I saw several people flinch.
‘So what did happen last night?’ asked Daisy. She was enjoying herself, I could see. Daisy loves an audience, and here she was the centre of attention. Her eyes blazed blue, her hair crackled pale fire – she was absolutely Daisy, absolutely my best friend.
I keep on remembering her like that.
‘We all know that Theodora held a ritual before bed last night,’ I said – I could feel that Daisy wanted me to speak. She did not even need to look at me. ‘Daniel Miller came in at the end of it, and the two had an argument. Then Theodora Miller was led away to her cabin – cabin seven – by Miss Bartleby. Miss Bartleby prepared Theodora for bed, and as she did so was joined by Heppy. Miss Bartleby tucked Theodora in and Heppy read to her until just before midnight, and then they walked back to Heppy’s cabin – cabin one. Heppy asked Miss Bartleby to lock her in, and Miss Bartleby did so, something confirmed by Mr Young. The boat was then largely quiet.’
‘Until, of course, we were all woken up just after six this morning by screaming,’ Daisy said. ‘Heppy had discovered Theodora lying dead in her bed in cabin seven. Heppy was herself covered in blood. It seemed, as I have said, very simple. Heppy had sleepwalked into Theodora’s cabin, killed Theodora and then gone back to her own cabin. She only realized what she’d done the next morning.
‘But, you see, that story did not quite fit the facts. First of all, the bloodstains on Heppy did not match the crime scene. Theodora had only been stabbed a few times, in the throat and around the heart, and she must have been covered with her sheet when it happened – we heard from several people that Theodora liked to have it tucked tightly, high up around her neck. It ought to have caught all the blood, meaning that Heppy should have been hardly bloody at all, and it ought still to have been on the bed. But instead it was on the floor, on the other side of the cabin, and Heppy’s hands and nightie were covered in blood. There was blood on the sink in Theodora’s bathroom too, which didn’t fit with Heppy’s story.’
‘Then we went to talk to Heppy,’ I went on. ‘And she told us that, because she knew she might sleepwalk, she had asked to be locked in her own cabin by Miss Bartleby, from the outside. Then she went to sleep – but when she woke up the cabin door was open, the key still on the outside. That was when she discovered that she was covered in blood – and that she had sleepwalked that night, after all. So we realized that, for Heppy’s door to be open, someone must have unlocked it after Miss Bartleby and Mr Young saw it locked up.’
‘Yes!’ said Daisy eagerly. ‘Someone who knew Heppy sleepwalks, usually at around two a.m., and that she always goes into Theodora’s room when she does so. Someone was trying to frame Heppy. So who else could it be? We knew from the evidence of a witness that only someone with a cabin on the port side of the saloon deck could have committed the crime.’
‘What witness?’ asked Daniel, interrupting rudely.
I saw May bounce and twist in her seat.
‘Someone,’ I said. ‘We aren’t at liberty to say.’
My father pressed down on the top of May’s head until she subsided crossly.
‘We also deduced that, because it must have been someone who knew that Heppy sleepwalked, it had to be a Breath of Life member, or ex-member, which meant—’
‘— Miss Doggett, Mr DeWitt, Miss Bartleby or Mr Miller!’ said Daisy at once. ‘We had our suspects. But who fitted the facts? We had to dig deeper. And what we discovered was extremely interesting.’
2
‘This really is all nonsense,’ said Daniel. ‘Are you going to admit that you’re not policewomen at all? You’re little girls – you’re the same age as these boys!’
‘I did think they were at first,’ said Mr Young plaintively.
‘We are absolutely NOT the same age as the boys!’ cried Daisy. ‘You can look at our passports, if you like.’
‘Oh really?’ asked Daniel. ‘May I? As it happens, I’ve done a spot of spying myself. I’ve been into your cabin and I have your passports here.’
He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out two passports. My heart clenched. ‘Just look at them! These are not young women – these are little girls, not even out of school yet. See!’
As I watched, he thrust the two passports in Mr Mansour’s face.
‘How dare you!’ cried Daisy, panting with rage. ‘How dare you break into OUR cabin!’
‘Ah, you don’t like it much, do you?’ crowed Daniel. ‘Mr Mansour, just look at these. They were clearly both born in 1920 … something!’
