The Steampunk Megapack

by Jay Lake

  Anticipating the question, I had been examining the body, although with­out touching it. Now I stepped forward for a closer examination.

  “Six or seven hours, at least,” I said at length. “The ship’s doctor—Brown—will tell you better than I.”

  “We’d better have him in,” said La­v­ender, “although you are probably right. Excuse me, Mr. Crown,” he added. “I don’t mean to usurp your position in this matter.”

  The purser shuddered. “Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll be glad to do what­ever you suggest.”

  “Then get the doctor here, quietly, and ask Rittenhouse if he cares to come down. What else there is to do, you will know better than I—that is, I suppose you will have to report to the captain, or something of the sort. You’d better take Mrs. King out of this, too, Crown. I would like to talk to her a little later, though.”

  He looked keenly at the frightened, shaking woman, but his touch on her arm as he uttered his last words was gentle. I knew that he was wondering about her hesitation before opening the door. I, too, had been wondering. Was it merely a woman’s uncanny pre­science, or something more sig­nif­i­cant?

  When the purser and the matron had gone away, he turned to me.

  “A queer, unhappy case, Gilly,” he quietly remarked. “Do you sense it? The beginning, if I am not mistaken, of some­thing very curious indeed.”

  Without further words, he turned from the bed and began a swift search of the cabin. His nimble fingers flew as he worked, and under his touch the possessions of the murdered baroness came to view and disappeared again with skillful method. Apparently he found nothing to guide him.

  When he had finished, he said, “The question is, of course: did he, or she, or they—whichever may have been the case—find what they were looking for?”

  “The jewels are gone?” I asked. “You don’t find them?”

  “They are not here,” he replied, “un­less they are very cleverly hidden. The second question we are bound to consider, Gilly, is: were there any jew­els?” That startled me. He answered my surprised glance.

  “We have no proof that she ever had any jewels. She was vague enough about them, when she spoke to us—vague about their value—and she re­fused to deposit them with the purser, which was her proper course. We have only her word for it that she possessed the jew­els, and that she carried them with her. None the less,” he added firmly, “she may have had them, and they may have been stolen. Certainly she was not murdered as a matter of whim.”

  “I think you suspect something that you are not mentioning, Jimmie,” I re­marked, with another glance at the dead woman.

  He followed the glance. “Yes,” he replied, “you are right. I believe this all began somewhere on shore. Almost the most important thing to be done, is to establish the identity of this wo­man.”

  “You doubt that she is—?”

  “The Baroness Borsolini? Well, yes and no. She may have been just what she claimed to be, and yet nobody in particular. ‘Baroness,’ in Italy, means no­thing of importance. The last Ital­ian baron I knew was floor-walker in a Chicago ­department store. And, of course, she may not have been a baroness at all. My doubt of the poor wo­man, I will admit, goes back to the fact that she seemed to know me. However, if we are fortunate, we shall know all about her before long.”

  Again I looked a question.

  “Last night,” said he, “I sent a wire­less, in code, to Inspector Gallery, in New York. I was curious about the baroness and her tale, and suspecting further trouble, I tried to anticipate some of our difficulties.”

  “You anticipated—this?”

  “No,” he flared quickly. “Not this, by Heaven! If I had, Gilly, I’d have stood guard myself all night long. I an­ticipated another attempt on the jew­els,” he added in lower tones. “An­other attempt on ­what­ever it is this woman had that her murderer wanted. We must have a talk with that night watchman, too, be­fore long. I wonder who occupied the cabin across the way?”

  “We can soon discover that,” said I; and at that moment the purser came back with the doctor.

  Brown, a fussy little man with a beard the color of his name, had heard the story from the purser, and was prepared for what he saw. He conducted a swift and skillful examination that proved his ability, and verified my statement as to the time the woman had been dead.

  “Let us assume seven hours, then,” said Lavender. “That would fix the mur­der at about two in the morning—possibly a little earlier, possibly a little later. Where the devil would the watch­man have been at that hour? No doubt he had just passed on, for certainly the ­mur­derer would have been watching for him. By the way, Crown, who occupies B–14?”

