Missing Susan

CHAPTER 3

THE THAMES

IN THE TINY sleeping quarters of the boat Morvoren, beneath the sheet of polythene that substituted for the missing part of the coach roof, the captain was preparing to abandon ship. His suitcase lay open on the bunk, and various items of apparel were strewn about on every flat surface, awaiting consideration by their distracted owner, who seemed inclined to fill up his case with books instead of clothing.

Rowan Rover looked reproachfully at his selection of summer trousers as if holding the garments personally responsible for their unfashionable condition. His late employment in tropical Sri Lanka had left him with a superfluity of lightweight trousers, which, given the few weeks’ wear per annum allowed by the English climate, threatened to outlast the millennium. They had been purchased at that unfortunate period in the history of couture when flared trousers were in fashion, and the ridiculousness of this bygone splendor no doubt contributed to their dogged indestructibility. He could have consigned them to the rubbish bin, and invested in more elegantly tailored apparel, but since financially and philosophically he could not bring himself to dispose of usable clothing, he had attempted to improve their appearance by narrowing the trouser legs himself, an act he undertook with more zeal than skill. Thus, he occasionally appeared to have one leg thicker than the other.

The trousers were in need of other types of alteration as well, because, as the years wore on, his girth increased, causing the trousers’ zippers to slip inexorably out of a securely closed position. After one disastrous attempt at trouser-widening, resulting in the complete destruction of the garment, he had given up the prospect of further do-it-yourself tailoring, and he now relied on safety pins inserted in the fly below the desired level of the zipper to protect him from embarrassing moments. He liked to think that no one noticed these little economies.

Rowan Rover selected two pairs of trousers, tan and black, and folded them carefully at the bottom of the suitcase, tossing on top of them as many shirts and undergarments as would fit without disturbing his cache of books: a British Heritage guidebook of Britain, a road atlas, a volume of English folklore, and a pocket encyclopedia of true crime.

The Murder Mystery Tour of Southern England would begin tomorrow, September 5, when he was scheduled to meet his charges-and the coach and driver-at Gatwick. The weather promised to be perfect. The English summer had been unseasonably warm (if this be global warming, make the most of it, he thought, paraphrasing an early American patriot), and current forecasts promised sunshine and balmy breezes for the next few weeks. Hence the need for his tropical wardrobe. In case the weather forecast was as inaccurate as usual, he would take sweaters.

He glanced at the list of people signed up for the tour: a dozen Americans, mostly from the West Coast, and one Scotswoman named MacPherson, from Edinburgh. It was the third name on the list that gave him pause: Susan.

His encounter with Mr. Kosminski (whom he still thought of as The Businessman) on the Ripper tour last March had faded in his memory to the insubstantiality of a bad dream. He had mentioned it to no one.

He remembered sitting in the Aldgate pub, making polite after-tour chitchat with the American, thinking he was about to be invited to lecture at some university, when, in the middle of his sip of Scotch, the man had plumped out his request: that Rowan Rover should murder his niece on the September mystery tour.

Rowan’s initial reply had been a coughing fit, as a swallow of Glenlivet took a wrong turn down his throat in the tension of the moment.

Aaron Kosminski smiled, while endeavoring to look concerned. “Can I get you a glass of water?” he asked pleasantly.

Rowan Rover shook his head, unable to trust his throat to produce words. He took several deep breaths, interspersed with more coughs, before he managed to wheeze out a reply. “Sorry. I must have misunderstood you. Were you talking about one of those murder weekends with actors, by any chance? I don’t do those.”

“I don’t blame you,” said Kosminski. “They always struck me as rather undignified.” He glanced around to make sure that Rowan’s coughing fit had not attracted any undue attention. Satisfied on this point, he continued, “I was, in fact, proposing that you should-how shall I put it?-practice what you preach. Confirm your morbid and childish fascination with murder most foul. Why don’t you give it a try? See what it’s like. It could give you all kinds of insight in your chosen profession.”

Rowan Rover stared at the man in amazement. He was the calmest and most reasonable of persuaders. Just so must the New York killer David Berkowitz have explained to the police about his neighbor’s dog, Sam, who told him to go out and shoot people. Kosminski had the serenity of Edmund Kemper, apologizing for accidentally touching the breast of the kidnapped woman he would murder an hour later. Rowan had met loonies before, but never one so cheerfully secure in his delusions.

