Crime writers being what they are, however, this situation soon gave me the germ of an idea. A couple of evenings later, noticing Daria, the Ukrainian receptionist, off duty around one the bars, I fell into conversation with her and we spent a pleasant couple of hours in discussion, during which time I asked her a handful of questions about the way the boat and its systems worked, mentally storing away the information.
‘So, your missing cruise card, it did not reappear?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I lied.
‘Is OK then,’ she continued. ‘But no one can use it to make you pay for drinks you not have,’ she laughed.
‘It was so easy to cancel,’ I replied, sipping from my tall glass of Prosecco.
Daria was drinking vodka. ‘We have good security system,’ she added. ‘All I do is cancel the way the card charges; all rest I leave unchanged.’
A bell rang in my head and, on the occasion of our next shore visit, in Rio, I tested the system by using my original cruise card when I disembarked. I half expected the white-uniformed cadet at the exit desk by the gangway who was scanning the passengers’ IDs to stop me and point out my card was no longer valid. He didn’t. Returning from the city a few hours later, I deliberately used the new card to recheck my theory, and, again, it passed muster, confirming that the personal details electronically inscribed into both the invalid and the valid cruise cards did not clash and were identical.
Maybe one day I’d be able to use this fact in a story, I thought.
And soon I would, but not in the way I’d previously expected.
I’d met Ophelia at a book signing. We authors don’t have groupies the way rock musicians are rumoured to. I suppose there’s nothing glamorous about typing at a keyboard in silence for hours on end and emerging, blurry-eyed, into the world every year or so with a new volume, and, if we’re lucky, whoring it as best we can in sparsely populated public libraries and at far-flung literary conferences, and enjoying the attentions of at least a couple of reviewers who have ventured beyond the press release and actually read the book. At the end of this particular signing, however, I was confronted by a reasonably pretty young woman, with long dark hair, who had read a few of my previous novels and wanted to know when I would be writing again about Dominick and Summer, my amateur, feisty and ever-quarrelling society sleuths. She was annoyed that I had seemingly killed Dominick off with a heart attack at the outset of what I hoped would be the final book featuring the characters. I’d been sick and tired of them and would happily have despatched both Dominick and Summer, preferably having them torn to pieces by rampaging zombies or annihilated in a worldwide pandemic, had my literary agent and editor not counselled otherwise, suggesting I allow some ambiguity to their finale. Was Dominick really dead, Ophelia asked, or was it all a ruse to be explained in a future instalment, no doubt in a bid to mystify their nemesis, Jackson Vine? I was actually beginning to think I had maybe been a bit rash in my decision, as the new book I was promoting – a stand-alone with a brand new investigator (who also happened to be a killer) – had so far sold only half the number my books usually did, and the crowd at this particular signing had been sparse and uncommunicative. Even Ophelia hadn’t actually bought the book at the store but had brought her copy along, no doubt acquired online at a discount that meant I would only be getting a reduced royalty on the sale.
I tried, nevertheless, to defend my reasons for what she considered to be Dominick’s murder, but she stood her ground, arguing I did not have the right to get rid of a much-loved (by her) character. She was getting on my nerves, but then again she was rather pretty, in the English rose sort of way that often touched me inside, so I began flirting with her, for lack of anything else to do right then.
‘Actually, you know, there’s a lot of me in Dominick,’ I revealed with a sly smile.
‘I thought there must be; gut feeling, I guess,’ Ophelia said. ‘That makes me angry, too, you see.’
‘Really?’
‘Whenever I’m reading about him, I’ll often turn to the dust jacket and see your photo and think he must look a bit like you…’ she said.
Dominick only drank Coca-Cola, while I preferred wine. He always dressed with a strong sense of fashion, which allowed me to pad the narrative with the names of labels and superfluous descriptions of clothes (although Summer gave me even more licence on that front), while I always wore black Farah trousers and loafers. Dominic was extremely rich while I was nothing of the sort. But Ophelia was quite welcome to think of me that way.
The bookshop assistant picked up the small pile of a dozen or so books I had signed without being asked in order to ensure they remained for some time in the store and were not returned to the publisher’s warehouse – a trick of the trade you get taught with your very first book. The shop was growing quiet, a few late-evening punters browsing unenthusiastically or seeking shelter from the thin drizzle of a London autumn evening. I looked up at Ophelia. Her eyes locked with mine. How had I signed the book for her, I tried to recall? Had it been a standard indifferent dedication, or had I been more effusive?
‘Well, that’s me done,’ I said, as I rose from the chair and stepped away from the table. ‘Care for a drink? We can chat a bit more…’
‘I’d love that,’ Ophelia said.
Affairs are often like flash floods. They begin with a rush of lust, a torrent of words, that you momentarily believe will drown everything in sight and in mind, only for them to fade under the pressure of time and life until all that is left is the steam rising from the street gutters, the shadow of what once was – an X-ray of perceived love. Or maybe I was just too demanding and misanthropic, or simply too selfish to compromise.
