by Fiona Leitch
“Okay,” I said, “say someone does have a grudge against me. That gives them a motive, a pretty crap one, but a motive nonetheless. I have absolutely no idea who it could be, so we still need to look at who, physically, could have killed Sylvia. And who could have stolen my belt in order to frame me.” I shuddered at the idea of the murderer being in our cabin, poking around in our things, carefully choosing their next murder weapon. “So let’s look at that first. Who could have got in here? And when?”
“You were certain someone had been in here when we got back from dinner last night,” said Will. “If you remember, I was all ready to - ”
“Babe, you’re always ready for that. So we’ve both got keys. I had mine on me. Where was yours?”
“I’ve never used it,” said Will. “Whenever I’ve left the cabin you’ve either been with me, or stuck in here. You always make a point of patting your pocket or checking your bag for your key, so I haven’t bothered with mine.”
I looked at him in alarm. “Then whoever took the corkscrew could’ve taken your key and used it to get in here!”
Will looked around in mild panic, then relaxed. “No, look, it’s on the side where I left it, by the kettle. But I will take it with me in future. Just in case…”
“So we’re back to the same conclusion we had with Louise’s murder. That the murderer had a master key or something.”
Will nodded. “It looks like it… But if that’s case, how come Harry Carter hasn’t discovered that one’s missing? Hotels don’t give out master keys to everyone. Staff normally have to sign them out so they can keep tabs on them.”
“Maybe the murderer takes the key out and puts it back before anyone notices it’s gone.” I looked at Will. “If they have access to the keys, they must be a crew member.”
“Rob, the missing purser,” said Will. I nodded.
“Maybe. It depends on whether he’s missing because he’s lying low, or because he’s…” I drew my finger sharply across my throat. “No one seems to have seen him for days, but Karl said he’s been back at some point to change his uniform.”
Will smiled grimly. “Someone came back to change his uniform,” he said. “That doesn’t mean it was Rob. They could have done away with him, taken his cabin key and stolen his clean uniform.”
“Which means the murderer could be running around dressed as a crew member, able to get hold of a master key and, by extension, able to access every single cabin on this ship.” We looked at each other, my words sinking in. “That’s a comforting thought, isn’t it?”
“Yes…” Will looked thoughtful. “Maybe we should go and talk to the duty purser, and find out how easy it would be for someone to access the keys without being challenged.”
“Come on then.” I stood but he smiled and grabbed my hand.
“It’s nearly midnight,” he said. “It can wait until the morning. There’ll probably only be a skeleton staff on at this time of night, and it might be better when there’s a few of them on duty so we can ask them if they’ve seen anyone looking suspicious. Or seen Rob, for that matter.” I sat down, reluctantly admitting he had a point.
“Okay,” I said. “But tomorrow, first thing, we go and talk to them. We’ve only got two more days at sea, and time’s running out…”
We went to bed, and after much tossing and turning Will finally fell asleep. I lay next to him, listening to the sound of his breathing and watching the moonlight filter through the curtains. The pattern of the waves rose and fell across the ceiling as the boat ploughed onwards through the swelling sea, reminding me of the nights we’d spent together in Venice; listening to the much gentler tide lapping against the buildings and the early morning boat traffic along the canal. I thought of our first night together, and everything we’d been through since, and thought, everything will work itself out, it always does, then fell asleep, hoping I was right.
I dreamt I was running through the dark, winding passages of Venice again, pursued by a skeleton in an immaculate white crew uniform. The skeleton was laughing and, bizarrely enough, humming ‘Dancing Queen’ in an evil, menacing tone that made me shudder; it sounded like the buzzing of thousands of flies, grating at my nerves, making my flesh crawl as I imagined them feeding on the rotting corpses of Louise and Sylvia.
I turned left, then left again, passing the restaurant where Will and I had first had dinner together; then another left, through an archway into a narrow, unlit corridor that led into a square full of people dancing. I’ll be safe here, I thought in my dream; but the dancers all turned away from me. I recognised Zoé and Heather, Michael, Harvey and, um, Benny and Bjorn from Abba. I gave up; none of them were going to help me, least of all the Scandinavian pop stars. Ungrateful bastards, I thought, I bought your Greatest Hits CD! I turned and fled down another passage way, by now hopelessly lost; but this one ended in a deep, dark canal, its black waters gleaming like ink. I turned, feeling the skeleton behind me, its ivory bones gleaming in a sudden shaft of moonlight. The skeleton reached out to me and I braced myself, waiting for it to push me into the canal. But it just held out a pen and said, ‘Will you sign my book?’
Chapter 24
I woke the next day feeling surprisingly rested for someone who’d had a night full of mad dreams involving boney book fans and Swedish musicians. Will was already up, shaving in front of the bathroom mirror clad in just a towel, wrapped around his waist. Although he was 50 years old and entering the realms of middle age, he still had a good body. His time in the Army and then the Intelligence services had kept him lean and surprisingly muscular; surprising, because he’d been with me nearly 2 years now, and I like my food - in case you hadn’t noticed - and am not keen on any exercise other than the horizontal kind. Although he has occasionally persuaded me to stand up or bend over, and there was that one time when we were both lucky to escape without a hernia…But anyway. I digress.
