no notion of what a motherly appearance might be. Nor do I have a network of spies. I have only one spy. His name is Al Fister, a young neighbor of mine who has been working with me in trying to locate Lenore Gregory. At present he is waiting in the next stateroom, but earlier I left him to keep watch on the dock while I came aboard. It was he who called the police. Before that, just after I left him, he saw someone slip ashore and vanish in the fog. He is certain that this person was a man. He had long hair and was wearing dark glasses.”
“Hippie type. My God, do you have any idea how many hippies infest San Francisco?”
“Approximately as many, I imagine, as infest Los Angeles. What amazes me is how I failed to encounter this person aboard. If he was down here, as I suspect, I must have missed him by seconds, and Lenore Gregory must have missed him by even less, inasmuch as she was in the passage, returning from finding her friend, seconds before I was.”
“In the first place, maybe he wasn’t down here at all. You’re only guessing that he was. In the second, even if he was right here in the stateroom and slipped a lethal dose of hemlock into the sherry, which I doubt, he could have got away without using the passage, just as he could have come without using it. See here.”
Captain Kelso took two lumbering, swift steps and with an enormous foot kicked back the edge of the worn rug, revealing a hatch.
“This leads down into the hold and the bilges,” he said. “From the hold there are half a dozen other hatches opening into the cabins, a mess hall, and out on the deck. All of them can easily be opened from above or below. So, you see, Captain Westering was available for murder. And the murderer, if he needed it, had an easy exit from the scene.”
“He would have needed to be familiar with the vessel.”
“True. This one or one similar.”
Miss Withers had been conscious for some seconds of a kind of muted commotion in the passage outside, and it now terminated in a brisk, somehow official, rapping on the door. Captain Kelso barked, and the door swung open, pushed by the hand of a stocky man in conservative, conventional clothes who carried the aura of headquarters about him as surely as he carried, somewhere on his person, his official credentials.
“Here they are, Captain,” the man said to Kelso, “the pair of them.”
“Good enough, Carney,” Captain Kelso said. “Close the door and wait in the passage.”
Carney touched the brim of his hat in a pseudo salute and backed out, pulling the door shut behind him, as directed, and leaving on the inside, in his own words, the pair of them. Either of them singly would have been impressive enough; as a pair they were close to overwhelming. Miss Withers, having weathered the Prophet Onofre, had been prepared to believe that no apparition was left aboard to disturb her aplomb, however suddenly, or in whatever place, it should materialize. Now, when she had caught her breath, she conceded her error. The striking pair standing side by side before the closed door made the poor Prophet seem common by comparison, a dull charlatan living in lunacy on a diet of locusts and babbling dreams. The comparison, however, was a comparison of extremes. Whereas the Prophet Onofre was as distorted as an El Greco figure, a vision of obscene ugliness, these two were a double dose of stunning beauty in almost regurgitative quantity.
Amazon, thought Miss Withers, was the word. Or, she amended, perhaps Valkyrie. One of them was about an inch taller than the other, the taller being about six feet flat-footed, and about five or ten pounds heavier, weighing out, at a practiced guess, at about 140 pounds stripped. Not one of the pounds was surplus, nor, so far as Miss Withers was a judge, misplaced. The magnificent epidermis of both creatures was a dull golden color, seeming to glow softly in the dim light of the cabin, but there the sameness ended and the differences began.
“Hippie type. My God, do you have any idea how many hippies infest San Francisco?”
“Approximately as many, I imagine, as infest Los Angeles. What amazes me is how I failed to encounter this person aboard. If he was down here, as I suspect, I must have missed him by seconds, and Lenore Gregory must have missed him by even less, inasmuch as she was in the passage, returning from finding her friend, seconds before I was.”
“In the first place, maybe he wasn’t down here at all. You’re only guessing that he was. In the second, even if he was right here in the stateroom and slipped a lethal dose of hemlock into the sherry, which I doubt, he could have got away without using the passage, just as he could have come without using it. See here.”
Captain Kelso took two lumbering, swift steps and with an enormous foot kicked back the edge of the worn rug, revealing a hatch.
“This leads down into the hold and the bilges,” he said. “From the hold there are half a dozen other hatches opening into the cabins, a mess hall, and out on the deck. All of them can easily be opened from above or below. So, you see, Captain Westering was available for murder. And the murderer, if he needed it, had an easy exit from the scene.”
“He would have needed to be familiar with the vessel.”
“True. This one or one similar.”
Miss Withers had been conscious for some seconds of a kind of muted commotion in the passage outside, and it now terminated in a brisk, somehow official, rapping on the door. Captain Kelso barked, and the door swung open, pushed by the hand of a stocky man in conservative, conventional clothes who carried the aura of headquarters about him as surely as he carried, somewhere on his person, his official credentials.
“Here they are, Captain,” the man said to Kelso, “the pair of them.”
“Good enough, Carney,” Captain Kelso said. “Close the door and wait in the passage.”
Carney touched the brim of his hat in a pseudo salute and backed out, pulling the door shut behind him, as directed, and leaving on the inside, in his own words, the pair of them. Either of them singly would have been impressive enough; as a pair they were close to overwhelming. Miss Withers, having weathered the Prophet Onofre, had been prepared to believe that no apparition was left aboard to disturb her aplomb, however suddenly, or in whatever place, it should materialize. Now, when she had caught her breath, she conceded her error. The striking pair standing side by side before the closed door made the poor Prophet seem common by comparison, a dull charlatan living in lunacy on a diet of locusts and babbling dreams. The comparison, however, was a comparison of extremes. Whereas the Prophet Onofre was as distorted as an El Greco figure, a vision of obscene ugliness, these two were a double dose of stunning beauty in almost regurgitative quantity.
Amazon, thought Miss Withers, was the word. Or, she amended, perhaps Valkyrie. One of them was about an inch taller than the other, the taller being about six feet flat-footed, and about five or ten pounds heavier, weighing out, at a practiced guess, at about 140 pounds stripped. Not one of the pounds was surplus, nor, so far as Miss Withers was a judge, misplaced. The magnificent epidermis of both creatures was a dull golden color, seeming to glow softly in the dim light of the cabin, but there the sameness ended and the differences began.
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