Murder by Latitude

by Rufus King

  Valcour smiled queerly. “Proof? None.”

  “Then dear God alive, man, do you realize you are asking me to let you start a panic among my passengers?”

  “You misunderstood me, Captain. I am just warning you that to the best belief of the New York Police Department you have a man on board here who is wanted for murder. The last thing in the world that I want to do is either to make the fact public or to subject your passengers to police methods. Everything that I say to you is in strict confidence.”

  “Do not mind me if I get irritated, Valcour. I am a man who irritates easily. I think myself that you are on a wild-goose chase. Look, let me show you—I personally know for a fact that, with the exceptions of your own and those of Mr. and Mrs. Poole, our bookings for this passage were made well over two weeks ago, whereas this murder you speak about was done last week. Furthermore, there were no changes made in the ship’s complement while we were at Hamilton.” Captain Sohme spread his great hands broadly. “Unless your man is a stowaway, where is he?”

  “Captain, I have dealt with many strange cases during my connection with the police and I tell you frankly that this is the strangest case I have ever known. Since the moment when it broke I have had the conviction that when we get to the bottom of it we will find a motive so unusual in its nature that it would make this case unique—that when the picture is completed it will turn out to be (if you will forgive me an extravagance) a mosaic done in scarlets. If I were to discuss my reasons with you now they would only confuse you as greatly as they confuse myself. As to your contention that except for those of the Pooles and my own all bookings for this trip were made over two weeks ago, I can simply point out that a passage could easily have been bought from one of the passengers already on the list. It’s done frequently, isn’t it?”

  “Yes—there would be a simpleness about it, too.”

  “Very simple. Especially as no passports are required either for Bermuda or Canada—just some papers.”

  “It is like going through a fog, man.”

  “And, as in a fog, we must go slowly.”

  “There is nothing we can do?”

  “Nothing.” Valcour smiled slightly, and added, “We can just deliver that letter to Mrs. Poole.”

  CHAPTER 3

  LAT. 33° 10' NORTH, LONG. 64° 44' WEST

  There was nothing, Mrs. Poole believed, so vaguely uncomfortable as a deck chair. If there had to be deck chairs she felt that a law should be passed to have them made to measure. That a hard, inflexible object of uniform size and pattern should be expected to conform even faintly to the uneven yieldingness of a variably sized traveling public… She turned her head sideways and looked at Ted.

  It was a pity he had his clothes on—just as it was an equal pity that so many men had their clothes off, when obeying the convention of any activity such as swimming, for example. An undressed humanity would have appalled her, but as with everything there should be certain definite and important exceptions. One might even embrace as one of the exceptions whole nations: Norwegians, now—an undressed Norway—in summer, of course—those ghastly, bitter, world’s end northern winters.

  Nature had simply located the various races’ bodies wrong. Take your tropics. Who, she asked herself (staring still sideways in warm contentment at Ted), cared a hoot about the stocky, over-bellied bodies so interminably on view in the tropics—in any of the sun-parched, rain-drenched, insect-ridden, overrated tropics. Now a tropics filled with Teds, as she had first seen him: flat on his back on the hot pinkish sands of Bermuda’s Coral Beach, very young and wiggling all through his smooth brown hardness, wiggling from sheer pleasure of the drenching, burning sun which was offsetting the chill sea breeze, strong fingers scooping up pink gold and pouring it in lazy rivulets on bronze, his head rising like a turtle’s, and brown eyes staring at her from above sienna cheeks…

  “I’ve only got two days left to get burned in,” he had said.

  That had been (the satisfaction in her eyes deepened—after all, the main thing in life was to know what you wanted; it was simple enough to get it) the first time she had heard Ted’s voice in her life, the first time she had ever seen Ted in her life. That had been three days ago, and it was only a brief yesterday that he had become, with his profile, her present husband.

  Canvas-covered metal segments of the railing rose and fell in effortless rhythm. She thought of them as slender white fingers stroking blue sky and sea. Even though looking at Ted she could see it—sense it all about her: the picture and the odorless essence of the sea that sifted all about her. She was happy just lying there and looking sideways at Ted, with his brown eyes drooping sleepily downwards on a book.

