“Yacht,” corrected Max absentmindedly. “To be considered a boat it would have to be much smaller. Yes, I spoke with them together yesterday. There is something odd there.”
“Yacht—got it. I’ve no more experience with sailing than I have with the great outdoors. As I think I’ve mentioned, I feel that the great indoors was invented to keep us all safe and out of trouble.”
Indeed, he’d confided to Max that as far as he was concerned, all sailing craft had two positions: safely afloat or sunk to the bottom of the sea with all hands lost. He could tell the Calypso Facto was a beauty, however: a floating luxury hotel.
“How is it you know so much about boats and yachts, anyway?” he asked Max now.
“I don’t, really. I know fore and aft; I know ‘port out, starboard home.’ I gather I’ve been living a lie on that subject for many years, however: the POSH acronym is meaningless, as it all rather depends on which direction you’re sailing as to whether or not you’ve got posh accommodations.” Max didn’t elaborate on the fact that his limited knowledge of sailing came from his time serving undercover on luxury cruise ships, trying to discover, for example, who was smuggling stolen art out of the U.K.: he’d been seconded several times to the Met’s Art and Antiques Unit. He might reminisce with Cotton and Patrice later, once this crime had been solved, but so much of what he had done in days past was covered by the agreement he had signed with the government to keep secrets secret. It was easier in the end never to talk about any of it.
“I see,” said Cotton. “Well, I couldn’t agree with you more about the baron and his lady: there is something odd there. No one seems to know why those two were aboard, as I’ve indicated. Even Romero was a bit vague. But he’s American, you know, and I gather a bit taken with the idea of being associated with nobility, however tenuously, and however minor they may be. Which is strange, when you recall that his country was founded on the idea of getting the nobs out of their hair—out of their powdered wigs, I should say. In my experience, Americans love them all now. Almost single-handedly they have saved the tourism industry. Ah, here we are.”
They clambered aboard the yacht to find the ship’s captain waiting for them on the main deck. Cotton, Max noticed, had managed the trip with not a hair out of place nor a splash of water on his clothing. He was wearing lace-up shoes but with rubber soles—clearly an enormous concession to the occasion. It was probably Cotton’s idea of resort wear. Max had watched as Cotton boarded the tender and sat down, hitching up his perfectly pressed trousers to preserve the crease.
“Really?” Max had said. Max was wearing jeans and trainers with a wool jumper under his weatherproof jacket. The rather gaudy scarf had been knitted for him by a St. Edwold’s volunteer, and its main benefit was that it was warm. Max never had the heart to refuse these spontaneous acts of generosity coming from his parishioners, which made him one of the most colorful priests in the area. Cotton wore his usual suit and tie.
“What?” Cotton asked.
“I mean, was your tuxedo at the dry cleaners?” Cotton had to be the most debonair policeman on the force. Max doubted the urbane detectives of Paris and Rome could hold a candle to him and his wardrobe. Max wasn’t sure if Cotton was dressing for success and aiming for the next rung on the ladder, or if he simply liked clothes and dressing up for every occasion, choosing each tie and pocket handkerchief with care. Perhaps a bit of both.
The captain proved to be just under six feet tall and roundly built. He sported a Captain Ahab beard—a reddish chin curtain that contrasted with the graying brown hair springing from his forehead. His eyes were pale blue and sunk into a permanent network of squint lines.
“Captain Smith, at your service,” he said, offering a gnarly hand to both men. “I understand you’d like the cook’s tour. Nasty business, this. It does a ship’s reputation no good to have an unsolved murder attached to its name. Crews can be superstitious, and so can passengers. There’ll be talk of a ghostly woman in white before you know it, mark my words.”
“We’re doing what we can to solve this murder,” Cotton told him. “That may put the stories to rest.”
The captain shook his head. “The last time I heard of the like happening it were two passengers that had quarreled over a woman. One claimed self-defense but there’s no way that could happen here or on any modern ship, not unless the victim were eight feet tall—you’ll see that for yourselves. Folk don’t just fall off a ship like this: it were custom built for extra safety so things like this couldn’t happen. Where would you like to start?”
Max said, with a glance at Cotton, “I don’t think we have a set agenda, but at some point I’d like to concentrate on the guest cabins.”
“Fine. There are twelve of those. Also there are smaller cabins for the crew members, of course.”
“What sorts of amenities do you have on board?” He’d been filled in by Patrice and Cotton but it never hurt to hear from the man who presumably knew the yacht better than anyone.
“What don’t we have is the better question. All the usual, plus a putting green, saunas, pool, hot tub—all that. Wine storage and enormous freezers. A game room. A safe room and storage vaults for valuables. A laundry station. And of course for this lot there’s a private theater so they can study themselves on film. We have a large crew as these things go but we’re stretched thin keeping it all running.” The captain’s face as he listed these creature comforts was not unlike a missionary discussing the religious rites of cannibals he’d been sent to serve—a combination of awe and revulsion. Captain Smith looked to be of the old school, where real men subsisted on hard tack and a pint of fresh water a day if they were lucky. The frivolity of a luxury yacht like the Calypso Facto seemed to rub him up the wrong way. He probably was well compensated by Romero to blunt the effect.
