A waiter poured her some white wine and the table discussed the fish starter, a salmon mousse with aspic jelly. One of the Etherington brothers said something about Genie’s murder, which was sadly now becoming common knowledge among the diners.
Fen, not wanting the others around the table to know that she and James were perhaps more in the know than your average passenger, kept her voice low when she replied to James, still thinking about Dodman and his possible role in the crimes. ‘It’s too much of a coincidence, James. A jewellery theft and two very different murders. One man couldn’t be responsible for them all?’
‘I don’t know, old thing.’ James picked up his wine glass and took a sip before continuing. ‘Don’t you think that’s the point? Two murders and one massive theft in the space of a few days, that’s the coincidence. That one person was responsible for all them? Maybe that’s not.’
35
The fog that had been following them since Southampton had returned and Fen awoke the next morning with a heavy heart. She’d slept badly, with dreams of stockings tangling themselves around her throat waking her up several times in the night. Her investigations were getting her nowhere and she felt uncharacteristically grumpy.
She sat up and pulled the eiderdown round her shoulders, then lowered it slightly so she could reach over to her bedside cabinet and bring her newspaper crossword onto her raised knees. She glanced through the clues again, happy with a few of the answers, including SAPPHIRES that she’d been able to put in. One segment, the lower left-hand corner, of the grid was being particularly elusive and she revisited those clues.
‘This one’s just four letters.’ She almost yawned and wished there was a way of getting herself a cup of coffee without having to get out of bed and dressed. There was certainly no bell in this cabin with which she could bring Dodman or someone similar running.
Dodman… James had had a point last night when he’d suggested that the steward was somehow related to all the crimes on board. But she couldn’t believe it of him, he was always so helpful… maybe a bit too helpful?
She yawned again and looked afresh at the quarter of the grid that needed filling. A four-letter clue should be easy enough. ‘Grille revolves in endless dirge…’ she read it out and thought out loud. ‘Revolves will mean something… And the straight clue will either mean grille or dirge, but I think grille as dirge needs to be endless… Ah.’ She reached across for her pen and neatly filled in the word GRID. ‘Backwards dirge with the e missing off the end, that’s what revolves meant.’
Solving that one clue helped her fill in the rest of the corner, but the word ‘grid’ stuck in her mind and she fished around on her bedside table for the passenger list that she’d started writing her own grid on. She hadn’t found out anything of any relevance since she last filled in some words about Genie, but looking at the two separate word networks did make her wonder how, and if, they could connect.
If she was to find something solid to connect them, then she’d need to know an awful lot more about Albert, and the only way to do that would be to snoop around his cabin.
Not sure that she was acrobatic enough to try and fit through a porthole, assuming she could open it from the outside in the first place, Fen decided she’d need help. And that might mean putting suspicions about Dodman to one side as she took advantage of what she thought was his good and helpful nature once more. His universal key seemed to fit every lock in the ship and he had obviously helped Genie get into the locked auditorium. Searching a dead man’s cabin was a far cry from getting your hands on a dressing-up box, but Fen thought it worth a try.
After washing and dressing, Fen ventured forth to look for Dodman. She found him being as helpful as usual to the old couple, the Nettletons, who were complaining about the standard of the poached eggs for breakfast.
‘You’d think people’d be happy to have eggs at all, miss,’ he commented with a shake of his head once the old couple were out of earshot, ‘without asking for Gentleman’s Relish on the side as if it were some heaven-given right. If those Germans had got their way, we’d all have been eating cabbage, and then we would never have heard the end of it.’
Fen resisted the urge to correct him, disabuse him of his stereotyping, given that she was about to ask a favour of him. Plus, it was true that life on board the De Grasse was spoiling them all, compared to the hardships that no doubt everyone on board had endured in some way or another during the war years. Even so, demanding Patum Peperium was taking the anchovy-covered biscuit. ‘Dodman, can I ask you a favour?’ she began, hoping that he wouldn’t think her as demanding as the Nettletons for asking.
‘Indeed, miss, anything for you.’ He clasped his hands behind his back and stood in what Fen believed to be ‘at ease’ in military terms.
‘Cabin thirteen, Dodman. Do you think there’d be any way that I could be allowed in?’
‘Oh miss,’ Dodman looked disappointed. ‘That’s terribly irregular. The captain said under no circumstances should anyone enter the room.’
‘I see. That is a shame. Only I saw that man, the German that is, one night out in the corridor and, would you believe it, since then I haven’t been able to find my favourite pen anywhere.’ Fen was making up any old tosh, hoping it would convince the usually genial steward to let her in. Unless it’s him that doesn’t want me to investigate in there? The thought crossed her mind and it came as a relief when Dodman so easily relented. She was sure James was wrong and Dodman’s connection to
