Nine and Death Makes Ten

by Carter Dickson

"I went down to Mrs. Zia Bey's cabin, to plead with her to give up poor Jerome's letters ..."

  "Devil take my body, I tell you I never wrote any let—"

  "Sh-h! Go on, my wench."

  'To do somebody a favor, then," retorted Valerie, and tears (considerably assisted by a stance facing the wind) started into her eyes. "When I got outside the door, I heard her talking to some man inside."

  "What man?" asked H.M. "Could you identify his voice?"

  "No, I'm afraid not. It was rather a deep voice, but speaking low, and I couldn't hear any words. I went into Mr. Matthews's cabin across the passage (not knowing it was his cabin, or I wouldn't have gone); and waited for the man to go. In a little while I heard the door of B-37 open and close. I risked a little peek out. It was Captain Benoit, just turning into the main alleyway with his back to me. He had a long envelope full of letters in his hand."

  "How'd you know they were letters?"

  Valerie gestured. "Well, they were papers of some kind, so naturally they must have been letters."

  "Uh-huh. And then?"

  She swallowed hard. "I tapped on the door of Mrs. Zia Bey's cabin. There was no answer. So I opened the door. The light was on. I saw her lying on the dressing-table, all over blood—Ugh! I nearly fainted. I went close to make sure she was really what she seemed to be. I must have left my fingerprints on the powder-bowl then. Oh, and I turned out the light when I left the cabin.

  "I didn't know what I was doing. I felt simply horrible. So I vaguely remember dodging back into Mr. Matthews's cabin, and wondering what I was to do now. I stayed there for maybe five minutes more with the door closed."

  The purser interposed.

  "You realize, don't you, Miss Chatford," he said, "that the real murderer must have been in B-37, probably hiding in the bathroom, when you went in to look at Mrs. Zia Bey's body?"

  "H-how's that?"

  "Unless," the purser scowled hideously, "unless Benoit killed Mrs. Zia Bey and somebody else killed Benoit. Which doesn't sound likely. Go on."

  Again Valerie gestured.

  "I'd been back in Mr. Matthews's cabin for perhaps five minutes ..."

  "Stop again," interrupted H.M. "During that time, did anybody leave B-37 after Captain Benoit? Did you hear anybody?"

  Valerie shook her head.

  "I'm sorry. I was much too upset to notice. I shouldn't have heard it if anybody had. But it must have been Benoit, mustn't it? Surely it must! I never thought about anybody else. His shooting himself, everything else, all fits in. You're trying to b-bully me, and I won't be bullied!

  "But that's all there is. In about five minutes, I heard someone come along and tap at the door of B-37. I peeped out again, and there was Mr. Matthews. Presently he opened the door. Later I tried to get away, when he sent the steward to get the captain; but I almost walked straight into a stewardess, and I had to go back again. Everything else I told him was true. I stayed cooped up in his cabin, and later in the bathroom, for hours and hours and hours. Only to be insulted when Mr. Matthews did come in."

  H.M. seemed slightly dazed.

  "You've known this all the time, and thought Benoit was the murderer? Then why didn't you speak out?"

  "I did it to save Jerome," cried the girl tragically. "I even thought I might get a word of t-thanks."

  Now this was far overplaying her role, as she instinctively felt herself. She overplayed it still more as she proceeded to tell them the same story, about the letters, as she had told Kenworthy himself. But the little devil of emotional acting had got into her Aryan soul, and called for sentimental drama. Max knew this. Kenworthy himself, having had several days for reflection, knew it too.

  "So you were protectin' this feller's good name; is that it?" inquired H.M., tossing his last quoit.

  "Yes."

  H.M. opened one eye at Kenworthy. "Were there any letters, son?"

  "For the last time," returned Kenworthy, "emphatically, no! Candidly, do I look the sort of bloke who would pour out his soul on paper? Orally, yes. At a night-club, without doubt. For the eyes of a solicitor, no. Don't think I'm not grateful, Valerie. I appreciate what you tried to do no end, and the governor will appreciate it too. But, without wanting to be unchivalrous, it seems to me that your best efforts to help me have done nothing but land me in the soup."

  "Have you seen the woman's body, son?"

