Dying For a Cruise (12 page)

He couldn’t have been more than five feet in height, for a start, which made her wonder how many powerful people he must have known in the police department to allow him to get around the minimum height restriction rules. Or did they even still exist?

But it was not just his height (or rather lack thereof) that made her goggle at him. He was, without doubt, quite simply the most ugly individual Jenny had ever seen. His eyes were tiny, button black and set deep in his face. His chin was non-existent, his mouth a rather lipless gash. But it was the turned-up nature of his nose, which the cook suddenly saw as he turned and looked directly at her, that made him look most like a human variety of a pug dog. It was so squashed up it looked almost comical. And the nostrils … yes, they were almost pointing upwards.

If he ever got caught out in the rain he’d surely drown, Jenny thought inconsequentially, and suddenly became aware of the hysteria behind that thought. Not to mention the unintentional unkindness. She mentally apologized, stepped to one side, and pointed into the galley. ‘He’s in there,’ she said quietly, and the small man gave her a single, sharp glance, nodded and led the way briskly inside.

The surgeon was close on his heels. The two forensics men, and the final man of the group, a big, solid, blond individual who was presumably a sergeant, stayed by the door, awaiting orders.

Jasmine said, rather loudly, ‘What on earth is going on?’

‘If you please, madam,’ the sergeant said in a deep, pleasant bass. ‘Take a seat. We’ll know more shortly.’

Hearing sudden and unexpected voices, David and Dorothy Leigh at last appeared in the doorway leading from the starboard deck and stared at the strangers in disbelief.

Inside, Inspector Neil Rycroft, he of the pug face, stared at the dead man on the floor and watched the police surgeon give his usual thorough but of necessity brief examination.

‘Dead no more than four hours, no less than one. No outward signs of violence. No cuts, bumps, contusions or entry marks that I can see. No signs of strangulation.’

‘He’s wet,’ Rycroft said. His voice was high-pitched, almost child like in tone, but curiously expressionless. He didn’t seem to be accusing the surgeon of missing the obvious, nor did he seem to be coming to any conclusions himself. That voice had misled many a criminal – and many a criminal’s solicitor – into thinking that Neil Rycroft was a bit of a simpleton.

Which he most definitely wasn’t.

The surgeon obviously knew Rycroft’s ways well, for he merely responded, just as impassively, with a single ‘yes’.

‘Drowning would seem to be the obvious cause of death,’ Rycroft added thoughtfully.

The surgeon grunted and stood up. ‘I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve completed an autopsy. We’re a bit stacked up at the moment though. A lot of those train-crash victims from Richester way have been sent down to our labs. It’ll be a few days before I can give you any details.’

Rycroft sighed. ‘Right. But you think he drowned?’

The surgeon turned the corpse over, did some rather disgusting-type medical things and then nodded.

‘I’d say, unofficially, there was little doubt of it,’ the surgeon said, then added cautiously, ‘but don’t quote me just yet. And certainly don’t put anything down on paper until I can confirm it.’

The inspector nodded, showed the surgeon out, and beckoned his forensic boys in. He shut the door carefully behind them, then stood looking at the group scattered throughout the main salon.

‘Who discovered the body?’ Rycroft asked, looking automatically at Tobias Lester.

It was odd, Jenny thought, just a shade miffed, how men of authority seemed to naturally seek out another of their kind.

Tobias nodded at Jenny. ‘Our cook did.’

The inspector and his sergeant glanced at the large, calm woman, their eyes assessing. She looked like an avenging goddess from some long-forgotten mythology – six feet tall, voluptuous and rather beautiful, in an odd way.

The parrot, which had returned to his perch on her shoulder, gave them pause, but not for long. No doubt, in the course of their professional life, they came across all sorts.

‘You found him like that?’ Rycroft jerked his head towards the galley.

Jenny shook her head. ‘No.’

Rycroft stiffened. It was a rather absurd gesture in one so small and ugly, confronting one of Jenny Starling’s girth and six-feet-tall frame. ‘You really shouldn’t interfere with a body, you know,’ he said crisply, disapproval now rife in his high voice.