Mr Mansour peered at the pages Daniel had thrust under his nose. The whole saloon had gone shiveringly still, or perhaps it was only the inside of my own head.
‘Hmm,’ said Mr Mansour at last. ‘It is not very clear, is it? There seems to have been some water damage.’
‘We were caught in the rain at Paddington Station,’ said Daisy, pink with outrage.
‘LIAR!’ cried Daniel.
‘Curious but not definitive,’ said Mr Mansour. ‘And if the two young ladies say they are from the police, and Miss Wong’s father confirms it, then I must listen to him.’
My father merely turned his gaze on to Daniel and nodded. I knew it was because he could not bear to lie again, but to Daniel it must have seemed like yet another confirmation.
‘You – you’re all quite mad! This is nonsense!’
‘Do be quiet,’ said Daisy. ‘We must get on with revealing the murderer. As we were saying, we had narrowed down the suspects to four. Now we must return to what we discovered in Theodora’s cabin, and examine it more thoroughly.’
‘There were some very odd things,’ I said in answer to her nod. ‘It wasn’t only that the sheet was on the floor, it was – well, the detail of it. Daisy, you explain.’
‘Blood!’ said Daisy. ‘The thing about blood is that, when it’s fresh, it’s a liquid, so it tends to drip and move about.’
Miss Bartleby said, ‘Really! Ugh!’
‘And that’s what the blood on the sheet in Theodora’s room had done. The sheet was all covered in long drips. Which, when you think about it, quite goes against the laws of physics. You see, the sheet was on Theodora’s bed when she was murdered, and then it ended up crumpled on the floor. There shouldn’t have been any time when it was hanging up – only from the evidence of the drips, we can tell that there was. So why on earth would someone – the murderer – hang up a sheet and then throw it back down onto the floor?’
‘We worked it out when we looked at the curtains in the door of Theodora’s cabin,’ I said. ‘There were one or two little smears of blood on them, and more on the curtain rail. But we guessed that the sheet might have brushed up against them—’
‘Not guessed,’ said Daisy. ‘We never guess. We looked rationally at the stains, and then at the sheet, and deduced that the sheet must have been hung up in the doorway immediately after the murder. After we’d worked that out, the reason why came quite quickly on its heels. Watson, do the honours.’
I took a deep breath. I could feel the eyes of everyone in the room on me, and I realized that I am almost used to this now. I always think of Daisy as the one who is the centre of attention, but the truth is that these days I don’t mind attention at all. ‘The murderer hung up the sheet so that Heppy would push through it, thinking it was just the curtain to the room, and cover herself in blood,’ I said.
Several people exclaimed. I saw Mr DeWitt look horrified.
‘This whole murder was very cleverly planned,’ said Daisy. ‘Planned to look as though Heppy murdered her mother in her sleep, when really that wasn’t the case at all. The murderer killed Theodora when they were very much awake, and then spent time carefully staging the scene. They hung up the sheet, knowing perfectly well that Heppy would soon walk through it. She would only notice the blood when she woke up – and, of course, her first assumption, and the assumption of everyone else, would be that she killed her mother.’
Heppy sobbed quietly.
; ‘And that’s what we all thought, didn’t we?’ I went on. ‘That’s what Mr Mansour assumed, and why he locked her away. But, as soon as we realized what the sheet really meant, we saw how useful Heppy’s arrest was to all of our suspects.’
‘How could you say that?’ gasped Miss Bartleby. ‘Poor sweet Heppy! I was devastated!’
‘Were you!’ snapped Daisy. ‘Shall we take you first, since you’ve so helpfully volunteered?’
3
‘Daisy,’ I said, laying my hand on her arm. I had a worm of discomfort in my heart. What we knew about Miss Bartleby – I did not think it should be shared. But Daisy narrowed her eyes and shook me off.
‘The truth is important,’ she said. ‘We have to do this!
‘You were with the victim last night,’ Daisy went on, turning back to Miss Bartleby. ‘We all know that. You helped her get ready for bed – you and Heppy. Did you argue with Mrs Miller? Did you decide to go back later, when you knew she was asleep, and kill her, unlocking Heppy’s door afterwards, so that she would sleepwalk into her mother’s room and be blamed for it?’
