The Titanic Enigma (18 page)

He had left nothing else of value in the room and taken his latest notes with him. He locked the safe again and straightened up. Glancing at his desk, he could tell his fountain pen
had been moved a fraction of an inch and a piece of blank paper shifted slightly from where it had been when he left the cabin half an hour earlier.

He stood rigid looking around the comfortable room. He was pretty sure nothing else had been moved. But what did this mean? His instincts told him someone had intruded upon his
privacy. Furthermore, they must have either been a skilled burglar or else they had obtained a copy of his key. Most importantly, there had to be a reason for it. Someone must know who he was and
why he was aboard. They must have been watching him, studying his movements. He would have the locks changed first thing the following morning.

A knock at the door jolted Fortescue from his darkening thoughts. He turned, swung open the door and saw a young steward he had noticed last night at the
restaurant.

‘Your dinner order, sir,’ the steward said. He had an earnest face, warm brown eyes, a continental accent. Fortescue guessed he was Italian or perhaps
Spanish.

‘Thank you. On the table, please.’ He slipped the young man a sixpenny piece as he left.

Leaving the food for a moment, Fortescue glanced down at the invitation he had picked up and placed on his desk. It came in an elegant cream envelope with his name in green ink and
written in a feminine hand. He sliced it open, took out a single piece of paper and read:

The Verandah Café was usually a communal area for all First Class passengers, but on the first afternoon of the voyage, the beautiful and charming Frieda had
befriended the Captain, Edward Smith, and persuaded him to have it put aside as a private function room for her planned event on Saturday evening

The cafe was an elegant place to eat and to meet fellow First Class passengers. Long and narrow with windows looking out to the port side of the
Titanic
,
the opposite wall was lined with large mirrors and doorways leading to another set of rooms and the kitchens. It was perhaps the least formal public area, one of the few places where
children could play, but during Saturday afternoon a great deal of work had been done. The tables and chairs had been stored away, the doors out to the deck were closed and someone with a modern
eye for decoration had decked out the room with great swathes of coloured silk that draped from the ceiling to produce an effect reminiscent of a Bedouin tent. Oil lamps covered with brightly
painted shades hung suspended from wires traversing the low ceiling and the wooden floor was covered with small pieces of coloured paper shaped as flower petals.

Fortescue was one of the last to arrive and was immediately taken aback by the scene. A young waiter in White Star Line uniform approached with a tray of champagne glasses. Fortescue
selected one and brought it to his lips just as loud music burst across the room. He had not noticed the ship’s band grouped together at the far end close to the deck exit and the music they
were making was like nothing he had ever heard before. To his ears it sounded absolutely cacophonous. One of the band was singing. The words made little sense to him.

‘What do you think, Mr Wickins?’ It was Frieda at Fortescue’s right elbow.

‘Wonderful,’ he replied. ‘Your people have a done a fantastic job with the decor, Fräulein Schiel.’

‘Please, I think we have moved beyond surnames. Unless you address me as Frieda I shall be most offended.’

Fortescue smiled and sipped his champagne. ‘Then it must also be John.’

She nodded. ‘What do you think of the band?’

‘Extraordinary.’

She detected his tone and laughed out loud. ‘It is the very latest thing I brought the sheet music on board especially. It’s called “Alexander’s Ragtime
Band” by a man named Irving Berlin. I’ve given the musicians a whole ream of ragtime music; they were a little bemused, I must admit . . . But it’s so
dilly.’

And what does “dilly” mean?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Jazz lingo, John . . .’

He nodded. ‘I guess it’s part of your job to teach yourself “Californian”.’

‘I’ll get you dancing to Mr Berlin before the night is out.’

He raised his glass and she tugged his arm, pulling him over to a small gathering close by. Frieda made the introductions.

‘Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon and her husband, Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon.’ She waved a hand towards a middle-aged couple. The husband looked very formal in a stiff evening suit,
but his wife had a lightness about her and a sparkle in her eyes. ‘Lady Duff Gordon owns the most wonderful shop in the world,’ Frieda went on volubly. ‘I went there last year on
a visit to London, Mr Wickins. It is Maison Lucile of Mayfair.’ Fortescue gave her a blank look. ‘Lingerie,’ she added with a cheeky grin.

Next in line were a shy couple, newly-weds from Rome who seemed completely overwhelmed by the evening. They said ‘hello’, in heavily accented English.

‘This is a man you may already know, Mr Wickins,’ Frieda said. ‘Mr William Stead. Mr Stead . . . Mr Wickins.’

‘Good evening,’ the man said stiffly and looked Fortescue up and down.

‘Mr Stead is a famous journalist. And I only learned from him this evening that he is a very serious spiritualist.’

Fortescue nodded, keeping his thoughts to himself. He wanted to question the oxymoron of ‘serious spiritualist’, but kept quiet on the subject, merely nodding and
producing a polite smile. A pleasure . . .’

‘Finally this is Mrs Helen Candee, a most accomplished author.’

Fortescue took the lady’s hand. ‘Delighted to make your acquaintance,’ he said. ‘I’m an admirer. I followed your series of short stories published last
year in
The Times
.’

‘Well, I shall leave you all to chat. I must circulate,’ Frieda announced and was soon engrossed in more introductions.

They formed an awkward group; people who would not normally associate informally but were now thrown together in this most unusual environment.

Stead was ebullient. ‘Fine young lady,’ he said, looking over towards where Frieda had vanished amongst her guests. ‘Terribly louche career choice, though, acting,
wouldn’t you agree . . . er, sorry, I forgot your . . .’

