The Body on the Lido Deck

by Jane Bennett Munro

  Well. Since I could hear that, it must be possible for others to hear me from inside. That cheered me slightly, but not enough to mitigate the cold, the darkness, the pain from my jaw, and the knowledge that I’d soon run out of oxygen because the cooler, according to Rob, was airtight.

  Or was it?

  I thought I saw a flash of light. I shifted experimentally, reaching to touch the roof and the walls. There was enough room for me to stretch out full length, which I already knew because both Meacham and Mrs. Levine had been stretched out straight and they were both bigger than I was. There was also enough room for me to curl up into a ball to conserve warmth.

  One unexpected benefit was that the cold metal felt really good on my battered jaw. I moved it experimentally and came to the conclusion that despite the best efforts of both Rob and Grant, it still wasn’t broken.

  Moreover, there definitely was a sliver of light coming in under the door, so the cooler wasn’t airtight after all, and I wouldn’t be running out of air. It occurred to me that I’d better not say anything about it, though, or Grant would plug it up.

  “Don’t you have anything to say, bitch?” Grant taunted me.

  He was really going to have to come up with some new insults, I thought, but I didn’t say so, because it occurred to me that as long as he was out there, I had best keep quiet, or else he’d open up the cooler and finish me off as he had Leonie.

  On the other hand, if I kept quiet, he might get impatient and open up the cooler just to make sure I was dead, and then I could take him by surprise.

  But mostly I kept quiet because I was really, really tired.

  I even thought I might fall asleep at one point, except that the hard metal was really not all that comfortable, even though its coldness felt really good on the various bruises I could feel developing.

  Grant pounded on the cooler door, startling me. “Hey, bitch. You asleep in there?”

  I kept silent.

  He pounded again. “Hey!”

  Eventually, I thought, he’ll get bored and leave. Then what?

  As if he’d read my mind, Grant said, “Oh, to hell with you. Good-bye, bitch.” With that, the light went off and I heard the door shut.

  Now what?

  Outside the door, I thought I heard water running. Perhaps Grant was washing up before venturing out amongst people who would be shocked by his bloody appearance. I couldn’t imagine that it would do him much good, though. He’d have to change his clothes, and how was he going to disguise his torn ear?

  Maybe he’d find Rob and get him to sew it up or debride it or something. If he did, then I could make noise. I knew they’d hear it, because I could hear them. Then Rob could rescue me.

  Unless they were in cahoots.

  I hadn’t considered that before, and I was sorry I’d thought of it. It was a depressing thought.

  Now I understood why the security guards Grant had promised us had never materialized. If he’d killed Leonie with her own necklace, then he’d also used it to strangle both Mrs. Levine and Meacham, because the ligature marks matched the woven gold rope Leonie had worn the night she was killed. The reason we hadn’t found it with Leonie’s body was because Grant had taken it with him.

  But he had to have an accomplice. Somebody had had to help him string up the body on the roof of the Lido deck. Had it been Meacham? Was that why Grant had killed him, so he couldn’t talk?

  Or had Joe Gerard called Meacham to relieve him, and Grant had had to kill Meacham so he could kill Joe?

  So if Grant had killed both Meacham and Joe that night, why hadn’t he strangled both of them?

  I tried to visualize it. If Grant had tried to strangle one of them, the other would’ve tried to stop him. Grant would have had to disable one so he could strangle the other.

  Yes, that would make more sense. Grant had had to kill Meacham. That’s why he’d told Joe to call Meacham rather than some other security guard. Then he’d knocked Joe out, lay in wait for Meacham, strangled him, and put the body in the cooler. Then he’d gone back to security, expecting that Joe would regain consciousness and not remember anything, including the fact that he’d ever called Meacham in the first place. But Joe never did regain consciousness, which meant that Grant had to cover his shift and call the doctor—and then hurry up to the Nav deck to wake up Nigel before the doctor came so that nobody would know he’d ever been there.

