The Body on the Lido Deck Read online

  “Your ID says Toni Shapiro,” he objected.

  “Day is my maiden name, which I use professionally,” I told him. “And I know I’m not licensed to practice medicine here, but I do know a thing or two about forensics and maybe I can help. Not only that, but my mother and stepfather are on this cruise too, and my stepfather is a retired homicide detective chief superintendent from Scotland Yard.”

  That got his attention. “Scotland Yard? Homicide? Would that be Nigel Gray?”

  “That’s the one,” I said with surprise. “You know him?”

  “I certainly do,” he said. “Years ago we had a death on board just as we were about to dock at Southampton. It turned out to be a homicide. Detective Inspector Gray was in charge of the investigation.”

  “So you’ve had a murder on board before,” I said. “How long ago was that?”

  “What makes you think this is a murder?” he asked, ignoring my question.

  “What makes you think it’s not?” I countered. “You can’t rule out murder unless you investigate. Nigel and I can help. In the meantime, hadn’t you better close off the Lido deck? Her head’s in the pool and the rest of the body’s splattered all over the deck down there.”

  “Blimey!” He went pale again. Turning away from the grisly scene, he unhooked his radio from his belt and gave a series of commands. “It’s a good job we’re going to be in port today. Maybe we can get this mess cleaned up before anybody notices it.”

  Good luck with that, I thought. What were the chances nobody would notice that the Lido deck was closed? More than likely the passengers would know about the body before anybody went ashore in Bridgetown. Those who didn’t would know by the time they came back on board.

  As if he’d been reading my mind, the captain glanced at his watch. “We’ll be docking in about an hour. I’ve got to contact the police in Bridgetown—and get a cleaning crew in here.”

  “Not until the police see her,” I objected. “They’ll need to photograph the scene and retrieve as much as possible of the body. There’ll have to be an autopsy to see if there are any injuries that can’t be explained by being crushed by the roof, and toxicology to determine if she was drugged or otherwise rendered unconscious before she was put in there.”

  “Bloody hell,” the captain muttered under his breath.

  “Nigel would agree with me,” I pursued. “Shall I go get him?”

  “You keep referring to the body as ‘she’,” Captain Sloane said. “Do you know her?”

  “In my opinion, her own mother wouldn’t know her,” I said. “But it’s been my experience that men don’t usually go in for Tickle-the-Toe-Red nail polish.”

  The captain actually chuckled at that.

  “Also,” I pursued, “the head in the pool has red lipstick and long blonde hair.” I could have showed him the pictures I’d taken, but I decided not to, as he seemed to be a trifle squeamish about such things. “And an earring,” I added.

  The six-inch gash in the scalp over the depressed skull fracture was another thing entirely. That would be a matter for the police.

  At this point the captain seemed to become aware that I was wrapped in a towel and dripping on the deck. “Have you been in the pool?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I saw it fall, and I went in to get a closer look at it.”

  He scowled and shook his head as if to disperse a cloud of gnats. “What the bloody hell were you even doing on the Lido deck at that ungodly hour?”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I said. “I didn’t want to wake my husband, so I came up to the Lido deck to read for a while.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “With what?”

  “The head, of course,” he said impatiently.

  “I left it where it was,” I said.

  “In the pool?”

  “Yes.” I wasn’t really lying. I mean, I had left the head precisely where I’d found it. Besides, I saw no point in telling the captain that I’d moved it to take pictures. He was obviously in no condition to look at them anyway.

  “In God’s name, why?” The captain’s face had been growing paler and paler as this conversation progressed, and by this point he was taking on a greenish tint. Beads of sweat had popped out on his tanned forehead, and he pulled out a handkerchief to mop his brow.

  “Because it’s evidence,” I said. “If the police want me to go in after it when they get here I’ll be happy to do so. I mean, I’m already wet.”

  He closed his eyes and swallowed hard before speaking. “At least that cuts the job of finding out who’s missing in half. If we wait until everyone goes ashore, we can eliminate all those passengers as well.”

