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Chapter 5 - No Phones, No Lights, No Motor Car

"Question Everything.  Learn Something.  Answer nothing." Engineer's motto.

Hargrove jolted awake as the ship lurched hard to port.  All remaining attempts to stay unconscious were dashed, literally, as the handle of his Webley slid across the wooden table onto his head, which had been resting on the bench at its side.

“Aw gah” he tried.  “Gack.”  The room spun.  Horrible groaning sounds emanated from the bowels of the ship, which seemed trapped in the throes of some gastronomic nightmare.  “Erp.”

With great care and considerable pain, the detective shifted to allow himself to look around.  The room was lit dimly by the emergency red lighting, casting confusing shadows on the curved bulkheads.  In the thick imperfect glass of the outside porthole, Hargrove could see the reflection of himself against the night sky: a frightening spectre of a bandaged man, red bow tie picking bloody highlights off a pink suit.

Pink?  The Marxist detective sat right up in horror.  Gasping in pain, he settled his head forward into his arms.  Ah yes – the lighting.  He hadn’t become seduced by capitalist debauchery at all; it was just the ships emergency lighting.

The ship!  The popping and creaking seemed to have settled down somewhat, and the lurching had stopped.  Cautiously, Hargrove determined that the tilted lines of the floor weren’t at all the result of trauma on his part.  The floor had a fifteen-degree angle to it that was definitely real, and frighteningly unnatural.

After returning the Webley to its holster in his jacket, he tentatively worked his way to the door and poked his head out into the hall.  In that moment, the disturbing silence of the ship that had followed whatever horrible catastrophic event had occurred was broken, giving rise to the symphony of shouting, screaming and babble that marks all great events of the proletariat.

In a moment, that too passed, dulled to a distant roar.  Partly through a retreat on the part of Hargrove’s mind, some defence mechanism natural to those with razor sharp mental faculties, but also due in part to the fact that the ship seemed solid and content in its new attitude.

As was becoming his habit, Hargrove proceeded along the path of least resistance.  Namely downhill, which now meant port, and as much as possible, stern.  Or was that bow, and right?  Or left, and Stem?  Well never mind, it was the easiest route, and for that reason alone, Hargrove took it.

“Well, well, well.  Look who has finally graced us.  Excellent, my boy, thought you wouldn’t make it personally, but there you go.”  The dry tones of General Tobermorry did nothing to improve Hargrove’s humour.   “Come to join our search for the Armenian Separatists, then, have you?”

Mind racing, Hargrove completed the twisting logic of one of the more recent puzzles even as he left the cabin for the deck:.  Why, these sorts of things were no match for him.  His brilliant deductive powers ravaged his broken body, top to bottom, and leapt from him to inform the rest of the room, leaving him heaving and gasping with his own brilliance.

“We’ve run aground.”

“Quite”, Gen. Tobormorry intoned unimpressed.  The sand bar stretched out behind him, robbing the Marxist detective of his just rewards.  “What do you think, Rory, of our great detective now?  He has a flair for the obvious, I’d say.”

The General’s amused bourgeoisie tones made Hargrove’s hands twitch toward his dishevelled jacket.  No, mustn’t go there.  There was work to be done.  His keen eye wandered over the deck, where Passengers in various states littered the area. 

They’d obviously been attempting to engage the life rafts before this more recent event, and several seem to have been thrown out over the edge in that same catastrophic end.  Knocked clear of their penny loafers, served them right.  Anyone who would wear Ocean-Pacific tops and Nike shoes deserved their fate, particularly when one considered the offences brought on by their oversized garishly coloured beach shorts.

Why the very existence of these pathetic parasitic layabouts signified the ripeness of the time for social revolution. Clearly the bacteria of their malaise had found fertile ground in this lot of unproductive wastrels.  Soon the cause would swell to strength.  Ranks of proletariat rising to the call, casting the pickaxe of change at the fungus of bourgeoisie scum, they’d -

The surly engineer threw him an evil grin, reminding Hargrove of how he had made it to his current painful state.  Later.  There was time for these thoughts later. 

“Och sir, yer lookin’ quite the pompous eruption of infected sheep droppings.”  McGuiness said, presumably by way of apology.

“Sir?”  It was too much. Him, a fellow worker addressed as ‘sir’, as if he was some stuffed shirt!  He was not some shmincy overdressed fanciful ponce like…the engineer’s eyes adopted an evil glint.  Hargrove retreated, stumbling, against the bulkhead, suddenly deflated.  Casting about for a change of subject, he interjected quickly, “er, have we located Frieda Engles?”

Amused indifference turned to snorting disdain.  “My dear boy, you can’t be serious.  A man’s been shot, we’ve run aground.  Mister Largent has kindly informed us of her complete innocence.  I hardly think this silliness need continue.”

“Ah, but there you are wrong.” Hargrove was suddenly in control again.  “In fact, she is there, behind you, and this ‘silliness’ as you so incorrectly refer to it, is only the beginning.”  Confident in his iron grasp of the situation, he strode purposefully across the deck past the General, to where a well coifed immaculate brunette in a high cut tight fitting skirt sat dejectedly on a crate marked ‘ENGLES,  F.’.

What’s in the crate?  Who is Frieda Engles, and what does Hargrove think she did?  Will they succumb to the heat on this sandbar in the middle of nowhere, especially when the latrines give out?  Why is the engineer free, not to mention Hargrove, who has, after all shot the crewman?

Do ticks have jaws?  What is it with ticks?

On to Chapter 6