Inspector Devereux left for Paddington Station and an evening of preliminary telegraph traffic with Johannesburg and Durban. At the Paddington Hotel he discovered that the answer from Joshua Wingfield Wallace, the private detective, had been picked up shortly before seven o’clock the day after it was posted. The man on reception was new and eager to impress his customers and his bosses. He had, he said, tried to engage the Mr Smith in conversation, but with little success. The only information he got out of Smith, after handing over the letter, was that he, Smith, had to go back to the west of England on business the following day. He had gone to his room and not been seen until his departure the following morning. Smith had taken no meals or drinks of any kind in the Paddington. God knows, the man on reception at the time said, what he had done for food. He must have gone elsewhere by the back entrance. There was just one other thing, the young man on reception told Inspector Devereux. It would be easy to remember this Mr Smith, if that was his real name, which the young man doubted. The accent, the young man thought, was foreign though he couldn’t place it. He was of normal height, in his middle thirties, but he had a great black beard that reached down almost to his chest.
The passenger lists from Durban to London came early the following morning. Inspector Devereux came with them, three lots of passenger lists with two copies of each one, produced at remarkable speed by the Union Castle line’s staff in Southampton. The Powerscourt drawing room had been turned into a battle headquarters with two desks facing each other, one for the Inspector, one for the Powerscourts. Devereux’s sergeant, he told them, was still engaged in telegraphic conversations with the Johannesburg and Durban police.
‘None of the ships were full,’ Devereux said. ‘The Alnwick Castle, the Dover Castle, Walmer Castle all had plenty of space left. They told me, the Southampton people, that there was an average of about one hundred and twenty passengers in first class and about a hundred in second class. That means we’ve got six hundred and sixty names here. I suggest we begin with the Alnwick Castle.’ He handed a sheaf of papers to Powerscourt.
Lady Lucy had always been a believer in lists and notebooks and careful records. She had produced from her stores three brand-new dark blue notebooks, one for each of the participants. After a while, Powerscourt thought, the names and the numbers became hypnotic.
Of the first ten passengers only one deserved to have his name entered in the notebooks as a possible, Mr Raymond Armstrong. All the rest were the wrong age or the wrong sex and even Mr Ramon might have been too old at seventy-one.
‘Inspector Devereux,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘why is this Harry Jones person paying twenty-six pounds eleven shillings for first class when some of the others are paying one hundred and fifty-one pounds each?’
‘Size of cabin, sea views, state room or not, those are what usually sends up the price. Shouldn’t think this Jones has got a sea view at all.’
‘What do you say to the seventy-four-year-old Captain Cooper, Inspector?’ Powerscourt asked.
‘I think not. He’s too old. There’s only Mr Davies, the businessman, and Dr Hodge the politician left in the running for us here and I think we can ignore the doctor. No politician, wherever they come from, is going to risk killing three innocent people, however great their grudge. It would finish their career. So I think we can strike him out, just leaving us with Mr Davies.’
After an hour and a half they were nearing the end of the list of second-class passengers in the final liner, the Walmer Castle.
‘I say, Francis, Inspector,’ Lady Lucy was drawing doodles of glasses, wine glasses, champagne flutes, port glasses, brandy glasses on the left-hand page of her handbook. ‘I wonder if there mightn’t be another way of reducing the number of names we end up with. Do you think, Inspector, that we will be able to discover where most of the tickets were bought?’
‘I hope so,’ said the Inspector.
‘And am I right in saying that even though the ship goes round in a circle in a way, always returning to where it started, the tickets from here will be marked as going from London to Cape Town or London to Durban?’
‘That is correct.’