  He’d had no idea that Joe would find the footage he needed so fast and get it sent off to Scotland Yard before Grant could get back down to security after speaking with the captain. He must have been frantic, having to sit there being polite while Sarah played cocktail party hostess. And then I’d had the effrontery to fall and hit my head and require medical attention, which had delayed Grant even more.

  No wonder he wanted to kill me.

  But why had he wanted to kill Leonie?

  Wait a minute.

  Grant had been on all three ships. Had he known Evie Hodges?

  More to the point, had he killed Evie Hodges?

  Why?

  Maybe it had nothing to do with Evie. Maybe Grant was having an affair with Leonie too. Maybe she’d rejected him. Maybe he’d raped her and killed her to keep her from telling anybody.

  No, that didn’t work. Leonie’s head wound had been an accident. Perhaps the captain had reported it to Grant, and Grant had gone to the infirmary to evaluate the situation and had found both Rob and Lynch leaving the infirmary after having put Leonie in the cooler, believing she was dead.

  So he’d gone and opened up the cooler and found Leonie alive. And he’d finished her off by strangling her with her necklace.

  But that didn’t make sense either, because if he’d raped her and didn’t want her to talk, why wait? Why not just strangle her at the time?

  No. It had to be some other reason. Actually, it had to be something that occurred to him when he opened the cooler, because otherwise why would he wait until then to kill her?

  Suppose he had killed Evie Hodges. Did he know that Leonie was her daughter? How would he know that? On the Southern Cross she might have told him that she had a daughter, but her name was Maggie, not Leonie, and she was only four years old. Did Grant know that Leonie had changed her name?

  He knew now because we’d all been talking about it, but had he known it beforehand?

  Outside, I heard a door slam. Grant must have left. What had he been doing all this time?

  But no, I heard voices. Somebody had come in. Rob? I thought about making noise and attracting attention, but what if Rob was in on it with Grant?

  How would Grant get Rob to be in on it? Maybe Rob had been lying to me when he’d said that he and Lynch had both left when Grant arrived to check on the body. Maybe Rob was in on it because of his past history with Leonie. Or maybe …

  “Grant? What the hell happened to you?”

  It was Rob.

  “It’s this damn storm. I lost my balance and fell against the wall and my ear caught on something and tore.”

  “Caught on what?” I heard Rob say. “This looks like somebody bit it off. It looks just like what Mike Tyson did to Evander Holyfield.”

  “Come on, Doc. Who would do a thing like that?”

  “You tell me. In any case, we’ve got to fix you up. Do you have the missing piece? I could try to sew it back on …”

  “No,” Grant said. “I don’t have it.”

  “Oh well,” Rob said. “Maybe a plastic surgeon can reconstruct it. All I can do is stop the bleeding. You’ll need a tetanus shot too.”

  “Whatever. Can you get on with it?”

  “Come on. Let’s go into this first exam room. I’ll just turn on the light and— What the hell is Meacham doing in here?”

  “How should I know?” Grant replied irritably.

  Rob wasn’t buying it, apparently. “H
e was in the cooler. Now he’s here. What happened?”

  “I told you, I don’t know. Can’t we use another room?”

  “No!” Rob insisted. “Who’s in the cooler?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Let’s just go look, shall we?”

  “No. How about you just sew up my ear and quit going on and on about the fucking cooler,” Grant suggested.

  “Wait a minute,” Rob said. “What’s this on the floor? It looks like a piece of meat.”

  “Don’t bother with that,” Grant said. “Let’s get my ear taken care of. Don’t pick that up. You don’t know where it’s been.”

  “Well, what do you know? It seems to be the missing piece of your ear. Is this the wall you fell against, because there’s nothing here that would tear off an ear. Are you quite sure somebody didn’t bite it off?”

  “I told you, Doc, I tore it. Nobody bit me.”

