A Poison of Passengers by Jack Treby

Author:Jack Treby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: whodunnit, crime, thriller, mystery, 1930s, spy, ocean liner, lusitania, titanic, cunard, traditional british, murder mystery, golden age, cruise ship, acquitania, poison
Publisher: Carter & Allan
Published: 2018-09-08T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

‘What’s going on? Is everything all right?’ A couple of heads were poking out of doorways along the port side corridor. I was not the only one to have heard the maid’s scream.

‘I...yes. No...I...everything’s fine,’ I called out, trying to get a grip on myself. ‘Just a...small accident.’ The heads disappeared, but a steward was speeding around the near corner. I tore my gaze away from the bedroom. ‘There’s been an accident,’ I told him, waving my newspaper at the fellow before he could catch his breath. ‘You need to fetch a doctor. As quickly as you can.’ The steward gazed past me into the bedroom. His eyes widened at the sight of the body, but then he swallowed hard, nodded, and raced off back in the direction he had come.

Jenny Simpkins was continuing to stare, her hand clamped to her mouth. ‘She must have banged her head,’ the girl breathed, trying to make sense of the bloody scene. ‘Slipped and fallen.’

It was a reasonable conjecture. I folded up the newspaper and stowed it in my jacket pocket. The body was spread out across the carpet, the head lying beneath a washbasin on the right hand side. The stateroom was similar in size to my own, with its own private bathroom, but there was a separate sink as well, to the right of one of the beds. I shuddered, catching sight of a smear of blood on the side of the bowl. Jenny was right. Mrs O’Neill must have tripped and struck her head, and then crashed to the floor. And there the poor woman was, her eyes staring upwards, a dribble of blood congealing at the edge of her mouth, the carpet stained red beneath her.

The last time I had seen Mrs O’Neill, she had been positively bursting with life, gathering herself up in the aftermath of tragedy. She had gone to the Palladian last night after supper and, by all accounts, had been up on the dance floor into the early hours, waltzing away. And now this. My God, was there no end to it? I slumped against the frame of the door. Everywhere I went, it seemed, people were dropping dead, on the Galitia and elsewhere. I closed my eyes and took a moment to gather my wits. All those letters, the bomb hoax and now another fatality. One dead body onboard ship might be considered an accident, but two in a row....that was simply not plausible. I had been through this sort of affair too many times now to believe in coincidences. Mrs O’Neill could not simply have tripped and banged her head. Somebody had done this to her. And if she had been deliberately murdered, then what about Harry? Had Doctor Armstrong got it wrong? Had he been killed too? Please God no, I thought. All those suspicions I had had, in the aftermath of his death, now came flooding back to me.

First things first, I thought, trying to calm myself. Was there anything out of place inside the cabin? It was a fairly ordered space, by the looks of it.

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