by Tim Heald
‘Conspiracy or cock-up,’ said Elizabeth. She ordered her caviar straight without egg, onions or sour cream. Ever the purist.
‘If the victims were the Umlauts, the greatest enemy they have on board is Prince Abdullah. Do you think he’s trying to kill them?’
‘It’s so easy,’ she said, ‘someone just has to drop some paraffin on to the steak Diane or whatever, just before the waiter lights his match and pouf! you’ve singed the King of Spain’s beard. In a manner of speaking. If you see what I mean.’
‘And anyone can have done it?’
She shrugged. ‘If that’s what it was. After all, you can apparently blow up a Boeing with a mixture of Vodka, lemonade and toothpaste so it really wouldn’t be too difficult to lethalize a flambéed steak or crêpe. Simplicity itself. Do you imagine the powers-that-be will slap a ban on table-side cooking? I would. Remember your friend Tipperary Tatler is on the loose. Perhaps it’s her doing.’
They both stared ruminatively into space and wondered how long it would be before an element of panic was introduced to the ship. Once that happened it would spread as rapidly and inexorably as germs in the air-conditioning or a dreaded lurgy in the galley.
‘Gosh,’ said Tudor, snapping out of his reverie. ‘What’s this?’ Between his knife and fork there now rested a piece of stiff creamy card with the ship’s crest on it and his name printed in crude black ink capital letters. DOCTOR TUDOR CORNWALL. He stared at it suspiciously and then turned it over. On the other side was a message.
‘MYOB,’ he read. ‘Or you’re next. And you’ll be all fire and no smoke.’
‘MYOB?’ queried Elizabeth.
‘An acronym for Mind Your Own Business,’ said Tudor. ‘Haven’t heard that since, oh, university I suppose. It was a catch-phrase of Ashley Carpenter as a matter of fact.’
‘I never heard him use it.’ Elizabeth had been Carpenter’s pupil in the not-so-distant bad old days. Her relationship had been more than academic so she should have known about his own business.
‘You came after that time,’ said Tudor. ‘He would have adopted a new range of acronyms and acrostics by your day. Or abandoned them altogether. Always up with the latest fashion was our Ashley.’
‘Do you think’ – Elizabeth looked implausibly ingenuous – ‘that MYOB is a signal that he’s on board and pulling strings? Seems a strange message otherwise.’
Caviar came. The helping seemed larger even than usual. If it were true that an army marched on its stomach it was even more true, thought Tudor, of a cruise liner full of paying passengers. Give the punters too much to eat and they’ll be lulled into a false sense of security before you can say knife.
‘There’s no way that Ashley Carpenter can be on board the Duchess,’ said Tudor. ‘I mean, we’d know.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Elizabeth. ‘He’s a terrible tease.’
‘He didn’t get on in the UK,’ said Tudor, ‘and I’m pretty sure he didn’t embark in Cork.’
‘Maybe,’ said Elizabeth, ‘he came in the other night. Off the Irish lectureboat. Swapped places with the Captain.’
Tudor rubbed his chin and ate a mother-of-pearl spoonful of Beluga. They did things properly in the Chatsworth.
‘Why would he do that?’
‘No telling with Ashley,’ she said. ‘He hates you, that’s obvious, and he’s keen to get back at me for some reason. Also he has increasing tendencies to megalomania. I don’t see any reason for not thinking that he’s up to his ears with this gang of hijackers wherever they come from and whoever they are. He’s quite doolally.’
‘First of all the Irish press party or whoever they are stage a ham-fisted attempt to hijack the ship,’ he said. ‘They fail but Tipperary Tatler escapes and is still at large.’
‘Possibly attempting to incinerate the Umlauts.’
‘Precisely,’ said Tudor, ‘and, for the sake of an alternative theory, warning me off with anonymous notes.’
‘OK.’ The girl shovelled Beluga into her mouth. She clearly found the dainty spoon too mimsy. Caviar wasn’t meant to be nibbled, not where she came from.