  The baroness’ cabin was at the cor­ner of an intersecting passage, and its entrance was off the smaller corridor. B–14 occupied the corresponding ­po­sition across the passage, and was the opposite cabin to which Lavender had referred.

  “I’ll find out for you,” answered the purser; but the doctor replied to the question.

  “A clergyman,” he said. “Mur­chi­son, of some place in Iowa. He’s ill. He had me in, last night.”

  “Last night?” echoed my friend.

  “Yes,” said the doctor, “and it can’t have been very long before—before this happened! About one o’clock, I think. It’s not nice to think that this may even have been going on, while I was just across the way.”

  “How is he?”

  “Oh, he’s sick enough, but it’s the usual thing. It was new to him, though, and I suppose he thought he was going to die. The poor chap is pretty low.”

  “He may have heard something, if he was awake,” suggested Lavender. “Can he be questioned?”

  “Oh, yes, but I doubt if he heard anything but his own groans. Some­body’s with him now. I heard talking as I came by.”

  “I told Major Rittenhouse,” volunteered the purser. “He said he’d be right down. He ought to have been here by this time.”

  “We’d better go to my stateroom,” said Lavender. “There’s nothing further to be learned here, I think. I shall want to talk with the night watchman, Purser, when I can get to him. I suppose he’s asleep now. Doctor Brown, would you care to speak to your pa­tient across the way? Ask him if he heard anything in the night, you know; and press the point. Any trifle may be important.”

  The door opened and the tall fig­ure of Major Rittenhouse entered softly. He closed the door quietly behind him.

  “I heard the last question,” he re­marked, then glanced at the bed. For just an instant, his eyes rested on the dead woman, then without emotion he continued. “I have already questioned Mr. Murchison, Lavender. It occurred to me as a good idea to look up the nearest neighbor. In a case like this, time is of considerable im­port­ance. Murchi­son was awake most of the night, and had the doctor in, once. About four o’clock he got up and staggered around his room a bit, then opened his door. He saw some­one leav­ing this cabin, and sup­posed the baroness to be ill, too, for he thought no more about it.”

  “Four o’clock!” cried Lavender. “And if he thought the baroness was ill, he must have seen—”

  “Mrs. King!” gasped the purser, with new horror in his voice.

  “I don’t know her name, and nei­ther did Murchison,” said Ritten­house; “but the woman he saw was one of the stewardesses.”

  Chapter III

  Rain fell heavily throughout the af­ter­noon, filling the smoking-rooms and lounges of the floating hotel with animated conversation; but in Lav­ender’s stateroom, as the great liner shouldered through the squall, a grim­mer conversation went forward, un­known to the hundreds of our fellow passengers. It was feared that, soon enough, the ill tid­ings of death would spread through the ship, and throw a blight over the happy voyagers. Meanwhile, the task of apprehend­ing the murderer of the un­fortunate baroness had to move swiftly. It is probable that no shipboard mystery ever occurred more fortuitously; that is to say, with two more admirable detectiv
es than Lavender and Rittenhouse actually on board to handle the investigation; but it is equally probable that no more mys­terious affair ever engaged the talents of either investigator. We were a little world of our own, isolated from the rest of civilization by hundreds of miles of salt water; our inhabitants were com­paratively few in number, and there was no opportunity whatever of escape. Somewhere in our midst actually moved and ate and slept a man or a woman guilty of a hideous crime of violence; yet not a single clue ap­par­ently existed to the ident­ity of that individual, unless Mur­chison’s ­tes­t­i­mony had supplied it.

  Mrs. King, the stewardess, was ­re­luctant to an extraordinary degree, when for the second time she was ques­tioned about her murdered charge. At first, she denied point-blank any knowledge of the events of the night, but then, as Laven­der continued to probe, she burst into a storm of hysterical weep­ing. Confronted with the purport of the clergyman’s in­formation, she made a statement that only added mys­tery to the case.

  “I did go in there at four o’clock,” she said tearfully, addressing the pur­ser, “and, so help me God, Mr. Crown, she was already dead!”

