Max poured himself a cup of coffee from the urn set up on a sideboard by the hotel’s room service staff. Throughout the investigation, that urn never was allowed to run empty.
He had just rung off the phone with Awena, who was leaving to take Owen to the toddler’s yoga class led by Tara Raine in the back room of Goddessspell. Owen was a bit young for the group but, not surprisingly, was getting the hang of it already, moving quickly beyond the basic child’s and cat poses. It must, thought Max, be genetic. Awena practiced meditation and yoga daily, crediting it with her ability to manage her myriad responsibilities with no apparent effort.
He turned now to his colleagues. “Can you fill me in on who is involved—who is in the cast, so to speak, as a suspect?”
“I can,” said Patrice. “We’re looking at a closed and rather exclusive circle of suspects. By ‘exclusive’ I mean exclusive in their own estimation. You’ll see. Anyway, it’s practically one of those locked-room mysteries you used to love so much, Max.”
Max smiled. She had given him a collection of Father Brown stories one Christmas. He still had it on a shelf at the vicarage, next to his collection of Agatha Christies. What a long way he and Father Brown had traveled.
“That much is clear,” said Cotton. If Patrice’s knowledge of Max’s reading habits struck him as odd, he gave no hint. “Since she was killed on board, the murderer was someone on board. Ipso, as they say, facto. If you rule out pirates coming alongside and boarding over the rail, which I think in fairness we have to do.”
“Do we?” murmured Max.
“In all honesty, yes, I think so. The crew may not be up to much but I think they’d notice a pirate ship hoving into view on the horizon. And we’re talking about the waters off Monkslip-super-Mare, remember, not Somalia.”
Max was thinking that so long as unauthorized persons boarding the yacht remained an option, this was not a proper locked-room mystery. But he said nothing.
“Anyway,” Cotton continued, “apart from the crew, there were only a handful of people to be accounted for at the time she disappeared. A handful who could have committed the crime, I mean.”
“Which was when? It would help if we knew.”
“When she disappeared? Well, I misspoke a bit there. We know when she was last seen alive. And we know when someone realized she was missing. We know when her body was found. So there is a window of time during which she had to have been killed.”
“I don’t suppose the coroner could help you pinpoint the time. They never can.”
“I know,” said Cotton. “There is no person on God’s earth more useless at pinpointing time of death than a coroner. Or ‘the absence of life,’ as they’d probably put it. Our man analyzed the stomach contents and we know when she left the party and what was on the menu that night, so that helps, but not much. He can’t pinpoint the time of death except to say, basically: ‘Not long before she went in.’ He’s giving it an hour or two either side of midnight as his guesstimate for the time of death.”
“You say someone realized she was missing. Who was that?”
Patrice stirred. “As I’ve indicated, she was traveling with a young man by the name of Jake Larsson. Jake had great hopes of achieving fame and fortune as an actor. You know that old song, of course—I’ve got it stuck in my head now: ‘An actor’s life for me.’ It was felt by all and sundry that a lack of talent was the only thing standing in his way. As one of them said to me, his hair gave a better performance in the Scottish play than he did. I’ll let the others describe the situation for you in detail. But Jake, bless him, seems to have felt Margot was his ticket out of obscurity. This is the equivalent of an actress sleeping with the screenwriter to get ahead but that didn’t seem to put a damper on Jake’s hopes.”
“Anyway,” said Cotton, “Jake claims he suffers from insomnia and when he woke at one-fifteen in the morning, Margot was not in the room. He says she snored like a train going off the tracks in a hurricane so it was the absence of noise that woke him. Note the ‘absence of’ again. If his acting career fails he could try for a job as a coroner.”
Cotton, Max again was reminded, was a child of the theater himself, the product of a helter-skelter upbringing by a feckless mother. Given the circumstances, his scorn for theater folk was as understandable as it was predictable.
“Did Jake go and look for her?”
“No. He says he went back to sleep.”
“So,” said Max. “We have Jake in our sights as a suspect. Meaning, we have only his word for it he went back to sleep. He may have followed her out to see what was up. Or he may be lying about the time he woke, trying to confuse the timeline for reasons of his own. Or he may be trying to insert himself into the drama for reasons of his own—to make himself appear to be more at the center of things. Who else is in the frame?”
“Me, I’d start with the director,” said Patrice. “Romero Farnier. I mean, have you ever? Even his name sounds totally made up.”
“Have I ever heard of him? As a matter of fact, I have.”
“He does those gangbuster movies,” said Cotton.
