Murder by Latitude

by Rufus King

“Yes. If there is one, can you work it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then shall we ask? Perhaps if we try the officers’ quarters—”

  She was already off, sucking him along in her wake, balancing her body expertly with the heave, the roll, the unsettling sinking of the deck. Valcour touched her arm.

  “Just a moment, Mrs. Poole.”

  She stopped and looked at him impatiently. He had the feeling that he had dragged her from some inner scene of vital calculation. “Yes?”

  “I remember seeing a machine in the wireless room. I have the key to the door, and if you care to we could go in there. We would be undisturbed in there, if what you wish written is of a private nature?”

  “Quite private.” As she started aft again along the dark and deserted deck, she added, “it’s my will.”

  Valcour was alongside of her, keeping pace with her.

  “Do I understand you correctly?” he said. “You want to draw up and execute a will?”

  “Yes. It isn’t as if I should die intestate. There’s a will already on file in my lawyer’s office. I want to supersede it.”

  “Perhaps you’ve taken what I said too seriously. I wanted to put you on your guard, but not to alarm you.”

  Her laugh was metallic. “Well, your attitude has scarcely been quieting.”

  Valcour took the key from his pocket and unlocked the wireless-room door. He switched on a light. They were inside, and Valcour closed the door.

  “I regret having upset you. It was necessary to discuss the matter with you. You can understand how important it was to know whether that letter meant anything to you. I wish you had an inkling as to what it signifies, Mrs. Poole.”

  “I haven’t. It scares me.”

  “But it must mean something to you.”

  “I tell you it doesn’t.” Her nerves were edgy and she blazed the statement at him.

  “In itself it isn’t fundamentally alarming.” He was trying, by deliberate contradictions, to force her reactions. “There is nothing definitely threatening about it.”

  “There is. I feel a threat in every word of it.”

  “Of course its implication is rather obvious.”

  “Quite.” Her voice was brittle and bitter as she quoted, “‘Death comes again and again when one is young, even though the body does not die.’ It means that I’ve done something despicable to a young man.”

  “That’s putting it harshly.” (Somewhere, from her subconscious mind, lights were glinting…)

  “It’s stripping it down to precisely what the note means. Well, I haven’t. I’ve never been anything but kind all my life. That’s what I’ve been, Mr. Valcour—just complaisant and kind—too damned complaisant and too damned kind—”

  He had no idea she was so closely verged on hysterics until she began to cry; her last words had been a wet mumble.

  “Shall I call your maid, Mrs. Poole?”

  “No. I’ll be all right in a minute. I get this way sometimes.”

  “I think the water in this carafe is fresh.” He poured some into a glass and gave it to her. “Sit down, Mrs. Poole.”

  She took the glass of water from him and sipped it. She sat down. She took a small handkerchief and dried the wet streaks on her face. “I’ve some property in Vermont,” she said, “so we’ll have to have three witnesses.”

  Valcour dragged himself back sharply from irritating fog. He drew another chair up to the table and moved the typewriter, which was on the table, into a more convenient position. He took a sheet of paper from a rack and inserted it in the machine.

  “Mrs. Poole, will you forgive me for asking whether you feel certain you are wise in drawing up this will without legal counsel? I have a pretty good conception of the largeness of your estate.”

  “Quite wise, Mr. Valcour. I am thoroughly familiar with the construction of wills.”

  “It wasn’t that—”

  “What else should prevent me then?”

  He returned her look steadily. “Nothing, Mrs. Poole. Shall we first make a rough draft? I can take down directly on the machine as you dictate. Afterwards we’ll make a fair copy for signing.”

  It seemed very quiet in the wireless room: a quietness that muted the wind and the ship’s complaining creaks and the sharp and endless ripping of the waters.

  “Are you ready, Mr. Valcour?”

  “Quite ready, Mrs. Poole.”

  “Then the heading, please: Last Will and Testament of Cassie Deverest Poole, of the Borough of Manhattan of the City of New York in the County and State of New York. There’s a new paragraph then.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Poole.”

  “I, Cassie Deverest Poole, of the Borough of Manhattan of the City of New York in the County and State of New York, do hereby declare this written instrument as my last Will and Testament, hereby revoking any and all former wills by me made. It’s funny the way you have to say things in legal documents, isn’t it.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Poole.”

