Singing in the Shrouds

CHAPTER 8 Sunday the Thirteenth

The next day being Sunday, Father Jourdain with the captain’s permission celebrated Holy Communion in the lounge at seven o’clock. The service was attended among the passengers by Miss Abbott, Brigid, Mr. McAngus, and rather surprisingly, Mr. Merryman. The third officer, the wireless officer, two of the cadets, and Dennis represented the ship’s complement. Alleyn, at the back of the room, listened, watched, and not for the first time felt his own lack of acceptance to be tinged with a faint regret.

When the service was over the little group of passengers went out on deck and presently were joined by Father Jourdain, wearing, as he had promised, his “decent black cassock.” He looked remarkably handsome in it with the light breeze lifting his glossy hair. Miss Abbott, standing, characteristically, a little apart from the others, watched him, Alleyn noticed, with a look of stubborn deference. There was a Sunday morning air about the scene. Even Mr. Merryman was quiet and thoughtful, while Mr. McAngus, who, with Miss Abbott, had carried out the details of Anglo-Catholic observance like an old hand, was quite giddy and uplifted. He congratulated Brigid on her looks and did his little chassé before her with his head on one side. Mr. McAngus’s russet-brown hair had grown, of course, even longer at the back, and something unfortunate seemed to have happened round the brow and temples. But as he always wore his felt hat out-of-doors and quite often in the lounge, this was not particularly noticeable.

Brigid responded gaily to his blameless compliments and turned to Alleyn.

“I didn’t expect to see you about so early,” she said.

“And why not?”

“You were up late! Pacing round the deck. Wrapped in thought!” teased Brigid.

“That’s all very fine,” Alleyn rejoined. “But what, I might ask, were you up to yourself? From what angle of vantage did you keep all this observation?”

Brigid blushed. “Oh,” she said with a great air of casualness, “I was sitting in the verandah along there. We didn’t like to call out as you passed, you looked so solemn and absorbed.” She turned an even brighter pink, glanced at the others, who were gathered round Father Jourdain, and added quickly, “Tim Makepiece and I were talking about Elizabethan literature.”

“You were not talking very loudly about it,” Alleyn observed mildly.

“Well—” Brigid looked into his face. “I’m not having a ship-board flirtation with Tim. At least — at least, I don’t think I am.”

“Not a flirtation?” Alleyn repeated and smiled at her.

“And not anything else. Oh, golly!” Brigid said impulsively. “I’m in such a muddle.”

“Do you want to talk about your muddle?”

Brigid put her arm through his. “I’ve arrived at the age,” Alleyn reflected, “when charming young ladies take my arm.” They walked down the deck together.

“How long,” Brigid asked, “have we been at sea? And, crikey!” she added. “What an appropriate phrase that is!”

“Six days.”

“There you are! Six days! The whole thing’s ridiculous. How can anybody possibly know how they feel in six days? It’s out of this world.”

Alleyn remarked that he had known how he felt in one day. “Shorter even than that,” he added. “At once.”

“Really? And stuck to it?”

“Like a limpet. She took much longer, though.”

“But—? Did you?”

“We are very happily married, thank you.”

“How lovely,” Brigid sighed.

“However,” he added hurriedly, “don’t let me raise a finger to urge you into an ill-considered undertaking.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything about that,” she rejoined with feeling. “I’ve made that sort of ass of myself in quite a big way, once already.”

“Really?”

“Yes, indeed. The night we sailed should have been my wedding night, only he chucked me three days before. I’ve done a bolt from all the brouhaha, leaving my wretched parents to cope. Very poor show, as you don’t need to tell me,” said Brigid in a high uneven voice.

“I expect your parents were delighted to get rid of you. Much easier for them, I daresay, if you weren’t about, throwing vapours.”

They had reached the end of the well-deck and stood, looking aft, near the little verandah. Brigid remarked indistinctly that going to church always made her feel rather light-headed and talkative and she expected that was why she was being so communicative.

“Perhaps the warm weather has something to do with it, as well,” Alleyn suggested.

“I daresay. One always hears that people get very unguarded in the tropics. But actually you’re to blame. I was saying to Tim the other night that if I was ever in a real jam I’d feel inclined to go bawling to you about it. He quite agreed. And here, fantastically, I am. Bawling away.”

“I’m enormously flattered. Are you in a jam?”

“I suppose not, really. I just need to keep my eye. And see that he keeps his. Because whatever you say, I don’t see how he can possibly know in six days.”

Alleyn said that people saw more of each other in six days at sea than they did in as many weeks ashore but, he was careful to add, in rather less realistic circumstances. Brigid agreed. There was no doubt, she announced owlishly, that strange things happened to one at sea. Look at her, for instance, she said with enchanting egoism. She was getting all sorts of the rummiest notions into her head. After a little hesitation, and very much with the air of a child that screws itself up to confiding a groundless fear, Brigid said rapidly, “I even started thinking the Flower Murderer was on board. Imagine!”

