Singing in the Shrouds ra-20

by Ngaio Marsh

  It was Brigid who first noticed the break in the weather. A kind of thin warmth fell across the page of her book; she looked up and saw that the curtain of fog had grown threadbare and that sunlight had weakly filtered through. At the same moment the Farewell gave her noonday hoot and then Brigid heard the sound of an engine. She went over to the port side and there, quite close, was the pilot cutter. She watched it come alongside the rope ladder. A tall man stood amidships, looking up at the Farewell. Brigid was extremely critical of men’s clothes and she noticed his with absent-minded approval. A sailor at the head of the ladder dropped a line to the cutter and hauled up two cases. The pilot went off and the tall man climbed the ladder very handily and was met by the cadet on duty, who took him up to the bridge.

  On his way he passed Mr. Merryman and Mr. Cuddy, who looked up from their crime novels and were struck by the same vague notion, immediately dismissed, that they had seen the new arrival before. In this they were not altogether mistaken; on the previous evening they had both looked at his heavily distorted photograph in the Evening Herald. He was Superintendent R. Alleyn.

  Captain Bannerman put his hands in his jacket pockets and surveyed his latest passenger. At the outset Alleyn had irritated Captain Bannerman by not looking like his own conception of a plain-clothes detective and by speaking with what the captain, who was an inverted snob, considered a bloody posh accent entirely unsuited to a cop. He himself had been at some pains to preserve his own Midland habits of speech.

  “Well,” he said. “Superintendent A’leen, is it? I take it you’ll tell me what all this is in aid of and I don’t mind saying I’ll be glad to know.”

  “I suppose, sir,” Alleyn said, “you’ve been cursing ever since you got whatever signals they sent you.”

  “Well — not to say cursing.”

  “I know damn well what a bore this must be. The only excuse I can offer is one of expedience, and I must say of extreme urgency.”

  Captain Bannerman, deliberately broadening his vowels, said, “Sooch a-a-s?”

  “Such as murder. Multiple murder.”

  “Mooltipul murder? Here, you don’t mean this chap that says it with flowers and sings?”

  “I do, indeed.”

  “What the hell’s he got to do with my ship?”

  “I’ve every reason to believe,” Alleyn said, “that he’s aboard your ship.”

  “Don’t talk daft.”

  “I daresay it does sound preposterous.”

  Captain Bannerman took his hands out of his pockets, walked over to a porthole and looked out. The fog had lifted and the Farewell was under way. He said, with a change of voice, “There you are! That’s the sort of crew they sign on for you these days. Murderers!”

  “My bosses,” Alieyn said, “don’t seem to think he’s in the crew.”

  “The stewards have been in this ship three voyages.”

  “Nor among the stewards. Unless sailors or stewards carry embarkation notices.”

  “D’you mean to stand there and tell me we’ve shipped a murdering passenger?”

  “It looks a bit like it at the moment.”

  “Here!” Captain Bannerman said with a change of voice. “Sit down. Have a drink. I might have known it’d be a passenger.”

  Alleyn sat down but declined a drink, a circumstance that produced the usual reaction from his companion. “Ah!” Captain Bannerman said with an air of gloomy recognition. “I suppose not. I suppose not.”

  His manner was so heavy that Alleyn felt impelled to say, “That doesn’t mean, by the way, that I’m about to arrest you.”

  “I doubt if you could, you know. Not while we’re at sea. I very much question it.”

  “Luckily, the problem doesn’t at the moment arise.”

  “I should have to look up the regulations,” sighed Captain Bannerman.

  “Look here,” Alleyn suggested, “may I try and give you the whole story, as far as it affects my joining your ship?”

  “That’s what I’ve been waiting for, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Alleyn agreed, “I’m sure it is. Here goes, then!”

  He looked full at Captain Bannerman, who seated himself, placed his hands on his knees, raised his eyebrows, and waited.

