The Golden Rendezvous

Chapter 5

Ferguson, a tall, swarthy, saturnine cockney with no hair left to speak of, glanced round as I burst through the doorway from the starboard wing of the bridge into the wheelhouse. His face showed his relief.

“Strewth,” am I glad to see “Where’s the fourth mate?” I demanded.

“Search me, sir. Then course alterations…”

“To hell with the course alterations! Where did be go?” Ferguson blinked in surprise. He had the same look on his face as Whitehead had had a few seconds ago, the wary bafflement of a man who sees another going off his rocker.

“I don’t know, sir. He didn’t say.”

I reached for the nearest phone, got through to the dining room, asked for Bullen. He came on and I said, “Carter here, sir. Could you come up to the bridge straightaway?”

There was a brief pause, then, “Why?”

“Dexter’s missing, sir. He had the watch but he left the bridge twenty minutes ago.”

“Left the bridge.” Bullen’s voice held no inflection, but only because he made it that way. Lord Dexter’s son or not, young Dexter was finished on the Campari unless he could explain this one away. “Looked for him yet? He could be anywhere.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of, sir.”

The phone clicked and I hung up. Young Whitehead, still looking apprehensive, had just arrived in the cabin. I said, “You’ll find the third mate in his cabin. My compliments to him, ask him if he’ll take over the bridge for a few minutes. Ferguson?”

“Sir?” the voice was still wary.

“Mr. Dexter said nothing at all when he left?”

“Yes, sir. I heard him say something like, ‘Wait a minute, what the hell’s going on here?’ or something like that, I can’t be sure.” Then he said, ‘Keep her as she is. Back in a jiffy,’ and then he was off.”

“That was all?”

“That was all, sir.”

“Where was he standing at the time?” “On the starboard wing, sir. Just outside the door.”

“And he went down that side?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where was Whitehead at the time?”

“Out on the port wing, sir.” Ferguson’s expression and tone showed beyond all doubt that he was with a loony, but he was playing it cool all the same.

“Didn’t cross to see where Mr. Dexter had gone?”

“No, sir.” he hesitated. “Well, not right away. But I thought it a bit funny so I asked him to have a look. He couldn’t see anything.”

“Damn! How long after Mr. Dexter left before he took this look?”

“A minute. Maybe closer on two. Couldn’t be sure, sir.”

“But whatever Mr. Dexter saw, it was aft?”

“Yes, sir.”

I moved out on the wing bridge and looked aft. There was no one to be seen on any of the two decks below. The crew had long finished washing down decks and the passengers were still at breakfast. Nobody there. Nothing of any interest at all to be seen. Even the wireless office was deserted, its door closed and locked. I could see the brass padlock clearly, gleaming and glittering in the morning sun as the Campari pitched slowly, gently, through the ever lengthening swell.

The wireless office! I stood there perfectly rigid for all of three seconds, a candidate, in Ferguson’s eyes, for a strait jacket if ever there had been one, then took off down the companionway the same way as I had come up, three steps at a time. Only a smart piece of braking on my part and a surprisingly nimble bit of dodging on the captain’s prevented a head-on collision at the foot of the companionway. Bullen put into words the thought that was obviously gaining currency around the bridge.

“Have you gone off your bloody rocker, mister?”

“The wireless office, sir,” I said quickly. “Come on.” I was there in a few seconds, Bullen close behind. I tried the padlock, a heavy-duty, double-action Yale, but it was securely locked.

It was then that I noticed a key sticking out from the bottom of the padlock. I twisted it, first one way, then the other, but it was jammed fast. I tried to pull it out and had the same lack of success. I became aware that Bullen was breathing heavily over my shoulder.

“What the devil’s the matter, mister? What’s got into you all of a sudden?” “One moment, sir.” I’d caught sight of Whitehead making his way up to the bridge and beckoned him across. “Get the bo’sun. Tell him to bring a pair of pliers.”

