Singing in the Shrouds Page 23

  ‘Never a one.’

  ‘Good man. Jolly good.’ He shook Alleyn’s hand with manly emphasis. ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘dumb though it may be of me I still can not see why, at the end, you couldn’t warn us men. Before you fetched him in.’

  ‘A: because you were all lying like flatfish. As long as you thought he was the innocent observer who could prove you lied I had a chance of forcing the truth from you. And B: because one or more of you would undoubtedly have given the show away if you’d known he was guilty. He’s extremely observant.’

  Dale said: ‘Well, I never pretended to be a diplomatic type,’ and made it sound noble. Then, unexpectedly, he reddened. ‘You’re right about the drinks,’ he said. ‘I’m a fool. I’m going to lay off. If I can. See you later.’ He went out. Miss Abbott marched up to Alleyn.

  She said: ‘I suppose what I’d like to say couldn’t be of less importance. However, you’ll just have to put up with it. Did you guess what was wrong with me, the night of the alibi conversation?’

  ‘I fancied I did,’ he said.

  ‘So I supposed. Well, if it’s any consolation, I’m cured. It’s a mistake for a lonely woman to form an engrossing friendship. One should have the courage of one’s loneliness. This ghastly business has at least taught me that.’

  ‘Then,’ Alleyn said gently, ‘you may give thanks, mayn’t you? In a Gregorian chant?’

  ‘Well, goodbye,’ she said, and she too went out.

  The others having all gone, Father Jourdain and Tim, who had both waited at the far end of the room, came up to Alleyn.

  Father Jourdain said: ‘Alleyn, may I go to him? Will you let me see him?’

  Alleyn said that of course he would but added, as gently as he could, that he didn’t think Mr Merryman would respond graciously to the visit.

  ‘No, no. But I must go. He received Mass from me in a state of deadly sin. I must go.’

  ‘He was struggling with—‘ Alleyn hesitated. ‘With his devil. He thought it might help.’

  ‘I must tell him. He must be brought to a realization,’ Father Jourdain said. He went out on deck and stared, without seeing it, at Table Mountain. Alleyn saw his hand go to his breast.

  Tim said: ‘Am I wanted?’

  ‘I’m afraid you are. He’s talked to me. It’s pretty obvious that the defence will call psychiatric opinions and yours may be crucial. I’ll tell you what he has said and then ask you to see him. If you can get him to speak it may go some way in his favour.’

  ‘You talk,’ Tim said, ‘as if you weren’t a policeman.’

  III

  ‘So the priest and the psychiatrist are to do what they can,’ Alleyn wrote to his wife. ‘Makepiece, of course, says he would need weeks to arrive at a full report. He’s professionally all steamed up over Merryman’s readiness to describe an incident that no doubt will be advanced as the key to his obsession and is a sort of text-book shining example of the Oedipus Complex and the whole blasted job. Do you remember there was one curious link in all these wretched crimes? It was the women’s names. All jewels. Marguerite, of course, means Pearl, and the doll’s name Esmeralda, Emerald. It was bad luck for Jemima Carmichael that her young man called her Jem. The sound was enough and she wore a pearl necklace. The necklaces were always twisted and broken. And, of course, there were the flowers. This is his story. When he was just seven years old his mother, a stupid woman whom he adored, had a birthday. It was in the early spring and he spent the contents of his money-box on a handful of hyacinths. He gave them to her but at the same time his father brought her a necklace. He fastened it round her neck with a display of uxoriousness which Merryman describes through his teeth. In raising her hands to his she dropped the hyacinths and in the subsequent embrace, trod on them. Makepiece says the pattern, from his point of view, is perfect—jewels, flowers, neck, amorousness and fury. The boy flew into a blind rage and went for her like a demon, twisted and broke the necklace and was dragged away and given a hiding by his father. This incident was followed at ten-day intervals by a series of something he calls fainting fits. Makepiece suspects petit mal. Here Merryman’s story ends.

  ‘It’s as if the fact of his arrest had blown the stopper off a lifelong reticence, and as if, having once spoken, he can’t stop but, with extraordinary vehemence, is obliged to go through with it again and again. But he won’t carry his history an inch further and refuses to speak if any attempt is made to discuss the cases in hand. Makepiece thinks his mistaking Dennis for the woman has had a profound effect.

