Murder by Latitude

by Rufus King

  “Our fog, Captain,” he said.

  “Yes, Valcour, our fog.”

  Valcour closed the door. He felt his way slowly through velvet drifts of wetness along the black invisible deck. He descended to the main deck, and closed the night behind him. Dim ceiling lights cheerlessly illumined the companionway and passage as he made his way to his cabin and went inside. He shot the bolt and assured himself that he was alone. He drew a chair up to the settee and sat down. He took from his pocket and placed on the settee the watch, the gold case of which was chased and marked with the elaborate initial F, and beside the watch he opened up the leather folder containing two photographs: the elderly woman with a round vague face, the young girl whose petulant features were weakly pretty beneath dark ringlets…and in his mind, coming between him and the photographs, was a picture of Mr. Dumarque in flowered silk who, because of a scar, did not desire to expose his person…and coming to him through the porthole from the fog and darkness, the siren wailed again, as it would unceasingly at two-minute intervals, during the dreary balance of the endless night.

  CHAPTER 39

  LAT. ?° ?' NORTH, LONG. ?° ?' WEST

  Telegram from government radio station at Cape Hatteras to Commissioner of the New York Police Department:

  NO RESULTS OF ANY NATURE OBTAINED UP TO SIX AM STOP AS SS EASTERN BAY MUST HAVE PASSED BEYOND OUR ZONE IF HOLDING TO HER NORMAL COURSE SUGGEST THAT YOU WORK THROUGH STATION AT CAPE MAY AND FROM LOCAL STATIONS DIRECT STOP WILL CONTINUE INCLUDING YOUR MESSAGE IN OUR REGULAR GENERAL BROADCAST IF YOU SO DESIRE STOP PLEASE ADVISE

  * * * *

  The sea, the sky, the ship was bathed in fog. Valcour stepped out onto the deck into a glow of luminous gray. His eyes were gritty from sleeplessness and the dampness felt agreeable to his hot dry skin. There was no breeze to dissipate the moisture, and even the siren’s monotonous wail was muffled under blankets. He slowly paced the wet and empty deck until faintly, from a tremendous distance, came the thin sound of eight bells. He continued his steady pacing for a quarter of an hour more, and then he went below. His knock on the door to Mr. Dumarque’s cabin was very gentle. There was no response and he opened it and went inside. The cabin, as he had expected, was empty, and Mr. Dumarque would be at breakfast.

  The steamer trunk was unlocked and Valcour examined its contents with swift thoroughness. He closed it again and drew a single suitcase from beneath the bunk. Its lock yielded to a small implement that he took from his pocket, and he raised the case’s lid. From a flap he took six letters. They were addressed to M. Jean Dumarque, Hotel des Arts, New York, and had been posted in France, and their contents were written in French. He stared at them speculatively for a moment and then, with a curious smile, selected one and put it in his pocket. The other contents of the suitcase did not interest him at all. He lowered the lid, relocked it, and shoved it back under the bunk. He stood up and opened the cabin door, and came face to face with Mr. Dumarque.

  “Really, my dear Valcour, you will accept a thousand pardons. I should never have returned so soon. It was, I assure you, a matter of cold bacon. My appetite fled before it as from a strong wind, I restrained myself from screaming, I got up quietly from the table, and I am here. And now, if you have recovered from your confusion, possibly you will wish me a good-morning.”

  Valcour’s smile reflected Mr. Dumarque’s thin one. “I do,” he said, “and also offer my regrets about the bacon. I tried not to muss your things too much.”

  “Do not speak about it, my dear Valcour. I am positive that had I not found you here I should never have known that a thing had been touched.”

  “Your suitcase was locked.”

  “But that was stupid—permit me to present you with the key.”

  “I have already opened it and locked it again.”

  Mr. Dumarque’s stare remained impersonal. “You found, I trust, what it was you wanted?”

  “Thank you, I did.”

  “In the suitcase, my dear Valcour?”

  “In the suitcase.”

  Mr. Dumarque’s set smile broadened a little. “Then there is nothing to keep you from breakfast.”

  “Nothing.” Valcour stepped out into the passage and added, as he started to walk away, “Unless it’s the thought of cold bacon.”

