest of the world there was a barrier behind which she trumpeted privately into her handkerchief.

Presently she got up, now mistress of herself, thanked Alleyn for his party and left it.

The Cuddys came forward, clearly agog, eager, by allusion and then by direct reference, to speculate upon Miss Abbott’s distress. Nobody supported them. Mr. McAngus merely looked bewildered. Tim talked to Brigid and Captain Bannerman and Aubyn Dale talked to Mrs. Dillington-Blick. Mr. Merryman looked once at the Cuddys over his spectacles, rumpled his hair and said something about “Hoc morbido cupiditatis” in a loud voice to Alleyn and Father Jourdain. Alleyn was suddenly visited by an emotion that is unorthodox in an investigating officer; he felt a liking and warmth for these people. He respected them because they refused to gossip with the Cuddys about Miss Abbott’s unhappiness and because they had behaved with decency and compassion when she broke down. He saw Brigid and Mrs. Dillington-Blick speak together and then slip out of the room and he knew they had gone to see if they could help Miss Abbott. He was very much troubled.

Father Jourdain came up to him and said, “Shall we move over here?” He led Alleyn to the far end of the room.

“That was unfortunate,” he said.

“I’m sorry about it.”

“You couldn’t possibly know it would happen. She is a very unhappy woman. She exhales unhappiness.”

“It was the reference to that damn spiritual striptease session of Dale’s,” Alleyn said. “I suppose something in the programme had upset her.”

“Undoubtedly,” Father Jourdain smiled. “That’s a good description of it, a spiritual striptease. I suppose you’ll think I’m lugging in my cloth, but you know I really do think it’s better to leave confession to the professional.”

“Dale would call himself a professional.”

“What he does,” Father Jourdain said, with some warmth, “is vulgar, dangerous, and altogether odious. But he’s not a bad chap, of course. At least I don’t think so. Not a bad sort of chap at all.”

Alleyn said, “There’s something else you want to say to me, isn’t there?”

“There is, but I hesitate to say it. I am not sure of myself. Will you laugh at me if I tell you that, by virtue of my training perhaps, and perhaps because of some instinct, I am peculiarly sensitive to — to spiritual atmosphere?”

“I don’t know that I—”

Father Jourdain interrupted him.

“I mean that when I feel there is something really out of joint spiritually — I use this word because I’m a priest, you know — with a group of people, I’m usually right.”

“And do you feel it now?”

“Very strongly. I suspect it’s a sense of unexpressed misery,” said Father Jourdain. “But I can’t hunt it home.”

“Miss Abbott?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Even that,” Alleyn said, “is not what you want to say.”

“You’re very perceptive yourself.” Father Jourdain looked steadily at him. “When the party breaks up, will you stay behind for a moment?”

“Certainly.”

Father Jourdain said so softly that Alleyn could barely hear him, “You are Roderick Alleyn, aren’t you?”

The deserted lounge smelt of dead cigarettes and forgotten drinks. Alleyn opened the doors to the deck outside: the stars were careering in the sky; the ship’s mast swung against them; and the night sea swept thudding and hissing past her flanks.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” said Father Jourdain behind him.

Alleyn shut the doors again and they sat down.

“Let me assure you at once,” Father Jourdain said, “that I shall respect your — I suppose anonymity is not the right word. Your incognito, shall we say?”

“I’m not particularly bothered about the choice of words,” Alleyn said dryly.

“Nor need you be bothered about my recognizing you. It’s by the oddest of coincidences. Your wife may be said to have effected the introduction.”

“Really?”

“I have never met her, but I admire her painting. Some time ago I went to a one-man show of hers and was very much impressed by a small portrait. It too was anonymous, but a brother-priest, Father Copeland of Winton St. Giles, who knows you both, told me it was a portrait of her husband, who was the celebrated Inspector Alleyn. I have a very long memory for faces and the likeness was striking. I felt sure I was not mistaken.”

“Troy,” Alleyn said, “will be enormously gratified.”

“And then, that bet of Mr. Merryman’s was organized, wasn’t it?”

“Lord, lord! I do seem to have made an ass of myself.”

“No, no. Not you. You were entirely convincing. It was the captain.”

“His air of spontaneity was rather massive, perhaps.”

