Singing in the Shrouds (12 page)

“Ma-ma!”

The voice squeaked horridly from under his feet. He made a stifled sound and lurched against the hatch.

“Good heavens, what have I done!” cried Father Jourdain.

“By the sound of it,” Alleyn said, “I should say you’ve trodden on Esmeralda.”

He stooped. His hands encountered lace, a hard dead surface and something else. “Don’t move,” he said. “Just a moment.”

He carried a pencil-thin flashlamp in his pocket. The beam darted out like a replica in miniature of P. C. Moir’s torch.

“It was already broken. Look.”

It was indeed broken. The head had been twisted so far and with such violence that Esmeralda now grinned over her left shoulder at a quite impossible angle. The black lace mantilla was wound tightly round the neck and lying on the rigid bosom was a litter of emerald beads and a single crushed hyacinth.

“You’ve got your wish,” Alleyn said. “He’s on board, all right.”

Captain Bannerman pushed his fingers through his sandy hair and rose from his sitting-room table.

“It’s half-past two,” he said, “and for any good the stuff I drank last night does me, I might as well have not taken it. I need a dram and I advise you gentlemen to join me.”

He dumped a bottle of whisky and four glasses on the table and was careful not to touch a large object that lay there, covered with a newspaper. “Neat?” he asked. “Water? Or soda?”

Alleyn and Father Jourdain had soda and Tim Makepiece water. The captain took his neat.

“You know,” Tim said. “I can’t get myself geared to this situation. Really, it’s jolly nearly impossible to believe it.”

“I don’t,” said the captain. “The doll was a joke. A damn nasty, spiteful kind of joke, mind. But a joke. I’ll be sugared if I think I’ve shipped a Jack the Ripper. Now!”

“No, no,” Father Jourdain muttered. “I’m afraid I can’t agree. Alleyn?”

Alleyn said, “I suppose the joke idea’s just possible, given the kind of person and all the talk about these cases and the parallel circumstances.”

“There you are!” Captain Bannerman said triumphantly. “And if you ask me, we haven’t got far to look for the kind of chap. Dale’s a great card for practical jokes. Always at it on his own confession. Bet you what you like—”

“No, no!” Father Jourdain protested. “I can’t agree. He’d never perpetrate such an unlovely trick. No.”

Alleyn said, “I can’t agree either. In my opinion, literally it’s no joke.”

Tim said slowly, “I suppose you all noticed that — well, that Mr. McAngus was wearing a hyacinth in his coat.”

Father Jourdain and the captain exclaimed, but Alleyn said, “And that he dropped it when he clashed heads with Mr. Merryman. And that Mr. Merryman picked it up and threw it down on the deck.”

“Ah!” said the captain triumphantly. “There you are! What’s the good of that!”

“Where,” Tim asked, “did she leave the doll?”

“On the hatch. She put it there when she got her cable and evidently forgot to take it indoors. It was just above the spot where we found it, which was about three feet away from the place where Merryman threw down the hyacinth; everything was nice and handy.” He turned to Tim. “You and Miss Carmichael were the first to leave the general group. I think you walked over to the starboard side, didn’t you?”

Tim, pink in the face, nodded.

“Er — yes.”

“Do you mind telling me
exactly
where?”

“Er — no. No. Naturally not. It was — where was it? Well, it was sort of a bit further along than the doorway into the passengers’ quarters. There’s a seat.”

“And you were there, would you say — for how long?”

“Well — er—”

“Until after the group of passengers on deck had dispersed?”

“O, Lord, yes! Yes.”

“Did you notice whether any of them went in or, more importantly, came out again, by that doorway?”

“Er — no. No.”

“Gentlemen of your vintage,” Alleyn said mildly, “from the point of view of evidence are no damn good until you fall in love and then you’re no damn good.”

“Well, I must say!”

“Never mind. I think I know how they dispersed. Mr. Merryman, whose cabin is the first on the left of the passage on the starboard side and has windows looking aft and to that side, went in at the passengers’ doorway near you. He was followed by Mr. McAngus, who has the cabin opposite his across the passage. The others all moved away in the opposite direction and presumably went in by the equivalent passengers’ entrance on the port side, with the exception of Mrs. Dillington-Blick and Aubyn Dale, who used the glass doors into the lounge. Captain Bannerman and I had a short conversation and he returned to the bridge. Father Jourdain and I then walked to the after end or back or rear or whatever you call it of the deck, where there’s a verandah and where we could see nothing. It must have been at that moment somebody returned and garrotted Esmeralda.”

“How d’you remember all that?” Captain Bannerman demanded.

“God bless my soul, I’m on duty.” Alleyn turned to Father Jourdain. “The job must have been finished before we walked back along the starboard side.”

“Must it?”

“Don’t you remember? We heard someone singing ‘A Broken Doll.’ ”

Father Jourdain passed his hand across his eyes. “This is, it really is, quite beastly.”

“It appears that he always sings when he’s finished.”

Tim said suddenly. “We heard it. Brigid and I. It wasn’t far off. On the other side. We thought it was a sailor but actually it sounded rather like a choirboy.”

