Death in the Middle Watch

by Bruce, Leo

  As he certainly kept Alexander Carlisle. He liked the West Indian and felt a certain respect for a man so obviously self-dependent, so much a master of his own fate, but he found it quite easy to picture him silently opening Cynthia’s cabin door and entering. Nor did Carolus think it impossible that Cynthia had invited him to do so. The snag here, as with so many of the passengers, was lack of any recognizable motive, but since Carolus still had more than a week among them, he believed that a motive would eventually appear.

  A more promising possibility, if only because Carolus knew so little about him, was the man who had announced himself to the Purser as Dr Runwell. Those sharp grey eyes, that keen unfriendly look, might mean anything. Carolus realized that he had not seen Dr Runwell since that first encounter on deck. Perhaps he sat behind Carolus in the dining hall, but surely sometimes he must come out on deck? There was nothing to point at him, nothing whatever, yet Carolus lingered for some time over him. and, as if by some curious speak-of-the-Devil kind of superstition, he suddenly noticed the man himself sitting quite alone on the other side of the saloon. He was not reading or apparently taking any interest in his fellow passengers. He just sat bolt upright and looked ahead. “I’m taking this cruise purely for my health,” Carolus remembered him saying. Well, perhaps.

  Then there was Medlow, too obviously a “suspect” to be suspected at all. His deliberately crazy manner and loud voice, his noisy disapproval of everyone and everything about him and his claim to be making a report of some kind as though he were a member of MI5—all suggested that he was almost asking to be suspected, and unless this were a sinister double bluff, Medlow could be dismissed from Carolus’s mind.

  Not so “the lady at the table where we sit.” Mrs Grahame-Willows might well be that gossiping mischief-maker familiar to all who spend long periods on ship, but there might be other motives for the stories she set circulating. There seemed to be too much design in her exaggerations, too much sheer fantasy in her stories to be completely ingenuous and the rapidity with which she always produced her explanations after each event was in itself suspicious. That Carolus had accepted her as a figure of comedy when described by Mrs Stick was not in itself a complete contradiction.

  But Carolus moved on to Dr Yaqub Ali. Had these been the days of Sherlock Holmes, any Asian would have been per se a suspect and Carolus felt bound to remember the circumstances of Tom Travers’s death, but he did not seriously suppose that the doctor had murdered Cynthia Darwin or had any part in her murder. He could, he admitted, be wrong and at this stage, when so few of his ideas led to any reasonable conclusion, he could not afford utterly to wipe out Dr Yaqub Ali’s name.

  There remained the young man Gavin Ritchie who used makeup and the blonde girl who so very pointedly had not come aboard with him or been seen with him since then. But Ritchie’s passionate friendship with the Assistant Purser, though it did not clear him entirely, was a circumstance that made his involvement in a violent act somewhat improbable. Of the Assistant Purser, it was possible to imagine brutality but there had been nothing to suggest that he, or Susan Berry’s friend the Second Engineer, had any sort of involvement other than the fact, true of all the officers and crew, that they served on a ship on which a man was believed to have been lost overboard and on which a woman passenger had been killed. Or perhaps the fact—again learned from the Purser—that they had all been serving on the same ship a year ago when the woman’s rich husband died and was buried at sea, was enough to make them be entertained as suspects.

  There was another couple named Popple, and yet another whose name Carolus had not even troubled to ascertain; three single men who played gin rummy all day, and a couple of nondescript girls with whom he had not spoken. There were also the members of the cheerful Irish family.

  This left, of all those known to him who had been on board at the time of Cynthia Darwin’s murder, no one but the deckhand Leacock, and with him Carolus admitted there was something of a problem. Leacock drank, and yet was emphatically considered by Porteous an “excellent fellow.” He was quarrelsome, as Carolus observed, yet seemed to be put in a position of trust by the ship’s officers. He was moreover indiscreet and talkative, the last man, one would have thought, allowed to be on familiar terms with the passengers. There was in fact some mystery about him. Carolus did not go so far as to suspect him of murder, but he felt that although Leacock had been ready, perhaps too ready, to answer all his questions, he could have told Carolus very much more, and nearer the point, than he had done.

