The Widow's Cruise Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Nicholas Blake

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Embarkation

  Fraternisation

  Annihilation

  Investigation

  Elucidation

  More from Vintage Classic Crime

  Copyright

  About the Book

  When Nigel Strangeways books tickets for a holiday in the Greek islands with renowned sculptor Claire Massinger, he has no idea that the trip will end in tragedy.

  From the moment the boat sets sail it becomes clear that many of his fellow passengers – from a neurotic widow to the ship’s lecturer – have guilty secrets to hide, but do any of them also have a motive for murder? It will take all of Nigel’s insight and flair if he is to uncover the truth.

  About the Author

  Nicholas Blake was the pseudonym of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who was born in County Laois, Ireland, in 1904. After his mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, spending summer holidays with relatives in Wexford. He was educated at Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927. Blake initially worked as a teacher to supplement his income from his poetry writing and he published his first Nigel Strangeways novel, A Question of Proof, in 1935. Blake went on to write a further nineteen crime novels, all but four of which featured Nigel Strangeways, as well as numerous poetry collections and translations.

  During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information, which he used as the basis for the Ministry of Morale in Minute for Murder, and after the war he joined the publishers Chatto & Windus as an editor and director. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968 and died in 1972 at the home of his friend, the writer Kingsley Amis.

  Also by Nicholas Blake

  A Question of Proof

  Thou Shell of Death

  There’s Trouble Brewing

  The Beast Must Die

  Malice in Wonderland

  The Case of the Abominable Snowman

  The Smiler with the Knife

  Minute for Murder

  Head of a Traveller

  The Dreadful Hollow

  The Whisper in the Gloom

  End of Chapter

  The Worm of Death

  The Sad Variety

  The Morning After Death

  For

  PETER AND LOUISE

  “’Tis double death to drown in ken of shore.”

  SHAKESPEARE

  Prologue

  * * *

  THERE WAS SOMETHING wrong with the swans that May afternoon. A chilly, tetchy wind rasped over the Serpentine, ruffling their feathers and unsettling, it seemed, their nerves. They could not keep still. A swan rose heraldically upright, splatting the water with cumbrous, half-arm blows, then tore unprovoked at a companion which had been gloomily surveying its reflection, and chased it out of sight beyond the bridge. Another swan, in a state of maniac exasperation, kept pecking viciously at something under its lifted wing—an action which caused it to careen and flounder, feathers disorganised, neck like a snake striking. Several other swans, as if swept by mass hysteria, began to dig themselves furiously in the ribs.

  “Do you suppose they have ants in their arm-pits?” asked Clare.

  “I think they’re having a nervous breakdown,” Nigel replied.

  “Well, if they are, they’re overdoing it badly.”

  “Or it could be a form of neuro-mimesis.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s extremely undignified,” said Clare Massinger severely.

  “You can’t expect even a swan to be dignified when it’s got an itch. I don’t suppose Zeus looked very dignified when he was assaulting Leda.”

  “That was different.”

  A swan plodded from the Serpentine on to dry land, stretching out its neck for a piece of bread proffered by a nursemaid.

  “It looks like an Edwardian hat trying to walk,” remarked Clare. Her long, blue-black hair swirled like smoke in a gust of wind, and turning away she found herself confronting the Peter Pan statue, which she contemplated in silence for a period of time.

  “You know,” she said at last, “it has a lack of fascination all its own.”

  As they walked away arm in arm towards Lancaster Gate, Clare reverted to the queer manifestation they had just witnessed.

  “Don’t you think we ought to do something about them, darling?”

  “The swans? What?”

  “Well, ring somebody up and tell them the birds are verminous or demented or whatever it is. Who’s responsible for them?”

  “Oh, the Board of Works, I dare say: or the L.C.C. I’ve no idea. But that’s reminded me. I rang up Swan’s this morning. All their Hellenic cruises are booked up for this year. I’ve put our names down, in case any of the passengers cry off. But I think we ought to try for one of this new series of cruises Michael was talking about. It’d mean starting from Athens instead of Venice; but we could have a few days in Athens first, by ourselves.”

