Murder by Latitude

by Rufus King

  “Not unless they thought they’d come in handy.”

  “For sewing? But they’re not. They’re too long.”

  “Not necessarily for sewing, Miss Sidderby.”

  She stared at him curiously. “But they wouldn’t be good for anything else,” she said, and then added, slowly, “would they, Mr. Valcour?”

  Valcour pulled himself abruptly from a disagreeable picture of Miss Sidderby’s lost and magnetic scissors separated into single slender sharp blades and said, “No, Miss Sidderby, they couldn’t possibly be good for anything else.”

  She came a little closer to him and said, “Have you come to any decision about that unhappy thing last night? Do you still think he did not die a natural death, Mr. Valcour?”

  “Yes, Miss Sidderby.”

  Her eyes were small drops of fright.

  “Then someone did it.” She laughed nervously and said, “It isn’t as if we were on a street car.”

  CHAPTER 14

  LAT. 35° 0' NORTH, LONG. 64° 33' WEST

  Breakfast, that morning, was a drab and dismal business. Mrs. Poole’s chair was vacant, Captain Sohme’s chair was vacant, and so was the chair of Mr. Dumarque. The ports were open, but a thin drizzle that had started outside completely muffled the already deadened air, and the little dining saloon was stuffy. Over everything in it hung the faint odor of forgotten food. Lethargy caused by an exhausting and sleepless night gripped everyone, and after perfunctory morning greetings conversation ebbed.

  Valcour, in his seat between young Mr. Force and Mr. Wright, waited until Miss Sidderby finished deciding audibly whether she would take some cereal or not, and then said, “I suppose we ought to attend it.”

  The sentence rippled gently out through the table’s dull placidity.

  “Attend what?” said Mr. Stickney, looking over the top of a typewritten menu.

  “The burial,” Valcour said quietly. “The burial services for Mr. Gans.”

  The Misses Sidderby looked vaguely startled, and Mrs. Sanford continued staring blankly at an empty plate.

  “Absolutely,” said Mr. Stickney. “As a mark of respect.”

  Young Force made the uncomfortable stillness more uncomfortable still by saying, “Respect for what?”

  Mrs. Sanford, with all the sugar gone from her eyes, looked at him without any expression at all and said, “A respect for death, young man.”

  “I see.” Young Force laughed shortly, making his singularly beautiful features a little less beautiful. “It’s a general principle.”

  The Misses Sidderby were distinctly shocked and withdrew into mutual whisperings.

  “You do not respect death?” Valcour said pleasantly, and turned his head slightly to observe young Force. “Possibly you look upon it as so many young people do—perhaps because they feel themselves so far removed from it—as something that is simply set aside for the future to be dreaded?”

  Young Force wasn’t smiling any more. “No, Mr. Valcour,” he said. “As something to be seized.”

  “At any time?”

  “At any convenient time.”

  Young Force raised a glass of water to his lips and Valcour, remembering Mr. Dumarque’s injunction, looked at his hands.

  “Are you an artist, Mr. Force?” he said.

  Young Force flushed faintly and said, “Commercial. Why?”

  “You have the hands of one.”

  “That’s sort of overrated, isn’t it? I mean about people’s physical characteristics being significant of their vocations?”

  “Not in its broader classifications, and not if you use the idea negatively.”

  “Negatively?”

  “Yes. You often can tell things that people couldn’t possibly be just by looking at them, even though you can’t spot exactly what they could be. It serves to eliminate; narrows the field. Coffee, please, steward, poached eggs on toast, and nothing else, thank you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Oh, but my dear Valcour,” Mr. Sanford said, “you ought to take a fruit every morning—even the simple juice of an orange—and have you caught the man yet and put him in irons?”

  Valcour smiled and said, “Not yet.”

  Mr. Stickney wanted details. “Which department do you think he’s in?” he said. “Personally I’m betting on the deck department. They’re in closer contact with the wireless than the engineers are, don’t you think?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Well, then, which department do you think?”

  “All of them, all of them,” Mr. Sanford twittered “—even us.”

