“And of course we get very good art classes, and last winter I had a course of—”
(How late was it? Surely very late. She had been talking and talking. If only something definite would happen—)
And immediately, as though in answer to her wish, something did happen. Only, at that moment, it seemed very natural.
Jacqueline turned her head and spoke to Simon Doyle.
“Ring the bell, Simon. I want another drink.”
Simon Doyle looked up from his magazine and said quietly: “The stewards have gone to bed. It’s after midnight.”
“I tell you I want another drink.”
Simon said: “You’ve had quite enough to drink, Jackie.”
She swung round at him.
“What damned business is it of yours?”
He shrugged his shoulders, “None.”
She watched him for a minute or two. Then she said: “What’s the matter, Simon? Are you afraid?”
Simon did not answer. Rather elaborately he picked up his magazine again.
Cornelia murmured: “Oh, dear—as late as that—I—must—”
She began to fumble, dropped a thimble….
Jacqueline said: “Don’t go to bed. I’d like another woman here—to support me.” She began to laugh again. “Do you know what Simon over there is afraid of? He’s afraid I’m going to tell you the story of my life.”
“Oh, really?”
Cornelia was the prey of conflicting emotions. She was deeply embarrassed but at the same time pleasurably thrilled. How—how black Simon Doyle was looking.
“Yes, it’s a very sad story,” said Jacqueline; her soft voice was low and mocking. “He treated me rather badly, didn’t you, Simon?”
Simon Doyle said brutally: “Go to bed, Jackie. You’re drunk.”
“If you’re embarrassed, Simon dear, you’d better leave the room.”
Simon Doyle looked at her. The hand that held the magazine shook a little, but he spoke bluntly.
“I’m staying,” he said.
Cornelia murmured for the third time, “I really must—it’s so late—”
“You’re not to go,” said Jacqueline. Her hand shot out and held the other girl in her chair. “You’re to stay and hear what I’ve go to say.”
“Jackie,” said Simon sharply, “you’re making a fool of yourself! For God’s sake, go to bed.”
Jacqueline sat up suddenly in her chair. Words poured from her rapidly in a soft hissing stream.
“You’re afraid of a scene, aren’t you? That’s because you’re so English—so reticent! You want me to behave ‘decently,’ don’t you? But I don’t care whether I behave decently or not! You’d better get out of here quickly—because I’m going to talk—a lot.”
Jim Fanthorp carefully shut his book, yawned, glanced at his watch, got up and strolled out. It was a very British and utterly unconvincing performance.
Jacqueline swung round in her chair and glared at Simon.
“You damned fool,” she said thickly, “do you think you can treat me as you have done and get away with it?”
Simon Doyle opened his lips, then shut them again. He sat quite still as though he were hoping that her outburst would exhaust itself if he said nothing to provoke her further.
Jacqueline’s voice came thick and blurred. It fascinated Cornelia, totally unused to naked emotions of any kind.
“I told you,” said Jacqueline, “that I’d kill you sooner than see you go to another woman…You don’t think I meant that? You’re wrong. I’ve only been—waiting! You’re my man! Do you hear? You belong to me….”
Still Simon did not speak. Jacqueline’s hand fumbled a moment or two on her lap. She leant forward.
“I told you I’d kill you and I meant it…” Her hand came up suddenly with something in it that flashed and gleamed. “I’ll shoot you like a dog—like the dirty dog you are….”
Now at last Simon acted. He sprang to his feet, but at the same moment she pulled the trigger….
Simon fell twisted—fell across a chair…Cornelia screamed and rushed to the door. Jim Fanthorp was on the deck leaning over the rail. She called to him.
“Mr. Fanthorp…Mr. Fanthorp….”
He ran to her; she clutched at him incoherently….
“She’s shot him—Oh! she’s shot him….”
Simon Doyle still lay as he had fallen half into and across a chair…Jacqueline stood as though paralysed. She was trembling violently, and her eyes, dilated and frightened, were staring at the crimson stain slowly soaking through Simon’s trouser leg just below the knee where he held a handkerchief close against the wound.
