The Festival Murders

by Mark McCrum

  Klaus had travelled with the Goldencruise group before, he explained. To the Antarctic, another how-to-say adventurous location. And then before that along the north coast of Australia. ‘The Kimberley, they call it, after one of your British colonial administrators. A very wild area. Plenty of crocodiles but no people. There were some Aborigines there once, but those convicts poisoned most of them.’ He laughed, challengingly, but Francis wasn’t going to rise to this sort of provocative non-PC; he always preferred to listen and let people reveal themselves.

  As their starters arrived, there were loud shouts from below as moorings were untied; then a wobble as the ship moved away from the quay and out into the harbour.

  ‘At last we are sailing,’ said Klaus, raising his glass again.

  It felt good to be on the move, the port receding as the view from the windows changed to the open blue of sea and sky. They passed fishing boats heading out beyond the long stone breakwater, each with its halo of circling white birds.

  At the welcome drinks that evening, Francis wore a cream linen suit. He had bought it on a whim in a January sale and never quite found the right occasion to wear it at home. Now, he felt, it came into its own. He looked round at the dressed-up groups of guests gathered in the wood-panelled Panorama Lounge. They were mostly from what Klaus would have called the ‘living’ third of life: white-haired, bald, turkey-necked, liver-spotted. The best plastic surgeons in the world couldn’t totally turn back the clock, though valiant attempts had been made here and there.

  Francis wondered if he had the nerve to go and chat to one of the exceptions: a tall, middle-aged Asian guy with shoulder-length dark hair, magnificently turned out in a crimson and gold salwar kameez, who was standing next to a portly white fellow in a double-breasted Prince of Wales check. He decided he didn’t quite, not yet, then found himself exchanging smiles with the dark-haired young woman he had noticed during the afternoon’s mandatory safety briefing up on the top deck, when the guests had been shown their emergency muster stations and how to put on their lifejackets (as well as being warned to keep their blinds down at night because of the ‘slight risk’ of piracy). Her name was Sadie and her older companion was not her mother, as Francis had imagined, but her ant. Aunt Marion’s husband Saul had had to drop out of the cruise at the very last moment but fortunately Sadie was working in South Africa for nine months so had been able to fly up and take his place.

  ‘My husband the workaholic,’ Marion grumbled, flashing chunky diamonds as her bony fingers seized a smoked salmon tartlet from a passing tray. ‘I only wish he knew what he was missing out on.’

  When dinner was called, Marion invited Francis to join them. Head waiter James put the trio on a table for six and then brought three singles over. First, the old lady with the grey bun who had been behind Francis at check-in, all sparkly and smiley now in an eau-de-Nil top criss-crossed with threads of silver; she was English too, it turned out, and her name was Eve. Then a pink-cheeked American with a head as shiny as a billiard ball – Joe. And finally, crisp in a navy blazer with brass buttons, Klaus. He took the last place between Marion and Sadie. Having introduced himself to Sadie, he gave Francis a man-to-man nod which pretty much said, A very attractive woman I see. You are the younger man. All yours for now. He then turned politely to the aunt.

  So Francis settled in with Sadie. Her missing uncle Saul was some big-shot on Wall Street and – she rolled her lovely brown eyes – he was always doing this. Aunt Marion only forgave him because he earned such pots of money. It was obscene, to be honest, how much he pulled in. Not that she, Sadie, usually got the benefit of his holiday no-shows. But because she was in Cape Town anyways it made sense. She was working for the Peace Corps on an education project down there. It was in this township, Khayelitsha, which was like this huge sprawling area of shacks that most whites never saw, except when they flew over it into the airport. Some of the classrooms were actually in ship’s containers. ‘Like the ones we saw in dock back there? You wouldn’t believe the poverty?’ She had that sing-song rising inflection more usual with Australians or Californians than East Coast Americans.

  The starters arrived. Roasted goat’s cheese with herb salad for Sadie; steamed monkfish medallions for Francis. Accepting another top-up of Chenin Blanc, Sadie started telling Francis about her South African boyfriend, Louis, who was like the most exciting guy in the Cape Town NGO sector; but then, she giggled, it was only Cape Town. She couldn’t really imagine him being her boyfriend in New York. In fact, to be totally honest, she was wondering what to do about him.

