Patrice did not so much sit as collapse into a chair, flailing about to find a fulcrum to balance the weight she carried in front. Max remembered the same awkward maneuver from Awena’s last months of carrying Owen, when she would stretch one arm back, reaching blindly for a chair or sofa arm, simultaneously grasping her stomach. Awena reported that standing up was no easier and that a hoist would have been welcome in the ninth month.
Once Patrice was settled, holding her middle with two hands as if a beach ball rested on her lap, Max placed a pillow behind her back.
“When is your due date?” he asked.
“Not until next month,” Patrice replied. “They were getting ready to send in a substitute player anyway when Margot Browne had her ‘accident,’ and we had to make a last-minute change in the game plan, sending in reinforcements. That would be you. Thanks ever so for answering the call, and so quickly. I’ve filled DCI Cotton in on what I know, but it’s too bad—I was really just getting close to figuring out what was up and now…” She trailed off.
“Another duty calls. Got it. But it’s helpful to have a neutral party and witness like you to fill me in—someone who had a chance to get to know the victim while she was alive. And to observe her interactions with the others. What was your cover, by the way?”
“We kept it vague,” Patrice answered. “I gave out that I was a troublesome ex-girlfriend of some high-profile actor and that Romero Farnier had taken me on board for a free vacay as sort of a gesture of pity. Or to take me off the hands of his high-profile friend, while keeping me from talking to the tabloids. Also that I simply needed something to do to keep my mind off things. Obviously, I wasn’t going to be much use as some sort of deckhand, although I did volunteer to help out in the galley, chopping vegetables and so on, where I was not much wanted. Rumors were started that Romero and I were ex-lovers, too, although I quickly scotched that. It was complicated enough without that nitwit girlfriend of his fuming about, suspecting the worst and short-sheeting my bed or something. Tina’s the jealous type, even when the object of her jealousy is hauling around several extra stone, is wearing a honking great maternity smock, and has to bolt for the ladies’ room every ten minutes.”
“He was in on the cover, was Romero?”
“God, no—not in the way you mean. If anyone was a person of interest in this investigation, it was Romero. He’s rather a mandarin figure—a puller of strings, a maker of magic. King of all he surveys. Certainly that is the case when he directs his films, where he is said to rule with an iron fist. Well, that’s his job, of course, and that’s how he chooses to do it. But what we suspected him of doing also was drug smuggling—using the yacht and his status to get past the port authorities somehow. What we hadn’t worked out is how. To get me inserted into the situation, Romero was hauled in by the California FBI—scared him witless, by all accounts. But then he was given some soft soap about how they were on the trail of a notorious art thief and only he could save the day. Played to his ego, you know. Dead easy, that. He was only told to allow me on board and pretend I was, as I say, some sort of Hollywood hanger-on who’d fallen for some doe-eyed movie star and was determined to have his child. Having failed at convincing said movie star that he should be hearing wedding bells, I was to be shipped to Europe as a consolation prize for my trouble. Initially, the plan was to have Belinda Bower—that’s my cover name—to have her be a crew member of some sort, but once it became evident I could barely make it down the stairs into the hold, the FBI decided it would be better for me to mingle in my now-elephantine way among the guests, where I was sure to learn more, anyway. Sadly, that didn’t prove to be true. I learned a lot, but none of it relevant that I could see. They mostly went in, night and day, for shop talk: who was starring in what film, who was bedding whom. Then the cry went up that Margot was missing. You know the rest.”
“Do you know if Margot was a strong swimmer?” Max asked.
“No,” said Patrice, firmly shaking her head. “No, she was absolutely terrified of the water. She told me so but I could see it for myself. She wouldn’t even dip her toes in the little pool onboard, in case someone brushed by and accidentally pushed her in. You couldn’t drown a fly in that tiny pool if you tried, though. The best I could do, anyway, was to sort of paddle around like a hippo doing the breaststroke. I watched her—she always took a chair in the shade as far from the water as she could get. Part of that was to protect her skin from the sun—she was a redhead and she really had to lather on the sunscreen; she always looked like an oil slick when she wasn’t wrapped head to foot in blankets—but mostly it was to avoid the off chance that someone would pick her up and heave her into the water, perhaps as a joke. It’s funny…” Patrice had her hands on her stomach and was rubbing the sides in a circular motion, like a fortune teller with a crystal ball. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, Max noted, but that may have been part of her discarded-girlfriend cover.
“What’s funny?”
