A Death on the Ocean Wave Read online

  Tim Heald

  A Death on The Ocean Wave

  A TUDOR CORNWALL MYSTERY

  In his third adventure, Doctor Tudor Cornwall, head of criminal affairs at the University of Wessex, finds himself literally all at sea. Accompanied by his precocious star pupil, Elizabeth Burney, Tudor boards the good ship Duchess as a guest speaker on a transatlantic crossing which goes spectacularly wrong.

  Are the Irish journalists actually terrorists in thin disguise? Does the captain really have laryngitis – or has he been done away with? How come Freddie Grim formerly of Scotland Yard is preaching at matins? Was the flambé at Doctor and Frau Umlaut’s table meant to be quite so explosive? Is Prince Abdullah a real Royal?

  And, most importantly of all, can Tudor solve these and other mysteries before the ship docks?

  Chapter One

  The Duchess didn’t look like a cruise ship. She had two funnels, round port holes, scrubbed wooden decks and a jaunty air of sea-worthiness which suggested a bygone era in which passengers travelled by sea because that was the best and possibly the only way of getting from A to B. The Duchess was all brass, teak and jolly Jack tar. She was the pride and joy of Riviera Shipping, the smartest, most eclectic and most expensive shipping line of the twenty-first century. No bingo and balcony, no chrome and casino: this was P.O.S.H.

  Doctor Tudor Cornwall stood on the Budmouth Quayside and sighed. Middle age was making him conservative and old-fashioned. He who had once been an awkward, progressive maverick, castigated by his opponents as a dangerous leftie, was now reduced to celebrating the traditional lines of a ship that looked like a ship.

  ‘Nice, eh?’ he said to the gamine figure at his side.

  Elizabeth Burney smiled. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Sort of thing I used to have in my bath when I was a kid.’

  They could have been father and daughter. He, grizzled, tweedy, beetle-browed, overcoated, feeling the cold of a bright, sharp October morning; she, booted, be-jeaned, cotton-shirted, cashmere-sweatered, unbothered by the chill; he, fifty-something; she, twenty-something. But not father, not daughter – guest lecturer; research assistant.

  He was looking forward to the assignment. Some people didn’t enjoy transatlantics. They were bored by day after day of featureless ocean. The rise and fall of the dangerous deep made them sick and alarmed; consequently they couldn’t eat; conversely they drank too much. Tudor, on the other hand, relished the unaccustomed isolation; he liked getting no signal on his mobile; he enjoyed caviar and cold, dry chateau-bottled Muscadet. Applause was gratifying as well. Likewise recognition. As Reader in Criminal Studies at the University of Wessex, head of an increasingly well-regarded department, author, expert, broadcaster, aspiring television personality, Dr Tudor Cornwall was on the verge of celebrity. Actually, in his own worlds of Wessex and criminal studies he was a celebrity, albeit a minor one. ‘Minor’ celebrity, he reflected, was a bit like ‘minor’ poet or ‘minor’ public school. It was almost a pejorative. Never mind, on the good ship Duchess he was a guest lecturer and therefore ipso facto a celebrity grade one, alpha male. He was not a vain man but the notion gave a keen edge to his anticipation.

  The girl, on the other hand, was just beginning. She was a blank page, the beginning of a book, could go anywhere, could become anything. Not that she was unformed. Far from it. She was a precociously developed personality, smart and streetwise way beyond her years. Tasmanian by birth and upbringing she was as far from home as it was possible to be. An uprooted orphan, she never spoke of family or friends down under. It was as if she had drawn a line under her past, wiped the slate clean, moved on. She herself would never have used such clichés for she was naturally original and inventive. But she seemed to have no past. It was as if she had been beamed in from outer space – which, in a sense, she had.

  They had met when Tudor was on a Visiting Fellowship in that far-off land. Even then she had an ambiguous, shady reputation. She was the protégé of Tudor’s oldest but false friend, Ashley Carpenter. Probably his mistress, though that was too old-fashioned a word to describe their relationship. She was also alleged to be the college thief, though this, too, was an assumption without serious substance. She had been foisted on Tudor in what, at the time, had seemed like a final act of revenge by Carpenter. Subsequent events had cast doubts on this. Tudor still thought of her as some sort of Trojan horse, but he no longer regarded her as hostile. She seemed well disposed, affectionate even, and she was awfully bright. Although he couldn’t admit it, even to himself, he was more than a little in love with her. She, on the other hand, didn’t appear to be in love with anyone. She never mentioned Ashley Carpenter.