  “Us?” Mr. Stickney pushed his chair somewhat back from the table. His eyes bulged at Valcour. “You’re including us?”

  Valcour did not look directly at Mr. Stickney. He looked at no one at all. “Well,” he said carefully, “why not?”

  The Misses Sidderby were two frightened rabbits huddled in chairs that seemed suddenly over-large, and Mrs. Sanford receded into pallid vagueness in the manner of a glob of protoplasm at a faked séance. The greasy look of Mr. Wright’s pudgy features became more pronounced and sweat rested on his forehead as a mild dew.

  “You’re implying that it might be one of us—here—now?” Wright said.

  Valcour’s voice remained impersonal. “Mr. Dumarque is not as yet with us. Why should we fail to include him?”

  Young Force had turned his chair and was almost facing Valcour. “What’s the idea, Mr. Valcour?”

  “For not considering ourselves immune from suspicion, Mr. Force?”

  “Yes.” The air was brittle with anger, and young Force’s eyes hardened a little. “It’s a rotten accusation to make, and you can see the position it puts us in.”

  The dining saloon was a well of stillness peopled with a group from Madame Tussaud’s.

  “You use a pumice stone, don’t you, Mr. Force?” Valcour said.

  The hardened look about the eyes deepened. “What of it?”

  Mrs. Poole was standing just inside the open doorway, and Valcour, when he heard her speak, wondered how long it was she had been standing there.

  “Doesn’t everybody?” she said. She went to her chair at the table and sat down. “Ted does.” She felt Ted’s hand reaching for hers beneath the table. Her own lay warmly in it, flaccidly possessive, its palm flat pressed against his palm and circled by his firm young fingers. Happiness rose up about her like a lake, and everything beyond an immediate pleasure of floating in its waters was negligible; all the stupid things of life, including murder (which she felt surely was the most stupid of all) were negligible… “I use a pumice too.”

  “The weird angles taken by breakfast conversations have always intrigued me.” Mr. Dumarque was in the room and going to his seat, and sitting down. He looked precisely as he had looked the day before—neither fresher nor less fresh—an established and not immoderate freshness. One vaguely was conscious of creams and pomades rather than of soap and water—of scentless creams and scentless pomades, most carefully applied and meticulously removed. “Why speak of pumice?” he said.

  Mrs. Poole smiled languidly, pressing her hand a little more closely into Ted’s. “It has something to do with the murder.”

  “Ah—that is good.”

  Miss Sidderby, who felt that she was about to stifle, managed a faint, “Good?”

  “Yes, my dear Miss Sidderby. It is good because it is bizarre. I am bored with prints of feet and fingers. I am not bored by pumice.”

  Mr. Stickney, having finished with a snort, said, “Well, you won’t be so blamed bored when you hear we’re included in the suspects.”

  “For the murder?”

  “Yes, Mr. Dumarque”—Valcour was exceedingly matter-of-fact—“there is no valid reason for excluding anyone on the ship.”

  “But this is charming—”

  “Oh don’t—please don’t.” Miss Sidderby stood up and moved uncertainly toward the door. “You mustn’t please say things like that. I found him, you see, and his lips
were quite black. They were really very black—” Ella was beside her, and the wax work group was swinging round and round—fog and mist and clashing bells and jangles.

  “Come with me to the cabin, darling,” Ella said, and drew her toward the doorway. Ella turned when they had reached it and said with an ineffective bitterness, “Was this quite necessary, Mr. Valcour?”

  “Sure it was.” Mr. Stickney grew heavily sarcastic. “You got to be warned in case one of us might feel like sticking a knife into you in the night.”…Miss Sidderby, through it all, kept up a running, barely audible series of don’ts—Please don’t, you mustn’t really—if you had seen how black they were and how terribly, terribly pitiful… “Take a look at us all” (Mr. Stickney was drowning her out) “and see which one of us shows the mark of Cain. Sure, Valcour had to do it.” …Oh don’t, you mustn’t—it’s so dreadful to deal lightly with death—with the young when they die—the young, young dead… “Yes, ma’am, every time you take a seat at this table you’ll know that maybe you’re eating in company with a murderer. Sure, Valcour had to…”

  “Gentlemen,” Captain Sohme, red-eyed from sleeplessness, towered in the doorway above the two rabbit-like Misses Sidderby, “the burial of Mr. Gans is about to commence. Those of you who care to, please step outside and line up by the forward railing of the boat deck. The body of the deceased will be given to the sea from the starboard side of the well deck just below. I must ask you to come at once as I do not care to have the ship hove-to any longer than is necessary.”

