The Body on the Lido Deck

by Jane Bennett Munro

  “Yes, dear, I know that.”

  “First he showed me the engine control room. It’s huge. There are what they call ‘mimic boards’ for all the equipment with screens and gauges showing what’s going on and alerting people if anything goes wrong. There are always two engineers on duty there, while more engineers are actually in the engine room dealing with those things. The captain, or whoever’s on duty on the bridge, notifies the engine control room if he needs more speed or more power, and the engine control room engineers notify the engineers in the engine room.”

  “That makes sense,” Nigel said.

  “Then we went down to the engine room, which is actually several rooms connected to each other. He showed me these huge diesel generators that make the electricity. There are six of them. There’s also an emergency generator in case the others fail. Then there are the azipods.”

  “The what, dear?” Mum asked.

  “Azipods. It’s a new thing. Instead of propellers and thrusters, they have these podlike things that rotate 360 degrees to move the ship in any direction. They operate those from the bridge. They have hydraulic motors that rotate them, and internal propellers so they don’t get fouled by anything floating around in the ocean.”

  “Get to the black eye,” I suggested, tiring of all the technical talk.

  “Well, it was all very interesting, but Gerard wasn’t the most gracious host. I called him on it. He told me it wasn’t his job to give tours to passengers and that he had better things to do, particularly when the passenger in question was the husband of the nosy bitch who got his son killed.”

  I gasped in outrage, but before I could object, Hal resumed. “So I socked him, and the fight was on. We exchanged a few punches, and then we both realized how ridiculous it was and started laughing. He apologized for calling Toni a bitch, and I apologized for punching him first, and for the last hour we’ve been down in the bar drinking beers and bonding.”

  “Aww, isn’t that sweet,” I said.

  “All’s well that ends well,” quoted Nigel. “My adventure was pretty dull compared to yours. By the way, does Gerard know that Keith Sloane is really his son?”

  “He does now,” Hal said. “He doesn’t care. He doesn’t like him any more than he did before he knew. All he said on the matter was that if he’d raised Keith himself, he’d be a much better person. We had quite a discussion on environment versus heredity.”

  “You didn’t come to blows over it, did you?” I asked.

  “No, I think we both needed to blow off steam, and we’d already done that.”

  “To go on with my story,” Nigel said, “I asked Officer Lynch all the questions we’d discussed. He was on duty on the bridge when Leonie had her accident, and he was still on duty when she was crushed in the roof. Officer Bellingham will tell you that nobody on the bridge opened or closed the roof until seven, which was when it was supposed to be opened. He was also on duty the night that Joe Gerard was attacked and Meacham was killed.”

  “What about Mrs. Levine?” I asked.

  “That’s a bit of a problem,” Nigel said. “We don’t know exactly when Mrs. Levine was killed.”

  “Well, she was alive and well when we were in Philipsburg, because she was on the yacht with me, and we found her body that night, and it was still warm. It had to have been during dinner, and Officer Grant wasn’t at dinner that night.”

  “I didn’t ask Lynch about that, but I doubt he had anything to do with it. Since he couldn’t have killed Leonie, he had no reason to kill Mrs. Levine.”

  “Okay. Did you ask him about his relationship with Leonie?”

  “I did. He said he started dating her after she graduated from university. Remember, he and Leonie had grown up together, along with the doctor and the cruise director. They’d all known one another as kids. He helped his sister Jessica get her position here, and they both helped Leonie. But he said that he and Leonie only dated a short time, and as far as the captain was concerned, Leonie had told Dave why she was spending so much time with the captain. So he had no motive to kill her for that.”

  “Did you ask him about running into Officer Grant outside the infirmary?”

  “Yes. He confirmed that he and Rob ran into Grant, but they didn’t go back into the infirmary with him. He said he went back to the bridge, and the other officer on duty can confirm that.”

  “Okay, scratch Officer Lynch,” I said. “Does Gerard have alibis for those times?”

