The Golden Rendezvous

Chapter 4

I didn’t get a great deal of investigating done that night. I’d figured out how to start, all right, but the devil of it was I couldn’t start till the passengers were up and about in the morning. Nobody likes being turned out of his bed in the middle of the night, a millionaire least of all.

After having cautiously identified myself to the bo’sun to ensure that I didn’t get the back of my head stove in with a marlinespike, I spent a good fifteen minutes in the vicinity of the wireless office, relating its position to other offices and nearby accommodation. The wireless office was on the starboard side, left immediately above the forward “A” deck accommodation and Cerdan’s suite was directly below — and on the basis of my assumption that the murderer, even if he didn’t wait for the last few words of the message to come through, could have had no more than ten seconds to get from wherever the hidden receiver was to the wireless office, then any place within ten seconds’ reach of the wireless office automatically came under suspicion. There were quite a few places within the suspected limits. There was the bridge, flag office, radar office, chart room, and all the deck officers’ and cadets’ accommodation. Those could be ruled out at once. There was the dining room, galleys, pantries, officers’ lounge, telegraph lounge and, immediately adjacent to the telegraph lounge, another lounge which rejoiced in the name of the drawing room — it having been found necessary to provide an alternative lounge for our millionaires’ wives and daughters who weren’t all so keen on the alcoholic and ticker-tape attractions of the telegraph lounge as their husbands and fathers were.

I spent forty minutes going through those — they were all deserted at that time of night — and if anyone had yet invented a transistor receiver smaller than a match box, then I might have missed it; but anything larger, I’d have found it for sure. That left only the passengers’ accommodation, with the cabins on “A” deck, immediately below the wireless office, as the prime suspects. The “B” deck suites, on the next deck below, were not out with the bounds of possibility; but when I ran a mental eye over the stiff-legged bunch of elderly crocks on “B” deck, I couldn’t think of a man among them who could have made it to the wireless office in under ten seconds. And it certainly hadn’t been a woman: because whoever had killed Brownell had not only also laid out Benson, but removed him from sight, and Benson weighed a hundred and eighty pounds if he weighed an ounce.

So, “A” or “B” decks. Both of them would have to go through the sieve tomorrow. I prayed for good weather to tempt our passengers out onto the sun decks to give the stewards, in the course of making up beds and cleaning out the cabins, the chance to carry out a thorough search. The customs in Jamaica, of course, had already done this; but they had been looking for a mechanism over six feet in length, not a radio which, in these days of miniaturisation, could easily have been hidden in, say, one of those hefty jewel boxes which were run of the mill among our millionaires’ wives.

We were running almost due northeast now, under the same indigo sky ablaze with stars, the Campari rolling gently as it sliced along the line of the long, slow swell. We’d taken almost half an hour to make an eighty-degree change of course so that no night-owl passenger abroad on deck could see the changing direction of our wake, not that those precautions were going to be of any use if any of our passengers had the faintest of stellar navigation or, come to that, the very elementary ability to locate the pole star.

I was walking slowly up the boat deck, port side, when I saw Captain Bullen approaching. He lifted his arm, motioned me into the deep shadow cast by one of the ship’s lifeboats.

“Thought I would find you here or hereabouts,” he said softly. He reached under his jacket and pressed something cold and hard into my hand. “I believe you know how to use one of those.”

Starlight glinted dully off the blued metal in my hand. A Colt automatic, one of the three kept on a locked chain in a glass cabinet in the captain’s sleeping cabin. Captain Bullen was certainly taking things seriously at last.

“I can use it, sir.”

“Right. Stick it in your belt or wherever you stick those damned things. Never realised they were so blasted awkward to conceal about your person. And here’s a spare magazine. Hope to God we don’t have to use them.” Which meant the captain had one also.

“The third gun, sir?”

“I don’t know.” He hesitated. “Wilson, I thought.”

“He’s a good man. But give it to the bo’sun.”