  With the arrival of the intermezzo, Klaus swung round and joined in. ‘Did I hear you two talking about the Peace Corps?’ he asked and he was off, starting with the interesting info that George W. Bush had, counterintuitively, actually doubled its size during his so-called war on terror. Francis was aware that on his left Eve had been dropped by the bald American and was eating her curried cream of clam soup by herself. So he left Klaus and Sadie to it and turned to her, introducing himself by offering her a glass of wine.

  ‘Thank you, but I won’t,’ she said. ‘I gave it up many years ago.’

  Eve had thoughtful green eyes above a puckered, amused mouth. She lived, yes, in the UK, in a little town called Malmesbury – did Francis know it? Just north of the M4 near Bath. Her husband, Alfred, had passed away seven years ago and after that she hadn’t seen the point of sitting around at home thinking about their life together, so she’d decided to do something completely different. She went on a cruise, just a little one, up to the Norwegian fjords. ‘And then I got a taste for it, and there was no stopping me. Now I do three or four a year.’

  ‘I’m impressed,’ said Francis.

  ‘So you should be!’ She laughed. ‘I’ve been all over. The South Seas. That was extraordinary. All these tiny islands with vast tracts of ocean between them. You feel wonderfully remote. Then I went to Greenland last summer, and I loved that so much I followed it up with Antarctica at Christmas. Got to see these places while you’ve got the chance, don’t you think? You wouldn’t believe the colours you get in the icebergs. And the wildlife is quite magnificent. Polar bears in the north, penguins down south. Such funny little creatures. Like so many pompous Rotarians heading off for a black tie dinner. To see them out there in the wild is such a joy.’

  Next year she had signed up to do the Russian Far East and Indonesia. ‘I’ve always wanted to visit Kamchatka, ever since I played Risk as a child. And it may sound silly, but I’ve a hankering to see Komodo dragons.’ She loved Goldencruise. ‘They do this very nice thing where the ships aren’t too big, so you can get to know the other passengers. And the staff and crew. They become your friends too, believe it or not.’

  ‘I see,’ said Francis.

  ‘You don’t believe me, do you? Poor, lonely, deluded creature, you’re thinking. Imagining the staff are her friends.’ Eve’s eyes twinkled. ‘But sometimes, Francis, people tell an old bird like me things they can’t tell anyone else.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Personal things. Troubles they might have at home. That sort of stuff. You know, I like those sorts of confidences. It makes me feel useful again. And if you travel with the same ship, you see the same people. Lovely Gregoire, waiting to greet you with a kiss at the top of the gangway when you arrive. It somehow makes you feel safe …’

  The funny thing was, she went on, that she had never travelled at all until she was seventy. In her middle age she had looked after her elderly mother for years. ‘I was a carer, basically, though we didn’t call it that in those days. Not a lot of fun, looking back. Mummy got needier and needier, until it came to a point where I gladly would have smothered her. And I missed out on children. Which was a shame. Then, when Mummy finally shuffled off her mortal coil, I met darling Alfred, at a bridge night, and my life changed again. He was a lovely man, but not a traveller in the leisure sense. He spent so much time going round the world for business that he was happiest on the golf course back
home when he had time off.’

  Somehow it didn’t seem polite to ask where the money had come from: Mummy, or Alfred? Had Alfred been the charming adventurer, latching on to a lonely middle-aged woman with inherited wealth? Or quite the reverse?

  ‘I realize I’m very fortunate,’ Eve said. ‘To be as old as I am and still to have my health and sanity. So many don’t, do they? Living in la-la land, unable to recognize their friends and relatives. Ghastly. And yes, to be comfortably off with it. But when you get to my age you realize you can’t change the way the world works. I give to charity, of course; but then I also make the most of things, because if I don’t, who’s going to? And when I do finally pop off there’ll be some very happy donkeys in Somerset.’

