Murder on the Titanic

by Evelyn Weiss

explosives that Jimmy Nolan and Chisholm had agreed.

  Gwyneth decided that she must help us get out of New York City. Having failed to discover whether or not I understood the significance of the coded papers, Chisholm knew he had to act quickly. He contacted a couple of members of another Irish-American gang, the Rhodes Boys. We now know that these two men were called Dixon and Farrell. Chisholm had met them on his previous visit to New York, after the Titanic.

  Now, the Gophers had gained control over the Rhodes Boys gang. Dixon and Farrell hated being told what to do by the Gophers, they hated the Gophers taking what they saw as their money, and they would very happily shoot a woman on Chisholm’s instructions, if the blame would be laid onto Jimmy Nolan. We’ll never know if, or what, Chisholm paid those two.

  Chisholm told Dixon that we’d be getting onto the Ninth Avenue El. When that attempt to kill me failed, Dixon stole a car near the Polo Grounds. Then Chisholm telephoned them, first from the hotel in Westchester and then from Glen Springs Sanitarium, and they devised a new plan.

  I gather that the New York State Police have confirmed that the tree across the road near Watkins Glen was deliberately cut down in order to block the road. Dixon and Farrell were to ambush our car at the fallen tree, and find some pretext to shoot me. Only me, nobody else. Chisholm’s fight with Dixon and Farrell was all staged, all planned between them. Really, it was just an elaborate piece of theatre. A fake ambush to cover the carefully planned murder of just one person – me.

  But of course, there was one part of Chisholm’s plan that he didn’t tell Dixon and Farrell. That part of his plan was that, once I was dead, and Chisholm had no further use for Dixon and Farrell, he was going to kill both of them in such a way that few clues would be left about them. Everyone would assume that they were working for Jimmy Nolan.”

  The professor cuts in. “Ruthless – but highly risky, too. He could easily have been killed himself, lighting the car’s gasoline tank like that.”

  “Yes. Chisholm took a risk blowing the car up – but to him, it was a necessary one. I think Dixon himself said, that night among the trees, that witnesses are inconvenient things to have around. That’s certainly a principle that Chisholm believed in.”

  My attention is suddenly drawn: we’re right out in the middle of the water, and we see a flash of bronze and gold in the blue sky above us: a bird of prey flies over the loch, right above the boat. It’s high above us, but its huge size is obvious. Kitty points it out to us instantly. “A golden eagle. Fraser, you took me up the hillside to see the nest, didn’t you?”

  Fraser doesn’t pause in his rowing. “That’s right. The eagle pair have got a chick this year. They’ll be hunting now, to feed it.”

  “You have sharp eyes, Miss Kitty.” Axelson shades his eyes as he looks into the sky, and we watch the eagle as it circles and then floats away in the direction of the woods. The professor turns to me. “So, much to Chisholm’s disappointment, Miss Agnes, you survived the second attempt to shoot you.”

  “Yes. Again, my luck held up. So after that, at the Rosedene Hotel in Scarborough, Chisholm changed tack. He tried to drug me instead. He probably used some ordinary sleeping pills that he bought from a corner drugstore in Scarborough, because by that time he was running out of options.

  Knowing that I like Coca-Cola, he ordered a bottle of Coke, early on the morning of the Empire State’s flight. A waitress at the hotel took the Coke to Chisholm’s room, he put the powdered sleeping pills or whatever they were into it, and then he asked the waitress to take it to my room. I was meant to think that Chisholm had organized a little treat for me, a bottle of Coca-Cola in my room, on the morning of our flight over Lake Ontario.

  You see, that was the first of the three responses I received to my telegrams from the Olympic. The Rosedene Hotel telegraphed back and confirmed that on the night that the three of us stayed there, a Sir Chisholm Strathfarrar had ordered a Coca-Cola to be sent up, early in the morning, to his room – then he had asked the waitress to wait. While she waited, of course, he added the drug to the bottle. Finally, he asked the waitress to take the bottle through to the room of another guest, Agnes Frocester.

