The map and the letter excite her particularly. ‘How do I get to see them?’ she says. For a moment I want to demur – I hadn’t cracked the cipher and I’d been trying for weeks, I just knew she thought she’d get it in two seconds flat, which was basically calling me stupid. Then I told myself I was being stupid. River and me – we’re not like that. We don’t do each other down, we build each other up. If she could solve it, it’d solve a hell of a lot of our problems too.
‘Cuttling’s got them,’ I tell her, ‘and he’s guarding them real good. Crazy, cos Harry and me, we’ve seen them enough times – heck, I see them in my sleep sometimes. But when the ruby disappeared, he got it into his head that someone would swipe them too. Still, if anyone can talk him into getting them out again, it’s you.’ She can charm the birds out of the trees, my sister, and I have not met a man yet who can resist her when she puts her mind to something.
There might be an issue if Miss Jones has any say in the matter, though. Miss Jones don’t know I’ve seen the way she looks at Harry – sheep’s eyes is understating it. And if she looks at Harry like a sheep, she looks and me (and River too now) like a wolf. ‘What big teeth you have, Grandma,’ kind of thing.
Harry puts his head around the lounge door. ‘Hey, you’ve been out here for an age!’ he says. ‘Whispering secrets in each other’s ears?’
‘Something like that,’ I say. ‘Hey Harry, do me a favour, OK?’
‘Sure thing, doll.’
I can see River’s about to jump on that ‘doll’, and I put a hand on her arm to warn her off. Yeah, I love my sister, but she can get a bit … psycho. Usually in a good cause, it’s true, but she’s never quite got the hang of discretion being the better part of valour. Shoot first, ask questions later, that’s River. Also punch first, ask questions later; karate chop first, ask questions later, and put into an iron maiden and kick the door shut, ask questions later. Don’t get on her bad side, is what I’m saying.
‘Can you distract Miss Jones for a bit? Take her for a little walk, show her the flight deck, that kind of thing?’
He smiles. ‘Why don’t I take the pair of you for a little walk, show you the fight deck, that kind of thing?’
‘This is business, not pleasure. We want Cuttling to get the map out, and we can do without Miss Jones putting a spanner in the works.’
We joke around for a few minutes, but in the end Harry agrees to get her out of the way. Miss Jones looks surprised at the invitation, but very, very pleased. Cat that got the cream.
Hey, I could go for a saucer of cream myself right now.
What? Scrub that. No idea where that came from.
River and I bookend Cuttling who’s still making his way down the brandy bottle. I top up his glass and River makes her move.
It’s fun to see River get to work, and she’s got a big advantage here anyway – besides her obvious ones – because she can speak his language a lot better than I can. He’s a collector, and she’s dug up more artefacts than a squirrel has nuts.
Soon they’re on to such fascinating topics as what might be found at Sutton Hoo (some place in England where the Vikings might’ve been) and the discovery of 30,000 clay tablets at Persepolis (yawn). But she knows her stuff, my sister – turns out Persepolis was burned to the ground by Alexander the Great, that takes us to Alexander founding the city of Alexandria, and that takes us to (yes, you’ve got it) Cleopatra. And by this time they’re thick as thieves and Cuttling is so desperate to show her the map and letter he’s practically begging. She graciously agrees to the favour of inspecting them. Phil and I exchange amused glances, we both appreciate the skill on display here.
The papers are locked in a case that’s locked in a cupboard that’s locked in Cuttling’s cabin, with an extra padlock on top that Cuttling alone has a key for. I’d have said that was a bit over the top when there were only six of us plus crew on the flight, but now we know for sure there’s a murderer on board, I’m thinking it’s fair enough.
Soon the documents are spread out in front of us, giving me major flashbacks to the hours Harry and I spent staring at them. But we’re all disappointed. Yeah, River’s interested all right – especially in the hieroglyphs, which she describes as ‘pidgin Egyptian’ – she can’t crack the code and don’t get anywhere near to solving the mystery. She looks real cross with herself. ‘Hey, don’t sweat it,’ I say. ‘Harry’s probably right – once we get there, it’ll all fall into place.’
