Singing in the Shrouds (16 page)

“Quite,” Alleyn murmured.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, then, tomorrow?”

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

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

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

“You haven’t done that!”

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

“Or given it away?”

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

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

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

“But not into the Spanish dress?”

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

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

“To dance by the light of the moon?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What about?” Alleyn asked.

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

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

“They stink like a wet haystack.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think she was the viewer.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Have you got any aspirins?”

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

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

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

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

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

The next moment, it, too, went out.

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

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

“Tim?” she said.

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

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

“
No
—” she cried out. “
No! Tim
!”

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

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

A few seconds later, Tim Makepiece came back.

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

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

“Did you turn out the deckhead lights?”

“No. Biddy, darling—”

“Did you meet anyone?”

“No. Biddy—!”

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