by Kim Ekemar
“How many left-handed writers did you find?” Eduardo asked.
“Six out of twenty-nine”, Ricardo answered. “Still, this test was far from conclusive. You can’t charge someone because you think a murder was committed by a person who is left-handed.”
“That sounds reasonable.”
“I then conducted interviews with everyone present, before I began to narrow down the list of suspects, who I later – one by one – interviewed again. These subsequent interviews didn’t clear up much, I have to admit. Next, I asked the captain to lend me the passports of these nine persons – three crew and six passengers – and took photos of these and also that of the victim. The captain sent the pictures using his satellite phone to a colleague of mine who I knew worked the night shift in Buenos Aires. With them, I added an urgent request to forward them to Interpol. When the response arrived in the morning hours, it made for some interesting reading. The victim had used a forged Israeli passport and was wanted by the International Criminal Court in Hague in connection with war crimes against humanity in Syria. As for the suspects, they all had a more or less turbulent or even crime-ridden past. Six of them had worked in, or had other long-time ties to, the Middle East.”
“Your conclusion, then, was that it had to do with Syria and war crimes, narrowing down the list to six?” Eduardo suggested.
“Not at all, because none of these six persons entirely satisfied my preliminary profile of the murderer. Although not being any sort of definite evidence, only three of my suspects were left-handed. And remember, I still had no irrefutable clue as to the motive or how the murderer had escaped from the bridge. One among the crew, Segundo, had been threatened by the victim. The reason, as it turned out, was because he had “stolen” – so to speak – the victim’s girlfriend, Berenice, who was also among my suspects. Had they planned this together? The Englishman, a quite eccentric character named Crenshaw, could have had some unknown grudge with the victim from his time working in the Middle East. I found it curious that Crenshaw had remained on board with his camera equipment instead of taking pictures up close by the glacier. The only one that I almost struck off the list of suspects was Pierre Mohraki, the French immigrant from Algeria. However, from what I had heard him speak, he was considerably more fluent in English than in the language of his adopted country. This didn’t match the information I had received from Interpol, which stated his residence in France to be twenty-six years. So, I hesitated to take him off the list.”
“But at some point, you had a breakthrough”, Eduardo said with a smile before sipping his glass of wine.
“Yes, and it came with the Interpol report about the victim. I found the fact that he was wanted for war crimes in Syria to be a far more compelling motive than for example some petty fight over a lost girlfriend – although you can certainly never know. People kill for a variety of surprisingly trivial reasons. On the other hand – could this perhaps be a state-ordered assassination; a political hit job? But who among the nine suspects could possibly fit that profile, I asked myself? What about the two Americans who perhaps may be acting agents for the CIA? Or could it be the Lebanese wanted by Interpol and his Turkish mistress on some secret revenge mission? Or Segundo, the machine engineer and his lover, the ship’s hostess, plotting to get rid of a violent, bothersome ex-lover? Then I thought, if this had been team work of sorts, who else beyond these obvious couples could have been working with a partner? The aloof Englishman who didn’t like to socialise? The handicapped Frenchman who had suffered food poisoning on the previous night? Or the ship’s medic, who at sixty-four was about to retire? That’s when it occurred to me that I should apply the possibility that the murderer could have had an accomplice. Curiously enough, the disappearance of Evelyn was what got me thinking of that possibility.”
“An accomplice? How would that have facilitated the killer’s escape?”
“Well, if Crenshaw, the British photographer, had some backup who had given him support, I was not aware of it. But what if it were the other way around – was he helping someone? Thinking along this line, I tried out different scenarios. For example, I knew that Mohraki had invited his granddaughter along for the cruise. At fifteen, she didn’t seem at all interested in the natural wonders that the voyage was all about but instead chose to play games on her tablet. As far as I could recall, I had only seen her go out on one excursion, the one to see the penguins. So, why would a crippled grandfather bring a disinterested granddaughter on an expensive cruise halfway around the world, allowing her to play computer games instead of participating in the excursions he had paid for? I decided it would be worth the effort to interview her.”
