Poireau nodded sympathetically. An orderly mind, that! Already he had shuddered at the thought of the disastrous complications there might be, in determining alibis, on account of the changing of the clocks on the westward course.
To his surprise, Mrs. Chip-Ebberly added: “I do not think that Miss Price had been murdering her uncle. It is not likely that a young niece would kill an uncle, however objectionable!”
Poireau regarded her with admiration. “Not likely, non, madame,” he said gravely. He continued: “And yet a short time ago ‘you implied, I think, that this niece did do just that.”
Mrs. Chip-Ebberly hesitated. She said: “I now have reason t believe that another is guilty of the crime!”
Poireau’s eyebrows rose invitingly. “Oui, madame?”
She said firmly: “I intend to take the matter up with the Captain, in person!” Darkly she added: “It is a case of international espionage!”
This time Poireau was really startled. He gazed at Mrs. Chip-Ebberly with her swathings of wool and flannel, her rugs, her knitting. He said: “That is, indeed, interesting!”
Mrs. Chip-Ebberly looked about nervously again. It was as if she feared a spy at her shoulder. With a nod to Poireau, she departed.
Poireau shrugged. He sent a steward to ask the First Officer to arrange a meeting with Miss Price and Mr. Homer T. Anderson.
Poireau announced: “I have settled the question of Mademoiselle Price.”
Winifred Price looked at him with a curious intensity.
Anderson began to growl out something.
Poireau held up a cautionary finger. “Doucement!” he said. “We have had enough of random recriminations. I do not accuse you, monsieur, of the murder. But you have told a lie! You have lied to Atlas Poireau!”
Anderson blustered: “What are you talking about?”
Poireau said sharply: “Yes! You lied when you said that Miss Price saw her uncle after you did. I recommend that, if you have spread that tale, you now take pains to correct it. You chatted with Mr. Price last night. The topic of your conversation is not, at the moment, material. It was possibly, as you say, about the weather and the cuisine. About nothing at all! But in the course of this unimportant conversation Mr. Price offers you a cigarette, which you accept.”
Poireau turned to Winifred. “You mentioned that when you spoke with your uncle, he had no cigarettes left? That was why he gave you none?”
She nodded.
Anderson said: “So what? That only goes to prove what I said. He gave me a smoke, finished his pack, and then she came along.”
Poireau said: “Non, monsieur! The opposite is true. Mr. Price was out of cigarettes when he spoke with his niece. When she left him he went below, bought two packs, and went on deck again—to talk with you! This I know. The bar steward recalls the purchase, just before the bar closed. We know Mr. Price did not smoke all the cigarettes he bought, for they were found on his body—one pack still sealed, and one with five cigarettes gone. That was the pack he held out to you.”
“Then she’s lying when she says he didn’t have any when she was with him.”
Poireau shrugged. “A quoi ban? How could she know such a lie would help her? Moreover, there is a more conclusive proof. When Miss Price came to her uncle he had only a halfpenny left in English money: he told her so—and if you are skeptical of her account, monsieur, the steward recollects that when Mr. Price paid for a cocktail just before dinner he put down a and had to make up the rest of the amount in American coins. Miss Price gave him two pound notes to exchange, she tells us. And in his pockets”—Poireau gestured dramatically towards the green box— “we found English money to the amount of one pound, seventeen shillings halfpenny—which would be the exact amount of change remaining to him after a purchase of two packs of cigarettes at one and sixpence each!”
Poireau looked about in triumph. He twisted his moustaches.
Anderson scowled. He said after a moment, grudgingly: “Maybe I made a mistake. But I’m not talking any more without a lawyer.”
He went out.
The First Officer cried: “Very pretty, Mr. Poireau! Very neat! Though it is really quite obvious after all, isn’t it, when one stops to think. There is the change, and there are the cigarettes—”
Poireau said noncommittally: “Very obvious.”
Winifred Price still eyed him with a curious expression. She asked: “Do you think Mr. Anderson killed my uncle, M. Poireau?”
“I do not know, mademoiselle.”
“Well, I—thank you,” she said.
Poireau looked at her a little sadly.
