Singing in the Shrouds

CHAPTER 12 Cape Town

Cape Farewell steamed into Table Bay at dawn and hove to awaiting the arrival of her pilot cutter and the police launch from Cape Town. Like all ships coming in to port she had begun to withdraw into herself, conserving her personality against the assaults that would be made upon it. She had been prepared. Her derricks were uncovered, her decks broken by orderly litter. Her servants, at their appointed stations, were ready to support her.

Alleyn looked across neatly scalloped waters at the butt-end of a continent and thought how unlikely it was that he would ever take such another voyage. At Captain Bannerman’s invitation, he was on the bridge. Down on the dismantled boat-deck eight of the nine passengers were already assembled. They wore their shore-going clothes because Cape Farewell was to be at anchor for two days. Their deck-chairs had been stowed away, the hatch was uncovered and there was no-where for them to sit. Sea-gulls, always a little too true to type, squawked and dived, squabbled and swooped about the bilgewater of which Cape Farewell blandly relieved herself.

Two black accents appeared distantly on the surface of the Bay.

“There we are,” Captain Bannerman said, handing Alleyn his binoculars.

Alleyn said, “If you don’t mind I’m going to ask for the passengers to be sent to their sitting-room.”

“Do you expect any trouble?”

“None.”

“He won’t—” Captain Bannerman began and hesitated. “You don’t reckon he’ll cut up rough?”

“He is longing,” Alleyn said, “to be taken away.”

“Bloody monster,” the captain muttered uneasily. He took a turn round the bridge, and came back to Alleyn.

“There’s something I ought to say to you,” he said. “It doesn’t come easy and for that reason, I suppose, I haven’t managed to get it out. But it’s got to be said. I’m responsible for that boy’s death. I know. I should have let you act like you wanted.”

“I might just as easily have been wrong.”

“Ah! But you weren’t, and there’s the trouble.” The captain fixed his gaze on the approaching black accents. “Whisky,” he said, “affects different men in different ways. Some it makes affable, some it makes glum. Me, it makes pigheaded. When I’m on the whisky I can’t stomach any man’s notions but my own. How do you reckon we’d better handle this job?”

“Could we get it over before the pilot comes on board? My colleague from the Yard has flown here and will be with the Cape police. They’ll take charge for the time being.”

“I’ll have a signal sent.”

“Thank you, sir,” Alleyn said and went below.

A seaman was on guard outside the little hospital. When he saw Alleyn he unlocked the door and Alleyn went in.

Sitting on the unmade-up bed with its sharp mattress and smartly folded blankets, Mr. Merryman had adopted an attitude quite unlike the one to which his fellow passengers had become accustomed. His spine curved forward and his head depended from it as if his whole structure had wilted. Only the hands, firmly padded and sinewed, clasped between the knees, retained their eloquence. When Alleyn came in, Mr. Merryman looked up at him over the tops of his spectacles but said nothing.

“The police launch,” Alleyn said, “is sighted. I’ve come to tell you that I have packed your cases and will have the things you need sent with you. I shall not be coming in the launch but will see you later today. You will be given every opportunity to take legal advice in Cape Town or to cable instructions to your solicitors. You will return to England as soon as transport is available, probably by air. If you have changed your mind and wish to make a statement—”

Alleyn stopped. The lips had moved. After a moment, the voice, remotely tinged with arrogance, said, “…not in the habit of rescinding decisions — tedium of repetition. No.”

“Very well.”

He turned to go and was arrested by the voice.

“—a few observations. Now. No witnesses and without prejudice. Now.”

Alleyn said, “I must warn you, the absence of witnesses doesn’t mean that what you may tell me will not be given in evidence. It may be given in evidence. You understand that,” he added, as Mr. Merryman raised his head and stared blankly at him, “don’t you?” He took out his notebook and opened it. “You see, I shall write down anything that you say.”

Mr. Merryman said with a vigour that a moment ago would have seemed impossible, “Esmeralda. Ruby. Beryl. Bijou. Coralie. Marguerite.”

He was still feverishly repeating these names when Inspector Fox from the Yard, with members of the Cape Town police force, came to take him off.

For a little while Alleyn watched the police launch dip and buck across the bay. Soon the group of figures aboard her lost definition and she herself became no more than a receding dot. The pilot cutter was already alongside. He turned away and for the last time opened the familiar doors into the sitting-room.

They were all there, looking strange in their shore-going clothes.

Alleyn said, “In about ten minutes we shall be alongside. I’m afraid I shall have to ask you all to come to the nearest police-station to make your depositions. Later on you will no doubt be summoned to give evidence, and if that means an earlier return, arrangements will be made for transport. I’m sorry but that’s how it is. In the meantime I feel that I owe you an explanation, and perhaps something of an apology.” He paused for a moment.

Brigid said, “It seems to me the boot’s on the other foot.”

