The Blind Barber (12 page)

Obviously this had been at the back of his mind from the beginning, and he did not like to face it. His hands were clenched. There was a silence while Peggy put the passenger-list aside and also looked up.

“What iss de suggestion?” asked Captain Valvick.

“It’s a queer thing,” said Morgan. “We don’t want our pleasant farce to turn into something else, do we? But why do you think new sheets and maybe blankets were put on that berth?”

“All right,” said Warren, quietly. “Why?”

“Because there may have been more blood afterwards than
we
saw there. Steady, now.”

There was a silence. Morgan heard the breath whistling through Captain Valvick’s nostrils. With a jerk Warren turned round; he regarded the berth for a moment and then began tearing off the bedclothes.

The cabin creaked faintly …

“You may be wrong,” said Warren, “and I hope you are. I don’t believe anything like that. I
won’t
believe it. Pillow—top-sheet—blanket—under-sheet of the bed … It’s all right. Look.” He was holding them up, a weird figure in shirt-sleeves, with a brown blanket and a whirl of linen about him. “Look at it, damn you! Everything in order. What are you trying to scare us for? See, this sheet of the bed … Wait a minute … !”

“Take it off,” said Morgan, “and look at the mattress. I hope I’m wrong as much as you do.”

Peggy took one look, and then turned away, white-faced. Morgan felt a constriction in his throat as he stepped up beside Warren and Valvick. A blanket had been neatly spread under the sheet and over the mattress; but stains were already soaking through it. When they swept off the blanket, the colours of the blue-and-white striped mattress were not very distinguishable in a great sodden patch spread for some length down.

“Is it … ?” asked Morgan, and took a deep draw on his cigarette. “Is it … ?”

“Oh, yes. It iss blood,” said Captain Valvick.

It was so quiet that even across that distance Morgan imagined he could hear the liner’s bell. They were moving almost steadily now, with a deep throb below decks in the ship and a faint vibration of glassware. Also Morgan imagined the pale classic-faced girl lying unconscious, with the dim light burning above her in the berth, and the door opening as somebody came in …

“But what’s happened to her? Where is she now?” Warren asked, in a low voice. “Besides,” he added, with a sort of dull argumentative air—“besides, he couldn’t have done
that
with a blackjack.”

“And why should he do it, anyway?” asked Peggy, trying to control her voice. “Oh, it’s absurd! I won’t believe it! You’re scaring me! And—and, anyway, where did he get the linen for the bed? Where is she, and why? …
Oh, you’re trying to frighten me, aren’t you
?”

“Steady, Baby,” said Warren, taking her hand without removing his eyes from the bed. “I don’t know why he did it, or what he expected to gain by making the bed over. But we’d better cover that up again.”

Carefully putting down his pipe on the edge of the thrumming washstand, Morgan choked back his revulsion and bent over to examine the berth. The stains were still wet, and he avoided them as much as he could. So strung up was he into that queer, clear-brained, almost fey state of mind that sometimes comes in the drugged hours of the morning, that he was not altogether surprised when he heard something rattle deep down between mattress and bulkhead. He yanked over a corner of the sheet, wound it round his fingers, and groped.

“Better not look, old girl,” he said after a pause. “This won’t be pretty.”

Shielding the find with his body so that only Captain Valvick could see, he pulled it up in the sheet and turned it over in his palm. It was a razor, of the straight, old-fashioned variety, and closed; but it had recently been used. Rather larger than the ordinary size, it was an elaborate and delicate piece of craftsmanship with a handle so curiously fashioned that Morgan wiped the blood away to examine it.

The handle was of a wood that resembled ebony. Down one side ran a design picked out in thin silver and white porcelain. At first Morgan took it for an intricate nameplate, until, under cleaning, it became a man’s standing figure. The figure was possibly three inches high, and under it was a tiny plate inscribed with the word
Sunday
.

“Ay know,” said Captain Valvick, staring at it. “It iss one of a set of seven, one for every day of de week. Ay haff seen dose before. But what iss dat t’ing on it, like a man?”

The thin figure, in its silver and white and black, was picked out in a curious striped medieval costume, which recalled to Morgan’s mind vague associations with steel-cut engravings out of Doré. Surgeon, surgeon—barber, that was it! There was the razor in the thing’s fist. But most ugly and grotesque of all, the head of the figure was subtly like a death’s head, and a bandage was across the eyes so that the barber was—

“Blind,” said Warren, who was looking over his shoulder. “Put it away, Hank! Put it away. Blind … death and barber … end of the week. Somebody used that, and lost it or left it here. Put it away. Have a drink.”

