by Fiona Leitch
“My mum had forgotten her pills and I went back to the cabin to get them…” She looked at me, her face clouding. “Wait, you don’t think I did it? Just because I was out of the room?” She shook her head angrily. “Is that why you were asking me about Mum? Trying to see if I was some downtrodden, repressed weirdo who had suddenly snapped and stabbed a bloody irritating woman with a corkscrew?”
“No - no, of course not,” I said, unconvincingly. She looked furious.
“No? How many other people have you had this chat with?”
I sighed. “Just you. You’re the only one who was out of the room at the time. All the other suspects were in the Pearl.”
“Well it wasn’t bloody me!” She stood up. “You might write a good murder but you’re no detective.”
“I know,” I said, “but like you I’m a suspect, and an innocent one, and I am desperate to find out who really did it.”
She calmed down but still looked a bit peeved. Well, I had just accused her of being a serial killer, so I suppose it was fair enough. I gave a small laugh.
“I bet you’re wishing you hadn’t apologised to me now,” I said.
Chapter 29
So it was looking like Sarah hadn’t had a grudge against me (and Susie) after all, but chances were she had one against me now. Ho hum.
I sat back in the sun lounger and wondered what I’d missed. Sarah was right, I was rubbish at being a detective. The murders in my books were always at the very least logical, but in real life, murders can be impulsive, spur of the moment and very, very messy, both literally and metaphorically. Had Louise’s death been planned before the murderer had even set foot on the ship? The use of a date rape drug (which seemed likely, but we still didn’t know for sure) pointed to a certain level of planning; but then very few people had known that she was going to be on the ship, seeing as she was a last minute replacement for another writer. Maybe they’d chosen her at random. But then they’d apparently left her for me to find. Or maybe they hadn’t; maybe we’d been overthinking it, maybe they’d been in a hurry and they just hadn’t shut the door behind them properly. Maybe I needed another cocktail…
No, that wouldn’t help. Well, it would help me not care, but it wouldn’t improve my powers of deduction. Maybe I should get an opium habit like Sherlock Holmes? But my limited experience with drugs (not opium or anything nasty like that, I should probably point out) had sharpened my dancing skills, rather than my mental faculties. Or I thought they had sharpened my dancing skills; in reality I’d probably looked like a baboon going through a mental health crisis.
Focus, Bella! Honestly, when I’m having trouble seeing the full picture I tend to go off at a tangent.
The full picture… I face-palmed (internally - there were other people nearby). We still hadn’t watched all the footage from the Pearl, distracted as we were by our fear of Joel’s impending demise. We needed to watch the whole thing, from the beginning.
I sent Will a quick text message - S is not our killer. Back to the drawing board! Am by the pool - then scrolled backwards through the footage and began to watch.
Dear Reader, let me tell you that watching people eat their dinner is pretty boring… what with that and the alcohol I’d had earlier, I’d just started to doze off when Will appeared.
“Do you want a blanket, dear?” he asked, grinning. I swiped quickly at my mouth - I have a tendency to dribble in my sleep - and sat up.
“Cheeky sod.” I picked up the iPad, which had slipped unheeded from my hands onto the floor, and stopped the footage. He sat on the lounger next to me, leaning in to kiss me tenderly on the lips. I reached round to touch his cheek and pulled him in closer for another one.
“Do you think they’d notice if we got jiggy right here?” I murmured. He laughed.
“Hmm, I could just lie back and let you ride me like a polo pony…”
“A polo pony? Oh my god you are so posh.” He opened his mouth to protest but I stopped him with another kiss. “Don’t get me wrong, I like it. It’s very sexy…”
A buttoned-up middle aged woman holding the hand of a wet, ice-cream faced toddler ahem’d in our direction as she passed, the sticky child staring at us in deep interest. I pulled away from Will and smiled sheepishly at her, but I got the impression she was less scandalised by our behaviour than envious of us having the opportunity to snog on a sun lounger like a couple of horny teenagers.
