The Case of the 'Hail Mary' Celeste

by Malcolm Pryce

  ‘In 1915 he received a letter from His Majesty the King advising him that His Majesty had been gracious enough to grant him a pardon. I was overjoyed at this news, even more so than my husband, who had a very strong inclination to smell a rat or at least suspect the presence of one even in a rose garden. Nothing in this world, he said to me, comes without strings attached, royal pardons notwithstanding. Fie! I said, this is the King of which you speak, not some lowly cut-throat from one of your dockside gambling dens. Oh no, he replied, men do not get to be kings by accident. Men who fill that office have the guile of a fox and the morals of a highwayman. How else do you survive in such a hotly contested position? Kings, he said, are descended from men who knew how to strike a hard bargain and you will find it is the same here. And indeed it was. The King had a little errand for my husband to perform in return for his royal pardon. It entailed his participation in something called Project Babel. From what I could gather, this was an enterprise every bit as hubristic as the Biblical project which inspired the name.’ Mrs Gape paused and said, ‘Why are you meddling in my affairs, Mr Wenlock?’

  ‘I wasn’t aware that I was.’

  ‘Then perhaps you are meddling in my affairs without realising it. You went to see the gorilla yesterday.’

  ‘How do you know? It sounds like you are meddling in my affairs.’

  ‘Until yesterday afternoon I was unaware that you existed. Then I received a telephone call from a man called Mr Old who told me that you had been to see Clerihew and you would probably seek me out. He said on no account was I to talk to you.’

  ‘Would I be right in surmising that you are the lady who fainted in 1932 when she saw the gorilla’s suitcase?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. Of course, I was mocked as a madwoman, but I was as sane then as I am today. There was no doubt about it: the mark on the little gorilla’s suitcase was the tattoo of Laura Bell, complete with anchor, that my husband had on his right forearm.’

  ‘That is quite a fantastical claim.’

  ‘But none the less true for that.’

  ‘Surely it was nothing more than a misunderstanding? That your husband had a Laura Bell tattoo and the suitcase had the same motif embossed in the leather does not necessarily imply that they are one and the same, that the suitcase was made from a piece of your husband.’

  ‘How else do you explain it?’

  ‘Perhaps the suitcase belonged to someone who served on the Laura Bell and enjoyed such a period of happiness there that he had the name embossed on his suitcase.’

  ‘Mr Wenlock, you have a charmingly rose-tinted image of the conditions aboard that ship and of the sort of human shipwrecks that served on her. You would no more find one in possession of a suitcase than a top hat. Moreover, my late husband would turn in his grave right now if he thought it possible that anyone who served under his command could have taken away such fond memories of his servitude that he would have the name of the vessel tattooed on his suitcase.’

  ‘Nonetheless, it is quite common for sailors to tattoo the name of a ship on their arms. All sailors do it, even when serving under tyrannical masters. That being the case, there may be any number of men walking round with the words Laura Bell inked on their bicep. Indeed, “Laura Bell” strikes me as a common sort of name and there must be quite a number of ships so christened. If you will allow me that, then I put it to you that even if the case was made from the skin of a man, which I doubt, it would not necessarily be the skin of your late husband. It could be the skin of any number of crew members from any number of ships called the Laura Bell.’

  ‘It had his mole, too. Three inches to the left. And a scar where I stabbed him one night with the bill of a swordfish. Explain that.’

  ‘I would explain that by saying it was a figment of your imagination induced by the shock of seeing that tattoo on the gorilla’s suitcase. What happened at the zoo?’

  ‘When I came round from my fainting fit, I was taken to a military hospital where I received a visit from two very shady gentlemen who were quite rough with me and told me that if I didn’t shut my trap I would lose my pension.’

  ‘If you were seventeen in 1910, you couldn’t have been more than forty when you had your fainting fit in 1932.’

  ‘This was no ordinary war widow’s pension; it was a special dispensation granted by His Majesty the King in recognition of services rendered to him by the Gape family.’

  ‘This afternoon when Mr Old called, you were told not to talk to me and yet you came?’

  ‘I’ll say to you the same that I said to Mr Old when he telephoned. “Talk to him?” I said. “I’ll take my rolling pin to him if he thinks he can interfere with my Special Dispensation.”’

  ‘I think no such thing.’

  ‘It’ll take more than words to convince me of that; men often achieve ends they never intended. My rolling pin is in my handbag in case you doubt my earnest.’

  ‘I have every confidence that were I to look into your bag I should find a rolling pin just as you say. All the same, I would never dream of depriving a lady of her pension. What was Project Babel?’