Among the various items of Alleyn’s training as an investigating officer, the trick of wearing an impassive face in the teeth of unexpected information was not the least useful. It stood him in good stead now.

“I wonder,” he said, “what in the world could have put that idea in your head.”

Brigid repeated the explanation she had already given Tun yesterday afternoon. “Of course,” she said, “he thought it as dotty as you do and so did the F.N.C.”

“Who,” Alleyn asked, “is the F.N.C.?”

“It’s our name for Dale. It stands for Frightfully Nice Chap only we don’t mean it frightfully nicely, I’m afraid.”

“Nevertheless, you confided your fantasy to him, did you?”

“He overheard me. We were ‘squatting’ on his and the D-B’s lush chairs and he came round the corner with cushions and went all avuncular.”

“And now you’ve brought this bugaboo out into the light of day it’s evaporated?”

Brigid swung her foot and kicked an infinitesimal object into the scruppers. “Not altogether,” she muttered.

“No?”

“Well, it has, really. Only last night, after I’d gone to bed, something happened. I don’t suppose it was anything much, but it got me a bit steamed up again. My cabin’s on the left-hand side of the block. The porthole faces my bed. Well, you know that blissful moment when you’re not sure whether you’re awake or asleep but kind of floating? I’d got to that stage. My eyes were shut and I was all air-borne and drifting. Then with a jerk I was wide awake and staring at that porthole.” Brigid swallowed hard. “It was moonlight outside. Before I’d shut my eyes I’d seen the moon, looking in and then swinging out of sight and leaving a procession of stars and then swinging back. Lovely! Well, when I opened my eyes and looked at the porthole — somebody outside was looking in at me.”

Alleyn waited for a moment and then said, “You’re quite sure, I suppose?”

“Oh, yes. There he was, blotting out the stars and the moon and filling up my porthole with his head.”

“Do you know who it was?”

“I haven’t a notion. Somebody in a hat, but I could only see the outline. And it was only for a second. I called out — it was not a startlingly original remark—‘Hullo! Who’s there?’ and at once it went down. I mean it sank in a flash. He must have ducked and then bolted. The moon came whooping back and there was I, all of a dither and thinking ‘Suppose the Flower Murderer is on board and suppose after everyone else has gone to bed, he prowls and prowls around like the hosts of Midian’—or is it Gideon, in that blissful hymn? So you see, I haven’t quite got over my nonsense, have I?”

“Have you told Makepiece about this?”

“I haven’t seen him. He doesn’t go to church.”

“No, of course you haven’t. Perhaps,” Alleyn said, “it was Aubyn Dale being puckish.”

“I must say I never thought of that. Could he hit quite such an all-time low for unfunniness, do you suppose?”

“I would have expected him to follow it up with a dummy spider on your pillow. You do lock your door at night, don’t you? And in the daytime?”

“Yes. There was that warning about things having been pinched. Oh, Lord!” Brigid ejaculated. “Do you suppose that’s who it was? The petty larcener? Why on earth didn’t I remember before! Hoping he could fish something out through the porthole, would you think?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Alleyn said.

The warning gong for breakfast began to tinkle. Brigid remarked cheerfully, “Well, that’s that, anyway.”

Alleyn waited for a moment and then said, “Look. In view of what you’ve just told me, I’d keep your curtains over your port at night. And as there evidently is a not-too-desirable character in the ship’s complement, I don’t think, if I were you, I’d go out walking after dark by yourself. He might come along and make a bit of a nuisance of himself.”

Brigid said, “O.K., but what a bore. And, by the way, you’d better hand on that piece of advice to Mrs. D-B. She’s the one to go out walking — or dancing, rather — by the light of the moon.” Brigid smiled reminiscently. “I do think she’s marvellous,” she said. “All that joie de vivre at her age. Superb.”

Alleyn found time to wonder how much Mrs. Dillington-Blick would relish this tribute and also how many surprises Brigid was liable to spring on him at one sitting.

He said, “Does she dance by the light of the moon? Who with?”

“By herself.”

“You don’t tell me she goes all pixy-wixy on the boat deck? Carrying that weight?”

“On the other deck, the bottom one, nearer the sharp end. I’ve seen her. The weight doesn’t seem to matter.”

“Do explain yourself.”

“Well, I’m afraid you’re in for another night-piece — in point of fact the night before last. It was awfully hot; Tim and I had sat up rather late, not, I’d have you know again, for amorous dalliance but for a long muddly argument. And when I went to my cabin it was stuffy and I knew I wouldn’t sleep for thinking about the argument. So I went along to the windows that look down on the lower deck — it’s called the forrard well-deck, isn’t it? — and wondered if I could be bothered climbing down and then along and up to the bows where I rather like to go. And while I was wondering and looking down into the forrard well-deck which was full of black shadows, a door opened underneath me and a square patch of light was thrown across the deck.”