“How large is the galley?” Max asked. “How many can it serve, I mean?”
“I take your meaning. How many, that depends on how often we dock for supplies, but I can tell you that area’s nearly six hundred and twenty feet in size. That’s not including the storage areas for provisions, of course.”
“Of course,” said Cotton, whose entire, sparsely furnished flat was six hundred square feet. He called it his Zen Den.
“And there’s a safe room? How interesting. Like a panic room, is it?”
“We never panic,” the captain admonished him. “That’s not a word I’ll allow on my ship. But yes, that is what some would call it. Of course, we travel nowhere near pirate-infested waters—it’s a ship built for mindless pleasure, not a cargo ship—but a safe room is all the latest rage and this yacht has all the latest.”
“We’d like to see that, too, if we may,” said Cotton.
“Right this way.”
The captain took them down in a coffin-like elevator to a room secured with a keypad-style computerized lock. He asked the two men to turn their backs to him as he punched in the four-digit code that would unlatch the metal door.
“In here,” he said, swinging it wide to admit them. “It’s all bullet-proofed, this lot,” he added, with obvious pride, possibly longing for the day when he could foil boarding pirates with this secret failsafe to protect his crew and passengers.
Max and Cotton looked around them at shelves containing rolled bedding and tins and packets of food, and vast canisters of staples like sugar and flour. The area was ringed with bench seating for perhaps a dozen people; at the far end of the room was a bank of communications equipment. It would be a very tight fit but it could just about accommodate everyone on board in a temporary emergency. Max would have given a lot to see how the baron and baroness might have adapted to being penned in with the ship’s crew. They would probably have rather taken their chances being cast adrift on a lifeboat, using the baroness’s diamonds as fish bait.
“You could survive in here for about a week if you had to, as far as the provisions go,” the captain told them. “But with the communications equipment—all state of the art, you kno
w—we would signal for help and be rescued long before the food ran out.” Clearly, for him, this room was far, far better than the ship’s froufrou nonsense like putting greens. This was where the oftentimes hazardous business of running a ship was made manifest.
Max was wondering how easy it would be to sabotage the ventilation system to the room. Certainly that would be taken care of by whatever ship’s architect had designed the space. But what one person could design or invent, another person could disrupt.
His eyes roamed over the shelves of canned and boxed provisions.
“Was this area searched before?” he asked Cotton, who nodded.
“Certainly. But only just. It’s kept locked, as you saw, and we were focused on the rooms that might be more directly connected to the murder. We only looked in here on the slight chance of finding a stowaway. It was a possibility that had to be eliminated.”
“Quite right,” said Max. “But send someone out here to look inside these tins and boxes. To search the contents of each and every one.” He didn’t have to tell Cotton what they were looking for, which was essentially anything that didn’t belong.
“I say,” put in the captain. “I don’t—Is that really necessary? I supervised the loading of the provisions myself. You can’t be too careful these days. You have my word; nothing dodgy came aboard.”
“No, one can’t be too careful,” Cotton agreed. “Now we’ll have another look at the guest rooms.”
Max and Cotton walked away as the captain busied himself securing the door.
“If we knew the spot where Margot went overboard, it might help us pinpoint what happened when,” said Max.
“Oh, but we do know now. Or we are fairly certain we do. Come along; I’ll show you.”
Chapter 21
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
“You see these marks?” Cotton asked. “My team found them during the initial search but weren’t sure if they were significant. They took photos, as Sergeant Essex thought it might be important. She’s usually right.”
“That were never there before the murder,” said the captain. “That lot will need to be sanded and polished back and painted over.”
“Not just yet,” Cotton told him.
What they were looking at were scratches: one deep gouge in the wood railing and similar, smaller marks about a foot away from the main injury to the wood.
“We’re thinking that whoever hefted Margot overboard had a bit of struggle. These marks were likely made by the high-heeled shoes she had on that night—she often wore heels to compensate for her moderate height. And because they were the fashion, I suppose. Anyway, the lab confirms that these marks were made by a rubberized tip or tips scraping against the wood. The sort of rubber heel tips you’d find on a woman’s shoes. There’s also a trace of red shoe paint, probably rubbed off one of the heels. The boyfriend says her red shoes are missing from the room they shared.”
“The cabin. We don’t have the shoes themselves?” said Max.
“No, undoubtedly they came off as the body was pulled about in the water. The coroner found marks of heel straps where they’d abraded the skin after death, presumably in being torn from the feet. Still, it’s all indicative: this is likely the spot where she went overboard.”
The ship bristled with spikes and hooks and ropes and poles that clearly served some specific nautical purpose. Max, carefully side-stepping a hook that seemed to point at him with murderous intent, said, “Not jumped over.” It was not a question.
“No way. She went in with the help of someone on board this ship that night.”
“Could the coroner say anything about the height or weight of the assailant?”
Cotton shook his head. “Not really, no. He can only guess that whoever it was had a struggle with what was effectively dead weight. They none of them are large people, the suspects. Not the sort of heavyweight champion who could simply have hefted her over, clear of the rail. There’s one lad in the boiler room or whatever you’d call it—”
“There’s no—” the captain began.
