by Kim Ekemar
“It only means that you have to ask him.”
Ricardo decided to change tack.
“What was your reaction when you heard the shot being fired?”
Momentarily, the question kept her thinking.
“At first, I didn’t believe it was a gunshot – more as something to do with the ship’s engine. Then, when Charlie said that it was a gun that had been fired, I remembered certain incidents when I was stationed in the Middle East. As unlikely as it is to relive the violence in that particular part of the world while you’re on a cruise ship near Cape Horn, it eventually struck me that nothing and no one is any longer safe in this world.”
“That’s quite a statement, Missis Bright.”
She merely stared at him, waiting for the next question.
“Thank you, Missis Bright, I think that will be all for now”, Ricardo dismissed her.
She got up, quickly opened the door and walked down the corridor. Charlie was waiting for her by the staircase.
“How did it go?” he asked. “Do you want a smoke and to talk about it?”
Evelyn nodded her agreement, put on the jacket he had brought and followed him up the stairs to the Sky Lounge, located at the stern. The lounge was empty. Charlie looked at his watch, which showed half an hour before midnight. Of course it’s empty; everyone’s asleep at this hour, he thought as he strode across the room out into the chilly night air. He offered Evelyn a cigarette from a crumpled Marlboro pack.
As she exhaled the smoke, Evelyn began recounting the questions and the answers she had given to the policeman. They were both leaning on the railing watching the almost invisible shore as they smoked. She shivered a little in the cold, damp night air.
“You’re freezing”, Charlie said. “Allow me to make you warmer.”
With the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, he got up to stand behind her. The next moment, she was hit hard on the back of her head with a metal pipe. Evelyn collapsed, with her upper body slumped across the railing.
She’s definitely worth more dead than alive, Charlie thought, as he threw the metal pipe overboard and grasped Evelyn’s legs.
It took Charlie little effort to heave his diminutive wife’s unconscious body overboard, where it struck an ice floe on its way into the dark waters.
CHAPTER 17
The Wanton Hostess
The next interviewee was Berenice, the ship’s thirty-something hostess who also was the one responsible for managing the sales in the ship’s shop. To Ricardo, she immediately came across as nervous and evasive. Berenice fluttered her eyelashes at him in a shy, coquettish way each time she hesitated about her answer to his question. He found her apparent flirting offensive, as he was doing his best to conduct a professional investigation into the death of one of her fellow crew members.
*
Berenice Castillo was born in Santiago de Chile. She had never known her father, and her mother had always waved away any questions from Berenice about him. In her teens, Berenice understood that she was the result of a fleeting affair that hadn’t seen the light of dawn the following day.
She grew up to be a beautiful girl, whereas her mother was merely pretty. When she was seventeen, it became obvious to her that her mother was growing increasingly envious of her daughter’s looks while her own were rapidly fading. Previously, she couldn’t have cared less what Berenice did, whether she studied or stayed up late or met friends who weren’t desired company. Around this time, her mother started nagging at the way she dressed, wanted to know who she was seeing and how she could afford the nice clothes, her handbags and all the other accessories.
Berenice mentally shrugged away her mother’s efforts to start controlling her life at this late stage of her adolescence. She played truant and started to see men fifteen or twenty years her senior. They bought her dinners in expensive restaurants and fashionable items that made her look even more attractive. All she had to give them in return was coquettish smiles, cheeky double-entendre innuendos and to occasionally spend an hour or two in some hotel room rented by the hour. Berenice didn’t mind. She enjoyed it – it all became part of a rewarding game to her.
When she turned 21, Berenice moved away from home. With the help of an infatuated lover, she had found a small flat that he paid the rent for as long as he could visit her whenever he felt the urge to see her. Soon after, when he discovered that Berenice entertained half a dozen other men in the flat that he alone paid the rent for, he stopped doing so. After a row that ended with a black eye for her and his disappearance from her life, she suddenly found herself in dire need of ready money to finance her acquired taste for luxury. Her black eye kept her usual suitors at bay, but a girlfriend assured her that it was only a question of time before she returned to her former handsome self. Meanwhile, why didn’t she apply for work as a pole dancer at the same strip club where the girlfriend was making good money? Berenice would need some training before she started, of course, and when she was ready, surely whatever was left of the discolouration could easily be covered by make-up.
Always on the lookout for younger women to replace those who were closing in on thirty, the club owner willingly accepted her job application. He gave her some money to go shopping for provocative clothing, with the provision that they should be as revealing as possible and present no difficulty to being taken off before the music stopped. After some difficult first nights, Berenice detachedly got used to undressing before a leering crowd of men that put bills inside the garters that she wore with no other purpose than to be remunerated in this handy way.
Over the next ten years, she had seven different relationships with men who invariably beat her up for one reason or another when she didn’t bring home enough money, flirted with other men to increase their willingness to tip her or just because she had a knack of attracting mean-spirited characters in the first place.