  ‘Mr Wenlock, you strike me as being a man in his thirties and so perhaps you will not remember the mortal peril that faced our island in 1915. The Germans had embarked on a policy of unconditional and unrestricted submarine warfare. Their dreadful U-boats had brought our island so close to starvation it was said we were only a fortnight from having to surrender to the Hun. The larder of dear old England was bare. The cruellest blows to our merchant fleet were in the North Atlantic to the north and west of Ireland. Against this background, a party of nuns from the Lacrismi Christi convent in Povington wrote to the War Office with a proposal which became Project Babel. Perhaps you will tell me what your business in this affair is. And please do not play the innocent. Just from talking to you it is abundantly clear that you are meddling in my affairs.’

  I glanced at the clock above the door as the whirr that preceded the chime drew my attention. It was 11.00. I wondered what I should say. I did not see what could be achieved by misleading Mrs Gape. ‘I am investigating a crime that took place on the Great Western Railway. At the moment I have no clear idea in what relationship it stands to the affairs of your late husband.’

  ‘What sort of crime?’

  ‘A robbery. Why are you worried about your pension?’

  Mrs Gape pressed her lips together as if deliberating. ‘After his hurried release from prison, I heard no more from my husband apart from a postcard. Later that summer I received a letter from the War Office informing me that he had been lost at sea during a secret mission and that they were awarding me a pension on the understanding that I didn’t speak about it to anyone. This pension has kept the wolf of hunger from my door ever since. I had no reason to doubt their word, but then in 1935 I received a letter from the British consul in Port Bismarck in West Africa, regretting to inform me that my husband had been murdered. The French authorities had apprehended a deserter from the Foreign Legion, a criminal well known to them, called Le Chou, who appeared to be using the identity of Clerihew Gape. He was wearing his clothes and carrying Mr Gape’s passport. Under questioning Le Chou denied having murdered Mr Gape but claimed to have won the clothes from him in a card game. I knew then, of course, that my husband must be dead since no one could beat him at cards. My understanding is, he was later returned to his barracks where the military police, not satisfied with Le Chou’s story, used a hand-wound telephone generator to administer electrical shocks to his tongue. He duly amended his account and said he traded Gauloises cigarettes for the clothes with a chief of the Segembwezi in 1931. Either way, I decided it best to say nothing since I had been in receipt of a pension based on the presumption that he had died at sea in 1915 and if it were determined that he had died in Africa in 1931 they might ask for the money back, which I hardly need tell you, I was in no position to provide. What sort of robbery?’

  ‘An important letter has been stolen. What was the nature of Projec
t Babel?’

  Mrs Gape pulled her coat collar together around her throat and stood up. ‘You don’t know what Project Babel was?’

  ‘I know it had something to do with the nuns who went missing.’

  ‘Well, as long as you don’t know any more than that, I think my pension will be safe for a while.’

  ‘It seems odd that they would release your husband from prison . . . were his qualities so rare that they could not find someone suitable on the outside?’

  ‘Mr Gape wondered the very same thing and came to the conclusion that the quality that distinguished him in their eyes was his worthlessness. A man whose death they would no more mourn than the death of a fly.’

  ‘All the same, there must have been many men who fell into that category.’

  ‘But how many of them owned a lightship?’

  ‘Was that necessary to their plan?’

  Mrs Gape paused as if to consider, then said, ‘The project the holy sisters wrote to the War Office about involved anchoring a lightship in the sea lanes of the North Atlantic, in the place where our merchant seamen were going to their deaths. They offered to crew the ship and pray for the dying, to offer succour to those poor wretches they managed to fish from the sea.’ A sly grin spread across her face as she registered my reaction. ‘Of course, I suspect the War Office had something else in mind when they accepted this proposal.’

  ‘And yet somehow they disappeared from a train.’

  She gathered her coat around her, pressed her handbag against her chest and stood up. ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘Do you doubt it?’

  She smiled and then walked to the door and said at the threshold, ‘It is my duty to tell you to be careful. Mr Old told me that if you continued to make a nuisance of yourself they would hang you.’

  ‘Won’t you stay a while longer?’

  ‘I’ve spent all the time here that I need to. Good day to you.’

  ‘No, no, stay a while . . . I must—’

  But she had gone.

