“I’d better not. Why don’t you settle up now?”
“A coffee, perhaps?” Ella suggested.
They shook their heads.
From the other room, Danny Pitt spoke up. “Before you go, would you mind telling us what happened between you and Gus, the lady’s husband?”
There were murmurs of support from all around the room.
Wilf looked at Pearl, who shrugged.
“There isn’t much more I can tell you,” said Wilf. “He called me a liar and I called him a rat and soon after that he disappeared. Who knows where he ended up? Someone suggested he may have gone down under, and there could be some truth in that.” He paused and looked at the floor, milking the line for all it was worth.
Pearl began to giggle again.
“Anyway, it cemented our relationship.”
Pearl found this uncontrollably funny.
“I don’t think he’ll surface now,” added Wilf. “So we come here once a year and sit here at our usual table and have a meal on Gus, and, do you know, we feel quite close to him?”
Soon after, they paid their bill in cash and left. Ella got a ten pound tip. The money was unimportant. Her suspicions meant she would never feel comfortable in the house again.
Which didn’t matter, as it turned out, because she and Gavin left soon after, even though the police convinced them that the story of the missing husband had been just a clever con. It was the bad publicity over the stolen mink coat that did for them.
The Problem of Stateroom 10
The conversation in the first class smoking room had taken a sinister turn.
“I once met a man who knew of a way to commit the perfect murder,” said Jacques Futrelle, the American author. “He was offering to sell it to me — as a writer of detective stories — for the sum of fifty pounds. I declined. I explained that we story writers deal exclusively in murders that are imperfect. Our readers expect the killer to be caught.”
“Now that you point it out, a perfect murder story would be unsatisfactory,” said one of his drinking companions, W.T.Stead, the campaigning journalist and former editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, now white-bearded and past sixty, but still deeply interested in the power of the written word. “Good copy in a newspaper, however. In the press, you see, we need never come to a conclusion. Our readers cheerfully pay to be held in suspense. They enjoy uncertainty. They may look forward to a solution at some time in the future, but there’s no obligation on me to provide one. If it turns up, I’ll report it. But I’m perfectly content if a mystery is prolonged indefinitely and they keep buying the paper.”
“The classic example of that would be the Whitechapel murders,” said the third member of the party, a younger man called Finch who had first raised this gruesome subject. His striped blazer and ducks were a little loud for good taste, even at sea.
“Dear old Jack the Ripper?” said Stead. “I wouldn’t want him unmasked. He’s sold more papers than the King’s funeral and the Coronation combined.”
“Hardly the perfect murderer, however,” commented Futrelle. “He left clues all over the place. Pieces of flesh, writing on walls, letters to the press. He only escaped through the incompetence of the police. My perfect murderer would be of a different order entirely.”
“Ha! Now we come to it,” said Stead, winking at Finch. “Professor S.F.X. Van Dusen. The Thinking Machine.”
“Van Dusen isn’t a murderer,” Futrelle protested. “He solves murders.”
“You know who we’re talking about?” Stead said for the benefit of the young man. “Our friend Futrelle has a character in his stories who solves the most intractable mysteries. Perhaps you’ve read “The Problem of Cell 13”? No? Then you have a treat in store. It’s the finest locked room puzzle ever devised. When was it published, Jacques?”
“Seven years ago — 1905 — in one of the Boston papers.”
“And reprinted many times,” added Stead.
“But The Thinking Machine would never commit a murder,” Futrelle insisted. “He’s on the side of law and order. I was on the point of saying just now that if I wanted to devise a perfect murder — in fiction, of course — I would have to invent a new character, a fiendishly clever killer who would leave no clues to his identity.”
“Why don’t you? It’s a stunning idea.”
“I doubt if the public are ready for it.”
“Nonsense. Where’s your sense of adventure? We have Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman, a burglar as hero. Why not a murderer who gets away with it?”
Futrelle sipped his wine in thoughtful silence.
Then young Finch put in his two-pennyworth. “I think you should do it. I’d want to read the story, and I’m sure thousands of others would.”
“I can make sure it gets reviewed,” offered Stead.
“You don’t seem to understand the difficulty,” said Futrelle. “I can’t pluck a perfect murder story out of thin air.”
“If we all put our minds to it,” said Stead, “we could think up a plot before we dock at New York. There’s a challenge! Are you on, gentlemen?”
Finch agreed at once.
Futrelle was less enthusiastic. “It’s uncommonly generous of you both, but—”
”Something to while away the time, old sport. Let’s all meet here before dinner on the last night at sea and compare notes.”
“All right,” said Futrelle, a little fired up at last. “It’s better than staring at seagulls, I suppose. And now I’d better see what my wife is up to.”
Stead confided to Finch as they watched the writer leave, “This will be good for him. He needs to get back to crime stories. He’s only thirty-seven, you know, and toils away, but his writing has gone downhill since that first success. He’s churning out light romances, horribly sweet and frothy. Marshmallows, I call them. The latest has the title My Lady’s Garter, for God’s sake. This is the man who wrote so brilliantly about the power of a logical brain.”
“Is he too much under the influence of that wife?”
“The lovely May? I don’t think so. She’s a writer herself. There are far too many of us about. You’re not another author, I hope?”
“No,” said Finch. “I deal in objets d’art. I do a lot of business in New York.”
“Plenty of travelling, then?”
“More than I care for. I would rather be at home, but my customers are in America, so I cross the ocean several times a year.”
“Is that such a hardship?”
“I get bored.”
“Can’t you employ someone to make the trips?”
“My wife — my former business partner — used to make some of the crossings instead of me, but no longer. We parted.”
“I see. An international art-dealer. How wrong I was! With your fascination for the subject of murder, I had you down for a writer of shilling shockers.”
“Sorry. I’m guilty of many things, but nothing in print.”
“Guilty of many things? Now you sound like the perfect murderer we were discussing a moment ago.”
Secretly amused, Finch frowned and said, “That’s a big assumption, sir.”
“Not really. The topic obviously interests you. You raised it first.”
“Did I?”
“I’m certain you did. Do you have a victim in mind?” Stead enquired, elaborating on his wit.
“Don’t we all?”
“Then you also have a motive. All you require now are the means and the opportunity. Has it occurred to you — perhaps it has — that an ocean voyage offers exceptional conditions for the perfect murder?”
“Man overboard, you mean? An easy way to dispose of the body, which is always the biggest problem. The thought had not escaped me. But it needs more than that. There’s one other element.”