‘But some of the tickets will be for a return journey. You would pay for such a ticket all together, maybe with a slight reduction, even if you got two separate pieces of paper as you do with a train ticket. But even though it might say that you boarded the ship in Durban, you could be going home. You could have started out in London. And if a lot of the tickets were returns, bought in London, and even though some of the passengers would be marked as having boarded in Durban, and though they would obviously be travelling from South Africa to London, they’d be coming home again. They’d have bought their tickets in London. Mystery Man, on the other hand, would be coming on a ticket almost certainly bought in South Africa, maybe Durban Southampton Durban, but his journey would be the first leg, not the second of the trip. All of which, I think, means that if we can find out where the passengers bought their tickets, we can discount all those return tickets bought at the London end. That should eliminate quite a lot of people.’
‘Well done, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt. ‘That should save us a heap of trouble.’
Ten minutes later Lady Lucy drew a stream of bubbles coming out of an enormous champagne bottle on her pad. ‘We’re through, Inspector. We’ve got thirty-one names of the right age and sex in the first-and second-class accommodation on the three ships.’
‘Excellent,’ said Devereux. ‘I’ve got thirty-two but one of mine is a minister so I think I’ll get rid of the holy man. Some pretty strange occupations on board these vessels. Did you get the chap who was a musical instrument vendor, for heaven’s sake?’
‘We did,’ said Powerscourt, ‘and a quarryman and a fishmonger and a house painter.’
‘Well, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll take these names to our telegraph office and set to work. I’ll wire over to Thomas Cook to see if any of their branches sold the things. Once we’ve eliminated the people who bought their tickets here I’ll launch the South Africans. The Inspector looking after us in Durban is a famous rugby player — he was on their inaugural tour here four or five years ago. He says he has very fond memories of playing in England.’
‘Dammit, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt after the Inspector left, ‘there’s something niggling at the back of my mind and I can’t get my hands on it. It’s slipped away. I think it might be important.’
‘Well, Francis, you know my views. If you worry away at it, whatever it is, it won’t come to you. If you think of something else altogether, it’ll make its own way to the front of your brain. Think of the latest sins and wickednesses of our precious twins. That should do the trick.’
Powerscourt never heard the end of the sentence. He had shot out of the room and returned almost at once with an enormous atlas under his arm. He took a notebook from his jacket pocket and riffled through the pages. Then he opened the atlas at a page showing the west of England. ‘Contrary to popular opinion after my announcement about passenger lists, Lucy, I have to repeat that I am not going out of my mind. You will recall that the Mr Smith, correctly named or not, said he had to get back to the West Country. And I have just remembered what I was searching for in my mind. When I first met Inspector Devereux in the Silkworkers Hall he was looking at a collection of rubbish that had been collected after the dinner. Among the objects was a part of a ticket, whether bus ticket or train ticket I know not, from a place ending in “be”. Now that is pretty useless in itself, there are a great many place names ending in “be”. And I remember thinking at the time that it could have been the murderer himself who dropped the ticket stub — all the Silkworkers who were there that night came from central London. Now let’s have a hunt for places ending in “be”. I think it means valley in Celtic. Let’s look at Dorset. Here we are. Kingcombe, Barcombe, Loscombe, Melcombe Horsey, riding centre presumably.’
‘Combe Fishacre,’ Lady Lucy took up the chase, ‘Thorncombe, Combe Almer, Motcombe, what a lot of Combes.’
‘Let’s try Devon,’ said her husband. ‘Ellacombe, Maiden-combe, Overcombe, Widecombe, Babbacombe Bay.’
‘Holcombe, Harcombe,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘Boscombe, Salcombe, Combe Buckfastleigh, Branscombe.’
‘I’m sure there’s a whole lot more. I’m going to contact the London Library in a minute. The librarian there is an expert on British place names, I think he even wrote a book on them a couple of years back.’
‘Forgive me, Francis, I’m being dense. What can we do with this list of place names?’
‘We can’t really do anything with them until we have narrowed down the list of names. Now I think about it, mind you, they might help produce the names. This is one of the great beauties of having an Inspector on board, my love. He brings entire police forces with him. We suggest to the good Inspector Devereux that he contacts his brothers in Christ in the counties of Devon and Dorset and Cornwall and ask them which, if any, of the places might be large enough to be issuing tickets, and in which place a man intent on murder might want to hide himself. If the