Brigid’s face, vivid and gay with the anticipation of her narrative, clouded a little.

“In point of fact,” she said, “for a second or two it was a trifle grisly. You see, a shadow appeared on the lighted square. And — well — it was exactly as if the doll, Esmeralda, had come to life. Mantilla, fan, wide lace skirt. Everything. I daresay it contributed to my ‘thing’ about the flower murders. Anyway it gave me quite a jolt.”

“It would,” Alleyn agreed. “What next?”

“Well, somebody shut the door and the light patch vanished. And I knew, of course, who it was. There she stood, all by herself. I was looking down on her head. And then it happened. The moon was up and just at that moment it got high enough to shine into the deck. All those lumps of covered machinery cast their inky-black shadows, but there were patches of moonshine and it was exciting to see. She ran out and flirted her fan and did little pirouettes and curtseys and even two or three of those sliding backsteps they do with castanets in The Gondoliers. I think she was holding her mantilla across her face. It was the strangest sight.”

“Very rum, indeed. You’re sure it was the D-B?”

“But, of course. Who else? And, do you know, I found it rather touching. Don’t you agree? She only stayed for a few moments and then ran back. The door opened and her shadow flashed across the patch of light. I heard men’s voices, laughing, and then it was all blanked out. But wasn’t it gay and surprising of Mrs. Dillington-Blick? Aren’t you astonished?” asked Brigid.

“Flabbergasted. Although one does hear, of course, of elephant dances in the seclusion of the jungle.”

Brigid said indignantly, “She’s as light as a feather on her pins. Fat people are, you know. They dance like fairies. Still, perhaps you’d better warn her not to on account of the petty larcener. Only please don’t say I told you about her moonlight party. In a funny sort of way I felt like an interloper.”

“I won’t,” he promised. “And in the meantime don’t take any solitary walks yourself. Tell Makepiece about it, and see if he doesn’t agree with me.”

“Oh,” Brigid assured him. “He’ll agree all right.”

And a dimple appeared near the corner of her mouth.

The group round Father Jourdain had moved nearer. Mr. McAngus called out, “Breakfast!” and Brigid said, “Coming!” She joined them, turned, crinkled her eyes at Alleyn and called out, “You have been nice. Thank you — Allan.”

Before he could reply she had made off with the others in search of breakfast.

During breakfast Tim kept trying to catch Alleyn’s eye and got but little response for his pains. He was waiting in the passage when Alleyn came out and said with artificial heartiness, “I’ve found those books I was telling you about. Would you like to come along to my room, or shall I bring them up to yours?”

“Bring them,” Alleyn said, “to mine.”

He went straight upstairs. In five minutes there was a knock on the door and Tim came in, burdened with unwanted textbooks. “I’ve got something I think I ought to tell you,” he said.

“Brigid Carmichael wonders if the Flower Murderer is on board and Aubyn Dale knows she does.”

“How the hell did you find out!” Tim ejaculated.

“She told me.”

“Oh.”

“And I’m rather wondering why you didn’t.”

“I didn’t get a chance before dinner. I was going to after dinner, but you were boxed up with the D-B and Dale in the lounge and later on — well—”

“You were discussing Elizabethan literature on the verandah?”

“Exactly.”

“Very well. At what stage did you inform Miss Carmichael of my name?”

“Damn it, it’s not as bad as you think. Look-did she tell you that too?”

“She merely called it out before the whole lot of them as we came down to breakfast.”

“She thinks it’s your Christian name — Allan.”

“Why?”

Tim told him. “I really am ashamed of myself,” he said. “It just slipped out. I wouldn’t have believed I could be such a bloody fool.”

“Nor would I. I suppose it comes of all this poodle-faking nonsense. Calling oneself by a false name! Next door to wearing false whiskers, I’ve always thought, but sometimes it can’t be avoided.”

“She’s not a notion who you are, of course.”

“That, at least, is something. And, by the way, she’ll be telling you about an incident that occurred last night. I think you’ll agree that it’s serious. I’ve suggested the mythical sneak-thief as the culprit. You’d better take the same line.”

“But what’s happened?”

“A Peeping Tom’s happened. She’ll tell you. She may also tell you how Mrs. Dillington-Blick goes fey among the derricks by moonlight.”

“What!”

“I’m going to see the captain. Father Jourdain’s joining me there; you’d better come too, I think. You might as well know about it.”

“Of course. If I’m not confined to outer darkness.”

“Oh,” Alleyn said, “we’ll give you another chance.”

Tim said, “I’m sorry about my gaffe, Alleyn.”

“The name is Broderick.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She’s a nice child. None of my business but I hope you’re not making a nonsense. She’s had one bad knock and she’d better not be dealt another.”

“She seems,” Tim observed, “to confide in you a damn sight more freely than in me.”

“Advanced years carry their own compensation.”

“For me, this is it.”

“Certain?”

“Absolutely. I wish I was as certain about her.”

“Well — look after her.”

