Singing in the Shrouds

CHAPTER 7 After Las Palmas

The passengers always met for coffee in the lounge at eleven o’clock. On the morning after Las Palmas this ceremony marked the first appearance of Mrs. Dillington-Blick and Aubyn Dale, neither of whom had come down for breakfast. It was a day with an enervating faint wind and the coffee was iced.

Alleyn had chosen this moment to present Mrs. Dillington-Blick with the disjecta membra of Esmeralda. She had already sent Dennis to find the doll and was as fretful as a good-natured woman can be when he came back empty-handed. Alleyn told her that at a late hour he and Father Jourdain had discovered Esmeralda lying on the deck. He then indicated the newspaper parcel that he had laid out on the end of the table.

He did this at the moment when the men of the party and Miss Abbott were gathered round the coffee. Mrs. Cuddy, Mrs. Dillington-Blick, and Brigid always allowed themselves the little ceremony of being waited upon by the gentlemen. Miss Abbott consistently lined herself up in the queue and none of the men had the temerity to question this procedure.

With the connivance of Father Jourdain and Tim Makepiece, Alleyn unveiled Esmeralda at the moment when Aubyn Dale, Mr. Merryman, Mr. Cuddy and Mr. McAngus were hard by the table.

“Here she is,” he said, “and I’m afraid she presents rather a sorry sight.”

He flicked the newspaper away in one jerk. Mrs. Dillington-Blick cried out sharply.

Esmeralda was lying on her back with her head twisted over her shoulder and the beads and dead hyacinth in position.

After its owner’s one ejaculation the doll’s exposure was followed by a dead silence and then by a violent oath from Mr. Merryman.

Almost simultaneously Miss Abbott ejaculated, “Don’t!”

Her iced coffee had tilted and the contents had fallen over Mr. Merryman’s hands.

Miss Abbott moistened her lips and said, “You must have jolted my arm, Mr. Merryman.”

“My dear madam, I did nothing of the sort!” he contradicted and angrily flipped his hands. Particles of iced coffee flew in all directions. One alighted on Mr. Cuddy’s nose. He seemed to be quite unaware of it. Half smiling, he stared at Esmeralda and with lightly clasped fingers revolved his thumbs slowly round each other.

Aubyn Dale said loudly, “Why have you done this! It looks disgusting.” He reached out and with a quick movement brushed the dead hyacinth off the doll. The beads fell away with a clatter and rolled about the table. Dale straightened the flashily smiling head.

Mr. McAngus murmured gently, “She looks quite herself again, doesn’t she? Perhaps she can be mended.”

“I don’t understand all this,” Dale said angrily to Alleyn. “Why did you do it?”

“Do what, exactly?”

“Lay it out like that. Like — like—”

Mrs. Cuddy said with relish, “Like one of those poor girls. Flowers and beads and everything; giving us all such a turn.”

“The doll,” Alleyn said, “is exactly as Father Jourdain and I found it, hyacinth and all. I’m sorry if it’s upset anyone.”

Mrs. Dillington-Blick had come to the table. It was the first time, Alleyn thought, that he had seen her without so much as a flicker of a smile on her face. “Was it like that?” she asked. “Why? What happened?”

Dale said, “Don’t worry, darling Ruby. Somebody must have trodden on it and broken the beads and — and the neck.”

“I trod on it,” Father Jourdain said. “I’m most awfully sorry, Mrs. Dillington-Blick, but it was lying on the deck in pitch-dark shadow.”

“There you are!” Dale exclaimed. He caught Alleyn’s eye and recovered something of his professional bonhomie. “Sorry, old boy. I didn’t mean to throw a temperament. You gathered the doll up just as it was. No offense, I hope?”

“None in the wide world,” Alleyn rejoined politely.

Mrs. Cuddy said, “Yes, but all the same it’s funny about the flower, isn’t it, dear?”

“That’s right, dear. Funny.”

“Being a hyacinth and all. Such a coincidence.”

