‘The problem came the morning after the theft though, didn’t it? You hadn’t banked on me and Genie finding Fischer on our search of the ship, and with the area suddenly buzzing with crew and deemed a crime scene, Frank couldn’t risk being caught retrieving the jewels. I should imagine they’re still there now, yes?’
‘I hope so,’ Eloise shuddered. ‘I had to kick Frank in the shin yesterday and I thought he was about to give it all away. I was worried that you’d found them when you said you’d been up there. It was lucky, for us anyway, that you found the body before the tiara.’
‘But find a body we did.’ Fen bit her lip. ‘A body with a message.’
43
‘Yes, explain to us about all of that,’ Dr Bartlett asked. ‘This Fischer chap was found wrapped in a swastika flag and stabbed through the heart.’
‘A message if ever there was one, isn’t that right, Captain?’
Fen saw that the captain was recovering some of his senses and had rattled the cuffs holding his wrists together several times. Dodman and Bisset each had a hand on one of his shoulders. He wasn’t going anywhere.
Fen looked at him and then at her grid again. She nodded and carried on. ‘At first, I thought it was Bisset, of course. He’d told us all that he’d been the last man standing at Le Havre, that he’d been there when the Allies were bombing it. He’d taken the Nazi flag down from the pole in the town square. He didn’t mention that he’d kept it, but when a swastika turns up on a French boat, well, it sure as anything wasn’t put there by the management.’
‘And wasn’t in our fancy-dress box either, perish the thought,’ Dodman chipped in.
‘And not stolen by you, Mr Dodman, not as the lock to Bisset’s cabin was apparently forced and you have the universal keys to these decks, letting us all into auditoriums and brig cells. If the flag had been stolen by you, then you could have snuck in much more subtly.’
‘I should hope not, miss, I was no fan of having one of them on board, but the war’s over now, like you said, and we can’t go around killing each other.’ Dodman crossed his arms and stood firm.
‘Quite right. And it wasn’t just the flag that was part of the message,’ Fen carried on, having nodded an agreement to the steward. ‘Hiding the body in a lifeboat was part of it, too. If the intent was merely to kill him, why not chuck the dead man overboard, or if you wanted everyone to know he was a Nazi, leave him on the deck wrapped in the swastika? No, the murderer wanted revenge and to show his disapproval for the way German scientists, scientists who created weapons of huge destructive power, were now being let off the hook. And that took the pageantry that Lagrande had devised.’
‘Pageantry?’ Bartlett asked.
‘You know what I mean,’ Fen waved his query aside. ‘There was something theatrical about it all. Another parallel, in a way, to events on board. Anyway, Lagrande had told us that the lifeboats were going to be taken off the De Grasse at New York for a revarnish and check over in dry dock.
‘Where better for the American authorities to find the body of the German rocket scientist who they had offered sanctuary to? I suppose there’s some official name for it, but it seems America is offering a home to the very boffins who were coming up with weapons used against us Allies during the war. Rather than have them imprisoned or executed, or set to stand trial, they want their work, their minds. There are blueprints in cabin thirteen for V-2 rockets, long-range ballistic missiles. War enders.’
There was a gasp from those assembled.
Only Bisset looked thoughtful and stepped forward to add his two penn’orth in. ‘For what it’s worth, he is not the first the French Line has transported. They try to slip aboard one or two per crossing, so as not to cause suspicion among the other passengers, who are mostly returning soldiers at the moment. But Lagrande seemed agitated this trip, there was something in the way he had studied the passenger list, the full and more detailed one, that wasn’t usual.’
‘He was coming up with a particularly devious way to tell Ernst Fischer that this time he was the one within someone else’s sights. Wracker-Nayman, a warning shot across the bow to Fischer that his days were numbered.’
‘So why was Genie murdered?’ Spencer, who had otherwise been silent, spoke up. ‘My Genie.’
‘Oh, Spencer, I’m so sorry.’ Fen looked at him and hoped her eyes conveyed how truly sorry she was for his loss. Comforting those grieving was never her strong suit, but perhaps getting justice for their loved ones was.
‘I should have trusted her,’ Spencer was almost sobbing, his days in the brig and the grief he felt over his late fiancée taking their toll. ‘Genie would never have done anything so bad as murder a man.’
‘Being a bit of a magpie is no crime.’ Fen looked about her. ‘Eloise, you were wrong to try and pin the theft of your aunt’s jewels on Genie, but Spencer here knew there was a chance it could have been her. She’d riffled through the costumes in the auditorium already this trip.’
‘And I was jealous of the time she was spending with you, Bartlett,’ Spencer added. ‘I’m a jealous fool and never let her explain…’
Fen turned to Dr Bartlett, his brow furrowed in concentration at what was being said. ‘I found the letter you wrote to Genie, telling her of her pregnancy. That explains the time you two were spending together.’
‘She came to me as we boarded at Le Havre, and said she felt peculiar. I advised her to cut down on the drinking and I examined her. She was with child.’
Spencer started sobbing.
