It's Murder, On a Galapagos Cruise: An Amateur Female Sleuth Historical Cozy Mystery (Miss Riddell Cozy Mysteries Book 2)

by P. C. James

  Pauline nodded. “You’re already thinking like a detective,” she said. “We’re going to be a great team. As you say, to be certain, a murderer would want it to be from the next deck up. Maybe it wasn’t really murder. Maybe someone pushed him, he overbalanced on the railing and plunged to his death and the someone was horrified at what they’d done.”

  “If it was an accident,” Freda said, “wouldn’t they have gone for help?”

  “You or I would,” Pauline said, “but many people are just frightened of what could happen to them, or they could have some reason to believe the authorities wouldn’t believe it was an accident. I agree it’s unlikely, but we can’t rule it out. Let’s go up to the next deck.”

  The upper deck was windy causing their hair and skirts to flap around them.

  “I don’t like it up here with this stiff breeze,” Freda said. “I feel I’m going to be blown overboard.”

  Pauline didn’t reply. She’d reached the point from where Jose might have fallen, and she was gently shaking the loose gate in the railing.

  “This is where he fell from,” Pauline said. Freda slowly joined her and held onto the rail rather than the gate. She looked over.

  “I agree,” she said. “A thirty-foot drop onto hard, wooden planking. He wouldn’t have survived even if he’d gone face first rather than backwards, as the position of the body and the injuries suggested.”

  Pauline nodded. “I think he was forced against this gate by someone holding a knife under his chin. Then, either the gate moved behind him and he overbalanced or the someone pushed him and over he went.”

  They continued staring down at the deck below, remembering the body as it lay there the night before.

  “There’s nowhere for him to have got that cut under his chin,” Freda said. “There are cables and metal beams but nothing with a sharp edge.”

  “No,” Pauline said. “It was definitely a knife or something very like it.”

  “It still could be an accident, or manslaughter anyway,” Freda said, unwilling to accept she was sharing a ship with a killer.

  “It can’t be an accident, but it could be manslaughter rather than murder,” Pauline agreed. “Our job is to find out which and why.”

  For a moment, they examined the deck around the gate, and nearby corners and crevices. There was nothing. The ship was too newly recommissioned for much of any kind of litter to be hiding out.

  “What do we do now?” Freda asked.

  “We ask questions,” Pauline replied. “The captain said Jose Garcia, that was his family name by the way, was a member of the maintenance crew, so we start there.”

  “But we’ve never seen any of the maintenance crew,” Freda objected.

  “You haven’t been looking,” Pauline said. “Remember the man working in the cabin along our corridor? Or the men changing the layout of the lounge after dinner last night and breakfast this morning?”

  “Oh, yes. I see. I was thinking of the people running the engines and things.”

  “I think they’re engineering,” Pauline said. “We’ll walk the decks until we find a willing volunteer. There’ll be crew about after we dock.” The ship was approaching a harbor mouth and a pilot vessel was approaching.

  “Won’t the police be interviewing them then?”

  “Maybe,” Pauline agreed, “and if they are, we’ll wait until later. We need to know who Jose was and who his friends and colleagues were.”

  “You said the captain told you this was a maiden voyage for the ship and tour company,” Freda said. “He may not have had either.”

  “Someone knew him well enough to stick a knife under his chin and cause him to fall over a railing,” Pauline said. “That isn’t the action of someone you’ve just met. That requires a history of love or hate.”

  They watched as the ship was guided to its berth and tied up. When it was secure, a gangplank was placed, and police came aboard.

  “More tea, I think,” Pauline said, “and one of those nice pastries I saw them putting out as we came through the lounge.” At breakfast, the guests had been told they couldn’t disembark until the authorities had given permission for them to leave.

  “They’ll be all gone by now,” Freda said. “We should have had one before we came up here.”

  “North Americans eat cakes,” Pauline said. “There are always pastries left.” She was right. Fortunately, they’d finished their tea and macaroon when the call came for them to go to the captain’s cabin, a call they’d been expecting because they had found the body.

  With the aid of an interpreter, they described the scene as they’d found it. The police captain asked, “You heard no cry or the noise of the body hitting the deck?”

  “No, we heard nothing. We were on the deck for a few minutes before I saw him,” Pauline said.

  “You said the time was about twenty hundred hours,” the police captain said, “and you saw no one else about.”

  “That’s correct,” Pauline said. “We finished dinner, sat over coffee before taking a stroll. It was a cool night, quite surprisingly cold really, and I imagine anyone who’d come out had hurried back inside.”

  “The moon was bright, you said.”

  “It was but shining on the other side of the ship. The side nearest our cabins, where we finished our walk, was shadowy. Not dark but the man was lying in a place where the lifeboats provided shadow from the moon and starlight and the deck lights.”

  “The doctor says you thought he’d been stabbed.”

  “I did. When I saw blood on my fingers after checking for a pulse at his throat, I assumed he’d been stabbed with an upward thrust from a knife,” Pauline said. “Then, after Freda, who is a nurse, checked, she realized his neck was broken.”

  “And did that change your mind about murder?”

