Murder on Board Read online

  Murder on Board

  The Diary of a Murderer

  Mark Rice

  Copyright © 2019 by Mark Rice

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.

  Junction Publishing

  United Kingdom - New Zealand

  [email protected]

  www.junction-publishing.com

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Ordering Information:

  Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the “Special Sales Department” at the email address above.

  Murder on Board/ Mark Rice. -- 1st ed.

  Created with Vellum

  This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother and father whose belief in me was unshakeable.

  Contents

  Day 1

  Day 2

  Day 3

  Day 4

  Day 5

  Day 6

  Day 7

  Day 8

  Day 9

  Day 10

  Day 11

  Day 12

  Day 13

  Day 14

  Day 15

  Day 16

  Day 17

  Day 18

  Day 19

  Day 20

  Day 21

  Day 22

  Day 23

  Day 24

  Day 25

  Day 26

  Day 27

  Day 28

  Day 29

  Day 30

  Day 31

  Day 32

  Day 33

  Day 34

  Day 35

  Day 36

  Day 37

  Day 38

  Day 39

  Day 40

  Day 41

  Day 42

  Day 43

  Day 44

  Day 45

  Day 46

  Day 47

  Day 49

  Day 50

  Day 51

  About the Author

  Other Titles By Mark Rice

  Acknowledgments

  Day 1

  Tuesday 3rd January.

  Departure.

  I opened the door and found Margaret pulling back the bedroom curtains to let in what light there was to be found at dawn on a winter’s morning.

  She turned and smiled at me. “You should have woken me,” she scolded gently as she made her way to the en-suite. “We’ll be pushed to make breakfast.”

  We are at the start of our journey to England to join the SS Azara that sets sail this evening on a fifty-day cruise. We must reach Southampton by 15:00 and, to do so, all parts of our travel plan have to work perfectly.

  Twenty minutes later, we are outside the Conrad hotel in Dublin airport on a dark, wet and cold morning. I glanced at my watch. We’d checked out already and were patiently waiting for the driver of the hotel courtesy shuttle, parked a few feet away. When he finally appeared it signalled the arrival of six other passengers with bags who’d shunned the biting cold wind and had sat in the warmth of the reception. Thus, it was a full minibus that departed for the short journey to Dublin Airport’s Terminal 2.

  On the bus I glanced again at my wife. Margaret is a totally innocent soul in this venture of mine. We’ve been married some three years but together for ten years in total. We met through work and clicked with an outpouring of passion, love and lust that had been in cold storage for the previous twenty years. The sliding open of the minibus’s door to release the travellers and their luggage snapped me back to reality.

  Freed from the cases and with time to spare before the departure gate was announced we shared an Irish big breakfast with a large mug of steaming hot tea. The food stations were buzzing with activity, people who had been on the road for hours to reach the airport, and knew they still had hours to travel, ate heartily.

  In England, eight hours later, our journey ended with a short taxi ride to the Octavian Cruise line’s terminal building. We arrived bang on time.

  The taxi driver, a chatty medical student, pocketed the tip and removed our cases from his boot.

  Nearby a team of uniformed workers were unloading cases from the open storage bellies of an endless stream of coaches. They were offloading hundreds of pensioners that were swapping English snow, sleet and rain for Caribbean sunshine.

  The SS Azara is a 69,000-ton ship that stands fourteen decks tall and towers over the check-in terminal. I’d spotted it within a minute of leaving the train station, as it was considerably taller than any building or ship in the port. Its sleek white bow stood majestically pointing towards us as the taxi laboured through the midday traffic.

  The SS Azara will carry 2,012 passengers and 887 crew and all passengers are boarding today, in fact, within the next three hours. The ship will depart at 19:00 tonight with the highlight of the cruise being a 1,000-mile journey up the Amazon River to visit the city of Manaus. It returns to Southampton on 22nd February.

  We'd labelled the cases with our cabin number and this time we passed them to the baggage handlers and rode an escalator to the first floor of the terminal building. There we found about 1,800 people patiently waiting their turn to hand over their debit/credit card details, have their photographs taken and receive a ship account card which is used for everything you buy onboard and for accessing your cabin.

  Cards pocketed, we moved onto the security scanner queue, a part of the process we had been through many times before, incident free. I watched the people and bags being processed ahead of us and was already in holiday mode.

  “Excuse me, sir, is this your bag?” the cruise line security team member asked me, pointing to one of our hand luggage bags. He’d selected mine and I suddenly feared the worst, that the true nature of my talcum powder container had been rumbled. These scanners may be more sophisticated than I had originally thought.

