Devil's Breath

by G. M. Malliet

  Pointing at her stomach, she said, “You’ve arrived just in time, as you can see. I’ll be handing over this investigation to you, and to DCI Cotton, any day now.”

  Chapter 13

  DROWNING

  Patrice did not so much sit as collapse into a chair, flailing about to find a fulcrum to balance the weight she carried in front. Max remembered the same awkward maneuver from Awena’s last months of carrying Owen, when she would stretch one arm back, reaching blindly for a chair or sofa arm, simultaneously grasping her stomach. Awena reported that standing up was no easier and that a hoist would have been welcome in the ninth month.

  Once Patrice was settled, holding her middle with two hands as if a beach ball rested on her lap, Max placed a pillow behind her back.

  “When is your due date?” he asked.

  “Not until next month,” Patrice replied. “They were getting ready to send in a substitute player anyway when Margot Browne had her ‘accident,’ and we had to make a last-minute change in the game plan, sending in reinforcements. That would be you. Thanks ever so for answering the call, and so quickly. I’ve filled DCI Cotton in on what I know, but it’s too bad—I was really just getting close to figuring out what was up and now…” She trailed off.

  “Another duty calls. Got it. But it’s helpful to have a neutral party and witness like you to fill me in—someone who had a chance to get to know the victim while she was alive. And to observe her interactions with the others. What was your cover, by the way?”

  “We kept it vague,” Patrice answered. “I gave out that I was a troublesome ex-girlfriend of some high-profile actor and that Romero Farnier had taken me on board for a free vacay as sort of a gesture of pity. Or to take me off the hands of his high-profile friend, while keeping me from talking to the tabloids. Also that I simply needed something to do to keep my mind off things. Obviously, I wasn’t going to be much use as some sort of deckhand, although I did volunteer to help out in the galley, chopping vegetables and so on, where I was not much wanted. Rumors were started that Romero and I were ex-lovers, too, although I quickly scotched that. It was complicated enough without that nitwit girlfriend of his fuming about, suspecting the worst and short-sheeting my bed or something. Tina’s the jealous type, even when the object of her jealousy is hauling around several extra stone, is wearing a honking great maternity smock, and has to bolt for the ladies’ room every ten minutes.”

  “He was in on the cover, was Romero?”

  “God, no—not in the way you mean. If anyone was a person of interest in this investigation, it was Romero. He’s rather a mandarin figure—a puller of strings, a maker of magic. King of all he surveys. Certainly that is the case when he directs his films, where he is said to rule with an iron fist. Well, that’s his job, of course, and that’s how he chooses to do it. But what we suspected him of doing also was drug smuggling—using the yacht and his status to get past the port authorities somehow. What we hadn’t worked out is how. To get me inserted into the situation, Romero was hauled in by the California FBI—scared him witless, by all accounts. But then he was given some soft soap about how they were on the trail of a notorious art thief and only he could save the day. Played to his ego, you know. Dead easy, that. He was only told to allow me on board and pretend I was, as I say, some sort of Hollywood hanger-on who’d fallen for some doe-eyed movie star and was determined to have his child. Having failed at convincing said movie star that he should be hearing wedding bells, I was to be shipped to Europe as a consolation prize for my trouble. Initially, the plan was to have Belinda Bower—that’s my cover name—to have her be a crew member of some sort, but once it became evident I could barely make it down the stairs into the hold, the FBI decided it would be better for me to mingle in my now-elephantine way among the guests, where I was sure to learn more, anyway. Sadly, that didn’t prove to be true. I learned a lot, but none of it relevant that I could see. They mostly went in, night and day, for shop talk: who was starring in what film, who was bedding whom. Then the cry went up that Margot was missing. You know the rest.”

  “Do you know if Margot was a strong swimmer?” Max asked.

