Barbara Hambly - Dead water

“Around eleven.” Hannibal glanced up at the clerestory windows that ranged around the top of the Saloon; the light dimmed and faded in them, warning of gathering clouds. Thunder muttered in the distance. “They barely scraped over. Does that make a difference?”

“Only that Weems must have gone overside sometime after that, or else his body would have been scraped off entirely. Where have they put the body?”

Hannibal, who had entirely too much imagination for his own good, looked slightly green at the image this conjured up, and said a little faintly, “In his stateroom.” He poured himself some more sherry. “Though whether Tredgold will let you have a look at it is . . .”

“Mr. Sefton.” Colonel Davis withdrew a morocco-leather memorandum-book from his pocket as he approached. “I understand you claim to have been playing the violin on deck after you left the Saloon?”

“At the time I hoped I wouldn't waken anyone,” sighed Hannibal. “Now I wish that I had. My man Benjamin has pointed out that Weems probably went overboard after we crossed over that bar at eleven—providing us with a terminus ad quem, anyway.”

“More than that.” The young planter consulted his notes, a nervous tic pulling sharply at the left side of his face. “According to Mr. Souter, the rudder was dragging and pulling shortly before midnight, as it does when it's picked up a branch. Mr. Molloy was just getting ready to come off watch when it happened, and cursed at it, Mr. Souter says. When Souter took over the wheel, he felt it, and whatever it was, it pulled loose in about an hour.”

January shivered. The man might well have ruined him—and hundreds of other investors—walking away without a thought to the lives he was wrecking. . . . But it was still a horrible way to die. Even in the deserts of Algeria, a thief would lose a hand, not his life.

“Mr. Weems left supper early,” Davis went on, glancing at Hannibal, whether for reaction or confirmation January could not guess. “Almost as soon as dessert was served . . .”

“And I stayed on,” pointed out Hannibal, “to entertain the company as usual after supper was over—not wishing to play the despot, I did not demand Ben accompany me after the day he'd had. If you recall, I was continuously in the Saloon from supper until well after midnight, engaged with either music or cards.”

“Yes,” agreed Davis, “yes, of course. As for where Mr. Weems was . . .”

“Begging your pardon, sir.” Thucydides turned from preparation of a pot of tea for the ladies breakfasting in the Parlor, setting the enormous japanned tray down. “I don't know where Mr. Weems was the whole of that time, sir, but I met him on the upper starboard promenade, outside the gentlemen's staterooms, just after ten o'clock. He was standing outside a stateroom, trying to unlock the door, I thought. I spoke to him, not meaning disrespect, but thinking he'd mistaken the room, for his stateroom is the first one at the bow end of the boat, and he was trying to unlock one down at the stern end. But he turned away fast and went off down the promenade to the stern without speaking.”

“You're sure it was he?”

The steward nodded gravely. “I saw his face clear in the light of the lantern he carried, though it was black foggy.”

Davis frowned. “Now, why would he have mistaken which end of the boat his stateroom was on? Unless he was intoxicated, and I have never seen him so—though of course if he was, it might explain his falling accidentally over the rail.”

“A man would have to be more intoxicated than liquor could make him,” mused January, “to go over the railings of either the upper deck or the lower . . . sir,” he remembered to add, hoping Davis wasn't a stickler for servants not speaking unless and until spoken to. And when the planter only furrowed his brow inquiringly, he went on. “Those railings are nearly elbow-high, and the upper-deck promenades are narrow—three feet, I think, from the wall to the railing. A man falling backwards against the rail might flip over it if he hit it with sufficient force, but his feet would almost certainly strike the wall and catch him.

“And the fact is, sir, though I don't know why Weems was trying to get into one of the staterooms at the stern end of the promenade, I think he tried to get into more than one.” And he recounted the attempted intrusion into Hannibal's stateroom, ending with: “That was just about at eleven, because I heard the leadsmen calling out as the boat was coming up to the bar.”

Davis glanced sharply at Thucydides—who very properly kept his eyes lowered from the white man's gaze—then at January. “And where is your master's stateroom in relation to the stern end of the promenade?”

“Third from the end,” said January. “Sir.”

“The last four are Mr. Lundy's, Mr. Sefton's, Mr. Cain's, and Mr. Molloy's, sir,” provided Thu.

“I expect the lock-faces would bear some sign of it,” said Hannibal as the steward left the Saloon with his enormous tea-tray in hand, “if the locks of those staterooms had been picked or forced, unless Mr. Weems was extremely adept at what he was doing.” With considerable deliberation he poured the rest of his sherry-and-laudanum back into the flask and worked the cork back in. “Even if my protestations of innocence are out of order—and I do bear letters from Vice-President Hubert Granville of the Bank of Louisiana on the subject of Mr. Weems's theft of quite a substantial sum of the Bank's specie—I wonder if perhaps my man here could take a look at the body? He used to work for a surgeon—I think he's probably the best-trained medical observer on board.”

