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ASHANTA WAS ALL FOR finding Edith Summersby right away. She stood up, sat down, then stood up again. It was a cold night and neither of us was dressed for it, but we both tingled with energy.
I took her arm and pulled her next to me. “We need to think about this.”
“Don’t be silly. We can’t sit around procrastinating, we’ve got to strike while the iron’s hot. She’s ready to open up.”
“Or someone thinks she is.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Do you know what her handwriting looks like?”
She ground her teeth. “Okay, okay, gotcha. What’s your suggestion then?”
“Avoid doing anything rash. We go back to our cabin and talk.”
“That’s the worst place. We’ve already agreed it might be bugged.”
I rubbed the space between my eyebrows. “What if it isn’t her handwriting? What would that mean? We have to think.”
“Have you ever seen Mr Wiles’s handwriting?” she said.
“Why Mr Wiles?”
“He’s the one who told you Edith Summersby was dead. Maybe he’s trying to discover whether you believe him.”
“Or it’s a genuine cry for help. Either way, we’ve got to look innocent. The best way to do that would be to go up to Edith Summersby and say, ‘Excuse me, did you put this in my bag?’”
“Alternatively, we could do nothing. If anyone asks later, I could pretend I’d lost it. It might have fallen out when I removed my phone.”
“From the point of view of anyone who suspects anything, though, you might just be keeping mum. Which would mean you were investigating.”
“It’s so complicated.” She drew her fingers down her jowls. “You think we should confront her, though?”
“Hang on, we’re getting sidetracked. Surely the point isn’t what we should do about it. Rather, if this woman isn’t Edith Summersby, who is she? And what happened to the real Edith Summersby?”
“Carl.”
“What?”
“Carl of the roulette table, remember? He knows.”
“Or did. If they’ve killed Mrs Summersby, they’ve almost certainly killed Carl.”
She didn’t say anything. Then she grinned lopsidedly like it had finally sunk in that this wasn’t necessarily a game. “Shit.”
“We’ve got to confront Mrs Whoever-she-is,” I said, “then we’ve got to tell Mason we won’t be joining him for dinner any more. After tonight’s fiasco, we’ve got the perfect excuse. Then we leave well alone. If things look like they’re hotting up, we jump ship at the Falklands.”
“Shouldn’t we just go into the casino and see if Carl’s there? After all, it might all be Mr Wiles’s imagination. If he isn’t there, surely we can ask one of the other croupiers where he is. They must have been told something. They wouldn’t just accept his complete disappearance sans any explanation.”
I stroked my chin and took a sharp breath. Unless they were all in on it, which seemed highly unlikely, she was right.
The casino was a deck down in probably the biggest floor-space on the ship. Carpeted in deep-pile Axminster with spotlights and a bar, it had every game of chance you could conceivably want. The entrance was lined with slot machines and keno then there were tables for craps, roulette, baccarat, blackjack and poker, each manned by a croupier in a red waistcoat and black trousers. About fifty people, mostly couples, wandered about looking bleary. Oscar Peterson played the piano. Carl was nowhere to be seen.
“How much did you bring with you?” Ashanta said.
I went in my pocket and held up a five pound note.
She pulled a purse from her clutch bag and looked inside. “Twelve fifty.”
“Eight chips,” I said.
“Er, five, boyfriend. Let’s start as we mean to go on. Now go purchase.”
I went to the bar and we walked to the roulette table. It was manned by a young woman with no customers. She stiffened slightly as we approached, as if we were going to inspect her uniform. A middle-aged couple joined us.
“Place your bets,” the croupier said.
I don’t really know how roulette works, but I put one of our chips on 14 and the croupier said, “Rien ne va plus”. Then the wheel slowed, the ball piddled about for a bit and everything on the table was raked away. The middle-aged couple left in disgust.
“Er, where’s Carl tonight?” Ashanta said.
The croupier’s eyebrows narrowed. “Carl?”
“We played here when we first came on board. I think his name was Carl.”
“Oh, that Carl. Yes, he had to quit. He had a family illness. Place your bets.”
I put a chip on 14 again. It seemed as good a place as any.
“Rien ne va plus,” she said.
“So did Carl leave the ship?” Ashanta asked.
“I believe they sent a motor launch from Cayenne.”
“I wondered how long it’d take you to start asking questions about Carl,” said a voice behind us. We turned round. Mr Wiles. His white hair was dishevelled in the middle and he looked drunk. He sat down next to us as the croupier raked my chip away.
“I’d forgotten you’d mentioned him, Colin,” Ashanta said coolly.
“I don’t think so,” Mr Wiles said. He put six chips on the second 12 space and six on the Black. I put another of mine on 14.
“Rien ne va plus,” the croupier said.
“What’s your name?” Ashanta asked her.
“Frankie,” she replied.
Ashanta turned to Mr Wiles. “As I remember, Colin, you told us that Carl was fired for telling everyone Mrs Summersby was dead. ‘A man with a grievance’, you called him. But Frankie here knows a very different story.”
Frankie raked our chips away.
Mr Wiles smiled. “That’s presumably because the cabin crew were told a different story.”
“So the truth is that he was fired?”
“That’s right. And well done for blackening his name. Thanks to you, Frankie here will go back to the Berth deck, tell her colleagues the truth and Carl will never work again. We wished to spare him that last indignity.”
“We?”
“Rien ne va plus,” Frankie said, although we hadn’t placed any bets.