  I listened to her footsteps echo down the corridor, followed by the soft hum of the lift. Two things were apparent. Two days ago Mr Dombey at the bookshop had authorised me to find a suitcase that he had lost on a train twelve years ago, a case that bore the name of a ship, the Laura Bell. Now Mrs Gape came to see me claiming her late husband had been the captain of the Laura Bell, and she was of the opinion that he had been turned into a suitcase. She based this claim on the similarity she discerned between the name on the case and the design of her husband’s tattoo. I had already submitted the requisition form on behalf of Mr Dombey at Lost Property. But what did it mean? What could it mean? I picked up a pen from the inkstand and began to jot down some notes. Jenny’s aunt had witnessed the theft of a letter which allegedly came from the lost nuns of 1915. Their mysterious disappearance was part of a top secret War Office project called Project Babel. The nuns left behind died suddenly in a fire and their convent was taken over by the Army. It was reasonable to conjecture the fire had been deliberately set with the intention of shutting up the remaining sisters who might otherwise start asking awkward questions. According to Mrs Gape, her husband, Clerihew Gape, had been released from jail by royal pardon in order that he could captain the Laura Bell in Project Babel. Mrs Gape never saw him again and was told by the War Office that her husband had died at sea. She was given a pension on the strength of this, but later received word that he had died in Africa in 1931. When Clerihew a baby gorilla arrived at London Zoo in 1932 she, like many others, queued up to see him. She became convinced that his suitcase was made from the skin of her husband. This was denied but the suitcase was taken off display and eventually acquired by an American collector called Hershey Lindt. This was also the name of an elephant-foot-umbrella-stand merchant Shanghaied aboard a tramp steamer in 1927 who told the British consul in Singapore that he had seen a nun held captive in the basement of the ship. And it was an exporter of elephant-foot umbrella stands who received the gorilla as gift to the British nation on behalf of the Port Bismarck Rotary Club in 1931. Who was Hershey Lindt? He seemed to be everywhere. I took out Gibson’s Atlas of Colonial Railways from the second drawer of my desk and opened to the page on Africa. Port Bismarck was situated at the mouth of the Sulabunga River, near the border of the Congo Free State and the French Congo. I decided I would send a telegram to the Port Bismarck Rotary Club asking for information about Mr Lindt.

  THE BOY’S OWN RAILWAY GOSLING ANNUAL

  Vol.VII 1931 Price: 1/-

  Replies to our readers’ letters

  B. G. BENSON, WIGAN—Stick to blow football and if your urge to shoot postmen is not to be assuaged with the advent of maturity you may wish to consider joining the French Foreign Legion.

  MASTER GRAINVILLE, YEOVIL—Your first step would be to practise handling non-venomous snakes such as the grass snake. But try not to practise on the same one. Life is already difficult enough for a snake.

  THE CONTINUING ADVENTURES OF RAILWAY GOSLING CADBURY HOLT – ON THE TRAIL OF THE MISSING NUNS!

  The Mountains of the Green Dawn

  The next morning, his eyes two dark saucers of pain from the drinking, Gape continued his tale of the previous evening. I sensed he had begun to recognise that the end was approaching.

  ‘A beach in Algeria, empty, save for some wild ponies. It was fringed with orange groves. Paradise.’ His hands trembled on the tiller. Somewhere in the forest canopy a wild animal screeched. ‘In the distance we saw a town. Sister Philippa, Sister Bryony and four others decided to walk there to barter for provisions. While they were away we discovered a young girl in the orange groves, a shepherdess with her flock. Sister Clodagh spoke to her in French. Her name was Bashirah, but since this was considered a heathen Mohammedan name the holy sisters baptised her in the sea and gave her the name Prudence. She left, seemingly quite pleased with her new name, and returned that evening with the news that the party of nuns had been captured by the Alhaj’abhra. She gave us to understand they had been taken to the slave market at El Gaberdine. This was half a day’s march away and after some discussion the girl hinted that her uncle Farooq might be willing to make his motor bus available in return for some English pounds. The U-boat’s safe contained gold Swiss francs, and after examining them the girl agreed that they were suitable. The next morning she arrived with the bus, driven by her uncle Farooq. He regretted that he wouldn’t be able to accompany the party because he had an agreement with the other bus drivers not to poach passengers from El Gaberdine. And so off they went on their own. Sister Ludo at the wheel and the entire armoury of the U-boat pointing out of the windows of the bus, making it look like a hedgehog.’ Mr Gape paused and turned to look at me. I was staring at him as entranced as a child at a magic show. He shook his head as if even today it defied his belief. ‘I stayed behind to guard the U-boat, so I can only give a second-hand report about what happened. By the time they reached El Gaberdine the day’s trading was over and the six holy sisters had been sold to a merchant in Khartoum. They were already heading south-east in one of the big Alhaj’abhra caravans. This news put the holy sisters into such a rage that they sacked the great eleventh-century library that Farooq had recommended for sightseeing. There they stole the famous map showing the location of the River Pishon.’ Gape squinted ahead, his attention drawn to some change in the prospect that I could not discern. He turned to me suddenly.

  ‘What do the instruments say?’

  ‘What instruments?’

  ‘The damn compass, you fool!’

  ‘I really must ask you to—’

  ‘You can ask me to go to Hell for all I care, but kindly answer the question!’

  The compass needle was spinning continuously in one direction like the hand of a drunken clock.

  ‘It’s . . . it’s . . .’

  ‘It’s spinning, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it is! What does it mean?’

  ‘It means we have fallen off the map. Yonder, see beyond the
tree line, those are the Mountains of the Green Dawn.’