  “Yes, officer, it is.” I answered cordially, my senses on high alert “What seems to be the matter?”

  “Can you step over here, please?” he gestured me towards a small curtained cubicle some feet to his right and I followed him over. Margaret, now reunited with her bag, stood at the gangplank looking anxiously towards me.

  Behind the curtain, my bag was opened and the security man removed two bottles of wine I’d purchased at the airport hours earlier.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but the cruise lines rules are quite clear on this matter and you are not allowed to bring alcohol on board. I’ll have to confiscate these.” In that moment I simultaneously experienced relief and disappointment.

  “Of course, officer. You do what you have to. I’m sorry I didn’t spot that restriction when I was reading the cruise details.”

  I was lying, of course. I knew damn well you couldn’t bring alcohol on board, but I’d got away with it in the past. I reckon I was just unlucky. If I’d drawn a different security team member, they’d have allowed the bottles to pass without comment. Ship prices for alcohol are not cheap. Well, he was just damn lucky he wasn’t actually going to sail with us tonight because if he had
been his odds of making it through the night had just taken a dramatic dip. I took the bag from him and rejoined Margaret.

  “What was the problem back there?” she asked, so I told her. “Oh, Luke, haven’t I warned you about this penny-pinching. Trying to save a few quid here and there always ends up backfiring and costing us more.”

  I knew I shouldn’t have told her. It just gave her the opportunity to wheel out that same old speech again.

  By 17:00 we were onboard and admiring the new carpets and swish look to the ship we'd last seen four years ago. It had undergone major refurbishment in Germany last year and it showed.

  We found our cabin, F100 on Deck 5, right in the bow of the ship. Persel, our cabin steward, introduced himself with a smile and announced that nothing would be too much trouble for him to arrange for us. Moments later he wheeled the luggage into the room and as he left I accompanied him out to have a quiet word in the corridor. I have found that it’s always worth buying a bit of service at the start of a cruise from cabin staff. I mean, it’s pretty useless giving the gratuity to them at the end when they can do nothing for you. No, I wanted Persel on my side from day one and he knew the drill.

  “Thank you for bringing our cases, it’s much appreciated,” I said as I pressed a £50 note into his hand.

  Persel seemed surprised at the amount and thanked me profusely.

  I had a sixth sense that I may need his services in the coming days and weeks and the money would buy me his prompt discreet attention. “I may need your help during this cruise as my wife is poorly,” I lied.

  He nodded his understanding of my words and turned away a happy man.

  To date, I have gone through life as an eternal optimist and have been proved wrong more times than I care to mention. Why do I set myself up for a disappointment? It’s an inbuilt character weakness that I have because when I am let down, as I invariably am, I am surprised and angry. Angry because people with a more cynical approach to life are proven correct. So now, finally, I am joining the cynics and my talcum powder concoction, for want of a better description, is actually a sign that I am changing my attitude to life. I am becoming less of an optimist, more of a pragmatist. The optimist in me hopes that I will never have to use my concoction, but the pragmatist believes I will. At least this time when incidents arise I have the ability to react and not to just internalise it and let it eat away at me. Not like the last cruise.

  With the cabin door firmly closed in his wake, now was the time for us to kick off our shoes and finally relax. The madness of the journey to reach the ship was already dissolving in our minds, as we took in the comfortable surroundings of our inside cabin, home for the next seven weeks.

  That’s the beauty of travelling by sea. You unpack just once and the world thereafter is delivered to your door and not the other way round.

  There was just time for a quick scan of the ships daily newsletter, Skyline, which detailed the multiple activities onboard each day from 07:00 to midnight and beyond. After a quick stroll along the deck, we made our way to the compulsory fire safety drill.

  Our muster location was zone C, located on deck 7 in the Pelican Ballroom dance lounge. We arrived and found about two hundred passengers already gathered inside, and an overflow of humanity stood outside or sat waiting in the window wells of the inside corridor. I scanned their bored faces and watched as they interacted with their partners and fellow passengers and crew. None of them would have been any the wiser of my intent, as I smiled and gazed at the people around me.

  The crew wore uniforms, with their lifejackets on and fastened. They guided new arrivals to any free spots in the already full corridor.

  We were gestured to stand next to the bar counter and that’s when I accidentally stepped on the woman’s foot. She let out a little cry, reminiscent of a whimper from a small dog, rather than a human being’s cry of pain. I turned to apologise but in doing so, managed to elbow her in the right breast.

  Her partner, an elderly man leaning on a walking stick, looked sourly at me but didn’t move a muscle.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” I exclaimed, bending down to pick up her shoe which had fallen off.

