Murder on the Mary Jane Read online

  “The logical place to find more alcohol would be the kitchen,” O’Harris nodded. “Or a room near it, at least. I doubt, in his state, he fully appreciated the situation that was occurring all around him.”

  “And that leaves a very big question,” Clara stood up and rearranged the skirt of her dress. “Who killed him, and why?”

  “A crewman?” Captain Pevsner asked anxiously.

  “We can’t rule out that another passenger avoided the lifeboats,” Clara responded. “In which case, it would seem someone followed this man and killed him. Whether that was a spur of the moment thing, or whether someone was planning this, we can’t say for the moment.”

  “It’s interesting that no one appears to have missed him,” Captain O’Harris mused. “Most people do not come to these things alone.”

  “No one has come to me and said their husband or friend is missing,” Captain Pevsner confirmed.

  “So it would seem no one aboard cares much about the fellow,” Clara sighed, feeling sorry for the man on the floor.

  H.K. was clearly a wretch and a drunk, but most people came to such a predicament through ill-circumstances. Who knew what was in the man’s past that spurred him on to drink? And, had it contributed to his murder?

  “Might we ask the ship’s doctor to take a look at him?” Clara asked.

  Captain Pevsner looked perplexed.

  “Why? He can’t be helped?”

  “The doctor may offer some insight into how he died,” Clara explained patiently.

  Captain Pevsner seemed somewhat unconvinced, but he agreed to go and fetch the doctor.

  “Nasty business,” O’Harris frowned once they were alone.

  Clara was looking at the champagne flute which was smeared with blood down one side.

  “If only he had climbed aboard the lifeboat,” she said. “He would be still alive.”

  “No wedding ring,” O’Harris noted. “We can exclude the possibility of a wife.”

  Clara glanced down at the man’s hands and saw they were bare.

  “Who comes to a New Year’s Eve party like this alone? It is hardly the sort of place you would expect to meet someone. Everyone would have come as couples.”

  “Maybe he came with a girlfriend,” O’Harris answered. “And maybe the girl got fed up with him when he started to hit the booze.”

  “That is possible,” Clara agreed. “He doesn’t look like the sort of fellow who would have trouble finding a girl to accompany him.”

  “How do you mean?” O’Harris asked curiously.

  Clara smiled.

  “He is good looking and well-off. He dressed smartly for the evening, took time over his appearance. He is not so chronic a drunk that he neglects himself. A girl who met him and did not know about his drinking would be attracted.”

  “You think he was a chronic drunk?” O’Harris tilted his head to look at H.K.’s face from another angle.

  “His face is covered in broken veins, the sort you see on someone who has either worked out in the cold a lot or drinks heavily. From his appearance I guess the latter. He has that look to him,” Clara felt sadness creeping over her again as she looked at H.K. “I think he was a regular heavy drinker. I could be wrong.”

  “What about the knife?” O’Harris moved around to study the blade that protruded from H.K.’s side.

  “Kitchen knife,” Clara shrugged. “Hardly hard to find one in here.”

  “An impulsive act, then?” O’Harris offered.

  “Maybe,” Clara still had that frown on her face. She didn’t like what she was looking at, and not just because it was a dead body. She felt there was something sinister behind this, something that went beyond an argument turned bad.

  Captain Pevsner returned with the ship’s doctor. The man was knocking on the door of retirement. Ex-Navy, as the medals on his jacket demonstrated, he had a naval pension to live off, but couldn’t quite let go of the sea. He had a thick mane of white hair and even thicker eyebrows. He seemed competent enough, at least he had been polite and friendly when Clara had visited him earlier. Now he nodded to her.

  “You look better.”

  “I feel better. That pill worked wonders,” Clara replied.

  Captain Pevsner led the doctor around the far side of the islands, so he had a view of the dead man from the feet up.

  “Oh dear,” he said as the corpse came into view, though his tone sounded more puzzled than alarmed. “A stabbing.”

  “I wondered if you could tell me anything about how he might have died, beyond the obvious,” Clara said.