  A blackberry and apple sorbet arrived. Then, with the main courses, the conversation became general. It emerged that the bald American was a soldier; Colonel Joe, no less.

  ‘Did you see action?’ Sadie asked; a trifle mischievously, Francis thought.

  ‘Nothing like the boys do these days.’ Colonel Joe paused, then puffed out his barrel chest. ‘No, ma’am, I was more what they called a Cold Warrior.’

  Francis caught Sadie’s eye for a second; her lips quivered, but there was no open laughter. Colonel Joe was serious, as he was, too, about the risk of piracy, which had been rather scooted over, he thought, during the safety briefing earlier. Over half the world’s attacks took place, he said, either off the coast of Somalia or in the Gulf of Guinea, which is where they were right now.

  ‘This adds a certain how-to-say frisson to our dinner, does it not?’ said Klaus.

  ‘It would be more than a freakin’ frisson if any of these guys got on board,’ said the colonel. ‘They’re famous for their ruthlessness.’

  ‘Stop it, you two, you’re frightening me,’ said Eve. ‘Goldencruise surely wouldn’t take a risk with this sort of thing, would they?’

  ‘That expedition leader guy did say they had made preparations,’ said Sadie.

  ‘Preparations!’ scoffed Colonel Joe. ‘But cruise ships are not allowed to dock if they’re carrying weapons, so I don’t know what they’d do if there really was an attack.’

  ‘They have search lights,’ said Klaus, authoritatively. ‘Very powerful ones. And loudspeakers. And water hoses and such.’

  ‘Loudspeakers,’ scoffed Colonel Joe. ‘“Will you please remove your Kalashnikovs from the ship.”’ He mimicked a tannoy announcement and then laughed. ‘I don’t see a bunch of war-hardened n— Africans taking much notice of that.’ He had swerved off the N-word just in time. Presumably for my benefit, Francis thought.

  After the meal, Francis accepted Sadie and Marion’s suggestion of a digestif in the Panorama Lounge. Klaus was close behind them, adding himself to the group by asking what people would like to drink. This was a somewhat bogus way in, as everyone knew the cruise was all-inclusive, so it wasn’t as if he were standing a round.

  There was a pianist in black tie tinkling away in the corner, a pint-sized Filipino doing shmaltzy covers of popular classics, but not many from the dining room had come up this first evening of the second leg. The fabulously dressed Asian and his portly chum were there, drinking up at the bar with another odd couple: a short, tanned old fellow with suspiciously jet-black hair straggling down over the collar of his blue Hawaiian shirt and a much younger woman whose glowing caramel skin was set off beautifully by a tight silver lamé dress. They were all laughing extra-loudly, as if at a sequence of private jokes.

  In Francis’s little group, Klaus rather dominated the conversation, revealing yet another area of expertise: where to find Club Class flights on the cheap.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Sadie. ‘I’m just going for a walk on deck. Clear my head. Would you like to join me, Francis?’

  How could he refuse? As he got to his feet Klaus gave him a sophisticated look: that of a man whose dominance of the conversation has been usurped by half the listeners leaving, but who is determined not to show that he minds, even a little; added to that, the ill-disguised envy of an older man who watches a younger one being invited away for who knows what reason by an attractive woman.

  ‘Mind how you go,’ he said, raising his whisky glass and giving Francis a wink. ‘Remember – no lights. No torches, not even smartphones.’ He cackled, proprietorially.

  One floor up, on deck six, Francis held open the double doors. A whoosh of night air greeted them, warmer and more humid than the air-conditioned interior. At this level a gangway ran right around the ship, passing the steel wall that enclosed the theatre and then, ahead of that, up by the bow, the big, curved-glass windows of the Observation Lounge, all blinds down tonight. At the stern was an open area of deck with another bar, though that, too, was dark and closed.

  ‘Shall we go up to the top deck?’ said Sadie. Francis followed the swish of her cocktail dress as she climbed the clanging steel steps. Above, they found the open space of deck seven, the two big lifeboats on either side dark silhouettes against the brilliant night sky.

