by Mike Ashley
“Dr Sandow, come quickly.” A distraught Mrs Ramsey was at the front door.
“She’s snuffed it,” Jessup said, lugubriously. “May she find forgiveness in Heaven, but I doubt it.”
“Though her skins be as scarlet, they will be as white as snow,” misquoted Toop, softly.
“You reckon so?” Jessup looked dubious.
“If she had lived I doubt whether she would have hanged. Rather she would have been committed to the Parkside Asylum, driven mad not by love but by arsenical poisoning.”
“What! You still harping on that?”
“Oh, yes, Alby, I am indeed.”
“Well, we goin’ back to Gilbert Street to make our report?”
“On the way I think we’ll call on Miss Vickers and congratulate her on her engagement.”
Toop stationed the two constables at the front door of Mr Halliday Vickers’s ornate Robe Terrace masion. The house had an Eastern influence of minarets and balconies with a weathercock perched incongruously on a dome. He took Jessup with him about the house, pausing to peer through its many windows, until they reached the back door. In a wash house at the end of the verandah a woman was turning the crank of a washing machine, the clothes churning like butter in a wooden barrel. She stared amazed as the two officers opened the kitchen door without knocking.
The room was shadowy, the shades drawn against the hot glare. Emily Vickers stood at the scrubbed wooden table dicing vegetables. A pot containing a fricassee of mutton stood at one elbow. At the other was a bowl, its contents covered with a beaded muslin cloth. She was wearing a pinafore over a grey dress with a drooping bustle in the “elegant fish” style so much in vogue. Toop noticed the scarlet bow between the twin peaks of her collar.
“A hot day, Miss Vickers.”
“Not as hot as we were accustomed to in India.” If she was startled by their intrusion she did not betray it, but said, calmly, “This is an unsuspected visit, Inspector. May I enquire its purpose?”
“To congratulate you on your engagement and to enquire after your father’s health.”
“A letter would have sufficed for the first, the second a word with Dr Sandow.”
“I’m also the bearer of bad tidings. Miss Ivy Amory, the governess to your fiancé’s children, has just died.”
Miss Vickers continued chopping the vegetables without a quiver. “I’m sorry to hear that. She was devoted to the children.”
“And to Mr Fife.”
She flashed a glance at him from eyes of murky brown, but said nothing.
“She confessed on her death bed. No doubt, you wish she’d let Ada Fife die in the natural course of events instead of committing this violent act which has resulted in so many enquiries.”
“I’m not sure what you mean. Ada was still a relatively young woman.” She scraped the vegetables from the board into the pot.
“Do you do all the cooking for the household?”
“Yes, my father prefers the meals I prepare.” She carried the pot to the stove.
“It was a very hot day last year when W. G. Grace led his English Eleven out onto a playing field scorched brown by our pitiless sun and faced South Australia’s Twenty Two. I paid 2/6d to stand in the broiling sunshine and watch our narrow defeat. News of the English victory would have been flashed immediately to London.”
She raised her heavy brows in an hauteur tinged with contempt. “How does this little anecdote concern me?”
“Oh, but it does, Miss Vickers. A wonderful invention, the electric wire. Don’t you remember the rejoicing in the streets in ’72 when the Darwin to Adelaide Overland Telegraph was officially opened? Or were you still in England then. You lived with an aunt, didn’t you? Not with your father in India. A maiden aunt who left you well provided for when she died after a lingering illness. Her death caused suspicion in a certain housemaid, who reported her suspicions. Scotland Yard was very informative. You were never charged because of insufficient evidence and the accusation of the housemaid was put down to envy. Nevertheless, you decided it was politic to quit England and join your father. How unfortunate that he turned out to be such a martinet, treating you like a servant and discouraging any suitors, until he became too ill to interfere. So many ailing people about you and you nursed them all devotedly.”
He whisked off the muslin cover from the bowl. “You’ve forgotten one ingredient in your stew.” A strip of fly-paper lay soaking in water. “So that’s how it’s done, the liquid drained off and added to the stew.”
