LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      ‘

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