  “I hope,” said a voice beside Carolus, “that you do not exclude me from your suspects of the crime, which I see you all too obviously trying to elucidate?” It was Mr Gorringer and he took the seat beside Carolus. “Although our long relationship might be expected to protect me, yet a good detective must surely have no friends. I am willing, no, I positively insist on being considered among the possibilities.”

  “Very well,” said Carolus curtly. “Where were you at the time of Mrs Darwin’s murder, that is to say between one and two in the small hours?”

  Mr Gorringer was equally curt, even somewhat snappish.

  “In my bunk,” he said.

  “To which you naturally have no witnesses?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Then you are on my list, in so far as I have one, along with the rest of the passengers and crew of this ship.”

  “Are you not, perhaps, carrying a joke too far, my, dear Deene? My suggestion was a facetious one and should have been seen by you as such. I should be distressed if you did not credit me with as ready a sense of humour as your own. But be that as it may, we shall, I think, congratulate ourselves tomorrow when the body of our fellow passenger has been removed from the ship and placed on board a homebound aeroplane. Then and then only shall I feel that a true holiday will begin for all of us.”

  “You will? I shall feel on the contrary, that I must get down to some really hard work.”

  “Will you not, if I may use a somewhat inappropriate metaphor, be seeking to shut the stable door when the horse has gone?”

  Carolus looked serious.

  “I hope not,” he said. “I truly hope not. Unless of course you are referring to the late Mrs Darwin as a horse.”

  “Certainly not. I warned you that I was speaking in metaphor. You are too ready to misunderstand me.”

  There was a long silence between them. Then Mr Gorringer remarked reflectively, “So we shall approach Calpe, one of the Pillars of Hercules of the ancients, tomorrow.”

  “You mean we reach Gibraltar,” said Carolus.

  “I do. It will be a sad approach to those of us who esteemed the poor lady whose remains will be taken ashore by her husband.”

  “But that mustn’t prevent your seeing the famous apes,” said Carolus. “They so exactly resemble the Lower Fifth at Newminster. And now, before turning in, I must consult Mrs Stick. She keeps me informed of the more sensational rumours. Goodnight, headmaster.”

  He found Mrs Stick on deck with her husband.

  “Thank goodness you’ve come, sir. I don’t think I could have gone on much longer,” she said, leaving Stick and joining Carolus. “Stick was set on going round the deck twenty-four times and I was feeling half blown away by the wind, though it’s not so bad as last night. If we was to go into the Sun Lounge for a minute I’ve got something I think you ought to hear about.”

  Carolus willingly followed the little woman in.

  “She says,” Mrs Stick began at once, “that the Port Authorities in Gibraltar won’t hear of it, sending a lady ashore in a coffin when nobody can say how she came to die. I mean, it does sound a bit on the off side, doesn’t it? So I suppose we shall know all the rest of the cruise that she’s lying in her cabin dead, as you might say.”

  “I might, but I promise you I won’t. Your friend is quite incorrect. The whole thing has been arranged by wireless. The body will be taken ashore before the passengers are out of their cabins in the early morning.”
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br />   “There! I told Her She must be mistaken, but you know what She is once she gets an idea in Her head. Wild elephants won’t move it. But She did happen to say that She thinks a Dr Runwell had something to do with it—the murder, I mean. She says She doesn’t like the look of this Dr Runwell at all. She says he might easily have stuck a knife in anyone.”

  “But Mrs Darwin died of strangulation.”

  “So they say. But how does anyone know? All we know is the poor lady went to bed and never got up next morning. That’s all we’ve been told. She says she might have been poisoned or had her throat cut for all we can tell. Nor She doesn’t much like the look of that doctor, anyway. She says all She knows is, She wouldn’t like to have anything wrong with her when he’s around, that’s all, She says. She says he’d operate on you as soon as look at you, She says.”

