He was still feverishly repeating these names when Inspector Fox from the Yard, with members of the Cape Town police force, came to take him off.
For a little while Alleyn watched the police launch dip and buck across the bay. Soon the group of figures aboard her lost definition and she herself became no more than a receding dot. The pilot cutter was already alongside. He turned away and for the last time opened the familiar doors into the sitting-room.
They were all there, looking strange in their shore-going clothes.
Alleyn said, “In about ten minutes we shall be alongside. I’m afraid I shall have to ask you all to come to the nearest police-station to make your depositions. Later on you will no doubt be summoned to give evidence, and if that means an earlier return, arrangements will be made for transport. I’m sorry but that’s how it is. In the meantime I feel that I owe you an explanation, and perhaps something of an apology.” He paused for a moment.
Brigid said, “It seems to me the boot’s on the other foot.”
“And to me,” said Tim.
“I’m not so sure,” Mrs. Cuddy remarked. “We’ve been treated in a very peculiar manner.”
Alleyn said, “When I boarded this ship at Portsmouth I did so on the strength of as slight a piece of information as ever sent an investigating officer to sea. It consisted of the fragment of an embarkation notice for this ship and it was clutched in the hand of the girl who was killed on the wharf the night you sailed. It was at least arguable that this paper had been blown ashore or dropped or had come by some irrelevant means into the girl’s hand. I didn’t think so, your statements didn’t suggest it, but it was quite possible. My superior officers ordered me to conceal my identity, to make what enquiries I could, entirely under cover, to take no action that did not meet with the captain’s approval, and to prevent any further catastrophe. This last, of course, I have failed to do. If you consider them, these conditions may help to explain the events that followed. If the Flower Murderer was aboard, the obvious procedure was to discover which of you had an acceptable alibi for any of the times when these crimes were committed. I took the occasion of the fifteenth of January, when Beryl Cohen was murdered. With Captain Bannerman’s assistance I staged the alibi conversation.”
“Good Lord!” Miss Abbott exclaimed. She turned dark red and added, “Go on. Sorry.”
“The results were sent by radio to London and my colleagues there were able to confirm the alibis of Father Jourdain and Dr. Makepiece. Mr. Cuddy’s and Mr. McAngus’s were unconfirmed, but in the course of the conversation it transpired that Mr. McAngus had been operated upon for a perforated appendix on the nineteenth of January, which made him incapable of committing the crime of the twenty-fifth, when Marguerite Slatters was murdered. If, of course, he was speaking the truth. Mr. Cuddy, unless he was foxing, appeared to be unable to sing in tune, and one of the few things we did know about our man was his ability to sing.”
Mrs. Cuddy, who was holding her husband’s hand, said, “Well, really, Mr. Cuddy would be the last to pretend he was a performer! Wouldn’t you, dear?”
“That’s right, dear.”
“Mr. Dale,” Alleyn went on, “had no alibi for the fifteenth, but it turned out that on the twenty-fifth he was in New York. That disposed of him as a suspect.”
“Then why the hell,” Dale demanded, “couldn’t you tell me what was up?”
“I’m afraid it was because I formed the opinion that you were not to be relied upon. You’re a heavy drinker and you have been suffering from nervous strain. It would, I felt, be unsafe to trust to your discretion.”
“I must say!” Dale began angrily but Alleyn went on.
“It has never been supposed that a woman was responsible for these crimes, but”—he smiled at Miss Abbott— “one of the ladies, at least, had an alibi. She was in Paris on the twenty-fifth, at the same conference, incidentally, as Father Jourdain, who was thus doubly cleared. Until I could hear that the remaining alibis were proved, I couldn’t take any of the passengers except Father Jourdain and Dr. Makepiece into my confidence. I should like to say, now, that they have given me every possible help and I’m grateful as can be to both of them.”
Father Jourdain, who was very pale and withdrawn, raised his hand and let it fall again. Tim said they both felt they had failed at the crucial time. “We were sceptical,” he said, “about Mr. Alleyn’s interpretation of Biddy’s glimpse of the figure in the Spanish dress. We thought it must have been Mrs. Dillington-Blick. We thought that with all the women accounted for, there was nothing to worry about.”
“I saw it,” Brigid said, “and I told Mr. Alleyn I was sure it was Mrs. Dillington-Blick. That was my blunder.”
“I even heard the singing,” Father Jourdain said. “How could I have been so tragically stupid!”
“I gave Dennis the dress and pretended I didn’t,” Mrs. Dillington-Blick lamented.
Aubyn Dale looked with something like horror at Mr. Cuddy. “And you and I, Cuddy,” he pointed out, “listened to a murder and did nothing about it.”
Mr. Cuddy, for once, was not smiling. He turned to his wife and said, “Eth, I’m sorry. I’m cured, Eth. It won’t occur again.”
Everybody tried to look as if they didn’t know what he was talking about, especially Mrs. Dillington-Blick.
“O.K., dear,” said Mrs. Cuddy, and actually smiled.
Mr. McAngus leaned forward and said very earnestly, “I can, of course, see that I have not behaved at all helpfully. Indeed, now I come to think of it, I almost ask myself if I haven’t been suffering from some complaint.” He looked wistfully at Mrs. Dillington-Blick. “A touch of the sun perhaps,” he murmured and made a little bob at her. “It is,” he added after a moment’s added reflection, “very fussing to consider how one’s actions go on and on having the most distressing results. For instance, when I ventured to buy the doll I never intended—”
A steamer hooted and there, outside, was a funnel sliding past and beyond it a confusion of shipping and the wharves themselves.
“I never intended,” Mr. McAngus repeated, but he had lost the attention of his audience and did not complete his sentence.
Miss Abbott said in her harsh way, “It’s no good any of us bemoaning our intentions. I daresay we’ve all behaved stupidly one way or another. I know I have. I started this trip in a stupid temper. I’ve made stupid scenes. If it’s done nothing else it’s shown me what a fool I was. Control!” announced Miss Abbott. “And common sense! Complete lack of both leads to murder, it seems.”
“And of charity,” Father Jourdain added rather wearily.
“That’s right. And of charity,” Miss Abbott agreed snappishly. “And of proportion and I daresay of a hundred other things we’d be the better for observing.”
“How right you are!” Brigid said so sombrely that Tim felt obliged to put his arm round her.
Alleyn moved over to the glass doors and looked out. “We’re alongside,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything more to say. I hope, when you go ashore, you still manage to find some sort of — what? compensation? — for all that has happened.”
Mrs. Dillington-Blick approached him. She offered him her hand, and when he took it leaned towards him and murmured, “I’ve had a blow to my vanity.”
“Surely not.”
“Were all your pretty ways purely professional?”
Alleyn suppressed a mad desire to reply, “As surely as yours were not,” and merely said, “Alas, I have no pretty ways. You’re much too kind.” He shook her hand crisply and released it to find that Brigid and Tim were waiting for him.
Brigid said, “I just wanted to tell you that I’ve discovered you haven’t got it all your own way.”