‘Oh,’ I said, confused. ‘That’s so interesting. I’m going to have to look up sextants in an encyclopedia once I get on shore, I guess. By the way, I want to talk to as many people as I can, about their impressions, you know. Who else was on the boat deck? I know Ronan and Gil were there. I’ve already talked to them.’
Popeye mentioned several seamen I wouldn’t know if I fell over them. And Nigel, whom I’d noticed myself from my spot on the rail.
‘What about Ensign Bates and Blanche Bryant?’
‘I didn’t see Bates. Why don’t you ask Mrs Bryant yourself?’
I was prepared for this. ‘I missed her at breakfast and she’s not in her berth or the wardroom.’
‘Yeah, that woman is a loner, for sure. She must have a hidey-hole somewhere. No, I didn’t see her.’
So Tom and Blanche still didn’t have alibis.
I again fought the wind climbing down the ladder to the main deck. I had some sort of idea about trying to find Blanche and Tom together. I searched among the vehicles on deck, had several conversations with various seamen on cigarette breaks, but couldn’t find Tom or Blanche, alone or together. Mind you, I didn’t try to get into any of the trucks and vans – that would be too obvious.
Back in my bunk, wrapped up in every blanket I had, I read through my notes. I should feel successful, I told myself. I’d found – through a very clever ruse, I thought – that Tom and Blanche weren’t on the boat deck during the iceberg episode. And Tom didn’t carry his message to Sparks in person. But I didn’t feel successful. I felt rotten. Was it really possible that one or the other of them, or both, had murdered Grace? I’d been obsessed with the possibility of murder ever since finding Grace’s body, but now it felt real.
‘What do we do now?’ Olive asked. Olive had joined me on my bunk, where we were reducing my stock of Dellaphine’s pralines.
‘I think we should go back to the master,’ I said. ‘And tell him he must conduct an official inquiry into Grace’s death.’
‘But we don’t know anything,’ Olive said, ‘not really. Just that we can’t alibi Tom and Blanche. But this is a big ship with a hundred people on board. And dozens of places they could have been.’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘that’s the point. We can’t interrogate every seaman and every passenger. We’d never get away with it. But the master can. He can order everyone on board into his cabin one at a time and ask them anything he wants. He can send anyone to the brig. A master is king of his ship.’
‘There’s no motive. We have no proof at all that Grace’s death was related to Eddie Bryant’s death on the previous voyage – or to anything else for that matter. Just suspicions.’
‘The master can ask questions about that too. He can ask Gil what he and Eddie talked about when Gil visited him; ask Nigel what he overheard and what Grace knew. And ask Blanche where she was when her husband and Grace were killed.’
‘But he called the police when the ship docked,’ Olive said. ‘Wasn’t there an investigation then?’
‘Not much of one. Just enough to provoke gossip about Blanche. Anyway, we can’t do anything about that now. It’s finding justice for Grace that I’m concerned about.’ I snapped the top back on the tin of pralines.
TWELVE
The master was livid. His face was scarlet and a vein in his forehead bulged. His wizardish eyebrows were knit in a straight line across his forehead. I thought the man might have a heart attack.
‘What is wrong with you?’ he asked. ‘Why can’t the two of you mind your own business? The Secretary of the Navy made a terrible mistake allowing women on military vessels. It’s not natural!’ He slammed his hand down on the tiny desk in his quarters.
‘We can’t ignore the facts,’ Olive said.
‘I decide what the facts are on this ship!’ the master said.
‘Please listen to us,’ I said. ‘We think a young woman might have been murdered.’
The master, who looked more and more as if he might be eighty years old rather than in his spry seventies, gave in. He listened. When we were done, he toyed with his pencil for a few minutes, then looked up at us, speaking more calmly than he had in a long time.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘You tell me that you can’t place either Ensign Tom Bates or Blanche Bryant during the time of Grace’s death. That, in spite of the fact that almost everyone was on deck when we passed the iceberg. OK, then. Let’s ask them where they were. Seaman!’ he called out.
