He. waited. Aubyn Dale raised his head and suddenly demanded, “Where’s Merryman?”
There were exclamations from the Cuddys.
“That’s right!” Mr. Cuddy said. “Where is he! All this humbugging the rest of us about. Insinuations here and questions there! And Mr. Know-all Merryman mustn’t be troubled, I suppose!”
“Personally,” Mrs. Cuddy added, “I wouldn’t trust him. I’ve always said there was something. Haven’t I, dear?”
“Mr. Merryman,” Alleyn said, “is asleep in bed. He’s been very unwell and I decided to leave him there until we actually needed him as, of course, we shall. I have not forgotten him.”
“He was well enough to go to the pictures,” Mrs. Cuddy pointed out. “I think the whole thing looks very funny. Very funny indeed.”
Brigid suddenly found herself exclaiming indignantly, “Why do you say it looks ‘funny’? Mr. Merryman has already pointed out what a maddeningly incorrect expression it is and he is ill and he only came to the pictures because he’s naughty and obstinate and I think he’s a poppet and certainly not a murderer and I’m sorry to interrupt but I do.”
Alleyn said, almost as Father Jourdain might have said, “All right, my child. All right,” and Tim put his arm round Brigid.
“It will be obvious to you all,” Alleyn went on exactly as if there had been no interruption, “that I must find out why the steward was there and why he was dressed in this manner. It is here that you, Mrs. Dillington-Blick, can help us.”
“Ruby!” Dale whispered, but she was not looking at him.
“It was only a joke,” she said. “We did it for a joke. How could we possibly know—?”
“We? You mean you and Mr. Dale, don’t you?”
“And Dennis. Yes. It’s no good, Aubyn. I can’t not say.”
“Did you give Dennis the dress?”
“Yes.”
“After Las Palmas?”
“Yes. He’d been awfully obliging and he said — you know what an odd little creature he was — he admired it awfully and I, I told you, I took against it after the doll business. So I gave it to him. He said he wanted to dress up for a joke at some sort of birthday party the stewards were having.”
“On Friday night?”
“Yes. He wanted me not to say anything. That was why, when you asked me about the dress, I didn’t tell you. I wondered if you knew. Did you?”
Alleyn was careful not to look at Captain Bannerman. “It doesn’t arise at the moment,” he said.
The captain made an indeterminate rumbling noise that culminated in utterance.
“Yes, it does!” he roared. “Fair’s fair and little though I may fancy the idea, I’m not a man to shirk my responsibilities.” He jerked his head at Alleyn. “The superintendent,” he said, “came to me and told me somebody had been seen fooling about the forrard well-deck in that damned dress. He said he hadn’t seen it himself and whoever did see it reckoned it was Mrs. Dillington-Blick. And why not, I thought? Her dress, and why wouldn’t she be wearing it? He asked me to make enquiries and stop a repetition. I didn’t see my way to interfering and I wouldn’t give my consent to him doing it on his own. All my time as master, I’ve observed a certain attitude towards my passengers. I didn’t see fit to change it. I was wrong. I didn’t believe I’d shipped a murderer. Wrong again. Dead wrong. I don’t want it overlooked or made light of. I was wrong.”
Alleyn said, “That’s a very generous statement,” and thought it best to carry on. “I had not seen the figure in the Spanish dress,” he said. “I had been told it was Mrs. Dillington-Blick and there was no reason that anybody would accept to suppose it wasn’t. I merely had a notion, unsupported by evidence, that the behaviour as reported was uncharacteristic.”
Brigid said, “It was I who told about it. Mr. Alleyn asked me if I was sure it was Mrs. Dillington-Blick and I said I was.”
Mrs. Dillington-Blick said, “Dennis told me what he’d done. He said he’d always wanted to be a dancer.” She looked at Alleyn. “When you asked me if I would wear the dress to dance by the light of the moon, I thought you’d seen him and mistaken him for me. I didn’t tell you. I pretended it was me, because—” her face crumpled and she began to cry—“because we were planning the joke.”
“Well,” Alleyn said, “there it was. And now I shall tell you what I think happened. I think, Mr. Dale, that with your fondness for practical jokes, you suggested that it would be amusing to get the steward to dress up tonight and go to the verandah and that you arranged with Mrs. Dillington-Blick to let it be understood that she herself was going to be there. Is that right?”
Aubyn Dale had sobered up considerably. Something of his old air of conventional decency had reappeared. He exhibited all the troubled concern of a good chap who is overwhelmed with self-reproach.
“Of course,” he said, “I’ll never forgive myself for this. It’s going to haunt me for the rest of my life. But how could I know? How could I know! We — I mean, I–I take the whole responsibility—” he threw a glance, perhaps slightly reproachful, at Mrs. Dillington-Blick— “I just thought it would be rather amusing to do it. The idea was that this poor little devil should—” he hesitated and stole a look at Mr. McAngus and Mr. Cuddy— “well, should go to the verandah, as you say, and if anybody turned up he was just to sort of string them along a bit. I mean, putting it like that in cold blood after what’s happened, it may sound rather poor but—”
He stopped and waved his hands.
Miss Abbott broke her self-imposed silence. She said, “It sounds common, cheap, and detestable.”
“I resent that, Miss Abbott.”
“You can resent it till you’re purple in the face but the fact remains. To plot with the steward! To make a vulgar practical joke out of what may have been the wretched little creature’s tragedy — his own private, inexorable weakness — his devil!”
“My child!” Father Jourdain said. “You must stop.” But she pointed wildly and clumsily at Cuddy. “To trick that man! To use his idiotic, hopeless infatuation! And the other—”
“No, no. Please!” Mr. McAngus cried out. “It doesn’t matter. Please!”
Miss Abbott looked at him with what might have been a kind of compassion and turned on Mrs. Dillington-Blick. “And you,” she said, “with your beauty and fascination, with everything that unhappy women long for, to lend yourself to such a thing! To give him your lovely dress, to allow him to so much as touch it! What were you thinking of!” She ground her heavy hands together. “Beauty is sacred!” she said. “It is sacred in its own right; you have committed sacrilege.”
“Katherine, you must come away. As your priest, I insist. You will do yourself irreparable harm. Come with me.”
For the first time she seemed to hear him. The familiar look of mulish withdrawal returned and she got up.
“Alleyn?” Father Jourdain asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“Come along,” he said, and Miss Abbott let him take her away.
“That woman’s upset me,” Mrs. Dillington-Blick said, angrily sobbing. “I don’t feel at all well. I feel awful.”
“Ruby, darling!”
“No! No, Aubyn, don’t paw me. We shouldn’t have done it. You shouldn’t have started it. I feel ghastly.”
Captain Bannennan squared his shoulders and approached her. “Nor you!” she said, and, perhaps for the first time in her adult life, she appealed to someone of her own sex. “Brigid!” she said. “Tell me I needn’t feel like this. It’s not fair. I’m hating it.”
Brigid went to her. “I can tell you, you needn’t,” she said, “but we all know you do and that’s much better than not minding at all. At least—” she appealed to Alleyn— “isn’t it?”
“Of course it is.”
Mr. McAngus, tying himself up in a sort of agonized knot of sympathy, said, “You mustn’t think about it. You mustn’t reproach yourself. You are goodness itself. Oh, don’t!”
Mrs. Cuddy sniffed piercingly.
“It’s this awful heat,” Mrs. Dillington-Blick moaned. “One can’t think.” She had, in fact, gone very white. “I–I feel faint.”