Murder On “B” Deck by Vincent Starrett

Author:Vincent Starrett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Media
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

It is the expected that happens, Shakespeare or the Bible to the contrary notwithstanding. Almost miraculously, the murder of the Countess Fogartini had been kept a secret for three days, and that in a community noted for its gossip. Now, suddenly, it was everywhere at once. The ship rocked, tardily, with the sensational news, and the fears of Walter Ghost were justified. Stern wives sent timid husbands careering after exasperated chief officers to ascertain the truth or falsity of the report. Brigades of women stormed the offices of lesser officials and all but demanded to be put ashore. Jennings, maintaining a precarious balance between truth and untruth, was driven almost distracted. Little groups stood about in the lounges and card rooms looking with suspicion upon all comers courageous enough to walk about unaccompanied.

Mollock, the town crier, whose intoxication had inaugurated the sinister gossip, nursed a swollen jaw in his stateroom while the grim tidings filtered through the ship. In nearly every other stateroom, however, Dame Rumour shuddered pleasantly over the horror or trod the shaking decks whispering its import. Between the clanging hour of the novelist’s personally conducted expedition and the less reverberating clamour of the dinner gong, the story of the battle and its motive had crossed the second-cabin barriers, idled at the luncheon tables, descended to the engine room, climbed the masts and stairways, and penetrated to every corner of the liner. At dinner it was the principal topic of conversation.

Exactly how or when the name of the Countess Fogartini entered the narrative it would have been difficult to discover. That Silks had been able to supply Underwood with the name of the noblewoman he had been accused of murdering seemed to Ghost a likely explanation, however, as far as the second cabin was concerned. As for the first cabin, once the whisper of murder had been heard, there could have been few who had failed to connect it with the missing countess. Her still vacant chair at the captain’s table was almost an official confession.

In the second-cabin dining room, the individual whose name appeared upon the passenger list as Daniel Cataract found himself a subject of deeper interest than the winner of the day’s pool. The women looked at him with fascinated horror, noting the adorable manner in which his graying hair curled at the temples. The men asked frank and leading questions, assuring him that his assailant had been an ass. The Rev. W. J. A. Saddletire, an unctuous nuisance, paused for a moment, in passing, to lay an arm across his shoulders, as to say, “Whatever this man may have done, observe that I do not hesitate to lend him the comfort and solace of my holy presence.”

The object of these attentions, harassed and angry, asserted emphatically enough that he had never to his knowledge laid eyes upon the murdered woman—if such a woman existed or ever had existed—but that for two cents, not an exorbitant sum, he would be very happy to visit the first cabin and quite permanently murder Dunstan Mollock.

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