The Case of the Fickle Mermaid
Page 11
“What it is?” asked one pink-cheeked youth. “Fraulein, whatever is the matter?”
“What have you found?” asked another.
Gretel quickly recovered her composure. Much as the discovery of the cook’s body had startled her, she was not unaccustomed to such sights. Other people, in her experience, had a tendency to overreact to the presence of death, and she had no wish to spread panic through the ship. She pulled the canvas back into place and was on the point of describing a rat or some such when none other than Herr Hoffman himself appeared at her elbow.
“Well, fraulein, tell us what it is you are trying to hide,” he demanded.
“I do not care for either your tone or your implication,” she told him.
“It is clear something has happened,” he said, in a voice even more authoritative and clear than usual, turning as if to address anyone who cared to hear, rather than speaking to Gretel herself. “Won’t you tell us what it is?”
“For pity’s sake, keep quiet, man,” she hissed at him. “Do you want to cause hysteria among the passengers?”
A small crowd was gathering, and already excitement and suspicion were running through it like ill-trained puppies, nipping at ankles and yapping in a manner that could only serve to agitate people further.
But Hoffman was not to be stopped. With a flourish, he reached over, grabbed the lifeboat cover, and wrenched it back, exposing poor Frenchie to the nippy night air. If, as seemed his plan, he had wanted to effect a dramatic revelation, he was prevented from doing so because of the height and position of the boat, so that he was compelled to exclaim to the onlookers, “A body! A corpse!” As the crowd gasped and shrieked, he added, “A man dead, cold, murdered!” just in case anyone had missed the point. “And we find his assassin with him still!” he cried, pointing at Gretel with all the dramatic ham of a provincial amateur operatic performance.
She narrowed her eyes at him. Having Hoffman attempt to murder her was one thing; having him endeavor to besmirch her reputation was quite another. She allowed the quickly swollen crowd to have their moment of shock and frenzy, letting them exclaim and swoon and snatch up their smelling salts without interruption. When she was satisfied that as many as could fit on the deck around them had been assembled, and that all had given vent to their feelings, she cleared her throat, drew herself up as best she could on her unstable platform, and held up a hand for quiet. At last the hubbub subsided. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Ferdinand thread his way to the front toward her and several of his men taking up positions around the scene.
“There is indeed, here in this lifeboat, the body of the deceased chef known as Frenchie.” There was a fresh murmur of shock, but Gretel pressed on. “He was missed four days ago from his post aboard the Arabella. An extensive search was mounted, but it proved fruitless.”
“He must have made his way to this ship, only to be murdered here!” the quartermaster insisted. The crowd followed his thinking and glared at Gretel in the way a pantomime audience might be incited to boo a villain.
She held her nerve and said levelly, “The somewhat disturbing extent of the hapless Frenchie’s cadaver, to wit the bloated features,”—there came a groaning from the crowd—“the blueness of his flesh,”—followed by gasps—“the way the eyes bulge in their sockets,”—there was the sound of one or two fainters hitting the deck—“together with the distinctive and powerful odor of decay,”—several people retched over the rails—“are irrefutable evidence of the fact that he is long dead. What is more, I would say that he did not meet his end here, but at some other place.”
“So you say.” Hoffman scowled.
“Yes, I do say, and I do so because it is obvious to a bat in a sack. A person who has had his throat slit—and this victim’s head is all but severed from his body—bleeds quickly and profusely”—another brace of ladies in the crowd pitched from the vertical to the horizontal—“yet there is no blood, dried or wet, in this boat. All there is is a corpse, several days old, still clutching a bottle . . .” She paused, raising her lorgnettes to her eyes for a closer look. “. . . of brandy. Whoever murdered him did it somewhere else. Whoever murdered him then moved him into his current position for reasons as yet unknown. Whoever murdered him was not me,” she added, pointedly looking at Herr Hoffman.
General von Ferdinand stepped forward, issuing orders for his men to move the passengers away and rope off the area. He sent word to the captain to tell him of the discovery, and a messenger gull was organized to inform Captain Ziegler that his errant chef had been located. With a great deal of muttering, Herr Hoffman relinquished his position as Gretel’s prosecutor and took himself off to organize the tender for the return trip to the Arabella. The ball, it seemed, had come to an unexpectedly early finish, much to the displeasure of the baroness. She steamed onto the deck looking for someone upon whom to vent her ire. She found Gretel.
“What is the meaning of this?” she spat. “Why am I compelled to cut short my entertainments?”
“We have discovered the body of a missing person, baroness,” Gretel told her.
“Who was this . . . person?”
“He was the chef from the cruise ship Arabella.”
The baroness tutted loudly. “I fail to see why a person of no consequence should alter my plans, be he alive or dead,” she said.
Gretel quelled the urge to punch the baroness on her pointy Findleberg nose.
“Whether or not Frenchie’s demise warrants your sympathy, baroness, the matter of murder is always of consequence.”
“Murder, you say?” This information at least seemed to penetrate the woman’s ironclad soul. “Are you sure? Herr General, are you of the same opinion? Could the man not have died at his own hand? Or in a drunken mishap, perchance?”