  “No,” said Patrice, firmly shaking her head. “No, she was absolutely terrified of the water. She told me so but I could see it for myself. She wouldn’t even dip her toes in the little pool onboard, in case someone brushed by and accidentally pushed her in. You couldn’t drown a fly in that tiny pool if you tried, though. The best I could do, anyway, was to sort of paddle around like a hippo doing the breaststroke. I watched her—she always took a chair in the shade as far from the water as she could get. Part of that was to protect her skin from the sun—she was a redhead and she really had to lather on the sunscreen; she always looked like an oil slick when she wasn’t wrapped head to foot in blankets—but mostly it was to avoid the off chance that someone would pick her up and heave her into the water, perhaps as a joke. It’s funny…” Patrice had her hands on her stomach and was rubbing the sides in a circular motion, like a fortune teller with a crystal ball. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, Max noted, but that may have been part of her discarded-girlfriend cover.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Not funny, of course, but now that I think about it, that’s exactly what someone did. Picked her up like a doll and heaved her overboard. Despite her larger-than-life reputation, she was on the small side, shrinking a bit with age, too. Not more than five foot seven?” She turned to Cotton for confirmation; he nodded. “It would take no strength at all, really, for someone with a bit of muscle. How cruel … to think she went that way, after all—the way she most feared.” Patrice gave a little shudder, adding in an absent way: “My mother was always afraid of dying in a fire but thank God, I suppose, she died of natural causes. It was a genuine fear—every time we set out on a trip we’d have to return home to make sure she’d turned the iron and the cooker off, stuff like that. We might be miles away, but she couldn’t relax until we’d gone back to make sure. God knows where phobias like that come from.”

  Max guessed from Patrice’s wistful look she might be thinking it was a shame her mother wouldn’t be around to see her grandchild. He remembered Mrs. Logan, having met her once—she was a firebrand, to coin a phrase. She’d been an infant-school teacher of keen intellect, a known figure in the education reform movement, whose own three children had been her lasting joy. He supposed she’d died believing Patrice was some generic brand of government employee working behind a desk in tech or finance or some other safe occupation. Most of Patrice’s work for Five had been so deep undercover even her closest relatives could not be told what she was really up to, or why she had a tendency to disappear for long stretches of time. He supposed the father of her child might know the truth but even that was not a given.

  “I’m sorry to hear she’s gone,” said Max quietly. “She was irreplaceable. One of a kind.”

  He and Patrice exchanged small smiles of mutual understanding. Her relationship with the firebrand, while steeped in love, had been tempestuous at times.

  Turning to Cotton, Patrice said, “We now are quite sure Margot was not alive when she went into the water?”

  “According to the coroner, no, she could not have been breathing. There was no water in her lungs, so she was dead before she went in. To be precise, before she was dropped or pushed in. Possibly in addition to the GHB overdose there was manual strangulation as well, and possibly by a left-hander.”

  “There does seem to be a bit of overkill,” said Max.

  “Frenzy?” Cotton wondered. “Or just someone methodically making doubly sure she wouldn’t survive? The hyoid bone wasn’t fractured, says the coroner—‘There was an absence of this finding’—you know how they talk; God forbid anyone should be able to understand what they’re saying or be able to pin them down to anything. But as you probably are aware, that sort of fracture only happens in about a third of all homicides by strangulation. So the ‘absence’ means nothing. A tox scan did show loads of al
cohol and of course the GHB that remained in her system, so it may not have needed much to kill her. It’s a wonder she could stand, really, given the amounts that must have been in her bloodstream.”

  “She may have been too out of it to put up a struggle.”

  “Precisely. Candy from a baby, or words to that effect.”

  “I wonder what she was doing out there on deck, anyway,” said Max. “It’s still frigid at night this time of year.”

  “I wondered the same thing,” said Patrice. “Was she meeting someone? Taking a constitutional in the middle of the night, without Jake? To get away from Jake? Had she and Jake quarreled? Because strolling about that time of night, it doesn’t make sense, especially not given the weather. You’d only do that if you were storming off in a huff, too angry to think about grabbing a warm coat or to really notice the cold. Or, as I say, if she were meeting up with someone.”

  “We may never know,” said Cotton. “If she was wearing a robe or shawl, it was torn off by the waves. She was found in the tatters of a gown that was inadequate to face the climate, to say the least. Anyway, if she’d been alive when she went in, it would have made no difference to her survival. The waters around here are frigid, even in May, especially at night. Say around sixteen degrees Celsius. She wouldn’t have survived long even if she’d gone in still breathing. The body reacts to sudden immersion like that by making the victim gasp uncontrollably, drawing water into the lungs—so says the coroner. What happens on reflex is precisely what you don’t want to have happen.”

