The Body on the Lido Deck

by Jane Bennett Munro

  “Oh, he’ll be polite,” I said. “He has to. There’ll be other people there. You know what, I bet he invited us to sit at his table to keep an eye on us so that we won’t talk about the murder.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Hal said. “You and Nigel aren’t going to talk about it in any case.”

  “We won’t, but I bet the other people will. They’re going to be asking the captain all sorts of questions.”

  “I’m sure he’s an old hand at not answering anything he doesn’t want to.”

  “I think he knew that lady a lot better than he let on. He said he didn’t, but it really shook him up.”

  “Not necessarily,” Hal objected. “Didn’t you tell me that he said it was because of the heat down on the lower decks?”

  “Yes, he said that, but you can’t tell me that the captain was down there sorting trash all that time. He was probably down there long enough to issue orders and put a lesser officer in charge of the job while he went around dealing with other things.”

  “What other things?” Hal argued.

  “Like disposing of the head before anybody saw it, maybe.”

  “I thought you suspected someone from the spa of doing that.”

  “Only because it would be so easy to do that without being seen. One could just pop out, jump in the pool, grab the head, wrap it in a towel, toss it down the laundry chute, and get cleaned up in a locker room. Nobody’d ever have to know. Since we were in port today, they didn’t have any customers this morning.”

  “Very neat,” Hal said. “Now let’s go down before you destroy my appetite completely.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But might I suggest that we don’t put anything out to go to the laundry tonight, just in case?”

  The captain’s table was in the choicest location in the dining room. It had the best view of the ocean, which was worthless at the late seating because it was already dark outside. It also had the best view of the dining room, and everyone could see who had the honor of dining with the captain.

  I needn’t have worried about people asking the captain questions about the murder after all. It was a table for eight, and the four of us were dining with First Officer David Lynch, Chief Engineer Joseph Gerard, and Dr. Robert Welch as well as Captain Sloane.

  The surf ’n’ turf was prepared perfectly and accompanied by a delightful red wine chosen by the captain. Chief Engineer Gerard explained to us that he was responsible for the ship’s engines, propulsion systems, and plumbing, as well as anything else that was mechanical, electrical, or electronic. First Officer Lynch told us that he was the captain’s right hand and that all staff managers reported to him. Mum and Hal talked about what they had done and seen in Bridgetown, and the captain talked about our next port, which was Philipsburg, St. Maarten. By common consent, the murder was not mentioned.

  Not until the Filipino maître d’ rushed up to the captain and whispered in his ear.

  6

  I leave this rule for others when I’m dead,

  Be always sure you’re right … then go ahead.

  —Davy Crockett

  THE CAPTAIN STOOD up. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to excuse me. Something requires my attention in the laundry.” Then, as an afterthought, he motioned to Dr. Welch. “You’d better come as well. And I suppose you, Chief Superintendent, and you, Dr. Day.”

  Nigel and I stared at each other. I was sure the same thought was going through his head as was going through mine.

  They’d found the head.

  “I don’t understand,” my mother said. “Why do they need a doctor in the laundry? Has someone been injured, do you think?”

  “You could say that, my love,” Nigel told her. “If we aren’t back in time, you two go ahead and see the show. We’ll catch up when we can.”

  The laundry on C deck was accessible only by the freight elevator, which could only be accessed through the kitchen directly forward of the dining room. Passengers rarely got to see this part of the ship.

  There was none of the luxurious décor we’d become accustomed to. No carpets, no wallpaper, no pictures on the walls. Just utilitarian tan paint and metal floors. The only things on the walls were warning signs and crew duty rosters. When the elevator doors opened, I was sure we had descended to the bowels of hell. It was at least twenty degrees hotter down here than it was in the dining room.

  The temperature inside the laundry must have been well in excess of a hundred degrees. The air was so humid that I felt as if I’d been slapped with a wet towel. Someone had considerately decreed that the walls in here be painted blue, as if to make the crew think it was cooler than it actually was. It didn’t fool me.

  It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out where the problem was. All the Filipino crew members were clustered around one of the giant industrial-sized washers, chattering loudly in what I assumed was Tagalog—all except one young man, who was stretched out on the floor being tended to by another crew member, who applied a wet compress to his forehead. The smell told me that he, or someone, had been sick, although the evidence of that had already been cleared away.

  The washer had been stopped, and through the glass door I saw pink sudsy water and pink towels.

  Captain Sloane removed his cap and scratched his head. “What department uses pink towels?”

  I cleared my throat. “I believe those towels are supposed to be white.”

  The captain put a hand over his mouth and turned away. “Oh dear God!”

  Nigel nodded. “You’ll need to drain that water before we open the door.”

  One of the Filipinos objected.

  “Do what he says,” Dr. Welch directed. “Drain it. Don’t use the spin-dry cycle.”

  The Filipino pressed buttons and turned a dial, and the water began to drain. Slowly the drum inside began to turn, and as the towels inside started tumbling, I caught a glimpse of red. A mouth, with teeth. An eyeball. Blonde hair.