The time came when, at 30, her youthful attraction had spirited away. She was unceremoniously fired from the club with no resources other than the meagre savings she had not spent on fashion items, cocaine and the whims of her temporary beaus without worries about the future. After a couple of months, her situation became precarious. Through an acquaintance, she managed to get an interview with the company that ran luxury cruises in Patagonia. Wearing modest-looking clothes and a pleasant smile that showed off her dimples to her advantage, she was successfully interviewed by the male human resources director. She was offered the job as hostess on the ship as soon as the seasonal cruises would begin at the end of September.
That had been a year ago, and since then she had been off to a bad start with Ari Cohen, the third-in-command on board.
*
Since the interview with Detective Inspector Arriaga wasn’t going as well as she wished, she became increasingly more agitated and nervous.
“Did you hear the shot from the bridge ring out?” Ricardo continued the interrogation.
“Well … maybe I heard some sound in the distance … but I didn’t realise until much later that it was a shot. You know, later, when the captain explained that there had been an accidental death on the ship. Eventually, I realised that it was Ari who had died.”
When Ricardo didn’t say anything, she hesitated.
“I didn’t pay too much attention to it at the time”, she hastily repeated. Ricardo intuited that she was lying. He wondered why.
“Please state your whereabouts at twelve minutes past three when you heard it?”
“Oh, I was in my cabin, preparing information for the evening’s briefing about tomorrow’s visit to Cape Horn.”
This time, her statement was too glib, as if she had rehearsed her reply in anticipation of his question.
“So, you were in your cabin, preparing for an upcoming briefing, which I assume you must have given on dozens of occasions during your time working on this cruise ship. Now, tell me what you did when you thought you had perhaps heard a shot in the distance?”
Berenice’s face once a
gain blushed deeply as she struggled with the answer to his question. Ricardo didn’t wait for her response.
“Had you known Ari Cohen for long?” he asked.
“Why do you ask? What does that have to do with anything?”
“As you yourself acknowledged, Ari Cohen was involved in an accidental shooting, and I’m trying to make heads or tails of it. Now please answer my question. How long had you known him?”
She seemed ruffled by his question, blushing before she answered.
“This was the second season we’d been working together as crew on Stella Australis. I’d known him for a year.”
He posed more questions in the same vein, but Ricardo couldn’t get any additional information of value, so he permitted her to leave.
CHAPTER 18
The Bouncer Twin
Tall and with his long blond hair tied in a knot on top of his head, Segundo entered the captain’s cabin without knocking. He sat down on the chair that Ricardo signalled and waited expectantly for the questioning to begin.
*
Born in Puerto Montt, Mauricio and Segundo were, physically speaking, identical twins. When they entered adolescence, however, it became apparent to their parents that their sons were gradually and inexplicably beginning to develop in different ways. Segundo was the lazy one, interested only in physical exercise and none of the mental work that he was tasked with at school. He began to miss classes, and he lied to both his parents and his teachers when he was confronted about the fact, explaining that it was his brother who had been absent.
Perhaps his parents unwittingly caused Segundo psychological impact by humorously naming him thus, to indicate that he was the second of the twins to be born. It was noticeable that he grew up feeling less important than his elder brother; always second-rate and in second place. In any case, while the more diligent Mauricio continued his studies and eventually applied to study law at university, Segundo dropped out of school altogether when he was sixteen. He spent time in the gym with friends and did some boxing. Weightlifting became his favourite pastime, and he proudly flexed his biceps whenever the opportunity came along. He began taking anabolic steroids to further improve his muscle development.
The summer they became nineteen, Mauricio went to live on the campus of the university where he had been accepted. Their parents decided it was time also for Segundo to move away from home, something that he willingly accepted so he could stop listening to their nagging voices about what he should and shouldn’t do with his life. The separation was facilitated by a cheque that his father gave him to cover six months of expenses until he could get a job and stand on his own two feet.
Segundo took a train to Santiago, where he rented a small, cheap flat in a rundown suburb to make his farewell cheque last longer. When he realised that his final allowance was dwindling faster than he had anticipated, he found work as a bouncer for a sleazy nightclub popular for the raucous music being played and the ease with which assorted drugs could be purchased there. He quickly came to enjoy the power that came with the work – the denial of entrance; the bribes so he would allow those less glamorous inside; throwing out intoxicated guests who became too noisy. All of this, as Segundo imagined it, was because people kowtowed to the pumped-up muscles that he flexed, wearing a T-shirt with its sleeves rolled up to the armpits.
In the long run, his wages and the grateful handshakes he received still proved to be insufficient for paying his escalating living costs. The main reason for this was his increasing consumption of cocaine, which had begun six months into his employment. Segundo was evicted from his flat and had to sleep in the rough for three nights until an acquaintance, who shared his addiction, took pity on him and for a fee offered temporary shelter at his place.