“Well, now that you mention it, it certainly seems somewhat odd to return after six months with a granddaughter who doesn’t appreciate the wonders of Tierra del Fuego”, Eduardo observed.
“Leila was brought to us a little later. Her initial stance was one of a typical teenager: a sullen, defiant, gum-chewing attitude challenging me that I, at thirty-seven, am too old to understand what’s truly important in life.”
Both Gabriela and Eduardo laughed. Gabriela got up to get them coffee.
“This quickly changed when I began questioning her”, Ricardo continued when she had returned. “Leila became increasingly nervous and uncooperative. I insisted on knowing what her reaction had been when the gun went off and she found herself alone in the Darwin Lounge. My repeated question made her stutter that she was confused; that she didn’t hear the shot; then admitting that she had; and despite the commotion, she nevertheless claimed to only have remained in the lounge listening to music and playing a game on her tablet. I recalled that, in my interview with him, the bartender had mentioned that Leila had brought a rather cumbersome backpack with her, so I asked her what it had contained. My off-the-cuff question made her face blush as she stammered that it only held some ‘personal stuff’. To put it differently: it sounded like a violin with a broken bridge – it didn’t ring true. I knew she was lying to me, and since she did with only one reasonable motive for doing so, she must be protecting her grandfather. I decided to take a renewed interest in Pierre Mohraki’s movements during the afternoon in question.”
“You are very thorough, cousin”, Gabriela interjected, “I must say that for you.”
“Thank you, Gabriela, but it’s really standard procedure when you’re doing a police investigation. You do your best to keep your mind open and try to follow up on all the potential leads, despite most of them turning out to be dead ends. Anyway, I summoned Pierre Mohraki again and decided to push him as if I had something on him just to see where it would take me.”
“That was your fourth interview with him, wasn’t it?” Eduardo asked. “He must have remarked on your insistence to question him.”
“You’re right, he should have, but the only signs of apprehension I noted was that he tapped his feet while taking his time to respond.”
“I’m curious about what finally made him confess to his premeditated murder”, Gabriela wondered.
“He never told me outright, but I think it was a combination of things. He had hoped that Shadid’s death would be considered a suicide, but when that failed, my repeated interrogations of course made him aware that he had been elevated to become one of the main suspects. Also, if he were going to get the blame for killing Shadid, I’m sure he wanted to play down Leila’s role as an accomplice to the murder. I believe another important factor was demonstrated in his unswerving confidence throughout the interviews, even after he had confessed to the killing, and later, when he was confronted with how he had escaped from the bridge. It’s best explained, I think, by silent and unconditional support he counts on from French and, perhaps, other European intelligence services.”
“Now, please tell us – how did Asghar manage to get out from the bridge with the doors locked from the inside?!” Gabriela wanted to know.
“It was really there in front of my nose all along”, Ricardo replied, “although it
took me quite some time to realise it. With no secret exits, the only way must have been through one of the three doors. The main one leads to the corridor with its rows of cabins. One minute after the shot rang out, Officer Ernesto and the bartender stood outside it and could hear a pounding sound coming from inside the bridge. Then the captain and I arrived, and I remained there until the door was opened by Ernesto some twenty-five minutes later. This meant that Asghar couldn’t have gone out that way.
“The other two doors lead out to the flying bridge, which goes all the way around the front of the bridge, with no other exit or ladder leading from it. To complicate things, the roof over the bridge protrudes a considerable distance from the railing of the balcony above, so the task of climbing up from the flying bridge presents a difficult if not a near impossible challenge unless you’re an unusually physically fit person. The same difficulty applies if attempting to climb down from the flying bridge to the Yamana Lounge. If the killer had managed to get down to the Yamana Lounge below, neither Crenshaw nor the two housekeepers observed anything out of the ordinary. Unless Crenshaw was involved in the murder, I had to assume that the killer didn’t go that way. That left only one possible alternative: Asghar must somehow have gone out on the flying bridge and moved up to the balcony above, the one outside the Darwin Lounge.