  “That poor—that dear young man done up in canvas—so terribly alone in so much water—”

  “Hush, darling.”

  “Can any of you ladies sing?” Captain Sohme’s red eyes flitted over the heads of the near-by Misses Sidderby, from Mrs. Sanford’s large bleakness to Mrs. Poole. “If so, it would be orderly and proper for one of you to sing a hymn. I do not believe that the owners will consider it an extravagance if we keep the ship hove-to long enough for that. I am myself no good at hymns.”

  Miss Sidderby felt a curious revulsion from her weakness. Her eyes were filled with an endless picture of that thin young lonesome body stitched in canvas and dragged down by lead through sullen tunnels of wet and unfelt green—slower and slower and more slowly revolving through deep wet green—then staying suspended in dreadful lonesomeness at the lead’s counterbalancing point—so deep in chill unfriendly lonesomeness forever… “I should be very glad, Captain Sohme,” she said firmly, “to sing.”

  CHAPTER 15

  LAT. 35° 1' NORTH, LONG. 64° 32' WEST

  “‘Lead kindly light, amid the encircling gloom’” …gray sky and wet gray sea, thin drifts of drizzle drifting out of bleakness endlessly, damping the ship and all its white strained faces, then drifting apathetically off again along their endless journey… “‘Lead Thou me on…”

  It was a clear voice that Miss Sidderby had, and it cut like a slender silver blade through the gray and miserable day. She stood quite near to the ungainly canvas bundle that was resting on a plank, and Captain Sohme, a steady solid mass of bone and flesh and salt and wind and sea, stood beside her. Of all the passengers, she alone was standing down there on the low well deck, and Ella had been nervous about it, and mad about it too, and both Mrs. Poole and Mrs. Sanford had offered to be there with her and she had refused—as if at this precious moment she would even think of collapsing…

  “‘The night is dark…’”

  How silly and how interesting that sailors should cry—a messboy, wasn’t it?—surely he’d assisted in serving at one of their meals: nothing but a tall and gawky Scandinavian child who, when he smiled, showed the lack of at least seven important teeth—but he wasn’t smiling now—he was crying, because his cheeks were wet where fat and unhappy tears ran dripping out of his eyes—how tight the canvas must be pressing on that thin young face—“…and I am far from home—Lead Thou me on…”

  It wasn’t even as if Mr. Gans had been a genuine sailor—wireless men weren’t, she knew, genuine sailors—the sea wasn’t bred into their flesh and blood the way it was with sailors, who were born of it and who, when they died, could more fittingly go back to it again—as men of the earth went back to earth again—Captain Sohme was signaling something quietly with his hand, and Mr. Swithers, with his face in a knot, had stepped forward close to the bundle—

  “‘I shall not want or strive for loss or bitter gain…’”

  They were lifting the inboard end of the plank, and the bundle was clinging to its smoothness so precariously, so (as it seemed to her) almost desperately—she lost the drift of what she was singing, the words were all wrong—“Must you, must you—” she heard herself saying, and Captain Sohme’s great hand pressed steadily about her arm and his “Please continue singing, ma’am,” whispered harshly in her ear—

  “‘Lead Thou me on…”—That dreadful sound of canvas sliding down along smooth wood—the words, the closing words—what were they?—they must be out before the splash—to rhyme with “gain”—something fitting and conclusive must be sung to rhyme with “gain” before that dreadful and conclusive splash—“‘Forevermore to’”…the bundle was going to turn—it wasn’t going to strike the water straight, and young Mr. Swithers was spitting out a “So long, kid”—it wasn’t fair…“‘remain.’”