Winifred Price stood up suddenly. She said: “M. Poireau, you make me feel like a—you make me feel antisocial! And I don’t understand. You’ve fooled Mr. Anderson. Because he’s stupid, and anyway he’s scared about something. But you know very well you haven’t been logical!”
Mr. Waggish was shocked. He cried: “Oh, I say, Miss Price!”
“Non, mademoiselle?”
“No! You proved I was with my uncle before Mr. Anderson was. And he’s lying when he says he saw me there later, so he hasn’t thought yet, beyond being exposed in his lie. But you haven’t really proved … I could have gone up on deck again afterwards, too, couldn’t I?”
“And you did so, n’est-ce pas? You went back on deck.”
Winifred said: “Yes! I didn’t go to bed when I told you I did. It’s true about not seeing Uncle Paul again; but I went up to the boat-deck. It was midnight when I came in for good.”
Poireau nodded. “And were seen by a witness.”
She gasped. “You knew? You knew I lied about it? Then why did you believe me when I said I didn’t kill my uncle?”
Poireau said: “The witness said that you were the very picture of guilt, that your face was scarlet.”
“Then why—”
Poireau smiled. “Mademoiselle, consider! The witness drew her own conclusions from what she saw. But then, she had not taken the courses in Psychology! Does one come in, when one has just killed a man and hidden his body—blushing scarlet? Non! One is pale. One trembles.… But it is, on the other hand, extremely likely that one blushes in a different circumstance. If one has just had a rendezvous on the boat deck!”
Winifred Price blushed. She said defensively: “Well, I had to apologize for the way my uncle acted! And I was afraid Tom would get into trouble if I told about meeting him on the boat deck after dark. He said it was against the rules.”
Mr. Waggish interposed: “It surely is.” His eyes were round.
She said imploringly: “It was my fault, Mr. Waggish! And, M. Poireau, you mustn’t think I’m disloyal to Llewelyn! And anyway the Purser has a girl in Manchester.”
She left the room.
Mr. Waggish said: “I might have known Tom would be up to— So that was it!”
“Oui. C’était ça.”
Mr. Waggish said doubtfully: “I don’t know French, M. Poireau.” He added: “But it certainly makes things sound more impressive!”
Poireau looked at him a little sharply. But the First Officer was innocent of irony. Poireau acknowledged: “I have found it so.”
The door opened, and the Purser burst in. He cried angrily: “I’ve just heard Miss Price is in trouble. They’re saying she killed her uncle, just because she was seen on deck at midnight. But I can prove she was innocent. She was with me on—”
Mr. Waggish said: “She just told us about it. But Mr. Poireau knew already. He found out by detecting!”
“She told— Oh!”
Poireau asked: “You did not know she had told us, then?”
The Purser’s very fair skin crimsoned. He clenched his fists, and retorted furiously: “How could I know? No, I didn’t!”
The First Officer said reassuringly: “Mr. Poireau has proved she is innocent.”
The Purser’s anger vanished. He asked in surprise: “You’ve already solved the crime, Mr. Poireau?”
Poir
eau cried: “Ah, non—par exemple! Even Atlas Poireau requires more than an hour or two! The complications only now begin! Why does Anderson say nothing of his stolen cosh? What dastardly plot has Mrs. Chip-Ebberly uncovered? Why did a pipe and a red and yellow muffler repose beneath the body?”
“It does sound mysterious.” Mr. Waggish sounded pleased.
Poireau was pained. “But,” he declared, “there is no such thing as ‘mystery,’ mon cher. There is only disorder! To solve a crime, is only to use the logic: to restore misplaced details to their proper position.”
Mr. Waggish asked, a little taken aback at Poireau’s vehemence: “And the details that will not fit? that are illogical?”
Poireau said severely: “In my cases there are no such things. I permit no nonsense! Life is system. One needs only to know the rules. Two and two make four. There are one hundred cents to a dollar. There are twenty shillings to a pound. Every action has a reaction. Every effect has a cause!”
The Purser nodded. He had calmed down. He said: “As a mathematical man, I can appreciate that. Detecting must be like keeping books. You add this, you subtract that … Why, one could practically do it by machine! It’s very simple.”