‘I
do
know, as a matter of fact,’ Jenny shot back just as crisply. ‘When I went into the galley at about half past four, everything was perfectly in order. It was only when I opened the door to the cupboard that Mr Olney fell out. I left him where he lay. I touched nothing, immediately put a chair in front of the door, left to tell the captain to dock the boat and send someone for the police, then sat in the chair in front of the door until you came. Nobody went in or came out of the galley, unless they did so during the brief minute I left to inform the captain what had happened.’

She stated the facts in a calm, unassertive manner, but she noticed both policemen’s eyes sharpen on her in sudden, avid interest. She could almost read their minds.

Very calm. Very cool. Very correct. All very praiseworthy but totally unnatural. We’ll have to keep our eye on this one
.

Jenny had seen that look before in a policeman’s eye. Alas, all too often. She was dreading the time when they finally got around to taking down names and details. For her name had to be mud in the vast majority of police stations in and around Oxfordshire and the home counties.

‘I see. Very commendable,’ Inspector Rycroft said dryly. ‘Since you seem to have such a good grasp of events, perhaps you could give Sergeant Graves here a list of all the people on board? I’d also like a run-down of the ship’s itinerary.’

Tobias winced at the term ‘ship’.

Lucas stirred, thinking that he, as host, should be the one to do the talking, then suddenly remembered that these were rozzers – and Lucas Finch and rozzers had never mixed – and just as quickly subsided again, more than happy to leave the dirty work to the cook.

Jenny glanced at the sergeant who was waiting, pencil in hand, hovering over his ever-ready notebook.

Jenny knew all about policemen’s notebooks too.

‘The mur—the dead man is Mr Gabriel Olney,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure where he lives but I’m sure that Mrs Olney, Mrs Jasmine Olney, will be able to tell you,’ she began, getting off to a thoroughly disastrous start.

First of all, she’d almost said ‘the murdered man’ when, in reality, she really had no reason to believe it was murder. But she’d have bet her last penny that the inspector hadn’t missed the tell-tale slip. And secondly (and much worse) she’d boldly stated the fact that it was Gabriel Olney who was dead when his widow, who was standing not more than ten yards away, had not been given a shred of warning.

It just went to show, Jenny thought sourly, that practice hardly made perfect.

Jasmine abruptly sat down, and blinked.

At this point, Rycroft and Sergeant Graves glanced at her curiously. Rycroft said, reasonably softly, ‘Mrs Olney? You had no idea of your husband’s death?’

Jasmine shook her head. Then she blinked again. She seemed to be unable to find a thing to say. Eventually she licked her dry lips and said, somewhat unsteadily, ‘No one told me.’

‘We thought it best not to,’ Jenny said quickly, but inside she could have kicked herself for her thoughtlessness.

But then again, a suspicious little voice would insist on piping up in the back of her mind, Jasmine might have known all along about her husband – if she was the one who’d put him in her cupboard in the first place.

Rycroft glanced back to the cook, obviously puzzled. He thought that either the cook was the most cold-hearted woman he’d ever met, or the shrewdest.

He would soon learn which.

‘Carry on, please,’ he said, his disconcertingly high-pitched voice once again as bland as milk.

‘There’s Dorothy and David Leigh.’ She nodded to the young couple, who were still standing transfixed in the doorway to the starboard deck. ‘They live in the village of Buscot, the same as Mr Lucas Finch, the owner of the boat.’ She hesitated over the word ‘owner’, not sure of her ground. Had Gabriel Olney already legally bought the
Stillwater Swan
?

If he noticed her sudden stumble, Rycroft didn’t mention it.

‘Go on.’

‘There’s the engineer….’

‘We know all about Mr O’Keefe, madam,’ the sergeant said helpfully, and Jenny nodded. Of course, they’d have questioned him thoroughly on the way here.

Again Rycroft wondered at the statuesque cook’s apparent understanding of the way the police mind worked. He began to feel distinctly uneasy. There was something about her that looked familiar, now that he thought about it. Not that he’d ever met her before – Rycroft had an excellent memory, and someone as noticeable as the cook would have stuck in his mind like a rose thorn.

Nevertheless….

‘Who else is on board?’ he prompted crisply.

