Murder on the Titanic

by Evelyn Weiss

– so should we. Until we have clear evidence to the contrary, we should act as if Lord Buttermere’s telegram is genuine. We should follow Lord Buttermere’s instructions.”

  “I can’t believe this, Gwyneth! It was Buttermere’s idea to go down to that shaft tunnel unarmed. That led to you being shot. And yet you’re supporting him…”

  Gwyneth doesn’t answer, and her face is impassive. McMorrow and Bass grip Chisholm’s arms. I rise from my chair: I’ve got to fight this. But Inspector Trench himself holds my arms, gently but firmly, and Chisholm is frog-marched from the room. Ten minutes tick by: the police officers return. The professor shrugs his shoulders as the two men accompany him to his cabin. I hear the Inspector’s voice, bidding me to go to my own cabin. Like a sheep, I just obey.

  32.The fifth person

  The carved, polished wood of my cabin doesn’t stop it feeling like a prison cell. I think of Chisholm. What can I do?

  There’s a knock at the door.

  A panic grips my chest. The gunman. I see Daniel Carver’s face in my mind. But all the same, I call out.

  “Who’s there?”

  “It’s me. Gwyneth.”

  “What do you want? If you want to justify Lord Buttermere and his actions to me – then, don’t. Just go away, please.”

  “Let me in.”

  As I turn the handle to open the door, a new thought occurs to me: perhaps Carver is with her, perhaps he’s holding a gun to her head to make her speak to me, to ask me to open the door. Perhaps we’ll both be killed… but my hands move faster than my mind. The door’s open, Gwyneth’s face looks into mine. And she’s alone.

  “Let me in, quickly. I don’t want anyone to see me.”

  I decide to take the risk. Because I have some questions of my own for Gwyneth, and I need to know that I can truly trust her. I let her in: she steps into my cabin, with a furtive glance back into the corridor. She sits on my easy chair, and I sit on the side of my bed.

  ‘Shall I pour some water for you, Gwyneth? And, by the way, I noticed, you know. I noticed that you never spoke.”

  “When?”

  ‘When we had the first meeting in the Captain’s Sitting Room, and Calvin – your pretend husband – said he wanted everyone to put their cards on the table. We went round the table in turn, each of us telling everyone our secrets. Chisholm, Inspector Trench, Lord Buttermere – they all spoke about their secret service activities. But you never said what I hoped you’d say.”

  “And what did you hope I’d say?”

  “‘I’m Gwyneth Ogilvie, an agent of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. Although, because of the nature of my work, I have many other names, including Gwyneth Gilmour, and Colette Morgan, to name just two of them.’”

  ‘Yes. You’ve worked me out, Agnes. That’s exactly what I should have said, but I managed to dodge that one. Unlike that bullet.”

  “But I have a second question, Gwyneth. Jimmy Nolan. The torn photograph of you and him together in the bar at the Hotel Metropole.”

  “The thought of that photograph – it still makes me laugh! I’ll go back to the beginning, Agnes, and explain.”

  “Yes please. I think you owe us all an explanation. So, you can start by telling me.”

  “Maybe you’ll understand, once you hear my story. I grew up as a very privileged young woman, Agnes. Which I do appreciate – I’m ridiculously lucky, I know. But all the same, by the time I was twenty-five years old, I was bored witless by fashion, gossip, parties, and most of all by men who were making it their mission to ingratiate themselves with me and my family. With a view to marriage, of course. I know it sounds like every girl’s dream – but it’s a hollow, shallow place, Agnes. My brain craved stimulation and independence, neither of which were possible, in the position I had in society.”

  “I can understand that, yes.”

  “I got into this whole espionage business five years ago, when my father was expanding his shipyards at Newport News. There were those among the workforce who objected to his employment of black workers alongside white. I spoke to my father about it, I told him I wanted to do something to help. I’m still impressed with him, that he said yes. Maybe he saw the desperate boredom in my eyes… Anyway, when we looked into it, both he and I began to suspect that the so-called union, who were protesting against the employment of black workers, were linked to extortion and bribery – and to the ill-treatment of the black community in Newport News. So, I went around, I talked to people, I asked lots of questions. The streets of Newport News are a world away from the Virginia society scene: no-one recognized me as Jefferson Ogilvie’s daughter. In fact I went around dressed very much like you do, Agnes. A lot of black and gray: very sober and sensible. I was very surprised when I found that some people did open up to me: they trusted me with their secrets. I found out some very interesting facts, and two rather horrible men ended up going to jail. And the black workers got their jobs. But although it was in a good cause, it was the nature of the task that fascinated me. The asking questions, the snooping, the sleuthing – I was using my brain, and I was responsible for my own actions. I loved it.

