Murder by Latitude

by Rufus King

  “You take it seriously then?”

  “I think I do.”

  “Even to the extent of its possibly being one of us?”

  “I think so.”

  “Me?”

  The man laughed with the proper amount of deprecation. “Why not? You’re one of us. Did you?”

  “Kill Gans? Hell yes. Got another match?” The man stood up and struck a match. He moved over to the bunk and lighted young Poole’s fresh cigarette. He did not look into young Poole’s eyes as he held the lighted match. He looked at young Poole’s neck.

  “You smoke a lot,” he said.

  “Habit. Wish I could break it, sometimes.”

  There was a little pause before the man said, “I could show you how to break it.”

  “Will power? Painting my tonsils? That stuff?”

  “No. It’s easier than that. Surer, too.”

  Young Poole yawned, belching smoke, then closed his lips again. “Handy thing to know about. Wish you’d show me sometime.”

  The man smiled vaguely. “Perhaps I will.”

  Ted’s yawns were endless. “Golly, what a life.”

  The cabin was very gray, very still. “While it lasts,” the man said.

  CHAPTER 21

  LAT. 35° 7' NORTH, LONG. 64° 30' WEST

  “I really don’t know what’s the matter with me,” said Miss Sidderby, “but I’ve lost something else.” Her eyes were still depressed from the recent ordeal of Mr. Gans’s burial, and her inquisitive little face was pinched and drawn. Valcour and Mrs. Poole had found her standing on deck, just outside of the smoking-saloon door.

  Valcour smiled at her. “What is it this time, Miss Sidderby?” he said.

  “It’s a silver thimble.”

  Valcour’s smile broadened. “Another of your sister’s sacred presents?”

  “Yes.” She included Mrs. Poole in her bewilderment. “It does seem so selfish to worry about it—even to think about it—about anything so trivial as a thimble after having just been through what we have been. Not that a thimble is really trivial—that is—” She grew slightly incoherent.

  “Thimbles certainly are not really trivial,” Mrs. Poole said senselessly, urged to say something to prevent the imminent emotional breakdown. “You say you’ve lost other things, too?”

  “A pair of sewing scissors. The steel was magnetic, and they were much too long.”

  Mrs. Poole smiled at Valcour. “Would you deduce that we had an escaped milliner on board?”

  “Either that or a crow disguised as a sea gull. When did you lose the thimble, Miss Sidderby?”

  “I really don’t know, Mr. Valcour.”

  “When did you use it last?”

  “Yesterday afternoon, out here on deck.”

  “Then it could have been lost at the same time as the pair of scissors?”

  “Yes. I could understand it if the sewing bag had fallen to the deck or anything, but it didn’t. I just left it on that chair when I went to see Mr. Sanford’s porpoise and there it was, just as I’d left it, when I came back and picked it up to get ready for dinner.”

  “Do you remember who was on deck at the time?”

  “Not particularly. I think almost everyone was; not in a bunch, you know, but sitting or moving about.”

  “Who was sitting near you?”

  “Nobody was. Ella’s chair is next to mine, and she was down in our cabin dressing. She takes quite a long time to dress. I’ve frequently told her she makes a rite of it.” Miss Sidderby smiled faintly at her little, and standard, jest. “And Mr. Force’s and Mr. Wright’s chairs are on the other side of me, but they weren’t in them. I know, because Mr. Sanford was sitting on the footrest of Mr. Force’s chair while he was mentioning the porpoise.”

  “Porpoise?” Mrs. Poole selected this repetition of the only interesting note in the conversation.

  “There wasn’t any, really. Mr. Sanford just imagined that he’d seen one.”

  Mrs. Poole was mildly amused. “Fancy imagining a porpoise.” Her mind drifted off again to Ted. It was a quarter past twelve, and luncheon would be at half past. She ought to go down below and wake him up. There was, after all, a limit to the sleep allowance which should be permitted to husbands.

