The Pleasure Cruise Mystery (24 page)

“Forewarned is forearmed,” thought Vereker, but to make doubly sure he drew an automatic pistol from its box in his case, slipped it into the pocket of his dinner jacket and went down to the dining-room.

Next morning Heather arrived just after Vereker had breakfasted and, having sent Dobbs into Eastbourne for a supply of a special tobacco sold only by a tobacconist in the Terminus Road, a ruse suggested by the resourceful inspector, the two men descended to the refrigerating chamber. There Heather took the necessary photographs of the finger-prints on the insulated door and scraped off sufficient of the clots and smudges to enable him to have the precipitin test for human blood applied. They then went up to the library to have what Heather called “a special board meeting” on the whole case.

“Now, Mr. Vereker,” said the inspector when they were both seated at the library table, “I have been thinking a great deal about your murder mystery since I left you, but for the life of me I can't come to any definite conclusions. I'd have solved the problem long ago if I'd been on the spot, but I want more facts. Facts are my strong point. I'm not Sherlock Holmes's brother, who could sit in his armchair and give you a satisfactory answer to your questions by sheer imaginative reasoning. I'm only a poor C.I.D. man, and we're not quite as bright as that. Before we go any further, however, and from the facts you've given me, I make one startling deduction.”

“Out with it, Heather!”

“You've struck one great difficulty in your investigation, and that is the identity of the body found on the deck and which has been accepted by nearly all concerned as that of Mrs. Mesado. You're right, Heather, but I think I've decided that point.”

“Well, what's your conclusion?”

“My conclusion is that the body found on D deck of the liner ‘Mars' was not the body of Mrs. Mesado at all, but that of her sister, Amy Diss, or Maureen O'Connor as she afterwards called herself,” said Vereker quietly.

“I'd like to hear how you arrived at it, Mr. Vereker.”

“I'll give you my reasons. The first factors which made me scent that there was some mystery about the Colvins and Mrs. Mesado was a conversation which I overheard in my cabin. Mrs. Mesado's cabin was next to mine. She and her brother-in-law were having a heated discussion, and Mrs. Mesado warned him that he would have to ‘do the job as soon as possible'. He was on the defensive and hinted at the risks. A missing necklace was mentioned, and was called Maureen's necklace. This necklace has given me endless trouble, because it has run all along in harness with the story of a very strange murder, and I have had some difficulty in disentangling them and keeping the two threads apart. But for the present we'll keep strictly to the murder. The night following the one on which I overheard this discussion in Mrs. Mesado's cabin there was a scream from the lady, and high words between her and Richard Colvin. Mrs. Mesado said, ‘Dick, it's all up,' and he replied, ‘You're not going to leave this cabin, Beryl.' Mrs. Mesado replied, ‘Remember it's murder. Damn you, get out of my way!' There were sounds of a brief struggle, a door slammed and all was silence. Now this occurred just after half-past one, say between one-thirty and a quarter to two. The time is most important, Heather, as it frequently is in such cases.”

“One-thirty and a quarter to two,” repeated Heather and jotted the note down on a sheet of paper.

“I immediately jumped from my bed and was wondering what action I should take in a very difficult business when I heard something rattle on the floor behind me. I was under the impression that something had fallen off my dressing table, but on examination found I was mistaken.”

“That was the necklace which it's certain Mrs. Mesado flung into your window in the belief that it was the window of her own cabin. We can assume that she must have been alive and on the starboard side of D deck at that hour.”

“Exactly, Heather. I found the necklace later on in the morning, but at the moment the necklace is an irrelevant intrusion beyond the fact that it possibly clears up the point of Mrs. Mesado being alive and active at quarter to two.”

“She vanished from that moment, anyhow, and that's significant enough!” remarked the inspector.

“Don't interrupt me for a moment, Heather; I want to make my story absolutely clear. At two o'clock Ricardo rapped on my window, and after some hesitation I went out to see what he wanted. I found him standing over the body of a woman. Dressed in Mrs. Mesado's blue georgette evening gown and evening shoes and very much like her facially, except for the strange difference caused in the appearance of a human face by death, I hastily assumed, as Ricardo had done, that it was Mrs. Mesado. You must remember—and this is a cardinal point with me—that I had never seen the lady absolutely face to face. My error was excusable to a certain extent, but a bad error from a detective's point of view.”

“We'll forgive you provisionally. Go on, Mr. Vereker.”