  “You know about these cases, of course,” Alleyn said, “as far as they’re being reported in the papers. During the last thirty days up to about eleven o’clock last night there had been two homicides which we believed to have been committed by the same person. In each case the victim was a woman, and each case she had been strangled and flowers had been left on the body. I needn’t worry you with any other details at the moment.”

  “Last night, a few minutes before this ship sailed, a third victim was found. She was in a dark side alley off the passageway between the place where the bus and taxis put down passengers and the actual wharf where you were moored. She was a girl from a flower shop who was bringing a box of hyacinths to one of your passengers, a Mrs. Dillington-Blick. Her string of beads had been broken and flowers had been scattered, in the usual way, over the victim.”

  “Any singing?”

  “What? Oh, that. That’s an element that has been very much played up by the press. It certainly does seem to have occurred on the first occasion. The night of the fifteenth of last month. The victim, you may remember, was Beryl Cohen, who ran a cheapjack stall in Warwick Road and did a bit of the older trade on the side. She was found in her bed-sitting-room in a side street behind Paddington. The lodger in the room above seems to have heard the visitor leaving at about ten o’clock. The lodger says the visitor was singing.”

  “What a dreadful thing,” Captain Bannerman said primly. “What sort of song, for God’s sake?”

  “ ‘The Jewel song,’ ” Alleyn said, “from Faust. In an alto voice.”

  “I’m a bass-baritone, myself,” the captain said absently. “Oratorio,” he gloomily added.

  “And it appears that the sailor on duty at the head of your gangway last night heard singing in the fog. A funny sort of voice, he said. Might mean anything, of course, or nothing. Drunken seaman. Anything. He didn’t recognize the tune.”

  “Here! About last night. How d’you know the victim was—” Captain Bannerman began and then said, “All right. Go on.”

  “In her left hand, which was clenched in cadaveric spasm, was a fragment of one of the embarkation notices your company issues to passengers. I believe the actual ticket is usually pinned to this notice and torn off by the officer whose duty it is to collect it. He hands the embarkation notice back to the passenger; it has no particular value but I daresay a great many passengers think it constitutes some kind of authority and stick to it. Unfortunately this fragment only showed part of the word Farewell and the date.”

  “No name?”

  “No name.”

  “Doesn’t amount to much, in that case,” said Captain Bannerman.

  “It suggests that the victim, struggling with her murderer, grasped this paper, that it was torn across, and that the rest of it may have remained in the murderer’s possession or may have been blown somewhere about the wharf.”

  “The whole thing might have been blowing about the wharf when the victim grabbed it.”

  “That’s a possibility, of course.”

  “Probability, more like. What about the other half, then?”

  “When I left for Portsmouth this morning, it hadn’t been found.”

  “There you are!”

  “But if all the others have kept their embarkation notices—”

  “Why should they?”

  “May we tackle that one a bit later? Now, the body was found by the P.C. on that beat five minutes before you sailed. He’s a good chap and kept his head admirably, it seems, but he couldn’t do anything about boarding you. You’d sailed. As he talked to me on the deck telephone he saw your funnel slip past into the fog. A party of us from the Yard went down and did the usual things. We got in touch with your company, who were hellishly anxious t
hat your sailing shouldn’t be delayed.”

  “I’ll be bound!” Captain Bannerman ejaculated.

  “…And my bosses came to the conclusion that we hadn’t got enough evidence to justify our keeping you back while we held a full-scale enquiry in the ship.”

  “My Gawd!”

  “So it was decided that I should sail with you and hold it, as well as I can, under the counter.”

  “And what say,” Captain Bannerman asked slowly and without any particular signs of bad temper, “what say I won’t have it? There you are! How about that?”

  “Well,” Alleyn said, “I hope you don’t cut up rough in that particular direction and I’m sure you won’t. But suppose you did and suppose I took it quietly, which, by the way, I wouldn’t, the odds are you’d have another corpse on your hands before you made your next landfall.”

  Captain Bannerman leaned forward, still keeping his palms on his knees, until his face was within a few inches of Alleyn’s. His eyes were of that piercing, incredible blue that landsmen so correctly associate with sailors, and his face was the colour of old bricks.

