Singing in the Shrouds (8 page)

The Cuddys were the tricky ones. Mrs. Cuddy looked as if she wasn’t going to give herself away if she knew it and Mr. Cuddy’s smile suggested that he enjoyed secret information about something slightly discreditable to everyone else. They exchanged looks occasionally.

However, as the Montrachet was followed by Perrier-Jouet in a lordly magnum, even the Cuddys shed some of their caginess. Mrs. Cuddy, having assured Alleyn that they never touched anything but a drop of port wine on anniversaries, was persuaded to modify her austerity and did so with abandon. Mr. Cuddy cautiously sipped and asked sharp questions about the wine, pointing out with tedious iteration that it was all above his head, he being a very simple-living person and not used to posh meals. Alleyn was unable to like Mr. Cuddy very much.

Nevertheless, it was he who provided a means of introducing the topic that Alleyn had planned to exploit. There were no flowers on the table. They had been replaced by large bowls of fruit and shaded lamps, in deference, Alleyn pointed out, to Mr. Cuddy’s idiosyncrasy. It was an easy step from here to the Flower Murderer. “Flowers,” Alleyn suggested, “must have exactly the opposite effect on him to the one they have on you, Mr. Cuddy. A morbid attraction. Wouldn’t you say so, Makepiece?”

“It might be so,” Tim agreed cheerfully. “From the standpoint of clinical psychiatry there is probably an unconscious association—”

He was young enough and had drunk enough good wine to enjoy airing his shop and, it seemed, essentially modest enough to pull himself up after a sentence or two. “But really very little is known about these cases,” he said apologetically. “I’m probably talking through my hat.”

But he had served Alleyn’s purpose, and the talk was now concentrated on the Flower Murderer. Theories were advanced. Famous cases were quoted. Arguments abounded. Everybody seemed to light up pleasurably on the subject of the death by strangulation of Beryl Cohen and Marguerite Slatters. Even Mr. Merryman became animated and launched a full-scale attack on the methods of the police, who, he said, had obviously made a complete hash of their investigation. He was about to embroider his theme when the captain withdrew his right hand from under the tablecloth without looking at Mrs. Dillington-Blick, raised his glass of champagne and proposed Alleyn’s health. Mrs. Cuddy shrilly and unexpectedly shouted “Speech, speech!” and was supported by the captain, Aubyn Dale, the officers and her husband. Father Jourdain murmured, “By all means, speech.” Mr. Merryman looked sardonic and the others, politely apprehensive, tapped the table.

Alleyn stood up. His great height, and the circumstance of his face being lit from below like an actor’s in the days of footlights, may have given point to the silence that fell upon the room. The stewards had retired into the shadows, there was a distant rattle of crockery. The anonymous throb of the ship’s progress re-established itself.

“It’s very nice of you,” Alleyn said, “but I’m no hand at all at speeches and would make a perfect ass of myself if I tried, particularly in this distinguished company — The Church! Television! Learning! No, no. I shall just thank you all for making this, I hope I may say, such a good party and sit down.” He made as if to do so when to everybody’s amazement, and judging by his extraordinary expression, his own as well, Mr. Cuddy suddenly roared out in the voice of a tone-deaf bull, “For — or—”

The sound he made was so destitute of anything remotely resembling any air that for a moment everybody was at a loss to know what ailed him. Indeed it was not until he had got as far as “jolly good fellow,” that his intention became clear and an attempt was made by Mrs. Cuddy, the captain and the officers to support him. Father Jourdain then good-humouredly struck in, but even his pleasant tenor could make little headway against the deafening atonalities of Mr. Cuddy’s ground swell. The tribute ended in confusion and a deadly little silence.

Alleyn hastened to fill it. He said, “Thank you very much,” and caught Mr. Merryman’s eye.

“You were saying,” he prompted, “that the police have made a hash of their investigations. In what respect, exactly?”

“In every possible respect, my dear sir. What have they done? No doubt they have followed the procedure they bring to bear upon other cases which they imagine are in the same category. This procedure having failed they are at a loss. I have long suspected that our wonderful police methods so monotonously extolled by a too-complacent public are in reality cumbersome, inflexible, and utterly without imaginative direction. The murderer has not obliged them by distributing pawn tickets, driving licences or visiting cards about the scenes of his activities and they are left therefore gaping.”

“Personally,” Alleyn said, “I can’t imagine how they even begin to tackle their job. I mean, what
do
they do?”

