Singing in the Shrouds

‘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.