  Clare Massinger had recently come to that point, which nearly every artist experiences two or three times in a working life, when the reservoir seems empty and some radical change of style or content necessary if the work is not to become a meaningless repetition of past achievement. In Greece, she felt, she might refresh her vision as a sculptor and recharge her batteries. Since neither she nor Nigel could speak the language, some sort of conducted tour would be the best way to get what she needed, in the limited time they had at their disposal.

  She agreed now that they should inquire about the cruises which had just been started by the Prytanis line. Nigel Strangeways visited the Greek Tourist Office next morning. There were berths available on the T.S.S. Menelaos, he was told, sailing from Athens on 1st. September. The ship would visit Delos and then a number of islands in the Dodecanese, returning to the mainland by way of Crete, with expeditions to Epidauros, Mycenae and Delphi. The passengers would be mainly British and American, but there was a small party of French also, and a sprinkling of Germans and Italians. There were to be Greek guides on board, and several lecturers of European reputation, including a distinguished Byzantine scholar, the Bishop of Solway, and that famous Hellenophile and populariser of classical Greek literature, Jeremy Street.

  Nigel had no hesitation in booking passages. The itinerary of the Menelaos, taking in so many islands whose very name had the ring of legend, sounded altogether admirable. Clare’s dark eyes lit up when he told her where they would be going. Nigel felt no premonition that this itinerary would carry him into a labyrinth of human motives darker and more complex than the dwelling of the Minotaur.

  Embarkation

  * * *

  SIXTEEN WEEKS LATER, Nigel was leaning on the rail of the promenade-deck, looking at the shipping in the Piraeus. This morning he and Clare had paid a last visit to the Theatre of Dionysos and the Acropolis. The heat—it was nearly 100° in the shade—and the perfect majesty of the Parthenon had silenced them: even Clare’s inordinate appetite for sight-seeing was temporarily sated: so, after a leisurely lunch, they took a taxi to the Piraeus, with the view of settling in before the mass of passengers arrived.

  The Menelaos had been lying at the quayside for thirty-six hours and the cabins were suffocatingly hot. Opening the port-hole of Clare’s, which adjoined his own on the main-deck, was enough to bring Nigel out in a profuse sweat. Clare announced that she was going to have a strip-wash, and then ‘get everything ship-shape’—a procedure which would involve, Nigel had no doubt, unpacking and strewing her clothes all over her own bunk and that of her f
ellow-occupant, a Miss E. Jamieson, B.A., who had fortunately not yet turned up. Nigel left her to it, fought his way through a blast of heat to open the port-hole of his own cabin, which, the passenger-list told him, he would be sharing with Dr Stephen Plunket, M.D., M.Sc., neatly disposed his belongings, and came out on deck gasping for air. Having filled in time investigating the main features of the vessel—the two saloons, forward and aft, the bars (not open yet), the small swimming-pool (still dry) on the forecastle beneath the bridge—Nigel took up his position at the port rail of the promenade-deck amidships.

  Beneath him, a flat tanker was oiling the Menelaos through an umbilical cord of pipe-line. Beyond, the blue-and-white flags of three Greek corvettes, moored together, rippled in a light breeze that had risen. There were three passenger vessels, their white paint dazzling in the Athenian sunlight, lying stem to stern at the quays opposite; one of these, the T.S.S. Adriatiki, was the ship chartered by Swans on which Nigel had unsuccessfully tried to get berths for Clare and himself. A large P. & O. cruise-liner, with a single funnel like a huge yellow pepper-pot, was getting up steam. Some weather-beaten tramp steamers, a gaggle of assorted small craft, warehouses, ship-cranes and the hazy blue-white sky made up the rest of the scene. In the air hung a pervasive smell—fumes from the tanker mingled with an odour of, was it Greek cooking, or decaying vegetables, or both? It might be convenient, thought Nigel, that he was sharing a cabin with the ship’s doctor.

