by Frances
Voyage into Violence
A Mr. and Mrs. North Mystery
Frances and Richard Lockridge
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
1
Pamela North stepped out into the passage-way and encountered a man wearing a sword. The sword was long, and its hilt was gold-encrusted. The man wore, also, a red tunic, belted and criss-crossed with white webbing, and blue trousers, striped with the red of the tunic. He wore a peaked white cap, banded in red. This was not at all what Pamela North had expected to see; she had rather hoped to see Jerry. Pam withdrew into the stateroom and closed the door slowly, but very firmly.
“What,” Pam North said, speaking aloud to the cabin’s emptiness, “what kind of ship is this, anyway? Where the officers wear swords? What have we got ourselves into?”
She waited briefly for an answer, and received none. She went carefully to the door and, carefully, opened it again. The man with the sword was receding along the corridor. He appeared to be walking with purpose, and he was, clearly, looking straight ahead. There was no doubt that he was wearing a sword; no doubt of the red tunic. Pam averted her eyes, looked in the other direction along the corridor. Jerry North approached, not wearing a sword. Pam went several steps to meet him.
“We,” she said, “have been boarded. Men with swords. They’re all over the place. Pirates? Before we even leave the pier? Or is he the captain?”
Jerry North looked at his wife, an activity in which he usually found pleasure. He looked at her, now, with uneasiness, and ran a hand through his hair. He spoke very slowly, forming each word clearly.
“Are you,” Jerry said, “all right?”
“I saw a man with a sword,” Pam North said, with equal clarity. “Right here. A minute ago. A sword, and a uniform all colors and if captains wear swords, I’m not going.” She paused. “Binoculars,” she said. “Not swords.”
“Oh,” Jerry said, “an Old Respectable. What we’ve been waiting for.”
“Not I,” Pam said. She looked at Jerry with doubt. “Does what you just said mean something? If you’re saying I’m old. And respectable isn’t anything to make a point of.”
They would, Jerry said, go where it was quiet. They would sit down. They would have cigarettes. He put an arm around Pam’s shoulders and led her back to the stateroom. He closed the door. He lighted her a cigarette. He said it was very simple, although perhaps a little unexpected. He said they were, indeed, all over the ship. The Coral Café, where he had gone to see about a table, was full of them.
“With swords?” Pam said.
Not commonly with swords, Jerry North admitted. But with uniforms of all colors, as she said. They had come aboard with rifles. “Because,” he said, “they are the Ancient and Respectable Riflemen. On their annual encampment.”
“On a ship?” Pam said. “This ship? Why?”
“Yes,” Jerry said. “Yes. I don’t know. Probably, it’s like a convention. A get-together. Last year they had it at a hotel in the White Mountains. But that was in late July.” He paused. “I stood in line between two of them,” Jerry said. “They explained themselves.”
“They might well,” Pam said. “A—a kind of Boy Scout troop? They’re old for it. The man with a sword—late-ish fifties, if a year. And lower two hundreds, if you come to that. And, you haven’t explained the sword.”
He could not, Jerry said. Those in the café, arranging as he had been arranging for assigned seats in the dining saloon, had been innocent of swords. But he could guess—the sword was a symbol of authority. Presumably, therefore, the wearer was on a tour of duty, set apart from his duty-free fellows. It could, therefore, be assumed that he was on watch.
“Probably,” Jerry said, “as Respected Officer of the Day. The chap who heads them up is a Respected Captain. Respected Captain Folsom. There are ten more coming. Their bus went to a wrong pier. Wrong river, actually. They’re the ones we’re waiting for now.” He paused. “I was in line quite a while,” he added, in explanation.
He had made good use of his time, Pam admitted. Bill Weigand could not have done better. Which brought up the point—where were the Weigands? She was told that they would be along, that—
There was a knock on the door of stateroom 93, A Deck, S.S. Carib Queen, cruise ship about to sail—as soon as ten Ancient and Respectable Riflemen found their way to her—on an eight-day voyage to Havana and Nassau. Jerry opened the door. Dorian and Bill Weigand said they were reporting in. Dorian said that there seemed to be a good many soldiers aboard. “Or something,” she added.
