The Widow's Cruise

  Nikki departed, scratching his bristly blue jowl. Nigel picked out of the sheaf of papers the statements written by Peter Trubody, Ivor Bentinck-Jones, and Nikki himself. These, with Jeremy Street and Faith Trubody, who had already given him the information, were the only people on board who Nigel knew or suspected had motives for murdering Ianthe Ambrose.

  Peter’s statement said that he had been sitting with his family in the forward lounge from about 8.45 the previous evening. He had remained there till the dance started, except for a minute or two—he could not give the exact time—when his sister had asked him to fetch a stole from her cabin. Thereafter, he was dancing, or talking with Mrs Blaydon at the bar, till 10.30.

  Ivor Bentinck-Jones—his handwriting had a crabbed, secretive look compared with Peter Trubody’s careless scrawl—stated that he was in the bar on the after-deck from the end of dinner till about 9.15. He then went below to get a clean handkerchief, having used the one in his pocket to mop his trouser-leg, on which he had spilt some drink. “I then observed the cruise-manager entering Mrs Blaydon’s cabin, under the circumstances of which I have already apprised you and am prepared to testify on my oath.” After this episode Bentinck-Jones had gone up on deck for a breath of air before the dance began. He was in the forward lounge from then on.

  Nikki’s statement was a good deal more elaborate, and not so precise. He had gone up to the boat-deck at about ten to nine, to see that all was in readiness for the lecture. His duties had then taken him to various other parts of the ship. At 9.15 he went to Mrs Blaydon’s cabin, was repulsed, retired to brush his hair and lick his wounds, appeared in the forward lounge between 9.25 and 9.30.

  The three statements seemed unexceptionable. One would have to make sure that Faith had asked Peter to fetch her stole. Bentinck-Jones’s information about spilling the drink struck Nigel as a bit over-zealous: but the man could not have premeditated the murder of Primrose Chalmers at this period, for he could not have known that she would slip out of the lecture early.

  The Nikki-Melissa episode still seemed peculiar. Knowing that the lecture would be over at 9.30, was it not odd that she should make an assignation with Nikki for 9.15? Only a quarter of an hour before her sister might be expected to return? Whatever one might think of Melissa, she was surely not the short-time tart. Was it possible that she had never, in fact, made the assignation? that Nikki had seen her enter her cabin and decided to try his luck? He had had encouragement enough, in all conscience.

  The subject of Nigel’s thoughts now ushered in the Bishop of Solway.

  “No, don’t go, Nikki.” Nigel turned to the Bishop. “Would you help me, sir? Nikki’s going to get through to Kalymnos on the radio-telephone. Will you be present when he does so?”

  The Bishop looked no less puzzled by his request than Nikki.

  “You understand Greek,” said Nigel. “I just want to be sure that the message isn’t—er—garbled.”

  “Well, bless my soul!” The Bishop shot a keen glance at Nikki, who stood there with his mouth open like an operatic tenor about to launch upon some great protesting aria. “Very well. What is the message?”

  Nigel told him.

  IX

  It was now barely 11.30. But no passengers had come to volunteer evidence, and Nigel was eager to get the next interview over with: he rather dreaded it, but so much depended upon it. Running Dr Plunket to earth in his surgery, he asked if it would be possible to talk with Mrs Blaydon now.

  “Well, I said midday, but I don’t suppose half an hour will make any difference. I’m afraid I must insist on being present, though. She’s my patient, and she’s been badly knocked up.”

  “By all means be present. I’ll make it as short and easy for her as I can.”

  The doctor entered Melissa’s cabin first. Then, putting his head out, he beckoned Nigel in.

  The cabin was stuffy with heat and a stale smell of eau-de-cologne, though an electric fan was working at full pressure. The linen curtains were drawn over the porthole, muting the light to a kind of dusk. It was one of the most expensive cabins on the Menelaos, with twin beds instead of tiered bunks. On one of these lay Melissa Blaydon, propped up with pillows, one languid brown arm lying on the white counterpane, the other hand supporting her beautiful head, which was half veiled with a yellow silk handkerchief. Even in the shock of grief, her instinct for the attractive pose had not deserted her. She was, as always, exquisitely made-up; but her features seemed a little coarsened by the ordeal she had been undergoing.

