There were two suitcases in the luggage area. One had seen considerable use; the other appeared to be new. There was also a flat green attaché case. Heimrich was a little surprised to find it still there. It would be locked, of course. Yes, it had a combination lock. Conceivably, Ellen Grimes might know the combination. Probably she would not. Probably—
He put the case down on the bed and started to twirl the inset combination wheel and found that, under his finger, it spun with no resistance. As if—
He looked more closely. The leather around the lock was scored. A knife blade, probably. He lifted the lid of the case, and it rose without resistance. And the case was empty.
A forced lock, which would not have been difficult. A lock Sir Ronald himself would not, of course, need to have forced. Unless he had some reason to want it to appear that the case had been forced open? What reason? To involve some unknown person, and so to refute a theory of suicide if such a theory were to be advanced?
It was conceivable. It was also far-fetched.
He went through drawers in a chest, and found shirts and socks and handkerchiefs and other things which one might expect to find. He did not find papers, incriminating or not incriminating, which might have been taken from the attaché case.
Fingerprints on the attaché case? His own, now. Probably Sir Ronald’s. But he had no equipment to take fingerprints or lift them, and probably the security force of Italia hadn’t either. And he could not remember that fingerprints had ever been of much use in the cases he had handled. One merely missed the familiarity of routine.
The two suitcases were empty. So were the pockets of the neatly hanging suits and sports jacket. Sir Ronald Grimes had not been a man to stuff his pockets. Whatever he had needed to carry with him had been, presumably, in pockets of the dinner clothes he was wearing and if so, now at the bottom of—
The telephone rang in the next cabin. Probably the operator to tell Lady Grimes Dr. Arnold Oliver was not—
“Arnold,” Ellen Grimes said. “It is Arnold? A most dreadful thing has happened. Ronald has—has disappeared. Yes, from the ship. We—we don’t know, Arnold. They’re—they’re trying to find out.”
For some seconds then she did not speak. Then she said, “I know you do, Arnie. And I know there isn’t anything to say. Listen. Maybe you can’t. I know that. But there’s a man here—a police inspector who just happened to be aboard and is trying to help—somebody’s told him Ronald was sick. Very sick. Will you talk to him? Tell him—oh, anything you can? Will you do that?”
Heimrich was in the room by then. She held the receiver out to him, and he took it, and she went back to sit where she had before.
Heimrich said, “Doctor? My name’s Heimrich. Yes, a policeman. New York State Police. No official standing here, except the ship’s captain—”
He was interrupted. The voice which interrupted him was deep, and static marred it little.
“Sir Ronald’s disappeared. That’s what Ellen’s been telling me?”
“Yes. He seems not to be on the ship. It’s been searched. The inference is—”
“I know what the inference is. Lady Grimes? She’s—making do?”
“Very well, under the circumstances, Doctor. Very bravely.”
“Expect it of her,” Dr. Oliver said. “Got guts, that one. Who told you Sir Ronald was sick?”
“A man aboard. A man who knew him.”
“Nothing to it. Not a damn thing to it, man. Fit as they come, Ronald was. Not as young as he was once, but who the hell is? What did this man you say knew him tell you was the matter with Ronald Grimes? Because whoever told you he was sick is a jackass. Not a doctor, is he?”
“No. He wasn’t specific. Said he’d got it all secondhand. He implied cancer. Near terminal stage. You examined Sir Ronald recently, Lady Grimes tells me?”
“January,” Oliver said. “Annual checkup. Good about that. They both were, long as I’ve known them.”
“He didn’t have cancer?”
“Didn’t have anything. Oh, that’s not true, of course. Everybody’s got something. Particularly at sixty. Start of emphysema, probably. But who hasn’t who’s lived all his life in cities? Nothing conclusive in the picture. Just suspicious. Told him to give up smoking. Had to watch what he ate, to a degree. Touchy stomach. Worked too hard, too many years, too much strain. Chronic gastritis.”
“You ran a G.I. series on him?”