  Then Mrs Stick added a few observations of her own which roused a keener interest in Carolus.

  “You know that young plump party with the blonde hair, don’t you?” The description was adequate and Carolus nodded. “Well, I may be mistaken but you can’t help noticing things, can you?”

  Carolus waited.

  “It’s the man whose wife’s been done for,” said Mrs Stick, and once again was silent.

  “What about him? Or her?” Carolus asked obligingly.

  “They were together all yesterday evening, that’s what. Sitting together as though they couldn’t take their eyes off each other. Mind you, she is an attractive girl, whatever anyone says. But it’s a bit quick, isn’t it, when his poor wife’s only just been murdered. I mentioned it to Her, but She doesn’t think there’s anything in it. She says people only come on a cruise like this to have a good time. So I said, ‘Not when their wife’s been murdered, or shouldn’t do,’ I said. She’s very funny in that way. If anyone else notices something She won’t have it.”

  Carolus seemed to be considering Mrs Stick’s observations.

  “You’re quite sure?” he asked.

  “Sure as I’m sitting here. That Mr Darwin, it was, and the young party they call Rita, though Rita What I don’t know. They were sitting side by side looking at each other. Whatever happened afterwards I don’t know.”

  “Afterwards?”

  “When we all went to bed, I mean. But by the way they were looking at each other—well! You’d never have thought he’d come on the ship to find his wife done away with. Not that he doesn’t seem quite a nice fellow when he talks to you. It may all be on that Rita’s side. But what I say is, it didn’t look like it.”

  Carolus felt that a comment was being demanded of him and did his best. “You never know,” he said. It was enough.

  “Of course you don’t,” said Mrs Stick. “Not when it’s one of those blonde girls like that. Perhaps she’s after his money.”

  “How would she know he has any?”

  “She told me that. He’s got ever such a big business, She said. Something to do with television, She said, so he’s bound to make a lot. This Rita only had just enough to book her passage, She says. So there you are.”

  And there in fact Carolus was and there was Mrs Stick when the two of them decided to go to bed and, as Mrs Stick said, “wait and see in the morning.”

  Ten

  BY BREAKFAST TIME IT was all over—the coffin had gone ashore followed by Guy Darwin and before midday Mr Porteous, who had accompanied the bereaved husband, reported to Carolus that he had seen them both, Darwin and the coffin, on a plane taking off for London.

  “So I hope we shan’t hear any more of that,” said Porteous.

  Carolus did not share the aspiration.

  “You don’t seriously think that you can get rid of the situation as simply as this, do you? The thing is only beginning, and you must surely be aware of it. Just because Darwin has shown himself understanding of your problems, you needn’t think they don’t exist.”

  “What problems? I think you take a very gloomy view of it all, Deene. Holiday cruises have been interrupted by unfortunate circumstances of this kind before now, you know, and the company organizing them has survived.”

  “If you mean by ‘unfortunate circumstances of this kind’ the murder of a woman passenger in her cabin, I doubt it. There was a famous case once, I remember, when a steward murdered a young woman who had acted in films. But that was on a transatlantic crossing, not on a holiday cruise. And certainly not when the husband of the same woman had died on the same ship just a year earlier.”

  “That was unfortunate, as I told you at our first meeting, but there is no evidence, that I know of, to connect it with this.”

  “No? You have the wonderful faculty of deliberate blindness,” said Carolus. “Sometimes I envy you. But not now. It’s through your blindness in this case that you are walking into danger.”

  “Danger? What kind of danger?” asked Mr Porteous, with more concern than he had hitherto shown.

  “Just danger,” said Carolus airily, and left the impresario of holiday pleasures to think it over.

  After lunch, Carolus ignored Mrs Stick waving with some agitation from the door of the Sun Lounge and went in search of Dr Yaqub Ali. Perhaps something Mr Porteous had said had suggested a line of thought to him or perhaps he had intended, when a suitable moment arrived, to interview the Pakistani ship’s surgeon.

