A Death on the Ocean Wave

by Tim Heald

  Waclav brought a pot of Darjeeling and some lemon slices. The three of them sat in silence while he poured.

  When he had retreated, Umlaut said, ‘I also am sorry.’

  ‘I’m not sure I agree with your sitrep,’ said Elizabeth. ‘If you have good reason to believe that the right and proper captain of the ship, namely Sam Hardy, has been abducted, maybe even murdered, and that Angus Donaldson might conceivably have been involved in the crime, then surely you’re duty bound to solve the mystery no matter what. If Donaldson’s position as de facto, substitute boss has been wrongfully obtained then all bets are off. I’m not convinced Donaldson has the right to tell you what to do.’

  ‘Mind if I join you?’ It was Mandy Goldslinger looking as if she had slept as fitfully as Tudor. She had rings under her eyes, her hands shook and her voice sounded husky.

  ‘Tomato juice, Waclav,’ she said, ‘heavy on the Tabasco and Worcester. Very black coffee.’ She sat down without waiting for a say-so.

  ‘Couldn’t help hearing that,’ she said, ‘and I agree and then again I don’t. If it’s any consolation I’ve had a shot across the bows from Donaldson just like Tudor has. And according to the rules he has authority on his side. I mean he’s the number two and there’s no number one and therefore in the absence of the said number one the number two takes the top spot. Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘Not entirely,’ said Tudor, ‘but I think we call get your drift.’

  ‘On the other hand,’ continued the Cruise Director, ‘if the number two has only got into pole position on account of nefarious behaviour towards his superior officer and captain then all bets are off and it’s permissible to investigate. Not just permissible but imperative.’

  ‘May an old man pull up a chair?’

  It was Sir Goronwy Watkyn looking as if he had enjoyed a better night’s sleep than anyone.

  ‘It appears,’ he said, extracting an empty chair from an adjacent table, ‘that willy-nilly we find ourselves as players in the sort of puzzle in which I and the good Doctor here’ – he nodded almost conspiratorially in the direction of Tudor Cornwall – ‘specialize – though usually as arbiters rather than participants.’

  ‘We are together here whether we like it or not,’ said Umlaut. ‘It is inescapable. We are in on the act. We are on stage. We cannot just be in the audience.’

  ‘Our friend has a certain logic on his side,’ said Sir Goronwy portentous as ever. ‘In life on land an inspector calls. In a situation such as this, one dials nine nine nine and policemen arrive, lawyers are retained and the whole apparatus of detection, apprehension, trial and sentence is gone through in the traditional manner. Out here however we are in, as it were, a nautical jungle. There are no policemen, no lawyers, no trials, no juries. On this occasion, quite fortuitously, we have a number of experts of whom I have the honour to be one. This expertise should be utilized. We would be failing in our duty if we were to do otherwise and particularly if we were to stand idly by.’

  ‘But,’ protested Tudor, ‘we have absolutely no legal authority. Besides, in a day or so the ship will be docking and the whole matter can be handed over to the legitimate authorities.’

  ‘But those authorities will be American,’ said Umlaut, ‘and the ship is registered in the United Kingdom. This presents the first of many dilemmas. The pirates are, I believe, Irish. American justice is, as you say, notoriously one-eyed with regard to the Emerald Isle. The Abdullah man comes from I know not where. So where does this leave us? In a state of much confusion. I certainly am in such a state.’

  ‘Seems to me,’ said Elizabeth, ‘that Donaldson is, on the one hand a prime suspect, and on the other, judge and jury. That’s not right.’

  They all thought about this while the staff replenished their drinks.

  ‘I don’t trust Donaldson,’ said Mandy Goldslinger, ‘and I fear for Sam.’ She seemed tearful.

  Tudor pushed his chair back. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’ll forgive me but I have a lecture to deliver at eleven and I need to prepare. Also I have a letter to write.’