“The only passenger who remained in the Darwin Lounge, after the shot was heard, was Asghar’s granddaughter – a circumstance that made this escape route all the more plausible. She had gone there with her sizeable backpack. It was possible that she had remained in the lounge on purpose, before going out onto the balcony to lower a rope ladder for her grandfather to climb, which he later threw into the ocean.”
“That doesn’t explain how he shut the door from the inside”, Gabriela pointed out.
“I didn’t figure that part out until I realised that he, during the repeated interviews, allowed his apprehension to show by tapping his feet. This was something that occurred especially when I mentioned Leila’s name.”
CHAPTER 25
How the Murder on Stella Australis’s Bridge Was Done
“Tapping his feet? What has that to do with locking the door?” a mystified Eduardo asked.
“As I interviewed the suspects, I studied their behaviour – especially if they had any nervous tics or other telltale signs that they were uncomfortable before responding to my questions. Ferah, for example, raised her left eyebrow and gave me a lot of nonsense, speaking very fast in an attempt to overwhelm or distract me. Antanias sweated a lot and pretended to become upset. Evelyn gritted her teeth and clenched her jaws. Segundo had a facial tic that made him repeatedly blink one eye. And so on.”
“So, Mohraki’s giveaway sign was that he moved his legs and feet while sitting down?”
“Yes. A man who claims to have severely damaged his knee in a recent traffic accident wouldn’t be tapping both his feet”, Ricardo replied, and sipped on his wine, “nor would he be climbing rope ladders. If Mohraki was moving his feet sitting down, it meant he really didn’t need his cane to support him. So, why did he carry one?”
“So, how did you go about it?”
“When we got to the police station, I decided to inspect his cane in the presence of Chief of Police Valverde. Since he was not in a position to refuse my request, he reluctantly handed it over. An interesting object, as it turned out. At a brief glance, it looked like any ordinary cane. It was made of bamboo and had rubber covering the handle and a rubber cap about the same size covering the other end. When I removed the rubber from the handle, it revealed a mechanic grip, similar to the brake on a scooter. Beneath the other rubber cover, there was a mechanism that could gyrate ninety degrees and looked like the tips of a pair of pliers. It was attached to a metal tube inside the hollow bamboo cane that could be pulled out to make an extension. A thin steel wire was connected to the pair of pliers. When I uncoiled it, the wire was the length of the cane and its extension, and I was able to fasten it to the grip at the top of the cane. When I tightened the grip halfway, the pliers closed completely. Then, when I shut the grip all the way, it turned clockwise one hundred and eighty degrees.”
Gabriela and Eduardo waited in silence for Ricardo to continue.
“I now understood how Asghar had managed to leave all three doors to the bridge locked from the inside. Despite his careful planning during the past six months, there were several unexpected events that he hadn’t anticipated. For obvious reasons, Asghar hadn’t expected that the ship would start moving across the bay. He had also erroneously calculated that the bullet from the forty-five would make a clear hole through the windscreen without having considered that it was made of tempered security glass. After shooting Shadid, knowing that it was a question of minutes before people would come rushing to the bridge, he grabbed the first thing he found to make the hole in the window large enough. What he found was the large flashlight covered with rubber lying next to one of the screens. Leaning on his right hand on the sloping window, he struck the glass repeatedly using the back end of the flashlight until he had made the desired hole. Later, when I used the flashlight to search for the bullet that had ricocheted, I cut my palm on minuscule shards of glass left on it.
“When Asghar noticed that his hand had disturbed the blood splattered on the glass, he looked around for something he could use to drip more of the victim’s blood in order to conceal his mistake. He tore off a bit of a chart laid out on the table, dipped it in the blood that was still flowing on the floor, and threw or blew it onto the glass until he was satisfied. Before leaving, he looked for the bullet that had ricocheted and found it on the floor where it had dropped after hitting the ceiling.