  Now when you’re an Ogilvie, you have connections. It may not be perfectly ethical, but I pulled a few strings and I got myself a meeting in Washington with some senior people at the United States Secret Service. They told me that they were in the process of putting together a new organization which could fight organized crime across state boundaries. The FBI, they were calling it. I asked if I could work for them. I showed them the case documents from the work I’d done for my father.

  I was amazed; they agreed with me that I could help them. They told me that the FBI was tackling a particularly difficult case in New York, New Jersey and along the eastern seaboard, from Baltimore to Boston. A network of Irish-American gangs in the major cities were siphoning off some of their money from protection rackets, prostitution and illegal alcohol and gambling, and using it to fund political causes and possibly terrorism in Ireland. Like you, Agnes, I’m sympathetic to the Irish cause, but I’m not sympathetic to blowing people up in order to get what you want. I could see the vital importance of the work, and I jumped at the chance. The FBI asked me to work for them. They asked me to infiltrate these gangs, find out what I could, and send my information through to Washington. I was thrilled.

  My first assignment was to meet a man at a bar in New York. The bar was at the Hotel Metropole, and the man was Jimmy Nolan. And they told me that there would be a concealed photographer, and that I was to be very friendly to Mr Nolan. A honey trap.”

  “A honey trap is?...”

  “A trap for bees, I guess. Or bears, maybe. Or in the FBI’s case, a woman giving a man the impression – sometimes more than the impression – that she’ll be his lover. Sweet-talking secrets out of him.”

  “Were you happy to do that?”

  “I most certainly was not. I went through with their ridiculous set-up, and it got me nowhere. Jimmy Nolan is – was – an intelligent man. If you’re a gangster, and a pretty woman comes up to you in a bar and makes love to you with her eyes, you’re going to suspect something, aren’t you?”

  “What happened, then?”

  ‘Well, I did the meeting, and the photographer got his photo, and after an hour chatting in the bar with Jimmy Nolan, I told him that I was going to the bathroom. I did go to the bathroom – and then I walked straight out of that hotel and never went back to him. I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but the man was a vile egomaniac and I couldn’t stand his company. Instead I went and told that photographer, who had taken the picture from a concealed alcove behind a curtain, that this was utter nonsense and that it would never get us the evidence needed to arrest Jimmy Nolan. He wouldn’t give me the photograph, though. Years later, after it had gotten torn somehow, the photographer sent it to the FBI, maybe to try to cause trouble for me. Unfortunately, not everyone at the FBI trusted me, at that time. Someone at the FBI then sent the photograph on to Inspector Tren
ch.”

  “So that’s why Jimmy Nolan didn’t recognize you in the shaft tunnel. He’d forgotten you.”

  ‘Exactly. I met him once, for an hour, two years ago. Anyway, after that farcical start, I decided to use my own methods to investigate the Gophers. I talked to a lot of people: people who’d been threatened, people who paid protection money. Members of the Rhodes Boys Gang, and former Gophers, too, who had fallen out with Nolan. And occasionally, bankers and lawyers too. Because some of New York’s pillars of the establishment had been threatened by Nolan to do things for him: move some illegal money between bank accounts, or defend one of the Gophers in court. All of these people had reason to hate Jimmy Nolan. I would just get a meeting arranged, normally in a café or bar, then listen to what the person had to say.

  And I also met Percy Spence on the Titanic. I’d met him before, but this time we were to swap a significant amount of intelligence. I had a double cover for that journey: I booked a third-class ticket, which of course I never used, under the name Maria Jones, a name I was using at that time for some of my FBI reports.

  I liked Spence from the outset: he and I seemed like kindred spirits. I was utterly mistaken though: I thought he was a loyal British agent. My instincts were wrong, there – but I think that was my only real mistake. I kept sending my reports to