Death on the Koh-i-Noor (Edwin Scott Crime Trilogy Book 3) Read online

  Death on the Koh-i-Noor

  by

  Felix Bruckner

  Prologue – A Dark Diamond

  Until the discovery of the Cullinan Diamond in 1905, the Koh-i-Noor was thought to be the world's largest diamond. It is currently to be found among the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London, a magnet for tourists from all over the globe. The term means “Mountain of light”; however, during its long dark history on the Indian Subcontinent, it had gained a reputation as an unlucky stone, and many deaths were attributed to it. Unlike the men who sailed his ships, Sir Hubert Pennington-Smythe was not a superstitious man, and the Chairman considered the SS Koh-i-Noor to be the jewel in his crown.

  “Whoever possesses the Koh-i-Noor possesses India, runs the legend ... Or, in our case, the Passage to India,” insisted Sir Hubert.

  The forty-five thousand tonne SS Koh-i-Noor was a beautiful craft: white, with twin gold funnels, carrying one thousand crew and fifteen hundred passengers. The name may have been inauspicious for the latest vessel of the Orient Line, and, inevitably, it was again to be associated with tragedy. Why had Fate decreed that the deaths should occur during my short spell as the ship's assistant surgeon?

  My name is Edwin Scott. I'm twenty-nine, slight and fair-haired, the son of a head chef from Clapham; my passion is reading, with a predilection for the exploits of Sherlock Holmes. Like my hero, I still possessed an old violin, one which I had played at school; now and again, I would extract this from its dented case to try a few musical phrases – excruciating for my neighbours, and swiftly curtailed.

  When I was near the end of my first house job, I received a post-card from a friend; on the front was a picture of the partially built Sydney Opera House.

  “Dear Edwin,” it ran.

  “Am on a round-the-world voyage as a ship's doctor with the Orient Line. It's a fantastic experience. You should try it, before you settle down to a career, wedded bliss, etc.

  With best wishes,

  Yours, Adam Fenchurch.”

  Like a desert seed, the thought lay dormant for six long years. It resurfaced in nineteen-sixty-six, after I had been ditched by Barbara Clifton, my girl-friend of two years – to whom I had considered myself engaged. It was now May of that year: I had passed my Membership exam, was just completing a spell as registrar on the metabolic unit at my old teaching hospital, and hoped to return there as senior registrar in rheumatology.

  I made enquiries at the Orient Line's central office in the City of London; to my surprise, I was offered a job as assistant ship's surgeon, and asked to report forthwith to SS Chitral in the East India Docks, for dock duty. There were three of us awaiting a definitive posting; though by no means the youngest or least experienced, as the latest arrival, I was designated the junior surgeon.

  “If you hang on for five minutes, while I finish writing up my notes, I'll show you the ropes ...” offered Jim O'keefe, the senior of the three. “Hm ... According to our duty rota, you are first on call tonight.”

  My first call came at eleven o'clock that evening.

  “Man badly hurt in SS Turk,” was the message, relaid to me by the Assistant Purser. A small motor launch carried me from the Chitral to the rusty tramp-steamer. With me I took my Sherlock Holmes bag – a battered old Gladstone bag, containing a magnifying glass and tweezers, as well as the usual stethoscope, ophthalmoscope and patella-hammer. A ship's officer met me at the top of the ladder, and helped me on board. He was a big man, bearded and tanned, immaculate in full uniform.

  “Bob Pike, Chief Officer ...” He shook my hand firmly. “Looks bad ...Young rating has fallen into the hold. Quite a drop ... Arm's badly hurt.”

  Instead of taking me straight to the patient, he led me to the captain's cabin; with a key from his pocket, he opened the medical cabinet.

  “Reckon you'll need some medical supplies ... Take time to come back here to collect things later on, after you've seen him ...”

  I found some ampoules of morphine, and threw a couple into my bag, together with a handful of syringes, some bandages, some gauze swabs and a rigid splint.

  “Where is he now?” I asked rather stupidly.

  “Why he's still down in the hold, doc ...”

