Ngaio Marsh
Singing in the Shrouds

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Ngaio Marsh Ltd 1958

Copyright © 1958 Ngaio Marsh Ltd

Ngaio Marsh asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006159582

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007344741

Version: 2016-08-30

Dedication

FOR

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Cast of Characters

1 Prologue with Corpse,

2 Embarkation

3 Departure

4 Hyacinths

5 Before Las Palmas

6 Broken Doll

7 After Las Palmas

8 Sunday the Tenth

9 Thursday the Fourteenth

10 Aftermath

11 Arrest

12 Cape Town

Keep Reading

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Cast of Characters

PC Moir |
A Taxi-driver |
A Sailor |
Mrs Dillington-Blick |
Her Friend |
Mr Cuddy | A draper
Mrs Cuddy | His wife
Miss Katherine Abbott | An authority on church music
Mr Philip Merryman | A retired schoolmaster
Father Jourdain | An Anglo-Catholic priest
His Fellow-Cleric |
Jemima Carmichael |
Dr Timothy Makepiece | Medical Officer, Cape Farewell
Mr Aubyn Dale | A celebrity of commercial television
His dearest friend |
Their dearest male friend |
Their dearest female friend |
Mr Donald McAngus | A philatelist
Dennis | A steward
A Wireless Officer |
Captain Bannerman | Master, Cape Farewell
Superintendent Roderick Alleyn | ClD, New Scotland Yard

CHAPTER 1

Prologue with Corpse

In the Pool of London and farther east all through the dockyards the fog lay heavy. Lights swam like moons in their own halos. Insignificant buildings, being simplified, became dramatic. Along the Cape Line Company’s stretch of wharfage the ships at anchor loomed up portentously: Cape St Vincent, Glasgow. Cape Horn, London. Cape Farewell, Glasgow. The cranes that served these ships lost their heads in the fog. Their gestures as they bowed and turned became pontifical.

Beyond their illuminated places the dockyards vanished. The gang loading the Cape Farewell moved from light into nothingness. Noises were subdued and isolated and a man’s cough close at hand was more startling than the rattle of winches.

Police Constable Moir, on duty until midnight, walked in and out of shadows. He breathed the soft cold smell of wet wood and heard the slap of the night tide against the wharves. Acres and acres of shipping and forests of cranes lay around him. Ships, he thought romantically, were, in a sort of way, like little worlds. Tied up to bollards and lying quiet enough but soon to sail over the watery globe as lonely as the planets wandering in the skies. He would have liked to travel. He solaced himself with thoughts of matrimony, promotion and, when the beat was getting him down a bit, of the Police Medal and sudden glory. At a passageway between buildings near the Cape Farewell he walked slower because it was livelier there. Cars drove up: in particular an impressive new sports car with a smashing redhead at the wheel and three passengers, one of whom he recognized with interest as the great TV personality, Aubyn Dale. It was evident that the others, a man and woman, also belonged to that mysterious world of glaring lights, trucking cameras and fan mails. You could tell by the way they shouted ‘darling’ at each other as they walked through the passageway.

PC Moir conscientiously moved himself on. Darkness engulfed him, lights revealed him. He had reached the boundary of his beat and was walking along it. A bus had drawn up at the entry to the waterfront and he watched the passengers get out and plod, heads down and suitcases in hand, towards the Cape Farewell – two clergymen, a married couple, a lush bosomy lady and her friend, a benevolent-looking gentleman, a lovely young lady with a miserable expression and a young gentleman who lagged behind and looked as if he’d like to ask her to let him carry her luggage. They walked into the fog, became phantoms and disappeared down the passageway in the direction of the wharf.

For the next two and a half hours PC Moir patrolled the area. He kept an eye on occasional drunks, took a look at parked vehicles, observed ships and pubs and had an instinctive ear open for any untoward sounds. At half past eleven he took a turn down the waterfront and into a region of small ambiguous ships, ill-lit and silent, scarcely discernible in the fog that had stealthily accumulated about them.

‘Quiet,’ he thought. ‘Very quiet, this stretch.’

By a strange coincidence (as he was afterwards and repeatedly to point out) he was startled at this very moment by a harsh mewing cry.

‘Funny,’ he thought. ‘You don’t often seem to hear seagulls at night. I suppose they go to sleep like Christians.’

The cry sounded again but shortly as if somebody had lifted the needle from a record. Moir couldn’t really tell from what direction the sound had come but he fancied it was from somewhere along the Cape Company’s wharf. He had arrived at the farthest point of his beat and he now returned. The sounds of activity about the Cape Farewell grew clear again. She was still loading.

When he got back to the passageway he found a stationary taxi wreathed in fog and looking desolate. It quite surprised him on drawing nearer to see the driver, motionless over the wheel. He was so still that Moir wondered if he was asleep. However he turned his head and peered out.

‘Evening, mate,’ Moir said. ‘Nice night to get lost in.’

‘And that’s no error,’ the driver agreed hoarsely. ‘’Ere!’ he continued, leaning out and looking fixedly at the policeman. ‘You seen anybody?’

‘How d’you mean, seen?’

‘A skirt. Wiv a boxerflahs.’

‘No,’ Moir said. ‘Your fare, would it be?’

‘Ah! My fare! ’Alf a minute at the outside she says, and nips off lively. ’Alf a minute! ’Alf a bloody ar, more likely.’

‘Where’d she go? Ship?’ asked Moir, jerking his head in the direction of the Cape Farewell.

‘ ’Course. Works at a flah shop. Cartin’ rahnd bokays to some silly bitch wot’ll frow ’em to the fishes, like as not. Look at the time: arpas eleven. Flahs!’

‘P’raps she couldn’t find the recipient,’ PC Moir ventured, using police-court language out of habit.

‘P’raps she couldn’t find the flippin’ ship nor yet the ruddy ocean! P’raps she’s drahned,’ said the taxi driver in a passion.

‘Hope it’s not all that serious, I’m sure.’

‘Where’s my fare comin’ from? Twelve and a tanner gone up and when do I get it? Swelp me Bob if I don’t cut me losses and sling me ’ook.’

‘I wouldn’t do that,’ PC Moir said. ‘Stick it a bit longer, I would. She’ll be back. Tell you what, Aubyn Dale’s on board that ship.’

‘The TV bloke that does the Jolyon Swimsuits commercial and the “Pack up Your Troubles” show?’

‘That’s right. Dare say she’s spotted him and can’t tear herself away. They go nuts over Aubyn Dale.’

‘Silly cows,’ the taxi driver muttered. ‘Telly!’

‘Why don’t you stroll along to the ship and get a message up to her?’

‘Why the hell should I!’

‘Come on. I’ll go with you. I’m heading that way.’

The driver muttered indistinguishably but he clambered out of his taxi and together they walked down the passageway. It was a longish passage and very dark, but the lighted wharf showed up mistily at the far end. When they came out they were almost alongside the ship. Her stern loomed up through the fog with her name across it.

CAPE FAREWELL

GLASGOW

Her after and amidships hatches had been shut down and, forward, her last load was being taken. Above her lighted gangway stood a sailor, leaning over the rails. PC Moir looked up at him.

‘Seen anything of a young lady who brought some flowers on board, mate?’ he asked.

‘Would that be about two hours back?’

‘More like half an hour.’

‘There’s been nobody like that since I first come on and that’s eight bells.’

‘ ’Ere!’ said the driver. ‘There must of.’

‘Well, there wasn’t. I been on duty here constant. No flowers come aboard after eight bells.’

PC Moir said: ‘Well, thanks, anyway. P’raps she met someone on the wharf and handed them over.’

‘No flowers never came aboard with nobody. Not since when I told you. Eight bells.’

‘Awright, awright, we ’eard,’ said the driver ungratefully. ‘Bells!’

‘Are your passengers all aboard?’ Moir asked.

‘Last one come aboard five minutes back. All present and correct including Mr Aubyn Dale. You’d never pick him, though, now he’s slaughtered them whiskers. What a change! Oh, dear!’ The sailor made a gesture that might have indicated his chin; or his neck. ‘I reckon he’d do better to grow again,’ he said.

‘Anyone else been about? Anyone you couldn’t place, at all?’

‘Hallo-allo! What’s wrong, anyway?’

‘Nothing so far as I know. Nothing at all.’

The sailor said: ‘it’s been quiet. The fog makes it quiet.’ He spat carefully overboard. ‘I heard some poor sod singing,’ he said. ‘Just the voice: funny sort of voice too. Might of been a female and yet I don’t reckon it was. I didn’t rekkernize the chune.’

Moir waited a moment and then said: ‘Well, thanks again, sailor, we’ll be moving along.’

When he had withdrawn the driver to a suitable distance he said, coughing a little because a drift of fog had caught him in the throat: ‘What was she like, daddy? To look at?’

The taxi driver gave him a jaundiced and confused description of his fare in which the only clear glimpse to emerge was of a flash piece with a lot of yellow hair done very fancy. Pressed further the driver remembered pin-heels. When she left the taxi the girl had caught her foot in a gap between two planks and had paused to adjust her shoe.

Moir listened attentively.

‘Right you are,’ he said. ‘Now, I think I’ll just take a wee look round, daddy. You go back to your cab and wait. Wait, see?’

This suggestion evoked a fresh spate of expostulation but Moir became authoritative and the driver finally returned to his cab. Moir looked after him for a moment and then walked along to the forward winch where he was received by the shore gang with a degree of guarded curiosity that in some circles is reserved for the police. He asked them if they had seen the girl and repeated the driver’s description. None of them had done so.

As he was turning away one of the men said: ‘What seems to be the trouble anyway, Copper?’

‘Not to say trouble,’ Moir called back easily. A second voice asked derisively: ‘Why don’t you get the Flower Killer, Superintendent?’

Moir said good-naturedly: ‘We’re still hoping, mate.’ And walked away: a man alone on his job.

He began to look for the girl from the flower shop. There were many dark places along the wharf. He moved slowly, flashing his lamp into the areas under platforms, behind packing-cases, between buildings and dumps of cargo and along the dark surface of the water where it made unsavoury but irrelevant discoveries.

It was much quieter now aboard the Farewell. He heard the covers go down on the forward hatch and glancing up could just see the Blue Peter hanging limp in the fog. The gang that had been loading the ship went off through one of the sheds and their voices faded into silence.

