Set For Murder (Showbiz Is Murder Book 1)

by Jolie Beaumont

  “Actually, real dukes who are unmarried are rather rare, at least when you discount the ones who are over eighty and under eight.”

  “How are you fixing for earls?” asked Nick.

  “Even scarcer, I’m afraid.”

  Nick turned to Penny and said, “I guess you’ll have to stay in show business.”

  “But you shouldn’t think I place much store in your desire to marry a duke, Miss Garnett,” said Inspector Travers. “Most young American females on their first trip to England do think they’re going to be swept off their feet by the scion of one of our noble houses, yet most don’t commit murder. I want to talk to you about something else, though. I’d like to enlist your help.”

  “How can I help you?” asked Penny, still wary of the inspector’s intentions.

  “You’re a woman, and you’re in show business. You have something in common with the former Duchess of Tarrington.”

  “Only if you take away the castle and the jewels and the millions in the bank.”

  “For the moment, we’ll take all that away and concentrate just on the fact that Honey Holdendale was a woman, like you.”

  “All right. What do you want to do? Re-enact the crime?”

  Travers shook his head. “I want to understand what happened before she was murdered. Honey Holdendale got up in the morning, ate breakfast and played a game of tennis. Apparently, she felt perfectly fine. After tennis, she met with Bert Ayres in her cabin. After that, she refused to leave her cabin for the rest of the day. She claimed she had a bad headache, but we know that wasn’t so.”

  “How do you know?” asked Penny.

  “There was a full bottle of aspirin in her bathroom, unopened. We found no other painkillers in the cabin, or bottles of alcohol. If she had truly had a headache, wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume she would have taken something for it?”

  “I suppose so,” Penny reluctantly agreed. “But how do you know it was Bert who caused her headache?”

  “I don’t. That’s where you come in. Give me another reason why Honey Holdendale locked herself in her cabin all day. Three or four would be even better.”

  “Well … I …” Penny looked over at Nick, who said, “This is your scene, Sis. I was never a girl.”

  Penny thought for a moment. Then she said, smiling, “I know! She had a spot!”

  “A spot?” asked Travers.

  “Here, on her nose.” Penny pointed to the tip of her nose. “A big one.”

  “That would make her stay in her cabin?” The inspector looked doubtful.

  “Sure it would, if you’re someone like the Duchess of Tarrington, someone people will be looking at, someone people will be photographing. Think of it—would Garbo appear in public with a pimple on her nose?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Then, there you are.”

  “It’s a good theory, but there is a problem.”

  “What?”

  “I saw the duchess, after she died. There was no spot on her nose, or anywhere else on her face.”

  “Back to the drawing board, Sherlock,” Nick said to her sister.

  “You’re doing very well, though,” said Travers. “I believe you can come up with another reason.”

  “I can try,” said Penny, warming up to her role.

  While she was thinking, Nick snapped his fingers. “I know! Remember that time Patty Offenspeckle didn’t invite you to her birthday party and you pretended you couldn’t have gone, anyway, because you were going to be interviewed by the Des Moines Register? When your friends came by, on their way to the party, I had to pretend to call you to the telephone for the interview.”

  Penny looked over at the inspector and blushed. “I guess you think that was pretty goofy of me, caring so much about not being invited to a party, but I was only eight years old. I don’t think anyone really believed I was being interviewed by a newspaper.”

  “What were you going to do when someone asked to see the article?”

  “We had it all figured out,” said Nick. “We were going to tell everyone the newspaper building burned down before the article was printed.”

  “Very original. But what exactly are you suggesting, Mr. Garnett? That Honey Holdendale was pouting in her cabin, because someone had snubbed her?”

  “When you put it like that, it doesn’t sound likely,” Nick admitted. “Maybe she was afraid of being recognized by someone on this ship.”