  “He said he was either in the engine control room or in the engine room,” Hal said, “and there are multiple engineers and other crew members who can vouch for him, and therefore he also had no reason to kill Mrs. Levine.”

  “So it was Officer Grant all along,” I said. “He had Leonie’s necklace, you know. He tried to strangle me with it. Maybe we were right about her regaining consciousness in the cooler. He must have strangled her with it. Otherwise, why would he have it?”

  “I can’t even begin to imagine,” Hal said.

  “Maybe he took it as a trophy,” Mum suggested.

  “Serial killers do that sometimes,” Nigel said, “as a souvenir of their victims. But as far as I can see, Grant killed Leonie and the other murders were to cover that up.”

  “Maybe he killed Leonie to cover up an even earlier murder,” I suggested.

  “But we didn’t have a previous murder,” Mum said. “Did we?”

  “According to the crew manifests,” I said, “Officer Grant was on all three ships. What murder took place on one of the other two ships that we do know about?”

  “Evelyn Hodges,” Nigel said, “of course. But what reason would he have had to kill her?”

  “It could have been anything,” I said. “Unrequited love, jealousy, or maybe she had something on him and was blackmailing him. We’ll probably never know unless he tells us himself.”

  “Maybe she knew he killed someone on the Seven Sisters and he killed her to shut her up,” Hal said.

  “This is getting positively Gothic,” my mother said. “He might have killed someone before he even started working on cruise ships, and someone on the Seven Sisters knew about it.”

  “It’s like one of those things where you see your reflection in a mirror reflected in a second mirror and the images go on and on and never end,” I said.

  “Well, Officer Grant is maybe fifty years old,” Nigel said practically, “so it has to end somewhere.”

  “In 1983,” Hal said, “Officer Grant would have been maybe twenty years old. Date rape? Statutory rape?”

  “Maybe he got the poor girl pregnant and she killed herself,” I said, getting into the spirit of the thing. “Although the pill had been around for about fifteen years by then, not all girls are prepared for being raped.”

  “And maybe Evie Hodges knew,” Hal said, “and threatened to tell her buddy Colin Sloane about it.”

  “And we all know that Colin Sloane wouldn’t hesitate to report it,” Nigel said.

  “Just like he did his classmate Bert Meacham,” I said.

  “It’s a very pretty story,” Nigel said, “but there’s no evidence to support it, and it’s all in the past in any case. All we know from the evidence we have is that Grant strangled Leonie, Mrs. Levine, and Meacham with Leonie’s necklace.”

  “And tried to strangle me, don’t forget,” I said.

  “I’m not likely to,” Hal said with feeling.

  “Children,” said my mother, “and my darling husband, we have to be up and dressed and ready to disembark this death ship by seven in the morning, which is …” she looked at her watch. “Three hours from now. I suggest we get some sleep.”

  Friday

  FORT LAUDERDALE, FLORIDA

  26

  Love is strong as death; jealousy is as cruel as the grave.

  —Song of Solomon 8:6

  DISEMBARKATION DID
NOT proceed exactly as expected.

  The customs agent merely glanced at our customs declarations and tossed them into a box, so no duty was required. Two security guards then intercepted us and guided us into a room where my laptop and cell phone were returned to me. They were not at liberty to tell me where they’d found them. Then they put us in a taxi, which whisked us to the British embassy where we were interviewed at length about our contribution to the investigation.

  As a result, our flights home were rescheduled, so we were required to stay overnight in Salt Lake City. Consequently, we did not get home until the following day, which gave us part of Saturday and all of Sunday to recover and be ready for work on Monday.

  Mum and Nigel flew on to Long Beach from Salt Lake City. Nigel promised to update us whenever he heard from his buddy Alastair Hardwick.

