The Body on the Lido Deck Page 3

  “I’m responsible for accident prevention and the safe disposal of waste,” Dalquist said. “Although, if you’re here, Chief Superintendent, it probably wasn’t an accident.”

  “I don’t think it was,” I said. “I think the body was put in the roof to cover up what really happened, and to prevent identification.”

  “And who are you, Madam?” Grant inquired.

  I introduced myself.

  “What do you think really happened, Doctor?” Grant asked me. “And how do you come to be involved in this? We don’t usually consult passengers on these matters.”

  I decided not to tell him that Nigel was also a passenger. “I was here on the Lido deck, minding my own business, when I saw her head fall into the swimming pool. Then the rest of the body fell onto the deck here. So I went into the pool and looked at the head long enough to see that she had a scalp laceration and a depressed skull fracture, which might have been caused by an accident, but then someone tried to cover it up by putting the body here to be crushed by the roof. I’m surprised the captain hasn’t told you all this.”

  “He did,” Dalquist responded. “So someone put this body in the roof, hoping that when the captain closed the roof for the night last night, it’d be crushed beyond recognition?”

  “Not last night,” I objected. “It had to have been this morning. Her foot was still warm, and her blood hadn’t clotted.”

  Dalquist and Grant exchanged glances.

  “You’re saying that someone opened the roof, put the body in it, and closed it on her this morning?” Grant asked incredulously.

  “Yes, sometime between six and seven.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Something woke me up, and I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I came up to the Lido deck so I wouldn’t wake my husband. When they opened the roof at seven, the head fell into the pool. Blood was dripping. She couldn’t have been dead any longer than that.”

  “You think the head wound occurred between six and seven this morning also?” Grant asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “That could have occurred anytime during the night. She could have lived for hours after that. I suppose she could still have been alive when her body was crushed in the roof. But even if she hadn’t been crushed in the roof, the brain hemorrhage would have eventually killed her.”

  “We’ve been told that the captain opens and closes the roof from the bridge,” Nigel said. “Can anyone else do that?”

  “Anybody on the bridge could do it, if directed by the captain to do so,” Dalquist said. “That would include the first officer, the second or navigation officer, the third officer, helmsman, and the quartermaster.”

  “What if repairs or maintenance have to be done?” Nigel asked. “Surely the captain and bridge officers aren’t involved in that, with everything else they have to do.”

  “Routine maintenance and repairs get done between cruises, or when the ship is in dry dock,” Dalquist said. “I’m not aware of any repairs having to be done to the roof during a cruise as long as I’ve been in the cruise ship business. This is a first for me.”

  “It is for me too,” Grant said.

  At that moment we heard sirens. “That must be the police,” I said and ran back upstairs to see. Officer Dalquist and the two security guards came barreling up the stairs after me, as if they thought I was the perpetrator and might be attempting to escape. We all gathered at the rail. The Barbados police vehicles were white with blue and yellow squares along the side, the word POLICE underneath, and flashing red and blue lights on top. The words Royal Barbados Police Force could be seen at the bottom of a white wreath inside the blue square on the door, along with the words “To serve, protect, and reassure.”

  They’d brought a van as well as a police car. Actually, it was a police wagon. I wondered if the van was a mobile lab, like the Twin Falls police had. Two uniformed officers got out of each vehicle and moved toward the gangway.

  At that moment I heard the captain’s announcement over the PA system that passengers could now go ashore, with the usual admonitions about lining up in an orderly manner and telling us which side of which deck the gangway was on, because it wasn’t always in the same place. It varied from port to port, depending upon the facilities available.

  No sooner had the captain stopped speaking than a steel drum band began playing on the dock. Nigel came up next to me and leaned on the rail. “You don’t suppose the police will make everybody stay on board so they can interview all the passengers, do you?” I asked him.

  “I doubt it,” Nigel said. “Surely they would have told the captain to keep everybody on board when he called them; but apparently they didn’t, because he’s made his usual announcement about going ashore—and look, the first passengers are coming down the gangway now.”

  I looked. They were. A steady stream of passengers came down the gangway. At the bottom, crew members dressed as pirates greeted them and urged them to have their pictures taken. Most people did so, smiling. Those pictures would later be posted so that passengers could order copies of them for ridiculously inflated prices. I wondered what they all thought about the police being there in such abundance. It would definitely cause some speculation among the passengers, who might possibly come up with scenarios even more bizarre than the one we actually had.

  “I hope he doesn’t regret this later,” I commented.

  “He won’t,” Officer Dalquist said. “For security purposes, it’s better to get as many people out of the way as possible.”

  “Even if one of the passengers is the killer?”

  “That would be very unlikely,” Dalquist said. “A passenger wouldn’t be able to operate the roof. Besides, all the passengers will be back on board tonight.”

  “I suppose that if one doesn’t come back on board, it would be a clue,” I said. “Would the ship really leave without everybody back on board?”

  “Definitely,” Dalquist said. “We have to keep to a strict schedule. It’s not like we’re the only cruise ship out here.”