Segundo understood that he had two choices to balance his earnings against his expenditure: either he stopped spending the major part of his salary on cocaine or he had to increase his income. Since, at this point in his life, he couldn’t seriously see himself renouncing the one thing – besides working out at the gym – that made him feel euphoric, he arrived at the conclusion that the solution lay in swelling his income. Since the owner of the club had refused his request for a salary increase, Segundo decided to rob a petrol station where only cash payments were accepted.
With a pistol in his pocket that Segundo – unknowing to his landlord while alone in the flat – had found when going through the drawers in the master bedroom, he loitered near the entrance to the petrol station’s mini market where the cash register was located. When the shop was empty of customers, Segundo entered after having pulled a ski mask over his face and the weapon from his pocket. Threatening the attendant, who nonplussed remained behind the counter with his hands in the air, Segundo waved his gun and demanded the cash in the till. After being obeyed, he rushed outside with the loot. However, he was careless enough to rip the balaclava off his head before climbing onto his stolen, nondescript motorcycle, one that he had had the insight to switch the number plates on for a pair that he had stolen off a similar vehicle. The cameras surveying the area got several seconds of clear, unobstructed video recording of his face.
The police tracked down Segundo a week later and arrested him for robbery. He vehemently denied everything, even when he was confronted with the damning video sequence and the DNA on the balaclava that he had dropped when climbing onto the getaway motorbike. He kept up his story of denial until he found it convenient to give the police the same defensive argument that he had used when confronting his teachers after missing school. He did so with confidence after learning that his brother the weekend in question had gone hiking on his own in the Andes.
“Why, I don’t have a driver’s licence, and, even less so, a bike”, he protested. “Since it couldn’t have been me, perhaps it was my twin brother? Did you ask him?”
His suggestion didn’t improve family relations a bit, but to his satisfaction, at least it got him off the hook. The judge in the case ruled that, since you can’t risk putting an innocent man in prison and it was impossible to determine who the offender had been, the case was dismissed. Segundo blessed his fortune of having been born an identical twin.
Shortly afterwards, his landlord acquaintance got upset with him and accused him of the theft of his pistol. Despite his protests and denial, Segundo was thrown out on the street. The same week, the police raided the nightclub and arrested the owner and a large part of the club’s patrons for the use of illegal drugs on its premises. Although his name was one of those mentioned in the police report as wanted for questioning, by sheer luck the police had arrived when Segundo had a night off. Being of interest to the police, out of work and with nowhere to stay, Segundo knew he had to find some other means of livelihood – preferably as far away from Santiago as possible.
Skimming the wanted ads on a computer at an Internet café, he thought the work description for an employment on board a cruise ship sounded attractive. Free room and board, cruising to visit unknown places and getting paid handsomely for doing so, sounded to Segundo like a perfect solution to his present predicament.
He got the position. A month later, he was on board Stella Australis working as one of the assistants in the engine room. The only thing he dearly missed from his former life was the cocaine.
*
“Tell me, why did you decide to sign on as a crew member on Stella Australis?”
“The simple and honest answer, I think”, Segundo slowly replied, while repeatedly closing his left eye in an involuntary way, “is that I was looking for adventure with bed and breakfast paid for.”
“Why did Ari Cohen attack you?”
“Attack me?”
“I saw first-hand how he threatened to punch you in the engine room yesterday afternoon.”
“Oh, that!” Segundo hesitated briefly, while his eye resumed the tic. “A question of disagreement over a card game debt.”
Ricardo didn‘t believe him.
“Where were you when the shot was
fired?”
“In my cabin, but I didn’t hear it – I heard about it later.”
“You were supposed to be on standby in the engine room – why weren’t you?”
“A schedule misunderstanding; I wasn’t aware the ship was going to sail while the passengers were still visiting the glacier.”
“Why couldn’t superior officer Ernesto Paniagua find you?”
“I was smoking outside, since it’s not allowed in the interior of the ship.”
“Where?”
Again, Ricardo could observe his facial tic as he waited for Segundo’s response.
“On the balcony of the Sky Lounge.”
“When did you find out that you were wanted for duty?”
“About half an hour later … or perhaps it was an hour later.”
“Did you see or meet with anyone between three and three forty?”
“Not that I can recall.”
“All right, that’s all for now. You may go, but I’m certain to call you back later for additional questioning.”
CHAPTER 19
The Murder Timeline
The northeaster was now blowing with more force through the Beagle Channel as the cold air from Antarctica caused a low-pressure weather front between the black cliffs. One hour past midnight, the moon made a surprise appearance from behind the clouds. Again, Captain Abasolo asked for an update about the status of the leak in the hull.
“There has been no increase in the water flow in the last hour”, Vicente informed him. “The four bilge pumps are working satisfactorily, and I don’t expect any change as long as we’re not sailing. However, any movement of the ship will risk an increase of the breach.”
“We’ll remain here for the night”, the captain decided. “Tomorrow at dawn we will begin advancing at low speed towards the Pia Glacier, where we’ll pick up the abandoned passengers before moving on to Ushuaia.”