The Widow's Cruise

by Nicholas Blake

  “Absolutely all.”

  Melissa was sitting in a curiously rigid pose: then she gave herself a sort of angry shake. “Well then, what’s all the fuss about?”

  “Primrose thought the person she saw swimming was Ianthe. The swimmer had a dark head—looked like a seal, she says—and was not wearing a bathing-cap. Mrs Blaydon always wore a yellow one. But Ianthe had always said she couldn’t swim. Primrose had it in for Ianthe, and believed she’d caught her out lying.” He turned to Melissa. “You never told me about the wicker case floating away.”

  “My good man, one can’t always remember everything,” the woman replied, with an edge on her voice.

  “When did this happen?”

  “Just before Ianthe fainted. As I told you, I tried to get her into some shade. In doing so, I accidentally kicked the case off a rock into the water.”

  “Then she fainted?”

  “Yes.”

  “But, instead of reviving her, you swam out to retrieve the case?”

  “I retrieved it in order to revive her. There was a bottle of smelling-salts in it,” Melissa patiently but acidly replied.

  “I see.”

  “And I was in such a hurry that I did not put on my bathing-cap. Does that set your mind at ease?”

  Nigel studied the sheet of paper again. “Primrose was almost certain the swimmer had been Ianthe. She went off and made a plan to confirm it. This plan was the cause of her death: I’ll come back to it presently. First, let me re-construct the murder in the cove.” Nigel was now addressing the other three again, as if Melissa were not present. “Mrs Blaydon stuns her sister with a heavy stone——”

  “Say! You’re crazy!” Nikki expostulated. “On the beach there, where anyone might have seen her?”

  “She and her sister had been there for an hour or two—long enough to discover what a deserted place it is. The only people who turned up were the Chalmerses, whom Ianthe got rid of double-quick, very conveniently for her sister. They were at the water’s edge, screened from the track on one side by a steep overhang and by boulders.”

  “But anyone approaching from the eastward side could have seen them,” said Nikki. “You come round a jutting bit of hillside, along the track from the harbour, and you look straight across the cove——”

  “You seem to know it very well, Nikki.”

  The cruise-manager gave Nigel an angry look, and took refuge in silence.

  “The fact is that, on that stony track, people couldn’t walk silently. You’d hear footsteps before they came round the escarpment. Sound travels far in the Greek air. As I was saying, Mrs Blaydon stuns her sister; then she drags her into the water and wedges the body under a rock. It was all over in a minute. She could not know that Peter Trubody was watching from the hillside.”

  The woman at the table made as if to speak, but contented herself with a shrug of her beautiful shoulders.

  “Peter saw Ianthe, stretched out on a rock at the water’s edge. He saw Mrs Blaydon, naked except for the bathing-cap, lift her sister’s head and let it drop back with a crack on to the rock. Mrs Blaydon had just struck her and was making sure she was unconscious. Peter got the impression Ianthe was dead—she was, all but. This gave him a terrible shock, and he ran away without looking behind him. He got this shock because, though he’d not seen it happening, some instinct told him that Mrs Blaydon was responsible for Ianthe’s death. He could not bear to stay a moment longer. Had he done so, he would have observed Mrs Blaydon pull her sister’s body into the water and wedge it under a rock, where nobody passing along the track could see it. In doing this, her bathing-cap got pulled off. When she came out of the water, she noticed that her dress and the wicker case had fallen in. The latter was floating away. She dived in, without putting on her cap again, because it was vital to her plan that the case should not be lost. In the case was Ianthe’s landing-card.”

  Mrs Blaydon’s eyes, perplexed now and troubled, met Nigel’s again.

  “You mustn’t say these horrible things. It’s frightening.”

  “Having disposed of the body, retrieved the case and the wet dress, Mrs Blaydon put on her bath-robe and moved round to the other side of the cove, where she could dry her dress in the sun. Mr Chalmers found her there half an hour or so later. He told me, by the way, that ‘her bathing things and dress were spread out to dry on the rocks’—an interesting, unconscious assumption, for he could hardly have seen, from the track above, that the dress was wet. In spite of Mr Chalmers warning her that it was getting late, Mrs Blaydon still nearly missed the ship.”

  “I hurt my ankle. That’s what made me late,” said Melissa plaintively.

