Singing in the Shrouds

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?’