  That made sense, because passengers were required to swipe their IDs through a bar code reader as they disembarked, and then again when they reboarded. This created a record of who was aboard and who wasn’t, and it made sure that everybody who went ashore was back on board when the ship sailed. There was only one thing wrong with that.

  “You can’t let anyone go ashore,” I objected. “One of them might be the killer.”

  “Impossible,” the captain argued. “Can’t be done. We can’t prevent people from going ashore. What would we tell them?”

  “I suppose the truth is out of the question?” I asked innocently, although I suspected I knew the answer.

  “Absolutely out of the question,” he said. “We don’t want to start a panic.”

  “Don’t you want to at least wait until the police get here and see what they say?” I asked.

  “Now look here, madam,” he began.

  “Dr. Day,” I corrected him.

  “Toni!”

  I looked up to see Hal coming toward me. I waved. “It’s my husband,” I told the captain, who did not look thrilled.

  My husband, Hal Shapiro, towered over my diminutive five foot three by at least a foot and outweighed me by a hundred pounds. With his blond hair, beard, and mustache, and bright-blue eyes, he resembled a Viking rather than the mild-mannered college professor that he actually was.

  “What’s going on?” he asked as he got close enough for me to hear him. “They’ve closed off the Lido deck.”

  “That’s because they don’t want people to see the body,” I said.

  “The what?” He stepped closer and looked down through the opening in the roof. “Jesus. Is that …?”

  “A body. Yes.” I turned to the captain. “This is my husband, Hal Shapiro. Honey, you remember Captain Sloane.”

  “Of course.” Hal reached out and shook the captain’s proffered hand. “How are you, sir?”

  “As well as can be expected under the circumstances,” the captain said. “Do you have any idea who it might be, Mr. Shapiro?”

  “Dr. Shapiro,” Hal corrected. “And no, I don’t.”

  “You’re both doctors?”

  “I’m a PhD,” Hal said. “I’m a professor at our local college.”

  “And are you also familiar with forensic science?”

  “Everything I know I learned from Toni,” Hal said. “You know, who you really need up here is my father-in-law.”

  “Where are Mum and Nigel anyway?” I asked him. “Eating breakfast?”

  “Still in bed, as far as I know,” Hal said. “Want me to go get him?”

  “Yes, please,” I said before Captain Sloane could answer.

  Hal gave me that look he always gives me when he thinks I’m speaking out of turn. “I was asking the captain.”

  “Certainly,” Captain Sloane said. “It will be nice to see Detective Inspector Gray again.”

  Hal looked at me, startled. “Does he know Nigel?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We can talk about it later. Go, go!”

  Hal went.

  I didn’t. The captain looked as though he wished I had. “Dr. Day, if
you don’t mind my saying so, you should take this opportunity to get some breakfast before we dock. Nothing’s going to happen before then.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not really hungry, are you? I think I’ll just stay up here and admire the view.”

  “As you wish,” he said dismissively. “I have things to attend to before we dock in Bridgetown.”

  “Like notifying the police,” I suggested.

  “Precisely. Among other things.”

  I took the hint. “I’ll just be up there watching,” I said, indicating an observation point near the bow. “Holler if you need me.”

  Captain Sloane nodded politely, but I wasn’t fooled. I knew that the minute my back was turned he’d do an eye-roll and mutter, “As if.”

  Or the British equivalent thereof.

  As I watched the massive North Star slowly make its way into its assigned berth at the port of Bridgetown, I couldn’t help thinking that there was something awfully wrong with this picture. Would Captain Sloane have gone ahead and had the crew just clean up the mess and dispose of the body parts along with all the bleach and industrial-strength cleaner, thereby destroying any DNA evidence and probably fingerprints too?

  Would he have contacted the Barbados police if I hadn’t been there?

  Don’t be ridiculous, Toni, I admonished myself. If Captain Sloane wasn’t a man with scruples, he wouldn’t be a captain in the first place. He couldn’t possibly have any reason to cover up this murder.