  "I've seen it." The young man's long face, behind his octagonal spectacles, turned slightly green. "In the ice-house or cold-storage room or whatever it is."

  "And did you know her?"

  "No. Except—" His eyebrows drew together. "I've got a hazy sort of idea that I saw her once before, under circumstances which struck me as being very comic, and with somebody whose face I'll swear I've seen aboard this ship."

  "But where? And when? And who?"

  "I can't remember!" groaned Kenworthy. "If this sea would steady down a bit, and give my innards time to take the pressure off my brain, maybe I could stir the old subconscious."

  "You may have that opportunity," the third officer grinned, "if we run into fog. As we're apt to do."

  "Many thanks for small consolations. All the same, sir"— Kenworthy appealed to H.M.—"see if you can't apply a consolation too. After all, is it so impossible that Benoit killed the woman and then committed suicide? It seems the most reasonable explanation to my enfeebled wits."

  Dr. Archer interposed crisply.

  "Ah!" he said, tapping with well-manicured fingers on the back of the bench. "Exactly the question I was about to ask. Why are you all so sure it was not suicide?"

  "Because, son—"

  "One moment!" said Dr. Archer, lifting a magisterial hand. "Accepting," he smiled and bowed, "accepting Miss Chatford's latest story, I can't see any other explanation. Is it likely, now, that still another person slipped out of Mrs. Zia Bey's cabin after Captain Benoit had gone? At least, without being heard by Miss Chatford? She heard the door open and close before. Surely she would have heard it again? Aren't you creating a straw-murderer for the pleasure of stumping yourself with a problem? Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, I've had some experience with these things. I insist that my experience ought to carry some weight."

  H.M. rolled up his head. "Experience? What experience?"

  The doctor's quizzical expression became a broad and twisted grin.

  "I was for some years," he replied, "one of the acting police surgeons (it was a part-time job for several of us) of A Division of the Metropolitan Police. I've said little in this business so far. I wanted the mountain to come to Mahomet. Still"—he flipped finger and thumb together, as though he were flicking a bread-pellet—"there it is. Does the name of Chief Inspector Masters mean anything to you, Sir Henry?

  Or Sergeant, now Inspector, Pollard? But never mind my bona fides. On Monday morning, at the request of the ship's surgeon (who had never done one) I performed a post-mortem on the body of Mrs. Zia Bey."

  "Good!" said Lathrop, swinging round. "I kept insisting that somebody ought to do that. In law—"

  Dr. Archer stopped him.

  "As Mr. Lathrop says," he continued, "Mr. Lathrop's insistence on the point led to results. The result of that postmortem might surprise you."

  H.M. stared at him. "I say, son. You're not goin' to tell us the woman was poisoned or drowned?"

  The doctor laughed. Max thought that his constant twingling, or laughing, or pointed innuendo, might have got on their nerves if they had not all been so determinedly cheerful. It was a part of the atmosphere they were pledged to establish among themselves.

  "I only said," Dr. Archer pointed out smoothly, "that the result might surprise you. That's aside from the point. I must ask you, as a medical jurist: What evidence have you that Captain Benoit did not, in fact, shoot himself?"

  Then up rose George A. Hooper, with his arms flapping, and again related his story.

  "You actually saw all this?" persisted the doctor.

  "Ah; I saw the murder. With my own eyes," added Hoo
per, pointing to them by way of emphasis.

  "But, in pitch darkness, how could you be sure there was another person with him? Or be sure he was shot through the back of the head?"

  "When the gun went off," answered Hooper simply, "I saw it."

  "By the flash of the revolver-shot?"

  "Ah."

  "My dear sir, that's impossible."

  Hooper changed color. "Are you," he inquired after reflection, "calling me a liar?"

  "Not at all. I merely say—M

  "If that," said Hooper, suddenly bouncing up like an India rubber man, "is not calling me a liar—"

  "S-h! Oi! Now, now," intervened Lathrop soothingly, while H.M. picked up the quoits and continued to toss them without comment. "It's all impossible," Lathrop went on, himself evidently at his wit's end, "Non-existent people who leave bloody fingerprints are impossible. When two and two don't make four, it's impossible, I tell you, Sir Henry, you've got to get us out of this, or we'll all go nuts. This can't go on

  much longer. Or can it?"

