Get a first look at this brilliant modern cosy murder mystery from R. O. Thorp, who was one of the Observer's top 10 debut novelists of 2021, and whose writing has won the London Short Story Award.
1
The Dauphin slid gracefully out of the freezing Northern English port without drawing undue attention, as was its wont. The docks were deserted, but even if Michael, the young and romantically inclined port intern, had been watching, the passing vessel was perhaps not the most interesting. It was not as aggressively expensive as a millionaire’s yacht, or intent on breaking records for fuselage or speed or fittings; it was sleek and clean as a seal. Only the most discerning would have noted the luxury of the curtains in the visible windows, the precise lines of the hull, or the array of top-of-the-line radar and sounding equipment on its roof. Just as the wealthiest person at a party slips through unnoticed in their perfectly tailored bespoke suit and the most discreet of jewels, it swept out of the harbour quietly, and was gone.
It was, of its kind, a remarkable vessel. It was constructed rather like an opera cake, as the Danish designer, given free rein and inclined to take as much of said rein as possible, had intended. The top layer was navigation, manned by a series of brutally competent Swedes, Greenlanders and a handful of morbid Norwegians, who were largely morbid because people kept assuming they were also Swedish. The middle was luxurious accommodation, and not the kind where a state room meant a double bed stuck in a kind of plexiglass bubble and not enough room to move without bumping one’s head, limb or both, as was the case on many so-called luxury liners. The Dauphin had space, and plenty of it; just six suites, all with their own sitting rooms and private bathrooms, and hot water that whispered out of chromium taps, with towels replaced faithfully and soap that smelled of olive oil and citrus. These swept the curves of the ship, holding it in at the waist. Below was the ship’s intrigue, its mark of distinction among the pedigreed cruises of its type: two scientific laboratories, divided in half like lungs. The Dauphin bore its clientele into Arctic waters, and its publicity materials promised that while they dabbled on ice floes and witnessed the glories of the deep, champagne in hand, the Real Work of science was continuing below. In fact, the publicity aimed to give the guests a sense of sanctimony: that theirs was a vessel with real purpose, carrying knowledge forward. Unlike those selfish guests on other, more craven cruises, they were witnessing a journey with a greater goal. As wealthy people like nothing better than being told how humble they are, the Dauphin was a great success, booked out many months in advance for its winter journeys.
‘I expect they’ll want us to be grateful, too,’ said Rose Blanchard, resentfully. ‘They’ve paid all this packet to come along and eat foie gras, and they’ll say they’re funding us.’ Rose was technically Dr Blanchard, after she’d terrified her examiners into giving her a doctorate after barely ten minutes of examination, and looked nothing whatever like a rose at all, a remark people had been making since she was very small and which had made her develop an expression that resembled a feral wolverine. She was tall and fair-eyebrowed and had an intelligent, shifting face, one that always looked on the brink of moving into something else, something new.
‘They are funding us,’ Finn said mildly. Finn was also Dr Blanchard, having helpfully been given a doctorate the year after Rose, though in his case the examination had been a three-hour-long gentle chat in which Finn gangled and murmured his way through a remarkable innovation in shark biology, looking up occasionally with an expression that unfailingly gave his examiners the urge to give him a tea-cake and a reassuring pat. Instead they gave him his Pass With Minor Corrections and went away feeling, as one generally did with Finn, a kind of ruefulness at the cruelty of the world because it was not filled with Finns.
‘Yes. I suppose.’ Rose looked over at Finn’s unpacking, which was extremely tidy and scrupulously organised. ‘What if they’re awful? We have to eat with them. Some of the time. On the big special occasions, wasn’t it?’
‘I don’t think they’ll be awful,’ said Finn. Finn never thought anybody was awful; his oversized head covered in loopy curls seemed unable to contain anything mean about another being. He also stooped slightly at the shoulders, drawing himself inward over his chest, as if to hide from bad news.
‘You never think anybody is awful,’ said Rose. Like most marine biologists on field work – she’d spent the past six months throwing harpoons at rays to tag them, and was an excellent shot – she was tanned to the neck and hands and feet, and the rest of her was an odd, swimming white. In the light it created an image that she was barely a person, barely there. She was, however, very much there, and was prone to making sudden and incisive pronouncements at just the moment people had uneasily forgotten her. ‘You should. You should have thought Martin was awful.’
‘Martin wasn’t. I mean. He was.’ Finn made a quiet face that made him look like a put-upon sheepdog. ‘He was just – going through a bad time.’
‘He stole the watch I bought you for your graduation and gave it to his husband as an anniversary present,’ said Rose, reasonably. ‘The husband we weren’t told about. He was a rotter.’
They both breathed in the tart disinfectant of the laboratory, which was happily blank and clear, untainted by any trace of Martin, who had doubled as both Finn’s last laboratory supervisor and a feckless charmer who had hidden husband, home and several children until the secrecy became inconvenient. Rose, who had immediately and equally secretly made some very hard-to-trace trouble for Martin when this truth was unveiled – not an easy thing from a laptop in the Azores, but achieved nonetheless – regarded her brother gently. His face – unsettled, pale, still a little too thin – bore witness to the damage Martin had left.
‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be so flippant. Come here – you’ll be all right.’ She wrapped her arms around him from behind. Brother and sister stood pressed neatly to one another like two folded spoons. They were on the same lines, growing muscle in the same places, fat in others; it was comforting, if contorting. The lines of twins, swimming up at them from the mirror. When they’d first been told they weren’t the same person, as very small children, Rose had cried.
The Dauphin slipped serenely onward, through the mizzling curtain of North Sea fog. Michael the port intern should by all rights have been watching it from the dock, getting slowly soaked, wondering dreamily about its insides, its smell, the inner workings of its confoundingly quiet engines. Or perhaps he’d have been worrying, as he often did, about the manifests, and whether he had time to get a new cup of tea before the dock manager, Kevin, came down to bellow about shipping schedules like a furiously territorial goose.
Michael, however, was not on the dock. His body was turned on its side, his hand lying unfolded behind the docking-shed bales, one palm upward. His fingernails were as blue in death as violets.