  Could he?

  3

  Tell that to the marines; the sailors won’t believe it.

  —Sir Walter Scott

  “ANTOINETTE!”

  Only one person in the world called me that.

  I turned to see my mother approaching. She wore a long-sleeved, mint-green cotton shirt and a wide floppy hat to keep the Caribbean sun off her fair skin. She climbed up to my observation point, using the rail to pull herself up, stood beside me, and heaved a sigh. “Kitten, what have you gotten yourself into now? Can’t we take a holiday without you finding a murder to get involved in?”

  My mother, Fiona Gray, formerly Fiona Day, had recently turned sixty-five and retired from the corporate secretarial position she’d had for the past forty years. Celebrating her retirement was the reason we were on this cruise in the first place.

  She and I had emigrated from England when I was three years old, at the invitation of my father’s parents, who lived in Long Beach, California. That was over forty years ago, but it hadn’t had the slightest effect upon her accent, which was as crisply British as ever. She’d always resembled Susan Hayward—still did—and wore her curly red hair in the same style, even though now it was mostly gray. She and I had the same green eyes, but my hair was black and my complexion olive, like my father’s had been.

  I kissed her cheek. “Good morning, Mum. Have you had breakfast?”

  “Not yet, dear. Have you?”

  “Just coffee, so far. Did you see the body? Or what’s left of it?”

  She shuddered. “No, and perhaps I ought not. What d’you mean, ‘what’s left of it’?”

  “Someone closed the roof on her and crushed her beyond recognition.”

  Mum’s complexion, already naturally pale, grew noticeably paler. “Now that’s fair turned me up, that has. No breakfast for me, I’m afraid, dear.”

  I looked around and didn’t see anyone else. “Did Nigel come with you?”

  “He’s down on the Lido deck with the captain,” she said.

  “Will you be all right up here for a little while?”

  She patted my shoulder. “You go ahead, kitten. I’ll be fine.”

  I went back down the stairs and saw Nigel and Hal standing by the body with the captain. I walked over to Nigel, who slung an arm around my shoulders and gave me a mustachioed kiss. “I say, Toni, old dear, couldn’t you let me have my holiday without finding me a bloody murder to solve?”

  My stepfather resembled the actor Bernard Fox, who played Dr. Bombay on the sixties sitcom Bewitched, which I’d watched as a child; but Nigel was grayer and not nearly as pompous, and he clearly adored my mother, who’d been a widow since she was only seventeen and pregnant with me. My young father, an American serviceman, had been killed in a hit-and-run accident on a busy London street. Mum had never shown the slightest interest in remarrying until she met Nigel on the Queen Mary five years ago. It had been love at first sight for both of them.

  “It wasn’t my idea,” I told him.

  “If there’s a murder within a mile of Toni, she’s going to find it,” my husband said, “more’s the pity.”

  “If you’ll excuse me,” the captain said, “I need to go down to the bridge and contact the authorities.”

  He turned to leave, but I stopped him. “You’re not going to leave the scene unguarded, are you? Someone could tamper with evidence.”

  Captain Sloane turned back. “Dr. Day, could you possibly allow me to run my ship?”

  “She’s right, Captain,” Nigel said. “You do realize that there’s a murderer on board, don’t you?”

  Captain Sloane sighed. “This area is closed to passengers. In the meantime, I’ll notify security. Now, please excuse me.”

  “Could you please close the roof?” I called after him. “The flies are getting in.”

  He ignored me. I watched him go, with misgivings. Hal shook his head. “Poor guy. Do you intend to stay here until the police arrive?”

  “I think Toni and I should,” Nigel said. “Why don’t you and Fiona go ashore? There’s no reason for all of us to suffer.”

  Hal agreed with alacrity, gave me a quick kiss, and went back up the stairs to fetch Mum. I imagined they’d go down by way of the elevator, not wanting to pass by the crime scene in deference to Mum’s sensibilities.

