by M. M. Kaye
She’s fainted, thought Amanda frantically. What on earth does one do for a faint? Oh, bother the woman!
She leapt for the bell and pressed it hard. The stewardess would know what to do.
Amanda bent and attempted to lift the limp body, but the task was beyond her. She managed to turn Mrs Blaine over. But at the sight of that contorted face her heart gave an odd lurch: Julia Blaine’s mouth had fallen open and her eyes were wide and fixed and staring.
‘It isn’t a faint. She’s had a fit,’ said Amanda, unaware that she had spoken aloud. She reached for the unbroken glass, and filling it with water from the cold tap, splashed it over Mrs Blaine’s face and neck: the water streamed over Julia’s contorted features and across her staring eyeballs. But her eyelids did not close …
Amanda straightened up, cold and trembling. She sprang to the bell and pressed it again, frantically, and then seized by a sudden, shuddering horror, jerked open the door and ran out into the corridor. It stretched away on either side of her, blank, brightly lit and empty, and she had no idea at which end of it the stewardess had her cabin, or where to find her. But she must fetch help, and quickly.
Julia’s own cabin was empty, and there was no one in No. 12, for it was a darkness and the door stood open. She turned in desperation to the one beyond it and hammered on the door.
‘Who is it?’ demanded a man’s voice impatiently.
Amanda tried to speak and found that she could not. The next moment the door opened and Steven Howard, pyjama clad and sleepy, was staring down at her with a mixture of amusement and unqualified surprise.
‘Well, well!’ said Mr Howard cordially, his interested gaze missing no detail of her unorthodox attire. His eyes went to her white face and his own face changed abruptly, so that all at once it was an entirely different person who was standing there in the white, brightly lit corridor of the S.S. Orantares. His hand shot out and gripped Amanda’s shoulder, steadying her:
‘What is it?’
‘It’s Mrs Blaine,’ said Amanda, shuddering. ‘She’s in my cabin. I–I think she’s had a fit and I can’t bring her round. And I rang and rang, but no one has answered the bell, and … and…’
Mr Howard said briskly: ‘Just a minute.’ He reached for a dressing-gown, put it on and said: ‘Where is she?’
Amanda led the way to her cabin and stood back for him to enter, and he went quickly past her and dropped on one knee beside the sprawling figure whose pink satin attire was blotched and stained with water.
After a moment or two he lifted his head and said curtly: ‘She’s dead.’
He came to his feet rather slowly and looked at Amanda. It was a long, measuring look that held that same curious suggestion of speculation and intentness that she had seen in his eyes on the terrace of the Club at Fayid.
‘No!’ said Amanda in a whisper. ‘Oh no! She can’t be—she was talking to me! Why don’t you get a doctor? Why don’t you do something? If it’s a heart attack a doctor____’
Mr Howard cut her short: ‘I’m not too sure that it was a heart attack.’
‘What else could it possibly be?’
‘Well, it could be suicide.’
‘No,’ said Amanda loudly and definitely. ‘She wouldn’t have done that, because it would mean that he could____’ She stopped abruptly.
‘Mean that who could what?’ inquired Steven Howard softly.
‘Nothing,’ said Amanda confusedly. ‘I didn’t mean … it was just something that she said.’
Mr Howard reached across her and shut the cabin door.
‘I think you’d better tell me just exactly what happened,’ he said. ‘Quickly, before anyone comes. If you rang for the stewardess she may be along at any moment, so let’s have it.’
He spoke quite quietly, but with an unconscious note of authority which, for some reason, it did not occur to Amanda to question, and she found herself telling him exactly what Julia Blaine had said and done: repeating the substance of that hysterical outburst almost word for word.
Mr Howard said: ‘Then you saw her take the tablets herself?’
‘Yes. She put them in her mouth and then drank some lemon-water, and a little while later she seemed to feel ill, and then she fell down like–like she is now, only on her face.’
‘Is that the glass?’
‘Yes.’ Amanda’s teeth chattered a little and she clenched them on her lower lip.
