“Really?”
“Yes, indeed. The night we sailed should have been my wedding night, only he chucked me three days before. I’ve done a bolt from all the brouhaha, leaving my wretched parents to cope. Very poor show, as you don’t need to tell me,” said Brigid in a high uneven voice.
“I expect your parents were delighted to get rid of you. Much easier for them, I daresay, if you weren’t about, throwing vapours.”
They had reached the end of the well-deck and stood, looking aft, near the little verandah. Brigid remarked indistinctly that going to church always made her feel rather light-headed and talkative and she expected that was why she was being so communicative.
“Perhaps the warm weather has something to do with it, as well,” Alleyn suggested.
“I daresay. One always hears that people get very unguarded in the tropics. But actually you’re to blame. I was saying to Tim the other night that if I was ever in a real jam I’d feel inclined to go bawling to you about it. He quite agreed. And here, fantastically, I am. Bawling away.”
“I’m enormously flattered. Are you in a jam?”
“I suppose not, really. I just need to keep my eye. And see that he keeps his. Because whatever you say, I don’t see how he can possibly know in six days.”
Alleyn said that people saw more of each other in six days at sea than they did in as many weeks ashore but, he was careful to add, in rather less realistic circumstances. Brigid agreed. There was no doubt, she announced owlishly, that strange things happened to one at sea. Look at her, for instance, she said with enchanting egoism. She was getting all sorts of the rummiest notions into her head. After a little hesitation, and very much with the air of a child that screws itself up to confiding a groundless fear, Brigid said rapidly, “I even started thinking the Flower Murderer was on board. Imagine!”
Among the various items of Alleyn’s training as an investigating officer, the trick of wearing an impassive face in the teeth of unexpected information was not the least useful. It stood him in good stead now.
“I wonder,” he said, “what in the world could have put that idea in your head.”
Brigid repeated the explanation she had already given Tun yesterday afternoon. “Of course,” she said, “he thought it as dotty as you do and so did the F.N.C.”
“Who,” Alleyn asked, “is the F.N.C.?”
“It’s our name for Dale. It stands for Frightfully Nice Chap only we don’t mean it frightfully nicely, I’m afraid.”
“Nevertheless, you confided your fantasy to him, did you?”
“He overheard me. We were ‘squatting’ on his and the D-B’s lush chairs and he came round the corner with cushions and went all avuncular.”
“And now you’ve brought this bugaboo out into the light of day it’s evaporated?”
Brigid swung her foot and kicked an infinitesimal object into the scruppers. “Not altogether,” she muttered.
“No?”
“Well, it has, really. Only last night, after I’d gone to bed, something happened. I don’t suppose it was anything much, but it got me a bit steamed up again. My cabin’s on the left-hand side of the block. The porthole faces my bed. Well, you know that blissful moment when you’re not sure whether you’re awake or asleep but kind of floating? I’d got to that stage. My eyes were shut and I was all air-borne and drifting. Then with a jerk I was wide awake and staring at that porthole.” Brigid swallowed hard. “It was moonlight outside. Before I’d shut my eyes I’d seen the moon, looking in and then swinging out of sight and leaving a procession of stars and then swinging back. Lovely! Well, when I opened my eyes and looked at the porthole — somebody outside was looking in at me.”
Alleyn waited for a moment and then said, “You’re quite sure, I suppose?”
“Oh, yes. There he was, blotting out the stars and the moon and filling up my porthole with his head.”
“Do you know who it was?”
“I haven’t a notion. Somebody in a hat, but I could only see the outline. And it was only for a second. I called out — it was not a startlingly original remark—‘Hullo! Who’s there?’ and at once it went down. I mean it sank in a flash. He must have ducked and then bolted. The moon came whooping back and there was I, all of a dither and thinking ‘Suppose the Flower Murderer is on board and suppose after everyone else has gone to bed, he prowls and prowls around like the hosts of Midian’—or is it Gideon, in that blissful hymn? So you see, I haven’t quite got over my nonsense, have I?”
“Have you told Makepiece about this?”
“I haven’t seen him. He doesn’t go to church.”
“No, of course you haven’t. Perhaps,” Alleyn said, “it was Aubyn Dale being puckish.”
“I must say I never thought of that. Could he hit quite such an all-time low for unfunniness, do you suppose?”
“I would have expected him to follow it up with a dummy spider on your pillow. You do lock your door at night, don’t you? And in the daytime?”
“Yes. There was that warning about things having been pinched. Oh, Lord!” Brigid ejaculated. “Do you suppose that’s who it was? The petty larcener? Why on earth didn’t I remember before! Hoping he could fish something out through the porthole, would you think?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Alleyn said.
The warning gong for breakfast began to tinkle. Brigid remarked cheerfully, “Well, that’s that, anyway.”
Alleyn waited for a moment and then said, “Look. In view of what you’ve just told me, I’d keep your curtains over your port at night. And as there evidently is a not-too-desirable character in the ship’s complement, I don’t think, if I were you, I’d go out walking after dark by yourself. He might come along and make a bit of a nuisance of himself.”
Brigid said, “O.K., but what a bore. And, by the way, you’d better hand on that piece of advice to Mrs. D-B. She’s the one to go out walking — or dancing, rather — by the light of the moon.” Brigid smiled reminiscently. “I do think she’s marvellous,” she said. “All that joie de vivre at her age. Superb.”
Alleyn found time to wonder how much Mrs. Dillington-Blick would relish this tribute and also how many surprises Brigid was liable to spring on him at one sitting.
He said, “Does she dance by the light of the moon? Who with?”
“By herself.”
“You don’t tell me she goes all pixy-wixy on the boat deck? Carrying that weight?”
“On the other deck, the bottom one, nearer the sharp end. I’ve seen her. The weight doesn’t seem to matter.”
“Do explain yourself.”
“Well, I’m afraid you’re in for another night-piece — in point of fact the night before last. It was awfully hot; Tim and I had sat up rather late, not, I’d have you know again, for amorous dalliance but for a long muddly argument. And when I went to my cabin it was stuffy and I knew I wouldn’t sleep for thinking about the argument. So I went along to the windows that look down on the lower deck — it’s called the forrard well-deck, isn’t it? — and wondered if I could be bothered climbing down and then along and up to the bows where I rather like to go. And while I was wondering and looking down into the forrard well-deck which was full of black shadows, a door opened underneath me and a square patch of light was thrown across the deck.”
Brigid’s face, vivid and gay with the anticipation of her narrative, clouded a little.
“In point of fact,” she said, “for a second or two it was a trifle grisly. You see, a shadow appeared on the lighted square. And — well — it was exactly as if the doll, Esmeralda, had come to life. Mantilla, fan, wide lace skirt. Everything. I daresay it contributed to my ‘thing’ about the flower murders. Anyway it gave me quite a jolt.”