The Empress Murders Extract by Toby Schmitz

A razor-sharp, mind-bendingly clever whodunnit from award-winning playwright and actor, Toby Schmitz. Read an extract of The Empress Murders.

It's 1925 and the Empress of Australia is making her regular Atlantic crossing, New York–bound, with a full manifest of passengers.

When a dead body is uncovered onboard, it is up to Inspector Archie Daniels to find the killer. But solving one murder quickly turns into solving two, then three, and it becomes clear that Daniels must act fast to avoid an all-souls-lost–level calamity. No one, from the horrendously wealthy and entitled first-class passengers to those they consider the dregs of empire below deck, is safe. And no one can get off ...

Everyone is in peril. Everyone is a suspect.

Read on for a taste of The Empress Murders by Toby Schmitz ...

WELCOME ABOARD

Here’s an idea, I float because a person had me.

Unlike people, ideas get re-christened mid-voyage, all the time.

I was Leaf In Puddle for aeons. I was Fishing Raft for millennia, I was Canoe. I grew Sails, then— a weirdly long time coming— a Keel. I got other names, then names within names.

The outbreak of the Great War stalled my build in the shipyard, until Kaiser Wilhelm II sped me to the slips, christening me Tirpitz, eager for a showy Royal Yacht to stand on the deck of as he accepted the Allied surrender. Instead, the Allies relieved Germany of me, and I became Troop Ship while the world worked out how to get all those soldiers home, then for a bit I was Passenger Ship, trafficking mainly in migrants.

The war had made my name popular: there were now three at sea called Tirpitz, which is as crass as a kindergarten full of Lilys. So, I was the Empress of India for a few minutes, the Empress of China for a few days, then— presumably before someone at the Canadian Pacific Railway naming department was let go— I was anointed the Empress of Australia, and still am.

I’m not a Train, if that wasn’t clear.

I’m now an Ocean Liner. A cast-iron idea.

A new idea shipping the lanes the past hundred years is that it’s bad luck to change a vessel’s name. Though luck is only another idea, albeit moderately older . . . Listen, what would I know? I’m an idea about a leaf. All I know is sea-change.

You may have heard of me. Two years ago on a Pacific run I was docked in Yokohama for the largest earthquake on record. Earthquakes don’t rattle me, it’s those tsunamis that make my bilge rise. Anyway, I managed to help— while aflame, mind you— ferrying casualties out and supplies back in, and was famous for a moment.

There’s a brass plaque on the landing of my Great Staircase that will give you the rundown.

I got a lavish refit, still have that new ship smell in certain nooks and quarters. Twin screws, flashy Parsons turbines, three smokestacks (one purely for show). My interiors were refreshed with French Regency and Empire furnishings, in the 1st class lounge (Boat Deck) you can kick a football and not have it hit a wall . . .

Huh. My electrics just flickered.

(In the near-empty C Deck Canteen, Inspector Archie Daniels, the ship detective, doesn’t notice the lights stutter. Stout, underslept, Daniels squints into a cup of black tea. Thinking again.)

ROUGH DRAFT

We’ll start on C Deck with Mr Frey. The lamp in his 3rd class cabin is a bulb on a brass arm jutting from the plaster. Stencilled around the canvas lampshade is the Canadian Pacific Railway insignia, so when the porthole goes dark, as it’s soon to do, the letters CPR warp in negative relief around the cramped room.

Frey is sat at his desk-cum-washstand in his good shirt with high collar attached, pencil nub poised. When the lights flicker he looks up at the mirror: where his face should be is a blank piece of paper, stuck there with wax. Frey can write anywhere, yet he can’t

do it looking at himself.

As a boy he read frantically. Discovered and finished the Great Australian Poets in a sitting. On the farm, where nothing moved except sheep and the weathervane, literacy was met with suspicion and jealousy. He had books mailed to his schoolhouse, did them on

the long walk home, then burned them, mouthing the last words, down by the creek.

On his last day of school, his teacher demanded he continue his literary tuition after Christmas free of charge. He got home that afternoon to find his mother had forged his signature and volunteered him for the Great War.

The war let him read, threw a ladder from the sky into the trench. At the Somme, and other jolly destinations, he’d entomb books in the tunnels. His only guilt, this habitual permutation of his parents’ philistinism, getting rid of books.

If I get out of this, he thought at Gallipoli, warming his hands over fluffy embers of The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), I shall be a writer.