He arrived back at the passageway. Beyond its far end the taxi still waited. On their way through here to the wharf he and the driver had walked quickly; now he went at a snail’s pace, using his flashlight. He knew that surfaces which in the dark and fog looked like unbroken walls, were in fact the rear ends of sheds with a gap between them. There was an alley opening off the main passage and this was dark indeed.

It was now one minute to midnight and the Cape Farewell, being about to sail, gave a raucous unexpected hoot like a gargantuan belch. It jolted PC Moir in the pit of his stomach.

With a sudden scrabble a rat shot out and ran across his boots. He swore, stumbled and lurched sideways. The light from his flashlamp darted eccentrically up the side alley, momentarily exhibiting a high-heeled shoe with a foot in it. The light fluttered, steadied and returned. It crept from the foot along a leg, showing a red graze through the gap in its nylon stocking. It moved on and came to rest at last on a litter of artificial pearls and fresh flowers scattered over the breast of a dead girl.

CHAPTER 2

Embarkation

At seven o’clock on that same evening an omnibus had left Euston Station for the Royal Albert Docks.

It had carried ten passengers, seven of whom were to embark in the Cape Farewell, sailing at midnight for South Africa. Of the remainder, two were seeing-off friends while the last was the ship’s doctor, a young man who sat alone and did not lift his gaze from the pages of a formidable book.

After the manner of travellers, the ship’s passengers had taken furtive stock of each other. Those who were escorted by friends speculated in undertones about those who were not.

‘My dear!’ Mrs Dillington-Blick ejaculated. ‘Honestly? Not one!’

Her friend made a slight grimace in the direction of the doctor and raised her eyebrows. ‘Not bad?’ she mouthed. ‘Noticed?’

Mrs Dillington-Blick shifted her shoulders under their mantling of silver fox and turned her head until she was able to include the doctor in an absent-minded glance.

‘I hadn’t noticed,’ she confessed and added, ‘Rather nice? But the others! My dear! Best forgotten! Still – ’

‘There are the officers,’ the friend hinted slyly.

‘My dear!’

They caught each other’s eyes and laughed again, cosily. Mr and Mrs Cuddy in the seat in front of them heard their laughter. The Cuddys could smell Mrs Dillington-Blick’s expensive scent. By turning their heads slightly they could see her reflection in the window-pane, like a photomontage richly floating across street lamps and the façades of darkened buildings. They could see the ghosts of her teeth, the feather in her hat, her earrings, the orchids on her great bust and her furs.

Mrs Cuddy stiffened in her navy overcoat and her husband smiled thinly. They, too, exchanged glances and thought of derisive things to say to each other when they were private in their cabin.

In front of the Cuddys sat Miss Katherine Abbott; alone, neat and composed. She was a practised traveller and knew that the first impression made by fellow-passengers is usually contradicted by experience. She rather liked the rich sound of Mrs Dillington-Blick’s laughter and deplored what she had heard of the Cuddy accent. But her chief concern at the moment was for her own comfort: she disliked being ruffled and had chosen her seat in the middle of the bus because people would be unlikely to brush past her and she was out of the draught when the door opened. In her mind she checked over the contents of her two immaculately packed suitcases. She travelled extremely light because she loathed what she called the ‘fussation’ of heavy luggage. With a single exception she carried nothing that was not positively essential. She thought now of the exception, a photograph in a leather case. To her fury her eyes began to sting. ‘I’ll throw it overboard,’ she thought. ‘That’ll larn her.’

The man in front of her turned a page of his newspaper and through her unshed tears Miss Abbott read a banner headline: ‘Killer Who Says It With Flowers. Still no arrest.’ She had longish sight and by casually leaning forward she was able to read the paragraph underneath.

‘The identity of the sex-murderer who sings as he kills and leaves flowers by the bodies of his victims is still unknown. Investigations leading to hundreds of interviews have proved clueless. Here (left) is a new snapshot of piquant Beryl Cohen, found strangled on the 15th January, and (right) a studio portrait of Marguerite Slatters, the second victim of a killer who may well turn out to be the worst of his kind since Jack the Ripper. Superintendent Alleyn (inset) refuses to make a statement, but says the police will welcome information about Beryl’s movements during her last hours (see page 6, 2nd column).’

Miss Abbott waited for the owner of the newspaper to turn to page 6 but he neglected to do so. She stared greedily at the enlarged snapshot of piquant Beryl Cohen and derisively at the inset. Superintendent Alleyn, grossly disfigured by the exigencies of reproduction in newsprint, stared dimly back at her.

The owner of the paper began to fidget. Suddenly he turned his head, obliging Miss Abbott to throw back her own and stare vaguely at the luggage rack where she immediately spotted his suitcase with a dangling label: ‘P. Merryman, Passenger, S.S. Cape Farewell.’ She had an uncomfortable notion that Mr Merryman knew she had been reading over his shoulder and in this she was perfectly right.

Mr Philip Merryman was fifty years old and a bachelor. He was a man of learning and taught English in one of the less distinguished of the smaller public schools. His general appearance, which was highly deceptive, corresponded closely with the popular idea of a schoolmaster, while a habit of looking over the tops of his spectacles and ruffling his hair filled in the outlines of this over-familiar picture. To the casual observer Mr Merryman was perfect Chips. To his intimates he could be hell.

He was fond of reading about crime, whether fictitious or actual, and had dwelt at some length on the Evening Herald’s piece about The Flower Killer as, in its slipshod way, it called this undetected murderer. Mr Merryman deplored journalese and had the poorest possible opinion of the methods of the police but the story itself quite fascinated him. He read slowly and methodically, wincing at stylistic solecisms and bitterly resentful of Miss Abbott’s trespassing glances. ‘Detested kite!’ Mr Merryman silently apostrophized her. ‘Blasts and fogs upon you! Why in the names of all the gods at once, can you not buy your own disnatured newspaper!’

He turned to page six, moved the Evening Herald out of Miss Abbott’s line of sight, read column two as quickly as possible, folded the newspaper, rose and offered it to her with a bow.

‘Madam,’ Mr Merryman said, ‘allow me. No doubt you prefer, as I confess I do, the undisputed possession of your chosen form of literature.’

Miss Abbott’s face darkened into a rich plum colour. In a startlingly deep voice she said: ‘Thank you: I don’t care for the evening paper.’

‘Perhaps you have already seen it?’

‘No,’ said Miss Abbott loudly. ‘I haven’t and what’s more I don’t want to. Thank you.’

Father Charles Jourdain muttered whimsically to his brother-cleric: ‘Seeds of discord! Seeds of discord!’ They were in the seat opposite and could scarcely escape noticing the incident.

‘I do hope,’ the brother-cleric murmured, ‘that you find someone moderately congenial.’

‘In my experience there is always someone.’

‘And you are an experienced traveller,’ the other sighed, rather wistfully.

‘Would you have liked the job so much, Father? I’m sorry.’

‘No, no, no, please don’t think it for a moment, really. I would carry no weight in Durban. Father Superior, as always, has made the wisest possible choice. And you are glad to be going – I hope?’

Father Jourdain waited for a moment and then said: ‘Oh, yes. Yes. I’m glad to go.’

‘It will be so interesting. The Community in Africa – ’

They settled down to talk Ango-Catholic shop.

Mrs Cuddy, overhearing them, smelt Popery.

The remaining ship’s passenger in the bus took no notice at all of her companions. She sat in the front seat with her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her camel-hair coat. She had a black zouave hat on the back of her head and a black scarf wound skilfully about her neck and a great studded black belt round her waist. She was so good-looking that all the tears she had shed still left her attractive. She was not crying now. She tucked her chin into her scarf and scowled at the bus driver’s back. Her name was Jemima Carmichael. She was twenty-three and had been crossed in love.

The bus lurched up Ludgate Hill. Dr Timothy Makepiece put down his book and leant forward, stooping, to see the last of St Paul’s. There it was, fabulous against the night sky. He experienced a sensation which he himself would have attributed, no doubt correctly, to a disturbance of the nervous ganglions but which laymen occasionally describe as a turning over of the heart. This must be, he supposed, because he was leaving London. He had come to that conclusion when he found he was no longer staring at the dome of St Paul’s but into the eyes of the girl in the front seat. She had turned, evidently with the same intention as his own, to look out and upwards.

Father Jourdain was saying: ‘Have you ever read that rather exciting thing of GKC’s: The Ball and the Cross?’

Jemima carefully made her eyes blank and faced front. Dr Makepiece returned uneasily to his book. He was filled with a kind of astonishment.

II

At about the same time as the bus passed by St Paul’s a very smart sports car had left a very smart mews flat in Mayfair. In it were Aubyn Dale, his dearest friend (who owned the car and sat at the wheel in a mink coat) and their two dearest friends who were entwined in the back seat. They had all enjoyed an expensive farewell dinner and were bound for the docks. ‘The form,’ the dearest friend said, ‘is unlimited wassail, darling, in your stateroom. Drunk, I shall be less disconsolate.’

‘But, darling!’ Mr Dale rejoined tenderly, ‘you shall be plastered! I promised! It’s all laid on.’

She thanked him fondly and presently turned into the Embankment where she drove across the bows of an oncoming taxi whose driver cursed her very heartily. His fare, a Mr Donald McAngus, peered anxiously out of the window. He also was a passenger for the Cape Farewell.

About two and a half hours later a taxi would leave The Green Thumb flower shop in Knightsbridge for the East End. In it would be a fair-haired girl and a box of flowers which was covered with Cellophane, garnished with a huge bow of yellow ribbon and addressed to Mrs Dillington-Blick. The taxi would head eastward. It, too, was destined for the Royal Albert Docks.

III

From the moment she came aboard the Cape Farewell, Mrs Dillington-Blick had automatically begun to practise what her friends, among themselves, called her technique. She had turned her attention first upon the steward. The Farewell carried only nine passengers and one steward attended them all. He was a pale, extremely plump young man with blond hair that looked crimped, liquid eyes, a mole at the corner of his mouth and a voice that was both strongly Cockney, strangely affected and indescribably familiar. Mrs Dillington-Blick took no end of trouble with him. She asked him his name (it was Dennis) and discovered that he also served in the bar. She gave him three pounds and hinted that this was merely an initial gesture. In less than no time she had discovered that he was twenty-five, played the mouth-organ and had taken a dislike to Mr and Mrs Cuddy. He showed a tendency to linger but somehow or another, and in the pleasantest manner, she contrived to get rid of him.