“Not funny, of course, but now that I think about it, that’s exactly what someone did. Picked her up like a doll and heaved her overboard. Despite her larger-than-life reputation, she was on the small side, shrinking a bit with age, too. Not more than five foot seven?” She turned to Cotton for confirmation; he nodded. “It would take no strength at all, really, for someone with a bit of muscle. How cruel … to think she went that way, after all—the way she most feared.” Patrice gave a little shudder, adding in an absent way: “My mother was always afraid of dying in a fire but thank God, I suppose, she died of natural causes. It was a genuine fear—every time we set out on a trip we’d have to return home to make sure she’d turned the iron and the cooker off, stuff like that. We might be miles away, but she couldn’t relax until we’d gone back to make sure. God knows where phobias like that come from.”
Max guessed from Patrice’s wistful look she might be thinking it was a shame her mother wouldn’t be around to see her grandchild. He remembered Mrs. Logan, having met her once—she was a firebrand, to coin a phrase. She’d been an infant-school teacher of keen intellect, a known figure in the education reform movement, whose own three children had been her lasting joy. He supposed she’d died believing Patrice was some generic brand of government employee working behind a desk in tech or finance or some other safe occupation. Most of Patrice’s work for Five had been so deep undercover even her closest relatives could not be told what she was really up to, or why she had a tendency to disappear for long stretches of time. He supposed the father of her child might know the truth but even that was not a given.
“I’m sorry to hear she’s gone,” said Max quietly. “She was irreplaceable. One of a kind.”
He and Patrice exchanged small smiles of mutual understanding. Her relationship with the firebrand, while steeped in love, had been tempestuous at times.
Turning to Cotton, Patrice said, “We now are quite sure Margot was not alive when she went into the water?”
“According to the coroner, no, she could not have been breathing. There was no water in her lungs, so she was dead before she went in. To be precise, before she was dropped or pushed in. Possibly in addition to the GHB overdose there was manual strangulation as well, and possibly by a left-hander.”
“There does seem to be a bit of overkill,” said Max.
“Frenzy?” Cotton wondered. “Or just someone methodically making doubly sure she wouldn’t survive? The hyoid bone wasn’t fractured, says the coroner—‘There was an absence of this finding’—you know how they talk; God forbid anyone should be able to understand what they’re saying or be able to pin them down to anything. But as you probably are aware, that sort of fracture only happens in about a third of all homicides by strangulation. So the ‘absence’ means nothing. A tox scan did show loads of alcohol and of course the GHB that remained in her system, so it may not have needed much to kill her. It’s a wonder she could stand, really, given the amounts that must have been in her bloodstream.”
“She may have been too out of it to put up a struggle.”
“Precisely. Candy from a baby, or words to that effect.”
“I wonder what she was doing out there on deck, anyway,” said Max. “It’s still frigid at night this time of year.”
“I wondered the same thing,” said Patrice. “Was she meeting someone? Taking a constitutional in the middle of the night, without Jake? To get away from Jake? Had she and Jake quarreled? Because strolling about that time of night, it doesn’t make sense, especially not given the weather. You’d only do that if you were storming off in a huff, too angry to think about grabbing a warm coat or to really notice the cold. Or, as I say, if she were meeting up with someone.”
“We may never know,” said Cotton. “If she was wearing a robe or shawl, it was torn off by the waves. She was found in the tatters of a gown that was inadequate to face the climate, to say the least. Anyway, if she’d been alive when she went in, it would have made no difference to her survival. The waters around here are frigid, even in May, especially at night. Say around sixteen degrees Celsius. She wouldn’t have survived long even if she’d gone in still breathing. The body reacts to sudden immersion like that by making the victim gasp uncontrollably, drawing water into the lungs—so says the coroner. What happens on reflex is precisely what you don’t want to have happen.”
Cotton sighed and continued, “We find bodies washed ashore here more often than we’d like, but that’s usually a question of a swimmer going too far out, someone who has underestimated the strength of the waves, or who has been caught in a riptide. And they’re usually out there in July and August, when it’s not so ruddy cold. Cold also makes the limbs useless quite quickly—even strong swimmers don’t last long.”
“And as I’ve said,” put in Patrice, “she was no manner of swimmer at all. Given the conditions that night, even if she’d gone in alive and someone saw her go overboard, there’s no guarantee they could have reached her in time.”
“Yes,” said Max. He shook his head. “The poor woman.” Death might come as a blessing to those nearing the end of a long life, but Margot was someone no doubt with hope for the future, and with many good years in front of her. Miracles can happen: the call from a director who could revive her career might come at any moment. She was working in a profession built on hopes and dreams, a vocation that fueled the longings of those who paid the price of admission for a few hours of escape from their own problems. Someone had robbed Margot Browne of her own hope, and of years of giving hope and respite to others.
And it was his job now to help figure out who did it. He vowed he would succeed if he could.