Locked-Room Mystery Box Set

by Kim Ekemar

  The photographs that Crenshaw transmitted to his employer in 2016 were reproduced by media across the globe, and they later won him an award for the best war reportage of the year. That was the last work Crenshaw did for his paper, because without telling anyone the reason why, he simply quit and returned to London. He couldn’t take the meaningless deaths any longer. During sleepless nights, Crenshaw would lie awake with his eyes closed and recapitulate the images he had captured with his cameras.

  It took his mother a year to realise that her son’s distant and lethargic behaviour was a sign of post-traumatic stress disorder, and it occurred to her that it would be a good idea to dispatch him on a vacation as far away as possible from the Middle East, or any other war zone for that matter. She couldn’t think of a better place to accomplish this than to send her son on a cruise around Cape Horn.

  *

  Ricardo studied the man sitting in front of him, but not as the dinner companion who had been assigned a table with another passenger who also happened to travel on his own. He observed Crenshaw as an investigator who needed to contemplate all options in a murder case.

  “Please tell me what you were doing when you heard the shot go off at twelve minutes past three”, Ricardo began.

  “I left the Darwin Lounge some time before I heard the gunshot”, Crenshaw responded after having considered the question. “I went downstairs two decks to find the Yamana Lounge. Two housekeepers were present when I entered – I’m sure that’s something they can corroborate. I went out onto the balcony to see if I could get a different shot of the glacier, which I couldn’t since the weather was getting worse. Instead, I returned to my cabin. Moments later, I heard the report of a gun. To me, it sounded as if a large-calibre pistol had been fired.”

  “Why do you suppose this?” Ricardo asked.

  Several seconds passed before Crenshaw decided to answer the question.

  “As a photojournalist, I’ve been covering everything from skirmishes, battles, warfare and much worse over what seems to be an eternal span of time”, he finally spoke. “To put it bluntly – over the years I’ve been subject to too many arms being fired. As far as I’m concerned, today’s gunshot was only one more of the too many weapons that I have heard being discharged.”

  “Considering your professional background, then, what was your immediate reaction when you heard the shot?”

  Instead of giving a reply, Crenshaw gazed into the air. Since he had begun the interview, Ricardo had searched Crenshaw’s facial and hand movements for any kind of emotional reactions, but there were none to be found. He found this striking, especially after the interviews with his two previous highly temperamental witnesses. Perhaps it’s all about a stiff-upper-lipped English background, Ricardo speculated in silence, or maybe he’s playing his cards close to the chest to avoid giving away his game.

  “It made me think back over things I saw in the Middle East”, Crenshaw finally replied, in a vague way.

  “What did you do after the shot was fired?”

  “I went to bed fully clothed and pulled the blanket over my head. I stayed there until the captain ordered everyone to join him in the Darwin Lounge.”

  Despite more questions of the same kind, Ricardo was unable to get any further information of interest from Crenshaw.

  CHAPTER 15

  The CIA Agent

  Charles Bright – who repeatedly insisted that Ricardo should call him Charlie – more than anything seemed to find faint amusement in Ari Cohen’s death. At the same time, he did his best to get chummy with Ricardo in an attempt to find out more about what exactly he was investigating.

  “I’m something of a sleuth, you know”, Charlie opened the conversation, “an amateur compared to you, of course, but I’m pretty good at guessing the outcome of the police drama documentaries you get on television.”

  “A sleuth, you say? What’s your line of work, then?”

  “I like to think of myself as the fastest salesman in the Midwest”, Charlie replied with a chuckle. “To be a good salesman, you need patience. To be a great salesman, you need talent. So, I always do research on my customers to find the perfect pitch, and it’s that experience that makes me good at investigative work.”

  With his jovial, chatty manner, either he’s very adept at deception, or he’s a clown who doesn’t know his nose from his toes, Ricardo thought.

  *

  At the age of 24, Charlie Bright was accepted by the CIA to be trained as an agent for this US intelligence organisation. After miscellaneous missions of minor importance, he was eventually assigned to cover the Middle East with increased responsibilities that included more interesting tasks. He was stationed in Baghdad, where he arrived a few months after Saddam Hussein had been executed. Although Baghdad continued to be his base, he travelled widely over the Middle East, and in particular to Syria when the civil war in that country got worse.

  However, Charlie’s character was such that he couldn’t resist making money on the side, which was both tempting and easy in a region rife with corruption and where information was often considered more valuable than gold. Usually giving the jovial performance of a friendly American who was as interested in talking about whoever he was conversing with as much as about himself, he nevertheless possessed a cold streak that he rarely displayed openly. His station chief knew, both from his file and what he personally had observed, that Charlie was exactly the opposite of what he projected himself to be: namely, a man with no empathy who fitted the profile of an assassin.