  “It’s awfully good of you to see me,” said Nigel. “Please accept my sympathy. It’s been a horrible shock for you, and I’ll try to badger you as little as possible. At least it may save you hours of questioning by the police when we get to Athens.”

  “Do sit down, Mr Strangeways—Nigel, if I may call you that.” With a faint gesture of the hand that lay on the counterpane, Melissa indicated the twin bed. “This dear man—” her eyes glanced towards Dr Plunket—“has told me you are a famous detective. I’d never have thought it. Now, what do you wish to ask me?”

  Grief seemed to have given the woman a dignity, a calm, which she had not shown before in their brief acquaintance: the gamine element was no longer in evidence.

  “When did you last see your sister?”

  “After dinner last night. I brought her some grapes.”

  “What was her state of mind then?”

  “Well, she was very silent. But she did say her headache was much better, and that she’d be going to the lecture presently. She didn’t seem to want me to stay, so I came up to the lounge after sitting with her about ten minutes.”

  “You got no impression that she was—well, thinking of putting an end to her life?”

  “Of course not! I’d never have left her if—I mean, she didn’t seem any more depressed than usual. To tell you the truth, I’d begun to doubt if she’d ever been really serious when she talked about suicide.”

  “Could you just tell me about your own movements, for the record? You came up to the bar?”

  “Yes. I had a drink. Then I came down here to dress for the dance.”

  “What time would that have been?”

  “Well, I take rather an age dressing. I allowed myself forty minutes; the dance was to start at 9.30. Yes, so I must have come down about ten to nine.”

  “And your sister was not here?”

  “No. I assumed she’d gone up already, to get a good seat at the lecture.”

  “I noticed you did not put in an appearance till the second fox-trot had begun. You’d been delayed?”

  “Well, I was very hot, so I had a shower. And then a rather tiresome thing happened.”

  “What was that?”

  “Oh, I’d really rather not tell you.”

  “You don’t need to. Nikki has.”

  The mascaraed lashes fluttered. Melissa turned her head farther away from him. “Oh! Oh dear me! But how very extraordinary of him! This is most embarrassing for me. The last thing I want to do is to get the silly man into trouble.”

  “He says you’d made an—asked him to come and see you at 9.15.”

  “Does he indeed? Well, I must say! I’m afraid the poor doctor is mystified by all this.” Melissa was positively in a flutter now. “Doctor, will you please let me talk to Mr Strangeways alone. I promise I won’t tire myself.”

  “Very well. But not more than ten minutes. I’ll come back then.”

  Melissa gave Dr Plunket a grateful, languishing look, and he went out.

  “Nikki must have misunderstood something I’d said. I did tell him, in the morning, that perhaps I’d see him before the dance started.”

  “See him privately?”

  “Well, yes. He’d been getting rather troublesome—I mean, I like him, he’s very attractive, but I felt the time had come to cool things off a bit. But then he strode in and sort of pounced on me.”

  “In the dark.”

  “Yes. It really was a nuisance, you know.”

>   “You were dressing in the dark?”

  “I—? Oh, I see. I’d just come in from the shower. I suppose he saw me entering the cabin and followed. I was still—I’d just taken off my bath-robe, and was going to turn on the light, when he bounced in.”

  Nigel pursued it no further. Gazing steadily at the averted head, the exquisite profile standing out from the yellow scarf, he said,

  “I’m afraid your sister did not commit suicide.”

  “Afraid? I don’t understand . . . Oh God!” Melissa buried her face in her hands. “She didn’t—it’s nothing to do with that poor child?” she muttered brokenly.

  “We don’t know yet. When did you hear about Primrose?”