‘You are wonderful!’ her friend exclaimed.

‘My dear!’ Mrs Dillington-Blick returned, ‘he’ll put my make-up in the fridge when we get to the tropics.’

Her cabin was full of flowers. Dennis came back with vases for them and suggested that the orchids also should be kept in the refrigerator. The ladies exchanged glances. Mrs Dillington-Blick unpinned the cards on her flowers and read out the names with soft little cries of appreciation. The cabin, with its demure appointments and sombre decor seemed to be full of her – of her scent, her furs, her flowers and herself.

‘Steward!’ a querulous voice, at this juncture, had called in the passage. Dennis raised his eyebrows and went out.

‘He’s your slave,’ the friend said. ‘Honestly!’

‘I like to be comfortable,’ said Mrs Dillington-Blick.

It was Mr Merryman who had shouted for Dennis. When it comes to separating the easygoing from the exacting passenger, stewards are not easily deceived. But Dennis had been taken in by Mr Merryman. The spectacles, the rumpled hair and cherubic countenance had led him to diagnose absence-of-mind, benevolence and timidity. He was bitterly disappointed when Mr Merryman now gave unmistakable signs of being a Holy Terror. Nothing, it seemed, was right with the cabin. Mr Merryman had stipulated the port side and found himself on the starboard. His luggage had not been satisfactorily stowed and he wished his bed to be made up in the manner practised on land and not, he said, like an unstuck circular.

Dennis had listened to these complaints with an air of resignation; just not casting up his eyes.

‘Quite a chapter of accidents,’ he said when Mr Merryman paused. ‘Yerse. Well, we’ll see what we can do for you.’ He added: ‘Sir,’ but not in the manner required by Mr Merryman at his minor public school.

Mr Merryman said: ‘You will carry out my instructions immediately. I am going to take a short walk. When I return I shall expect to find it done.’ Dennis opened his mouth. Mr Merryman said: ‘That will do.’ Rather pointedly he then locked a case on his dressing-table and walked out of the cabin.

‘And I’ll take me oaf,’ Dennis muttered pettishly, ‘he’s TT into the bargain. What an old bee.’

Father Jourdain’s brother-priest had helped him to bestow his modest possessions about his room. This done they had looked at each other with the hesitant and slightly self-conscious manner of men who are about to take leave of each other.

‘Well – ’ they both said together and Father Jourdain added: ‘It was good of you to come all this way. I’ve been glad of your company.’

‘Have you?’ his colleague rejoined. ‘And I, needless to say, of yours.’ He hid his hands under his cloak and stood modestly before Father Jourdain. ‘The bus leaves at eleven,’ he said. ‘You’d like to settle down, I expect.’

Father Jourdain asked, smiling: ‘Is there something you want to say to me?’

‘Nothing of the smallest consequence. It’s just – well, I’ve suddenly realized how very much it’s meant to me having the great benefit of your example.’

‘My dear man!’

‘No, really! You strike me, Father, as being quite tremendously sufficient (under God and our Rule, of course) to yourself. All the brothers are a little in awe of you, did you know? I think we all feel that we know much less about you than we do about each other. Father Bernard said the other day that although ours is not a Silent Order you kept your own rule of spiritual silence.’

‘I don’t know that I am altogether delighted by Father Bernard’s aphorism.’

‘Aren’t you? He meant it awfully nicely. But I really do chatter much too much. I should take myself in hand and do something about it, I expect. Goodbye, Father. God bless you.’

‘And you, my dear fellow. But I’ll walk with you to the bus.’

‘No – please – ’

‘I should like to. ’

They had found their way down to the lower deck. Father Jourdain said a word to the sailor at the head of the gangway and both priests went ashore. The sailor watched them pace along the wharf towards the passageway at the far end of which the bus waited. In their black cloaks and hats they looked fantastic. The fog swirled about them as they walked. Half an hour had gone by before Father Jourdain returned alone. It was then a quarter past eleven.

Miss Abbott’s cabin was opposite Mrs Dillington-Blick’s. Dennis carried the suitcases to it. Their owner unpacked them with meticulous efficiency, laying folded garments away as if for some ceremonial robing. They were of a severe character. At the bottom of the second suitcase there was a stack of music in manuscript. In a pocket of the suitcase was the photograph. It was of a woman of about Miss Abbott’s own age, moderately handsome but with a heavy dissatisfied look. Miss Abbott stared at it and, fighting back a painful sense of desolation and resentment, sat on the bed and pressed clumsy hands between large knees. Time went by. The ship moved a little at her moorings. Miss Abbott heard Mrs Dillington-Blick’s rich laughter and was remotely and very slightly eased. There was the noise of fresh arrivals, of footsteps overhead and of dockside activities. From a more distant part of the passengers’ quarters came sounds of revelry and of a resonant male voice that was somehow familiar. Soon Miss Abbott was to know why. The cabin door had been hooked ajar so that when Mrs Dillington-Blick’s friend came into the passage she was very clearly audible. Mrs Dillington-Blick stood in her own open doorway and said through giggles: ‘Go on, then, I dare you,’ and the friend went creaking down the passage. She returned evidently in high excitement saying: ‘My dear, it is! He’s shaved it off! The steward told me. It’s Aubyn Dale! My dear, how perfectly gorgeous for you.’

There was another burst of giggling through which Mrs Dillington-Blick said something about not being able to wait for the tropics to wear her Jolyon swimsuit. Their further ejaculations were cut off by the shutting of their door.

‘Silly fools,’ Miss Abbott thought dully, having not the smallest interest in television personalities. Presently she began to wonder if she really would throw the photograph overboard when the ship was out at sea. Suppose she were to tear it up now and drop the pieces in the waste-paper basket? Or into the harbour? How lonely she would be then! The heavily-knuckled fingers drummed on the bony knees and their owner began to think about things going overboard into the harbour. The water would be cold and dirty: polluted by the excreta of ships: revolting!

‘Oh, God!’ Miss Abbott said, ‘how hellishly unhappy I am.’

Dennis knocked at her door.

‘Telegram, Miss Abbott,’ he fluted.

‘Telegram? For me? Yes?’

He unhooked the door and came in.

Miss Abbott took the telegram and shakily opened it. It fluttered between her fingers.

‘Darling Abbey so miserable do please write or if not too late telephone, F.’

Dennis had lingered. Miss Abbott said shakily: ‘Can I send an answer?’

‘Well – ye-ees. I mean to say – ’

‘Or telephone? Can I telephone?’

‘There’s a phone on board but I seen a queue lined up when I passed.’

‘How long before we sail?’

‘An hour, near enough, but the phone goes off earlier.’

Miss Abbott said distractedly: ‘It’s very important. Very urgent, indeed.’

‘ ’Tch, ’tch.’

‘Wait. Didn’t I see a call box on the dock? Near the place where the bus stopped?’

‘That’s correct,’ he said appreciatively. ‘Fancy you noticing!’

‘I’ve time to go off, haven’t I?’

‘Plenty of time, Miss Abbott. Oodles.’

‘I’ll do that. I’ll go at once.’

There’s coffee and sandwiches on in the dining-room.’

‘I don’t want them. I’ll go now.’

‘Cold outside. Proper freezer. Need a coat, Miss Abbott, won’t you?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Oh, very well. Thank you.’

She took her coat out of the wardrobe, snatched up her handbag, and hurried out.

‘Straight ahead, down the companionway and turn right,’ he called after her and added: ‘Don’t get lost in the fog, now.’

Her manner had been so disturbed that it aroused his curiosity. He went out on the deck and was in time to see her running along the wharf into the fog. ‘Runs like a man,’ Dennis thought. ‘Well, it takes all sorts.’

Mr and Mrs Cuddy sat on their respective beds and eyed each other with the semi-jocular family air that they reserved for intimate occasions. The blowers on the bulkhead were pouring hot air into the cabin, the porthole was sealed, the luggage was stowed and the Cuddys were cosy.

‘All right so far,’ Mrs Cuddy said guardedly.

‘Satisfied, dear?’

‘Can’t complain. Seems clean.’

‘Our own shower and toilet,’ he pointed out, jerking his head at a narrow door.

‘They’ve all got that,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t fancy sharing.’

‘What did you make of the crowd, though? Funny lot, I thought.’

‘RC priests.’

‘Only the one. The other was seeing-off. Do you reckon, RC?’

‘Looked like it, didn’t it?’

Mr Cuddy smiled. He had a strange thin smile, very broad and knowing. ‘They look ridiculous to me,’ he said.

‘We’re moving in high society, it seems,’ Mrs Cuddy remarked. ‘Notice the furs?’

‘And the perfume! Phew!’

‘I’ll have to keep my eye on you, I can see that.’

‘Could you catch what was said?’

‘Quite a bit,’ Mrs Cuddy admitted. ‘She may talk very la-de-dah but her ideas aren’t so refined.’

‘Reely?’

‘She’s a man-eater.’

Mr Cuddy’s smile broadened. ‘Did you get the flowers?’ he asked. ‘Orchids. Thirty bob each, they are.’

‘Get on!’

‘They are! It’s a fact. Very nice, too,’ Mr Cuddy said with a curious twist in his voice.

‘Did you see what happened with the other lady reading over the elderly chap’s shoulder? In the bus?’

‘Did I what! Talk about a freezer! Phew!’

‘He was reading about those murders. You know. The flower murderer. They make out he leaves flowers all scattered over the breasts of his victims. And sings.’

‘Before or after?’

‘After, isn’t it awful?’ Mrs Cuddy asked with enormous relish.

Mr Cuddy made an indefinite noise.

His wife ruminated: ‘It gives me the creeps to think about. Wonder what makes him go on so crazy.’

‘Women.’

‘That’s right. Put it all on the ladies,’ she said good-naturedly. ‘Just like a man.’

‘Well, ask yourself. Was there much in the paper?’

‘I couldn’t see properly but I think so. It’s on all the placards. They haven’t got him, of course.’

‘Wish we’d got a paper. Can’t think how I forgot.’

‘There might be one in the lounge.’

‘What a hope!’

‘The old chap left his in the bus. I noticed.’