  “Oh, of course ... Lead the way, then ...”

  The ship's hold was a gaping cavern, situated centrally. I looked into its depth: all appeared black. A ladder led straight down into a bottomless pit.

  “Down you go, doc ... I'll take your bag ... Don't worry, it's not that far; only thirty feet ...”

  With considerable trepidation, I swung my legs over the edge, hung on to the officer's hand while searching with my feet for the ladder; I felt one foot on a rung, positioned the other foot on the next one down, put my full weight on it, grasped the top rung with both hands, and began the descent. I kept my gaze to the front, and avoided looking down. I moved slowly and very deliberately; as my eyes began to accommodate to the dark, I realized that there was indeed some low-level illumination inside the hold. My feet touched the steel deck; I could feel the cold through the soles of my shoes; Mr Pike joined me a few moments later.

  When my pulse rate had subsided a little, I looked around me. The place was like a giant Aladdin's cave about two thirds full, stacked with crates of all sizes. A few feet from the bottom of the ladder lay a young rating, covered in a blanket; next to him stood a sombre quartermaster, who switched on a powerful flash-light as I approached. The patient groaned, but lay still; his eyes were open, and he gazed anxiously at me. He was clearly conscious.

  “Where are you hurt, young man? And what's your name?” I asked.

  “It's my arm, Sir; it's terrible ... Name's Hobbs, Martin Hobbs.”

  His voice was a low sigh, hardly audible. His face appeared very pale in the bright light of the torch. Perspiration glistened on his forehead.

  Gently, I removed the blanket. He wore a short-sleeved shirt, lightly spattered with blood, black trousers and black shoes; his right arm was angulated just below the elbow, and the shattered bones projected through the skin – a severe compound fracture of both radius and ulna; there didn't seem to be any active bleeding now. I took his pulse on the other wrist: a hundred and five, barely palpable. He was in shock. I did a rapid general examination. His pupils were normal size and reacted to light. He could wiggle all his fingers and move his lower limbs – no obvious neurological damage. I felt his skull and inserted my hand along his spine – no tenderness, no deformity. His ribs appeared intact, and his abdomen was soft and non-tender.

  “Right, the rest of you appears to be okay, Mr Hobbs ... I 'll give you an injection for the pain, and then we'll splint your arm ... You'll feel better soon ...”

  I drew up some morphine in a syringe, and gave him a quarter of a grain into the left deltoid muscle. I waited a few minutes for the injection to work, and then turned my attention to his arm. I clearly couldn't reduce the fracture, so I padded the wound with gauze swabs, wrapped the fore-arm in bandages, and splinted the whole limb as best I could. The ship's crew had lowered a rigid stretcher into the hold by two ropes, and we strapped the patient firmly into this. He appeared to be dozing; at any rate he made no objection, and kept his eyes closed. He was hoisted gently up the ladder by the crew on deck; I followed cautiously, though with more confidence than on my downward journey.

  At the top, I checked the patient again: he was breathing comfortably, and his eyes remained closed; his pulse had slowed to ninety. He was still attached securely to the stretcher, and his arm appeared well immobilised in its splint.

  “Ambulance on its way,” murmured the chief off
icer.

  “Right, I'll just write a brief note for the Casualty Officer, if you could let me have some writing paper and an envelope ...”

  I handed the letter to the paramedic, and watched as the stretcher was lowered onto a launch for its brief journey to the quay and the waiting ambulance. Finally, I observed Mr Pike as he wrote his entry in the ship's log, mainly to check that he had spelled my name correctly ...

  Over the next few weeks, I was ferried around the Port of London in the small motor launch to attend the crew on a variety of vessels, large and small, ramshackle or newly painted; unlike my first patient, these men had suffered only minor injuries through fights or drunken falls – or merely complained that they were sick. During my time here, I received a full course of immunisations against yellow fever, cholera, typhoid and paratyphoid A and B. Within days of my arrival, Dr O'Keefe, was transferred to the SS Oriana in Southampton, for a voyage around the world, taking in Japan and the Far East – the very posting I had wished for myself.

