The Widow's Cruise

by Nicholas Blake

  “Twice?” asked Faith.

  “Yes, after you addressed her as ‘Brossy’, of course—but, before that, when you upbraided me for behaving like a corny detective novel, she said—do you remember?— ‘I rather agree, Faith: you’ve—er—said it.’ She put the colloquialism in quotes, as a rather pedantic schoolmistress would when talking to a pupil: Melissa would never have used a slang expression self-consciously like that.”

  The four were sitting on the boat-deck of the Menelaos, which was steaming eastwards again. The formalities at Athens had taken little more than twenty-four hours, thanks mainly to the long statement made by Nigel to the police authorities; he would have to return later, when the results of the autopsy on Primrose Chalmers were known and the body of Melissa Blaydon had been conveyed from Kalymnos to Athens. Legal identification of the two sisters’ bodies could only be proved when reports from their dentists came to hand: but the authorities had no doubt that Nigel’s solution of the mystery was broadly correct. So the Menelaos, after oiling, was allowed to resume her cruise. Nearly all the passengers remained in her, though Ivor Bentinck-Jones had seen fit to leave the ship at Athens, and Jeremy Street had informed Nikki that he did not propose to stay in her a day longer than his contract bound him to.

  “When did you first suspect it was Ianthe?” Peter Trubody now asked. There were dark rings under his eyes, and he presented a very much subdued appearance: he had done a lot of growing-up during the last few days—enough to anticipate what was in Nigel’s mind, for he added soberly, “You needn’t mind—I shan’t burst into tears or anything. It was only while I thought Melissa must have done it—” he broke off, his lip trembling a little.

  “First suspected Ianthe? Well, it didn’t come in a blaze of light, you know. I fancied it was Melissa for a while. It had to be her or Ianthe, once the facts all pointed towards the murder having been committed on Kalymnos. But Melissa had no conceivable motive, whereas Ianthe had two immensely strong ones.”

  “No, I mean the impersonation.”

  “Oh, it would be so much easier for Ianthe to pose as Melissa than vice-versa,” Clare put in.

  “Exactly. We all knew what Ianthe looked like—we’d seen her face, always without make-up. None of us knew what Melissa looked like without it. Ianthe could make-up to disguise herself as Melissa. If Melissa had been impersonating Ianthe, at the lecture on the boat-deck, she’d have had to remove her make-up and the difference beween their naked faces would be noticeable.”

  “But Ianthe couldn’t have gone on the rest of her life posing as Melissa,” said Peter. “She’d be bound to be shown up. I don’t see what she expected to gain out of—out of the damnable things she did.”

  “That’s just where you’re wrong. But I’d better tell you her motives first, then what she planned to do, and then how it worked out in practice.”

  Nigel recounted what the Bishop of Solway had told him about the sisters’ childhood—how Melissa had always been the favoured one and their father could never show Ianthe true affection.

  “Then Melissa married a rich man, who left her all his money when he died. Ianthe, though a brilliant scholar, was a failure as a schoolmistress: she’d recently been sacked, and might well fail to get another job. Also, she was a man-hater—or at least ill at ease with men—so she had little prospect of marriage. From childhood, she’d had good reason to envy her sister, to be jealous of her, to be poisoned with resentment and hatred.”

  “But Melissa would have given her money, supported her; she was immensely generous,” Peter protested.

  “I’ve no doubt she would. But imagine Ianthe forced to accept it—from Melissa of all people! Her pride and rancour simply wouldn’t have tolerated charity from that source. Then she had this nervous breakdown. It crystallised all her resentment of her sister.”

  “Was she mad?” asked Faith. “She must have been.”

  “I don’t think so. But the breakdown set her feet on the path towards murder. Melissa, whom she had not met for years, was cabled for. Melissa felt some guilt at having neglected her sister for so long: this cruise was part of her reparation. The two women had eyes of the same colour and were of the same height and build: Ianthe would have seen Melissa without make-up, and realised that their faces were still very much alike, as they had been—so the Bishop told me—in childhood. He also told me that Ianthe had been a first-rate mimic then. I imagine the possibility of impersonating her sister entered Ianthe’s mind first, in quite a vague way; then it spawned the idea of murdering her.”