“I sent Ricardo for the ship's doctor and made a very hasty examination of the body. I came to the conclusion that the lady was dead or on the point of death. If she was not dead, life was so nearly extinct that it was undiscernible under such a cursory inspection by a layman. Two very interesting facts I gathered, however. First, though the lady was in evening dress she was wearing a pair of ordinary chamois leather gauntlets. I pulled these off and found both hands terribly cut and bruised. The flesh was sticking to the gloves owing to the congealing of the blood of her wounds.”

“She was alive at quarter to two, and this was at two o'clock. Where were your wits, Mr. Vereker?” asked Heather.

“Wool gathering. I was working at a big disadvantage. The whole business was too sudden and fantastic for me to think coldly. Never mind. Secondly, on the right forefinger was a marquise ring out of which two stones, an emerald and a ruby, were missing. There was, moreover, no signet ring on her left hand. Still a woman changes her rings as readily as her mind, so I couldn't make much of this point. I noted her blue satin shoes, and on feeling them remarked that they were certainly a size too large for her. Few women, even for comfort, wear dress shoes that are too easy, and the fact made me ponder.”

“It ought to have hit you in the face like a straight left,” remarked Heather with a malicious smile.

“I felt it as a mere flick at the moment. The doctor, Ricardo and Fuller, the night steward, immediately appeared on the scene. Fuller and I carried the body down to Mrs. Mesado's cabin, where the doctor solemnly announced that the lady was dead. I could see Macpherson was worrying about how the whole business affected the ship's point of view rather than anything else. He tactfully got rid of Ricardo and me and sent for the dead woman's sister and brother-in-law. I missed seeing their psychological reaction to the dreadful news and was terribly disappointed and handicapped.”

“That psychology stunt will be the ruin of you as a 'tec, Mr. Vereker. Stick to facts; they never let you down too badly,” remarked Heather, lighting his pipe with slow satisfaction.

“When Ricky and I were alone together in my cabin I got from him the story of his discovery of the body,” continued Vereker, heedless of the inspector's sarcasm. “Just prior to his find he had made a detour of the promenade deck and near the window of my cabin saw what he thought to be a man and woman in a lovers' embrace, or, as he put it, in the conventional osculatory pose.

“What's the English for that?” asked Heather.

“He thought the man was bending over the woman and kissing her.”

“That young man's thoughts will land him in trouble yet if his language doesn't.”

“By this time,” continued Vereker, “I was already beginning to make contact with reality. I jumped wildly at a theory and presumed on the strength of it that the ‘lovers' had been Colvin with Mrs. Mesado's body. I concluded that he had been about to heave the body overboard when he was surprised by Ricardo's sudden appearance and, being a man whose nerves were sadly on edge through drink, got the wind up badly, dropped the lady and rushed back to his cabin.”

“Not bad for a wild guess,” suggested Heather, shoving a thick forefinger into the bowl of his pipe.

“Funnily enough it was correct up to a point,” laughed Vereker. “To proceed with my yarn, I asked Ricardo if he had noticed anything strange about the dead woman's appearance. He simply remarked that her face was considerably altered in death, that her clothes looked as if they had been pulled about and that she was wearing ordinary chamois leather gauntlets with evening dress. You see, Ricky was observant but not acutely observant. He ought to have spotted the fact that, though the body was dressed in Mrs. Mesado's evening gown and shoes, it was not the body of Mrs. Mesado, even though they were very much alike. He had seen Mrs. Mesado face to face.”

“His lack of trained observation helped to mislead you, Mr. Vereker,” agreed Heather.

“Yes, in spite of my dawning suspicion that there was something very strange about the whole business. Eventually Ricardo left my cabin, and I was about to turn in when Colvin knocked on my door and I admitted him. He was, as I expected him to be, in a highly nervous state, but after a drink he pulled himself together and said he had come to thank Ricky and me on behalf of his wife and himself for the trouble we had taken and the help we had given over the sad matter of his sister-in-law's death. He then told me Mrs. Mesado had suffered from serious heart trouble and that they had been led by her medical adviser to expect her sudden collapse and death at any moment. He added that she had apparently been quite well when he saw her last, which was at ten p.m. I knew this statement to be a deliberate lie as far as time was concerned, but I applied my knowledge in the wrong direction in drawing an inference from it. I promptly accepted the fact that the dead woman must be Mrs. Mesado; indeed, up to this point I hadn't seriously questioned the identity of the body, but I leapt to the conclusion that he was lying about the time in order to cover his own guilt. Provisionally I mentally jotted him down as a suspect of the murder of Mrs. Mesado, and concluded that he had only paid me this visit to find out whether I'd overheard him quarrelling with her as late as one forty-five.”