  “That would be good if it were true,” Rob said, “because human bites are really bad. They almost always get infected. You’re going to need prophylactic antibiotics too.”

  “Goddamn it, would you fix my sodding ear and quit talking?” Grant’s voice was getting louder and louder and at least an octave higher. He was practically screaming.

  “No, I don’t think I will,” Rob said. “At least not right now. I’m going to see who’s in the cooler.”

  “The bleedin’ hell you are,” Grant snarled, and the scuffling began. Something crashed into the morgue door, something big, like a human body. I winced as I heard the meaty thunk of a fist hitting a jaw, or perhaps a cheekbone. I hoped it was Rob’s fist versus Grant’s face and not the reverse.

  Someone wrenched the morgue door open, and the scuffle continued on into the morgue, where I could clearly hear the two men grunting and puffing as each strove to knock the other into the middle of next week. This is dinner theater, I thought. Where’s the popcorn?

  I heard another meaty thunk, and someone crashed into the cooler door. As the body slithered to the floor, Rob’s voice said, “Take that, you son of a bitch.”

  From that I deduced that Rob had punched Grant and that it was now a propitious time to make my appearance. I doubled myself up and slammed my feet into the cooler door.

  To my intense astonishment, it popped open. It must not have been locked properly.

  But that was nothing compared to the effect it had on Rob and Grant. The door caught Grant on the side of the head and knocked him sideways into Rob, who sidestepped him. He crashed into the cupboard under the sink head-first. I rolled myself out of the cooler and landed on him. He didn’t move.

  Rob looked like he’d just seen a ghost. “Toni! What were you doing in there?”

  “It wasn’t my idea,” I said, climbing off Grant and getting to my feet. “He put me in there, and I was just waiting to see who was going to win this fight before I made my presence known. I didn’t want to end up like Leonie.”

  He threw his arms around me and hugged me tight. “My God, you’re a sight for sore eyes! How long were you in there?”

  “Too long,” I said.

  Grant stirred. Rob said, “Let’s get out of here.” We went out into the corridor and Rob shut and locked the morgue door. We heard Grant yelling “Let me out of here” and banging on the door.

  “Let’s get out of here before he remembers he has keys,” Rob suggested. We made our way out to the reception area, with me moving slowly. Every muscle ached, and I was probably hypothermic to boot. But we made it just in time to see Captain Sloane and Chief Gerard come bursting through the outer door.

  “Where is he?” Gerard demanded.

  I pointed.

  Both men ran into the morgue and hauled Grant out. Gerard landed a haymaker on him that laid him out cold.

  “That’s for killing my son, you bastard. May you rot in hell.”

  Captain Sloane scratched his upper lip. “With Keith in the brig, I don’t know what we’re to do with him. There’s not enough room.”

  “Put him in the cooler,” I suggested. “That’s what he did with me.”

  25

  O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!

  My tables; meet it is I set it down,

  That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.

  —Shakespeare, Hamlet

  IT WOULD HAVE served Grant right to be jammed into the brig with Keith Sloane, but I didn’t really care what happened to him, because the next two people who came through the infirmary door were Hal and Nigel. Hal had a shiner that nearly rivaled my purple jaw.

  “Toni! Oh God, Toni!” He swept me up in his arms. “Thank God you’re all right. But are you?” He held me away from him and examined my face. “The whole side of your face is purple! And you look like a vampire. What did those bastards do to you?”

  Nigel hugged me too and planted a mustachioed kiss on the undamaged side of my face. “It’s good to see you, old girl. I do hope all that blood isn’t yours.”

  I looked down at myself. My front was drenched in Grant’s blood. “It’s not,” I told him.

  “Thank God,” Nigel said, “because we appear to be short one doctor.”

  “It’s nothing an ice pack won’t fix,” I assured him. “And what about you? You look like you need one too.”

  “Well, we’ve come to the right place,” Hal commented, looking around. “Surely we can find an ice pack around here somewhere.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

  “Come on, where’s that refrigerator?”