She reacted then, her face as ugly and Gorgon-like as Miss Amory’s had been. “Damn you, you meddling snoop. And damn that lovesick governess for whom George never had so much as a glance. If she hadn’t murdered Ada all would have gone well. You think me a cold-blooded woman, but everything I did I did for George so he could have wealth and esteem and love.”
Toop shook his head, his eyes flint-hard. “Everything you did you did for yourself. From jealousy and desperation that you’d never have a husband, never have children, and you took what belonged to another woman. Who would have been next? Nancy? Did you know she is pregnant with Fife’s child?”
She fell back against the dresser. A plate crashed to the floor beside her. It must have sounded to her like the smashing of her life.
“Constable Jessup will remain with you and I’ll leave two constables stationed on the verandah. I’ll return with a warrant for your arrest for the murder of Hamish Robertson, the attempted murders of Ada Fife, Ivy Amory and Halliday Vickers. I think the court will be impressed with an experiment I intend to conduct with fly-paper and a stray cat.”
On his way back to the city, Toop deliberately took a route along Le Fevre Terrace. Arrangements would have to be made for the Fife children to be collected from the Vickers household. He doubted whether Mrs Blount would now have to find a new position.
Along the Terrace he passed the man himself, driving his handsome equipage and spanking thoroughbred. Toop hid a smile as he raised his derby.
For years the ambitious George Dugald Fife had fought and charmed his way into the elect of Adelaide society. Now he would have the most unenviable reputation in South Australia, that of having two women commit murder for him.
The gentleman on the Titanic
John Lutz
John Lutz has been writing short stories for over forty years and has a shelf full of awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private-Eye Writers of America. He’s probably best known for the novel SWF Seeks Same (1990), which was made into the highly-charged film Single White Female (1992). He’s also written a long series about St Louis PI Alo Nudger and an even darker series about Florida ex-cop-turned-PI Fred Carver who in Scorcher (1987) has to cope with a maniac with a flamethrower who murders Carver’s son. For the following story, though, Lutz takes us back to arguably the most famous ship in history, the Titanic. The sinking of the Titanic brought to an end a Golden Era and is a suitable point at which to bring to a close our travels through the crimes of the centuries.
The handsome young English gentleman boarded the Titanic shortly before she sailed. Instead of staying up on deck to watch Queenstown and the Irish shore recede, as did most of the other passengers, he retired to his first-class cabin on C-deck.
He looked to be about thirty, and everything about his dress and demeanour suggested he was of high birth. His well-tailored grey suit flattered his slim but muscular build, and at lunch he demonstrated flawless social skills. His features were lean, somewhat bony, his eyes hooded and blue, his thin lips almost always arced in a pleasant near-smile that never quite took form. Accompanying these other attributes was his modulated voice and accent of the ruling class, suggesting wealth, education, and connections. The single women in first class were keenly interested.
They weren’t alone in their curiosity. “Do you know the chap?” asked retired British Army colonel Roger Brookes, watching the gentleman walk away from the table.
“He didn’t give his name, I’m sur
e,” Alma Clinkscale, one of two marginally attractive but wealthy twin sisters at the table said.
Her sister Vera, identically blond and bland except for a dark mole beneath her left eye, looked up from stirring her tea. “I’ll bet you were listening closely for it.”
“As if you weren’t.”
Vera glared across the scones at her sister, the mole lending at least some intensity to her expression.
“Extraordinary, hey?” the colonel mumbled from beneath his grey hedge of a moustache. Though in his sixties, he had a military carriage that made his ordinary brown tweed suit seem a uniform despite the bread crumbs flecking his jacket and vest. Colonel Brookes had served the Empire long and well, and his doddering manner and etiquette lapses such as crumbs at table were willingly overlooked. His devoted and accommodating wife Maude reached over and brushed the worst of the crumbs away.
“Wick is his name,” said a deep voice from across the table. It belonged to British financier Donald Braithwaite. As usual when he spoke, all other conversation ceased. Large, broad-shouldered, and imposing, with a jutting jaw and fierce dark eyes sunk deep in their sockets, he would have been a man to listen to even if he didn’t own much of England. “Bloke’s name is Ashton Wick.”
