Singing in the Shrouds

by Ngaio Marsh

  Dale was slumped in his chair. He presented a sort of travesty of the splendid figure they had grown accustomed to. His white dinner-jacket was unbuttoned. His tie was crooked, his rope-soled shoes were unlatched, his hair was disordered and his eyes were imperfectly focused. His face was deadly pale.

  Alleyn said: ‘Now, Mr Dale, are you capable of giving me an account of yourself?’

  Dale crossed his legs and with some difficulty joined the tips of his fingers. It was a sketch of his customary position before the cameras.

  ‘Captain Bannerman,’ he said, ‘I think you realize I’m ver’ close friend of the General Manager of y’r Company. He’s going to hear juss how I’ve been treated in this ship and he’s not going to be pleased about it.’

  Captain Bannerman said: ‘You won’t get anywhere that road, Mr Dale. Not with me nor with anyone else.’

  Dale threw up his hands in an uncoordinated gesture. ‘All right. On y’own head!’

  Alleyn crossed the room and stood over him. ‘You’re drunk,’ he said, ‘and I’d very much rather you were sober. I’m going to ask you a question that may have a direct bearing on a charge of murder. This is not a threat: it is a statement of fact. In your own interest you’d better pull yourself together if you can and answer me. Can you do that?’

  Dale said: ‘I know I’m plastered. It’s not fair. Doc’, I’m plastered, aren’t I?’

  Alleyn looked at Tim. ‘Can you do anything?’

  ‘I can give him something, yes. It’ll take a little time.’

  ‘I don’t want anything,’ Dale said. He pressed the palms of his hands against his eyes, held them there for some seconds and then shook his head sharply. ‘I’ll be OK,’ he muttered and actually did seem to have taken some sort of hold over himself. ‘Go on,’ he added with an air of heroic fortitude. ‘I can take it.’

  ‘Very well. After you left this room tonight you went out on deck. You went to the verandah. You stood beside the chaise-longue where the body was found. What were you doing there?’

  Dale’s face softened as if it had been struck. He said: ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Do you deny that you were there?’

  ‘Refuse to answer.’

  Alleyn glanced at Tim who went out.

  ‘If you’re capable of thinking,’ Alleyn said, ‘you must know where that attitude will take you. I’ll give you a minute.’

  ‘Tell you, I refuse.’

  Dale looked from one of his fellow passengers to the other: the Cuddys, Jemima, Miss Abbott, Father Jourdain, Mr McAngus; and he found no comfort anywhere.

  ‘You’ll be saying presently,’ he said with a sort of laugh, ‘that I had something to do with it.’

  ‘I’m saying now that I’ve found indisputable evidence that you stood beside the body. In your own interest don’t you think you’d be well advised to tell me why you didn’t at once report what you saw?’

  ‘Suppose I deny it?’

  ‘In your boots,’ Alleyn said drily, ‘I wouldn’t.’ He pointed to Dale’s rope-soled shoes. ‘They’re still damp,’ he said.

  Dale drew his feet back as if he’d scorched them.

  ‘Well, Mr Dale?’

  ‘I—I didn’t know—I didn’t know there was anything the matter. I didn’t know he—I mean she—was dead.’

  ‘Really? Did you not say anything? Did you just stand there meekly and then run away?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘I suggest that you had come into the verandah from the starboard side: the side opposite to that used by Mr Cuddy. I also suggest that you had been hiding by the end of the locker near the verandah corner.’

  Unexpectedly Dale behaved in a manner that was incongruously, almost embarrassingly theatrical. He crossed his wrists, palms outward, before his face and then made a violent gesture of dismissal. ‘No!’ he protested, ‘you don’t understand. You frighten me. No!’

  The door opened and Tim Makepiece returned. He stood, keeping it open and looking at Alleyn.

  Alleyn nodded and Tim, turning his head to the passage, also nodded.

  A familiar scent drifted into the stifled room. There was a tap of high heels in the passage. Through the door, dressed in a wonderful negligee, came Mrs Dillington-Blick.

  Mrs Cuddy made a noise that was not loud but strangulated. Her husband and McAngus got to their feet, the latter looking as if he had seen a phantom and the former as if he was going to faint again. But if, in fact, they were about to say or do anything more they were forestalled. Jemima gave a shout of astonishment and relief and gratitude. She ran across the room and took Mrs Dillington-Blick’s hands in hers and kissed her. She was half-crying, half-laughing. ‘It wasn’t you!’ she stammered. ‘You’re all right. I’m so glad. I’m so terribly glad.’