“I’ve every intention of doing so,” Tim said, and on that note they found Father Jourdain and went to visit Captain Bannerman.

It was not an easy interview.

Alleyn would have recognized Captain Bannerman for an obstinate man even if he had not been told as much by members of the Cape Line Company before he left. “He’s a pig-headed old b.,” one of these officials had remarked. “And if you get up against him he’ll make things very uncomfortable for you. He drinks pretty hard and is reported to be bloody-minded in his cups. Keep on the right side of him and he’ll be O.K.”

So far, Alleyn thought, he had managed to follow this suggestion, but when he described the episode of the moonlit figure seen by Brigid on Friday night, he knew he was in for trouble. He gave his own interpretation of this story and he suggested that steps should be taken to ensure that there was no repetition. He met with a flat refusal. He then went on to tell them of the man outside Brigid’s porthole. The captain said at once that he would detail the officer of the watch, who would take appropriate steps to ensure that this episode was not repeated. He added that it was of no particular significance and that very often people behaved oddly in the tropics — an observation that Alleyn was getting a little tired of hearing. He attempted to suggest a more serious interpretation and met with blank incredulity.

As for the Dillington-Blick episode, the captain said he would take no action either to investigate it or prevent a repetition. He treated them to a lecture on the diminishing powers of a ship’s master at sea and grew quite hot on the subject. There were limitations. There were unions. Even passengers nowadays had their rights, he added regretfully. What had occurred was in no way an infringement of any of the regulations, he didn’t propose to do anything about it and he must request Alleyn to follow suit. And that, he said finally, was flat.

He stood with his hands in his jacket pockets and glared through his porthole at the horizon. Even the back of his neck looked mulish. The other three men exchanged glances.

“The chap’s not aboard my ship,” the captain loudly announced without turning his head. “I know that as well as I know you are. I’ve been master under the Cape Company’s charter for twenty years and I know as soon as I look at him whether a chap’ll blow up for trouble at sea. I had a murderer shipped fireman aboard me, once. Soon as I clapped eyes on him I knew he was no good. Never failed yet. And I’ve been observing this lot. Observing them closely. There’s not a murdering look on one of their faces, not a sign of it.” He turned slowly and advanced upon Alleyn. His own face, lobster-red, wore an expression of childish complacency. “You’re on a wild goose chase,” he said blowing out gusts of whisky. Then with quite astonishing violence he drew his mottled hirsute fist from his pocket and crashed it down on his desk. “That sort of thing,” said Captain Bannerman, “doesn’t happen in my ship!”

“May I say just this?” Alleyn ventured. “I wouldn’t come to you with the suggestion unless I thought it most urgently necessary. You may, indeed, be perfectly right. Our man may not, after all, be aboard. But suppose, sir, that in the teeth of all you feel about it, he is in this ship.” Alleyn pointed to the captain’s desk calendar. “Sunday the tenth of February,” he said. “If he’s here we’ve got four days before his supposed deadline. Shouldn’t we take every possible step to prevent him going into action? I know very well that what I’ve suggested sounds farfetched, cockeyed, and altogether preposterous. It’s a precautionary measure against a threat that may not exist. But isn’t it better—” He looked at that unyielding front and very nearly threw up his hands. “Isn’t it better, in fact, to be sure than sorry?” said Alleyn in despair. Father Jourdain and Tim murmured agreement but the captain shouted them down.

“Ah! So it is and it’s a remark I often pass myself. But in this case it doesn’t apply. What you’ve suggested is dead against my principles as master and I won’t have it. I don’t believe it’s necessary and I won’t have it.”

Father Jourdain said, “If I might just say one word—”

“You may spare yourself the trouble, I’m set.”

Alleyn said, “Very good, sir, I hope you’re right. Of course we’ll respect your wishes.”

“I won’t have that lady put-about by any interference or — or criticism.”

“I wasn’t suggesting—”

“It’d look like criticism,” the captain mumbled cryptically and added, “A touch of high spirits never did anyone any harm.”

This comment, from Alleyn’s point of view, was such a masterpiece of meiosis that he could find no answer to it.

He said, “Thank you, sir,” in what he hoped was the regulation manner and made for the door. The others followed him.

“Here!” Captain Bannerman ejaculated and they stopped. “Have a drink,” said the captain.

“Not for me at the moment, thank you very much,” said Alleyn.

“Why not?”

“Oh, I generally hold off till the sun’s over the yardarm if that’s the right way of putting it.”

“You don’t take overmuch then, I’ve noticed.”

“Well,” Alleyn said apologetically, “I’m by the way of being on duty.”

“Ah! And nothing to show for it when it’s all washed up. Not that I don’t appreciate the general idea. You’re following orders, I daresay, like all the rest of us, never mind if it’s a waste of time and the public’s money.”

“That’s the general idea.”

“Well — what about you two gentlemen?”

“No thank you, sir,” said Tim.

“Nor I, thank you very much,” said Father Jourdain.

