Murder on the Titanic

by Evelyn Weiss

the gangway, remind me of a looking at a choir in a church.

  I hear the now-familiar voice of Lieutenant Bouchard. “Everyone here is under arrest. Put your hands up, surrender to us now.”

  There’s a pause, and I see the shoulders of one of the Gophers move, as if he is about to put his hands into the air. I can see fear in all their eyes, and I’m close enough to hear a whisper from one of them. “The game’s up. We’d better do as the cops say.” But they’re hesitant, uncertain.

  Bouchard’s shout comes again. “Like I say, hands up!”

  A deafening yell rings from behind my ear. “No. Look what I’ve got here.”

  The knife is pushing into the skin of my neck, and I’m shoved forward, out into the beam of the spotlight. Malone pushes me to the foot of the gangway, in full view of the hidden police.

  “See, I’ll slit this girl’s throat in front of your eyes. Unless you let every one of us go, right now.”

  In a moment I’m surrounded by the rest of the Gopher gang. They’ve all come down the gangway, and they group behind me, using me as a shield against the cops’ guns. I try to glance behind me: I glimpse faces lit harshly by the light, grim and focused. But the knife pushes against my throat, I turn to face forward again.

  I’m facing directly into the spotlight, blinded by the whiteness, but I try to keep looking, keep thinking. I hear the clicks of the Gophers’ revolvers being readied, all around me.

  I hear a voice. An English accent, with a hint of Scots.

  “I suggest a swap.”

  A voice rings out from behind me. “What?”

  “A swap. No-one wants a woman to be hurt. I’ll take her place.” Chisholm steps forward. The spotlight is behind him, silhouetting him in sharp relief. He hails us again. “I’ll come up to you, and then you must let her go.”

  I keep thinking through the possibilities that might happen. One thing I do know: Chisholm’s effort to help me is not going to work. The Gophers hold the cards here. They’re not going to let me go until Chisholm steps onto the gangway; then they’ll grab him. Both of us will end up as hostages. Although the blade is digging into me, I shout.

  “Chisholm! Stay there! Don’t come up to them.”

  Chisholm stops. He looks Malone in the eye. “Yes, you can have me, as a swap for the girl. Here I am, and I’ve got no gun, no weapon of any kind. But there’s just one thing. I don’t want anyone slipping, no nasty accidents. I’m no intention of swapping myself for a dead girl. So can you just move that knife away from her throat?”

  The knife’s still there against my skin, but I feel less pressure from its edge. Then I look down at my chest, and I see the blade moving into my line of sight, below my chin. It’s still firmly in Malone’s hand, but it’s now at least six inches from my neck. Chisholm takes another step. He’s two yards away. I can feel the men around me, their bodies tense, ready to grab him.

  Suddenly Chisholm reaches forward, grasps my hands. Malone is off-guard and I’m pulled forward; the knife slips from Malone’s hand, it tumbles through the air, clatters onto the ground. Chisholm pulls me hard, straight forward, down below the foot of the gangway. My face and chest hit the stone flags of the pier, the breath is knocked out of me, and I’m stretched out flat on the floor. But I hardly notice my pain, because of the demonic din I hear. The air is full of savage crackling, bursting explosions of noise around my ears. A volley of gunfire has opened up all around me.

  I’m lying face-down at the foot of the gangway: Chisholm lies ahead of me, holding my hands. He’s stretched out on the stonework too, not moving. But I glance to my side and I see Malone, no longer hidden behind me, falling, a dead weight. He crumples to the ground as if his body’s been broken. His face is a sea of red, and a finger of blood slowly traces a line down, across the middle of his open, naked eyeball. I realize: he’s dead.

  More shots ring out. The Gophers have rallied and are returning the cops’ fire. The staccato crackle of gunfire echoes along the pier. Another body falls across me: a blow like a hammer.

 

  Sharpness in my nostrils.

  Smelling salts. I’m feeling woozy, coming round from unconsciousness. I must have fainted. A blurred view gradually comes into focus: the side of the Olympic, its paintwork catching the first rays of the early dawn light.

  Everything looks blurry round the edges of my vision. I turn my head, and see, at the foot of the wall, the E Deck door and the gangway. I can see police there, moving and lifting sacks. Bulging, awkward to carry, and every one of them stained red.

  They’re not sacks.

  “Oh my dear Christ! It looks like a massacre.”