“So…” Will became businesslike. “How come Sarah’s no longer a suspect?”
I filled him in on our conversation, cringing as I recalled my heavy-handed attempt to question Sarah. He noticed.
“Hey, you’re a detective now, Mrs Carmichael,” he said. “You’re not out to make friends, you’re out to find the truth.”
“I’m not doing a very good job of either, am I?” I said.
“At least we’re managing to rule out people.”
“Yeah but I’m too good at that. I’ve ruled out just about everyone. Are we sure it wasn’t me?”
Will smiled. “I don’t know why you’re worried about it, this is my job and even I haven’t got very far…”
I held up the iPad. “We need to finish watching the footage - all of it, from start to finish. Something has got to jump out at us, some clue…”
So with seagulls shrieking and wheeling through the sky above us, we watched. We watched as everyone trooped in wearing their fancy dress. Louise and Joel made their grand entrance again. We moved between the tables again, talking to the other diners, laughing. Rob came in and chatted with Karl, who had been paying a lot of attention to Heather on the other side of the bar. As we watched she wrote something down on a beer mat and slipped it across the counter to him, then slid off her bar stool and walked away to rejoin Sylvia. Smiling, Karl discreetly pocketed the beer mat and went to clear a table.
We watched as Rob took over bar duties, mixing drinks for the waiters during courses, and then for the diners as they wandered up to the bar in the less formal part of the evening. If he really was there to meet someone, were they already in the Pearl? There was no sign of him acknowledging anybody. I watched him closely, but -
“There!” I jabbed my finger at the screen, stopping the footage.
“What?” Will looked surprised.
“I think Rob just did something to that drink…” I rewound the footage, and sure enough behind the bar the late steward poured a glass of something - the camera was too far away and at too difficult an angle to see it clearly - and paused to look around surreptitiously. His hand disappeared into his trouser pocket, then hovered briefly over the rim of the glass - then away. He paused again, maybe to let whatever it was dissolve. Then he turned and placed the glass, which looked to contain white wine, onto the bar counter. Next came a glass of red wine and an orange juice.
“Oh my god,” said Will. On screen, my husband turned away from his conversation and picked up all three drinks, balancing the glasses precariously between his hands, and walked over to the table where I sat with Zoé, Sylvia and Heather.
“Rob spiked my drink, not Louise’s…” I couldn’t quite believe it. Despite knowing that someone had been deliberately trying to frame me for murder, it hadn’t occurred to me that maybe I had actually been their first choice of victim. I watched as, at the table, we continued our discussion - if I remembered rightly, we’d been talking about carefully planned murders versus spontaneous ones, and which was more likely to get you caught. I remembered Will saying that the problem with planning everything down to the last detail was that the people involved don’t always behave the way you expect. And I hadn’t. I hadn’t drunk that drink. I’d reached that stage of the evening where I was starting to feel a little worse for wear and had decided to stick with water for the rest of the night…
I watched as a fascinated Zoé, listening to Will with her mouth open and an air of sheer concentration on her face, picked up my glass and went to take a sip. I held my breath, even though I
knew that she hadn’t drunk any of it. On screen Zoé suddenly noticed what she was doing and shook her head, passing the drink to me and picking up her own orange juice. It could so easily have been Zoé murdered in my place! For a long time after that my glass of wine just sat on the table, all through dessert. I went to the bar and got a glass of water, and we did our usual wandering between tables, chatting. And then it happened. Louise bowled over to our now-empty table and reached for my glass - it seemed like any glass would have done - but mine just happened to contain adulterated white wine.
And no one spared her a second glance. If the mysterious woman who we’d all but forgotten about, convinced as we had been that it was Sarah - if she was in the Pearl keeping an eye on her cunning plan as it went down the toilet, she was very good at being discreet and non-reactive. There was no sign of anyone thinking bugger as Louise necked the spiked wine, no reaction to her fairly rapidly becoming legless. I seemed to be the only one who noticed her stumbling around; even her date for the night, Joel, was unaware. He was too busy watching me.