‘Did you? You know,’ Mr Cuddy said, ‘I’ve got quite a fancy for the evening paper. I might stroll back and see if it’s there. The bus doesn’t go till eleven. I can just do it.’

‘Don’t be long. You know what I’m like. If you missed the boat – ’

‘We don’t sail till midnight, dear, and it’s only ten to eleven now. I won’t be more than a few minutes. Think I’d let you go out to sea with all these fascinatin’ sailors?’

‘Get along with you!’

‘Won’t be half a tick. I’ve got the fancy for it.’

‘I know I’m silly,’ Mrs Cuddy said, ‘but whenever you go out – to the Lodge or anything – I always get that nervous.’

‘Silly girl. I’d say come too, but it’s not worth it. There’s coffee on down below.’

‘Coffee essence, more like.’

‘Might as well try it when I get back. Behave yourself now.’

He pulled a steel-grey felt hat down almost to his ears, put on a belted raincoat and, looking rather like the film director’s idea of a private detective, he went ashore.

Mrs Cuddy remained, anxious and upright on her bunk.

Aubyn Dale’s dearest friend looking through the porthole said with difficulty: ‘Darling: it’s boiling up for a pea-shuper-souper. I think perhaps we ought to weep ourselves away.’

‘Darling, are you going to drive?’

‘Naturally.’

‘You will be all right, won’t you?’

‘Sweetie,’ she protested, ‘I’m never safer than when I’m plastered. It just gives me that little something other drivers haven’t got.’

‘How terrifying.’

‘To show you how completely in control I am, I suggest that it might be better to leave before we’re utterly fogged down. Oh, dear! I fear I am going into a screaming weep. Where’s my hanky?’

She opened her bag. A coiled mechanical snake leapt out at her, having been secreted there by her lover who had a taste for such drolleries.

This prank, though it was received as routine procedure, a little delayed their parting. Finally, however, it was agreed that the time had come.

‘ ’Specially,’ said their dearest male friend, ‘as we’ve killed the last bottle. Sorry, old boy. Bad form. Poor show.’

‘Come on,’ said their dearest girl friend. ‘It’s been smashing, actually. Darling Auby! But we ought to go.’

They began elaborate leave-takings but Aubyn Dale said he’d walk back to the car with them.

They all went ashore, talking rather loudly, in well trained voices, about the fog which had grown much heavier.

It was now five past eleven. The bus had gone, the solitary taxi waited in its place. Their car was parked farther along the wharf. They stood round it, still talking, for some minutes. His friends all told Dale many times how much good the voyage would do him, how nice he looked without his celebrated beard, how run down he was and how desperately the programme would sag without him. Finally they drove off waving and trying to make hip-hip-hooray with their horn.

Aubyn Dale waved, shoved his hands down in the pockets of his camel-hair coat and walked back towards the ship. A little damp breeze lifted his hair, eddies of fog drifted past him. He thought how very photogenic the wharves looked. The funnels on some of the ships were lit from below and the effect, blurred and nebulous though it now had become, was exciting. Lights hung like globes in the murk. There were hollow indefinable sounds and a variety of smells. He pictured himself down here doing one of his special features and began to choose atmospheric phrases. He would have looked rather good, he thought, framed in the entrance to the passageway. His hand strayed to his naked chin and he shuddered. He must pull himself together. The whole idea of the voyage was to get away from his job: not to think of it, even. Or of anything else that was at all upsetting. Such as his dearest friend, sweetie though she undoubtedly was. Immediately, he began to think about her. He ought to have given her something before she left. Flowers? No, no. Not flowers. They had an unpleasant association. He felt himself grow cold and then hot. He clenched his hands and walked into the passageway.

About two minutes later the ninth and last passenger for the Cape Farewell arrived by taxi at the docks. He was Mr Donald McAngus, an elderly bachelor, who was suffering from a terrible onset of ship-fever. The fog along the Embankment had grown heavier. In the City it had been atrocious. Several times his taxi had come to a stop, twice it had gone off its course and finally, when he was really feeling physically sick with anxiety the driver had announced that this was as far as he cared to go. He indicated shapes, scarcely perceptible, of roofs and walls and the faint glow beyond them. That, he said, was where Mr McAngus’s ship lay. He had merely to make for the glow and he would be aboard. There ensued a terrible complication over the fare, and the tip: first Mr McAngus under-tipped and then, in a frenzy of apprehension, he over-tipped. The driver adopted a pitying attitude. He put Mr McAngus’s fibre suitcases into their owner’s grip and tucked his cardboard box and his brown paper parcel under his arms. Thus burdened Mr McAngus disappeared at a shambling trot into the fog and the taxi returned to the West End of London.

The time was now eleven-thirty. The taxi from the flower shop was waiting for his fare and PC Moir was about to engage him in conversation. The last hatch was covered, the Cape Farewell was cleared and Captain Bannerman, Master, awaited his pilot.

At one minute to twelve the siren hooted.

PC Moir was now at the police call-box. He had been put through to the CID.

‘There’s one other thing, sir,’ he was saying, ‘beside the flowers. There’s a bit of paper clutched in the right hand, sir. It appears to be a fragment of an embarkation notice, like they give passengers. For the Cape Farewell.’

He listened, turning his head to look across the tops of half-seen roofs at the wraith of a scarlet funnel, with a white band. It slid away and vanished smoothly into the fog.

‘I’m afraid I can’t board her, sir,’ he said. ‘She’s sailed.’

CHAPTER 3

Departure

At regular two-minute intervals throughout the night, Cape Farewell sounded her siren. The passengers who slept were still, at times, conscious of this noise; as of some monster blowing monstrous raspberries through their dreams. Those who waked listened with varying degrees of nervous exasperation. Aubyn Dale, for instance, tried to count the seconds between blasts, sometimes making them come to as many as one hundred and thirty and at others, by a deliberate tardiness, getting them down to one hundred and fifteen. He then tried counting his pulse but this excited him. His heart behaved with the greatest eccentricity. He began to think of all the things it was better not to think of, including the worst one of all: the awful debacle of the Midsummer Fair at Melton Medbury. This was just the sort of thing that his psychiatrist had sent him on the voyage to forget. He had already taken one of his sleeping-pills. At two o’clock he took another and it was effective.

Mr Cuddy also was restive. He had recovered Mr Merryman’s Evening Herald from the bus. It was in a somewhat dishevelled condition but when he got into bed he read it exhaustively, particularly the pieces about the Flower Murderer. Occasionally he read aloud for Mrs Cuddy’s entertainment but presently her energetic snores informed him that this exercise was profitless. He let the newspaper fall to the deck and began to listen to the siren. He wondered if his fellow-travellers would exhibit a snobbish attitude towards Mrs Cuddy and himself. He thought of Mrs Dillington-Blick’s orchids, heaving a little at their superb anchorage, and himself gradually slipped into an uneasy doze.

Mr Merryman, on the other hand, slept heavily. If he was visited by dreams of a familiar steward or an inquisitive spinster, they were of too deeply unconscious a nature to be recollected. Like many people of an irascible temperament, he seemed to find compensation for his troubles in the profundity of his slumber.

So, too, did Father Jourdain, who on finishing his prayers, getting into bed and putting himself through one or two pretty stiff devotional hoops, fell into a quiet oblivion that lasted until morning.

Mr Donald McAngus took a little time to recover from the circumstances that attended his late arrival. However he had taken coffee and sandwiches in the dining-room and had eyed his fellow-passengers with circumspection and extreme curiosity. His was the not necessarily malicious but all-absorbing inquisitiveness of the Lowland Scot. He gathered facts about other people as an indiscriminate philatelist gathers stamps: merely for the sake of adding to his collection. He had found himself at the same table as the Cuddys – the passengers had not yet been given their official places – and had already discovered that they lived in Dulwich and that Mr Cuddy was ‘in business’ though of what nature Mr McAngus had been unable to divine. He had told them about his trouble with the taxi. Distressed by Mrs Cuddy’s unwavering stare he had tied himself up in a tangle of parentheses and retired unsatisfied to his room and his bed.

There he lay tidily all night in his gay crimson pyjamas, occupied with thoughts so unco-ordinated and feckless that they modulated imperceptibly into dreams and were not at all disturbed by the reiterated booming of the siren.

Miss Abbott had returned from the call box on the wharf, scarcely aware of the fog and with a dull effulgence under her darkish skin. The sailor at the gangway noticed, and was afterwards to remember, her air of suppressed excitement. She went to bed and was still wide-awake when the ship sailed. She watched blurred lights slide past the porthole and felt the throb of the engines at dead slow. At about one o’clock in the morning she fell asleep.

Jemima Carmichael hadn’t paid much attention to her companions: it took all her determination and fortitude to hold back her tears. She kept telling herself angrily that crying was a voluntary physical process, entirely controllable and in her case absolutely without justification. Lots of other people had their engagements broken off at the last minute and were none the worse for it: most of them without her chance of cutting her losses and bolting to South Africa.

It had been a mistake to peer up at St Paul’s. That particular kind of beauty always got under her emotional guard; and there she went again with the man in the opposite seat looking into her face as if he’d like to be sorry for her. From then onwards the bus journey had seemed intolerable but the walk through the fog to the ship had been better. It was almost funny that her departure should be attended by such obvious gloom. She had noticed Mrs Dillington-Blick’s high-heeled patent leather shoes tittupping ahead and had heard scraps of the Cuddys’ conversation. She had also been conscious of the young man walking just behind her. When they had emerged from the passageway to the wharf he said:

‘Look, do let me carry that suitcase,’ and had taken it out of her hand before she could expostulate. ‘My stuff’s all on board,’ he said. ‘I feel unimportant with nothing in my hand. Don’t you hate feeling unimportant?’

‘Well, no,’ Jemima said, surprised into an unconventional reply. ‘At the moment, I’m not minding it.’

‘Perhaps it’s a change for you.’

‘Not at all,’ she said hurriedly.

‘Or perhaps women are naturally shrinking creatures, after all. “Such,” you may be thinking, “is the essential vanity of the human male.” And you are perfectly right. Did you know that Aubyn Dale is to be a passenger?’

‘Is he?’ Jemima said without much interest. ‘I would have thought a luxury liner and organized fun would be more his cup-of-tea.’