She stammered out:
“I didn’t mean…Oh, my God, I didn’t really mean….”
The pistol dropped from her nervous fingers with a clatter on the floor. She kicked it away with her foot. It slid under one of the settees.
Simon, his voice faint, murmured: “Fanthorp, for heaven’s sake—there’s someone coming…Say it’s all right—an accident—something. There mustn’t be a scandal over this.”
Fanthorp nodded in quick comprehension. He wheeled round to the door where a startled Nubian face showed. He said: “All right—all right! Just fun!”
The black face looked doubtful, puzzled, then reassured. The teeth showed in a wide grin. The boy nodded and went off.
Fanthorp turned back.
“That’s all right. Don’t think anybody else heard. Only sounded like a cork, you know. Now the next thing—”
He was startled. Jacqueline suddenly began to weep hysterically.
“Oh, God, I wish I were dead…I’ll kill myself.
I’ll be better dead…Oh, what have I done—what have I done?”
Cornelia hurried to her.
“Hush, dear, hush.”
Simon, his brow wet, his face twisted with pain, said urgently:
“Get her away. For God’s sake, get her out of here! Get her to her cabin, Fanthorp. Look here, Miss Robson, get that hospital nurse of yours.” He looked appealingly from one to the other of them. “Don’t leave her. Make quite sure she’s safe with the nurse looking after her. Then get hold of old Bessner and bring him here. For God’s sake, don’t let any news of this get to my wife.”
Jim Fanthorp nodded comprehendingly. The quiet young man was cool and competent in an emergency.
Between them, he and Cornelia got the weeping, struggling girl out of the saloon and along the deck to her cabin. There they had more trouble with her. She fought to free herself; her sobs redoubled.
“I’ll drown myself…I’ll drown myself….
I’m not fit to live…Oh, Simon—Simon!”
Fanthorp said to Cornelia: “Better get hold of Miss Bowers. I’ll stay while you get her.”
Cornelia nodded and hurried out.
As soon as she left, Jacqueline clutched Fanthorp.
“His leg—it’s bleeding—broken…He may bleed to death. I must go to him…Oh, Simon—Simon—how could I?”
Her voice rose. Fanthorp said urgently: “Quietly—quietly…He’ll be all right.”
She began to struggle again.
“Let me go! Let me throw myself overboard…Let me kill myself!”
Fanthorp holding her by the shoulders forced her back on to the bed.
“You must stay here. Don’t make a fuss. Pull yourself together. It’s all right, I tell you.”
To his relief, the distraught girl did manage to control herself a little, but he was thankful when the curtains were pushed aside and the efficient Miss Bowers, neatly dressed in a hideous kimono, entered, accompanied by Cornelia.
“Now then,” said Miss Bowers briskly, “what’s all this?”
She took charge without any sign of surprise and alarm.
Fanthorp thankfully left the overwrought girl in her capable hands and hurried along to the cabin occupied by Dr. Bessner. He knocked and entered on top of the knock.
“Dr. Bessner?”
A terrific snore
resolved itself, and a startled voice asked: “So? What is it?”
By this time Fanthorp had switched the light on. The doctor blinked up at him, looking rather like a large owl.
“It’s Doyle. He’s been shot. Miss de Bellefort shot him. He’s in the saloon. Can you come?”
The stout doctor reacted promptly. He asked a few curt questions, pulled on his bedroom slippers and a dressing-gown, picked up a little case of necessaries and accompanied Fanthorp to the lounge.
Simon had managed to get the window beside him open. He was leaning his head against it, inhaling the air. His face was a ghastly colour.
Dr. Bessner came over to him.
“Ha? So? What have we here?”
A handkerchief sodden with blood lay on the carpet, and on the carpet itself was a dark stain.
The doctor’s examination was punctuated with Teutonic grunts and exclamations.