Morgan looked at the evil and smeared design. He looked at the door, then at the white-painted bulkhead in the bunk, the tumbled bedclothes and the spotty brown blanket. Again he tried to picture the girl in the yellow frock lying here under a dim light, while the outside door was opening. So who was the girl, and where was she now, wrapped round in the soaked sheets that were here before? It was five miles to the bottom of the sea. They would never find her body now. Morgan turned round.

“Yes,” he said, “the Blind Barber has been here tonight.”

A
S THE HANDS OF THE
travelling-clock at the head of Morgan’s bed pointed to eight-thirty, he was roused out of a heavy slumber by the sound of an unmusical baritone voice singing with all the range of its off-keys. The voice singing, “A Life on the Ocean Wave.” It brought nightmares into his doze before he struggled awake. As he opened his eyes, the heartening bray of the breakfast bugle went past in the gangway outside, and he remembered where he was.

Furthermore, it was a heartening morning. His cabin—on the boat-deck—was filled with sunshine, and a warm salt-spiced breeze fluttered the curtain at the open porthole. It was winelike May again, with a reflected glitter of water at the porthole; and the ship’s engines churning steadily in a docile sea. He drew a deep breath, feeling a mighty uplift of the heart and a sensual longing for bacon and eggs. Then somebody threw a shoe at him, and he knew Warren was there.

Warren sat across from him on the couch under the porthole, smoking a cigarette. He wore white flannels, a careless blue coat, and a sportive tie; he showed not at all the rigours of last night, nor any depression of spirit. His hair was brushed smoothly again, unpropped by sticking-plaster. He said:

“Howdy, General,” and tipped his hand to his head. “Wake up, can’t you? Wow! it’s a beautiful morning! Even our old sea-beetle of a skipper is going to be in better temper to-day. All the sea-sick lads are beginning to creep out of their holes and say it was only something they ate, no doubt. Haaaaa!” Breathing deeply, he arched his chest, knocked his fists against it, and beamed with seraphic good-humour. “Get ready and come down to breakfast. This is an important morning in the lives of several people, including Captain Whistler.”

“Right,” said Morgan. “Find something to amuse yourself with while I catch a bath and dress … I suppose there’s some kind of story all over the boat about last night’s activities, isn’t there? We were doing a good deal of shouting out on that deck, now I remember it.”

The other grinned.

“There is. I don’t know how it happens, but there’s a kind of wireless telegraphy aboard these tubs that always gets a story even if it’s a little cockeyed. But I’ve only heard two versions so far. When I came out this morning, I heard an old dame in 310 raising hell with the stewardess. She was furious. She says six drunken men were standing outside her porthole all night, having a terrible argument about a giraffe, and she’s going to complain to the captain. I also passed two clergymen taking a morning stroll. One of them was telling the other some kind of a complicated story—I didn’t get much of it. It was something to the effect that the boat’s got in her hold a cargo of cages full of dangerous wild beasts, only they’re keeping it quiet so as not to alarm the passengers. In the storm last night the cages worked loose and the Bengal tiger was in danger of getting out, but a seaman named Barnacle got it back in its cage. The preacher said A. B. Barnacle was armed only with a whisky-bottle. He said the sailor must be a very brave man, although he used horrible language.”

“Come off it,” said Morgan, staring.

“So help me, it’s absolutely true!” the other declared fervently. “You’ll see for yourself.” His face clouded a little. “Look here, Hank. Have—have you thought any more about that
other
business?”

“The film?”

“Ah, hang the film! I’ll trust you. We’ll get it back somehow. No, I meant the—the
other
business, you know. It gives me the jitters. If it weren’t for that … that, and the fact that when I get my hands on the lousy, low-down skunk who—”

“Save it,” said Morgan.

