When the First Officer returned with the two sailors, Nigel questioned them through Nikki. Their evidence proved interesting. They had searched the fo’c’s’le, then one of them had gone into the swimming-pool (they had left this to the last, Nigel surmised, because like so many sailors they disliked physical contact with the element from which they made their living). After dragging out the body, one of the sailors went to report to the First Officer. The other was accosted by a passenger, who came through the doorway from the promenade-deck. Closely questioned by Nigel, this sailor admitted that the passenger had distracted his attention from the body for a few moments long enough, Nigel believed, to take the notebook. The sailor described the passenger as a short man with a fat face and an American shirt. It fitted well enough the appearance of Ivor Bentinck-Jones.
The passenger, replied the sailor to Nigel’s final question, had not seemed especially disturbed when he saw the body.
“I’d like this man to identify the passenger straight away,” said Nigel to the Captain, who made an assenting gesture. Nikki interposed with a rattle of Greek—he was pointing out, no doubt, that the owners would take a poor view of passengers being dragged out of their beds in the small hours and accused of robbing corpses; but the Captain overruled him.
Nigel turned to Dr Plunket. “How is Mrs Blaydon taking it?”
“Pretty hard. I had to give her a sedative. She’s not in a condition to be questioned yet.”
“That can wait. But I wish you’d do one thing for me. Look at her ankle. She sprained it or turned it or something. See if it needs attention.”
Dr Plunket stared at Nigel for a moment. “All right. You’re the boss.”
II
“This is an outrage!” exclaimed Ivor Bentinck-Jones. “By whose authority——?”
“The Captain’s authority. I’m glad you agree that the murder of a child is an outrage,” said Nigel calmly.
“What? What’s that? She was murdered?”
“Strangled. You didn’t notice the bruises on her throat when you were examining her body?”
“Examining?—I never examined her body.”
“Too busy robbing it, were you?”
Bentinck-Jones’s face went dead for a moment, before it resumed its expression of violent protest. “That sort of remark could get you into serious trouble,” he said.
“It’s just as well there’s nobody else to hear it, then,” Nigel replied, goading him.
Bentinck-Jones had been brought to the First Officer’s cabin, which the Captain had assigned to Nigel for interviews. The man had put on trousers and a jersey over his pyjamas: his sparse hair stuck up in spikes, and he had forgotten to replace his false teeth. He no longer looked the life and soul of the party.
“If that’s your line,” he said coolly, “I demand that a witness be present at this interview.”
“Are you sure that is wise? You don’t mind a third person hearing about your, er, private activities?”
“No objection whatsoever.”
Nigel’s pale blue eyes, at their chilliest now, scrutinised the man for several seconds.
“You do realise that you may be responsible for this child’s death?” he asked.
“That’s the most pernicious nonsense. And an actionable statement, too. I warn you——”
“Responsible for her death, I said. You spun her a yarn about being a Secret Service man looking for Eoka agents on board. It wouldn’t deceive a child. It didn’t deceive Primrose. But you had encouraged her to spy and eavesdrop among the passengers, and write it all down in her notebook. As a result, she discovered something which made her a menace to one of the passengers. Therefore she had to be killed.”
“Well, really! I invent a little game, to amuse this child——”
“A useful game for you.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“Her notebook would turn up, with any luck, some profitable openings for blackmail.”
There was a silence. Ivor’s mouth made a nibbling movement: his eyes were wary. Like most blackmailers, Nigel reflected, this man has iron nerves as well as a thick skin: let’s see just how thick it is.
“You’d still like a witness?”
“I insist on one.”
“Very well.” Nigel opened the door, outside which stood an armed sailor, went to Nikki’s cabin, and asked him to come along. As they entered, Nigel caught a flicker of—calculation, was it? or satisfaction?—on Bentinck-Jones’s face.
“We were discussing blackmail,” he told Nikki. Then, turning to Ivor, “We have cabled your description to Records at Scotland Yard. We shall get an answer this morning, if you are known there.”