“That’s right,” smiled Mr. Cuddy. “Funny.”

Mr. Merryman, who was still fretfully drying his hands on his handkerchief, suddenly cried out in anguish.

“I was mad enough to suppose,” Mr. Merryman lamented, “that in undertaking this voyage I would escape, however briefly, from the egregious, the remorseless ambiguities of the lower-school urchin. Funny! Funny! Will you be so kind, my good Cuddy, as to enlighten us? In what respect do you consider droll, entertaining or amusing the discovery of a wilted hyacinth upon the bosom of this disarticulate puppet? For my part,” Mr. Merryman added with some violence, “I find the obvious correlation altogether beastly. And the inescapable conclusion that I myself was, hypothetically at least, responsible for its presence adds to my distaste. Funny!” Mr. Merryman concluded in a fury and flung up his hands.

The Cuddys eyed him with dawning resentment. Mr. McAngus said brightly, “But of course. I’d quite forgotten. It was my hyacinth. You took it, do you recollect? When we had our little collision? And threw it down.”

“I did not ‘take’ it.”

“Accidentally, of course. I meant accidentally.” Mr. McAngus bent over the doll. His reddish knotted fingers manipulated the neck. “I’m sure she can be mended,” he said.

Mrs. Dillington-Blick said in a constrained voice, “Do you know — I hope you’ll forgive me, Mr. McAngus, and I expect I’m being dreadfully silly — but do you know I don’t somehow think I feel quite the same about Esmeralda. I don’t believe I want her mended, or at any rate not for me. Perhaps we could think of some little girl — you may have a niece.” Her voice faded into an apologetic murmur.

With a kind of social readiness that consorted very ill with the look in his eyes, Mr. McAngus said, “But, of course, I quite understand.” His hands were still closed round the neck of the doll. He looked at them, seemed to recollect himself, and turned aside. “I quite understand,” he repeated, and helped himself to a herbal cigarette.

Mrs. Cuddy, relentless as a Greek chorus, said, “All the same it does seem funny.” Mr. Merryman gave a strangulated cry, but she went on greedily, “the way we were all talking about those murders. You know. And then the way Mrs. Blick got that cable from her gentleman-friend about the girl being murdered who brought the flowers. And the way hyacinths keep turning up. You’d almost think it was intentional, really you would.” She stared in her unwinking fashion at Mrs. Dillington-Blick. “I don’t wonder you feel funny about it with the doll being dressed like you. You know. It might almost be you, lying there, mightn’t it, Mrs. Blick?”

Miss Abbott struck her big hands together. “For God’s sake!” she ejaculated. “Do we have to listen to all this? Can’t someone take that thing away!”

“Of course,” Alleyn said and dropped the newspaper over the doll. “I can.”

He gathered up the unwieldy parcel and took it to his cabin.

“As usual,” he wrote to his wife, “I miss you very much. I miss—” He paused and looked, without seeing them, at the objects in his cabin. He reflected on the old circumstance that although his memory had been trained for a long time to retain with scrupulous accuracy the various items of human faces, it always let him down when he wanted it to show Troy to him. Her photograph was not much good, after all. It merely reminded him of features he knew but couldn’t visualize; it was only a map of her face. He put something of this down in his letter, word after careful word, and then began to write about the case in hand, setting out in detail everything that had happened since his last letter had been posted in Las Palmas.

There was a tap on the door. Alleyn hurriedly wrote, “…here they are. Au revoir, darling,” and called out, “Come in.”

Father Jourdain now wore a thin light-coloured suit, a white shirt and a black tie. The change in his appearance was quite startling; it was as if a stranger had walked in.

“I really don’t feel,” he said, “that the mortification of a dog collar in the tropics is required of me. I shall put it on for dinner, and on Sunday I shall sweat in my decent cassock. The sight of you two in your gents’ tropical suitings was too much for me. I bought this in Las Palmas and in happier circumstances would get a great deal of pleasure out of wearing it.”

