by Mike Ashley
It’s understandable, therefore, that I tend to see things in theatrical terms; positions on the stage, exits and entrances, a stratified cast of characters. In the melodrama that unfolded as the captain explained the situation, the unenviable role of victim fell to Lady Julia Harkness. Actually, there was a certain sweet irony in that, since Julia Ormerod (as she then was) made a name for herself in the mid and late 1990s as the most perfectly adorable victim ever to grace the West End. She was reviled and snubbed by Shaw’s hypocrites and Barrie’s insensitive husbands, turned out into the snow by Maeterlink, driven mad by Ibsen and hounded into decline and the grave by Lewis and Pinero. After a decade of this unceasing abuse, she quit the stage to marry Sir George Harkness, shortly after he made his first million selling spavined horses to the cavalry during the South African war, and settled down to a life of refined tranquility in Berkshire.
Why she was sailing to America nobody could tell me; the general view seemed to be that a wealthy and respectable widow didn’t need a reason. As far as we knew at that point, she died her last death shortly after lighting a cigarette on the boat deck, in company with a group of other ladies, not long after dinner. The witnesses all agreed that she lit the cigarette, inhaled deeply, choked violently and fell over; after a few ferocious convulsions she became still, and by the time the ship’s doctor arrived at the scene she was already dead. Almost immediately, the doctor diagnosed the cause of death as cyanide poisoning.
Here the mystery began. According to witnesses, including the captain himself, at whose table she had dined, it was impossible for the poison to have been in her food. Her appetite had been poor, on account of seasickness; she had taken a little soup and a few mouthfuls of salmon, and drunk maybe half a glass of wine. Everyone else who had had soup from the same tureen, salmon from the same dish and wine from the same bottle was still very much alive. The cigarette could also be ruled out; one of the young ladies in the group had handed round her cigarette case, and four others had smoked from it. The doctor had recovered the body to his surgery and was carrying out a post-mortem, though he couldn’t vouch for the conclusiveness of his results given the rather basic facilities at his disposal.
As for a possible motive, the captain had nothing to offer. Lady Julia was, he said, not the most pleasant person he’d ever met; she seemed to have a low opinion of many people and little compunction about sharing it with anybody who’d listen. On the other hand, the captain said, if that sort of thing was enough to provoke murder, the first class lounge would’ve been two-thirds empty before we were out of sight of Ireland. As for specific grievances against her, he didn’t know of any. She was rich, of course, but a few discreet questions among the passengers she’d been keeping company with revealed that her heirs were three nephews, all at home in Berkshire. Her circle aboard ship were all slight acquaintances or people she’d met for the first time on the voyage. If robbery was the motive, she’d been killed for nothing, since her pearl necklace and the Harding sapphires were still in place when the doctor took away the body, and were currently in the ship’s safe.
As far as the means for the crime were concerned, there were over five hundred passengers, quite apart from the crew, and a small quantity of cyanide would be easy to smuggle aboard. For obvious practical reasons, he didn’t propose to search the ship unless it was absolutely essential.
“Well,” I said, when the captain had finished his summary, “at least we know one thing.”
He looked at me. “Do we?” he said, rather hopelessly.
I nodded. “Whoever killed the wretched woman must’ve planned to do it before he left England. People don’t tend to carry doses of cyanide about with them on the off-chance that it might come in handy along the way.” The captain’s expression tightened a little; I suppose I was being rather flippant. “As far as I know,” I went on, “the only thing cyanide’s any use for is killing people, or killing things, at any rate; so we can rule out the possibility of someone having it with them for a legitimate reason and subsequently deciding to use it as a weapon. This can only be a premeditated murder, which leaves us with two possibilities. Either the killer is a lunatic killing at random, or the crime was deliberate and premeditated, and therefore designed to achieve something. Occam’s razor – ” The captain raised an eyebrow, but I ignored him. “Occam’s razor argues against a millionairess being the victim of an indiscriminate maniac. Either there’s a personal grudge involved that we don’t know about – which is far from unlikely – or she was killed for her money.”