  The doctor carefully dropped to his knees. The process involved a lot of creaking from his protesting joints. He crouched like a gargoyle over the body, his crown of hair making him seem all the more otherworldly. He touched the handle of the knife gingerly.

  “I would say the knife went into a lung,” he scrunched up his eyes as he assessed the angle of the blade. “The thrust would have been an upwards jab, which means the knife would have missed the ribcage and gone up beneath it. But it is too low to strike the heart, may I?”

  The doctor pointed at the knife and glanced at Clara, indicating he wanted to remove it.

  “Go ahead,” Clara said. If she was going to resolve this matter before the police came, she would need all the clues she could get. No doubt Dr Deàth, Brighton’s coroner, would not be happy with the tampering, but she was in a tricky position. Besides, she doubted Pevsner was going to allow the body to remain here. He wanted his kitchen back up and running.

  The ship’s doctor removed the knife. It was a kitchen knife, as Clara had predicted. The blade was about seven or eight inches long and had a bend at the tip.

  “Scraped a rib after all,” the ship’s doctor noted of the bent blade. “It wouldn’t have reached the heart, not from this angle and thrust so low into the body. But it would have gone into the right lung, puncturing it. That alone would not have been fatal, at least not swiftly. Do you know what happens when the lung is punctured?”

  Clara had worked as a nurse during the war and had seen her fair share of accidents and emergencies.

  “The punctured lung would leak air into the chest cavity with every breath the man took,” she said. “Eventually, the air in the chest would cause so much pressure that the healthy lung would collapse and the man would suffocate.”

  “Ah, you have some medical knowledge,” the doctor smiled at Clara warmly.

  She was beginning to like the man.

  “I was a nurse in the war.”

  “And you are quite right, but the process takes time and I don’t think our friend here had reached that stage. No, I think he bled to death,” the doctor took a good look at the blood pooled around the body. “I wonder…”

  He rose with difficulty, having to lever himself up using the counter top of one of the islands. His knees protested heartily. Once upright, he stepped over the blood pool and arrived at the dead man’s head. The process of crouching down, with the protest of his joints, was repeated until he was able to bend forward and lift H.K.’s head.

  “There!” The doctor pointed out to Clara a bloody patch on the floor and a wet looking wound on the back of H.K.’s head. “He must have fallen backwards with the shock of being stabbed, or someone pushed him, and he hit his head so hard he passed out.”

  The doctor sniffed.

  “The man reeks of alcohol. That would have helped to send him unconscious for a while, long enough at least for him to bleed out without rousing.”

  “And that’s how he died,” Clara said.

  The doctor was rising up again like some old pneumatic machine that needed oiling.

  “At least he didn’t know about it,” he observed. “Not after he fell and hit his head, anyway.”

  “Can I move him now?” Captain Pevsner glanced at Clara. “I need my kitchen back.”

  “I don’t think we can learn anymore from him,” Clara agreed. “I will need to talk to your kitchen staff, though.”

&n
bsp; Captain Pevsner was a little disgruntled, but understood.

  “The chart room is back along the corridor. They should be all there. I’ll get the body removed while you talk to them. I could do with a hand,” Pevsner looked up purposefully at Captain O’Harris.

  “I’ll remain here,” O’Harris said, with a barely perceptible groan.

  Clara patted his arm.

  “Come join me when you are done.”

  Then she headed off to locate the chart room and her first set of witnesses.

  Chapter Four

  “Which of you would be the cook?” Clara asked as she entered the chart room.

  Several unhappy faces turned towards her. The kitchen crew were all men and they all looked as though they had just burned the captain’s dinner.

  “I’m the cook,” a rugged man with the girth of an elephant levered himself up from a wooden chair. “Theobald Schilling.”

  “German?” Clara asked.

  “My father was,” Theobald shrugged. “Who are you?”

  “Clara Fitzgerald,” Clara introduced herself. “I am a private detective and Captain Pevsner has asked me to discreetly unravel the mystery of the dead man in your kitchen.”