They sat down and looked at Alleyn with an air of expectancy. It occurred to him that however sincerely they might deplore the presence of a homicidal monster as their fellow traveller they were nevertheless stimulated in a way that was not entirely unpleasurable. They were both, he thought, energetic inquisitive men and each in his own mode had a professional interest in the matter in hand.

“Well,” he said, when they were settled, “how do you feel about Operation Esmeralda?”

They agreed, it appeared, that nothing had happened to contradict Alleyn’s theory. The reaction to the doll had been pretty well what he had predicted.

“Though the trouble is,” Father Jourdain added, “that when one is looking for peculiar behaviour one seems to see it all over the place. I must confess that I found Dale’s outburst, the Cuddys’ really almost gloating relish, Merryman’s intolerable pedantry, and McAngus’s manipulations equally disturbing. Of course it doesn’t arise,” he added after a pause, “but even poor Miss Abbott behaved, or so it seemed to me, with a kind of extravagance. I suppose I lost my eye.”

“Why,” Alleyn asked, “do you call her ‘poor Miss Abbott’?”

“Oh, my dear Alleyn! I think you know very well. The problem of the unhappy spinster crops up all along the line in my job.”

Tim gave an inarticulate grunt.

“Yes,” Alleyn said, “she is obviously unhappy.” He looked at Tim. “What did that knowledgeable noise mean?”

Tim said impatiently, “We’re not concerned with Miss Abbott, I imagine, but it meant that I too recognize the type, though perhaps my diagnosis would not appeal to Father Jourdain.”

“Would it not?” Father Jourdain said. “I should like to hear it all the same.”

Tim said rapidly, “No, really. I mustn’t bore you and at any rate one has no business to go by superficial impressions. It’s just that on the face of it she’s a textbook example of the woman without sexual attraction who hasn’t succeeded in finding a satisfactory adjustment.”

Alleyn looked up from his clasped hands. “From your point of view isn’t that also true of the sort of homicide we’re concerned with?”

“Invariably, I should say. These cases almost always point back to some childish tragedy in which the old gang — fear, frustration and jealousy — have been predominant. This is true of most psychological abnormalities. For instance, as a psychotherapist I would, if I got the chance, try to discover why hyacinths make Mr. Cuddy feel ill and I’d expect to find the answer in some incident that may have been thrust completely into his subconscious and that superficially may seem to have no direct reference to hyacinths. And with Aubyn Dale, I’d be interested to hunt down the basic reason for his love of practical jokes. While if Mr. Merryman were my patient, I’d try and find a reason for his chronic irritability.”

“Dyspepsia no good?” Alleyn asked. “He’s forever taking sodamints.”

“All dyspeptics are not irritable woman-haters. I’d expect to find that his indigestion is associated with some very long-standing psychic disturbance.”

“Such as his nurse having snatched away his favourite rattle and given it to his papa?”

“You might not be as far out as you may think you are, at that.”

“What about Dale and McAngus?”

“Oh,” Tim said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Dale hadn’t achieved, on the whole, a fairly successful sublimation with his ghastly telly-therapy. He’s an exhibitionist who thinks he’s made good. That’s why his two public blunders upset his applecart and gave him his ‘nervous breakdown.’ ”

“I didn’t know he’d had one,” said Father Jourdain.

“He says he has. It’s a term psychotherapists don’t accept. As for McAngus, he really is interesting; all that timidity and absent-mindedness and losing his way in his own stories — very characteristic.”

“Of what?” Alleyn asked.

“Of an all-too-familiar type. Completely inhibited. Riddled with anxieties and frustrations. And of course he’s quite unconscious of their origins. His giving Mrs. D-B that damn doll was very suggestive. He’s a bachelor.”

“Oh, dear!” Father Jourdain murmured and at once added, “Pay no attention to me. Do go on.”

“Then,” Alleyn said, “the psychiatrist’s position in respect of these crimes is that they have all developed out of some profound emotional disturbance that the criminal is quite unaware of and is unable to control?”