  ‘Well, star pupil,’ said the Reader in Criminal Studies, grasping the handle of his battered leather suitcase, ‘shall we go on board?’

  She smiled up at him.

  ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘She’s home for a week.’

  ‘Not quite a week,’ he said. ‘We dock in New York in six days’ time.’

  She hefted her rucksack on to her shoulders.

  ‘That’s hair splitting,’ she said. ‘I think of it as a week. Call it a nautical week. Like a knot. Chronological equivalent of a sea-mile.’

  Her teacher sucked his teeth. ‘A week is a week. Six days is six days. You can’t have it both ways.’

  ‘I like having it both ways,’ she said. ‘Suits my temperament. If I say six days is a week then a week is six days. That’s the meaning of meaning.’

  ‘Oh shut up,’ he said. ‘Stop being tiresome and precocious.’

  There were procedures to be gone through. There were, reflected both Tudor and Elizabeth, always procedures to be gone through. This was what so much of life had become: a procedure to be gone through. Tudor’s professional life should have been divided into teaching and researching and writing. Instead it was dominated by form-filling and pen-pushing and answering to a faceless, humourless, gormless bureaucracy. Elizabeth’s particular bugbear were the immigration authorities who seemed to have an antipathy to Australians in general and her in particular. These were particular procedural problems, but both of them were confronted with the increasing regimentation and regulation of modern life. For free spirits such as them the experience was hobbling. For professional crime-studiers who believed that everything they did should be individual, intuitive, quirky and idiosyncratic the constant drive to make them conform to a grim post-Stalinist pattern of behaviour was a constant reproach. Crime didn’t stick to rules. That was the whole point.

  The pre-boarding procedures took place in a large corrugated-iron shed cursorily tricked out with tired bunting and frayed red carpet. As formalities went these were agreeably perfunctory. Luggage went through an X-ray screening machine and was then whisked off to their cabins. It was a listless examination as was the body search, performed by bored men and women out-sourced from some private agency and abetted by hand-held metal detectors. Tudor and the girl knew that it was all a charade, a sop to the terror instilled in so many westerners by the destruction of the World Trade Centre. It meant nothing but it made people feel good, or at any rate less bad. It created the illusion that the President of the United States was doing something. Likewise the British Prime Minister. Tudor knew perfectly well, and his talks with his friends and contacts in the Intelligence Services confirmed, that if any terrorist organization worth its salt wanted to do something horrible to a cruise liner it was a doddle.

  Nevertheless the two of them submitted to the more or less pointless formalities with a good grace before striding purposefully up the gangplank and submitting their shiny new ID cards to the beaming Filipino purserette at the vessel’s entrance.

  ‘Welcome aboard,’ she said. The badge attached to her crisp, starc
hed white shirt, said ‘Cherry.’

  Tudor and Elizabeth smiled back.

  Cherry consulted a chart on the baize-covered table in front of her, then turned to a gallery of hooks behind her and picked off two old-fashioned keys with heavy wooden tags.

  ‘Two floors up,’ she said. ‘Boat deck, aft. Adjacent cabins.’

  She smiled with what might have been innuendo but might just have been friendliness.

  Tudor and Elizabeth smiled back in a blank semi-expressionless way that ignored any suggestion of suggestiveness, accepted their keys and moved off in the direction of the stairways which were carpeted in blue and lined with photographs and portraits of assorted aristocrats and royals from Britain and beyond. Two decks up they turned left along the Duchess’s starboard corridor until at the very end they found their cabins.

  ‘I’d like to be on deck when we sail out,’ said Tudor. ‘Why don’t I see you by the Lido Bar in half an hours’ time?’

  ‘Where’s the Lido Bar?’ she asked, wide-eyed, innocent.

  ‘You’ll find it,’ said Tudor. ‘She’s a small ship. If in doubt ask a uniform.’ Tudor had guest-lectured on the Duchess before. He knew his way around. So, metaphorically at least, did Elizabeth even though this was her first time on board.