“The bo’sun?” Bullen’s voice sharpened, then he remembered the need for secrecy and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial growl. “You know the regulations, mister. Those guns to be used only in times of war, piracy, or mutiny and never to be issued to anyone other than an officer.”

“The regulations don’t concern me half as much as my own neck does, sir. You know Macdonald’s record — youngest-ever sergeant-major in the commandos, a list of decorations as long as your arm. Give it to Macdonald, sir.”

“We’ll see,” he grunted, “we’ll see. I’ve just been to the carpenter’s store. With doc Marston. First time I’ve ever seen that old phony shaken to the core. He agrees with you, says there’s no doubt Brownell was murdered. You’d think he was up in the dock of the Old Bailey with the alibis he’s giving himself. But I think Mcllroy was right when he said the symptoms were about the same.”

“Well,” I said doubtfully, “I hope nothing comes of it, sir.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know old doc Marston as well as I do, sir. The two great loves of his life are Jamaica rum and the desire to give the impression that he’s on the inside of everything that goes on. A dangerous combination. Apart from Mcllroy, the purser, yourself, and myself, the only person who knows that Brownell didn’t die a natural death is the bo’sun, and he’d never talk. Doc Marston is a different proposition altogether.”

“Not to worry, my boy,” Bullen said with something like relish in his voice. “I told our worthy surgeon that, Lord Dexter’s pal or not, if he as much as lifted a glass of rum before we arrived in Nassau, I’d have him on the beach, and for good, within the week.”

I tried to imagine anyone telling that venerable and aristocratic doctor anything of the sort: my mind boggled at the very thought. But they hadn’t made Bullen company commodore for nothing. I knew he’d done exactly as stated.

“He didn’t take off any of Brownell’s clothes?” I asked. “His shirt, for instance?”

“No. What does it matter?”

“It’s just that it’s probable that whoever strangled Brownell had his fingers locked round the back of the neck to give leverage, and I believe that police today can pick up fingerprints from practically any substance, including certain types of clothes. They shouldn’t have too much trouble picking up prints from those nice shiny, starched collars that Brownell wore.”

“You don’t miss much,” Bullen said thoughtfully. “Except may be you’ve missed your profession. Anything else?”

“Yes. About this burial at sea tomorrow at dawn.” There was a long pause, then he said with the blasphemously weary restraint of a long-suffering man who has already held himself in check far too long, “What bloody burial at dawn? Brownell is our only exhibition for the Nassau police.”

“Burial, sir,” I repeated. “But not at dawn. About, say, eight o’clock, when a fair number of our passengers will be up and about, having had their morning constitutional. This is what I mean, sir.” I told him what I meant and he listened patiently enough, considering. When I was finished he nodded slowly, two or three times in succession, turned and left me without a word.

I moved out into a lane of light between two lifeboats and glanced at my watch. Twenty-five minutes past eleven. I’d told Macdonald I’d relieve him at midnight. I walked across to the rail and stood there by a life-jacket locker, staring out over the slow shimmering swell of the sea, hands at arms’ length on the rail, vainly trying to figure out what could possibly lie behind all that had happened that evening.

When I awoke, it was twenty minutes to one. Not that I was immediately aware of the time when I awoke; I wasn’t immediately and clearly aware of anything. It’s difficult to be aware of anything when your head is being squeezed between the jaws of a giant vice and your eyes have gone blind, to be aware of anything, that is, except the vice and the blindness. Blindness. My eyes. I was worried about my eyes. I raised a hand and fumbled round for a while and then I found them. They were filled with something hard and encrusted, and when I rubbed the crust came away and there was stickiness beneath. Blood. There was blood in my eyes, blood that was gumming the lids together and making me blind. At least, I hoped vaguely, it was blood that was making me blind. I rubbed some more blood away with the heel of my hand, and then I could see. Not too well, not the way I was used to seeing; the stars in the sky were not the bright pin points of light to which I was accustomed but just a pale, fuzzy haze seen through a frosted-glass window. I reached out a trembling hand and tried to touch this frosted glass, but it vanished and dissolved as I reached out and what my hand touched was cool and metallic. I strained my eyes wide open and saw that there was indeed no glass there; what I was touching was the lowermost bar of the ship’s rail.

