Dying For a Cruise (17 page)

Jenny, who was sat out on the starboard deck watching a pair of moorhens and their chicks swimming in and out of the river reeds, had declined the offer. She had no one to telephone, and besides, she had some thinking to do.

It didn’t take the policemen long to find her. Graves pulled up a similarly hefty chair to the one the cook had requisitioned, whilst Rycroft perched with perfect ease on a flimsily wooden and canvas folding deckchair.

‘Well, Miss Starling,’ Rycroft said. ‘You’re the expert,’ he added sarcastically. ‘What are your thoughts so far?’

Jenny dragged her eyes from the moorhens and looked at him. She sighed unhappily.

‘I think,’ she said, ‘that someone has either been very clever, or very lucky, or both. Unless….’ But the thought that suddenly popped into her head was a little too far-fetched to voice without first thinking it over.

And thinking it over very carefully, at that.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard from the medical examiner yet?’ she asked curiously.

Rycroft shook his head and explained about the railway disaster that had slowed things up.

Jenny sighed. ‘A pity. I would have liked to know if Mr Olney had been drugged. I don’t believe he was, of course, but … it’s nice to be
sure
of these things, isn’t it?’

Rycroft blinked. ‘Drugged? What made you ever imagine that he’d been drugged? The medico was sure that he drowned.’

Jenny nodded. ‘Oh yes, I’m sure that he did too.’

Rycroft slowly leaned back in his chair and took several deep breaths. He hated questioning women. They were so damned … illogical.

‘If there were drugs involved, then it was premeditated.’ He tried a different tack, and the cook willingly went with him.

‘If Gabriel was drugged, yes. But I don’t think he was. And I don’t think, somehow, that this was pre-planned. It smacks too much of desperation for that.’

Rycroft glanced at Graves to see if he was faring any better. Apparently he was, for he said slowly, thoughtfully, ‘You have some kind of problem with the method of killing, Miss Starling?’

Jenny started. There was no other word for it. She opened her eyes very widely and said, with total sincerity, ‘But of course I have. Don’t you?’

Rycroft clutched the side of the chair until his knuckles turned white.

Jenny stared at them, bewildered. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But I thought … I mean, it’s so obvious, that I was sure that you must have….’

Aware that she was not exactly earning herself any brownie points, she took a deep breath and started at the beginning.

‘On the face of it,’ she explained, ‘the rope and boot on the port side of the deck suggests that Mr Olney was overpowered, that the killer tied the rope to his foot, hauled him over the side, let him drown, pulled him back and put him in the cupboard. Yes?’

Rycroft let go of the chair, and nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘But that’s so patently absurd as to be laughable,’ she said, her voice rising an octave into a near-squeak of incredulity. ‘To begin with, how did the killer overpower Mr Olney? He was fit enough, and an old soldier to boot.’

Rycroft was beginning to feel uncomfortable. It occurred to him that whilst he had spent his time
investigating
, Jenny Starling had spent her time
thinking
. And he was beginning to appreciate just how exasperated his colleagues must have felt on their previous murder investigations where she had also been involved.

Now, he shrugged and tried to keep up with her. ‘Well, we assumed the killer gave Olney a crack on the head before trussing him up,’ he said, somewhat defensively, and looked at Graves, who nodded his agreement.

‘But didn’t the medical man say he could find no obvious cuts, bruises or outward marks of violence on the body?’ she reminded him. ‘At least, when I looked at Mr Olney with you, Inspector, I couldn’t see anything. Only his fingernails looked a bit broken, and his knuckles looked slightly discoloured. I don’t know enough about pathology, of course, to know if bruises can develop after death or not. But apart from that, there seemed to be nothing wrong with Mr Olney at all. Or am I wrong?’

Rycroft ran a finger around his collar. ‘No, you’re not wrong,’ he admitted uneasily. He too had noticed no obvious wounds on the body. And any medico examining a body – even giving it a very quick and preliminary look over at the scene – would have noted any bashes on the head.

‘And surely one of the very first thing a doctor checks is a body’s head?’ Jenny said, eerily echoing his own thoughts.

Rycroft reluctantly admitted that it was so. Looking back, he could see in his mind’s eye the police surgeon run his hands carefully over Gabriel Olney’s head.

‘And he didn’t report to you later on any bumps or bangs on Mr Olney’s head?’ she pressed.

Rycroft frowned, not liking the feeling he was getting that he was being backed into a corner. ‘No. He didn’t,’ he confirmed shortly.