“Obviously. And an electrocardiogram. Perfectly sound heart. Perfectly sound man, or as close as he had any right to be. And what’s this got to do with the fact that he’s disappeared?”
“I don’t precisely know, Doctor,” Heimrich said, “I’m trying to find out.”
“All right,” Dr. Oliver said. “Like to speak to Ellen. Put her on again, will you?”
“Yes,” Heimrich said, and held the telephone toward Ellen Grimes and beckoned with it. She came across the cabin slowly and took the telephone. Heimrich went back into the other cabin. There are times when there really isn’t anything to say. Those are the times when people insist on saying it.
Dr. Arnold Oliver would make consoling sounds to Ellen Grimes. A friend of hers, as well as her physician, Heimrich judged from the way she had spoken. She would make responding sounds. The pattern, the meaningless pattern, would be completed. Heimrich looked out through one of the windows of Cabin 16. Susan had been right about the moon; there was moonlight on the water. It rippled with the water, swelled with the water. But the moon was on the other side of the ship. Its light just touched the ship’s rail, leaving the deck in darkness except for lights burning at intervals in the overhead. If they had gone to sit in their chairs on the enclosed deck, they would not have sat in moonlight.
Heimrich looked again into the empty attaché case. It was as empty as it had been before. It was not new; in a corner the lining had a small rent in it. Heimrich put a finger in behind the torn lining. The finger found nothing. The two suitcases still were empty. The pockets of the two suits were empty, and the pockets of the sports jacket—
Wait a minute, he told himself. Above the right-hand jacket pocket there was a small, separate pocket with its own flap. A change pocket, presumably. Or a pocket merely considered ornamental. In any case, a pocket he had overlooked before. He ran a finger into it; there was room for only one of his fingers. A silly little pocket in a well-cut jacket.
His probing finger encountered something in the pocket. A match folder, it felt like. He fished it out. It was a match folder with the words “Field and Tennis” lettered on it. About half the matches had been torn out. The Washington club at which Ronald Grimes had played tennis, probably. A match folder dropped casually into a useless little pocket, Heimrich opened the folder. Somebody had used the flap as a note pad.
The penciled notes were written very small, in a tight hand. Heimrich switched on a light on the dressing table and could make out the words, or almost make them out. “A. Schmidt Gesel.” Or what looked like that. “Zrinjevac 48 Zag.” Or what looked like that. The address of somebody named “Gesel.?” Or—wait a minute—of a company. “A. Schmidt Gesellschaft?” It might be that. In something called “Zag.?” It looked like “Zag.” in the cramped writing. An abbreviation for—for what? Heimrich riffled through his mind and found nothing useful. Unless—
Zagreb. Wasn’t there a city somewhere named that? A very ancient city? In—wait a minute. Riffle another of the mind’s pages. Yugoslavia. That was it. Near Trieste? There was no use riffling the mind for that. It wouldn’t be there. It would be in an atlas, if Italia’s library contained an atlas. Which it probably didn’t.
Heimrich carried the match folder back into the adjacent cabin. Ellen Grimes was sitting at the dressing table, and the telephone was in its cradle. She turned and looked at him, and her young face seemed to sag. She pulled it back together. She did not say anything.
Heimrich held the match folder down to her, his finger pointing to what was written inside the flap. He waited while
she read it and until she looked up again at him.
“Does it mean anything to you, Lady Grimes?” Heimrich asked her.
She shook her head slowly. Then she said, “Nothing, Inspector.”
“Is it your husband’s handwriting?”
She looked at it again.
“It’s written so small,” she said. “Not the way he wrote. It doesn’t look like his writing. But—I suppose it might be, if—whoever wrote it was cramped for space. I don’t know, Inspector.”
She tucked the flap back in.
“It’s from the club,” she said. “His club. The—the club where we played.”