  He smiled around at the little group which seemed dissatisfied if not exactly open-mouthed. He glanced out of the window – a big square job at this more exalted level than his stateroom. Outside the day had turned sullen gun-metal grey and the sky was quite without features.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  His talk on pirates seemed to go reasonably well. He had done it many times before and was able to speak for forty-five minutes or so without notes. The producer in the box at the back of the theatre was an old acquaintance now and trusted him not to do anything ridiculous, to keep his voice level consistent, speak slowly, and perhaps above all not to attempt anything too ambitious on the joke front. There were between 100 and 150 in the audience which was marginally more than for his ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ lecture. He decided on a blazer with an open-necked shirt which seemed to him to combine informality and gravitas to more or less the right degree. He used a hand-held mike and walked about on the stage, pausing occasionally to sit but not, as some speakers, did, venturing down into the actual auditorium. That, he considered, was too Billy Graham.

  One or two of his listeners went to sleep or at least closed their eyes and opened their mouths which might, or might not, have been the same. He spotted Freddie Grim and his wife; Ambrose Perry and at least one Abdullah ‘wife’ though not the Prince himself. No Umlaut, no Goldslinger, no Watkyns and no Elizabeth. They could have been continuing their post-breakfast discussions or merely skipped his talk. Elizabeth, at least, had heard it several times before.

  Mid-morning was prime time for speaking because on the whole the passengers had not yet had recourse to the bottle. Any time after lunch was bad, though evenings were worst. Mercifully this was not a lecture time zone and the apres-dinner slots were all filled by stand-up comics and dancers who reported whole rows of passengers sleeping off the evening meal in preparation for the midnight buffet. In the middle of the morning audiences were inclined to be, relatively speaking, wide awake.

  When he finished there was a ripple of polite applause and he took two or three questions. He always dreaded questions on the grounds that they would either be wince-makers such as ‘Do you write under your own name?’ or even, most shaming of all ‘What did you say your name was?’ or, arguably worse, would come from someone who knew more about pirates than he did or even, God save him, was a pirate or retired pirate him or herself. ‘Thus when I boarded a cargo ship called Polaris in the Malacca Strait...’ or ‘Out of two hundred and thirty-seven reported incidents of piracy in the Indian Ocean last year how many would you say...’

  Mercifully on this occasion the questions were all placid half-volleys along the lines of ‘Why Blue Beard and not some other colour?’ and ‘Is there a future for piracy?’ These were easily swatted away and when he had finished he received another round of applause warmer than the first.

  As the audience filed out for early cocktails one of them headed for the stage and as he came down the steps into the body of the hall came up very close and whispered in a breathy almost stage-Irish, ‘Great talk, Dr Cornwall. Now just smile at me bravely and make a show of saying something sensible. But don’t try anything silly or you’re dead meat.’

  It was an Abdullah wife, but masquerading under the anonymity-conferring robes was none other than the missing girl herself, Tipperary Tatler.

  She prodded him in the ribs with something metallic feeling. ‘This is loaded,’ she said, ‘and I shan’t hesitate to use it.’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ he said.

  They were alone in the theatre now. The lights were dim. The sound box and projectionist’s room were empty too. It was just the two of them. If she were to carry out her threat and shoot him dead she would have no difficulty in getting away and vanishing back into the safety of the Prince’s harem. The threat was real. Tudor thought of calling the bluff but decided that it would be the silly side of valour. He had no wi
sh to end his life shot dead in the theatre of the Duchess after one of his talks. People would say it was a more than usually disappointed member of his audience expressing disgust. That would taint the obituaries. Seriously, he told himself, there was no point in taking unnecessary risks. Besides he had sent his letter which was the nearest he could think of to an SOS for Eddie Trythall. He wondered if it would get through.

  ‘Try me,’ said the woman. ‘I’m perfectly happy to pull the trigger and I’m quite confident I’d get clean away. If not then tant pis. The Americans will be thoroughly understanding. Unlike the Brits. They like us. Now just walk normally and naturally out the door and turn left. I’ll keep guiding you.’

  Tudor shrugged and did as he was told. On balance he didn’t think he had a serious alternative. Outside the library they almost bumped into Freddie Grim who smiled and gave him an odd look but said nothing.

  Tipperary obviously sensed trouble for she gave him a snarling jab with the gun – always supposing it was a gun. It could have been anything, but Tudor still reckoned it was not a bluff worth calling. Besides he was curious. Once the ship lurched unexpectedly and Tudor stumbled. The woman jabbed him again and hissed an obscenity. They took the stairs upwards and then walked forward along the boat deck before cutting inside.