  Nigel tried to imagine this place in the 5th century, with the triremes coming in and the Long Walls running up to Athens; but the heat had taken all the spring out of his imagination. A sudden outburst of sound, from the other side of the Menelaos, broke into his thoughts. Moving over to the starboard side and looking down on the quay to which the ship was moored, Nigel saw a lorry laden with rectangular chunks of ice. A sailor, standing on a makeshift cradle hung from the deck, was passing these into the ship through a port-hole, one by one, as they were handed up to him. A violent altercation had blown up between the overseer of the shore party handling the ice, and a ship’s officer who was leaning over the rail twenty feet away from Nigel. Whether the ice had arrived late, or was the wrong shape, or whether the two disputants just disliked each other’s faces, Nigel had no means of determining. But the scene could not have been more dramatic if it had been leading up to the crisis of an ancestral blood feud. At one point the ship’s officer actually tore his hair in despair—a gesture Nigel had not witnessed since attending an O.U.D.S. performance of Œdipus thirty years ago. What most impressed him, though, was the rhythm of the exchanges. The officer shouted, in the staccato, stabbing language of his nation, accompanying the speech with a wealth of murderous gesture, while the overseer stood listening. Then the overseer screamed back, dancing hysterically on his feet as though at any moment he might rise into the air and strangle the officer, while the latter heard him out, chewing his brigand-like moustache. Strophe and antistrophe, thought Nigel: the noble Athenian tradition of argument—of listening to your opponent’s case as well as voicing your own. It was this sort of thing, Nigel realised, which made your heart warm to the Greeks—made you love them, passionately, indiscriminately and for ever.

  “Is blood going to flow?” came the light, high voice of Clare beside him.

  “Oh, you’re here. No, they’re just having a little difference of opinion about ice.”

  The combatants shrieked at each other, alternately, for a few minutes longer. Then, as abruptly as it had blown up, the storm ended. The overseer spat at the virgin-white side of the ship: the officer made a gesture which might have expressed the whole tragedy of King Lear, and turned away. Honour was satisfied, emotion exhausted.

  On the quay below, emerging from buses and taxis, passengers were now beginning to arrive. They had to run the gauntlet of a horde of hucksters, selling everything from Greek vases (20th century) to Coca-Cola, from hunks of pink melon to Evzone dolls. Nigel and Clare played the time-honoured travellers’ game of speculating about the characters, professions and provenance of these still unknown fellow-travellers. They had just spotted a Royal Academician (who later proved to be the Bishop of Solway) and a trio of classical schoolmasters (who turned out to be, respectively, an analytical chemist, a barrister, and a civil servant), when their attention was drawn by two women strolling slowly towards the gangway. Or rather, by one of them. Of middle height, her graceful carriage minimising a certain stockiness of figure, with high cheek bones and charming hollows beneath them, and a delicate brown complexion that, when she came closer, showed itself as a triumph of cosmetic art, this woman had that air of sexual awareness which tells its own story. She wore a lemon-coloured linen suit and a wide white straw hat.

  “Oh look!” said Clare. “Here comes the ship’s femme fatale.”

  The woman’s companion, though of the same height, seemed dumpy in comparison. She wore a puce-coloured jumper which emphasised the muddiness of her skin, a rumpled tweed skirt and serviceable shoes. The general effect of a badly-done-up parcel was heightened by untidy hair, a shambling gait and restless, spasmodic gestures. As she looked up at the ship, her mouth jerked uncontrollably, and she put up a hand as if to hold it still. It was at this moment that Nigel heard a girl, standing at the rail beside him, exclaim,

  “Oh God! Peter, look! There’s the Bross. What on earth is she doing here?”

  “The Bross?”

  “Miss Ambrose. You know.”

  There was such dismay in the girl’s voice that Nigel looked up sharply. The girl had gone white: her thin body was hunched, almost as if she expected a blow, and her hands were clenched on the rail. She was sixteen or seventeen, Nigel judged, and the boy she had called ‘Peter’ was obviously her brother—a twin brother, very likely.

