Death in the Middle Watch (10 page)

And now, he thought, perhaps I really can get to bed.

O
N THE FOLLOWING EVENING
, though the wind had gone down and the passengers seemed to have lost the look of tension that some of them had worn on the previous night, Carolus himself did not feel reassured. There was in all probability. he reminded himself, a murderer on board since, as the Purser had told him, no one had remained ashore in Lisbon, and Carolus was not the man, even among the absurdities of a holiday cruise, to treat murder lightly. As he had shown in previous cases, he had an almost superstitious awe of the very word. He was ready to see the humours of human vanity and particularly of curious idiom, but he had never found anything in the least amusing about a man or woman who usurped the authority of God to put an end to the life of another.

Cynthia Darwin, for all he knew, might have been an odious woman, might even have been involved in the death of her first husband: her character was irrelevant. Someone, someone perhaps known to Carolus, had gone to her cabin and having been trustingly admitted, had strangled the wretched woman. And although Carolus had boasted that he had certain theories or ideas about the identity of the murderer, he had to admit that they were too vague and remote to be formulated, even to himself.

Sitting in the lounge, he could scrutinize the very people who might be suspected because they at least had the opportunity, and although many of them seemed hopelessly improbable by reason of their characters as far as Carolus knew them, he was too experienced to dismiss them from a list of the potentially guilty. Susan Berry for example. Could one imagine that rabbit-mouthed and frustrated nymphomaniac strangling another woman and quite a sturdy-looking one at that? She was compounded of jealousies and longings, but how could she feel jealous of Cynthia Darwin except perhaps for the money which enabled the woman to dress well? Susan Berry had not even seen Guy Darwin—so far as was known—at the time when Cynthia was murdered. Carolus was ready to admit that envy and frustration could carry women to extraordinary lengths, but Susan, like everyone else on board, escaped anything like real suspicion.

Like Patty Spittals, for instance. A silly, kindly woman devoted to the husband she pretended to deride, and amused by his wealth rather than purse-proud or seriously pretentious. It was true that she had every opportunity and might easily have built up enough confidence between herself and the dead woman to be admitted to her cabin at once, as the murderer had been. But what possible motive could she have had? She had been on the cruise last year when Cynthia's first husband had died and been buried at sea and nothing was yet known to Carolus of her behaviour at that time towards the widow, but Patty was a good-natured woman and it was difficult to imagine her in the more sinister role.

The same applied to her husband. It was stretching the imagination too far altogether to imagine the ex-Mayor and millionaire with the solemn manner, which he often broke by a wink, feeling such animosity towards Cynthia Darwin that he would go to her cabin and strangle her, but there was, of course, the
precedent of Macbeth and his wife and the power of Patty Spittals over her husband might account for some of that animosity. He, too, had the opportunity and the fact that his wife so firmly denied having heard anything at all from the next cabin, while Susan Berry supposed she had heard the murderer's knock, kept Sir Charles in the circle of possibilities.

Nor could Porteous be dismissed out of hand. He was a man with an obsession, and such men are dangerous. He had spent his life building up the business of Summertime Cruises and would obviously do anything to preserve it, as he had shown in his callous behaviour on two occasions already. What connection this could have with the murder of one of his passengers Carolus was at a loss to imagine, but he was convinced that if the existence of Cynthia Darwin threatened Porteous's schemes, he would not scruple to rid himself of her in even the most violent way. Whether Ratchett would follow him, or even keep silence for his sake was extremely doubtful: Carolus had seen how deluded Porteous was when he spoke of the loyalty of such men as Ratchett. But Porteous was the “boss” and among men of Ratchett's type that counted for a lot, whether he wished it to or no.

When Carolus came to consider Captain Scorer as a potential murderer, he decided that he was beyond all probabilities. First, he could see no conceivable motive; second, the opportunity, though not entirely impossible, was far-fetched; and third, Scorer was certainly not a man who could ever be suspected by a sane observer of any such action. Carolus hesitated to erase him from his imaginary list only because the captain was, after all, on board his ship, and had, as Carolus had gathered from the Purser, not invited Cynthia Darwin to sit at his table. It would be ingenious to imagine a murder being committed for the sake of a place at the Captain's table, and to Carolus, who had known equally strange motives, it
was not impossible, but to suppose that the Captain himself might act against a woman who had once sat near him in the dining hall was idiotic. Yet there was something about Scorer that made Carolus keep him in mind.

