Singing in the Shrouds ra-20

by Ngaio Marsh

  Let not our flesh corrupted be.

  “No! No! NO!” Mr. Merryman shouted, coming very close and handing him an embarkation notice. “You have completely misinterpreted the poem. My compliments to the captain and request him to lay on six of the best.”

  Mr. Merryman then opened his mouth very wide, turned into Mr. Cuddy and jumped overboard. Alleyn began to climb a rope ladder with Mrs. Dillington-Blick on his back and thus burdened, at last fell heavily to sleep.

  CHAPTER 7

  After Las Palmas

  The passengers always met for coffee in the lounge at eleven o’clock. On the morning after Las Palmas this ceremony marked the first appearance of Mrs. Dillington-Blick and Aubyn Dale, neither of whom had come down for breakfast. It was a day with an enervating faint wind and the coffee was iced.

  Alleyn had chosen this moment to present Mrs. Dillington-Blick with the disjecta membra of Esmeralda. She had already sent Dennis to find the doll and was as fretful as a good-natured woman can be when he came back empty-handed. Alleyn told her that at a late hour he and Father Jourdain had discovered Esmeralda lying on the deck. He then indicated the newspaper parcel that he had laid out on the end of the table.

  He did this at the moment when the men of the party and Miss Abbott were gathered round the coffee. Mrs. Cuddy, Mrs. Dillington-Blick, and Brigid always allowed themselves the little ceremony of being waited upon by the gentlemen. Miss Abbott consistently lined herself up in the queue and none of the men had the temerity to question this procedure.

  With the connivance of Father Jourdain and Tim Makepiece, Alleyn unveiled Esmeralda at the moment when Aubyn Dale, Mr. Merryman, Mr. Cuddy and Mr. McAngus were hard by the table.

  “Here she is,” he said, “and I’m afraid she presents rather a sorry sight.”

  He flicked the newspaper away in one jerk. Mrs. Dillington-Blick cried out sharply.

  Esmeralda was lying on her back with her head twisted over her shoulder and the beads and dead hyacinth in position.

  After its owner’s one ejaculation the doll’s exposure was followed by a dead silence and then by a violent oath from Mr. Merryman.

  Almost simultaneously Miss Abbott ejaculated, “Don’t!”

  Her iced coffee had tilted and the contents had fallen over Mr. Merryman’s hands.

  Miss Abbott moistened her lips and said, “You must have jolted my arm, Mr. Merryman.”

  “My dear madam, I did nothing of the sort!” he contradicted and angrily flipped his hands. Particles of iced coffee flew in all directions. One alighted on Mr. Cuddy’s nose. He seemed to be quite unaware of it. Half smiling, he stared at Esmeralda and with lightly clasped fingers revolved his thumbs slowly round each other.

  Aubyn Dale said loudly, “Why have you done this! It looks disgusting.” He reached out and with a quick movement brushed the dead hyacinth off the doll. The beads fell away with a clatter and rolled about the table. Dale straightened the flashily smiling head.

  Mr. McAngus murmured gently, “She looks quite herself again, doesn’t she? Perhaps she can be mended.”

  “I don’t understand all this,” Dale said angrily to Alleyn. “Why did you do it?”

  “Do what, exactly?”

  “Lay it out like that. Like — like—”

  Mrs. Cuddy said with relish, “Like one of those poor girls. Flowers and beads and everything; giving us all such a turn.”

  “The doll,” Alleyn said, “is exactly as Father Jourdain and I found it, hyacinth and all. I’m sorry if it’s upset anyone.”

  Mrs. Dillington-Blick had come to the table. It was the first time, Alleyn thought, that he had seen her without so much as a flicker of a smile on her face. “Was it like that?” she asked. “Why? What happened?”

  Dale said, “Don’t worry, darling Ruby. Somebody must have trodden on it and broken the beads and — and the neck.”

  “I trod on it,” Father Jourdain said. “I’m most awfully sorry, Mrs. Dillington-Blick, but it was lying on the deck in pitch-dark shadow.”

  “There you are!” Dale exclaimed. He caught Alleyn’s eye and recovered something of his professional bonhomie. “Sorry, old boy. I didn’t mean to throw a temperament. You gathered the doll up just as it was. No offense, I hope?”