‘I understand it’s a rest cure. Far away from the madding camera and I bet you anything you like that in no time he’ll be missing his spotlights. I’m the doctor, by the way, and this is my first long voyage. My name’s Timothy Makepiece. You must be either Miss Katherine Abbott or Miss Jemima Carmichael and I can’t help hoping it’s the latter.’

‘You’d be in a bit of a spot if it wasn’t,’ Jemima said.

‘I risked everything on the one throw. Rightly, I perceive. Is it your first long voyage?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t sound as excited as I would have expected. This is the ship, looming up. It’s nice to think we shall be meeting again. What is your cabin number? I’m not being fresh: I just want to put your bag in it.’

‘It’s 4. Thank you very much.’

‘Not at all,’ said Dr Makepiece politely. He led the way to her cabin, put her suitcase into it, made her a rather diffident little bow and went away.

Jemima thought without much interest: ‘The funny thing is that I don’t believe that young man was putting on an act,’ and at once stopped thinking about him.

Her own predicament came swamping over her again and she began to feel a great desolation of the spirit. She had begged her parents and her friends not to come to the ship, not to see her off at all and already it seemed a long time ago that she had said goodbye to them. She felt very much alone.

The cabin was without personality. Jemima heard voices and the hollow sounds of footsteps on the deck overhead. She smelt the inward rubbery smell of a ship. How was she to support five weeks of the woman with the pin-heels and the couple with Clapham Common voices and that incredibly forbidding spinster? She unpacked the luggage which was already in her cabin. Dennis looked in and she thought him quite frightful. Then she took herself to task for being bloody-minded and beastly. At that moment she found in her cabin-trunk a parcel from a wonderful shop with a very smart dress in it and a message from her mother and at this discovery she sat down on her bunk and cried like a small girl.

By the time she had got over that and finished her unpacking she was suddenly quite desperately tired and went to bed.

Jemima lay in her bed and listened to the sounds of the ship and the port. Gradually the cabin acquired an air of being her own and somewhere at the back of all the wretchedness there stirred a very slight feeling of anticipation. She heard a pleasant voice saying again: ‘You don’t sound as excited as I would have expected,’ and then she was so sound asleep that she didn’t hear the ship sail and was only very vaguely conscious of the fog signal, booming at two-minute intervals all night.

By half past twelve all the passengers were in bed, even Mrs Dillington-Blick who had given her face a terrific workout with a new and complicated beauty treatment.

The officers of the watch went about their appointed ways and the Cape Farewell, sailing dead slow, moved out of the Thames estuary with a murderer on board.

II

Captain Jasper Bannerman stood on the bridge with the pilot. He would be up all night. Their job was an ancient one and though they had radar and wireless to serve them, their thoughts as they peered into the blank shiftiness of the fog were those of their remote predecessors. An emergency warning come through with its procession of immemorial names – Dogger, Dungeness, Outer Hebrides, Scapa Flow, Portland Bill and the Goodwin Sands. ‘She’s a corker,’ said the pilot alluding to the fog. ‘Proper job, she’s making of it.’

The voices of invisible shipping, hollow and desolate, sounded at uneven distances. Time passed very slowly.

At two-thirty the wireless officer came to the bridge with two messages.

‘I thought I’d bring these up myself, sir,’ he said, referring obliquely to his cadet. ‘They’re in code. Urgent.’

Captain Bannerman said: ‘All right. You might wait, will you,’ and went into his room. He got out his code book and deciphered the messages. After a considerable interval he called out: ‘Sparks.’

The wireless officer tucked his cap under his arm, entered the captain’s cabin and shut the door.

‘This is a damned perishing bloody turn-up,’ Captain Bannerman said. The wireless officer waited, trying not to look expectant. Captain Bannerman walked over to the starboard porthole and silently re-read the decoded messages. The first was from the Managing Director of the Cape Line Company:

‘Very secret. Directors compliments stop confident you will show every courtesy to Superintendent Alleyn boarding you off Portsmouth by pilot cutter stop will travel as passenger stop suggest uses pilots room stop please keep me personally advised all developments stop your company relies on your discretion and judgment stop Cameron stop message ends.’

Captain Bannerman made an indeterminate but angry noise and re-read the second message.

‘Urgent immediate and confidential stop Superintendent R. Alleyn will board you off Portsmouth by pilot cutter stop he will explain nature of problem stop this department is in communication with your company stop C.A. Majoriebanks Assistant Commissioner Criminal Investigation Department Scotland Yard message ends.’

‘I’ll give you the replies,’ Captain Bannerman said, glaring at his subordinate. ‘Same for both! “Instructions received and noted Bannerman.” And you’ll oblige me, Sparks, by keeping the whole thing under your cap.’

‘Certainly, sir.’

‘Dead under.’

‘Certainly, sir.’

‘Very well.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

When the wireless officer had gone Captain Bannerman remained in a sort of scandalized trance for half a minute and then returned to the bridge.

Throughout the rest of the night he gave the matter in hand, which was the pilotage of his ship through the worst fog for ten years, his sharpest attention. At the same time and on a different level, he speculated about his passengers. He had caught glimpses of them from the bridge. Like every man who so much as glanced at her, he had received a very positive impression of Mrs Dillington-Blick. A fine woman. He had also noticed Jemima Carmichael who came under the general heading of Sweet Young Girl and as they approached the tropics would probably cause a ferment among his officers. At another level he was aware of, and disturbed by the two radiograms. Why the suffering cats, he angrily wondered, should he have to take in at the last second, a plain-clothes detective? His mind ranged through an assortment of possible reasons. Stowaway? Escaping criminal? Wanted man in the crew? Perhaps, merely, a last-minute assignment at Las Palmas but if so, why didn’t the fellow fly? It would be an infernal bore to have to put him up: in the pilot’s room of all places where one would be perpetually aware of his presence. At four o’clock, the time of low vitality, Captain Bannerman was visited by a premonition that this was going to be an unlucky voyage.

III

All the next morning the fog still hung over the English Channel. As she waited off Portsmouth the Farewell was insulated in obscurity. Her five male passengers were on deck with their collars turned up. In the cases of Messrs Merryman, McAngus and Cuddy and Father Jourdain they wore surprised-looking caps on their heads and wandered up and down the boat-deck or sat disconsolately on benches that would probably never be used again throughout the voyage. Before long Aubyn Dale came back to his own quarters. He had, in addition to his bedroom, a little sitting-room: an arrangement known in the company’s offices as The Suite. He had asked Mrs Dillington-Blick and Dr Timothy Makepiece to join him there for a drink before luncheon. Mrs Dillington-Blick had sumptuously appeared on deck at about eleven o’clock and, figuratively speaking with one hand tied behind her back, had achieved this invitation by half past. Dr Makepiece had accepted, hoping that Jemima Carmichael, too, had been invited but Jemima spent the morning walking on the boat-deck and reading in a chilly but undiscovered little shelter aft of the centrecastle.

Mr McAngus, too, remained but a short time on deck and soon retired to the passengers’ drawing-room, where, after peering doubtfully at the bookcases, he sat in a corner and fell asleep. Mrs Cuddy was also there and also asleep. She had decided in the teeth of the weather forecast that it was going to be rough and had taken a pill. Miss Abbott was tramping up and down the narrow lower deck having, perhaps instinctively, hit upon that part of the ship which, after the first few hours, is deserted by almost everyone. In the plan shown to passengers it was called the promenade deck.

It was Jemima who first noticed the break in the weather. A kind of thin warmth fell across the page of her book: she looked up and saw that the curtain of fog had grown threadbare and that sunlight had weakly filtered through. At the same moment the Farewell gave her noonday hoot and then Jemima heard the sound of an engine. She went over to the port side and there, quite close, was the pilot cutter. She watched it come alongside the rope ladder. A tall man stood amidships, looking up at the Farewell. Jemima was extremely critical of men’s clothes and she noticed his with absentminded approval. A sailor at the head of the ladder dropped a line to the cutter and hauled up two cases. The pilot went off and the tall man climbed the ladder very handily and was met by the cadet on duty who took him up to the bridge.

On his way he passed Mr Merryman and Mr Cuddy who looked up from their crime novels and were struck by the same vague notion, immediately dismissed, that they had seen the new arrival before. In this they were not altogether mistaken: on the previous evening they had both looked at his heavily distorted photograph in the Evening Herald. He was Superintendent R. Alleyn.

IV

Captain Bannerman put his hands in his jacket pockets and surveyed his latest passenger. At the outset Alleyn had irritated Captain Bannerman by not looking like his own conception of a plainclothes detective and by speaking with what the Captain, who was an inverted snob, considered a bloody posh accent entirely unsuited to a cop. He himself had been at some pains to preserve his own Midland habit of speech.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Superintendent A ’leen is it? – I take it you’ll tell me what all this is in aid of and I don’t mind saying I’ll be glad to know.’

‘I suppose, sir,’ Alleyn said, ‘you’ve been cursing ever since you got whatever signals they sent you.’

‘Well – not to say cursing.’

‘I know damn’ well what a bore this must be. The only excuse I can offer is one of expedience: and I must say of extreme urgency.’

Captain Bannerman, deliberately broadening his vowels said: ‘Sooch a-a-s?’

‘Such as murder. Multiple murder.’

‘Mooltipul murder? Here: you don’t mean this chap that says it with flowers and sings.’

‘I do, indeed.’

‘What the hell’s he got to do with my ship?’

Tve every reason to believe,’ Alleyn said, ‘that he’s aboard your ship.’

‘Don’t talk daft.’

‘I dare say it does sound preposterous.’

Captain Bannerman took his hands out of his pockets, walked over to a porthole and looked out. The fog had lifted and the Farewell was underway. He said, with a change of voice: ‘There you are! That’s the sort of crew they sign on for you these days. Murderers!’

‘My bosses,’ Alleyn said, ‘don’t seem to think he’s in the crew.’

‘The stewards have been in this ship three voyages.’

‘Nor among the stewards. Unless sailors or stewards carry embarkation notices.’

‘D’you mean to stand there and tell me we’ve shipped a murdering passenger?’

‘It looks a bit like it at the moment.’

‘Here!’ Captain Bannerman said with a change of voice. ‘Sit down. Have a drink. I might have known it’d be a passenger.’