“And to me,” said Tim.

“I’m not so sure,” Mrs. Cuddy remarked. “We’ve been treated in a very peculiar manner.”

Alleyn said, “When I boarded this ship at Portsmouth I did so on the strength of as slight a piece of information as ever sent an investigating officer to sea. It consisted of the fragment of an embarkation notice for this ship and it was clutched in the hand of the girl who was killed on the wharf the night you sailed. It was at least arguable that this paper had been blown ashore or dropped or had come by some irrelevant means into the girl’s hand. I didn’t think so, your statements didn’t suggest it, but it was quite possible. My superior officers ordered me to conceal my identity, to make what enquiries I could, entirely under cover, to take no action that did not meet with the captain’s approval, and to prevent any further catastrophe. This last, of course, I have failed to do. If you consider them, these conditions may help to explain the events that followed. If the Flower Murderer was aboard, the obvious procedure was to discover which of you had an acceptable alibi for any of the times when these crimes were committed. I took the occasion of the fifteenth of January, when Beryl Cohen was murdered. With Captain Bannerman’s assistance I staged the alibi conversation.”

“Good Lord!” Miss Abbott exclaimed. She turned dark red and added, “Go on. Sorry.”

“The results were sent by radio to London and my colleagues there were able to confirm the alibis of Father Jourdain and Dr. Makepiece. Mr. Cuddy’s and Mr. McAngus’s were unconfirmed, but in the course of the conversation it transpired that Mr. McAngus had been operated upon for a perforated appendix on the nineteenth of January, which made him incapable of committing the crime of the twenty-fifth, when Marguerite Slatters was murdered. If, of course, he was speaking the truth. Mr. Cuddy, unless he was foxing, appeared to be unable to sing in tune, and one of the few things we did know about our man was his ability to sing.”

Mrs. Cuddy, who was holding her husband’s hand, said, “Well, really, Mr. Cuddy would be the last to pretend he was a performer! Wouldn’t you, dear?”

“That’s right, dear.”

“Mr. Dale,” Alleyn went on, “had no alibi for the fifteenth, but it turned out that on the twenty-fifth he was in New York. That disposed of him as a suspect.”

“Then why the hell,” Dale demanded, “couldn’t you tell me what was up?”

“I’m afraid it was because I formed the opinion that you were not to be relied upon. You’re a heavy drinker and you have been suffering from nervous strain. It would, I felt, be unsafe to trust to your discretion.”

“I must say!” Dale began angrily but Alleyn went on.

“It has never been supposed that a woman was responsible for these crimes, but”—he smiled at Miss Abbott— “one of the ladies, at least, had an alibi. She was in Paris on the twenty-fifth, at the same conference, incidentally, as Father Jourdain, who was thus doubly cleared. Until I could hear that the remaining alibis were proved, I couldn’t take any of the passengers except Father Jourdain and Dr. Makepiece into my confidence. I should like to say, now, that they have given me every possible help and I’m grateful as can be to both of them.”

Father Jourdain, who was very pale and withdrawn, raised his hand and let it fall again. Tim said they both felt they had failed at the crucial time. “We were sceptical,” he said, “about Mr. Alleyn’s interpretation of Biddy’s glimpse of the figure in the Spanish dress. We thought it must have been Mrs. Dillington-Blick. We thought that with all the women accounted for, there was nothing to worry about.”

“I saw it,” Brigid said, “and I told Mr. Alleyn I was sure it was Mrs. Dillington-Blick. That was my blunder.”

“I even heard the singing,” Father Jourdain said. “How could I have been so tragically stupid!”

“I gave Dennis the dress and pretended I didn’t,” Mrs. Dillington-Blick lamented.

Aubyn Dale looked with something like horror at Mr. Cuddy. “And you and I, Cuddy,” he pointed out, “listened to a murder and did nothing about it.”

Mr. Cuddy, for once, was not smiling. He turned to his wife and said, “Eth, I’m sorry. I’m cured, Eth. It won’t occur again.”

Everybody tried to look as if they didn’t know what he was talking about, especially Mrs. Dillington-Blick.

“O.K., dear,” said Mrs. Cuddy, and actually smiled.

Mr. McAngus leaned forward and said very earnestly, “I can, of course, see that I have not behaved at all helpfully. Indeed, now I come to think of it, I almost ask myself if I haven’t been suffering from some complaint.” He looked wistfully at Mrs. Dillington-Blick. “A touch of the sun perhaps,” he murmured and made a little bob at her. “It is,” he added after a moment’s added reflection, “very fussing to consider how one’s actions go on and on having the most distressing results. For instance, when I ventured to buy the doll I never intended—”

A steamer hooted and there, outside, was a funnel sliding past and beyond it a confusion of shipping and the wharves themselves.

“I never intended,” Mr. McAngus repeated, but he had lost the attention of his audience and did not complete his sentence.