  “Last night. After the dance. A rumour went round—they’d been appealing on the loud-speaker. Then one of the officers told us. It’s the most horrible thing. I’d been down here to look for Ianthe: she wasn’t in the cabin—it was about eleven o’clock then, and she didn’t usually stay up late. I looked for her on the decks everywhere—that was when the officer told me about Primrose—but I couldn’t find her. So I asked Nikki to broadcast a message for her on the loud-speaker.”

  “Melissa, you must prepare yourself for a worse——”

  “I know what you’re going to tell me.” She was staring straight in front of her. “Ianthe was murdered. Isn’t that it?”

  Nigel did not need to reply.

  “Have they found her—her body?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t know what to say”—her voice was nearly a wail—“I just don’t know what to say. I was afraid of this.”

  “Afraid she’d be—? Have you any suspicions about who might have done it?”

  “Well, she did get her knife into people, poor Ianthe. Mr Street, for instance.”

  There was silence. Then Nigel said, carefully picking his words, “I won’t bother you with the reasons, but I believe the clue to the murders is on Kalymnos.”

  “On Kalymnos?” It came out in a ghostly echo.

  “Yes. It’d be the greatest help to me if you described exactly what you and your sister did after you went ashore yesterday.”

  Melissa’s head turned slowly, till for the first time she was looking at Nigel full-face: her eyelids looked swollen, and there was a bewildered, wild sort of expression in her eyes, as they searched his.

  “I’ll try. If it’s important.”

  Helped along by an occasional question from Nigel, she told her story. The sisters had explored the little town, bought some postcards, had lunch in the open air outside one of the cafés along the quay, then moved off to find the cove which Nikki had recommended. They met no one on the track which led to it. They must have reached the cove, Melissa thought, at about 2.30. They sun-bathed for a while—Ianthe had taken to sun-bathing the last few days—then Melissa decided to have a swim: the water was deep there, and there were good rocks to dive off. Ianthe, however, spied sea-urchins on several of them, below the surface of the water, and urged her sister not to risk bathing off these rocks. It was shortly after this that the Chalmerses had turned up.

  “Yes, Mr Chalmers told me your sister warned them about the sea-urchins, and told them there was a safe beach farther on. By the way, how did she know there was?”

  “Oh, she didn’t. She just wanted to get rid of them—particularly the child. Primrose got on her nerves. Well, the fact is, Ianthe was rather possessive in her attitude towards me—you must have noticed it yourself. We hadn’t met for so long, and I suppose she liked to have me all to herself.”

  “So neither of you bathed?”

  “Not then. Ianthe never did, anyway.”

  “She couldn’t swim?”

  “Well, she didn’t swim.”

  “Never learnt, as a child?”

  “I don’t remember. And of course, she might have learnt since. But she talked as if she couldn’t.”

  “I see. Will you carry on from there?”

  After the Chalmerses’ departure, Melissa had gone to sleep. When she woke up, she noticed Ianthe, who was lying beside her, looking ill. She said she had a terrible headache. Melissa tried to move her, away from the sea’s edge, into the shade, but Ianthe fainted. Melissa soaked handkerchiefs and put them on her sister’s forehead—there was no one in sight, to whom she could call for help. Presently Ianthe began to recover: she was in rather a bad temper, and said she must go back to the ship. Melissa wanted to accompany her, fearing she might not be well enough to get back alone, but Ianthe insisted on going by herself.

  “She had some special reason for being alone, did you feel?”

  “Special reason?”

  “She usually kept at your side so much, I wondered if she’d engaged to meet someone and didn’t want you to know about it.”

  “Oh, I see.” Melissa fell silent, her brow contracted in thought. “Well, now you ask me, she did seem rather impatient to get away. I put it down at the time to her being irritable, after her faint. She didn’t really like being so dependent on me.”

  “It’s a sign of convalescence, when people start to get irritable.”

  Melissa glanced at him briefly. “So irritability doesn’t fit in with contemplated suicide?”

  “Exactly.” Melissa’s mental processes, thought Nigel, had been sharpened by her loss.

  “And you think she might have arranged to meet someone yesterday afternoon, on the island, and that whatever happened between them led to her being murdered last night? That’s why you said the clue to the murderer would be found on Kalymnos?”