“You were a bit hasty, Mr. Vereker, but I can see the circumstances were extraordinarily complicated and difficult. I don't think I'd have fallen into the identity error so easily,” remarked Heather gravely.

“I'm not so sure, Heather. Let me repeat that I had never seen the lady face to face myself. Neither Fuller nor the doctor had taken the slightest notice of the lady prior to her death even if they had seen her. The stewardesses, who might have shed a light on the matter, never saw the body after death. Ricardo overlooked any difference in appearance, and finally her own sister and brother-in-law offered not the slightest hint that the body was not Mrs. Mesado's. This act of theirs completely deceived me at first. By suggestion the human mind slips into the grossest errors with fatal ease, Heather. I stress this point very emphatically. Suggestion permeates and works miracles in the whole realm of human psychology. Immediately you depart from concrete facts you enter into the dominion of its strange power. Suggestion is at the heart's core of all advertisement and propaganda; it lurks, dangerous, in a rhetorical outburst, in a polemic, in soft persuasion. It rings in the melody of a poem, in the yearning of a lover's voice; it snarls in a maniac's threat!”

“You're trying it on me now,” remarked Heather with a bland smile.

“That's irrelevant, Heather. Let me proceed. I accepted the tacit admission of the Colvins that the body was that of Beryl Mesado without objection. The very absence of any protestation on their part, their silence, swept me on to acceptance with the force of a mighty current. I was completely at the mercy of the working of my own mind—of the human mind in general. It instinctively responded to suggestion, was temporarily hypnotised. I was under the power of an idea, and an idea once formed is almost infrangible. It was only the subsequent persistence of glaring discrepancies and the critical elasticity of my own brain that freed me from my complete domination by that idea.”

“Tell us how you performed this little miracle, Mr. Vereker. I like to know how you do these bright things,” said Heather calmly.

“The very first inkling I had that I'd made some error in identity was given me by the question of the dead lady's jewellery. I've told you the story of the two missing necklaces; and the fact that Mrs. Mesado had called one of these Maureen's necklace introduced a mysterious Maureen among the
dramatis personae
. I openly asked Colvin at a later date who Maureen was, and he lied and told me it was a name Beryl Mesado had assumed when she was a ballet dancer. Since then we've found out who Maureen is. But prior to this I was assailed by continuous glaring discrepancies. I'll detail them for your future guidance in investigation. The gloves on the hands of the dead woman were too big for her and were initialled C. C., clearly showing they belonged to Constance Colvin. Mrs. Mesado's gloves, of an exactly similar make, were marked B.M., and it was evident that the two sisters wore the same size of glove, and as they lived together they had taken the precaution to initial them to prevent confusion as to ownership. I found a pair of Mrs. Mesado's chamois leather gauntlets in her cabin drawer, and found that my assumption was correct. Yet the lady whose dead hands were encased in Constance's gloves was wearing gloves much too large for her. Her hands were more than a size smaller! I did not stress the importance of this point at the time, owing to the fact that chamois leather gloves shrink after being washed and might be purchased a size too large for preliminary wear. It was splitting hairs, but I'm over cautious at times. Later in the morning, when I accompanied Colvin into Mrs. Mesado's cabin and had a good look at the body once more, I made a startling discovery. The dead lady parted her hair on the right side of her head, and I knew from the one clear view I'd had of Mrs. Mesado's hair that hers was parted on the left. The colour of the hair was fair in both cases, but Beryl's was a good deal lighter than that of the deceased. The dress shoes on the dead lady's feet were a size too large for her, her dress too ample in the girth. She had evidently taken off a wedding ring and a signet ring from her left hand and wore a marquise ring on her right forefinger. Two of the stones of this ring were missing. The injuries on her hands which the Colvins said had been caused by a car smash troubled me, for I was certain that Mrs. Mesado's left hand, which I had seen just after we had set sail, was uninjured when I saw it. Ricardo rather confused me on this point by suggesting I had seen Constance Colvin in Beryl's cabin. Now Constance wore a signet ring on her left hand, but she parted her hair on the right side like Maureen, the dead lady. Moreover, when Colvin went through Mrs. Mesado's jewel-case in search of a necklace I noted the fact that there was no signet ring and no wedding ring among her effects. I naturally asked myself where they had gone. I was now smelling a rat very strongly. I picked up Mrs. Mesado's passport, and though the accompanying portrait was certainly something like the lady whose body lay on the cabin bed I concluded it was not
her
portrait. The hair parting was again the vital difference. I then opened the cabin wardrobe and, though Mrs. Mesado had worn a black and white check costume for morning wear, there was no such costume among all her clothes! This was a revelation, Heather!”