Singing in the Shrouds (9 page)

“Very fishy!” Tim said, shaking his head owlishly. “Oh, very fishy indeed, I fear, sir!”

Mr. Merryman gave a little crowing laugh.

“I know!” Mr. McAngus abruptly shouted. “I have it! Tuesday! Television!” And at once added, “No, no, wait a moment.
What
did you say the date was?”

Alleyn told him and he became silent and depressed.

“What about Miss Abbott, now?” Captain Bannerman asked. “Can Miss Abbott find an alibi? Come along, Miss Abbott. January fifteenth.”

She didn’t answer at once but sat, unsmiling and staring straight before her. A silence fell upon the little company.

“I was in my flat,” she said at last, and gave the address. There was something uncomfortable in her manner. Alleyn thought, “Damn! The unexpected. In a moment somebody will change the conversation.”

Aubyn Dale was saying waggishly, “Not good enough! Proof, Miss Abbott, proof.”

“Did anybody ring up or come in?” Brigid prompted with a friendly smile for Miss Abbott.

“My friend — the person I share my flat with — came in at ten-thirty-five.”

“How clever to remember!” Mrs. Dillington-Blick murmured and managed to suggest that she herself was enchantingly feckless.

“And before that?” Mr. Merryman demanded.

A faint dull red settled above Miss Abbott’s cheekbones. “I watched television,” she said.

“Voluntarily?” Mr. Merryman asked in astonishment.

To everybody’s surprise Miss Abbott shuddered. She wetted her lips. “It passed… it… sometimes helped to pass the time—”

Tim Makepiece, Father Jourdain, and Brigid, sensing her discomfiture, tried to divert Mr. Merryman’s attention, but he was evidently one of those people who are unable to abandon a conversation before they have triumphed. “ ‘Pass the time,’ ” he ejaculated, casting up his eyes. “Was ever there a more damning condemnation of this bastard, this emasculate, this enervating peepshow. What was the programme?”

Miss Abbott glanced at Aubyn Dale, who was looking furiously at Mr. Merryman. “In point of fact—” she began.

Dale waved his hands. “Ah-ah! I knew it. Alas, I knew it! Nine to nine-thirty. Every Tuesday night, God help me. I knew.” He leaned forward and addressed himself to Mr. Merryman. “My session, you know. The one you dislike so much. The Jolyon swimsuit programme—
Pack Up Your Troubles,
which, oddly enough, appears to create a slightly different reaction in its all-time-high viewing audience. Very reprehensible, no doubt, but there it is. They seem quite to like it.”

“Hear, hear!” Mrs. Cuddy shouted vaguely from the far end of the lounge and stamped approval.

“
Pack up your troubles,
” Mrs. Dillington-Blick ejaculated. “Of
course
!”

“Madam,” Mr. Merryman continued, looking severely at Miss Abbott. “Will you be good enough to describe the precise nature of the predicaments that were aired by the — really, I am at a loss for the correct term to describe these people’the protagonist will no doubt enlighten me—”

“The subjects?” Father Jourdain suggested.

“The victims?” Tim amended.

“Or the guests? I like to think of them as my guests,” said Aubyn Dale.

Mrs. Cuddy said rather wildly, “That’s a lovely,
lovely
way of putting it!”

(“Steady, Eth!”)

Miss Abbott, who had been twisting her large hands together, said, “I remember nothing about the programme. Nothing.”

She half rose from her seat and then seemed to change her mind and sank back. “Mr. Merryman, you’re not to badger Miss Abbott,” Brigid said quickly and turned to Aubyn Dale. “You, at any rate, have got your alibi, it seems.”

“Oh, yes!” he rejoined. He finished his double brandy and, in his turn, slipped his hand under Mrs. Dillington-Blick’s forearm. “God, yes! I’ve got the entire Jolyon swimsuit admass between me and Beryl Cohen. Twenty million viewers can’t be wrong! In spite of Mr. Merryman.”

Alleyn said lightly, “But isn’t the programme over by nine-thirty? What about the next half-hour?”

“Taking off the war-paint, dear boy, and meeting the chums in the jolly old local.”

It had been generally agreed that Aubyn Dale’s alibi was established when Mr. McAngus said diffidently, “Do you know — I may be quite wrong — but I had a silly notion someone said that particular session was done at another time, I mean, if of course it
was
that programme.”

“Ah?” Mr. Merryman ejaculated, pointing at him as if he’d held his hand up. “Explain yourself. Filmed? Recorded?”