  “That can’t be it, Nick,” said Penny. “Her picture was on the front page of the ship’s newspaper. Everyone must have seen it. Maybe, though, she was hiding someone in her cabin—someone who wasn’t supposed to be on the ship—and she didn’t want anyone to recognize him.”

  “You mean a spy, or a secret agent?” asked Nick, who was already envisioning a scene in a musical play and the possibilities for a dance number.

  “That’s right!” Penny agreed. “And she was afraid that if someone saw him and recognized him, the whole plot would be discovered.”

  “I hate to spoil the party,” said Inspector Travers, “but are you suggesting the Duchess of Tarrington was an enemy agent?”

  “I suppose that is kind of farfetched,” said Penny.

  “If she was hiding anyone, it would have been her lover,” said Nick. “And if it had been her lover, she wouldn’t have hidden him in her cabin all day and told everyone she had a headache. She would have known it would attract too much attention.”

  “I’m afraid we haven’t been very much help, Inspector.”

  “Actually, Miss Garnett, you have been a help. It’s quite possible that Honey Holdendale was hiding something in her cabin—as you two said. Not a person, but something she didn’t want anyone else to know about. If we can discover what that thing is, we’ll be halfway toward solving the mystery of her murder.”

  After the inspector left, Nick turned back to the piano. He played a few bars, and Penny opened her mouth in preparation to sing. Before she could get a word out, he stopped and said, “It’s just dawned on me.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a murderer on board this ship.”

  “Of course, there is. That’s why we have to find out who it is, so the inspector won’t arrest Bert. Come on, let’s rehearse.”

  It was usually hard to get Penny to agree to rehearse, so Nick wasn’t about to pass up this opportunity. But once again he stopped playing after just a few bars of music. “When you say ‘we,’ Penny, do you mean the ‘royal we,’ as in Scotland Yard?”

  Penny shook her head. “I mean the ‘Broadway we,’ as in you and me.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  This time Nick continued to play until the end of the song.

  CHAPTER 10

  WHILE INSPECTOR TRAVERS went to collect the replies to the wires he had sent out earlier, Jeffrey Baird perused the shelves of the ship’s library. The library housed a surprisingly good collection of books, rendering the room worthy of its name. He was still inspecting the ship’s collection of books about Egypt—for some reason he suspected his next assignment would take him to that part of the world—when Cecil Arden came up beside him and asked if the inspector was in.

  “Not at the moment. Have you come to confess, by any chance?”

  “Only to the amateur’s weakness for thinking he has solved the crime before the professionals.”

  “You think you know ‘whodunit’?”

  “Not who, but perhaps how.”

  Baird raised an eyebrow.

  “Yes, I know about the steak knife,” said Arden, giving a slight shudder. He would have been appalled if someone had taken a knife to a Rembrandt painting or a Monet. When he learned the Duchess of Tarrington had been murdered in such a brutally violent way, he had been shaken to the core. After the initial shock, his puzzle-loving mind had been working at feverish pitch—his exterior face to the world had remained calm, of course—to discover who had committed such a desecration.

  “Something’s not right there,” Ar
den added.

  “And you have a theory?”

  “I do.”

  “You could tell me, and I could tell Inspector Travers.”

  Cecil Arden hesitated. “Perhaps I should think it through a bit more, before I start blabbering and make a fool of myself,” he said before leaving.

  He doesn’t trust me, Baird understood in a sudden flash of comprehension. He thinks Travers has allowed me to be his assistant so he can keep an eye on me, watch my reactions to the people being questioned. Then the next flash came. And do I trust him? Can I trust anybody, when there’s a murderer amongst us?

  Peter Carroll was on Travers’s mind, and so the inspector continued his search for the man. When he wasn’t in the usual public spaces, Travers turned to the chief steward, who kept a list of all the day’s activities in his office.

  “The mah-jongg lesson is mostly attended by ladies,” the chief steward explained, putting aside that paper. “These are the activities for children.” That page joined the list of mah-jongg students. “Ah, here he is. ‘Introduction to Boxing.’ It is a private lesson in the exercise room.” The chief steward glanced at his watch. “The lesson should be ending in five minutes.”

