For Sara, he was simply a victim of the creature terrorising this ship, making him something to be studied, rather than lamented.
‘Did you notice the dagger?’ asked Creesjie, disgusted. ‘I’d wager that’s the dagger Old Tom promised to leave under his bunk if we accepted his bargain.’
Sara stared at it. It was an ugly thing with a wooden handle, the sort of blade cutpurses used to steal a handful of coins. Jan’s exalted station hadn’t even bought him a beautiful weapon to be murdered by.
She wondered if that was the point. Old Tom had stripped him of every piece of dignity he had.
‘Do you think somebody accepted Old Tom’s offer?’ asked Creesjie.
‘I don’t know. If there’s suddenly a king aboard in the next few days, I’d say yes.’ She smiled tightly, then felt guilty. ‘Has anybody told Arent? They were close.’
‘He’s awake?’ said Creesjie, squeezing her arm.
‘An hour ago,’ confirmed Sara, smiling.
‘There’s a fire on the orlop deck,’ said Lia. ‘I heard he was helping down there.’
‘Of course he is,’ said Sara, a touch of pride in her voice. ‘Well, if he’s working down there, I suppose I shall start up here.’
‘How?’ asked Creesjie.
‘In his cases, Pipps always says to look for things that aren’t there and should be, or are there and shouldn’t be.’
‘Sounds like very unsatisfactory advice to me,’ grumbled Creesjie. ‘How does he tell one from the other?’
Sara shrugged. ‘He never explained that part.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you one thing,’ said Creesjie insistently. ‘That candle was snuffed when we entered the cabin.’
She was clearly thinking the same thing Sara was. Her husband didn’t sleep without a candle, because he was afraid of the dark. And, more importantly, Sara had tainted his wine with her sleeping draught.
She had watched him drink it.
With that sleeping draught inside him, he wouldn’t have been able to wake up until the morning, at the very earliest. Even if he’d had the inclination, there was no way he could have risen to snuff the candle, which meant his murderer must have done it.
She turned to Drecht, who was hovering in the doorway, captain of a guard that had nobody to guard.
‘Was I the last person to see my husband alive?’ she asked him.
He was lost in thought and didn’t immediately respond.
‘Guard Captain!’ said Sara, her tone of command snapping him out of his despair.
‘No, my lady,’ he said smartly. ‘He called me in just as dinner was being served. He asked me to search the cabin for a dagger. He asked me to do it every night. He said Old Tom had threatened him.’
‘Did you?’
‘Of course.’
‘Did you find one?’
‘No.’
The dagger protruding from her husband’s chest took on an accusatory air. ‘That wasn’t in here when I left,’ he protested, as everybody glanced at it from the corner of their eyes. ‘And even it had been, nobody came or went until Creesjie and I found the body. I was on watch all night. I didn’t doze, I didn’t wander.’
‘I remember hearing him call to you at dinner,’ muttered Creesjie thoughtfully. ‘He sounded peculiar, I thought.’
‘He’d been peculiar ever since visiting the passenger cabins,’ agreed the guard captain.
‘When was that?’
‘The night of Vos’s death.’ He tugged his beard, summoning the memory. ‘He’d spent the afternoon poring over the passenger manifest and that other list of names beside it, rambling about losing control of demons. He must have seen something, because he said this wasn’t about The Folly, then leapt up. He went to confront somebody. He sounded afraid.’
‘Who was it?’
‘I didn’t see. I only heard what he said, and the way he said it. “You’ve been waiting for me, I believe.” Those were his words. And he spoke … deferentially. Never heard him sound like that before.’
‘Then what happened?’ asked Sara eagerly.
Her blood was up. This is what Pipps must feel like all the time, she thought. The thrill of discovery, and the sense of having an enemy just beyond reach. God help her, but this voyage was the most exhilarating thing that had ever happened to her.
‘He came out two hours later and asked me to take him back,’ continued Drecht. ‘He didn’t say anything. Once he was inside his cabin, he started sobbing. After that, he didn’t come out again.’
‘Father was sobbing,’ said Lia incredulously.
Sara paced the cabin, trying to make sense of a husband she didn’t recognise. He was powerful, which meant he didn’t go to see people. He summoned those he needed. Whoever he’d discovered on the passenger manifest had made him deferent. But who could that be? Who would he march to the passenger cabins to see?
Sara went over to the desk and inspected the lists, but could see nothing that would have disturbed her husband. A quill was discarded next to them, a blot of ink dried on the wood.
She felt a strange sense of déjà vu. Only three days ago, she’d done the same thing in Cornelius Vos’s cabin, though she couldn’t have explained why. There was nothing to be learned beyond what Arent had already observed. Everything had been tidied away, aside from the receipts of passage for the family, suggesting he’d been preoccupied with them before his death. Sara couldn’t tell why, though something about it bothered her. Vos was methodical. He wouldn’t have taken them out unless there was an irregularity.
‘Lia,’ she said.
‘Yes, Mama.’
‘Would you examine the passenger manifest and list of people Old Tom possessed for me? You’ve a keen eye and a quick mind, perhaps you can see something I’ve missed.’
Lia beamed at the compliment and sat down at the desk.
The second question was what had they discussed? Whatever it was had made her husband weep. That suggested it had something to do with Arent, she thought. He was the only person her husband obviously loved.
She glanced around the cabin once again, searching for the clue to make sense of everything. Her eyes were dragged back to the candle. The murderer must have snuffed it, but why? And how had they managed to get in and out without Drecht seeing? Drecht could have been lying to them, but Isaack Larme had told them the guard captain had been offered a huge reward for escorting her husband back to Amsterdam safely. Besides, if Drecht had wanted to kill him, he’d had ample opportunities in the past. Why do it here and now, when it would be so obvious he was the killer?
Her eyes prodded at the furnishings, searching for some other explanation. In The Secret of the Midnight Scream, Pipps had deduced that a trapdoor beneath the floorboards had concealed the killer, who’d hidden there until the investigation had concluded, then crept out when the coast was clear.
Sara began stamping on the floorboards, earning strange looks from the others.
They were solid.
‘Drecht?’
‘My lady?’
‘Climb on a chair and start hammering the ceiling will you? My dress is too heavy.’
Drecht raised a bushy eyebrow. ‘My lady, I understand you’re suffering an ordeal, but –’
‘There may be a trapdoor,’ she explained, walking over to the writing desk and inspecting her husband’s documents. ‘Somebody may have dropped down from above.’
‘But that’s your cabin, my lady.’
‘Yes, but I haven’t been in it this evening because I was tending Arent.’
As they pondered it, Lia made a small, startled sound, then laughed. ‘That’s very clever,’ she said in amusement. Nobody listening would ever have believed her father lay murdered only a few paces from her.