The captain shook his head slowly. “As far as we know,” he said, “nobody on this ship stands to profit from her death, and the people who were in a position to give her the poison were all relative strangers.” He rubbed the tip of his nose against the back of his hand; I knew a lieutenant in France who used to do that when he was puzzled about something. “Are we looking for a hired assassin, do you think? I have to say, that seems a bit far-fetched to me.”
I pulled a face. “It’s one of those confounded puzzles that gets worse the more you think about it,” I said. “And I don’t think we’re going to make any progress sitting here, more’s the pity. I suppose we’d better go and have a look at the place where it all happened; and then we’d better begin talking to people. To be honest with you, the most we can hope to achieve is to keep everything pretty much as it is until we reach New York, and hand the whole business over to the authorities there.”
“I suppose so,” the captain replied. “But I was hoping we could resolve matters before then. There’s still the distinct possibility that whoever did this could kill someone else.”
He was looking at me again, and I didn’t like it. In my life I’ve had to take responsibility rather more often than I’d have liked, and usually very little good has come of it. My career record as a failed barrister and an inept infantry officer didn’t strike me as sufficient justification for entrusting me with the safety of five hundred people; particularly when I was feeling distinctly fragile, and still wearing my pyjamas. “I really wish you’d find someone else to look into this,” I said. “Pretty well all I’m qualified to do with the evidence you’ve given me is turn it into verse and set it to music, and I don’t think that’d help matters very much.”
He looked at me some more. “Perhaps you should go back to bed for a while,” he said.
I don’t know how real detectives can stand it.
Perhaps if I’d ever met a real detective, I might have a better insight into the way they cope. I haven’t, of course, and what little I know about them derives from the theatre, the movies and sensational fiction. My understanding is, however, that they somehow contrive to spend hours at a time interviewing witnesses, and still remain calm and positively civil – British detectives, anyway – in the face of unremitting vagueness, deviousness and affronted dignity. After four hours the next morning asking what I thought were perfectly reasonable questions, politely expressed, my admiration for the professional guardians of the law knew no bounds. For my part, I wanted to strangle somebody.
A wise man knows his own breaking point. I sent a steward to convey my apologies to the last three people on my list; I was running behind schedule, (a lie) and would therefore be obliged if their appointments could be deferred for half an hour. Then I got out of the poky little cabin I’d been using as an interview room and headed for the fresh air.
To legitimise my truancy, I made for the boat deck, scene of the crime, of which I had so far made only a cursory examination. Fictional sleuths, I knew, made a great performance of examining the mise en scene; they crawled about on their hands and knees like Boy Scouts following a spoor, peered through lenses, picked up hairs and fragments of cigar ash and packed them carefully away in clean envelopes. My head was still a bit too delicate for crawling about on decks, but there was one thing I knew I had to look for; something obvious and fundamental, which ought to provide the key to the whole affair.
It wasn’t there, of course.
This meant that I had to ask a steward to take me to the bridge (no, I explained, I didn’t know the way), and when I arrived, I learned that the officer I needed to see had gone off duty ten minutes before I got there. Another long walk; he was in his cabin, getting ready for bed. Fortunately, he was able to answer my question with a single word. Largely for the sake of appearances, I went back to the crime scene and made a show of looking round. I didn’t get down on my hands and knees, but I did lean over a few times, and even stooped to pick something up (I should have been looking for it all along; but attention to detail was never my strong point, as my old master in chambers would be delighted to confirm); the rest of the time I spent leaning against the rail looking thoughtful and broody. I don’t suppose I fooled anybody. I may mix with actors in the course of business, but I’ve yet to master the art of protective mimicry.
My brief furlough over, I went back to that miserable little cabin and waited for the next witness to arrive. Before she showed up, the captain bustled in, looking very pleased with himself. He asked how I was getting along, and didn’t wait for an answer.
