The Body on the Lido Deck

by Jane Bennett Munro

  “So does that mean that anybody can open and close the roof?” Hal asked. “We were told that only the captain can do that.”

  “A bit o’ polite fiction for passenger consumption,” Gerard said. “As long as it’s running properly, the captain is the one who opens it and closes it daily when we’re at sea. When maintenance or repairs are needed, we in engineering and maintenance have to be able to access it.”

  “Can anyone besides the folks on the bridge and maintenance and engineering open and close the roof?” I pursued.

  Gerard’s expression turned wary. “Why d’you want to know that?”

  “Because a woman’s body was crushed in the roof sometime between six and seven yesterday morning. Somebody opened the roof, put the body in, and then closed it. If the captain didn’t do it, and maintenance and engineering didn’t do it, who did?”

  Gerard frowned. “How d’you know it was between six and seven in the morning?”

  “Simple. Her blood hadn’t clotted and her feet were still warm.”

  “And how d’you know that?” Gerard’s company manners seemed to be slipping. His Scots was getting thicker too.

  “I was there,” I explained. “I was on the Lido deck when the head fell in the pool and the body fell on the deck. Naturally I had to investigate—and that’s another thing. Who removed the head from the pool?”

  “And how would I be knowin’ that?”

  “Because it disappeared during the time when maintenance was draining the pool and all of us were topside watching the police arrive.”

  Gerard hunched his shoulders and placed his hands on his hips before closing the space between us. “Madam, I don’t appreciate the implication that my department is in the habit of tamperin’ with evidence, and I’ll thank ye to keep yer nose out of it.”

  I took a step back. Hal didn’t. He and Gerard were practically nose to nose when Hal said, “And I’ll thank you not to talk to my wife like that. Is this how you think passengers should be treated?”

  Gerard was unimpressed. “What d’you think about your wife going around interferin’ in things that are none of her affair?”

  “I say more power to her,” Hal said. “I took a vow to love and honor, not to be a control freak.”

  “Y’ mean tae say it disna bother you?” Gerard asked in disbelief.

  “Sure it does,” Hal said, looping an arm around my shoulders. “But I figured out a long time ago that worrying about Toni once in a while is better than not having Toni at all.”

  Gerard looked as if he’d have liked to come back with a snappy retort, but the radio on his belt crackled, and he had to answer it. “Yes, sir. Right away.” He put it back on his belt and heaved a sigh. “I’m sorry, you’ll have tae excuse me. It seems one of the washing machines in the laundry requires my attention.”

  “Probably the one they found the head in last night,” I remarked.

  Gerard’s company manners vanished completely. “Bluidy hell,” he snarled and walked away in the direction of the elevator.

  “That’s spoiled his day,” Hal remarked. “I hope he hasn’t had breakfast yet.”

  “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,” I said. “Can you say ‘male chauvinist pig’?”

  Hal chuckled. “I thought I saw smoke coming out of your ears, but maybe it was a trick of the light.”

  “Nope,” I said, shaking my head for emphasis, “it was definitely smoke.”

  “What’s all this about smoke?” Nigel inquired, startling me. I turned to see him and Mum behind us. I hadn’t heard them coming.

  “What are you guys doing up so early?” I asked.

  “We didn’t sleep well,” Mum said.

  “How come?”

  “After we left the dinner table last night, Fiona got into a bit of a dust-up with the Chief Engineer,” Nigel said.

  “A thoroughly unpleasant man,” Mum interjected with a sniff.

  “I couldn’t agree more,” I said. Gerard took the concept of the dour Scot to a whole new level, in my opinion. “We had a bit of a dust-up with him too, just now.”

  “She rather took exception to his thoughts about what you and I were doing getting involved with a dead body,” Nigel continued. “He was of the opinion that we were wasting our time because nothing was going to be done about it no matter what we did.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Not a bit of it,” Mum said. “He said that the cruise line would have nothing to do with it because we were in a port, and the port would do nothing because it occurred on a cruise ship.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I said in disgust. “So the murderer’s just going to get away with it because these assholes can’t be bothered to do the right thing?”

  “Language, dear,” my mother reminded me tartly. “Although that was rather the way I felt about it too.”

  “There is also the matter of jurisdiction,” Nigel said. “Barbados is a British commonwealth, and the cruise ship sails under the British flag, but one has no jurisdiction in the other and vice versa.”

  “What about Scotland Yard?” I asked.

  “Scotland Yard would have jurisdiction in both,” Nigel said, “assuming we were called in by one or the other. That’s the rub, you know.”

  “You know the captain,” I suggested. “You could talk him into calling them in. Couldn’t you?”

  “Toni,” said my long-suffering husband, “quit nagging.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, endeavoring to sound contrite, “I don’t mean to be a pest. It’s just that Dr. Welch and I collected all this evidence last night and I don’t want it to all be for naught.”

  “I know,” Nigel reminded me. “I was there.”

  “I also took pictures of everything. Last night I backed them up by e-mailing them from my smartphone to my laptop, and I forwarded them to Pete—”

  “Why send them to Pete, kitten?” Mum inquired. “He can’t do anything with them.”

