NaNoWriMo 2006 novel. Writing 50,000 words in 30 days. Quality may suffer.
He was not at breakfast but Montague still went as arranged to call on him, when there was no answer at the cabin door he became alarmed and fetched the purser who banged on the door with the blunt end of a marling spike, causing a resounding clang which would have raised the whole ship but failed to arouse Pabodie. The Purser fetched the captain who used his master key to unlock the door but still it did not open. Four deck hands were fetched to force the door and with much difficulty they finally opened it to a splintering of wood. It appeared Frank Pabodie had removed the door of his wardrobe and ingeniously used it to wedge the door shut.
The site inside the cabin was horrific. The room was torn apart, the carefully removed door to the wardrobe must have been the most unbroken piece of it, the rest of it, the desk, the chair, and the bunk were little more than kindling on the floor. The books that the room was full of had been torn to shreds, the bedsheets two scattered about in strips, the body of Frank Pabodie was little better. It lay face down on the floor with horrific deep slashes across its face, arms, and chest. The whole cabin swam with blood. The port hole had been torn from it's mountings on the side of the hull. They turned Pabodie over, the expression on his face, what was left of his face, was one of unimaginable terror.
Montague went to the remains of the wardrobe, he found the bundle of newspaper shredded, the knife was not there.
'You saw him last night sir?' said the captain.
'I did,' replied Montague.
'Perhaps you had better come with me.'
They went to the captain's cabin where the captain sat Montague down and, poking his head out the door and calling a steward, ordered a pot of coffee from the kitchen. 'Perhaps you would like something stronger?' he asked, 'to steady your nerves.'
Montague declined.
'Very well,' said the Captain, and then politely but sternly, 'I think you should tell me what you talked about last night.'
'Of course,' said Montague. 'I called on Mister Pabodie last night to help him with some research, although by the time he had related the story of the item we were to investigate it was too late to do any real work. That is why we had arranged that I would return again this morning. Mister Pabodie was on his way back from an expedition to Africa where he had come into possession of a most curious item. It was this item that I looked for after we realised he was dead. I found the paper it was wrapped in but the item itself was missing.'
'What was it?' asked the Captain.
'It was a small sacrificial dagger, apparently of solid gold.'
'Very valuable?'
'If it was indeed gold then certainly, very valuable in material terms only. It's value as an artefact I cannot say.'
Why not?'
'It's origins were a mystery.'
'That is all you talked about?'
'No, there is something else. Pabodie was convinced, and if what he told me was the truth then he had good evidence, that a person or persons were pursuing him with the intent of retrieving the item. He believed they were responsible for the murder of a Frenchman named Albert in a Brazzaville hotel. He also believed there would be a warrant for his own arrest for the same crime, though he was innocent.'
'You know he was innocent?'
'I believe he was. He thought he had given his pursuers the slip when he left Africa but apparently they found him in London. He said nothing concrete that could not be just coincidence, but the weight of circumstantial evidence was large.'
'He thought they had pursued him here?'
'No, he did not believe they could have, but he was still deathly frightened. I'm afraid he was incoherent, he talked of "things under the sea. He had suffered quite an ordeal in Africa and I fear he had become delusional.'
'Well,' said the Captain, 'there is obviously a lot to the story. Will you be so good as to write up a full signed statement for me. I would imagine the police in New York will wish to speak to you. How long will you be staying?'
'Till late August,' said Montague, 'I am lodging in Manhatten I believe, the university have arranged it.'
'That will make things easier. Were you the last person to see Pabodie alive? It may become complicated if you were.'
'No,' said Montague, 'that was the most curious matter in a night of curious matters. Pabodie made sure that I had an alibi.'
'You think he expected to be murdered?'
'I put it down at the time as one of his delusions. Now, I do not know.'
They were interrupted by a knock at the cabin door and a sailor came in. 'I think you had better see this sir,' he said.
The sailor led them to the deck directly about Pabodie's cabin and told them to lean over the rail and look at the side of the ship. Beneath Pabodie's broken porthole were long deep vertical scratches in the metalwork of the hull leading down from Pabodie's cabin twenty feet to the waterline.
'My god!' exclaimed the Captain, 'it looks like it's been attacked by a wild animal?'
'So did Pabodie,' said Montague quietly.
'Mister James,' said the captain, 'if you have any idea what happened I would like to hear it.'
'Maybe,' said Montague. 'Pabodie's killer must have entered and exited his room through the porthole, I suspect you had a stowaway, a man who managed to lower himself down to the porthole and break it open, killed Pabodie, found the knife, but when he went to leave found he had no way up on to the deck again and fell into the sea, scratching at the side of the ship as he did.'
'It fits the facts,' mused the captain, 'but what sort of a man could do such a thing?'
'Pabodie talked of savages in the jungle performing horrific rituals, maybe ...'
'You believe this?'
'It is the only explanation I can think of.'
'Well,' said the captain, 'it will be good enough for my report at least. The New York police can make their own judgements when we arrive.'
'One more thing Captain,' said Montague.
'Yes.'
'You will take an inventory of Pabodie's cabin I suppose.'
'We will.'
'After you have done so might I be permitted to make copies of some his documents. I am still curious about the origins of the item that was stolen.'
The captain thought for a moment and then said 'I don't see why not.'
Montague spend most of the rest of the day alone in his cabin, locked in thought. When he emerged for supper he found he had become something of a celebrity amongst the other passengers and Miss Lucy Willett thought it necessary to intercept him at the entrance to the dining room in order to ensure they sat at the same table.
'When I compared you to Sherlock Holmes last night it seems I was being prescient,' she said as she escorted him through the gossiping dining room, 'I hear you have more than matched Mister Conan Doyle's detective.'
'I hardly think that,' said Montague, but Miss Willett was too full of his triumph of deduction and sudden celebrity to take any notice of his modesty.
At the table the conversation continued in the same vein, extolling his virtue as a detective and praising his fast deduction of the crime. Montague's own assertions that his solution was far from proved, and indeed several questions lingered over it, were largely laughed away as innapropiate English modesty. After the rabble had bored of discussing the solving of the crime they turned to its more salacious details, alluding to its brutality, frightening each other with talk of a dangerous savage stowed away in some dark corner of the boat. Finally one of the diners suggested that, had Mister Pabodie been more sociable, he might have been out of his cabin at the time and escaped with his life, and Montague placed his knife and fork down and, using the voice he sometimes found necessary to use on undergraduates, said 'excuse me, but I must remind you that a man has been murdered, a man, having had the opportunity to spend some time with last night, I would have been proud to call friend. A good man. Please have a little more respect.'
For a moment nobody spoke, and then Lucy Willett coughed gently and said 'you are right of course Montague, we are behaving terribly, do forgive us we have been so starved of gossip on this voyage and then suddenly all of this. And you must admit, it is an event that might have come right out of one your own stories.'
'That is just it,' said Montague, almost under his breath, 'it is not like my own stories at all, it is different in many important ways. I do not know what to make of it.'
'You do not think he was murdered by a savage then?' said Mrs Willett.
'I do not know Madam, I was asked for a possible explanation so I gave one, but how did this savage climb down the side of the ship? How did this savage have the strength to smash the porthole? And most of all how did this savage trail Pabodie to London and then to Southampton and then on board this ship? It is preposterous.'
'So what do you think happened?'
'I do not know. I genuinely do not know. The only explanation that fits the facts is that something, I know not what, came out of the sea and up the side of the ship. But that is ridiculous.'