As he certainly kept Alexander Carlisle. He liked the West Indian and felt a certain respect for a man so obviously self-dependent, so much a master of his own fate, but he found it quite easy to picture him silently opening Cynthia's cabin door and entering. Nor did Carolus think it impossible that Cynthia had invited him to do so. The snag here, as with so many of the passengers, was lack of any recognizable motive, but since Carolus still had more than a week among them, he believed that a motive would eventually appear.

A more promising possibility, if only because Carolus knew so little about him, was the man who had announced himself to the Purser as Dr Runwell. Those sharp grey eyes, that keen unfriendly look, might mean anything. Carolus realized that he had not seen Dr Runwell since that first encounter on deck. Perhaps he sat behind Carolus in the dining hall, but surely sometimes he must come out on deck? There was nothing to point at him, nothing whatever, yet Carolus lingered for some time over him. and, as if by some curious speak-of-the-Devil kind of superstition, he suddenly noticed the man himself sitting quite alone on the other side of the saloon. He was not reading or apparently taking any interest in his fellow passengers. He just sat bolt upright and looked ahead. “I'm taking this cruise purely for my health,” Carolus remembered him saying. Well, perhaps.

Then there was Medlow, too obviously a “suspect” to be suspected at all. His deliberately crazy manner and loud voice, his noisy disapproval of everyone and everything about him and his claim to be making a report of some kind as though he were a member of MI5—all suggested that he was almost
asking to be suspected, and unless this were a sinister double bluff, Medlow could be dismissed from Carolus's mind.

Not so “the lady at the table where we sit.” Mrs Grahame-Willows might well be that gossiping mischief-maker familiar to all who spend long periods on ship, but there might be other motives for the stories she set circulating. There seemed to be too much design in her exaggerations, too much sheer fantasy in her stories to be completely ingenuous and the rapidity with which she always produced her explanations after each event was in itself suspicious. That Carolus had accepted her as a figure of comedy when described by Mrs Stick was not in itself a complete contradiction.

But Carolus moved on to Dr Yaqub Ali. Had these been the days of Sherlock Holmes, any Asian would have been per se a suspect and Carolus felt bound to remember the circumstances of Tom Travers's death, but he did not seriously suppose that the doctor had murdered Cynthia Darwin or had any part in her murder. He could, he admitted, be wrong and at this stage, when so few of his ideas led to any reasonable conclusion, he could not afford utterly to wipe out Dr Yaqub Ali's name.

There remained the young man Gavin Ritchie who used makeup and the blonde girl who so very pointedly had not come aboard with him or been seen with him since then. But Ritchie's passionate friendship with the Assistant Purser, though it did not clear him entirely, was a circumstance that made his involvement in a violent act somewhat improbable. Of the Assistant Purser, it was possible to imagine brutality but there had been nothing to suggest that he, or Susan Berry's friend the Second Engineer, had any sort of involvement other than the fact, true of all the officers and crew, that they served on a ship on which a man was believed to have been lost overboard and on which a woman passenger had been killed. Or
perhaps the fact—again learned from the Purser—that they had all been serving on the same ship a year ago when the woman's rich husband died and was buried at sea, was enough to make them be entertained as suspects.

There was another couple named Popple, and yet another whose name Carolus had not even troubled to ascertain; three single men who played gin rummy all day, and a couple of nondescript girls with whom he had not spoken. There were also the members of the cheerful Irish family.

This left, of all those known to him who had been on board at the time of Cynthia Darwin's murder, no one but the deckhand Leacock, and with him Carolus admitted there was something of a problem. Leacock drank, and yet was emphatically considered by Porteous an “excellent fellow.” He was quarrelsome, as Carolus observed, yet seemed to be put in a position of trust by the ship's officers. He was moreover indiscreet and talkative, the last man, one would have thought, allowed to be on familiar terms with the passengers. There was in fact some mystery about him. Carolus did not go so far as to suspect him of murder, but he felt that although Leacock had been ready, perhaps too ready, to answer all his questions, he could have told Carolus very much more, and nearer the point, than he had done.

