CHAPTER 8

Sunday the Thirteenth

The next day being Sunday, Father Jourdain with the captain’s permission celebrated Holy Communion in the lounge at seven o’clock. The service was attended among the passengers by Miss Abbott, Brigid, Mr. McAngus, and rather surprisingly, Mr. Merryman. The third officer, the wireless officer, two of the cadets, and Dennis represented the ship’s complement. Alleyn, at the back of the room, listened, watched, and not for the first time felt his own lack of acceptance to be tinged with a faint regret.

When the service was over the little group of passengers went out on deck and presently were joined by Father Jourdain, wearing, as he had promised, his “decent black cassock.” He looked remarkably handsome in it with the light breeze lifting his glossy hair. Miss Abbott, standing, characteristically, a little apart from the others, watched him, Alleyn noticed, with a look of stubborn deference. There was a Sunday morning air about the scene. Even Mr. Merryman was quiet and thoughtful, while Mr. McAngus, who, with Miss Abbott, had carried out the details of Anglo-Catholic observance like an old hand, was quite giddy and uplifted. He congratulated Brigid on her looks and did his little chassé before her with his head on one side. Mr. McAngus’s russet-brown hair had grown, of course, even longer at the back, and something unfortunate seemed to have happened round the brow and temples. But as he always wore his felt hat out-of-doors and quite often in the lounge, this was not particularly noticeable.

Brigid responded gaily to his blameless compliments and turned to Alleyn.

“I didn’t expect to see you about so early,” she said.

“And why not?”

“You were up late! Pacing round the deck. Wrapped in thought!” teased Brigid.

“That’s all very fine,” Alleyn rejoined. “But what, I might ask, were you up to yourself? From what angle of vantage did you keep all this observation?”

Brigid blushed. “Oh,” she said with a great air of casualness, “I was sitting in the verandah along there. We didn’t like to call out as you passed, you looked so solemn and absorbed.” She turned an even brighter pink, glanced at the others, who were gathered round Father Jourdain, and added quickly, “Tim Makepiece and I were talking about Elizabethan literature.”

“You were not talking very loudly about it,” Alleyn observed mildly.

“Well—” Brigid looked into his face. “I’m not having a ship-board flirtation with Tim. At least — at least, I don’t think I am.”

“Not a flirtation?” Alleyn repeated and smiled at her.

“And not anything else. Oh, golly!” Brigid said impulsively. “I’m in such a muddle.”

“Do you want to talk about your muddle?”

Brigid put her arm through his. “I’ve arrived at the age,” Alleyn reflected, “when charming young ladies take my arm.” They walked down the deck together.

“How long,” Brigid asked, “have we been at sea? And, crikey!” she added. “What an appropriate phrase that is!”

“Six days.”

“There you are! Six days! The whole thing’s ridiculous. How can anybody possibly know how they feel in six days? It’s out of this world.”

Alleyn remarked that he had known how he felt in one day. “Shorter even than that,” he added. “At once.”

“Really? And stuck to it?”

“Like a limpet. She took much longer, though.”

“But—? Did you?”

“We are very happily married, thank you.”

“How lovely,” Brigid sighed.

“However,” he added hurriedly, “don’t let me raise a finger to urge you into an ill-considered undertaking.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything about that,” she rejoined with feeling. “I’ve made that sort of ass of myself in quite a big way, once already.”

“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?”