  I looked around. “Where did Officer Grant go?”

  Dalquist looked around too. “I don’t know. I thought he was right behind us.”

  At that point I heard voices from below, and apparently Officer Dalquist and the security guards did too, because they turned from the rail and headed toward the stairs. Nigel and I followed them down to see the captain standing near the body, accompanied by two men and a woman in suits, and a man in surgical scrubs. I also noticed that someone had erected a barricade around the pool and the remains, and that the water level in the pool was lower. Evidently it was being drained. I was surprised that we’d spent enough time topside to allow all that to get done before we got back downstairs.

  The Barbadians flashed their badges and introduced themselves: Detective Chief Superintendent Malcolm Braithwaite, a tall, handsome black man with a cap of thick white hair who spoke with a crisp British accent; Detective Inspector Gordon Jones, shorter and more burly than his companion and having a soft island accent; and the coroner, Marietta Gresham-St. John, a squat, middle-aged black woman with frizzy orange hair and surprisingly pale green eyes. She sounded American.

  Captain Sloane introduced the man in scrubs as the ship’s doctor, Robert Welch, whom I diagnosed immediately by his speech as a Brit. He was tall and gangly with red hair and freckles and didn’t look old enough to have completed college, let alone medical school and a residency. In fact he looked like Richie Cunningham from Happy Days. He cast a horrified look upon the remains and recoiled. “Oh, I say!”

  Officer Dalquist introduced himself. It was getting to be quite a crowd. Again, I wondered where Officer Grant had disappeared to.

  My stepfather also introduced himself, again failing to mention that he was retired. I certainly wasn’t going to mention it, and I hoped the captain wouldn’t either. As a mere passeng
er, I had less than no credibility with the Royal Barbados Police, doctor or not, so I looked upon Nigel as a free pass to the inner sanctum of police procedure.

  I introduced myself anyway. “Toni Day,” I said, “MD. I’m a pathologist.”

  Chief Superintendent Braithwaite looked down upon me from a height well over six feet with liquid brown eyes. “Really? In what capacity?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, but Captain Sloane beat me to it. “She’s a passenger,” he said curtly. “She has no business being here.”

  I was afraid that the next words out of his mouth would blow Nigel’s cover, so I spoke right up in my defense. “I did, however, prevent the guy with the mop and bucket from sloshing ammonia all over the remains.”

  “Did you now,” said Dr. Welch. “Jolly good show, eh what?”

  He sounded just like Nigel.

  The Barbadians looked singularly unimpressed, even the coroner, which surprised me. As a fellow pathologist, I’d have expected her to be more receptive, but she wore the same impassive expression as her two male companions.

  But then I had second thoughts. Maybe she wasn’t a pathologist after all. Back home in Twin Falls, the coroner is an elected official, usually a mortician or a cop. Even if she was a doctor, she wouldn’t necessarily be a pathologist.

  Only one way to find out. “Dr. Gresham-St. John, are you a pathologist too?” I asked brightly, looking her straight in the eye.

  “Yes, I am,” she replied, still not smiling. “I trained at Johns Hopkins.”

  “University of California, Irvine,” I said. “Did you do a fellowship in forensic pathology? Are you board-certified?”

  “I did, and I am,” she said smugly. “So I do know a thing or two about what to do in a case like this.”

  She sounded defensive. I wondered why. Was it possible that she felt threatened by me? That certainly hadn’t been my intention. I was just trying to make conversation. “I’m sure you know a lot more about it than I do,” I said. “Everything I know about forensics I learned in the field.”

  She seemed to relax a bit at that. “Then suppose you and I look over these remains and you tell me what you think.”

  Accordingly, we walked over to where the remains lay. The smell of blood and feces had become stronger, and the flies had increased in number. Either the captain hadn’t heard me, or he’d decided to ignore me when I’d asked him to close the roof. Soon the sun would be high enough in the sky to hit the remains where they lay, drying them out and making the smell even more potent. Dr. Gresham-St. John grimaced. I noticed that the policemen kept their distance, as did the captain and Officer Dalquist and the security guards. But Nigel was right behind us, unwilling to be left out of any of the doings.

  “Do you have any idea who it is?” she asked me.

  “She,” I said. “The remains are female. Check the nail polish.”

  She peered closely at the feet. “Yes, I see. She’s also got the beginnings of a hammertoe. She must wear high heels a lot. Did you find her shoes?”

  “No. Not here, anyway. Can you tell how old she is by her feet?”

  “I’d guess late twenties, early thirties max. Where’s her head?”

  “In the swimming pool,” I said. “Want me to go get it for you?”

  She shook her head. “No, no, I want to see it where it is first.”

  “That’s what I thought. That’s why I left it there.”

  She nodded approvingly. “Let’s take a look at it.”

  We ducked under the caution tape and stood at the pool’s edge, looking down. The water level had gone down at least a foot.

  The head was gone.

  4

  Blind and naked ignorance

  Delivers brawling judgments, unashamed,

  On all things all day long.

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  “OH SHIT,” I said.

