by Mark McCrum
‘Cruising on his own?’
‘I think he was. Yes, come to think of it he had a few golden girls after him, so definitely.’
‘Golden girls?’
‘Widows. Gold-diggers. There’s always a couple.’
‘You don’t remember his name?’
Mike frowned. ‘Krug, something. Krugminder – something like that. Viktor might remember. He was leading the expeditions on that cruise.’
‘And Kimberley?’
‘That was on a different ship. But yeah,’ he grinned, ‘we all knew about her. Famous lady. There were obituaries in all the Australian papers. She was the widow of one of Australia’s richest men, Dougie Wyldestone, d’you ever hear of him?’
‘Can’t say I have.’
‘He was one of those guys who was in on the discovery of minerals in Western Australia at the start of the last century. He got in there quick and grabbed the relevant leases. Anyway, she was much younger than him. Like in her twenties when he was in his eighties. She was his housekeeper before she became his wife. So everyone was fascinated by her. Thai. You can imagine the rumours.’
‘About her death?’
‘No, about why she’d married him. You know, the old story, bit like our friends on this ship.’ Mike made a face which indicated that the friends he meant were Don and Lauren. ‘This one managed to get most of the loot when the old feller died, though there was a fight with his children from his first marriage, I believe. She lived for years in this massive mansion in Perth and had a string of younger boyfriends. Tennis pros, gym instructors, that kind of thing. I don’t think she ever married again.’
‘And what was her name?’
‘Ah, didn’t I say? Marikit …’
‘Marikit Wyldestone …?’
‘Yeah. Even though she might have got her money in a dodgy way, she was always very generous with it. So she was much-loved by the ordinary Aussies.’
‘Interesting stuff. And you say that cruise was on a different ship?’
‘Kimberley, yeah, that’s a regular one for the Golden Mermaid. Sister Goldencruise vessel, which then goes on up to Indonesia and Japan and places like that.’
Mike had got to his feet and indicated he was off to get some more food.
‘So tell me what happens in Freetown?’ Francis asked, when he returned with a plate piled high with cooked breakfast.
‘Ah, it’s a good day out,’ Mike replied. ‘Sierra Leone is amazing. The port at Aberdeen – that’s the district of Freetown where we land – is too small for us to dock, so we have to anchor offshore and do a Zodiac transfer. Which is great fun, the guests love that, scrambling up on to the rocky beach. We didn’t do it the last two years, because of the Ebola epidemic, so it’s going to be interesting to see how the place is now.’
‘So when were you there before?’
‘April 2014, literally just before the epidemic broke. God knows, we might have been taking a terrible risk, trailing round Freetown, but nobody knew anything about it then …’
‘And none of the guests contracted the disease?’
‘Not that I ever heard about. Then last year they were technically in the clear, but the WHO didn’t give the thumbs-up till mid-March, after we’d sailed from Cape Town, so Goldencruise didn’t put it on the itinerary. But no, all back to normal now, I hope.’
‘So then, after the beach …?’
‘Yeah, we bus them up to the amputee hospital, which was always a bit of a wake-up call for them. To see the mess the civil war left behind, even years later. You tend to find them all getting their cheque books out after that.’
‘Not that you’re being cynical.’
‘Not at all. But it’s a funny thing about Americans, don’t you think? Not that they’re naive – well, maybe they are. But it’s like’ – he slipped into a hick accent – ‘“Ah gee, I didn’t realize there would be so many guys with no legs and arms, please, let me chuck some money at you.” It all works well, because of course what the hospital wants is for money to be chucked at it. The whole place is run by an American anyway. That’s why they take them up there – it’s not too alien. She’s some incredible missionary woman who came here on holiday or on a fact-finding trip or something and then saw all these limbless guys without any help and decided to stay. Amazing really. I love people like that, who see something terrible and decide they can’t turn away. On a human level, it’s impressive.’
‘Sounds like it is.’
‘And then for a bit of light relief after that we take them up to the chimp sanctuary. That’s good fun. The chimps are cute. Pose for photos and yawn and scratch their crimson arses and stuff like that. They really do look almost human, loping around with their long arms. You can certainly get your head around evolution when you see them in action. Then it’s back down to the beach for cocktails and the amputee-leper football match.’