“Yes, sir, I’ll get the pliers”

“I said, ‘Tell the bo’sun to bring them,’“ I said savagely. “Then ask Mr. Peters for the key to this door. Hurry!”

He hurried. You could see he was glad to escape. Bullen said, “Look here, mister…”

“Dexter left the bridge because he saw something funny going on. So Ferguson said. Where else but here, sir?”

“Why here? Why not…”

“Look at that.” I took the padlock in my hand. “That bent key. And everything that’s happened has happened because of here.”

“The window?”

“No good. I’ve looked.” I led him round the corner to the single square of plate glass. “Night curtains are still drawn.”

“Couldn’t we smash the damned thing in?”

“What’s the point? It’s too late now.”

Bullen looked at me queerly but said nothing. Half a minute passed in silence. Bullen was getting more worried every second. I wasn’t. I was as worried as could be already. Jamieson appeared, on his way to the bridge, caught sight of us, made to come towards us, then carried on as Bullen waved him away. And then the bo’sun was there, carrying a pair of heavy insulated pliers in his hand.

“Open this damned door,” Bullen said curtly. Macdonald tried to remove the key with his fingers, failed, and brought the pliers into use. With the first tug of the pliers the key in the lock snapped cleanly in half. “Well,” Bullen said heavily, “That helps.” Macdonald looked at him, at me, then back at the broken key still held in the jaws of the pliers.

“I didn’t even twist it, sir,” He said quietly. “And if that’s a Yale key,” he added with an air of faint distaste, “Then I’m an Englishman.” he handed over the key for inspection. The break showed the grey, rough, porous composition of some base metal. “Homemade, and not very well made at that, either.”

Bullen pocketed the broken key. “Can you get the other bit out?”

“No, sir. Completely jammed.” He fished in his overalls, produced a hacksaw. “Maybe this, sir?”

“Good man.” It took Macdonald three minutes hard work the hasp, unlike the padlock, was made of tempered steel — and then the hacksaw was through. He slid out the padlock, then glanced enquiringly at the captain.

“Come in with us,” Bullen said. There was sweat on his brow. “See that nobody comes near.” He pushed open the door and passed inside; I was on his heels.

We’d found Dexter all right, and we’d found him too late. He had that old-bundle-of-clothes look, that completely relaxed huddled shapelessness that only the dead can achieve; face down, outflung on the corticene flooring, he hardly left standing room for Bullen and myself.

“Shall I get the doctor, sir?” It was Macdonald speaking: He was standing astride the storm sill, and the knuckles of the hand holding the door shone bonily through the tautened skin.

“It’s too late for a doctor now, bo’sun,” Bullen said stonily.

Then his composure broke and he burst out violently: “My god, mister, where’s it all going to end? He’s dead you can see he’s dead. What’s behind what murderous fiend why did they kill him, mister? Why did they have to kill him? Damn it to hell, why did the fiends have to kill him? He was only a kid what real harm did young Dexter ever do anybody?” It said much for Bullen at the moment that the thought never even occurred to him that the dead man was the son of the Chairman and Managing Director of the Blue Mail Line.

That thought would come later.

“He died for the same reason that Benson died,” I said.

“He saw too much.” I kneeled beside him, examined the back and sides of his neck. No marks there at all. I looked up and said, “Can I turn him over, sir?”

“It can’t do any harm now.” Bullen’s normally ruddy face had lost some colour and the lips were clamped in a thin hard line.

I heaved and pulled for a few seconds and managed to get Dexter more or less turned over, half on his shoulders and half on his back. I didn’t waste time checking his breathing or his pulse; when you’ve been shot three times through the middle of the body the breathing and pulse are things of the past. And Dexter’s white uniform shirt, with the three small powder-blackened blood-tinged holes just beneath the breastbone, showed indeed that he had been shot three times: the area covering those holes could have been blotted out by a playing card.

Somebody had made very sure indeed. I rose to my feet, looked from the captain to the bo’sun, then said to Bullen, “We can’t pass this off as a heart attack, sir.”