  “Bloody hell,” Dalquist said. “Doctor, are you quite sure it was here?”

  “What did you do with it?” Dr. Gresham-St. John asked me.

  “Nothing!” I said defensively. “I left it right there on the bottom where I found it. Why do you think I did anything with it? Why would I tell you it was here if I’d done anything with it?”

  She shrugged. “You tell me.”

  “Oh, now, look here,” Nigel said reproachfully. “You can’t possibly suspect Toni of tampering with the head. She stopped a crewman who tried to clean up the remains with ammonia.”

  She frowned. “Who told him to do that?”

  “He said the captain did,” I said.

  She folded her arms across her ample bosom. “Oh, surely not. You must be mistaken.”

  “The captain wouldn’t do that,” Officer Dalquist said. “He wants to clear this up as much as you do.”

  I turned to look at the captain, who returned an impassive gaze. I shrugged. “I’m only telling you what the man said.”

  “Does this crewman have a name?” Dalquist asked.

  “I’m sure he does,” I said, “but I don’t know what it is. All I can tell you is that he’s young, tall, black, and wears a tan uniform.”

  “Terrific,” the coroner said sourly. “Well, no matter. Maybe we won’t need the head. We can fingerprint her left hand and identify her that way.”

  I shook my head. “You do need the head,” I told her. “She had a head injury. A six-inch gash on the back of her skull and a depressed skull fracture.”

  “Couldn’t that have been an accident? Could she have fallen and hit her head on something?” she asked.

  “Or maybe she was pushed,” I suggested. “Or beaned with a baseball bat. But whatever happened, someone saw fit to cover it up by crushing the body in the roof. Why would anybody do that if it was just an accident?”

  Dr. Gresham-St. John slanted me a skeptical look. “Okay, Doctor, what do you think happened?”

  “I don’t know what caused the head injury,” I said. “But the appearance of the face suggests strangulation. You’d agree if you could see what I saw. Her face was all puffy, and her tongue was blue and protruding from her mouth.”

  “Couldn’t that have happened when she was crushed in the roof?”

  “Only if she was still alive when she was crushed,” I said. “If she was dead when she was crushed, she had to have been strangled beforehand, otherwise she wouldn’t have looked like that.”

  Dr. Gresham-St. John assumed a challenging stance, hands on hips. “You do realize, Doctor, that we’ve only your word for that.”

  What’s up with the adversarial stuff, I thought, doesn’t she know we’re on the same side? “You know,” I said quietly, “several other people besides me saw the head in the pool. Of course, none of them got a good look at it like I did, and now someone’s removed it so that they never will. What does that tell you?”

  Dr. Gresham-St. John wasn’t backing down. “What does it tell you?”

  “It tells me that somebody’s got something to hide. And that tells me that this was no accident.”

  Nigel too had clearly had enough of the coroner’s antagonism. “Surely you don’t think the deceased just happened to fall into the crack while the roof was being closed,” he said. “I mean, really, someone would have had to hold the body in place while simultaneously closing the roof.”

  “How?” asked Dr. Gresham-St. John.

  “It would require at least two people,” Officer Grant said, startling me. I hadn’t seen him come back. “One to secure the body, and one to close the roof on her.”

  “And from what I’ve been told so far, the roof can only be opened and closed from the bridge,” I said.

  Captain Sloane spoke for the first time. “Doctor, are you seriously accusing me or one of my bridge officers of complicity in this heinous crime?”

  “Not if there’s anyone else who
can open and close the roof,” I pointed out. “You all know better than I do who that might be.”

  “Who closed the roof last night?” asked Dr. Gresham-St. John.

  “First Officer Lynch,” the captain said, “at seven o’clock, as usual.”

  “We’ll need to speak with him,” said Chief Superintendent Braithwaite, startling me. He’d been so quiet I’d forgotten he was there. “He won’t like finding out that he closed the roof on someone and killed her.”

  “She’d’ve had to be killed before seven o’clock last night,” the captain countered, “because that’s when the roof was closed for the night. But there are still people wandering around up there that early. The Crow’s Nest Lounge is open until two a.m. Surely someone would have noticed.”

  “In which case, it would have been reported last night,” I said.

  Dr. Gresham-St. John looked at me narrowly. “I’m getting the impression you don’t think she’s been up here since last night.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “When the body fell on the deck, I was already up here. Her foot was warm. If she’d been up there in the roof since seven o’clock last night, it would have been cold.”

  “How warm?” she demanded.

  “Warmer than ambient temperature,” I said. “That’s the best I can do. Also, her blood was still dripping. And yes, I know, you’ve got to take my word for that too.”

  “Are you suggesting that someone opened the roof after it had been closed for the night to put this body here, and then closed the roof on it?” Braithwaite asked.

  “I don’t see how it could have been any other way,” I said.

  “And the roof has to be opened and closed from the bridge?” the coroner asked.

  “One of the crew told me that the captain does it from the bridge,” I said. “But if Officer Lynch did it last night, I guess any one of the bridge officers could have done it as well.”