11
Heimrich walked slowly forward through the lighted passageway. Sir Ronald Grimes had been dying of cancer; he had been depressed because his career was ended. He had had nothing more wrong with him than apparently minor indigestion. He had been looking forward to a reasonable number of years of life and to the cultivation of his garden. A doctor vouched for his health. With more frankness than doctors usually show in talking of the patients? A doctor who was, apparently, a fairly close friend of Lady Ellen Grimes. Was Ian Whitney another friend? A closer one than she now admitted?
It added to nothing certain. An attaché case which had been forced open and left empty. Another attaché case which, if it had existed, had disappeared. Papers in either which might incriminate someone? Or extra pairs of shorts and socks? A match folder with what might be the address of a German firm penciled in it. A German firm—Schmidt was certainly German enough but, come to that, so was Heimrich—in a place which might be Zagreb, Yugoslavia. And might not.
The ship’s small library was on this deck. He could see if it contained an atlas on its shelves. He would—
He came to an exit to the deck. Fresh air might blow something into his mind, which could do with having something blown into it. He went out to the deck. He could walk around outside the veranda belvedere and go back in on the port side and have a look at the library. The writing room was across a passageway from the library. Susan might have gone there to write her letters and postcards. On the other hand—his watch said ten minutes of eleven—she probably would have gone below by now. He would just have a look.
It was cool on the open deck, and there was a breeze. It was not enough to disturb the ocean, which moved under the moonlight in easy swells. Heimrich started forward toward the prow of Italia and the balcony which circled in front of the veranda belvedere. And a sound made him turn.
It was a soft thumping sound, and after it there was another, heavier, thumping sound. Then, as he looked down the deck, he saw a rapidly receding shadow. And he heard the sound of someone running—running aft down the deck, away from Heimrich. Then, between him and the running shadow, he heard what sounded like a moan.
He ran along the dimly lighted deck toward the moaning sound. The running shadow vanished in front of him—was a flicker of movement, then disappeared. In the brief glimpse he had had of it, it had never been more than a shadow—a shadow almost shapeless, of no height, no dimension. And it had merged with, vanished into, the ship’s shadow.
What was lying on the ship’s deck did not vanish. It was a man, or the body of a man. Heimrich crouched beside it. A slight man, wearing a steward’s uniform, lying face downward on the deck. And—breathing. Breathing slowly, with evident effort, but breathing.
And blood was flowing from the back of his head, matting dark hair. The wound was straight and narrow and looked deep. It was, Heimrich thought, such a wound as a narrow club might make; such a wound as a thin walking stick might make. But there was no time now to wonder about the wound.
Heimrich lifted the man in his arms, and the man bled on him. His run aft had taken him roughly amidships, and a few yards beyond was an entry door into the ship. The door was heavy, tightly closed. It opened outward toward the deck. Heimrich had to lower the bleeding man so that his feet rested on the deck and hold him there with an arm around his waist and tug at the heavy door. It opened with reluctance. It tried to close itself again. Heimrich got his back against it and braced it open and lifted the man over the high sill, and the door pushed him into the ship. He picked the slight man up again in his arms.
At the passageway, Heimrich turned right and was opposite a door numbered 18. That was Lady Grimes’s cabin. The next cabin was empty—now it was empty. He could not carry a man—a man who might be dying—down many stairways to the hospital on A deck. The next cabin—
A steward was coming down the passageway toward Heimrich, and when he saw what Heimrich was carrying in his arms, he began to run. When he was a few feet away, he said, “Hurt. He’s hurt!” There was astonishment, disbelief, in his voice.
Heimrich had stopped in front of Cabin 16. He said, “In there,” and the steward opened the door, and Heimrich carried the man into the room which had been Sir Ronald Grimes’s and laid him on the bed. The wound still was bleeding, and the steward got towels from the bathroom and put them under the bleeding head.
“Get help,” Heimrich said. “Get a doctor.”
The steward picked up the telephone and dialed and then began to speak rapidly, in Italian.
The man’s face was thin and young. It was almost a boy’s face. The boy had grown a thin, black mustache, which was still only a line across his upper lip.