  Cotton sighed and continued, “We find bodies washed ashore here more often than we’d like, but that’s usually a question of a swimmer going too far out, someone who has underestimated the strength of the waves, or who has been caught in a riptide. And they’re usually out there in July and August, when it’s not so ruddy cold. Cold also makes the limbs useless quite quickly—even strong swimmers don’t last long.”

  “And as I’ve said,” put in Patrice, “she was no manner of swimmer at all. Given the conditions that night, even if she’d gone in alive and someone saw her go overboard, there’s no guarantee they could have reached her in time.”

  “Yes,” said Max. He shook his head. “The poor woman.” Death might come as a blessing to those nearing the end of a long life, but Margot was someone no doubt with hope for the future, and with many good years in front of her. Miracles can happen: the call from a director who could revive her career might come at any moment. She was working in a profession built on hopes and dreams, a vocation that fueled the longings of those who paid the price of admission for a few hours of escape from their own problems. Someone had robbed Margot Browne of her own hope, and of years of giving hope and respite to others.

  And it was his job now to help figure out who did it. He vowed he would succeed if he could.

  Chapter 14

  PIRATES

  Max poured himself a cup of coffee from the urn set up on a sideboard by the hotel’s room service staff. Throughout the investigation, that urn never was allowed to run empty.

  He had just rung off the phone with Awena, who was leaving to take Owen to the toddler’s yoga class led by Tara Raine in the back room of Goddessspell. Owen was a bit young for the group but, not surprisingly, was getting the hang of it already, moving quickly beyond the basic child’s and cat poses. It must, thought Max, be genetic. Awena practiced meditation and yoga daily, crediting it with her ability to manage her myriad responsibilities with no apparent effort.

  He turned now to his colleagues. “Can you fill me in on who is involved—who is in the cast, so to speak, as a suspect?”

  “I can,” said Patrice. “We’re looking at a closed and rather exclusive circle of suspects. By ‘exclusive’ I mean exclusive in their own estimation. You’ll see. Anyway, it’s practically one of those locked-room mysteries you used to love so much, Max.”

  Max smiled. She had given him a collection of Father Brown stories one Christmas. He still had it on a shelf at the vicarage, next to his collection of Agatha Christies. What a long way he and Father Brown had traveled.

  “That much is clear,” said Cotton. If Patrice’s knowledge of Max’s reading habits struck him as odd, he gave no hint. “Since she was killed on board, the murderer was someone on board. Ipso, as they say, facto. If you rule out pirates coming alongside and boarding over the rail, which I think in fairness we have to do.”

  “Do we?” murmured Max.

  “In all honesty, yes, I think so. The crew may not be up to much but I think they’d notice a pirate ship hoving into view on the horizon. And we’re talking about the waters off Monkslip-super-Mare, remember, not Somalia.”

  Max was thinking that so long as unauthorized persons boarding the yacht remained an option, this was not a proper locked-room mystery. But he said nothing.

  “Anyway,” Cotton continued, “apart from the crew, there were only a handful of people to be accounted for at the time she disappeared. A handful who could have committed the crime, I mean.”

  “Which was when? It would help if we knew.”

  “When she disappeared? Well, I misspoke a bit there. We know when she was last seen alive. And we know when someone realized she was missing. We know when her body was found. So there is a window of time during which she had to have been killed.”

  “I don’t suppose the coroner could help you pinpoint the time. They never can.”

  “I know,” said Cotton. “There is no person on God’s earth more useless at pinpointing time of death than a coroner. Or ‘the absence of life,’ as they’d probably put it. Our man analyzed the stomach contents and we know when she left the party and what was on the menu that night, so that helps, but not much. He can’t pinpoint the time of death except to say, basically: ‘Not long before she went in.’ He’s giving it an hour or two either side of midnight as his guesstimate for the time of death.”

  “You say someone realized she was missing. Who was that?”