  The cabin, like the ship, was old-fashioned. After all, the Duchess had been built in Gdansk some twenty years earlier when Lech Walesa was strutting his stuff. Poles were fine ship-builders but, like the Pope and Walesa, they were essentially traditionalist. Thus Tudor’s cabin had sturdy mahogany furnishings and a serviceable en-suite bathroom but no gold taps and no balcony. Indeed it didn’t even have a window but a couple of large, brass-surrounded port holes. Port holes on a modern cruise-ship. Good selling point, he reckoned.

  His cases would come in good time and be stored in the walk-in fitted cupboard. He eyed the half-bottle of champagne on the coffee table and decided to broach it later, then picked up the heavy manila envelope with ‘Doctor Tudor Cornwall, Guest Lecturer, Cabin BD77’ written in inky loops on the outside, and opened it with his fingers, thinking, slightly pompously, that a line of Riviera’s pretensions really ought to provide paper-knives in its boat-deck cabins.

  There was a stiffy inside bidding him to a Captain’s Cocktail Party in the ballroom that evening after they had set sail. He noticed that the Captain – though 'Master’ was the preferred moniker – was still Sam Hardy. He had sailed with Sam before. Several times. He must be getting on for retirement age. Not that Sam had much to do with sailing the ship. He was a Captain Birdseye sort of captain, all jovial bonhomie and silver whiskers, more at home waltzing round the dance floor with elderly widows or telling noon-time jokes over the Tannoy from the bridge. The actual work was done by his officers. Well, that was unfair, conceded Tudor. Being mine host and master of ceremonies on a ship like the Duchess was a twenty-four hour permanent smile, constant charm, never-a-cross-word sort of job, and in a way far harder work than actually making sure the old ship got safely from one side of the Atlantic to the other. Tudor wouldn’t have liked being master of the Duchess but it suited old Sam Hardy. The ladies liked him and that was all that mattered.

  There was another envelope, similarly addressed though this time in typewriting.

  Tudor smiled. He knew what this was and he smiled as he read it.

  ‘Hi Tudor!’ it ran. ‘Good to have you aboard again. I really look forward to more of your criminal experiences and I know the lucky passengers are in for a real treat as usual. We’ll be having a short briefing in the cinema at 9.00 p.m. this evening for guest lecturers, gentlemen hosts and other entertainers. And I’d be delighted if you and your companion could join me and the rest of the team for dinner in the Chatsworth Room at 7.30 for 8.00. Look forward to catching up. Best, Mandy xx.’

  ‘Mandy’ and the kisses were handwritten and underneath were the words ‘Mandy Goldslinger. Cruise director.’ He liked Mandy. They, too, had worked together in the past. She was of a certain age and uncertain antecedents: Coral Gables by way of Budapest. She could, up to a point, have been one of the Gabor sisters if life had panned out differently. Her virtues of brash street-wise American pzazz perfectly complimented the stolid all-British joviality of Skipper Sam.

  Tudor put the two missives back on the table and contemplated the bowl of fruit: apple, banana, two kiwi fruit, red and white grapes. Standard issue for Guest Lecturer Grade One. He wondered who his colleagues would be, what the passengers would be like. The lumpen passenger list was always pretty much the same. Likewise the lecturers. But voyages such as this invariably threw up the odd surprise. He was sure this would be no exception. Thinking which, he picked up his key and set off in the direction of the Lido Bar, whistling a happy tune.

  Chapter Two

  Tudor was not a sailor in the practical sense of knowing a quarter deck from a poop or being able to tie a sheepshank or a bowline but he took a real pleasure in things nautical. It was a vicarious spectator’s pleasure but none the less genuine for that. Watching the Duchess cast off her chains before being tug-nudged gently out to sea was always mesmerizing. He had little real understanding of what was happening, but he derived an expert’s enjoyment from watching other experts at work. You didn’t have to be C.S. Forester or Patrick O’Brien to do that.

  The ship’s orchestra, all seven of them, were playing ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ from a balcony on the deck above and white-clothed trestle-tables were laid out with canapes and bottles of sparkling white Spanish wine.