The seaman on duty outside the master’s cabin entered.
‘Sir?’ he said.
‘Please find Ensign Bates and Blanche Bryant and bring them here right away. If you have any difficulty locating them, shanghai some help.’
‘Yes, sir,’ the seaman said.
After the seaman left, the master swiveled his chair toward us. ‘This may take some time. I don’t believe Ensign Bates is on watch. You may wait on my bunk until they arrive. I have some paperwork to finish.’ He swiveled back to his desk. Olive and I perched on the edge of his bunk. I felt like a child sent to sit in a corner for bad behavior.
Ensign Bates had such an innocent, perplexed look on his young face when he entered the master’s office that my purpose almost failed me. He pulled off his watch cap and spoke to the master, but not before he stared at Olive and me. ‘Master?’ he said. ‘You sent for me?’
‘These ladies have some questions for you and Mrs Bryant. We are waiting for her to join us.’
‘What is going on?’ he said.
‘Be patient.’
We all waited like mourners in a graveyard when the casket is late for its burial – and it’s raining.
The seaman the master had sent for Tom and Blanche showed up at the door with Blanche.
When she entered the cabin, her expression wasn’t surprised, but defiant. The master dismissed the seaman, which left the five of us crammed into his cabin.
‘What is this about?’ Blanche asked.
‘I hesitated to call you in,’ the master said. ‘But I want this matter closed. Mrs Pearlie and Miss Nunn have some serious questions for you. They are convinced that Miss Bell was murdered, and since I refused to open an official inquiry, they have been doing some private detection.’ The master’s tone of voice was decidedly derisive, but I knew to keep my mouth shut about it. For now, anyway.
Both Blanche and Tom exclaimed, but the master raised his hand. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Wait. First, I want Miss Nunn and Mrs Pearlie to explain their suspicions.’
Olive and I were both well trained in our vocations, and I thought that our presentations were clear and professional. I described Grace’s position on the staircase and where the contents of her tray were scattered. Olive went over the lack of bruises on Grace’s body. I watched Tom’s face. By the end of our explanations, he looked perturbed, but not guilty. Blanche was furious, but she didn’t look guilty, or even frightened, either.
‘That’s disturbing,’ Tom said, ‘but what does that have to do with me?’
‘Tom,’ Blanche said, ‘don’t you understand? You and I are lovers. We murdered my husband; Grace knew something that implicated us, so we murdered her, too.’
Tom went as white as the ice that floated all around us. He choked out a response.
‘What is wrong with you?’ he said to me and Olive. ‘How could you possibly think such nonsense!’
‘There’s nothing wrong with us,’ I answered. ‘We believe that Grace was murdered, and since we have no official help from the master, we are trying to get justice for her. We haven’t been able to place either of you at the time Grace died. We want to know where you were.’
‘I was standing next to you at the rail of the ship!’
‘Not for long. You said you needed to deliver an order to Sparks in the radio room. But when I talked to him, he said you sent one of your gunners to him with the message.’
‘For God’s sake! I was pulled away by a problem with the stern anti-aircraft gun. A defective shell had jammed t
he mechanism. It took me and two of my men an hour to repair it. I can give you their names if it’s necessary.’
‘Good,’ I said. I was pleased that Tom had an alibi. Despite my determination to find Grace’s killer, I was relieved that Tom was in the clear.
That left Blanche.
‘Mrs Bryant, we all know that you prefer your privacy. But you must tell us where you were around sixteen hundred hours on the day Grace Bell died,’ the master said to her. ‘And if someone can vouch for that.’
‘All right,’ Blanche said. ‘I will produce my alibi. But I’ll need to fetch it. You may send a seaman with me if you’re afraid I’m on my way to throw myself into the ocean.’
‘What do you mean, “produce”?’ the master asked.
‘You’ll see.’ With that, Blanche turned and left. The master ordered the seaman on watch outside his door to follow her.
‘What is that damn woman up to now?’ the master muttered.