“Affable chap, but a bit vague,” the colonel remarked, reaching for what was left of a hard roll. “Fine posture. Well set up, as if he’s been in one of the services.”
“No, I don’t think he’s ever been a military man,” Braithwaite said. He lifted glittering stemmed crystal and took a sip of his port wine.
“He is English, isn’t he?” the colonel’s wife asked.
“Oh, yes,” Braithwaite said, “though he was educated in France. I met him a few years ago when I was in Paris on business. He’s some sort of artist. A sculptor, I believe.”
“An artist!” Alma Clinkscale said. “Isn’t that sensual and wonderful!”
The colonel gazed at her with disapproval.
“He was rumoured to have talented hands,” Braithwaite said.
Vera Clinkscale sampled her tea, apparently found it to her liking, and smiled without looking up.
Woolgathering, no doubt, the colonel decided.
Later that afternoon, as Wick was taking the air on the main promenade deck, a woman’s voice made him pause and turn. More than the voice, it was what the woman had said that brought him up short: “Bertie!”
He stood casually, with one knee slightly bent and a hand in a pocket, and watched her approach. Recognition flooded into him. He knew her, but she was greatly changed.
“Why, Bertie Wicker!” she said more softly, smiling as she drew near. She was wearing a high-collared cotton dress with a billowing grey skirt, cinched tightly at the waist. No jewellery glinted in the sun, and her dark hair was mussed and hanging over one of her startlingly bright violet eyes. Wick sized her up immediately: She would be twenty-one now (he had known her in the slums of London six years ago when he was a twenty-four-year-old destitute art student), she was traveling third class, and she was beautiful. Her smile grew even broader. “Do you remember me? I’m Lorna Palin.”
“Yes, Lorna . . .”
“My, my, don’t you look as if you’re doing well?” Then she seemed suddenly ill at ease. “You might not know it, but I, uh, used to have a terrible crush on you.”
Wick knew and had known at the time. If she hadn’t been so young . . .
“I was but a girl then, Bertie. Now I’m much older.”
“As I am,” Wick said. She was gazing at him the way the younger Lorna had those years ago. He realized he was returning her frank and somewhat confused stare. Their attraction still held, after so much time. “You’ve become quite beautiful,” Wick stammered.
“So have you, Bertie.” She winked.
He studied her, gnawing his lower lip. Then he gripped her elbow and steered her toward the rail. She didn’t seem to mind. “Lorna, I’m going to have to take you into my confidence.”
“Please do, Bertie.”
“It isn’t Bertie anymore,” he said. “It’s Ashton.”
She took him in with those marvellous violet eyes. “Are you putting on airs, Bertie?”
He smiled. “Not exactly.” His face grew serious. “I could always trust you as a child, Lorna.”
“And you can trust the woman,” she told him, somehow closer to him without seeming to have moved.
“On this ship, I’m not Bertie Wicker, I’m Ashton Wick.”
“Bertie, are you on the wrong side of the law? Did the art not work out?”
“I’m on the right side of the law, Lorna. Would you believe me if I told you I’m with British Intelligence?”
“If you need me to believe you, then I do believe.”
“No one else is to know. To you now, as to everyone else on board, I’m Ashton Wick.”
“Then that’s how it will be . . . Ashton. Though I do like Bertie better.”
“Lorna, please!”
“All right, Ashton,” Lorna said firmly.
“And we mustn’t seem to know each other while on board. We must stay apart.”
“Ah, I don’t like that part of it, Ber – Ashton.”
“It’s tremendously important, or I wouldn’t ask. War with Germany is in the wind, and I have a sworn and secret duty on this vessel.”
“Yes, I saw a cartoon in Punch, and there were Germany, France, and England, sitting all together and chatting on a powder keg with its fuse burning.”
“That’s what makes this so important,” Ashton said urgently. “It’s for all of Europe.”