  Tudor took a glass of Cava and a miniature chipolata on a toothpick, walked to the rail and contemplated.

  The members of the band seemed even older than the passengers. They had a slightly louche, left-over air that Tudor associated with a certain sort of seaside resort or spa. People who he’d assumed were long dead turned up in resorts such as Budmouth, or ships such as the Duchess, all wrinkles and hip-replacements. Many of them were orphaned so that one was likely to encounter Gerry without the Pacemakers (now there was a sick geriatric joke), Wayne Fontana without the Mindbenders or Brian Poole without the Tremeloes. Ancient hasbeens strutting their last at the end of the pier. At least the Duchess’s orchestra had each other, wearied by age though not yet quite condemned. They played the ‘Saints’ with a lugubrious panache, their moustaches improbably dyed, their paunches straining against the buttons of striped pseudo-Edwardian waistcoats, wispy hair lapping discoloured collars. They might, reflected Tudor, have known better days, they might have been drowning but they were still playing on. Dying but not dead, bloodied but unbowed. In a moment they’d do ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. At least the ship’s orchestra was maintaining a pretence and doing so with conviction.

  This was not always the case with the passengers who in some cases closely resembled what Tudor imagined were the walking dead. Watching from the rail, drink and sausage in hand, he had a sense that he was the only man alive. This was unfair. He knew it as soon as he thought it. There were some sprightly nonagenarians tripping the light prosaic before his eyes on the lido deck. Men and women were mocking age and infirmity, shaking their zimmers at the Grim Reaper and embarking with stoicism and gritted teeth on what for some was almost certainly the Last Great Cruise.

  One or two had already changed for dinner: men in white tuxedos with brightly coloured waistcoats and cummerbunds, buckled shoes, sleek silver hair and gold fillings; women in long ball gown concoctions that would not have shamed Barbara Cartland and beehive hair-do’s that suggested a golf-club dinner-dance in Surrey circa Coronation Year. Tudor told himself to stop being ageist and snobby. He himself wasn’t that smart nor that young any more. Those still in day clothes had an air of Carry on Cruising: male tattoos of a bruiser, sergeant’s mess quality Hawaiian shirts, golf shoes; sandals with knee-length socks, pearls, cardigans. Everything said money and middle Britain; Thatcherland; suburban and provincial. ‘Shut up,’ Tudor said to himself. ‘This is your audience. If you want to be a celebrity you’ve got to
make people like this like you.’ Even as he said it, half of him at least thought the game not worth the candle.

  ‘Doctor Cornwall,’ said a smoky estuarine voice at his elbow, ‘nice to see you again. Muriel and I wondered whether you might be on board.’ When Tudor too obviously didn’t recognize him, he said, ‘St Petersburg the year before last. Freddie Grim, ex-Flying Squad. Used to work with Slipper of the Yard.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Cornwall, suddenly remembering all too well. Slipper was the man who had developed an obsession with the Great Train Robber, Ronnie Biggs. Freddie Grim had been close to him. If Cornwall’s memory was not playing tricks Freddie Grim had accompanied Slipper on the notoriously unsuccessful trip to Brazil where they had so ignominiously failed to secure the robber’s extradition.

  ‘Great Train Robbery,’ he said hopefully and was relieved when Grim’s mouth cracked in a satisfied grin, revealing a set of unnaturally even teeth and letting out a halitosis breeze of stale tobacco and lunch-time beer. He was wearing a blazer with the badge which appeared to be that of the Metropolitan Police Bowls Club and a matching cravat.

  ‘Spot on,’ said the former policeman. ‘See our Ron’s trying to get let out on compassionate.’

  Biggs was in Belmarsh prison where he was supposed to have suffered a couple of strokes. His solicitor was having no luck at all in presenting his client as more sinned against than sinning.

  ‘Giving us the Bounty again?’

  Tudor nearly always did his ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ talk on board ship. In it he proved beyond reasonable doubt that Captain Bligh was strict but fair and that his survival in a small open boat was due to consummate seamanship. It seemed an appropriate subject for a cruise and invariably proved popular. His audiences tended to sympathize even if they felt Bligh’s rules were strictly administered. In fact, particularly if strictly administered. Most of them were almost certainly floggers if not hangers. Probably both.