‘So I repeat,’ the fat cook said. ‘How did the killer overpower Mr Olney?’

‘He couldn’t have. Unless he was drugged,’ Sergeant Graves said. ‘But you said you didn’t believe he was drugged.’

Jenny sighed. ‘No. I don’t think so, but I don’t
know
so. Not for sure. That’s why I wanted to know if you’d got the postmortem report.’

Rycroft grunted. ‘Well, say for the moment the killer
did
dope Mr Olney somehow. He tied him up, chucked him over the side, and drowned him.’

But Jenny was already shaking her head. ‘Inspector, does that sound reasonable to you?’ she asked, and Rycroft was back once more to clutching the side of his chair.

‘Consider the difficulties,’ she urged, for all the world like a teacher instructing a classroom. ‘The killer would have had to have doped Mr Olney sometime in the afternoon. Without being seen. He – or she – would then have had to either hide the unconscious man, or go through the rigmarole with the rope and drowning that you’ve just described, again
without being seen
. Then the killer would have to hide the body in my cupboard – still without being seen. How? How could all this be done?’

Rycroft swallowed hard. ‘We know that at four o’clock the deck was dry,’ he began. ‘The killer could reasonably guess that the captain would be in the bridge, and O’Keefe in the engine room.’

‘Providing it was neither of them that did it,’ she put in.

‘Right,’ Rycroft conceded.

‘And he knew that Jasmine would be in her room,’ Graves put in brightly.

‘Right. The note was a decoy,’ Rycroft agreed.

‘But by four o’clock Jasmine had been out of her room for a good half an hour or so,’ she pointed out, hating to rain on their parade. But facts were facts.

Rycroft groaned. ‘But she went back up to her room for a quarter of an hour,’ he suddenly remembered. ‘To change, or whatever. And at just about four o’clock too.’ He was reluctant to let a good theory go to waste, just because the facts didn’t fit.

‘The Leighs were on the opposite side of the boat,’ Graves added, getting carried away with the theorizing now, ‘and you were in the galley.’

‘So how did the killer get the body into my cupboard?’ she asked bluntly.

‘When you were taking Dorothy Leigh her tea and toast,’ Rycroft said quickly.

Jenny looked from one policeman to another. ‘But don’t you see how
risky
this all is?’ she asked, exasperated. ‘What’s to stop me from going back to the galley straight after taking Dorothy her toast? The killer couldn’t
know
that I would take a stroll around the boat. And besides all that, Lucas Finch was wandering around all afternoon. He could have bumped into the killer at any point in these proceedings.’

‘If it isn’t Finch we’re after.’ This time it was Rycroft’s turn to put in the little dig.

Jenny ignored this childishness and kept doggedly to the point. ‘What’s to have stopped the Leighs from leaving the starboard deck? How could the killer know how long Jasmine would be gone? She might only have nipped up to the loo. She could have been gone only a minute or so. But in that time the killer dragged Olney’s body to the side, drowned him and carted him back to my cupboard? I don’t think so.’

Graves scratched his chin. ‘If he or she did, it sounds….’ He looked lost for words.

‘Desperate?’ Jenny supplied one for him helpfully. ‘Suicidal?
Risky
?’

‘And yet, it worked,’ Rycroft pointed out.

‘But did it?’ she asked sceptically. ‘If so, how come the deck was wet, but not the route the killer must have taken to my galley? Why wasn’t the galley floor wet? It wasn’t, you know. Only the cupboard floor was wet.’

‘I know that,’ Rycroft snapped, although in fact that detail had totally escaped him. ‘The killer must have covered him in something dry.’

‘The plastic sheet,’ Graves suddenly whooped, remembering the cook’s fascination with the engineer’s woodpile and its covering and now understanding it. ‘It was bound to dry out quickly in the boiler room, and putting it in the engine room meant that it was also out of sight.’

‘So the killer must have waited until Brian O’Keefe had stepped out of the engine room,’ she said. ‘He has to every now and then, of course,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘I’ve seen him. He checks in with the captain every so often for a start. Then he checks the paddles at the back. Oils things. But it all takes time. How did the killer know that O’Keefe was going to conveniently leave the engine room and allow him or her time to put the wet plastic over the wood to dry out?’

‘But O’Keefe did leave the engine room,’ Graves pointed out. ‘He was going to ask the captain where they were. But then recognized the straight stretch of river, or so he said. So he was out of the engine room for a few moments at least.’ Then he frowned. ‘Of course, the killer would still have had to have been nippy. Very nippy now that I think about it.’

