Murder on the Titanic

by Evelyn Weiss

Rufus is no longer welcome in this house. But at that point I heard the door open.

  “Mr du Pavey, how lovely to see you! Are you staying for dinner?” It’s Gwyneth’s voice.

  “I’d hate to inconvenience…”

  “Not at all. Miss Lloyd and I have just been talking about this evening’s meal and the numbers of us dining. There are a few guests here already, you see. Calvin was out on the lake yesterday, he caught some fine fish. There’s more than enough for an extra guest. What do you think, Calvin?”

  It’s five minutes later. I’m on the way to my room, when I notice Chisholm’s door open. I see him standing there in his room. He’s just finished dressing for dinner: a black jacket and bow tie on his tall, erect frame. Now and then, I see him and it’s as if I’ve forgotten what a dashing figure he cuts.

  “Agnes? Do you have a moment?”

  I step into the room. Although it’s simply a guest room in the fishing lodge, the scatter of belongings from his suitcase seem to have printed Chisholm’s masculine presence in every corner.

  “You know, don’t you Chisholm? Rufus du Pavey is here for dinner with us.” I tell him about my eavesdropping, and the argument that I heard in the parlor.

  “So Agnes, what you’ve overheard – it shows that du Pavey is indeed desperate for money.”

  “Yes. It helps us make sense of some things. The blackmail of Spence – there would be a cause for that, maybe, if Spence and du Pavey did visit…”

  “Ladies of the night? I don’t buy it. Spence was a womanizer – but in the ballroom, not the gutter. Du Pavey might have slung some mud, but it would never have stuck. If du Pavey had tried blackmail on that basis, Spence would have laughed in his face, brazened it out. No. I think there’s something more sinister.”

  “Which is?”

  “As I told you, Spence was a traitor.”

  “The papers… that document. Yes, Chisholm – I can see that that contract is clear evidence that Britain is desperately arming for war. It would be of huge interest to German spies, and I guess of huge interest to Spence too, if he was working with those spies.”

  “Maybe du Pavey had evidence that would prove Spence’s treason. Now that would be cause for blackmail. Like anyone, Spence would rather pay over his whole fortune to du Pavey, rather than face the noose.”

  “Yes… but the one thing I don’t understand is Mr Freshing’s part in this.”

  “Mr Freshing was horrified to see the papers. Now, as we established, du Pavey’s blackmail letter and the contract are unconnected.”

  “Which means?...”

  “You see, Agnes? It wasn’t seeing the blackmail note in your hands that upset Mr Freshing: it was seeing the contract document. Freshing was horrified because he himself had committed treachery. He was in a position to give Spence the contract, in betrayal of the position of trust he held.”

  “But… isn’t it just too much of a coincidence? That a note from du Pavey, blackmailing Spence for his treason, should end up, by sheerest chance, folded up in the same safe as a contract document stolen by Freshing, which he intended to sell to Spence?”

  Chisholm pauses, and ponders what I’ve said. “You’re right, Agnes. It’s a tangle, I admit.”

  “I wonder, if you looked at it all from a completely different angle, then the tangle might make sense.”

  “Maybe. But there’s something there, isn’t there? Du Pavey – he’s in on this too. Somehow.”

  “I agree – if it is a tangle, then Rufus is certainly there somewhere in the spider’s web. And we don’t know his own story yet: where he was, what he was doing, on the night that Spence was murdered and the Titanic sank.”

  “When we were sailing on the Olympic, du Pavey agreed to Axelson’s proposal of hypnosis. After the Lake Ontario flight, maybe…”

  “But Chisholm, there’s one other thing that you should know. I sense something else, something very different. Just now in the parlor - it was the way Rufus spoke – and, the way he hesitated – when Gilmour accused him of a duplicitous personal life. I can’t put it any other way, except I had the overwhelming feeling that Rufus wanted to fling the accusation of a secret life straight back into his – Gilmour’s – face.”

  “We’ll work on it, Agnes. Sometimes, when you worry away at these tiny details – I feel you’re the real brains of our team. I’m just the brawn.”

  “Oh no. You’re never just that. But – come on, we’ll be late for dinner.”

  Gwyneth was right: the fish is delicious, and there is plenty for all. Rufus has been seated next to me, away from Calvin.

  “We meet again, Agnes. You look radiantly beautiful tonight.”

  “You’re too kind, Rufus. I don’t think I’ve ever thought of myself as beautiful. And certainly never ‘radiant’. So – thank you.”