  “Ah, ladies!” Captain Sohme joined them. His face and manner were both a trifle hectic, in an effort at establishing some sort of sane gaiety on this wretched trip. (“Above all,” one of the printed instructions issued by the Mercantile Transport Line to its captains read, “make a continuous effort to keep the passengers gay, utilizing such means as are provided for innocent fun and amusement, to wit: shuffle board, quoits, etc., etc…”) “Let us all have a cocktail before lunch. There is something very cheerful and happy about a cocktail, and God knows that you ladies need something to keep you cheered up on this unhappy voyage.” He herded them, largely, through the smoking-saloon door, and pressed a button set in the wall paneling for the steward. “We have had an exceptionally good run—three hundred and eight. That is not bad for an old tub like this. If it were possible, I would give her a cocktail, too.”

  “Dead reckoning?” Valcour said.

  “Oh yes, Valcour. With this overcast sky there is no possibility of shooting the sun, and with the glass the way it is acting I do not believe we will be able to take any observations for a day or maybe two.”

  Miss Sidderby was on the point of dipping into one of her studied questions about the patent log, but she hadn’t the heart. She hadn’t, she felt, the heart for anything more at all until the memory of the morning should have left her, if it ever left her, in the erasing course of time.

  “Ha, steward!—what shall it be, ladies? For myself, I am old-fashioned and shall drink a dry Martini. Charley, here, he makes them very good.”

  Charley pursed his lips a little, and looked modestly down a long British nose.

  “I’ll have a Martini,” said Mrs. Poole.

  Valcour nodded that he would have one, too.

  “And you, Miss Sidderby?”

  “Thank you, Captain. I really shouldn’t. I so seldom do—”

  “Nonsense. You are looking very peaked, and I order you to have one with us. Four Martinis, Charley, and if there is a dividend left in the shaker I, for one, will not kick. After all, Miss Sidderby, I am the master of this ship.”

  Miss Sidderby felt a little warmed. There was, in Captain Sohme’s voice, such genuine friendliness; and in his kindly, simple, distance-seeing eyes as he looked at her.

  “Then I will have to,” she said, and the thought of drinking a cocktail before lunch made her feel almost gay.

  “And when they come,” Captain Sohme’s cheerful, solid voice went on, “I shall propose a toast to the effect that happiness may bless the balance of our passage.”

  CHAPTER 22

  LAT. 35° 7' NORTH, LONG. 64° 30' WEST

  The man looked at his watch. “It’s twelve-fifteen,” he said. “We’ll be having lunch presently, in about a quarter of an hour.”

  “Eat and sleep, eat and sleep—eleven little pigs all in a sty.” Young Poole’s yawn almost cracked his jaw. He swung stockinged feet over the edge of the bunk. “Got to wash,” he said.

  “Will I be in your way, Ted?”

  “In this Royal Suite? Just park yourself in its vastness, and pass out another light. You’ll like to see me wash. I’m told by the best people that when I’m washing myself I favorably resemble a seal.” He stuck a fresh cigarette between his lips and waited on the edge of the bunk while the man struck a match and passed it over to him. “Thanks. I really haven’t any idea why people are so good to me.”

  “Not at all, Ted.”

  The man sat down. He put the paper of matches into the right-hand side pocket of his coat. He did not take his hand out of the pocket again.

  “Thank God I’ve already shaved. If there’s one thing I loathe it’s shaving. Those lads in the House of David—what a soft berth they picked for themselves.” Young Poole stood up. He took
off a faded dressing gown made of toweling and went, in his underwear, to the basin.

  “You’re pretty strong, aren’t you?” The man’s hand was still in his right-hand coat pocket. He was fiddling, very gently, with something.

  “Oh, so-so. I’ll give you the six famous poses of the Perfect Athlete if you like? I’ll give them to you even if you don’t like.” He did so.

  “What was the last one?” said the man, still smiling.

  “Adonis at the Bath, and if this lousy stuff coming out of this tap is fresh water I’ll eat my shirt.”

  The man stood up. His hand was still in the right-hand pocket of his coat. He moved toward the cabin door.

  “Going?” said young Poole, above the swish of water running into the basin.

  “Guess so.” The man opened the cabin door and took a step out into the passage. He looked with curious swiftness up and down it. It was empty. He came back into the cabin again, and closed the door.

  “Not going?” Ted’s voice was muffled with sluiced water, and soap dripped wetly about his face and eyes as he bent over the basin.