  CHAPTER 16

  LAT. 35° 2' NORTH, LONG. 64° 32' WEST

  Valcour joined Captain Sohme immediately after the services for Mr. Gans had been concluded, and the Eastern Bay was again proceeding along her course. His face was grave and a little drawn-looking.

  “An impressive and pitiful business, Captain,” he said.

  “It is a pity that for an instant Miss Sidderby forgot to sing. I was afraid we were to have a hitch, but she recovered herself in very orderly fashion. I have changed my opinion of her, Valcour. She is a very nice little woman, and I am beginning to like her.”

  “She has some curiously fine and uncommon qualities.”

  They had reached the entrance to Captain Sohme’s quarters. They went inside, and Captain Sohme closed the door. He went at once to a locker and got out a bottle of brandy and two glasses. He filled them and offered one to Valcour. They drank.

  “And now,” Captain Sohme said, “what was it you learned from the expressions during the services? You have decided which man is the guilty party and we will immediately be able to clap him in irons?”

  Valcour stared gravely at Captain Sohme, and his voice, when he spoke, was exactly audible in the quiet closed room.

  “The man we want,” he said, “is not quite normal.”

  Captain Sohme’s strained and weary features sagged further. “Surely we have enough to put up with on this wretched passage without that.”

  He sat very still, very upright on the edge of his bunk, massively planed against the room’s dark wood, his face picked out in ochres and siennas above blue-shadowed drill.

  “I have before met madness on a ship,” he went on. “The Bella—a packet operating out of Bombay. He cut three throats, this madman, with a slicing knife stolen from the galley, and which he had kept concealed stuck in his shoe beneath his dungarees. There was a foam coming from his mouth when he broke from us and jumped over the side. Mr. Hendrickson, who was then our chief engineer (I was myself the third mate), beat this man over the head with an iron belaying pin when he tried to climb back on board by way of the anchor chain. Did I tell you that we were in harbor? The water for several minutes was noticeably covered with his brains and blood. The deck itself was dirty with the blood of the three men he had killed and from the vomiting of such of us who had been onlookers and had not good stomachs. My own stomach is a very strong one and I did not vomit with the rest. If I thought we were to look forward to such a shambles I would put every man passenger on board in irons and keep them there, even if the owners were to discharge me for it.”

  Captain Sohme’s large body sagged a little, and the strength in his voice was lessened by helple
ssness. “They would, you see,” he went on, “discharge me for it. I could not go to them and say: ‘Look here, now, let me tell you that because our wireless man died I at once clapped all our men passengers in irons.’ ‘It is you,’ they would tell me, ‘who have gone mad. You have been a very good captain up to date, but you have suddenly gone crazy. Here we spend,’ they would say to me, ‘heavens knows how much money in advertising and building up a passenger trade, and when a death occurs which you think is murder’ (because of some obscure marks about a neck and a little piece of blank paper—for that is the way they would look at it, Valcour) ‘you at once fly off the handle and subject these expensively advertised-for passengers to indignities and clap them in irons. Why not,’ they would say, ‘suspect the crew if you had to go and suspect anybody? You can put as many of the crew into irons as you like.’ No, no, Valcour, they would fire me as quickly as that! I should have nothing left to face. For all the rest of my life, if deprived of my command, I should have nothing left to face. I have seen them, these old men who have suffered, however unjustly, that disgrace. They are like old and unwanted ships, working what is left of their souls and hearts out for lesser and lesser cargoes, shoved off someplace into the obscurer corners of the seas only to sink in uncared-about disreputableness upon a lonesome and forgotten reef.”

  It was about him again. Valcour could feel it drifting grayly through the drizzled ports, chaining him with impalpable links, this fog that had muffled his movements slowly, since the beginning of this strange, strange case… “I do not mean that sort of madness, Captain: the violent sort of which you have just told me. I am speaking of the abnormality which lies in all of us, only in this man I believe it to be more pronounced.”

  Captain Sohme’s voice exploded into irrepressible irritation. “‘This man’—‘this man’—which man?”

  Valcour shrugged. “I still don’t know, and that is why I say he is especially abnormal—which is, of course, a euphemism for madness.”