There was a shift in poetry, around the time Frey shipped to Egypt for infantry training, to an aesthetic both beautiful and brutal: oriental. How a poem looks could now reflect how it feels.

A surge in the ship makes his wicker chair creak. He smells steerage food seeping through the fresh paint they slather on the plasterboard because it’s easier than scouring off the grease and tobacco smoke. Behind that, always down here, the faecal whiff.

Frey’s lean, one-meal-a-day frame cramps around his stomach. It is bewitching being hungry, knowing a feast awaits. Tonight he will not chow cabbage and mutton shoulder-to-shoulder at a 3rd class trestle table. Tonight Frey has engineered an invitation for the nutritional delights of above. He became a dab hand at this during the war, buttering up officers who could afford to eat properly, and is surprised more people aren’t skilled at it. A mere case of flattery.

Satisfied being unsatisfied, he takes in the reflection of the room bordering the blank piece of paper, dissolving the syllables of oriental in his mouth like a communion wafer. Even before you tooth their roots, words mean different things . . .

French Regency & Empire Furnishings, for example. Handsome words on the poster at the travel agency— however, 3rd class passengers are whisked past their main effect. The cornices and chairs with curlicues, the sprays of baroque in the curtains and rugs, the slender Art Nouveaux lines calming it down if not altogether tying it together, with the latest Arts Décoratifs fixtures looking on, assuming the way forward.

Frey had to work the travel agent for this odd room. C Deck is four-to-a-room bunks but for this rogue cabin, a breakaway from the deck above, a shack for extraneous furnishings.

Much use has been made of carpet offcuts in here. The blue base carpet— besieged by yellow fleurs-de-lis— is obscured by a carpet rug of rust and tangerine oblongs at haphazard angles. The overstuffed sofa, which doesn’t seat one, is upholstered in butter-coloured carpet; a butter carpet cushion always slips to the floor so stays there. Wedged under the porthole latch is a little tin in which two stems of clover and white roots have been sunning on the awkward sill. There is a plank cot bed, Frey’s three almost-too-heavy-to-lift

suitcases sticking out from underneath, a brushed metal latrine one can privatise nonsensically with a verdant carpet curtain on wooden rings, and a barrack-grade enamel basin with tap. All of which Frey can touch from where he sits.

He puts a palm on his pocketbook.

Frey crafts poems from words he’s heard. Most mundane with occasional gems: bequeath, Bahamas, big-time. He’s always invented poems from words he’s heard over ones he’s read, thinking it a deviance, but Berlin got him believing it’s the only way. The poetry

readings in Berlin stopped him dead. He saw men (and women) cut books up and rearrange words. His engine found its name: Dada. Evergreen Dada. Art is what you want it to be and everything is art and nothing is.

Just be new.

Frey makes lists of words, cross-references them with panache, connects them with snaky lines, attempts his poems, multiple versions, a mayhem of mock phrases. Slips words around like mahjong tiles, like those Chinese puzzles with sliding shapes.

The salted porthole in his cabin has started to go India ink, and the letters CPR are beginning to lattice the bulkheads.

Frey says ‘time’ and stands.

Moves the little tin with clover in it to the washstand.

Frey sticks his fresh-shaved face into the one-abreast corridor.

Then presses a plasterboard panel opposite his room, and it clicks open: a hidden door, revealing a humid, unlit service annex. His one Harris Tweed suit is hooked on a wooden hanger above a fat pipe that runs the length of the ship and the leaking steam presses

it for him during the day.

Dressed now, he heads to the wooden stairs, which will deliver him from this communal reek up to the tinkling of A Deck cocktail hour. Someone a few doors down is singing ‘Hope and Glory’ with dirty lyrics.

Being introduced to a slew of new people rarely happens on terra firma.

Happens all the time on ocean liners.

It’s about to happen to you.

Breathe, I’ve got you. You really needn’t remember all the names and nationalities, the shapes of their eyes and so on.

What you ought to remember is that someone’s been murdered.

An extract from The Empress Murders by Toby Schmitz.

Available 29 April wherever books are sold.

The Empress Murders

by Toby Schmitz

The Empress Murders is a razor-sharp, mind-bendingly clever novel that is both a witty, bloodthirsty whodunnit and an excoriating look at the excesses of the British Empire, just as the sun begins to set on it.

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