‘Wickins, John Wickins,’ Fortescue replied and studied the man’s face. He was a showman, Fortescue realized immediately, and a big-mouth. Surely he could not be so
poor with his memory as to forget a name offered only a minute earlier. It was a deliberate display of one-upmanship!

‘I imagine that would depend on how good one is as an actor,’ Fortescue commented. ‘She has the advantage that her brother Marcus is a writer and
cinematographer.’

Stead exhaled through his nose. ‘Writer? Well, I suppose he could be called that.’

‘I spoke to him earlier,’ Mrs Candee interjected. ‘He seems to have a firm understanding of what he is planning to do . . . and he is an extremely well-read young
gentleman with a penchant for Proust.’

‘Good old Frog literature, what?’ Stead glanced around at the others. Lady Duff Gordon frowned; the Italian couple had no idea what Stead was talking about. Only Sir
Cosmo seemed to concur, nodding seriously.

Fortescue turned to Helen Candee, a broad-shouldered and well-upholstered woman in her early fifties, her thick wavy hair greying. She had dark, probing eyes and a rather severe
face. Fortescue knew the woman possessed a sound intellect, and was a rabid feminist who supported the suffragette movement. He could sense that she was not well liked by the Englishmen in the
group.

‘Will you be writing a piece about this voyage?’ he asked, turning away slightly from the others as Stead began to hold forth on something Fortescue suspected would be
both boring and self-aggrandizing

‘Oh, no!’ Helen Candee said, shaking her head. ‘Purely a pleasure trip. I do not mind confessing that I’m quite exhausted. I have just completed the first
draft of a novel.’

‘Indeed? How wonderful,’ Fortescue replied and was about to ask what the subject matter might be when he heard a commotion from the other end of the room. He saw Marcus
Schiel getting on a chair.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, most welcome guests,’ he announced. His accent seemed a little more defined than on the only other occasion Fortescue had heard him speak, the
previous night at dinner. ‘My sister Frieda and I have prepared a little entertainment for you. Many of you would have heard of the great filmmaker Georges Méliès who works from
his astonishing studio in Montreuil near Paris. My sister Frieda and I have had the extraordinary good fortune and privilege to work with the great man since Christmas, and tonight we would like to
show you a short segment of a film I helped direct and in which my sister acted. Ladies and gentlemen, would you please follow me through to the adjoining room where we have set up some of the
equipment we have brought with us.’

Fortescue could tell the gathered elite were a little taken aback. He heard a woman say, ‘Well, goodness me!’ He turned to Helen Candee who had also sensed the
bemusement. She beamed at him as he ushered her forward and they fell in behind Stead and the Duff Gordons. They all shuffled towards a darkened room off the side of the cafe.

It took a while for his eyes to adjust and he felt a little uncomfortable being squashed into a blacked-out confined space; but the sensation did not last long. He heard murmurs and
someone trod on his left foot, but then a light burst across the room illuminating the faces of all those gathered around a central table that held a monstrous-looking contraption. A couple of the
more nervous women exclaimed loudly and one of the gentlemen growled, ‘Good Lord!’

Fortescue had heard of film projectors and had read about their workings, but he had no concept of how big and ugly they were. The machine on the table was the size of a large dog
crouched ready to pounce. The light was intensely bright; a dazzling beam shone on the far wall forming a rectangle about six feet by four.

‘Ladies and gentlemen.’ It was Marcus Schiel again. ‘Please don’t be alarmed!’ He laughed nervously. ‘We would like to present to you a full
five-minute excerpt from Georges Méliès’ latest motion-picture masterpiece
Conquest of the Pole
, starring Frieda Schiel.’

Fortescue had in fact seen a movie once before. A year ago he had spent a very pleasant week in Brighton. One afternoon he had been caught in a deluge and had dashed for the closest
building. It happened to be a venue called the Duke of York’s Picture House. There he had paid tuppence, been escorted to a rather uncomfortable chair in a small half-empty theatre and
watched amazed as two films were shown, both recently acquired from America:
Frankenstein
and
The Abyss
. He had left the cinema reeling and thrilled. But that had not prepared him
for the onslaught on the senses he now experienced. For in this confined space, and aboard a ship in the mid-Atlantic of all places, he was watching the most extraordinarily clever piece of art
unfold on the makeshift screen.

He could sense the excitement of the others all around him, even a reverberation of fear, surprise, enchantment. It all added to the experience, making it almost surreal, so that
after five minutes in the blaze of light and scintillating images, he found he was short of breath.

In the motion picture Frieda looked like a creature from a fantasy; she was dressed in an exotic headdress and played the Queen of Ice repelling the advances of prospective explorers
determined to reach the North Pole. There was no doubting her talent and Fortescue could immediately understand why she and her brother had taken the chance of trying to find success in America.
The camera loved Frieda – she was a natural.

The lights came up, and for a moment no one could speak, no one could move, then someone started to clap. Fortescue quickly picked up on it and joined in. Suddenly the room was
echoing with the applause of the gathered guests. Frieda appeared on one side of the room with perfect theatrical timing The gathering parted to form a path for her to walk through. Then Marcus
joined her and they both took a bow, the applause still going strong

‘My new friends, honoured guests,’ Frieda said and raised her hands to quieten the gathering They hushed and she went on. ‘It is wonderful of you to give my brother
and myself such a fulsome reception. We –’ and she glanced at Marcus ‘– are so thrilled that you have enjoyed our little distraction. Now, I urge you all to indulge in the
champagne and canapés – indulge!’ And with that she swept through the room and back into the main part of the cafe.