  Mr. Dumarque did not move until Valcour was lost around the passage’s end, then he went inside the cabin and bolted the door. He went swiftly to the wardrobe trunk and opened it. From one of its drawers he took out a rubber toilet case and examined, with minute care, a cake of scented soap. He replaced the soap in the case and closed the drawer. He shut the trunk. He drew a fine cambric handkerchief from his pocket and, sitting down, delicately removed a film of sweat from his pale cold brow.

  Valcour went up again on deck. He mounted to the boat deck and looked into the smoking saloon. It was empty. He tried the lounge and saw, seated in one of its more comfortable chairs, young Force. He went over and joined him.

  “I wonder whether you would do a favor for me,” he said.

  “I’d be glad to, Mr. Valcour.”

  “You’re a student of French, aren’t you, Mr. Force?”

  “I can understand it and read it, but I don’t speak it very well.”

  “Are you familiar with colloquial French—the sort one finds in newspapers and letters?”

  “I believe so, Mr. Valcour.” Young Force waited until the sound of the siren had died down, and then said, “Why?”

  “I have a letter that I should like you to translate. Will you?”

  “Certainly, if I can.”

  Valcour took from his pocket the letter he had taken from Mr. Dumarque’s suitcase and handed it to young Force. Young Force stared at the envelope.

  “It’s addressed to Mr. Dumarque,” he said.

  Valcour smiled at little. “Do you mind if we keep that fact to ourselves?”

  Young Force didn’t say anything for a moment. He stared steadily at Valcour. “I think I see,” he said.

  Valcour stopped smiling and his voice was very serious. “I can trust you, Mr. Force?”

  “You can trust me, Mr. Valcour. Do you want this done right away? If you do, I’ll get my dictionary so that there’ll be no mistake.”

  “I do not require it immediately, Mr. Force, but I would appreciate having the translation sometime before tonight.”

  “Something is going to happen tonight?”

  “I think it will.”

  “I’ll have this ready for you in half an hour or so.

  “That would be very kind of you.”

  “It’ll be no trouble at all, Mr. Valcour.”

  “You will find me in my cabin.”

  “I’ll bring the translation to you there.”

  Valcour stood up. “Will you be careful, please, about the folds?”

  “I’ll put the letter back just as I found it.”

  Valcour went down to his cabin. He closed the door and lay down on its bunk. He smoked four cigarettes and then, looking at his watch, saw that twenty-seven minutes had passed. He lighted a fifth cigarette and said, in response to a knock at the door, “Come in!”

  Young Force came in and closed the door. He handed Valcour Mr. Dumarque’s letter and a sheet of paper. “It seems rather a harmless letter,” he said.

  Valcour pocketed Mr. Dumarque’s letter and then, looking at the sheet of paper, read:

  MY DEAR FRIEND :

  It is with pleasure that, as ever, one receives from you a communication. You have reason when you say that a road does not lengthen without a turning at its end. I find myself embarrassed with a thousand affairs at present to do, and so you will forgive an old fellow, my dear Jean, if his expressions for a good voyage be brief. Nanette informs me to tell you that a kiss for you is waiting upon your return.

  HENRI.

  Valcour looked up from the sheet of paper. He folded it and put in his pocket. “I don’t think it’s harmless,” he said.

  “It seemed so to me.”

&
nbsp; “Well, it won’t to the jury,” Valcour said.

  CHAPTER 40

  LAT. ?° ?' NORTH, LONG. ?° ?' WEST

  Telegram from government radio station at Cape May to Commissioner of the New York Police Department:

  FROM TR POSITION REPORTS RECEIVED THIS NOON ESTABLISHED FACT THAT SS NORTHERN VICTORY BOUND MADEIRA COMMA SS VANCOMAR BOUND NEW YORK COMMA SS LEVERAGE BOUND STOCKHOLM ALL PASSED WITHIN SHORT RADIUS OF PROBLEMATIC NOON POSITION SS EASTERN BAY STOP AT TWO O’CLOCK THIS AFTERNOON HAD ESTABLISHED COMMUNICATION WITH THREE VESSELS LISTED STOP EACH REPORTS THAT ALTHOUGH WEATHER CLEAR AND VISIBILITY EXCELLENT SS EASTERN BAY NOT SIGHTED DO YOU WISH US TO CONTINUE INCLUDING YOUR MESSAGE IN OUR REGULAR CQ GENERAL BROADCAST

  The fog was as heavy, at three in the afternoon, as it had been throughout the morning and the endless night. There was an exhausting quality about it. It had narcoticized even the effect of the siren’s intermittent wail.