  Part I

  Outward Bound

  Chapter One

  Indian Ocean, Monday 18th July 1966

  The sea was choppy. The Monsoon season was upon us, as the SS Koh-i-Noor ploughed her way laboriously through the Indian Ocean. When I was summoned urgently to the wireless cabin (we still called it that on the Koh-i-Noor in 1966), I experienced the usual adrenaline surge which came with every medical call. Automatically, I grabbed my Gladstone bag from under the examination couch, and ran. However, I soon discovered that this was no run-of-the-mill medical emergency.

  Smell is the most primitive of senses, and evokes by far the most vivid human memories. On the very threshold of the wireless cabin, I was transported back to the operating theatre at the London Hospital, in my days as thoracic house surgeon.

  The registrar was performing a pneumonectomy for lung cancer, the consultant and myself assisting. Hitherto everything had gone smoothly. However, without warning, there was a spurt of arterial blood, catching my cap and the chief's gown, filling the chest cavity, and spilling onto the theatre floor. Blood pressure dropped to unrecordable levels, despite the rapid transfusion of blood by the anaesthetist. The registrar froze. Blood completely obscured the operating field.

  “We're losing him ...”

  “Scissors and Spencer Wells's forceps,” demanded Mr Taverstock almost conversationally, and they were thrust sequentially into his hand by sister.

  There was no time to change sides; so, from the left of the table, the consultant opened the pericardium, felt inside with his gloved hand, and clamped the main pulmonary artery. The bleeding stopped instantly, and the blood in the chest was sucked out. He loosened the clamp momentarily, and we could see the bleeding vessel – a large artery supplying the tumour. He clamped this vessel, before releasing the Spencer Wells on the pulmonary artery.

  “Blood pressure back to 120/80 ...” reported the anaesthetist.

  “Give him another couple of pints, Norman ... Right, carry on with the operation, Mr Bly ...”

  Quaking, the registrar resumed the pneumonectomy ...

  The smell I had noted on entering the cabin was indeed the smell of blood. There was lots of it. It was spattered over one wall, over the telegraph key, and pooled on the desk and on the floor.

  The wireless cabin was a small room. Wedged into a corner was a desk, on which stood a massive radio-transmitter, a printer, a microphone for the radio-telephone, and a telegraph key for tapping out messages in Morse code. From a hook hung two sets of ear-phones. Next to the transmitter, fixed to the wall, there was a pigeon-hole rack for messages; some of these were strewn over the table beneath the rack. I glanced briefly through the slips of paper, several stained with blood: just routine radio reports received, and automatic copies of messages sent, nothing of note – probably examined and left there by the intruder. A swivel chair was drawn up to the desk. On this, in his shirt-sleeves, sat Graham Parkin, the first radio officer, his uniform jacket draped neatly over the back of the chair; he was slumped forward, his face in the puddle of blood on the desk.

  The cabin seemed packed with people, though in fact there were only another three: Christopher McFee, the duty officer, Danny Stone, third radio officer, who had discovered the body, and Charles Hardcastle; the senior surgeon caught my eye, grimaced weakly, and nodded towards Parkin.

  Without further ado, I proceeded to examine the body. The left side of his shirt-front was coated with blood; the skin was still warm. With the tips of my fingers on his temples, I raised him and tilted the head backwards: his throat had been slit; the wound was jagged and uneven, deeper on the left, and petering out on the right.

  “The cut was made from left to right: he was attacked from behind by a right-handed assailant, whose left hand covered the victim's mouth (to prevent him calling out), while extending the neck ...”

  The knife was blunt, yet it had severed the left external jugular vein and external carotid artery, and opened the upper trachea – clearly a powerful thrust. There was no question that the victim was dead: there was no carotid pulse; pupils were dilated and non-reactive to light; examination of the fundi through my ophthalmoscope revealed “cattle-trucking” of the retinal veins (the blood broken into small columns), a sure signal of circulatory arrest. I had no need to listen for the heart-beat with my stethoscope.

  “The blood has not yet congealed; the clotting time should be no more than thirty minutes, so he's been dead less than half an hour,” I continued.