‘I saw that on the itinerary.’
‘Only in Africa! One team is like the amputees from the civil war and the other team is the lepers. I shouldn’t laugh, but you gotta see these guys. They really go for it. Zooming around the sand on crutches. Kicking with one leg.’ Mike shook his head. ‘It’s pretty awesome stuff. And the beach is beautiful. A great big curve of sand and palm trees. You know, if they got their act together they could have some serious tourism in Sierra Leone.’
‘So it’s all totally safe now, is it?’
‘So they tell us. Still, you won’t catch me snogging the local guide, that’s for sure.’ He laughed. ‘Then we bring the guests back here in the Zodiacs at sunset and take them off to Banana Island.’
‘The same night?’
‘Hell, no. They need their five-course dinner, don’t they? After a full-on day like that. No, the ship goes up the coast and anchors by the island overnight, and we offload first thing in the morning.’
‘And what happens on Banana Island?’
‘Bugger all. There’s a scruffy little village to look at and a walk through the jungle for the more adventurous guests. You might see a couple of monkeys in the wild, if you’re lucky …’
He tailed off; his boss had joined them.
‘Morning guys,’ said Viktor. ‘All set for another long day at sea? I need to talk to you, Mike, when you’ve finished breakfast. There’s been a bit of a change of plan.’
‘So what’s happening?’ Francis asked.
‘There’ll be a passenger briefing later,’ Viktor said, coolly. ‘You’ll find out then.’
Secrets, secrets, secrets. As Francis paced round the ship after breakfast, gearing himself up for his lecture at ten thirty, he felt there were too many. Two deaths that none of the passengers were yet aware of, and now … what? It was, he supposed, fair enough that Viktor should keep his operational info confidential. But still, a little galling. Especially since Francis knew so much more than all the other guests.
Around him they were all getting on happily with their ‘at sea’ days. Whatever Viktor had up his sleeve for tomorrow, today the programme was running as planned. Lectures by himself and Mike (replacing the one cancelled yesterday); a game of competitive quoits on deck seven; even a teatime birding quiz with Leo in the Panorama Lounge. For those who couldn’t be bothered with such worthy pursuits, there was of course the Whirlpool Bar, which opened pretty much as soon as breakfast had been cleared away. Two deeply tanned ladies were already waist deep in the central spa pool, pink cocktails in hand at ten in the morning. Twelve feet away, on the other side, a flabby gent with a threadbare carpet of white hair down his back was reading from a Kindle while sipping a pint of lager. God forbid that his bony fingers should lose their grip on his device!
At ten thirty Francis stood waiting by the lectern in the theatre as the guests trooped in and took their places. Bruce and Candy had made it; Derek the Aussie and his wife Noelene; Brad and Damian; even, he noticed, Shirley and Gerald, in an audience that numbered close to thirty. With the sparkling blue ocean outside, his subject felt very drab and E
nglish as he took them through his usual well-rehearsed account of the crime genre, from the Newgate Calendar and Godwin’s Caleb Williams, through Poe, Conan Doyle, Chesterton, Christie, Sayers, Allingham, James, right up to the gorier narratives of today. Some of his jokes got chuckles; the less obvious ones seemed to miss the mark. They had just started on questions at the end when he was interrupted by an announcement over the tannoy. For a moment, hearing Viktor’s voice, Francis thought they had decided to move the briefing forward. But no: Mike had spotted a school of tuna and the ship had slowed down and diverted for people to see it.
The theatre emptied in under a minute, with barely an apology. Francis followed his audience out to find an excited crowd gathered at the back of the sun deck, cameras in hand; though you needed, he thought, a telephoto lens as powerful as Damian’s foot-long proboscis to catch the tiny surface splashes a couple of hundred yards off the port side of the ship. Sadie was out here too, in a turquoise sarong, with a pair of binoculars, chatting to Leo. Her laugh was rather stagey, head thrown back, and Francis wondered for a moment whether she had noticed him. She hadn’t been to his lecture; he kept his distance.