  Patrice stirred. “As I’ve indicated, she was traveling with a young man by the name of Jake Larsson. Jake had great hopes of achieving fame and fortune as an actor. You know that old song, of course—I’ve got it stuck in my head now: ‘An actor’s life for me.’ It was felt by all and sundry that a lack of talent was the only thing standing in his way. As one of them said to me, his hair gave a better performance in the Scottish play than he did. I’ll let the others describe the situation for you in detail. But Jake, bless him, seems to have felt Margot was his ticket out of obscurity. This is the equivalent of an actress sleeping with the screenwriter to get ahead but that didn’t seem to put a damper on Jake’s hopes.”

  “Anyway,” said Cotton, “Jake claims he suffers from insomnia and when he woke at one-fifteen in the morning, Margot was not in the room. He says she snored like a train going off the tracks in a hurricane so it was the absence of noise that woke him. Note the ‘absence of’ again. If his acting career fails he could try for a job as a coroner.”

  Cotton, Max again was reminded, was a child of the theater himself, the product of a helter-skelter upbringing by a feckless mother. Given the circumstances, his scorn for theater folk was as understandable as it was predictable.

  “Did Jake go and look for her?”

  “No. He says he went back to sleep.”

  “So,” said Max. “We have Jake in our sights as a suspect. Meaning, we have only his word for it he went back to sleep. He may have followed her out to see what was up. Or he may be lying about the time he woke, trying to confuse the timeline for reasons of his own. Or he may be trying to insert himself into the drama for reasons of his own—to make himself appear to be more at the center of things. Who else is in the frame?”

  “Me, I’d start with the director,” said Patrice. “Romero Farnier. I mean, have you ever? Even his name sounds totally made up.”

  “Have I ever heard of him? As a matter of fact, I have.”

  “He does those gangbuster movies,” said Cotton.

&
nbsp; “You mean blockbuster,” said Max. “Earthquakes, tidal waves, wars, alien invasions, car chases—”

  “And a strict lack of anything like plot, rhyme, or reason,” said Patrice. “The public just eats it up. And of course, being the director of that chaotic sort of thing pays well—it paid for the yacht, no doubt, and much besides. But Romero is the tortured-artist type. He wants to go all indie film, and now that he’s rich he can bankroll himself—once he screws up his courage to go for it. Maybe he’ll cast you as the lead, Max. It would be right up your alley.”

  “Hmph,” said Max. “And who else?”

  “Well, there’s Romero’s fiancée. I mean, that’s her title, if she is to be believed; his casual girlfriend, if his version of the relationship is correct. Half his age, the usual thing—you know. Blonde ambition personified—or rather, ginger ambition in this case. She’d be a better match for Jake but Jake, as we’ve said, has not a lot going for him apart from his youth and his looks. Our little Tina has bigger plans for her adorable self than that.”

  “Tina—last name?”

  “Tina Calvert.”

  “Would I know her? I mean, from film or something?”

  “American,” said Patrice briefly. “Stage actress. A few indie films. Ambitious, as I’ve indicated—to the point of ruthlessness. Mostly to be found off-off-Broadway these days, if she can be found at all. But she’s counting on Romero to change all that for her.”

  “You don’t like her,” said Max.

  “It would take a bigger woman than me to like her.” She looked down at her stomach and laughed. “No pun intended. But you decide for yourself. I gather that some men like her, if in small doses.”

  “Okay. Who else?”

  “We have a sprig of the nobility in our lineup,” said Cotton. “A minor branch of a gilded family tree. He is descended somehow from the Germanic branch of the Windsors, the branch the family would rather forget about now, you know. They tell me he’s possibly two hundredth in position away from the throne, but you never know: the other nobs might succumb to a genetic flaw to which he himself is immune. Anyway, I gather that is the hope from his side. He and his wife, the Baroness Sieben-Kuchen-Bäcker, appear to be skint and are living off their fabled connections. They don’t have a permanent address of their own—they just drift around in boundless style from one friend’s manor house to another friend’s manor house, leaving just before they wear out their welcome. Again, I can’t emphasize enough, their connection to the real nobs is vague, to say the least, but some people are easily impressed. Again, a triumph of hope over reality. That seems to be a theme of all the people on board.”