  Mrs Dillington-Blick gazed at her in amazement.

  ‘You don’t even know what’s happened, do you?’ Jemima went on. ‘Something quite dreadful but—‘ She stopped short. Tim had come to her and put his arm round her. ‘Wait a moment, my darling,’ he said and she turned to him.

  ‘Wait a moment,’ he repeated and drew her away.

  Mrs Dillington-Blick looked in bewilderment at Aubyn Dale.

  ‘What’s all the fuss?’ she asked. ‘Have they found out?’

  He floundered across the room and seized Mrs Dillington-Blick by the arms, shaking and threatening her.

  ‘Ruby, don’t speak!’ he said. ‘Don’t say anything. Don’t tell them. Don’t you dare!’

  ‘Has everybody gone mad?’ asked Mrs Dillington-Blick. She wrenched herself out of Dale’s grip. ‘Don’t!’ she said and pushed away the hand that he actually tried to lay across her mouth. ‘What’s happened? Have they found out?’ And after a moment, with a change of voice: ‘Where’s Dennis?’

  ‘Dennis,’ Alleyn said, ‘has been murdered.’

  III

  It was, apparently, Mr Cuddy who was most disturbed by the news of Dennis’s death but his was an inarticulate agitation. He merely stopped smiling, opened his mouth, developed a slight tremor of the hands and continued to gape incredulously at Mrs Dillington-Blick. His wife, always predictable, put her hand over his and was heard to say that someone was trying to be funny. Mr McAngus kept repeating: ‘Thank God. I thank God!’ in an unnatural voice. Miss Abbott said loudly: ‘Why have we been misled! An abominable trick!’ While Aubyn Dale crumpled back into his chair and buried his face in his hands.

  ‘Mrs Dillington-Blick herself,’ Alleyn thought, ‘was bewildered and frightened.’ She looked once at Aubyn Dale and away again, quickly. She turned helplessly towards Captain Bannerman who went to her and patted her shoulder.

  ‘Never you fret,’ he said and glared uneasily at Alleyn. ‘You ought to have had it broken to you decently, not sprung on you without a word of warning. Never mind. No need to upset yourself.’

  She turned from him to Alleyn and held out her hands. ‘You make me nervous,’ she said. ‘It’s not true, is it? Why are you behaving like this? You’re angry, aren’t you? Why have you brought me here?’

  ‘If you’ll sit down,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you.’ She tried to take his hands. ‘No, just sit down, please, and listen.’

  Father Jourdain went to her. ‘Come along,’ he said and led her to a chair.

  ‘He’s a plain-clothes detective, Mrs Blick,’ Mrs Cuddy announced with a kind of angry triumph. ‘We’ve all been spied upon and made mock of and put in danger of our lives and now there’s a murderer loose in the ship and he says it’s one of us. In my opinion—’

  ‘Mrs Cuddy,’ Alleyn said, ‘I must ask you for the moment to be quiet.’

  Mr Cuddy automatically and for the last time on the voyage said: ‘Steady, Ethel.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Alleyn went on, ‘I must ask you all to be quiet and to listen carefully. You will understand that a state of emergency exists and that I have the authority to deal with it. The steward, Dennis, has been killed in the manner you have all discussed
so often. He was clad in the Spanish dress Mrs Dillington-Blick bought in Las Palmas and the inference is that he was killed in mistake for her. He was lying in the chair in the unlit verandah. The upper part of his face was veiled and it was much too dark to see the mole at the corner of his mouth. In the hearing of all of the men in this room Mrs Dillington-Blick had said she was going to the verandah. She did go there. I met her there and went with her to the lower deck and from thence to her cabin door. She was wearing a black lace dress, not unlike the Spanish one. I returned here and almost immediately Mr Cuddy arrived announcing that he had discovered her and she was dead. Apparently he had been deceived by the dress. Dr Makepiece examined the body and says death had occurred no more than a few minutes before he did so. For reasons which I shall give you when we have time for them, there can be no question of his having been murdered by some member of the ship’s complement. His death is the fourth in the series that you have so often discussed and one of the passengers is, in my opinion, undoubtedly responsible for all of them. For the moment you’ll have to accept that.’

  He waited. Aubyn Dale raised his head and suddenly demanded: ‘Where’s Merryman?’