  The men looked uncertain.

  “You?” Theobald asked. “Alone?”

  Clara made a play of looking over her shoulder to see if anyone was behind her.

  “It looks to be that way,” she remarked to Theobald. “Would you like me to inform Captain Pevsner you do not wish to cooperate with me?”

  Theobald jerked in surprise at the statement.

  “No,” he said quickly. “I was only a little taken aback.”

  Clara mellowed. She knew that, for many men, finding themselves confronted by a female private detective took some getting used to.

  “Mr Schilling, were you the first to discover the man in your kitchen?” She asked.

  Schilling shook his head.

  “That was Robbie,” he pointed to a man of about forty who had been sitting next to him. “Robbie is my assistant, but like the captain’s first mate.”

  Charlotte turned to Robbie. He was a complete contrast to his boss; skinny where Schilling was fat, calm when Schilling seemed anxious. He seemed rather bored with the whole situation, as if it was an inconvenience, like an oven stopping working.

  “Robbie,” Clara addressed the man. “What might be your surname?”

  “Bunting,” Robbie huffed, he looked unimpressed at talking to a woman detective too.

  “You went into the kitchen first?” Clara persisted.

  Robbie shrugged, indicating he thought that obvious.

  “Did you touch or move the body?” she asked.

  Robbie snorted, clearly thinking that a stupid question.

  “I stopped in my tracks and turned around to cook,” he answered. “Why would I touch him?”

  “Maybe if you thought he wasn’t dead,” Clara suggested.

  “He had a kitchen knife sticking out his side!” Robbie laughed nastily at her.

  Clara was becoming annoyed.

  “Then you recognised the knife?” She asked him sharply.

  Robbie seemed wrong-footed for a moment.

  “What?”

  “You recognised the knife as belonging to the kitchen?” Clara said.

  Robbie glanced at Schilling, a sudden uneasiness creeping over him.

  “It was a knife,” Robbie grumbled. “The handle looked like the ones we have in the kitchen.”

  “Did you notice anything else?” Clara resumed.

  Robbie regained his earlier arrogance and sneered at her.

  “The fellow was dead and bleedin’ all over the floor. I noticed that.”

  Clara narrowed her eyes at him, but said no more. He was not worth the aggravation. Instead she turned to Schilling.

  “When the evacuation was declared, what happened in the kitchen?”

  “We turned off the hobs,” Schilling hefted his shoulders. “Left the ovens on though, because Pevsner hoped we would not be long. The ovens are old and temperamental. They take a while to heat up to the right temperature. I prefer not to turn them off and let them get cold if I can help it.”

  “You fully expected to come back,” Clara observed. “You were confident Captain Pevsner could deal with the mine.”

  “Pevsner is an old hand at this,” Schilling replied. “He has dealt with mines before, admittedly that was during the war, but I didn’t doubt him.”

  Schilling seemed the honest, loyal sort. The sort who does not think too hard about possibly bad consequences. One of those souls who was forever hopeful that everything would be alright. It seemed he had absolute faith in Pevsner.

  “Did you all head to the lifeboats together?” Clara asked.

  “We did,” Schilling confirmed. “I made sure everyone was aboard a lifeboat before they launched.”

  “The band did not get the same consideration,” Clara pointed out. “Why was Pevsner happy to let you off and not the musicians?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Robbie snapped. “The musicians could keep playing and hold up peoples’ spirits. We were of no use aboard. No point cooking for people when they are all out at sea!”

  “You might have helped dispose of the mine,” Clara retorted, fed up with the snide man.

  “None of us know how to shoot a rifle,” Robbie told her promptly, which provided Clara with an opening to respond.

  “Really? Surely you served in the war?”

  Schilling gave a strange cough. His second assistant, who had yet to be introduced, seemed to try and lean away from Robbie, distancing himself. The kitchen lads made no comment, keeping to themselves. Robbie’s sullen look had become ingrained, but now he seemed to be scowling at the universe at large. No one answered Clara.