“Oh, please!” Father Jourdain ejaculated and at once added, “Sorry. Silly remark.”

“Here!” the captain interposed, jabbing a square finger at the newspaper-covered form on the table. “Can’t you do any of this funny business with fingerprints? What about them?”

Alleyn said he’d try, of course, but he didn’t expect there’d be any that mattered as their man was believed to wear gloves. He very gingerly removed the newspaper and there, shockingly large, smirking, with her detached head looking over her shoulder, was Esmeralda. In any case, Alleyn pointed out, the mantilla had been wound so tightly round the neck that any fingerprints would be obliterated. “It’s a right-handed job, I think,” he said. “But as we’ve no left-hand passengers that doesn’t cast a blinding light on anything.” He eased away the back lace, exposing part of the pink plastic neck. “He tried the necklace first but he never has any luck with beads. They break. You can see the dents in the paint.”

He dropped the newspaper over the doll and looked at Tim Makepiece.

“This sort of thing’s up your street, isn’t it?”

Tim said, “If it wasn’t for the immediacy of the problem it’d be damned interesting. It still is. It looks like a classic. The repetition, the time factor — by the way, the doll’s out of step in that respect, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Alleyn said. “Dead out. It’s six days too soon. Would you say that made the time theory look pretty sick?”

“On the face of it — no, I don’t think I would; although one shouldn’t make those sorts of pronouncements. But I’d think the doll being inanimate might be — well, a kind of extra.”

“A
Jeu d’esprit
?”

“Yes. Like a Malcolm Campbell amusing himself with a toy speedboat. It wouldn’t interfere with the normal programme. That’d be my guess. But if one could only get him to talk.”

“You can try and get all of ’em to talk,” said Captain Bannerman sardonically. “No harm in trying.”

“It’s a question, isn’t it,” Alleyn said, “of what we are going to do about it. It seems to me there are three courses open to us. (A) We can make the whole situation known to everybody in the ship and hold a routine enquiry, but I’m afraid that won’t get us much further. I could ask if there were alibis for the other occasions, of course, but our man would certainly produce one and there would be no immediate means of checking it. We know, by the way, that Cuddy hasn’t got one for the other occasion.”

“Do we?” said the captain woodenly.

“Yes. He went for a walk after leaving his silver-wedding bouquet at a hospital.”

“My God!” Tim said softly.

“On the other hand an enquiry would mean that my man is fully warned and at the cost of whatever anguish to himself goes to earth until the end of the voyage. So I don’t make an arrest and at the other side of the world more girls are killed by strangulation. (B) We can warn the women privately and I give you two guesses as to what sort of privacy we might hope to preserve after warning Mrs. Cuddy. (C) We can take such of your senior officers as you think fit into our confidence, form ourselves into a sort of vigilance committee, and try by observation and undercover enquiry to get more information before taking action.”

“Which is the only course
I’m
prepared to sanction,” said Captain Bannerman. “And that’s flat.”

Alleyn looked thoughtfully at him. “Then it’s just as well,” he said, “that at the moment it appears to be the only one that’s at all practicable.”

“That makes four suspects to watch,” Tim said after a pause.

“Four?” Alleyn said. “Everybody says four. You may all be right, of course. I’m almost inclined to reduce the field, tentatively, you know, very tentatively. It seems to me that at least one of your four is in the clear.”

They stared at him. “Are we to know which?” Father Jourdain asked.

Alleyn told him.

“Dear me!” he said. “How excessively stupid of me. But of course.”

“And then, for two of the others,” Alleyn said apologetically, “there are certain indications; nothing like certainties, you might object, and yet I’m inclined to accept them as working hypotheses.”

“But look here!” Tim said. “That would mean—”

He was interrupted by Captain Bannennan. “Do you mean to sit there,” he roared out, “and tell us you think you know who done — damnation! Who did it?”

“I’m not sure. Not nearly sure enough, but I fancy so.”

After a long pause Father Jourdain said, “Well — again, are we to know which? And why?”

Alleyn waited for a moment. He glanced at the captain’s face, scarlet with incredulity, and then at the other two; dubious, perhaps a little resentful.

“I think perhaps better not,” he said.

When at last he went to bed, Alleyn was unable to sleep. He listened to the comfortable pulse of the ship’s progress and seemed to hear beyond it a thin whistle of a voice lamenting a broken doll. If he closed his eyes it was to find Captain Bannerman’s face, blown with obstinacy, stupid and intractable, and Esmeralda, smirking over her shoulder. And even as he told himself that this must be the beginning of a dream, he was awake again. He searched for some exercise to discipline his thoughts and remembered Miss Abbott’s plainsong chant. Suppose Mr. Merryman had ordered him to put it into English verse?

“No!
No
! NO!” Mr. Merryman shouted, coming very close and handing him an embarkation notice. “You have completely misinterpreted the poem. My compliments to the captain and request him to lay on six of the best.”

Mr. Merryman then opened his mouth very wide, turned into Mr. Cuddy and jumped overboard. Alleyn began to climb a rope ladder with Mrs. Dillington-Blick on his back and thus burdened, at last fell heavily to sleep.

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.”