“That’s it.”

“And does it follow that he may, at the conscious level, loathe what he does, try desperately hard to fight down the compulsion, and be filled with horror each time he fails?”

“Very likely.”

“Indeed, yes,” Father Jourdain said with great emphasis. “Indeed, indeed!”

Alleyn turned to him. “Then you agree with Makepiece?”

Father Jourdain passed a white hand over his dark luxuriant hair. “I’m sure,” he said, “that Makepiece has described the secondary cause and its subsequent results very learnedly and accurately.”

“The secondary cause!” Tim exclaimed.

“Yes. The repressed fear, or frustration or whatever it was — I’m afraid,” said Father Jourdain with a faint smile, “I haven’t mastered the terminology. But I’m sure you’re right about all that; indeed you know it all as a man of science. But you see I would look upon that early tragedy and its subsequent manifestations as the — well, as the modus operandi of an infinitely more terrible agent.”

“I don’t follow,” Tim said. “A more terrible agent?”

“Yes. The devil.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I believe that this poor soul is possessed of a devil.”

Tim, to Alleyn’s amusement, actually blushed scarlet as if Father Jourdain had committed some frightful social solecism.

“I see,” Father Jourdain observed, “that I have embarrassed you.”

Tim mumbled something about everybody being entitled to his opinion.

Alleyn said, “I’m afraid I’m rather stuck for a remark, too. Forgive me, but you do mean, quite literally, exactly what you’ve just said? Yes, I’see you do.”

“Quite literally. It is a case of possession. I’ve seen too many to be mistaken.”

There was a long pause during which, Alleyn reminded himself that there were a great number of not unintelligent people in the world who managed, with some satisfaction to themselves, to believe in devils. At last he said, “I must say, in that case, I very much wish you could exorcise it.”

With perfect seriousness Father Jourdain replied that there were certain difficulties. “I shall, of course, continue to pray for him,” he said.

Tim shuffled his feet, lit a cigarette, and with an air of striking out rather wildly for some kind of raft, asked Alleyn for the police view of this kind of murder. “After all,” he said, “you must be said to be experts.”

“Not at all,” Alleyn rejoined. “Very far from it. Our job, God save the mark, is first to protect society and then as a corollary to catch the criminal. These sorts of criminals are often our worst headache. They have no occupational habits. They resemble each other only in their desire to kill for gratification. In everyday life they may be anything; there are no outward signs. We generally get them but by no means always. The thing one looks for, of course, is a departure from routine. If there’s no known routine, if your man is a solitary creature as Jack the Ripper was, your chances lessen considerably.” Alleyn paused and then added in a changed voice: “But as to why, fundamentally, he is what he is — we are dumb. Perhaps if we knew we’d find our job intolerable.”

Father Jourdain said, “You are, after all, a compassionate man, I see.”

Alleyn found this remark embarrassing and inappropriate. He said quickly, “It doesn’t arise. An investigating officer examining the bodies of strangled girls who have died on a crescendo of terror and physical agony is not predisposed to feel compassion for the strangler. It’s not easy to remember that he may have suffered a complementary agony of the mind. In many cases he hasn’t done anything of the sort. He’s too far gone.”

“Isn’t it a question,” Tim asked, “of whether something might have been done about him before his obsession reached its climax?”

“Of course it is,” Alleyn agreed, very readily. “That’s where you chaps come in.”

Tim stood up. “It’s three o’clock. I’m due for a game of deck golf,” he said. “What’s the form? Watchful diligence?”

“That’s it.”

Father Jourdain also rose. “I’m going to do a crossword with Miss Abbott. She’s got the new Penguin. Mr. Merryman is Ximenes standard.”

“I’m a Times man myself,” Alleyn said.

“There’s one thing about the afternoons,” Father Jourdain sighed, “the ladies do tend to retire to their cabins.”

“For the sake of argument only,” Tim asked gloomily, “suppose Cuddy was your man. Do you think he’d be at all liable to strangle Mrs. Cuddy?”