  Finally they reached what was clearly their destination. The door said ‘Captain. Private.’ Tudor arched an eyebrow as the woman took a key from her pocket, opened the door, gave Tudor a shove in the back which propelled him inside, closed the door behind him and disappeared. Tudor was not at all sure what or whom to expect but it was lax of him not to expect the disarmingly but unconvincingly friendly figure he found in front of him sitting at the captain’s desk scribbling something on a notepad.

  ‘Tudor,’ said the man, tall, lean, fifty something, in corduroy trousers and a tweed jacket with a roll-neck sweater. He looked what he was: a provincial academic. But what he really was, was Tudor’s nemesis; his Moriarty, the blast from the past who was not at all what he had seemed and had come back to haunt him on what now seemed to be a regular basis.

  ‘Ashley,’ he said, trying to appear unfazed as if encountering his former undergraduate contemporary and friend was the most natural thing in all the world. Maybe it was. Ashley had become the bad penny in his life. He was always turning up when least expected and least wanted. Why not now?

  The basic facts about Ashley were simple enough. He and Tudor had been contemporaries at Oxford University many years ago and had both entered academic life as young dons in criminal affairs departments on opposite sides of the world: Ashley in Australia whence he came; Tudor in the UK. From time to time their paths had crossed, mainly at academic conferences in different parts of the globe but inevitably they drifted apart. Then, suddenly, out of the blue, Ashley had invited Tudor to be Visiting Fellow in his faculty at university in Tasmania. Tudor accepted but when he arrived Ashley had vanished without explanation. He reappeared but not before a woman had been murdered by a form of remote control and Tudor was suspected of the crime. Only then did Ashley return, determined, apparently, to have his old ‘friend’ convicted. He failed. Tudor returned to the University of Wessex but found that he had acquired a formidably bright Ph.D. student in Elizabeth Burney, former protégée and erstwhile mistress of Ashley himself. Elizabeth seemed to have changed sides and had been loyal and clever ever since the transition. But there was always the possibility, embedded deep and immovably in Tudor’s sub-conscious, that she was some form of sleeper. One day perhaps she would be ‘activated’ by Ashley and used against him.

  Quite what had motivated this late flowering lust for revenge was quite beyond Tudor. It was too simple and unrigorous to simply shrug and say that he must have gone mad. But there was a deep, smouldering resentment that was not going to go away and which threatened to haunt the pair of them for the rest of their lives. Now, just when he thought that his false friend had gone into permanent hibernation he erupted again. And here he was. It was all simplicity itself yet complex beyond belief.

  ‘Sit down, do,’ said Carpenter. ‘Make yourself at home. Can I get you anything?’

  ‘Thank you, no,’ said Tudor.

  ‘You’re looking well. I enjoyed your drone on Pirates. Picked it up on closed circuit TV. For various reasons I’m not leaving the cabin or I’d have come and attended in person. Very professional. Like the way you wander about. And good work with the hand-mike. Very practised.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’ Tudor inclined his head. ‘So to what do we owe this unexpected pleasure?’

  Ashley smiled a smug superior smile. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s a long story, but it all arose out of my visiting fellowship at this really quite bizarre university. It’s not like any other academic institution I’ve been associated with. Very liberating. Not conventional at all. We teach traditional subjects and disciplines but in a non-traditional way. For example, the old-fashioned notion that the teachers are in some way ‘in charge’ of the students – that’s out of the window. It’s a true democracy. Like I say, very liberating.’

  ‘So you thought you’d do some liberating beyond the college walls?’

  Ashley laughed though he didn’t seem to find the remark particularly funny.

  ‘I have to admit that knowing that you and Elizabeth were on board gave the idea an extra piquancy, but liberating the Duchess seemed a perfect idea. She’s both marvellously high-profile and incredibly vulnerable. The easiest possible target but also the most headline-grabbing.’

  ‘But plan A didn’t work?’

  ‘Evidently not,’ said Ashley, ‘though there was always an element of fantasy in that, don’t you think? It was always unlikely that our gallant little band would actually take the ship over and I’m delighted that you were able to call their bluff. It should prove a thoroughly educational experience for the children. I trust they’ll learn from it. But I always thought Plan B was more likely to be successful. As indeed appears to be the case.’ He did look intolerably smug, thought Tudor. He had never seemed smug at Oxford. Rather the reverse. Perhaps, however, that apparent callowness had really been an inferiority complex that he and others had been too insensitive to recognize. Maybe the English of that generation had seemed insufferable. Maybe they had inflicted humiliations without quite knowing that they were doing so. He had not consciously felt arrogant at the time but perhaps that was how he had looked.

