The Missing Sapphire of Zangrabar

by steve higgs

  ‘I need to speak with the captain. Can you arrange that?’ Jermaine looked unsure. ‘This man carried my luggage when I came on board,’ I explained. ‘He has to be Jack’s killer. There’s too much coincidence.’

  He nodded his understanding. ‘I’ll see what I can do. I’ll, ah, I’ll go now then,’ Jermaine left via his usual door avoiding the guards outside the main entrance to the suite.

  Barbie was left behind with me. ‘What else does it say?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, ah, here.’ She handed me her phone, which immediately went to a different screen the moment I touched it. I made a grunting noise and showed her as I handed it back. She touched it again and the screen with Shaun Metcalf’s face was back.

  It was a guilty face if ever I saw one, the scar on his eyebrow no doubt the product of a shady past or a delinquent childhood. The captain would have to pay attention to me now that I could identify a convicted jewel thief among his crew. I continued reading the old news article, but it didn’t say anywhere that he was a known accomplice of anyone called Langley. It did say though that he was from Brooklyn, the same place as Jack had said he was from. I handed the phone back to Barbie. ‘Can you search for more information about the missing jewel and any suspects?’

  She said, ‘Okay,’ with her permanent sweet smile and almost instantly handed the phone back to me with the results. Again, I touched it and killed the screen I was looking at. ‘Like this.’ Barbie patiently showed me how to touch the screen and move it about without making it go away.

  Having mastered that, I discovered there were numerous articles about the jewel the scar faced murderer was accused of stealing. It would take hours to read them all. Time I didn’t have as Jermaine would return any moment with the captain. ‘Is it possible to narrow the search?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure. What do you want to look for?’

  ‘Can you combine the name of the jewel with Jack Langley or just Langley?’ She could and she did, this time getting only one article, in which it named Shaun Metcalf as having several potential accomplices. It was an old piece, written more than a decade ago, but it listed four different men that were known to Shaun Metcalf, and could have been the other man they suspected to be involved in the jewel theft. Actually, it said that it could have been one or all of them but went on to advise the reader that two had been eliminated as unlikely because they were in jail now and another had been questioned by the police and released. It left a man called John Langley and it provided a picture. He and Metcalf had served jail time together in their twenties for stealing jewellery from the houses of the rich.

  The picture was of a man in his twenties, but it was the same Jack Langley I had met on my first night. I had found him. I had no doubt that Shaun Metcalf had taken a job on the ship to get even with his old partner. He had murdered Jack Langley and taken the jewels. Find him and the case was solved. I would be free finally.

  A loud knock at the door broke my concentration and heralded it opening. It wasn’t the captain that preceded Jermaine into the room though, it was the ever-unpleasant Mr Schooner once more. He already had a sneer on his lips. An embarrassed Jermaine shuffled in behind him, a burly guard on his shoulder like a threat.

  ‘Can I help you, Mrs Fisher? Your butler seems to think you have evidence that might prove your innocence.’ He made no attempt to hide the derision in his voice.

  I turned to Barbie to ask for her phone again. ‘May I?’ She willingly handed it over. ‘This person,’ I showed Mr Schooner the screen, ‘is a member of the crew, a convicted jewel thief and a known accomplice of the man we know as Jack Langley whose real name is John.’

  He looked down at the phone but then back up at me before he had time to take anything in. He looked angry. Really angry. ‘You gave her a phone?’ he snapped at Barbie. She flinched under his verbal assault, her perfect features now contorted in shock. ‘I gave strict instruction that Mrs Fisher was not to have communication with the outside world. You can expect to lose your job for this.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ I demanded. ‘This man is the killer.’ I had the phone up to his face so he couldn’t avoid it. ‘He went to jail when he and Jack stole a priceless jewel. The jewel was never recovered but Shaun Metcalf was convicted anyway, and his partner got away. He is on board to exact his revenge. I bet if you search his room you will find the missing jewels. This is the man that killed Lieutenant Davis.’