Poireau was piqued.
Mr. Waggish shook his head. “But could everyone operate such a machine? I saw the details. But I couldn’t fit them into their proper places. I think it’s wonderful what you’ve done, Mr. Poireau!”
Atlas Poireau smiled modestly. He twirled his moustaches. He said: “That is true!”
Sir Jon. Nappleby
Death Rays. Atom Bombs. Hydrogen Bombs.
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.
Nappleby frowned. What on this paper he held—what in Price’s history, that unedifying compound of the dull, the salacious, and the lucrative—what in Anderson’s, grotesque and (it now appeared) sinister as well—could direct his subconscious mind to remembrance of a Wordsworthian and quasi-Platonic vision of childhood innocence?
He looked again at the printer writing at the top:
Florabunda. Capt.—see.
And. 15 gr?
and at the list below, written in a cruder, sprawling hand:
Death rays
A-bombs
H. “
A-bombs--
enemies---
New York- Moscow etc.
genuine Imittation
Kit? Bombinos
“This fell, you say, from Anderson’s pocket?” Nappleby lifted a troubled gaze from the paper to the face of Mrs. Chip-Ebberly, which emerged from a chaste chrysalis of sweaters, coats, and rugs.
“From his pocket. I could not help seeing what was written on it.” Mrs. Chip-Ebberly paused to analyze her conduct. “To be precise, I made no effort not to see what was written. Decorum was overmastered by some mysterious sixth sense. I read. Impelled, no doubt, by heredity.”
“Heredity?” Nappleby was uncertain.
“It was one of my forebears who discovered the scheme of the man Fawkes. Another Chip-Ebberly, under the Regency, foiled a plot to mine the Circumlocutions Office. It is scarcely to be wondered at, therefore, that I recognized this Anderson for what he is. I had already discovered that he was in possession of a dangerous weapon. He held mysterious conferences with Mr. Price. When I found this paper, I desired to notify the Captain. But the First Officer informs me, Sir Jon., that you have had more experience of spies than the Captain has.”
“That is very interesting.” Nappleby was still more puzzled.
“It was my brother-in-law who prevented a Turkish agent from smuggling a sketch of the Albert Memorial out of the country. In that case, of course, the laws of heredity would not apply.”
Nappleby considered. “Have you ever spoken with Anderson?”
“I have said good morning, or good evening, as the case might be. My object, of course, was to lure him on to betray himself. My cousin Fitz-Ebberly, who is with the Foreign Office, informs me that women are frequently used for such purposes in espionage, and, more to the point, in counterespionage.” Mrs. Chip-Ebberly adjusted a rug which threatened to slip from her shoulders. “It is chilly here, but only on deck can one be sure of privacy.… In the foregoing connection, I may observe that Mr. Price was not infrequently in the company of a woman. A Miss Despana. The name can hardly be her own.”
Nappleby gave her the intelligent nod this innuendo seemed to require. “And did you ever talk with Price himself?”
She arranged her rugs again, with extreme care, preparatory to moving. “Certainly not.”
Nappleby sighed as she departed. One knew too much to dismiss her summarily as a crank. From just such freakish old ladies, from adolescents given to melodramatizing, from timid house-agents’ clerks, came information that was all too real. This paper was real. Death rays … Bombinos … endless imitation.
Again, why Wordsworth? The Della Robbian savor of the conclusion might in some devious way have channelled his memory. But no: that was not enough, any more than was the puerile misspelling. Imittation. Nappleby sought help in the poem itself:
Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years’ Darling of a pigmy size!
. . . . . . . .
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art …
The rolling, the faint vibration, the creaking of the ship, as Nappleby strode the deck, urged his thoughts ineluctably into a different rhythm. The voice of some dim subanalytical stratum of his mind declaimed in jerking tempo:
Alas, regardless of their doom
The little victims play.
Alas, regardless of their doom
The little victims play.