At first I found Ophelia amusing, affectionate, sexy, cheeky and devoted. But then, one slow inch at a time, her idiosyncratic traits began to irritate, annoy and irk me, and I began to wish we had never met. I have no wish to go all porno here and relate the exquisite, intimate details of our lengthy tryst – I’m not that sort of writer. Neither do I have any intention of going into all the psychological ramifications involving the two of us, or why, at the end of the day, I came to the unhappy conclusion that we were totally unsuitable for each other.
Suffice to say she’d come down from Scarborough via a minor redbrick university, where she’d, of course, read media studies. She had no extant family, few friends – maybe those she’d once had had seen through her early and avoided her presence – and, damn it, she was possessive. By sleeping with me she felt she owned a part of me, wanting to know all about the book ideas I had, hoping to influence me and to become my muse so to speak, seeking some form of minor glory from our carnal relationship, when all I sought was the carnal and no more, and flinched at the idea of anything serious. I was too much of a loner and basically selfish for that.
I was about to call an end to what we had, for what it was worth, but something inside me intuited that Ophelia was not the sort of girl who would take an enforced break-up well. There was a dark side to her, the potential for destruction. Self-destruction, maybe, or, in the worst possible scenario, my own. Would she become a stalker? An avenger? Whichever it was, I knew she would not react well.
Faced with these possibilities, I dithered. I continued sleeping with her, saw her weekly but resisted any suggestion she move in with me. She was in the final months of writing her thesis (on the male gaze in indie movies), and lived on a small inheritance from her parents, who’d died some five years earlier in a car accident in Lanzarote.
One night, we were in bed, sheets humid with the sweat of our exertions, the silence now weighing heavily on both of us, the sounds reaching us through the half-open window from the road fading as the traffic whittled down to a crawl.
‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.
A typical Ophelia question. I was thinking of nothing, blissfully oblivious to the whole world, still coming down from my orgasm, calmly floating in that ineffable region between pleasure and oblivion.
&n
bsp; ‘Nothing.’
‘Surely, you must be thinking of something. You’re a creative sort of guy. I can’t believe you can just switch off.’
‘I can. It’s a way of recharging my batteries, I suppose. What about you?’
‘What? What am I thinking?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, you know our birthdays are coming up?’
We’d discovered at an early point in our relationship that our birthdays were just a few days apart, even though I was a clear ten years older.
‘So they are…’
‘We should do something. Together. Go away, say, not letting any of our acquaintances know. A magical mystery journey somewhere.’
‘Hmm…’
‘Wouldn’t it be a great idea?’
We’d once gone to Brighton for a few days and, on another occasion, Ophelia had accompanied me to a festival in Bristol, where she had annoyed me intensely by never leaving my side, seemingly attempting to bask in the glory of telling the world she was fucking an actual published writer. She also had ambitions to write, but so far was all talk and no typing.
I nodded. I was no longer thinking of nothing. An idea had taken root. Knowing Ophelia would never go quietly, I had hit on a scenario that might prove foolproof.
A few days later, thoughts ordered, my plan mentally moved from a fragmented jigsaw to reality.
‘Have you ever been on a cruise?’ I asked Ophelia.
‘Wow … for our birthdays, do you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘That would be just amazing.’
‘As you know, I’m struggling a little, with the deadline looming for the next book, and I was thinking about what Larry Block once told me. He often goes on cruises to get away from it all and concentrate on writing. He says he finds it incredibly productive.’
He’d actually written that it was ‘like being on a writer’s retreat but without the distraction of all the other writers’. In this case Ophelia would be the main distraction but her presence there would have both pros and cons.
‘Where to, then?’
‘French Polynesia and New Zealand.’
‘Amazing.’ It was an expression she overused and that often set me on edge.
‘Tahiti, Bora Bora, both the New Zealand islands. We’d fly out to Acapulco to board the boat and fly back from Wellington at the end.’
‘Amazing,’ Ophelia said again and I winced. ‘Do you think that in New Zealand we could visit the Lord of the Rings set? It’s supposed to be fantastic.’
‘I don’t see why not.’
The sail into Tahiti proved a massive disappointment. I had memories of Paul Gauguin, topless natives, palm trees, Robert Louis Stevenson and all sorts of exotic vistas, but for over an hour and a half we had navigated our way through a landscape of container docks, larger than any I’d ever seen, which, weather apart, could have been part of any old Northern European bleak immensity of derelict industrial areas, straight from a 1950s espionage thriller. Fortunately, Papeete itself was an improvement, if a touch tawdry. We visited the municipal market, where I bought Ophelia a necklace of black keisho pearls, the price of which I haggled down and felt quietly triumphant about, only to later see the same piece on another stall at an even cheaper price. But she looked nice wearing it, even more so when we made love for the last time in our cabin, by the light of a moon flickering like a will-o’-thewisp in the Marquesas Islands night.
I’d done my research and had planned the deed for our next stop – the smaller island of Nuku Hiva, which we would have to reach by tender as the dock was not big enough for a large cruise vessel.