  “Happy?” she said.

  “Sleepy.”

  “And happy?”

  “And happy.”

  “Why don’t you sleep?”

  She would never, she felt, get tired of his smile.

  “I am,” he said. He yawned and she could sense the wiggling going on beneath his clothes.

  “You aren’t polite,” she said.

  “You can’t be both polite and happy.”

  “Here she comes.”

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Syrup.”

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Sanford Syrup. Doesn’t she?…dripping treacle… You’d better really go to sleep.”

  “You too.”

  “I will.”

  Mrs. Sanford paused solidly at the rail and stared from beneath a floppy pompadour at the (suddenly) sleeping Pooles. Her sugary eyes crystallized as they pinned themselves on Mrs. Poole. The sun blazing out from a cloudless sky was very searching. She shrugged her shoulders faintly, and foulards unhappily outlined her stocky limbs as she continued her thoughtful walk along the deck.

  Mrs. Poole, with her head still sideways, opened her eyes. It seemed that Ted’s were permanently closed. She raised herself carefully from the chair and walked over to the rail where she stood and looked for a moment at Ted. White glinted where his lips were parted slightly, and the book he had been reading slipped with its bright yellow jacket to the deck, a brilliant splash upon the dazzle of scrubbed wood, and his eyes remained closed. She cupped a match successfully against the breeze, and timed the lighting of a cigarette to correspond with the arrival of Lieutenant Valcour at her side.

  “Even on the ocean,” she said.

  Valcour laughed. “Well—if you must be famous.”

  “I did think that of all the boats that ever sailed, this one would surely have no one on her list who knew me.”

  “Privacy, Mrs. Poole, is a non-existent quantity. Many people dream about it all their lives and only achieve it by dying.”

  They stood with their backs to the railing, staring at Ted.

  “You won’t tell him, will you?” she said.

  He noted the slight hardening of her lips, and the deepening of faint lines about her eyes.

  “He doesn’t know?”

  Her smile was quite set. “He thinks we’re—well, contemporaries.”

  “But he’s bound to find out, isn’t he? I mean, you can’t go running about on little boats to obscure places forever. You wouldn’t want to.”

  “But it won’t matter later.” She looked smug.

  “Harpooned?”

  Her laugh was very clear and fresh. Ted stirred drowsily and opened his eyes into blinding sunlight.

  “It doesn’t take long to sink a harpoon,” she said.

  Valcour kept his voice low and said swiftly, “I must talk with you privately, Mrs. Poole, when you can conveniently arrange it.”

  She stared at him, frankly puzzled. “You sound serious.”

  “It is.”

  “This evening?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Hello, you two,” said Ted.

  CHAPTER 4

  LAT. 33° 50' NORTH, LONG. 64° 40' WEST

  In spite of numerous voyages made in his capacity of a wireless operator, Mr. Gans could never shake off
entirely an ever-present touch of seasickness. The malady did not attack him violently; it simply lingered somewhere in the pit of his stomach, caused a slight uneasiness in his head, and spoiled his appetite.

  He returned at once to the wireless shack, after a sparse supper in the officers’ mess, and adjusting his headset sat listening-in on the evening’s traffic. It was normally light and sporadic for that latitude and period of the evening. There was little static. He listened to a desultory exchange of international wisecracks between the operators of a Belgian freighter and an American tanker.

  At eight bells young Mr. Swithers dropped in for a cigarette and a chat. The chat ranged, for an hour, from the average hypocrisy of churchgoers, through the sanctity of motherhood, to the antics of girls in various mutually patronized dives.

  At nine o’clock, having finally decided that Antwerp made a monkey out of Port Said, Mr. Swithers bummed a last cigarette and departed for his bunk.

  Mr. Gans continued to sit. He drummed on the table. He fidgeted. He wished to God the News Bulletin would come through and he could close station and go to bed. He wondered whether he mightn’t just as well, as he frequently did, make the news up and call it a day. Life on shipboard was interminably lulling, and his eyelids were heavy with the desire for sleep. The call letters of the Eastern Bay were repeated twice before they registered.