“By thunder,” Alleyn said, “if I were in his boots, I would. Come on.”

In the afternoons there were not very many shady places on deck and a good deal of quiet manoeuvring went on among the passengers to secure them. Claims were staked. Mr. Merryman left his air cushion and his Panama on the nicest of the deck-chairs. The Cuddys did a certain amount of edging in and shoving aside when nobody else was about. Mr. McAngus laid his plaid along one of the wooden seats, but as nobody else cared for the seats this procedure aroused no enmity.

Aubyn Dale and Mrs. Dillington-Blick used their own luxurious chaise longues with rubber-foam appointments and had set them up in the little verandah, which they pretty well filled. Although the chaise longues were never occupied till after tea, nobody liked to use them in the meantime.

So while Tim, Brigid and two of the junior officers played deck golf, Miss Abbott and five men were grouped in a shady area cast by the centrecastle between the doors into the lounge and the amidships hatch. Mr. Cuddy slept noisily with a Reader’s Digest over his face. Mr. McAngus dozed, Mr. Merryman and Alleyn read,

Father Jourdain and Miss Abbott laboured at their crossword. It was a tranquil-looking scene. Desultory sentences and little spurts of observation drifted about with the inconsequence of a conversational poem by Verlaine.

Above their heads Captain Bannerman took his afternoon walk on the bridge, solacing the monotony with pleasurable glances at Brigid, who looked enchanting in jeans and a scarlet shirt. As he had predicted, she was evidently a howling success with his junior officers. And with his medical officer, too, reflected the captain. Sensible perhaps of his regard, Brigid looked up and gaily waved to him. In addition to being attractive she was also what he called a thoroughly nice, unspoiled little lady; just a sweet young girl, he thought. Dimly conscious, perhaps, of some not altogether appropriate train of thought aroused by this reflection, the captain decided to think instead of Mrs. Dillington-Blick — a mental exercise that came very easily to him.

Brigid took a long swipe at her opponent’s disc, scuppered her own, shouted “Damn!” and burst out laughing. The junior officers, who had tried very hard to let her win, now polished off the game in an expert manner and regretfully returned to duty.

Brigid said, “Oh, Tim, I am sorry! You must get another partner.”

“Are you sick of me?” Tim rejoined. “What shall we do now? Would you like to have a singles?”

“Not very much, thank you. I need the support of a kind and forebearing person like yourself. Perhaps some of the others would play. Mr. McAngus, for instance. His game is about on a par with mine.”

“Mr. McAngus is mercifully dozing and you know jolly well you’re talking nonsense.”

“Well, who?” Brigid nervously pushed her hair back and said, “Perhaps it’s too hot after all. Don’t let’s play.” She looked at the little group in the shade of the centrecastle. Mr. Merryman had come out of his book and was talking to Alleyn in an admonitory fashion, shaking his finger and evidently speaking with some heat.

“Mr. Chips is at it again,” Tim said. “Poor Alleyn!” He experienced the sensation of his blood running down into his boots. Surely he, Tim Makepiece, a responsible man, a man of science, a psychiatrist, could not have slipped into so feeble, so imbecile an error. Would he have to confess to Alleyn? How could he recover himself with Brigid? Her voice recalled him.

“What did you say?” she asked.

“ ‘Poor Broderick.’ ”

“Is he called Allan? You’ve got down to Christian names pretty smartly. Very chummy of you.”

Tim said after a pause, “I don’t to his face. I like him.”

“So do I. Awfully. We agreed about it before.” Brigid shook her head impatiently. “At any rate,” she said, “he’s not the guilty one. I’m sure of that.”

Tim stood very still and after a moment wetted his lips.

“What do you mean?” he said. “The guilty one?”

“Are you all right, Tim?”

