“Good,” said Cotton, presenting himself at Max’s door early the next morning and casting a glance over his casual wear. “I see you’re ready for another adventure, this time on the open seas. ‘They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters.’”
Max wondered if Cotton realized he was quoting from the Bible. He had been after Cotton for years to attend a service at St. Edwold’s. So far Cotton had made several generous donations to the church, and had helped capture a villain within its venerable old walls, but the DCI had not otherwise put in an appearance. Still, Max was a fisher of men’s souls, and an infinitely patient one.
“‘They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits’ end,’” quoted Max back at him.
“I certainly hope not. Come along, they’ve found a boat tender to take us out to the yacht. The tender is like a bathtub with an awning, but I am told it’s safe as houses. I hope you’ve brought your Omega Seamaster.”
Max smiled at the reference to the exploding Bond gadget. Cotton was a fan of the eternally running series. He rather thought that in Cotton, George Greenhouse was missing a chance at an eager new MI5 recruit.
“The captain’s out there waiting for us,” Cotton continued as the two men headed toward the harbor. “I had Sergeant Essex call ahead to tell him we’re on our way. We’ll have a chat with him, and then we’ll have a look-see at the entire setup, with special attention paid to Margot’s room. Jake and Margot’s cabin, I should say. We’ll see if we can’t quickly bury the head of this rattlesnake.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Murder poisons everything. You have to bury the head of a rattlesnake right after you’ve cut it off,” Cotton explained.
“Really? Have you ever even seen a rattlesnake?”
“Well, no. I meant metaphorically, of course. It’s something Romero told me. If you don’t bury the head another animal might come along and eat the snake head and die. The poison is in the head. So you have to bury it.”
“And what does he know about it?”
“He owns a cattle ranch, somewhere in the California foothills. Do you know what else? He owns a Jeep with B6-level security. You know, protection against high-powered rifles and suicide bombs.”
“I know what B6-level security means, thank you. But does he really need all that?”
Cotton shrugged. “Rich people can be paranoid.”
Max knew from experience how true this was. “Anything else?”
“Cows eat grapes.”
“Again, I beg your pardon.”
“Cows eat grapes, he tells me. Romero also owns a small vineyard. They once had a broken fence out there and the cows got in. They ate the grapevines down to the nub. He had to start over with new plants.”
“It sounds as if you and he had quite the little chat. Did the subject of the murder even come up?”
“Interesting guy,” Cotton went on, ignoring him. “It has to be said, most murderers are just boring. People who just want the attention, basically. The families of victims are often struck by how dull killers can be. They’re expecting Satan himself to walk into the courtroom and what they see instead is just some doltish, underachieving jackass with tattoos and bad skin who wants to be evil, perhaps, but doesn’t have the brains for it.”
“One of Satan’s many disguises is ignorance. But we can’t discount Romero because he’s an interesting overachiever.”
“Of course not. It’s just very difficult to see a man like Romero stooping to murder, particularly a murder like this one. There would have to be rather a good motive.”
“On that we can agree.”
The two men walked the paved promenade toward the harbor to find the little craft that would convey them the short distance to the yacht. Patrice had reiterated her determination to stay behind. (“I’ve lived through the sea-sickness and morning-sickness combo enough for one lifetime. How women on the way to the new world managed it I’ve no idea.”)
It was a sunny, brisk day, the sort of day that stirred the blood, lifted the heart, and made a person think the world was spinning along exactly as it should. Max thought he might bring Awena and Owen out for a day at the shore as soon as the temperature warmed. This day he wore a woolen scarf tightly knotted round his neck, and he was wishing he’d thought to bring gloves.
He anticipated what Owen’s first encounter with a large body of water might be like, knowing the child would love the shore as much as his parents did. Right now Owen’s only experience was with the River Puddmill wending its ponderous way through Nether Monkslip. Max thought he might also look into swimming lessons for Owen, even though it would mean weekly drives to the pool in Staincross Minster.
He and Cotton hurried on, heads down against the cold. Monkslip-super-Mare’s harbor, just deep enough for small fishing boats, was wedged between Dorset and Devon, in an area where the Jurassic cliffs briefly paused before resuming their dramatic sweep up the coast. The village sat majestic and assured, its useful harbor and the voluptuous beauty of its surrounding hills guaranteeing its continued existence. Baffled archeologists could only guess at a time line for its origins. The winding streets had retained their medieval bones, and some relics remained of the area’s importance as a gathering place in olden times of chieftains and kings. The gentle overlay of centuries allowed the visitor the illusion that if he stood very still and listened intently, all the sounds and voices from long ago would come rushing past his ears. The scent of clematis was carried on the wind, borne down from hills thick with greenery; hidden by trees were ancient holloways which had carved themselves into the landscape over centuries. Some of these trails cut inland for miles, secret and enticing, never quite deserted by mankind, never deserted by wildlife.