  “Shall we go on?”

  “All ready.”

  “I direct that my funeral expenses and all just debts be duly paid…” Her voice went slowly on in the quiet room; her voice and the quick sharp click as Valcour tapped the keys. “The residue of my estate, both real and personal, I give, devise, and bequeath”—it wasn’t a will he was typing, Valcour felt—“to my beloved husband Theodore Poole as and for”—it wasn’t a will at all that he was typing and that she, so hesitantly, was dictating to him—“his own property absolutely.” It was a death warrant. That’s what it was. “Then there’s that business about the executor and the attestation clause, isn’t there, Mr. Valcour?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Poole.”

  Her voice went drifting through the brooding quietness to the attestation clause’s end, and Valcour took the single sheet of paper from the carriage. He handed it to her to read, and noticed that her eyes stared down at it unseeingly. The noises of wind and sea were stronger, and suddenly were still again, and Ted Poole was in the room, with the door shut behind him.

  “Hello, you two,” he said.

  She picked up the sheet of paper and handed it to Valcour. “Would you keep this for me until the morning, please?”

  “Certainly, Mrs. Poole.”

  “What is it, Cassie?”

  She stood up and her body looked tired. “It’s a little present for you, dear. Let’s go to bed.”

  “Good-night, Mr. Valcour,” Ted said, his hand holding open the door to blackness and the night song of the windy sea.

  “Good-night, Mr. Poole. If there is anything further that I can do for you, Mrs. Poole”—his eyes were very steady, very searching, as they looked at her—“you’ll let me know?”

  “Thank you, Mr. Valcour.”

  The door shut him in with silence. He looked at the sheet of paper in his hand. He looked at the line left blank for her signature. It wasn’t blankness that he saw. It was, in its clearness and its safeness in the fog enmeshing them, a reprieve. But not—conviction gripped him on this point—for her.

  CHAPTER 12

  LAT. 34° 49' NORTH, LONG. 64° 33' WEST

  Cable from Commissioner of the New York Police Department to port authorities at Bermuda:

  REQUEST YOU ATTEMPT LOCATE BY WIRELESS SS EASTERN BAY WHICH CLEARED HAMILTON YESTERDAY STOP PLEASE REQUEST SHIP’S MASTER INFORM YOU WHETHER LIEUTENANT VALCOUR IS ON BOARD AND IF SO WHY NO REPLY HAS COME THROUGH FROM HIM TO RADIO SENT HIM FROM US LAST NIGHT STOP MATTER MOST URGENT AND YOUR COOPERATION GRATEFULLY APPRECIATED

  * * * *

  Valcour occupied a cabin by himself. He woke up and stared from his uncomfortably narrow, and short, bunk at the disc of gray daylight flattened against the room’s solitary port. The air in the cabin was stale. At the time he had gone to bed the seas had made it inadvisable to have the port open, and he had felt it necessary to shut and bolt the cabin’s door. His head was heavy with the choked feeling caused by a bad night’s sleep in bad air. Apart from the dull vibrations
from the engine there was scarcely any motion noticeable at all, and he felt that the sea would be flat and gray and oily.

  He got up and put on a bathrobe and slippers. He took a Colt automatic from underneath the pillows on the bunk and put it in his bathrobe pocket. He unbolted the cabin door and stared up and down the deserted passage. He went to the bathroom and took a cold salt-water shower, returned to his cabin, dressed, and went on deck, where a whitish sky blended solidly with a lead-colored sea and the air felt damp and tepid.

  “A peculiar morning, sir.” Mr. Sanford, looking more like a shadfly than ever in the gray light, joined him.

  “It’s a deadly morning,” Valcour said. “My room was so close I scarcely slept at all.”

  Mr. Sanford’s smile was ingratiating. Almost everything about Mr. Sanford was ingratiating, and like the sea he, too, was somewhat oily.