  Mr Schooner’s attention was all on me, his face mere inches from mine. He didn’t say anything for a couple of seconds, then he cracked a smile and began to laugh. Barbie’s horrified expression slowly relaxed. She was hoping his threat of dismissal was somehow part of a joke she didn’t understand. A grin flitted nervously across her face. I was just utterly bewildered.

  Before I could ask what he found so funny, he started speaking, ‘You do have a wonderful imagination, Mrs Fisher. Jewel thieves, accomplices, old convicts getting revenge on their partners after spending years in jail harbouring a secret. How do you come up with it all?’ He was still laughing between sentences, a small tear escaping his left eye from the mirth.

  ‘This is evidence,’ I pointed out, waving the phone around under his nose. I could hear in my voice though that I was no longer as sure as I had been.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he replied. ‘Circumstantial coincidence at best.’ He took the hat he held under his right arm and placed it back on his head, turning to a mirror across the room to check his reflection. ‘Will there be anything else?’

  I stared at him. I was lost again. I thought I had a solution. Would the captain have listened? When I said nothing, because I could think of nothing to say, Mr Schooner tilted his head in a mock salute and went to the door.

  He had a final comment though for Jermaine and Barbie, ‘You can both consider yourselves suspended pending formal review. I want you out of this room in the next two minutes or I will have the guards remove you. Don’t expect to keep your jobs once we reach St Kitts.’ Then he closed the door and was gone.

  ‘I’m fired?’ Barbie said slowly as if trying the concept out to see how it felt.

  Jermaine settled onto the nearest couch. The words, ‘Oh my,’ escaped his lips.

  I felt terrible. How had it all come to this?

  ‘The captain wouldn’t come,’ said Jermaine from his seated position. ‘I found him, but Mr Schooner was with him. As soon as I said what I needed him for, he sent Mr Schooner to deal with it. There was nothing I could do.’

  ‘This isn’t your fault,’ I replied instantly.

  Jermaine looked up at me, an incredulous look on his face. ‘Of course it’s not my fault. I haven’t done anything.’ He was getting angry now. ‘This is your fault, but I still seem to be out of a job.’ He stood up to deliver the outburst, then looked embarrassed once the words had left his mouth. ‘Sorry, madam, I’m…’ He didn’t finish the sentence. He just turned and left, leaving the room via the door in the kitchen back to his cabin.

  I turned to Barbie, my expression wretched.

  She spoke first though, ‘I should go.’ Tears were not far from falling, the words came out around a barely suppressed sob. I handed her the phone and she left too.

  All alone in my vast suite I felt like I must be the most miserable person on the planet. I had no friends, I had no husband, I had nowhere to live once I got off this ship, but that was probably a moot point because I was accused of murder and was most likely going directly to jail. Even if I was eventually proven innocent, I would still spend time in a cell while I waited for a trial.

  I crumpled to the floor, too stunned to walk to the bedroom to collapse on the bed and somehow too miserable to cry. In my depression, I had to ask if I would simply be better off jumping from the balcony right now. It would be so easy to achieve. The doors were only a few feet away. I got to my feet, wobbling on uncertain legs as I made my way across the room. As I put my hand on the chrome handle to let myself outside, the door behind me opened.

  A voice said, �
��I have to make sure you are alone.’

  I looked at my hand on the door handle. ‘What the heck am I doing?’

  ‘Huh?’

  I turned to see a guard in the doorway. He was looking at me with a confused look. ‘Where are they?’ he asked.

  Time to play dumb. ‘Where’s who?’

  He met me with a disbelieving look, I was wasting his time and he knew it. ‘Your butler and the gym bunny. Where are they? I have to escort them out. Mr Schooner’s orders.’

  ‘They left already.’

  ‘Left? But I’m guarding the door.’ Then I saw the light dawn. For three days they had been guarding the door to my suite to prevent me from leaving, but my butler had his own entrance. He was looking across the room to the kitchen and the door that led out of it. The door was closed now, but on the outside, it had a bell and on the door itself was a sign that read Butler’s Cabin in large letters.