Bentinck-Jones sat back, his hands lightly clasped over his fat little stomach.
“You are accusing me of blackmail, before a witness? What evidence have you?”
“You started to blackmail me, for example. During our mule-trip on Mount Patmos.”
“You’re dreaming,” Ivor protested. But a relief that he could not quite conceal showed in his face: it signified to Nigel that there was someone else on board in whom the man really had got his claws.
“Your methods,” Nigel pursued, “are quite clever—in a third-rate way. Sly hints, delicate insinuations first, to try out the morale of a prospective victim. You’re careful, at first, to say nothing which could not have an innocent interpretation. That’s how you protect yourself. And then there’s your double bluff—the professional blackmailer disguised as an amateur busybody—the real pest at work behind the harmless little nuisance. Quite a good camouflage.”
Would that get through his skin, Nigel wondered. It did not seem to. The man’s expression was complacent, almost contemptuous, as if these charges were too absurd to answer.
“On Patmos you talked to me about ‘unmarried couples’ in the context of Miss Massinger’s possible commission to do a portrait-bust of Royalty. You were just probing, to discover my reactions. If I’d shown signs of perturbation——”
“Look at Nikki. He’s as bewildered by this extraordinary rigmarole as I am.”
Nigel kept his pale blue eyes fastened on the man.
“Very well, then. We’ll return to Primrose Chalmers. Have you any objection to your cabin and your person being searched? for her notebook?”
“None at all.” Bentinck-Jones said it too quickly. Nigel realised with chagrin that the man must have disposed of the notebook he had taken off Primrose’s body: he’d had four hours, after all, to master its contents. However, in the remote chance that Bentinck-Jones was bluffing, Nigel proceeded with the search. The notebook was not on him, nor in his cabin. Worse still, the man who shared the cabin with Ivor, and made no objection to his own belongings being searched too, said that Ivor had come into the cabin at about 11.15 and told him that the missing child had been found drowned: they had discussed it for a little, then turned out the lights. He himself had not been able to go to sleep, and could state definitely that Bentinck-Jones had not turned on the light or left the cabin till Nigel sent for him just now.
The body had been found just before 11 p.m. Ivor had turned up a minute or two later by the swimming-pool. This would have given him less than a quarter of an hour to memorise the contents of the notebook, before pitching it overboard and returning to his cabin. Not long enough, surely?
And then, back in the First Officer’s cabin, with the contents of Primrose’s sporran laid out on the table before him, Nigel realised with exasperation that all this was a dead end. He had seen the child taking notes, always with that fountain pen. The body had been in the water for the best part of two hours. The ink would have run, the writing become totally undecipherable.
He looked up sharply at Bentinck-Jones. The man’s eyes were fixed upon the table where lay a handkerchief, a pencil, a miniature golliwog and a pen. There was a faint smirk on his face.
“To-morrow,” said Nigel, “I shall be addressing the passengers. I shall tell them, without mentioning nam
es, that there is a blackmailer on this cruise. I shall ask anyone who has been approached by this blackmailer to come to me privately. Whether the blackmailer’s activities are linked with the murders of Primrose Chalmers and——”
“You could save your breath,” said Ivor Bentinck-Jones, his fat voice grating now, “and ask this man what he was doing in Miss Ambrose’s cabin at quarter-past nine last night.”
Nigel turned his head. The cruise-manager was staring at Ivor, an almost theatrical look of consternation on his face. “You accuse me? This is another of your lying blackmails! I——”
“Take it easy, Nikki.”
“He is a liar!”
“No, you can’t wriggle out of it.” Ivor chuckled. “I happened to be following you along the passage, on my way to my cabin. You entered Miss Ambrose’s—you should always knock, Nikki, before going into a lady’s cabin. As I passed the door, I heard a struggle——”
“Stop! I can explain, I can——”
“About a minute later, you passed my own door, which happened to be ajar. You were breathing hard, your hair was rumpled, your tie half-way round your neck, and”—with an incredibly swift movement, Bentinck-Jones reached out and jerked up one of Nikki’s sleeves— “yes, there were scratches on your wrists.”
