Singing in the Shrouds

‘Look, do let me carry that suitcase,’ and had taken it out of her hand before she could expostulate. ‘My stuff’s all on board,’ he said. ‘I feel unimportant with nothing in my hand. Don’t you hate feeling unimportant?’

‘Well, no,’ Jemima said, surprised into an unconventional reply. ‘At the moment, I’m not minding it.’

‘Perhaps it’s a change for you.’

‘Not at all,’ she said hurriedly.

‘Or perhaps women are naturally shrinking creatures, after all. “Such,” you may be thinking, “is the essential vanity of the human male.” And you are perfectly right. Did you know that Aubyn Dale is to be a passenger?’

‘Is he?’ Jemima said without much interest. ‘I would have thought a luxury liner and organized fun would be more his cup-of-tea.’

‘I understand it’s a rest cure. Far away from the madding camera and I bet you anything you like that in no time he’ll be missing his spotlights. I’m the doctor, by the way, and this is my first long voyage. My name’s Timothy Makepiece. You must be either Miss Katherine Abbott or Miss Jemima Carmichael and I can’t help hoping it’s the latter.’

‘You’d be in a bit of a spot if it wasn’t,’ Jemima said.

‘I risked everything on the one throw. Rightly, I perceive. Is it your first long voyage?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t sound as excited as I would have expected. This is the ship, looming up. It’s nice to think we shall be meeting again. What is your cabin number? I’m not being fresh: I just want to put your bag in it.’

‘It’s 4. Thank you very much.’

‘Not at all,’ said Dr Makepiece politely. He led the way to her cabin, put her suitcase into it, made her a rather diffident little bow and went away.

Jemima thought without much interest: ‘The funny thing is that I don’t believe that young man was putting on an act,’ and at once stopped thinking about him.

Her own predicament came swamping over her again and she began to feel a great desolation of the spirit. She had begged her parents and her friends not to come to the ship, not to see her off at all and already it seemed a long time ago that she had said goodbye to them. She felt very much alone.

The cabin was without personality. Jemima heard voices and the hollow sounds of footsteps on the deck overhead. She smelt the inward rubbery smell of a ship. How was she to support five weeks of the woman with the pin-heels and the couple with Clapham Common voices and that incredibly forbidding spinster? She unpacked the luggage which was already in her cabin. Dennis looked in and she thought him quite frightful. Then she took herself to task for being bloody-minded and beastly. At that moment she found in her cabin-trunk a parcel from a wonderful shop with a very smart dress in it and a message from her mother and at this discovery she sat down on her bunk and cried like a small girl.

By the time she had got over that and finished her unpacking she was suddenly quite desperately tired and went to bed.

Jemima lay in her bed and listened to the sounds of the ship and the port. Gradually the cabin acquired an air of being her own and somewhere at the back of all the wretchedness there stirred a very slight feeling of anticipation. She heard a pleasant voice saying again: ‘You don’t sound as excited as I would have expected,’ and then she was so sound asleep that she didn’t hear the ship sail and was only very vaguely conscious of the fog signal, booming at two-minute intervals all night.

By half past twelve all the passengers were in bed, even Mrs Dillington-Blick who had given her face a terrific workout with a new and complicated beauty treatment.

The officers of the watch went about their appointed ways and the Cape Farewell, sailing dead slow, moved out of the Thames estuary with a murderer on board.

II

Captain Jasper Bannerman stood on the bridge with the pilot. He would be up all night. Their job was an ancient one and though they had radar and wireless to serve them, their thoughts as they peered into the blank shiftiness of the fog were those of their remote predecessors. An emergency warning come through with its procession of immemorial names – Dogger, Dungeness, Outer Hebrides, Scapa Flow, Portland Bill and the Goodwin Sands. ‘She’s a corker,’ said the pilot alluding to the fog. ‘Proper job, she’s making of it.’

The voices of invisible shipping, hollow and desolate, sounded at uneven distances. Time passed very slowly.

At two-thirty the wireless officer came to the bridge with two messages.

‘I thought I’d bring these up myself, sir,’ he said, referring obliquely to his cadet. ‘They’re in code. Urgent.’

Captain Bannerman said: ‘All right. You might wait, will you,’ and went into his room. He got out his code book and deciphered the messages. After a considerable interval he called out: ‘Sparks.’