His steward tapped on the door to tell him the bath was ready as usual; Morgan slid into a dressing-gown and went out into the breezy passage. Passing the outer door, he pushed it open a little way to put his head out and breathe the full exaltation of the morning. The warm air blew on him in a splendour of sunlight broadening along the horizon behind long pinkish-white streamers of cloud. There was a deep grey-green sea, stung with flecks of whitecaps and wrinkling under a glitter of sun that trembled up like heat haze. He looked up ahead to the long lift and fall of the bows; at the sweep of white cabins; at the red-mouthed air-funnels and brasswork of portholes awink with morning; he heard the monotonous break and swish of water past the bows, and felt that it was good. Everything was good. He even had a fleeting tenderness for Captain Whistler, who was probably now sitting with a beefsteak at his eye and sighing because he could not go down to breakfast. Good old Captain Whistler. There even occurred to him a wild idea that they might go to Whistler straightforwardly, man to man, and say, “Look here, skipper, it was a blinking shame we had to paste you in the eye last night and strew whisky-bottles all over your deck, and we’re sorry; so let’s forget it and be friends. Shall we?” But more sober reflection suggested to him that not all the good omens of the morning presaged enough magic to wangle this. Meanwhile, he dreamily sniffed the morning. He thought in joyous contentment of England and his wife Madeleine who would meet him at Southampton; of the holiday in Paris they would take on the money he had contrived to hypnotise out of gimlet-eyed publishers in America; of the little white hotel by the Ecole Militaire, where there were eels in the fountain of a little gravelled garden; and of other things not relevant to this chronicle.

But, while he bathed and shaved he reviewed the unpleasant side of the problem. He could still feel the horrible shock of finding that grotesque razor in the berth, and the blood under his fingers to mark the way of the Blind Barber. In a conference lasting until nearly four in the morning they had tried to determine what was best to do.

Warren and Valvick, as usual, were for direct action. The former thought it would be best to go straight to Whistler, taking the razor, and saying, “Now, you old so-and-so, if you think I’m crazy, what do you think of
this
?” Morgan and Peggy had dissented. They said it was a question of psychology and that you had to consider the captain’s frame of mind. In the skipper’s momentarily excited state, they said, Warren might just as well tell him he had gone back to his cabin and discovered a couple of buffaloes grazing on the furniture. Better wait. In the morning Whistler would institute a search and find a woman missing; then they could go to him and vindicate themselves. Ultimately, it was so agreed.

With the razor safely locked away in Morgan’s bag, and the berth on C deck made up in case a steward should become curious, Morgan again discussed the plan with Warren while he dressed that morning. For the moment, Morgan deliberately kept himself from speculating on the hows and whys of the (alleged) murder last night. There were things to come first. Shortly the ship would be buzzing with the news of the recovery of the emerald elephant. Afterwards, with this weight removed from the skipper’s microscopic intelligence, they could soothe him back to belief in a throat-cutting. Then would come the real duel with the Blind Barber.

“What I want to know,” said Warren, as they descended to the dining-saloon, “is whether it’ll be Dr. Kyle or the Perrigords who find the emerald. I still have my suspicions … ”

“Of the medical profession?” asked Morgan. “Nonsense! But I would rather like to see Dr. Kyle shaken out of his calm. Jove! you were right! The boat’s waking up. We’ll have the sick-list down to a minimum by this afternoon. Look at all the kids. If old Jules Fortinbras has got his sea legs—”

The dining-saloon was full of sunlight and murmurous with an eager clatter of knives and forks. Stewards beamed and did tricks with trays. There were more people out for breakfast at the unholy hour of eight-thirty than there had been for dinner last night. But at the captain’s table sat only one solitary figure—Dr. Kyle, sturdily plying knife and fork. Dr. Kyle was a trencherman after the fashion of the lairds in Sir Walter Scott. He could mess up a plate of fried eggs with a dispatch that would have roused the envious approval of Nicol Jarvie or that foreigner, Athelstane.

“Good morning!” said Dr. Kyle, with unexpected affability, and rolling round his shoulder, he looked up. “A fine day, a fine day. Good morning, Mr. Warren. Good morrrrning, Mr. Morgan. Sit down.”

The other two looked at each other and strove to dissemble. Every morning, hitherto, Dr. Kyle had been perfectly polite, but hardly interested or communicative. He had conveyed an impression that his own society was all he cared to cultivate. A solid large-boned figure in black, with his well-brushed greyish hair and the furrows carven down his cheeks, he had devoted himself to food with the concentration of a surgical operation. Now he had an almost raffish appearance. He wore a tweed suit, with a striped tie, and his grizzled eyebrows were much less Mephistophelian as he welcomed them with a broad gesture. It was, Morgan supposed, the weather …