Devil's Breath

by G. M. Malliet

  “The only Alexis I ever knew was a girl,” said Max. “I baptized her last year.”

  “It’s trendy right now; it’s one of those names that can be masculine or feminine.” She had glanced down at her hand, which rested on her stomach. “I’m thinking of it for the baby, actually. Since I don’t know yet if it’s a boy or a girl—I didn’t want to know—it will save time.”

  Now the baroness (“Her people are something in Nottingham”) was playing a variation on the theme of the fleetingness of life—referring if only glancingly to the tragedy that had befallen Margot. Then she got more into the specifics: “She was well-intentioned, I think. In that rather earnest way of some actresses. But really, she was the type to be ruled by her emotions. At the mercy of her emotions. And if she fell off the ship, well, it was simply her destiny. You do see that, of course.”

  Before she could get too caught up in some aristo riff on the inevitability of it all, Max said, with studied politeness, “If I could take you back to the events of that evening for a moment, would that be all right?” He had decided already that Patrice had been right: the best approach with these two might be to grovel a bit. They seemed to expect it.

  A deep sigh and a great heaving of tiny brocaded bosom from the baroness. She held out her right arm and pointedly consulted her diamond-studded watch. The pair exchanged glances and Max was sure he did not imagine a spot of telepathy at work. (Show him the door? No, he’ll just be more trouble later if we don’t answer his questions now.)

  “I suppose. If you must,” said the baroness. “But please do keep in mind we are keeping people waiting.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Max. “Such bad form. But your friends will understand, given the enormity of the tragedy.” This was said in such a way as to graciously if firmly stifle further argument. “Besides, your friends are probably dying to hear all the details.”

  She seemed at least to understand this concept of increasing her value by carrying insider news of the scandal to the blue-blooded masses. Max was reminded of Jake’s comment about old ducks who loved nothing better than discussing other people’s troubles, and how Margot had lacked the inclination. It had been, thought Max, a surprisingly perceptive and thoughtful comment on Jake’s part, although Max was absolutely certain Margot would have bridled at being called an old duck.

  “There was this little party on board,” the baroness began. “The trouble started there—rather, it came to a head. We—”

  But she got no further before she was interrupted by her husband. “Much better to let it pass, don’t you think, old boy?” This was the baron-as-sahib, a creature at large at a time when the sun never set on the British Empire. “Let the fuss die down? I mean, it’s such a tawdry event and it involves such a tawdry person.”

  There was, thought Max, a great deal of acting going on here—perhaps even more so than with the professional actors on the list of suspects. He was offended and struggled mightily to smother the retort that came to his lips. Looking at this privileged pair, alight with carefree youth and beauty, he wanted to say: Margot was once like you two. She was young and beautiful. She also worked for a living when and as she could, rather than sponge off her friends as you do. She grew old and she probably had only a future alone to look forward to, and that is no crime.

  “Murder is always tawdry,” he said evenly.

  “Murder?” they said in unison, exchanging glances.

  “Yes. And the process of rooting out the person who is to blame for this crime you will find even more tawdry, Baron Sieben-Kuchen-Bäcker. The police questioning may go on for days, and lead to no end of fuss. Much better, don’t you think, to help clear the air as quickly as possible?”

  From his acidic expression, the baron did not take to the idea of being held up for days. But deliberately Max had used the man’s full title, feeling ridiculous as he did so, even as he watched the baron flower under this sprinkling of flattery. To keep his temper with the man, Max wanted to avoid letting the conversation drift in the direction of whether or not Margot might be considered tawdry. He supposed some people would think she was. But she had been in a profession where age and appearance mattered above all, particularly for a woman, and her diminishing future prospects must have been frightening to contemplate.

  Then remembering how terrified she’d been of the water, Max felt a particular repugnance for this crime rise up in him. How closed-in her life seemed to have become, and how sad her ending. Still, up until the end, Margot kept up appearances as best she could. She was not one to go down without a fight.