The wireless officer tucked his cap under his arm, entered the captain’s cabin and shut the door.

‘This is a damned perishing bloody turn-up,’ Captain Bannerman said. The wireless officer waited, trying not to look expectant. Captain Bannerman walked over to the starboard porthole and silently re-read the decoded messages. The first was from the Managing Director of the Cape Line Company:

‘Very secret. Directors compliments stop confident you will show every courtesy to Superintendent Alleyn boarding you off Portsmouth by pilot cutter stop will travel as passenger stop suggest uses pilots room stop please keep me personally advised all developments stop your company relies on your discretion and judgment stop Cameron stop message ends.’

Captain Bannerman made an indeterminate but angry noise and re-read the second message.

‘Urgent immediate and confidential stop Superintendent R. Alleyn will board you off Portsmouth by pilot cutter stop he will explain nature of problem stop this department is in communication with your company stop C.A. Majoriebanks Assistant Commissioner Criminal Investigation Department Scotland Yard message ends.’

‘I’ll give you the replies,’ Captain Bannerman said, glaring at his subordinate. ‘Same for both! “Instructions received and noted Bannerman.” And you’ll oblige me, Sparks, by keeping the whole thing under your cap.’

‘Certainly, sir.’

‘Dead under.’

‘Certainly, sir.’

‘Very well.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

When the wireless officer had gone Captain Bannerman remained in a sort of scandalized trance for half a minute and then returned to the bridge.

Throughout the rest of the night he gave the matter in hand, which was the pilotage of his ship through the worst fog for ten years, his sharpest attention. At the same time and on a different level, he speculated about his passengers. He had caught glimpses of them from the bridge. Like every man who so much as glanced at her, he had received a very positive impression of Mrs Dillington-Blick. A fine woman. He had also noticed Jemima Carmichael who came under the general heading of Sweet Young Girl and as they approached the tropics would probably cause a ferment among his officers. At another level he was aware of, and disturbed by the two radiograms. Why the suffering cats, he angrily wondered, should he have to take in at the last second, a plain-clothes detective? His mind ranged through an assortment of possible reasons. Stowaway? Escaping criminal? Wanted man in the crew? Perhaps, merely, a last-minute assignment at Las Palmas but if so, why didn’t the fellow fly? It would be an infernal bore to have to put him up: in the pilot’s room of all places where one would be perpetually aware of his presence. At four o’clock, the time of low vitality, Captain Bannerman was visited by a premonition that this was going to be an unlucky voyage.

III

All the next morning the fog still hung over the English Channel. As she waited off Portsmouth the Farewell was insulated in obscurity. Her five male passengers were on deck with their collars turned up. In the cases of Messrs Merryman, McAngus and Cuddy and Father Jourdain they wore surprised-looking caps on their heads and wandered up and down the boat-deck or sat disconsolately on benches that would probably never be used again throughout the voyage. Before long Aubyn Dale came back to his own quarters. He had, in addition to his bedroom, a little sitting-room: an arrangement known in the company’s offices as The Suite. He had asked Mrs Dillington-Blick and Dr Timothy Makepiece to join him there for a drink before luncheon. Mrs Dillington-Blick had sumptuously appeared on deck at about eleven o’clock and, figuratively speaking with one hand tied behind her back, had achieved this invitation by half past. Dr Makepiece had accepted, hoping that Jemima Carmichael, too, had been invited but Jemima spent the morning walking on the boat-deck and reading in a chilly but undiscovered little shelter aft of the centrecastle.

Mr McAngus, too, remained but a short time on deck and soon retired to the passengers’ drawing-room, where, after peering doubtfully at the bookcases, he sat in a corner and fell asleep. Mrs Cuddy was also there and also asleep. She had decided in the teeth of the weather forecast that it was going to be rough and had taken a pill. Miss Abbott was tramping up and down the narrow lower deck having, perhaps instinctively, hit upon that part of the ship which, after the first few hours, is deserted by almost everyone. In the plan shown to passengers it was called the promenade deck.