“You may well ask!” cried Mr. Merryman, now pleasurably uplifted. “No doubt they search the ground for something they call, I understand, occupational dust, in the besotted hope that their man is a bricklayer, knife-grinder, or flour-miller. Finding none, they accost numbers of blameless individuals who have been seen in the vicinity and weeks after the event ask them to produce alibis. Alibis!” Mr. Merryman exclaimed and threw up his hands.

Mrs. Dillington-Blick, opening her eyes very wide, said, “What would
you
do, Mr. Merryman, if
you
were the police?”

There was a fractional pause, after which Mr. Merryman said with hauteur that as he was not in fact a detective the question was without interest.

The captain said, “What’s wrong with alibis? If a chap’s got an alibi he’s out of it, isn’t he? So far so good.”

“Alibis,” Mr. Merryman said grandly, “are in the same category as statistics; in the last analysis they prove nothing.”

“Oh, come now!” Father Jourdain protested. “If I’m saying compline in Kensington with the rest of my community at the time a crime is committed in Bermondsey, I’m surely incapable of having committed it.”

Mr. Merryman had begun to look very put out and Alleyn came to his rescue.

“Surely,” he said, “a great many people don’t even remember exactly what they were doing on a specific evening at a specific time. I’m jolly certain I don’t.”

“Suppose, for instance, now — just for the sake of argument,” Captain Bannerman said, and was perhaps a trifle too careful not to look at Alleyn, “that all of us had to produce an alibi for one of these crimes. By gum, I wonder if we could do it. I wonder.”

Father Jourdain, who had been looking very steadily at Alleyn, said, “One might try.”

“One might,” Alleyn rejoined. “One might even have a bet on it. What do you say, Mr. Merryman?”

“Normally,” Mr. Merryman declared, “I am not a betting man. However,
dissipat Evius curas edaces
. I would be prepared to wager some trifling sum upon the issue.”

“Would you?” Alleyn asked. “Really? All right, then. Propose your bet, sir.”

Mr. Merryman thought for a moment. “Coom on, now,” urged the captain.

“Very well. Five shillings that the majority here will be unable to produce, on the spot, an acceptable alibi for any given date.”

“I’ll take you!” Aubyn Dale shouted. “It’s a bet!”

Alleyn, Captain Bannerman and Tim Makepiece also said they would take Mr. Merryman’s bet.

“And if there’s any argument about the acceptability of the alibi,” the captain announced, “the non-betters can vote on it. How’s that?”

Mr. Merryman inclined his head.

Alleyn asked what was to be the given date and the captain held up his hand. “Let’s make it,” he suggested, “the first of the flower murders?”

There was a general outbreak of conversation, through which Mr. Cuddy could be heard smugly asserting that he couldn’t understand anybody finding the slightest difficulty over so simple a matter. An argument developed between him and Mr. Merryman and was hotly continued over coffee and liqueurs in the lounge. Gently fanned by Alleyn, it spread through the whole party. He felt that the situation had ripened and should be harvested before anybody, particularly the captain and Aubyn Dale, had anything more to drink.

“What about this bet?” he asked in a temporary lull. “Dale has taken Mr. Merryman. We’ve all got to find alibis for the first flower murder. I don’t even remember when it was. Does anybody remember? Mr. McAngus?”

Mr. McAngus at once launched himself upon the uncertain bosom of associated recollections. He was certain, he declared, that he read about it on the morning when his appendix, later to perforate, subjected him to a preliminary twinge. This, he was persuaded, had been on Friday, the sixteenth of January. And yet — was it? His voice sank to a whisper. He began counting on his fingers and wandered disconsolate amidst the litter of parentheses.

Father Jourdain said, “I believe, you know, that it
was
the night of the fifteenth.”

“…and only five days afterwards,” Mr. McAngus could be heard droning pleasurably, “I was whisked into Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, where I hung between life and death—”

“Cohen!” Aubyn Dale shouted. “Her name was Beryl Cohen. Of course!”

“Hop Lane, Paddington,” Tim Makepiece added with a grin. “Between ten and eleven.”

The captain threw an altogether much too conspiratorial glance at Alleyn. “Coom on!” he said. “There you are! We’re off! Ladies first.”

Mrs. Dillington-Blick and Brigid at once protested that they hadn’t a hope of remembering what they did on any night in question. Mrs. Cuddy said darkly and confusedly that she preferred to support her husband and refused to try.

“You see!” Mr. Merryman gleefully ejaculated. “Three failures at once.” He turned to Father Jourdain. “And what can the Church produce?”