If Francis was mildly cheesed off that a school of fish had proved more compelling than questions about his talk, he was also glad to have got his obligations out of the way. He had a quick coffee in the Whirlpool Bar, then headed back round the ship, feeling increasingly like a hamster with nowhere to hide. There was, he supposed, safety in numbers. Even the most determined killer was hardly going to have a go at him when most of the guests were out and about, enjoying the fresh air.
Daphne and Henry, in matching maroon tracksuits, were making their way at a dodder round deck seven. Daphne was right behind her hubby, pushing him on with encouraging little shouts.
‘Attaboy, Henry! You know you can do it.’
The old man’s colour was high; crimson shading into purple.
Francis chuckled at Klaus’s thought that she was trying to finish him off. Or did exercise alleviate Alzheimer’s? Who knew – perhaps she just wanted him to be fit.
Francis returned to his cabin, wondering if Carmen might have left a message for him. He had felt rather sidelined yesterday, despite her pre-dinner apologies and the chat they’d had afterwards. Now he felt more so. Viktor had made it clear that he wasn’t sharing the ‘change of plan’ with the likes of him. So what was it? Was there new information? Were they finally going to tell the passengers about Eve and George? Ah, well, he would have to find out later, with all the others.
Meanwhile, he wasn’t giving up on his own ideas, whatever Carmen thought of them. Now Mike had confirmed that there had been deaths on other cruises, what did that mean? There was no harm in having a closer look, was there? Following up the names and details of those who had died. It was the sort of Internet challenge he enjoyed, especially as he was operating from a remote satellite connection somewhere off West Africa.
Francis had thought he would be in for a bit of a search, but a helpful – if improbable – site called cruiseshipdeaths.com provided everything he needed. There they all were, from Sir David Frost, seventy-four, on board the Queen Elizabeth en route from Southampton to Rome in August 2013 (he too had been lecturing), to Baby Doe, aged one day, abandoned by her twenty-year-old mother on board the Carnival Dream in the Caribbean in October 2011.
Mike had been almost right. It was a Mr Krugbender, an American, who had died last Christmas on the Golden Adventurer’s twelve-day round trip from Ushuaia, Argentina, through the Falkland Islands and on down to Antarctica. He had been travelling on his own and there was nothing suspicious about his death. But Mike had understated things. There were no less than two other deaths registered for the Golden Adventurer in the past year: a Mrs Drew-Huggins, seventy-nine, on the Ecuador to Chile leg in October; and Major Ralph Walden Fisher, eighty-six, on the ship’s Tromsø to Longyearbyen passage in July. And yes, here she was, on the twelve-day April cruise from Broome to Darwin on the Interluxe Goldencruise Golden Mermaid: Marikit Wyldestone, aged just seventy-three. He skipped through a couple of obits of her, which confirmed what Mike had told him. An undeniably merry widow, known for both her charity work and her lovers; by the looks of it, the former sometimes provided the latter. The general tenor of the write-ups of her death was one of surprise. No one had thought lively Marikit would pass on so suddenly and so soon.
Then Francis dived a little deeper, amazed, as so often, at what you could find online these days. Getting hold of a copy of a will would once have meant a personal visit to the Supreme Court of New South Wales in Sydney and similar trips to find probate records in Ohio and Illinois. Now you could order one online, pay a small fee and have it delivered to your inbox in days; or, for a bit more cash, overnight.
Serious researches in hand, Francis took his laptop up to the breezy sunshine of deck six. The Whirlpool Bar was busy. The early-morning boozers had moved on to pre-lunch aperitifs and been joined by others. Loud laughter rang from the groups around the tables. There were shrieks and splashes from the central spa pool.
Francis took a seat in the last available space, a table for two right in the corner by the steps down to the back of deck four. He ordered a beer and clicked through to Facebook. Out here in bright sunshine in the middle of the ocean, the whole thing seemed surreal. Who were these people, his so-called ‘friends’? A sprinkling were real friends, or at least real acquaintances, as in people he liked and occasionally saw. But there were many others who had joined his list by a strange kind of osmosis. People he had known at college, years ago, for example. The act of clicking ‘confirm friend’ hadn’t even led to a catch-up message, quite often, let alone a catch-up meeting. There they were, these forgotten people, in his news feed, with their strange lives and alien opinions; and odder still, the reactions and opinions of their ‘friends’.