  “No,” Pauline said. “I just thought he’d been stabbed and then fallen. The fall broke his neck after he was dead.” Seeing where the police captain was going, she decided to speed things up. “It wasn’t until I heard that the wound under his chin was just a cut, that I realized he hadn’t died that way.”

  “So, you no longer think he was murdered?”

  “I don’t know how he died, Captain,” Pauline said. “I only know it wasn’t the way I thought when I first found him.”

  The police captain nodded. “Thank you, Señorita. Your assistance has been invaluable.”

  Pauline and Freda left the cabin in silence. Once away from there, however, Freda said, “You didn’t tell him you still think Jose was killed and didn’t die in an accident.”

  “He didn’t persist in his question about my murder theory and I have no proof to give it credence. It’s best we let the local authorities manage things in their own way,” Pauline said. “If only in the hope it means we can have our holiday together without further delay.”

  “Pauline!” Freda said, shocked. “After all you said, you can’t mean that.”

  Pauline frowned. “Don’t misunderstand me, Freddy, I take all violent deaths very seriously, but the most likely explanation is this man, Jose, was part of some sordid criminal enterprise and he paid for it with his life. It is for local people to manage their own affairs. We will investigate but not become embroiled in the local investigation or point them in directions we’re only guessing at.”

  “But surely we should help where we can?” Freda protested.

  “Help, by all means, but their law is their law. They understand the underpinnings where we don’t,” Pauline said. “I believe in the law; it’s all any society has to keep itself stable. But laws are specific to time and place and should not be tampered with by those who don’t understand either.”

  “I suspect our laws are kinder and more compassionate,” Freda said, still brooding on yesterday’s incident at the marketplace. “Wouldn’t we make things better by helping them see that? If their laws matched ours, you would be outraged by what we witnessed the other day instead of just accepting it.”

  “
As I said, all customs and laws work in their own context,” Pauline said. “It doesn’t follow they would be successful in a different time or place. If we implemented our customs and laws here, as we tried to do in so many other places up until recently, we would create the backlash we’ve already seen all around the world and will see more of in future. The number of people dead may be just as high thanks to our meddling as if we’d left well enough alone. We are visitors here, not conquerors and we have no business interfering.”

  “But, Pauline…”

  “No buts,” Pauline said. “We can’t just step off a plane in someone else’s country and start dictating to them.”

  Freda sighed. They were never going to agree on this. Pauline was always so aloof and distant. She never could see that sometimes you had to guide people for their own good.

  6

  Santa Cruz and Giant Tortoises

  As the breakfast was being served, Captain Ferguson’s voice boomed over the ship’s public address system.

  “Good morning, everyone. I hope you had a good night’s sleep on your first night at sea and you’re awake and refreshed for the day ahead, which will be a little different from that outlined in our itinerary. Please listen carefully while I explain.

  “As most of you will know by now, we had an unfortunate accident onboard last night. One of the crew fell to his death and we’ve put into Puerto Ayora, the capital of the Galapagos Islands, to report the incident and transfer the body ashore. The Ecuadorean police will come aboard soon and they will be here for some time investigating the incident. I hope we won’t be held up too long.

  “However, they may want us to stay in port at least for today. Rather than waste a day of your vacation, we have brought forward the final day’s activities. As you know, the giant tortoises are the heart of the Galapagos, indeed they’re what give the islands their name, and they were intended to be the crowning event on the last day of the cruise. Instead, to ensure you don’t miss these magnificent creatures, we will visit the Charles Darwin Station today and see and learn more about these gentle giants.

  “The tour will spend half the day there and then you will be free to spend the rest of the day in town where you can enjoy sightseeing, souvenir shopping and meeting the local people. We do apologize for this change, but it is beyond our control. I’m confident our delay will be short and we’ll sail tonight. Those of you who have purchased your excursion tickets for the tortoise breeding station, please make your way to deck three before eight-thirty am. Those of you who haven’t and wish to do so…”

  “Well,” said Pauline, as the announcement went into details they had no need of, “they were the highlight of the trip for me. Everything else will seem an anti-climax now.”

  “Surely not,” Freda said, aghast at such heresy. “It’s the finches and the iguanas that are key to the Galapagos story.”

  Pauline smiled. “I know that’s true, and I know I should value them as you do but we have finches at home, and iguanas, however cleverly adapted, are still just lizards and not my cup of tea.”

  Freda shook her head in dismay at this levity. “Then we should get our tickets and be on deck number three because you can’t afford to miss the only bit you’re interested in. This announcement has already left it very late.”

  “I suspect the Captain has only just been told by the police that the ship can’t drop off a body and sail on as if nothing happened,” Pauline said. “Hence this scramble to make use of the day.”

  “You didn’t find some way to tell the police it was murder, did you?” Freda said, laughing.

  “I did tell them that was what I thought at first but I don’t believe police anywhere just accept ‘accident’ as an explanation when notified about a death. I think we’ll be lucky to sail tonight.”

  “Are you glad now we came?” Freda said, as she took a photo of Pauline beside the largest tortoise on the hillside. The tortoise continued munching the coarse grass as if unaware people were lining up to have it star in their vacation pictures.