No, there was one person who’d noticed; Rob. I could see his puzzled look as he watched me, no doubt wondering when I was going to start showing the effects of the drug; then his alarm at Louise’s state, the realisation that something had gone wrong clearly apparent now that I was looking for it. As Louise got increasingly unsteady on her feet he came out from behind the bar, lurking, waiting for something to happen. He looked very much on edge.
We watched as Karl and Heather left the Pearl within two minutes of each other, having carefully avoided each other beforehand but for one surreptitious nod from Heather as she headed for the door. Nearby, I steered an apparently wasted Louise into a chair before she fell over and spoke to her, looking around for help. Zoé - who had wandered out of camera shot a few minutes before, standing on the periphery of a group of chattering murder mystery players - scurried over and, after we exchanged a few words, waved Rob over. They carefully hoisted Louise up and quickly walked her out of the room. And everyone else was so busy chatting, the drinks flowing freely, that few of them even registered them leave.
Back on deck, Will’s phone beeped. I stopped the footage as he swiped at the screen, squinting; he’d left his glasses behind in the cabin again. He frowned.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, squinting harder. “I asked Carmen in the London office to do some digging on a few of our fellow passengers, and she’s sent me a report. I can’t get the attachment to open on here…”
“Where are your glasses? Do you want me to do it?”
He shook his head. “No, I need to see it on a big screen. I’ll nip back to the cabin and look at it on the laptop. Are you coming?”
“I’ll stay here,” I said. The fresh air was helping to clear my head, which felt fuzzy not just from alcohol but from the realisation that I had been more of a target than I’d previously realised. “I’ll watch the rest of this.”
“If you can stay awake,” said Will, grinning. He gave me a kiss on the cheek and left.
I rubbed my eyes, stretched, and hit Play again.
I tried not to notice the way Joel’s eyes followed me around the room, or the way he took a deep breath, as if summoning his courage, before approaching me. One of the many other things that had been a surprise on this cruise was finding out that he apparently still had feelings for me. I say ‘apparently’, because the way he’d behaved towards the end of our marriage, and then in the Press afterwards, hadn’t pointed to him having any particular regrets other than getting caught and not being able to enjoy my money any more. Ooh, that sounded bitter. But it was true. Had that been the only reason he was with me? I’d been so infatuated with him and, I dunno, ridiculously grateful that someone so young and hot and cool had fancied me, that I think maybe deep down I’d never really accepted that he loved me. I think I’d always been waiting for him to find someone equally young and sexy. Had I done him a disservice? Had he been a lot more genuine in his affection for me? But then he had cheated on me. Would he have done that if I’d been able to have children with him?
Did any of this bloody matter now? My relationship with Will was just about the best thing that had ever happened to me. I could stop writing and never have another best or even mediocre seller now, and I wouldn’t care. I loved that man as an equal, with every fibre of my being, and I knew he felt the same about me and always would. And if that sounds soppy and pathetic and completely Mills and Boon, you know what? I don’t care. I hope you feel that way about someone some day.
I rolled my eyes at myself (internally again - there were still other people around). For god’s sake Bella, you’re supposed to be looking for a murderer, not analysing your feelings about your bastard unfaithful ex-husband! But I felt uncomfortable referring to him as that now. He was trying to help clear my name after all, and he’d apologised for his behaviour, sort of.
On screen Joel and I talked, and I told him where Louise was and sent him on his way. I rewound the footage and watched it again, this time completely ignoring the two of us - who I knew weren’t guilty of murder - and concentrating on everyone else. There must be something, someone acting guilty, or looking at the door, wondering what to do about their cunning plan that had gone so horribly awry that the wrong victim had been carted off. No. Rob came back after a few minutes and resumed his place behind the bar, smiling at the diners as he poured drinks and looking tense as they turned their backs. He was not a happy bunny.
