The Body on the Lido Deck

by Jane Bennett Munro

  “Ah,” said Sarah. “So that’s how Colin knew him.”

  “And Colin never told you he had a daughter?” Mum asked Sarah.

  Sarah frowned. “Never,” she replied. “Maybe he didn’t know, or maybe he was afraid to tell me since we were already engaged.”

  “But he wasn’t,” I protested. “I mean, not unless you were engaged for five years. When Leonie’s mom worked on the Southern Cross, Leonie was already four years old.”

  Sarah’s face cleared. “That must have been Colin’s first ship after he graduated as a third officer: the Seven Sisters. I didn’t even know him then.”

  Aha! The Seven Sisters. Now we had the name of the ship. I mentally filed that away to tell Nigel.

  “Are you angry that he didn’t tell you he had a daughter?” Mum asked her.

  “I have no right to be,” Sarah said.

  “Why?” my mother persisted.

  “Because I kept it from him that I was already pregnant when we were married.”

  “But surely—” Mum began.

  But Sarah interrupted her. “By another man.”

  “You mean that Keith …”

  “Is my son. Not Colin’s.”

  15

  Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.

  —Mark Twain

  WELL!

  That little bombshell had my head spinning. It reminded me of a joke I’d once heard where a young man chose a girl to marry, and his father said, “You can’t marry her. She’s your sister.” So he went to his mother and she said, “It’s okay. He’s not your father.”

  All eyes were pinned on Sarah. She blushed. “I trust that stays just between us. I want to tell Colin in my own time.”

  “You’re going to tell him, then,” Mum said.

  Sarah sighed. “Yes. I think it’s time we got all this out in the open. Particularly now that Keith is working on ships now. I’m afraid that he’s inherited his father’s temper. It’s something Colin will have to deal with, I’m afraid.”

  “So who is his father?” I asked, earning a glare from my husband and an “Antoinette!” from my mother.

  “It’s all right,” Sarah said. “It’s all going to come out anyway, but I need to tell Colin before I can tell anyone else. You do see that, don’t you?”

  Feeling sheepish, I allowed as how I did.

  “Does he know that Keith’s his son?” Mum asked.

  “No,” Sarah said. “If I couldn’t tell Colin, I certainly couldn’t tell him.”

  Rob glanced at his watch. “I’ve got to go check on my patient.” He drained his Bloody Mary and departed.

  Sarah looked at her watch too. “I’d better go too. Thanks for the Irish coffee. It was just what I needed, a bit of Dutch courage.” She stood up.

  “Are you going to tell your husband right now?” asked my mother.

  Sarah sighed. “I see no reason to postpone it. Colin has a right to know who our son really is.”

  “And you have a right to know about his daughter,” Mum said.

  “I certainly do,” said Sarah. She turned and walked away resolutely.

  Mum stared after her. “I don’t envy her, kitten.”

  “Me either,” I said.

  “Now what?” asked Hal.

  I was about to answer that when I heard a clatter outside. I turned to see a helicopter approaching. “That must be the medevac,” I said excitedly. “Let’s go up and watch it land.”

  We took the elevator up to the observation deck. It had stopped raining, but the wind had not diminished. Rob was there, his white lab coat whipping about his legs. An orderly accompanied him. Joe Gerard lay on a gurney between them, covered by a blanket strapped down securely to prevent it from blowing off. He was ominously still, legs out straight, toes pointed.

  The helicopter landed, but the blades kept turning. As soon as Joe was secured, it took off again. Rob stood staring after it, shaking his head. The orderly had left.

  I climbed up to where he stood. “Still decorticate?”

  “Nope,” Rob said. “Decerebrate. It’ll take a bloody miracle to save him now.”

  “You did the best you could,” I told him.

  “Tell that to our chief engineer,” he said sourly. “He doesn’t share your opinion. He called me a bloody quack.”

  “Really.”