“No offense, is there?”

They hurriedly assured him there was none, waited for a moment and then went to the door. The last glimpse they had of the captain was of a square, slightly wooden figure making for the corner cupboard where he kept his liquor.

The rest of Sunday passed by quietly enough. It was the hottest day the passengers had experienced and they were all subdued. Mrs. Dillington-Blick wore white and so did Aubyn Dale. They lay on their chaise longues in the verandah and smiled languidly at passers-by. Sometimes they were observed to have their hands limply engaged; occasionally Mrs. Dillington-Blick’s rich laughter would be heard.

Tim and Brigid spent most of the day in or near a canvas bathing pool that had been built on the after well-deck. They were watched closely by the Cuddys, who had set themselves up in a place of vantage at the shady end of the promenade deck, just under the verandah. Late in the afternoon Mr. Cuddy himself took to the water clad in a rather grisly little pair of puce-coloured drawers. He developed a vein of aquatic playfulness that soon drove Brigid out of the pool and Tim into a state of extreme irritation.

Mr. Merryman sat in his usual place and devoted himself to Neil Cream, and when that category of horrors had reached its appointed end, to the revolting fate that met an assortment of ladies who graced the pages of The Thing He Loves. From time to time he commented unfavourably on the literary style of this work and also on the police methods it described. As Alleyn was the nearest target he found himself at the receiving end of these strictures. Inevitably, Mr. Merryman was moved to enlarge once again on the flower murders. Alleyn had the fun of hearing himself described as “some plodding Dogberry drest in a little brief authority. One Alleyn,” Mr. Merryman snorted, “whose photograph was reproduced in the evening newssheets — a countenance of abysmal foolishness, I thought.”

“Really?”

“Oh, shocking, I assure you,” said Mr. Merryman with immense relish. “I imagine, if the unknown criminal saw it, he must have been greatly consoled. I should have been, I promise you.”

“Do you believe, then,” Alleyn asked, “that there is after all an ‘art to find the mind’s construction in the face’?”

Mr. Merryman shot an almost approving glance at him. “Source?” he demanded sharply. “And context?”

“Macbeth, one, four. Duncan on Cawdor,” Alleyn replied, feeling like Alice in Wonderland.

“Very well. You know your way about that essentially second-rate melodrama, I perceive. Yes,” Mr. Merryman went on with pedagogic condescension, “unquestionably, there are certain facial evidences which serve as pointers to the informed observer. I will undertake for example to distinguish at first sight a bright boy among a multitude of dullards, and believe me,” Mr. Merryman added dryly, “the opportunity does not often present itself.”

Alleyn asked him if he would extend this theory to include a general classification. Did Mr. Merryman, for instance, consider that there was such a thing as a criminal type of face? “I’ve read somewhere, I fancy, that the police say there isn’t,” he ventured. Mr. Merryman rejoined tartly that for once the police had achieved a glimpse of the obvious. “If you ask me whether there are facial types indicative of brutality and low intelligence I must answer yes. But the sort of person we have been considering”—he held up his book—” need not be exhibited in the countenance. The fact that he is possessed by his own particular devil is not written across his face that all who run may read.”

“That’s an expression that Father Jourdain used in the same context,” Alleyn said. “He considers this man must be possessed of a devil.”

“Indeed?” Mr. Merryman remarked. “That is of course the accepted view of the Church. Does he postulate the cloven hoof and toasting-fork?”

“I have no idea.”

A shadow fell across the deck and there was Miss Abbott.

“I believe,” she said, “in a personal devil. Firmly.”

She stood above them, her back to the setting sun, her face dark and miserable. Alleyn began to get up from his deck-chair, but she stopped him with a brusque movement of her hand. She jerked herself up on the hatch, where she sat bolt upright, her large feet in tennis shoes dangling awkwardly.

“How else,” she demanded, “can you explain the cruelities? God permits the devil to torment us for His own inscrutable purposes.”

“Dear me!” observed Mr. Merryman, quite mildly for him. “We find ourselves in a positive hive of orthodoxy, do we not?”

“You’re a churchman,” Miss Abbott said, “aren’t you? You came to Mass. Why do you laugh at the devil?”

Mr. Merryman contemplated her over his spectacles and after a long pause said, “My dear Miss Abbott, if you can persuade me of his existence I assure you I shall not treat the Evil One as a laughing matter. Far from it.”

“I’m no good,” she said impatiently. “Talk to Father Jourdain. He’s full of knowledge and wisdom and will meet you on your own ground. I suppose you think it very uncouth of me to butt in and shove my faith down your throats, but when—” She set her dark jaw and went on with a kind of obstinacy, “When I hear people laugh at the devil it raises him in me. I know him.”

The others found nothing to say to her. She passed her hand heavily across her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t usually throw my weight about like this. It must be the heat.”

