Found Floating, page 26
What would have been the feelings of Luke and Eva then? They had risked their lives and liberties, given immense trouble and suffering to themselves and their family, and gained—nothing whatever! Their problem remained just as acute as ever. It was necessary to take some new step.
Then came convalescence and the decision to go on this Olympic cruise. No doubt the Dugdales had agreed that their attempt must be repeated, this time with success. No doubt they had been watching for an opportunity of carrying it out, probably devising scheme after scheme. At last they devised one which seemed satisfactory. If they could get Mant alone at night in some deserted spot near Patricia, they could see their way. When they reached Ceuta and noticed the long, deserted pier, they felt that this was the place. It was decided—had the Dugdales anything to do with it?—that Mant would go ashore. Here was the chance they had been waiting for.
It now became necessary to arrange that they themselves, and Mant, should go ashore alone but separately. As far as they themselves were concerned, this was easy. But they were faced with the difficulty that Old William proposed to go with Mant. What was to be done? Their former plan of the poisoning occurred to them. By Eva directing the attention of the party away from Luke, Luke was able to lean over and let a drop of poison fall on William’s food. Probably this also was arsenic.
After dinner Luke and Eva went ashore and took cover to wait for Mant. He might not, of course, have been alone: he might have accompanied other passengers, in which case the plan would be postponed. But, as it happened, he was alone, and they joined on. Then doubtless Eva held him in talk while Luke slipped behind him and sandbagged him.They had their rope with them, and they made it fast to the body and lowered it into the sea.
So far French could go with reasonable ease. But when he tried to reconstruct the next step he found himself entirely baffled. In the light of his recent discoveries, it seemed clear that the Dugdales had then got the body somehow on board Patricia, there hiding it so extremely well that no one suspected its presence. About half-past four in the morning they somehow threw it into the sea, removing all trace of what they had done.
All that evening French wrestled with his problem, and that night he lay awake in his berth while Patricia rolled over a heavy ground swell which was setting northwards up the Ionian Sea. He could not sleep. He must find some solution. He had got so far with the case that the remainder must be comparatively easy. As had happened in countless instances before, he told himself that what another man had done, he could do. The Dugdales had devised a plan to meet these conditions. Well, he could do the same.
But he didn’t: not till daylight was shining in through his porthole. Then suddenly he could have kicked himself. There was a perfectly simple and obvious way out.
Suppose before they went ashore after dinner the Dugdales had hung a rope out of their porthole? Suppose after killing Mant, Dugdale had found a boat and towed the body to the side of the ship? Their cabin was on the starboard side, and the ship was lying facing out to sea, with her port side against the mole. Suppose Dugdale had then tied the body to the rope from the porthole, replaced the boat, and gone into the town with his wife? Suppose on returning to the ship they had pulled in the rope, so that the body was raised out of the water? Or even so that it was left in the water and would be towed along? In either case, in the darkness of the night, it would not be seen. Then when they were out sufficiently far from the shore, all they had to do was to cut the rope, and all trace of their crime was hidden. No doubt before throwing the body into the sea the necessary weight to sink it had been attached.
French was delighted with his theory. It met the facts, and as it seemed to be the only one which would do so, it must, he thought, be true.
Presently powerful confirmation of the idea occurred to him. The chief engineer had pointed out that the time that the body would take to sink to propeller level would be such that, in the case of a ship of any size, it must have been thrown into the water near the stern. Now the Dugdales’ cabin was near the stern,
But still, French saw, there remained the greatest problem of all: How was he going to prove his theory? So far he had no evidence which would be worth two pins in a law court. No, before his case was finished, he must do a lot better.
Usually he had found that in what seemed at first sight perfect schemes of murder, a really careful consideration showed previously unsuspected flaws. Fortunately for the security of the public, few such plans were completely watertight. Was there in this plan of the Dugdales’ any intrinsic or fundamental flaw, which, if he could only find it, would give him the proof he needed?
As he was considering the point he grew sleepy. With a grunt of satisfaction with the progress he had made, he turned over and did his best to recover the sleep that he had lost earlier.
20
The Decision of William
When French woke a couple of hours later he found they were rolling more heavily than they had yet done. He shaved with some little difficulty and went on deck. The morning was fresh and clear and the sun brilliant, but the wind was high. It screamed through the deck fittings and made him cling on to the rail and to his cap. The sea he thought really rough, but the second officer told him it was only ‘much furrowed’, or not more than about eight feet from trough to crest. French would have said the waves were two or three times as high, but whatever their dimensions, their beauty was unquestionable. Delighted to find he was not ill, he watched them with joy. Their colouring was superb: the deepest ultramarine, dancing and scintillating in the sun, and crested with dazzling white. Whole separate series of waves he could trace, On the great fundamental rollers were others, forming on their sides what he would have called an ordinary choppy sea. These bore still smaller waves, and on the smallest were ripples. Fascinated, he felt he could watch them forever.