“Is he, indeed?” The Colonel's pale gaze raked up and down January as if comparing his height and size with his hands—which did not have the knotted tendons and swollen joints of a field-worker's—and his air of calm self-confidence. Then, “So you do admit to being sent by the Bank of Louisiana?”

“I was, yes, sir,” replied Hannibal. “To recover the Bank's specie—which I have no proof whatsoever that Weems took. But Weems's actions—and those of the woman he's been pretending not to know for the past week and who now claims herself as his fiancée—aren't those of a man with a clear conscience.”

“No. But they may be those of a man who knows himself to be unjustly persecuted. Mr. Tredgold?” Davis turned to beckon the Silver Moon 's owner. Tredgold had returned to the card-table and was pouring a shot of brandy into his coffee with the air of a man who really needs it. “Will you accompany us to view the body?”

“Er . . . please,” replied Tredgold, fumbling a key-ring from his coat-pocket and selecting from it a stateroom key. He looked pale around the mouth beneath his drooping mustache. “I leave the matter entirely in your hands.”

With a gratified air young Colonel Davis strode from the Saloon, January and Hannibal trailing at his heels.

The door to Weems's stateroom was closed, but when Davis fitted the key into the lock, January heard sharp movement inside, followed at once by Diana Fischer's unmistakable voice. “Who's there . . . ?”

Davis opened the door to reveal the woman kneeling beside the bunk. The soaked bedclothes were dragged back and the thin mattress wrenched awry. Weems's body lay on the floor in the corner, bundled awkwardly on one side with its unbuttoned clothing half pulled off it.

Mrs. Fischer scrambled to her feet, her face first pale, then flushing red. “What is the meaning of this outrage?” She strode toward Davis like an avenging harpy, and seized him by his lapels. “I come here to pay a final farewell, to sit for a time beside my poor beloved's body, to look once more into his poor face. . . .”

Her voice caught in a sob, though her eyes bore no sign of either tears or swelling and her nose was decidedly un-red. “And what do I find? Those animals, those vile murderers have been in here! Look at what they have done!” She released Davis's lapel long enough to sweep her hand at Hannibal, and at January, who was taking note of the fact that the front of her dress was splotched with dampness across the hips, where she would have levered a sodden body off the bed.

“I'm afraid you must hold us excused, m'am.” Hannibal politely removed his hat. “Since your affianced husband was brought here, my man and I were either in the presence of Colonel Davis, or that of some of the deck-passengers—”

“That yellow hussy?” She spat the words in her contempt.

Davis said nothing.

“Then there is more happening aboard this accursed vessel than meets the eye!” She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead, with the appearance of a woman about to crumple in a faint. “For when I came into this room it was as you see it, desecrated ! Well might you imagine my horror, my outrage . . .”

While she trumpted her horror and outrage, January looked around the tiny stateroom. Under Weems's half-stripped body the straw matting of the floor was rumpled and twisted, as if it, too, had been taken hastily up, section by section. The dead bank manager's portmanteau and valise were open and their contents hastily jammed back or lying strewn around. Davis's eyes narrowed and his tic twitched again. “The room has been searched,” he said.

With that grasp of the obvious, thought January, you'll go far in politics. Sir.

With some difficulty they persuaded Mrs. Fischer to leave, Hannibal going to fetch Sophie and returning, not only with the young maid—her face streaked with tears of sympathy for a grief her mistress clearly was far from feeling—but with January's small surgical kit. Outside, the thunder clouds of a summer storm were gathering and the water was growing choppy; when Sophie helped Mrs. Fischer from the room, Davis lit both lamps and brought them close to the bed.

“Did Mrs. Fischer have a key to the stateroom?” asked Hannibal, going to the corpse.

“Thu would know. Sir.” January held up his hand, and instead of going at once to lift Weems back onto the bunk, he knelt, and examined the seams of the mattress, thoroughly fingered the wet pillow for anomalous lumps or shapes, and held one of the lamps low to get a close look at every crack and crevice of the wooden frame. That done—and nothing discovered—he handed the lamp back to Colonel Davis and helped Hannibal manhandle the body onto the bed.

Most of Oliver Weems's bones had been broken by the action of the rudder and the paddle in which his body had been entangled—his left arm, when January gently disentangled the shirt and coat from the torso, proved to have been almost torn off. Because of its long submersion there was very little blood left in the veins. The head and neck were board-stiff, but it was impossible to tell how many of the other joints would have been so had the body lain undisturbed.

“Which doesn't tell us anything, really,” he said, glancing back over his shoulder at Davis as he gently probed at the joints. “Rigor can set in as soon as three hours after death if the body's undisturbed and warm, but in water it would be delayed.”

There were at least four places where the skull gave sickeningly to pressure. January supposed he should be grateful that the head hadn't been torn entirely off. There were no gashes or stabs, and the hands were unmarked by defensive wounds.

As his hands turned the mud-sodden cloth of coat, shirt, trouser-band, January noticed how some of the buttons had been nearly ripped from their holes, while others were whole, as if neatly unfastened by searching fingers. But why search? he wondered. Anything in his pockets she could have easily claimed.