Aubyn Dale came along the deck, spectacular in sharkskin shorts, crimson pullover, and a pair of exotic espadrilles he had bought in Las Palmas. He wore enormous sunglasses and his hair was handsomely ruffled.

“I’m going to have a dip,” he said. “Just time before dinner and the water’s absolutely superb. Madame won’t hear of it, though. Any takers here?”

Mr. Merryman merely stared at him. Alleyn said he’d think about it. Miss Abbott got down from the hatch and walked away. Dale looked after her and wagged his head. “Poor soul!” he said. “I couldn’t be sorrier for her. Honestly, life’s hell for some women, isn’t it?”

He looked at the other two men. Mr. Merryman ostentatiously picked up his book and Alleyn made a non-committal noise. “I see a lot of that sort of thing,” Dale went on, “in my fantastic job. The Lonely Legion, I call them. Only to myself, of course.”

“Quite,” Alleyn murmured.

“Well, let’s face it. What the hell is there for them to do — looking like that? Religion? Exploring Central Africa? Or — ask yourself. I dunno,” said Dale, whimsically philosophical. “One of those things.”

He pulled out his pipe, shook his head over it, said, “Ah, well!” and meeting perhaps with less response than he had expected, walked off, trolling a stylish catch.

Mr. Merryman said something quite unprintable into his book and Alleyn went in search of Mrs. Dillington-Blick.

He found her, still reclining on the verandah and fanning herself, enormous but delectable. Alleyn caught himself wondering what Henry Moore would have made of her. She welcomed him with enthusiasm and a helpless flapping gesture to show how hot she was. But her white dress was uncreased. A lace handkerchief protruded crisply from her décolletage and her hair was perfectly in order.

“You look as cool as a cucumber,” Alleyn said and sat down on Aubyn Dale’s footrest. “What an enchanting dress.”

She made comic eyes at him. “My dear!” she said.

“But then all your clothes are enchanting. You dress quite beautifully, don’t you?”

“How sweet of you to think so,” she cried delightedly.

“Ah!” Alleyn said, leaning towards her. “You don’t know how big a compliment you’re being paid. I’m extremely critical of women’s clothes.”

“Are you, indeed. And what do you like about mine, may I ask?”

“I like them because they are clever enough to express the charm of their wearer,” Alleyn said with a mental reservation to tell that one to Troy.

“Now, I do call that a perfect remark! In future I shall dress ’specially for you. There now!” promised Mrs. Dillington-Blick.

“Will you? Then I must think about what I should like you to wear. Tonight, for instance. Shall I choose that wonderful Spanish dress you bought in Las Palmas. May I?”

There was quite a long pause during which she looked sideways at him. “I think perhaps that’d be a little too much, don’t you?” she said at last. “Sunday night, remember.”

“Well, then, tomorrow?”

“Do you know,” she said, “I’ve gone off that dress. You’ll think me a frightful silly-billy, but all the rather murky business with poor sweet Mr. McAngus’s doll has sort of set me against it. Isn’t it queer?”

“Oh!” Alleyn exclaimed with a great show of disappointment. “What a pity! And what a waste!”

“I know. All the same, that’s how it is. I just see Esmeralda looking so like those murdered girls and all I want to do with my lovely, lovely dress is drop it overboard.”

“You haven’t done that!”

Mrs. Dillington-Blick gave a little giggle. “No,” she said. “I haven’t done that.”

“Or given it away?”

“Brigid would swim in it and I can’t quite see Miss Abbott or Mrs. Cuddy going al flamenco, can you?”

Dale came by on his way to the bathing pool, now wearing Palm Beach trunks and looking like a piece of superb publicity for a luxury liner. “You’re a couple of slackers,” he said heartily and shinned nimbly down to the lower deck.

“I shall go and change,” sighed Mrs. Dillington-Blick.

“But not into the Spanish dress?”

“I’m afraid not. Sorry to disappoint you.” She held out her luxurious little hands and Alleyn dutifully hauled her up. “It’s too sad,” he said, “to think we are never to see it.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t be absolutely sure of that,” she said and giggled again. “I may change my mind and get inspired all over again.”

“To dance by the light of the moon?”

She stood quite still for a few seconds and then gave him her most ravishing smile. “You never know, do you?” said Mrs. Dillington-Blick.

Alleyn watched her stroll along the deck and go through the doors into the lounge.

“…and I expect you will agree,” he wrote to his wife that evening, “that in a subsidiary sort of way, this was a thoroughly disquieting bit of information.” >

Steaming down the west coast of Africa, Cape Farewell ran into the sort of weather that is apt to sap the resources of people who are not accustomed to it. The air through which she moved was of the land — enervated and loaded with vague impurities. A thin greyness that resembled dust rather than cloud obscured the sun but scarcely modified its potency. Mr. Merryman got a “touch” of it and looked as if he was running a temperature but refused to do anything about it. Dysentery broke out among the crew and also afflicted Mr. Cuddy, who endlessly consulted Tim and, with unattractive candour, anybody else who would listen to him.