The few minutes that passed went by very slowly. The master fiddled with the paperwork at his desk. Tom leaned up against the bulwark, his arms crossed. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
We heard footsteps coming down the passageway.
‘At last,’ the master muttered, turning away from his work. A knock sounded at his cabin door. ‘Come,’ he said.
Blanche came in holding the hand of a boy who looked to be around fourteen years old. Only his face and hands were clean. The rest of him was filthy. The boy was skinny, had dirty blond hair that straggled below his ears, bright blue eyes and the kind of obstinate expression often seen on the faces of young people the news magazines called ‘teenagers’.
‘Here is my alibi,’ Blanche said. ‘Bruce and I were together on the ’tween deck during the entire time the ship was near the iceberg. We were looking at it through a porthole near the ladder to Hold Five.’
The boy stepped forward and stretched out his hand to shake hands with the master.
‘My name is Bruce,’ he said. ‘I snuck on board your ship at the Navy Yard.’ The boy spoke with an educated British accent.
‘I’ll be damned,’ the master said. ‘A stowaway!’
‘Mrs Bryant found me after we left port,’ Bruce said. ‘She’s been helping me. She gave me blankets and food. She brought me a life preserver during the gale and stayed with me.’
So that’s where Ronan’s extra life preserver had gone. And the leftovers that Blanche took from our meals.
‘And what,’ the master said to Blanche, ‘were you thinking? You should have reported this child immediately. His family must be worried sick!’
‘My family is in England,’ Bruce said. ‘They sent me to the United States to be safe. I don’t want to be safe! I want to go home! Mrs Bryant understood and wanted to help me.’
‘I took care of the boy until we were past any place you could drop him off,’ Blanche said. ‘I know how it feels to want to be home so desperately.’
‘Ensign Bates,’ the master said, ‘would you please take our stowaway to the chief steward. See that he is cleaned up and fed. And we need to find him a bunk.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Tom said, taking the boy by the arm and guiding him out into the passageway. But not before Bruce winked at Blanche.
That left the three of us – me, Olive and Blanche – alone with the master in his cabin.
‘Mrs Bryant,’ he said to Blanche, ‘once we reach Liverpool, I will see that you are charged with … I don’t know what yet, but there must be laws against harboring stowaways. Believe me, I will find out.’ He switched his gaze to Olive and me. ‘Locking you up in the brig would be too good for the pair of you. You’ve disrupted the ship’s routine, my work, irresponsibly, during wartime. Eddie Bryant killed himself. Grace fell and hit her head. There will be no more talk of murder – understand? Now get out of my sight.’
I hid out in my berth while the story of my humiliation spread around the entire ship. At least I assumed it was being passed from seaman to passenger and back around again. I must look like a fool. A bored spinster who invented a murder to occupy herself – the typical nosy woman.
Defeated by my failure, I’m sure the master assumed I’d be quiet and ladylike for the rest of the trip.
He didn’t know me very well.
I dug my gin out of my musette bag and took a swig from the bottle and leaned back against the bulwark at the head of my bed. Yes, I’d been wrong, very wrong. Blanche didn’t murder Grace. Neither did Tom. In a way, though, being wrong was well worth it, because I’d found out they both had solid alibis. Someone else had murdered Grace.
She had been murdered, I was sure of it, and no dismissal by the master could convince me otherwise.
I’d had visions of being completely ostracized by my fellow passengers and the ship’s officers, but everyone was intrigued by our young stowaway and Blanche’s role in his adventure. The two of them sat together at dinner, surrounded by the passengers and several of the officers, basking in the attention, like movie stars being adored by their fans. The Smit girls, especially Corrie, peppered them with questions.
Bruce didn’t say much at first. He was focused on eating a plate piled with meat loaf, mashed potatoes crowned with a chunk of melting butter, carrots and lima beans. The chief steward had done a good job cleaning him up. His dusty blond hair was revealed as straw-colored and he had light freckles spattered across his nose. He was wearing seaman’s trousers cinched to his narrow waist with a rope and a thick sweater with arms rolled up.