  “Forgot my matches,” the man said.

  “Think you put them in your pocket.”

  “Guess I did at that.”

  The man took his hand from his right-hand coat pocket. There was a silver thimble cupped in the palm of it. In the thimble, held solid by a lump of sailmaker’s wax that had hardened, was a long needle.

  “Just come to your Uncle Dudley for anything you may want to know,” Ted said. “And I’m a perfect devil with tea leaves.”

  The man looked at Ted’s bent back; at the exposed and glistening nape of the bronzed and soapy neck; at that little indentation resting at the base of Ted’s brain.

  “I will, Ted,” he said.

  Ted’s body was heavy and the man had some difficulty in lifting it onto the bunk. He took a towel from the washstand and wiped the soap and water from Ted’s face and neck and hands. He carefully examined the little indentation at the nape of Ted’s neck. There was no blood, and the needle had fortunately broken off a little beneath the flesh, so that the flesh was quite smooth and there was no prick when he gently ran his finger across it.

  He arranged Ted’s warm limp body in an attitude of natural rest, and threw the toweling bathrobe over it. He drained the water from the basin and wiped it dry with the towel. He decided not to throw the towel through one of the open ports because the steward would want to know where it had gone when he checked up and changed the linen, and there was a possibility that someone standing on the deck above might see the towel as it hit the water and floated, as it would, conspicuously on its surface. He dropped it into a container for dirty linen that was beneath the basin.

  He did throw the silver thimble with its small bit of broken needle end out of one of the ports. He opened the cabin door and looked along the deserted passage. He stepped outside and closed the door.

  “Neat,” he said.

  CHAPTER 23

  LAT. 35° 7' NORTH, LONG. 64° 30' WEST

  “Mr. Poole does not answer, madam.”

  Charley, somewhat inflated over the success of his dry Martinis, was giving the correct imitation of the perfect British steward.

  Mrs. Poole felt a distinct prick of annoyance. “Perhaps he wasn’t there,” she said. “Did you look in and see?”

  “Yes, madame. I even took the liberty of calling to him from the cabin doorway, but he continued to sleep.”

  “Did you go over and shake him?” said Valcour.

  “Certainly not, sir.” Charley’s reaction to the question was one of polite shock.

  “Then do,” said Mrs. Poole.

  Charley compressed his lips a little. He could not quite prevent his thinning eyebrows from rising. “Yes, madame.” He left the smoking saloon.

  Valcour was singularly ill at ease, and the fog was drifting in around him again. He tried to convince himself that there was no reason for it. Miss Sidderby was dilating largely to him upon the healing beneficences of sleep. He could not concentrate on what she was saying, and his smile of polite attention was set…a sleep that lasted through what must have been several knocks upon a door…through being called to from an open doorway…at midday… He felt the urge to know the answer to several questions immediately… (“You’re quite right, Miss Sidderby; yes, the quotation does come from Macbeth, something about knitting afresh the raveled sleeve of care, I think.”) …and the principal thing that he wanted to know was the present and recent location of—

  Mr. Dumarque and young Force came in through the doorway, and Captain Sohme plunged at once into his role of genial host. “Gentlemen, you are just in time. We are having some very good dry Martinis, and if you will be patient for a few minutes, Charley will mix us up another shakerful. Charley makes them very good.”

  Mr. Dumarque moved a chair over closer to Mrs. Poole. “Shall I be bromidic about patience,” he said, “and say something as to its being, in this instance, far greater than its own reward?”

  “If you feel that you must,” she said.

  “It’s all a question of excess,” young Force was saying to Miss Sidderby. “You can make your body just as sodden from sleeping too much and too frequently as you can from too much whisky.”

  Miss Sidderby was mildly shocked into an “I suppose you can.” The use of the word “body” had always struck her as being slightly indelicate. She wondered why Charley, who had just come back into the smoking saloon, was so pale. He looked as if he’d been running, almost the way she felt that she looked in nightmares when she had been running hard and very breathlessly away from something that was chasing her—something that was always rather vaguely dreadful.