Aubyn Dale drank a little more and began to look it and so, to Alleyn’s concern, did Captain Bannerman. The captain was a heavy, steady drinker, who grew less and less tractable as his potations increased. He now resented any attempt Alleyn might make to discuss the case in hand and angrily reiterated his statement that there were no homicidal lunatics on board his ship. He became morose, unapproachable, and entirely pigheaded.

Mr. McAngus on the other hand grew increasingly loquacious and continually lost himself in a maze of non sequiturs. “He suffers,” Tim said, “from verbal dysentery.”

“With Mr. McAngus,” Alleyn remarked, “the condition appears to be endemic. We mustn’t blame the tropics.”

“They seem to have exacerbated it, however,” observed Father Jourdain wearily. “Did you know that he had a row with Merryman last night?”

“What about?” Alleyn asked.

“Those filthy medicated cigarettes he smokes. Merryman says the smell makes him feel sick.”

“He’s got something there,” Tim said. “God knows what muck they’re made of.”

“They stink like a wet haystack.”

“Ah, well,” Alleyn said, “to our tasks, gentlemen. To our unwelcome tasks.”

Since their failure with the captain they had agreed among themselves upon a plan of campaign. As soon as night fell each of them was to “mark” one of the women passengers. Tim said flatly that he would take Brigid and that arrangement was generally allowed to be only fair. Father Jourdain said he thought perhaps Alleyn had better have Mrs. Dillington-Blick. “She alarms me,” he remarked. “I have a feeling that she thinks I’m a wolf in priest’s clothing. If I begin following her about after dark she will be sure of it.”

Tim grinned at Alleyn, “She’s got her eye on you. It’d be quite a thing if you cut the Telly King out.”

“Don’t confuse me,” Alleyn said dryly, and turned to Father Jourdain. “You can handle the double, then,” he said. “Mrs. Cuddy never leaves Cuddy for a second and—” He paused.

“And poor Miss Abbott is not, you feel, in any great danger.”

“What do you suppose is the matter with her?” Alleyn asked and remembered what he had heard her saying as she left Father Jourdain on Saturday night. The priest’s eyes were expressionless. “We are not really concerned,” he said, “with Miss Abbott’s unhappiness, I think.”

“Oh,” Alleyn said, “it’s a sort of reflex action for me to wonder why people behave as they do. When we had the discussion about alibis, her distress over the Aubyn Dale programme of the night of January the fifteenth was illuminating, I thought.”

“I thought it damn puzzling,” said Tim. “D’you know, I actually found myself wondering, I can’t think why, if she was the victim and not the viewer that night.”

“I think she was the viewer.”

Father Jourdain looked sharply at Alleyn and then walked over to the porthole and stared out.

“As for the victim—” Alleyn went on, “the woman, do you remember, who told Dale she didn’t like to announce her engagement because it would upset her great friend? — ” He broke off and Tim said, “You’re not going to suggest that Miss Abbott was the great friend?”

“At least it would explain her reactions to the programme.”

After a short silence Tim said idly, “What does she do? Has she a job, do you know?”

Without turning his head Father Jourdain said, “She works for a firm of music publishers. She is quite an authority on early church music, particularly the Gregorian chants.”

Tim said involuntarily, “I imagine, with that voice, she doesn’t sing them herself.”

“On the contrary,” Alleyn rejoined, “she does. Very pleasantly. I heard her on the night we sailed from Las Palmas.”

“She has a most unusual voice,” Father Jourdain said. “If she were a man it would be a counter tenor. She represented her firm at a conference on church music three weeks ago in Paris. I went over for it and saw her there. She was evidently a person of importance.”

“Was she indeed?” Alleyn murmured and then, briskly: “Well, as you say, we are not immediately concerned with Miss Abbott. The sun’s going down. It’s time we went on duty.”

On the evenings of the eleventh and twelfth, according to plan, Alleyn devoted himself exclusively to Mrs. Dillington-Blick. This manoeuvre brought about the evident chagrin of Aubyn Dale, the amusement of Tim, the surprise of Brigid, and the greedy observance of Mrs. Cuddy. Mrs. Dillington-Blick was herself delighted. “My dear!” she wrote to her friend. “I’ve nobbled the Gorgeous Brute!! My dear, too gratifying! Nothing, to coin a phrase, tangible. As yet! But marked attention! And with the tropical moon being what it is, I feel something rather nice may eventuate. In the meantime, I promise you, I’ve only to wander off after dinner to my so suitable little verandah and he’s after me in a flash. A.D., my dear, rapidly becoming pea green, which is always so gratifying. Aren’t I hopeless — but what fun!!!”

On the night of the thirteenth, when they were all having coffee, Aubyn Dale suddenly decided to give a supper-party in his private sitting-room. It was equipped with a phonograph on which he proposed to play some of his own records.