  Which returned him to the subject at hand. Had there been a quarrel on the yacht, a fight that had ended in her death? He asked the baron and baroness (the B & B, as Patrice liked to call them) if they had seen any signs of the trouble ahead that night.

  “No,” said the baron flatly. “She drank too much at dinner, as she always did, but I saw nothing like an argument with anyone building, if that’s what you mean. Anyone apart from Romero, of course. But to be quite honest, we were used to that. She did keep complaining of the cold. Shivering and carrying on. Finally she left, presumably to find a coat or something to throw around her shoulders.”

  “No one offered her a jacket or their own shawl?”

  “No. Why on earth would they? She was just complaining to complain. The room wasn’t cold. And besides, she didn’t ask.”

  “So, again, you saw nothing out of the ordinary?”

  The baron shook his head.

  “Oh, but, darling,” said his wife. “Did you not see how her little paramour looked at her? One could tell he felt he was in for rather a long night and he didn’t look as if he enjoyed the prospect, not one bit.”

  “No, my dear, I didn’t notice. He is not altogether the sort one does notice.”

  “Ya-h-s-s,” she drawled. “A good-looking example of his type, of course, but quite, quite vulgar. May I have one of your ciggies?”

  Her husband withdrew a packet, retrieved a cigarette, and handed it to his wife. Max observed them as they went through an elaborate ritual of lighting and puffing and smiling at one another and waving the smoke away, mirroring each other in their graceful postures, their bodies tilted slightly back at the waist. The cigarette was unfiltered and the baroness delicately pinched away a shred of tobacco from her tongue. She was eyeing Max appreciatively now, stretching her swanlike neck for a better view.

  “Was there anything else? Of course we’re too, too anxious to help, but we have these people waiting—so awkward. You do see.” How many times was she going to tell him about her waiting friends?

  “Was there a particular topic of conversation at that last dinner?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said the baroness vaguely. “The weather. Yes, someone—I think it was the captain—started in on the weather. How they’d had these dreadful storms last year and everyone was praying the El Niño or whatever it was that caused it wouldn’t return again. Yes, it was the captain, I do recall now. His entire conversation is taken up with naval topics like knots and velocity and so on and so forth. I can barely understand what the man is saying half the time, can you, darling?”

  “No, my dear, I cannot.”

  “If I’m honest, the only one I can even stand is that little writer with the topknot. Addison. He’s promised to take a look at mummy’s memoirs. He thinks there might be a market for that sort of thing. He says he’ll speak to his agent about it.”

  “I thought he was a scriptwriter,” said her husband.

  “Playwright, scriptwriter, I don’t know, what’s the difference? It’s all writing—all make-believe, as with all these show-business types we’re surround by at the moment. They are make-believers with no work ethic whatsoever. Addy at least does try very hard. Every time you see him, he’s got the Moleskine out—scribble, scribble. Or he’s banging away at that laptop. At the moment he’s writing a novel, I think. Or maybe it’s a biography.”

  “Oh, ye gods, yes. I’d forgotten. A
book about The Margot, is it not?”

  “Yes, darling. The mind simply reels.”

  “If we could turn our minds for the moment to the night in question,” put in Max.

  “I say—Mr. Tudor, is it?—I wonder when we’ll be allowed to go back onto the yacht to retrieve some more things?” the baron wanted to know. “We’re running low on proper clothing, particularly evening wear.”

  “I even left behind the necklace I always wear with this frock,” the baroness added.

  Max stifled a splutter of annoyance and willed his expression into even, steady lines, like a man watching a mildly amusing video on the Internet. He had the distinct impression the baron was somehow mistaking him for a member of the hotel staff, or perhaps a constable sent by DCI Cotton to fill them both in on matters of routine. It was again taking an effort for Max to keep his composure around the B & B. Margot was barely pulled out of the water and onto a slab in the morgue and these two were worried whether they had the right shoes and jewelry to go with their evening costumes.

