"All right, there you are," said Warren, himself shivering as he stood against the wall of the white passage. "There's where she got caught in the door. You see the blood on the rubber matting… "
The captain looked at him.
"Blood? What blood? I don't see any blood."
There was none, although Morgan knew it had been there. He took off his spectacles, wiped them, and looked again without result. And again he felt in the pit of his stomach that uneasy sensation that behind this foolery there was moving something monstrous and deadly.
"But—!" said Warren desperately. He stared at the captain, and then threw open the door of the state-room beside his.
The light in the roof was burning. The berth on which they had laid the injured girl was empty; the pillow was not disarranged, or the tucked-back sheets wrinkled. There was not even the smeared towel with which Peggy had wiped blood from the girl's face. A fresh towel, white and undisturbed, swung from the rack of the washstand.
"Yes?" said Captain Whistler stormily. "I'm waiting."
7 — Into Which Cabin?
In its own way that was the beginning. It was the mere prospect of an empty bed and a clean towel, not in themselves especially alarming things, which sent through Morgan a sense of fear such as he had not known even in the past during the case of the Eight of Swords, or was to know in the future during the case of the Two Hangmen. He tried to tell himself that this was absurd and was a part of the crack-brain comedy on C deck.
It wasn't. Afterwards he realised that what had struck him first was something about the position of those sheets…
During the brief moment of silence while they all looked into the white state-room, he thought of many things. That girl — he saw again her straight, heavy, classic face, with its strong eyebrows, twitching and blood-smeared against the pillow — that girl had been here. There was no question about that. Ergo, there were three explanations of why she was not here now.
She might have recovered consciousness, found herself alone in a strange cabin, and left it for her own. This sounded thin, especially as her injury had been severe and as a normal person on recovering consciousness would have called for help, kicked up a row, rung for the steward, at least shown sign of weakness or curiosity. But there was an even stronger reason. Before leaving the cabin, she would not have remade the bed. She would not carefully have put on fresh sheets and a pillow-case, in addition to disposing of a soiled towel and hanging another exactly in its place. Yet this had been done. Morgan remembered that, as they put her down, there had been spots of blood flicked on the sheet. He remembered that a lurch of the ship had caused the contents of a whisky-glass to soak the pillow and a part of the top sheet. The bed had been remade! but why and by whom?
The second explanation was a piece of fantasy which even Morgan doubted. Suppose.the girl had been acting? Suppose she was in league with their friend the joker; that she had only pretended being hurt to distract their attention while somebody rifled Warren's cabin? Ridiculous or not, that film had very dangerous potentialities in countries where it is not considered humorous to direct raspberries at the Chancellor. The world wags, and Progress brings back the solemn nonsense of autocracy. In England or the United States the thing would be regarded with levity, as the sort of diplomatic howler often perpetrated by a Tophat; but elsewhere—? Still, Morgan did not believe in any such abstruse plot. Aside from the fact that the joker could gain very little freedom of movement merely because he had got a woman to sham injuries in the next cabin, there was the question of the girl's condition. The dangerous contusion along the skull, the blood of n real cerebral haemorrhage, the white eyeballs uprolled In unconsciousness, were not feigned. She had been hurt, find badly hurt.
The third explanation he did not like to think of. But he was afraid of it. It was five miles, they said, to the bottom of the sea. As he saw weird images in the stuffy little cabin, he felt a jerk of relief — yes, in a way — that Peggy Glenn hud disregarded orders and had not stayed at the bedside. Somebody would have come in and found her there.
These thoughts were so rapid that Captain Whistler had spoken no more than one sinister sentence before Morgan turned round. The captain, his fat figure hunched into a waterproof, had lowered his head nearly into the collar. Under the full electric light the colours of his swollen face were even more of the paint-palette variety, especially the left eye that had closed up behind a purpling hatch. He knew that they were looking at this, and it made him madder still.
"Well?" he said. "What kind of a joke is this? Where's the woman you said was dying? Where's the woman you begged me to help? Blast my compass with lightning! What's your idea in wasting my time when there's fifty thousand pounds' worth of emeralds stolen somewhere on
this ship? There's nobody in that bunk. There's been nobody in that bunk." A ghoulish thought seemed to strike him. "You don't tell me there's anybody there now, do you? Come on, young man; you don't seriously think you see anybody there now, do you?"
He backed away a little, his eyes on Warren, "Barnacle," said Captain Valvick violently, "dere iss no yoke. Ay tell you he iss right! Ay saw her — ay have my fingers on her head. Ay carry her in here. She wass—" Words failed him. He strode over, seized the pillow out of the berth and shook it. He peered under the berth, and then into the one above. "Coroosh! You don't t'ink we are in de wrong place, do you?"
Peggy, who had been stretching her arms out of War- | ren's loose blue coat to push the hair from her eyes, seized i the captain's arm.]
"It's true, Captain. Oh, can't you see it's true? Do you think we could have been mistaken about a thing like that? There's my compact, see? I left it on the couch. She was here. I saw her. I touched her. Maybe she just woke up and left. She had on a yellow crepe de chine frock, a dark green coat with—"
Captain Whistler inspected each one of them with his good eye and then shut it up. Then he passed the back of' his hand across his forehead.
"I don't know what to make of you," he said. "So help! me Harry! I don't. Forty years I've been at sea, thirteen in sail and seventeen in steam, and I never saw the beat of it. Mr. Baldwin!"
"Sir!" answered the second officer, who had been standing outside the door with a blank expression on his face. "Yes, sir?"
"Mr. Baldwin, what do you make of all this?" "Well, sir," replied Mr. Baldwin doubtfully, "it's all these elephants and bears that bothers me, sir. Not knowing, can't say; but I'd got a bit of a notion we were tryin to round up a bleeding Zoo."
"I don't want to hear anything about elephants an bears, Mr. Baldwin. Will you shut up about elephants and bears? I asked you a plain question and want a plain answer. What do you think of this story about the woman?"
Mr. Baldwin hesitated. "Well, sir, they can't all be loonies, now, can they?"
"1 don't know," said the captain, inspecting them. "My God! I think I must be going mad, if they're not. I know nil of them — I don't think they're crooks — I know they wouldn't steal fifty thousand pounds' worth of emeralds. And yet look here." He reached over and touched the berth. "Nobody's lain on that, I'll swear, if there was the blood they say. Where's the towel they say they used, hey? Where's the blood they say was outside the door? The woman didn't change the linen on that bed and walk off with the towel, did she?"
"No," said Morgan, looking straight at him. "But somebody else might have. I'm not joking, Captain. Somebody else might have."