Mr Howard reached out and picked it up, holding it by the extreme edge of the rim. He smelt it, put it down again and said: ‘Where did all that water on her clothes come from? It didn’t all come out of this glass, did it?’
‘I filled it again at the basin and poured it over her. I thought it might bring her round.’
‘I see.’ He went down on his knees again and examined the contorted, staring face and then lifted the slack hands one after another. A few coarse grains of white powder clung damply to the palm of one hand. Steven Howard sniffed it, and rubbing the tip of his finger over it, touched it to his tongue with infinite caution, and frowned.
He sat back on his heels and looked around at the floor and presently said: ‘What was the last thing she said again?’
‘She said she’d kill herself. But I didn’t think she meant it. I thought she was only–only____’
‘Quite,’ said Mr Howard curtly. ‘All the same it looks as though she may have meant it.’
He frowned thoughtfully down at the plump-fingered hands with their glittering rings and then stood up abruptly:
‘It doesn’t look as though anyone is going to answer that bell. You’d better see if you can find someone. See if you can rout out a steward or a stewardess; or grab the first ship’s officer you see and tell him to send along a doctor.’
He looked Amanda over and added dryly: ‘And if I were you, I’d put on a dressing-gown.’
An hour later Julia Blaine’s body had been removed to the sick bay and the water had been mopped off Amanda’s cabin floor. Amanda herself, having repeated her story—with several reservations—at least half a dozen times, was at last left in peace.
The ship’s doctor had seemed puzzled by the cause of death and he too had suggested the possibility of suicide, but the stewardess had sworn with fervour and a touch of hysteria that she had given Mrs Blaine two aspirins and nothing else. She had produced the bottle in evidence, and the doctor had taken charge of it and after careful examination pronounced the tablets to be innocuous.
Alastair Blaine, white-faced and incredulous, had agreed that his wife had been in poor spirits of late; that she was highly strung and, though her health had not been of the best, there had never been any suggestion of heart trouble, and he did not know how she could have obtained poison.
‘In the East, that is easy,’ commented the Captain dryly. ‘A little money, and the thing is done’—he had pantomimed a sly, expressive Oriental gesture.
Amanda, prompted by Steven Howard, had agreed that Mrs Blaine had talked of taking her life. And looking at Alastair Blaine’s haggard face, she had refrained from any mention of names or motives; allowing it to be inferred that a combination of nerves, ill-health and the heat had been responsible for Mrs Blaine’s state of mind. She had not looked at Steven Howard, and to her relief he had failed to point out that this version differed considerably from the one that she had given him so short a time ago. He had, in fact, barely spoken. But Amanda had the odd impression that in some way that she could not define, he had directed the course of the inquiry and headed it away from dangerous ground. He had eventually, and still without appearing to do so, managed to get rid of the Captain, the First Officer, the doctor, the stewardess and sundry other spectators who had crowded in and asked questions and talked in unison. He had been the last to leave, and had stood in the doorway, his hands thrust into the pockets of his dressing-gown, frowning down at her.
‘Are you sure you’re all right? You wouldn’t like me to knock up Mrs Halliday or get one of the stewardesses to sleep on that top berth?’
‘No thank you,’ said Amanda wearily. ‘I’m all right. You wouldn’t think that anyone could feel sleepy after all that, but I do. I feel very stupid and dopey.’
‘Reaction from shock,’ said Mr Howard. ‘Well if anything scares you, don’t wait for someone to answer that bell. Come out into the corridor and yell!’
‘Scares me? What is there to be scared of?’ asked Amanda, puzzled.
‘I don’t know,’ said Steven Howard slowly. ‘Nothing, I hope.’
He looked round the narrow cabin almost as though he were making certain that no one could be concealed there, and the frown line deepened between his brows. Then he shrugged his shoulders, smiled briefly, and was gone.
Amanda yawned. She felt unbelievably exhausted. She slipped out of her dressing-gown, leaving it in a heap on the floor, and climbing into her berth, switched off the light.
After a minute or two she became aware that there was a small hard lump either in or under her pillow, and she put up a sleepy and impatient hand to investigate.