‘Do we think that Ashley and Tipperary Tatler are in cahoots?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Ashley was always attracted to dangerous Bohemian redheads. And I think because he sees himself as a failure in conventional terms he wants to remedy the situation with the most radical solution he can find. In other words, violence. He wants to shoot his way into Who’s Who. The only way he can even manage a footnote in history is by bombing his way in. He’s the John Wilkes Booth of our times. He can’t be a great man himself so he’ll kill one to secure a vicarious destiny. Greatness by proxy. What do you think? You were his contemporary.’ This was true. Tudor and Ashley had competed for the same girl; argued at the same tutorials; got drunk together; played squash against each other; rowed briefly in the same eight; drank beer and sometimes Scotch in each other’s company; lied on each other’s behalf. Been friends. Now, for reasons that Tudor still found difficult to clearly comprehend they had become the best of enemies. It was something to do with jealousy, though quite what he was not entirely sure. Ashley seemed to him, as he always had done, at least as much a suitable subject for envy himself.
He had no inkling of this enmity until Ashley had invited him down under as a visiting fellow and plotted against him in a cunning and almost lethal way. One legacy of that bizarre encounter was Elizabeth Burney who had once been Ashley’s own star pupil and also much much more. Now she was his though only in an academic and never in a million years a carnal one. He had hoped that Ashley would vanish but like the proverbial bad penny he kept turning up when least expected or wanted. The girl and he had privately christened him a latter day Moriarty to Tudor’s Holmes. Now here he was once more. Apparently. Perhaps.
Now Mandy Goldslinger also turned up, breathing heavily, flushed, flustered and wearing a little black dress which, as is the way with little black dresses, particularly when worn by ladies of a certain age and a particular disposition began too early and finished too late. Or something like that. It certainly seemed to Tudor that there was not enough of it.
La Goldslinger’s impressive breast was heaving with a combination of over-exertion and over-emotion. She appeared to have been running in a literal and metaphorical top gear. And quite possibly been at the brandy.
‘There’s someone in the Captain’s cabin,’ she said, breathlessly.
‘Someone?’ Tudor was intrigued. ‘You mean someone other than a skipper stricken by laryngitis?’
‘If it’s Sam he wouldn’t submit to house arrest. I don’t think Sam’s on board, wherever he is. I think there’s someone else in there.’
Elizabeth and Tudor looked at each other meaningfully. They were both thinking Ashley Carpenter. Neither said anything. Professor Carpenter was unlikely to mean anything to Mandy Goldslinger.
‘How do you know?’ asked Elizabeth.
‘A tray,’ said the Cruise Director. ‘I saw someone with a tray with dinner on it. They knocked on the door and it was opened from inside. The girl went in.’
‘Girl?’
‘Yes. A stewardess. In Duchess uniform.’
‘Did you notice anything about her particularly?’ Tudor wanted to know but he could tell from her expression that Mandy couldn’t tell one member of crew from another. Or didn’t. They were like servants to a feudal aristocrat. They all looked the same and were, basically, beneath notice. They merely fetched and carried. A bartender on board mixed cocktails. Why would one know his name or face?
‘She was just one of those girls.’
‘Tipperary Tatler,’ said Elizabeth in a ‘Eureka! I’ve got it’ tone of voice which owed more to intuition than forensics. There was no reason on earth for thinking that the captain’s cabin girl was the Irish terrorist. Elizabeth was playing a hunch. She was good at it, but Chief Inspector Trythall would not have approved. No method, he would have said – typical girl. He, like any good coppe
r, marched inexorably through the alphabet taking in every letter as he went. Not for him these sudden inspired leaps from A to Z.
Mandy Goldslinger looked at her as if she were mad.
‘The Irish terrorist girl who escaped,’ said Tudor helpfully. ‘She originally claimed to work for this fictitious magazine so we’ve named her after it. Sorry!’
La Goldslinger gave the lady Cruise Director’s equivalent of a snort, managing with a gesture and something between a sniff and a sneeze, that she just hated having to deal on equal terms with delinquent children.
‘I don’t see that the identity of the serving girl is relevant,’ she said, sounding like Queen Elizabeth I reprimanding an over-familiar courtier, ‘the point is, surely, that the Captain’s cabin is occupied.’
‘And you previously thought it was empty?’
‘Well, yes. Maybe. What do you think’s happened to Sam? Has he been murdered?’
‘You could take things at face value,’ said Tudor, not believing himself or even convinced that he was saying what he heard, ‘that poor old Sam’s got laryngitis, doesn’t want to be disturbed and has lost his voice.’