It was Jemima who first noticed the break in the weather. A kind of thin warmth fell across the page of her book: she looked up and saw that the curtain of fog had grown threadbare and that sunlight had weakly filtered through. At the same moment the Farewell gave her noonday hoot and then Jemima heard the sound of an engine. She went over to the port side and there, quite close, was the pilot cutter. She watched it come alongside the rope ladder. A tall man stood amidships, looking up at the Farewell. Jemima was extremely critical of men’s clothes and she noticed his with absentminded approval. A sailor at the head of the ladder dropped a line to the cutter and hauled up two cases. The pilot went off and the tall man climbed the ladder very handily and was met by the cadet on duty who took him up to the bridge.

On his way he passed Mr Merryman and Mr Cuddy who looked up from their crime novels and were struck by the same vague notion, immediately dismissed, that they had seen the new arrival before. In this they were not altogether mistaken: on the previous evening they had both looked at his heavily distorted photograph in the Evening Herald. He was Superintendent R. Alleyn.

IV

Captain Bannerman put his hands in his jacket pockets and surveyed his latest passenger. At the outset Alleyn had irritated Captain Bannerman by not looking like his own conception of a plainclothes detective and by speaking with what the Captain, who was an inverted snob, considered a bloody posh accent entirely unsuited to a cop. He himself had been at some pains to preserve his own Midland habit of speech.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Superintendent A ’leen is it? – I take it you’ll tell me what all this is in aid of and I don’t mind saying I’ll be glad to know.’

‘I suppose, sir,’ Alleyn said, ‘you’ve been cursing ever since you got whatever signals they sent you.’

‘Well – not to say cursing.’

‘I know damn’ well what a bore this must be. The only excuse I can offer is one of expedience: and I must say of extreme urgency.’

Captain Bannerman, deliberately broadening his vowels said: ‘Sooch a-a-s?’

‘Such as murder. Multiple murder.’

‘Mooltipul murder? Here: you don’t mean this chap that says it with flowers and sings.’

‘I do, indeed.’

‘What the hell’s he got to do with my ship?’

Tve every reason to believe,’ Alleyn said, ‘that he’s aboard your ship.’

‘Don’t talk daft.’

‘I dare say it does sound preposterous.’

Captain Bannerman took his hands out of his pockets, walked over to a porthole and looked out. The fog had lifted and the Farewell was underway. He said, with a change of voice: ‘There you are! That’s the sort of crew they sign on for you these days. Murderers!’

‘My bosses,’ Alleyn said, ‘don’t seem to think he’s in the crew.’

‘The stewards have been in this ship three voyages.’

‘Nor among the stewards. Unless sailors or stewards carry embarkation notices.’

‘D’you mean to stand there and tell me we’ve shipped a murdering passenger?’

‘It looks a bit like it at the moment.’

‘Here!’ Captain Bannerman said with a change of voice. ‘Sit down. Have a drink. I might have known it’d be a passenger.’

Alleyn sat down but declined a drink, a circumstance that produced the usual reaction from his companion. ‘Ah!’ Captain Bannerman said with an air of gloomy recognition. ‘I suppose not. I suppose not.’

His manner was so heavy that Alleyn felt impelled to say: ‘That doesn’t mean, by the way, that I’m about to arrest you.’

‘I doubt if you could, you know. Not while we’re at sea. I very much question it.’

‘Luckily, the problem doesn’t at the moment arise.’

‘I should have to look up the regulations,’ sighed Captain Bannerman.

‘Look here,’ Alleyn suggested, ‘may I try to give you the whole story, as far as it affects my joining your ship?’

‘That’s what I’ve been waiting for, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Alleyn agreed, ‘I’m sure it is. Here goes then!’

He looked full at Captain Bannerman who seated himself, placed his hands on his knees, raised his eyebrows and waited.

‘You know about these cases, of course,’ Alleyn said, ‘as far as they’re being reported in the papers. During the last thirty days up to about eleven o’clock last night there have been two homicides which we believe to have been committed by the same person, and which may be part of a larger pattern. In each case the victim was a woman and in each case she had been strangled and flowers had been left on the body. I needn’t worry you with any other details at the moment. Last night, a few minutes before this ship sailed, a third victim was found. She was in a dark side-alley off the passageway between the place where the bus and taxis put down passengers and the actual wharf where you were moored. She was a girl from a flower-shop who was bringing a box of hyacinths to one of your passengers: a Mrs Dillington-Blick. Her string of false pearls had been broken and the flowers had been scattered, in the usual way, over the victim.’

‘Any singing?’