Ferdinand shook his head. “Such an injury could not have been self-inflicted, baroness. This is indeed a serious matter and will need investigating. We are fortunate to have Fraulein Gretel to assist us,” he explained, turning to offer the detective one of his most handsome smiles.
Gretel felt a pleasing warmth travel from her throat to the very tips of her ears. It was a warmth of such quality that it could not be cooled even by the icy, disapproving stare of Baroness Schleswig-Holstein.
What did bring her up short, however, what sent a chill sprinting up her spine, was the eerie, distant singing that suddenly filled the sky. All present gasped and turned in the direction from which the sound came, straining to spy its point of origin in the gloom; but the dark was too deep, the sea too wide, the horizon too far. There was nothing that could be seen, but still the ephemeral song continued, growing louder and clearer. Two nearby sailors cursed. Another began to pray. Passengers who had been persuaded away from the drama of a dead body reappeared, as if drawn by the siren’s call. Soon the deck was crowded once more, and all the company was silent and enthralled. They could do naught but listen as the bewitching notes cut through the night air. The moment was rare and particular and none who had been there would ever be able to forget it.
What they would also remember, whether they wished to or not, was the more raucous, discordant sound coming from the direction of the Arabella: the mournful howling emitted by the lonesome mer-hund locked in Gretel’s cabin.
TEN
Captain Ziegler’s fury was quite something to behold. Gretel sat in his sumptuous cabin, still in her ball gown, allowing him to rant and rave, reasoning that his outburst was a storm so violent it must soon blow itself out.
“Disaster is heaped upon catastrophe, I tell you! The days pass and your presence does nothing to bring about a resolution of these vexing matters. God’s teeth, and hang me for a liar if the situation has not worsened!” he raged, banging his fist down on the very fine mahogany of the desk before him. “’Tis not enough that my cook goes missing, he must be found mutilated and murdered and apparently placed upon my rival’s ship.”
“A fact some might say indicates the involvement of Herr Sommer.”
“Ah, a matter we have not yet fully discussed, if I might remind you . . .”
“. . . you gave me assurances, woman. The case will be solved . . .”
“And so it shall.”
“Before my ship is devoid of crew? Two more men jumped ship on hearing the news of Frenchie and the mermaid’s singing. Two more! Much more of this and I shan’t be able to sail.”
“Could not others be pressed into service for the time being?”
“The Arabella is no rowing boat or canal barge. Such sails as she boasts require a number of men to work them. When I fall below that figure, will you be ascending the rigging, fraulein?”
Gretel took a deep, slow breath and rose from her seat. It had been a long night. The happy revelries of the ball had required a certain exertion. The heightened tension of the discovery of a dead body, and the ludicrous accusations that followed, had drained her. She was weary and had had quite enough of being bellowed at.
“Captain Ziegler,” she said, levelly holding his wild-eyed glare, “I will allow that circumstances are testing.” She held up a hand to ward off his interruption. “Be that as it may, the measure of a man is surely not what manner of trouble he finds himself in, but in what manner he finds his way out of it. And I contest the notion that matters have worsened of late. True, we have lost a good man, who also happened to be an excellent cook, but even in death Frenchie can tell us much.”
“How so?”
“To begin with, there is the way in which he met his end. His throat was slit with a large blade, and that weapon must be found.”
“Huh! Every man worth his salt keeps a knife. How will we know which it was?”
“It will be the one missing. By which I mean, no murderer will keep the murder weapon close to him. Look for a man who no longer has a knife, or has recently acquired a new one. Secondly, the fact that Frenchie was placed where he was suggests a complicated mind at work. This was no random act, nor a killing done in a moment of passion or rage. The perpetrator wanted Frenchie out of the way—and we must ask ourselves why that might be the case—and once he was dispatched, they sought to use his corpse to obscure both their identity and their purpose. Their attempt to implicate me in his demise was nonsense, of course, but it served to swell the confusion surrounding his discovery. And then there is the bottle the late cook clutches still.”
“Ah! I have that!” cried the captain, pleased with himself. “The murderer wanted to make it look as if Frenchie was drunk at the time he met his end. Perhaps violent in his cups, so that the villain could claim he acted to save his own neck.”
Gretel smiled indulgently as she gently strangled this weakling of a notion with her own robust logic. “The bottle was empty. The stopper in place. What drunkard would carry with him a bottle full of nothing? No, I inspected his grip. Frenchie held that bottle with his dying grasp, knowing even as the life bled from him that his clutch post mortem would be too stiff for another to undo. Particularly if that other was in a hurry. The act was deliberate. It was meant to signify something to whoever found him. I intend discerning that something.”
The captain looked sorrowful and shook his head. “It should not have come to that. An honest man’s heart stopped, his life at an end, to further the cause of some unscrupulous person, damn their eyes.”
Gretel toyed with the idea that this might be the moment to reveal her knowledge of the captain’s previous identity. It seemed a little rich for a man who had, in years gone by, made his living doing precisely the deed he now described with such loathing not to acknowledge this double standard. But then, he was her client, his past was not her business. It was his future she must concern herself with.