  “I’m telling you, I looked there. No ice packs.”

  “You need to look in the freezer.”

  I put my hands on my hips. “What do you take me for? Don’t you think I did that?”

  “Sorry, sweetie. Where did all that blood come from?” Hal asked.

  “I bit Grant’s ear off,” I told him.

  He stepped over to Grant’s supine form, bent over and looked. “My God. You really did. Where’s the rest of it?”

  “I don’t know. Around here on the floor someplace.”

  “Is this it?” asked Gerard, holding up a chunk of bloody tissue.

  Captain Sloane averted his gaze.

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Could the doctor sew it back on?”

  “That’s what he was trying to do when the fight broke out,” I said.

  “If ye want my opinion,” Gerard growled, “he’s not worth the trouble.”

  “So your mouth isn’t bleeding,” Hal said with distaste. “That’s Grant’s blood on your teeth.”

  “Some of it’s mine,” I said. “My mouth is cut on the inside. When we get upstairs I plan to brush my teeth with bleach. For an hour. And gargle.” I hadn’t even thought about blood-borne pathogens until now. I hoped Grant didn’t have any. In a hospital setting we both would have had our blood tested for HIV and hepatitis B and C, but this was no hospital.

  “What happens now?” I asked.

  “We fly him back to England and let Scotland Yard deal with him,” Captain Sloane said. “My son too.”

  “No, I meant what do we do now,” I explained.

  “I think you need a shower, an ice pack, and a good night’s sleep,” Hal said. “In that order. And get rid of those bloody clothes. Oh, and speaking of clothes, we still need to put our luggage out for pickup.” He turned to the captain. “Is it too late?”

  Captain Sloane shook his head.

  “No worries,” I said, remembering. “I put it out before I came down here.”

  “I hope Fiona put ours out,” Nigel said.

  “Under the circumstances,” the captain said, “I will make sure that somebody picks it up before you go ashore.”

  “So we just disembark as if nothing happened?” Hal asked.

  “I will let you know in the mornin
g.”

  “Hell, it already is morning,” Hal grumbled as we rode the forward elevator up to the Nav deck. “We’ll have to get up in four hours.”

  “You go ahead,” I told him. “I have to clean up first. And take some ibuprofen.”

  Hal went down the hall to the ice machine to get ice to make ice packs for both of us while I showered. I didn’t brush my teeth with bleach or for an hour, but I did brush them for a really long time, and used up all my mouthwash trying to get the taste of blood out of my mouth, but it was no use. I think the scent had become embedded in my nasal passages.

  By the time I’d gotten myself cleaned up and my hair dry, Nigel and Mum were knocking on the door.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” Nigel said, “but Fiona woke up and I had to tell her what happened, and she insisted on coming over here to see for herself that you were all right.”

  “Kitten!” Mum rushed in with every intention of clutching me to her bosom, but when she saw my face, she stopped. “My stars and garters! Your face looks like an eggplant. Are you sure your jaw isn’t broken?”

  I assured her that it wasn’t.

  “You must tell me everything. And I do mean everything,” my mother insisted. “Leave nothing out.”

  So I curled up on the bed while Mum sat beside me, and I told her everything and left nothing out. I watched as my mother’s expression went from alarm to horror to incredulity and back again. To her credit, she didn’t interrupt me, although it was an obvious struggle for her not to.

  “My goodness,” she said when I’d finished, “Officer Grant seemed so nice and helpful. And that awful man Gerard wasn’t so awful after all. Who’d have thought?”

  “I guess you never really know another person until you get them mad,” I said.

  “And nobody does that better than Toni,” Hal said with a wink at me.

  “And what about you, Hal dear?” said Mum. “Where did you get that mouse on your eye?”

  “Gerard,” Hal said succinctly. Mum bristled, but before she could say anything, he raised a hand to stop her. “No, just listen to me. The captain asked him to give me a personal tour of the engine room.”