“Perfectly

“You look peculiar

“It’s the heat. Come back here, do.” He took her arm and led her to the little verandah, pushed her down on the sumptuous footrest belonging to Mrs. Dillington-Blick’s chaise longue and himself sat at the end of Aubyn Dale’s, “What guilty one?” he repeated.

Brigid stared at him. “There’s no need, really, to take it so massively,” she said. “You may not feel as I do about it.”

“About what?”

“The business with the D-B’s doll. It seems to me such a beastly thing to have done and I don’t care what anyone says, it was done on purpose. Just treading on it wouldn’t have produced that result. And then, putting the flower on its chest — a scurvy trick, I call it.”

Tim stooped down and made a lengthy business of tying his shoelace. When he straightened up Brigid said, “You are all right, aren’t you? You keep changing colour like a chameleon.”

“Which am I now?”

“Fiery red.”

“I’ve been stooping over. I agree with you about the doll. It was a silly unbecoming sort of thing to do. Perhaps it was a drunken sailor.”

“There weren’t any drunken sailors about. Do you know who I think it was?”

“Who?”

“Mr. Cuddy.”

“Do you, Biddy?” Tim said. “Why?”

“He kept smiling and smiling all the time that Mr. Broderick was showing the doll.”

“He’s got a chronic grin. It never leaves his face.”

“All the same—” Brigid looked quickly at Tim and away again. “In my opinion,” she muttered, “he’s a D.O.M.”

“A what?”

“A dirty old man. I don’t mind telling you, I’d simply hate to find myself alone on the boat-deck with him after dark.”

Tim hastily said that she’d better make sure she never did. “Take me with you for safety’s sake,” he said. “I’m eminently trustworthy.”

Brigid grinned at him absent-mindedly. She seemed to be in two minds about what she should say next.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Nothing. Nothing, really. It’s just-I don’t know — it’s ever since Dennis brought Mrs. D-B’s hyacinths into the lounge on the second day out. We don’t seem to be able to get rid of those awful murders. Everybody talking about them. That alibi discussion the night before Las Palmas and Miss Abbott breaking down. Not that her trouble had anything to do with it, poor thing. And then the awful business of the girl that brought Mrs. D-B’s flowers being a victim and now the doll being left like that. You’ll think I’m completely dotty,” Brigid said, “but it’s sort of got me down a bit. Do you know, just now I caught myself thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be awful if the Flower Murderer was on board.’ ”

Tim had put out a warning hand, but a man’s shadow had already fallen across the deck and across Brigid.

“Dear child!” said Aubyn Dale. “What a pathologically morbid little notion!”

Tim and Brigid got up. Tim said automatically, “I’m afraid we’ve been trespassing on your footrests,” and hoped this would account for any embarrassment they might have displayed.

“My dear old boy!” Dale cried. “Do use the whole tatty works! Whenever you like, as far as I’m concerned. And I’m sure Madame would be enchanted.”

He had an armful of cushions and rugs which he began to arrange on the chaise longues. “Madame tends to emerge for a nice cuppa,” he explained. He punched a cushion with all the aplomb of the manservant in Charley’s Aunt and flung it into position. “There now!” he said. He straightened up, pulled a pipe out of his pocket, gripped it mannishly between his teeth, contrived to tower over Brigid and became avuncular.

“As for you, young woman,” he said cocking his head quizzically at her. “You’ve been letting a particularly lively imagination run away with you. What?”

This was said with such an exact reproduction of his television manner that Tim, in spite of his own agitation, felt momentarily impelled to whistle “Pack Up Your Troubles.” However, he said quickly, “It wasn’t as morbid as it sounded. Brigid and I have been having an argument about the alibi bet and that led to inevitable conjectures about the flower expert.”

“M-m-m,” Dale rumbled understandingly, still looking at Brigid. “I see.” He screwed his face into a whimsical grimace. “You know, Brigid, I’ve got an idea we’ve just about had that old topic. After all, it’s not the prettiest one in the world, is it? What do you think? Um?”

Pink with embarrassment, Brigid said coldly, “I feel sure you’re right.”