  “Do you mean,” he asked furiously, “to tell me you think this chap’s not had enoof to satisfy him for the voyage?”

  “So far,” Alleyn said, “he’s been operating at ten-day intervals. That’ll carry him, won’t it, to somewhere between Las Palmas and Cape Town?”

  “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe he’s aboard.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “What sort of a chap is he? Tell me that.”

  Alleyn said, “You tell me. You’ve got just as good a chance of being right.”

  “Me!”

  “You or anyone else. May I smoke?”

  “Here—” the captain began and reached for a cigarette box.

  “A pipe, if you don’t mind.” Alleyn pulled it out and as he talked, filled it. “These cases,” he said, “are the worst of the lot from our point of view. We can pick a card-sharp or a conman or a sneak-thief or a gunman or a dozen other bad lots by certain mannerisms and tricks of behaviour. They develop occupational habits and they generally keep company with their own kind. But not the man who, having never before been in trouble with the police, begins, perhaps latish in life, to strangle women at ten-day intervals and leave flowers on their faces. He’s a job for the psychiatrist if ever there was one, and he doesn’t go in for psychiatry. He’s merely an example. But of what? The result of bad housing conditions or a possessive mother or a kick on the head at football or a bullying schoolmaster or a series of regrettable grandparents? Again, your guess is as good as mine. He is. He exists. He may behave with perfect propriety in every possible aspect of his life but this one. He may be, and often is, a colourless little fellow who trots to and fro upon his lawful occasions for, say, fifty years, seven months and a day. On the day after that he trots out and becomes a murderer. Probably there have been certain eccentricities of behaviour which he’s been at great pains to conceal and which have suddenly become inadequate. Whatever compulsion it is that hounds him into his appointed crime, it now takes over. He lets go and becomes a monster.”

  “Ah!” Captain Bannerman said. “A monster. There’s unnatural things turn up where you’d least expect to find them in most human souls. That I will agree to. But not in my ship.”

  The two men looked at each other, and Alleyn’s heart sank. He knew pigheadedness when he met it.

  The ship’s engines, now at full speed, drove her, outward bound, upon her course. There was no more fog; a sunny seascape accepted her as its accident. Her wake opened obediently behind her and the rhythm of her normal progress established itself. England was left behind and the Farewell, sailing on her lawful occasions, set her course for Las Palmas.

  “What,” Captain Bannerman asked, “do you want me to do? The thing’s flat-out ridiculous, but let’s hear what you want. I can’t say fairer than that, can I? Come on.”

  “No,” Alleyn agreed, “that’s fair enough and more than I bargained for. First of all, perhaps I ought to tell you what I don’t want. Particularly, I don’t want to be known for what I am.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I gather that supercargoes are a bit out-of-date, so I’d better not be a supercargo. Could I be an employee of the company going out to their Durban office?”

  Captain Bannerman stared fixedly at him and then said, “It’d have to be something very senior.”

  “Why? On account of age?”

  “It’s nothing to do with age. Or looks. Or rather,” Captain Bannerman amended, “it’s the general effect.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t quite—”

  “You don’t look ill, either. Voyage before last, outward bound, we carried a second cousin of the managing director’s. Getting over d.t.’s, he was, after taking one of these cures. You’re not a bit like him. You’re not a bit like a detective, either, if it comes to that,” Captain Bannerman added resentfully.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Have you always been a ’tec?”

  “Not absolutely.”

  “I know,” Captain Bannerman said, “leave it to me. You’re a cousin of the chairman and you’re going out to Canberra via Durban to one of these legations or something. There’s all sorts of funny jobs going in Canberra. Anybody’ll believe anything, almost.”

  “Will they?”

  “It’s a fact.”

  “Fair enough. Who is your chairman?”

  “Sir Graeme Harmond.”

  “Do you mean a little fat man with pop eyes and a stutter?”