  Mr. Gans threw a switch. The dynamo whined complainingly to a shrill purr, and the brittle shush-shush of the set’s quenched gap sent his signal to the calling station. His pencil started to write the singular incoming message with accomplished ease. He nodded curtly, while in the middle of writing down the message, to the man who had come into the wireless room and who was standing beside him at the table. He didn’t know the man’s name. He didn’t want to. Nuisance, passengers—pests. He threw the switch, shot in an acknowledgment, signed off, managed by gymnastics to get in the final dot—the dynamo slumped whirring to a sigh, and left the creaks and night-magnified noises of the restless sea.

  “Funny message, that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I shouldn’t have read it, I guess.”

  Mr. Gans tore the message blank from its carbon. He continued to mingle politeness with severity. “It is against the regulations. However, as it’s in code, it wouldn’t mean anything to you.”

  “Must be the New York Police code, as it’s addressed to Valcour.”

  “Guess it is.”

  “I should think you’d have to be very careful when taking down code. I mean, slight slip-ups in an ordinary message wouldn’t matter, but in code…” The man’s voice trailed off, and his eyes stared slowly around the room.

  “We rarely have slip-ups, sir—unless it’s a night when the static’s pretty bad, or there’s a lot of interference. Then we usually get a repeat.”

  “You’ve an assistant, haven’t you?”

  “No, sir. Not on this tub.”

  “Really. But what would happen if something happened to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You mean that nobody else knows how to operate the set?”

  “No. They’d have to pick up another operator when we hit port.” Mr. Gans stood up.

  “Going to deliver it at once?”

  “Messages are always delivered at once, sir. Besides, they want a return answer tonight, and I want to get to bed.”

  “I’ll show you where Valcour is, if you like. I just passed him on deck, up near the captain’s quarters.”

  “Thank you.”

  They went from the brightness of the wireless room out onto the black boat deck.

  “Nice night.”

  Mr. Gans, from familiarity, was oblivious to any conditions of any night.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s phosphorus, isn’t it?”

  “What is, sir?”

  They paused by the rail.

  “That stuff down there. See it?”

  Mr. Gans looked in the direction that had been indicated by the man’s pointing finger. Smooth planes of jet swung endlessly past.

  “I don’t see what you mean, sir.”

  The man’s fingers started to close about Mr. Gans’s thin and ineffective neck.

  “Just keep on looking,” he said, “and you’ll see.”

  CHAPTER 5

  LAT. 33° 51' NORTH, LONG. 64° 40' WEST

  The elder Miss Sidderby paused by the taffrail and observed, with some faint show of interest, the patent log. The motion was more noticeable at the taffrail than at any other section of the ship, but it did not bother her. She was a natural sailor and, on her passage down to Bermuda, had experienced no illness at all.

  She knew everything there was to know about patent logs—their mechanism and their purpose had been carefully looked up in an encyclopedia months before this happy trip had become a reality—but she wanted it explained to her by stuffed white drill dotted with brass. It would offer such a splendid point for contact.

  Her eyes searched the after deck’s darkness for glints of white. There were none. Perhaps, after all, she had better take up auction bridge. Ella, her younger sister, who had no neurosis for white drill, was an adept at auction bridge. She was playing it now. (Miss Sidderby knew) in the lounge with Captain Sohme for a partner, and the interesting Lieutenant Valcour and that Mrs. Poole for opponents.

  Miss Sidderby mounted a ladder and started forward along the boat deck towards the officers’ quarters. The patent log would have to wait. She eyed the stars—astronomy—her second reserve string—“and, dear Mr. (blank) is that really the Dipper? But how clever! And you can find the North Star just by following out the line made by those two stars at its end, no matter whether it’s upside down or not? And now, Mr. (blank), you must tell me exactly how to locate Jupiter. Don’t you admire virility even in stars? I do—it makes them so much more glamorous—” Her rehearsal stopped abruptly. She had a vague impression of something falling—of (was it?) footsteps hurrying someplace. Her eyes returned from their contemplation of infinity to the deck.