I could see better now, at least better than a blind man could. My head was lying in the scuppers, inches away from one of the lifeboat davits. What in god’s name was I doing there with my head in the scuppers, inches away from the davits? I managed to get both hands under me and, with a sudden drunken lurch, heaved myself into a semi-sitting position with one elbow still on the deck. A great mistake, a very great mistake, for at once a blinding, agonising pain, that never-recorded pain that must be experienced in the final shattering millisecond of awareness as a plunging guillotine slices through bone, flesh, and muscle before crashing into the block beneath, slashed its paralysing way across head, neck, and shoulders and toppled me back to the deck again. My head must have struck heavily against the iron of the scuppers, but I don’t think I even moaned. Slowly, infinitely slowly, consciousness came back to me. Consciousness of a kind. Where clarity and awareness and speed of recovery were concerned, I was a man chained hand and foot, surfacing from the bottom of a sea of molasses. Something, I dimly realised, was touching my face, my eyes, my mouth: something cold and moist and sweet. Water. Someone was sponging my face with water, gently trying to mop the blood from my eyes. I made to turn my head to see who it was and then I vaguely remembered what had happened last time I moved my head. I raised my right hand instead and touched someone’s wrist.

“Take it easy, sir. You just take it easy.” the man with the sponge must have had a long arm; he was at least two miles away, but I recognised the voice for all that. Archie Macdonald. “Don’t you try moving now. Just you wait a bit. You’ll be all right, sir.”

“Archie?” We were a real disembodied pair, I thought fuzzily. I was at least a couple of miles away too. I only hoped we were a couple of miles away in the same direction. “Is that you, Archie?” God knows I didn’t doubt it. I just wanted the reassurance of hearing him say so.

“It’s myself, sir. Just you leave everything to me.” It was the bo’sun all right; he couldn’t have used that sentence more than five thousand times in the years I’d known him. “Just you lie still.”

I’d no intention of doing anything else. I’d be far gone in years before I’d ever forget the last time I moved, if I lived that long, which didn’t seem likely at the moment.

“My neck, Archie.” My voice sounded a few hundred yards closer.

“I think it’s broken.”

“Aye, I’m sure it feels that way, sir, but I’m thinking myself may be it’s not as bad as all that. We’ll see.” I don’t know how long I lay there, maybe two or three minutes, while the bo’sun swabbed the blood away until eventually the stars began to swim into some sort of focus again. Then he slid one arm under my shoulders and under my head and began to lift me, inch by patient inch, into a sitting position.

I waited for the guillotine to fall again, but it didn’t. This time it was more like a butcher’s meat chopper, but a pretty blunt chopper: several times in a few seconds the Campari spun round 360 degrees on its keel, then settled down on course again. 047, I seemed to recall. And this time I didn’t lose consciousness.

“What time is it, Archie?” A stupid question to ask, but I wasn’t at my very best. And my voice, I was glad to hear, was at last practically next door to me.

He turned my left wrist.

“Twelve forty-five, your watch says, sir. I think you must have been lying here a good hour. You were in the shadow of the boat and no one would have seen you even if they had passed by this way.”

I moved my head an experimental inch and winced at the pain of it. Two inches and it would fall off.

“What the hell happened to me, Archie? Some kind of turn or other? I don’t remember.”

“Some kind of turn!” his voice was soft and cold. I felt his fingers touch the back of my neck. “Our friend with the sandbag has been taking a walk again, sir. One of these days,” he added thoughtfully, “I’m going to catch him at it.”

“Sandbag!” I struggled to my feet, but I’d never have made it without the bo’sun. “The wireless office! Peters!”

“It’s young Mr. Jenkins that’s on now, sir. He’s all right. You said you’d relieve me for the middle watch, and when twenty past twelve came I knew something was wrong. So I just went straight into the wireless office and phoned Captain Bullen.”

“The captain?”