“You mean blockbuster,” said Max. “Earthquakes, tidal waves, wars, alien invasions, car chases—”
“And a strict lack of anything like plot, rhyme, or reason,” said Patrice. “The public just eats it up. And of course, being the director of that chaotic sort of thing pays well—it paid for the yacht, no doubt, and much besides. But Romero is the tortured-artist type. He wants to go all indie film, and now that he’s rich he can bankroll himself—once he screws up his courage to go for it. Maybe he’ll cast you as the lead, Max. It would be right up your alley.”
“Hmph,” said Max. “And who else?”
“Well, there’s Romero’s fiancée. I mean, that’s her title, if she is to be believed; his casual girlfriend, if his version of the relationship is correct. Half his age, the usual thing—you know. Blonde ambition personified—or rather, ginger ambition in this case. She’d be a better match for Jake but Jake, as we’ve said, has not a lot going for him apart from his youth and his looks. Our little Tina has bigger plans for her adorable self than that.”
“Tina—last name?”
“Tina Calvert.”
“Would I know her? I mean, from film or something?”
“American,” said Patrice briefly. “Stage actress. A few indie films. Ambitious, as I’ve indicated—to the point of ruthlessness. Mostly to be found off-off-Broadway these days, if she can be found at all. But she’s counting on Romero to change all that for her.”
“You don’t like her,” said Max.
“It would take a bigger woman than me to like her.” She looked down at her stomach and laughed. “No pun intended. But you decide for yourself. I gather that some men like her, if in small doses.”
“Okay. Who else?”
“We have a sprig of the nobility in our lineup,” said Cotton. “A minor branch of a gilded family tree. He is descended somehow from the Germanic branch of the Windsors, the branch the family would rather forget about now, you know. They tell me he’s possibly two hundredth in position away from the throne, but you never know: the other nobs might succumb to a genetic flaw to which he himself is immune. Anyway, I gather that is the hope from his side. He and his wife, the Baroness Sieben-Kuchen-Bäcker, appear to be skint and are living off their fabled connections. They don’t have a permanent address of their own—they just drift around in boundless style from one friend’s manor house to another friend’s manor house, leaving just before they wear out their welcome. Again, I can’t emphasize enough, their connection to the real nobs is vague, to say the least, but some people are easily impressed. Again, a triumph of hope over reality. That seems to be a theme of all the people on board.”
“They are actors, most of them,” said Patrice. “Or connected in some way to the profession.”
“Figures,” said Max.
“How so?”
“It would be a much more straightforward case if we weren’t surrounded by so many people whose job it is to dazzle and blue the facts and skirt the truth. A murder involving a team of accountants would make a nice change.”
“Nicely put,” said Patrice. “Although why you think accountants are so blameless is beyond me. The man who does my taxes is a complete rogue. Anyway, that is precisely why you’re here.”
“By the way, does the baron have a Christian name?” Max asked.
“The baron? Yes. It’s Axelrod. She is Emma.”
“Nice. The baroness—would you say she was an intelligent person? A thoughtful one?”
“No. But she is full of thoughts,” said Patrice. “Most of them silly thoughts. I don’t think she ever read an entire newspaper in her life. She seems to have formed her world view by reading Vogue and gained her insights into the human condition from ads in Country Life. He is the brains of the pair, not that that is saying much.”
Turning to face Cotton—no mean feat, as it meant shifting two stone to point vaguely in his direction—she said, “I have seen Max unravel the most tightly wound alibi; whatever Axelrod and the fair Emma may have been up to, Max will suss it.”
Cotton nodded. “I know. There was one case he solved with an apple.”
“Really? An apple? How did—”
“Please,” Max cut in. Time was of the essence, and Cotton would have ample opportunity to regale Patrice with details of his old cases once this one was wrapped up. Max suspected that Cotton had begun making notes on the crimes they had worked on solving together, with an eye to publishing the cases as stories one day. That Cotton might see himself as a sort of Watson in the making. Good luck finding a publisher, thought Max. Most of their cases, while true events, contained elements so bizarre as to qualify them only as potboilers. “Who else do we have?”
“There’s Maurice,” said Patrice. “‘Stylist to the Stars,’ as he himself would not blush to tell you. He was quite close to Margot; I’ve seen for myself he’s pretty wrecked by her murder. He’s taken to his room here at the hotel and hasn’t been seen about by anyone except the room service staff. When I put questions to him, he tried to conduct the interview with blinders on.”
“I’m sorry?”
“A sleep mask, you know. He declared that the news of her death had torn his soul from his body and daylight now blinded him. Or something.”
“Like a vampire.”