  Travers reached the exercise room just as the instructor was giving Carroll a final tip concerning his stance and his swing. The small and dimly lit room smelt of perspiration and had an air of dogged determination. Travers supposed the health fanatics, like the few men in the room who seemed to be taking their exercise very seriously, wouldn’t mind the Spartan atmosphere, while those doing battle with an ever-expanding waistline probably preferred fighting their battles in relative shadow and obscurity.

  Carroll, who didn’t need to lose weight—his physique was enviably trim—was listening attentively to the instructor. Then they went through the moves. The young man was good on his feet, Travers noted, almost graceful as he sparred with the instructor. A few minutes later the instructor signaled that the lesson was over. Carroll mopped his sweating face with a towel, which he then flung about his neck. While the instructor went to greet the next student, Carroll passed the punching bag and gave it a powerful whack. If it had been a man instead of the punching bag, the blow would have knocked him onto the floor, very likely with a broken nose. Carroll had a great deal of anger and frustration bottled up inside, it seemed.

  Travers went over to Carroll and invited him to join him for a little talk. “Let’s go over there,” he said, nodding in the direction of the room’s two stationary bikes, which were unoccupied and sitting to the side. “No one should be able to overhear us.”

  “I have no reputation to worry about,” Carroll reminded him. “I’m the American adventurer who married for money, remember? Surely, I would be capable of murder too.”

  Travers noted the young man’s bitter tone with real sadness. If Carroll had married for money—and the fact that he had left his ill wife alone in her cabin seemed to suggest there was no great love on the young man’s part—he apparently wasn’t callous enough to enjoy his “wages of sin.” His future therefore looked bleak. And Travers could therefore understand why Carroll felt the need to take out his frustration on a punching bag, which was actually a healthy way to cope with it.

  Carroll mounted one of the machines and sent the wheels spinning at a rapid pace.

  “Everyone is a suspect at this point,” Travers assured the young man, leaning against the other machine. “A murder investigation is more democratic than you might think.”

  “I have no alibi.”

  “Let me determine that. Confirmation of a person’s whereabouts often comes about in mysterious ways.”

  Peter gave the inspector a sideways glance. “You’re going out of your way to sound fair, Inspector. I wish I knew if you could be trusted or if it’s all an act.”

  “You can’t know, so the best thing to do is tell me the truth. Tell me where you were between the hours of eight and eleven last night.”

  “My wife, Lady Margaret, wasn’t feeling well again. She wanted to rest and have dinner in her room. I don’t like being cooped up in small spaces any more than I like being stared at in public spaces like that dining room—and I knew everyone would stare if I dined alone at our table--so I went to the bar. I sat at a table in the back of the room, ordered a few whiskies and asked for a plate of roast beef sandwiches.”

  “The waiter on duty can confirm that. Were you there all evening?”

  “No.” Peter brought his bicycle to a halt. “I wish I had been. After I ate, I wandered around a bit. There is a billiard room, but I was never much of a player and so I didn’t stay there long. The room was empty, because dinner was still going on in the dining room. I tried the cinema, but the evening program hadn’t yet begun. So I decided to go to the music room and work a bit on my symphony.”

  “You had the sheets of music with you?”

  Peter pulled out a few crumpled cocktail napkins from his jacket pocket and showed them to the inspector. They were filled with musical notations written in a scrawling hand. “I’m sure this is why God created napkins,” he said.

  Travers didn’t really understand artists and other creative types. If he were to write a symphony or write a book or paint a picture, he would need a clean and orderly workspace with the tools of his trade conveniently at hand. It was hard for him to believe that this smudged and jumbled mass of ink spots jotted down on a flimsy piece of paper that was already showing signs of wear and tear might someday be part of an acclaimed musical composition. Yet he knew this was often how artists worked, recording ephemeral flashes of inspiration on whatever solid material was at hand. He also knew the paper napkins might have been written upon at any time, and not necessarily the night before.