  “It’s a theory.”

  “You think she met her—the person who killed her—on the island?”

  “Yes. What time was it when she left you?”

  “Oh, goodness, I don’t know. I’ve no idea how long I was asleep.”

  “Was it half an hour, say, before the time you spoke with the Chalmerses again?”

  “About that, perhaps.”

  “You did bathe, after all, I gather?”

  Melissa explained that, as soon as Ianthe had set off, she decided to bathe—her sister being no longer there to fuss about sea-urchins. When she finally got out, that side of the cove was in shadow, so she moved over to the other side.

  “To dry your dress in the sun?”

  “Dry my dress?” Melissa looked momentarily disconcerted.

  “Mr Chalmers told me you had it spread out on a rock to dry.”

  “Yes. It was maddening. I’d sort of kicked it off a rock by mistake when I was diving in. That’s why I nearly missed the ship. I was waiting till it got dry.”

  “And Peter Trubody was waiting for you?”

  “How do you mean?”

  Nigel felt something defensive in Melissa’s attitude. He said, “Well, you came back to the ship together.”

  “Oh, I see. Yes, he was at the quayside. But he wasn’t waiting for me, as far as I know.”

  “He didn’t explain why he’d left it so late?”

  “No. Actually, I could hardly get a word out of him. He seemed in a very queer state of mind. Oh my God! You don’t think?—” Melissa broke off, her slim brown hand clenching on the counterpane.

  “What don’t I think?”

  “That Peter could have—that it was he Ianthe had arranged to meet?”

  Whatever Nigel’s thoughts were on this subject, he did not enlarge upon them, for Dr Plunket entered the cabin and firmly told him his time was up.

  X

  “You can tell Mr Bentinck-Jones I want to see him now.”

  Nikki’s teeth flashed at Nigel like breakers ahead. “And then I take his cabin to pieces?” he asked with relish.

  “You’ll probably find the film in his camera.”

  The camera, however, was slung over its owner’s shoulder when he entered, grinning impudently at Nigel.

  “And how’s the great detective doing? Still baffled?”

  Nigel scrutinised him. This man, beneath his professional bonhomie, had neither shame nor compunction: the
ordinary weapons, therefore, were useless against him: even the protracted silence with which Nigel greeted his arrival seemed to cause him no uneasiness whatsoever. He sat down on the bed and lit a cigarette.

  “What are your commands, dear sir?” said Ivor at last.

  “I hear you’ve been at it again.”

  “At it? That depends on what you mean,” Ivor blithely remarked.

  “Not what you got a stretch for ten years ago.”

  “Well, well, so we’ve been digging up the past, have we?”

  “We have. And the present. I’ll come to that in a minute. Who do you think committed these murders?”

  “I haven’t your facilities for collecting evidence. Why ask me?”

  “Because your profession demands a close study of people’s weaknesses.”

  “My profession?”

  “Or hobby, or whatever you call it.”

  “I’m afraid you have the advantage of me.”

  “You’re damn right I have. Mr Street has told me all about your conversation with him.”

  The man’s pudgy, impudent face took on a guarded look. He puffed a little faster at his cigarette, before replying.

  “Mr Street is an imaginative man. What was his version of this alleged conversation?”

  Nigel told him—spinning it out, for Nikki must be given time, but not mentioning the photograph with which Bentinck-Jones had threatened Street. “Are you denying that you tried to extort money from him by threats?”

  “Of course I deny it. You have no proof at all of his story.”

  “You admit nothing?”

  “I admit I saw him and Miss Trubody in a compromising position.” The man’s tongue licked at the side of his mouth, as if to retrieve a crumb of some dainty he had been eating.

  “So you’re just a harmless old voyeur?”

  “I disapprove of elderly men corrupting minors. It is the public duty of any citizen to expose that sort of thing. Or don’t you agree?” Ivor made no attempt to conceal the cynicism of his utterance.

  “How nice for you, to get moral satisfaction as well as a cash payment out of your hobby. Would you say Jeremy Street was capable of strangling minors as well as corrupting them?”