  “It was, Agnes. And we were so nearly part of it. But I reckoned that, if I pulled you down on the floor… we’d both be below all the lines of fire. The Gophers would be firing from chest or head height, and the police would be aiming at chest or head height. All the bullets went over us.”

  I’m relieved to hear Chisholm’s voice, to know that he’s unhurt. I notice a dark, moving blur: a figure striding towards us. Then I see him clearly; it’s Lieutenant Bouchard. There’s almost a smile on his face.

  “Great idea Chisholm, to pull the girl down out of the way, and then we could get clear shots at them all. Distracted the Gophers, too. I reckon only about six of them managed to return any fire at all. No police officers were hit. Perfect, just perfect.”

  I start speaking.

  “This is horrific. I can’t believe…”

  “We just need to clean this mess up – and make up some story to tell the newspapers, of course. One of our boys back at the office will be able to invent something. In fact I’m looking forward to reading it.”

  I see two policeman carrying something that was once a man. They hold his arms and feet, in just the same way as last night we saw the decoys carrying the coffin-like packing cases. The man’s body looks like he’s been shot several times: bloodstains cover almost every inch of his clothes. A stream of blood is pouring from one end of their grim load, and I realize that half his head is missing. I turn me eyes away from the sight, but as I swivel my head round, I’m confronted by a network of red streams flowing down the gangway towards me.

  Among this scene of butchery, I hear the most surprising thing. Like a skylark in the air, I hear the sound of a man’s voice singing.

  “But, hark! a voice like thunder spake,

  The West’s awake! the West’s awake!

  Sing, Oh! hurrah! let England quake,

  We’ll watch till death for Erin’s sake.”

  I realize: one man is still alive. I can see him further up the gangway: his shirt and legs are red with blood, he lies sprawled on the floor, but his mouth moves, and the voice – haunting, plaintive, but somehow full of hope – drifts from it.

  A police officer steps up the gangway. I see him taking a pistol from his holster.

  “NO!” I scream – strong arms hold me, but I push them away. “No, No!” But other hands grip me and drag me down. As my face is held down, my nose scraping against the stone flags of the quay, I hear the crack of a single shot.

  I feel I’m dissolved in horror, and though the hands still hold me down, and I can see nothing, I hear a voice speaking. The voice of Lieutenant Bouchard. He sounds like a parent explaining something slowly and patiently to a child. “Miss, that man was dying: we did him a favor. But I guess you may feel upset, after what you’ve seen tonight. This was not a place for a lady to be. But for New York City, this is one of the sweetest dawns we’ve ever seen. The city will sleep better tonight than it’s done for twenty years. In the next few months we’ll close down half the brothels and gambling dens in the city. And by Christmas, every small shop in Manhattan will be twenty-five per cent richer, thanks to the protection money they’ll no longer have to pay to that pile of moldering scum.” He gestures across to the bodies that the police are now loading onto a cart. As if they were bags of rubbish.

  I’m no longer being held down: I move, sit up
, and look the lieutenant in the face. I’m barely able to put my words together. But I hold onto my few thoughts, and I speak.

  “Maybe I am in shock, Lieutenant Bouchard. But I don’t agree with you. If you’d been alert to the Gophers’ trick with the fake packing cases, maybe you could have arrested these men, instead of slaughtering them.”

  “I guess you’re entitled to your opinion, Miss. But most of these twelve would have ended up in the chair anyway. We’ve saved the New York courts a whole lot of time and money. Saved some electricity, too.”

  I ignore his callous joke. Instead I say “Have you counted the bodies?”

  “Yeah, there’s a dozen.”

  “Well, there shouldn’t be. Malone, the man who had me with the knife, plus six teams of two to carry the cases, equals thirteen.”

  “Look, Miss – you object to us shooting at armed men who are known criminals. Men who would have killed us all – including you – without a second thought. Now, you’re telling me there’s not enough dead men? Would you have liked to see even more corpses? I’d say you’re over-wrought and confused. But then I guess some women are prone to hysteria. Chisholm, can you please take her arm, take her away from here, and go and calm her down somewhere?”

  I find myself agreeing with Lieutenant Bouchard. “Yes please Chisholm. Can you take me away from here, can we go back down Pier 59? Perhaps that storeroom…”

  Bouchard interrupts loudly. “Yes, you and