‘What? Oh, that. That’s an element that has been very much played up by the Press. It certainly does seem to have occurred on the first occasion. The night of the fifteenth of last month. The victim you may remember was Beryl Cohen who ran a cheapjack stall in Warwick Road and did a bit of the older trade on the side. She was found in her bed-sitting-room in a side street behind Paddington. The lodger in the room above seems to have heard the visitor leaving at about ten o’clock. The lodger says the visitor was singing.’

‘What a dreadful thing,’ Captain Bannerman said primly. ‘What sort of song, for God’s sake?’

‘The Jewel Song,’ Alleyn said, ‘from Faust. In an alto voice.’

‘I’m a bass-baritone, myself,’ the Captain said absently. ‘Oratorio,’ he gloomily added.

‘The second victim,’ Alleyn went on, ‘was a respectable spinster called Marguerite Slatters, who was found similarly strangled in a street in Fulham on the night of the 25th January. A nightwatchman on duty in a warehouse nearby says he heard someone rendering “The Honeysuckle and the Bee” in a highish voice at what may have been the appropriate time.’

Alleyn paused, but Captain Bannerman merely glowered at him.

‘And it appears that the sailor on duty at the head of our gangway last night heard singing in the fog. A funny sort of voice, he said. Might mean anything, of course, or nothing. Drunken seaman. Anything. He didn’t recognize the tune.’

‘Here! About last night. How d’you know the victim was – ’ Captain Bannerman began and then said: ‘All right. Go on.’

‘In her left hand, which was clenched in cadaveric spasm, was a fragment of one of the embarkation notices your company issues to passengers. I believe the actual ticket is usually pinned to this notice and torn off by the officer whose duty it is to collect it. He hands the embarkation notice back to the passenger: it has no particular value but I dare say a great many passengers think it constitutes some kind of authority and stick to it. Unfortunately this fragment only showed part of the word Farewell and the date.’

‘No name?’

‘No name.’

‘Doesn’t amount to much, in that case,’ said Captain Bannerman.

‘It suggests that the victim struggling with her murderer grasped this paper, that it was torn across and that the rest of it may have remained in the murderer’s possession or may have been blown somewhere about the wharf.’

‘The whole thing might have been blowing about the wharf when the victim grabbed it.’

‘That’s a possibility of course.’

‘Probability, more like. What about the other half then?’

‘When I left for Portsmouth this morning it hadn’t been found.’

‘There you are!’

‘But if all the others have kept their embarkation notices – ’

‘Why should they?’

‘May we tackle that one a bit later? Now, the body was found by the PC on that beat, five minutes before you sailed. He’s a good chap and kept his head admirably, it seems, but he couldn’t do anything about boarding you. You’d sailed. As he talked to me on the dock telephone he saw your funnel slip past into the fog. A party of us from the Yard went down and did the usual things. We got in touch with your Company, who were hellishly anxious that your sailing shouldn’t be delayed.’

‘I’ll be bound!’ Captain Bannerman ejaculated.

‘ – and my bosses came to the conclusion that we hadn’t got enough evidence to justify our keeping you back while we held a full-scale inquiry in the ship.’

‘My Gawd!’

‘So it was decided that I should sail with you and hold it, as well as I can, under the counter.’

‘And what say,’ Captain Bannerman asked slowly and without any particular signs of bad temper, ‘what say I won’t have it? There you are! How about that?’

‘Well,’ Alleyn said, ‘I hope you don’t cut up rough in that particular direction and I’m sure you won’t. But suppose you did and suppose I took it quietly, which, by the way, I wouldn’t: the odds are you’d have another corpse on your hands before you made your next landfall.’

Captain Bannerman leant forward, still keeping his palms on his knees, until his face was within a few inches of Alleyn’s. His eyes were of that piercing, incredible blue that landsmen so correctly associate with sailors and his face was the colour of old bricks.

‘Do you mean,’ he asked furiously, ‘to tell me you think this chap’s not had enoof to satisfy him for the voyage?’

‘So far,’ Alleyn said, ‘he’s been operating at ten-day intervals. That’ll carry him, won’t it, to somewhere between Las Palmas and Cape Town?’

‘I don’t believe it. I don’t believe he’s aboard.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘What sort of chap is he? Tell me that.’

Alleyn said: ‘You tell me. You’ve got just as good a chance of being right.’

‘Me!’