  ‘Mike,’ the man yelled to his partner outside. Mike poked his head around the door as the first man advanced across the room toward the kitchen.

  ‘What?’ asked Mike.

  His partner was now in the kitchen. ‘I think there is another way out of this suite. Get over here.’

  Curious, Mike went to join his partner, both of them going through the door into Jermaine’s cabin and leaving the main door to my suite open and unattended.

  I glanced quickly at Jermaine’s door. They were both inside his cabin. ‘I’ll just let myself out then,’ I whispered to myself as I crossed the room, grabbing my handbag and a baseball cap as I went. Then, still in my pyjamas and slippers, I went in search of Shaun Metcalf.

  The Jewel Thief

  Hanging around in the passage outside my suite didn’t seem like a good idea, so I hurried away as fast as I could without looking like I was running away. Then I heard a string of swear words coming from the open door of the suite and abandoned any notion of being surreptitious. Before they could get out of the room and spot me, I made the corner and ducked out of view.

  I wasn’t out of earshot though and could hear them blaming each other and exchanging some inventive expletives. They only had two choices for which direction I might have gone, so even though they came across as a little dumb, I wasn’t going to hang around. There was an elevator bank to my right, the lights above both showed neither car was on my level.

  Were they coming? I stabbed the button between the two elevators repeatedly even though I knew doing so wouldn’t make the doors open any sooner. I wanted to skip back to the corner and see if they were coming but if they were, I was probably going to scream and wet myself.

  The left-hand car was moving, the number shown above it slowly ticking inexorably through the teens.

  Then I heard running footsteps. They were heading toward me!

  Stuff waiting for the elevator, I ran for the stairs. Then the damned lift pinged. Split with indecision, I flipped a mental coin and dived through the elevator doors as they opened, just as both guards came barrelling around the corner and saw me.

  They pointed and yelled as they sprinted toward the closing doors. Caught inside the confines of the steel box, I had nowhere to go and couldn’t have got there if I did. The doors slid shut in the nick of time, the guards’ bodies slamming against them and rattling the elevator as it started to move. I wanted to breathe a sigh of relief, but I wasn’t certain the elevator would descend faster than they could get down the stairs.

  Yet again, I was trapped.

  Think, Patricia. Is it better to go all the way to the bottom and hope you outrun them or get off on a random floor and see what happens? Surely, the further I went or the longer I was in the elevator, the more likely it was that they would meet a barrier of some kind that would slow them down. That was my plan then. I didn’t know what floor Barbie’s cabin was on, only that it was somewhere in the bowels of the ship. I would take the elevator to floor seven where it terminated and get off there. I would need a different elevator or some stairs to access the crew decks, however, I was convinced it wouldn’t take me long to find a man that could tell me where the super-sexy, toned, athletic, blonde girl lived.

  I hadn’t considered one important factor in my plan though: other people could press the elevator call button. Two floors down, the car slowed, stopped and opened. A nice-looking couple were waiting to get in. They looked a little surprised at my ready-for-bed outfit, but smiled pleasantly and got in.

  ‘Thirteen, please,’ the lady said as I was standing next to the buttons.

  Across the atrium the elevator had opened in, a stairwell door burst open and the guards were staring at me. I was a rabbit in headlights again, stabbing the button and trying not to wet myself.

  ‘Shouldn’t we wait for those men?’ the lady asked, her face genuinely confused by my desperation to get the doors shut. She raised her arm to stop the doors as they started to shut.

  I yelled, ‘Noooo!’ as I slammed into her, pushing her to the side of the car and watching in relief as the doors shut on the guards’ angry faces once more.

  ‘Is everything alright?’ the man asked as he pulled his wife gently away from me.

  God, I must look like a crazy woman. ‘I’m sorry. So, so sorry. Those men are chasing me, I just need to get away.’

  ‘Goodness,’ the wife said, her hand to her heart in shock. ‘Why?’