  “And that’s not all,” Rob went on. “You’d better stay out of his way too. He said that if you’d kept your nose out of what doesn’t concern you, his son wouldn’t have ended up like this.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I said. “He can’t hold me responsible for that. I didn’t conk him on the head.”

  “No, but you’re the one who wanted to see the security tapes.”

  A thought struck me. “You know, it was Nigel who convinced Officer Grant to let us look at them. Maybe I’d better warn him.”

  Rob snorted. “Maybe someone ought to warn Officer Grant too. Especially if Joe doesn’t make it.”

  My immediate inclination was to say that of course Joe would make it, but who recovers from brain damage so severe that it causes decerebrate posturing? Rob was right. It would take a bloody miracle, without which Chief Engineer Joseph Gerard would be on the warpath. So what I said instead was, “How about we talk about something else?”

  We stepped down from the helipad to rejoin Hal and Mum. Rob shot me a sidelong grin. “Something like the murder, for instance?”

  “Well, I didn’t get a chance to ask if you saw anybody hanging around the infirmary after you put Leonie in the cooler.”

  “No, why?”

  “If Leonie died at five thirty-five, and you put her right into the cooler, and we saw the body being put onto the roof at five fifty-five on the security tapes, that leaves less than twenty minutes between when you and Officer Lynch left the infirmary and somebody else went in and got the body out. Was anybody else in the infirmary with you besides Lynch?”

  “At that hour in the morning? No way.”

  “Also,” I continued, “the tapes showed the Lido deck elevator opening at five forty-five. That means whoever took the body had to do it within ten minutes after you guys left her there.”

  “And didn’t you say that her feet were still warm when she fell onto the Lido deck?” Mum asked.

  “I did,” I said. “Maybe she wasn’t in the cooler for even ten minutes after you left. Somebody had to be just waiting for you to leave so they could go in and get the body.”

  “I’m beginning to wonder,” Mum began, and then she broke off and covered her eyes with her hand. “No, I can’t say it. It’s just too awful.”

  “You’re wondering the same thing I am,” I said. “You’re wondering if Leonie was really dead when Rob put her in the cooler.”

  “She was,” Rob insisted. “She had no pulse, she wasn’t breathing, her pupils were fixed and dilated … oh God.”

  “Sometimes it’s hard to tell,” I said. “Sometimes you have to wait a long time before you give up on a pulse.”

  “How would you know? You’re a pathologist.”

  “Last year I nearly did an autopsy on a lady who turned out not to be dead,” I told him. “They pronounced her dead in the emergency room and sent her to the morgue. I didn’t even look for a pulse. Why would I? The only thing that stopped me was that she grabbed hold of my apron strings. I had the scalpel in my hand, Rob, all ready to do the usual Y-shaped incision.”

  He turned and looked at me. “Toni, stop. You made that up.”

  I shook my head. “No, I didn’t. It really happened. What I’m trying to do is tell you that nobody’s perfect and you aren’t alone.”

  Rob snorted. “Well, I sure feel alone.”

  “Right,” I said. “You young whippersnappers think you’re the only ones who ever make mistakes. Well, you’re
going to keep on making them, because that’s how you learn. Why do you think it’s called ‘practicing’ medicine?”

  Rob looked at me in disbelief, but I went on talking before he could say anything. “I’m old enough to be your mother, and I know these things. You should listen to me.” Listen to me, I thought. I’m channeling my Jewish mother-in-law.

  Rob shook his head. “You aren’t that much older than me. I’m thirty-five.”

  “Forty-eight,” I told him. “But that’s not the point. The point is to get over yourself and stop obsessing over this. You didn’t hurt anybody. Leonie got crushed in the roof through no fault of yours. And Joe may or may not make it, but not because of anything you did wrong. So can we move on now?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “What are you two plotting now?” Nigel inquired from behind us. “And could we possibly do it inside out of this wind?”

  “She’s giving me a pep talk,” Rob said.

  “What for?”