“They shot him three times,” Bullen said matter-of-factly. “We’re up against someone in the maniac class, sir.” I stared down at Dexter, unable to look away from the face, racked and twisted by his last conscious moment of life, that fleeting moment of tearing agony that had opened the door to death. “Any one of those bullets would have killed him. But whoever killed him killed him three times, someone who likes pressing a trigger, someone who likes seeing bullets thud into a human being, even although that human being is dead already.”

“You seem very cool about this, mister.” Bullen was looking at me with a strange look in his eyes.

“Sure I’m cool.” I showed Bullen my gun. “Show me the man who did this and I’ll give him what he gave Dexter. Exactly the same and to hell with Captain Bullen and the laws of the land. That’s how cool I am.”

“I’m sorry, Johnny.” Then his voice hardened again. “Nobody heard anything. How did nobody hear anything?”

“He had his gun close up to Dexter, maybe jammed right against him. You can see the marks of burnt powder. That would help to deaden the sound. Besides, everything points to this person — those persons — as being professionals. They would have silencers on their guns.”

“I see.” Bullen turned to Macdonald. “Could you get Peters here, bo’sun? At once.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Macdonald turned to leave, and I said quickly, “Sir, a word before Macdonald goes.”

“What is it?” His voice was hard, impatient. “You’re going to send a message?”

“Too right I’m going to send a message. I’m going to ask for a couple of fast patrol boats to be sent out here to meet us. At the speed those gas turbine jobs can go they’ll be alongside before noon. And when I tell them I’ve had three men murdered in twelve hours, they’ll come running. I’ve had enough of playing it smart, first. This fake burial to lull their suspicions this morning, to make them think we’ve got rid of the only evidence of murder against them. See where it’s got us? Another man murdered.”

“It’s no use, sir. It’s too late now.”

“What do you mean?”

“He didn’t even bother to replace the lid after he left, sir.”

I nodded towards the big transmitter-receiver, with its metal lid slightly askew, the securing screws loose. “Maybe he was in a hurry to get away, maybe he just knew there was no point in securing it anyway; we were bound to find it out sooner or later and sooner rather than later.” I lifted the lid and stood to one side to let Bullen look also.

Nothing was ever surer than that no one would ever use that transmitter again. It was littered inside with torn wire, bent metal, smashed condensers and valves. Someone had used a hammer. There was no guesswork about that: the hammer was still lying among the tangled splintered wreckage that was all that was left of the once complicated innards of the transmitter. I replaced the lid. “There’s an emergency set,” Bullen said hoarsely. “In the cupboard under the table there. The one with the petrol generator. He’ll have missed that.” But the murderer hadn’t missed it; he wasn’t the type to miss anything. And be certainly hadn’t missed with that hammer. If anything, he’d done an even more thorough job on the emergency set than on the main set, and, just for good measure, he’d smashed up the armature of the petrol generator.

“Our friend must have been listening in on his receiver again,” Macdonald put in quietly. “So he came out either to stop the message or smash up the sets, so that no more messages could come through. He was lucky; had he been a bit later and the radio officer back on watch, my men would have been holystoning the decks outside and there would have been nothing he would be able to do.”

“I don’t associate luck with this killer in any way,” I said.

“He’s too damned efficient for that. I don’t think any more messages which might have worried him had come through, but he was afraid they might. He knew both Peters and Jenkins were off watch at the burial, and he probably checked that the wireless office was locked. So he waited till the coast was clear, came out on deck, unlocked the office, and went inside. And Dexter, unfortunately for himself, saw him going in.”

“The key, mister,” Bullen said harshly. “The key. How come?”

“The Marconi man in Kingston who checked the sets, sir. Remember?” He remembered all right: the Marconi man had telephoned the ship, asking if servicing facilities were required, and Bullen had seized on it as a heaven-sent opportunity to close down the radio office and refuse to accept any more embarrassing and infuriating messages from London and New York. “He spent about four hours there. Time to do anything. If he was a Marconi man, I’m the queen of the may. He had a nice big impressive tool kit with him, but the only tool he used, if you could call it that, was a stick of wax, heated to the right temperature, to take an impression of the Yale even if he had managed to pinch the Yale and return it unseen it would have been impossible to cut a new one; those special Yales are far too complicated. And my guess is that that was all he did while he was there.”