I lay in bed and watched him pulling faces at himself in the mirror as he shaved. He filled out one cheek with his tongue and caught sight of me from the corner of his eye.
“Morning,” he said, running the razor under the tap. “Everything okay?”
“Just admiring the view,” I said, giving him a salacious glance and licking my lips suggestively. He threw a hand towel at me.
“Behave yourself! You treat me like a piece of meat.”
“No I don’t! Although you could have thrown the towel you’re wearing at me…” He laughed.
“I was trying not to encourage you. But I’m not sure why…” He dried his face and joined me on the bed. “I just got clean, but I could get dirty again.”
I sat up, kissed him hard and threw back the covers. “Nope! No time! This is the day we solve the case!”
“Is it?”
“It has to be. We reach New York tomorrow.”
As luck would have it, the same purser who had brought me Louise’s message on the night of her death was on duty behind the desk. He nodded at us in a friendly but professional manner as he finished a telephone conversation.
“How can I help you?” he asked, although he obviously had some idea of what we wanted. He lowered his voice as a group of passengers walked by. “The Chief Purser has told me to answer any questions you might have about - that night.”
“Thank you,” I said, smiling at him and peering at his name badge. David. “We can see you’re busy so we won’t take up too much of your time. I don’t suppose you know Rob? The steward we’ve been looking for?”
He shook his head. “I don’t, sorry. He never worked the desk on the same shift as me, and I don’t think he’d done many trips.”
“How long have you worked for the cruise line?” asked Will.
“I’m one of the longest serving pursers,” said David. “I’ve worked here for about five years.”
“That’s a lot of trips,” said Will, encouragingly. “You must know this ship like the back of your hand.”
David smiled. “I do. B
etter than the Captain! She’s a beauty, isn’t she?”
“She is,” said Will. “So you know all the nooks and crannies? Maybe there are a few places the crew like to go when they’re off duty, to get away from the passengers?”
He smiled. “One or two. Most of us have to share cabins, so it’s nice to find a spot to yourself occasionally. Even better when the boss don’t know about them either.”
“Could Rob be camping out somewhere in one of these secret hidey holes, if he’s trying to keep a low profile? Mr Carter is supposed to be looking for him, but I bet he doesn’t know the ship as well as you and your mates do.”
David thought about it, then slowly shook his head. “There are places where you could tuck yourself away,” he said, “but you’d have to come out at some point, to eat and go to the loo.”
Will nodded in understanding. “I see, of course… But how about if Rob didn’t need to do either of those things? Could he stay hidden, without being discovered?”
“But surely he’d have to eat?” David looked puzzled.
“Not if something had happened to him,” said Will, gently. A look of comprehension, followed by shock, crossed the purser’s face.
“You mean - if he was dead?” Will nodded and he gulped. “I’ll have a think and see if I can come up with any ideas…”
“The other thing we need to ask you about is keys,” I said. “Who has access to the spare keys you have here?”
“There aren’t any spare keys, as such,” David explained. “They’re blanks. If a passenger loses their key we take a blank and program it to unlock their cabin.”
“And who has access to these blanks?” I asked.
“All the duty pursers. When we use a blank, we enter the card’s code number on the computer and then assign the cabin number to it.”
“So if someone had taken a blank and assigned it to, say, our cabin, it would show up on the computer?” He nodded. “Could you look up our cabin and see if that happened? And maybe Ms Meyers’ cabin?”
The purser quickly typed in a few numbers, then turned the screen around to face us.
“There are currently two key cards assigned to your cabin,” he said. “These are the cards’ unique code numbers.” He pointed to a string of digits on the screen. I took out my key card and compared it, as Will did the same. Both cards matched.
The purser then entered Louise’s cabin number. “There was just the one card assigned to Ms Meyers’ cabin, when we sailed.”
“So if anyone got into either of those cabins, they used one of those cards?” I asked. He nodded. “What about the cleaners? How do they get in to change the bedding when the cabins are empty?”
“There are master keys for each deck,” he said. “Those are kept locked up in the Housekeeping department. I helped out in Housekeeping once when we had a really rough crossing and half the cleaners got sick. I’ve got a strong stomach.”
“And there’s no way anyone could get hold of one?”
“I think it would be unlikely. Like I said, they’re kept under lock and key. Every morning the Head Housekeeper assigns each deck and the corresponding keys to the cleaners working that shift - they work in pairs, so there’s two master keys for each deck. But they’re signed out at the start of the shift and signed back in as each pair finishes. If any were missing it would soon be noticed, and they could see who had them last.”
The desk phone rang and the purser looked at us apologetically. I smiled and nodded, and he picked it up.
I turned to Will. “So there goes that theory,” I said. “Rob must have taken Louise’s key when him and Zoé took her back to the cabin, and he must’ve passed it on to the killer.”
“The mysterious woman,” said Will. “Yes. But then how did she - or Rob, if he’s still around - how did they get into our cabin?”