“Actually, he seems to be rather sweet and to all appearances, genuinely devoted to Margot, if rather frustrated by her antics. I totally get that. Anyway, I finally convinced him I had to be able to look him in the eyes while I interviewed him. Although, of course, he thought we were just having a chat for old times’ sake, not an interview. I didn’t tell him the real reason for my involvement in all this. There’s no need, since I’ll be off the case soon enough, anyway.”
“How do you mean, frustrated by her?”
“Smart Women, Foolish Choices. You know. Margot was low on survival skills, not to mention common sense.”
“I gather,” put in Cotton, “that if one of her ex-lovers were on board, he might disagree with that assessment.”
“Oh?” said Max. “One lover out of how many?”
“How many stars are there in the night sky?” asked Patrice. “And a few husbands, too. Each one a bigger loser than the last, to hear Maurice tell it. And I will. Let him tell you, I mean.”
“What about the crew?” Max asked. “Any connections there to Margot, or to the events surrounding her death?”
“Well, the crew wasn’t exactly locked in the hold the whole trip,” said Cotton, “but they alibi each other. We’ve made certain of that, of course, or as certain as can be. There are twelve of them all told, counting the captain, and they include the first mate, a couple of engineers and deckhands, a chef and sous-chef, and a stewardess-slash-yoga instructor. The latter is Delphine Beechum and she’s the only one who routinely interacted with the passengers. Upstairs and downstairs, you know. She denies it but she may have had a bit of a flirtation going with Margot’s true love Jake. They are closer in age and somehow they managed to give the impression to some of the others that something was going on there. Meaningful, longing glances exchanged before descending into down-dog pose, that sort of thing.”
“But personally, I think Delphine flirts just to keep in practice,” said Patrice. “I can’t see her going for Jake in a big way.”
“Was Margot typically part of the yoga practice?” asked Max.
“Good heavens, no,” said Patrice. “Yoga at sunrise was not Margot’s strong suit, although overall she was rather fit—apart from the drinking, I mean. I would turn up each day just to keep an eye on how things were progressing but in truth with this stomach I could only just about manage corpse pose. Such a dreadful play on words, all things considered now, but that’s what it’s called.”
“So Margot’s failure to appear that morning—”
“Meant nothing whatsoever. In fact, it is difficult to say when the alarm might have been raised under normal circumstances—she was fully capable of sleeping ’til after two some days. That’s if they were simply standing around wondering when she might appear, which to all appearances they were not. The captain heard about a body washing ashore over the radio and decided to do a room check and a head count. That was when the alarm was raised. The crew did a thorough search and realized Margot was nowhere on board. This was well before the noon hour.”
“The papers had it slightly wrong, then,” said Max. “They had what they rather coyly kept calling her ‘companion’ noticing her missing.”
“Not exactly correct,” said Cotton. “Just in the area of correct. Typical.”
“You can forget most of what you read about the case in the papers,” said Patrice. “The majority of them paid lip service to her demise and then just skipped ahead to rehash old gossip from the movie magazines. And much of that gossip was second-hand rubbish. I would imagine Jake is busy recasting himself as something of the alert hero in this particular film. He’s not troubling himself with playing the distraught hero, however. That would be punching well above his weight, anyway.”
“Another thing,” Cotton put in, opening up his laptop. “If we go by the tide tables, we’re figuring she probably went in the water between eleven p.m. and midnight. It’s another factor that meshes more or less with what they were able to discern from the stomach contents and with what we were able to wrest from the coroner. Remember, he said an hour or two on either side of midnight.”
“I just keep thinking it’s unlikely she’d be wandering the ship on her own so late,” said Max. “Her companion Jake—he noticed nothing amiss earlier in the evening?” Max asked.
“So he claims,” said Cotton. “But I don’t honestly think he was paying much attention. And in his favor, he’s not pretending he ever doted on her every move. So, where should we start? With him?”
Max shook his head. “Jake can wait. I’d rather start with someone who knew her well and liked her in spite of her flaws. We can work outward from there to her known enemies, if she had any. It sounds as if the someone who liked her was the stylist. Perhaps if nothing else Maurice can explain to me just what it is a stylist does for a living. But I’ll also want to see the ship itself. I want to get a feel for the setup there.”
“We’ll have to go out on a boat tender. Perhaps tomorrow—I’ll see what I can arrange and when. The port here isn’t deep enough for the Calypso Facto to dock.”
Patrice spoke from deep within the banks of pillows on her chair. “I’ll sit that one out, if you don’t mind. From now until this baby arrives, I’m staying on dry land.”