And my guess was completely wrong. But the thought that this fake Marconi man might have employed himself in another way during his stay in the wireless office did not occur to me until many hours later: it was so blindingly obvious that I missed it altogether, although two minutes constructive thought would have been bound to put me on to it. But hours were to elapse before I got round to the constructive thought, and by that time it was too late. Too late for the Campari, too late for its passengers, and far, far too late for all too many of the crew.

We left young Dexter lying in the wireless office and secured the door with a new padlock. We’d talked for almost five minutes about the problem of where to put him before the simple solution occurred to us: leave him where he was. Nobody was going to use that wireless office any more that day; he was as well there as anywhere till the Nassau police came aboard.

From the wireless office we’d gone straight to the telegraph lounge. The teleprinters in there were coupled to receiver transmitters on fixed wavelengths to London, Paris, and New York but could be adapted by men who knew what they were doing, such as Peters and Jenkins, to receive and transmit on practically any wavelength. But not even Peters and Jenkins could do anything about the situation we found: there were two big transmitters in the telegraph lounge, cleverly designed to look like cocktail cabinets, and both had received the same treatment as the sets in the wireless office: the exteriors intact, the interiors smashed beyond repair. Somebody had been very busy during the night: the wireless office must have been the last item on his list.

I looked at Bullen. “With your permission, sir, Macdonald and I will go and have a look at the lifeboats. We might as well waste our time that way as in any other.”

He knew what I meant all right and nodded. Captain Bullen was beginning to look slightly hunted. He was the ablest, the most competent master in the Blue Mall; but nothing in his long training and experience had ever been designed to cope with a situation like this. And so Macdonald and I duly wasted our time. There were three lifeboats equipped with hand-cranked transmitters for emergency use if the Campari sank or otherwise had to be abandoned. Or they had been equipped with them. But not any more. The transmitters were gone. No need to waste time or make a racket smashing up sets when all you have to do is to drop them over the side. Our murderous friend hadn’t missed a single trick.

When we got back to the captain’s cabin, where we had been told to report, there was something in the atmosphere that I didn’t like at all. They say you can smell fear. I don’t know about that, but you can sense it and you could certainly sense it in that cabin at nine o’clock that morning. The fear, the atmosphere of trapped helplessness, the sense of being completely at the mercy of unknown and infinitely powerful and ruthless forces made for an atmosphere of nervously brittle tension that I could almost reach out and touch.

Mcllroy and Cummings were there with the captain and so, too, was our second mate, Tommy Wilson. He had had to be told; the stage had been reached now where every officer would have to be told, so Bullen said, in the interests of their own safety and self-defence. I wasn’t so sure. Bullen looked up as we came through the door; his face was grim and still, a thinly opaque mask for the consuming worry that lay beneath.

“Well?”

I shook my head, took a seat; Macdonald remained standing, but Bullen gestured him irritably to a chair. He said, to no one in particular, “I suppose that accounts for all the transmitters on the ship?”

“As far as we know, yes.” I went on: “Don’t you think we should have White up here, sir?”

“I was about to do that.” He reached for the phone, spoke for a moment, hung up, then said roughly, “Well, mister, you were the man with all the bright ideas last night. Got any this morning?” Just to repeat the words makes them sound harsh and unpleasant, but they were curiously empty of any offence; Bullen didn’t know which way to turn and he was grasping at straws. “None. All we know is that Dexter was killed at eight twenty-six this morning, give or take a minute. No question about that. And at that moment most of our passengers were at breakfast; no question about that either. The only passengers not at breakfast were Miss Harcourt, Mr. Cerdan and his two nurses, Mr. and Mrs. Piper from Miami, and that couple from Venezuela — old Hournos and his wife — and their daughter. Our only suspects, and none of them makes any sense.”