  I became aware that I still held my smartphone in my hand, not wanting to put it in any of my wet pockets. “Now that the captain’s gone,” I said, “I think I’ll take a picture or two.”

  “Good idea,” Nigel said. “Although I imagine the police will do that as well.”

  I began to take pictures of the remains, while Nigel shooed flies away. I photographed her from her foot with the Tickle-the-Toe-Red toenails to the ragged red fringe that had once been her neck. Whatever clothing she’d been wearing had been crushed into her body, but I could see some residual glittery red-gold material. Perhaps she’d been wearing a red dress with gold threads, or maybe her dress had been gold lamé that was now soaked in her blood. It was hard to tell. If she’d been wearing shoes, they were nowhere in sight. Perhaps they’d fallen off while her murderer had carried her up to the roof.

  I also wondered about jewelry. I didn’t see any. If she’d worn a necklace, it should have fallen into the pool along with her head, in which case I’d have seen it when I went into the pool to examine the head, but I didn’t. There was just the one earring. If all those glittering stones were diamonds, those earrings would have cost a fortune. There were no rings, at least not on the one hand that was still recognizable, her left.

  “I wonder how long it will take for the police to get here,” Nigel said.

  I heard a sound behind us and turned to look. A crewman wearing the tan shirt and trousers worn by the members of the housekeeping staff had brought out a mop and bucket and set it down with a clang. He sloshed the mop up and down in something highly ammoniac-smelling and clearly meant to apply it to the remains.

  “No! No! Don’t do that!” I exclaimed. “You’ll compromise the remains!”

  The crewman, a young black man, looked at me in astonishment. He shook his head, smiled a bright-white smile, and spoke reassuringly in a soft island accent. “Scuse me, mum. De captain, he say clean up dis mess.”

  “Look here, young man,” Nigel said in his crispest British. “The police are coming, and this is a crime scene. They won’t li
ke it if you disturb it. They could arrest you for tampering with evidence.”

  The crewman looked from Nigel to me and back again, seemingly at a loss for words.

  “He’s right, you know,” I told him. “He’s from Scotland Yard, and he knows about this stuff. You can clean it later, after the police are done with it.”

  “Yes ’m,” the crewman said. He bent over to pick up his bucket and mop, and jumped back, nearly knocking Nigel over. He stared at me, eyes stretched wide, and pointed. “Dat’s a foot!”

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “Did you just now notice that?”

  The crewman didn’t answer me. He was too busy running for the restroom, his mop and bucket forgotten.

  I turned to Nigel, put my hands on my hips, and said, “Well!”

  Nigel shook his head. “The captain should know better than that.”

  “He does!” I insisted. “I told him that myself before you came up here! He completely blew me off.”

  “Toni, do calm yourself. I rather suspect that someone else told that young man the captain wanted the mess cleaned up, someone who didn’t know any better.”

  “Like Fernando or Ramon,” I guessed.

  “In any case,” Nigel went on, “the police will soon set the captain straight on what should or should not be done with the body.” He cast a disparaging glance upon the remains. “Such as it is.”

  “What would Scotland Yard do with it?” I asked.

  Nigel didn’t have a chance to answer that. Two officers approached us. One was young, tall, and thin with a full head of dark hair, while the other was shorter and burlier than his companion, with graying hair, and appeared to be in his late forties or early fifties. Two security guards accompanied them.

  “Now then, what’s all this?” inquired the burly one as he came within speaking distance.

  “I’m sorry,” said the tall one, looming up behind him. “Sir, madam, I’ll have to ask you to leave. This is a crime scene.”

  Nigel introduced himself, omitting mention of the fact that he was retired. Both officers snapped to attention. “Chief Security Officer Desmond Grant,” the burly one said. “I’m responsible for dealing with any adverse incidents or crimes aboard this ship.” He indicated his companion. “And this is Chief Safety, Environmental, and Health Officer Roger Dalquist. I didn’t know we’d called in Scotland Yard.”