Despite its popularity, the resort had been spared over-development and the worst sorts of seaside entertainment: the shops selling plastic spades and buckets and refrigerator magnets with British flags had been consigned to a single meandering side street; the newest large buildings were the Victorian hotels sunning themselves above the promenade.
Max had taken advantage of the concealing holloways just the night before, stealing away to ring George Greenhouse from within the enfolding, twisting darkness of the ancient path nearest the hotel. It had been a quick call to say only that they had no solid leads, but hoped a closer examination of the ship might yield some clues. The rules of an MI5 engagement were that the operative was on his own with little or no contact with higher-ups, but Max had taken extraordinary measures not to be seen or overheard. Anyone entering the holloway automatically set off nature’s alarm system, sending woodland creatures scurrying.
Max and Cotton located the boat tender and boarded with care: the sea this day was choppy, and water sloshed against the little boats at harbor, washing them in a sudsy white foam. The sky seemed to melt into the water ahead of them; in the distance the yacht wobbled like a ghost ship. They were being ferried to the yacht by a weathered man with a neglected beard who looked like an abandoned DIY project, all jutting angles and missing fastens.
“The couples, married or otherwise, pretty much alibi each other,” Cotton was saying a few minutes later, shouting to be heard over the noise of the motor. “For what it’s worth,” he added, “which is not a lot, the baron claims to have been sound asleep on the boat in the arms of his baroness. You’ve talked with them by now. Your impressions?”
“Yacht,” corrected Max absentmindedly. “To be considered a boat it would have to be much smaller. Yes, I spoke with them together yesterday. There is something odd there.”
“Yacht—got it. I’ve no more experience with sailing than I have with the great outdoors. As I think I’ve mentioned, I feel that the great indoors was invented to keep us all safe and out of trouble.”
Indeed, he’d confided to Max that as far as he was concerned, all sailing craft had two positions: safely afloat or sunk to the bottom of the sea with all hands lost. He could tell the Calypso Facto was a beauty, however: a floating luxury hotel.
“How is it you know so much about boats and yachts, anyway?” he asked Max now.
“I don’t, really. I know fore and aft; I know ‘port out, starboard home.’ I gather I’ve been living a lie on that subject for many years, however: the POSH acronym is meaningless, as it all rather depends on which direction you’re sailing as to whether or not you’ve got posh accommodations.” Max didn’t elaborate on the fact that his limited knowledge of sailing came from his time serving undercover on luxury cruise ships, trying to discover, for example, who was smuggling stolen art out of the U.K.: he’d been seconded several times to the Met’s Art and Antiques Unit. He might reminisce with Cotton and Patrice later, once this crime had been solved, but so much of what he had done in days past was covered by the agreement he had signed with the government to keep secrets secret. It was easier in the end never to talk about any of it.
“I see,” said Cotton. “Well, I couldn’t agree with you more about the baron and his lady: there is something odd there. No one seems to know why those two were aboard, as I’ve indicated. Even Romero was a bit vague. But he’s American, you know, and I gather a bit taken with the idea of being associated with nobility, however tenuously, and however minor they may be. Which is strange, when you recall that his country was founded on the idea of getting the nobs out of their hair—out of their powdered wigs, I should say. In my experience, Americans love them all now. Almost single-handedly they have saved the tourism industry. Ah, here we are.”
They clambered aboard the yacht to find the ship’s captain waiting for them on the main deck. Cotton, Max noticed, had managed the trip with not a hair out of place nor a splash of water on his clothing. He was wearing lace-up shoes but with rubber soles—clearly an enormous concession to the occasion. It was probably Cotton’s idea of resort wear. Max had watched as Cotton boarded the tender and sat down, hitching up his perfectly pressed trousers to preserve the crease.
“Really?” Max had said. Max was wearing jeans and trainers with a wool jumper under his weatherproof jacket. The rather gaudy scarf had been knitted for him by a St. Edwold’s volunteer, and its main benefit was that it was warm. Max never had the heart to refuse these spontaneous acts of generosity coming from his parishioners, which made him one of the most colorful priests in the area. Cotton wore his usual suit and tie.
“What?” Cotton asked.
“I mean, was your tuxedo at the dry cleaners?” Cotton had to be the most debonair policeman on the force. Max doubted the urbane detectives of Paris and Rome could hold a candle to him and his wardrobe. Max wasn’t sure if Cotton was dressing for success and aiming for the next rung on the ladder, or if he simply liked clothes and dressing up for every occasion, choosing each tie and pocket handkerchief with care. Perhaps a bit of both.
The captain proved to be just under six feet tall and roundly built. He sported a Captain Ahab beard—a reddish chin curtain that contrasted with the graying brown hair springing from his forehead. His eyes were pale blue and sunk into a permanent network of squint lines.
“Captain Smith, at your service,” he said, offering a gnarly hand to both men. “I understand you’d like the cook’s tour. Nasty business, this. It does a ship’s reputation no good to have an unsolved murder attached to its name. Crews can be superstitious, and so can passengers. There’ll be talk of a ghostly woman in white before you know it, mark my words.”
