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murder.”
    “Mooltipul murder? Here, you don’t mean this chap that says it with flowers and sings?”
    “I do, indeed.”
    “What the hell’s he got to do with my ship?”
    “I’ve every reason to believe,” Alleyn said, “that he’s aboard your ship.”
    “Don’t talk daft.”
    “I daresay it does sound preposterous.”
    Captain Bannerman took his hands out of his pockets, walked over to a porthole and looked out. The fog had lifted and the
Farewell
was under way. He said, with a change of voice, “There you are! That’s the sort of crew they sign on for you these days. Murderers!”
    “My bosses,” Alieyn said, “don’t seem to think he’s in the crew.”
    “The stewards have been in this ship three voyages.”
    “Nor among the stewards. Unless sailors or stewards carry embarkation notices.”
    “D’you mean to stand there and tell me we’ve shipped a murdering passenger?”
    “It looks a bit like it at the moment.”
    “Here!” Captain Bannerman said with a change of voice. “Sit down. Have a drink. I might have known it’d be a passenger.”
    Alleyn sat down but declined a drink, a circumstance that produced the usual reaction from his companion. “Ah!” Captain Bannerman said with an air of gloomy recognition. “I suppose not. I suppose not.”
    His manner was so heavy that Alleyn felt impelled to say, “That doesn’t mean, by the way, that I’m about to arrest you.”
    “I doubt if you could, you know. Not while we’re at sea. I very much question it.”
    “Luckily, the problem doesn’t at the moment arise.”
    “I should have to look up the regulations,” sighed Captain Bannerman.
    “Look here,” Alleyn suggested, “may I try and give you the whole story, as far as it affects my joining your ship?”
    “That’s what I’ve been waiting for, isn’t it?”
    “Yes,” Alleyn agreed, “I’m sure it is. Here goes, then!”
    He looked full at Captain Bannerman, who seated himself, placed his hands on his knees, raised his eyebrows, and waited.
    “You know about these cases, of course,” Alleyn said, “as far as they’re being reported in the papers. During the last thirty days up to about eleven o’clock last night there had been two homicides which we believed to have been committed by the same person. In each case the victim was a woman, and each case she had been strangled and flowers had been left on the body. I needn’t worry you with any other details at the moment.”
    “Last night, a few minutes before this ship sailed, a third victim was found. She was in a dark side alley off the passageway between the place where the bus and taxis put down passengers and the actual wharf where you were moored. She was a girl from a flower shop who was bringing a box of hyacinths to one of your passengers, a Mrs. Dillington-Blick. Her string of beads had been broken and flowers had been scattered, in the usual way, over the victim.”
    “Any singing?”
    “What? Oh, that. That’s an element that has been very much played up by the press. It certainly does seem to have occurred on the first occasion. The night of the fifteenth of last month. The victim, you may remember, was Beryl Cohen, who ran a cheapjack stall in Warwick Road and did a bit of the older trade on the side. She was found in her bed-sitting-room in a side street behind Paddington. The lodger in the room above seems to have heard the visitor leaving at about ten o’clock. The lodger says the visitor was singing.”
    “What a dreadful thing,” Captain Bannerman said primly. “What sort of song, for God’s sake?”
    “ ‘The Jewel song,’ ” Alleyn said, “from
Faust
. In an alto voice.”
    “I’m a bass-baritone, myself,” the captain said absently. “Oratorio,” he gloomily added.
    “And it appears that the sailor on duty at the head of your gangway last night heard singing in the fog. A funny sort of voice, he said. Might mean anything, of course, or nothing. Drunken seaman. Anything. He