It's Murder, On a Galapagos Cruise: An Amateur Female Sleuth Historical Cozy Mystery (Miss Riddell C by P.C. James (easy novels to read txt) 📕

said. “A thirty-foot drop onto hard, wooden planking. He wouldn’t have survived even if he’d gone face first rather than backwards, as the position of the body and the injuries suggested.”

Pauline nodded. “I think he was forced against this gate by someone holding a knife under his chin. Then, either the gate moved behind him and he overbalanced or the someone pushed him and over he went.”

They continued staring down at the deck below, remembering the body as it lay there the night before.

“There’s nowhere for him to have got that cut under his chin,” Freda said. “There are cables and metal beams but nothing with a sharp edge.”

“No,” Pauline said. “It was definitely a knife or something very like it.”

“It still could be an accident, or manslaughter anyway,” Freda said, unwilling to accept she was sharing a ship with a killer.

“It can’t be an accident, but it could be manslaughter rather than murder,” Pauline agreed. “Our job is to find out which and why.”

For a moment, they examined the deck around the gate, and nearby corners and crevices. There was nothing. The ship was too newly recommissioned for much of any kind of litter to be hiding out.

“What do we do now?” Freda asked.

“We ask questions,” Pauline replied. “The captain said Jose Garcia, that was his family name by the way, was a member of the maintenance crew, so we start there.”

“But we’ve never seen any of the maintenance crew,” Freda objected.

“You haven’t been looking,” Pauline said. “Remember the man working in the cabin along our corridor? Or the men changing the layout of the lounge after dinner last night and breakfast this morning?”

“Oh, yes. I see. I was thinking of the people running the engines and things.”

“I think they’re engineering,” Pauline said. “We’ll walk the decks until we find a willing volunteer. There’ll be crew about after we dock.” The ship was approaching a harbor mouth and a pilot vessel was approaching.

“Won’t the police be interviewing them then?”

“Maybe,” Pauline agreed, “and if they are, we’ll wait until later. We need to know who Jose was and who his friends and colleagues were.”

“You said the captain told you this was a maiden voyage for the ship and tour company,” Freda said. “He may not have had either.”

“Someone knew him well enough to stick a knife under his chin and cause him to fall over a railing,” Pauline said. “That isn’t the action of someone you’ve just met. That requires a history of love or hate.”

They watched as the ship was guided to its berth and tied up. When it was secure, a gangplank was placed, and police came aboard.

“More tea, I think,” Pauline said, “and one of those nice pastries I saw them putting out as we came through the lounge.” At breakfast, the guests had been told they couldn’t disembark until the authorities had given permission for them to leave.

“They’ll be all gone by now,” Freda said. “We should have had one before we came up here.”

“North Americans eat cakes,” Pauline said. “There are always pastries left.” She was right. Fortunately, they’d finished their tea and macaroon when the call came for them to go to the captain’s cabin, a call they’d been expecting because they had found the body.

With the aid of an interpreter, they described the scene as they’d found it. The police captain asked, “You heard no cry or the noise of the body hitting the deck?”

“No, we heard nothing. We were on the deck for a few minutes before I saw him,” Pauline said.

“You said the time was about twenty hundred hours,” the police captain said, “and you saw no one else about.”

“That’s correct,” Pauline said. “We finished dinner, sat over coffee before taking a stroll. It was a cool night, quite surprisingly cold really, and I imagine anyone who’d come out had hurried back inside.”

“The moon was bright, you said.”

“It was but shining on the other side of the ship. The side nearest our cabins, where we finished our walk, was shadowy. Not dark but the man was lying in a place where the lifeboats provided shadow from the moon and starlight and the deck lights.”

“The doctor says you thought he’d been stabbed.”

“I did. When I saw blood on my fingers after checking for a pulse at his throat, I assumed he’d been stabbed with an upward thrust from a knife,” Pauline said. “Then, after Freda, who is a nurse, checked, she realized his neck was broken.”

“And did that change your mind about murder?”

“No,” Pauline said. “I just thought he’d been stabbed and then fallen. The fall broke his neck after he was dead.” Seeing where the police captain was going, she decided to speed things up. “It wasn’t until I heard that the wound under his chin was just a cut, that I realized he hadn’t died that way.”

“So, you no longer think he was murdered?”

“I don’t know how he died, Captain,” Pauline said. “I only know it wasn’t the way I thought when I first found him.”

The police captain nodded. “Thank you, Señorita. Your assistance has been invaluable.”

Pauline and Freda left the cabin in silence. Once away from there, however, Freda said, “You didn’t tell him you still think Jose was killed and didn’t die in an accident.”

“He didn’t persist in his question about my murder theory and I have no proof to give it credence. It’s best we let the local authorities manage things in their own way,” Pauline said. “If only in the hope it means we can have our holiday together without further delay.”

“Pauline!” Freda said, shocked. “After all you said, you can’t mean that.”

Pauline frowned. “Don’t misunderstand me, Freddy, I take all violent deaths very seriously, but the most likely explanation is this man, Jose, was part of some sordid criminal enterprise and he paid for it with his life. It is for local people to manage their own affairs. We will investigate but not become embroiled in the local investigation or point them in directions we’re