‘Incidentally,’ Jenny put in, ‘I hope you realize the significance of that straight stretch of river.’

Rycroft glanced at her. He didn’t look pleased. ‘Significance?’

The cook sighed. Did she have to point out even the obvious? ‘The
Swan
travels at about four miles per hour. On a straight stretch of river, such as the one we travelled down yesterday afternoon, the captain could have tied off the wheel, murdered Olney, and gone back, without anyone knowing. With the boat travelling slowly, the straight stretch could be made to last for at least half an hour, and the boat would be perfectly safe without anyone steering her. Other boats would be sure to see her coming a long way off and steer to either side of her, so there’d be no question of a collision to give the game away. The captain could have left the wheelhouse any time during that period. It’s a wonderful sort of alibi to have. Everyone thinks the captain
must
be steering the boat. But that’s not necessarily so.’

Rycroft sighed, fighting back the urge to scream. Loudly.

‘We’ve already established that nobody had an alibi for every moment of that afternoon, Miss Starling. I think we can agree that anyone
could
have done it.’

Sergeant Graves shifted uneasily in his chair. ‘What exactly are you getting at, Miss Starling? Are you saying that Mr Olney
wasn’t
drowned on the port deck?’

Jenny shook her head, more in sorrow than in denial. ‘I’m just pointing out how impossibly risky the whole thing must have been, if the evidence is to be believed,’ she explained patiently. ‘And haven’t you asked yourself
why
Gabriel Olney was put in my cupboard? If the killer did heave him over the side, tied by one foot to a rope to ensure that he drowned, why didn’t the killer then simply undo the rope and let Gabriel’s corpse float down the river? In due course, he’d be noted as missing, we’d quickly set up a hue and cry, and his body would be found somewhere on the Thames. The police would conclude, with no bumps or signs of violence on the body, that he’d simply fallen overboard and drowned. Even if you
did
suspect foul play,’ she cut in quickly, as Rycroft opened his mouth to hotly deny that they’d come to such a conclusion so quickly, ‘what
proof
would you have? You might suspect that there was something rotten going on, but you’d be more likely to drop it and label it an accident after a diligent investigation, if Olney had been found floating face down by some innocent bystander walking their dog. But by putting the corpse in my cupboard, it was like advertising the fact that it was murder. Why?’

Rycroft was beginning to get a headache.

‘Do
you
know why?’ he asked hopefully.

But Jenny shook her head. ‘It seems to make no sense. But then so many things about this case don’t make sense. Haven’t you noticed how …
messy
things are?’ she demanded, beginning to sound thoroughly exasperated herself now. ‘Hasn’t it struck you how muddled up everything is? Brian O’Keefe searches the Olneys’ room, but somebody sends a note to Mrs Olney that sends her upstairs, and so she almost catches Brian out, forcing him to flee down the balcony. David Leigh forges a suicide note, but the killer goes out of his way to make sure everyone knows it was murder. Everyone seems to be falling over everyone else’s feet.’

‘Coincidence?’ Graves murmured. ‘Or something else?’

‘If it’s something else,’ Jenny said gloomily, ‘then a whole lot of them are in on it together. But it’s too messy for that. Too uncoordinated. If it was a conspiracy, you could expect them to make a better job of it. As it is, it’s been like a comedy of errors from start to finish. And yet the murder itself must have been very clever. The rope, the boot, the plastic sheet … the incredible timing. You just can’t put it all down to luck on the killer’s part.’

Rycroft got briskly to his feet. ‘Sergeant, I want you to go to the village and ring up the medical examiner.’ It was just his luck his mobile had a dead battery. ‘Tell him I want a toxicology test run on Olney immediately. Wait around and keep chivvying them if you have to, but make sure they get on with it, and then bring the results back with you. At least we can clear up the question of whether or not he was drugged.’

Graves nodded and left.

When he was gone, Rycroft looked at the cook thoughtfully. ‘I think you’ll find, you know,’ he said slowly, ‘that Olney was drugged. If, as you say, he wasn’t knocked on the head, then how did the killer get him to meekly agree to having a rope tied around his leg? Not to mention allow himself to be tossed overboard without so much as raising a shout?’ Rycroft shook his ugly head. ‘No. If somebody was trying to drown me, I’d scream blue bloody murder.’