  “Mrs Blaydon had to be as late as possible. If she arrived on board at the very last minute, there was every chance that, in the general bustle and sensation of her arrival, she’d be able to palm Ianthe’s landing-ticket together with her own on to the quarter-master. She succeeded. There would now be evidence that Ianthe had returned to the ship. And it was most important there should be; otherwise, if the rest of Mrs Blaydon’s plan went wrong, the investigation would discover that no one in fact had seen Ianthe walking back along the track, or at the quayside, or returning to the Menelaos.”

  Nigel was certainly gripping his audience now. It was as though they felt that, after turning them down several blind alleys, he was now leading them along an open road. Like a jury returning to give a verdict of Guilty, they kept their eyes averted from the woman in the dock. Nikki seemed on the point of expostulating, but so much out of his depth that he could not do so. Bentinck-Jones had relaxed, and was eyeing Nigel with an expression half sceptical, half respectful. Faith Trubody, who had been seized by a fit of nervous yawning, fidgeted, bit her nails, ran her fingers through her blonde hair. As for Melissa Blaydon herself, the deepening anxiety in her eyes and the tense pose of her body showed the strain under which she laboured.

  The bridge telegraph clanged twice, with an urgency that underlined the drama in the cabin. There was a loud bellow from the Menelaos’s steam whistle, and Mrs Blaydon flinched.

  “Are we coming in?” Faith gave a nervous laugh. “We must be nearly there.”

  Nigel resumed, speaking faster. “Mrs Blaydon is seen at dinner, alone. She tells us she’s taking some fruit to Ianthe in the cabin, and Ianthe is feeling better and will attend the lecture. After dinner, Mrs Blaydon is at the bar for a little, then retires ‘to dress for the dance.’ She goes to her cabin, removes her make-up, puts on her sister’s clothes. Remember, no one saw the two sisters together after they’d been seen in the cove. Posing as Ianthe, Mrs Blaydon goes to the lecture: she behaves in such a way—sighing heavily and muttering to herself—that afterwards people would accept Ianthe’s disappearance as suicide. Ianthe, we were meant to think, threw herself off the ship. With any luck at all, the body would not be discovered in the cove for several days at least—long enough to sustain the idea that it had been driven back to the island by current and wind. But it was at this point that Primrose Chalmers’s plan cut across the murderer’s.

  “Primrose got up, when ‘Ianthe’ left the lecture, followed her down to the promenade-deck, caught up with her and, according to one eye-witness, took hold of her sleeve, spoke to her, wouldn’t let go. ‘Miss Ambrose,’ this witness told us, ‘went stiff and tried to pull her arm away as though she wanted to go down to her cabin.’ She did, of course—very badly: one sister must disappear now, and the other return to her own identity. But Primrose said something to ‘Ianthe’ which made her change her mind. There can be little doubt what it was: Primrose hinted that she had seen something peculiar in the cove that afternoon.

  “All Primrose wanted, of course, was to confirm her belief that Ianthe had been lying when she said she couldn’t swim. She took the woman she believed to be Ianthe out on to the fo’c’s’le, under the pretext of requiring privacy, manœuvred her to the swimming-pool, and pushed her in.

  “I happened at that moment to be at an open window in the saloo
n. I heard a faint cry and a splash. Ten seconds later, the sounds were repeated. This is what happened:—Primrose stayed on the edge of the pool, to see if the woman could swim. She could. She swam a few strokes, seized the child’s ankles, dragged her in and strangled her. We don’t know just what Primrose had said to her on the way to the pool: but it was enough to convince her—quite mistakenly, as it happened—that the child had witnessed the murder in the cove.”

  “This is the most damnable—you can’t believe it!” Melissa was staring at Nigel in horror.

  He continued to address the others, as if she were a lay-figure propped in the chair.

  “Another witness saw a woman she took to be Miss Ambrose hurrying down towards her cabin, with a rug draped over her head. The murderer had snatched it up from a deck-chair on the way back from the pool, to conceal her dripping hair and clothes. It is now just before 9.15—five minutes since ‘Ianthe’ left the lecture.