“One of them has a sword,” Pam said. “They’re riflemen. Jerry’s got us seated. Anyway—” Jerry nodded. “And,” Pam said, “we’ve got a bottle somewhere in a bucket, because we have to get outside before the bars open. Outside the limit, I mean.”
Bill said they knew what she meant, and that they would be right back. They went into their own cabin, next that of the Norths’. They were right back, and a steward brought, from “somewhere,” a bottle of champagne in a bucket of ice. They toasted their own brief freedom, at a little after noon of a Friday in early October—freedom from an office and from authors, from an apartment and cats, from a sketch pad (although that freedom was unlikely to be exercised), from the indefensible crime of murder.
Pam was, to be sure, uneasy—when she thought of it—over her freedom from cats. But Martha had promised, and Martha was reliable. Daily she would feed the cats; she would even, from time to time, converse with them, explaining that it would be only a few days, really, before all would be as it had always been. The cats would be impatient—since for cats all change is bad, and the absence of selected humans the worst of all—but they would survive. On the next day week they would be profane in greeting, but they would forgive.
“Table for four,” Jerry was telling Bill, while Pam thought briefly of her cats. “Near the captain’s table. Quite choice, from the diagram. You must know a man who knows a man. Norths and Weigands, I said, and they said, ‘Oh. Captain Weigand?’ Fame? Or influence?”
There was a man he had run into once, Captain Weigand admitted. He admitted it almost drowsily. He had mentioned to the man that he and his wife, and a Mr. and Mrs. North, were cruising on the Carib Queen. Bill looked tired, Jerry thought; very often he looked tired. “Right,” Bill said, as if Jerry had spoken, “the first two days, I sleep. If somebody sticks somebody with this sword of Pam’s, don’t wake me up.”
“Bill!” Pam said. “It’s a toy sword. And they’re Boy Scouts, really. Only older and, of course, fatter. Jerry found out all about them. They’re camping out.”
“Meanwhile,” Dorian Weigand said, “we’re moving. Should we go and watch the skyline pass?”
For answer, Jerry held up the champagne bottle. It was still half full.
“I only asked,” Dorian said, and swung one slim leg so that she sat on her foot. “I’ll be as blasé as anyone. Try me.”
Jerry filled her glass.
A loud-speaker, with a British accent, announced the first luncheon sitting.
“We’re second-sitting types,” Pam said, and looked at Jerry and said, “I hope?” Jerry nodded.
They sipped champagne, while the Carib Queen pulsated gently under them. They finished the champagne. It was Pam who suggested that, while they waited, they might go “topside” and see the ship. She was looked at. “I mean upstairs,” Pam said. “Or do we go up a ladder?” She was looked at again, and admitted she had been reading up. She had, Jerry told her gently, been reading the wrong things. She had not, as she seemed to think, joined the Navy. But, nevertheless, they went.
They got lost at first, which is inevitable at first. But they found a staircase leading up, and went up it
; they found the promenade deck and walked around it, and the Carib Queen progressed tenderly through the Narrows. She was a small and bright and perky ship, done in green and white, and everywhere she shone. Aft, on the promenade deck, was the swimming pool, empty of water and with a netting over it of heavy rope. There were also deck chairs, standing in good order. They paused to rent chairs from a deck steward in a white jacket. Already, there was no hurry about anything, and the sun was shining brightly.
They had left the deck, and were in a wide corridor separating the forward lounge from the smoking lounge—there were, Pam noted, going to be plenty of spaces to sit down—when the public-address system cleared its metallic throat and announced the second luncheon sitting. They went aft again, and down, and sat at a table for four near the center of a big room—and near two large round tables, which were in the center of the room. One of them, forward of the other, was presided over by a handsome youngish man with the four stripes of a captain on his sleeves. The table aft appeared to be presided over by a gray-haired man, with a red face. He was compressed into a red tunic. “Respected Captain Folsom,” Jerry told them, and Folsom looked at them—his hearing seemed acute—and beamed pleasantly. Jerry nodded and the others smiled with the detached politeness of the unintroduced.