  The baroness had dropped one clue, however, for what it was worth: anyone who had lived through the past winter’s savage cold weather wouldn’t soon forget it or dismiss it so lightly. Max imagined the couple had not been in the area, no doubt having found themselves a nice warm spot in which to ride out the bad times. There was a fading tan line at the baroness’s neckline that confirmed his guess that she had lolled about a tropical resort in the not-too-distant past. Possibly one of their many put-upon friends wintered in the Bahamas.

  “How did you happen to be invited aboard the yacht?” Max asked.

  “We met Romero in Monte, wasn’t it, darling?”

  The baron looked to his wife for confirmation, and she nodded, adding, “He was quite insistent we come aboard as his guests. It seemed a pleasant way to travel back to England. Little did we know! If we’d known Margot was in his entourage we would probably have refused the invitation.”

  “We would most certainly have refused,” put in her husband. “A famous film director is one thing. That woman was—well, she was trouble from the start. And now look what it’s all come to.”

  “It was purely an accidental meeting, then? You didn’t know Romero, or Margot, from before?”

  “Really,” said the baron, “do we look like we would know people in show business?”

  Max had to admit they did not.

  “If we do see a film it’s a private screening in someone’s home,” the baroness put in. “I mean, really.”

  Sorry I asked. “So, the only topic that evening was the weather?”

  “I think Romero was going on about his moo-vie.” Here, from the baron, an exaggeration of Romero’s American accent—complete with a surprisingly adept imitation of his macho mannerisms. “His film, you know. And Margot started banging on about how she’d be perfect for the part. You could tell, he just did not want to have that conversation, not for a moment, but nothing was going to stop The Margot from getting what she wanted. Or from trying until he threw her overb— Oh, wait. I didn’t mean that literally, of course. She just fell off the side, of course. We all know that. Murder? Preposterous.”

  “Did you see her at any time after the dinner? On deck or anywhere else?”

  The baron hesitated, shrugged, then seemed to realize there was nothing to be gained by a lie.

  “We decided at some point to pop up on deck for some fresh air. We saw her there. Weaving about. She collapsed into a deck chair. We pretended not to see her and walked away. It was just embarrassing, you know. For us. I don’t think Margot had enough sense to be embarrassed by the state she was always in.”

  “What time was this?”

  They exchanged glances, and the baron said, “Around midnight?” A look passed between him and his baroness that Max could not read. It was done in the sort of shorthand adopted by a long-term couple.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Maybe before?”

  “And that was all?” Max asked. “Think hard, please. It could be important.”

  They looked at each other, and then they both looked at him.

  “That was all,” they said in unison.

  Chapter 19

  TINA AND CO.

  Tina was aptly named, as she immediately made one think of all variations on the word “tiny.” Her given name, Max knew, was Christina, but the nickname fit her perfectly.

  Petite, diminutive, waiflike, she couldn’t have weighed ninety-five pounds sopping wet and wearing a towel, despite the obvious implants to which Jake had referred: she had the exaggerated sort of bosom seen on mermaid figureheads of old whaling ships. A perfectly formed woman-child in miniature. Max imagined that for an actress her stature might be a drawback, as she would forever be cast as the ingénue, or even the voluptuous teenage daughter. A sort of curse of The Flying Nun.

  Although Max knew she was thirty-three, she could pass for sixteen. A rather sultry and vixenish sixteen, hair coiled provocatively on her breasts and eyes outlined Cleopatra-style, but still. She had cinched the waist of her blue polka-dot dress with a wide red belt to accentuate her figure; around her short slender neck she wore a nautical-themed blue scarf. He wondered idly if she had to shop in the girls’ departments at clothing stores, for while the wearer of the dress was provocative by nature, it seemed the dress itself was rather childish. But she had somehow managed to find ruby red heels to compensate for her short stature, and those surely had not come from the children’s department.

  There’s no place like home, Max thought idly.