  Miss Sidderby had asked to be excused. She could not, she had said in a thoroughly shaken little voice, sing again. She stood beside Valcour at the forward railing of the boat deck and her eyes, with dreadful intensity, were fixed upon this pitiful repetition of yesterday’s scene and her hands, because it was a funeral, were gloved.

  In spite of the brief distance to the well deck below, vision was impaired by fog, and voices from the group of figures clustered by the starboard railing were muffled and unintelligible, even during those deathlike moments of stillness between siren blasts which, because the ship was stopped and had no way upon her, were altered to two prolonged ones with a nervous interval of about one second between.

  “It seems as if yesterday were years and years away,” Miss Sidderby said, and her eyes were feeling hot and uncomfortable again as they stared at that canvas bundle, which might just as well have been the other one for all its appearance went. A little bigger, she thought. There wasn’t, within it, such poor, poor thinness… That dreadful whistle—its sound was so much worse out here on deck. It wasn’t a mechanical sound. It was a scream born of terrible things: of terror—of warning—of pain—

  “Do you feel that you ought to be out here, Miss Sidderby?” Valcour said. His own eyes went beyond her to where, standing almost formally at the rail, were Mr. Dumarque, Mr. Wright, and young Force, and, farther off than this group of three, the Sanfords with Mr. Stickney and Miss Sidderby’s sister, Ella.

  “I think it would be cowardly not to be here, Mr. Valcour.” Wetness clashed suddenly with hotness. “I think that Mrs. Poole is a beast,” she said. She could feel the steadying warmth of Valcour’s firm hand through her glove.

  “Mrs. Poole is a curious woman,” he said. “Her life has not been normal.”

  “I don’t care, Mr. Valcour. I wouldn’t even let a cat of mine be buried without standing by to…” The siren drowned her out. “…selfish, spoiled, miserable old woman. She is old, Mr. Valcour. I think she’s every bit as old as I am, and I’ll be forty-seven the middle of next month.”

  The services, Valcour could see, were started and Captain Sohme, huge in grayness, was fingering the small black book in his hand and advancing a step nearer to the canvas bundle rigid on its plank.

  “I think that things are better for Ted Poole as they are,” Valcour said. Mrs. Sanford, he noted, had leaned over toward Mr. Stickney to say something, and Mr. Stickney, with the expression of a semi-intelligent wooden Indian, was removing his hat.

  “Oh, he isn’t, Mr. Valcour; he isn’t. Nobody’s better dead. There’s always a way out of things, if you keep alive to find it.” She kept her voice low, and her stare didn’t move from that little black book in Captain Sohme’s hand. It must have been about now, she thought, that, yesterday, she had started to sing. But it couldn’t be, because it hadn’t been until Captain Sohme had finished talking, and just now he had turned a page and his lips were moving soundlessly (to her) through that impressive, harrowingly beautiful service which is spoken as a last and lovely farewell to the dead. What company they would be for each other—this, and that other. Two canvas bundles deeply drifting through a wet green stillness. It would take the edge off lonesomeness. Her lids closed sharply over stinging buttons of fire, but she could not shut out from them the picture of those canvas bundles aimlessly drifting along strange hidden currents of the cold and pitiless sea—with Mr. Gans’s thinner bundle perhaps catching up with the bigger bundle of Mr. Poole—meeting, swaying, slowly revolving, so far down there, and bumping—The siren’s scream crashed down upon her like a mallet and her hands were weak with coldness and with sweat. Her head was a housing place for an anvil and her thoughts, like drunken sparks flying hotly from it, flashed crazily after something sane to cling to. “I lost a needle,” she said.

  Valcour looked down at her flushed and wet-streaked face. “I beg your pardon, Miss Sidderby?”

  “I lost a needle, Mr. Valcour.” Captain Sohme had stopped reading, because he had closed the book. And his eyes were closed too, and his lips were moving through the deathless phrases of that prayer which speeds the parting of the dead. “It was a long, strong needle, Mr. Valcour”—the words dropped meaninglessly through her lips from inner chaos—“and I think I must have lost it at the same time as I lost the scissors and the silver thimble.”