Nikki gave the man a bear-like clout, which sent him reeling. The armed sailor looked in, then shut the door again.
“You claim this happened at 9.15?” said Nigel, dancing the miniature golliwog on the table before him. “How do you remember the time so exactly?”
“I left the bar for a minute—the clock said just before 9.15—to come down and get a handkerchief. I came straight down.”
And at 9.10 Ianthe Ambrose had left the lecture, said Nigel to himself.
“I will speak to Mr Strangeways privately,” said Nikki, glaring at Bentinck-Jones. “I will not speak before this filth, this grinning toad, this lousy heel of a——”
“Pipe down, Nikki. That’ll be all for to-night, Bentinck-Jones. Thank you for your help.”
“Watch your step, Strangeways. Just watch it. Good night.”
III
“Well, Nikki?”
“You do not believe those lies, Mr Strangeways? He is a blackmailer—you say so yourself—a criminal type.”
“But they were not lies, Nikki, were they?”
The cruise-manager’s prune-dark eyes swivelled away: then, straightening his massive shoulders, he gave Nigel a rueful, a charming, an almost schoolboy look.
“No. They were not. But I did not kill anyone. I could not have killed Miss Ambrose.”
“Why not?”
“Because it was Mel—her sister—in the cabin.”
“You had an assignation with her? an arrangement to meet her there?”
“Sure thing. While her sister was at the lecture.” Nikki opened his eyes wide, flashing his magnificent teeth at Nigel. “Oh boy! What a woman! This is private and confidential, yes?”
“We shall see.”
“Women are crazy. You know? She says for me to come to her cabin, and when I go there she does not want it, she fights like a cat. It is their moods. They are crazy in their moods. And yet she had had a shower-bath, and she was naked.”
“Wait a minute, Nikki. Let’s start at the beginning. When was this assignation made?”
“In the morning. Before we go ashore.”
“To meet in her cabin, during the lecture?”
“O.K. correct.”
Nigel remembered something Clare had told him. “You’re sure the assignation was for her cabin, not for a bathing-beach on the island?”
“I don’t—oh, I get you: I did tell Mrs Blaydon about a good place to bathe, where she could be private.”
“You told her this as a favour?”
“Sure thing.”
“You didn’t plan to meet her there?”
“What’d be the use? Her sister was going to be with her.”
“But Miss Ambrose returned alone to the ship in the middle of the afternoon.”
“She did? Say, I guess I missed an opportunity, then,” the cruise-manager shamelessly remarked.
“Did you miss it? Miss Massinger and I saw you walking away in the direction of the cove.”
A shutter came down over Nikki’s eyes. “You must have been mistaken.”
Nigel let it pass, for the time being, but noted the man’s relief when he returned to the events of last night. Nikki had gone into Melissa Blaydon’s cabin. It was quite dark. Melissa was there—“disrobed: undraped,” said Nikki, airing his vocabulary with some complacence. She must have recently taken a shower, for her body was damp and her hair soaking. When she struggled with him, he thought at first she was just playing hard to get: but the violence of her reaction soon disabused him of this notion. “I am not one to take advantage of a lady when she is unwilling,” he nobly remarked.
“But didn’t she explain why she was unwilling?”
“No. She said nothing.”
“Nothing at all? How very odd. You mean she didn’t even cry out, or——?”
“She fought quite silently. She was stronger than I expected—very strong. I felt she was, well, sort of panicky, desperate. So I desisted from pressing my attentions upon her.”
“Very gentlemanly of you, I’m sure. And afterwards, during the dance, did she make any reference to what had happened?”
“I didn’t speak to her during the dance. I was sore at her.”
Nigel gazed meditatively at Nikki, who was made uncomfortable by it and lit a cigarette, turning his head away. Nigel’s thoughts were not on the cruise-manager, however: he was thinking how peculiar it was that, just before the dance, a woman like Melissa should get her hair wringing wet. Surely, if she was taking a shower, she’d wear a bathing-cap? And why had she said nothing, not a word of protest or explanation, to Nikki?