  *****

  That night, the murderer struck again.

  16

  Wednesday evening. Wind fresh, N.N.E., barometer rising. Latitude and longitude deleted at request of censor. An air of tension growing, as though an echo from the muffled crackle of the wireless-key had crept down into the passengers' quarters.

  No word was said about it. The officers went about their business as casually as ever. But you never saw them except at a distance. They appeared and vanished; and a door blew shut. A liner at sea is sensitive as a theater to emotional atmospheres, which is why everybody knew.

  The passengers joked a good deal among themselves. It was announced that a film would be shown in the lounge after dinner, but that the bar would close at ten o'clock.

  Max, killing time until it was a reasonably decent hour to think of dressing for dinner, lounged down to his cabin shortly before seven. He got no farther than the door past the shop on B Deck, when he was arrested by familiar tones.

  "Looky here," howled an irate voice. "This is beginnin' to get on my nerves. I know your heart's secret about it. But I still don't want any hair-restorer. I want a shave, s-h-a-v-e, shave. For five days I been shavin' myself to keep out of your way. For the love of Esau will you stop gabblin' about hair-restorer and get on with it?"

  "'Air," said the barber, "is like grass. Now grass grows, don't it, sir? No thoughtful man can have any doubt about that. And there you are. Why does it grow?"

  "I dunno. What I'm saying is—"

  "Exactly my point, sir," said the barber triumphantly.

  "It grows because the rain falls on it and waters it. We see that even grass, which is God's gift and a natural phenomenon, as you might say, requires something poured on it to make it sprout. Isn't that so?"

  Max pushed back the curtain and put his head into the barber's shop.

  Clean and white-tiled, with mirrors a-gleam, the place looked very trim except for H.M. His spectacles were down on his nose, and he peered at a neck-breaking angle behind the great swathing of white cloth. But he could not hold the barber's eye.

  The barber, after opening a little glass door to inspect steaming towels, closed it with satisfaction and went on whipping up lather in a porcelain mug.

  "So if even Dame Nature must be pampered in that way, what's the result? Come in, sir: you're next!"

  The barber broke off, and stopped whisking up lather, as he recognized Max. A sinister suspicion appeared to cross his mind. He put down the mug. But as Max merely nodded, considering that he could do with a haircut anyway, drifted across to a chair, and picked up a copy of the Tatler, the barber was reassured. Though he continued to regard Max with the deepest misgiving out of the corner of his eye, he went on with his work.

  "I'll tell you something else, sir," he continued in a loud voice. "I won't say, mind you, that I didn't feel just a little bit 'urt the other day. (Let me have your glasses, sir. That's it.)"

  "Listen, son. Did you hear what I told you about the towel? Not too hot. I got a sensitive—"

  "I have my pride, sir, same as anybody else," said the barber in an injured tone. "You were the first customer I'd had, too. (Now the hot towel, if you please. That's right. Not too hot, is it?)"

  "Uh!"

  "It is, sir, or it isn't?"

  "Uh! Uh! Uh!"

  "Then we'll just let it stay. Hold still, sir, while I wrap it round and make a little place for your nose to come out. Speaking of noses—but I'll come back to that. What I really wanted to say was, I have my pride the same as anybody else. Not that you didn't pay me my money, three times over. No! But it's very seldom that a gentleman sits down in my chair, and gets up again, when I've got the lather actually on the brash."

  "Wha-ha?"

  "I said, on the brush. However, no offense, I'm sure! They lay the film tonight is Shirley Temple, and I'm sure you'll en— Is anything wrong, sir?"

  There was so long a silence that Max, flipping over the pages of the magazine without seeing them, at last became conscious of it. He felt sick and disgusted with the whole mess. He knew Valerie Chatford was a crook. He had a creepy feeling that they were not done with trouble. As the effect of the silence reached him like a kind of explosion, he glanced up.

  He saw H.M.'s face reflected in the big mirror on the wall. H.M., holding the hot towel in one hand, had struggled upright in the barber's chair. His red-heated face, the eyes wide and unblinking, was set in an expression which could not have been more curious if the barber had hit him across the back of the head with a bottle of the famous hair-restorer.