Alleyn sat down but declined a drink, a circumstance that produced the usual reaction from his companion. ‘Ah!’ Captain Bannerman said with an air of gloomy recognition. ‘I suppose not. I suppose not.’

His manner was so heavy that Alleyn felt impelled to say: ‘That doesn’t mean, by the way, that I’m about to arrest you.’

‘I doubt if you could, you know. Not while we’re at sea. I very much question it.’

‘Luckily, the problem doesn’t at the moment arise.’

‘I should have to look up the regulations,’ sighed Captain Bannerman.

‘Look here,’ Alleyn suggested, ‘may I try to give you the whole story, as far as it affects my joining your ship?’

‘That’s what I’ve been waiting for, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Alleyn agreed, ‘I’m sure it is. Here goes then!’

He looked full at Captain Bannerman who seated himself, placed his hands on his knees, raised his eyebrows and waited.

‘You know about these cases, of course,’ Alleyn said, ‘as far as they’re being reported in the papers. During the last thirty days up to about eleven o’clock last night there have been two homicides which we believe to have been committed by the same person, and which may be part of a larger pattern. In each case the victim was a woman and in each case she had been strangled and flowers had been left on the body. I needn’t worry you with any other details at the moment. Last night, a few minutes before this ship sailed, a third victim was found. She was in a dark side-alley off the passageway between the place where the bus and taxis put down passengers and the actual wharf where you were moored. She was a girl from a flower-shop who was bringing a box of hyacinths to one of your passengers: a Mrs Dillington-Blick. Her string of false pearls had been broken and the flowers had been scattered, in the usual way, over the victim.’

‘Any singing?’

‘What? Oh, that. That’s an element that has been very much played up by the Press. It certainly does seem to have occurred on the first occasion. The night of the fifteenth of last month. The victim you may remember was Beryl Cohen who ran a cheapjack stall in Warwick Road and did a bit of the older trade on the side. She was found in her bed-sitting-room in a side street behind Paddington. The lodger in the room above seems to have heard the visitor leaving at about ten o’clock. The lodger says the visitor was singing.’

‘What a dreadful thing,’ Captain Bannerman said primly. ‘What sort of song, for God’s sake?’

‘The Jewel Song,’ Alleyn said, ‘from Faust. In an alto voice.’

‘I’m a bass-baritone, myself,’ the Captain said absently. ‘Oratorio,’ he gloomily added.

‘The second victim,’ Alleyn went on, ‘was a respectable spinster called Marguerite Slatters, who was found similarly strangled in a street in Fulham on the night of the 25th January. A nightwatchman on duty in a warehouse nearby says he heard someone rendering “The Honeysuckle and the Bee” in a highish voice at what may have been the appropriate time.’

Alleyn paused, but Captain Bannerman merely glowered at him.

‘And it appears that the sailor on duty at the head of our gangway last night heard singing in the fog. A funny sort of voice, he said. Might mean anything, of course, or nothing. Drunken seaman. Anything. He didn’t recognize the tune.’

‘Here! About last night. How d’you know the victim was – ’ Captain Bannerman began and then said: ‘All right. Go on.’

‘In her left hand, which was clenched in cadaveric spasm, was a fragment of one of the embarkation notices your company issues to passengers. I believe the actual ticket is usually pinned to this notice and torn off by the officer whose duty it is to collect it. He hands the embarkation notice back to the passenger: it has no particular value but I dare say a great many passengers think it constitutes some kind of authority and stick to it. Unfortunately this fragment only showed part of the word Farewell and the date.’

‘No name?’

‘No name.’

‘Doesn’t amount to much, in that case,’ said Captain Bannerman.

‘It suggests that the victim struggling with her murderer grasped this paper, that it was torn across and that the rest of it may have remained in the murderer’s possession or may have been blown somewhere about the wharf.’

‘The whole thing might have been blowing about the wharf when the victim grabbed it.’

‘That’s a possibility of course.’

‘Probability, more like. What about the other half then?’

‘When I left for Portsmouth this morning it hadn’t been found.’

‘There you are!’

‘But if all the others have kept their embarkation notices – ’

‘Why should they?’

‘May we tackle that one a bit later? Now, the body was found by the PC on that beat, five minutes before you sailed. He’s a good chap and kept his head admirably, it seems, but he couldn’t do anything about boarding you. You’d sailed. As he talked to me on the dock telephone he saw your funnel slip past into the fog. A party of us from the Yard went down and did the usual things. We got in touch with your Company, who were hellishly anxious that your sailing shouldn’t be delayed.’

‘I’ll be bound!’ Captain Bannerman ejaculated.

‘ – and my bosses came to the conclusion that we hadn’t got enough evidence to justify our keeping you back while we held a full-scale inquiry in the ship.’

‘My Gawd!’

‘So it was decided that I should sail with you and hold it, as well as I can, under the counter.’

‘And what say,’ Captain Bannerman asked slowly and without any particular signs of bad temper, ‘what say I won’t have it? There you are! How about that?’

‘Well,’ Alleyn said, ‘I hope you don’t cut up rough in that particular direction and I’m sure you won’t. But suppose you did and suppose I took it quietly, which, by the way, I wouldn’t: the odds are you’d have another corpse on your hands before you made your next landfall.’

Captain Bannerman leant forward, still keeping his palms on his knees, until his face was within a few inches of Alleyn’s. His eyes were of that piercing, incredible blue that landsmen so correctly associate with sailors and his face was the colour of old bricks.

‘Do you mean,’ he asked furiously, ‘to tell me you think this chap’s not had enoof to satisfy him for the voyage?’

‘So far,’ Alleyn said, ‘he’s been operating at ten-day intervals. That’ll carry him, won’t it, to somewhere between Las Palmas and Cape Town?’

‘I don’t believe it. I don’t believe he’s aboard.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘What sort of chap is he? Tell me that.’

Alleyn said: ‘You tell me. You’ve got just as good a chance of being right.’

‘Me!’

‘You or anyone else: may I smoke?’

‘Here – ’ the Captain began and reached for a cigarette box.

‘ – a pipe, if you don’t mind.’ Alleyn pulled it out and as he talked, filled it.

‘These cases,’ he said, ‘are the worst of the lot from our point of view. We can pick a card-sharp or a con-man or a sneak-thief or a gunman or a dozen other bad lots by certain mannerisms and tricks of behaviour. They develop occupational habits and they generally keep company with their own kind. But not the man who, having never before been in trouble with the police, begins, perhaps latish in life, to strangle women at ten-day intervals and leave flowers on their faces. He’s a job for the psychiatrist if ever there was one and he doesn’t go in for psychiatry. He’s merely an example. But of what? The result of bad housing conditions, or a possessive mother or a kick on the head at football or a bullying schoolmaster or a series of regrettable grandparents? Again, your guess is as good as mine. He is. He exists. He may behave with perfect propriety in every possible aspect of his life but this one. He may be, and often is, a colourless little fellow who trots to and fro upon his lawful occasions for, say fifty years, seven months and a day. On the day after that he trots out and becomes a murderer. Probably there have been certain eccentricities of behaviour which he’s been at great pains to conceal and which have suddenly become inadequate. Whatever compulsion it is that hounds him into his appointed crime, it now takes over. He lets go and becomes a monster.’

‘Ah!’ Captain Bannerman said, ‘a monster. There’s unnatural things turn up where you’d least expect to find them in most human souls. That I will agree to. But not in my ship.’

The two men looked at each other, and Alleyn’s heart sank. He knew pigheadedness when he met it.

The ship’s engines, now at full speed, drove her, outward bound, upon her course. There was no more fog: a sunny seascape accepted her as its accident. Her wake opened obediently behind her and the rhythm of her normal progress established itself. England was left behind and the Farewell, sailing on her lawful occasions, set her course for Las Palmas.

V

‘What,’ Captain Bannerman asked, ‘do you want me to do? The thing’s flat-out ridiculous but let’s hear what you want. I can’t say fairer than that, can I? Come on.’

‘No,’ Alleyn agreed, ‘that’s fair enough and more than I bargained for. First of all, perhaps I ought to tell you what I don’t want. Particularly, I don’t want to be known for what I am.’

‘Is that so?’

‘I gather that supercargoes are a bit out-of-date, so I’d better not be a supercargo. Could I be an employee of the company going out to their Durban office?’

Captain Bannerman stared fixedly at him and then said: ‘It’d have to be something very senior.’

‘Why? On account of age? – ’

‘It’s nothing to do with age. Or looks. Or rather,’ Captain Bannerman amended, ‘it’s the general effect.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t quite – ’

‘You don’t look ill, either. Voyage before last, outward bound, we carried a second cousin of the managing director’s. Getting over D.T.’s, he was, after taking one of these cures. You’re not a bit like him. You’re not a bit like a detective either if it comes to that,’ Captain Bannerman added resentfully.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Have you always been a ’tec?’

‘Not absolutely.’

‘I know,’ Captain Bannerman said, ‘leave it to me. You’re a cousin of the chairman and you’re going out to Canberra via Durban to one of these legations or something. There’s all sorts of funny jobs going in Canberra. Anybody’ll believe anything, almost.’

‘Will they?’

‘It’s a fact.’

‘Fair enough. Who is your chairman?’

‘Sir Graeme Harmond.’

‘Do you mean a little fat man with pop eyes and a stutter?’

‘Well,’ said Captain Bannerman, staring at Alleyn, ‘if you care to put it that way.’

‘I know him.’

‘You don’t tell me!’

‘He’ll do.’

‘Do!’

‘I’d better not use my own name. There’s been something in the papers. How about C.J. Roderick?’

‘Roderick?’

‘It happens to be the first chunk of my own name but it’s never appeared in print. When you do this sort of thing you answer more readily to a name you’re used to.’ He thought for a moment. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Let’s play safer and make it Broderick.’

‘Wasn’t your picture in last night’s Herald?’

‘Was it? Hell!’

‘Wait a bit.’

The Captain went into his stateroom and came back with a copy of the paper that had so intrigued Mr Cuddy. He folded it back at the snapshot of piquant Beryl Cohen and Superintendent R. Alleyn (inset).

‘Is that like me?’ Alleyn said.

‘No.’

‘Good.’

‘There may be a very slight resemblance. It looks as if your mouth was full.’

‘It was.’

‘I see,’ said Captain Bannerman heavily.

