Ngaio Marsh - Singing in the Shrouds

“I was mad enough to suppose,” Mr. Merryman lamented, “that in undertaking this voyage I would escape, however briefly, from the egregious, the remorseless ambiguities of the lower-school urchin. Funny! Funny! Will you be so kind, my good Cuddy, as to enlighten us? In what respect do you consider droll, entertaining or amusing the discovery of a wilted hyacinth upon the bosom of this disarticulate puppet? For my part,” Mr. Merryman added with some violence, “I find the obvious correlation altogether beastly. And the inescapable conclusion that I myself was, hypothetically at least, responsible for its presence adds to my distaste. Funny!” Mr. Merryman concluded in a fury and flung up his hands.

The Cuddys eyed him with dawning resentment. Mr. McAngus said brightly, “But of course. I’d quite forgotten. It was my hyacinth. You took it, do you recollect? When we had our little collision? And threw it down.”

“I did not ‘take’ it.”

“Accidentally, of course. I meant accidentally.” Mr. McAngus bent over the doll. His reddish knotted fingers manipulated the neck. “I’m sure she can be mended,” he said.

Mrs. Dillington-Blick said in a constrained voice, “Do you know — I hope you’ll forgive me, Mr. McAngus, and I expect I’m being dreadfully silly — but do you know I don’t somehow think I feel quite the same about Esmeralda. I don’t believe I want her mended, or at any rate not for me. Perhaps we could think of some little girl — you may have a niece.” Her voice faded into an apologetic murmur.

With a kind of social readiness that consorted very ill with the look in his eyes, Mr. McAngus said, “But, of course, I quite understand.” His hands were still closed round the neck of the doll. He looked at them, seemed to recollect himself, and turned aside. “I quite understand,” he repeated, and helped himself to a herbal cigarette.

Mrs. Cuddy, relentless as a Greek chorus, said, “All the same it does seem funny.” Mr. Merryman gave a strangulated cry, but she went on greedily, “the way we were all talking about those murders. You know. And then the way Mrs. Blick got that cable from her gentleman-friend about the girl being murdered who brought the flowers. And the way hyacinths keep turning up. You’d almost think it was intentional, really you would.” She stared in her unwinking fashion at Mrs. Dillington-Blick. “I don’t wonder you feel funny about it with the doll being dressed like you. You know. It might almost be you, lying there, mightn’t it, Mrs. Blick?”

Miss Abbott struck her big hands together. “For God’s sake!” she ejaculated. “Do we have to listen to all this? Can’t someone take that thing away!”

“Of course,” Alleyn said and dropped the newspaper over the doll. “I can.”

He gathered up the unwieldy parcel and took it to his cabin.

“As usual,” he wrote to his wife, “I miss you very much. I miss—” He paused and looked, without seeing them, at the objects in his cabin. He reflected on the old circumstance that although his memory had been trained for a long time to retain with scrupulous accuracy the various items of human faces, it always let him down when he wanted it to show Troy to him. Her photograph was not much good, after all. It merely reminded him of features he knew but couldn’t visualize; it was only a map of her face. He put something of this down in his letter, word after careful word, and then began to write about the case in hand, setting out in detail everything that had happened since his last letter had been posted in Las Palmas.

… so you see [he wrote], the nature of the predicament. I’m miles away from the point where one can even begin to think of making an arrest. All I’ve been able to do is whittle down the field of possibles. Do you agree? Have you arrived at the predominantly possible one? I’m sure you have. I’m making a mystery about nothing, which must be the last infirmity of the police mind .

Meanwhile we have laid a plan of action that is purely negative. The first and second mates and the chief engineer have been put wise by the captain. They all think with him that the whole idea is completely up the pole and that our man’s not on board. But they’ll fall in with the general scheme and at this moment are delightedly and vigilantly keeping an eye on the ladies, who, by the way, have been told that there have been thefts on board and that they’ll be well advised to lock their doors, day and night. It’s been made very clear that Dennis, the queer fat steward, you know, is not suspected .

From almost every point-of-view [Alleyn went on after a pause], these cases are the worst of the lot. One is always hag-ridden by one’s personal conviction that the law is desperately inadequate in its dealings with them. One wonders what sort of frightfulness is at work behind the unremarkable face, the more-or-less unexceptionable behaviour. What is the reality? With a psychiatrist, a priest, and a policeman all present we’ve got the ingredients for a Pirandello play, haven’t we? Jourdain and Makepiece are due here now and no doubt I shall get two completely opposed professional opinions from them. In fact —

There was a tap on the door. Alleyn hurriedly wrote, “… here they are. Au revoir, darling ,” and called out, “Come in.”

Father Jourdain now wore a thin light-coloured suit, a white shirt and a black tie. The change in his appearance was quite startling; it was as if a stranger had walked in.

“I really don’t feel,” he said, “that the mortification of a dog collar in the tropics is required of me. I shall put it on for dinner, and on Sunday I shall sweat in my decent cassock. The sight of you two in your gents’ tropical suitings was too much for me. I bought this in Las Palmas and in happier circumstances would get a great deal of pleasure out of wearing it.”

They sat down and looked at Alleyn with an air of expectancy. It occurred to him that however sincerely they might deplore the presence of a homicidal monster as their fellow traveller they were nevertheless stimulated in a way that was not entirely unpleasurable. They were both, he thought, energetic inquisitive men and each in his own mode had a professional interest in the matter in hand.

“Well,” he said, when they were settled, “how do you feel about Operation Esmeralda?”

They agreed, it appeared, that nothing had happened to contradict Alleyn’s theory. The reaction to the doll had been pretty well what he had predicted.

“Though the trouble is,” Father Jourdain added, “that when one is looking for peculiar behaviour one seems to see it all over the place. I must confess that I found Dale’s outburst, the Cuddys’ really almost gloating relish, Merryman’s intolerable pedantry, and McAngus’s manipulations equally disturbing. Of course it doesn’t arise,” he added after a pause, “but even poor Miss Abbott behaved, or so it seemed to me, with a kind of extravagance. I suppose I lost my eye.”

“Why,” Alleyn asked, “do you call her ‘ poor Miss Abbott’?”

“Oh, my dear Alleyn! I think you know very well. The problem of the unhappy spinster crops up all along the line in my job.”

Tim gave an inarticulate grunt.

“Yes,” Alleyn said, “she is obviously unhappy.” He looked at Tim. “What did that knowledgeable noise mean?”

Tim said impatiently, “We’re not concerned with Miss Abbott, I imagine, but it meant that I too recognize the type, though perhaps my diagnosis would not appeal to Father Jourdain.”

“Would it not?” Father Jourdain said. “I should like to hear it all the same.”