“Then I’ll do as you say,” she told him, “but I do have a question. What’s British Intelligence?”
Shortly after leaving Lorna, Wick met, as planned, with Braithwaite in Braithwaite’s first-class stateroom at the opposite end of C-deck from Wick’s own. Braithwaite was waiting for him and opened the door on the first knock.
“Good afternoon, Herr Braithwaite,” Wick said as the door closed behind him.
Braithwaite waved an arm toward a red velvet wing chair, and Wick sat. Braithwaite continued to stand, crossing his beefy arms. He said, “For the purposes of this operation, remember that I outrank you. But on this ship, I will be Mr Braithwaite and you will be Ashton Wick.”
“Of course. That’s as headquarters instructed.” Wick knew that Braithwaite was one of those English who were German sympathizers banking quite literally on war and on Germany’s victory. A genuine British-born citizen, he was one of the more highly placed and valuable German agents. Wick sat calmly, waiting for his briefing. German intelligence operated on a strict need-to-know basis, and for the first time he was to learn the details of the mission.
Braithwaite uncrossed his arms and began pacing as he spoke softly and conspiratorially in his gruff voice. “One of the Englishmen traveling first class on the Titanic is transporting plans for a radio-controlled torpedo-guidance device to an American corporation for development and manufacture. Once we learn who has the plans, our object is to photograph them, then leave them undisturbed.”
Wick understood why the plans weren’t simply to be stolen. This way the Germans could develop a counter-device while the Americans and British continued wasting their time and resources on a guidance system vulnerable to interference.
“We have also learned,” Braithwaite said, “that the courier is one of those seated at our table in first-class dining.” He smiled. “The seating arrangements were not an accident.”
Wick also smiled. Berlin was thorough.
“When we decide on those of our fellow diners most likely to be the courier, we will search their staterooms, find the plans, and take our photographs. The problem, of course, is that this must be done within a limited amount of time.”
“I’m sure it will be accomplished,” Wick said.
He rose from his chair, as Braithwaite had gone to the stateroom door, indicating the briefing was ended.
Wick had considered, then rejected, the idea of
telling Braithwaite about Lorna Palin. He was sure that problem could be held in check. And he wasn’t quite sure how the ruthless Braithwaite might react to the information.
What Braithwaite hadn’t told Wick was that there was another German agent on board, travelling third class as a Swede under the name Nels Svenson. Svenson had witnessed the meeting between Wick and Lorna on the promenade deck, but as yet it hadn’t aroused his suspicions.
At dinner that evening, Wick was his usual charming and casual self, but through all eleven courses he was sizing up his fellow diners. Their table was actually two square tables butted together, so that twelve were seated rather than the usual eight. Who among those present possessed plans that could determine the course of history?
The twin sisters, Alma and Vera Clinkscale, he thought could probably be ruled out. But only probably. They might not be as airheaded and flirtatious as they seemed.
Next to the Clinkscales sat sardonic American playwright Charles Minheart, author of the recent Broadway and London hit musical Around the Maypole. He was a definite possibility.
Also at the table were the bumbling Colonel Brookes and his wife Maude, a typical ex-military couple. The colonel liked to recount old war adventures while his wife tolerated and tried to moderate his boorish behaviour.
There were also noveau riche American hardware tycoon Ernest Walker and his dour wife Jane, from some place called Indiana; young British bachelor Drake Manningly; Lucy Burnwright, a fading but flamboyant American actress who spent most of the evening flirting with Wick and Manningly when she wasn’t obviously trying to manipulate Minheart into giving her a role in the touring production of Maypole; and popular British journalist Rob Coyle, on board to write an article for the London Times about the great ship’s maiden voyage.
There were, Wick decided, too many possibilities. He had to tackle them in order of priority.
From a port to the east, another ship had set to sea. The German submarine SM U-7 was several days out in the Atlantic when its sternly handsome and stoical commander, Hermann Geerhauser, informed his officers and crew of the sub’s mission. His briefing was characteristically terse: “We are going to a point in the Atlantic where we are to shadow an ocean liner.” He did not tell them why.