As if reading his thoughts, Aaron Kosminski, still smiling, shook his head. “I assure you that I am quite sane,” he said. “After all, psychotics go out and commit their own murders, don’t they? They don’t hire people to do it for them. What I am suggesting to you is a simple business proposition, made to someone of good reputation-finances aside-who has no motive for causing the death of a total stranger from another country. That seems straightforward enough.”

Rowan Rover hazarded another sip of his Scotch. “You want me to kill your niece.”

Kosminski fingered his butter-soft leather gloves with a thoughtful expression. “Perhaps I could rephrase it. My niece Susan will embark on your murder tour of England this fall, and I would like her, while on this tour, to have a fatal accident, which shall be viewed by the police and all concerned as a regrettable but wholly unavoidable mishap. In return for your orchestrating this event, I am prepared to pay you the sum of fifty thousand dollars, whatever that happens to be in pounds at the time of the transaction.”

Rowan Rover blinked. “Why do you want to kill your niece?”

Kosminski sighed. “It is apparent, Mr. Rover, that you have never met my niece. But apart from aesthetics, the answer is the usual one: money. Dear Susan, her personal failings aside, has inherited the family money from her doting, but misguided grandfather. My father, a shrewd businessman, but with a dangerous flaw of sentimentality.”

“No family resemblance there, then,” said Rowan cheerfully.

Kosminski ignored the interruption. “Rather than sensibly investing this money into the family business, my niece Susan has decided to-as she puts it-retire.”

“How old is she?”

Kosminski’s frown deepened. “Thirty-six.”

“I see. So she has a good bit of time in which to frivol away the family fortunes.”

“We rather hope not, Mr. Rover,” said Kosminski with a piercing stare. “That is where you come in.”

Rowan squirmed under the businessman’s earnest stare. “Pardon my curiosity,” he said timidly, “but why bring me into this? Surely as an American you have access to any amount of professional assassins.”

Kosminski sighed. “Not in Minneapolis,” he said, in the tone of one who is loath to admit his hometown’s inadequacies. “Besides, hit men usually use guns, making it all too obvious that a murder has been committed. That would mean an investigation. What we want is an unfortunate accident. And the farther from home the better.”

“Preferably in rural England, I take it.”

“Precisely. When Susan announced that she wanted to waste yet more of her inheritance on this frivolous mystery tour, I came over to make inquiries. A background check on the proposed guide indicated that you might be eminently suitable for our purposes, and that the offer of a large sum of cash might be most welcome.”

“A large sum of cash is always welcome,” said Rowan evasively.

“This much money should last you a good while. That is, if you don’t invest in any more wives,” said Kosminski with a nasty smile.

“No, it’s a bad habit,” said Rowan. “I’ve forsaken it. I smoke now instead. Packs and packs a day. Would you care for one? Cigarette, I mean. Though I’ve wives to spare as well.”

“Fifty… thousand… dollars,” said Kosminski slowly.

Somehow, between the double Scotches and Aaron Kosminski’s quiet insistence, Rowan Rover had found himself tentatively agreeing to accept employment. It had seemed rather logical at the time. After all, the tour was months away, and just as likely to be canceled as not. Besides, Kosminski had done a thorough job of researching his prospective assassin. When the preliminaries were over, he had produced a budget of Rowan Rover’s projected yearly income, offset with his ominous new expenditures. The resulting deficit was so crushing that murder seemed a small price to pay to make it all go away. By the time Kosminski had finished his murder talk, and was advising his hired assassin on sound investments and the virtues of a strict budget, the whole interview had assumed the surreal quality of one of Richard Jones’ well-planned practical jokes. Rowan had found himself agreeing as if the conversation were part of a script. In time, the incident became just another pub conversation.

Until today.

Today he found in his mailbox a business envelope bearing American postage stamps, with a post office box for a return address. Inside the envelope was a cashier’s check for ten thousand pounds, and a note that said, “Remainder upon completion of the task. Bon voyage. A.K.”