  “None in the wide world,” Alleyn rejoined politely.

  Mrs. Cuddy said, “Yes, but all the same it’s funny about the flower, isn’t it, dear?”

  “That’s right, dear. Funny.”

  “Being a hyacinth and all. Such a coincidence.”

  “That’s right,” smiled Mr. Cuddy. “Funny.”

  Mr. Merryman, who was still fretfully drying his hands on his handkerchief, suddenly cried out in anguish.

  “I was mad enough to suppose,” Mr. Merryman lamented, “that in undertaking this voyage I would escape, however briefly, from the egregious, the remorseless ambiguities of the lower-school urchin. Funny! Funny! Will you be so kind, my good Cuddy, as to enlighten us? In what respect do you consider droll, entertaining or amusing the discovery of a wilted hyacinth upon the bosom of this disarticulate puppet? For my part,” Mr. Merryman added with some violence, “I find the obvious correlation altogether beastly. And the inescapable conclusion that I myself was, hypothetically at least, responsible for its presence adds to my distaste. Funny!” Mr. Merryman concluded in a fury and flung up his hands.

  The Cuddys eyed him with dawning resentment. Mr. McAngus said brightly, “But of course. I’d quite forgotten. It was my hyacinth. You took it, do you recollect? When we had our little collision? And threw it down.”

  “I did not ‘take’ it.”

  “Accidentally, of course. I meant accidentally.” Mr. McAngus bent over the doll. His reddish knotted fingers manipulated the neck. “I’m sure she can be mended,” he said.

  Mrs. Dillington-Blick said in a constrained voice, “Do you know — I hope you’ll forgive me, Mr. McAngus, and I expect I’m being dreadfully silly — but do you know I don’t somehow think I feel quite the same about Esmeralda. I don’t believe I want her mended, or at any rate not for me. Perhaps we could think of some little girl — you may have a niece.” Her voice faded into an apologetic murmur.

  With a kind of social readiness that consorted very ill with the look in his eyes, Mr. McAngus said, “But, of course, I quite understand.” His hands were still closed round the neck of the doll. He looked at them, seemed to recollect himself, and turned aside. “I quite understand,” he repeated, and helped himself to a herbal cigarette.

  Mrs. Cuddy, relentless as a Greek chorus, said, “All the same it does seem funny.” Mr. Merryman gave a strangulated cry, but she went on greedily, “the way we were all talking about those murders. You know. And then the way Mrs. Blick got that cable from her gentleman-friend about the girl being murdered who brought the flowers. And the way hyacinths keep turning up. You’d almost think it was intentional, really you would.” She stared in her unwinking fashion at Mrs. Dillington-Blick. “I don’t wonder you feel funny about it with the doll being dressed like you. You know. It might almost be you, lying there, mightn’t it, Mrs. Blick?”

  Miss Abbott struck her big hands together. “For God’s sake!” she ejaculated. “Do we have to listen to all this? Can’t someone take that thing away!”

  “Of course,” Alleyn said and dropped the newspaper over the doll. “I can.”

  He gathered up the unwieldy parcel and took it to his cabin.

  “As usual,” he wrote to his wife, “I miss you very much. I miss—” He paused and looked, without seeing them, at the objects in his cabin. He reflected on the old circumstance that although his memory had been trained for a long time to retain with scrupulous accuracy the various items of human faces, it always let him down when he wanted it to show Troy to him. Her photograph was not much good, after all. It merely reminded him of features he knew but couldn’t visualize; it was only a map of her face. He put something of this down in his letter, word after careful word, and then began to write about the
case in hand, setting out in detail everything that had happened since his last letter had been posted in Las Palmas.

  …so you see [he wrote], the nature of the predicament. I’m miles away from the point where one can even begin to think of making an arrest. All I’ve been able to do is whittle down the field of possibles. Do you agree? Have you arrived at the predominantly possible one? I’m sure you have. I’m making a mystery about nothing, which must be the last infirmity of the police mind.