  “Mrs. Sanford felt the same way,” he said. “She complained of it most of the night. We—she felt rather nervous and we kept our door bolted, and what with the poor ventilation, the natural excitement—no, we didn’t sleep very much.” He breathed deeply through thin flat nostrils without any visible expansion of a narrow chest, expelled, and said, “Ahh—so good to get the clean fresh air again. Mr. Valcour, how little we value the true lavishness of God’s lesser blessings. Shall we stroll?”

  They began to stroll, slowly to walk along the gray damp empty deck through the thin and tepid air.

  “I hope that Mrs. Sanford isn’t too much upset about this business,” Valcour said.

  “No, no, Mrs. Sanford’s nerves are quite steady, I thank you.”

  “But Miss Sidderby’s scream must have shocked her?”

  “Oh that—yes—I believe the scream did.”

  “You weren’t with her?”

  “No—no, not just then. That’s a gull, isn’t it? So impressive to see wild life maintaining itself so very, very far off shore.”

  “Gulls are astonishingly tireless birds,” Valcour said. “So your wife was alone when Miss Sidderby screamed?”

  “Yes, I think she was. It’s never occurred to me to ask her—Good-morning, good-morning, my man.” Mr. Sanford bowed smartly to a sleepy seaman swabbing down the port side of the deck, and stepped delicately around pools of water. “Shall I ask her? I mean, has the fact of Mrs. Sanford being alone when Miss Sidderby screamed anything to do with the investigation? You are making an investigation?”

  “Yes, Mr. Sanford. Captain Sohme and I are both making one.”

  “Then you’ve definitely decided that that poor fellow was murdered? You found some wound or something on his body?”

  “Nothing beyond the marks on his neck. I examined him before turning in.”

  “But you do think he was strangled?”

  “Yes, Mr. Sanford.”

  “It’s outrageous that men of that type should be shipped under the American flag.”

  Valcour stared at him curiously. “What type?” he said.

  “The murdering type. Why, it makes it unsafe for all of us, for the passengers. As Mrs. Sanford put it just before the last time we tried to get sleep, the man may be possessed of a homicidal mania.”

  “You think the murderer was a member of the crew?”

  Mr. Sanford stopped twittering (he gave the effect of twittering, even when he wasn’t talking) and said: “Oh, but my dear Mr. Valcour, surely you don’t think—?”

  Valcour shrugged faintly. “Why should we exclude any person on the ship from suspicion?”

  “But the passengers—the passengers—why on earth should one of us want to kill a wireless operator? Surely you must agree with me that the murder was just an unhappy outcome of—well, shall we say of a maritime feud?”

  “You may be right.”

  “I’m sure of it, sure of it.” Mr. Sanford was again involved in the twitters.

  “Did you happen to be anywhere near the boat deck when Miss Sidderby screamed?”

  “Dear me no, or I should have hastened to that poor lady’s assistance immediately.”

  “You were alone at the time?”

  The twittering missed fire for a moment and then went on: “Yes, Mr. Valcour, quite alone.”

  “Where, Mr. Sanford?”

  “Where? Now let me see—if one only had something relative to pin it on, as they do in the memory courses—”

  “There’s the scream to pin it on.”

  “Of course, of course—that. Well, if you must know, Mr. Valcour, I wasn’t on the boat at all.”

  Valcour said very softly, “You what?”

  Mr. Sanford’s laugh was both ingratiating and nervous. “I wasn’t here at all. My body was, but I wasn’t.”

  Valcour smiled a little. “Just where, with the exclusion of your body, were you?”

  “In the clouds, dear Mr. Valcour, up in the clouds.”

  “And your body?”

  “My body?”

  “Yes, where was your body, Mr. Sanford?”

  Mr. Sanford looked nervously over his shoulder, back along the deck. “I’ll be frank with you,” he said. “I’m given to spells.”

  “What sort of spells?”

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t have said spells. Lapses, that’s what they are, Mr. Valcour, little lapses.”

  “Yes, but lapses of what?”

  “Memory.”

  “You are under a doctor’s care, Mr. Sanford?”

  “Oh yes, oh dear me yes. Hutchins is his name—has offices in the Herkimer Building—trained nurses and everything. He prescribed this trip for me in the hope that it would prove soothingly beneficial.” His voice grew testy. “Well, it hasn’t. What is it they put men into on ships? Irons, isn’t it? You will catch the fellow sometime during the day and put him in irons, won’t you? I simply cannot endure another night with my cabin door shut and bolted. It would stifle me—Ah, Sue, darling!”