“Who else could I phone, sir?” Who else, indeed? Apart from myself the captain was the only deck officer who really knew what had happened, who knew where the bo’sun was concealed and why. Macdonald had his arm round me now, still half supporting me, leading me forward to the cross passage that led to the wireless office. “He came at once. He’s there now, talking to Mr. Jenkins. Worried stiff thinks the same thing might have happened to you as happened to Benson. He gave me a present before I came looking for you.” He made a movement and I could see the barrel of a pistol that was all but engulfed in his huge hand. “I am hoping that I get a chance to use this, Mr. Carter, and not the butt end, either. I suppose you realise that if you had toppled forward instead of sideways, you’d most likely have fallen over the rail into the sea.” I wondered grimly why they hadn’t, in fact, shoved me over the side but said nothing, just concentrated on reaching the wireless office. Captain Bullen was waiting there, just outside the door, and the bulge in the pocket of his uniform jacket wasn’t caused only by his hand. He came quickly to meet us, probably to get out of earshot of the wireless officer, and his reaction to my condition and story of what had happened was all that anyone could reasonably have wished for. He was just mad clear through. I’d never seen him in such a mood of tightly controlled anger since I’d first met him three years ago. When he’d calmed down a bit, he said, “but why the devil didn’t they go the whole hog and throw you overboard while they were at it?”

“They didn’t have to, sir,” I said wearily. “They didn’t want to kill me. Just to get me out of the road.”

He peered at me, the cold eyes speculative. “You talk as if you knew why they coshed you.”

“I do. Or I think I do.” I rubbed the back of my neck with a gentle hand. I was pretty sure now there weren’t any vertebrae broken; it just felt that way. “My own fault. I overlooked the obvious. Come to that, we all overlooked the obvious. Once they’d killed Brownell and we’d deduced, by association, that they’d also killed Benson, I lost all interest in Benson. I just assumed that they’d got rid of him. All I was concerned with, all any of us was concerned with, was to see that there was no further attack made on the wireless office, to try to find out where the receiver was, and to figure what lay behind it all. Benson, we were sure, was dead, and a dead Benson could no longer be of any use to us. So we forgot Benson. Benson belonged to the past.”

“Are you trying to tell me that Benson was — is — still alive?”

“He was dead all right.” I felt about ninety, a badly crippled ninety, and the vice round my head wasn’t easing off any I could notice. “He was dead, but they hadn’t got rid of him. May be they hadn’t a chance to get rid of him. Maybe they had to wait till it was real good and dark to get rid of him. But they had to get rid of himself we’d found him, we’d have known there was a murderer aboard. They probably had him stashed away in some place where we wouldn’t have thought of looking for him anyway, lying on top of one of the offices, stuck in a ventilator, behind one of the sundeck benches it could have been anywhere. And I was either too near where they’d stashed him, so that they couldn’t get at him, or they couldn’t chuck him overboard as long as I was standing by the rail there. Barring myself, they knew they were safe enough. Going at maximum speed, with a bow wave like we’re throwing up right now, no one would have heard anything if they had dropped him into the sea, and on a dark and moonless night like this no one would have seen anything either. So they’d only me to deal with and they didn’t find that any trouble at all,” I finished bitterly.

Bullen shook his head. “You never heard a thing? Not the faintest fall of a footstep, not even the swish of a cosh coming through the air?”

“Old flannel-feet must be a pretty dangerous character, sir,” I said reflectively. “He didn’t make the slightest whisper of sound. I wouldn’t have thought it possible. For all I know, I might have taken a fainting turn and struck my head on the davit as I fell. That’s what I thought myself even suggested it to the bo’sun here. And that’s what I’m going to tell anyone who wants to know tomorrow.” I grinned and winked at Macdonald, and even the wink hurt. “I’ll tell them you’ve been overworking me, sir, and I collapsed from exhaustion.”

“Why tell anyone?” Bullen wasn’t amused. “It doesn’t show where you have been coshed; that wound is just above the temple and inside the hairline and could be pretty well camouflaged. Agreed?”