  “Well,” said Captain Bannerman, staring at Alleyn, “if you care to put it that way.”

  “I know him.”

  “You don’t tell me!”

  “He’ll do.”

  “Do!”

  “I’d better not use my own name. There’s been something in the papers. How about C. J. Roderick?”

  “Roderick?”

  “It happens to be the first chunk of my own name, but it’s never appeared in print. When you do this sort of thing you answer more readily to a name you’re used to.” He thought for a moment. “No,” he said. “Let’s play safer and make it Broderick.”

  “Wasn’t your picture in last night’s Herald?”

  “Was it? Hell!”

  “Wait a bit.”

  The captain went into his stateroom and came back with a copy of the paper that had so intrigued Mr. Cuddy. He folded it back at the snapshot of piquant Beryl Cohen and Superintendent R. Alleyn (inset).

  “Is that like me?” Alleyn said.

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  “There may be a very slight resemblance. It looks as if your mouth was full.”

  “It was.”

  “I see,” said Captain Bannerman heavily.

  “We’ll have to risk it.”

  “I suppose you’ll want to keep very much to yourself?”

  “On the contrary. I want to mix as much as possible with the passengers.”

  “Why?”

  Alleyn waited for a moment and then asked, “Have you got a good memory for dates?”

  “Dates?”

  “Could you, for instance, provide yourself with a cast-iron alibi plus witnesses for the fifteenth of last month between ten and eleven P.M., the twenty-fifth between nine P.M. and midnight, and for last night during the half-hour before you sailed?”

  Captain Bannerman breathed stertorously and whispered to himself. At last he said, “Not all three, I couldn’t.”

  “There you are, you see.”

  Captain Bannerman removed his spectacles and again advanced his now empurpled face to within a short distance of Alleyn’s.

  “Do I look like a sex monster?” he furiously demanded.

  “Don’t ask me,” Alleyn rejoined mildly. “I don’t know what they look like. That’s part of the trouble. I thought I’d made it clear.”

  As Captain Bannerman had nothing to say to this, Alleyn went on. “I’ve got to try a
nd check those times with all your passengers and — please don’t misunderstand me, sir — I can only hope that most of them manage to turn in solider alibis than, on the face of it, yours looks to be.”

  “Here! I’m clear for the fifteenth. We were berthed in Liverpool and I was aboard with visitors till two in the morning.”

  “If that can be proved we won’t pull you in for murder.”

  Captain Bannerman said profoundly, “That’s a queer sort of style to use when you’re talking to the master of the ship.”

  “I mean no more than I say, and that’s not much. After all, you don’t come aboard your own ship clutching an embarkation notice.”

  Captain Bannerman said, “Not as a rule. No.”

  Alleyn stood up. “I know,” he said, “what a bind this is for you and I really am sorry. I’ll keep as quiet as I reasonably may.”

  “I’ll bet you anything you like he hasn’t shipped with us. Anything you like! Now!”

  “If we’d been dead certain we’d have held you up until we got him.”

  “It’s all some perishing mistake.”

  “It may be.”

  “Well,” Captain Bannerman said grudgingly as he also rose. “I suppose we’ll have to make the best of it. No doubt you’d like to see your quarters. This ship carries a pilot’s cabin. On the bridge. We can give you that if it suits.”

  Alleyn said it would suit admirably. “And if I can just be treated as a passenger—”

  “I’ll tell the chief steward.” He went to his desk, sat down behind it, pulled a slip of paper towards him and wrote on it, muttering as he did so, “Mr. C. J. Broderick, relative of the chairman, going out to a post at the British Embassy in Canberra. That it?”

  “That’s it. I don’t, of course, have to tell you anything about the need for complete secrecy.”

  “You do not. I’ve no desire to make a fool of myself, talking daft to my ship’s complement.”

  A fresh breeze had sprung up and was blowing through the starboard porthole. It caught the memorandum that the Captain had just completed. The paper fluttered, turned over, and was revealed as a passenger’s embarkation notice for the Cape Farewell.