‘We’ll have to risk it.’

‘I suppose you’ll want to keep very much to yourself?’

‘On the contrary. I want to mix as much as possible with the passengers.’

‘Why?’

Alleyn waited for a moment and then asked: ‘Have you got a good memory for dates?’

‘Dates.’

‘Could you, for instance, provide yourself with a cast-iron alibi plus witnesses for the fifteenth of last month between ten and eleven p.m., the twenty-fifth between nine p.m. and midnight and for last night during the half-hour before you sailed?’

Captain Bannerman breathed stertorously and whispered to himself. At last he said: ‘Not all three, I couldn’t.’

‘There you are, you see.’

Captain Bannerman removed his spectacles and again advanced his now empurpled face to within a short distance of Alleyn’s.

‘Do I look like a Sex-Monster?’ he furiously demanded.

‘Don’t ask me,’ Alleyn rejoined mildly. ‘I don’t know what they look like. That’s part of the trouble. I thought I’d made it clear.’

As Captain Bannerman had nothing to say to this, Alleyn went on. ‘I’ve got to try and check those times with all your passengers and – please don’t misunderstand me, sir – I can only hope that most of them manage to turn in solider alibis than, on the face of it, yours looks to be.’

‘Here! I’m clear for the 15th. We were berthed in Liverpool and I was aboard with visitors till two in the morning.’

‘If that can be proved we won’t pull you in for murder.’

Captain Bannerman said profoundly: ‘That’s a queer sort of style to use when you’re talking to the Master of the ship.’

‘I mean no more than I say, and that’s not much. After all, you don’t come aboard your own ship, clutching an embarkation notice.’

Captain Bannerman said: ‘Not as a rule. No.’

Alleyn stood up. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘what a bind this is for you and I really am sorry. I’ll keep as quiet as I reasonably may.’

‘I’ll bet you anything you like he hasn’t shipped with us. Anything you like! Now!’

‘If we’d been dead certain we’d have held you up until we got him.’

‘It’s all some perishing mistake.’

‘It may be.’

‘Well,’ Captain Bannerman said grudgingly as he also rose. ‘I suppose we’ll have to make the best of it. No doubt you’d like to see your quarters. This ship carries a pilot’s cabin. On the bridge. We can give you that if it suits.’

Alleyn said it would suit admirably. ‘And if I can just be treated as a passenger – ’

‘I’ll tell the Chief Steward.’ He went to his desk, sat down behind it, pulled a slip of paper towards him and wrote on it, muttering as he did so. ‘Mr C. J. Broderick, relative of the chairman, going out to a Commonwealth Relations Office job in Canberra. That it?’

‘That’s it. I don’t, of course, have to tell you anything about the need for complete secrecy.’

‘You do not. I’ve no desire to make a fool of myself, talking daft to my ship’s complement.’

A fresh breeze had sprung up and was blowing through the starboard porthole. It caught the memorandum that the Captain had just completed. The paper fluttered, turned over and was revealed as a passenger’s embarkation notice for the Cape Farewell.

Staring fixedly at Alleyn, the Captain said: ‘I used it yesterday in the offices. For a memo.’ He produced a curiously uncomfortable laugh. ‘It’s not been torn, anyway,’ he said.

‘No,’ Alleyn said, ‘I noticed that.’

An irresponsible tinkling on a xylophonic gong announced the first luncheon on board the Cape Farewell, outward bound.

CHAPTER 4

Hyacinths

Having watched Alleyn mount the companionway Jemima Carmichael returned to her desolate little veranda aft of the centre-castle and to her book.

She had gone through the morning in a kind of trance, no longer inclined to cry or to think much of her broken engagement and the scenes that had attended it or even of her own unhappiness. It was as if the face of departure had removed her to a spiritual distance quite out-of-scale with the night’s journey down the estuary and along the Channel. She had walked until she was tired, tasted salt on her lips, read a little, heard gulls making their BBC atmospheric noises and watched them fly mysteriously in and out of the fog. Now in the sunshine she fell into a half-doze.

When she opened her eyes it was to find that Doctor Timothy Makepiece stood not far off, leaning over the rail with his back towards her. He had, it struck her, a pleasant nape to his neck: his brown hair grew tidily into it. He was whistling softly to himself. Jemima, still in a strange state of inertia, idly watched him. Perhaps he sensed this for he turned and smiled at her.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘Not sea-sick or anything?’

‘Not at all. Only ridiculously sleepy.’

‘I expect that is the sea. They tell me it does have that effect on some people. Did you see the pilot go off and the arrival of the dark and handsome stranger?’

‘Yes, I did. Had he missed the ship last night do you suppose?’

‘I’ve no idea. Are you going for drinks with Aubyn Dale before lunch?’

‘Not I.’

‘I hoped you were. Haven’t you met him yet?’ He didn’t seem to expect an answer to this question but wandered over and looked sideways at Jemima’s book.

‘Elizabethan Verse?’ he said. ‘So you don’t despise anthologies. Which is your favourite – Bard apart?’

‘Well – Michael Drayton, perhaps, if he wrote “Since there’s no help”.’

‘I’ll back the Bard for that little number every time.’ He picked up the book, opened it at random and began to chuckle.

‘“O yes, O yes, if any maid

Whom leering Cupid hath betrayed,”’ he read.

‘Isn’t that a thing, now? Leering Cupid! They really were wonderful. Do you – but no,’ Tim Makepiece said, interrupting himself, ‘I’m doing the thing I said to myself I wouldn’t do.’

‘What was that?’ Jemima asked, not with any great show of interest.

‘Why, forcing my attentions on you to be sure.’

‘What an Edwardian expression.’

‘None the worse for that.’

‘Shouldn’t you be going to your party?’

‘I expect so,’ he agreed moodily. ‘I don’t really like alcohol in the middle of the day and am far from being one of Mr Aubyn Dale’s fans.’

‘Oh.’

‘I’ve yet to meet a man who is.’

‘All jealous of him, I dare say,’ Jemima said idly.

‘You may be right. And a very sound reason for disliking him. It’s the greatest mistake to think that jealousy is necessarily a fault. On the contrary, it may very well sharpen the perception.’

‘It didn’t sharpen Othello’s.’

‘But it did. It was his interpretation of what he saw that was at fault. He saw, with an immensely sharpened perception.’

‘I don’t agree.’

‘Because you don’t want to.’

‘Now, look here – ’ Jemima said, for the first time giving him her full attention.

‘He saw Cassio, doing his sophisticated young Venetian act over Desdemona’s hand. He saw him at it again after he’d blotted his copy-book. He was pathologically aware of every gallantry that Cassio showed his wife.’

‘Well,’ Jemima said, ‘if you’re pathologically aware of every attention Aubyn Dale shows his however-many-they-may-be female fans, I must say I’m sorry for you.’

‘All right, Smartie,’ Tim said amiably, ‘you win.’

‘After all, it’s the interpretation that matters.’

‘There’s great virtue in perception alone. Pure scientific observation that is content to set down observed fact after observed fact – ’

‘Followed by pure scientific interpretation that adds them all up and makes a nonsense.’

‘Why should you say that?’ he asked gently. ‘It’s you that’s making a nonsense.’

‘Well, I must say!’

‘To revert to Aubyn Dale. What about his big thing on TV? – “Pack Up Your Troubles”. In other words “Come to me everybody that’s got a bellyache and I’ll put you before my public and pay you for it.” If I were a religious man I’d call it blasphemy.’

‘I don’t say I like what he does – ’

‘Still, he does make an ass of himself good and proper on occasions. Witness the famous Molton Medbury Midsummer Muck-up.’

‘I never heard exactly what happened.’

‘He was obviously plastered. He went round televising the Molton Medbury flower show with old Lady Agatha Panthing. You could see he was plastered before he spoke and when he did speak he said the first prize in the competition went to Lady Agatha’s umbilicus globular. He meant,’ Timothy explained, ‘Agapanthus Umbellatus globosus. I suppose it shattered him because after that a sort of rot set in and at intervals he broke into a recrudescence of Spoonerisms. It went on for weeks. Only the other day he was going all springlike over a display of hyacinths and said that in arranging them all you really needed was a “turdy stable”.’

‘Oh, no! Poor chap. How too shaming for him!’

‘So he shaved off his fetching little imperial and I expect he’s taking a long sea voyage to forget. He’s in pretty poor shape, I fancy.’

‘Do you? What sort of poor shape?’

‘Oh, neurosis,’ Timothy said shortly, ‘of some sort, I should think.’

The xylophonic gong began its inconsequent chiming in the bridge-house.

‘Good lord, that’s for eating!’ Timothy exclaimed.

‘What will you say to your host?’

‘I’ll say I had an urgent case among the greasers. But I’d better just show up. Sorry to have been such a bore. Goodbye, now,’ said Tim attempting a brogue.

He walked rapidly away.

To her astonishment and slightly to her resentment Jemima found that she was ravenously hungry.

II

The Cape Company is a cargo line. The fact that six of its ships afford accommodation for nine passengers each does not in any way modify the essential function of the company. It merely postulates that in the case of these six ships there shall be certain accommodation. There will also be a Chief Steward without any second string, a bar-and-passengers’ steward and an anomalous offsider who may be discovered by the passengers polishing the taps in their cabins at unexpected moments. The business of housing, feeding and, within appropriate limits, entertaining the nine passengers is determined by Head Office and then becomes part of the Captain’s many concerns.

On the whole, Captain Bannerman preferred to carry no passengers, and always regarded them as potential troublemakers. When, however, somebody of Mrs Dillington-Blick’s calibre appeared in his ship, his reaction corresponded punctually with that of ninety per cent of all other males whom she encountered. He gave orders that she should be placed at his table (which luckily was all right anyway because she carried VIP letters) and, until Alleyn’s arrival, had looked forward to the voyage with the liveliest anticipation of pleasurable interludes. He was, he considered, a young man for his age.

Aubyn Dale he also took at his table because Dale was famous and Captain Bannerman felt that in a way he would be bunching Mrs Dillington-Blick by presenting her with a No. I Personality. Now he decided, obscurely and resentfully, that Alleyn also would be an impressive addition to the table. The rest of the seating he left to his Chief Steward who gave the Cuddys and Mr Donald McAngus to the First Mate, whom he disliked; Jemima Carmichael and Dr Makepiece to the Second Mate and the Wireless Officer of whom he approved, and Miss Abbott, Father Jourdain and Mr Merryman to the Chief Engineer towards whom his attitude was neutral.