“And all of those were at dinner last night when Brownell and Benson were killed,” Mcllroy said thoughtfully, “except the old man and his nurses. Which leaves them as the only suspects, which is not only ridiculous but far too obvious. I think we’ve already had plenty of proof that whatever the people behind all this are guilty of, being obvious is not one of them. Unless, of course,” he added slowly, “some of the passengers are working in collusion with each other.”

“Or with the crew,” Tommy Wilson murmured.

“What?” old Bullen gave him the full benefit of his commodore’s stare. “What did you say?”

“I said the crew,” Wilson repeated clearly. If old Bullen was trying to frighten Tommy Wilson he was wasting his time. “And by the crew I also include the officers. I agree, sir, that I heard — or knew if those murders for the first time only a few minutes ago, and I admit that I haven’t had time to sort out my thoughts. On the other hand, I haven’t had the chance to become so involved as all the rest of you are. With all respects, I’m not so deeply lost in the wood that I can’t see the trees. You all seem to be convinced that it must be one or more of our passengers responsible your chief officer here seems to have set this bee firmly in all your bonnets but if a passenger were in cahoots with one of the crew, then it’s quite possible that that member of the crew was detailed to hang round in the vicinity of the wireless office and start laying about him when necessary.”

“You said the chief officer was responsible for planting this idea in our minds,” Bullen said slowly. “What do you mean by that?”

“No more than I said, sir. I only…” Then the implications of the captain’s question struck him. “Good God, sir! Mr. Carter? Do you think I’m crazy?”

“No one thinks you’re crazy,” Mcllroy put in soothingly. Our chief engineer had always regarded Wilson as a bit of a mental bantamweight, but you could see him slowly revising his opinion. “The crew, Tommy. What makes you suspect the crew?”

“Elimination, motive, and opportunity,” Wilson said promptly. “We seem to have more or less eliminated the passengers. All with alibis. What are the usual motives?” He asked of no one in particular.

“Revenge, jealousy, gain,” said Mcllroy. “Those three.”

“There you are, then. Take revenge and jealousy. Is it conceivable that any of our passengers should have their knives so deeply stuck in Brownell, Benson, and Dexter as to want to kill them all? Ridiculous. Gain? What could that bunch of bloated plutocrats want with any more lucre?” He looked round slowly. “And what officer or man aboard the Campari couldn’t do with a little more lucre? I could, for one.”

“Opportunity, Tommy,” Mcllroy prompted him gently. “Opportunity, you said.”

“I don’t have to go into that,” Wilson said. “Engineer and deck crews could be eliminated at once. The engineering side, except for officers at mealtimes, never go anywhere near the passenger and boat decks. The bo’sun’s men here are only allowed there in the morning watch, for washing down decks. But” — he looked round him again, even more slowly every deck officer, radio officer, radar operator, cook, galley slave, and steward aboard the Campari has a perfect right to be within a few yards of the wireless office at any time; no one could question his presence there. Not only that a knock came at the door and assistant chief steward White came in, hat in hand. He was looking acutely unhappy and looked even more so when he saw the extent and composition of the welcoming committee.

“Come in and sit down,” Bullen said. He waited till White had done this, then went on: “Where were you between eight and half-past eight this morning, White?”

“This morning. Eight and half-past.” White was immediately all stiff outrage. “I was on duty, sir, of course. I…”

“Relax,” Bullen said wearily. “No one is accusing you of anything.” then he said, more kindly: “We’ve all had some very bad news, White. Nothing that concerns you directly, so don’t get too apprehensive. You’d better hear it.”

Bullen told him, without any trimmings, of the three murders, and the one immediate result was that everyone present could immediately remove White from the list of suspects. He might have been a good actor, but not even an Irving could have turned his colour from a healthy red to a greyish pallor at the touch of a switch, which was what White did. He looked so bad, his breathing got so quick and shallow that I rose hastily and fetched him a glass of water. He swallowed it in a couple of gulps.