“What has all this to do with that poor child’s being drowned?” the latter now asked.
“You get wet, drowning somebody,” said Nigel, more to himself than to his companion. And Nikki had told him there was something ‘panicky, desperate’ in the woman’s resistance.
Nikki was looking a bit panicky himself. It might well lose him his job if this episode with Melissa came out. Or the panic might have a more sinister origin.
“How do these landing-tickets work?” asked Nigel. “Are they checked every evening, after the passengers have re-embarked?”
“My secretary counts them, to see if there are the same number as we gave out in the morning. So we should know if a passenger had been left behind.”
“And last night—did you have the right number?”
“Yes sir. What’s on your mind?” Nikki looked puzzled.
“Let us exercise pure reason, Nikki. Either Miss Ambrose was murdered, or she committed suicide. Take suicide first. She could, possibly, have thrown herself off the ship without being seen or heard. But did she strangle and drown Primrose Chalmers first? Why should she? Someone intent on killing herself doesn’t take time off to kill somebody else en route. And anyway, the evidence points strongly to the child’s having been strangled in the swimming-pool: Ianthe, by all accounts, couldn’t swim: therefore she could not have done it. What’s the alternative?—that, within a short space of time, a woman commits suicide and a child is murdered, on the same ship, quite independently? Well, that’d be a fantastic coincidence. Take murder, then: Ianthe is murdered, possibly because she surprised the person who killed Primrose. It looks plausible. But Ianthe’s body is not on the ship. Therefore, if she was murdered, she must have been thrown overboard. But the risk of doing so, with people strolling or sitting about on the decks all the time, would be appalling. And what was she supposed to be doing? If she saw someone kill Primrose, she’d yell for help, wouldn’t she? Ditto if somebody laid hold on her to toss her overboard—she’d scream and struggle: it’d be a hell of a business, as the Captain said just now, to lift a full-grown, struggling woman over the rail.”
> “The killer might have stunned her first.”
“He might. But, if she’d just seen him killing Primrose, do you think she’d have let him come near her? If she was not murdered because she witnessed that crime, you have to postulate two separate murderers operating independently at the same time, or else one murderer who wanted, for different reasons, to get rid of both Ianthe and Primrose, and found opportunities to do so on the same night.”
“Ah, that’s it!” Nikki enthusiastically exclaimed. “You’ve got something there! It is a privilege to watch British police methods at work. Pure reason! Divine reason!”
“No, no. It just won’t do. Several people had motives for murdering Ianthe. But Primrose? a child with a notebook? She wasn’t really such a menace. What could she have found out that would force anyone into killing her? Unless—” Nigel paused.
“Unless?”
“—she saw the murderer of Ianthe Ambrose. She did, after all, slip out of the lecture shortly after Ianthe.” Nigel yawned and stretched. “Well, I’m for bed soon. Now: arrangements for to-morrow morning.”. .
IV
Immediately after breakfast, the English-speaking passengers were all assembled in the main dining-saloon—all, with the exception of Melissa Blaydon and the Chalmerses. At one end, behind a table, sat the Captain of the Menelaos, flanked by Nigel and the cruise-manager. The passengers muttered to one another, fidgeted, smoked, waiting for they did not quite know what to happen.
“What does this remind you of?” whispered Mrs Hale to Clare Massinger.
“An extension lecture, in a café in a small Midland city,” Clare promptly replied.
“The annual general meeting of a company that’s going on the rocks,” Mrs Hale suggested. “I hope Mr Strangeways will be able to handle the indignant shareholders.”
Mr Strangeways was saying to Dr Plunket, who had just sat down beside him, “How is Mrs Blaydon this morning?”
“A bit dopey still. But the natural Eve is indomitable. She’d made up her face for me. Vain woman; but attractive all right. Pulse normal, and——”
“Is her ankle normal?”
“How you do go on about her ankle. It’s swollen—a slight sprain—nothing to worry about.”