About a mile to port and moving parallel with Patricia was a tramp of perhaps a thousand tons. She was fairly wallowing. She would put down her bow as if she were going to dive to the bottom, then raise it in a smother of white water and foam. French could see her screw come out high and dry at times, while at others the blades slashed the water, throwing up cascades like an irregular and spasmodic fountain. He was glad, as he watched her, of the comparative stolidity of Patricia.
Presently matter triumphed over mind, and he went below to breakfast in a sadly depleted saloon. No one had yet arrived at his table, and as he ate alone his thoughts inevitably returned to his case.
In the cold light of day he was more critical of his conclusions than during the more fevered night. That theory he had evolved was very ingenious, but was it true? Almost at once a fact occurred to him which caused him to wonder.
He had assumed that during the night the body had been hung by a rope from the Dugdales’ porthole, either above or below water level. But was this a tenable assumption?
It was clearly impossible, he thought, that the body should have been below water level while the ship was moving. To drag a body through water at the rate of fifteen or sixteen knots would require great force. If it didn’t break the rope, it would surely injure the body. The clothes would be torn off and the rope would cut deeply into the flesh. Therefore, from three till four-thirty at least, the body must have been drawn up out of the water.
But was this possible either? Would the pressure of the rope not mark the body under these circumstances also? French was certain that it would. Even if the rope had been put round the chest beneath the arms, an hour and a half’s swinging on it would have caused post-mortem bruising and discolouration.
But the body showed no signs of such bruising, save for the one mark half round the right ankle. Was it conceivable that the Dugdales had tied the rope to the ankles? French couldn’t believe it. Somehow it wouldn’t be human nature to do so. To tie a sinker to the ankles was different. But to haul a body up, the rope would be put round the chest or wrists.
But there was a further consideration, and rather a devastating one. If the body had been hauled up by the ankles, certain objects which were found in the pockets would have fallen out. The coins in the trouser pockets might conceivably have remained, but the pocket-book in the breast-pocket of the coat would certainly have been lost. The more French thought over this point, the more convincing he found it.
If then he were right, the body had not been swung from a porthole. And if it had not been swung from a porthole, his theory was false. The Dugdales could not be guilty. French swore beneath his breath.
How he wished he could find out something definite. It was all very well to go on supposing what might have happened, but at best this only produced theory. What he wanted was certainty. Had the Dugdales committed this crime or had they not? That was the immediate question, and he could find no answer to it.
He moved like a brooding spirit about the ship, trying to find a deserted place in which he might attack the problem once again. His own special preserve on the forward well-deck was impossible this morning, not only from the wind, but from the mist of flying spindrift which came up over the side and from which everything on the decks was streaming. He thought he would go back to his cabin, like the majority of his fellow passengers. His berth would be as good a place for rumination as any, and he knew his cabin mate was on deck.
He lay down and began to think. But for a long time he made no progress. The affair seemed insoluble. He had an urge to go and consult the captain again, but he felt that he couldn’t depend on Goode for everything and must do some of the work himself.
As he lay looking at the reflections of the sea on the white woodwork a further idea suddenly struck him. That steward who had called the Dugdales to the captain’s enquiry! Had he by chance noticed their porthole? Could he say definitely that a rope had not been fixed to it?
Ten minutes later he was interviewing the steward. The man stated he had been in all three cabins occupied by members of the party on that evening, and he had noticed that in all of them the portholes were closed. He knew this because that evening there had been some difference of opinion about the portholes. The night was cold and he had shut them all. Some passengers had opened theirs again. None of the Carrington party had done so.
A glance showed French that a porthole could not be shut if a rope passed through it. Therefore, definitely he was wrong in his theory. He was in fact no further on than when he had started.
He felt baffled and exasperated. The problem had seemed easy and straightforward at first sight, but it was turning out one of the worst he had ever tackled. He knew the man had been murdered. He knew where. He knew how. He knew almost certainly who had done it. And he could obtain neither the complete details, nor proof of the guilt of his suspects. It was not good enough, he told himself severely. He must do a lot better.
But it was one thing to make a resolve, another to carry it out. For two hours he tossed in his berth, worrying over the affair.
Then at last a smile broke on his face. Fool that he had been! His theory had been right all the time, but he had missed just one small part of it.
Suppose the Dugdales had done exactly what he had already imagined, from the moment they left the ship up to the time they returned on board? If so, they would reach their cabin to find the body in the harbour beneath them, but anchored by a rope through the porthole. Why should they not then have pulled it up into the cabin? There would be no difficulty in getting it through the porthole. All these portholes are made, by Act of Parliament, large enough for a large-bodied man to pass through. There was ample space beneath the berth to have hidden the body behind their suitcases. Then at half-past four they could have opened the porthole and pushed it out.
French was pleased. This theory would meet the case. At last he could be certain of what had been done.