“Does he,” Pam asked, in a much lower voice, “get to captain a table? Like the real captain?” She indicated, with a just perceptible motion of her head, the “real” captain at the other big table. Jerry doubted it; Bill Weigand shook his head, underscoring doubt.
A white-jacketed steward hovered, advised in agreeable cockney. Already, New York seemed distant, although Brooklyn still progressed slowly past them to port. (Or they could presume it did; the dining saloon was windowless.)
“Is that—” Pam asked, indicating the officer with four stripes.
“Staff captain, ma’am,” the steward told her. “Captain Smythe-Hornsby, ma’am. A bit of the fish, ma’am?” Pam had a bit of the fish. The others had bits of the fish. “Ship’s captain’s on the bridge, ma’am,” the steward said. “Some of the sprouts, ma’am?” Pam had some of the sprouts. Jerry turned away in horror; Dorian shook her head; Bill had some of the sprouts. “Trifle looks nice today,” the steward said.
A tall man, notable for grooming, for the neat fit of a sports jacket, stood by the table over which Respected Captain Folsom presided. The tall man was an assured man, late on in his fifties, with a heavily handsome face. “Sit anywhere, I guess,” Captain Folsom told him, in the accents of New England. “Skipper’s on duty, they tell me.”
The tall man said, “Thank you,” and sat.
“Well, well,” Bill Weigand said. “Well, well, well. J. Orville in the flesh.” He spoke in a low voice, but now, as the room filled, conversation rose in it, so that there was little danger of being overheard.
They looked at Bill and waited.
“J. Orville Marsh,” Bill said. “The well-known private—” He hesitated momentarily. “Licensed private investigator,” Bill said. And he looked again at the tall and dignified man, who presented a well-tailored back. “I wonder—” Bill did not finish. Instead he looked, and the others looked, at a short round man, red-tunicked, strapped in white webbing, wearing a white cap with a red band, who marched between the tables. As he marched, the scabbard of his gold-hilted sword tinkled against the legs of chairs. He looked very hot under his white cap and, Pam thought, slightly embarrassed. But he kept his eyes fixed straight ahead, and his plump shoulders back as well as he was able. The strain could be observed.
He marched—there was no other word for it—to the table over which Respected Captain Folsom presided. He stood where Folsom could see him, and stood at attention.
“Duty Officer Magumber reporting, sir,” he said. “All present and accounted for, sir.”
“Or, Magumber,” Folsom said. “Present or accounted for.”
“Sir,” the man with the sword said.
“Carry on,” Folsom said.
“Sir,” the man with the sword said, and did an about-face. The sword swung with his movement; it banged into a shin of Respected Captain Folsom.
“Ouch!” Folsom said, in the aggrieved tones of a New England businessman of middle years. “Watch that damn’ thing, Teddy.”
“It was your idea, J.R.,” Magumber said, in equally non-military tones. “Think I like lugging it around? Banging into things?”
“Officer of the Day, carry on,” Folsom said, reverting to Respected Captain.
“Sir,” Theodore Magumber, of Theodore Magumber, Inc., Wholesale Produce, said, and went off, in a military manner, to carry on.
Jerry North choked slightly on his trifle.
“I think,” Dorian said, as if she had been considering the question for some time, “that this is going to be a great deal of fun. I think the Ancient and Respectables will help.”
“For short,” Jerry told her, “they call themselves the Old Respectables.”
“There will,” the public-address system said, after a preliminary click, “be a cocktail party in the Coral Café this afternoon, to which all are invited. Thank you. Click.” There was a momentary hush in the big room, in which upward of a hundred civilians and Old Respectables lunched, in which the lights were soft and the white-jacketed stewards quick. “Click,” the public-address system said. “We are presently dropping the pilot. Thank you. Click.”
A woman with improbably red hair went past the table for four at which Norths and Weigands toyed with trifle. Her movements were resolute, and somewhat more military than had been those of Officer of the Day Magumber. She was followed by a much younger woman with hair of no special color, who wore a linen suit, which had no special color either. The suit hung flatly, in straight lines.