  “I can’t wake him, sir.” Charley wasn’t talking to Mrs. Poole. He was standing with watery, frightened eyes in front of Captain Sohme.

  “Why not?”

  “I shook him by the shoulder, and all it did was to turn him over flat on his back. Loose-like. He stayed on his back.”

  “Was he breathing?” Valcour’s voice was incisive. He was standing up.

  Charley whimpered. “There wasn’t no blood,” he said.

  “Blood? Shut up, you fool.” Captain Sohme shot a startled look toward Miss Sidderby. “Be calm, ladies, be calm.”

  They were, both of the ladies, quite calm—terribly so—with Miss Sidderby’s eyes perfectly wide open and absolutely blank, just as blank as if somebody had taken a heavy stick and stunned her; and Mrs. Poole’s face was a lovely cameo done in chalk, and lightly rouged with lilac, and with eyes that for one vivid clash welded themselves to those of Valcour before he turned and was gone from the saloon…gone to Ted…(she prayed it)…to wake up Ted…

  The men were all standing. The effect was distinctly one of mild panic. Charley, quite automatically, was whimpering and whimpering, and drizzled grayness of the cheerless day filtered through them like an unpleasant drink.

  Captain Sohme’s laugh was a minor explosion. “We are making fools of ourselves,” he said, and his voice was overloud. “Our nerves are making us look at a mountain which will turn out to be nothing but a mole, and if you do not stop that god-damned sniveling, Charley, I will forget that we have ladies present and punch you in the teeth. I will be back in two minutes, and we will have another round of cocktails and will laugh about this monkey business—no, no, why do you not stay here, Mrs. Poole?”

  “Why do you want me to stay?” She was clinging almost fiercely to his arm, and he could feel her fingers sinking sharply, uncomfortably into it. “It’s because you feel as I do—”

  “Nonsense, nonsense, dear lady. Of course, if you insist…”

  They were out of the saloon, Captain Sohme and Mrs. Poole, and his meaningless laughter boomed back from the drab, quiet deck, and young Force and Mr. Dumarque were out after them: young, quiet Mr. Force and, beside him, that curious figure in high strange heels who waited politely, at the doorway, for his companion to pass; and Miss Sidderby was a stone that s
omeone had put on the seat of a chair and her eyes, with gentle effort, turned to Charley.

  “And when you shook him by the shoulder, he stayed quite flat?” she said.

  Charley said “Yes” through his whimpering.

  “It’s a very bad sign,” Miss Sidderby said, “when they stay just quiet and flat.”

  CHAPTER 24

  LAT. 35° 8' NORTH, LONG. 64° 29' WEST

  Valcour straightened up (his ear had been pressed against young Poole’s chest, bared of its shirt) and his fingers rested lightly against young Poole’s face as he examined his eyes. He let the head go gently back upon the pillow again and, in doing so, was conscious of moisture beneath the lobes of the ears. His look hardened sharply as he recognized the moisture as a trace of soap that hadn’t dried—that must have been applied not later, say, than ten minutes ago at the most… One didn’t get up out of bed and wash one’s face and then compose one’s body quietly on the bed again—and die.

  “If you will come in and bolt the door, please, Captain—”

  But Mrs. Poole was inside, too, and Captain Sohme in angry, unhappy, desolate bewilderment was closing and bolting the door and deliberately turning his great back on the wretched scene going on over at the bunk. If she would only say something beyond that first sharp “Ted?”…and quit those bitter muffled noises with her nose squashed flat against that young brown chest, and stop squeezing that limp brown sturdy hand which did not squeeze back and mumbling wetly, “Dead—dead—dead.”

  “We need a woman here,” Captain Sohme said, and stared fiercely, without touching it, at the knob of the door.

  “This damn, damn ship—” she was saying. (How old she looks! he thought, and said loudly, “It is, it is—I feel there is a curse upon it.”)—“This nasty little horrid damn ship…why don’t you carry a doctor? Why doesn’t the law compel you to carry a doctor? I insist that we put into the nearest port at once and get a doctor. I insist you change your course to one of the regular passenger lanes and stop a ship and get a doctor. I’ll buy your whole damn little ship right now.” She was shouting, shouting terribly at the very top of her lungs.