The Titanic Murders (5 page)

Promptly at nine-thirty the boat train rolled out of Waterloo Station, its chocolate-brown coaches pulled by a green locomotive, beginning an eighty-mile journey that gave the Americans a picturesque tour of the English countryside. Slate-roofed, red-brick town houses marked Surbiton, Woking and the rest, tidy rows of tidy structures each with its own back garden bursting
with blossoms. The countryside was ablaze with color: daffodils, tulips and narcissus, brilliantly green hedgerows and flowering cherry trees, all flourishing in the April sunshine of a spring that had come early.

“We’re tickled you decided to go First Class,” Henry said, settling back. He had hung up the silly Inverness cape and his considerable girth was encased in brown tweed. “You know how these liners segregate the classes.”

“I’m glad you two are willing to put up with riffraff like us,” Futrelle said.

“We’ll force ourselves,” Henry said with a grin.

“This wasn’t your doing, was it?”

“How so?”

May flashed a look his way, but Futrelle pressed on just the same: “You know, Henry, I do turn an honest dollar, now and then. I haven’t been reduced to taking charity.”

“What the hell are you talkin’ about?”

Futrelle told him about the unexpected gift from Ismay.

“I had nothin’ to do with that,” Henry said with a dismissive wave. “But it doesn’t sound like Ismay’s style, either—I’ve been on White Star liners he was ridin’ before, and he’s one rude, arrogant son of a bitch… pardon my French, ladies.”

Soon the train was traveling through Surrey, domain of the landed gentry with their cottages of dressed fieldstone, half-timbering and thatch, where fields of grass and heather stretched endlessly, interrupted occasionally by clusters of birch, oak, spruce and beech.

“How did your trip go, Jack?” Henry asked. “Come back with some nice fat contracts for stories and books?”

“Be good, Henry B.,” René scolded mildly. “It’s none of your business.
Did
you, Jack?”

Futrelle chuckled. “I did very well, actually. I’ve contracts enough to hold me through the next year, easily… but I’ve had to revive my old nemesis.”

“More ‘Thinking Machine’ stories?” Henry asked, eyes laughing. “I thought you’d sworn off that cranky old egghead—like Doyle dumping Holmes off that cliff.”

Futrelle worked up half a smile. “Yes, but like Sherlock’s papa, I’m afraid, Mammon tempted me back into the fray.”

May said, “Jack’s written six new ‘Thinking Machine’ stories on this trip—heaven help us if our steamer trunks are lost!”

“How about you, Henry?” Futrelle asked. “Find any British plays worth producing? Got your next
Lion and the Mouse
lined up?”

“I’ve got a couple honeys under option. But I’m branching out, Jack, into the future.”

“What future would that be?”

“In my steamer trunk are a couple of tin cans that set me back ten thousand pounds.”

“Tin cans?”

“Of motion-picture film, Jack—I’ve got Reinhart’s
The Miracle
in kinemacolor! Just spoke with Oscar Hammerstein yesterday, and he’s interested in going partners.”

Futrelle made a face. “I’m not an admirer of the cinematograph. I believe in words not pictures.”

“You sold
The Hidden Hand
for filming,” René reminded him.

“Yes, and they butchered it.”

After a while the landscape rolling by the boat-train window shifted from idyllic rural to harsh urban, sprouting not flowers but corrugated-iron factory roofs, the forests not trees but smokestacks of textile mills and steelworks. Much as he
admired the captains of industry, like those on this train, Futrelle could not reconcile their capricious leisure with the quiet desperation of workers such as those who dwelled in the dingy rabbit warren of squalid red-brick row houses gliding by the window like an admonishing vision courtesy of one of Scrooge’s ghosts.

Henry, with that good heart of his, must have felt a twinge himself, because he suggested they repair to the smoking car, where shortly Jack was lighting up a tailor-made Fatima from a gold-plated cigarette case and Harris a Cuban cigar.