‘It’d better do,’ says Cuttling. ‘Cleopatra’s bones are coming home with me or you’re all gonna be very sorry … ’ Phil’s just pouring Cuttling yet another drink. When Cuttling utters his threat, Phil’s hand suddenly wobbles. River’s lightning reaction scoops up the documents just in time to stop them being splattered with brandy. ‘Idiot boy!’ barks Cuttling. ‘Watch what you’re doing, can’t you? These things are priceless!’
Phil don’t look embarrassed or ashamed, he looks furious. ‘Let’s go get you cleaned up,’ I say hastily, and hurry him out of the lounge, leaving River behind to clear up the mess.
‘That man is an ill-bred ignoramus,’ Phil says, and I ain’t saying I disagree with that.
‘You’re not usually clumsy like that, though,’ I say. ‘Look, he’s just making empty threats—’
But Phil’s not listening. ‘The disrespect,’ he says. ‘Does he not know he speaks of a goddess? He speaks of her bones as if she were no more than a dog!’
‘To guys like Cuttling,’ I say, ‘people only exist as a means to an end. And that’s real people, folks he sees day to day and talks to, like you and me. Someone like Cleopatra? He knows all about her, wants her possessions, all that stuff. But he don’t have the smarts to think for a minute that she was someone who lived and loved and had hopes and dreams and all that. Her bones don’t mean any more to him than her hat. They’re just another thing for him to put on a shelf and gloat over, because no other collector’s going to get anything to rival them. Yeah, it’s wrong – but he’s a crackpot. Heck, if he’d been in New York at the time, he’d be top of the suspect list for Wallace’s murder.’
That distracts Phil at least, which is what I’d intended. We start to go over the evidence yet again – maybe this time we’ll find some flaw in Cuttling’s alibi. We know there’s a murderer on board, after all …
Then River appears. Her eyes are shining. That’s the look I see in the mirror when I think I’m about to solve a case.
‘You’ve done it!’ I exclaim. ‘You’ve cracked the code!’
She shakes her head, but she sure as heck still looks pleased with herself. ‘We need to find somewhere private,’ she says. ‘Somewhere we can talk. Our cabin?’
‘There’s a corpse in there,’ I remind her.
She shrugs. ‘I’m sure it won’t mind. But I suppose that does make it a tiny bit crowded. Any other ideas?’
‘If Harry was around, I guess he’d let us use his cabin,’ I say. ‘But he’s still off tomcatting with Miss Jones, poor egg.’
She looks quizzically at me. ‘Do you really like him?’ she says.
‘Sure,’ I say. She’s seen Harry, right? What sorta question is that?
Phil has a bunk in the staff area (which he ain’t happy about one bit – the Kid’s got some funny ideas about stuff being ‘below his dignity’) and he suggests we go there. No arguments from either of us, so off we go. ‘OK,’ I say to River, once the door is shut behind us, ‘what’s got you all hot under the collar, then?’
She perches herself on the edge of Phil’s bunk, but don’t answer directly. Instead she says, ‘Tell me again what happened in George Badger’s hotel room.’
I oblige, right up to its unpleasant climax.
‘He took a revolver out of the dresser drawer and shot himself through the head,’ she echoes. ‘And later you realised that Badger Senior’s letter had been on the dresser, so you went back for it.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Tell me what happened to the letter after t
hat. Exactly. Every detail.’
I shut my eyes, marshalling my facts, then say, ‘Harry picked it up off the dresser. He folded it – it already had fold lines, I guess it’d come in an envelope originally – and put it in his pocket.’
‘And when did you next see it?’
‘Well, we got pretty distracted by the whole murder thing,’ I say. ‘But we looked at it later that night. We couldn’t get any meaning from it, but back then we assumed it was because we didn’t have the map. Yeah, we’d both seen the map, but we sure hadn’t committed it to memory. We put the letter in my office safe, and that’s where it stayed, apart from when we was working on the thing, all the way until we handed it over to Cuttling.’
‘Right. So, the letter Cuttling just showed us – notice any difference between it and the one you were studying back at your office?’
I frown. I look at Phil, and he’s frowning too. What is River getting at?
‘You reckon Cuttling’s pulling a fast one?’ I ask. ‘Why would he do that? This is his expedition.’