Miss Abbott said in her harsh way, “It’s no good any of us bemoaning our intentions. I daresay we’ve all behaved stupidly one way or another. I know I have. I started this trip in a stupid temper. I’ve made stupid scenes. If it’s done nothing else it’s shown me what a fool I was. Control!” announced Miss Abbott. “And common sense! Complete lack of both leads to murder, it seems.”

“And of charity,” Father Jourdain added rather wearily.

“That’s right. And of charity,” Miss Abbott agreed snappishly. “And of proportion and I daresay of a hundred other things we’d be the better for observing.”

“How right you are!” Brigid said so sombrely that Tim felt obliged to put his arm round her.

Alleyn moved over to the glass doors and looked out. “We’re alongside,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything more to say. I hope, when you go ashore, you still manage to find some sort of — what? compensation? — for all that has happened.”

Mrs. Dillington-Blick approached him. She offered him her hand, and when he took it leaned towards him and murmured, “I’ve had a blow to my vanity.”

“Surely not.”

“Were all your pretty ways purely professional?”

Alleyn suppressed a mad desire to reply, “As surely as yours were not,” and merely said, “Alas, I have no pretty ways. You’re much too kind.” He shook her hand crisply and released it to find that Brigid and Tim were waiting for him.

Brigid said, “I just wanted to tell you that I’ve discovered you haven’t got it all your own way.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re not the only one to find the real thing on a sea voyage.”

“Really?”

“Really. Dead sure.”

“I’m so glad,” Alleyn said and shook hands with them.

After that the Cuddys and Mr. McAngus came and made their odd little valedictions. Mr. Cuddy said that he supposed it took all sorts to make a world and Mrs. Cuddy said she’d always known there was something. Mr. McAngus, scarlet and inextricably confused, made several false starts. He then advanced his long anxious face to within a few inches of Alleyn’s and said in a rapid undertone, “You were perfectly right, of course. But I didn’t look in. No, No! I just stood with my back to the wall behind the door. It was something to be near her. Misleading, of course. That I do see. Good-bye.”

Aubyn Dale let Mr. McAngus drift away and then pulled in his waist and with his frankest air came up to Alleyn and extended his hand.

“No hard thoughts, I hope, old boy?”

“Never a one.”

“Good man. Jolly good.” He shook Alleyn’s hand with manly emphasis. “All the same,” he said, “dumb though it may be of me, I still cannot see why, at the end, you couldn’t warn us men. Before you fetched him in.”

“A., because you were all lying like flatfish. As long as you thought he was the innocent observer who could prove you lied, I had a chance of forcing the truth from you. And B., because one or more of you would undoubtedly have given the show away if you’d known he was guilty. He’s extremely observant.”

Dale said, “Well, I never pretended to be a diplomatic type,” and made it sound noble. Then, unexpectedly, he reddened. “You’re right about the drinks,” he said. “I’m a fool. I’m going to lay off. If I can. See you later.” He went out. Miss Abbott marched up to Alleyn.

She said, “I suppose what I’d like to say couldn’t be of less importance. However, you’ll just have to put up with it. Did you guess what was wrong with me, the night of the alibi conversation?”

“I fancied I did,” he said.

“So I supposed. Well, if it’s any consolation, I’m cured. It’s a mistake for a lonely woman to form an engrossing friendship. One should have the courage of one’s loneliness. This ghastly business has at least taught me that.”

“Then,” Alleyn said gently, “you may give thanks, mayn’t you? In a Gregorian chant?”

“Well, good-bye,” she said, and she too went out.

The others having all gone, Father Jourdain and Tim, who had both waited at the far end of the room, came up to Alleyn.

Father Jourdain said, “Alleyn, may I go to him? Will you let me see him?”

Alleyn said that of course he would but added, as gently as he could, that he didn’t think Mr. Merryman would respond graciously to the visit.

“No, no. But I must go. He received Mass from me in a state of deadly sin. I must go.”

“He was struggling with—” Alleyn hesitated. “With his devil. He thought it might help.”

“I must tell him. He must be brought to a realization,” Father Jourdain said. He went out on deck and stared, without seeing it, at Table Mountain. Alleyn saw his hand go to his breast.

Tim said, “Am I wanted?”

“I’m afraid you are. He’s talked to me. It’s pretty obvious that the defence will call psychiatric opinions and yours may be crucial. I’ll tell you what he has said and then ask you to see him. If you can get him to speak, it may go some way in his favour.”

“You talk,” Tim said, “as if you weren’t a policeman.”

He finished his letter and went out on the bridge. Cape Farewell was discharging cargo. At midnight, having got rid of a bull-dozer, four cars, three tons of unbleached calico, and a murderer, she would continue her voyage to Durban.

He supposed he was unlikely ever to travel in her again.

The End