  It was all immaterial anyway. The harm was done and he was now, in mid-life, lumbered with a stalker of alarming ingenuity and determination.

  ‘What about Sam Hardy?’

  ‘Sam?’ repeated Carpenter in an absurdly conversational way as if they were making tea-time small talk and Tudor had just asked about one of the neighbours.

  ‘Sam’s fine,’ he said.

  ‘Then where is he? He’s not here. He’s supposed to have laryngitis.’

  ‘Alas poor Sam!’ murmured Ashley, pressing the ends of his fingers together and closing his eyes as if in deep contemplation. ‘So very greedy when it came down to it. They say everyone has his price but even so.’

  ‘Is he OK?’ Tudor did not wish the Master dead.

  ‘He’s fine, like I said. A distinguished guest on our floating campus somewhere over there on the ocean deep. Doesn’t have his gold, of course, though there was never any question of his being allowed to keep that.’

  ‘And you,’ said Tudor. ‘What about you? I don’t get it. I just don’t understand.’

  ‘You never did,’ said Ashley abruptly. ‘I’m another story altogether.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘We have plenty of time so I’ll tell you some of it. Not all, mind. We need to retain a few surprises up our sleeve, don’t you agree?’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  ‘Once upon a time,’ said Ashley, ‘or should I ask if you’re sitting comfortably? Or are both those gambits too patronizing for you?’

  ‘Just get on with it,’ said Tudor. He disliked being played with and if this was a cat and mous
e situation he didn’t honestly see that Ashley was entitled to the cat position. He himself had at least as many shots left in his locker, didn’t he?

  ‘Actually I think I’ll start at the end and work backwards,’ said Ashley. ‘You could say that the early history is water under the bridge, or that we’ve drawn a line under it – except, of course, that I don’t suppose I ever shall. But let us for the time being concern ourselves with the here and now.’

  ‘Let’s,’ said Tudor sharply. The cabin creaked.

  ‘Sam Hardy first then. Sam is, as you know, something of a joke. However passengers seem to love him and he does the Jolly Jack Tar bit to the manner born. He remains, as far as Riviera are concerned, an asset even though everyone, most of all Sam, knows that the asset is dwindling. He is a certain age; he is a little too fond of pink gins – made always, as you know with Plymouth full strength, the angostura left in and just a splash of still Malvern. No ice. Definitely no ice. Sam’s pension arrangements are dodgy to non-existent and when offered the opportunity of jumping ship with several million pounds worth of gold ingots I’m afraid he needed distressingly little persuasion.

  ‘I – we – were able to offer him the bolt hole he needed and which otherwise he would never have secured. Who knows, he might even have been able to hang onto the gold if your friend Mr Rayner hadn’t so disobligingly and unexpectedly heaved into view aboard his wretched Clipper.’

  ‘That was bad luck.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Ashley, ‘very. But by then Sam was safely on board our vessel and I had swapped places and was ensconced in his very comfortable quarters aboard the Duchess.’

  ‘So,’ said Tudor, ‘things weren’t going to plan.’

  ‘Not to plan A perhaps,’ agreed Ashley, ‘but I was still happy that we were more or less adhering to plan B. Maureen, the soi-disant editor of the Tipperary Tatler whom you now know quite well had mercifully broken out from the brig and was a valuable aide, disguised in one of my friend Abdullah’s wives’ voluminous robes. And we were only a few days out from New York where we could, indeed can, be guaranteed an enthusiastic welcome from the likes of Senator Kennedy and his followers. You simply can’t underesti¬mate the strength of the Irish lobby in the States and when a certain sort of feisty Irish band cocks a snook at the former Imperial power then you’re on to a certain winner. It might have been better to have managed the take-over of the Duchess in mid-Atlantic but there would have been complications – after all what were we to do with several hundred elderly Brits in corsets and on zimmers? In New York they can simply be wheeled ashore while we enjoy day upon day of singular propaganda scoop.’