‘Captain Tobias Lester.’ She nodded at the captain. ‘He lives in a cottage on Mr Finch’s estate at Buscot. And then there’s Francis … er Grey,’ she said, for the briefest of moments having forgotten his surname. It was not, perhaps, surprising. Francis had a way of making himself seem almost non-existent.

Which reminded her. Just where
was
Francis?

‘Mr Grey is Mr Finch’s manservant. The Leighs and Olneys are Mr Finch’s guests. I was hired to cook for the weekend. We set off from Buscot yesterday morning about … ten o’clock?’ She glanced questioningly at the captain, who nodded.

At that point, Tobias took over, very competently giving the police the
Stillwater Swan
’s timetable and docking points over the past two days. When he’d finished, Rycroft nodded, turned back to the cook and said smoothly, ‘You’ve left yourself out, madam.’

Jenny sighed. ‘My name,’ she said heavily, ‘is Miss Jenny Starling.’

And waited for it.

She didn’t have to wait long.

Opposite her, Sergeant Graves started to write it down, and mumbled automatically, ‘Do you have any other Christian names, please,’ before his head shot up comically. ‘Did you say
Starling
?’

Jenny, who considered her parents to have gone rather mad in the first names department, saddling her with two other totally unusable ones, was glad not to have to say what the rest of them were in front of witnesses.

‘Yes. Starling,’ she repeated heavily.

Rycroft was staring at her, his face falling into a look of utter dismay. It was most unfortunate. Folds of skin suddenly seemed to mould themselves into the semblance of a chow, and a rather sick-looking chow at that.

‘Sir, we’ve finished.’ The two forensic experts chose that moment to emerge from the galley. Rycroft glanced at them, eyebrows raised. They shook their heads. ‘Plenty of fingerprints – probably all legitimate. We’ll have to take samples from everyone present. Nothing much else – or rather, too much of everything else to be of use, I’m afraid. It’s a storage cupboard after all. It’ll take days to identify and sort out all the trace elements in there. But we’ve all the photographs we need.’

Which meant, Jenny thought, no obvious murder weapon, no traces yet or fibres. Someone, she thought grimly, had been very clever. Very clever indeed.

And that someone was on this boat now.

Rycroft sighed. ‘Take a thorough look over the rest of the boat, will you?’ he said curtly, and resumed his scowling contemplation of the cook.

Tobias and Lucas cast first the policemen, then the cook, curious looks. ‘Is something wrong?’ Lucas asked, rather absurdly, given the circumstances.

But both policemen ignored him. They were both staring at the cook as if at a rather unusual specimen in a zoo.

‘So you’re Jenny Starling,’ Rycroft said, his voice flat and yet very much aggrieved.

‘Yes,’ she agreed flatly. ‘I’m
Miss
Starling.’

‘And you’re at it again,’ Rycroft sighed. ‘In my patch, this time.’

‘I’ve not been at
anything
again,’ Jenny denied hotly. ‘All I do is mind my own business and cook good food. If people around me will go around kill—’ She abruptly bit off her angry words as Jasmine Olney suddenly raised her dark head and looked at her speculatively.

What Rycroft might have said to that they never knew, for at that moment one of the forensics boys came running in, his cherubic face flushed with excitement. ‘Sir! Sir, come and see this.’

Naturally, after that,
everybody
rushed outside to the port deck, where the second forensics man waited. He was stood, more or less, in the exact same spot that Lucas had been standing in, just a short while before.

Jenny saw again the same wet planking as everyone – the Leighs, Jasmine, the captain, Lucas and Brian – jostled around her. What she
hadn’t
noticed before was the piece of rope that was tied from the bottom of the railings, and that disappeared over the side to dangle in the river below.

As Rycroft walked carefully around the wet decking, the forensics man pulled up on the rope.

And revealed at the other end, sopping wet and dripping river water, was Gabriel Olney’s missing boot.

F
OR A WHILE
Inspector Rycroft simply stared at the boot, a totally unreadable expression on his remarkable face. He had not, of course, missed the fact that Gabriel Olney’s corpse had been minus one of its boots, but until now he hadn’t really come to any significant conclusion to account for its absence. Murder victims, in his experience, were apt to struggle, and in a struggle, all kinds of things could go astray, including items of clothing. Now, though, the salutary sight brought an obvious inference with it, and one that made his blood run cold.