  Sadie all but ran to the stern, where she grasped the white railings.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, after a moment, turning, smiling. ‘My ant was doing my head in down there.’

  ‘I thought it was Klaus who was being the bore.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, he was, for sure.’ She giggled. ‘But it’s just the way she sits there and takes it, all twinkly-eyed, expressing interest in something she has no interest in at all. She’s loaded. Why would she give a toss about cheap flights? She and Saul always fly First. When he joins her, which he doesn’t, because he’s usually having an affair. Really, everybody knows except her, it’s tragic. But I mean, why does she even bother to pretend to be one of the real-traveller gang? It’s so phoney.’

  ‘She’s just being polite, surely.’

  ‘Oh, sure she is. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be getting annoyed by her at this stage of the holiday. She’s been very kind, asking me along. It’s just, like, we’re sharing a cabin and, I don’t know how she does it, she manages to get right on my last nerve within about an hour of me first seeing her. Anyways, this is better.’ She let out a long, powerful sigh. ‘Just look at that.’

  Below them, beyond the deserted tables of the darkened deck six bar, the white wake of the ship bubbled away in a flat, narrowing line into the blue-black night. To the side, the sheer drop down to the ocean was dizzying.

  ‘You wouldn’t want to fall in there, would you?’ she said.

  Francis shivered and held the rails tightly too, his old vertigo kicking in. ‘You wouldn’t,’ he agreed.

  Sadie flung her profile upwards. She had a lovely retroussé nose above those frankly rather sensual lips. ‘Check these stars,’ she said, turning. ‘So bright out here, you feel you could reach out and touch them.’ She sighed. ‘That’s the thing I like most about Africa. The night sky. And the sunsets,’ she added.

  ‘And the space,’ said Francis. ‘Just the vastness of it.’

  ‘You’ve been to this continent before?’

  ‘I lived here. Some years ago.’

  ‘You never mentioned that.’

  ‘Nobody asked me.’

  ‘Even when Klaus was telling us about his great expedition to the tree where Stanley met Livingstone.’

  ‘Yes, well, there is a virtue in not sharing everything, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’d say.’ She turned and gave him a long, approving look. ‘You’re very English, you know that.’

  ‘Shall I take that as a compliment?’

  She laughed. ‘You should. That’s exactly the sort of thing I mean. “Shall I take that as a compliment?”’ she repeated, in a poor imitation of his accent. ‘Very Downton Abbey. So where were you in Africa? What were you doing?’

  ‘Something a bit like you, I suppose. Helping out in a school in Swaziland. It was only for six months. After I left college.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘A while ago.’

  Francis was vain enough not to want to s
ay how much of a while. But without dating his experience, he gave Sadie the gist of it. How, too, he had hoped to identify with the heritage of his Botswanan birth father, but had soon realized that what he had in common with the kids he was teaching had nothing to do with skin colour. Indeed, the whole experience had made him realize just how British he was.

  When they went back down to the bar, half an hour later, Klaus and Marion had gone off to bed.

  ‘Separately, I hope,’ laughed Sadie.

  The glamorous Asian and the old white guy with the suspect hair were the only ones left at the bar. His shapely younger partner, if that’s what she was, was out on the little circular dance floor, twirling round and round to the music on her own. She looked sad, and not entirely sober, stumbling a little on some of her turns.

  ‘Lively scene,’ said Sadie. ‘You want a nightcap?’

  ‘Maybe I’ll pass on that.’ Francis yawned. ‘There’s an early start tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, Togo, exciting. A bit of real Africa.’

  They went out together past the library and down two decks to discover they were sleeping on the same corridor.

  ‘I’m right opposite you,’ Sadie said, inserting her keycard in the wall slot with a giggle.

  ‘See you in the morning,’ Francis replied.

  ‘If those pirates keep away.’ She winked.

  He fell asleep to the soft rolling motion of the ship; the low hum of the distant engine; the gentle rustle of the sea on the hull. He imagined what it might be like, making love to a woman, in this bed, with these soothing sounds in the background. But no. That was absolutely not what he’d come for.