“Sorry to upset you, White,” Bullen went on. “But you had to know. Now then, between eight and eight-thirty: how many of your passengers had breakfast in their rooms?”

“I don’t know, sir, I’m not sure.” He shook his head, then went on slowly. “Sorry, sir. I do remember. Mr. Cerdan and his nurses, of course. The Hournos family. Miss Harcourt. Mr. and Mrs. Piper.”

“As Mr. Carter said,” Mcllroy murmured. “Yes.” Bullen nodded.

“Now, White, be very careful. Did any of those passengers at any time leave their rooms during this period? At any time? Even for a moment?”

“No, sir. Quite definitely not. Not on my deck, anyway. The Hournos are on “B” deck. But none of the others went in or out of any of the suites, only stewards with trays. I can swear to that, sir. From my cubicle — Mr. Benson’s, that is — I can see every door in the companionway.” “That’s so,” Bullen agreed. He asked for the name of the senior steward on “B” deck, spoke briefly on the phone, then hung up. “All right, white, you can go. But keep your eyes — and ears — open and report to me immediately you come across anything that strikes you as unusual. And don’t talk about this to anyone.” White rose quickly and left. He seemed glad to go.

“There it is, then,” Bullen said heavily. “Everyone — every one of the passengers, that is — in the clear. I’m beginning to think you may have the right of it after all, Mr. Wilson.” he looked speculatively at me. “How about it now, Mr. Carter?”

I looked at him, then at Wilson, and said: “Mr. Wilson seems to be the only one of us that makes any sense. What he says is logical, completely plausible, and fits the facts. It’s too logical, too plausible. I don’t believe it.”

“Why not?” Bullen demanded. “Because you can’t believe that any crew member of the Campari could be bought? Or because it knocks your own pet theories on the bead?”

“I can’t give you any why’s or why not’s, sir. It’s just a hunch, the way I feel.”

Captain Bullen grunted, not a very kindly grunt either, but unexpected support came from the chief engineer.

“I agree with Mr. Carter. We’re up against very, very clever people — if it is people.” He paused, then said suddenly: “Is the passage money for the Carreras family, father and son, paid in yet?”

“What the devil has that to do with anything?” Bullen demanded.

“Has it been paid?” Mcllroy repeated. He was looking at the purser.

“It’s been paid,” Cummings said quietly. He was still a long way from getting over the shock caused by the murder of his friend Benson.

“In what currency?”

“Traveller’s cheques. Drawn on a New York bank.”

“Dollars, eh? Now, Captain Bullen, I submit that’s very interesting indeed. Paid in dollars. Yet in May of last year the Generalissimo made it a penal offence to be in possession of any foreign currency whatsoever. I wonder where our friends got the money from. And why are they permitted to be in possession of it? Instead of lingering in some jungle jail?”

“What are you suggesting, chief?”

“Nothing,” Mcllroy confessed. “That’s the devil of it. I just don’t see how it can tie up with anything. I just submit that it is very curious indeed and that anything curious, in the present circumstances, is worth investigating.” He sat silently for a moment, then said idly, “I suppose you know that our Generalissimo friend recently received a gift from the other side of the iron curtain? A destroyer and a couple of frigates? Trebled his naval strength in one fell swoop. I suppose you know the Generalissimo is desperate for money — his regime is coming apart at the seams for lack of it, and that’s what lay behind last week’s bloody riots. You know that we have a dozen people aboard who would be worth God knows how many millions in ransom money? And that if a frigate suddenly did heave over the horizon and order us to stowell, how could we send out an SOS with all our transmitters smashed?”

“I have never heard such a ridiculous suggestion in my life,” Bullen said heavily. But ridiculous or not, you’re thinking about it, Captain Bullen, I said to myself; by heaven, you’re thinking about it.

“To knock your suggestion on the head straightaway, how could any vessel ever find us? Where to look for us? We changed course last night; we’re over a hundred miles away from where they might expect us to be even if they had any idea where we were going in the first place.”