“Some sort of engineer. He’s the right size for the job, but there’s nothing to connect him with the victim. Whoever it was had to shove and maneuver the body over, leaving these scratches on top of the rail.”
“It is an argument for only one killer. Or to be precise, only one disposer of the body.”
Cotton shrugged, nodded. “Perhaps,” he said. “Or two not-very-strong people. Perhaps with so much wine sloshing about the party that night, gathering the strength needed for body disposal was an issue. What are you thinking, Max?”
“Honestly, I’m not sure; I’m not there yet. My hunches won’t do us much good without facts to back them up.”
They took their leave of the captain at this point and began a search of the cabins, first doing a cursory examination of the crew cabins. The guest cabins had been left undisturbed except that most of the personal objects of the occupants had been removed—once their rooms had been searched by the police, they had all been allowed to pack whatever belongings they would need for several days’ stay at the hotel. In the case of the baron and baroness, Max reflected, that included some but not all of the necessary accoutrements.
“Anything good turn up in your searches?” Max asked.
Cotton shook his head. “Nothing. Delphine left behind a pen with the Grand Imperial Hotel’s logo on it. But she claimed she’d never been to the hotel before.”
“So how did she come by the pen?” Max mused.
“She said she had no idea—it could have come into her possession in a lot of ways.”
Only Margot and Jake’s cabin, when they got to it, retained the imprint of its former occupants. Jake had not been allowed to remove so much as a toothbrush, a fact over which he had complained at length.
Max and Cotton looked about them. As in all the guest cabins intended for two occupants, the twin beds were separated by a nightstand, and the room was decorated in a nautical style with blue wallpaper in a pattern of ocean waves and white furniture of a clean, modern design. Much of the furniture, as on any ship, was bolted to the floor for safety.
This particular cabin bore Margot’s imprint much more so than Jake’s, and gave every appearance of being a dressing room backstage at a theater. There were traces of powder everywhere, seemingly on every item—light powder in addition to the darker fingerprint powder left by forensics. Max raised an eyebrow as he surveyed the makeup table; Cotton correctly intuited the unspoken question.
“Not the kind of powder you may be thinking,” he told him. “No drugs of any kind were found in the room, apart from some sleeping tablets, over-the-counter cough remedies, and the like. The hardest-core powder found in here so far, according to the forensics team, is that made by Max Factor. Of course they’re still testing the contents of all these bottles and things but I was told not to get my hopes up. Everything passed the sniff-and-taste test when forensics initially went through the room.”
“Surely this cabin is messier than the norm?” In addition to bits of clothing strewn wildly across the floor—giving the place the appearance of a room once occupied by teenagers—lipsticks, pots of eye shadow, wands of mascara, colored pencils, brushes, and bottles of perfume were scattered everywhere on the small dressing table. Max thought it was interesting what was not there: there were no family or holiday-style photos, no personal snapshots of any kind, but several professional headshots of the actress were ranged across one narrow shelf over the tabletop. She was posed almost identically in each, head thrown back, her face in three-quarter profile. As the years progressed, the photos got progressively blurrier, as if she’d been photographed through a lens smeared with petroleum jelly, as perhaps she had been.
“It may be a bit messier than usual,” said Cotton. “I did gather she and Jake, not entirely a match made in heaven, quarreled at times. Items were thrown, regrettable things were said. Someone commented they were less like lovers and more like a pair of old roommates squa
bbling over who forgot to buy the bread and washing-up liquid. Perhaps she threw a big powder puff at him and it scattered.”
“Who was it who said that?”
“I’d have to search my notes, but I think it was Addy—Addison Phelps.”
“I shouldn’t wonder. Screenwriters and writers in general can be sharp-eyed when it comes to other people’s relationships. I suppose it’s in the job description.”
“What’s this?” Cotton was holding up a fuzzy strand that might have fallen out of a wig.
“It’s a hair extension.”
“A what?”
“You weave it into your hair to make it look longer.” Max knew this from finding such an item in his mother’s bathroom one time while he was visiting. Alarmed that she was losing her hair to treatment for some dreadful disease, he’d confronted her with it. She was still regaling her bridge partners with the story as she sailed round the world on yet another cruise, hair extensions in place.
“Oh,” said Cotton. “Is there a reason anyone would want to do that?”
Max thought. “No compelling reason I can think of offhand. But it operates more or less on the same principle as the toupee. It’s a sort of vanity item.”
“There’s no shortage of that here.”
“No, I agree. No expense spared on cosmetics and so on—it all looks like fairly high end stuff to me. Much of it French in origin. But there’s nothing that looks suspicious, either.” Max surveyed the landscape of the room, his eyes alert to any incongruity. The cabin was necessarily small but like all ships it had been cunningly designed to maximize the space. “It’s a wonder Jake had room for his shaving kit,” he said.
Cotton nodded: shawls and feather boas and scarves were draped everywhere, including over every lamp shade, perhaps serving the same purpose as they did in A Streetcar Named Desire—to conceal and soften the trace of years across the actress’s face. Cotton vividly recalled his mother’s using the same old hat trick.
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