He leaned over the rail and glanced down into the river below. The rope was thick and sturdy, and ropes, he imagined, were probably plentiful in the storeroom of a boat such as the
Stillwater Swan
. So, no mystery as to where the murderer might have acquired the murder weapon then. For now there could be no doubt that it
was
murder they were dealing with.

He examined the knot closely and hopefully, but it looked simple enough. Not a complicated, nautical knot certainly. Which meant that if Tobias Lester was in any way involved, then he’d been clever enough – and cool-headed enough – to remember to tie a knot that any other landlubber might have used.

He glanced down the side of the boat once more, his brow furrowed in thought. The river surface was nearly two feet from the bottom of the railing, where the rope had been securely tied.

So if someone had knocked out Olney, tied the rope round his foot and then hefted him over the side to watch him drown, it would have taken a person of considerable strength to pull him back up again. The victim was not particularly fat, it was true, but still, he was an adult, well-nourished male. And would have been – literally – a dead weight.

He certainly couldn’t see any of the ladies involved being capable of such physical manoeuvrings. Except for Jenny Starling, perhaps. She looked big enough to throw
anybody
around. But then again, a generously curvaceous hourglass figure didn’t necessarily mean that she had superior upper-arm strength or muscles like Jean-Claude Van Damme.

And in any case, he thought with an inner wince, Jenny Starling, as everyone on the local force knew only too well, had a reputation for
solving
murders. Not for committing them.

Worse luck.

Rycroft would have been delighted to be the copper to rid the force of the pesky presence of the successful but strictly amateur sleuth but no matter how tempting the thought, Rycroft just couldn’t see the phlegmatic cook suddenly turning into a deranged killer.

No, he had to be looking for a man.

He nodded to the forensics team, knowing without having to tell them that they’d give the rope, boot and the rest of the boat a meticulous going-over, and turned to observe the faces of the others.

Lucas Finch was staring at the rope as if it were a snake. The parrot, perhaps out of instinctive or simply because of avian loyalty, suddenly snuggled closer to Lucas’s neck and suddenly began to croak/croon a very swing-time rendition of ‘Stranger On the Shore’.

It made everybody feel, for some reason, abruptly uncomfortable.

The handsome young couple, the Leighs, were furthest away, and he noticed them begin to back off, the pretty blonde whispering something into her husband’s ear. The pair then rapidly disappeared back into the games room. Brian O’Keefe looked implacable. If he recognized the rope specifically, he gave no indication of it. But he shot the skipper a quick, thoughtful look that was more puzzled than anything else.

Jasmine was still staring at her husband’s boot as if spellbound.

‘I’ll have to ask you all to assemble in the salon and give me an account of your individual movements for this afternoon,’ Rycroft began crisply, ushering them backwards like a farmer’s wife shooing a flock of recalcitrant chickens.

Jenny led the way, selecting a large, black leather armchair for herself. She knew full well just how time-consuming these things could be. You might just as well make yourself comfortable as not.

Sergeant Graves brought out his notebook yet again.

Rycroft fixed Jenny with a gimlet eye. ‘Right, Miss Starling, we’ll begin with you, shall we?’ he asked, somewhat maliciously.

Jenny inclined her head. ‘I prepared lunch for one o’clock as usual. It started a little late, as Francis didn’t come to the galley to start serving until about a quarter past. Mr Olney ate, I believe, the same dishes as everyone else.’

Sergeant Graves’ lips twitched. She certainly wanted to make it clear that there was nothing suspect about her food.

‘After I’d cleared away the dishes, I decided to take a long walk. It was hot in the galley, it was our last day out, and I wanted to stretch my legs.’

Sergeant Graves, for one, didn’t doubt it. A woman the size of the cook would no doubt find the tiny galley something of a trial.

‘I returned about three o’clock and informed the captain. I started preparing the vegetables and various other edible items for the dinner this evening. I did not, at that point, go to the cupboard,’ she added quickly, seeing that Rycroft was about to ask just that.