  ‘There’s no doubt that for years he has fought a lonely, frantic battle with his obsession, and to some extent may have beaten it off by segregating himself in a boys’ school. Perhaps by substituting the lesser crime for the greater. He may have bought and destroyed necklaces and flowers for all one knows. But when his climacteric was reached and he retired from his school, the thing may have suddenly become malignant. I believe he took this voyage in an attempt to escape from it and might have done so if he hadn’t encountered on the wharf a girl with flowers and those the most dangerous for him. The fact that her name was Coralie finished it. As for the earlier cases, I imagine that when his ten-day devil arose, he put on his false beard, went out on the hunt, buying flowers for the purpose, and picked up women with whom he got into conversation. He probably discarded many who didn’t fit in with the pattern.

  ‘He exhibits, to a marked degree, the murderer’s vanity. I doubt if he has made one statement that was untrue throughout the voyage. He was eager to discuss these cases and others of their kind. Makepiece says he’s a schizophrenic: I’m never absolutely certain what that means but no doubt it will be advanced at the trial and I hope to God it succeeds.

  ‘Of course, almost from the beginning, I thought he was my man, if my man was aboard. If the others’ alibis stood up, he was the only one left. But there were signs. His preferences in literature, for instance. Any Elizabethan play that concerned the murder of a woman was better than any that didn’t. The Duchess of Malfi and Othello were the best because in each of these the heroine is strangled. He resented any suggestion that “sex monsters” might be unpleasant to look at. He carried bits of paper and sodamints in his waistcoat pocket. He spilt coffee all over himself when I uncovered the doll, and blamed Miss Abbott for it. He had been to a choir school and could therefore sing. He is an expert in make-up and no doubt bearded himself for the encounters. The beard, of course, went overboard after the event.

  ‘But it was one thing to realize all this and a hell of another to sheet it home. When I saw him, as sound asleep as if he’d expiated a deadly crime instead of committing one, I realized there was only one chance of getting him. He had no doubt decided on the line he would take after the body had been found: I would have to give him the kind of shock that would jerk him off it. I fixed it up with Makepiece. When the right moment presented itself, we would confront Merryman and Mrs Dillington-Blick. He knew he’d made his kill and of course believed her to be his victim. He was relaxed, eased of his fever and immensely enjoying his act. She loomed up on the other side of the window and—it worked.

  ‘The fact of the D-B being in her own style a femme fatale muddled the issues, since she quite deliberately went gunning for any male in sight and thus stirred up Cuddy and McAngus to the dizziest heights of middle-aged fatuity. Dale, of course, had merely settled down to a routine shipboard affair. She’s a pretty consistent job-of-work, I must say, and I don’t mind betting that when she’s got over her vapours she’ll take the whole thing as a sort of backhanded tribute.

  ‘For my part, having from the outset been hamstrung by Captain’s orders, I hope never to be given such a job again. I can even allow myself one brief bellyache: which is this. Why the hell did the D-B have to dress up a queer steward and put him on the verandah? And conversely why the hell couldn’t she tell me about it? It could have been turned without harm to advantage. Well, there it is; by his death he brought about a denouement grotesquely out-of-drawin
g to anything in his life.

  ‘Well, my darling, an airmail goes out at noon and will bring you this great wad of a letter. I’m staying in the ship until she sails and will return with the official party. In the meantime—’

  He finished his letter and went out on the bridge.

  Cape Farewell was discharging cargo. At midnight, having got rid of a bulldozer, four cars, three tons of unbleached calico and a murderer, she would continue her voyage to Durban.

  He supposed he was unlikely ever to travel in her again.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  A Man Lay Dead

  Enter a Murderer

  The Nursing Home Murder

  Death in Ecstasy

  Vintage Murder

  Artists in Crime

  Death in a White Tie

  Overture to Death

  Death at the Bar

  Surfeit of Lampreys

  Death and the Dancing Footman

  Colour Scheme

  Died in the Wool

  Final Curtain

  Swing, Brother, Swing

  Opening Night

  Spinsters in Jeopardy

  Scales of Justice

  Off With His Head

  Singing in the Shrouds

  False Scent

  Hand in Glove

  Dead Water

  Death at the Dolphin

  Clutch of Constables

  When in Rome

  Tied up in Tinsel

  Black As He’s Painted

  Last Ditch

  Grave Mistake

  Photo-Finish

  Light Thickens

  Black Beech and Honeydew (autobiography)

  Copyright

  HARPER

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  Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009

  FIRST EDITION

  Singing in the Shrouds first published in Great Britain by Collins 1958

  Ngaio Marsh asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of these works

  Copyright © Ngaio Marsh Ltd 1958

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