And that was how she found the bottle.
* * *
It was a small bottle, and there was something in it that rattled. Amanda lay for a time in the semi-darkness, turning it over in her hand and wondering how it could have come there. Presently she reached out to switch on the light again, and sat up to look at it.
It was an ordinary glass bottle of the type that usually contains aspirins. There were three small tablets in it and it bore a bright red label with a single warning word printed blackly across it. POISON.
All at once Amanda was frightened. She had been shocked and horrified by Julia’s collapse, and frightened by the staring, sightless eyes that had not blinked when the water splashed across them. But this was a different sort of fear. A cold, creeping fear that seemed to chill her blood and slow down the beat of her heart. For the bottle had not been there earlier that evening. She was quite sure of that. And for a very good reason.
She had sat down on the centre of the berth to read some letters before changing for dinner, and, reaching for the pillow, had tucked it between her shoulders and the back of the berth. There had been no bottle under it then.
That meant that someone had placed it there some time after eight o’clock. Julia? But Julia had not come near the pillow. She had sat on the foot of the berth and had not moved from there until she had stood up and put those tablets in her mouth and reached for the glass. Amanda had been between Julia Blaine and the pillow and it was quite out of the question that Mrs Blaine could have reached across her and put anything under it without her knowledge.
Who then? And why?
Quite suddenly an answer slipped into Amanda’s head as though someone had whispered it very softly into her ear.
Julia Blaine had neither died of a heart attack nor killed herself. She had been murdered. And that small bottle with the poison label proved it____!
The tablets that Julia had put into her mouth had been aspirin tablets given to her by the stewardess. The poison had been in the glass. In that innocent iced drink whose unsweetened tartness would serve to disguise any additional acidity.
Someone who knew that Julia Blaine drank lemon juice and water, but who did not realize that she had changed cabins with Amanda, had laid that deadly trap for her. Julia should have drunk from that glass in her own cabin, and she would have been found there, dead. And presently the bottle would have been found under her pillow, to ensure a verdict of suicide.
Fate had been on the murderer’s side, for chance had brought Julia to her former cabin and she had, after all, drunk from the glass and died. But it was Amanda who had found the bottle. And its presence under the wrong pillow was no longer a pointer to suicide, but proof of murder.
‘No!’ said Amanda, speaking aloud in the hot, silent little cabin. ‘No!’
Almost without realizing what she meant to do, she slipped out of bed. The carpet was still damp and faintly sticky under her bare feet, and she groped for her dressing-gown and putting it on rang the bell. This time it was answered promptly.
Amanda could hear the stewardess rustling down the corridor, her stiff, starched uniform sounding brisk and reassuring.
‘What is it, dear? Can’t you sleep?’ The stewardess was stout, middle-aged, motherly and, by some miracle, English.
Amanda said: ‘Did you–did you put a glass of water and lemon juice in here for Mrs Blaine, by mistake?’
The stewardess looked bewildered. ‘A lemon squash dear? No. Would you like one?’
‘No thank you. But there was one here. It was on that stool when I came in. Did you put it there?’
‘Me? Oh no, dear. We don’t provide drinks for the passengers unless they ask for them. But you’d only have to ring.’
‘Did Mrs Blaine ask for one? This was her cabin before; and I-I thought perhaps it was put in here by mistake.’
‘She didn’t ask me for one, poor lady. And no one who has to do with the cabins would have made such a mistake, I assure you. They were all aware of the exchange. So it must have been put there by one of your friends. Now what is it that you want, dear?’
‘Nothing,’ said Amanda, white-faced. ‘I–I only wondered … You see when she—Mrs Blaine—swallowed those tablets she drank out of a glass that was on that stool; and I–I wondered who had put it there.’
‘I’ll tell you what’s the matter with you, dear,’ said the stewardess kindly. ‘You’re sufferin’ from shock. That’s what it is. You mustn’t let it worry you. The poor lady must have bin out of her mind. Now just you try and forget all about it and go to sleep. I expect she had a drink out of that tooth glass over there.’