  Clara folded her arms across her chest.

  “I seem to have touched a sore spot,” she reflected. “You did not serve in the war, then?”

  Robbie made no answer. Schilling cleared his throat once again and then spoke.

  “Robbie was a conscientious objector,” he explained. “He spent most of the war in a prison for his views.”

  Clara now saw why the topic had caused such concern, and why the second assistant, who was probably a fraction too young to have served in the conflict himself, seemed to have an issue looking at Robbie. Schilling tried to deflect attention.

  “I never passed the medical,” he slapped his belly. “The recruiting sergeant took one look at me and said it would be too much work and effort to get me into shape. I offered to cook for the army. They said they couldn’t find a uniform to fit me. So, I ended up back with Captain Pevsner, cooking for his crew and the men he was transporting.”

  “I can see why Pevsner let you board the lifeboats,” Clara replied. “No point keeping you aboard and risking your lives for no reason.”

  She wondered if the band would see things that way.

  “Before you left the ship, did you happen to glimpse the man in the kitchen? Maybe on deck, or heading down a corridor?”

  “I didn’t see him,” Schilling shook his head, then he glanced at his kitchen crew. “Did any of you see him?”

  The others shook their heads.

  “Why was he in the kitchen anyway? Why didn’t he get in a lifeboat?” Robbie grumbled.

  “He was pretty drunk,” Clara explained. “I don’t think he realised the gravity of the situation. He appears to have gone to the kitchen looking for more champagne.”

  “He wouldn’t have found it there,” Schilling said. “Too hot. There is a cold room further along the corridor. The champagne is in there.”

  “Who would kill a random drunk looking for champagne?” Robbie blurted out. “Surely everyone was either tackling the mine or leaving on a lifeboat?”

  Clara could not answer him, it was a question she had pondered herself. Had someone spotted an opportunity for revenge? Or had there been an argument that had turned nasty?

  “Do you know who the m
an is?” Schilling asked.

  “Not as yet. No one seems to recognise him,” Clara replied. “Captain Pesvner is having the body removed from the kitchen. You should be able to get back to work soon.”

  “Good,” Schilling said with relief. “The guests will be getting through my last batch of canapes. I need to get cooking again.”

  Clara was not entirely surprised that Schilling’s primary thought was his work. She had investigated a few murders and people reacted to the discovery of a corpse in many ways. Some were overcome, while others were merely annoyed by the inconvenience the body caused them in their work. Schilling was clearly one of the latter.

  Clara thanked them for their time and then went back to the kitchen to see how things were progressing. H.K. had been removed to the cold room for the time being. Captain Pevsner was personally mopping up the blood from the floor, while O’Harris was talking to the doctor. He glanced up when Clara returned.

  “Anything?”

  “They were all on a lifeboat when the murder occurred,” Clara replied, frowning.

  “It would have been a bit too obvious to be one of them,” O’Harris agreed. “What do you want to do next?”

  “I can’t do a lot until we have a name for the man,” Clara said. “Hopefully Captain Pevsner can supply that.”

  “I shall aim to do so,” Captain Pevsner looked up from his mopping. “As soon as this is done and my kitchen can return to normal.”

  “In the meantime, let’s see if we can track down the crewman who was trying to get H.K. into a lifeboat. He may well be the last person to have seen him alive, besides the killer,” Clara said.

  Captain O’Harris joined her as she left the kitchen and headed up to the deck. The music was still playing loudly and none of the other passengers appeared to have caught wind of the murder. They all seemed to be enjoying themselves.

  “I only glimpsed that fellow who was trying to wrangle H.K. into a lifeboat,” Clara said. “I hope we can spot him again.”

  “I have a vague idea of what he looked like,” Captain O’Harris assured her. “Between us we should locate him.”

  They walked the length of the ship looking for the crewman. There now suddenly seemed to be a lot of staff aboard the ship and they had a nasty habit of looking all alike. Clara was beginning to feel a tad frustrated when Captain O’Harris nudged her hand and pointed to his right.