The time was now eleven-thirty. The taxi from the flower shop was waiting for his fare and P. C. Moir was about to engage him in conversation. The last hatch was covered, the Cape Farewell was cleared, and Captain Bannerman, master, awaited his pilot.
At one minute to twelve the siren hooted.
P. C. Moir was now at the police call box. He had been put through to the C.I.D.
“There’s one other thing, sir,” he was saying, “beside the flowers. There’s a bit of paper clutched in the right hand, sir. It appears to be a fragment of an embarkation notice, like they give passengers. For the Cape Farewell.”
He listened, turning his head to look across the tops of half-seen roofs at the wraith of a scarlet funnel with a white band. It slid away and vanished smoothly into the fog.
“I’m afraid I can’t board her, sir,” he said. “She’s sailed.”
CHAPTER 3
Departure
At regular two-minute intervals throughout the night, Cape Farewell sounded her siren. The passengers who slept were still, at times, conscious of this noise; as of some monster blowing monstrous raspberries through their dreams. Those who waked listened with varying degrees of nervous exasperation. Aubyn Dale, for instance, tried to count the seconds between blasts, sometimes making them come to as many as one hundred and thirty and at other times, by a deliberate tardiness, getting them down to one hundred and fifteen. He then tried counting his pulse but this excited him. His heart behaved with the greatest eccentricity. He began to think of all the things it was better not to think of, including the worst one of all — the awful debacle of the Midsummer Fair at Molton Medbury. This was just the sort of thing that his psychiatrist had sent him on the voyage to forget. He had already taken one of his sleeping pills. At two o’clock he took another and it was effective.
Mr. Cuddy also was restive. He had recovered Mr. Merryman’s Evening Herald from the bus. It was in a somewhat dishevelled condition, but when he got into bed he read it exhaustively, particularly the pieces about the Flower Murderer. Occasionally he read aloud for Mrs. Cuddy’s entertainment, but presently her energetic snores informed him that this exercise was profitless. He let the newspaper fall to the deck and began to listen to the siren. He wondered if his fellow travellers would exhibit a snobbish attitude towards Mrs. Cuddy and himself. He thought of Mrs. Dillington-Blick’s orchids, heaving a little at their superb anchorage, and he gradually slipped into an uneasy doze.
Mr. Merryman, on the other hand, slept heavily. If he was visited by dreams of a familiar steward or an inquisitive spinster, they were of too deeply unconscious a nature to be recollected. Like many people of an irascible temperament, he seemed to find compensation for his troubles in the profundity of his slumber.
So, too, did Father Jourdain, who on finishing his prayers, getting into bed and putting himself through one or two pretty stiff devotional hoops, fell into a quiet oblivion that lasted until morning.
Mr. Donald McAngus took a little time to recover from the circumstances that attended his late arrival. However, he had taken coffee and sandwiches in the dining-room and had eyed his fellow passengers with circumspection and extreme curiosity. His was the not necessarily malicious but all-absorbing inquisitiveness of the Lowland Scot. He gathered facts about other people as an indiscriminate philatelist gathers stamps — merely for the sake of adding to his collection. He had found himself at the same table as the Cuddys — the passengers had not yet been given their official places — and had already discovered that they lived in Dulwich and that Mr. Cuddy was “in business,” though of what nature Mr. McAngus had been unable to divine. He had told them about his trouble with the taxi. Distressed by Mrs. Cuddy’s unwavering stare he had tied himself up in a tangle of a parentheses and retired unsatisfied to his room and his bed.
There he lay tidily all night in his gay crimson pyjamas, occupied with thoughts so unco-ordinated and feckless that they modulated imperceptibly into dreams and were not at all disturbed by the reiterated booming of the siren.
Miss Abbott had returned from the call box on the wharf scarcely aware of the fog and with a dull effulgence under her darkish skin. The sailor at the gangway noticed and was afterwards to remember her air of suppressed excitement. She went to bed and was still wide-awake when the ship sailed. She watched blurred lights slide past the porthole and felt the throb of the engines at dead slow. At about one o’clock in the morning she fell asleep.
Brigid Carmichael hadn’t paid much attention to her companions; it took all her determination and fortitude to hold back her tears. She kept telling herself angrily that crying was a voluntary physical process, entirely controllable, and in her case absolutely without justification. Lots of other people had their engagements broken off at the last minute and were none the worse for it, most of them without her chance of cutting her losses and bolting to South Africa.
It had been a mistake to peer up at St. Paul’s. That particular kind of beauty always got under her emotional guard; and there she went again with the man in the opposite seat looking into her face as if he’d like to be sorry for her. From then onwards the bus journey had seemed intolerable but the walk through the fog to the ship had been better. It was almost funny that her departure should be attended by such obvious gloom. She had noticed Mrs. Dillington-Blick’s high-heeled patent leather shoes tittupping ahead and had heard scraps of the Cuddy’s conversation. She had also been conscious of the young man walking just behind her. When they had emerged from the passageway to the wharf he said, “Look, do let me carry that suitcase,” and had taken it out of her hand before she could expostulate. “My stuff’s all on board,” he said. “I feel unimportant with nothing in my hand. Don’t you hate feeling unimportant?”
“Well, no,” Brigid said, surprised into an unconventional reply. “At the moment, I’m not minding it.”
“Perhaps it’s a change for you.”
“Not at all,” she said hurriedly.
“Or perhaps women are naturally shrinking creatures, after all. ‘Such,’ you may be thinking, ‘is the essential vanity of the human male.’ And you are perfectly right. Did you know that Aubyn Dale is to be a passenger?”
“Is he?” Brigid said without much interest. “I would have thought a luxury liner and organized fun would be more his cup of tea.”
“I understand it’s a rest cure. Far away from the madding camera, and I bet you anything you like that in no time he’ll be missing his spotlights. I’m the doctor, by the way, and this is my first long voyage. My name’s Timothy Makepiece. You must be either Miss Katherine Abbott or Miss Brigid Carmichael, and I can’t help hoping it’s the latter.”
“You’d be in a bit of a spot if it wasn’t,” Brigid said.