  Meanwhile we have laid a plan of action that is purely negative. The first and second mates and the chief engineer have been put wise by the captain. They all think with him that the whole idea is completely up the pole and that our man’s not on board. But they’ll fall in with the general scheme and at this moment are delightedly and vigilantly keeping an eye on the ladies, who, by the way, have been told that there have been thefts on board and that they’ll be well advised to lock their doors, day and night. It’s been made very clear that Dennis, the queer fat steward, you know, is not suspected.

  From almost every point-of-view [Alleyn went on after a pause], these cases are the worst of the lot. One is always hag-ridden by one’s personal conviction that the law is desperately inadequate in its dealings with them. One wonders what sort of frightfulness is at work behind the unremarkable face, the more-or-less unexceptionable behaviour. What is the reality? With a psychiatrist, a priest, and a policeman all present we’ve got the ingredients for a Pirandello play, haven’t we? Jourdain and Makepiece are due here now and no doubt I shall get two completely opposed professional opinions from them. In fact—

  There was a tap on the door. Alleyn hurriedly wrote, “…here they are. Au revoir, darling,” and called out, “Come in.”

  Father Jourdain now wore a thin light-coloured suit, a white shirt and a black tie. The change in his appearance was quite startling; it was as if a stranger had walked in.

  “I really don’t feel,” he said, “that the mortification of a dog collar in the tropics is required of me. I shall put it on for dinner, and on Sunday I shall sweat in my decent cassock. The sight of you two in your gents’ tropical suitings was too much for me. I bought this in Las Palmas and in happier circumstances would get a great deal of pleasure out of wearing it.”

  They sat down and looked at Alleyn with an air of expectancy. It occurred to him that however sincerely they might deplore the presence of a homicidal monster as their fellow traveller they were nevertheless stimulated in a way that was not entirely unpleasurable. They were both, he thought, energetic inquisitive men and each in his own mode had a professional interest in the matter in hand.

  “Well,” he said, when they were settled, “how do you feel about Operation Esmeralda?”

  They agreed, it appeared, that nothing had happened to contradict Alleyn’s theory. The reaction to the doll had been pretty well what he had predicted.

  “Though the trouble is,” Father Jourdain added, “that when one is looking for peculiar behaviour one seems to see it all over the place. I must confess that I found Dale’s outburst, the Cuddys’ really almost gloating relish, Merryman’s intolerable pedantry, and McAngus’s manipulations equally disturbing. Of course it doesn’t arise,” he added after a pause, “but even poor Miss Abbott behaved, or so it seemed to me, with a kind of extravagance. I suppose I lost my eye.”

  “Why,” Alleyn asked, “do you call her ‘poor Miss Abbott’?”

  “Oh, my dear Alleyn! I think you know very well. The problem of the unhappy spinster crops up all along the line in my job.”

  Tim gave an inarticulate grunt.

  “Yes,” Alleyn said, “she is obviously unhappy.” He looked at Tim. “What did that knowledgeable noise mean?”

  Tim said impatiently, “We’re not concerned with Miss Abbott, I imagine, but it meant that I too recognize the type, though perhaps my diagnosis would not appeal to Father Jourdain.”

  “Would it not?” Father Jourdain said. “I should like to hear it all the same.”

  Tim said rapidly, “No, really. I mustn’t bore you and at any rate one has no business to go by superficial impressions. It’s just that on the face of it she’s a textbook example of the woman without sexual attraction who hasn’t succeeded in finding a satisfactory adjustment.”

  Alleyn looked up from his clasped hands. “From your point of view isn’t that also true of the sort of homicide we’re concerned with?”

  “Invariably, I should say. These cases almost always point back to some childish tragedy in which the old gang — fear, frustration and jealousy — have been predominant. This is true of most psychological abnormalities. For instance, as a psychotherapist I would, if I got the chance, try to discover why hyacinths make Mr. Cuddy feel ill and I’d expect to find the answer in some incident that may have been thrust completely into his subconscious and that superficially may seem to have no direct reference to hyacinths. And with Aubyn Dale, I’d be interested to hunt down the basic reason for his love of practical jokes. While if Mr. Merryman were my patient, I’d try and find a reason for his chronic irritability.”

  “Dyspepsia no good?” Alleyn asked. “He’s forever taking sodamints.”