  “For backup in case someone steals my laptop. I also forwarded them to Inspector Blackwell, the public relations officer with the Royal Barbados Police, and asked her to forward them to Chief Superintendent Braithwaite.”

  “That must have taken all night,” Nigel said.

  “It did, pretty much,” Hal agreed. “Then, after all that, First Officer Lynch knocked on our door and said the captain had sent him to make sure Toni was all right.”

  “We did notice a bit of a disturbance from the room across the hall,” Nigel said dryly. “Apparently Captain Sloane wasn’t concerned as to whether I was all right or not.”

  “That’s because I’m the one with all the pictures,” I said.

  “Toni thinks the captain sent Officer Lynch to steal her smartphone,” Hal said.

  “Oh, I can’t believe that nice young man would do such a thing, kitten,” Mum said. “Besides, your door was locked, surely.”

  “It wouldn’t matter,” I said. “The captain has a key to every room on this ship, including cabins.”

  “Antoinette!” Mum looked shocked. “You can’t seriously be suggesting that the captain would send someone to break into your cabin and rob you, now, can you?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know, but I slept with my smartphone under my pillow, just in case.”

  Hal chuckled. “Paranoia is alive and well in the Shapiro camp.”

  I ignored him. “Here’s the thing,” I persisted. “Is it really true that when a murder occurs on a cruise ship, nobody wants jurisdiction and nothing gets done? Because Captain Sloane told me he knew you from a case where a murder occurred on a ship just before it docked at Southampton, and you were the Scotland Yard detective in charge of the case.”

  “That’s true,” Nigel said. “Colin Sloane was first officer on that ship.”

  “So if Scotland Yard got called in for a murder a
board a ship about to dock in England, why wouldn’t it get called in for a murder aboard a ship about to dock in Barbados?”

  Nigel pulled thoughtfully at his moustache. “Toni, old girl, you just may have something there. Look here, I’ll talk to the captain and feel him out about that old case. He just might see it your way, and if he does, we can send all that evidence to Scotland Yard and let them do the detecting while we do what we came on this cruise to do in the first place.”

  “Have fun,” I said.

  “Precisely.”

  The four of us went down to the Lido restaurant for breakfast, which we carried out to the pool area to eat. “I trust,” my mother said sternly, “that there will be no talk of corpses and blood whilst we’re eating.”

  We knew better. My mother had very firm ideas on what was and what was not table talk. Often, during my medical school and residency days, when I started talking shop, she would draw herself up and say in her iciest British, “Antoinette, really, must we have bowels at dinner?”

  So we limited our breakfast conversation to what we would do while in port at Philipsburg. Mum and Nigel had signed up for a bus tour around the island, and Hal and I had signed up to participate in the St. Maarten Americas Cup 12-metre Challenge regatta. Three of the yachts that had participated in the Americas Cup in years past were permanent residents of Philipsburg Harbor, and cruise ship passengers signed up in droves to participate in a race between the three yachts.

  Mum and Nigel would have an interesting tour also, because St. Maarten and the port of Philipsburg were Dutch, while the other side of the island, St. Martin, was French.

  In every port, we would look for gifts for Pete, Bambi, and our granddaughters, Toni Amanda, eighteen months old, and Shawna Renee, due in three months. We figured she wouldn’t want to be left out just because she hadn’t been born yet. I also looked for gifts for Mum and Nigel, which I would stash away in our cabin to be smuggled home in our luggage and given as Christmas gifts, months from now.

  After we’d eaten, Mum went back to the cabin to get ready for the shore excursion, while Hal and Nigel and I went back topside to watch our approach and docking in Philipsburg. I prevailed upon Nigel to tell me about that long-ago shipboard murder.

  “It was twenty-five years ago, and I was just a lowly detective-inspector,” he said. “Colin Sloane was first officer, as I said. The victim was the cruise director, a lovely young woman. She was found at the bottom of a staircase on the Lido deck, not unlike the staircase you were running up and down all day yesterday.”

  “Was that what killed her?” I asked.

  Nigel shook his head. “It was my opinion that someone had punched her in the face. The autopsy showed that her nasal bones had been shoved right up into her brain—something easily done by a blow to the underside of the nose with the heel of the hand. It caused a subdural hematoma that was the actual cause of death. All the other bruising on the body was perimortem.”

  “Do you mean she was thrown down the stairs after she was already dead?” asked Hal.

  “The Home Office pathologist said that the bruising didn’t match a fall down any staircase he’d ever heard of. He thought it was more likely that the young woman had been beaten with a blunt object to simulate injuries from a fall down a staircase and was then just dumped there to be found the next day.”

  “So that one wasn’t crushed by the roof,” Hal said.

  “They hadn’t opened the roof,” Nigel said. “It was a transatlantic cruise, and the North Atlantic is cold.”

  “What day was she actually found?” I asked. “Was it the same day that the ship docked, or the day before?”

  “The same day,” Nigel said. “That was when the ship-to-shore call to Scotland Yard was made.”

  “Who called you?” Hal asked.

  “The captain.”

  “So who did it?”

  Nigel shook his head again. “We never solved it. By the time the body arrived at the Yard and the autopsy was done, the ship had sailed—and any evidence with it.”