My sister shrugs. ‘I don’t know why,’ she says. She turns to Phil. ‘When you spilled the drink, Mr Cuttling was quick to grab those papers. He didn’t want them getting messed up. Imagine getting something on such an important document … ’
She stares into my eyes as she says it, like she’s trying to get an idea from her head into mine.
And I suddenly get it. Call myself a detective? If there’s an imbecile on board, it ain’t Calvin Cuttling, that imbecile is Melody Malone.
‘There was blood on the letter!’ I say. ‘Maybe only a few drops, but it was there. Gee, I’m a fool. It was one of the reasons I didn’t move anything from Badger’s room the first time – the cops might have noticed the gap in the spatter pattern on the dresser and gone down the wrong route, didn’t want them getting some idea it was murder instead of suicide.’
‘So Harry picked up the soiled letter and put it in his pocket. What about the next time you saw it?’
I almost answer straight away, a reflex. But I need to be sure. I shut my eyes again, go through it all step by step. Can I trust my memory? I finally decide I can. ‘The next time I saw it – it was clean. Yeah. I’m sure. Not a drop of blood.’
‘Someone stole it from Harry and replaced it with a copy?’ asks Phil.
River and I look at each other for a moment, but although Phil’s idea ain’t impossible, we both know it ain’t the correct solution.
‘No,’ I say, my heart feeling heavy. ‘Harry replaced it with a copy.’
‘There could be an innocent explanation,’ River suggests.
‘Sure there could,’ I say.
‘But why would he do that?’ asks Phil.
I don’t know. But one thing I do know for sure – Harry could not have murdered Horace P. Wallace. In that, at least, he is one hundred per cent innocent. Heck, I even mentioned it at the time. His alibi is watertight – because his alibi is one Melody Malone.
I go through it in my head again. We leave Wallace’s office together. Wallace is alive, no question. There wasn’t no trickery, nothing like that. Does Harry go back for any reason? No, he does not. Could he maybe have left a booby trap of some kind? I couldn’t see how. We go off to the Liberty Crown, we get the letter, we return to the club, we find the body. And no, it was no fake body, no trick. I’ve seen dead before, and that was dead.
‘I want to have a look in his cabin,’ I say eventually.
‘Harry’s?’ asks River.
I nod. ‘Yeah, I guess it’s a long shot, but maybe we’ll find some sort of clue that’ll tell us what he’s up to.’
I’m feeling like the biggest chump known to mankind. There’s me getting the trembles whenever Harry’s around, and he’s been playing me like a fool. Ain’t my heart that’s broke so much as my pride.
Well, maybe my heart’s got a bit dented.
I’m trying not to show any of this. A gal’s got her reputation to think about. But River gives me a look, and I know she’s feeling sore on my behalf. Ain’t hiding anything from my sister.
‘Yes, I think it’s a good idea to search his cabin,’ she says.
‘It will be locked,’ Phil points out. ‘Do we, then, break down the door?’
‘I can probably pick the lock,’ River says. See, she’d have made a swell gumshoe.
But I shake my head. ‘We don’t want to make him all suspicious. We’ve got a real good excuse – we’re moving our things to his cabin! It was his idea, no way he can carp about it. Phil, go find the maid who found the body and ask her for the key. She was there when Harry offered his cabin to us, so she knows it’s a legit request. River and I will go grab our stuff and meet you there.’
Phil heads off, and River and I go to our cabin. My thoughts are churning with maybes and whys and hows as I put my wash things in a sponge bag then start to take my clothes out of the wardrobe. River does the same, and we’ve just finished when Phil arrives with the key.
He lets us into Harry’s cabin. It’s identical to ours, except it don’t come with a cadaver; nice touch. ‘Phil, go on watch,’ I say. ‘Let us know if Harry’s coming. I’ll make a search of the room. River, pack up Harry’s stuff and hang up our clothes, that sort of thing. We need to look like we’re doing what we say we’re doing, you get me?’
They both nod. Phil goes and loiters outside the door and I begin my standard search: left to right from floor to ceiling, moving through the room methodically, checking every possible hiding place. River begins to carry Harry’s clothes from wardrobe to bunk as I go on to the washstand. Remembering Harry’s skills I make one hundred per cent certain there ain’t nothing you could stash a paper in – even that face cream trick could work if you folded the letter up very small and wrapped it in something waterproof. But there ain’t nothing to be found at all, not nowhere in the whole room.