  Bambi and Pete met us at the Twin Falls airport with a hyperactive Little Toni who wrapped both arms around my leg and insisted that I pick her up—which I did, every muscle screaming in protest. No sooner did I get her settled in my arms than she reached out for Hal and insisted that he hold her. She paid no attention whatever to my purple jaw or Hal’s purple eye, which was more than I could say for Bambi and Pete and every other person in the airport who stopped us and wanted to know what had happened to us.

  “Most people come back from the Caribbean with tans,” Pete said, “not shiners. This is going to put people off cruising.”

  “Then get us out of here,” Hal said.

  Miraculously, our luggage arrived when we did, in spite of the delay and rescheduling of flights. Within fifteen minutes we were on our way home. Killer and Geraldine greeted us with yips and whines and wagging tails. Spook, on the other hand, didn’t make an appearance until I went to hang up our coats in the coat closet and he leaped out at me, yowling. He then jumped to the back of the couch, where he proceeded to groom himself and ignore us completely.

  Mum called us as soon as they got home, but we didn’t hear from Nigel about the case for a week and a half.

  “Put him on speakerphone,” Hal directed me when I answered the call.

  “I heard from Detective Chief Superintendent Hardwick,” Nigel said. “It seems that former Security Officer Desmond Grant made a full confession, and your speculations were spot on.”

  “Do tell,” I urged. “Don’t keep us in suspense.”

  “Grant said he went back into the infirmary to look at the body in the cooler, and when he opened the door, the ‘corpse’ was staring right back at him. He said it was the creepiest thing he ever saw. Then she lunged at him and screamed ‘You killed my mother!’”

  “Holy shit,” I exclaimed. “That’s spooky.”

  “He slammed the door shut on her, but she kept screaming and banging around in there. He panicked. He was afraid someone outside the infirmary would hear her and come to investigate. So he opened the door and when she lunged at him again, he grabbed her necklace and strangled her to shut her up.”

  “So are you telling us that Grant also killed Evie Hodges?” Hal asked.

  “Al was able to get records from both the Southern Cross and Seven Sisters,” Nigel said. “A girl was raped on Seven Sisters, a showgirl who was a friend of Evie Hodges. She told Evie who it was just before she killed herself. Evie recognized him on the Southern Cross, told him she knew, and blackmailed him. He killed her to keep her from talking.”

  “How did Leonie know about that?” I asked. “Her mother never came back from that cruise.”

  “She wrote to her parents,” Nigel said. “They kept the letter.”

  “How come they didn’t take it to Scotland Yard in the first place?” I asked. “Maybe Leonie wouldn’t have had to die if they’d known about Grant at the time.”

  “There was nothing about murder in the letter, only blackmail,” Nigel said. “Evie didn’t mention any names, only that it was one of the security guards.”

  “If she didn’t mention Grant by name, how did Leonie recognize him?” Hal asked.

  “I don’t think she did,” I said. “With her damaged brain, she couldn’t have been thinking clearly, or at all. She probably saw a security guard’s uniform and what was left of her brain made the connection, and she just blurted it out. But Grant couldn’t risk having anybody hear her, so he killed her.”

  “He probably figured that since Rob had already pronounced her dead, it wouldn’t make any difference,” Hal said.

  “Unless somebody saw the ligature mark,” I said. “Is that why he crushed her in the roof?”

  “Precisely,” Nigel said. “He blackmailed Meacham into helping him. It seems Meacham wasn’t exactly the brightest bulb on the tree, and Grant threatened to give him a bad report and get him fired if he didn’t help. Then, of course, he had to kill Meacham.”

  “But first he had to knock Joe out so he wouldn’t remember anything,” I said. “He must have hit him too hard. He didn’t intend to kill Joe, but he couldn’t have him conscious to watch him strangle Meacham and delete all the video files. Oh, and speaking of Meacham, how the devil did he manage to throw the weighted rope all the way across the Lido roof? He didn’t look the like the athletic type to me.”

  “He used a gun,” Nigel said. “Not the kind you’re thinking of. These are guns that fire missiles that ropes can be attached to. That’s how they can tie up the ship so fast. Instead of running around with ropes, they shoot them to whomever or wherever they need them to go.”