  I could see no evidence of a struggle: Parkin may well have known his attacker. I examined his hands. The tips of the fingers and thumbs were heavily nicotine-stained, and there was an old scar on the pulp of the left index.

  On the desk, barely marked by the blood, was a heavy crystal ash-tray containing some ash and fragments of partly-burned paper. There was no sign of a used match-stick.

  “What has happened to the match?” I mused aloud. Then:

  “Are you alright?”

  Danny Stone had turned very pale, and beads of sweat stood out on his forehead – he looked as though he might faint at any minute. I interrupted my examination, wiped my hands on a handkerchief from my pocket, and sat him down on the only armchair in the room; after a short while, the young radio officer had regained some colour. He nodded, and a wan smile appeared on his lips ...

  I searched through Parkin's pockets: in the jacket, I found a crushed twenty-pack of Woodbines, with only three cigarettes remaining, and a half-used box of matches (clearly he hadn't set light to the message slips in the ash-tray); in his trousers were a soiled white handkerchief and a ring with three keys. With some effort, I extracted from his hip pocket a scuffed leather folding wallet; this contained fifty-five pounds in notes, a packet of condoms, two of which had been used, and a passport-sized black and white photograph of a pretty girl with sad dark eyes and shoulder length raven hair (“Latin-American or Filipino,” I reckoned). I turned the picture over: on the reverse I saw the letter “L”, and below this “Balb. Aug '65” ...

  Now it was the turn of Charles Hardcastle, perched on the edge of the desk, to show signs of distress; his eyes roved around restlessly, and his skin looked pasty under his tan.

  “Oh dear,” he moaned, his voice slurred. “I feel sick ...”

  “Is he half-cut again?” I wondered. “But perhaps I should be charitable, and put it down to the pitching and heaving of the ship.”

  He stood up abruptly, swayed across the cabin, and staggered through the door. My charity had run out – I ignored him.

  From my Gladstone bag I now extracted my magnifying glass and a pair of tweezers. I examined carefully the fragments of paper in the ash-tray: there were two that were still largely intact. However, there was a lot of charring, and all I could make out was: “oh-i-N over ent on boa Mo

  da lock mes.” and “care out oney. out.”

  (Later, in my cabin, I pondered over the message on the message slip, probably a copy of Parkin's last transmissi
on; I deciphered it thus: “SS Koh-i-Noor. Undercover agent on board. Modern day Sherlock Holmes. I don't care about the money. I want out.”)

  On one piece of paper was a clear right thumb-print, moderately blood-stained: the killer's right hand must have been covered in blood. With my 35mm Leica camera, I photographed the print and the message fragments. With my tweezers, I carefully placed the ash and the unburned remnants of paper into a clean envelope, which I labelled “Contents of Ash-tray from Wireless Cabin”, dated and sealed.

  “I'll take the envelope to the captain's safe,” offered Christopher McFee. “We'll need it as evidence ...”

  “It's all right; I can deposit it there meself.”

  Captain Horatio Butterworth, R.D., R.N.R., stood in the doorway, plethoric, tubby, yet radiating force and authority. The captain is head of the police on board ship, as well as (if needs be) judge and jury. He can deprive anyone of their liberty (in the ship's cells); in years gone by, he had had the power of life and death ... Now he decided that there would be no announcement of the killing, to avoid panicking the passengers and crew. The body would be bagged, and kept in the kitchen's refrigeration room until it could be flown to England for forensic examination.

  “I'll radio ahead to Perth and all ports beyond, so that the police can interview and fingerprint all disembarking passengers and crew. 'Twill be difficult to keep the murder secret after that, but it can't be helped ... Rigorous checks must be made that no crew member jumps ship before we return to Southampton. I'll speak to Scotland Yard personally about boarding us when we arrive ...”

  Chapter Two

  Dock Duties, 4th May to 2nd July 1966

  Wednesday, 4th May: “Congratulations, Dr Scott ...”

  I was offered the rheumatology post at The London Hospital a few days after arrival at the East India Docks. I accepted.