Murder on the Leviathan Read Online Free Page B

imagine this comical specimen in the role of a ruthless killer. In addition to the doctor, another place had to be allocated to his wife. Having married only two weeks previously, the physician had decided to combine duty and pleasure by making this voyage his honeymoon. The chair occupied by the new Mme Truffo was completely wasted. The dreary, unsmiling Englishwoman who had found favour with the shipboard Aesculapius appeared twice as old as her twenty years and inspired in Gauche a deadly ennui - as, indeed, did the majority of her female compatriots. He immediately dubbed her 'the sheep' for her white eyelashes and bleating voice. As it happened, she rarely opened her mouth, since she did not know French and for the most part conversations in the saloon were, thank God, conducted in that most noble of tongues. Mme Truffo had no badge of any kind, but that was only natural, since she was neither an officer nor a paying passenger.
    The commissioner had also spotted in the register of passengers a certain specialist in Indian archaeology, Anthony F. Sweetchild by name, and decided that an Indologist might just come in handy. After all, the deceased Lord Littleby had also been something of the kind. Mr Sweetchild, a lanky beanpole with round-rimmed spectacles and a goatee, had himself struck up a conversation about India at the very first dinner. After the meal Gauche had taken the professor aside and cautiously steered the conversation round to the subject of Lord Littleby's collection. The Indian specialist had contemptuously dismissed his late lordship as a dilettante and his collection as a 'cabinet of curiosities' assembled without any scholarly framework. He claimed that the only item of genuine value in it was the golden Shiva and said it was a good thing the Shiva had turned up on its own, because everybody knew the French police were good for nothing but taking bribes. This grossly unjust remark set Gauche coughing furiously, but Sweetchild merely advised him to smoke less. The scholar went on to remark condescendingly that Littleby had, admittedly, acquired a fairly decent collection of decorative fabrics and shawls, which happened to include some extremely curious items, but that really had more to do with the native applied arts and crafts of India. The sixteenth-century sandalwood chest from Lahore with carvings on a theme from the Mahabharata was not too bad either -and then he had launched into a rigmarole that soon had the commissioner nodding off.
    Gauche had selected his final saloon-mate by eye, as they say. Quite literally so. The commissioner had only recently finished reading a most diverting volume translated from the Italian. Cesare Lombroso, a professor of forensic medicine from the Italian city of Turin, had developed an entire theory of criminalistics according to which congenital criminals were not responsible for their antisocial behaviour. In accordance with Dr Darwin's theory of evolution, mankind passed through a series of distinct stages in its development, gradually approaching perfection. But a criminal was an evolutionary reject, a random throwback to a previous stage. It was therefore a very simple matter to identify the potential robber or murderer: he resembled the monkey from which we were all descended. The commissioner had pondered long and hard about what he had read. On the one hand, by no means every one of the motley crew of robbers and murderers with whom he had dealt in the course of thirty years of police work had resembled gorillas, some of them had been such sweet little angels that a single glance at them brought a tender tear to the eye. On the other hand, there had been plenty of anthropoid types too. And as a convinced anticlerical, old Gauche did not believe in Adam and Eve. Darwin's theory appeared rather more sound to him. And then he had come across a certain individual among the first class passengers, a type who might have sat for a picture entitled 'The Typical