  There were many such young women in his parish, girls who seemed to have leap-vaulted straight from childhood to middle age, not bothering to stop to enjoy adolescence—if, he acknowledged, “enjoy” and “adolescence” were terms to be used in the same breath. He wondered what his Owen would be like as a teenager. Right now he was the most agreeable baby on the planet, too young to have formed opinions in opposition to those of his clueless parents, or to worry about anything except his next meal. Long may it last, Max prayed.

  As for Tina Calvert, she was eyeing Max up and down, not bothering to be subtle in her obvious appreciation. Max was used to it. He smiled genially.

  This, her returning smile seemed to say, was more like it. She even put away her emery board to focus on this vision before her. She widened her eyes, saying, “The last person to have questioned me about Margot was some policewoman. She was not half so interesting.” Probable meaning: I couldn’t manipulate her, and I did try. Max smiled to himself. Sergeant Essex would not have stood for a moment of nonsense from this woman. How very tiresome for Tina. “But I’ve told all I know, and she wrote it all down. Every word. You could just read her notes. Then we could move on to something more exciting to talk about. I mean, poor old Margot and all that. But it wasn’t all that unexpected, was it? Her dying like that, I mean.”

  “Really?” said Max. “Why do you say that?”

  “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” she asked. Not, Max felt, because she was being evasive, but because Margot Browne and her murder simply didn’t interest Tina as a topic for long. It was difficult to bring Tina into focus as a suspect, in fact. For her to have killed Margot, or to have had anything to do with her death, would have required an outward shift in focus—a turning away from the self of which Max already felt Tina to be incapable.

  Of course if her intense self-interest were threatened, Margot might have needed, in Tina’s view, to be disposed of. A minor inconvenience, merely: someone to be edited off the playlist.

  “Were we in a play together or something?” she wondered aloud. “Although, I don’t think I’d have forgotten you.” She returned his unwavering smile with a practiced, perky one of her own. Max imagined “perky” was Tina’s default setting. It went with the tiny waist and the rather elfin features, the upturned nose. Now she swung one leg over another, jiggling a shoe off the toes of one foot, as if impatient to hear what he had to say—which he very much doubted: after only a f
ew minutes in her company, he imagined any conversation that did not center on Tina and her doings would not be a conversation worth having, in Tina’s opinion. He already felt her attention drifting away, her eyes looking at a point over his shoulder. Her face held a vague expression of concern, but he imagined she might only be trying to recall if she’d screwed the top back onto her bottle of nail varnish.

  “Well, Ms. Calvert,” he began. “Thank you for being willing to take the time to talk with me.”

  “Don’t mention it,” she said, returning her gaze to meet his. “Pleasure, I’m sure.” She spoke in an American accent, a drawl he was attempting to pinpoint geographically. Finally, he asked, “Houston?”

  “Wow,” she said. “You’re good. Or did the police tell you?”

  He shook his head. In fact, the file on Tina only gave her birthplace, which was Kentucky. But he’d spent time in Houston, seconded to follow a case of antiquities fraud: a papyrus for sale that had been stolen from the British Museum—a papyrus that turned out to be fake. The museum had not been as grateful for this discovery as they might have been.

  “When I think of what I’ve paid voice coaches to get rid of that accent,” she fussed.

  “I do regret the occasion that prompts this conversation, however.”

  “Huh?”

  “Margot. Margot Browne. Her death.”

  “Oh.” That.

  “As I’m sure you can appreciate, the police are gravely concerned to have had this matter turn up in their bailiwick. I’ve been asked in an unofficial capacity to talk with the people closest to Margot, to try to get some sense of who she was and how this might have happened to her.” This was of course balderdash but no one so far had really questioned it, the possible exception being Maurice. Maurice, Max had decided, was altogether a more inquisitive sort than the others he had spoken with—more perceptive, more other-focused, more there.

  Tina confirmed his impression of her disinterest by saying, “I don’t really see why you’d bother. I mean, someone might have been doing her a favor, you ask me, darlin’. But the chances are huge she simply got trashed and, deciding she was done for, jumped overboard.”