  The purser’s astonished glance went round the cabin and settled on my friend; but Lavender only nod­ded.

  “That is what you should have told us at once,” he said. “You were afraid of compromising yourself, but you only com­promised yourself more deeply by keeping silent. You see, Rit,” he contin­ued, turning to the Major, “the time element remains unconfused. The mur­der occurred at about two o’clock, as the body indicated. Now, Mrs. King, let us have no more evasions and no more de­nials. If you stick to the truth, no harm will come to you that you don’t deserve. Tell us exactly why you went to the baroness’ cabin at four o’clock in the morn­ing.”

  “She—she called me!” whispered the woman, in a voice so low that we caught the words only with diffi­culty.

  “That, of course, is nonsense,” said Lavender, severely; but Major Rit­ten­house had caught a glimpse of the truth.

  “You mean that the call board showed a call from her room,” he in­ter­rupted. “But you didn’t hear the bell ring, did you?”

  The woman shook her head.

  “She was probably asleep, Jim­mie,” continued the Major. “She didn’t hear the bell, but when she awoke, some hours after it had rung, the board showed the baroness’ number up. She answered—and found the body!”

  “Is that what happened?” de­manded Lavender of the woman.

  Again Mrs. King responded with a gesture of the head, this time affirmative. The purser was angry.

  “You are the night stewardess,” he cried. “You have no right to be asleep.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Lavender, “she was asleep. It doesn’t help matters now to scold her. What happened is this: the murderer entered the cabin about two o’clock, and the baroness woke—possibly she had not been asleep. She heard the intruder, and sat up. Before she could scream, his hands were at her throat. There was a struggle, sharp but brief, and somehow the victim man­aged to reach and touch the call button. The ringing of the bell in the passage alarmed the murderer and he fled. Mrs. King was asleep and did not get the call. Two hours later, she awoke, saw that a call had come from the baroness’ cabin, and re­sponded. Murchison, across the way, opened his door and saw her leaving the room. A pity he didn’t open his door at two o’clock!”

  Rittenhouse nodded and took up the quiz. “You saw nothing in the room when you entered?” he asked. “No­thing that would give you an idea as to who did this thing?”

  “No,” answered the woman faintly.

  “Was there a light in the room?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then how did you know the baroness was dead?”

  “I—I turned on the light.”

  “Why did you turn on the light?”

  “She had called me,” answered the woman, somewhat defiantly. “I spoke when I went in, and she didn’t answer. I thought maybe she had got up and gone out—I thought maybe she was ill. So I turned on the light, and then I saw—I saw her!”

  Rittenhouse nodded again.

  “And then you turned out the light, and went away?” Lavender finished. “Why didn’t you tell somebody what had happened?”

  “I was afraid,” said Mrs. King simply. “I was afraid they would think I had done it.”

  “Hm-m!” said Lavender. He looked at the Major, who shrugged his shoulders.

  “I guess that’s all, Purser,” said La­v­ender, at length. “Let’s have the night watchman in.”

  But John Dover, the night watch­man, an ex-sergeant of the British army, could tell us nothing. His story was straight­forward enough.

  “Yes, sir,” said he frankly. “Hi passed that room many times, sir. There was no trouble that Hi could see, sir, hat any time. Hif there ’ad been, Hi’d ’ve looked into it. There was no light in the room, sir, hat any time.”

  This, after an hour’s questioning, was still his story.

  “It’s probably quite true, too,” ob­served Lavender, when the man had been cautioned to keep his mouth shut and had been dismissed. “The murderer wouldn’t be fool enough to at­tract the watchman. Well, Rit, where are we?”

  “Just about where we began, Jim­mie, I should say,” answered the Major.

  “You believe the stewardess’ story?” asked the purser dubiously.

  “There’s no earthly reason to dis­believe it, as yet,” responded Lav­en­der. “She could have done it, I ­sup­pose, but so could a dozen others. Ex­tra­ordinary as her statement is, it has many of the earmarks of truth. I believe she did ex­actly what eight out of ten women would have done in the circumstances. We can’t leave her out of our calculations, of course, but certainly we must allow her to believe that we accept her story in toto. In fact, I do accept it.”