‘No she didn’t,’ said Amanda. ‘It was another glass.’
‘Then where is it now?’
Amanda turned and looked about her, but the glass had gone. It was nowhere in the cabin.
‘There now!’ said the stewardess cosily. ‘You’re lettin’ your nerves run away with you, dearie. An’ no wonder! I’ll fetch you a nice cup of hot milk, and you’ll soon be asleep.’
‘No thank you,’ said Amanda in a small unsteady voice. ‘It’s very kind of you, but I don’t want anything. I’m sorry to have bothered you.’
‘That’s all right,’ said the stewardess. ‘Now you get back into bed, and I’ll turn the light out, and if you should want me you only have to ring.’
She tucked Amanda into her berth and went out, switching off the light and closing the door behind her. Her starched skirts rustled crisply away down the passage, and from somewhere nearby a door latch clicked softly.
A faint light from the passage outside filtered in through a narrow open grill above the door and thinned the darkness of the small cabin, and beyond the open porthole the sky was bright with moonlight.
Except for the soothing swish of the sea and the muffled, rhythmic throb of the engines, the night was still and silent and Amanda had heard no sound of footsteps. But suddenly her cabin door opened and closed again. And someone was there, standing beside her; a dark shape against the faint light from the transom.
Amanda’s heart seemed to jerk and turn over sickeningly. She sat up, shrinking back against the head of the berth, and tried to scream—and could not, because her throat was dry and constricted with terror; and because there was a hand across her mouth.
A voice spoke in a whisper: ‘Don’t make a noise. It’s I—Steve Howard.’
Amanda crumpled up in a small sobbing heap against him, and he put an arm about her, holding her hard, and sat down on the berth.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you’—his voice was barely a breath against her ear. ‘But I had to talk to you. Come on, dear—take a pull on yourself.’
Amanda lifted her head from his shoulder and said in a sobbing furious whisper: ‘Get out of my cabin!’
‘That’s more like it,’ approved Mr Howard. He produced a handkerchief and dried her eyes. Amanda snatched it from him, and having completed the operation for herself, reach
ed for the electric light switch.
Steve Howard’s hand shot out and caught her wrist. ‘No! Don’t turn on the light. I don’t want the stewardess coming in here to find out why you’re still awake. What were you telling her about a glass? I heard you talking to her. Your door was open. What about that glass, Amanda?’
Amanda shivered and her teeth made a small chattering sound in the silence. She said in a halting whisper: ‘There was a glass of water in here–with–with lemon in it, when I came to bed. Mrs Blaine always drinks–drank–lemon and water. She did it to make her thin. And she changed cabins with me.’
‘When was that?’ the whisper was suddenly sharp. ‘Why did you change cabins?’
‘This afternoon. Just before tea. This was her cabin. But she wouldn’t go into it when she saw the number. It’s thirteen, and she was superstitious about thirteen. So I told her that she could have mine.’
‘Who knew about it?’
‘I don’t know. The stewardess said that–that the ship’s people would all know. But I don’t suppose anyone else would. Except Alastair of course—her husband. The–the stewardess said that it must have been one of the passengers who put that glass there.’
‘Yes I know. I heard her. What made you ask her about it?’
‘I–I was frightened. Mrs Blaine drank out of it. And now it’s gone. Someone must have taken it.’
‘I did,’ said Steven Howard softly.
‘You! But why? I don’t understand.’
‘Don’t you? Why were you frightened because Mrs Blaine drank out of it?’
‘Because of the bottle,’ breathed Amanda tremulously. ‘There was a bottle hidden under my pillow, and I thought____’
‘What’s that!’ The whispered question cracked like a whip in the silence.
Amanda turned and thrust a shaking hand under the pillow, found the bottle and held it out.
Mr Howard took the bottle from her gingerly, holding it with extreme care, and turned to face the light that filtered in through the grill above the door. The little cabin that had seemed so dark when the light had first been switched off no longer appeared dark now that Amanda’s eyes had grown accustomed to the dim light, and the single word printed across the red label was clearly readable.