“We’re doing what we can to solve this murder,” Cotton told him. “That may put the stories to rest.”
The captain shook his head. “The last time I heard of the like happening it were two passengers that had quarreled over a woman. One claimed self-defense but there’s no way that could happen here or on any modern ship, not unless the victim were eight feet tall—you’ll see that for yourselves. Folk don’t just fall off a ship like this: it were custom built for extra safety so things like this couldn’t happen. Where would you like to start?”
Max said, with a glance at Cotton, “I don’t think we have a set agenda, but at some point I’d like to concentrate on the guest cabins.”
“Fine. There are twelve of those. Also there are smaller cabins for the crew members, of course.”
“What sorts of amenities do you have on board?” He’d been filled in by Patrice and Cotton but it never hurt to hear from the man who presumably knew the yacht better than anyone.
“What don’t we have is the better question. All the usual, plus a putting green, saunas, pool, hot tub—all that. Wine storage and enormous freezers. A game room. A safe room and storage vaults for valuables. A laundry station. And of course for this lot there’s a private theater so they can study themselves on film. We have a large crew as these things go but we’re stretched thin keeping it all running.” The captain’s face as he listed these creature comforts was not unlike a missionary discussing the religious rites of cannibals he’d been sent to serve—a combination of awe and revulsion. Captain Smith looked to be of the old school, where real men subsisted on hard tack and a pint of fresh water a day if they were lucky. The frivolity of a luxury yacht like the Calypso Facto seemed to rub him up the wrong way. He probably was well compensated by Romero to blunt the effect.
“How large is the galley?” Max asked. “How many can it serve, I mean?”
“I take your meaning. How many, that depends on how often we dock for supplies, but I can tell you that area’s nearly six hundred and twenty feet in size. That’s not including the storage areas for provisions, of course.”
“Of course,” said Cotton, whose entire, sparsely furnished flat was six hundred square feet. He called it his Zen Den.
“And there’s a safe room? How interesting. Like a panic room, is it?”
“We never panic,” the captain admonished him. “That’s not a word I’ll allow on my ship. But yes, that is what some would call it. Of course, we travel nowhere near pirate-infested waters—it’s a ship built for mindless pleasure, not a cargo ship—but a safe room is all the latest rage and this yacht has all the latest.”
“We’d like to see that, too, if we may,” said Cotton.
“Right this way.”
The captain took them down in a coffin-like elevator to a room secured with a keypad-style computerized lock. He asked the two men to turn their backs to him as he punched in the four-digit code that would unlatch the metal door.
“In here,” he said, swinging it wide to admit them. “It’s all bullet-proofed, this lot,” he added, with obvious pride, possibly longing for the day when he could foil boarding pirates with this secret failsafe to protect his crew and passengers.
Max and Cotton looked around them at shelves containing rolled bedding and tins and packets of food, and vast canisters of staples like sugar and flour. The area was ringed with bench seating for perhaps a dozen people; at the far end of the room was a bank of communications equipment. It would be a very tight fit but it could just about accommodate everyone on board in a temporary emergency. Max would have given a lot to see how the baron and baroness might have adapted to being penned in with the ship’s crew. They would probably have rather taken their chances being cast adrift on a lifeboat, using the baroness’s diamonds as fish bait.
“You could survive in here for about a week if you had to, as far as the provisions go,” the captain told them. “But with the communications equipment—all state of the art, you know—we would signal for help and be rescued long before the food ran out.” Clearly, for him, this room was far, far better than the ship’s froufrou nonsense like putting greens. This was where the oftentimes hazardous business of running a ship was made manifest.
Max was wondering how easy it would be to sabotage the ventilation system to the room. Certainly that would be taken care of by whatever ship’s architect had designed the space. But what one person could design or invent, another person could disrupt.
His eyes roamed over the shelves of canned and boxed provisions.
“Was this area searched before?” he asked Cotton, who nodded.
“Certainly. But only just. It’s kept locked, as you saw, and we were focused on the rooms that might be more directly connected to the murder. We only looked in here on the slight chance of finding a stowaway. It was a possibility that had to be eliminated.”
“Quite right,” said Max. “But send someone out here to look inside these tins and boxes. To search the contents of each and every one.” He didn’t have to tell Cotton what they were looking for, which was essentially anything that didn’t belong.
“I say,” put in the captain. “I don’t—Is that really necessary? I supervised the loading of the provisions myself. You can’t be too careful these days. You have my word; nothing dodgy came aboard.”
“No, one can’t be too careful,” Cotton agreed. “Now we’ll have another look at the guest rooms.”
Max and Cotton walked away as the captain busied himself securing the door.
“If we knew the spot where Margot went overboard, it might help us pinpoint what happened when,” said Max.
“Oh, but we do know now. Or we are fairly certain we do. Come along; I’ll show you.”