‘The day old Sam loses his voice,’ boomed a familiar Celtic foghorn, ‘is the day I have it off with the Pope. My view is that old Sam’s finally done a runner. Jumped ship and taken the crown jewels with him. He always was a shifty old bugger.’
Mandy Goldslinger began to cry.
Chapter Twenty-One
It was indeed Walter and Irmgarde Umlaut who had suffered incendiary indignity in the Chatsworth that night. Their wounds were, however, more cosmetic than damaging. What’s more the Umlauts were very cross. Vultur, in particular, was incandescent.
You had to hand it to them, thought Tudor, they were back in the Chatsworth in time for a brace of champagne sorbets and a couple of double espressos. Regular undaunted Prussian Guards, they didn’t frighten easily. Blackened but unbowed.
Sir Goronwy and Lady Watkyn passed unsteadily by their table and paused. ‘I’m giving them the Porthole Murder tomorrow,’ said the bardic Watkyn portentously. ‘Steady the Buffs and all that. Not too near the bone, I hope.’
‘You mean Gay Gibson, James Camb, the Durban Castle, Khaki Roberts and all that?’
‘I didn’t know it was a speciality of yours,’ said the Welshman.
‘It isn’t,’ said Tudor. ‘I’ve read Herbstein’s book that’s all.’
‘Ah.’ Sir Goronwy’s eyes were rheumy and his expression sceptical. ‘Port holes, missing persons, illicit sex... recurring perils of life at sea.’
Mandy Goldslinger sniffed tearfully.
‘I have great faith in the Celtic tendency,’ said Sir Goronwy. ‘The Welsh and the Scots will see us through.’
‘But not, I think, the Irish,’ said Tudor meaningfully.
‘Perhaps not,’ said Watkyn. ‘On which note I’ll bid you adieu.’
‘Pompous git,’ said Elizabeth.
‘What was all that about the Port hole case?’ asked Mandy, still lachrymose.
‘A stewardess on a ship called the Durban Castle vanished one night. She was pushed through a port hole by a man called Camb who got off on a technicality. Well, wasn’t hanged. He did a long stretch in Dartmoor. Sex that went wrong is what it looks like. Happens quite often on ocean liners. They seem to be havens of innocence and safety but in reality they’re hotbeds of lust, crime and sudden death. Like the benign, smiling English countryside. Like the Duchess.’
A sombre silence ensued.
‘We have a missing captain which may have a perfectly innocent explanation,’ said Elizabeth, ‘and an attempted hijack which may have been a silly student prank. And a lifeboat loaded with gold ingots which was returned intact. So, ipso facto, no provable crime has been committed.’
‘That’s one interpretation,’ said Tudor, ‘but the other is that we have a murder or abduction, attempted theft on an extremely ambitious scale and a thwarted act of piracy on the high seas.’
‘None of which you can prove.’
Caviar plates were cleared. Steak came.
‘You don’t like Donaldson,’ said Tudor, addressing Mandy Goldslinger.
‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘Why should I? He’s been after Sam’s job for years but he’s not up to it. And he disapproves of the relationship between the two of us.’
‘So he knows.’
‘He’s never said anything outright but he knows. Or at least suspects. He and Sam work in the same office. If you see what I mean. And Angus isn’t stupid.’
‘But straight.’
‘No reason to think otherwise,’ she said. ‘Like I said, I don’t care for him, but I can’t pin a dishonesty rap on him. He’s always acted by the book.’
‘And where does he fit in the present scheme?’ asked Tudor. ‘Sam is out of it. Whether it’s just laryngitis or something more serious is irrelevant. I hate to seem insensitive but that’s the way it is. Angus is the man we have to deal with whether we like it or not.’
Mandy sighed. ‘Angus sails the ship,’ she said. ‘That’s his job. That’s his expertise. Sam is front of house. Sam is the image. He’s what the punters enjoy; what they trust; why they sign up for the Duchess; why they love Riviera Shipping.’
‘But Sam’s the boss,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Angus has to defer if they disagree.’
‘They don’t disagree,’ said Mandy, ‘not openly. They can’t. Their duties just don’t overlap. It’s like Sam’s front of house and Angus is the chef.’
‘That’s the theory,’ said Tudor. ‘What about the reality?’