  Why? Think of a lie, Patricia, quickly. I must have been looking at them with blind panic in my eyes because that was what I was feeling. I was staring at them, my mouth open, struggling to find something to say.

  The lift pinged again, the doors opened to my left and I bolted, leaving their startled faces behind as I crossed the atrium as fast as I could go in my slippers.

  How far behind were the guards? I wasn’t even sure what number deck I had come out on, but details could wait until I was actually safe. I reached the door that led from the elevator atrium onto the deck itself and suddenly I was outside in the sun. There was a pool in front of me and despite the early hour there were children playing in it and a stack of adults laying on the sun loungers around it.

  Should I risk a look back into the elevator area to see if the guards were there? Probably not a clever idea. Instead, I forced myself to stroll nonchalantly by all the people enjoying the early morning sunshine. They barely noticed me even with my odd choice of clothes.

  I reached the far side of the pool, ducked around the side of a bar and found my way back into the ship without hearing anyone shouting or raising an alarm. I gave myself a minute at that point to lean against a handy wall. The ship was too vast for them to find me. At least that’s what I told myself as I set off again. It was too big and there were too many people for them to be able to catch me unless they got really lucky.

  The problem I faced now was that I had no idea where I was on the ship or where I was trying to get to; two pieces of information one might think vital for navigation. A quick glance upward as I crossed the deck outside had shown perhaps six decks above me reaching up toward the blue sky. If I estimate that there are twenty decks, the captain had told me how many there were on the first day, but I hadn’t been paying attention, then I have fourteen decks beneath me, and Barbie is toward the bottom of them. I was willing to bet there were maps or pictorial layouts all over the ship, but do you think I could find one now that I was in desperate need?

  What I came to first was another wide, open area filled with people. It contained shops and signs for a cinema. Escalators dropped down to the next level where I could see a water fountain surrounded by chairs set up to look like an Italian village square. Most of the chairs were occupied with guests eating their breakfast as wait staff in bright red shirts delivered food and collected empty plates. It looked wonderful, I had so much of this ship that I wanted to explore if I ever got the chance.

  I rode the escalator down, taking it all in, sniffing the glorious smell of coffee and fresh bread that filled the air. My stomach grumbled its emptiness, breakfast had been skipped again and
I fought an inner demon that argued I could stop for food now. The guards would never find me here. I doubted I would feel safe though, so my hunger would go unanswered for now. I spotted a male member of the wait staff and waved to slow him down.

  ‘Good morning, madam. Welcome to La Trevita. Please take a seat anywhere and one of us will be along momentarily to take your order.’ It was all delivered with practised polish and a slight French accent despite the Italian setting.

  ‘Thank you. I was hoping you might be able to help me with something else though.’ His eyebrows twitched as he waited for me to continue. ‘I am looking for a friend of mine, she’s my gym instructor, Barbie Berkeley. She’s a member of the crew. Could you direct me to the crew accommodation, please?’

  The young man looked surprised at the question but provided an answer anyway, ‘The staff are mostly located on deck four.’

  ‘Deck four, thank you.’ I turned to go but he called me back.

  ‘You will not be able to access it though. The staff areas are separate from the guest areas.’

  ‘How do I get to her then?’

  He sort of shrugged. ‘I guess you can go to one of the entry doors and ask for her. There’s an elevator that will take you there on the next deck. Take the stairs on the port side.’ He chuckled graciously at my confused face and pointed which way to go.

  I set off, hurrying but not running and hoping not only that I could follow his directions but also find someone that would help me locate Barbie when I got there. His directions were spot on, thankfully, which meant I found the stairs down easily. At the bottom there were other staff waiting for the elevator he had described; a chef and a man in some kind of maintenance outfit complete with toolbelt. No doubt there were myriad items that needed fixing or maintaining. As I approached, the chef turned his head slightly to see who it was and did a double take when he saw my face.

  It was Ian, the chef I had made sushi with on the second night while trying to catch Flint Magnum.