  Dr. Welch peered over my shoulder with interest. “Is that her?”

  “That’s her,” I said. “At least I hope it’s her. I hope we don’t have two headless bodies on this ship.”

  The water stopped draining, and a click announced the beginning of the spin-dry cycle.

  “Turn it off,” Dr. Welch said.

  The Filipino complied. Dr.Welch stepped forward and opened the door. I was pretty sure he wished he hadn’t. The miasma of blood and decaying tissue was strong enough to send many of the crew members scurrying for the far corners of the room, or another room altogether. Only a hardy few remained. The captain had disappeared.

  Nigel directed the remaining crew to lay a sheet on the floor in front of the washer. They pulled out towels one by one, shook them out onto the sheet, and then threw them into a hamper to be rewashed or possibly discarded altogether.

  I stood back while all this was going on, feeling thankful that my dress was washable, but unsure that blood spatters could be completely removed. Nigel, apparently unconcerned about soiling his white dinner jacket, squatted down and closely supervised the proceedings. “Toni, my girl, come take a look at this,” he urged. “Grab a pair of gloves. Grab some for me whilst you’re at it.”

  I looked around. One of the Filipinos proffered a box of nitrile gloves. It was only then that I noticed that they all wore gloves to handle the laundry. I grabbed a couple of pairs, tucked up my long skirt, and knelt next to Nigel.

  Because of decomposition hastened by the heat and humidity of the laundry and the agitation in very hot soapy water, the head was no longer in one piece. Considerable skin slippage was present, and one eyeball dangled onto the cheek. The color of the iris was now obscured by the postmortem cloudiness of the conjunctiva, but I knew that her eyes had been dark brown. Chunks of skin and soft tissue had sloughed from the skull and cheekbones. The swollen, blue-gray tongue had been caught between tee
th exposed by avulsion of the lips, forming an evil rictus of death. The bright-red lipstick was gone.

  I looked around at my companions. Dr. Welch stood behind Nigel, staring at the remains of the head with interest. Captain Sloane had returned, but at the sight of the head, he went pale. He turned and made a hasty exit.

  With my gloved hands, I arranged the pieces in the closest approximation of their original position that I could manage. I’d seen a mark on the left cheek when the head was still in the pool, and I wanted to get a better look at it. After having gone through the wash cycle in hot water, it stood out much darker than it had in the pool, plus the light was much better here than it had been up on the Lido deck at dawn. I pointed it out to Nigel. “See this?”

  He looked closer. “Looks like a handprint. Somebody smacked her a good one. You know, one could almost make out ridge detail.”

  “Let me get a picture of that,” I said. “Maybe someone can enhance it enough to identify who killed her.”

  “At least who hit her,” Nigel said. “It isn’t necessarily the same person who killed her.”

  “True.” I stripped my gloves off, took my smartphone out of my purse, and snapped pictures from multiple angles as close up as I could get.

  Dr. Welch watched in fascination. “What should we do next, Doctor?”

  I looked up at him. “Do you have surgical instruments in your clinic?”

  “Of course. What—”

  “How about a Stryker saw?”

  “Certainly. I do have to remove the odd cast from time to time.”

  “How about a big jar and a gallon of alcohol?”

  “I’m not sure I’ve got a gallon, but I’ve got several liters. What do you want to do?”

  “An autopsy. Want to help?”

  Dr. Welch’s eyes lit up. “Right-o!”

  We put the pieces into a plastic bag and wrapped the bag in a clean towel for transport to the medical clinic, just in case we ran into anyone on the way.

  “So how’d it go with the trash?” Nigel asked Rob in the elevator.

  “It was quite an experience,” Rob said. “You wouldn’t believe how careful they are. There’s this big sorting room down there where they separate out metals, aluminium cans, glass bottles—by color, mind you—paper and cardboard, food waste, et cetera. Then they shred the glass, and crush the cans, and bale everything up for disposal. Then a big lorry comes and takes it all away.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I had no idea.”

  “Well, I knew there was an elaborate procedure, but I didn’t know the details until today.”

  “So there’d be no way a human head could get past them.”

  “Right.”

  “What do they do with sewage?” I asked.

  “They filter it, treat it with bacteria that digest fecal matter, and then treat it chemically and expose it to UV light. Then the solids are compacted and incinerated on board. Then they can dump the water into the ocean, as long as it’s twelve miles or more from shore.”

  “What about stuff like this?” I asked, indicating the bundle he was carrying.

  “That gets disposed of on shore by specialists in biohazard waste.”

  The infirmary was on A deck, two decks above C deck, and much cooler. Dr. Welch led the way into his clinic and closed and locked the door behind him. “It’s after office hours, and we’ll just have to hope no emergencies arise.”

  “Too bad you don’t have a morgue,” I commented.