“I think we may have a lead,” he said excitedly. “One of the stewards – Brewer, a most reliable man – came to me a few minutes ago and told me that shortly before the tragedy took place, he noticed a passenger on the boat deck acting in a most suspicious manner.”
I nodded gravely. “Promising,” I said.
“I believe so,” the captain replied. “Luckily, Brewer is a most observant fellow, and happened to notice that the suspect –” my expression didn’t change, although people tell me I’m a hopeless poker player – “was wearing a rather unusual and distinctive hat, a fedora is the term, I believe; the latest thing in New York, but hasn’t caught on yet in England.”
“Excellent,” I said. “So we’re looking for an American.”
The captain nodded, pleased by my ready grasp of the evidence. “Furthermore,” he continued, “Brewer described the individual as tall and thin, by his movements young or at most in early middle age. I consulted the passenger list with the help of Mr Standish – the purser, you know.”
“We’ve met.”
“Of course, yes. Anyway, only three passengers fitted the description, and two of them had reliable alibis. Accordingly, I’ve sent three stewards to look for the third man and bring him to my office as soon as possible. I’ll let you know as soon as he arrives, and you can take it from there.”
I smiled warmly. “Splendid,” I said. “Though really, I don’t suppose you need me there. I mean to say, you appear to have the whole thing under control, so – ”
He shook his head. “I’d rather you conducted the actual interrogation,” he said. “Your barrister’s training, and so forth. If you don’t mind, of course.”
I made a graceful gesture of acquiescence. “My pleasure,” I said.
He left; and my next interviewee hadn’t shown up yet, so I slipped back up on deck and poked about around the lifeboats for a moment or so, until I’d satisfied myself on a couple of points. By the time I got back, my witness was ready and waiting.
“So sorry to have kept you,” I said. The woman – I forget her name – didn’t bother to acknowledge my apology, so I sat down and steepled my fingers on the desk in front of me.
“First,” I said, “I should just like to reassure you that we have no grounds whatsoever to suspect that you had anything at all to do with this dreadful business.”
“So I should hope,” the woman replied; but I couldn’t help noticing that she seemed to deflate very slightly, like a leaky tyre, and the red glow faded gradually from her face as the interview went on. “Nevertheless,” I continued briskly, “it would be most helpful if you could just answer a few simple questions, to help us build up a picture of what happened. Would that be all right?”
“I suppose so.”
“Splendid. Now, then.” I tried to remember how proper barristers went about it; but that was a long time ago, and I was never paying much attention at the best of times. “The other witnesses I’ve spoken to have given me a fairly good idea of what happened, but I’m hoping there are some points you can corroborate for me. We’re reasonably confident that however Lady Julia came to harm, it couldn’t have been in the dining room or the first class saloon; and the doctor informs me that if cyanide in any effective form had been administered before dinner, it would have taken effect long before Lady Julia went out on deck. Accordingly, we believe that the fatal act – what we lawyers call the actus reus – must have taken place on the boat deck.”
I paused, mostly to congratulate myself on remembering the Latin tag. It’s pretty much all I do remember of my criminal law. She said nothing, so I went on.
“As I understand it,” I said, “at approximately a quarter to eleven, you were standing at the rear of the boat deck, quite close to the rearmost lifeboat derrick.”
She frowned. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m not familiar with nautical jargon.”
“The steel crane arrangement that the boat hangs from.”
“Ah,” she said. “In that case, yes, I was.”
“Very good. Now, three other witnesses have confirmed that during the relevant time – approximately a quarter to eleven until the moment of death, something like ten minutes later – nobody passed them coming down the boat deck from forward – I’m sorry, from the front end of the ship; and I was hoping that you can tell me if anybody came past you from the back end going forward.”