This, the first luncheon on board, was also the first occasion at which the senior ship’s officers with the exception of those on duty were present. At a long table in a corner sat a number of young men presenting several aspects of adolescence and all looking a trifle sheepish. These were the electrical and engineering junior officers and the cadets.

Alleyn arrived first at the table and was carefully installed by the Captain’s steward. The Cuddys, already seated hard by, settled down to a good long stare and so, more guardedly, did Mr McAngus. Mrs Cuddy’s burning curiosity manifested itself in a dead-pan glare which was directed intermittently at the objects of her interest. Its mechanics might be said to resemble those of a lighthouse whose different frequencies make its signal recognizable far out at sea.

Mr Cuddy, on the contrary, kept observation under cover of an absent-minded smile while Mr McAngus quietly rolled his eyes in the direction of his objective and was careful not to turn his head.

Miss Abbott, at the Chief Engineer’s table, gave Alleyn one sharp look and no more. Mr Merryman rumpled his hair, opened his eyes very wide and then fastened with the fiercest concentration upon the menu. Father Jourdain glanced in a civilized manner at Alleyn and turned with a pleasant smile to his companions.

At this juncture Mrs Dillington-Blick made her entrance rosy with achievement, buzzing with femininity, and followed by the Captain, Aubyn Dale and Timothy Makepiece.

The Captain introduced Alleyn – ‘Mr Broderick, who joined us today – ’

The men made appropriate wary noises at each other. Mrs Dillington-Blick, who might have been thought to be already in full flower, awarded herself a sort of bonus in effulgence. Everything about her blossomed madly. ‘Fun!’ she seemed to be saying. ‘This is what I’m really good at. We’re all going to like this.’

She bathed Alleyn in her personality. Her eyes shone, her lips were moist, her small hands fluttered at the ends of her Rubenesque arms. ‘But I watched you!’ she cried. ‘I watched you with my heart in my mouth! Coming on board! Nipping up that Frightful Thing! Do tell me. Is it as Terrifying as it looks or am I being silly?’

‘It’s plain murder,’ Alleyn said, ‘and you’re not being silly at all. I was all of a tremble.’

Mrs Dillington-Blick cascaded with laughter. She raised and lowered her eyebrows at Alleyn and flapped her hands at the Captain. ‘There now!’ she cried. ‘Just what I supposed. How you dared! If it was a choice of feeding the little fishes or crawling up that ladder I swear I’d pop thankfully into the shark’s maw. And don’t you look so superior,’ she chided Captain Bannerman.

This was exactly how he had hoped she would talk. A fine woman who enjoyed a bit of chaff. And troubled though he was, he swelled a little in his uniform.

‘We’ll have you shinning down it like an old hand,’ he teased, ‘when you go ashore at Las Palmas.’ Aubyn Dale looked quizzically at Alleyn who gave him the shadow of a wink. Mrs Dillington-Blick was away to a magnificent start. Three men, one a celebrity, two good-looking and all teasing her. Las Palmas? Did they mean …? Would she have to …? Ah no! She didn’t believe them.

A number of rococo images chased each other improperly through Alleyn’s imagination. ‘Don’t give it another thought,’ he advised, ‘you’ll make the grade. I understand that if the sea’s at all choppy they rig a safety net down below. Same as trapeze artistes have when they lose their nerve.’

‘I won’t listen.’

‘It’s the form, though, I promise you,’ Alleyn said. ‘Isn’t it, sir?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Not true! Mr Dale, they’re being beastly to me!’

Dale said: ‘I’m on your side.’ It was a phrase with which he often reassured timid subjects on television. He was already talking to Mrs Dillington-Blick as if they were lifelong friends and yet with that touch of deference that lent such distinction to his programmes and filled Alleyn, together with eighty per cent of his male viewers, with a vague desire to kick him. There was a great deal of laughter at the Captain’s table. Mrs Cuddy was moved to stare at it so fixedly that at one moment she completely missed her mouth.

A kind of restlessness was engendered in the passengers, a sense of being done out of something and, in two of the women, of resentment. Miss Abbott felt angry with Mrs Dillington-Blick because she was being silly over three men. Mrs Cuddy felt angry with her because three men were being silly over her and also because of a certain expression that had crept into Mr Cuddy’s wide smile. Jemima Carmichael wondered how Mrs Dillington-Blick could be bothered and then took herself to task for being a humbug: the new passenger, she thought, was quite enough to make any girl do her stuff. She found that Dr Makepiece was looking at her and to her great annoyance she blushed. For the rest of luncheon she made polite conversation with the second mate who was Welsh and bashful and with the Wireless Officer who wore that wild and lonely air common to his species.

After luncheon Alleyn went to see his quarters. The pilot’s cabin had a door and porthole opening on to the bridge. He could look down on the bows of the ship, thrust arrow-like into the sea and at the sickle-shaped and watery world beyond. Under other circumstances, he thought, he would have enjoyed this trip. He unpacked his suitcases, winked at a photograph of his wife, went below and carried out a brief inspection of the passengers’ quarters. These were at the same level as the drawing-room and gave on to a passage that went through from port to starboard. The doors were all shut with the exception of that opening into the cabin aft of the passage on the port side. This was open and the cabin beyond resembled an overcrowded flower-shop. Here Dennis was discovered, sucking his thumb and lost in contemplation. Alleyn knew that Dennis, of whom this was his first glimpse, might very well become a person of importance. He paused by the door.

‘Afternoon,’ he said. ‘Are you the steward for the pilot’s cabin?’

Evidently Dennis had heard about Alleyn. He hurried to the door, smiled winsomely and said: ‘Not generally, but I’m going to have the pleasure of looking after you, Mr Broderick.’

Alleyn tipped him five pounds. Dennis said: ‘Oh, you shouldn’t sir, really,’ and pocketed the note. He indicated the flowers and said, ‘I just can’t make up my mind, sir: Mrs Dillington-Blick said I was to take some into the dining-room and lounge and as soon as I’ve finished in the bar I’m going to but I don’t know which to choose. Such an umberance-der-riches! What would you say for the lounge, sir? The décor’s dirty pink.’

Alleyn was so long answering that Dennis gave a little giggle. ‘Isn’t it diffy!’ he sympathized.

Alleyn pointed a long finger. ‘That,’ he said, ‘I should certainly make it that one,’ and went on his way to the passengers’ lounge.

III

It was a modest combination of bar, smoking-room and card-room and in it the passengers were assembled for coffee. Already by the curious mechanism of human attraction and repulsion they had begun to sort themselves into groups. Mr McAngus having found himself alongside the Cuddys at luncheon was reappropriated by them both and seemed to be not altogether at ease in their company, perhaps because Mrs Cuddy stared so very fixedly at his hair which, Alleyn noticed, was of an unexpected shade of nutbrown with no parting and a good deal of overhang at the back. He drew a packet of herbal cigarettes from his pocket and lit one, explaining that he suffered from asthma. They began to chat more cosily about diseases. Mr McAngus confided that he was but recently recovered from an operation and Mr Cuddy returned this lead with a lively account of a suspected duodenal ulcer.

Father Jourdain and Mr Merryman had discovered a common taste in crime fiction and smiled quite excitedly at each other over their coffee cups. Of all the men among the passengers, Alleyn thought, Father Jourdain had the most arresting appearance. He wondered what procession of events had led this man to become an Anglo-Catholic celibate priest. There was intelligence and liveliness in the face whose pallor, induced no doubt by the habit of his life, emphasized rather than concealed the opulence of the mouth and watchfulness of the dark eyes. His short white hands were muscular and his hair thick and glossy. He was infinitely more vivid than his companion, whose baby-faced petulance, Alleyn felt, was probably the outward wall of the conventional house-master. He caught himself up. ‘Conventional?’ Was Mr Merryman the too-familiar pedant who cultivates the eccentric to compensate himself for the deadly boredom of scholastic routine? A don manqué? Alleyn took himself mildly to task for indulgence in idle speculation and looked elsewhere.

Dr Timothy Makepiece stood over Jemima Carmichael with the slightly mulish air of a young Englishman in the early stages of an attraction. Alleyn noted the formidable lines of Dr Makepiece’s jaw and mouth and, being at the moment interested in hands, the unusual length of the fingers.

Miss Abbott sat by herself on a settee against the wall. She was reading. The hands that held her neatly-covered book were large and muscular. Her face, he reflected, would have been not unhandsome if it had been only slightly less inflexible and if there had not been the suggestion of – what was it? – harshness? – about the jaw.

As for Aubyn Dale, there he was, with Mrs Dillington-Blick who had set herself up with him hard-by the little bar. When she saw Alleyn she beckoned gaily to him. She was busy establishing a coterie. As Alleyn joined them Aubyn Dale laid a large beautifully tended hand over hers and burst into a peal of all-too-infectious laughter. ‘What a perfectly marvellous person you are!’ he cried boyishly and appealed to Alleyn. ‘Isn’t she wonderful?’

Alleyn agreed fervently and offered them liqueurs.

‘You take the words out of my mouth, dear boy,’ Dale exclaimed.

‘I oughtn’t to!’ Mrs Dillington-Blick protested. ‘I’m on an inquisitorial diet!’ She awarded her opulence a downward glance and Alleyn an upward one. She raised her eyebrows. ‘My dear!’ she cried. ‘You can see for yourself. I oughtn’t.’

‘But you’re going to,’ he rejoined and the drinks were served by the ubiquitous Dennis who had appeared behind the bar. Mrs Dillington-Blick, with a meaning look at Dale, said that if she put on another ounce she would never get into her Jolyon swimsuit and they began to talk about his famous session on commercial television. It appeared that when he visited America and did a specially sponsored half-hour, he had been supported by a great mass of superb models all wearing Jolyon swimsuits. His hands eloquently sketched their curves. He leant towards Mrs Dillington-Blick and whispered. Alleyn noticed the slight puffiness under his eyes and the blurring weight of flesh beneath the inconsiderable jaw which formerly his beard had hidden. ‘Is this the face,’ Alleyn asked himself, ‘that launched a thousand hips?’ and wondered why.

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