“I hope,” said a voice beside Carolus, “that you do not exclude me from your suspects of the crime, which I see you all too obviously trying to elucidate?” It was Mr Gorringer and he took the seat beside Carolus. “Although our long relationship might be expected to protect me, yet a good detective must surely have no friends. I am willing, no, I positively insist on being considered among the possibilities.”

“Very well,” said Carolus curtly. “Where were you at the time of Mrs Darwin's murder, that is to say between one and two in the small hours?”

Mr Gorringer was equally curt, even somewhat snappish.

“In my bunk,” he said.

“To which you naturally have no witnesses?”

“Certainly not.”

“Then you are on my list, in so far as I have one, along with the rest of the passengers and crew of this ship.”

“Are you not, perhaps, carrying a joke too far, my, dear Deene? My suggestion was a facetious one and should have been seen by you as such. I should be distressed if you did not credit me with as ready a sense of humour as your own. But be that as it may, we shall, I think, congratulate ourselves tomorrow when the body of our fellow passenger has been removed from the ship and placed on board a homebound aeroplane. Then and then only shall I feel that a true holiday will begin for all of us.”

“You will? I shall feel on the contrary, that I must get down to some really hard work.”

“Will you not, if I may use a somewhat inappropriate metaphor, be seeking to shut the stable door when the horse has gone?”

Carolus looked serious.

“I hope not,” he said. “I truly hope not. Unless of course you are referring to the late Mrs Darwin as a horse.”

“Certainly not. I warned you that I was speaking in metaphor. You are too ready to misunderstand me.”

There was a long silence between them. Then Mr Gorringer remarked reflectively, “So we shall approach Calpe, one of the Pillars of Hercules of the ancients, tomorrow.”

“You mean we reach Gibraltar,” said Carolus.

“I do. It will be a sad approach to those of us who esteemed the poor lady whose remains will be taken ashore by her husband.”

“But that mustn't prevent your seeing the famous apes,” said Carolus. “They so exactly resemble the Lower Fifth at
Newminster. And now, before turning in, I must consult Mrs Stick. She keeps me informed of the more sensational rumours. Goodnight, headmaster.”

He found Mrs Stick on deck with her husband.

“Thank goodness you've come, sir. I don't think I could have gone on much longer,” she said, leaving Stick and joining Carolus. “Stick was set on going round the deck twenty-four times and I was feeling half blown away by the wind, though it's not so bad as last night. If we was to go into the Sun Lounge for a minute I've got something I think you ought to hear about.”

Carolus willingly followed the little woman in.

“She says,” Mrs Stick began at once, “that the Port Authorities in Gibraltar won't hear of it, sending a lady ashore in a coffin when nobody can say how she came to die. I mean, it does sound a bit on the off side, doesn't it? So I suppose we shall know all the rest of the cruise that she's lying in her cabin dead, as you might say.”

“I might, but I promise you I won't. Your friend is quite incorrect. The whole thing has been arranged by wireless. The body will be taken ashore before the passengers are out of their cabins in the early morning.”

“There! I told Her She must be mistaken, but you know what She is once she gets an idea in Her head. Wild elephants won't move it. But She did happen to say that She thinks a Dr Runwell had something to do with it—the murder, I mean. She says She doesn't like the look of this Dr Runwell at all. She says he might easily have stuck a knife in anyone.”

“But Mrs Darwin died of strangulation.”

“So they say. But how does anyone know? All we know is the poor lady went to bed and never got up next morning. That's all we've been told. She says she might have been poisoned or had her throat cut for all we can tell. Nor She doesn't
much like the look of that doctor, anyway. She says all She knows is, She wouldn't like to have anything wrong with her when he's around, that's all, She says. She says he'd operate on you as soon as look at you, She says.”