“No, sir. Someone knows I had an accident the character responsible for it — and he’s going to regard it as damned queer if I make no reference to it at all. But if I do mention it and pass it off as a ladylike swoon, there’s an even chance he may accept it, and if he does we’re still going to have the advantage of being in the position of knowing there’s mayhem and murder aboard, while they will have no suspicion we know anything of the kind.”

“Your mind,” said Captain Bullen unsympathetically, “is beginning to clear at last.”

When I awoke in the morning the already hot sun was streaming in through my uncurtained window. My cabin, immediately abaft the captain’s, was on the starboard side, and the sun was coming from forward, which meant that we were still steaming northeast. I raised myself on my elbow to have a look at the sea conditions, for the Campari had developed a definite if gentle pitching movement, and it was then that I discovered that my neck was rigidly bound in a plaster cast. At least it felt exactly like it. I could move it about an inch to either side and then a pair of clamps took hold. A dull steady ache, but no pain worth mentioning. I tried to force my head beyond the limits of the clamps, but I only tried once. I waited till the cabin stopped swaying round and the red-hot wires in my neck had cooled off to a tolerable temperature, then climbed stiffly out of my bunk. Let them call me stiff-neck Carter if they wanted. That was enough of that lot.

I crossed to the window. Still a cloudless sky with the sun, white, glaring, already high above the horizon, striking a glittering, blinding path across the blueness of the sea. The swell was deeper, longer, heavier than I expected and coming up from the starboard quarter. I wound down the window and there was no wind I could notice, which meant that there was a fair breeze pushing up from astern, but not enough to whiten the smoothly roiled surface of the sea.

I showered, shaved — I’d never before appreciated how difficult it is to shave when the turning motion of your head is limited to an arc of two inches — then examined the wound.

Seen in daylight, it looked bad, much worse than it had in the night: above and behind the left temple, it was a two inch gash, wide and very deep. And it throbbed heavily in a way I didn’t much care for. I picked up the phone and asked for doc Marston. He was still in bed but, yes, he would see me right away, an early-bird Hippocratical willingness that was very much out of character, but maybe his conscience was bothering him about his wrong diagnosis of the previous night. I dressed, put on my hat, adjusted it to a suitably rakish angle till the band just missed the wound, and went down to see him. Dr. Marston, fresh, rested, and unusually clear of eye no doubt due to Bullen’s warning to lay off the rum didn’t look like a conscience-stricken man who’d tossed and turned the sleepless night long. He didn’t seem unduly worried about the fact that we carried aboard a passenger who, if he’d truthfully listed his occupation, would have put down the word “murderer.” all he seemed concerned about was the entry in last night’s log, and when I told him no entry about Brownell had been made or would be made until we arrived in Nassau, and that when it was made no mention of my name would appear in connection with the diagnosis of Brownell’s death, he became positively jovial. He shaved off a few square inches of hair, jabbed in a local anaesthetic, cleaned and sutured the wound, covered it with a sticking plaster pad, and wished me good morning. He was through for the day.

It was quarter to eight. I dropped down the series of accommodation ladders that led to the fo'c'sle and made my way forward to the carpenter’s store. The fo'c'sle was unusually crowded for that time of the morning. There must have been close on forty members of the ship’s company gathered there, deck staff, engine-room staff, cooks and stewards, all waiting to pay their last respects to Brownell. Nor were these all the spectators. I looked up and saw that the promenade deck, which curved right round the forward superstructure of the Campari, was dotted with passengers, eleven or twelve in all: not many, but they represented close on the total male passenger complement aboard — I could see no women therewith the exception of old Cerdan and possibly one or two others. Bad news travelled fast, and even for millionaires the chance of seeing a burial at sea didn’t come along too often. Right in the middle of them was the Duke of Hartwell, looking nautical as anything in his carefully adjusted royal yachting club cap, silk scarf, and brass-buttoned navy doeskin jacket.