  “Doctor stuff,” I said. I looked around and saw that Mum and Hal had disappeared. “Where’d they go?”

  “Back to the Ocean Lounge. Shall we do the same?”

  Rob and I assented and the three of us took the elevator back down to the Promenade deck. Mum and Hal were waiting for us in the Ocean Lounge.

  “How’d it go with the captain, lovey?” Mum asked Nigel.

  “He swore that nobody was in his cabin but Leonie and himself,” he said. “He said she’d had too much to drink and lost her balance. She struck her head, knocked herself out, and cut her head open, and then he called you, Rob. He said you came, and you and Officer Lynch put her on a gurney and took her away. Then he called housekeeping to come and clean up the blood on the carpet.”

  “That’s all?” I said.

  “He said he’d decided to tell her that he was her father, so he told her all about it, and they were celebrating. He’d ordered a bottle of champagne. That was why she had too much to drink.”

  “So he already knew she was his daughter,” I said.

  “Yes. He said that Evie told him about her on the Southern Cross. Of course, her name was Maggie then, as you know, not Leonie.”

  “So how’d he make the connection?”

  “Leonie had talked to him before, you remember. I imagine she’d already told him her real name.”

  “So then what?”

  “Then Sarah showed up. I thought you were going to keep her busy, Fiona. What happened?”

  “Well, lovey, she confessed to us that their son Keith is her son but not the captain’s, and the captain doesn’t know.”

  Nigel’s jaw literally dropped. “Are you having me on?”

  “No, dear. She said she was already pregnant when she and the captain got married.”

  “Did she already know about Leonie?”

  “No,” Mum said, “but she does now, and she decided that it was time her husband knew about Keith, so she left to tell him. There really wasn’t anything I could have done to keep her here, you know, short of physically restraining her.”

  Nigel nodded. “Yes, yes, I quite see that. I don’t suppose she happened to mention who Keith’s biological father is?”

  “No,” I said. “She said she had to tell the captain before telling anyone else.”

  “I suppose,” Mum said thoughtfully, “that means Keith doesn’t know he has a sister.”

  “Half sister,” Hal corrected her.

  “Stepsister,” I said. “They aren’t any blood relation at all.”

  “Whatever,” said Mum. “What I’m getting at is how he might react when he finds out.”

  “You think Keith might have killed Leonie?” I asked. “Why should he do that?”

  “Inheritance, dear. Didn’t you tell me that Sarah’s family is wealthy?”

  “Yes, but wait,” I said, confused. “Sarah is Keith’s mother. Sarah is the heiress. Where’s the problem?”

  “Think, kitten. If Sarah outlives our captain, there’s no problem. But what if she doesn’t?”

  “Oh.” I was beginning to see. “If the captain outlives her, he inherits her fortune. Then he could have bequeathed it to his daughter, Leonie.”

  “Or at the very least, Keith and Leonie would have to divide it,” Nigel said.

  “Then why would Keith want to mutilate the body so it couldn’t be identified?” Hal asked. “I thought you said—”

  “I did say,” I said. “I was operating under the assumption that the captain was the killer and that the body was mutilated by someone with a grudge against the captain. But if Keith is the killer …”

  “That goes right out the window,” Nigel said.

  “Exactly. So now we have to find someone with a grudge against Keith.”

  “So we’re back to square one,” Mum said. “Who would have a grudge against the captain’s son?”

  “Lots of people, I should think,” Hal said. “From what you’ve told me, he’s pissed off everybody he’s worked with.”

  “So a lot of people in the maintenance department don’t like Keith,” I said, “but do any of them hate him enough to do this?”

  “One of them might,” Nigel said. “Who has to deal with all those disgruntled crew members?”

  “Their boss,” I said.

  16

  It is a wise father that knows his own child.

  —Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice

  “THE CHIEF ENGINEER?” Hal asked in disbelief.

  “That awful man,” Mum said. “I wouldn’t mind at all if he turns out to be the killer.”