“God knows,” I said. I glanced at the purser, who was still talking to a passenger on the phone.
“Of course, madam,” said David.“And what cabin number is that? Thank you.”
Something clicked in my head. A light bulb went on - a very dim light bulb, maybe one of those old energy-saving ones that take a while to warm up, but a light bulb nonetheless. I looked at Will, but he hadn’t noticed a thing.
I turned to the purser, who had finished the call and was entering something into the computer.
“That phone call you just had - what was that?”
He looked surprised. “Just a passenger booking a call for this afternoon.” He grinned. “Apparently they had an afternoon nap yesterday and missed the theatre matinée, and they want to make sure they don’t miss it again today.”
“You asked for the cabin number. Doesn’t it come up on the phone, like Caller ID or something?” I could feel Will looking at me, wondering what I was getting at.
David shook his head. “No, it just rings…”
“So when Louise - Ms Meyers - when she rang and gave you the message, how did you know it was her?”
“She said it was her, and gave me her cabin number…” The purser was now looking quite worried.
“Did you recognise her voice?” asked Will. David nodded, but hesitantly.
“I hadn’t spoken to her, but I knew she was a Northerner… You don’t think…?”
“That it was someone pretending to be her. It could have been. They could have been calling from anywhere.” I turned to Will. “Maybe Louise didn’t make that call after all…”
Chapter 25
We left the stunned purser and headed for one of the few cafés we hadn’t tried yet. I ordered a pot of tea for two and we sat down, heads spinning somewhat at what could potentially be the most significant discovery of our investigation.
“Or it might be nothing,” I said. “It might still have been Louise who called…”
We sat and pondered in silence, as the waiter bought over a tray with a pretty flower patterned tea pot and milk jug, and two bone china cups.
“Shall I be Mother?” asked Will, picking up the pot. I nodded and watched as he poured. Then we sat in silence again, minds working furiously - well, I know mine was, anyway - as we sipped at our tea.
I finished my drink and carefully placed the cup in the saucer.
“You know what this means, of course,” said Will.
“That the murderer could have made the call.”
“Yes. And you know what that means.”
I thought hard, but I was still too stunned by the whole idea that it hadn’t been Louise that I came up blank. “No, what?”
“That our murder window of opportunity is all wrong.”
“It is?”
“Of course. We were basing it on Louise being alive when the pursers’ desk received that phone call. But if it wasn’t her, then the attack could’ve happened much earlier. The last time she was definitely seen alive - ”
“She was alive when I found her. Just.”
“The last time she was seen unharmed, then - was when Joel and Zoé left her in the cabin. And that was, what - 5 minutes earlier than we thought?”
I thought about Louise, lying on the carpet, and that slight flicker of recognition in her eyes as she saw me. I hoped I hadn’t imagined it, and that she’d known that she wasn’t alone as the life left her. “She couldn’t have been killed that much earlier, could she? She’d have been dead when I found her, surely?”
Will nodded thoughtfully. “Maybe…but you said it yourself, although she was bleeding steadily it was a small puncture wound, so it could have taken a while.” He fiddled with a tea spoon. “And if she was drugged and it had made her drowsy, which seems more than likely, it could have slowed her heart rate, and that could possibly slow down the rate of blood loss. Not much, admittedly, but maybe by a few minutes. I don’t know.”
I counted backwards in my head, working out the new time line in my head.
“So the murderer made the phone call at 9.33… That’s 3 minutes after the lights w
ent out in the Pearl, and about 2 minutes before they came back on. I’m assuming the murder took place just before the phone call - that would make sense, do you think?”
Will shrugged. “Probably. If they left the door unlocked for you to get in, they wouldn’t want to leave Louise for long and risk someone else finding her. And like you said, even accounting for a slow rate of blood loss, she would probably have been dead when you found her if it had been much earlier.”
“They could have made the call before the murder, but if I was bumping someone off I’d want to get it done and get myself away before I set up the body for discovery.”
“So the real murder could’ve taken place at the same time as the pretend one,” said Will.
I groaned in frustration. “So we’re none the wiser, are we? We already went through who was in the Pearl during the murder mystery, and it was basically everyone.”
“Everyone except Heather and Karl,” Will pointed out.
“Yeah…but I still think they were genuinely, you know, going for it in the next cabin. It certainly sounded genuine from where I was standing.”
“Do you remember that first night, when Heather did her impression of Louise? That sounded genuine too.”
I shook my head. Heather’s impression had been uncanny, but too many other things pointed to it being someone else. “I know it did, but think about it. If Heather was the mysterious woman, and she was off with Karl, what was Rob doing in the Pearl without her? Both Karl and Zoé said Rob was supposed to be meeting someone.” I shook my head. “And why would she kill Sylvia? She was her best friend. You saw how distraught she was."
Will looked thoughtful. “So who does that leave? We looked at who was in the Pearl when the lights came up. It doesn’t mean they were there when the lights were out, though, does it?”
“But how do we find that out? It was pitch black, remember. I couldn’t make out anyone, could you? And then of course we have no idea when or where Sylvia was murdered, so it’s not like we can look at who had the opportunity to kill her - ”