“Yes, it is bad this…The bone is fractured. And a big loss of blood. Herr Fanthorp, you and I must get him to my cabin. So—like this. He cannot walk. We must carry him, thus.”
As they lifted him Cornelia appeared in the doorway. Catching sight of her, the doctor uttered a grunt of satisfaction.
“Ach, it is you? Goot. Come with us. I have need of assistance. You will be better than my friend here. He looks a little pale already.”
Fanthorp emitted a rather sickly smile.
“Shall I get Miss Bowers?” he asked.
“You will do very well, young lady,” he announced. “You will not faint or be foolish, hein?”
“I can do what you tell me,” said Cornelia eagerly.
Bessner nodded in a satisfied fashion.
The procession passed along the deck.
The next ten minutes were purely surgical and Mr. Jim Fanthorp did not enjoy it at all. He felt secretly ashamed of the superior fortitude exhibited by Cornelia.
“So, that is the best I can do,” announced Dr. Bessner at last. “You have been a hero, my friend.” He patted Simon approvingly on the shoulder. Then he rolled up his sleeve and produced a hypodermic needle.
“And now I will give you something to make you sleep. Your wife, what about her?”
Simon said weakly: “She needn’t know till the morning…” He went on: “I—you mustn’t blame Jackie…It’s been all my fault. I treated her disgracefully…poor kid—she didn’t know what she was doing….”
Dr. Bessner nodded comprehendingly.
“Yes, yes—I understand….”
“My fault—” Simon urged. His eyes went to Cornelia. “Someone—ought to stay with her. She might—hurt herself—”
Dr. Bessner injected the needle. Cornelia said, with quiet competence: It’s all right, Mr. Doyle. Miss Bowers is going to stay with her all night….”
A grateful look flashed over Simon’s face. His body relaxed. His eyes closed. Suddenly he jerked them open. “Fanthorp?”
“Yes, Doyle.”
“The pistol…ought not to leave it…lying about. The boys will find it in the morning….”
Fanthorp nodded. “Quite right. I’ll go and get hold of it now.”
He went out of the cabin and along the deck. Miss Bowers appeared at the door of Jacqueline’s cabin.
“She’ll be all right now,” she announced.
“I’ve given her a morphine injection.”
“But you’ll stay with her?”
“Oh, yes. Morphia excites some people. I shall stay all night.”
Fanthorp went on to the lounge.
Some three minutes later there was a tap on Bessner’s cabin door.
“Dr. Bessner?”
“Yes?” The stout man appeared.
Fanthorp beckoned him out on the deck.
“Look here—I can’t find that pistol….”
“What is that?”
“The pistol. It dropped out of the girl’s hand. She kicked it away and it went under a settee. It isn’t under that settee now.”
They stared at each other.
“But who can have taken it?”
Fanthorp shrugged his shoulders.
Bessner said: “It is curious, that. But I do not see what we can do about it.”
Puzzled and vaguely alarmed, the two men separated.
Thirteen
Hercule Poirot was just wiping the lather from his freshly shaved face when there was a quick tap on the door, and hard on top of it Colonel Race entered unceremoniously. He closed the door behind him.
He said: “Your instinct was quite correct. It’s happened.”
Poirot straightened up and asked sharply: “What has happened?”
“Linnet Doyle’s dead—shot through the head last night.”
Poirot was silent for a minute, two memories vividly before him—a girl in a garden at Assuan saying in a hard breathless voice: “I’d like to put my dear little pistol against her head and just press the trigger,” and another more recent memory, the same voice saying: “One feels one can’t go on—the kind of day when something breaks”—and that strange momentary flash of appeal in her eyes. What had been the matter with him not to respond to that appeal? He had been blind, deaf, stupid with his need for sleep….
Race went on: “I’ve got some slight official standing; they sent for me, put it in my hands. The boat’s due to start in half an hour, but it will be delayed till I give the word. There’s a possibility, of course, that the murderer came from the shore.”
Poirot shook his head.
Race acquiesced in the gesture.