But could he, after all? He was far from being convinced in his own mind. Then be saw that two tests were available. The first was: At what hour had the steward closed the portholes? If before the return of Luke Dugdale—for Mrs Dugdale could never have got the body in alone—he was still far from the truth. The second was that the body could scarcely have been pulled in without wetting the berth beneath the porthole. Had that been done?
French immediately made a second call upon the long-suffering steward. And then at once he was plunged into a deeper slough of despair than ever. The steward had closed the portholes about ten o’clock, except in the case of old Mr Carrington, who had himself closed his earlier. That was before Mrs Dugdale had returned to the cabin and a considerable time before Dugdale had done so.
The matter was so completely decided by this evidence that it did not seem worth while asking the further question about whether the man had noticed traces of sea water in the cabin. French’s general training, however, made him do so.
The reply was unexpected. There had been no sea water in the Dugdales’ cabin, but the next day he had noticed slight traces of it in Mr William Carrington’s. Mr Carrington had explained that they had been caused by his tripping and falling against the wall behind the berth while wet from a plunge in the swimming pool, which was next to his cabin. French remembered that he had heard that William had had a bathe on his return from Tetuan. A swim was the one thing on board that the old man seemed really fond of.
No help there, thought French. Even if he had suspected William, William had not been ashore, and even if he had been in league with the Dugdales, French was satisfied he could never have pulled the body up single-handed. Mant was a big and heavy man and William was an invalid, and sick into the bargain. Nor could the Dugdales have gone to William’s cabin on their arrival and pulled up the body. The porthole was closed when the steward was sent to call the doctor.
No, French was further from the truth than ever. Discouraged and very tired, he went up to try to find someone sufficiently inured to the sea to join him at deck quoits.
Play on the heaving deck involved such concentration that for the time being French forgot all about his case. He played three games before lunch—draws, as neither side scored anything—and then, French’s table mates still being hors de combat, his partner kept him company during the meal. It was not till after it was over and French was going up on deck to have another look at the sea that his thoughts turned back to the real object of his trip.
Then an idea struck him which brought him up, as it were, all standing. He moved on like an automaton to the rail and stood gazing outwards, but in reality seeing nothing but the implications of this new conception.
The more he did so, the more his excitement grew. Wonderingly, tremulously, he asked himself the question: Had he got his solution? Wondering, tremulously, he became more and more convinced that he had. Yes, truly he believed he had! As he considered it, detail after detail fell into line and the whole affair took on a coherence which would permit of no explanation other than that it was the truth.
Yes, he could see now what had happened on that deserted wharf at Ceuta. At last it was plain how the body had reached the point at which it was picked up. No longer did the question of the closed portholes present a difficulty.
All was now clear as day. And not what happened at Ceuta only. French was equally satisfied that he knew just what had taken place in the old house in Bromsley. He was not investigating two cases, but one. He had at least been right in assuming that the second attempt to murder Mant Carrington had taken place only because the first had failed.
He was more delighted than he could have said. Here once again was success. It had been a problem of enormous difficulty. So much the better: his success was correspondingly greater. Once again he had vindicated himself and upheld the prestige of the Yard.
But, as so often happens, second thoughts were less rosy. It was true he had guessed what had happened, and this was of course splendid. But, from another point of view, he was not so much further on. It was little use to know what had taken place, unless he could prove it in a court of law. And he couldn’t prove it even to himself. No, however satisfied he might be as to its truth, his new theory still remained pure surmise.
He saw that he had been a little too quick in his self-congratulations. He was doing well: but he had not done. More work was needed to reach a conclusion. And he didn’t quite see what that work was to consist of.
Presently his first reactions to the idea passed away, and he settled down to think the matter out in detail. Then he saw that there was one enquiry which he could make without further delay. He drew a pad towards him and wrote a message to the chief of the Sydney police. Would that officer kindly wireless to him a précis of Mant Carrington’s history, as far as this could be learnt. The answer, he believed, would not only finally confirm or refute his theory, but if the former, would constitute an invaluable piece of evidence for the future trial.
Believing that he could do nothing more until he received his reply, French tried to banish the case from his mind and give himself up to the pleasure of the trip. He saw with growing regret that if he were right in his new ideas, the cruise had for him very nearly reached an end.
The wind by this time had dropped and the sea was already falling, and Patricia was moving along in a much more sober gait. After tea, deck quoits became a practical proposition, and he had the satisfaction of beating his former opponent. By dinner time only a slow roll remained and once again they had a full complement of diners.
Next morning French received at once a thrill and a disappointment. He went on deck to find Patricia lying in a large harbour dotted with shipping, mostly of the smaller types. Her bow pointed to a wide street which ran along its shoreward side. The houses in this street were built in isolated square blocks, and there was a slight suggestion of untidiness in their irregular distribution. Somehow it looked to French as if a fine modern city had been begun, and that the builders had grown tired when half-way through. But the street was busy and there were evidences of a moderate prosperity.