She frowned, clearly wrestling with the mental geometry of the thing. “You see,” I went on, “if that’s the case, we can be pretty sure that the person who administered the poison must’ve been one of the four ladies who were standing chatting with Lady Julia just before her death. But if anybody else was passing by during the relevant time – ”
“I see,” she interrupted. “No, nobody came past me, I’m certain of that. I was waiting for my husband to join me, he’d stopped in the bar to talk to some people and said he’d meet me on the deck, and I was looking out for him; he’d been rather longer than I expected.”
Quite, I thought. “That’s fine,” I said. “Most helpful. May I ask, did you see Lady Julia collapse?”
She looked rather embarrassed. “I’m afraid not,” she said. “As it happened, I was looking the other way. Of course, as soon as that woman screamed – ”
“Thank you,” I said. “No further questions.”
She took the hint and pushed off (just like a particularly stout, well-feathered old Welsummer hen that used to belong to my aunt Stephanie in Gloucestershire) and I had a moment or two to assimilate what I’d learned from her before the next exhibit turned up.
As I think I mentioned, I’m something of a student of mystery fiction. My guess was that next guest was, too; accordingly, I altered my manner a little.
“Sit down,” I snapped, as he shut the door behind him.
He gave me what I suppose he thought was a cool, insolent look, and slid into the chair. “Sure,” he replied. I’m not the world’s best at accents, particularly American ones, which can be so hard to pin down; but even I could recognize a native New Yorker.
“You aren’t wearing your hat,” I said.
He frowned. “Pardon me?”
“Your hat,” I repeated. “A particularly foul blue-grey fedora. Sears Roebuck, at a guess, but I don’t claim to be an expert.”
“I got a fedora,” he replied, more puzzled than anything. “What about it?”
“Where is it?”
He shrugged. “Damnedest thing. Blew right off my head into the ocean, just now.”
“You mean,” I said, “you deliberately threw it over the side, to get rid of it.”
He opened his eyes wide. “Why would I do a thing like that?”
“Oh, several reasons.” I shrugged. “Vestigial good taste, for one. Or maybe—” Here I leaned forward a little. Basil Rathbone does it rather better. “Maybe you didn’t want to be recognized.”
Well, I’d had my fun. I yawned a little, then leaned back. “So,” I said, “what sort of stuff do you deal in? Scotch?”
He took it pretty well. “Mostly” he said. “Also brandy, some wine. Classy stuff.”
“Naturally,” I replied. “The sort of thing you can’t just buy in Canada and lug over the border in a truck. Still, it’s a lot of trouble and expense to go to, isn’t it? Hardly worth your while, after expenses.”
He smiled. “It was a whim,” he said. “I’m telling the truth, I had to go to London on business – other business, nothing to do with you know what – and well, it seemed a shame to go home empty-handed, you know? So – ”
“Quite,” I said. “Just out of interest, how did you get it on board?”
He chuckled. “Easy as pie,” he said. “I had a few fellows row out one night when the ship was in dock, before we set out. We climbed up the side with a rope, hauled up the booze and stashed it. Nobody gave us any trouble. Couldn’t get away with that in the States, not without you bribe a lot of guys. You people don’t know security from nothing.”
I thought for a moment, then nodded. “Fine,” I said. “That’s all, for now.” He stood up, warily. “By the way,” I added, “the captain’s got some stewards out looking for you.”
He looked at me. “Is that right?”
I nodded. “You were seen lurking round the lifeboats just before the murder. He’s bound to ask you why. You may care to get a few answers ready for him and – well, make a few arrangements.”
His eyes narrowed. “I might, at that,” he said. “Thanks.” He paused. “You’re being mighty helpful,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“Why?”
I smiled. “Enlightened self interest,” I said. “You see, I’m going to be spending a bit of time – weeks, possibly a couple of months – living in your fair city, and as I understand it, there’s a degree of difficulty about getting hold of certain home comforts – I wonder,” I added, “do you happen to have a business card or anything like that?”