‘You or anyone else: may I smoke?’

‘Here – ’ the Captain began and reached for a cigarette box.

‘ – a pipe, if you don’t mind.’ Alleyn pulled it out and as he talked, filled it.

‘These cases,’ he said, ‘are the worst of the lot from our point of view. We can pick a card-sharp or a con-man or a sneak-thief or a gunman or a dozen other bad lots by certain mannerisms and tricks of behaviour. They develop occupational habits and they generally keep company with their own kind. But not the man who, having never before been in trouble with the police, begins, perhaps latish in life, to strangle women at ten-day intervals and leave flowers on their faces. He’s a job for the psychiatrist if ever there was one and he doesn’t go in for psychiatry. He’s merely an example. But of what? The result of bad housing conditions, or a possessive mother or a kick on the head at football or a bullying schoolmaster or a series of regrettable grandparents? Again, your guess is as good as mine. He is. He exists. He may behave with perfect propriety in every possible aspect of his life but this one. He may be, and often is, a colourless little fellow who trots to and fro upon his lawful occasions for, say fifty years, seven months and a day. On the day after that he trots out and becomes a murderer. Probably there have been certain eccentricities of behaviour which he’s been at great pains to conceal and which have suddenly become inadequate. Whatever compulsion it is that hounds him into his appointed crime, it now takes over. He lets go and becomes a monster.’

‘Ah!’ Captain Bannerman said, ‘a monster. There’s unnatural things turn up where you’d least expect to find them in most human souls. That I will agree to. But not in my ship.’

The two men looked at each other, and Alleyn’s heart sank. He knew pigheadedness when he met it.

The ship’s engines, now at full speed, drove her, outward bound, upon her course. There was no more fog: a sunny seascape accepted her as its accident. Her wake opened obediently behind her and the rhythm of her normal progress established itself. England was left behind and the Farewell, sailing on her lawful occasions, set her course for Las Palmas.

V

‘What,’ Captain Bannerman asked, ‘do you want me to do? The thing’s flat-out ridiculous but let’s hear what you want. I can’t say fairer than that, can I? Come on.’

‘No,’ Alleyn agreed, ‘that’s fair enough and more than I bargained for. First of all, perhaps I ought to tell you what I don’t want. Particularly, I don’t want to be known for what I am.’

‘Is that so?’

‘I gather that supercargoes are a bit out-of-date, so I’d better not be a supercargo. Could I be an employee of the company going out to their Durban office?’

Captain Bannerman stared fixedly at him and then said: ‘It’d have to be something very senior.’

‘Why? On account of age? – ’

‘It’s nothing to do with age. Or looks. Or rather,’ Captain Bannerman amended, ‘it’s the general effect.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t quite – ’

‘You don’t look ill, either. Voyage before last, outward bound, we carried a second cousin of the managing director’s. Getting over D.T.’s, he was, after taking one of these cures. You’re not a bit like him. You’re not a bit like a detective either if it comes to that,’ Captain Bannerman added resentfully.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Have you always been a ’tec?’

‘Not absolutely.’

‘I know,’ Captain Bannerman said, ‘leave it to me. You’re a cousin of the chairman and you’re going out to Canberra via Durban to one of these legations or something. There’s all sorts of funny jobs going in Canberra. Anybody’ll believe anything, almost.’

‘Will they?’

‘It’s a fact.’

‘Fair enough. Who is your chairman?’

‘Sir Graeme Harmond.’

‘Do you mean a little fat man with pop eyes and a stutter?’

‘Well,’ said Captain Bannerman, staring at Alleyn, ‘if you care to put it that way.’

‘I know him.’

‘You don’t tell me!’

‘He’ll do.’

‘Do!’

‘I’d better not use my own name. There’s been something in the papers. How about C.J. Roderick?’

‘Roderick?’

‘It happens to be the first chunk of my own name but it’s never appeared in print. When you do this sort of thing you answer more readily to a name you’re used to.’ He thought for a moment. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Let’s play safer and make it Broderick.’

‘Wasn’t your picture in last night’s Herald?’

‘Was it? Hell!’

‘Wait a bit.’

The Captain went into his stateroom and came back with a copy of the paper that had so intrigued Mr Cuddy. He folded it back at the snapshot of piquant Beryl Cohen and Superintendent R. Alleyn (inset).