So it hadn’t been a practical joke, after all. That gave him pause. For several minutes he stood there with the letter in his hand, staring stupidly into space while he considered all the implications of the message. How could he possibly have allowed himself to get mixed up in such lunacy? Finally he put the letter aside, and withdrew the rest of the mail from the box. There was the usual assortment of bills, a window-enveloped letter from the bursar’s office of Sebastian’s public school (marked URGENT), and a circular from a company that specialized in boat repair. Rowan Rover glanced at his watch. There was still time to deposit the cashier’s check before the bank closed. At least that would eliminate all his nagging financial problems, leaving him with one enormous moral one: the contemplation of murder.

Now, ten thousand pounds richer and on the verge of paying his debts, he was solvent, but no less apprehensive. He began to contemplate his next course of action. “After all,” he told himself, as he nervously rearranged the books in his suitcase, “I am an authority on murder. I’ve written books on British murder cases. Don’t I stand up and tell people that if Crippen hadn’t used hyoscine-of all the improbable poisons!-he’d have gone free? Don’t I laugh when I talk about that stupid solicitor Herbert Rowse Armstrong, who kept inviting his enemies to tea long after they’d begun to notice that having tea with Herbert gave them stomach cramps symptomatic of arsenic poisoning? And he paid for his stupidity on the gallows, right enough.” The thought of the gallows was chilling, but, after all, Britain had abolished capital punishment in the early Sixties, and, much as the public wanted it back when they caught the Moors Murderers, it had stayed abolished. No worries about the hangman, then.

Rowan Rover was an expert on every tantalizing murder Britain had ever seen. He knew who was caught and why, and in most of the so-called unsolved cases, he knew who had done it and how they managed to get away with it. This knowledge was, after all, the reason he had been engaged to host the September murder tour. “If I wanted to,” he told himself cautiously, “I’m sure I could get away with murder. I’ve been studying it all my life.”

Then in his best imitation of American ex-president Richard Nixon, he shook imaginary jowls, and said, “But it would be wro-ong!”

He picked up the paperback encyclopedia of crime and stared at its cover, a collage of murderers’ faces, all very ordinary and respectable-looking. “Still,” he said thoughtfully, “it would be interesting to see if I could stage a convincing accident. I could certainly name a few killers who managed it. I wouldn’t mind seeing if I could get away scot-free.”

Suddenly he pictured his own face adorning the cover of a future edition of the encyclopedia of crime: the carefully dyed black hair, the distinguished bulbous nose, and his dark eyes narrowed into the menacing slits indicative of a merciless killer. It didn’t bear thinking about. He buried the offending volume beneath a couple of handkerchiefs in the suitcase, then turned his attention to the Guide to England. It was all very well to speculate on the fanciful, but his immediate responsibility was to lead a well-researched and entertaining tour for the travel company. They, after all, might wish to hire him again. Whereas the Kosminski offer was, while generous, hardly the thing he would wish to turn into a career. (He pictured himself in a cell next to the surviving Kray twin, swapping grisly business tips. No, definitely not a career.)

He took out his tour itinerary and hotel brochures, supplied by his employers. There were to be eleven travelers, and, judging from the names, ten of them were women. After he met them, he could make decisions about how strenuous the tour could be. If most of them were upwards of seventy, then he must curb his desire for three-mile walks before lunch. Also, before he planned a detailed list of places to visit, he must gauge their knowledge of and interest in true crime. (Would they want to see the pond where Agatha Christie began her famous disappearance? Or would they want seamier stuff-the field near Alton where Sweet Fanny Adams was dismembered in 1867, thus giving the Royal Navy a new slang term for canned meat? Truthfully, Rowan Rover hoped for the former: the case of poor, young Fanny Adams sickened even his Ripper-hardened soul.)

The tour would begin with a two-night stay in Winchester, in the hotel next to the cathedral. From there he could plan day-trips to nearby places of interest. He consulted the atlas to see what locales lay within an hour’s drive of Winchester. He wouldn’t think about Susan just now, he decided. There would be time enough to worry about that once he got the tour well under way. Besides, Rowan Rover was from Cornwall; Hampshire was not familiar country to him. Accidents would be much easier to arrange on home turf, he thought. Wait until we get to the West Country. The phrase poor Susan went west sprang unbidden to mind, and he actually laughed out loud-before the implication of the entire plan sent him pawing through the guidebook for safer subjects to contemplate. He found the assassination of Thomas à Becket at Canterbury; the Peasenhall case: throat-cutting in Suffolk; ritual sacrifices at Stonehenge. No matter where he looked, it all came back to murder.