  There were excited ejaculations from the Cuddys.

  ‘That’s right!’ Mr Cuddy said. ‘Where is he! All this humbugging the rest of us about. Insinuations here and questions there! And Mister Know-all Merryman mustn’t be troubled, I suppose?’

  ‘Personally,’ Mrs Cuddy added, ‘I wouldn’t trust him. I’ve always said there was something. Haven’t I, dear?’

  ‘Mr Merryman,’ Alleyn said, ‘is asleep in bed. He’s been very unwell and I decided to leave him there until we actually needed him as, of course, we shall. I have not forgotten him.’

  ‘He was well enough to go to the pictures,’ Mrs Cuddy pointed out. ‘I think the whole thing looks very funny. Very funny indeed.’

  Jemima suddenly found herself exclaiming indignantly: ‘Why do you say it looks “funny”? Mr Merryman has already pointed out what a maddeningly incorrect expression it is and he is ill and he only came to the pictures because he’s naughty and obstinate and I think he’s a poppet and certainly not a murderer and I’m sorry to interrupt but I do.’

  Alleyn said, almost as Father Jourdain might have said: ‘All right, my child. All right,’ and Tim put his arm round Jemima.

  ‘It will be obvious to you all,’ Alleyn went on exactly as if there had been no interruption, ‘that I must find out why the steward was there and why he was dressed in this manner. It is here that you, Mrs Dillington-Blick, can help us.’

  ‘Ruby!’ Dale whispered, but she was not looking at him.

  ‘It was only a joke,’ she said. ‘We did it for a joke. How could we possibly know—?’

  ‘We? You mean you and Mr Dale, don’t you?’

  ‘And Dennis. Yes. It’s no good, Aubyn. I can’t not say.’

  ‘Did you give Dennis the dress?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘After Las Palmas?’

  ‘Yes. He’d been awfully obliging and he said—you know what an odd little creature he was—he admired it awfully and I, I told you, I took against it after the doll business. So I gave it to him. He said he wanted to dress up for a joke at some sort of birthday party the stewards were having.’

  ‘On Friday night?’

  ‘Yes. He wanted me not to say anything. That was why, when you asked me about the dress I didn’t tell you. I wondered if you knew. Did you?’

  Alleyn was careful not to look at Captain Bannerman. ‘It doesn’t arise at the moment,’ he said.

  The Captain made an indeterminate rumbling noise that culminated in utterance.

  ‘Yes, it does!’ he roared. ‘Fair’s fair and little though I may fancy the idea, I’m not a man to shirk my responsibilities.’ He jerked his head at Alleyn. ‘The superintendent,’ he said, ‘came to me and told me somebody had been seen fooling about the forward well-deck in that damned dress. He said he hadn’t seen it himself and whoever did see it reckoned it was Mrs Dillington-Blick. And why not, I thought? Her dress, and why wouldn’t she be wearing it? He asked me to make inquiries and stop a repetition. I didn’t see my way to interfering and I wouldn’t give my consent to him doing it on his own. All my time as Master, I’ve observed a certain attitude towards my passengers. I didn’t see fit to change it. I was wrong. I didn’t believe I’d shipped a murderer. Wrong again. Dead wrong. I don’t want it overlooked or made light of. I was wrong.’

  Alleyn said: ‘That’s a very generous statement,’ and thought it best to carry on. ‘I had not seen the figure in the Spanish dress,’ he said. ‘I had been told it was Mrs Dillington-Blick and there was no reason that anybody would accept to suppose it wasn’t. I merely had a notion, unsupported by evidence, that the behaviour as reported was uncharacteristic.’

  Jemima said: ‘It was I who told about it. Mr Alleyn asked me if I was sure it was Mrs Dillington-Blick and I said I was.’

  Mrs Dillington-Blick said: ‘Dennis told me what he’d done. He said he’d always wanted to be a dancer.’ She looked at Alleyn. ‘When you asked me if I would wear the dress to dance by the light of the moon, I thought you’d seen him and mistaken him for me. I didn’t tell you. I pretended it was me, because—’ her face crumpled and she began to cry, ‘because we were planning the joke.’

  ‘Well,’ Alleyn said, ‘there it was. And now I shall tell you what I think happened. I think, Mr Dale, that with your fondness for practical jokes, you suggested that it would be amusing to get the steward to dress up tonight and go to the verandah and that you arranged with Mrs Dillington-Blick to let it be understood that she herself was going to be there. Is that right?’