‘At about a quarter past four, I went out for some air on the starboard deck, and found Dorothy and David Leigh already out there. Mrs Leigh looked unwell, so I returned to the galley to make her some weak tea and some toast. I then took it out to her. I took a short turn around the boat, going on down the deck, through the back corridor, out onto the rear deck and, lastly, along the port deck. Mr Finch was stood on the port deck, alone. I noticed at that point that the planking next to him was wet. I then returned to the galley. I had been gone only five minutes or so. When I returned, I opened the cupboard door to get some pickled vegetables and discovered the body.’

Lucas had stirred a little angrily at her mention of himself and the wet planking, and then sighed wearily. It was no good blaming the cook for merely stating facts. The rozzers, he knew, would ferret about asking questions and no doubt unearthing all sorts of unsavoury titbits about himself and his guests before all this was over.

‘Thank you, Miss Starling,’ Rycroft said. ‘Very succinct,’ he added a touch dryly. ‘Mr Finch?’

Lucas stuck out his long, spindly legs and closed his eyes for a moment. He seemed to have aged somewhat in the past few hours.

‘Let’s see. We all had lunch together. And yes, Gabby did eat the same as the rest of us. It was all very tasty.’ He bowed to the cook.

Sergeant Graves’ lips twitched again.

Jenny – who noticed everything – thought somewhat inconsequentially that the sergeant’s personality did not match his name very well. He seemed to be brimming over with repressed good humour.

‘After lunch, we all sort of moped around for a few minutes, then Dorothy – Dorothy Leigh, that is – proposed a game of darts. Er … let’s see. The captain had come in at that point to say that the cook hadn’t yet returned, so I dragged him in on the game. David Leigh and myself played Gabby and Tobias. Or was it the other way round? Buggered if I can remember now.’

‘What time was this?’ Rycroft asked quickly.

‘About twoish? Somewhere round then. Mrs Olney said she couldn’t play, and Dorothy said she didn’t mind just watching. So we played for … I don’t know, twenty minutes. Maybe less. Then Dorothy became rather ill, and her husband took her upstairs. After that, the match was abandoned, of course, and we all dispersed. I think Gabby went out there—’ He pointed ‘—onto the starboard deck. I don’t know how long he stayed out there, of course, or where he went afterwards. I myself went out onto the rear deck to snooze for an hour or so. Then I sort of wandered around the boat for a bit. I’d only just stepped onto the port deck a few seconds before I spotted Miss Starling. I too noticed that the deck was wet, but I assumed Brian had been taking on some river water.’

‘What time was this?’ Rycroft asked again.

But Lucas wasn’t so sure. He thought it was sometime after four.

‘Then I took a turn round the end of the boat, checked that everything was OK and all that. Then I noticed the boat was slowing and turning into the bank and wondered why. It wasn’t a scheduled stop, and nobody had come to tell me about it. I was just going to the bridge to find out what was going on, and as I came into the salon, I found the cook sitting in the chair by the galley door. She told me what had happened. Then we arranged for you lot to come and….’ He shrugged. ‘That was that.’

‘So the last time you saw Mr Olney alive was at about half past two, when the darts match broke up?’

Lucas nodded.

‘Captain Lester?’ Rycroft glanced at the captain.

‘I had lunch, as usual, on a tray in the bridge. The cook brings it to me, or I go into the galley for it. I think I went to the galley to collect it today. We were due to sail at two, but I knew the cook had gone for a walk, and hadn’t reported back, so I went to tell Lucas we’d be delayed. Then we played darts, as he said, until poor little Dorothy got so sick. Then I went back to the wheelhouse.’ He paused and took a breath, obviously considering his words carefully. Once again there was that air of calm competence about him. ‘Sometime near … three o’clock, I should think it was, Miss Starling reported back and I took the
Swan
out. I was in the bridge until Miss Starling came in, about half past four, to tell me we had to stop and get the police. And that’s about all I can tell you.’

Sergeant Graves licked the end of his pencil and turned another page. So far, everybody seemed to be singing from the same hymn sheet, he thought sourly. If anybody knew anything, nobody seemed in any hurry to speak up.