She looked down at the chart upon the desk between them. A small model marked the position of both the Arabella and its grander competition. All around was mostly empty sea, but there were two tiny islands a way off to the west, and Gretel wondered if it was on the closest of these that the mermaid had sat and sung. It kept coming to her that the elusive creature was connected to Hoffman’s skulduggery somehow, and therefore to Sommer, too, if her instinct was correct. “It seems to me that the placing of Frenchie’s body aboard the Fair Fortune was a double bluff, designed to look like a ham-fisted attempt to implicate the ship or its connections, so that it would do just the opposite, as you have so astutely noticed. Therefore, I believe that someone on that ship is working with someone on this ship to blacken your reputation, scare off your crew and passengers, and put you out of business. As you know, I suspect Herr Hoffman of being involved. He is the common factor. It may well be that he is working with your rival, Thorsten Sommer, though I have no proof of this as yet. However, this is the line of inquiry I shall follow.”
“You suspect Sommer?”
“I do, though, as I say, without foundation, thus far.”
“Aye, the fellow is sly, I’ve always held so. And no doubt he would be pleased to see me and my ship gone from these waters.”
At that moment there was an urgent knocking on the door, and Will appeared, a messenger gull perched on his arm.
“Sorry to intrude, captain, but I thought I should bring him to you direct,” the boy said, holding the enormous bird as far from himself as his physique allowed.
“You did right, Will. Let me have him.” The captain stood and detached the message from the gull’s leg. It squawked loudly before flapping over to a gull perch on the far side of the room and settling to preen its feathers. Will looked mightily relieved to be rid of the thing.
“Hell’s eyes and damnation!” Captain Ziegler thrust the note into Gretel’s hand. “It is from Sommer himself. See if that don’t blow your theory out the water, fraulein,” he told her.
Gretel read the message aloud.
“‘First mate and Sailor Shultz missing. Crew and passengers in state of panic. Putting in at port of Nordstrand.’”
As Gretel left the captain’s cabin to return to her own, the stars in the night sky twinkled merrily as if everything were peaceful and lovely and all was right was the world. Except that it was not. At least, not the part of the world Gretel inhabited. Two crewmembers were missing from the Fair Fortune. The suggestion was not that they had availed themselves of a tender and sailed away, but that they had vanished, as mysteriously and suddenly as poor Frenchie. Had they, too, met an untimely end at the hands of murderers? Or had they been lured to a watery death by the mermaid? Either way, Gretel could no longer reasonably hold the view that Thorsten Sommer was behind the disappearance of Captain Ziegler’s crew. The loss of his first mate was no minor inconvenience. The setup aboard the Fair Fortune differed from that of the Arabella; there was no captain as such, but a combination of owner, or master, and first mate. Herr Sommer did not, in fact, hold the title of captain himself, and the first mate therefore had charge of the ship. Without him, they could not continue to sail, and therefore had been forced to go directly to the nearest harbor big enough to take them. This did not smack of a cunning double bluff. This smacked of something of a disaster, for the crewmembers most of all, for Sommer’s future business decidedly, and in a horribly damning way for Gretel’s theories regarding the case.
So late was the hour that the deck was deserted, save for the lone crewmember who had the watch, and another at the wheel. Gretel was on the point of descending the ankle-twistingly steep stairs when the sea sprite landed on the handrail in front of her.
“Well?” it asked. “Did you solve my little puzzle, or are you as silly as you look?”
Gretel felt this was not a position someone covered in purple fur could safely take, but decided against comment
ing as such. “It wasn’t really very difficult,” she replied. “Though I confess the information was interesting.”
The sprite shook its head, grinning. “Without my help, it would have taken you ages to work out who our glorious captain used to be, wouldn’t it?”
“Undoubtedly,” she said, watching the unsettling way the little creature was eyeing her lorgnettes. “I rather think you must have enjoyed life aboard a pirate ship,” she went on. “Lots of sparkly plunder for you to filch, one would imagine.”
“I don’t take things to keep, you know,” it insisted. “I don’t want them for myself.”
“No? What, then? Do you sell them?”
“Of course not; who would I sell them to? Nobody’s going to buy something from someone who doesn’t exist, are they?”
“You may have a point. So why take things in the first place?”
“I like to . . . move them around.” The sprite hopped off the rail and circled Gretel, running a silver-nailed finger along the silk of her skirts as it did so. “I like putting them in places they shouldn’t be and then seeing what happens. You wouldn’t believe the fuss sometimes.” It chuckled; a sharp, impish sound that caused the hairs on Gretel’s arms to stand up.
It struck her that the sprite was nothing more than a naughty child, desperate for attention. Although in its case, unlike a child, it could not gain that attention, which must make its existence—or nonexistence—a lonely one. Gretel wondered why it had singled her out for communication. It must, after all, be able to watch everyone on board as much as it liked.
“Tell me,” she asked, “on the night of the great storm, a little while back . . .”
“Huh! Call that a storm? That was nothing.”
“Nonetheless, you know to which night I am referring?”
“Of course.”
“I know you would have been on deck. A . . . person such as yourself could not possibly be frightened of a bit of weather.”