“I could support the chief’s arguments in that, sir,” I put in.

There seemed no point in mentioning that I thought Mcllroy’s idea as farfetched as did the captain. “Any person with a radio receiver might equally well have a transmitter and Miguel Carreras himself mentioned to me that he used to command his own ships. Navigation, by sun or stars, would be easy for him. He probably knows our position to within ten miles.”

“And those messages that came through on the radio.” Mcllroy went on. “Message or messages. A message so damned important that two men died, and the possibility that another such message might come through caused a third man to die. What message, captain, what so tremendously important a message? Warnings: from where, from whom, I don’t know. Warnings, Captain Bullen. Knowledge which in our hands would have destroyed some carefully laid plans, and the scope of those plans you can judge from the fact that three men died so that that message should not come through.”

Old Bullen was shaken. He tried not to show it, but he was shaken. Badly. And I knew it next moment when he turned to Tommy Wilson.

“On the bridge, Mr. Wilson. Double lookouts. Stay doubled till we get to Nassau.” he looked at Mcllroy. “If we get to Nassau. Signaller to stand by the Aldis all day. ‘I want assistance’ flags ready for the yardarm. Radar office: if they take their eyes off the screen for a second I’ll have ‘em on the beach. No matter how small a blip they see, no matter what distance, report immediately to the bridge.”

“We turn towards them for assistance, sir?”

“You blithering idiot,” Bullen snarled. “We run for our lives in the opposite direction. Do you want to steam into the waiting guns of a destroyer?” No question but that Bullen was far off balance: the self-contradictory element in his instructions escaped him completely.

“You believe the chief, then, sir?” I asked.

“I don’t know what to believe,” Bullen growled. “I’m just taking no chances.” When Wilson left I said, “Maybe the chief is right. Maybe Wilson is right too. Both could go together an armed attack on the Campari with certain suborned members of the crew backing up the attackers.”

“But you still don’t believe it,” Mcllroy said quietly. “I’m like the captain. I don’t know what to believe. But one thing I do know for certain the radio receiver that intercepted the message we never got that’s the key to it all.”

“And that’s the key we’re going to find.” Bullen heaved himself to his feet. “Chief, I’d be glad if you came with me. We’re going to search for this radio personally. First we start in my quarters, then in yours, then we go through the quarters of every member of the crew of the Campari. Then we start looking anywhere where it might be cached outside their quarters. You come with us, Macdonald.”

The old man was in earnest all right. If that radio was in the crew’s quarters, he’d find it. The fact that he’d offered to start the search in his own suite was warranty enough for that.

He went on: “Mr. Carter, I believe it’s your watch.”

“Yes, sir. But Jamieson could look out for me for an hour. Permission to search the passengers’ quarters?”

“Wilson was right about that bee in your bonnet, mister.” Which only went to show how upset Bullen was: normally, where circumstances demanded, he was the most punctilious of men and, in the presence of the bo’sun, he would never have spoken as he had done to Wilson and myself. He glowered at me and walked out.

He hadn’t given my permission, but he hadn’t refused it either. I glanced at Cummings; he nodded and rose to his feet.

We had luck in the conditions for our search, the purser and I, in that we didn’t have to turf anyone out of their cabins: they were completely deserted. Radio reports in the morning watch had spoken of weather conditions deteriorating sharply to the southeast and bulletins had been posted warning of approaching bad weather; the sun decks were crowded with passengers determined to make the most of the blue skies before the weather broke. Even old Cerdan was on deck, flanked by his two watchful nurses, the tall one with a big mesh-string knitting bag and clicking away busily with her needles, the other with a pile of magazines, reading. You had the impression with them, as with all good nurses, that less than half their minds were on what they were doing; without stirring from their chairs they seeded to hover over old Cerdan like a couple of broody hens. I had the feeling that when Cerdan paid nurses to hover he would expect his money’s worth. He was in his wheel chair, with a richly embroidered rug over his bony knees. I took a good long look at that rug as I passed by, but I was only wasting my time: so tightly was that rug wrapped round his skinny shanks that he couldn’t have concealed a match box under it, far less a radio.