It was all very prosaic, but even as the laborious process of establishing everybody’s alibis went on, Jenny knew, arrangements were probably being made to collect Gabriel Olney’s body. And back at the local station, she was also sure that a veritable army of policemen were busily checking into the backgrounds of all those concerned.

The murder of a man of Gabriel Olney’s status would almost certainly be given top priority. She wondered what the diligent sergeants and constables would unearth about all of them. And any skeletons in the cupboard, she warned her fellow shipmates silently, had better get ready to be thoroughly rattled.

‘Mrs Olney, I know that this is a hard time for you, but if you could just tell me what happened this afternoon?’ Rycroft asked, a little less curtly, of the dark-haired woman.

Jasmine Olney took a deep breath. She’d seemed to be genuinely bewildered throughout the whole experience, but now she could clearly be seen to pull herself together somewhat.

‘I’m afraid I can’t help you much there, Inspector,’ she said, her voice composed but a little husky. ‘Like the others, I had lunch, then followed them into the games room. I can’t play darts, so I read a magazine for a while and then, while the game was still going on, I left to take a nap in my room. Mrs Leigh – she’s very sweet – asked me if I was all right, or wanted an aspirin, but I said no. I wasn’t ill, just sleepy. I took a nap for … oh, I don’t know, about an hour or so. When I came back down it must have been about ten past three or thereabouts. I met the Leighs on the upstairs landing and we all came down together. I thought I’d get some sun, so I took a chair on the port deck and sunbathed. I stayed there until you policemen came. Oh, no, wait a moment, I think the engineer passed me about an hour or so before that. And that’s all I know.’

Jenny kept her mouth firmly shut. No doubt either she or the police would find out sooner or later just what all that fuss had been about between Brian O’Keefe and the newly created widow. Although it wasn’t hard to guess. Some serious flirting had been going on, and somebody had probably overstepped the mark, or misjudged the mood. On the whole, she thought it was far more likely to be the more volatile Jasmine at fault than the cocky engineer.

‘You didn’t see your husband at all in that time?’ Rycroft asked, his voice openly surprised now.

Jasmine started. ‘Well … er … no, actually I didn’t. I assumed he was reading out on the rear or starboard deck. He is a very avid reader …
was
a very avid reader, I suppose I should say,’ she corrected herself, her voice beginning to wobble just slightly. She reached for a tissue and leaned back in her chair, her pretty dark eyes filling with tears.

Rycroft coughed uncomfortably, and muttered squeakily, ‘Er, yes, quite so, madam.’

He looked up then, and saw, for the first time, that the Leighs were not present. Had not, in fact, been present since the group had returned from inspecting the dripping boot.

‘Sergeant, I think you’d better go upstairs and ask the Leighs to come down,’ he snapped, his voice dripping disapproval. ‘I don’t remember giving them permission to leave.’

‘Mrs Leigh is pregnant, Inspector,’ Jenny explained helpfully. ‘I think she’s been suffering from morning sickness rather badly this trip, poor thing. A shock like this probably made her feel even more ill, and I imagine her husband insisted that she lie down.’

Rycroft, unbelievably, blushed beetroot. ‘Oh? Yes, well … er … We’ll still have to take a statement from them. And this Francis fellow. Where the hell is he?’

As the sergeant left to fetch the Leighs, Lucas shifted himself from the chair. ‘I think you’ll find he’s in the small room off the galley. That’s usually where he skulks off to, if he wants some time alone. I’ll go get him,’ he offered helpfully.

Jenny opened her mouth to say what a damn cheek it was for Francis to use her bedroom in such a way, then subsided. To be fair, she could hardly call it ‘her’ bedroom. All it contained was her still largely unpacked suitcase.

Francis, in due course, reappeared with Lucas, but could add nothing to the proceedings. He’d served lunch, and apologized for being late about it. After lunch, he’d made sure drinks were served, then took himself off to the small bedroom for a bit of a lie down. He had, he confessed shamefacedly, fallen asleep and hadn’t awakened until right this minute. He apologized profusely to Lucas, who looked more amused than anything else.

At this point, the sergeant led the way back down the stairs and into the salon, with a somewhat chastened husband and wife close on his heels.