“Asghar then left through the door on the port side and went out on the flying bridge. After removing the pieces of rubber from his cane, he pulled out the extension and fastened the wire to the handle. He inserted the device hidden in his cane through the aperture in the windscreen and placed the pliers on the doorknob before turning it shut. Above, Leila was waiting on the balcony with her backpack. She had already attached the rope ladder to the railing and thrown it down over the bridge’s roof. After reassembling the cane to its original everyday use, Asghar quickly climbed up to her and pulled off his surgical gloves, plastic coat and rubber boots. After putting these items – along with the rope ladder, the bullet and the torn piece of map – inside a plastic bag that Leila had brought, he threw the bag into the sea. They both rushed inside the still-empty Darwin Lounge, where Leila threw herself down on a sofa and started playing a game on the tablet she had left behind. Meanwhile, Asghar hid inside the gym on the same deck, located outside on the other side of the lounge.”
“It must have been a nerve-racking challenge against the clock for him”, Gabriela remarked. “Asghar must have been aware that the captain, and others, would be looking for a way to take back command of the ship to avert a catastrophe.”
“I’ve since developed a theory about Asghar’s cool-headedness”, Ricardo replied. “But, first things first. The captain and his second-in-command came rushing through the Darwin Lounge to access the flying bridge from the balcony above. Eventually, more people arrived. When she considered the coast to be clear, Leila went over to the gym where her grandfather waited.”
“Why didn’t he throw the cane overboard, since it was the item that eventually compromised him?” Gabriela asked.
“I asked him the same question”, Ricardo replied with a smile. “‘I came on board with a cane and an injured knee’, he answered after a long pause, ‘how could anyone believe that my injury was real if I didn’t leave in the same way?’”
“What if there had been people in the Darwin Lounge when he went up the rope ladder?” Eduardo wondered. “Then he would have been discovered.”
“Asghar had thought of that”, Ricardo mused. “His alternative escape route was using the rope ladder to the deck below the bridge.”
“But that’s where Crenshaw and the two cleaning ladies were�
��, Eduardo observed.
“Remember that Asghar had planned the murder to look like a suicide. If he had succeeded, no one would have questioned his appearance in either lounge as long as they didn’t see him climbing the rope ladder.”
“What was Mohraki’s reaction when you found out about the secrets in his cane?” Gabriela wanted to know.
“He laughed, a little embarrassed perhaps, but he laughed nevertheless. ‘I applaud you, Detective’, he said, ‘you found out about my little trick.’”
“How could he know that this mechanism would fit so perfectly to the knob?” Eduardo wanted to know.
“As I told you earlier, he had taken the same cruise six months earlier to reconnoitre. Mohraki confessed that, during one of the regular tours to the bridge, he had managed to make an impression of the doorknob using soap that he previously had left in water until it became soft and mouldable.”
“That’s quite a story”, Eduardo said with an appreciative sigh. “But, tell us, why do you think he wasn’t too concerned about being discovered if he had encountered the captain or other witnesses while he set his plan in motion? It was beyond doubt a high-risk venture.”
“For the same reason he didn’t became overly concerned when I confronted him with proof that he was Shadid’s killer”, Ricardo answered. “Asghar turned out to be a valuable asset for the European intelligence services regarding the war in Syria – and, who knows, perhaps he still is? They proved their appreciation by giving him and his granddaughter French passports with new identities. When taking into consideration all aspects concerning the murder of the war criminal Shadid, I can imagine various scenarios to explain his tranquillity and cool head before, during and after the killing. The murder was either sanctioned by those in Europe who are protecting him for his past services rendered, and they may even have contracted him to discreetly get rid of Shadid. Or, although the hit job didn’t go as planned, Asghar is probably still counting on the Europeans to, out of self-interest, pull him out of the mess he finds himself in.”