Joel and Zoé came back, the timid bookseller looking flushed as her companion held the door open for her; very few women (and not that many men) could withstand a blast of the Joel Quigley charm when it was aimed at them, and he seemed to have recovered sufficiently from our conversation beforehand to chat easily to her. Flirting came as naturally to him as breathing, but Zoé wouldn’t have known that. And then Sarah left the Pearl, off to get her mother’s medication, and out went the lights…
I stared at the darkened screen for a few seconds; I couldn’t see a thing. Just as I went to fast forward, a flash of light appeared suddenly and disappeared just as quickly. I remembered that night; I’d thought at the time that maybe someone had opened the door and slipped out, but it was on the other side of the room so I’d dismissed it - in as much as I’d even thought about it, after everything that had happened afterwards. I rewound and watched it again; it was so brief, and the sudden brightness in the pitch dark made it difficult to make anything out. What was it?
I let the footage carry on. No more flashes of light, except for a tiny but insistent flash at the bottom of the screen, which I realised was Zoé’s phone ringing. The screen lit up as the phone rang - I heard that awful ring tone in my head again, and smiled as I remembered how loud and inappropriate it had been, and how it had completely ruined the atmosphere - then after a few seconds, it stopped. The screen went dark again. Poor Zoé, she was so mortified that it had taken a couple of rings before she’d been able to turn it off.
“Hello! I’ve been looking for you everywhere!” Talk of the devil, Zoé stood at the foot of my sun lounger, smiling. I smiled back. “What are you doing?”
“Just relaxing, getting some air,” I said, turning off the iPad. She looked at the tablet in my hand, an unasked question on her face. I hesitated for a moment; but she’d been in the Pearl, I’d just seen the evidence of that. What could be the harm in telling her? She was my greatest supporter on this ship after my two lovers - ooh, imagine a Will and Joel sandwich BELLA STOP IT! Thanking god she couldn’t hear my internal monologue (and call a psychiatrist), I held the iPad up. “I’ve been going over the CCTV footage from the Pearl, from the night Louise died.”
She looked surprised. “There was a camera in there?” I nodded. “Why didn’t Mr Carter tell you before?”
“Because he was - still is - convinced it was me whodunnit. I only got it this morning.”
“Has anyone else seen it?”
/> “I don’t think so. The Chief Purser gave it to me and Will to watch. I haven’t got to the end yet.”
“Right…” She gave me a look, and I knew she was itching to ask if she could watch it too. I knew she would love to be the one who proved my innocence. Bless her.
“I was just thinking about going to the Pearl to watch the rest of it,” I said. “There’s something on here that’s a bit weird and I want to have a look at the room again.” I thought maybe I could work out where that flash of light had come from, if I had a look around the dining room. I smiled at her. “Wanna come and be my Dr Watson?”
Chapter 30
The answer to that question was, of course, an enthusiastic ‘yes’, so the two of us made our way to the Pearl. I thought briefly of texting Will to tell him where I was, but Zoé chattered away constantly and it felt a bit rude to pull out my phone while she was in full flow.
Will and I had left the door to the Pearl unlocked, so I led the way in and sat down at a table, Zoé still warbling on about something or other (I’m ashamed to admit that I tuned her out after a while; sweet as she was, she was given to brainless prattling). I nodded in response to her comment to make it look like I was listening (don’t ask me what she said though, because I wasn’t), surreptitiously slipped my phone out of my pocket and typed in a quick text to Will, telling him where I was.
Zoé breathlessly plumped herself down next to me and leaned over to look at the iPad, which I’d lain on the table in front of me.
“So what’s this weird thing you want to have a look at?” she asked enthusiastically. There was something about her that made me think of an excitable puppy.
I looked up at the ceiling. “We’re right under the security camera,” I said, pointing upwards. “So this is as close to the camera angle as we can get.”
I scrolled back to the bits where the lights had gone out and pressed Play. There was the flash again. I looked at Zoé, who just stared blankly at me.