  Mr. Sanford twittered off to the doorway leading into the after passage. Mrs. Sanford was filling it, an anemic blue fascinator drawn about her foularded shoulders, and her face all flat and washed-looking. She managed to inject one ladleful of syrup into her smile toward Valcour, then she muttered something to her husband, who had joined her across the combing, and they shut the door.

  CHAPTER 13

  LAT. 34° 49' NORTH, LONG. 64° 33' WEST

  Valcour leaned back against the railing and stared thoughtfully at the closed door, its circular port blank and empty, with Mrs. Sanford’s washed-out face somewhere behind it, exhausted of treacle, dripping words and words and words upon her thin gray husband…with his spells…and Miss Sidderby, the elder, was coming along the deck, staring down at it, searching for something haltingly. She smiled nervously as she came abreast of Valcour and said, “Good-morning; it’s just about here that I lost them.”

  “Good-morning, Miss Sidderby.” He observed that her toilet had been perfunctory. Her touched-up hair was jammed rather than arranged beneath her felt hat, and such make-up as she had put on was streaky and of a deadly raspberry shade in the cold gray light. “You say you’ve lost something?”

  “I’ve lost my scissors, my sewing scissors. I’m sure I had them yesterday afternoon.” She indicated a near-by deck chair, its footrest folded back upon its seat, its slatted wood very damp and cold-looking. “That’s where I was sitting and I think they must have fallen to the deck. I don’t see them, do you?”

  Valcour’s eyes narrowed slightly. “What sort of scissors were they, Miss Sidderby?”

  “Sewing scissors.”

  “Yes, but their size, their shape?”

  “They’re long straight ones. They’re too big, really, but the steel is magnetized for picking up needles and pins, and they were a gift from Ella so I’ve got to use them anyway.”

  “How long would you say they were, Miss Sidderby? Five or six inches?—the blades, I mean.”

  “I should think so. I do hope they haven’t gone over the side.”

  “I don’t very well see how they could have. You’ve loo
ked in your cabin?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “What made you think of them so early this morning, Miss Sidderby?”

  “I’ve been thinking about them all night. I hate losing things, and Ella’s bound to raise Ned about them.” Miss Sidderby was fretful and showed it. “Ella’s funny about things she gives. She feels they should be sacred—not the silly things themselves—you know what I mean: she wouldn’t go so far as to come out flat and say ‘that sacred pair of scissors,’ but it’s what she calls the love and thought behind a gift that she says is sacred. I do wish she’d bought them two inches shorter.”

  “The scissors?”

  “Yes, but they were the only pair she could get at the moment that had magnetic steel.” The fretfulness increased and Miss Sidderby pushed some stealing hair back under her hat. “Ella always gives things on the moment, instead of waiting for Christmas, or some appropriate time to give gifts. She’s just as like as not to give you nothing on Christmas at all. I think it’s confusing.”

  Valcour stared thoughtfully at filmed metallic planes of passing water.

  “About what time during the afternoon were you using the scissors, Miss Sidderby?”

  “Late, I think. Yes, it was just before dinner. I’m sure I left them in my sewing bag when I got up to go and see that porpoise.”

  Valcour remembered no porpoise, and in any case he was fairly certain that they traveled in schools, and decidedly certain that had a school been sighted the fact would have become general property. It would instantly have become an event, just as every oddity becomes an event when voyaging at sea, in a subconscious reaching after release from all voyages’ singular monotony.

  “Who told you that a porpoise had been sighted, Miss Sidderby?”

  “That peculiar Mr. Sanford. He is peculiar, don’t you think? I mean just funny little things about him. Ella says he’s a sissy.” Miss Sidderby’s fretfulness approached its peak. “There wasn’t any porpoise, and I do think his face looks like a horse.”

  “Did you go back again to your deck chair?”

  “No, because dinner was ready. I just went over and picked up my sewing bag, and I don’t see why the scissors weren’t in it. Nobody would steal a pair of scissors, would they, Mr. Valcour?”