  “I am. I’ll even properly appreciate the iguanas now,” Pauline agreed, as she exchanged places with Freda.

  “They are huge, aren’t they?” Freda said, timidly touching the shell that reached as high as her waist.

  “And unbelievably placid,” Pauline said. “No wonder sailors on the Pacific stopped in at the Galapagos all those centuries ago. The fresh meat here just waits to be eaten.”

  “Oh don’t,” Freda said with a shudder. “How could anyone treat such harmless creatures that way?”

  “You haven’t been hungry enough, Freddie, or you’d know the answer to that question.”

  They gave up their spot to the next people waiting in line and meandered through the park. Other, not so ancient or so large, tortoises cropped the grass between the trees, testament to the success of the breeding program. In places, they could see what looked like fields of trees outside the breeding station.

  “What do you think they are?” Freda said.

  “If you’d been listening to the guide,” Pauline said, “you’d know there are coffee plantations farther up the hillside. I think that’s what they are.”

  “Hmm, probably. If the police are happy it was an accident, Polly, will you continue investigating?”

  “I plan to because it might set Captain Ferguson’s mind at ease. But really, it’s nothing to do with us and, as I said, I’m sure there’s a very sordid answer to this death that has nothing to do with the ship’s company or the cruise line.”

  “But the murderer may stay on the ship,” Freda said.

  “Unlikely. Their job is done. They will leave when the voyage is over and return to their gang.”

  “In my work, I’ve patched up all sorts of victims of accidents and diseases but rarely human violence,” Freda said, thinking aloud.

  “That’s because you worked in rural Cottage Hospitals,” Pauline said. “If you’d been in a city hospital, you would.”

  “You would think we could all get along, wouldn’t you, with all this beauty around us.”

  “You’re growing sentimental, Freddie. It isn’t described as ‘nature, red in tooth and claw’ because the world is a beautiful place.”

  After the tortoise breeding center, wandering the small town was disappointing. Tourism was only getting a foothold, but the main street already had more gift shops than regular stores. They spent some time viewing ponchos and lace headdresses before continuing back to the quay.

  Like quaysides at home, there was a busy fish market but here there was lots more to see and not just in the greater selection of seafood than they were used to.

  “Those pelicans begging for scraps are funny,” Pauline said, as they watched the huge birds hopping from floor to countertop like sparrows at a picnic.

  “Not very hygienic,” Freda replied, grimacing, her hospital training to the fore.

  Pauline laughed. “Then don’t eat the ceviche at dinner tonight.”

  “Oh, Lord. I had that last night, didn’t I?”

  “You did but I’m sure the fish didn’t come from this market.”

  “It could have come from one very like it, though, couldn’t it?”

  “The tour company will have been very careful to keep our Western tummies safe, you can be sure,” Pauline said.

  “I hope you’re right, but I won’t be eating raw fish again.”

  “Let’s walk to the end of the pier and get away from these distressing sights,” Pauline said, laughing at her sister’s pained expression.

  As they approached the end of the pier, however, they saw Arvin Weiss staring into the shelter intended to protect people from the wind.

  “Most people would look out over the harbor,” Freda said, shaking her head in disbelief, “but not Arvin. Should we turn around?”

  “It’s too late,” Pauline replied. “He’s seen us and wants us to join him.”

  Arvin was waving them to come but in a strange slow-motion way that suggested grea
t care.

  “What do you think is in that shelter?” Freda asked.

  Pauline laughed. “Can it be worse than pelicans on fish market counters?”

  “Hello, Arvin,” Freda began as they neared him.

  He put his finger to his lips.

  Pauline and Freda could now see inside the shelter. Lying full-length along a bench made for at least six people was a seal, its brown fur drying in the sun, and a dignified but unamused expression on its face.

  Freda quickly took a photo. “I don’t think it likes being disturbed,” she said.

  “It is rude of us to stare,” Pauline agreed.

  “How did it get there?” Arvin said. “That’s what beats me.”

  “It’s obviously more agile on land than we think seals should be,” Pauline said, “but I agree, how did it do that?”

  “Practice,” Freda said. “It probably suns itself here every fine day.”

  “Nobody would fight it for the seat, that’s for sure,” Arvin said, grinning.

  It was the first time Pauline had seen Arvin enjoying himself and it made her feel ridiculously pleased for him.

  Freda walked around the back of the shelter. “There isn’t one this side,” she called, “but there’s no sun either.” She returned to join the other two who were still watching the seal who glared back impassively, daring them to shoo it away.

  The seal yawned, displaying a fine set of sharp pointed flesh-tearing teeth and the three stepped back as one.

  “I think we should leave it to its rest,” Pauline said, turning away.

  Arvin too set off with them. “Do you really think it lies there every day?”

  “Whenever it wants to, I imagine,” Pauline said. “I don’t think people here eat seals so it’s quite safe.”

  “You would think the locals would want to sit in the sun some days, weekends, maybe,” Arvin said.

  “Would you want to sit there now? You’d never get the smell out of your clothes.”

  “I guess not,” Arvin agreed. “Still, having a shelter you can’t use must be a real bummer for the locals.”