‘I did my best to keep him fed,’ Blanche said, ‘but I’m afraid he’s lived mostly on apples and bread.’
‘What would you have done if Mrs Bryant hadn’t found you?’ Corrie asked.
Bruce had excellent manners. He finished chewing and swallowing before answering.
‘I was going to sneak out at night and steal from the galley. But like an idiot, I didn’t realize the galley was just as busy at night as it was during the day,’ Bruce said.
‘How did you get on board to start with?’ Ronan asked.
‘The dock was so busy that no one paid any attention to me. I hid in a stack of cargo and got winched up with it. When it got lowered into the hatch, I crawled off at the ’tween deck. Otherwise, I would have been caught by the seamen unloading in the hold.’
‘You must have been really cold,’ Alida said.
‘Yes, I was. But I found a bulkhead right next to the engine stack and made camp there.’
One of the messmen brought a second plate of food and offered it to Bruce. ‘Still hungry?’ he asked the boy. ‘Want another helping?’
‘Yes, please,’ Bruce answered. He resumed eating, leaving the rest of the story to Blanche to finish.
‘I was looking for a place to sit alone and smoke a cigarette in peace,’ Blanche said. ‘I remembered the ’tween deck from my earlier voyage. There’s a small door and a ladder down to it under the bridge deck. I tripped right over Bruce. We were both scared to death and screamed bloody murder. It’s a miracle no one heard us.’
‘Isn’t it kind of serious not to report a stowaway?’ Mr Smit asked.
Blanche shrugged. ‘After I heard Bruce’s story, I just couldn’t turn him in.’
‘So, Bruce,’ Tom said, ‘I know you’ve been grilled by the master and Chief Pearce. But how about telling your story to the rest of us?’
Bruce shoved his empty plate away from him and shrugged. ‘I want to go home. I hated being sent away with my sisters. Lots of boys my age are helping in the war effort. I could be a bicycle messenger, or work on a farm. What was I supposed to tell my friends? That I was safe in America while they were dodging bombs?’
‘Where are your parents, then?’ Mrs Smit asked.
Bruce shrugged again. ‘That’s the thing.’ His voice cracked, which he tried to hide by finishing his glass of milk. ‘I haven’t seen them in ages. My father is in the army. He was in North Africa and now he’s in Italy. My mother’s doing something secret with codes. She’s jolly good at ma
ths. I don’t know where she is, but she’s fine, my grandmother says.’
‘So you were living with your grandparents?’ Mrs Smit said.
‘Yes, but we didn’t see much of Grandfather, either. He was always at work. He was a professor of modern languages at Cambridge, but now he’s in the Foreign Office.’
‘That must have been hard on your grandmother,’ Ronan said, ‘taking care of you children on her own.’ Blanche began to shake her head at Ronan, but he didn’t notice.
‘She was always a tough old bird,’ Bruce said, ‘until my uncle died. He was my father’s younger brother. Grandmother, well, she had a rough time. Some days she didn’t get out of bed. That was when my mother and grandfather decided to send my two sisters and me to stay with friends in America.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I’m going back home! I can help, and no one can stop me!’
Ronan laid a gentle hand on Bruce’s shoulder. ‘I can see why Mrs Bryant kept your secret,’ he said. ‘Of course, you should be home; you could be a big help to your family.’
Bruce blinked back tears. ‘Thanks,’ he said.
‘Look,’ Ronan said, ‘has the chief steward given you a bunk yet? I’m in a double by myself. Want to share with me?’
‘Sure,’ Bruce said, ‘that would be great.’
The sunshine brought us all out on the deck the next morning after breakfast. We knew not to delay; the weather could change at any moment. We could even see some of our fellow convoy ships, no longer gray formless shapes surrounding us in the fog. Flags, mostly American or the Union Jack, fluttered from their staffs. The Evans was nearby, as usual. The corvette painted on its side was clearly seen in the sun.
‘Do the Germans really fall for that?’ Bruce asked me.
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