“Dates?”
“Could you, for instance, provide yourself with a cast-iron alibi plus witnesses for the fifteenth of last month between ten and eleven P.M., the twenty-fifth between nine P.M. and midnight, and for last night during the half-hour before you sailed?”
Captain Bannerman breathed stertorously and whispered to himself. At last he said, “Not all three, I couldn’t.”
“There you are, you see.”
Captain Bannerman removed his spectacles and again advanced his now empurpled face to within a short distance of Alleyn’s.
“Do I look like a sex monster?” he furiously demanded.
“Don’t ask me,” Alleyn rejoined mildly. “I don’t know what they look like. That’s part of the trouble. I thought I’d made it clear.”
As Captain Bannerman had nothing to say to this, Alleyn went on. “I’ve got to try and check those times with all your passengers and — please don’t misunderstand me, sir — I can only hope that most of them manage to turn in solider alibis than, on the face of it, yours looks to be.”
“Here! I’m clear for the fifteenth. We were berthed in Liverpool and I was aboard with visitors till two in the morning.”
“If that can be proved we won’t pull you in for murder.”
Captain Bannerman said profoundly, “That’s a queer sort of style to use when you’re talking to the master of the ship.”
“I mean no more than I say, and that’s not much. After all, you don’t come aboard your own ship clutching an embarkation notice.”
Captain Bannerman said, “Not as a rule. No.”
Alleyn stood up. “I know,” he said, “what a bind this is for you and I really am sorry. I’ll keep as quiet as I reasonably may.”
“I’ll bet you anything you like he hasn’t shipped with us. Anything you like! Now!”
“If we’d been dead certain we’d have held you up until we got him.”
“It’s all some perishing mistake.”
“It may be.”
“Well,” Captain Bannerman said grudgingly as he also rose. “I suppose we’ll have to make the best of it. No doubt you’d like to see your quarters. This ship carries a pilot’s cabin. On the bridge. We can give you that if it suits.”
Alleyn said it would suit admirably. “And if I can just be treated as a passenger—”
“I’ll tell the chief steward.” He went to his desk, sat down behind it, pulled a slip of paper towards him and wrote on it, muttering as he did so, “Mr. C. J. Broderick, relative of the chairman, going out to a post at the British Embassy in Canberra. That it?”
“That’s it. I don’t, of course, have to tell you anything about the need for complete secrecy.”
“You do not. I’ve no desire to make a fool of myself, talking daft to my ship’s complement.”
A fresh breeze had sprung up and was blowing through the starboard porthole. It caught the memorandum that the Captain had just completed. The paper fluttered, turned over, and was revealed as a passenger’s embarkation notice for the Cape Farewell.
Staring fixedly at Alleyn, the captain said, “I used it yesterday in the offices. For a memo.” He produced a curiously uncomfortable laugh. “It’s not been torn, anyway,” he said.
“No,” Alleyn said, “I noticed that.”
An irresponsible tinkling on a xylophonic gong announced the first luncheon on board the Cape Farewell, outward bound.
CHAPTER 4
Hyacinths
Having watched Alleyn mount the companionway, Brigid Carmichael returned to her desolate little verandah aft of the centrecastle and to her book.
She had gone through the morning in a kind of trance, no longer inclined to cry or to think much of her broken engagement and the scenes that had attended it or even of her own unhappiness. It was as if the fact of departure had removed her to a spiritual distance quite out of scale with the night’s journey down the estuary and along the Channel. She had walked until she was tired, tasted salt on her lips, read a little, heard gulls making their B.B.C. atmospheric noises, and watched them fly mysteriously in and out of the fog. Now in the sunshine she fell into a half-doze.
When she opened her eyes it was to find that Doctor Timothy Makepiece stood not far off, leaning over the rail with his back towards her. He had, it struck her, a pleasant nape to his neck; his brown hair grew tidily into it. He was whistling softly to himself. Brigid, still in a strange state of inertia, idly watched him. Perhaps he sensed this for he turned and smiled at her.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “Not sea-sick or anything?”
“Not at all. Only ridiculously sleepy.”
“I expect that is the sea. They tell me it does have that effect on some people. Did you see the pilot go off and the arrival of the dark and handsome stranger?”
“Yes, I did. Had he missed the ship last night, do you suppose?”
“I’ve no idea. Are you going for drinks with Aubyn Dale before lunch?”
“Not I.”
“I hoped you were. Haven’t you met him yet?” He didn’t seem to expect an answer to this question but wandered over and looked sideways at Brigid’s book.
“Elizabethan verse?” he said. “So you don’t despise anthologies. Which is your favourite — Bard apart?”
“Well — Michael Drayton, perhaps, if he wrote ‘Since There’s No Help.’ ”
“I’ll back the Bard for that little number every time.” He picked up the book, opened it at random and began to chuckle as he read aloud.
“O yes, O yes, if any maid
Whom leering Cupid hath betrayed…
“Isn’t that a thing, now? Leering Cupid! They really were wonderful. Do you — but no,” Tim Makepiece said, interrupting himself, “I’m doing the thing I said to myself I wouldn’t do.”
“What was that?” Brigid asked, not with any great show of interest.
“Why, forcing my attentions on you, to be sure.”
“What an Edwardian expression.”
“None the worse for that.”
“Shouldn’t you be going to your party?”
“I expect so,” he agreed moodily. “I don’t really like alcohol in the middle of the day and am far from being one of Mr. Aubyn Dale’s fans.”
“Oh.”
“I’ve yet to meet a man who is.”
“All jealous of him, I daresay,” Brigid said idly.
“You may be right. And a very sound reason for disliking him. It’s the greatest mistake to think that jealousy is necessarily at fault. On the contrary, it may very well sharpen the perception.”
“It didn’t sharpen Othello’s.”
“But it did. It was his interpretation of what he saw that was at fault. He saw, with an immensely sharpened perception.”
“I don’t agree.”
“Because you don’t want to.”
“Now, look here—” Brigid said, for the first time giving him her full attention.
“He saw Cassio doing his sophisticated young Venetian act over Desdemona’s hand. He saw him at it again after he’d blotted his copy-book. He was pathologically aware of every gallantry that Cassio showed his wife.”
“Well,” Brigid said, “if you’re pathologically aware of every attention Aubyn Dale shows his however-many-they-may-be female fans, I must say I’m sorry for you.”
“All right, smartie,” Tim said amiably, “you win.”
“After all, it’s the interpretation that matters.”
“There’s great virtue in perception alone. Pure scientific observation that is content to set down observed fact after observed fact—”