I skirted number one hold and thought grimly that there might indeed be something in the old superstitions: the dead cried out for company, the old salts said, and the dead men loaded only yesterday afternoon and now lying in the bottom of number four hold hadn’t been slow to get that company. Two others gone in the space of a few hours, near as a toucher three; only I’d fallen sideways instead of toppling over the rail. I felt those ice-cold fingers on the back of my neck again and shivered, then passed into the comparative gloom of the carpenter’s store, right up in the forepeak.

Everything was ready. The bier — a hastily nailed-together platform of boards, seven feet by two — lay on the deck, and the red ensign, tied to two corners of the handles at the top of the bier but free at the other end, covered the canvas wathed mound beneath. Only the bo’sun and the carpenter were there. To look at Macdonald you would never have guessed that he hadn’t slept the previous night. He had volunteered to remain on guard outside the wireless office until dawn; it had also been his idea that, though the chances of any trouble in daylight were remote, two men should be tailed for holystoning the deck outside the wireless office after breakfast, for the entire day if necessary. Meantime the radio office was closed — and heavily padlocked — to allow Peters and Jenkins to attend the funeral of their colleague. There was no difficulty about this: as was common, there was a standard arrangement whereby a bell rang either on the bridge or in the chief wireless operator’s cabin whenever a call came through on the distress frequency or on the Campari’s call sign.

The slight vibration of the Campari’s engines died away as the engine slowed and the revs dropped until we had just enough speed to give us steerageway in that heavy swell. The captain came down the companionway, carrying a heavy brass-bound bible under his arm. The heavy steel door in the port hand fo'c'sle side was swung open and back till it secured with a clang in its retaining latch. A long wooden box was slid into position, one end level with the opening in the side of the ship. Then Macdonald and the carpenter, bareheaded, appeared, carrying bier and burden, and laid them on the box.

The service was very brief, very simple. Captain Bullen said a few words about Brownell, about as true as words usually are in those circumstances, led the tattered singing of “abide with me,” read the burial service, and nodded to the bo’sun. The Royal Navy did this sort of thing better, but we didn’t carry any bugles aboard the Campari. Macdonald lifted the inboard end of the bier; the canvas-swathed mound slid out slowly from beneath the red ensign and was gone with only the faintest of splashings to mark its departure. I glanced up at the promenade deck and saw the Duke of Hartwell there, standing stiffly at attention, right arm bent up to his peaked cap in rigid salute. Even allowing for the natural disadvantages lent him by his face, I had seldom seen a more ludicrous sight. No doubt to the unbiassed observer he was putting up a more fitting show than myself, but I find it hard to be at my reverent best when I know that all I’m committing to the deep is a length of canvas, large quantities of engine-room waste, and a hundred and fifty pounds of rusty chain to give the necessary negative buoyancy.

The door in the ship’s side clanged shut; Captain Bullen handed over the Bible to a cadet; the engine revs mounted, and the Campari was back in business again. And the first item on the agenda was breakfast.

In my three years aboard the Campari I had rarely seen more than half a dozen passengers in the dining saloon for breakfast. Most of them preferred to have it served in their suites or on the private verandahs outside their suites. Barring a few aperitifs followed by Antoine’s or Henrique’s superb cooking, there was nothing to beat a good funeral to bring out the sociable best in our passengers. There could only have been seven or eight missing altogether.

I had a full complement at my table, except, of course, for the invalid Mr. Cerdan. I should have been on watch, but the captain had decided that, as there was a very able quartermaster on the wheel and no land within seventy miles, young Dexter, who usually stood the watch with me, could stand it alone for the length of breakfast.

No sooner had I pulled in my chair than Miss Harrbride fixed her beady eyes on me.

“What on earth’s happened to you, young man?” she demanded.

“To tell you the truth, Miss Harrbride, I don’t really know myself.”

“You what?”