  Dr Yaqub Ali was a youngish rather handsome man who looked well in uniform and seemed to know it.

  “I have wanted for some time to have a chat with you,” Carolus began. “You know that I’m trying to get at the truth about this murder.”

  Dr Ali spoke in a clipped voice and did not sound too friendly.

  “I understood that you had been employed to prevent a murder, not to solve the mystery of one,” he said.

  “Both,” said Carolus. “And both murders, for that matter.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “The murder of Mrs Darwin and that of her first husband a year ago.”

  “Really? You doubtless know more about the circumstances of the death of Mr Travers than I do. I only examined the body and signed a death certificate,” said the doctor sarcastically.

  “Yes. That’s about all. And you were too seasick to do either of them conscientiously. So let’s get down to realities. What do you really think Travers died of?”

  “Coronary thrombosis, as I wrote in the certificate I gave him. And I’d like to see you prove it was anything else.”

  “Prove, no. Suspect, yes. But you may not have realized it fully when you wrote the certificate. Seasickness can be a terrible thing.”

  “So can a suspicious detective. Perhaps you are going to tell me what killed Mrs Darwin?”

  “Yes. Strangulation. Very quickly and violently carried out as it had to be, to be unheard. An entirely different case. Travers was probably poisoned.”

  “You know everything, Mr Deene. Perhaps you also know who administered the poison?”

  “Yes. I think I know that too. But I admit to being unsure in that case. I was hoping you would help me. Who do you think it was?”

  Dr Ali smiled, but not amiably.

  “Really. You have a nerve. You come to tell me that I gave a dishonest or at least a mistaken death certificate, a very serious matter to a man in my position, though a trivial one it would seem in the eyes of a private detective, and you then ask me to assist you in your wrong-headed investigations.”

  “That’s it,” said Carolus blithely.

  “Then,” said Dr Yaqub Ali, losing his temper, “do you know what I say? I say, go to hell.”

  “Quite. That would be most convenient for you. In the meantime I must remind you that you have entered into a dangerous conspiracy with Porteous and others and will certainly have to answer for it when we reach London. Mrs Darwin must have some relations apart from her recently acquired husband.”

  “You put that very crudely. I was present at the wedding, and can assure you …”

  “Oh, yes. It was a love-match on one side anyway. I don’t
dispute that. I only said ‘recently acquired’ because you, and perhaps only you, doctor, know the exact circumstances of her widowhood.”

  “Let us stop beating about the shrub,” said Dr Ali, voicing his first Orientalism. “You think Mrs Darwin was murdered, don’t you? Perhaps you suspect me of the murder?”

  “I always suspect unnecessary secrecy in such a matter.”

  “Yes. I thought so.”

  “What I would like to know is what took you to Mrs Darwin’s cabin? How did you discover that she was dead?”

  “There, I fear, you touch on the Hippocratic oath. It was a fellow doctor who called me.”

  “You mean Dr Runwell?”

  “Since he is the only other doctor on board, you must be correct. But I prefer that the matter should not be made public. Dr Runwell, I gather, had known Mrs Darwin before her second marriage …”

  “But during her first?”

  “Possibly, yes. I have no information except what he told me, that he and Mrs Travers, as he called her, had been friends for some years. Whether or not they were lovers is not for me to say.”

  “If they were, the woman must have had charms which were not obvious to others. Go on.”

  “It seems, not to put too sharp an edge on it, that they had arranged that Runwell call at Cynthia Darwin’s cabin during the night, for what he described as a chat. I did not ask him to go into any further detail. It was not my business.”

  “But it damned well will be, when a coroner gets his teeth into you. Or haven’t you thought of that? Your Hippocratic oath will go out the window and you’ll have to speak the truth. What did he find?”

  “Just what I found not long after. The woman was in her bunk. She had been strangled before she could call for help.”

  “By someone whose knock she had mistaken for Runwell? Or by Runwell himself?”

  “I think you can dismiss that from possibility.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he would scarcely have called me if he had strangled Mrs Darwin, would he?”