“Good girl,” Aubyn Dale said and patted her shoulder.

Tim muttered that it was tea-time and withdrew Brigid firmly to the starboard side. It was a relief to him to be angry.

“My God, what a frightful fellow,” he fulminated. “That egregious nice-chappery! That ineffable decency! That indescribably phony good-will!”

“Never mind,” Brigid said. “I daresay he has to keep in practice. And, after all, little as I relish admitting it, he was in fact right. I suppose I have been letting my imagination run away with me.”

Tim stood over her, put his head on one side and achieved a quite creditable imitation of Aubyn Dale. “Good girl,” he said unctuously and patted her shoulder.

Brigid made a satisfactory response to this sally and seemed to be a good deal cheered. “Of course,” she said, “I didn’t really think we’d shipped a murderer; it was just one of those things.” She looked up into Tim’s face.

“Brigid!” he said, and took her hands in his.

“No, don’t,” she said quickly. “Don’t.”

“I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about. Pay no attention. Let’s go and talk to Mr. Chips.”

They found Mr. Merryman in full cry. He had discovered Brigid’s book, The Elizabethans, which she had left on her deck-chair, and seemed to be giving a lecture on it. It was by an authoritative writer, but one, evidently, with whom Mr. Merryman found himself in passionate disagreement. It appeared that Alleyn, Father Jourdain and Miss Abbott had all been drawn into the discussion while Mr. McAngus and Mr. Cuddy looked on, the former with admiration and the latter with his characteristic air of uninformed disparagement.

Brigid and Tim sat on the deck and were accepted by Mr. Merryman as if they had come late for class but with valid excuses. Alleyn glanced at them and found time to hope that theirs, by some happy accident, was not merely a shipboard attraction. After all, he thought, he himself had fallen irrevocably in love during a voyage from the Antipodes. He turned his attention back to the matter in hand.

“I honestly don’t understand,” Father Jourdain was saying, “how you can put The Duchess of Malfi before Hamlet or Macbeth.”

“Or why,” Miss Abbott barked, “you should think Othello so much better than any of them.”

Mr. Merryman groped in his waistcoat pocket for a sodamint and remarked insufferably that really it was impossible to discuss criteria of taste where the rudiments of taste were demonstrably absent. He treated his restive audience to a comprehensive de-gumming of Hamlet and Macbeth. Hamlet, he said, was an inconsistent, deficient and redundant réchauffé of some absurd German melodrama.

It was not surprising, Mr. Merryman said, that Hamlet was unable to make up his mind since his creator had himself been the victim of a still greater blight of indecision. Macbeth was merely a muddle-headed blunderer. Strip away the language and what remained? A tediously ignorant expression of defeatism. “ ‘What’s the good of anyfink? Wy, nuffink,’ ” Mr. Merryman quoted in pedantic cockney and tossed his sodamint into his mouth.

“I don’t know anything about Shakespeare—” Mr. Cuddy began and was at once talked down.

“It is at least something,” Mr. Merryman said, “that you acknowledge your misfortune.”

“All the same,” Alleyn objected, “there is the language.”

“I am not aware,” Mr. Merryman countered, “that I have suggested that the fellow had no vocabulary.” He went on to praise the classic structure of Othello, the inevitability of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, and astounding, the admirable directness of Titus Andronicus. As an afterthought he conceded that the final scene of Lear was “respectable.”

Mr. McAngus, who had several times made plaintive little noises, now struck in with unexpected emphasis.

“To me,” he said, “Othello is almost spoilt by that bit near the end when Desdemona revives and speaks and then, you know, after all, dies. A woman who has been properly strangled would not be able to do that. It is quite ridiculous.”

“What’s the medical opinion?” Alleyn asked him.

“Pathological verisimilitude,” Mr. Merryman interjected with more than a touch of Pooh-Bah, “is irrelevant. One accepts the convention. It is artistically proper that she should be strangled and speak again. Therefore, she speaks.”