“Yes. But, of course I may be—”

But Mr. Merryman pounced gleefully on Aubyn Dale. “What do you say, sir? Was the session recorded?”

Dale collected everybody else’s attention as if he invited them to enjoy Mr. Merryman with him. He opened his arms and enlarged his smile and he patted Mr. McAngus on the head.

“Clever boy,” he said. “And I thought I’d got away with it. I couldn’t resist pulling your leg, Mr. Merryman. You will forgive me, won’t you?”

Mr. Merryman did not reply. He merely stared very fixedly at Aubyn Dale, and as Brigid muttered to Tim, may have been restraining himself from saying he would see him in his study after prep.

Dale added to this impression by saying with uneasy boyishness, “I swear, by the way, I was just about to come clean. Naturally.”

“Then,” Alleyn said, “it was not a live transmission?”

“Not that one. Usually is, but I was meant to be on my way to the States, so we filmed it.”

“Indeed?” Mr. Merryman said. “And
were
you on your way to the United States, sir?”

“Actually, no. One of those things. There was a nonsense made over dates. I flew three days later. Damn nuisance. It meant I didn’t get back till the day before we sailed.”

“And your alibi?” Mr. Merryman continued ominously.

“Well… ah… well — don’t look at me, padre. I spent the evening with my popsey. Don’t ask me to elaborate, will you? No names, no packdrill.”

“And no alibi,” said Mr. Merryman neatly.

There was a moment’s uneasy suspense during which nobody looked at anybody else and then Mr. McAngus unexpectedly surfaced. “I remember it all quite perfectly,” he announced. “It
was
the evening before my first hint of trouble and I
did
watch television!”

“Programme?” Mr. Merryman snapped. Mr. McAngus smiled timidly at Aubyn Dale. “Oh,” he tittered, “I’m no end of a fan, you know.”

It turned out that he had, in fact, watched
Pack Up Your Troubles
. When asked if he could remember it, he said at once, “Very clearly.” Alleyn saw Miss Abbott close her eyes momentarily as if she felt giddy. “There was a lady,” Mr. MacAngus continued, “asking, I recollect, whether she ought to get married.”

“There almost always is,” Dale groaned and made a face of comic despair.

“But this was very complicated because, poor thing, she felt she would be deserting her great friend and her great friend didn’t know about it and would be dreadfully upset. There!” Mr. McAngus cried. “I’ve remembered! If only one could be sure which evening. The twenty-fifth, I ask myself? I mean the fifteenth, of course.”

Dale said, “I couldn’t tell you which programme but, ah, poor darling, I remember her. I think I helped her. I hope I did!”

“Perhaps,” Captain Bannerman suggested, “Miss Abbott remembers now you’ve mentioned it. That’d fix your alibi for you.”

“Do you, Miss Abbott?” Mr. McAngus asked anxiously.

Everybody looked at Miss Abbott and it was at once apparent to everybody but Mr. McAngus that she was greatly upset. Her lips trembled. She covered them with her hand in a rather dreadful parody of cogitation. She shook her head and her eyes overflowed.

“No?” Mr. McAngus said, wistfully oblivious and shortsightedly blinking, “Do try, Miss Abbott. She was a dark, rather
heavy
lady. I mean, of course, that was the impression one had. Because one doesn’t see the face and the back of the head is rather out of focus, isn’t it, Mr. Dale? But she kept saying (and I think they must distort the voice a little, too) that she knew her friend would be dreadfully hurt because apart from herself, she had so few to care for her.” He made a little bob at Aubyn Dale. “You were wonderful,” he said, “so tactful. About loneliness. I’m sure if you saw it, Miss Abbott, you must remember. Mr. Dale made such practical and helpful suggestions. I don’t remember exactly what they were but—”

Miss Abbott rounded on him and cried out with shocking violence, “For God’s sake stop talking. ‘Helpful suggestions’! What ‘suggestions’ can help in that kind of hell!” She looked round at them all with an expression of evident despair. “For some of us,” she said, “there’s no escape. We are our own slaves. No escape or release.”

“Nonsense!” Mr. Merryman said sharply. “There is always an escape and a release. It is a matter of courage and resolution.”

Miss Abbott gave a harsh sob. “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I’m not myself. I shouldn’t have had so much champagne.” She turned away.

Father Jourdain said quickly, “You know, Mr. McAngus, I’m afraid you haven’t quite convinced us.”

“And that’s the last alibi gone overboard,” said the captain. “Mr. Merryman wins.”

He made a great business of handing over his five shillings. Alleyn, Mr. McAngus, and Aubyn Dale followed suit.