  “How have your adventures in America been so far?”

  “Oh, I’m not very adventurous, you know. We’re staying here, it is a lovely setting. I hope to see more of Lake Ontario. Perhaps even the Canadian shore. After that, I guess I’ll get back to good old Connecticut to see my family.”

  “You and I could take a look at the lake later. Perhaps we could take a turn on the jetty together? The moon is very clear tonight, high over the lake. A perfect early spring evening.”

  “Perhaps.” I don’t want to go out there with him. Would he try to touch me, to kiss me?... On the other hand, I might find out something. I recall what Chisholm and Axelson said about our mystery suspect, Colette Morgan. Befriending men, becoming intimate with them, in order to find out facts about them. I remember a nasty word that I can’t quite forget. ‘Whoring’.

  My thoughts are interrupted. Chisholm’s speaking.

  “I’ll do it.”

  Have I missed something? I ask “Do what?’”

  “I’ll be Rufus’s passenger on his Lake Ontario flight. It seems that he needs a passenger – in fact ideally he’d have preferred to have two – to show that it’s a realistic commercial idea to carry people around by air. I’d be more than delighted – I’d be honored – to have the opportunity…”

  “Well – that would be marvelous Chis – thank you.” Du Pavey is delighted – but also, I suspect, he may use this opportunity to try to find out more about our investigation. I look at the two men, the interplay of their glances, the angles of their heads, the little gestures between them. Is Rufus playing Chisholm, or is Chisholm playing him? The professor watches them impassively. Like me, he’s following every single word they say. As dinner draws to a close, Rufus says “Chis, old boy, let’s you and I take some coffee in the parlor, if Mr Gilmour will permit? I’ll tell you more, show you the plans. We’ve got heaps to talk about. If you and I take ourselves away for the rest of the evening, we can stop boring all our fellow guests with talk about ailerons and airspeed.”

  Half an hour later, I’m on the way to my bed. A yawn escapes me. So much for a moonlight walk with a romantically inclined Rufus. I’m not attracted to him in the least – but all the same, it’s a dent to one’s confidence. The first man ever to make a pass at me loses all interest, the moment he gets a chance to talk about airplanes instead.

  I stop in the corridor on my way to my room. I knock at a door.

  “Agnes. Sorry, we’re engrossed in flight plans here, but you’re welcome to join us…”

  “I want to come with you. I’ll be your second passenger, Rufus.”

  22.Blue water, blue sky

  “Welcome to Canada.”

  Voices are calling to me. We’re on a lakeside promenade: our accents and clothes mark out Chisholm, Rufus and me as foreigners, tourists from the other side of the lake. Only the three of us have made this journey, brought across Lake Ontario by Calvin’s private boat. The next time I see the rest of our party will be at the ceremony in the reception tent in Niagara Falls State Park.

  I’m jostled in dense crowds: it seems that every family in Toronto has come to Scarborough Beach Park for this fine spring Saturday,
although they’re all wrapped up warmly against the Canadian winter that has hardly ended. Noises from the fairground rides blare at me, I see signs ‘Whirl of Pleasure’ ‘Bump the Bumps’: a swirl of garish colors, moving machinery, shrieking people enjoying their chance of a holiday. I also notice a large cinema poster: in huge lettering it announces – ‘Showing Now – A Movie of the Ultimate Terror: Titanic Sinks!!!’ We shuffle past the cinema in the dense throng, and I try not to look at the lurid poster, with its overdrawn faces of cartoon horror, limbs writhing and flailing as human bodies are crushed by a massive falling iceberg. Next to the cinema is an extraordinary scene: under a sign ‘Kept Alive by A Medical Miracle’ there’s a row of tiny babies, pitifully thin and frail, lying listlessly in a row of glass incubator tanks fronting onto the promenade. Rufus says “You can pay a nickel to go in there, gawp more closely at those unfortunate infants, even touch them.”

  Five minutes later, we reach a quieter part of the promenade: the lake laps quietly on a sandy, near-deserted beach, and a small hotel is the only sign of tourist development. Rufus greets two men in boiler suits who meet us at the doors of a large shed fronting out onto the beach. I had expected to see a field from which the airplane would take off, but behind the shed, wooded bluffs rise steeply above the shoreline.

  Rufus swings the doors open.

  I’ve never seen an airplane in my life. Photographs of them, that’s all. The thing in front of me fills