  The situation almost worsened as my downward head motion to pick up the shoe, just missed her glancing upwards to see who the clumsy sod was. Disaster avoided, I slid her shoe back into place.

  Margaret then grabbed me firmly by the arm and marched me away. “I’m mortified! You damn near head-butted that old dear,” Margaret said, looking sternly at me before giving in to a fit of giggles. “Really,” she continued, “I can’t take you anywhere.”

  Around us, the old folk were struggling to remain standing as the clock ticked past the 15-minute mark. Eventually, the voice of the ship’s captain, Peter Cox, boomed through the PA system and delivered succinctly the information on health and safety, before handing over to the muster station crew to instruct passengers on how to put on and wear their life jackets. Judging by the hopeless attempts made by some of the elderly passengers, a large number of deaths through strangulation in their cabins will most likely occur, long before the ship goes down.

  Today is the 3rd of January and it will be zero degrees at best outside on the open deck tonight. Obviously, we are heading for warmer climates in the coming days and weeks but until we reach the Azores in five days’ time, the North Atlantic will be a cold turbulent passage to complete.

  The ship's departure today was delayed by the slow loading of passenger bags and we missed the spectacular fireworks display set off on the quayside as its revised commencement time meant it now clashed with our dinner time. We had reserved the first sitting of the evening meal when we booked the cruise, so had to leave the outside deck early to make our 18:30 dinner date.

  We appeared a little late, and very casually dressed, in the Imperial Restaurant at table 80, where we met two of the three couples that we would dine with for the next fifty nights, Roger and Rose, and Frank and Jill. Neither couple were overjoyed as their cases had failed to materialize, meaning they'd been forced to attend the meal in their travelling attire.

  I sat with Margaret and surveyed our table companions, as I’d imagine Simon Cowell would do when assessing acts for Britain’s Got Talent. I looked at them somewhat dispassionately to see if they would be good company over the coming weeks, to see if they displayed the qualities I value in humanity, namely a sense of humour, intelligence, good manners and tactile affection. I go by the mantra, know me by my actions, not my words, as words are cheap.

  First impressions are also important. It’s hard to get over a bad start when meeting people for the first time but I was prepared to make allowances tonight as we’d all had a long day.

  Roger and Rose were already seated when we arrived. Frank and Jill came somewhat later and I could see his caring manner right away. He helped Jill into her seat before he settled into his own chair.

  The conversation was awkward at first as we all sounded each other out on common experiences.

  “So, Roger, have you cruised before?” I ventured. He looked a rather serious man, old enough to be my father and evaluated my question for what seemed an eternity before replying.

  “Well, Luke, this would be our forty-second cruise in total and we’ve done all but one of them with Octavian Cruises. We’ve been on two round-the-world cruises but never been up the Amazon River, so that’s what attracted us to this particular one.”

  “Yes,” Rose chipped in. “Roger was in the Royal Navy and had seen most of the world already so it was really unusual to find somewhere he hadn’t already visited!”

  “Whereas Rose,” responded Roger, “…had rarely travelled outside Wales before she met me, so we are filling in her missing life experiences, so to speak.”

  He gazed fondly at her and she reciprocated.

  “That much is true,” she confirmed. “Since we met I’ve travelled the world and can’t imagine life any other way.”

  “I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation
,” Frank sparked up. “So, you were in the Royal Navy? Me too.”

  Within moments the two men were swapping their naval histories and it seemed that often over the decades they really had passed each other, like ships in the night. However, they did find that they shared several mutual acquaintances. Both had left the Royal Navy decades ago but the nautical pull was strong. They were back now to enjoy life at sea, but this time as passengers.

  I decided to build a bridge or two with our new acquaintances and find out a bit more about whom I was dealing with at this table for the next few weeks. I dusted down an old story I could use for that purpose and ventured forth with it.

  “My father was in the navy too,” I volunteered, “but he was in the merchant navy.”

  “Makes no difference,” said Roger. “A sailor is a sailor and we are all tied together by the love and fear of the sea. If any ship gets into difficulties, merchant or Royal Navy, the nearest ships will always respond and come to their aid. It’s the first law of the sea.”

  “Funnily enough,” I continued, “even though he was in the merchant navy, his ship was requisitioned by the Royal Navy during the Suez Canal crisis, back in the 1950s, and it carried a platoon of Gurkha soldiers down the canal to support the main British Army effort.” I became aware that I now held the interest of the entire table. “My father went on to tell me a crewman lost one of his hands one night trying to remove a kukri, a lethal curved knife, from a sleeping Gurkha.”