  “But I just don’t see it,” Peter said. “How could she hope to pass herself off as Melissa for the rest of her life?”

  “You must remember that Melissa was a rolling stone. After her husband died, she moved from place to place abroad, never staying anywhere long. All Ianthe would have to do would be to avoid the places where her restless sister had lived—and, of course, keep out of the way of Melissa’s ex-lovers.”

  “Quite a job, that,” Faith remarked.

  “Oh shut up!” said Peter. “Don’t be so foul!”

  Clare said, “But what about the money?”

  “Melissa had no children. We shall find, probably, that she’d left all her money to Ianthe. But Ianthe was quite clever enough to realise that, if Melissa died by violence, she herself would be the first suspect, being sole heir. So she planned to——”

  “No, I mean how would Ianthe, posing as Melissa, be able to get hold of the money?” asked Clare.

  “Oh, easy. Typewritten letters to the brokers or solicitors or bank-manager or whoever it might be: Melissa’s signature forged: her account to be transferred to such-and-such a bank. But mind you, she had been studying the part of Melissa very carefully. Melissa told me, on Delos, that although Ianthe had previously shown no interest in her life for years, she had recently spent hours asking about her marriage, her travels, her friends, and so on. Ianthe was briefing herself, just in case she should run into someone who had known her sister.”

  “Ah, and that’s why Ianthe did the watch-dog act during the cruise,” said Clare.

  “Yes. We all noticed how she clung to Melissa. She could not risk anyone being alone with her sister for long, lest things might be said in conversation which Ianthe wouldn’t know about when the time came for her to play the part of Melissa. And there was always a danger that Melissa would tell somebody that her sister had learnt to swim when she was a child. We put it down to possessiveness on Ianthe’s part. But, as Melissa told me, Ianthe had always been an independent, unclinging type before. One can imagine her jumping at the idea of a cruise; for with any luck no intimate of Melissa or herself would be on board, and if it became necessary to identify her sister’s body, she’d be the only person competent to do so.”

  “It was all premeditated, then?”

  “Very much so. Mind you, I fancy the outline of the crime appeared to her first as a fantasy—the way it does to intellectuals: she toyed with it, elaborated it, brooded over it, until she was possessed by it. No doubt, before they came to Greece, she’d been secretly practising Melissa’s signature, her style of make-up, her vocal intonations, and so on. And she must have decided early on that the method of murder should be drowning: from the start of the cruise she let it be known that she couldn’t swim—a non-swimmer would not be suspected of drowning the victim. Whether the limp was originally part of the scheme or a brilliant last-minute improvisation, I don’t know.”

  “But surely,” said Peter, “it was an accident? Hurrying along that rough track to catch the steamer——”

  “Oh no. It was absolutely necessary to the impersonation. Just think.”

  “Necessary? I don’t see it.”

  Clare said, “I think I do. She could mimic Melissa’s voice, and make-up to look exactly like her—I suppose, by the way, she got herself the same hair-do as Melissa before they left England. But Melissa was a graceful woman, and Ianthe had a rather ungainly gait——”

  “Exactly! The thi
ng most likely to give you away, if you are trying to disguise yourself, is your walk. But Melissa limping would look no different from Ianthe limping. That’s why I got so inquisitive about the turned ankle. It wasn’t a fake. She did it quite deliberately.”

  “I think it’s horrible,” Faith exclaimed. “All the time she was sitting about on deck-chairs, huddled up like a—like a basilisk, she was plotting how to do this dreadful thing.”

  “Yes. She was waiting for the right time and place, learning the lay-out of the ship, and above all presenting a picture of a woman imperfectly recovered from a nervous breakdown, ripe for suicide. I’ll come back to that presently. Two things, though, she could not have foreseen—that you would be on board, Faith, and that Clare and I would. You and Peter were a great nuisance to her with your persecution campaign——”

  “I’m sorry about that aqua-lung business,” said Peter shamefacedly. “It was rather a silly trick, I suppose.”

  “Actually, I put him up to it,” Faith confessed.

  “You did, did you?” said Clare, a little tartly. “Children, I was always told, shouldn’t play with fire.”

  “I hated her. If only you knew how foully she behaved to me at school!”