They all began to talk at once, and with the exception of the Cuddys, avoided looking at Miss Abbott. Brigid moved in front of her and screened her from the others. It was tactfully done and Alleyn was confirmed in his view that Brigid was a nice child. Mrs. Dillington-Blick joined her and automatically a group assembled round Mrs. Dillington-Blick. So between Miss Abbott and the rest of the world there was a barrier behind which she trumpeted privately into her handkerchief.

Presently she got up, now mistress of herself, thanked Alleyn for his party and left it.

The Cuddys came forward, clearly agog, eager, by allusion and then by direct reference, to speculate upon Miss Abbott’s distress. Nobody supported them. Mr. McAngus merely looked bewildered. Tim talked to Brigid and Captain Bannerman and Aubyn Dale talked to Mrs. Dillington-Blick. Mr. Merryman looked once at the Cuddys over his spectacles, rumpled his hair and said something about “
Hoc morbido cupiditatis
” in a loud voice to Alleyn and Father Jourdain. Alleyn was suddenly visited by an emotion that is unorthodox in an investigating officer; he felt a liking and warmth for these people. He respected them because they refused to gossip with the Cuddys about Miss Abbott’s unhappiness and because they had behaved with decency and compassion when she broke down. He saw Brigid and Mrs. Dillington-Blick speak together and then slip out of the room and he knew they had gone to see if they could help Miss Abbott. He was very much troubled.

Father Jourdain came up to him and said, “Shall we move over here?” He led Alleyn to the far end of the room.

“That was unfortunate,” he said.

“I’m sorry about it.”

“You couldn’t possibly know it would happen. She is a very unhappy woman. She exhales unhappiness.”

“It was the reference to that damn spiritual striptease session of Dale’s,” Alleyn said. “I suppose something in the programme had upset her.”

“Undoubtedly,” Father Jourdain smiled. “That’s a good description of it, a spiritual striptease. I suppose you’ll think I’m lugging in my cloth, but you know I really do think it’s better to leave confession to the professional.”

“Dale would call himself a professional.”

“What he does,” Father Jourdain said, with some warmth, “is vulgar, dangerous, and altogether odious. But he’s not a bad chap, of course. At least I don’t think so. Not a bad sort of chap at all.”

Alleyn said, “There’s something else you want to say to me, isn’t there?”

“There is, but I hesitate to say it. I am not sure of myself. Will you laugh at me if I tell you that, by virtue of my training perhaps, and perhaps because of some instinct, I am peculiarly sensitive to — to spiritual atmosphere?”

“I don’t know that I—”

Father Jourdain interrupted him.

“I mean that when I feel there is something really out of joint spiritually — I use this word because I’m a priest, you know — with a group of people, I’m usually right.”

“And do you feel it now?”

“Very strongly. I suspect it’s a sense of unexpressed misery,” said Father Jourdain. “But I can’t hunt it home.”

“Miss Abbott?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Even that,” Alleyn said, “is not what you want to say.”

“You’re very perceptive yourself.” Father Jourdain looked steadily at him. “When the party breaks up, will you stay behind for a moment?”

“Certainly.”

Father Jourdain said so softly that Alleyn could barely hear him, “You
are
Roderick Alleyn, aren’t you?”

The deserted lounge smelt of dead cigarettes and forgotten drinks. Alleyn opened the doors to the deck outside: the stars were careering in the sky; the ship’s mast swung against them; and the night sea swept thudding and hissing past her flanks.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” said Father Jourdain behind him.

Alleyn shut the doors again and they sat down.

“Let me assure you at once,” Father Jourdain said, “that I shall respect your — I suppose anonymity is not the right word. Your incognito, shall we say?”

“I’m not particularly bothered about the choice of words,” Alleyn said dryly.

“Nor need you be bothered about my recognizing you. It’s by the oddest of coincidences. Your wife may be said to have effected the introduction.”

“Really?”

“I have never met her, but I admire her painting. Some time ago I went to a one-man show of hers and was very much impressed by a small portrait. It too was anonymous, but a brother-priest, Father Copeland of Winton St. Giles, who knows you both, told me it was a portrait of her husband, who was the celebrated Inspector Alleyn. I have a very long memory for faces and the likeness was striking. I felt sure I was not mistaken.”

“Troy,” Alleyn said, “will be enormously gratified.”

“And then, that bet of Mr. Merryman’s was organized, wasn’t it?”

“Lord, lord! I do seem to have made an ass of myself.”