  Thimble—scissors—sailmaker’s wax—small canvas sack—now needle—a long, strong needle. Valcour’s brain was a kaleidoscope, and Captain Sohme, significantly, was raising his hand…thimble—needle—sailmaker’s wax…quickly, quickly, something clawed at Valcour’s brain…needle—brain—thimble—neck… His shout of “Stop! Don’t let that body go—” was crushed beneath the siren’s overpowering scream and the plank, upended, dropped its leaded burden to the deep.

  CHAPTER 41

  LAT. ?° ?' NORTH, LONG. ?° ?' WEST

  Mrs. Poole’s armchair was arranged so that its back was to the ports. The ports themselves were closed and their curtains drawn. The cabin lights were on and its door was shut. The air in it was close and stuffy.

  Mrs. Poole stared at Anna Wickstod. It was as definitely soothing to stare at Anna Wickstod as it was to tell beads. The woman’s placidity included even her breathing.

  “What is the time, Anna?”

  Anna Wickstod looked at her watch. “It is three o’clock, miss.”

  Anna Wickstod had always addressed her as “miss,” and Mrs. Poole had never checked her. She found it subconsciously flattering.

  “They’ll have started, then.”

  “Yes, miss.”

  The ship, with its engines stopped, was as still as death, and the wail of the siren, muffled by the fog and closed ports, was obliterated by the very monotony of its constant repetition.

  “A cigarette, Anna.”

  “Yes, miss.”

  Anna Wickstod stood up and went to the wash-stand. She took a package of cigarettes from its shelf and offered it to Mrs. Poole. Mrs. Poole’s fingers tightened a little.

  “Those are Mr. Poole’s,” she said, and Anna Wickstod started to withdraw the package. “It doesn’t matter.” Mrs. Poole took one and put it between her lips. Her words were jerky. “Why should it?”

  Anna Wickstod struck a match and held it until Mrs. Poole had lighted the cigarette. “You had better let me brush your hair, miss.”

  “Later.” The cigarette, while she stared at Anna Wickstod, turned into ashes. “What time is it?”

  “A quarter-past three, miss.”

  “They’ll be finished soon.”

  “Yes, miss.”

  The air was heavy with stillness.

  “What are you doing, Anna?”

  “‘I am saying a prayer, miss. In my country, it is considered fitting to say a prayer for the dead.”

  Mrs. Poole did not laugh. “You might add one for the living,” she said.

  “For who, miss?”

  “For me.”

  “If you wish it, miss.”

  The ship was throbbing again.

  “We’re under way.”


  “Then it is over, miss.”

  “Yes, Anna. It is over.”

  There was a knock at the door.

  “See who it is.”

  Anna Wickstod went to the door. She opened it. “It is Lieutenant Valcour, miss.”

  “Mr. Valcour? Come in.”

  Valcour came inside, and Anna Wickstod closed the door. His sense of unease was very strong and he made no effort to shake it off. He imagined it was the way rats felt just before, due to an incomprehensible instinct, they quitted a ship. If such an instinct with its uncanny accuracy should be possessed by any of the lower living organisms why should it not, he felt, be possessed by men? His sensation was that of a man entering a race; marking time tensely for the starting pistol’s crack, which, when it came, would send him down the course with an invisible adversary. He would be running and would see no opponent at his side…but he would be there, that strange opponent…and others would be running in this curious race, too…every person on the ship, he felt, would be running in this curious race, too…

  “I dislike bothering you, Mrs. Poole,” he said, “but I need one more piece of evidence to bring my case to a close.”

  She had not, in her make-up, the ability to entertain several emotions at one time. It was her habit to concentrate upon a single one until it was drained. And she was finishing with Ted. A little longer (intensity, of course, was gone entirely)—but there was a lingering—“Will you sit down, Mr. Valcour?” she said.

  “Thank you.” He sat with considerable formality on the settee, and discarded vague expressions of sympathy one after the other. He tried to tell himself that one didn’t come into the presence of a woman whose husband, so instantly, had received the burial service, without expressing an appropriate condolence. But with Mrs. Poole, one did.

  “Will you smoke, Mr. Valcour?”

  “Thank you, no.”

  He struck a match and held it until she had lighted a cigarette.

  “Open the ports, please, Anna. You have solved this case, Mr. Valcour?”