  “You didn’t go to see the Broadway dancers perform?” he asked, returning the napkins to Carroll.

  Peter shook his head. “I saw their show in New York. They’re swell, but … Let’s just say I wasn’t in the mood to enjoy myself. I wanted to wallow in my sorrows.”

  “Did you ring for refreshments while you were in the music room?”

  Peter laughed again. “Did I ring for refreshments?” he repeated, mimicking the inspector’s British accent. “No, I did not, Inspector. It didn’t occur to me, not having grown up in an environment where one rang a bell and a servant came scurrying. Where I grew up you shouted, if you wanted something—and didn’t expect a reply. I’m still trying to get the hang of things.”

  “What time did you leave the music room?” asked Travers.

  “Around ten o’clock, I’d say. Lady Margaret likes to retire early. I didn’t want to come in late and disturb her.”

  “And cause another row?”

  Peter looked thoughtful. “I don’t blame her for anything. I was a cad. I didn’t realize she could actually care about a person. She always seemed so absorbed in her causes—in the suffering masses—but never about real people and their problems. I thought she wanted to marry me, because it was more convenient to have a husband. It would stop people from gossiping or ridiculing her for being an old maid. But we would go our own ways. I still don’t know if it’s me she cares about or her wounded sense of pride. I do know that if we are both unhappy, it’s my fault. I don’t love her, and I never did. I won’t pretend otherwise. I should never have married her.”

  Lady Margaret confirmed what her husband and the steward had said. She had remained in her cabin the entire night.

  “I’m not much of a sailor, I’m afraid,” she told the inspector.

  She was still in bed. Several political pamphlets were scattered about the bedcovers, while a stack of serious-minded magazines stood on the nightstand. On top was a recent issue of Labour Monthly, a periodical read by communists, socialists, and militant trade unionists. It was hard to imagine Lady Margaret as a militant, not when she looked so thin and pale. Yet she did also look terribly earnest, and sometimes it was the earnest ones—the true believers, who put principles before people—who were the most danger
ous kind.

  “Your cabin is just two doors down from the cabin of your stepmother,” said Travers. “Did you hear anything unusual, a raised voice in the hall, a door slamming?”

  Lady Margaret shook her head. “I was reading about the workers’ struggle in Chicago.” Her tone of voice suggested that she couldn’t possibly have paid attention to anything else.

  “Was your husband with you?”

  “Peter? No, why should he be?”

  “If you were ill—“

  “It would have done me no good to have him moping about. I told him to go out and enjoy himself.”

  “What time did he return?”

  “I don’t know. I had drifted off to sleep. When I awoke, he was already back and there was that commotion in the corridor.”

  When Travers returned to his office, he still had a question mark beside Peter Carroll’s name. The young man had had plenty of time to commit the murder. But why would he do it? Even if the Duke of Tarrington’s finances had taken a downturn, the family was far from destitute. And the pearls already belonged to the family, so why would Carroll have tried to steal them and murdered the duchess in a botched burglary attempt? It made no sense.

  Baird, who was back in his usual place and reading a book, set it down when Travers walked in. “Cecil Arden wants to see you,” he said. “He has a theory about how the murder was done.”

  “I’ll see him after lunch.” Travers drummed a tattoo on his gleaming desk. He was silently humming the popular song he had heard Nick Garnett play on the piano, and he was unhappy that he couldn’t get the tune out of his head. Finally, he said, “We have a problem, Baird.”

  The young man raised an eyebrow. “About Arden?”

  “No. About Mabel Watson. The report about her from the Yard is practically blank. I want you to fill in those blanks.”

  Baird’s face could be remarkably transparent at times, and at this time it was clear he found the assignment distasteful. “I could say I have a headache.”