“May I say just this?” Alleyn ventured. “I wouldn’t come to you with the suggestion unless I thought it most urgently necessary. You may, indeed, be perfectly right. Our man may not, after all, be aboard. But suppose, sir, that in the teeth of all you feel about it, he is in this ship.” Alleyn pointed to the captain’s desk calendar. “Sunday the tenth of February,” he said. “If he’s here we’ve got four days before his supposed deadline. Shouldn’t we take every possible step to prevent him going into action? I know very well that what I’ve suggested sounds farfetched, cockeyed, and altogether preposterous. It’s a precautionary measure against a threat that may not exist. But isn’t it better—” He looked at that unyielding front and very nearly threw up his hands. “Isn’t it better, in fact, to be sure than sorry?” said Alleyn in despair. Father Jourdain and Tim murmured agreement but the captain shouted them down.
“Ah! So it is and it’s a remark I often pass myself. But in this case it doesn’t apply. What you’ve suggested is dead against my principles as master and I won’t have it. I don’t believe it’s necessary and I won’t have it.”
Father Jourdain said, “If I might just say one word—”
“You may spare yourself the trouble, I’m set.”
Alleyn said, “Very good, sir, I hope you’re right. Of course we’ll respect your wishes.”
“I won’t have that lady put-about by any interference or — or criticism.”
“I wasn’t suggesting—”
“It’d look like criticism,” the captain mumbled cryptically and added, “A touch of high spirits never did anyone any harm.”
This comment, from Alleyn’s point of view, was such a masterpiece of meiosis that he could find no answer to it.
He said, “Thank you, sir,” in what he hoped was the regulation manner and made for the door. The others followed him.
“Here!” Captain Bannerman ejaculated and they stopped. “Have a drink,” said the captain.
“Not for me at the moment, thank you very much,” said Alleyn.
“Why not?”
“Oh, I generally hold off till the sun’s over the yardarm if that’s the right way of putting it.”
“You don’t take overmuch then, I’ve noticed.”
“Well,” Alleyn said apologetically, “I’m by the way of being on duty.”
“Ah! And nothing to show for it when it’s all washed up. Not that I don’t appreciate the general idea. You’re following orders, I daresay, like all the rest of us, never mind if it’s a waste of time and the public’s money.”
“That’s the general idea.”
“Well — what about you two gentlemen?”
“No thank you, sir,” said Tim.
“Nor I, thank you very much,” said Father Jourdain.
“No offense, is there?”
They hurriedly assured him there was none, waited for a moment and then went to the door. The last glimpse they had of the captain was of a square, slightly wooden figure making for the corner cupboard where he kept his liquor.
The rest of Sunday passed by quietly enough. It was the hottest day the passengers had experienced and they were all subdued. Mrs. Dillington-Blick wore white and so did Aubyn Dale. They lay on their chaise longues in the verandah and smiled languidly at passers-by. Sometimes they were observed to have their hands limply engaged; occasionally Mrs. Dillington-Blick’s rich laughter would be heard.
Tim and Brigid spent most of the day in or near a canvas bathing pool that had been built on the after well-deck. They were watched closely by the Cuddys, who had set themselves up in a place of vantage at the shady end of the promenade deck, just under the verandah. Late in the afternoon Mr. Cuddy himself took to the water clad in a rather grisly little pair of puce-coloured drawers. He developed a vein of aquatic playfulness that soon drove Brigid out of the pool and Tim into a state of extreme irritation.
Mr. Merryman sat in his usual place and devoted himself to Neil Cream, and when that category of horrors had reached its appointed end, to the revolting fate that met an assortment of ladies who graced the pages of The Thing He Loves. From time to time he commented unfavourably on the literary style of this work and also on the police methods it described. As Alleyn was the nearest target he found himself at the receiving end of these strictures. Inevitably, Mr. Merryman was moved to enlarge once again on the flower murders. Alleyn had the fun of hearing himself described as “some plodding Dogberry drest in a little brief authority. One Alleyn,” Mr. Merryman snorted, “whose photograph was reproduced in the evening newssheets — a countenance of abysmal foolishness, I thought.”
“Really?”
“Oh, shocking, I assure you,” said Mr. Merryman with immense relish. “I imagine, if the unknown criminal saw it, he must have been greatly consoled. I should have been, I promise you.”
“Do you believe, then,” Alleyn asked, “that there is after all an ‘art to find the mind’s construction in the face’?”
Mr. Merryman shot an almost approving glance at him. “Source?” he demanded sharply. “And context?”
“Macbeth, one, four. Duncan on Cawdor,” Alleyn replied, feeling like Alice in Wonderland.
“Very well. You know your way about that essentially second-rate melodrama, I perceive. Yes,” Mr. Merryman went on with pedagogic condescension, “unquestionably, there are certain facial evidences which serve as pointers to the informed observer. I will undertake for example to distinguish at first sight a bright boy among a multitude of dullards, and believe me,” Mr. Merryman added dryly, “the opportunity does not often present itself.”
Alleyn asked him if he would extend this theory to include a general classification. Did Mr. Merryman, for instance, consider that there was such a thing as a criminal type of face? “I’ve read somewhere, I fancy, that the police say there isn’t,” he ventured. Mr. Merryman rejoined tartly that for once the police had achieved a glimpse of the obvious. “If you ask me whether there are facial types indicative of brutality and low intelligence I must answer yes. But the sort of person we have been considering”—he held up his book—” need not be exhibited in the countenance. The fact that he is possessed by his own particular devil is not written across his face that all who run may read.”
“That’s an expression that Father Jourdain used in the same context,” Alleyn said. “He considers this man must be possessed of a devil.”
“Indeed?” Mr. Merryman remarked. “That is of course the accepted view of the Church. Does he postulate the cloven hoof and toasting-fork?”
“I have no idea.”
A shadow fell across the deck and there was Miss Abbott.
“I believe,” she said, “in a personal devil. Firmly.”
She stood above them, her back to the setting sun, her face dark and miserable. Alleyn began to get up from his deck-chair, but she stopped him with a brusque movement of her hand. She jerked herself up on the hatch, where she sat bolt upright, her large feet in tennis shoes dangling awkwardly.
“How else,” she demanded, “can you explain the cruelities? God permits the devil to torment us for His own inscrutable purposes.”