  "Gimme my glasses!" he said suddenly.

  "Sir?"

  "Gimme my glasses," howled H.M., sliding out of the chair and fumbling with the cloth round his neck. "I'm sorry, but I haven't got time to get shaved now."

  It was almost all up with the barber's artistic pride. For a moment it seemed touch and go whether he would not smash the shaving-mug on the floor, and dance on the pieces.

  A minor convulsion afflicted the white robe.

  "Get me out of this Appius Claudius get-up, can't you?" urged H.M. But, when the cover was removed, he changed his mind. He reached out and shook the barber's hand.

  "Son," he said solemnly, "you don't know what you've done for me. When I think that I've been avoidin' this place, when all the time it was the fount and origin of inspiration, I could kick myself from here to the forepeak. I'm comin' back. Burn me, I'll even buy a bottle of your tonic! In the meantime, here's a quid to go on with. Come on, Max. We got business."

  Two customers fled the barber's shop with such celerity that he had to run after them with their life-jackets. As they were going downstairs, H.M. imparted information.

  "We've got to find the purser," he said. "I'm not sure, and I hate to make predictions; but I think I've got it."

  Though the purser's window was open, Griswold himself was absent. His assistant, a pleasant freckled-faced young man with a serious manner, expressed regret.

  "All I want," insisted H.M., "is a look at the passengers' finger-print cards. Just the passengers'. And a magnifying glass."

  "I'm sorry, sir. Those cards are in the safe, and I don't know how to open it."

  "Where's the purser?"

  The young man hesitated. "At a conference in the captain's quarters, I think. I couldn't disturb him even for you."

  H.M.'s face grew more sober. "Ho? Submarines about?"

  "Couldn't say, sir. I should come back later, if I were you."

  "How much later?"

  "Probably a lot later. After dinner, anyhow."

  "That's torn it," growled H.M., as the roll-top window rumbled down.

  "Can't you go up and break in on them?"

  "Well. Now. Not if it's as serious as all that. This looks," said H.M., "uncommonly like business. For cat's sake," he barked, himself the least patient of men, "can't you be patient for a while? This'll keep, won't it? And a spot of grub won't do us any harm."


  The spot of grub, when it materialized, brought all the remaining passengers down to dinner. H.M., his napkin tucked into his collar, ate steadily and said nothing. Otherwise there was much subdued gaiety in the dining-room. Nobody made any reference to submarines. Hooper and Lathrop became involved in a long, complicated Biblical argument about the Israelites crossing the Jordan; they debated the width of the Jordan for some time before someone asked hesitantly whether they didn't mean the Red Sea.

  Hooper, as stubborn as a whole Somersetshire regiment, tucked in his chin and refused to budge from his position that it was the Jordan. Lathrop, more nimble, contributed a gruesome anecdote about a flood in Pennsylvania. Dr. Archer capped this with another anecdote, still more gruesome, about the Spanish War. For some reason these stories were considered amusing, and everybody laughed at them.

  (Waiting. And still more waiting. With a flash of insight 128

  Max realized that war is nearly all waiting, and that is why it tears the nerves.)

  After dinner they all trooped up to the lounge, where a motion picture screen had been set up. They gravely watched Shirley Temple reducing wicked rich men to tears and uniting true hearts: a spectacle which depressed the judicious but at least provided something to do. In the middle of it Max lost H.M.—and he did not reappear.

  The Edwardic's lounge regained its night-time rattle. It started to pitch again; Kenworthy, to his mortification, left in a hurry. Dr. Archer suggested a swim in the pool, where Max half promised to join him. Then he deliberately followed Valerie Chatford into the smoking-room.

  She sat down in the gloom which centered round the couch, far away from any light in that dim red place.

  "Hello," said Max. "Join me in a drink?"

  "No, thank you."

  "Sorry. I forgot you didn't approve of Drink."

  "If you put it like that," murmured Valerie, "I'll have a brandy."

  The clock above the empty fireplace ticked loudly. He had not meant to sting her with that remark. As she left the lounge, he had thought she looked tired and lonely and low-spirited. She was again wearing the dove-gray evening gown, which had something vaguely loose and shabby about it; nothing you could define, yet evident the second time it was worn.