  The first job he was given when the CIA decided to take advantage of this streak in his character was to eliminate a negotiator for the Palestinians. The negotiator pretended to be an American informant, when he in reality was working for the Islamic resistance movement Hamas. After having fed him some false information that led to an enemy raid on Israeli territory, the Americans needed no more proof of where the informer’s allegiances rested. Charlie accepted the mission to kill him and, in the view of his employer, he did so in an exemplary way. This led to other, occasional assassinations of persons who were described to him as either dangerous or duplicitous enemies to the interests of the United States. Charlie carried out the missions with no qualms whatsoever about complying with the orders he had been instructed to execute. He thrived on being in the midst of complex spy games, and was happy to, on top of that, get a little richer every day from the business dealings he made on the side.

  What eventually caused Charlie’s downfall was when he passed on some information that had been planted to see who was responsible for the leak about a certain CIA operation. He was confronted by the station chief, but Charlie admitted only to having shared harmless titbits for no compensation at all. His station chief didn’t believe him, but at the same time he knew that if he charged him with a treasonous act, Charlie would have no compunction about talking to the press about the assassination missions and other nefarious acts that he had been ordered to undertake.

  After the station chief had consulted his superiors at Langley, it was decided that Charlie should be recalled to the US, where he would remain as an inactive agent with full pay until further notice. And, as long as he was on the payroll, he could still be considered if some dirty work came along that needed to be carried out in the name of world peace.

  He spent the following year doing little work and squandering more money than his salary permitted. After having lost his lucrative side business in the Middle East, Charlie began musing on how he could receive some additional income. He started a hardware store in Virginia, but he soon became bored by its mediocre performance and the dull life it implied. Planning carefully, he set the store on fire one night, while he and his wife Evelyn enjoyed a perfect alibi dining in New York. The fire was started by a gas valve not completely shut and a live electric wire. After a perfunctory investigation and the customary bureaucratic delay, the insurance company paid him in full without further fuss. Charlie had smiled at the thought of having discovered a
new method of lining his pockets – carefully executed insurance frauds.

  A week before he and his wife Evelyn had boarded Stella Australis in Punta Arenas, he had been briefed by Langley about the mission he was expected to accomplish on board the ship. Encouraged by the ease with which he had got away with his insurance fraud a few years earlier, Charlie now considered putting into gear something he had patiently been preparing for. After investing part of his salary and the money he had received for his burnt-down business, he had for some time paid the premium for a life insurance in case of his wife’s death.

  Now, Charlie thought, the time has come to collect. A gentle push into the sea after dusk has settled, and no one will be any the wiser as to why Evelyn went overboard. She’d be gone, sadly, great cook and all, but a man’s got to have a living besides his natural inclination for a decent turnover of female companions.

  Moreover, he concluded with a smile, this trip will allow me to literally kill two birds with one stone.

  *

  “Can you tell me about your whereabouts between three and three thirty?”

  “My wife and I went outside where they store the Zodiacs next to the gym to have a smoke”, Charlie said. “It’s obviously less windy at the stern than on the balcony up front, you know, and that’s even before mentioning the cold. Then we went back to our cabin on the deck below.”

  “Did you hear the shot from the bridge?”

  “Well, I heard it at a distance. Our cabin is on the deck below the bridge, so it was not that loud.”

  “What was your immediate reaction when you heard the gun go off?”

  “Oh, I don’t know … you know, I’ve heard some guns being fired in my life, and a few big ones, too, but since the ship at that point was moving, I put it aside, thinking it probably had to do with something mechanical.”

  “You say you’ve heard a lot of guns being fired, and still you thought it had something to do with the ship’s mechanics?!”

  “Yeah, that’s about right.”

  “Previously you told me that you’re ‘something of a sleuth’ … didn’t you think of doing something to investigate the reason for the gunshot?”

  “Not really. When I’m on an expensive vacation like this one, I want to relax, so I figured that it wasn’t my problem.”

  “With your self-proclaimed experience, you weren’t curious at all?”

  “Look”, Charlie said, raising his voice, “I don’t know what you’re trying to get at, but I didn’t check out where the sound came from and, to be perfectly clear, I had more important things on my mind at the time. Domestic issues, like in all marriages.”

  Ricardo looked at him for thirty seconds, not believing him. He attempted to get more information from the American, but was unable to get anything of interest out of him.

  “All right, thanks for your cooperation, Mister Bright”, he finally dismissed him, “you may go now.”

  “Charlie, everyone calls me Charlie”, Charlie insisted and rose, beaming a friendly smile. “You should, too.”

  CHAPTER 16

  The Interpreter Prodigy

  Evelyn Bright entered the cabin after rapping twice on the door. After sitting down opposite him, Ricardo took his time studying her. She met his gaze without saying a word. Evelyn was not a beautiful woman by any means; she was rather plain-looking with her dyed, mistreated hair and thin face. Still, Ricardo detected an intelligent glint in her eyes.