  “Actually, we do,” he said, “but it’s little more than a cooler. We have to have someplace to keep a body until we reach the next port. Right this way.” He opened a door into a long corridor. “It’s all the way back. You can’t do an autopsy in it, for example, but there might be somewhere to work on this. We can put it in the cooler when we’re done with it.” He opened another door and turned on the light. “Just put the doings there in that sink,” he directed. He gestured at my dress, miraculously unstained so far. “Want some scrubs?”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  The scrubs he gave me were much too large, but once I secured the waistband of the scrub pants with a pair of hemostats and rolled up the legs, they were much more comfortable. Dr. Welch changed into scrubs as well, but Nigel just doffed his dinner jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. “I believe I’ll just watch. Carry on.”

  After donning surgical gloves, Dr. Welch and I laid out the skull and the tissue fragments on a surgical towel on the counter next to the sink. “When I saw her head in the pool this morning, I saw a six-inch laceration on the back of her head, and underneath it I felt a depressed skull fracture. Right here.”

  I indicated the spot, and Dr. Welch palpated it. “Blimey. This has got to be the cause of death.”

  “I’m sure it is. All we have to do is document it,” I told him. “I need you to hold the head upright so I can get a picture of the laceration.”

  He did so, and I snapped several pictures from various angles. “Now,” I said, “I need to see if there’s anything stuck to the edges of the wound to give us a clue to what she was hit with, and then I need to excise the skin around it and put it in alcohol to preserve it.”

  Dr. Welch handed me a pair of forceps, and I probed the edges of the wound. “Aha!” I said as I extracted a sliver of wood. “This looks like oak. What’s made out of oak?”

  “Other than the furniture in the cabins, I don’t know,” he said.

  “You think somebody hit her over the head with a table leg?” I asked. “Or a chair?”

  He picked up the head and held it at eye level. “I think it might be difficult to cause a wound in this location by hitting one over the head,” he said. “This wound looks more like she fell onto something with sharp corners.”

  “Like a coffee table,” I said, remembering the chip I’d seen on the captain’s coffee table. “Or maybe a dresser. Maybe this is an accident and not murder at all.”

  “Unless she fell because someone pushed her,” Nigel said. “And don’t forget that even if it was an accident, someone tried to cover it up by putting the body in the roof and crushing it. That’s a crime in itself. Obstruction of justice by tampering with evidence.”

  “I want to take a picture of this sliver,” I said. “Can you grab me a paper towel, Dr. Welch?”

  He did so. “You know, you may as well call me Rob. We’ve become quite close over the last few hours.”

  “Then you can call me Toni,” I said. “Have you got a ruler? I need something to show the dimensions of the sliver.”

  Nigel dug into his pocket and held up a dime. “Will this work?”

  “Yes. Just put it on the towel next to the sliver.” I snapped the picture at several magnifications. “Have you got a small jar I could save this in?”

  “Will a urine cup do?” he asked. He opened one of the lower cabinets and extracted one. “As you can see, we keep supplies in here too.”

  “Perfect,” I said and put the splinter into it, paper towel, dime, and all. “Oh, you know what, I think I’d better save some of her hair for exemplars, just in case. Can you grab me another urine cup?”

  Rob did so. I yanked a handful of blonde hairs with their dark roots out of the scalp and sealed them into it.

  “Now I think I’d better take the vitreous humor, just in case she was drugged or poisoned,” I said. “For that I need a syringe and a needle. And do you have a small tube with a cap?”

  Rob shook his head. “I don’t think we have anything like that,” he said.

  “Okay, then, I guess I can use a urine cup,” I said, “but it’s not optimal. Too much head space. It could dry out.”

  “Why not just leave it in the syringe and cap the needle?”

  “Oh, good idea.”

  He fetched me two five-cc glass syringes with needles. “One for each eye,” he said.

&
nbsp; “Cool.” I aspirated vitreous from each eyeball and capped the needles. “Do you have anything we could use to label these specimens?”

  He reached into a drawer and pulled out a Sharpie. “How about this?”

  I wrote “Montague, L.” and the date and time on each specimen container.

  “We can keep those in the cooler too,” Rob said.

  “Perfect. Now I need a scalpel,” I said.

  Rob fetched me one. “What are you going to do now?”

  “I need to remove the skull cap. So first I need to peel the skin and subcutaneous tissue off the skull, and then I’ll need the Stryker saw.”

  While Rob held the head steady, I made an incision across the top of the head from ear to ear. With another surgical towel and a little help from the scalpel, I peeled the skin forward over the face, and backward over the back of the head. Then with the Stryker saw I removed the skull cap.

  The depressed skull fracture was clearly visible from the exterior aspect, and I photographed it from several angles, including the corresponding hemorrhage in the overlying scalp. It was even more impressive from the inside of the skull cap, with splintery edges that had pierced the brain. Both Rob and Nigel whistled when I lifted it away to expose the extent of the subdural hematoma underneath. I took more pictures.

  Next, I removed the brain from the skull cavity, using the scalpel to sever the dura mater and the various cranial nerves that held it in place. “This is what I need a big jar for,” I said.

  Rob shook his head. “I don’t have anything that big, sorry.”

  “Would a big bucket with a lid do?” Nigel inquired. “Like the buckets that laundry detergent comes in? Or p’r’aps the kitchen might have some big jars—for mayonnaise or mustard, for example?”