“It’s that unpleasant fellow again,” Henry said, waving out a match, nodding toward a table by the window where indeed the ferrety Crafton was seated with none other than that great unmade bed of a man, William T. Stead. The two men had their heads together, Stead listening intently, frowning, Crafton whispering, his smile lifting the ends of the handlebar mustache into black angel wings.

“Not interested, sir!” Stead said suddenly.

Banter in the smoke-filled car fell to a hush, as the white-bearded, massively bellied Stead stood and berated his fellow passenger in a bellow.

“To the dogs with you, sir! The dogs!”

Embarrassed, Crafton smiled nervously, shrugging to the other men in the smoking car and nodding toward Stead, with an expression that encouraged their common knowledge that the old man was mad as a March hare.

Stead understood this patronizing gesture and grabbed Crafton by the front of his striped sack suit and lifted him from his chair like a naughty child.

“Fortunate for you, sir,” Stead said, nose to nose with the frightened little man, “that I am a pacifist!”

And then Stead tossed him back onto the chair, storming out of the car, leaving a smoldering stogie and a chagrined Crafton behind.

“Fella seems to make friends everywhere he goes,” Futrelle said to Henry.

“Maybe I should follow him around with a motion-picture camera,” the producer said.

Soon they were back in the compartment with their wives. The train had begun its long downhill ride to Eastleigh, doing better than sixty miles per hour, shooting like a bullet through the hill tunnels of Hampshire Downs, past Winchester, into Southampton, sailing like a ship through Terminus Station and across Canute Road.

Finally, just before 11:30
A.M.
, the boat train moved down the side of Central Road and took a slow turn to the right onto the track flanking the platform built on the White Star Line’s ocean dock. Nearby loomed the massive pair of long, narrow sheds, their corrugated steel painted green, where Second- and Third-Class passengers and cargo were processed.

But the boat train delivered its First-Class passengers dockside; they stepped out into the crisp sea air, where the port side of the giant ship towered before them, filling their sight like a vast cliff of steel.

May squeezed her husband’s hand, craning her neck back, still not able to see the sky: just the freshly painted black hull and, straining, the gold-trimmed white band above. To left and right, the
Titanic
filled their eyes. Around them fellow passengers were swarming about the pier, parents struggling to keep track of children, porters and deckhands lugging luggage. But May seemed oblivious to this chaos, her attention
seized by the Promethean vessel that was making scurrying ants of them all.

“Jack—it’s endless….”

“Four blocks wide, dear. Eleven stories tall—not counting the four funnels. The literature says you could drive twin locomotives through one of those glorified smokestacks… but who’d want to?”

“I can’t even
see
the funnels….”

“Step back, just a little.”

“There! There they are—they’re golden, Jack! Oh, and there’s the sky, at last.”

Futrelle, overwhelmed by its looming enormity, was nonetheless impressed by the vessel’s racing-craft-like sleekness.

“I think that’s the way!” Henry Harris, a giddy René on his arm, was pointing to the gentle slope of a gangway that led to the main entrance on B deck. They trundled that direction.

“Shall we go aboard, dear?” May asked.

“Why not?” Futrelle responded.

TWO

A CLOSE CALL

I
NTO THE ENTRYWAY OF
B deck, with its gleaming white walls and gleaming white linoleum, trooped the elegant army of First-Class passengers. They were met by a gaggle of ship’s staff—the chief steward and his assorted minions, and the purser’s clerk, who saw to it that tickets were quickly processed, names jotted in a ledger book, keys dispensed, directions to staterooms given, with smiles and courtesy and efficiency that boded well for a pleasant voyage to come.

In the entrance hall beyond, the opulence of the ship first made itself known to the Americans: gold-plated crystal teardrop light fixtures, polished oak paneling, gilt-framed landscapes in oil, Oriental carpet, horsehair sofas, silk lampshades, caneback chairs with red velvet cushions….

The abundance of it all assaulted their senses, stopping them in their tracks. May gasped, René began to laugh, and both women did pirouettes, looking all about with the wide, innocently greedy eyes of children in a lavishly stocked toy store.