‘No!’ said Miss Bartleby, raising a shaking hand to her mouth. ‘I would never! I loved Theodora!’
‘Perhaps you did,’ said Daisy. ‘Perhaps that’s the truth of it. Perhaps you loved her enough to commit a murder on her behalf – because that’s what happened to Joshua Morse, isn’t it? You killed him for her?’
‘NO!’ cried Miss Bartleby. Her eyes were bright with tears now, her little mouth trembling. ‘I – it – I don’t – I don’t remember. I don’t remember, please.’
‘Daisy!’ I snapped. This was too much. I did not want us to shame Miss Bartleby like this.
‘We’ll leave Joshua’s death for now,’ said Daisy, eyeing me reluctantly. ‘And – well, for this crime, we came to the conclusion that you did not kill Theodora. You’re far too short to reach the top of the curtain rail, for one thing. There was no blood on your clothes this morning, and no blood in your room – it seems quite clear that you are entirely innocent. So, regretfully, we must turn away from you. You did not unlock Heppy’s door last night. But, again, we know that someone did, for we have a witness who saw Heppy leaving Theodora’s room at two a.m. this morning. Mr DeWitt, please let everyone know what you told us earlier.’
‘Ah,’ said Mr DeWitt, straightening his spine. ‘Well. I happened to be awake at two—’
‘Why?’ asked Daisy sweetly.
‘I, ah, couldn’t sleep. So I went out of my cabin and saw – well, I saw Heppy walking away from me. She had clearly been into Theodora’s cabin, so I decided to look in on Theo, to make sure she was all right.’
Mr DeWitt’s story had already changed somewhat, I noticed.
‘I looked inside, and saw her lying there – dead! I rushed in, tripped over the sheet on the floor and realized it was covered in blood. I had to – I had to clean myself in Theodora’s sink – I thought – I didn’t want to, I mean, I didn’t want to be caught up in anything nasty.’
‘Alas, you were, anyway,’ said Daisy. ‘So, if you’re telling the truth, you saw Heppy leave at two, and then went into cabin seven to find Theodora dead in her bed, the sheet already on the floor. I assume it was lying in the middle of the floor when you fell over it, and you kicked it to the right in your haste – that’s where it was found in the morning. That part of your story does have the ring of truth to it – the sheet itself and the sink corroborate it – but could you have killed Theodora, hung up the sheet, waited for Heppy to walk through it and then did everything you say?’
‘But I didn’t!’ spluttered Mr DeWitt. ‘I didn’t! I swear it! I—’
‘I don’t believe you,’ snapped Daisy. ‘But what I do believe is the evidence of your trousers, and the Easton’s Syrup.’
Mr DeWitt froze.
‘Hazel,’ said Daisy. ‘Explain.’
‘We went into Mr DeWitt’s cabin today and noticed something interesting,’ I continued. ‘There was a pair of discarded pyjama bottoms, with blood around the hems. Exactly where it would get if Mr DeWitt had tripped over the sheet while wearing them. There was no blood anywhere else in the room, but there were seven empty bottles of Easton’s Syrup on his dresser.’
‘The thing about Easton’s,’ said Daisy, ‘is that it’s a pick-me-up that’s used quite widely. It’s supposed to be terribly good for you – but it does have quite a lot of strychnine in it. Strychnine is a poison. There’s not enough of it in Easton’s to hurt you if you shake up the bottle properly, but if you only drink the dregs you can be very badly affected. I heard about a woman who died of it! And, of course, if someone carefully strains the contents of several bottles and decants the distillation into one, the resulting mixture would be absolutely deadly. So why did Mr DeWitt have so many bottles? It seemed quite obvious. He was planning to poison the only other person on the ship who we knew took Easton’s: Theodora.’
‘You can’t prove that!’ shouted Mr DeWitt. ‘I take that tonic regularly. I – I—’
‘You’d be a fool to deny it! The tonic and the trousers prove your innocence of this crime,’ snapped Daisy. ‘That’s what you were doing last night, isn’t it? You were going to put the doctored bottle in Theodora’s room and kill her that way. But, when you woke up to carry out your plot, you stepped into the middle of quite a different one. You realized someone had already done the job you had set out to do. In a panic, you threw the doctored bottle over the side into the Nile – our witness heard the splash. But you forgot to throw away the cloth that you’d strained the tonic through, and so it was easy enough to work out what happened.’