  “How would Meacham know about that?” Hal asked.

  “Probably from his father,” Nigel said, “who was an able seaman on the Southern Cross.”

  “What about Mrs. Levine?” Hal asked.

  “That requires a bit of speculation,” Nigel said. “But it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that he overheard her making accusations about who could have killed that girl, and maybe he wanted to shut her up before she got around to him. Who knows?”

  “Then it must have been Grant who called Rob and said someone in maintenance had been badly injured,” I said, “just to get him out of the infirmary so he could put the body in the cooler. She had to have been killed during dinner on Monday night because she was still warm when we found her.”

  “I’ll bet he was still in the infirmary when we got there,” Hal said, “just waiting for us to leave so he could leave. But Toni got too close, so he conked her.”

  “And stole my cell phone,” I said. “He must have heard me say she’d been strangled. And then all of you came to tend to me, and then you had to find a gurney, which took forever. He must have been frantic.”

  “So who stole the head from the swimming pool?” Hal asked.

  “Grant did,” Nigel said. “He didn’t want anybody to identify her. That’s why he kept the necklace. They found it when they searched his cabin. They found your phone and laptop in there too, by the way.”

  “Maybe he also didn’t want anybody to know she’d been strangled beforehand,” I said. “I was the only one who saw the head before it was stolen. The next time anybody saw it, the flesh was falling off the bone.”

  “But, sweetie,” Hal said, “didn’t Grant know you’d gone into the pool to look at it?”

  “Oh jeez,” I said, “if that was the case, why didn’t he try to kill me right away?”

  “In his own words,” Nigel said, “‘the bitch was never alone.’”

  “That’s true,” Hal said. “You were always with one of us or with Rob. The first time Grant ever got you alone was in the infirmary when he put you in the cooler.”

  “And then,” Nigel said, “the doctor screwed up his escape by insisting on sewing up his ear. Grant knew he hadn’t killed you, and he couldn’t figure out why it took you so long to make your presence known to the doctor.”

  “I still wasn’t sure that Rob wasn’t in on it,” I said. “It wasn’t until he and Grant started fighting
that I knew he wasn’t.”

  “You could hear all that inside the cooler?” Nigel asked.

  “Yes, quite clearly.”

  “Then Grant was right about needing to silence Leonie,” Nigel said. “He’s lucky that she didn’t start making noise while Rob and Lynch were still there.”

  “Too bad she didn’t,” Hal said. “Three people would still be alive if she had.”

  “It’s a good job that Toni didn’t,” Nigel said, “or there would have been a fourth body.”

  “See there?” I said to my husband. “Don’t ever tell me I don’t know when to keep my mouth shut.”

  Hal put his arms around me and held me close, looking down into my eyes. “Now would be a good time,” he suggested and kissed me.

  The End

  Praise for Murder under the Microscope

  “Murder under the Microscope is an exemplary first novel.”

  —The US Review of Books

  “As a winner of an IP Book Award for Excellence, I wasn’t the least surprised that this book was selected.”

  —GABixler Reviews

  Praise for Too Much Blood

  “Munro’s writing is entertaining, believable, and fast-paced. She takes you into the autopsy room, shows the fragility of the characters, and makes the readers feel they are inside the story. Readers will definitely be looking forward to solving more cases with this character.”

  —The US Review of Books

  “Exceptional realism that only comes from personal, hands-on experience. Munro writes with captivating flair, and her story line is believable and realistic.”

  —Charline Ratcliff for Rebecca’s Reads

  Praise for Grievous Bodily Harm

  “Sassy pathologist Toni Day shines in this modern-day mystery of corporate shenanigans and hospital politics … A smart, enjoyable summer read.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Munro’s story is a roller-coaster ride of suspense and intrigue, with twists and turns that will entertain a lover of mysteries and forensic crime novels for hours.”