  *

  Evelyn Lichtmann grew up as part of a large Jewish family on New York’s Lower East side. Among her siblings, there were many talented people: a fast-talking stand-up comedian uncle, a magician brother, a successful stockbroker grandfather, a singing soprano cousin. Although her parents were quite ordinary (her mother was a librarian and her father an accountant), Evelyn possessed a talent of her own that inevitably impressed everyone – she had an extraordinary gift for learning languages. By the time she was twelve, she spoke four languages fluently; by fifteen, she had added three more; and when she entered university, she was decided on learning one still more challenging: Arabic.

  Evelyn became engrossed with the delightful phrases and was enchanted with the beautiful writing that expressed the Arabic language on paper. She took additional courses to master simultaneous interpretation, and soon after finishing her studies she managed to land a job with the United Nations. A decade later, she was contacted by the CIA and accepted a work offer that came with a significantly higher pay. The only catch was that her new job meant she had to spend at least five years in Baghdad.

  She considered the challenge of working abroad to be an exciting opportunity to brush up on different Arabic dialects while living in the region. Although she did succeed in fine-tuning her proficiency in Arabic, she found other aspects of being a woman in an Arab country more trying. Since Evelyn wasn’t particularly good-looking or feminine in her ways in the first place, her male American compatriots mostly ignored her while the locals bestowed either ridicule or centuries of accumulated cultural machismo on her. She found Arab men overbearing and nasty, and her distaste for them grew over time.

  The tipping point for Evelyn came four years into her assignment when, on a hot afternoon, she walked outside the compound where she worked. She was on her way to the market where she enjoyed chatting with the women who managed the stalls. Three Arabs followed her and shouted insults before they ran up and grabbed her. With her mouth covered by one dirty hand, another pair lifted her by the legs. Unable to scream or fight back, she was carried towards a back alley. By sheer luck, an army vehicle driven by Charlie Bright passed by at that very moment. He stopped the jeep and rushed to her help. The Arabs ran, because they knew that putting up a fight against one of the American soldiers would result in severe punishment.

  Charlie’s rescue of Evelyn led to an affair, which eventually resulted in their marriage. The other effect of the attack was Evelyn’s increased resentment against Arab men. During her final months in Baghdad, she started doing conscious errors in her translations if it meant that an interviewed Arab would suffer some consequence from it. As one of the most trusted translators in the region, she was never confronted about her intentional transgressions that more than once caused grief for those Arab men who had been misinterpreted.

  When Charlie was recalled to the CIA headquarters in Virginia, for what she at the time believed was the agreed end of his tour, she applied to go back with him. Soon after their return to the US, they got married. After a few years of marriage, she had slowly come to realise that they shared nothing beyond a life of practical daily matters to be solved and their common aversion to Arabs.

  They had tried to settle down in a small town where Charlie opened a hardware store. When it burnt down, Charlie seemed to take it in his stride. Meanwhile, in spite of her proficiency, Evelyn found it difficult to get the kind of translation work she was interested in – i. e. simultaneous interpretation – unless she was willing to move to either New York or Washington. Charlie vehemently refused to consider the idea of moving to a city.

  What they needed was a break, Charlie had informed her one morning. He had finally managed to bridge the issue of the loans they had owed, he told her, and their well-merited compensation was to take a holiday to recharge their batteries. Although Evelyn had no particular desire to go to a cold and icy place such as the one he then suggested, she knew that it would be futile to try to change Charlie’s mind once he had decided on something.

  Since she knew that Charlie, too, hated cold places, she suspected that he had received instructions about a mission from her former employer – one that he didn’t care to discuss with her.

  *

  “What do you do for a living, Missis Bright?” Ricardo began the interview.

  “I have a career as an interpreter and translator, but I’ve been unemployed on and off for three years.”

  “In that capacity, who have your employers been?”

  “Are you asking for my CV? Is this what
your interview is about?” Evelyn asked, clenching her teeth. “Well, after university, I went to work for the United Nations in New York for a decade. It eventually led me to employment in Iraq.”

  “Working as an interpreter in the Middle East”, Ricardo mused, “means you must be well versed in Arabic.”

  Evelyn didn’t reply; instead, she grated her teeth almost imperceptibly and waited for him to ask another question.

  “Considering your language skills, I find it regrettable that you haven’t been able to secure steady work since your return to the US”, Ricardo continued. “Did you have any particular reason for leaving your position in Iraq?”

  “No”, she replied. “I went back home, got married, and that’s about it.”

  “How long have you been married to Charles Bright?”

  “Three years.”

  “Do you miss working in the Middle East?”

  Ricardo saw her hesitating, and deduced that she did.

  “No” she replied, gritting her teeth. “What I miss is the work.”

  “Where were you immediately before and after twelve minutes past three when the shot was fired?”

  Evelyn thought hard before she looked at him and replied.

  “My husband and I left the lounge on the top deck and went to our cabin after smoking a cigarette outside. Later, in our cabin, we heard the shot, and Charlie made a comment that it sounded like a gun had been fired.”

  “Why did you decide to take this cruise?”

  “It was Charlie’s idea; you should ask him.”

  “Does it mean that you weren’t involved in the decision?”