He was still breathing with effort; his eyes were closed, and he seemed to fight for each breath. Heimrich pulled back jacket and shirt and put fingers against the boy’s chest. The heart was beating, and it seemed to Heimrich to be beating regularly enough. But a layman can only guess about such things.
“They come,” the steward said, standing behind Heimrich, who was bent over the boy. “At once they come. He fell, sì? Hit his head on something.”
“I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “I think he was hit with something. You told them to hurry?”
“Sì, signor. That it was very bad and to hurry. His name is Louis, signor. His last name I do not know. He is new on the ship. Just learning the service, signor. On night duty. What we call caretaker duty. In English it is that, I think. He is young, signor. Will he die?”
And then the steward crossed himself.
“I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “It may be only a scalp wound. But—it may be anything. Contusion, obviously. Or a fractured skull.”
“He is young, signor,” the steward said. “The young can stand much.”
Heimrich looked up at the steward. The steward was not young.
They had not closed the cabin door. A man in a white jacket came into the cabin and after him another. The second man carried a rolled stretcher under his arm. And after them another man came—an older man with a stethoscope in the pocket of his white jacket. The third man was the doctor who had expressed such confidence in the ship’s refrigerating system.
The doctor went to the boy on the bed and used his stethoscope and said, “Mmmm.” He turned the boy enough so that he could see the wound and, gently, he touched the boy’s head near the wound. He looked at Heimrich and said, “It is not good, Signor Inspector. There may be a fracture. He should not be moved, but we must move him. Luigi.”
The word was an order, and one of the men in white jackets said, “Sì, signor,” and he and the other man lifted the boy named Louis onto the unrolled stretcher and, carefully, carried him out of the cabin.
“He’ll make it?” Heimrich said to the doctor, and the doctor shrugged his shoulders and said, “We can hope, Signor Inspector.” Then he went out of the cabin after the two orderlies and their burden.
They had taken with them the towels the cabin steward had put under the bleeding head. Blood had soaked through the towels onto, and into, the bed’s cover. The steward looked at the stained bed for some seconds and then sighed deeply and looked at Heimrich.
“It was on the deck, signor? Where he fell? Or, as you say signor, was hit?”
“Yes.”
“He was not supposed to be there, signor. At eleven they go o
n duty, the caretaker stewards. Two on each deck, signor. One for the starboard cabins. One for those on the port side.”
“Regular assignments? I mean, serving the same cabins each night?”
“That is usual, signor.”
“Do you know what deck Louis was assigned to? And on which side of the ship?”
The steward shrugged. His shrug almost matched that of the doctor. He completed it by spreading his hands. He added unnecessary words. “I do not know, signor. The chief steward. He assigns us.”
There was no point in staying there looking at a bloodied bed. He wondered whether Lady Ellen Grimes, in the next cabin, had heard movement and voices. Heimrich was inclined to knock at her door and ask her but decided against it. If she was lucky, she was asleep. If she was wise she had taken something to make her sleep.
Heimrich went out of the cabin and along the passageway and out the door through which he had carried the boy named Louis, on his first voyage as a steward. The boy with, at a guess, his first mustache.
The moon had moved a little, or the ship had changed its course a little. Now the moonlight lay on half the wide promenade of the boat deck.
The shadow had moved aft and disappeared. Heimrich walked aft along the gently moving deck. He came to a door with “Classe Cabina” lettered on it and, below that lettering, “Cabin Class.”
The door opened away from Heimrich. He pushed on it and it opened. He did not go through it.
The shadow could have gone through that door. It could have come through the door from cabin class and hit the steward and gone back the way it had come—become a shadow lost in shadows. The shadow of a man or of a woman? Heimrich had no way of being sure. The running footfalls had sounded like a man’s—heavy, widely spaced. There had not—Heimrich thought there had not—been the click of a woman’s heels. But not of a man’s hard shoes either—only a hurried thudding.
Through the door to cabin class? Probably. But that did not mean that the shadow was traveling cabin class. It meant only that there had been a door to escape through.
20-Inspector's Holiday Page 14