Francis enjoyed eavesdropping. He was always up for listening in to a conversation on a bus or train, or increasingly, these days, of a one-sided nature, on a mobile. But Facebook licensed snooping on other people on a grand scale, with lives and motives and delusions laid horribly bare. This one was finding her teenaged daughter impossible to live with, that one was going through a messy divorce (friends who had once cooed over the endearing things that hubby had got up to were now invited to unfriend him – pdq). This one had just taken up yoga and was finding her new class hostile, that one was floored by depression. This one was standing to become a local councillor, that one had moved to New Zealand and become a climate change activist. This one fulminated batily from the right, that one pontificated self-righteously from the left. Francis rarely commented. Instead, he lurked. Lurked and learned.
He clicked open his newsfeed. There were the usual posts. ‘Friends’ opining about news items and public figures; grumbling about neighbours, bosses, partners, parents, children; boasting about parties they’d been to, restaurants and bars they’d visited, famous people they’d seen or even met, holidays they were on, flowers they’d planted, books they’d written; asking for help with this charity run or that worthy appeal. After each post came the stack of thumbs-up ‘likes’ and the trail of inane comments. ‘Wow!’ ‘Amazing!’ ‘Sounds lovely’, ‘Clever you’, ‘Big hugs’ etc.
Oh, what a lot these indiscreet individuals told you about themselves, even as they imagined they were in some online version of a chat in a pub or at a private dinner party. And what was this latest post? Input from his very newest ‘friend’.
Sadie Solomon
2 hours ago
This cruise I’m on just gets weirder and weirder. The night before last, as I wrote yesterday, we had an MOB (man overboard). Or rather a WOB (woman overboard). A fellow American, no less, not that much older than me, albeit with a much older partner (not like my lovely Louis Pienaar – hey Lou, I miss you!).
Anyway, the ship turned round for a bit, failed to find her, then we turned promptly back and steamed on, up this empty West Coast of Africa. Apparently we are somewhere of
f Liberia at the moment, though how would you know with nothing but mile upon mile of ocean to look at? We are not stopping at Monrovia, presumably because it’s too poor and genuinely ‘African’ for my high-end fellow ‘guests’ – as they call us passengers – to be allowed to see.
As you can imagine, since the MOB, as we so casually call it, the ship has been a hotbed of gossip. Basically: did she fall – or was she pushed? I have some thoughts about that, based on something I happened to see a few nights ago. I tried telling the captain about this, but he didn’t seem interested. Then there’s this English crime writer guy on the ship who fancies himself as a bit of a private dick. I told him too, but he doesn’t seem that bothered either. So now I’m feeling a bit stymied. It’s not as if there’s any police on board this ship. So my question to you guys is: should I just let this lie or what?
We are stopping in Freetown, Sierra Leone, tomorrow, for a day’s excursion. So I guess I could report to the police there. But whose business is it really that I saw the female victim, the night before she died, snogging one of the senior crew members?
Nothing like sharing! Had Sadie forgotten that she and he had become Facebook friends? The post had already garnered fifty-four ‘likes’ and twenty-nine comments, including five ‘Wow!’s. Sadie’s friends, scattered around the globe, were adamant that she should do something. Three thought she should contact the police as soon as they docked in Sierra Leone. You have to, Sade. I can’t believe the cruise line aren’t taking this seriously. One had even posted the FBI’s contact details for her. I’ll do it, hon, if it’s too hard to call from there and no one else will.
More important than that, from Francis’s point of view: she was sticking to her story. Would she really post a fib based on jealousy – or whatever – online like that?
SEVENTEEN
At three o’clock, as most of the guests were snoozing after lunch, Viktor came on the tannoy to tell them that there would be an important passenger announcement at five p.m. in the Panorama Lounge. When the time came, Francis followed the other guests upstairs to find the expedition leader at a lectern, pulling nervously at those bushy, greying sideburns of his.