“It’s true.” I put on my best shamed face. “I was standing up on the boat deck last night and the next thing I knew I was lying in the scuppers with my head cut must have struck it against the davit when I fell.” I had my story all prepared. “Dr. Marston thinks it was a combination of sunstroke — I was loading cargo most of the day yesterday and I can assure you that the sun was very hot — and the fact that, owing to our troubles in Kingston and the delay caused by it, I haven’t had very much sleep in the past three days.” “I must say things do keep happening aboard the Campari,” Miguel Carreras said. His face was grave. “One man dead from a heart attack or whatever it was, another missing — they haven’t found our chief steward yet, have they?”

“I’m afraid not, sir.”

“And now you get yourself banged up. Let’s sincerely hope that’s the end of it.”

“Troubles always happen in threes, sir. I’m sure this is the end of it. We’ve never before…”

“Young man, let me have a look at you,” a peremptory voice demanded from the captain’s table. Mrs. Beresford, my favourite passenger. I twisted round in my seat to find that Mrs. Beresford, who normally sat with her back to me, had herself turned completely round in hers. Beyond her the Duke of Hartwell, unlike the previous night, was having no trouble at all in devoting his entire attention to Susan Beresford:

The usual counterattraction on his right, in the best traditions of the theatrical world, rarely rose before noon. Mrs. Beresford studied me in silence for the better part of ten seconds.

“You don’t look well at all, Mr. Carter,” she pronounced finally.

“Twisted your neck, didn’t you? You didn’t have to turn round in your chair to talk to me.”

“A little,” I admitted. “It’s a bit stiff.”

“And hurt your back into the bargain,” she added triumphantly. “I can tell from the peculiar way you sit.”

“It hardly hurts at all,” I said bravely. It didn’t, in fact, hurt me in the slightest, but I hadn’t yet got the hang of carrying a gun in my waistband and the butt kept sticking painfully into my lower ribs.

“Sunstroke, eh?” her face held genuine concern. “And lack of sleep. You should be in bed. Captain Bullen, I’m afraid you’re overworking this young man.”

“That’s what I keep telling the captain, ma’am,” I said, “but he doesn’t pay any attention to me.”

Captain Bullen smiled briefly and rose to his feet. His eyes, as they roved slowly over the room, held the expression of a man who wanted both attention and quiet: such was the personality of the man that he got it in three seconds flat.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began. The Duke of Hartwell regarded the tablecloth with that smell-of-bad-fish expression he reserved for tenants wanting a cut in rent and merchant navy captains who forgot to preface public addresses with the words “Your Grace.”

“I am most distressed,” the captain went on, “as I am sure you are all distressed, by the events of the past twelve hours. That we should lose our chief wireless officer through death by natural causes is, God knows, bad enough, but that our chief steward should vanish the same evening-54 well, in thirty six years at sea I have never known anything like it. “What happened to chief steward Benson we cannot say with any certainty, but I can hazard a guess and at the same time issue a warning. There are literally hundreds of cases of men vanishing overboard at night, and I have little doubt but that Benson’s death is due to the same reason which probably accounts for 99 per cent of all the other cases. Even on the most experienced sailors the effect of leaning over the rail at night and watching the black water passing below has a weirdly hypnotic effect. I think it’s something akin to the vertigo that affects a great number of people, people who are convinced that if they go near, say, the parapet of a high building, some strange force will make them topple over, no matter what their conscious minds may say. Only, with leaning over the rails of a ship, there is no fear. Just a gradual mesmerism. A man just leans further and further over until his centre of gravity is suddenly displaced. And then he is gone.”

As an alibi or explanation for Benson’s disappearance it was as good as any; as a general statement it was also unfortunately true.

“And so, ladies and gentlemen, I would counsel you all, most strongly, never to approach the ship’s rails at night unless you are accompanied by someone else. I would be most grateful if you would all bear that strongly in mind.”

I looked round the passengers as far as my stiff neck would allow. They would bear it in mind all right. From now on wild horses wouldn’t drag them near the Campari’s rails at night.

“But,” Bullen went on emphatically, “it will help neither of those unfortunate men and only do ourselves a great disservice if we allow ourselves to brood over those things. I cannot ask you to dismiss those deaths from your minds at once, but I can ask you not to dwell on them. On a ship, as elsewhere, life must go on especially, I might say, on a ship. You are aboard the Campari to enjoy the cruise; we are aboard to help you enjoy it. I would be most grateful if you would give us your every assistance to get shipboard life back to normal as soon as possible.”