“Exactly.” Father Jourdain leaned forward and said, “Alleyn, why was that conversation about the Flower Murderer introduced?”

Alleyn said, “For fun. Why else?”

“So you are not going to tell me.”

“At least,” Alleyn said lightly, “I’ve got your alibi for January the fifteenth.”

“You don’t trust me, of course.”

“It doesn’t arise. As you have discovered, I am a policeman.”

“I beg you to trust me. You won’t regret it. You can check my alibi, can’t you? And the other time, the other poor child who had been to church — when was that? The twenty-fifth. Why, on the twenty-fifth I was at a conference in Paris. You can prove it at once. No doubt you’re in touch with your colleagues. Of course you can.”

“I expect it can be done.”

“Then do it. I urge you to do it. If you are here for the fantastic reason I half suspect, you will need someone you can trust.”

“It never comes amiss.”

“These women must not be left alone.” Father Jourdain had arisen and was staring through, the glass doors. “Look,” he said.

Mrs. Dillington-Blick was taking a walk on deck. As she passed the lighted windows above the engine-rooms she paused. Her earrings and necklace twinkled, the crimson scarf she had wrapped about her head fluttered in the night breeze. A man emerged from the shadow of the centrecastle and walked towards her. He took her arm. They turned away and were lost to view. He was Aubyn Dale. “You see,” Father Jourdain said. “If I’m right, that’s the sort of thing we mustn’t allow.”

Alleyn said, “To-day is the seventh of February. These crimes have occured at ten-day intervals.”

“But there have only been two.”

“There was an attempt on January fifth. It was not publicized.”

“Indeed! The fifth, the fifteenth and the twenty-fifth. Why, then, ten days have already passed since the last crime. If you are right (and the interval after all may be a coincidence) the danger is acute.”

“On the contrary, if there’s anything in the ten-day theory, Mrs. Dillington-Blick at the moment is in no danger.”

“But—” Father Jourdain stared at him. “Do you mean there’s been another of these crimes? Since we sailed? Why then—?”

“About half an hour before you sailed and about two hundred yards away from the ship. On the night of the fourth. He was punctual almost to the minute.”

“Dear God!” said Father Jourdain.

“At the moment, of course, none of the passengers except the classic one knows about this, and unless anybody takes the trouble to cable the news to Las Palmas they won’t hear about it there.”

“The fourteenth,” Father Jourdain muttered. “You think we may be safe until the fourteenth.”

“One simply hopes so. All the same, shall we take the air before we turn in? I think we might.” Alleyn opened the doors. Father Jourdain moved towards them.

“It occurs to me,” he said, “that you may think me a busybody. It’s not that. It is, quite simply, that I have a nose for evil and a duty to prevent, if I can, the commission of sin. I am a spiritual policeman, in fact. You may feel that I’m talking professional nonsense.”

“I respect the point of view,” Alleyn said. For a moment they looked at each other. “And, sir, I am disposed to trust you.”

“That, at least, is a step forward,” said Father Jourdain. “Shall we leave it like that until you have checked my alibis?”

“If you’re content to do so.”

“I haven’t much choice,” Father Jourdain observed. He added, after a moment, “And at any rate it does appear that we have an interval. Until February the fourteenth?”

“Only if the time theory is correct. It may not be correct.”

“I suppose — a psychiatrist—?”

“Dr. Makepiece, for instance. He’s one. I’m thinking of consulting him.”

“But—”

“Yes?”

“He had no alibi. He said so.”

“They tell us,” Alleyn said, “that the guilty man in a case of this sort never says he has no alibi. They say he always produces an alibi. Of some sort. Shall we go out?”

They went out on deck. A light breeze still held but it was no longer cold. The ship, ploughing through the dark, throbbed with her own life and with small orderly noises and yet was compact of a larger quietude. As they moved along the starboard side of the well-deck a bell sounded in four groups of two.

“Midnight,” Alleyn said. Sailors passed them, quiet-footed. Mrs. Dillington-Blick and Aubyn Dale appeared on the far side of the hatch, making for the passengers’ quarters. They called out good-night and disappeared.

Father Jourdain peered at his watch. “And this afternoon we arrive at Las Palmas,” he said.