To the right rose a magnificent marble staircase enclosed by a grand framework of wood sculpture, its carved walnut flowers running floor to ceiling, with exquisitely sculpted oak balustrades bearing wrought-iron and gilt-bronze scrollwork.

Henry put his hands on his hips and laughed. “And I thought
I
was a producer! This makes the
Lusitania
look like a garbage scow.”

Futrelle was admiring a beautiful bronze cherub perched on a pedestal at the center of the foot of the flight of stairs. “Well, I heard White Star planned to leave speed to Cunard, and concentrate on luxury—apparently it wasn’t just the bunkum.”

Only the relative lowness of the ceilings in this reception area provided a hint that this was anything but the finest land-based hotel. Behind them, the next group of First-Class passengers was traipsing in, to be similarly bowled over by this opulence.

The two couples made their way around and down the staircase to C deck, and were soon padding along a wide, blue-carpeted, brass-railed white corridor on the port side of the ship, where other First-Class passengers were following the path to their staterooms, as well. Up ahead was that family from the boat train, the handsome couple with the lovely little golden-haired girl, shapely blunt-nosed nanny with babe in arms and plump maid. They had paused and the young husband was speaking to someone.

John Crafton.

“Is your friend making friends again?” Henry whispered, walking just behind Futrelle and May.

Actually, he seemed to be. Crafton’s pearl-gray fedora was in his hands and he was smiling pleasantly, or at least as pleasantly as possible for him, and both the husband and the wife were returning the smile, with no apparent strain.

Only the nanny was frowning, and seemed nervous, but then again the baby in her arms was squirming and fussing.

As the Futrelles and Harrises approached where the little group clustered, blocking the way, Crafton noticed and said,
“We seem to be holding things up… I’m so pleased to have run into you, Mr. Allison, Mrs. Allison. Until later, then.”

Crafton tipped his hat and—the Futrelles and Harrises standing aside for him—swaggered past, cane in hand, nodding and smiling as he did.

René twitched her nose. “Why does a smile from him make me crave a bath?”

This required no answer, and anyway, they were up even with that family, now.

“I’m afraid we always seem to be in the way,” the young husband said, turning toward the two couples with an embarrassed grin. “I’m Hudson Allison, this is my wife Bess, our daughter Lorraine… Alice, there, has little Trevor.”

Introductions were made all around, hands shaken (though of course the maid was not mentioned, and nanny Alice only that once in passing); but more passengers were coming up the corridor and the baby was crying, so further information, getting better acquainted, would have to wait. It was time for everyone to move on.

Heading aft, making a left turn down a hallway (for all its length, the ship wasn’t all that wide—perhaps ninety feet), the Harrises finally found C83, their cabin. Before pushing on to find their own quarters, the Futrelles peeked in at the lovely little room with its graceful, even dainty Louis XVI styling, exemplified by walls of white-and-green-and-gold brocade with whitewashed waist-high walnut trim.

“Oh, René,” May said. “It’s simply beautiful!”

“Step inside, you two,” René said.

A gilt-adorned carved walnut bed with silk-damask-upholstered head- and footboard dominated the room, that same upholstery carried to a plump sofa and a padded walnut armchair.
A basket of fresh flowers adorned a rosewood-and-walnut dressing table, and more flowers waited on the marble-topped mahogany nightstand. A small black fan was ceiling-mounted, perching like a big out-of-place bug in all this elegance.

“I guess our baggage will be delivered later,” Harris said, taking in the posh little room with a big grin.

“Wrong again, Henry B.,” René said—she’d been exploring. “Here it all is!”

In a spacious trunk closet, as if they’d materialized magically, were neatly stacked the array of steamer trunks and bags.

“Can all the rooms be this marvelous?” May wondered.

“Let’s find out,” Futrelle said, and to the Harrises added, “We’ll probably head up on deck to take in the departure.”

“We’ll find you up there, or see you at luncheon,” Henry said. René waved, saying, “Toodle-oo, you two!”, and the Futrelles pressed on.