“All the same,” Alleyn said, “let’s have the expert’s opinion.” He looked at Tim.

“I wouldn’t say it was utterly impossible,” Tim said. “Of course, her physical condition can’t be reproduced by an actress and would be unacceptable if it could. I should think it’s just possible that he might not have killed her instantly and that she might momentarily revive and attempt to speak.”

“But, Doctor,” Mr. McAngus objected diffidently, “I did say properly. Properly strangled, you know.”

“Doesn’t the text,” Miss Abbott pointed out, “say she was smothered?”

“The text!” Mr. Merryman exclaimed and spread out his hands. “What text, pray? Which text?” and launched himself into a general animadversion of Shakespearian editorship. This he followed up with an extremely dogmatic pronouncement upon the presentation of the plays. The only tolerable method, he said, was that followed by the Elizabethans themselves. The bare boards. The boy-players. It appeared that Mr. Merryman himself produced the plays in this manner at his school. He treated them to a lecture upon speechcraft, costume, and make-up. His manner was so insufferably cocksure that it robbed his discourse of any interest it might have had for his extremely mixed audience. Mr. McAngus’s eyes became glazed. Father Jourdain was resigned and Miss Abbott impatient. Brigid looked at the deck and Tim looked at Brigid. Alleyn, conscious of all this, still managed to preserve the semblance of respectful attention.

He was conscious also of Mr. Cuddy, who had the air of a man balked of his legitimate prey. It was evident throughout the discussion that he had some observation to make. He now raised his voice unmelodiously and made it.

“Isn’t it funny,” Mr. Cuddy asked generally, “how the conversation seems to get round to the subject of ladies being throttled? Mrs. Cuddy was remarking on the same thing. Quite a coincidence, she was saying.”

Mr. Merryman opened his mouth, shut it, and reopened it when Brigid cried out with some violence, “I think it’s perfectly beastly. I hate it!”

Tim put his hand over hers. “Well, I’m sorry,” Brigid said, “but it is beastly. It doesn’t matter how Desdemona died. Othello isn’t a clinical example. Shakespeare wasn’t some scruffy existentialist, it’s a tragedy of simplicity and — and greatness of heart being destroyed by a common smarty-smarty little placefinder. Well, anyway,” Brigid mumbled, turning very pink, “that’s what I think and I suppose one can try and say what one thinks, can’t one?”

“I should damn well suppose one can,” Alleyn said warmly, “and how right you are, what’s more.”

Brigid threw him a grateful look.

Mr. Cuddy smiled and smiled. “I’m sure,” he said, “I didn’t mean to upset anyone.”

“Well, you have,” Miss Abbott snapped, “and now you know it, don’t you?”

“Thank you very much,” said Mr. Cuddy.

Father Jourdain stood up. “It’s tea-time,” ‘he said. “Shall we go in? And shall we decide,” he smiled at Brigid, “to take the advice of the youngest and wisest among us and keep off this not very delectable subject? I propose that we do.”

Everybody except Mr. Cuddy made affirmative noises and they went in to tea.

Alleyn put his letter away, doodled absently on his blotting paper for a few minutes, and then thought he’d stretch his legs before turning in.

He went down to the deck below and found it deserted. Having walked six times round it and had a word with the wireless officer, who sat lonely as a cloud in his cubbyhole on the starboard side, Alleyn thought he would call it a day. He passed Father Jourdain’s cabin door on his way through the passengers’ quarters and as he did so the handle turned and the door was opened a crack. He heard Father Jourdain’s voice.

“But, of course. You must come to me whenever you want to. It’s what I’m for, you know.”

A woman’s voice answered harshly and indistinguishably.

“I think,” said Father Jourdain, “you should dismiss all that from your mind and stick to your duties. Perform your penance, come to Mass tomorrow, make the special intention I have suggested. Go along, now, and say your prayers. Bless you, my child. Good-night.”

Alleyn moved quickly down the passage and had reached the stairs before Miss Abbott had time to see him.