Read Singing in the Shrouds for Free Online Page B

didn’t recognize the tune.”
    “Here! About last night. How d’you know the victim was—” Captain Bannerman began and then said, “All right. Go on.”
    “In her left hand, which was clenched in cadaveric spasm, was a fragment of one of the embarkation notices your company issues to passengers. I believe the actual ticket is usually pinned to this notice and torn off by the officer whose duty it is to collect it. He hands the embarkation notice back to the passenger; it has no particular value but I daresay a great many passengers think it constitutes some kind of authority and stick to it. Unfortunately this fragment only showed part of the word
Farewell
and the date.”
    “No name?”
    “No name.”
    “Doesn’t amount to much, in that case,” said Captain Bannerman.
    “It suggests that the victim, struggling with her murderer, grasped this paper, that it was torn across, and that the rest of it may have remained in the murderer’s possession or may have been blown somewhere about the wharf.”
    “The whole thing might have been blowing about the wharf when the victim grabbed it.”
    “That’s a possibility, of course.”
    “Probability, more like. What about the other half, then?”
    “When I left for Portsmouth this morning, it hadn’t been found.”
    “There you are!”
    “But if all the others have kept their embarkation notices—”
    “Why should they?”
    “May we tackle that one a bit later? Now, the body was found by the P.C. on that beat five minutes before you sailed. He’s a good chap and kept his head admirably, it seems, but he couldn’t do anything about boarding you. You’d sailed. As he talked to me on the deck telephone he saw your funnel slip past into the fog. A party of us from the Yard went down and did the usual things. We got in touch with your company, who were hellishly anxious that your sailing shouldn’t be delayed.”
    “I’ll be bound!” Captain Bannerman ejaculated.
    “…And my bosses came to the conclusion that we hadn’t got enough evidence to justify our keeping you back while we held a full-scale enquiry in the ship.”
    “My Gawd!”
    “So it was decided that I should sail with you and hold it, as well as I can, under the counter.”
    “And what say,” Captain Bannerman asked slowly and without any particular signs of bad temper, “what say I won’t have it? There you are! How about that?”
    “Well,” Alleyn said, “I hope you don’t cut up rough in that particular direction and I’m sure you won’t. But suppose you did and suppose I took it quietly, which, by the way, I wouldn’t, the odds are you’d have another corpse on your hands before you made your next landfall.”
    Captain Bannerman leaned forward, still keeping his palms on his knees, until his face was within a few inches of Alleyn’s. His eyes were of that piercing, incredible blue that landsmen so correctly associate with sailors, and his face was the colour of old bricks.
    “Do you mean,” he asked furiously, “to tell me you think this chap’s not had enoof to satisfy him for the voyage?”
    “So far,” Alleyn said, “he’s been operating at ten-day intervals. That’ll carry him, won’t it, to somewhere between Las Palmas and Cape Town?”
    “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe he’s aboard.”
    “Don’t you?”
    “What sort of a chap is he? Tell me that.”
    Alleyn said, “You tell me. You’ve got just as good a chance of being right.”
    “Me!”
    “You or anyone else. May I smoke?”
    “Here—” the captain began and reached for a cigarette box.
    “A pipe, if you don’t mind.” Alleyn pulled it out and as he talked, filled it. “These cases,” he said, “are the worst of the lot from our point of view. We can pick a card-sharp or a conman or a sneak-thief or a gunman or a dozen other bad lots by certain mannerisms and tricks of behaviour. They develop occupational habits and they generally keep company with their own kind. But not the man