  “Nikki now enters Mrs Blaydon’s cabin. I won’t go into this, in detail; but he finds a woman there, naked, her body wet, her hair soaking. She has just had time to tear off her wet clothes. Mrs Blaydon has tried to explain this by saying she’d taken a shower before dressing for the dance. I am asked to believe that a woman of fashion, a woman who always wore a bathing-cap in the sea, would go under a shower just before a dance without any covering for her hair.

  “After Nikki leaves her cabin, she dresses and puts on her make-up again, to appear at the dance, as Melissa, some twenty minutes later. It was a quick change. She did not have time to dry her hair properly, so she sprayed it with oil—Peter Trubody commented on this during the dance—to account for its looking wet. One must admire the attention to detail, at such a nerve-racking——”

  “Stop! This is insane!” Melissa cried. “I’ve just thought of something. It proves I didn’t—couldn’t impersonate Ianthe. My ankle. She wasn’t limping when she was seen at the lecture, was she? or on the deck afterwards? I’d hurt my ankle. I couldn’t possibly have walked without a limp. Could I?”

  “Sure, sure!” Nikki excitedly spoke. “I guess that proves the lady is innocent.”

  Nigel gazed meditatively at her face, anxious and distorted beneath the heavy make-up. “I’m afraid not. Miss Ambrose had a rather ungainly way of walking. Mrs Blaydon’s ankle was not badly sprained, only a bit swollen. She could walk on it, given a little resolution, so as not to betray a limp. She could even have turned her ankle deliberately, in order to give the effect of Ianthe’s awkward gait.”

  Nikki’s face was crestfallen. Faith chewed her nails. Ivor had the gloating look of one who has witnessed a murderous counter punch in the boxing ring.

  “No,” said Nigel slowly, “that one won’t wash. There’s a far better reason why Mrs Blaydon could not have murdered her sister.”

  “Well, for God’s sake!” exclaimed Ivor.

  “She didn’t?” Faith said, on a rush of pent-up breath.

  “The theory I have outlined to you,” went on Nigel impassively, “is a very attractive one. In fact, it had been in my mind from early on, and each new fact I discovered could be fitted into it. It covers all the facts, but one.”

  “Yes?” The woman in the chair breathed it rather than spoke it.

  “Mrs Blaydon had no possible, conceivable motive for murdering her sister.”

  “How do you know?” snarled Bentinck-Jones.

  “You say she is innocent?” Nikki asked, in an ominously quiet voice.

  “Mrs Blaydon is innocent.”

  “Well then,” said Faith indignantly, “why all this—this rigmarole, like the end of a corny detective novel?”

  “I rather agree, Faith: you’ve—er ‘said it’,” murmured Mrs Blaydon, wryly stressing the colloquialism.

  “Yes, goddammit, why did we have to have this circus?—torturing her, making us all think——”

  “I thought you know Mrs Blaydon,” Nigel cut in harshly.

  “Knew her?” Nikki looked stupid, stunned.

  “Well enough to know she wasn’t the kind of woman who’d kill anyone.”

  “Oh, so that’s it,” Bentinck-Jones sneered. “She didn’t murder because she’s not a murdering type. God preserve us from amateur detectives!”

  Nigel ignored him. After one glance at the drooping shoulders, the relaxed, exhausted pose, of the woman in the chair, who had closed her eyes and was smiling faintly at last, he turned away.

  “And now we come to Miss Trubody. We have not yet dealt with her.”

  “Me?” The girl jerked upright, as if every nerve in her body had suddenly been alerted. The bridge-telegraph clanged again. Through the window the heads of ship-cranes could be seen, stalking slowly past. The engines of the Menelaos thumped as the screws were reversed.

  “Me?” cried Faith, white-faced, her thin body tensed.

  “Mrs Blaydon,” said Nigel, “I’m afraid this has been an ordeal for you. I’ll spare you the rest. Nikki, will you take her to her cabin, please?”

  The woman rose, glanced at the others with unseeing eyes, smiled uncertainly at no one in particular, and with Nikki’s hand under her elbow limped towards the door. She was within a yard of it when, in a quiet, conversational tone, Faith Trubody said,

  “Oh, Brossy. Could you——”

  The woman stopped, swung round involuntarily; and it was, unmistakably, the movement of a school mistress who, at the blackboard, hears from behind her some noise of mischief or impertinence, some whisper or rustle or giggle, and swings round to quell it. She knew at once she had betrayed herself—before any of the others but Nigel realised it. The exquisitely, heavily made-up face altered before their eyes, working, distorting itself, shifting, coarsening, the mask of Melissa shaling away as when a landslide slowly erases the features of a cliff, and Ianthe Ambrose’s face, Ianthe’s personality were unbared from beneath. The make-up was still there, but it could no longer hold together the fiction that this was Melissa Blaydon.