“I agree. One can pretty well rule that out. Well, man, it’s up to you. This is your show.”
Poirot had been attiring himself with a neat-fingered celerity. He said now: “I am at your disposal.”
The two men stepped out on the deck.
Race said: “Bessner should be there by now. I sent the steward for him.”
There were four cabins de luxe, with bathrooms, on the boat. Of the two on the port side one was occupied by Dr. Bessner, the other by Andrew Pennington. On the starboard side the first was occupied by Miss Van Schuyler, and the one next to it by Linnet Doyle. Her husband’s dressing cabin was next door.
A white-faced steward was standing outside the door of Linnet Doyle’s cabin. He opened the door for them and they passed inside. Dr. Bessner was bending over the bed. He looked up and grunted as the other two entered.
“What can you tell us, Doctor, about this business?” asked Race.
Bessner rubbed his unshaven jaw meditatively.
“Ach! She was shot—shot at close quarters. See—here just above the ear—that is where the bullet entered. A very little bullet—I should say a twenty-two. The pistol, it was held close against her head, see, there is blackening here, the skin is scorched.”
Again in a sick wave of memory Poirot thought of those words uttered in Assuan.
Bessner went on: “She was asleep; there was no struggle; the murderer crept up in the dark and shot her as she lay there.”
“Ah! non!” Poirot cried out. His sense of psychology was outraged. Jacqueline de Bellefort creeping into a darkened cabin, pistol in hand—no, it did not “fit,” that picture.
Bessner stared at him with his thick lenses.
“But that is what happened, I tell you.”
“Yes, yes. I did not mean what you thought. I was not contradicting you.”
Bessner gave a satisfied grunt.
Poirot came up and stood beside him. Linnet Doyle was lying on her side. Her attitude was natural and peaceful. But above the ear was a tiny hole with an incrustation of dried blood round it.
Poirot shook his head sadly.
Then his gaze fell on the white painted wall just in front of him and he drew in his breath sharply. Its white neatness was marred by a big wavering letter J scrawled in some brownish-red medium.
Poirot stared at it, then he leaned over the dead girl and very gently picked up her right hand. One finger of it was stained a brownish-red.
“Non d’un
nom d’un nom!” ejaculated Hercule Poirot.
“Eh? What is that?”
Dr. Bessner looked up.
“Ach! That.”
Race said: “Well, I’m damned. What do you make of that, Poirot?”
Poirot swayed a little on his toes.
“You ask me what I make of it. Eh bien, it is very simple, is it not? Madame Doyle is dying; she wishes to indicate her murderer, and so she writes with her finger, dipped in her own blood, the initial letter of her murderer’s name. Oh, yes, it is astonishingly simple.”
“Ach, but—”
Dr. Bessner was about to break out, but a peremptory gesture from Race silenced him.
“So it strikes you that?” he asked slowly.
Poirot turned round on him nodding his head.
“Yes, yes. It is, as I say, of an astonishing simplicity! It is so familiar, is it not? It has been done so often, in the pages of the romance of crime! It is now, indeed, a little vieux jeu! It leads one to suspect that our murderer is—old-fashioned!”
“C’est de l’enfantillage,” agreed Poirot.
“But it was done with a purpose,” suggested Race.
“That—naturally,” agreed Poirot, and his face was grave.
“What does J stand for?” asked Race.
Poirot replied promptly: “J stands for Jacqueline de Bellefort, a young lady who declared to me less than a week ago that she would like nothing better than to—” he paused and then deliberately quoted, “‘to put my dear little pistol close against her head and then just press with my finger—’”
“Gott im Himmel” exclaimed Dr. Bessner.
There was a momentary silence. Then Race drew a deep breath and said: “Which is just what was done here?”
Bessner nodded.
“That is so, yes. It was a pistol of very small calibre—as I say, probably a twenty-two. The bullet has got to be extracted, of course, before we can say definitely.”
Race nodded in swift comprehension. Then he asked: “What about time of death?”