  “Oh, forget it, Faith!” Peter said. “It’s over and done with. You talk as if she’d ruined you for life.”

  “Then there was Clare, with her trained eye, who saw the skull beneath the skin—the close similarity of bone-structure. And there was me, with my trained mind and my professional inquisitiveness. Ianthe made one frightful gaffe, when she picked me to practise on.”

  “Practise on? What do you mean?”

  “Clare and I were promenading the deck one night, and she called out to us, using Melissa’s voice. We both thought it was Melissa, till we went up to her. I remembered that later. Well, the cove at Kalymnos gave Ianthe the chance she had been waiting for. She was a very clever woman, you realise, as well as a ruthless one. Her general scheme wasn’t nearly so reckless as you might think. She would drown Melissa, change clothes with her, return alone to the ship as Melissa, hand in both landing-cards together, say her sister had felt poorly and returned before her: after dinner, she would go to the cabin, remove make-up, put on her own clothes, attend the lecture, give an impression of acute melancholia, leave the lecture early, return to the cabin, and finally emerge as Melissa again. The disappearance of ‘Ianthe’ would be accepted quite naturally as suicide. If the body were found at all, it would not be found, in that unfrequented cove, for days or weeks, and the authorities would assume she had drifted back to the island after throwing herself off the ship. If the body were to be discovered before the cruise was over, Ianthe, posing as Melissa, was the person the authorities would send for to identify it. There was little likelihood of an investigation, under the circumstances. If the body were not discovered for some time, it would be unrecognisable anyway. But Ianthe had still worried about the possibility of distinguishing marks being noticed on Melissa’s body. She tried to prevent her sister sun-bathing in public. On the beach at Patmos she ticked Melissa off for not putting on a bath-robe over her bikini: I thought at the time it was just Ianthe’s prudishness. Oh yes, and it was on this beach that I observed for the first time what Melissa kept in that wicker case she carried about everywhere.”

  “Her landing-ticket, you mean?” asked Faith.

  “Yes. But something else—her make-up materials. You see the point?”

  “Well, no, I don’t think I do.”

  “The dawn will come. Well, there we have Ianthe’s outline plan. She would kill Melissa, become Melissa, and live on Melissa’s income, happy for ever after. And then the two sisters went to that desolate cove on Kalymnos, and Ianthe had the time, the place and the unloved one, all together. We now come,” said Nigel with a questioning glance at Peter, “to a pretty grim passage.”

  “It’s all right. I can—I want to know,” said Peter; but his lips had gone white.

  “After Ianthe had got rid of the Chalmerses, both the sisters sun-bathed. Posing as Melissa, Ianthe told me that she had gone to sleep for a bit. The real Melissa probably did—face down, on that flat rock, with little or nothing on. Ianthe, I suspect, had taken off all her own clothes: we know she’d been sun-bathing a lot the last few days, to get her skin, which was sallow anyway, the colour of Melissa’s: also, the Menelaos passengers being on the whole a gentlemanly and ladylike lot, if anyone did turn up they’d probably avert their eyes from two naked females. Well, Melissa is lying face down, asleep. Ianthe hits her a violent blow on the back of the head, stunning her. Melissa’s dress is lying nearby, and gets some blood on it; that’s my theory, anyway; Ianthe had to plunge it in the sea presently, to wash off the bloodstains. But first she begins to put her own clothes on Melissa’s body. While she’s doing this, she notices that the wicker case had got dislodged and is floating out to sea. She at once plunges in after it.”

  “Because Melissa’s make-up was in it and Ianthe had none of her own there?” said Clare.

  “I think so. If she couldn’t make-up there and then, her whole plan would be wrecked. Well, Primrose saw a swimmer retrieving the case, and thought it must be Ianthe because she was not wearing the yellow bathing-cap that Melissa always wore. When Ianthe scrambled ashore again, she put on Melissa’s bathing-cap and finished dressing the body. That was what she was doing when Peter saw her. She’d lifted the body up a bit to slip her jumper over the head, and she let the head fall back with a crack on to the rock.”

  “Just as if it was—was a dummy in a shop window,” Peter muttered. “Oh God!”