  “Me either,” I said, “but would he be mad enough to mutilate the body when he knows it’s his department that has to clean up the mess?”

  “That’s what he’d expect us to think,” Nigel said. “It would detract from any motive he might have.”

  “Next you’re going to accuse him of smashing his own son over the head in order to destroy those videotapes,” Hal said.

  “Well, maybe not that,” I said. “We still have Meacham to deal with. I wonder if Officer Grant ever located him.”

  “I wonder if our chief engineer was in cahoots with Meacham to mutilate the body,” Hal said.

  “Oh, I hate this,” I said in frustration. “We have all these questions, and we can’t get to the people we need to ask them of because they’re crew and off-limits to us.”

  “Toni, take it easy,” Rob said. “I’m crew. I’m off duty. I can talk to anybody. Where do you want me to start?”

  “Who brought the champagne?”

  “What? What champagne?” Rob looked bewildered.

  “Who brought the champagne to the captain’s cabin the night Leonie was there?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “If there was anybody else there besides Leonie, that person might have seen who.”

  “The captain’s room steward,” Mum said. “He’d be the one to bring anything to the captain’s cabin. That’s his job.”

  “I’m on it,” Rob said just as his cell phone rang, startling all of us, especially since none of us knew he carried one. He pulled it out, peered at the screen, frowned, and answered it. The conversation was brief, and the expression on Rob’s face was enough to tell the story.

  “Joe?” I asked.

  “Yup. He didn’t make it.”

  “Oh dear,” said Mum.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  Rob started to put his phone away, but I stopped him. “Can I see your phone?”

  “Certainly. Why?”

  “Because I didn’t know you could use cell phones out here in the middle of the ocean. What kind of phone is that?”

  “It’s just like yours,” he said.

  “You mean I could have made calls on my phone? Before it went missing, I mean.”r />
  “Well, maybe not,” Rob said. “You would have to be set up for international calling, and your wireless service has to be one that has a roaming agreement with Wireless Maritime Services.”

  “So can Nigel use your phone to call Scotland Yard instead of going through the purser?”

  “I suppose so. Do you need to do that now, Nigel?”

  “I suppose I could,” Nigel said. “What time is it there now?”

  Rob looked at his watch. “Almost five. You’d better hurry.”

  Nigel fished in his shirt pocket and pulled out a slip of paper. He handed it to Rob. “You’d best dial it for me. I might push a wrong button or something.”

  “Okay.” Rob dialed. After a few seconds he handed the phone to Nigel. “It’s ringing.”

  Nigel took it and held it up to his ear. After a few moments he said, “Chief Superintendent Alastair Hardwick, please. Homicide. Chief Superintendent Nigel Gray here.” He covered the speaker and whispered. “We’re in luck. He’s still there.”

  “Nigel, you old bastard, have I got news for you!” The current chief superintendent’s voice came through loud enough that we could all hear it. Rob must have put his phone on speaker.

  “Do tell,” Nigel said.

  “We’ve identified your murder victim.”

  “So have we,” Nigel said.

  “You didn’t tell me that, old boy. Her fingerprints match a certain Margaret Anne Hodges, a.k.a. Leonie Montague. Does that jibe with what you found?”

  “Yes,” Nigel said. “Anything interesting under her fingernails?”

  “Now that you mention it, yes. We found blood and tissue matching Keith Alexander Sloane.”

  “The captain’s son?” I inquired. “What did you have to match it to?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “My stepdaughter, Dr. Toni Day,” Nigel said. “She’s a pathologist. So what did you match it to?”

  “That young man has been in trouble since his first year at Eton. We’ve had his DNA profile on record since he beat up a classmate and nearly killed him, about ten years ago.”

  Scotland Yard’s version of Jamal, I thought. Which reminded me of the autopsy Rob and I had done on Leonie’s head. “What about the handprint on her cheek?” I asked. “Did that match Keith too?”