‘What you see is what you get.’ The Cruise Director seemed surprised. A lifetime of selling illusion might have robbed her of the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, thought Tudor. She couldn’t do her job if, to an extent, she didn’t believe her own publicity. That made her an unreliable witness. On the other hand she was the only member of staff in whom he could really trust. Or could he? So many grey areas. It made life unsettling but it was the nature of the job. Criminal affairs did not concern certainties. Post-mortems reflected the mortems themselves: grey, shadowy, murky, always open to doubt and debate. It was part of what made crime so fascinating.
‘You’re telling me that Angus and Sam were – are – peas in a pod?’ asked Tudor.
‘Of course not,’ said Mandy Goldslinger, with something approaching asperity. Except that Cruise Directors didn’t do asperity. They did schmooze and spin.
‘You mean they told one story and lived another,’ said Tudor.
‘No.’ She was irritated now, even though she knew that Tudor was a necessary ally. ‘They lived the same story and told the same story. They were both reading from the same hymn sheet. There’s no argument. They were a team – whatever they may have felt privately.’
Silence ensued. The atmosphere in the Chatsworth was edgy. It would have been extraordinary if it had been anything else. Atmospheres were elusive concepts. Tudor and Trythall argued about them incessantly. Trythall and other police procedurals denied their existence and believed that even if they did exist they were irrelevant to what actually happened. The presence of the seriously singed Umlauts didn’t help any more than the obvious truculence of those at Prince Abdullah’s table, leering across the room. There was an atmosphere and you could cut it with the proverbial knife.
‘I don’t like it,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I’m getting bad vibes.’
‘Relax,’ said Mandy Goldslinger, ‘everything’s under control.’ She wasn’t convincing, didn’t sound as if she meant it. The little tub in the middle of the vasty deep suddenly seemed a terribly vulnerable place to be.
‘I need to talk to Donaldson,’ said Tudor. ‘He’s in charge whether we like it or not.’
‘You,’ said Elizabeth, ‘have no standing in any of this. Goronwy Watkyn and Freddie Grim are just as well qualified. In any case, Angus Donaldson simply has to take us to our destination and the American authorities will sort everything out. So relax. G
o with the flow.’
‘I disagree,’ said Tudor. ‘I don’t think the American authorities will sort it out. My sense is that they still have a blind spot when it comes to Irish republicans, and Irish republicans are one of the threads we’re contending with here. I think the American process is even more susceptible to hot-shot lawyers than the British one. I think they’ll be out of sympathy and kilter with what is still, despite the Prince and the Umlauts, a British-owned shipping line. So actually my view is that American so-called justice will screw up and we’d be much better solving the whole thing at sea before we dock.’
‘You sound like a crusty old xenophobe,’ Elizabeth laughed scornfully. ‘I thought you were better than that.’
‘Tudor may be right,’ said Mandy Goldslinger unexpectedly. ‘I’m not too happy about the idea of the NYPD followed by the course of American justice. I can see our poor little ship being impounded for months if not years while nothing much happens at vast expense.’
‘And Mandy’s American,’ said Tudor with a self-satisfaction bordering on triumphalism.
‘If you’re determined to try to solve it single-handed without benefit of due legal and forensic process then I think you have to see Angus Donaldson and have a serious discussion with him.’ Elizabeth was being uncharacteristically sensible, even pedantic. ‘In Sam’s absence Donaldson’s in charge. You simply have to get his clearance. As we’ve said there’s already a sort of official ship’s system for sorting out misdemeanours at sea even if it’s only a semi-competent Master-at-Arms and his minions. You’ve also got Freddie Grim and Goronwy Watkyn, both of whom think their credentials are as good as yours. Or better.’
She was right. They all knew it.
‘No time like the present,’ he said, smiling at Mandy. ‘Can you fix?’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Angus and I have very correct and cordial relations. There’ll be no problems.’
She stood and left. Tudor sighed and gazed round the emptying restaurant. Staff were stacking, polishing glasses, laying tables for next morning’s breakfast. Passengers had mostly left heading for the cinema or the ballroom where the evening entertainment of crooner, crooneuse, stand-up comedian and the ship’s dancers, mainly classically trained Romanians would have to be introduced in just under ten minutes. A job for La Goldslinger though she might have delegated it to one of her two assistants in view of the pressing matter of pinning down the Staff Captain.