“John,” Wiles said.
After the wheel stopped spinning and Frankie said, “Place your bets” again, I put another chip on 14. Wiles divided ten chips between 1-18 and Odd.
“You said you wondered how long it’d take us to start asking questions about Carl,” Ashanta said, picking up the chip I’d laid and slapping it down it on 35 as if I was an idiot.
“We all know who you are,” Wiles said. “You and your ‘husband’.”
“Who are we then?” Ashanta said.
“Rien ne va plus,” Frankie said.
“How much do you know?” Wiles said.
“I’ve no idea what you mean,” Ashanta replied, though I could see he’d unnerved her. “I really haven’t.”
“Oh yes you have.”
“I know you’ve been drinking heavily,” Ashanta said. “And you’ll probably regret being so horrible to me in the morning.”
“Ah, never. Never in a million years. Because I know who you are, you see. We all do. You’re journalists.”
“What?” she said.
“Place your bets,” Frankie said.
I put a chip on 35. Mr Wiles divided ten chips between 1-18 and Odd again.
“Rien ne va plus.”
Wiles shook his head. “It’s no use pulling that face. You can’t dissuade me, I know too much. I know ‘Mr and Mrs Smith’ are Mr Ellis and Miss Jones. The whole ship knows it.”
“But we’re not journalists!”
“It was my idea to pass ourselves off as a married couple,” I said. “We won this cruise in a competition. Captain Mason – ‘John’ - will confirm that. Pretending Ashanta was my wife seemed a good way of making the whole thing even better.”
She kissed my hand. Frankie raked our chips in and, for all I know, binned them.
“You’re wasting your time,” he said.
“What is there for a journalist to report?” Ashanta asked.
“This is the Aurora’s last voyage.”
“Don’t you want it commemorated in print?”
“So you are journalists!”
“No!”
He banged his fist on the table, making Frankie jump. I saw her press an alarm button on the underside.
“Don’t patronise me,” he said. “I wasn’t born yesterday, and yes – yes, maybe I am drunk but in vino veritas, as they say. You’re wasting your time. Even if you find out what’s going on aboard this ship, no one’ll publish your story, because no one’ll believe you. Your best bet is to disembark at the next port. Get off and stay off.”
He turned to leave, but lost his footing and collapsed on the floor. A few people gasped, a pair of cabin attendants sped towards him and knelt down, uttering a combination of are-you-okays and sorry-sir-we’re-going-to-have-to-ask-you-to-leaves. He was sober enough to look mortified. They helped him up and escorted him out without him making any further eye contact with anyone.
“There goes his knighthood,” Ashanta said.
“I thought he was going to thump us.”
She smiled. “Let’s follow him.”
When we emerged on deck, we saw him several metres ahead, obviously reassuring the attendants that he was okay to complete the journey of shame to his cabin unaided. They left him and he dusted himself off. We hid behind the jamb of the casino entrance, waiting for him to make his move. The attendants passed us on their way back inside with a smile and a nod. Then he walked away.
He didn’t display any obvious signs of being drunk. His step was measured and purposeful. It wasn’t until he rounded the third corner that it became clear where he was headed. He wasn’t on his way home at all. He was going to see Captain Mason.
Duty Officer Gould stood aside for him like he was expected and he climbed the steps to Mason’s cabin, knocked and let himself in. We stood behind a flight of deck steps and watched.
We soon heard Wiles shouting. There was silence for a few seconds then he raged again, then again. Mason bawled back and there was about a minute of accusatory to-ing and fro-ing. Finally, Mason must have told Wiles to get out because he opened the door and left it open like people do when they want to score one last feeble point. Wiles descended the steps at speed and marched off.
A moment later, Mason emerged pulling his tunic on. He went back in for his hat then came down the steps, still doing his buttons up. He walked off purposefully in the opposite direction to Wiles.
“He’s headed our way,” I whispered.
“We’re in trouble,” Ashanta said.
We started to walk quietly away from his cabin, away from our own too. We climbed a flight of steps to the next deck up.
“I think we’d better give him time to cool off,” I said.
“What do you think he’s going to do?”
“God knows.”
“Let’s go up to the crow’s nest.”
I frowned. “How long do you think we’re going to be able to stay hidden there? He’s probably gone for Goulding and Endersby to organise a search party. I can see the headlines already. ‘Young couple in suicide pact’.”
“You think they’re going to kill us?”
“We can’t rule it out.”
“Then what good will going up to the crow’s nest do?” We were already on our way up so it was a rhetorical question.
“Firstly, we’ll see them coming, so we can run.”
“We can’t keep running for ever.”
“How long till we reach the Falklands? Two days?”
“We can’t hide that long.”
“The ship isn’t full to capacity. There must be empty cabins. If only we can find them.”
“And if only we could pick locks.”
We’d reached the Sun Deck now. We sat down. One or two passengers stood looking over the railings, two or three sat on the circle of benches around the flagpole.
“They’re not going to kill us in full public view,” I said. “We can stay here and make them negotiate.”
“Or go through the motions of negotiating.”
I threw my left palm up. “The cleaners!”
“What?”
“The cleaners must have master keys. It’s simply a question of waylaying one of them tomorrow morning. Come on,” I said, responding to her sceptical look, “it’s the beginning of a plan.”
She started. “Oh, shit.”
I followed her sight-line. Mason cleared the top of the stairway and strode towards us with a face like thunder. There wasn’t time to bolt.