  However, two things went wrong with Chisholm’s plan. The first thing was that I slept badly that night, then I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. I was restless and nervous, I got up early, before the Coke was brought to my room, and I went down to the lobby. So I never saw the Coke bottle in my room. Secondly, Chisholm didn’t reckon on Rufus du Pavey’s craving for attention, or his child-like impetuousness and appetite. Rufus went into my room at breakfast time, hoping for an opportunity to flirt with me. Rufus was disappointed that I wasn’t there, but like the overgrown child that he is, his disappointment was easily consoled: he saw the Coke bottle, took it and drank it. He had a lot of breakfast to soak up the effects of the drug, and he’s a big man, but even so, aboard the airplane, the substance that Chisholm had put in that Coca-Cola sent Rufus into a deep sleep for half an hour or so.

  Now, Chisholm had discussed the airplane and its layout with Rufus. Chisholm knew that Rufus, he and I would travel on the plane sitting on a low bench, side by side. His aim was that I would fall asleep on the flight, then, while Rufus was concentrating on flying the plane, Chisholm could undo my safety belt and push me off the bench, and then act all horrified. ‘She must have failed to fasten her belt properly’ he would have said to Rufus. The drug was a mild one: I would die not from it, but from drowning. But if and when my body would finally be recovered from Lake Ontario, the need for an autopsy would be the last thing anyone would think of. No-one would ever know that I’d been drugged.

  In the days that followed the Lake Ontario flight, I thought about what had happened in that airplane. Hardly anyone knew we were staying at the Rosedene Hotel: in fact, hardly anyone knew that the three of us were in Canada. So I concluded that, if it was indeed a deliberate poisoning, then the poisoner was most unlikely to be someone outside our own party. It had to be one of the three of us staying at the Rosedene Hotel, trying to drug another member of our party. Most obviously it could have been Rufus trying to drug Chisholm, but then making a mistake and taking the drug himself. But when we were back on the Olympic sailing to England, I learnt a lot more about Rufus, and I realized that he’s no murderer.

  So I thought long and hard. Of the three of us, it couldn’t be Chisholm trying to drug Rufus – Rufus was the pilot, so that would be suicidal. Unlikely as it seemed, I had to consider the only possibility that was left. That Chisholm was trying to drug me – but that he got Rufus by mistake. In the light of that idea, the things that happened to me at Watkins Glen, on the Ninth Avenue El, and even back at Sweynsey Hall, could begin to make sense.”

  The professor nods in acknowledgement. “And the next incident, which you were the first to understand, Miss Agnes, was the shooting of Gwyneth Gilmour and Jimmy Nolan in the shaft tunnel.”

  “Gwyneth was shot by accident. Nolan, on the other hand, was shot deliberately. The gunman was, of course, Daniel Carver. With both shots he was trying to kill Nolan, in order to protect Chisholm.”

  “Yes – despite his brutality, Carver showed more loyalty than Chisholm himself showed.”

  “That’s right. On the poop deck of the Olympic, Chisholm realized that he would have to do one last piece of theatre to save himself and his plot. To appear, once again, as the loyal British agent. This time he sacrificed his co-conspirator Daniel Carver, in the same way he had already sacrificed Dixon and Farrell, and the Gophers. Again, he played the part of the hero, and at the same time disposed of someone who, if arrested, might have confessed the whole German spy plot, including Chisholm’s own leadership of it, to Lord Buttermere.”

  We’re well over halfway along the loch now, and Fraser continues rowing, steadily, evenly. The shorelines on either side of the water curve gently towards the head of the glen. I look ahead, hoping for my first glimpse of Glenlui Castle, and I tell a little more of the story.<
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  “Percy Spence had done a good job of investigating the German spy plot. He’d recorded his findings in code: sequences of numbers, all on sheets of papers. When decoded, those numbers would translate into the name of every double agent he’d identified in the British Secret Intelligence Bureau, including Chisholm, of course.

  Spence wanted to telegraph those numbers from the Titanic on the 14th April. He went along to the wireless room and asked Harold Bride, who told him that he and Jack Phillips were very busy with messages. Bride told Spence that his message would have to wait until morning. A morning that never came, of course.

  But Kitty, here’s where you came in. When Spence realized the ship was sinking, he went back to his cabin and gathered the papers. That was when, unfortunately, he drank from the carafe of wine. He quickly realized that he was ill – maybe he understood that he’d been poisoned. From what Calvin Gilmour said under hypnosis, it sounds like Spence was aware of a threat to his life, and aware of the name – but not the face – of Daniel Carver.

  So, when he first felt the effects of the strychnine, he knew that it might be poison, and that he might die. So he gave the papers to you,