Well, I guess it was an outside chance, after all. But hey! Maybe all ain’t lost. River’s going through Harry’s clothes, and suddenly there’s an ‘Aha’ from her.
I join her. She’s pulled a sheaf of letters from an inside jacket pocket and is riffling through them. ‘Something from his bank – envelope addressed to a men’s outfitters … ’
‘Nothing else?’
‘Not a thing.’
I hold out a hand – it ain’t that I don’t trust her, just I like to make sure of things myself, you know? But Phil starts whistling outside the door, the sign that Harry’s on his way, so River shoves the letters back into the jacket pocket and a few seconds later we’re leaving Harry’s cabin arm in arm, not a care in the world, me calling out to Phil that he can move Harry’s things now, and acting all, ‘Oh, hey there, Harry!’ surprised to see him.
‘You are such a darling, giving us your cabin!’ says River in her most eyelash-fluttering way, putting a hand on his arm and thereby letting the eternal wrath of Miss Jones fall upon her.
‘Phil here’s going to take your belongings to Cuttling’s cabin,’ I put in. ‘That’s right, yeah?’
‘Oh, sure, sure,’ he says, but here’s the thing, he does not look happy about it. He’s trying to, real hard – but he ain’t succeeding. Which is maybe because we have invaded his privacy, or maybe because there really is something to find. It’s like he’s trying to hold off shouting at us, trying really hard. You can see the effort when he smiles, takes the bundle of clothing and the sponge bag from River, and says he’ll see to it himself and come meet us back in the lounge in a few minutes.
Outside the cabin, Miss Jones trots up and joins us. I ask if she had a nice time touring the flying boat, and she assures us it was ‘perfectly pleasant, thank you’, with only a slight undertone of wanting us dead.
The sound of a gong rings out. Lunchtime is here. ‘Watch out,’ River whispers to me. ‘Remember the coffee.’
‘That can’t have been Harry … ’ I say, but I guess I’m really trying to kid myself. Maybe he’s not the straight-up swell guy I’d thought he was, but a kill
er? A killer who tried to kill me?
‘Keep an eye on everyone,’ she says. ‘People are going to be careful about food and drink if there’s a poisoner about – but the poisoner doesn’t need to be. See if anyone seems less prudent than the rest.’
When we get to the lounge we find it transformed into a dining salon. As there’s only a few of us passengers we’re all seated at one big table, don’t matter what the etiquette manuals say, although Cuttling sits at the head of the table and Miss Jones, being as she’s only a secretary, is right at the far end. Phil ain’t here, he has to eat with the crew – not my decision, but I’m not footing the bill so I don’t get any say in it. Mrs Peterson-Lee is up and about again and joins us, although she don’t eat much. Her ‘nerves’ are still playing up, she says. I mean, yeah. Cleopatra was really known for her nerves.
Waiters skate from place to place dealing out the slop. River and me are on high alert, but no one else seems to be worrying about arsenic burgers or cyanide soup. Turns out we underestimated their sangfroid. No clues to be had here.
‘Imagine poor old Charles Lindbergh back on the Spirit of St Louis,’ says Cuttling as he chows down, completely unconcerned that there might be strychnine in the starters. ‘I don’t imagine he had turtle soup and filet of sole Amandine.’
Lindbergh was the guy who made the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic in the twenties. ‘I guess he’ll just have to put up with being in the history books,’ I murmur.
Miss Jones sends me an evil look. ‘Of course, Mr Cuttling will be in the history books too,’ she says. ‘As the discoverer of Cleopatra’s tomb.’
‘I sure will,’ he agrees with a self-satisfied smirk.
‘Interesting the people who end up in the history books,’ River puts in. ‘Caligula, Attila the Hun, Vlad the Impaler … ’
I flash her a look. Sheesh, sis, maybe wait until I get paid before winding up the boss, OK?
After peach pie and coffee (River and I steer clear of the coffee, no one else does), Cuttling asks for his bunk to be made up so he can get in a nap. The rest of us are asked to return to our cabins for maybe a half-hour while the dining saloon gets turned back into a lounge.
Doctor Who Page 18
