After its owner’s one ejaculation the doll’s exposure was followed by a dead silence and then by a violent oath from Mr. Merryman.
Almost simultaneously Miss Abbott ejaculated, “Don’t!”
Her iced coffee had tilted and the contents had fallen over Mr. Merryman’s hands.
Miss Abbott moistened her lips and said, “You must have jolted my arm, Mr. Merryman.”
“My dear madam, I did nothing of the sort!” he contradicted and angrily flipped his hands. Particles of iced coffee flew in all directions. One alighted on Mr. Cuddy’s nose. He seemed to be quite unaware of it. Half smiling, he stared at Esmeralda and with lightly clasped fingers revolved his thumbs slowly round each other.
Aubyn Dale said loudly, “Why have you done this! It looks disgusting.” He reached out and with a quick movement brushed the dead hyacinth off the doll. The beads fell away with a clatter and rolled about the table. Dale straightened the flashily smiling head.
Mr. McAngus murmured gently, “She looks quite herself again, doesn’t she? Perhaps she can be mended.”
“I don’t understand all this,” Dale said angrily to Alleyn. “Why did you do it?”
“Do what, exactly?”
“Lay it out like that. Like — like—”
Mrs. Cuddy said with relish, “Like one of those poor girls. Flowers and beads and everything; giving us all such a turn.”
“The doll,” Alleyn said, “is exactly as Father Jourdain and I found it, hyacinth and all. I’m sorry if it’s upset anyone.”
Mrs. Dillington-Blick had come to the table. It was the first time, Alleyn thought, that he had seen her without so much as a flicker of a smile on her face. “Was it like that?” she asked. “Why? What happened?”
Dale said, “Don’t worry, darling Ruby. Somebody must have trodden on it and broken the beads and — and the neck.”
“I trod on it,” Father Jourdain said. “I’m most awfully sorry, Mrs. Dillington-Blick, but it was lying on the deck in pitch-dark shadow.”
“There you are!” Dale exclaimed. He caught Alleyn’s eye and recovered something of his professional bonhomie. “Sorry, old boy. I didn’t mean to throw a temperament. You gathered the doll up just as it was. No offense, I hope?”
“None in the wide world,” Alleyn rejoined politely.
Mrs. Cuddy said, “Yes, but all the same it’s funny about the flower, isn’t it, dear?”
“That’s right, dear. Funny.”
“Being a hyacinth and all. Such a coincidence.”
“That’s right,” smiled Mr. Cuddy. “Funny.”
Mr. Merryman, who was still fretfully drying his hands on his handkerchief, suddenly cried out in anguish.
“I was mad enough to suppose,” Mr. Merryman lamented, “that in undertaking this voyage I would escape, however briefly, from the egregious, the remorseless ambiguities of the lower-school urchin. Funny! Funny! Will you be so kind, my good Cuddy, as to enlighten us? In what respect do you consider droll, entertaining or amusing the discovery of a wilted hyacinth upon the bosom of this disarticulate puppet? For my part,” Mr. Merryman added with some violence, “I find the obvious correlation altogether beastly. And the inescapable conclusion that I myself was, hypothetically at least, responsible for its presence adds to my distaste. Funny!” Mr. Merryman concluded in a fury and flung up his hands.
The Cuddys eyed him with dawning resentment. Mr. McAngus said brightly, “But of course. I’d quite forgotten. It was my hyacinth. You took it, do you recollect? When we had our little collision? And threw it down.”
“I did not ‘take’ it.”
“Accidentally, of course. I meant accidentally.” Mr. McAngus bent over the doll. His reddish knotted fingers manipulated the neck. “I’m sure she can be mended,” he said.
Mrs. Dillington-Blick said in a constrained voice, “Do you know — I hope you’ll forgive me, Mr. McAngus, and I expect I’m being dreadfully silly — but do you know I don’t somehow think I feel quite the same about Esmeralda. I don’t believe I want her mended, or at any rate not for me. Perhaps we could think of some little girl — you may have a niece.” Her voice faded into an apologetic murmur.
With a kind of social readiness that consorted very ill with the look in his eyes, Mr. McAngus said, “But, of course, I quite understand.” His hands were still closed round the neck of the doll. He looked at them, seemed to recollect himself, and turned aside. “I quite understand,” he repeated, and helped himself to a herbal cigarette.
Mrs. Cuddy, relentless as a Greek chorus, said, “All the same it does seem funny.” Mr. Merryman gave a strangulated cry, but she went on greedily, “the way we were all talking about those murders. You know. And then the way Mrs. Blick got that cable from her gentleman-friend about the girl being murdered who brought the flowers. And the way hyacinths keep turning up. You’d almost think it was intentional, really you would.” She stared in her unwinking fashion at Mrs. Dillington-Blick. “I don’t wonder you feel funny about it with the doll being dressed like you. You know. It might almost be you, lying there, mightn’t it, Mrs. Blick?”
Miss Abbott struck her big hands together. “For God’s sake!” she ejaculated. “Do we have to listen to all this? Can’t someone take that thing away!”
“Of course,” Alleyn said and dropped the newspaper over the doll. “I can.”
He gathered up the unwieldy parcel and took it to his cabin.
“As usual,” he wrote to his wife, “I miss you very much. I miss—” He paused and looked, without seeing them, at the objects in his cabin. He reflected on the old circumstance that although his memory had been trained for a long time to retain with scrupulous accuracy the various items of human faces, it always let him down when he wanted it to show Troy to him. Her photograph was not much good, after all. It merely reminded him of features he knew but couldn’t visualize; it was only a map of her face. He put something of this down in his letter, word after careful word, and then began to write about the case in hand, setting out in detail everything that had happened since his last letter had been posted in Las Palmas.
…so you see [he wrote], the nature of the predicament. I’m miles away from the point where one can even begin to think of making an arrest. All I’ve been able to do is whittle down the field of possibles. Do you agree? Have you arrived at the predominantly possible one? I’m sure you have. I’m making a mystery about nothing, which must be the last infirmity of the police mind.
Meanwhile we have laid a plan of action that is purely negative. The first and second mates and the chief engineer have been put wise by the captain. They all think with him that the whole idea is completely up the pole and that our man’s not on board. But they’ll fall in with the general scheme and at this moment are delightedly and vigilantly keeping an eye on the ladies, who, by the way, have been told that there have been thefts on board and that they’ll be well advised to lock their doors, day and night. It’s been made very clear that Dennis, the queer fat steward, you know, is not suspected.
From almost every point-of-view [Alleyn went on after a pause], these cases are the worst of the lot. One is always hag-ridden by one’s personal conviction that the law is desperately inadequate in its dealings with them. One wonders what sort of frightfulness is at work behind the unremarkable face, the more-or-less unexceptionable behaviour. What is the reality? With a psychiatrist, a priest, and a policeman all present we’ve got the ingredients for a Pirandello play, haven’t we? Jourdain and Makepiece are due here now and no doubt I shall get two completely opposed professional opinions from them. In fact—
There was a tap on the door. Alleyn hurriedly wrote, “…here they are. Au revoir, darling,” and called out, “Come in.”