No longer Wordsworth, even, but Gray. The bold catalogue of horrors on the paper in his hand had led him, so far, merely to a gallimaufry of gobbets from Augustan and Romantic showpieces. Wordsworth would not have been pleased at the jumble. He had called Gray gaudy and inane. Or rather (a pained and scholarly Nappleby hastened to point out in querulous emendation) had, in speaking of a particular poem of Gray’s—
Nappleby recalled his wandering thoughts: there was, very likely, no time for academic self-indulgence. Yet often enough just such vagrancy, such a divagation from the superficially relevant into allusion, reminiscence, quotation, had been the very lifeblood of his triumphant investigations. A line from Samuel Johnson: a pastiche of Swinburne: an obsessive phrase from Horace, Ploss, or Thomas Tusser—any of these might prove an Archimedean lever.
But in this case? Quid Christus Inieldo? What had epiphanies of pure and ecstatic infancy to do with weapons of mass destruction? With, it might be, international intrigue—with some vast plot directed against metropoles?
In one sense, of course, the connection was only too patent. The poet Gray, upon a Prospect of Eton College, had thought of death. Any one might relapse into a far profounder melancholy now, at the thought of the modern Prospect noumenally as well as (Nappleby glanced out at the indeterminate grey seascape) phenomenally conceived. To think of children was to think, by way of the immediate past, of the hideous possible future. But so general and platitudinous an association of ideas was surely not sufficient … Nappleby frowned at the paper again. Certain details were puzzling. ‘Kit’—why Kit? Christopher? Cat, kitten? Panther? A Boy Scout’s duffel-bag? Yet most of the details were clear in substance.
Nappleby thought of clues he had been grudgingly handed in other cases: vague, cryptic, lacunose. Whereas nothing could be more concrete and explicit than ‘H-bomb.’ The only uncertainty was what the whole thing was about.…
Nappleby welcomed the approach of the First Officer.
Mr. Waggish scowled incredulously at the troublesome catalogue. “Good God! Bombs? I thought the old girl was daft when I shoved her on to you!”
“I should be glad to know your interpretation of this paper.” Nappleby was adept in
eliciting suggestions from the verecund.
Mr. Waggish was diffident. “There are two different handwritings.” He looked questioningly at the man from Scotland Yard.
“Yes. The neat hand is Price; the other, Anderson.”
“Ah?”
“The Purser was able to find a specimen of their handwritings for purposes of comparison. There is, I should judge, no question.”
“After all, I’m no’ so entirely astonished, then, Sir Jon. Anderson is a rum cove. Very rum indeed. I told you what Mr. Poireau found about his lies! And so he’s fouled up with atomic weapons!”
“But uncertain, apparently, about his target. Which may afford us a ray of hope. Or he is—possibly—concerned only with their manufacture and distribution, not with plots for their employment. You say he calls himself a man of business.”
“I’ve had Sparks radio ashore to ask about him.” Grimness overtaking incredulity, the First Officer frowned again. “Spies on this vessel!”
“What else do you deduce from this paper?”
“One other thing.” Mr. Waggish was gaining assurance. “It seems awfully outright. You’d expect code. That is, I thought spies always used secret language. Cryptograms, invisible ink, and so on. In stories, surely, they do!”
“In my experience too.” Nappleby cast his mind back. “They try to make their activities seem commonplace, harmless, trifling.”
Yes: they dissimulated so elaborately that the dissimulation became a fine art though black. They were plausible, pretended to deal in belles-lettres, verses, paintings, kickshaws. Always in time—and just in time—Nappleby had managed to cut through their poetastrical frills and expose the truth. This time the frills, the infucation, the periphery of childishness, were of his own providing; the actual donnée itself was stark, explicit, and horrible. Why then did he find himself ornamenting that naked list: find himself thinking of the conspirator as some giant Idiot-Boy (which was Wordsworth again), some Brobdingnagian natural drooling and lolling with his bauble, settling the fate of the twentieth-century world quite without prejudice; order and distinction lost? (Genuine versus imittation; enemies—enemies versus God knew what!) Plucking off the petals of a daisy and chanting in innocent indifference “New York, Moscow, New York, Moscow,” towards the last petal, which would determine which should fall. Urbs delenda est: but which one? And what part had the ratlike Price played in all this? Was he in the plot, or had he met death because he threatened to publish it?
Murder in Pastiche Page 5