  “Don’t worry, Faith,” he said, taking her arm. “She’s seeing somebody off, I expect.”

  “It’ll spoil everything if——”

  “Don’t be a goat. She can’t eat you.”

  “Look, she’s coming up the gangway.” The girl ducked her head—a queer, involuntary movement—then hurried away down the deck, her brother following her with a grim look on his face which Nigel was to remember.

  The oddly-assorted couple were now climbing the gangway. As she handed in her embarkation card, the beauty threw the purser a dazzling, slightly lop-sided smile which gave character to her exquisitely made-up face. Her companion, eyes averted, shuffled past, and the pair went off towards their cabin, followed by stewards carrying their luggage.

  “Well, what do you make of them? A rich divorcee travelling with her secretary?”

  “They’re sisters,” said Clare firmly.

  “Sisters? Oh, nonsense!”

  “Yes. Identical bone-structure. One’s a successful mondaine, the other a neurotic. That’s what put you off. I look at the skull beneath the skin.”

  “You should know. One of them is Miss Ambrose, anyway: a schoolmistress, probably, judging by our young friend’s consternation just now. That’d be the sallow, twitching one, Let’s look at the passenger-list.”

  This document, which had been handed to them on embarking, showed that Cabin 3 on A deck was to be occupied by Mrs Melissa Blaydon and Miss Ianthe Ambrose.

  “Well, they may be sisters,” said Nigel. “Those elegant, classical Christian names suggest one father. But I still think it’s perverse of the expensive Melissa to be holidaying with a string-bag like Ianthe.”

  “Perversity makes strange bedfellows.”

  “Ambrose. Ambrose. I wonder could it be E.K. Ambrose?”

  “Who’s he?”

  “He was a very distinguished Greek scholar. Did definitive editions of Euripides. I read them at Oxford.”

  II

  During the several hours that elapsed before dinner, the passengers began to sort themselves out. National characteristics were soon in evidence. The blond individuals, slung round with cameras, haversacks and guide books, who marched purposefully up and down the boat-deck, could only be G
ermans. The French contingent, who had brought their own lecturer, gravitated together at one end of the forward saloon, where they chattered incessantly, ignoring their fellow-travellers. A few Italian men, dressed in flashy lounge suits, strolled about the ship escorting their wives and regarding with brilliant admiration every other personable female in sight. The Americans waited for the bars to open; while the British tried to avoid one another, glancing in a furtive and resentful manner at anyone they suspected of a tendency to interrupt their interminable postcard-writing.

  There were exceptions, of course. A fat-faced man got into conversation with Nigel and Clare, introducing himself as Ivor Bentinck-Jones. He was no stranger in these parts, he told them, and if they wanted to know the ropes, he was their man. With his twinkling eyes, jolly voice, and evidently unsnubbable nature, Mr Bentinck-Jones was cut out to be the life and soul of the ship. His eagerness to make friends, though a little pathetic, was not unlikeable: he seemed the sort of man, thought Nigel, who would attract confidences as a beggar attracts charity.

  “Are you quite satisfied with your cabin?” the man presently asked. “If not, Nikki would change it for you, I’m sure. He’s the cruise-manager, you know.”

  “Our cabins are quite comfortable, thank you,” replied Clare.

  “Oh, I see. Good. Sorry—I thought you were travelling together.”

  “So we are.”

  A momentarily discouraged look came into the man’s eye. Clare felt quite bad at depriving him of the mild pleasure he would have derived from meeting a couple living in sin on shipboard. “We are just good friends,” she added satirically.

  “Hello, there’s Jeremy Street.” Ivor Bentinck-Jones waved at a man who was approaching—a tall, distinguished figure, with a young-old face, thinning golden hair, and the consciously unobtrusive manner of a celebrity who knows his own market value and does not need to assert it. Jeremy Street wore an immaculate, white linen suit, a royal blue shirt and a silk neckerchief, the ensemble giving him the appearance of one of those would-be U types to be found in a store catalogue.

 
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