Father Jourdain said quietly that he was actually in the neighbourhood of the crime on that night. He had been giving a talk at a boys’ club in Paddington. “One of the men there drove me back to the community. I remember thinking afterwards that we must have been within a stone’s throw of Hop Lane.”

“Fancy!” Mrs. Cuddy interposed with ridiculous emphasis. “Fred! Fancy!”

“Which would, I suppose,” Father Jourdain continued, “constitute my alibi, wouldn’t it?” He turned to Alleyn.

“I must say I’d have thought so.”

Mr. Merryman, whose view of alibis seemed to be grounded in cantankerousness rather than logic, pointed out that it would all have to be proved and that in any case the result would be inconclusive.

“Oh,” Father Jourdain said tranquilly, “I could
prove
my alibi quite comfortably. And conclusively,” he added.

“More than I could,” Alleyn rejoined. “I fancy I was at home that night, but I’m blowed if I could prove it.”

Captain Bannerman loudly announced that he had been in Liverpool with his ship and could prove it up to the hilt.

“Now then!” he exhorted, absent-mindedly seizing Mrs. Dillington-Blick by the elbow. “What’s everybody else got to say for themselves? Any murderers present?” He laughed immoderately at this pleasantry and stared at Alleyn, who became a prey to further grave misgivings. “What about you, Mr. Cuddy? You, no doubt,
can
account for yourself?”

The passengers’ interest had been satisfactorily aroused. If only, Alleyn thought, Captain Bannerman would pipe down, the conversation might go according to plan. Fortunately, at this juncture, Mrs. Dillington-Blick murmured something that caught the captain’s ear. He became absorbed and everybody else turned their attention upon Mr. Cuddy.

Mr, Cuddy adopted an attitude that seemed to be coloured by gratification at finding himself the centre of interest and a suspicion that in some fashion he was being got at by his fellow passengers. He was maddening but, in a backhanded sort of way, rewarding. The fifteenth of January, he said, consulting a pocketbook and grinning meaninglessly from ear to ear, was a Tuesday, and Tuesday was his lodge night. He gave the address of his lodge (Tooting), and on being asked by Mr. Merryman if he had, in fact, attended that night, appeared to take umbrage and was silent.

“Mr. Cuddy,” his wife said, “hasn’t missed for twenty years. They made him an Elder Bison for it and gave him ever such a nice testimonial.”

Brigid and Tim Makepiece caught each other’s eyes and hurriedly turned aside.

Mr. Merryman, who had listened to Mr. Cuddy with every mark of the liveliest impatience, began to question him about the time he had left his lodge, but Mr. Cuddy grew lofty and said he wasn’t feeling quite the thing, which judging by his ghastly colour was true enough. He retired, accompanied by Mrs. Cuddy, to the far end of the lounge. Evidently Mr. Merryman looked upon his withdrawal as a personal triumph for himself. He straightened his shoulders and seemed to inflate.

“The discussion,” he said, looking about him, “is not without interest. So far we have been presented with two allegedly provable alibis”— he made a facetious bob at the captain and Father Jourdain —“and otherwise, if the ladies are to be counted, with failures.”

“Yes, but look here,” Tim said, “a little further examination—”

Mr. Merryman blandly and deliberately misunderstood him. “By all means!” he ejaculated. “Precisely. Let us continue. Miss Abbott—”

“What about yourself?” Mr. Cuddy suddenly bawled from the far end of the room.

“Ah!” Mrs. Cuddy rejoined and produced a Rabelaisian laugh. “Ho, ho, ho,” she said, without moving a muscle of her face. “What about yourself, Mr. Merryband?”

“Steady, Ethel,” Mr. Cuddy muttered.

“Good God!” Tim muttered to Brigid. “She’s tiddly!”

“She was tossing down bumpers at dinner — probably for the first time in her life.”

“That’s it. Tiddly. How wonderful!”

“Ho, ho, ho!” Mrs. Cuddy repeated. “Where was Merryband when the lights went out?”

“Eth!”

“Fair enough,” Aubyn Dale exclaimed. “Come along, Mr. Merryman. Alibi, please.”

“With all the pleasure in life,” Mr. Merryman said. “I have none. I join the majority. On the evening in question,” he continued didactically, as if he expected them all to start taking dictation, “I attended a suburban cinema. The Kosy, spelt (abominable vulgarism) with a ‘K.’ In Bounty Street, Chelsa. By a diverting coincidence the film was
The Lodger
. I am totally unable to prove it,” he ended triumphantly.