The Titanic Murders Read Online Free Page B

Chesterfield and top hat. In his middle sixties, his hair white, his generous mustache salt-and-pepper, he carried himself with an easy gracein contrast to the martinet movements of Archie Butt, whom he approached with a gentle smile.
    “All the baggage is aboard, Major,” he said in the cultured manner of an American who had spent considerable time in England. “Our compartment is ready.”
    “Frank,” the major said, “I’d like you to meet Jack Futrelle and his lovely wife, May… Jacques Futrelle, the detective writer, that is.”
    The major’s traveling companion turned out to be Francis Millet, the celebrated painter. Futrelle told Millet how much he loved his famous painting Between Two Fires, a gently comic slice of life and love among the Puritans, and Millet praised “The Problem of Cell 13.” May oohed and ahhed over the artist; though the Futrelles had traveled in circles of celebrity since their Gramercy Park days, during Jack’s tenure on the New York Herald, May remained girlishly impressed by the famous.
    “Oh, how we’ve enjoyed your paintings in the Metropolitan, Mr. Millet,” she burbled. “And at the Tate Gallery, here in London!”
    His smile was shy, his eyes twinkling with pleasure and embarrassment. “Call me Frank, please, Mrs. Futrelle.”
    “Only if you’ll call me May.”
    As they stood chatting, a rather bizarre figure rolled through the crowd like a cannon on wheels, a figure so out of place in this posh company he seemed designed to make Futrelle feel more at home here: wearing a gray suit that seemingly had been slept in, a shapeless brown hat whose brim was as crooked as a beggar’s smile, came a potbellied cross between a hobo and Saint Nick, with wild sky-blue eyes in a splotchy visage adorned with a full nest of snow-white beard that all but blotted out hisstring tie. He was probably in his mid-sixties, as was the rather ordinary, heavyset woman trailing along after him.
    “My word,” May breathed. “Who is that creature?”
    “A colleague of mine, madam, unlikely as it may seem,” the major said, “though we’ve never met.”
    “That’s William T. Stead, dear,” Futrelle told his wife. “One of the world’s foremost eccentrics.”
    “I’m afraid I’ve never heard of him.”
    “Well,” the major said, “you’ll undoubtedly hear him on the ship—he’s quite vociferous, one of the most notorious of the muckraking journalists of Britain, lately an outspoken pacifist, and a devoted spiritualist.”
    “What an outlandish combination of interests,” May said.
    Futrelle could see that his wife’s initial unfavorable reaction to Dr. Stead’s appearance had already been overcome by her native curiosity in the complex package that was this strange man, who the mystery writer knew to have been an influential, even pioneering newspaperman in his day.
    But Futrelle was puzzled about something, even as he watched the burly bearded figure board the train, the elderly woman seeing him off. “And how is it that Mr. Stead is your colleague, Archie?”
    “I understand the president has invited him to speak at the international peace conference, later this month in New York.”
    “Who else is appearing?” Millet asked dryly. “A trained bear?”
    “Don’t underestimate him, Frank,” the major said to his friend. “He has an evangelical background—they say he’s a mesmerizing speaker.”
    A diminutive figure, dapper in a single-breasted fine-striped sack suit and pearl-gray fedora, topcoat over one arm,swaggered up with a gold-topped walking stick and removed his hat, nodding to May. He had gone to some trouble to present a handsome appearance, an effort undercut by his narrow ferret’s face, intense unblinking dark eyes and an oversize, overwaxed handlebar mustache.
    “Good morning, Major,” the ferret-faced man said in a voice as oily as his black hair. “Bit of breeze, carrying soot, I’m afraid.”
    “One never knows what rubbish a breeze will