The younger woman was, in turn, followed by the assistant chief steward, in a blue uniform. The red-haired woman, who was clearly in her sixties, the skin of whose face was tightly stretched and almost wrinkleless, stopped by a chair at Captain Folsom’s table, and turned. She turned imperiously.
“Yes, Mrs. Macklin,” the steward said, speaking quickly. “This is the captain’s table, ma’am.” He stepped around the thin youngish woman, and pulled out a chair for the woman with red hair. She looked sharply at Respected Captain Folsom, at J. Orville Marsh—who certainly, Pam thought, doesn’t look like a private eye—and sat. The steward pulled out the chair on her right, and the thin young woman started to sit in it.
“Other side, man,” Mrs. Macklin said, and her voice was sharp. “Other side. You ought to know, Hilda.”…
It took all kinds to make a cruise, a fact upon which Pamela North commented some time later, standing with Jerry and Dorian in the swirl of a cocktail party in the café. Ancient and Respectable Riflemen in uniform (and not a few wearing their caps); staff captains; sharp-tongued, elderly women with improbably red hair. And, it was evident, a hundred or so more.
Among the kinds it also took was, most evidently, a hostess. She was a little tall, and just perceptibly angular, and what she wore Pam and Dorian, conferring by glance and, apparently, osmosis, considered a bit fussy. It was generally pinkish in hue, with blue accents at unexpected places, and it had perhaps been designed for a woman of whom there was more, here and there, than there was of Miss Springer.
“Now I am Miss Springer,” she said, landing beside the Norths and Dorian like a friendly, if largish, bird. “I’m here to help everybody—everybody—have a good time. We must all meet people.”
“Well,” Pam said, “I’m Pamela North. This is my husband, Mr. North. This is Dorian Weigand.” Pam paused momentarily. “Her husband’s asleep,” Pam said, feeling that she had left a gap. “He just arrested Killer McShane.”
“What?” Miss Springer said. “Oh, of course. How nice.”
“The killer didn’t think it—” Pam began, with what sounded precisely like innocence. But Jerry looked at her. Jerry said he was sure they would all have a wonderful time. He said it was a very fine party.
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br /> It was. The waters through which the Carib Queen steamed were placid—she was a sparkling thing on a still sparkling sea. The setting sun danced into the starboard windows of the café lounge, on the sun-deck level, with french doors standing open to the after-deck, above the swimming pool. There was still a net over the swimming pool, which might, Pam thought, prove as well. Some of the Old Respectables—but one should not be censorious. The poor things, Pam thought. Their wives weren’t with them. Only their rifles.
“Have you,” Miss Springer said, “met Captain Smythe-Hornsby? I know he’ll want to meet you. So much.” She looked at them, blue eyes roundly bright; pinkened cheeks glowing with cordiality. “Come, dear people.”
Unprotestingly, they went. Seen close, Captain Smythe-Hornsby was even younger, even more handsome, than he had seemed at table. Also, he was taller. He had changed to a white jacket. He was charmed at meeting Dorian Weigand, charmed anew at meeting Pamela North. Jerry’s hand was taken in the firm clasp of friendship, and Jerry’s eyes were looked forth-rightly into. The captain was glad to have them all aboard and he hoped they were finding their way around our little ship. He hoped that they were, as he was, finding this little do a passable show.
“Oh, most,” Dorian said. “Most charming.”
“Quite,” said Staff Captain Smythe-Hornsby. “Quite, Mrs.—” He hesitated. Dorian told him again.
“Silly ass,” Captain Smythe-Hornsby said, apparently of himself. “Weigand, of course.” He paused. “Of course,” he said, “Weigand.” And he spoke the name, the second time, as if it had a special meaning. “Hope the captain—” he said, but Miss Springer had returned. She had returned with the red-haired woman and, in the background, the girl with hair of no special color.
“You must, captain,” Miss Springer said, with girlish enthusiasm over the treat in store, “you must let me introduce you to Mrs. Macklin. And her daughter, of course. Miss,” she hesitated just perceptibly—“Macklin,” she said, in triumph.