  “You couldn’t detain a cruise ship,” I diagnosed.

  “Right. And then I had to inform the next of kin. A hateful job.”

  “Her parents?”

  “Yes, and then they had to break it to their four-year-old granddaughter,” Nigel said.

  “She had a child?” I asked in surprise.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh dear. How sad.”

  We were interrupted at that point by the captain’s announcement that the gangway was ready and that we could now go ashore.

  Two tall, gorgeous young ladies got on the elevator with us, both dragging overnight cases with them. “Are you leaving us?” I inquired.

  “Yes, we were just here for the show last night,” one said. She sounded British.

  “You don’t stay on board for the entire cruise?”

  “No, not usually,” she said. “We came on yesterday at Bridgetown, and today we’ll be meeting another ship.”

  “Is that usual? I mean, is that what show people usually do, just stay on for one night and then leave?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s what we do.”

  “So what would happen if a performer was to not show up at the next port?”

  The girls looked at each other and shrugged. “I suppose they’d try to get somebody else to fill in,” the other one said. She sounded American.

  “Has that ever happened before?” I asked as the elevator door opened onto A deck.

  They looked at each other again. “Not that we know of,” the American girl said. “Have a nice day in port!”

  By the time we’d made our way decorously down the gangway amid a horde of slow-moving elderly folks, the girls and their overnight cases were already out of sight.

  “I didn’t realize that,” Mum said. “I suppose I thought the same people did the show every night.”

  “I believe they do, love,” Nigel said. “It’s just the headliners that change every day. Can’t have the same thing going on every night or people would get bored, don’t you know.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” Mum said. “You and Antoinette missed a really good one last night. Those two young ladies are dancers, and they put on a production number with a young man who sang. I’ve got the program here somewhere.” She dug in her purse. “Now where did that get to?”

  “It’s okay, Mum,” I said. “We can look at it later. You need to get to your bus. That must be it over there, where those people are holding up signs.”

  “She’s right,” Nigel said. “Let’s go, old girl!”

  “Whom do you think you’re calling old?” demanded my mother in mock outrage. “Antoinette!”

  “Yes, Mum?”

  “You two be careful. If anything happens to you, I’ll never forgive you.”

  “Fiona, hush,” Nigel said. “They’ll be fine.”

  We waved as they hurried to their bus, and no sooner had they climbed aboard than it started to rain. Sudden rainstorms happen with some regularity in the Caribbean, and Hal and I were already in waterproof anoraks for our yacht race, so we put our hoods up and watched our shipmates dash for cover.

  “So I suppose,” Hal said, “that means that Leonie Montague came aboard the day before yesterday in Grenada.”

  “And also that she was supposed to leave us to meet another ship in Bridgetown,” I said. “I wonder which one.”

  “Did you happen to notice another ship in port while we were there?”

  We’d been the only ship in port at the time our passengers went ashore, Hal and Fiona among them. But what with everything that was going on with the body and the captain and the guy with the mop and the coroner and the missing head, we could have been surrounded by cruise ships and I wouldn’t have noticed. “What about you?” I asked him. “Didn’t you and Mum notice what other
ships were there when you came back?”

  Hal shrugged. “I don’t remember which ones. Maybe Fiona does. Anyway, what difference does it make where she was supposed to go? Where she came from might be more important. Is there somebody who schedules all these things?”

  A lightbulb went on in my brain. “I bet the cruise director knows,” I said. “She’s probably around here somewhere, making sure everybody gets to their tour groups.” I stood on tiptoe, peering around, trying to spot Jessica, our cruise director, a tall blonde who usually stood out in a crowd, but I couldn’t see her.

  “Never mind that,” Hal said. “We don’t have time to talk to her now anyway. We’ve got to get over to that pier before they sail without us!”

  We dashed and made it just as they were choosing up teams for the three different yachts. Hal was assigned to be a grinder, one of those who cranks the sails around when a change of direction is needed. My job was to pass out drinks from the cooler. Everyone was cautioned not to stand up and get hit by the boom, and we were off.

  Neither Hal nor I had ever been sailing before, let alone racing a sailing yacht. I was not prepared for the speed with which those yachts moved, or the speed with which they could change direction. I was also surprised at how small they were. They measured twelve meters in length, or roughly thirty-six feet; hence the name of the race. They had looked a lot bigger on TV. The grinders worked their butts off as the captain called out the direction changes, and the boom swished over my head repeatedly with a noise that was probably the reason it was called a boom in the first place: the sound of sails filling with wind. Salt water sloshed over the gunwales during the turns, so whoever sat along the sides got soaked. I was in the center of the boat with the cooler, so I stayed relatively dry, the downside being that my view was blocked by everybody around me. Still, I couldn’t help noticing how close we came to the two other yachts during the turns, and I thought it was a bloody miracle that we didn’t crash into each other.

  Being in the center of the boat had another advantage, though. I could hear all the conversation going on around me without having it swept away on the wind. It’s not particularly windy in the center of the boat, so I couldn’t help hearing someone say, “I heard there was a murder on one of these cruise ships. Is that true?”