I’d made it a habit to carry both our cruise cards in my shirt pocket. Ophelia didn’t mind this, as all our drinks and other expenses on the boat were charged to my account. The officer in charge swiped both cards as we stepped onto the smaller vessel that would take us ashore. In my shorts pocket I also had a third cruise card – in my name – which I had obtained the previous day at the reception desk by reporting that I had mislaid my original one. After we disembarked from the tender, I found a pretext for Ophelia to carry her own cruise card with her for once – ‘accidentally’ dropping it on the ground as we purchased a couple of soft drinks from a quayside vendor. What I actually gave her though, was, by sleight of hand, my spare one. Her card remained safely in my pocket.
I had already suggested that we didn’t book onto the official excursion, so instead we made our own way around the small island. I’d previously Googled all there was to know about Nuku Hiva – research is always a writer’s best friend – so I knew I had two options at my disposal.
Having made it a fair way across the island, we reached a small cove where, according to my information, the sharks congregated. There was no warning sign about their presence, the spot being so secluded, few locals, let alone visiting tourists, ever came this far. Sadly, there was only one around; it was visible in the distance but seemed totally uninterested in our presence, racing through the waters far out, ignoring us.
He looked rather large though; Ophelia squirmed when she noticed him. And right there and then, I realised that I was not a violent man and wouldn’t be able to begin struggling with Ophelia in a bid to throw her in the water. And anyway, for all I knew, she might be a good swimmer, able to escape quickly. And there was no way I was about to summon up the strength to hold her under as the shark approached. Plan one was therefore a washout.
Which left the crater of the dead volcano.
It was a hell of a climb and we were both sweating like hogs by the time we reached the top of the path leading to it. Ophelia complained non-stop about the heat, her tiredness and the mosquitoes that appeared to have a definite appetite for Boots Insect Repellent. However, I managed to convince her to complete the trek, telling her that the views and the photos she would be able to take would truly be phenomenal – or in her words, amazing.
Finally we emerged from the twisting, narrow path.
We were literally in the clouds. Beneath us, the canopy of trees was like a second ocean, rivalling the one in the distance with its infinite variations of green and brown. The air was still – a thick, pregnant silence. The black dust leading to the crater crunched under our feet, topping the jagged edge that separated us from the void.
I went first and peered over. It felt as if the slope wound down for miles into a foggy darkness. For a brief moment it was like going aeons back in time to a day when creation was still in its infancy, forming, shifting, alive. I drew in a breath. A few steps behind me, Ophelia was taking photos of the jungle we’d left behind on her digital camera, sweeping it around as she took selfies and then made a panoramic video of the mighty landscapes surrounding us.
‘It’s unbelievable,’ she exclaimed.
‘It is. Well worth the effort, eh?’
I suggested she move to the ledge and I take a photo of her with the crater in the background. She hesitated for a brief moment, but then agreed, putting a brave face on her rising vertigo.
She stood, a fixed smile on her face, looking back at me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and, dropping the camera to the ground I rushed towards her. She looked surprised at first, then questioning; then fear spread across her pale features as I made rough contact with her shoulders and pushed her backwards.
It lasted barely a second, but for what felt like an eternity she swayed on the spot, realising what was happening, then lost her balance and finally toppled over, her body making its fast, inexorable descent down the slopes of the crater. She remained silent all the way, until her white cotton shirt faded from view and I caught my breath again.
There were a lot of different things I could have said; I could have attempted to explain why I was doing this, why it made me unhappy but that I had no choice. That I had genuinely loved her, but … but … but…
But real life is not like a story. Time passes faster, and you are nowhere as articulate as you can be on the printed page or the computer screen.
I picked up the small camera I had dropped, pulled out the memory card, broke it clumsily into a few pieces and threw both the camera and its remains down the wide crater, in Ophelia’s trail.
I did hope she hadn’t suffered long.
I hurriedly returned to the quay and caught the final tender back to the boat, making it just in time, as the climb up the volcano had taken so much longer than I had hoped or expected.
Stepping onto the deck of the ship, I gave my cruise card for the crew member to swipe, then shouted out that I forgotten my baseball cap on the bench of the tender and ran back down the gangway to retrieve it. It was late in the day and the crew were too busy processing the returning crowd of passengers to take note of the fact that I had my cruise card scanned a second time. Ophelia’s absence from the boat would create no alarm.
Job done.
I was now free.
I would play the same trick upon leaving the boat at the end of the cruise, before being driven to the airport. According to all the computer records, Ophelia would duly have departed the Magellan on arrival in Wellington, just as she had returned to the vessel in Nuku Hiva.
Trust a crime writer to commit a perfect crime. Would I get away with it? Only time would tell, I reckoned, and that might be another story altogether.
Three on a Trail
Michael Stanley
They hadn’t spoken for quite a while. The climb up from the seashore to the crest of the cliffs had been tough, and now they were resting, looking out to sea.
Mystery Tour Page 18