  They all perceived it now. Ianthe could see her self-betrayal in their eyes. She did not even try to bluff it out. Instinct took over—the blind, furious instinct for self-preservation. She had the door open, shaking off Nikki’s hand. The armed sailor outside barred her way, and she clawed at his face so that he reeled back, blood starting from a furrow under his eye. She ran to the rail, saw concrete quayside not yielding water far beneath; darted away aft, down the ladder to the boat-deck, across the deck to the starboard side, but the rail here was lined with passengers, who turned like sheep when they heard Nikki’s shouts of “Stop her! Stop that woman!” But, before they had assembled their wits, Ianthe was down on the promenade-deck, moving aft again, with that crippled, scurrying, lurching gait, the headscarf streaming out behind her.

  From the boat-deck aft, Nikki hailed a group of sailors on the poop-deck below. Four of them began to run forward, two on either side of the ship. Ianthe saw them coming, as she reached the engine-room hatch. The hatch was open. Thirty feet below, the turbines, bedded in the ship’s floor, gleamed with oily sweat. Ianthe Ambrose had scuffled herself over the combing of the hatch before the sailors could reach her or any of the passengers crowded along the rail had realised what was amiss. She fell head first among the turbines, a long scream trailing behind her. The yellow scarf came fluttering to rest over her shattered head.

  II

  “So you thought I was carrying on like a corny detective novel?” said Nigel, gazing at Faith Trubody with mock severity.

  The girl wriggled in her deck-chair. “Well, all that phoney business of pinning the crime on each suspect in turn—you know—in the last chapter. I must say, though, when you turned on me at the end I nearly jumped out of my skin. I thought for a second I must be the murderer, instead of remembering it was my entrance-cue.” She turned to her brother. “Mr Strangeways told me, before the meeting, that at some point he’d say, ‘and now we come to Miss Trubody’: that was to be the signal: then, just as Mrs Blaydon was going out, I had to say something to her, cal
l her by Miss Ambrose’s nickname—I mean, I still thought it was Mrs Blaydon. That’s how we caught her out.”

  “Don’t gloat, twin,” said Peter, repressively.

  “I’m not gloating. And anyway, she deserved everything she got.”

  “Oh, you young creatures and your facile moral judgments!” Clare lazily drawled. “I suppose it was one of your nerve-wars, Nigel.”

  “You suppose right. She might still have got away with it, even then. That’s why I faked up a case against each of the others, and then came to the case against Melissa Blaydon, which was the strongest of all. I had to keep Ianthe on tenterhooks and gradually screw up the tension, hoping that when it was suddenly relaxed she’d be off her guard for a minute and give herself away.”

  “It must have been hell for her, after taking us in that she was Melissa, to find that you could prove Melissa guilty,” said Faith.

  “Yes. Particularly when I was reconstructing, with almost every detail correct, how Ianthe had in fact committed the crimes.”

  “A sort of mirror-image, you mean?” said Clare. “Ianthe had killed Melissa and Primrose, and was successfully impersonating her sister, and now she found you apparently had a watertight case against Melissa for killing Primrose and Ianthe? She couldn’t extricate herself from the toils, except by admitting she was Ianthe, which would be as good as confessing that she’d murdered Melissa. Very awkward for her.”

  “As I say, she might have got away with it if she’d just sat tight. But the sudden relaxing of tension when I said Melissa was innocent—that was too much for her.”

  “I can’t understand why she stayed on in the cabin—when you were accusing everyone in turn,” said Faith. “Surely she’d be afraid of saying something that gave her away.”

  “She didn’t dare leave. You remember, I told her twice she was at liberty to go. If she’d been innocent, she’d have left. But she had to know just how much I knew, or guessed, of the truth. And she kept her nerve remarkably well. It wasn’t till I suddenly relaxed the tension that she gave herself away—twice.”