  Well forward, close by Captain Sohme’s quarters, there was something flat and white-looking on the deck. As she advanced upon it the whiteness developed into white drill dotted with brass. The whiteness continued into a face. She recognized it as that of the wireless operator, and wondered whether the poor lamb were drunk or just asleep. But would his eyes be open in that staring, shocking way…

  Miss Sidderby bent closer and caught a rather dreadful little sound coming from between Mr. Gans’s black lips just before she shrieked.

  Miss Sidderby did not shriek again. She wanted to, she tried to, but something was the matter with her throat and she couldn’t do it. A weight was determined to drag her flat down on the deck, flat down beside those black and bubbled lips. Her years came forward in phalanxes to crush her. She knew she was on her knees (they felt quite hard and sharp against the hard unyielding deck and their brittle joints hurt terribly) and that her eyes were sinking with a disagreeable swirling sensation down towards poor thin Mr. Gans’s black wet lips… She ought to close his eyes because he was dead…but the lids didn’t look as if they would any longer fit… She was sure of it…quite sure of his deadness…

  “What’s the matter here?”

  Captain Sohme’s strong voice preceded a scattered pattering of running footsteps.

  “Mr. Gans.” She clung convulsively to white drill encasing a rock-carved leg. “Mr. Gans is dead.” She felt herself being lifted to her feet, felt a firm arm supporting her. “What a dreadful thing to happen on such a lovely trip,” she said.

  Ella, her younger sister, was on the other side of her, on the other side from the shoulder end of that firm supporting arm. Ella added a supporting arm, too, and through it all Miss Sidderby could feel the faint throbbing of the ship’s engines, the even heave and dropping of the deck, the singing, swinging wind rushing through the unseen rigging up aloft from nowhere to nowhere in the black starred night, across such vast and indifferent reaches
of wet loneliness… “You must close his eyes,” she said. “You must close his eyes at once. He is dead.”

  She felt herself a joint attraction with poor young dead Mr. Gans. They were staring at her just as intently as they were staring at those swollen, blood-congested lips. Mrs. Sanford was staring, with the body all gone from her treacle, and looking in consequence quite thin and watery-like: a juiceless, shriveling grape. And Mrs. Poole was staring, with all the satisfaction gone from her lovely eyes and something a good deal like fear in the place of it, and the lines (so very many more of those tiny little lines) showing even in the dim glow from a deck lamp that somebody had turned on—and what a difference it made when the corners of Mrs. Poole’s lovely mouth were hardened and setting, the way cement sets, as they were then…what an ageing…

  Only men were staring at poor Mr. Gans. Lieutenant Valcour was leaning down and doing things…saying something: “I suggest, Captain, that the ladies go into the lounge.” Ella was leading her through tense hushed groups—deck force, black gang, mess boys—all pale little faces knotted in twos and threes—all staring at her—sounds—words (nothing clearly) coming at her—all blending through vigorous noises of darkness into a general: “She found him.”

  The little lounge was cheery. They settled her in a chair and Ella, terribly eager, was bending over her solicitously and saying: “Don’t speak if you can’t, darling, but do tell us what happened.”

  Miss Sidderby eyed her younger sister.

  “I want a glass of water,” she said.

  CHAPTER 6

  LAT. 33° 52' NORTH, LONG. 64° 39' WEST

  Lieutenant Valcour carefully unclosed the fingers of dead Mr. Gans’s left hand. They were damp and beady from a lingering film of sweat and had been held very desperately, very convulsively tight. He took from between them, before the breeze could blow it away, a bit of paper. It was a corner torn from a message blank. It was a very small corner, and there was nothing on it at all.

  “I might suggest that we go at once to the wireless room, Captain,” he said. “Perhaps you would request Mr. Swithers to stay here with the body.” Mr. Swithers (dragged from his bunk by Miss Sidderby’s arresting shriek) barefooted, singleted, loosely trousered, and very impressed with death, said to Captain Sohme: “Shall we carry him to his bunk, sir?”