“Everybody invited,” he said largely, waving his brandy glass. “I won’t take no for an answer.” And indeed it would have been difficult under the circumstances for anybody to attempt to refuse, though Mr. Merryman and Tim looked as if they would have liked to do so.

The “suite” turned out to be quite a grand affair. There were a great many signed photographs of Aubyn Dale’s poppet and of several celebrities and one of Aubyn Dale himself, bowing before the grandest celebrity of all. There was a pigskin writing-case and a pigskin record-carrier. There were actually some monogrammed Turkish cigarettes, a present, Dale explained with boyish ruefulness, from a potentate who was one of his most ardent fans. And almost at once there was a great deal to drink. Mr. McAngus was given a trick glass that poured his drink over his chin and was not quite as amused as the captain, the Cuddys, and Mrs. Dillington-Blick, though he took it quite quietly. Aubyn Dale apologized with the air of a chidden child and did several very accurate imitations of his fellow celebrities in television. Then they listened to four records, including one of Dale himself doing an Empire Day talk on how to be broadminded though British, in which he laid a good deal of stress on the national trait of being able to laugh at ourselves.

“How proud we are of it, too,” Tim muttered crossly to Brigid.

After the fourth record most of the guests began to be overtaken by the drowsiness of the tropics. Miss Abbott was the first to excuse herself and everybody else except Mrs. Dillington-Blick and the captain followed her lead. Brigid had developed a headache in the overcrowded room and was glad to get out into the fresh air. She and Tim sat on the starboard side under Mr. McAngus’s porthole. There was a small ship’s lamp in the deckhead above them.

“Only five minutes,” Brigid said. “I’m for bed after that. My head’s behaving like a piano accordion.”

“Have you got any aspirins?”

“I can’t be bothered hunting them out.”

“I’ll get you something. Don’t move, will you?” Tim said, noting that the light from Mr. McAngus’s porthole and from the ship’s lamp fell across her chair. He could hear Mr. McAngus humming to himself in a reedy falsetto as he prepared for bed. “You will stay put,” Tim said, “won’t you?”

“Why shouldn’t I? I don’t feel at all like shinning up the rigging or going for a strapping walk. Couldn’t we have that overhead light off? Not,” Brigid said hurriedly, “in order to create a romantic gloom, I ssure you, Tim. It shines in one’s eyes, rather; that’s all.”

“The switch is down at the other end. I’ll turn it off when I come back,” he said. “I shan’t be half a tick.”

When he had gone, Brigid lay back and shut her eyes. She listened to the ship’s engines and to the sound of the sea and to Mr. McAngus’s droning. This stopped after a moment and through her closed lids she was aware of a lessening of light. “He’s turning his lamp off,” she thought gratefully, “and has tucked his poor dithering old self up in his virtuous couch.” She opened her eyes and saw the dim light in the deckhead above her.

The next moment, it, too, went out.

“That’s Tim coming back,” she thought. “He has been quick.”

She was now in almost complete darkness. A faint breeze lifted her hair. She heard no footfall but she was conscious that someone had approached from behind her.

“Tim?” she said.

Hands come down on her shoulders. She gave a little cry: “Oh, don’t! You made me jump.”

The hands shifted towards her neck and she felt her chain of pearls move and twist and break. She snatched at the hands and they were not Tim’s.

“No—” she cried out. “No! Tim!”

There was a rapid thud of retreating feet. Brigid struggled out of her chair and ran down the dark tunnel of the covered deck into someone’s arms.

“It’s all right,” Alleyn said. “You’re all right. It’s me.”

A few seconds later, Tim Makepiece came back.

Alleyn still held Brigid in his arms. She quivered and stammered and clutched at him like a frightened child.

“What the hell—” Tim began but Alleyn stopped him.

“Did you turn out the deckhead lights?”

“No. Biddy, darling—”

“Did you meet anyone?”

“No. Biddy—!”

“All right. Take over, will you? She’ll tell you when she’s got her second wind.”

He disengaged her arms. “You’re in clover,” he said. “Here’s your medical adviser.”

She bolted into Tim’s arms and Alleyn ran down the deck.

He switched on the overhead lights and followed round the centrecastle. He looked up and down companionways, along hatch combings, behind piles of folded chairs and into recesses. He knew, as he hunted, he was too late. He found nothing but the old blankness of a ship’s decks at night. On the excuse that he had lost his pocketbook with his passport and letters of credit, he aroused all the men, including Mr. Cuddy. Dale was still dressed and in his sitting-room. The others were in pyjamas and varying degress of ill temper. He told Father Jourdain, briefly, what had happened and arranged that they would go, with Tim, to the captain.

Then he returned to Brigid’s chair. Her pearls were scattered on the deck and in the loose seat. He collected them and thought at first that otherwise he had drawn a blank. But at the last he found, clinging to the back of the chair, discoloured and crushed, a scrap of something which, when he took it to the light, declared itself plainly enough. It was a tiny fragment of a flower petal.

It still retained, very faintly, the scent of hyacinth.