  “All dyspeptics are not irritable woman-haters. I’d expect to find that his indigestion is associated with some very long-standing psychic disturbance.”

  “Such as his nurse having snatched away his favourite rattle and given it to his papa?”

  “You might not be as far out as you may think you are, at that.”

  “What about Dale and McAngus?”

  “Oh,” Tim said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Dale hadn’t achieved, on the whole, a fairly successful sublimation with his ghastly telly-therapy. He’s an exhibitionist who thinks he’s made good. That’s why his two public blunders upset his applecart and gave him his ‘nervous breakdown.’ ”

  “I didn’t know he’d had one,” said Father Jourdain.

  “He says he has. It’s a term psychotherapists don’t accept. As for McAngus, he really is interesting; all that timidity and absent-mindedness and losing his way in his own stories — very characteristic.”

  “Of what?” Alleyn asked.

  “Of an all-too-familiar type. Completely inhibited. Riddled with anxieties and frustrations. And of course he’s quite unconscious of their origins. His giving Mrs. D-B that damn doll was very suggestive. He’s a bachelor.”

  “Oh, dear!” Father Jourdain murmured and at once added, “Pay no attention to me. Do go on.”

  “Then,” Alleyn said, “the psychiatrist’s position in respect of these crimes is that they have all developed out of some profound emotional disturbance that the criminal is quite unaware of and is unable to control?”

  “That’s it.”

  “And does it follow that he may, at the conscious level, loathe what he does, try desperately hard to fight down the compulsion, and be filled with horror each time he fails?”

  “Very likely.”

  “Indeed, yes,” Father Jourdain said with great emphasis. “Indeed, indeed!”

  Alleyn turned to him. “Then you agree with Makepiece?”

  Father Jourdain passed a white hand over his dark luxuriant hair. “I’m sure,” he said, “that Makepiece has described the secondary cause and its subsequent results very learnedly and accurately.”

  “The secondary cause!” Tim exclaimed.

  “Yes. The repressed fear, or frustration or whatever it was — I’m afraid,” said Father Jourdain with a faint smile, “I haven’t mastered the terminology. But I’m sure you’re right about all that; indeed you know it all as a man of science. But you see I would look upon that early tragedy and its subsequent manifestations as the — well, as the modus operandi of an infinitely more terrible agent.”

  “I don’t follow,” Tim said. “A more terrible agent?”

  “Yes. The devil.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I believe that this poor soul is possessed of a devil.”

  Tim
, to Alleyn’s amusement, actually blushed scarlet as if Father Jourdain had committed some frightful social solecism.

  “I see,” Father Jourdain observed, “that I have embarrassed you.”

  Tim mumbled something about everybody being entitled to his opinion.

  Alleyn said, “I’m afraid I’m rather stuck for a remark, too. Forgive me, but you do mean, quite literally, exactly what you’ve just said? Yes, I’see you do.”

  “Quite literally. It is a case of possession. I’ve seen too many to be mistaken.”

  There was a long pause during which, Alleyn reminded himself that there were a great number of not unintelligent people in the world who managed, with some satisfaction to themselves, to believe in devils. At last he said, “I must say, in that case, I very much wish you could exorcise it.”

  With perfect seriousness Father Jourdain replied that there were certain difficulties. “I shall, of course, continue to pray for him,” he said.

  Tim shuffled his feet, lit a cigarette, and with an air of striking out rather wildly for some kind of raft, asked Alleyn for the police view of this kind of murder. “After all,” he said, “you must be said to be experts.”

  “Not at all,” Alleyn rejoined. “Very far from it. Our job, God save the mark, is first to protect society and then as a corollary to catch the criminal. These sorts of criminals are often our worst headache. They have no occupational habits. They resemble each other only in their desire to kill for gratification. In everyday life they may be anything; there are no outward signs. We generally get them but by no means always. The thing one looks for, of course, is a departure from routine. If there’s no known routine, if your man is a solitary creature as Jack the Ripper was, your chances lessen considerably.” Alleyn paused and then added in a changed voice: “But as to why, fundamentally, he is what he is — we are dumb. Perhaps if we knew we’d find our job intolerable.”

  Father Jourdain said, “You are, after all, a compassionate man, I see.”