  “Yes. She was not one to respect the dead. And she had the devil’s own luck. If Peter hadn’t removed himself at this point, he’d have seen her drag the unconscious woman into the sea, and wedge her under that overhanging rock to drown. Then Ianthe washed the bloodstained dress and made-up her face. Presently she moved to the other side of the cove, so that she could dry the dress in the sun. Ianthe, as Melissa, returns to the ship. All goes well for a while. But then Primrose and Nikki between them contrive to complicate what had been a simple undertaking,”

  “Nikki? How?” asked Peter, with an undertone of jealousy in his voice.

  “In a minute. Ianthe killed the wretched Primrose in the same way and for the same reason that I described when I was making a case against Melissa.” Nigel outlined it for the benefit of the other two. He went on, “When she went out on to the fo’c’s’le with Primrose, Ianthe suspected, from the way the child hinted at things, that she’d witnessed the murder of Melissa. Then Primrose pushed her into the swimming-pool, and Ianthe lost her head and her temper, and dragged Primrose in and strangled her. It was her first bad mistake. With the child murdered, Ianthe’s ‘disappearance’ could not be accepted so readily as the suicide of a deranged woman. Well, Ianthe managed to get back to the cabin. She took off her soaking clothes, and the next moment Nikki came prancing in. The cabin was dark——”

  “You mean, Ianthe hadn’t turned on the light? Why on earth not?” asked Clare.

  “Panic. She’d only one thought in her head—to strip off the wet clothes which would betray her. It was a simple, instinctive compulsion to stay in the dark till she’d got a grip on herself again. But it was Nikki who got a grip on her. He thought it was the divine and willing Melissa. But the naked woman he found in the darkness there proved to be far from willing. She fought him savagely, and in silence. I ought to have seen the point of that long before I did.”

  “In silence?” Faith asked. “I don’t get it.”

  “Melissa, if Peter will allow me, was a highly experienced woman. In fact, a bit of a whore. If the woman in the cabin had been Melissa, she’d never have been panicked by Nikki, never have fought: she’d have spoken to him, calmed him down, made some excuse for not wanting him just then. Or she might have let him have his way. But the woman in the cabin acted like an inexperienced virgin. She struggled. She dared not cry out, because it might bring other passengers i
nto the cabin, who would turn on the light and see that it was Ianthe there. Even if it didn’t, Nikki might have recognised that the voice was not Melissa’s, for Ianthe was so agitated by what was happening that she knew she wouldn’t be able to mimic Melissa’s voice successfully. Well, she did get rid of Nikki. She dressed for the dance in Melissa’s clothes, sprayed oil on her wet hair, and made-up. She tended to overdo this, by the way. Mrs Hale had remarked to me before the dance, at dinner, that Melissa was made-up more heavily even than usual. But that was Ianthe’s trouble. She overdid things. Like those swans.”

  “Swans? What swans?” said Faith, gaping at him.

  “Ianthe behaved in a remarkably rational way, almost throughout,” said Nigel, as if he had not heard the question.

  “She was a formidably intelligent woman, of course. She never attempted to cast suspicion on anyone else, for instance; and she stuck to her original plan, even after Primrose had pushed in and greatly complicated things. When I talked to her alone, the morning after the murders, she resisted the temptation to say too much.”

  “Did you know, then, that she was really Ianthe?” Peter asked.

  “I knew the woman I was talking to must be Ianthe, unless I had misinterpreted every single piece of evidence. But I must admit there were moments when I could hardly believe she was not the real Melissa. She had Melissa’s voice, and eyes, and pose. The features were somehow, indefinably, coarser; but that could have been the effect of shock and grief. And she did talk rather more intelligently than I’d heard Melissa talking. But on the whole she gave a wonderfully convincing impression of Melissa’s personality.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Clare. “She’d always been jealous of her sister. As a girl, she’d desperately wanted to be Melissa—the daughter whom their father loved. I’ve no doubt, in those days, she copied Melissa often—consciously and unconsciously.”

  “Yes, that’s a good point. The only time she seemed at all disconcerted, during this interview, was when I brought up the question of the wet dress. She couldn’t help remembering the bloodstains she’d washed off. However, she recovered her poise very quickly, and gave me a natural explanation for its having got wet. No, she came through it extremely well, apart from her tendency to overdo things.”