There was a subdued murmur of agreement, then Julius Beresford, rising from his seat beside the captain, was on his feet.

“Do you mind if I say a few words, sir?” he could have bought the Blue Mail Line without even denting his bank balance, but still he asked permission to speak and called old Bullen sir.

“Certainly, Mr. Beresford.”

“It’s just this.” Julius Beresford had addressed too many board meetings to be anything other than completely at ease when speaking to people, no matter how many million dollars they represented. “I agree, and agree completely, with everything our captain has said. Captain Bullen has said that he and his crew have a job to do and that that job is to look after the every comfort and convenience of his passengers. Under the rather sad circumstances in which we have to meet this morning, I think that we, the passengers, have also a job to do — to make things as easy as possible for the captain, officers, and crew and to help them to bring things back to normal as soon as possible. “I’d like to start the ball rolling by asking you all to be my guests for a brief period this evening. To-day, ladies and gentlemen, my wife celebrates her birthday.” He smiled down at Mrs. Beresford.

“She forgets exactly which one. I cannot invite you to a birthday dinner, for what could I offer you as a special meal that Antoine and Henriques do not give us every night of the week? But Mrs. Beresford and I should be grateful if you would be our guests at a cocktail party this evening. Seven forty-five. In the drawing room. Thank you.”

I looked round the table. Miguel Carreras was nodding slightly, as if in grave acceptance and appreciation of Beresford’s underlying motives. Miss Harrbride was beaming with pleasure: she doted on the Beresfords, not for their money, but for the fact that they were one of the very oldest American families, with goodness only knew how many generations behind them. Mr. Greenstreet, her husband, studied the tablecloth in his usual intent fashion. And Tony Carreras, more impossibly handsome than ever, leaned back in his chair and regarded Julius Beresford with a slightly amused, speculative interest. Or maybe it was Susan Beresford he was looking at. I was more certain than ever that there was something wrong with Tony Carreras’ eyes; it was almost impossible to tell in what direction they were looking. He caught my glance and smiled.

“You’ll be there, Mr. Carter?” he had that relaxed, easygoing manner that comes from having a bank account bursting at the seams but none of the usual hint of condescension: Tony Carreras I could get to like.

Briefly only, I’m afraid. I have to go on watch at eight o’clock this evening.” I smiled. “If you’re still at it at midnight, I’ll join you.” Like hell I’d join them: at midnight I’d be showing the Nassau police over the ship. “And I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me now. I have to relieve the officer of the watch.”

I made my excuses and left. On the deck I almost bumped into a sandy-haired young seaman, Whitehead, who usually shared my watches on the bridge in his capacity as engine room telegraphist, lookout, bridge messenger, and coffee maker.

“What are you doing here?” I asked sharply. With young Dexter on watch I wanted as many sharp eyes and quick minds as possible round him: Whitehead had both. “You know you’re not to leave the bridge in my absence?”

“Sorry, sir. But Ferguson sent me.” Ferguson was the quartermaster on the forenoon watch. “We’ve missed the last two course alterations and he’s getting pretty worried about it.” We were bringing round three degrees to the north every fifteen minutes to get on a north by west course, but slowly, so as not to excite anyone.”

“Why come and bother me about it?” I said irritably. “Fourth Officer Dexter is perfectly capable of handling those matters.” He wasn’t, but one of the drawbacks of being a fellow officer of Dexter was that you were forced to lie like fury to maintain an outward appearance of solidarity.

“Yes, sir. But he’s not there, Mr. Carter. He left the bridge about twenty minutes ago and he hasn’t come back yet.” I pushed violently past Whitehead, knocking him to one side, and made for the bridge at a dead run, three steps at a time up the companionways. Rounding one corner, I caught a glimpse of Whitehead staring up after me with a most peculiar expression on his face. He probably thought I had gone mad.