  It was not long after these de­vel­op­ments that tidings of the death of the Baroness Borsolini were all over the ship. Ex­actly how the news was started, no­body knew, for everybody with di­rect knowledge had been sworn to sec­recy. It is a difficult thing, however, to hush up as serious a matter as murder, particularly on shipboard; and no doubt the leak could have been traced to the night watchman or Mrs. King, or the clergyman or the ship’s doctor, or possibly even to the Major’s wife or her sister. It is not the sort of ­know­ledge one human being can possess without telling to an­other.

  The purser, Crown, was deeply an­noyed, for he was worried about the good name of the ship; but Lavender only grunted and said it could not be helped. As a matter of strict accuracy, it was the very revelation of the mur­der that brought us one of our strongest and strangest clues. It brought to Lavender’s stateroom, the Hon. Ar­thur Russell, of Beddington, Herts., Eng­land, son of that Lord Denbigh whose name I had discovered on the ship’s passenger list.

  All over the ship the rumor of tra­gedy flew, once it had started, and the passengers gathered in groups to discuss the fearsome occurrence. In the smok­ing rooms, the male passengers bragged and told each other what they would do to apprehend the murderer, and in the lounges the women twittered and hissed like the gaudy birds of passage that they were. Many were frankly alarmed at the thought that the assassin was still at large, walking among them. They stated their fears audibly, and the purser was stormed by brigades of them, seeking information and assurances of safety.

  “We may all be murdered in our beds,” said they, in effect, so vehe­mently and in such numbers that Crown probably wished in his heart that many of them would be.

  “Idiots!” said Lavender to me in privacy after the harassed purser had told him what was going on. “They are, if anything, safer than before. The murder of the baroness was not a re­sult of blood-lust, nor the beginning of wholesale ass­as­sination. The selected victim has been killed, and for the mur­derer the episode is over. Quite the last thing he would do, unless he is crazy, is kill someone else. What he wants to do now is keep himself a secret, not to advertise himself by
further crime. Peo­ple are funny, Gilly; they don’t think. Most murderers are really very safe men to be near, after they have committed their murder. They have it out of their system; their hate or their vengeance has been satisfied; the one who stood in their path has been re­moved, and in all probability they will never again commit that crime. The way to stop murder—philosophically speak­ing—is not to lock up or kill ­mur­derers, but to prevent the ­ac­com­plishment of crime, or even the desire to kill, by ­scien­tific, educational methods. This, how­ever,” he added, with a smile and a shrug, “is not a doctrine that I often preach, and never in public. It would land me in the insane asylum!”

  I was inclined to agree with his last assertion; but Lavender is a queer fel­low, and his philosophy, as he states it, is very plausible. I merely smiled politely, and at his suggestion rang the bell and asked that our tardy luncheon be sent to the stateroom.

  As it happened, the Hon. Arthur Rus­sell came in with the tray—that is, he was hard on the heels of the waiter who bore it, and he apologized pro­fusely for in­terrupting. He was a man­nerly young Bri­ton, handsome and ­lik­able, and we asked him to sit down and have a cup of tea.

  I supposed him to be spokesman for his father, or for some group of the passengers, but his mission, it developed, was quite a different one. He was not seeking information; he had it to impart.

  “I say, Mr. Lavender,” he began, “is it all true, this that I hear? That the Baroness Borsolini is dead?”

  “Yes,” replied my friend, “quite true. She was found dead in her berth, this morning.”

  “And that she was”—he boggled over the word ‘murdered,’ and ­sub­stituted another one—“that she was killed?”

  “Yes,” said Lavender. “There is not a doubt in the world that she was murdered, Mr. Russell.”

  “Good Lord!” said the boy. He drew a long breath. “That’s what every­body is saying. I couldn’t believe it!”

  “Why?”

  “Because—well, I couldn’t, that’s all! It seemed too horrible. Why, only last night, sir, she was with me on deck—full of life—and happy—why, I may have been the last person to see her alive!” he finished.