“So now you’re an ace entomopter pilot?” remarked Count Marechal with mannered incredulity. He lit his fourth cigarette in a row and puffed smoke up into the thickening air of the salon.
“I wouldn’t presume to such a thing,” said Cabal. “Not least because I’m not sure what constitutes an ‘ace.’ I can take off, fly, manoeuvre a little, and land. I doubt that marks me out as a daring aeronaut, but if you say so.”
“And you managed a landing on a moving aeroship on your first attempt, did you?”
“In truth, I almost didn’t,” Cabal admitted. “I was very short of fuel on the final approach, and I doubt that I would have been able to make a second attempt. The lines across the roof — ”
“The arrestor cables on the flight deck,” Marechal corrected him with the testiness of the jargon martinet.
“Quite so. The lines on the roof were a nice innovation, but I think one really needs some sort of a hook on one’s entomopter to make the best use of them. The trainer I borrowed was not thus equipped. Or, if it was, I didn’t know which lever to pull to extend it. Not to worry. I set down fairly lightly, and the distinct possibility of falling off the front was happily curtailed by another entomopter that was parked up there. That would be yours, I assume?” Marechal paused in mid-drag, his cigarette quivering in his lips, which gave Cabal all the answer he needed. “I’d have them take a look at it before you use it again. I gave it a rather stiff wallop when I drove into it.”
“Oh, I’ve had enough of you, Cabal,” said Marechal, less languidly than he’d planned. He reached for his revolver.
“Don’t do that,” said Cabal in light reproof. “I haven’t got up to the point of all this, including why I came back.”
“We already know that. To play the hero,” said Marechal, although his hand paused, the fleshy base of his thumb resting on the revolver’s butt.
“I doubt that,” said Miss Barrow, and then looked uncomfortable when everybody stared at her.
“Miss Barrow is correct. Unflattering, but correct,” said Cabal, once again becoming the centre of attention. “I do almost everything for reasons that might be characterised as selfish. I regard my life as a vital thread in the ongoing march of humanity from protoplasm to — I don’t know, to be honest. Something slightly better than protoplasm would be a start. Therefore, anything that threatens my life now or later has to be dealt with. Paradoxically, that often means risking my life to secure my safety. The difference is that I risk it on my own terms.”
Marechal looked at him as if he’d delivered his little speech via a sock puppet called Mr. Mimsy. “Dear God, Cabal. Just how mad are you?”
“It really isn’t in your interests to kill me, Count, for reasons that will become apparent. That is, if I may be allowed to continue?” He took his pocket watch out and checked the time. Marechal interpreted the gesture to be a melodramatic expression of impatience, and waved him on to finish his story with an air of disgust.
“Thank you,” said Cabal. “Now, let me explain my understanding of the events that have occurred during this voyage. To be brief — ”
“That would be delightful,” muttered the count.
“To be brief … any crime is definable by the classic trio of motive, method, and opportunity. The recent occurrences are no different, but — to my chagrin — I concentrated on the most mechanistic of the three: the method. I thought if I could penetrate the mystery of how M. DeGarre was murdered in a locked room, then the other details would become apparent and the murderer unmasked. Well, I worked out how it was done, and it didn’t unmask anybody at all. The corollaries that it presented were suggestive, but I still could not focus on the members of the conspiracy.”
“A cabal, in fact,” said the count, much to his own amusement.
Cabal ignored him. “Opportunity is a difficult thing to make much of. With a police force to gather detailed statements and a timeline, perhaps something could be shaken out, but I doubt it. A large vessel with very few passengers, rattling around like peas in a coffee can. The periods that people are out of sight of one another are too great; any attempt to cross-reference alibis would be frustrated by the great blank areas.
“This leaves us with motive, and motive is critical here. Once I started to understand a few of the peculiarities of this journey, the reasons behind them weren’t far away.” He started pacing up and down: four steps one way, four steps back. “I had all manner of strange theories. The ship had Senzan agents aboard. No, it had Mirkarvian agents. Perhaps it had Katamenian agents. No, it had Senzan and Mirkarvian agents involved in some sort of shadowed battle aboard this ship. It became more and more ludicrous, and eventually I discarded these ideas. That was a mistake, because I was just one variant away from the truth.
“I shied away from such ideas because they continued to snowball in scale, and there comes a point where reasonable suspicion tends to paranoia. That was where I drew my figurative line in the sand, beyond which I would not go. What is paranoia to the rest of the world, however, is business as usual in this grubby little pressure cooker of penny-ante countries with overarching dreams.”
Colonel Konstantin sat upright, breathing heavily through his nose, but he said nothing.
“It was the silliest thing that made me realise it,” said Cabal. “A marionette show on a street in Parila. It was a little play that wouldn’t appeal to you, as it made light of the Mirkarvian fetish for matters military. It made me think of something I saw almost the first minute I set foot upon this vessel, and that made all else plain. Specifically, why DeGarre had to die.”
Miss Ambersleigh, who had read any number of novels involving the solving of nefarious crimes by sundry Walloons and landed gentry, was on the edge of her seat in bright-eyed excitement. “Because he was a Senzan spy?” she blurted out, and quickly covered her mouth with her hand.
Cabal ceased his pacing long enough to look directly at her. “No. No, Miss Ambersleigh. There is a Senzan spy involved in all this, but it wasn’t DeGarre. No, DeGarre died for being DeGarre. For being exactly what he appeared to be — a respected and world-famous designer of aeroships.”
Now it was Miss Barrow’s turn to be confused. “What? He was going to build a ship for the Senzans?”
“No, he was inadvertently going to prevent the Katamenians taking receipt of a dreadful weapon of war from the Mirkarvians.”
“But they searched the ship?”
“Yes, they did, and that was a masterly stroke of misdirection. All those tons of potatoes and turnips and other root vegetables too grimy to enumerate. Was that your idea, Count?”
Count Marechal smiled, and wafted his fifth cigarette in a casual salute of mocking acquiescence. In fact, the idea had come from a member of his junior staff, but it is the role of junior staff to make senior staff look good and take the blame for anything that might make the senior staff look bad.
“It was so obviously an attempt to hide something that the Senzans were all over those wretched piles of vegetables in a second,” continued Cabal. “They were so focussed on them that they gave the rest of the ship only a cursory inspection. Even if they hadn’t been otherwise engaged in bayoneting carrots, they probably wouldn’t have noticed anyway. Not like DeGarre; as soon as he was on the engineering deck, he would have been asking awkward questions. Why are the engines so overpowered? Why are the bulkheads so thick? Why is the flight deck — thank you for the correct term, Count — capable of holding so many entomopters?”
Konstantin was looking around himself with growing realisation and astonishment. “
“What is it?” demanded Miss Ambersleigh of anyone handy. “I don’t understand all this engineering talk. What is he talking about?”
“He’s saying,” answered Miss Barrow quietly, “that this ship is not a passenger vessel. It’s a warship.” Now she understood the delicacy of their position. DeGarre had been a nuisance, and had been eliminated with rapid efficiency. The fact that he was a foreigner and a man of some standing had not stayed the killer’s hand for a second.
“A warship? You sent me on a trip in a warship, Daddy?” Lady Ninuka was scandalised. “You told me the
“And so she is. Just not a passenger ship.