  Aubyn Dale had sobered up considerably. Something of his old air of conventional decency had reappeared. He exhibited all the troubled concern of a good chap who is overwhelmed with self-reproach.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I’ll never forgive myself for this. It’s going to haunt me for the rest of my life. But how could I know? How could I know! We—I mean, I—I take the whole responsibility,’ he threw a glance, perhaps slightly reproachful, at Mrs Dillington-Blick. ‘—I just thought it would be rather amusing to do it. The idea was that this poor little devil should—’ He hesitated and stole a look at Mr McAngus and Mr Cuddy. ‘—well, should go to the verandah as you say and, if anybody turned up he was just to sort of string them along a bit. I mean, putting it like that in cold blood after what’s happened, it may sound rather poor but—’

  He stopped and waved his hands.

  Miss Abbott broke her self-imposed silence. She said: ‘It sounds common, cheap and detestable.’

  ‘I resent that, Miss Abbott.’

  ‘You can resent it till you’re purple in the face but the fact remains. To plot with the steward! To make a vulgar practical joke out of what may have been the wretched little creature’s tragedy—his own private, inexorable weakness—his devil!’

  ‘My child!’ Father Jourdain said. ‘You must stop.’ But she pointed wildly and clumsily at Cuddy. ‘To trick that man! To use his idiotic, hopeless infatuation! And the other—’

  ‘No, no. Please!’ Mr McAngus cried out. ‘It doesn’t matter. Please!’

  Miss Abbott looked at him with what might have been a kind of compassion and turned on Mrs Dillington-Blick. ‘And you,’ she said, ‘with your beauty and fascination, with everything that unhappy women long for: to lend yourself to such a thing! To give him your lovely dress, to allow him to so much as touch it! What were you thinking of!’ She ground her heavy hands together: ‘Beauty is sacred!’ she said. ‘It is sacred in its own right: you have committed sacrilege.’

  ‘Katherine, you must come away. As your priest, I insist. You will do yourself irreparable harm. Come with me.’

  For the first time she seemed to hear him. The familiar look of mulish withdrawal returned and she got up.

  ‘Alleyn?’ Father Jourdain asked.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  �
��Come along,’ he said and Miss Abbott let him take her away.

  IV

  ‘That woman’s upset me,’ Mrs Dillington-Blick said, angrily sobbing. ‘I don’t feel at all well. I feel awful.’

  ‘Ruby, darling!’

  ‘No! No, Aubyn, don’t paw me. We shouldn’t have done it. You shouldn’t have started it. I feel ghastly.’

  Captain Bannerman squared his shoulders and approached her. ‘Nor you!’ she said, and, perhaps for the first time in her adult life she appealed to someone of her own sex. ‘Jemima!’ she said. ‘Tell me I needn’t feel like this. It’s not fair. I’m hating it.’

  Jemima went to her. ‘I can’t tell you you needn’t,’ she said, ‘but we all know you do and that’s much better than not minding at all. At least—‘ She appealed to Alleyn. ‘—isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  Mr McAngus, tying himself up in a sort of agonized knot of sympathy, said: ‘You mustn’t think about it. You mustn’t reproach yourself. You are goodness itself. Oh, don’t!’

  Mrs Cuddy sniffed piercingly.

  ‘It’s this awful heat,’ Mrs Dillington-Blick moaned. ‘One can’t think.’ She had, in fact, gone very white. ‘I—I feel faint.’

  Alleyn opened the double doors. ‘I was going to suggest,’ he said, ‘that we let a little air in.’ Jemima put her arm round Mrs Dillington-Blick and Tim went over to her. ‘Can you manage?’ he asked. ‘Come outside.’

  They helped her through the doors. Alleyn moved Mr Merryman’s chair so that its back was turned to the lounge and Mrs Dillington-Blick sank out of sight. ‘Will you stay here?’ Alleyn asked. ‘When you feel more like it I should be glad of another word with you. I’ll ask Dr Makepiece to come and see how you are. Perhaps, Miss Carmichael, you’d stay with Mrs Dillington-Blick. Would you?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘All right?’ Tim asked her.

  ‘Perfectly.’

  Alleyn had a further word with Tim and then the two men went back into the room.

  Alleyn said: ‘I’m afraid I must press on. I shall need all the men but if you, Mrs Cuddy, would rather go to your cabin, you may.’