Mr DeWitt was papery white, his face leathery with fear.
‘I didn’t kill her!’ he whispered. ‘It wasn’t me!’
‘Yes, we know,’ said Daisy severely. ‘I’ve just said: you did not commit this murder. You are the reason for the bloodstains in the bathroom, and the sheet on the floor where we found it, but we must look elsewhere for the criminal mastermind. We are getting close to the truth now – but who is it?’
4
‘So we’ve ruled out Mr DeWitt,’ said Daisy. ‘And that poisoning story got me thinking again about another poisoning we’ve heard about on this trip – that of Joshua Morse.’
‘Joshua was NOT poisoned!’ cried Miss Doggett. ‘He died of gastric flu!’
‘How dare you!’ shouted Daniel. ‘How can you still deny what happened!’
‘NOTHING HAPPENED!’ screamed Miss Doggett.
‘Now that’s not true,’ said Miss Bartleby decisively. We all turned to look at her. She was sitting up in her chair, lips pursed and brow wrinkled.
‘Rhiannon dear, we don’t talk about this! Remember?’ hissed Miss Doggett.
‘I know you’ve told me so before,’ said Miss Bartleby. ‘But I do remember, sometimes, and I’m remembering now. I didn’t serve the tea that day, because you said you’d do it!’
‘Rhiannon!’ snapped Miss Doggett. ‘You’re confused! I haven’t liked to say it, but you’re not in your right mind any more. You forget everything!’
‘I know I do,’ said Miss Bartleby, her lip trembling. ‘I know. But sometimes things come back to me, just for a while. And I know, I know now, that I wasn’t there that day. But you were, Ida.’
‘YOU ARE CONFUSED!’ bellowed Miss Doggett. Several people flinched. ‘You – you – your word means nothing. I hope you know that. There’s no proof. Joshua Morse died of a stomach complaint, and that’s all there is to it.’
‘It was you!’ whispered Daniel, staring at Miss Doggett. ‘When all along – all along – I was so sure that it was Mother. She never denied it, but I should have known – I should have known. Why, Theodora called you Cleopatra – and Cleopatra was a poisoner!’
‘Yes, Theodora never denied Joshua’s murder,’ Daisy cut in. ‘And that gave you a motive, didn’t it, Daniel? By your own admission, you went to her room at half past twelve. You were the last person to see her alive. So – did you kill h
er?’
‘No!’ said Daniel. ‘I swear it!’
‘I don’t think much of that,’ said Daisy. ‘I suspect you’ve at least entertained the idea before, haven’t you? You said that you came on this ship to try to reconcile with your mother, but I don’t believe that. I think you were out for revenge. It’s true that you didn’t have any blood on you this morning – but you might have thrown away your clothes. If you went in to see your mother at twelve thirty, and we know that Heppy sleepwalked at two a.m., it’s possible that the blood might have been dry by then – but the night was cold, and so we can’t be sure of that. So it could very well have been you – until we take into account something that Miss Doggett told us.’
‘Pardon?’ said Miss Doggett.
‘You said,’ Daisy told her, ‘that you were praying in your cabin, and you had a vision of Theodora with three stab wounds in her chest and throat. That is why you weren’t surprised this morning – because your magic powers had already shown her death to you.
‘Now, did you truly have a magic vision? I don’t believe so at all. It’s nonsense, pure and simple. So, how could you have known in what part of her body and how many times Theodora was stabbed before Heppy discovered her body this morning? Logically, there’s only one answer to that. You saw her body. Either you killed her, or you walked into her room after she had been murdered and saw her then.’
The whole saloon had gone quiet, watching Daisy, who waved her hands in the air as though she was pulling her story out of it.
‘I asked myself which one it was, and I was not sure. But then – Hazel, will you tell everyone exactly what Miss Doggett said to us about the sheet? Because I think it’s very interesting indeed.’
‘Miss Doggett said that Theodora was lying with three stab wounds in her chest and throat, and the sheet tucked up around her neck, as it always was,’ I said.
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