The Riverboat Mystery (Jenny Starling #3)(23)

She took the novel and headed very firmly away from the engine room to her own galley, where it was safe.

*

Gabriel watched Lucas saunter to the railings on the port deck and glanced around. Dorothy and David were busily engaged in a game of draughts, and his wife had had the good sense to make herself scarce, so now was the perfect time to have it out with Lucas.

Gabriel was still smarting over the way Lucas had laughed at him at lunch. Well, he thought, stepping out onto the deck and carefully shutting the sliding glass doors behind him, now it was his turn to have a really good laugh. Being as he was the one who was going to laugh last, as it were.

It all started off reasonably enough. ‘Lucas,’ Gabriel said, nodding amicably.

On the rail, the parrot scratched himself vigorously behind one ear. A small scarlet feather disengaged itself and floated on the breeze to settle on the water. No doubt it would puzzle quite a few anglers before the day was out.

Lucas turned, his smile widening innocently. ‘Gab,’ he said, and nodded back.

Gabriel leaned his back against the sturdy white-painted wooden rails, which came up almost to the lowest point of his shoulder blades. ‘Great trip,’ he said, feeling his way into it. He’d waited so long for this moment that he wanted to savour it. Besides, he never had been the kind of man to rush into things.

Lucas caught something in his tone of voice, though, and his smile began to falter. He looked at his guest with a slightly quizzical air. ‘It always is,’ Lucas boasted. And it was no idle boast, either. Gabriel had taken four trips on the Stillwater Swan, and all four had been magnificent.

‘I was wondering if you ever took her to London?’ Gabriel said, studying his fingernails. But his eyes glittered with glee. ‘I think I will, you know. Perhaps this autumn.’

Lucas felt himself stiffening. ‘Not still singing that same old song are yer, me old china?’ he said, and turned to face sideways. There was something about the way old Gabby was smiling that Lucas didn’t much like. ‘I’m getting a bit tired of telling you the Swan ain’t for sale. I’m thinking of getting some cards made up saying just that, so that I can just hand one out whenever you bang on about it. Save my breath, like.’

Lucas had invited the Olneys on so many trips just because, like most people, he appreciated having his possessions coveted. And old Gabby had wanted the Swan from the moment he’d clapped eyes on her. All very gratifying, of course, but now the old sod was beginning to get on his nerves a bit with this bee he had in his bonnet.

Lucas made up his mind then and there that this was the last time he’d invite him on board.

‘Hmm.’ Gabriel continued to study his fingernails with exaggerated care. ‘I brought a cheque to exchange for this magnificent lady along with me, but the wife found it, you know, and tore it up. Jasmine doesn’t appreciate quality like I do. Can’t expect it of her, I suppose,’ he sighed. ‘She’s so typically middle class. It takes the upper classes, or, oddly enough, the lower classes—’ and he paused here to give Lucas a telling look ‘—to really appreciate quality.’

Lucas was too thick-skinned to be insulted. Instead of blowing up, as Gabriel had half expected, Lucas merely laughed.

‘Poor old Jasmine,’ he said, not altogether insincerely. Who could envy anyone married to a boring lech like Gabriel? ‘Still, it was just as well that she did tear the cheque up, you know. As I told you last time, and the time before that, the Swan isn’t for sale.’ And Lucas gave the wide white rail an affectionate pat.

‘Ah, but that was before,’ Gabriel said, and he reached into his voluminous pocket to withdraw a rather chunky set of papers.

‘Before what?’ Lucas asked cautiously, his cockney twang becoming more pronounced as he began to feel decidedly uneasy.

‘Before I got a friend of mine from the MOD to copy me these,’ Gabriel said, and handed them over.

*

In the games room, Dorothy jumped the last of her husband’s pieces. ‘There. I knew you weren’t paying attention,’ she teased. ‘You can usually beat me hands down.’

She’d showered and washed her hair after her swim, and now her long locks fell around her shoulders like a gossamer cloud. She was wearing a periwinkle-blue summer frock, and David, for a moment pushing his troubles to one side, looked at her with appreciative eyes.

But before he could reply, they both nearly jumped out of their skins.

Out on the deck, Lucas Finch roared something so loudly and so furiously that he was all but incoherent. In the summer heat, every door, window and porthole on the Swan had been left open, allowing the outraged bellow to be heard in every room.

In the galley, Jenny dropped an onion, nearly cutting her finger into the bargain, and cursed rather roundly. She’d learned a rather interesting vocabulary of swear words from an admiral she’d once worked for. What curse or scandalous epithet that man hadn’t known hadn’t been worth hearing. He could even have taught Lucas’s parrot a thing or two.

She stooped down and picked up the fallen vegetable, put it in the sink to wash, and then wandered to the door of the galley. Outside, the main salon was empty, but the door to the games room stood open.

She could clearly see Dorothy and David Leigh, their mouths hanging comically open, staring out onto the port deck.

There, Jenny saw, Lucas Finch had Gabriel Olney by the throat. Literally.