With a couple of stewards keeping watch we went through the suites on “A” and “B” decks with meticulous care. I had a bridge megger with me, which was to lend cover to our cover story, if we had to use one, that we were trying to trace an insulation break in a power cable; but no passenger with a guilty mind was going to fall for that one for a moment when he found us in his cabin, so we thought the stewards a good idea.

There should have been no need for any passenger aboard the Campari to have a radio. Every passenger’s cabin on the ship, with the Campari’s usual extravagance, was fitted out with not one but two bulkhead relay receivers, fed from a battery of radios in the telegraph lounge; eight different stations could be brought into circuit simply by pressing the eight pre-selector buttons. This was all explained in the brochure, so normally nobody thought of bringing radios along.

Cummings and I missed nothing. We examined every cupboard, wardrobe, bed, drawer, even my ladies’ jewel boxes. Nothing. Nothing anywhere, except in one place: Miss Harcourt’s cabin. There was a portable there, but then I had known that there had been one: every night when the weather was fine, Miss Harcourt would wander out on deck, clad in one of her many evening gowns, find a chair, and twiddle around the tuning knob till she found some suitable soft music. Maybe she thought it lent something to the air of enchantment and mystery that should surround a movie queen; maybe she thought it romantic; it could have been, of course, that she just liked soft music. However it was, one thing was certain — Miss Harcourt was hot our suspect: not to put too fine a point on it, she just didn’t have the intelligence. And, in fairness, despite her pretensions, she was too nice.

I retired, defeated, to the bridge and took over from Jamieson. Almost an hour elapsed before another defeated man came to the bridge: Captain Bullen. He didn’t have to tell me he was defeated: it was written on him, in the still, troubled face, the slight sag of the broad shoulders. And a mute head shake from me told him all he needed to know. I made a mental note, in the not unlikely event of Lord Dexter turning us both out of the Blue Mail, to turn down any suggestions by Captain Bullen that we should go into a detective agency together; there might be faster ways of starving, perhaps, but none more completely certain.

We were on the second leg of our course now, 10 degrees west of north, heading straight for Nassau. Twelve hours and we would be there. My eyes ached from scanning the horizons and skies; even although I knew that there were at least ten others doing the same thing, still my eyes ached. Whether I believed Mcllroy’s suggestion or not, I certainly behaved as if I did. But the horizon remained clear, completely, miraculously clear, for this was normally a fairly heavily travelled steamer lane. And the loud-speaker from the radar room remained obstinately silent. We had a radar screen on the bridge but rarely troubled to consult it: Walters, the operator on watch, could isolate and identify a blip on the screen long before most of us could even see it.

After maybe half an hour’s restless pacing about the bridge, Bullen turned to go. Just at the head of the companionway he hesitated, turned, beckoned me, and walked out to the end of the starboard wing. I followed.

“I’ve been thinking about Dexter,” he said quietly. “What would be the effect I’m past caring about the passengers now; I’m only worried about the lives of every man and woman aboard — if I announced that Dexter had been murdered?” “Nothing,” I said. “If you can call mass hysteria nothing.”

“You don’t think the fiends responsible for all this might call it off? Whatever ‘it’ is?”

“I’m dead certain they wouldn’t. As no mention has been made of Dexter yet, no attempt to explain away his absence, they must know we know he’s dead. They’ll know damned well that the officer of the watch can’t disappear from the bridge without a hue and cry going up. We’d just be telling them out loud what they already know without being told. You won’t scare this bunch off. People don’t play as rough as they do unless there’s something tremendous at stake.”

“That’s what I thought myself, Johnny,” he said heavily. “That’s just what I thought myself.” He turned and went below, and I had a sudden foreknowledge of how Bullen would look when he was an old man.

I stayed on the bridge until two o’clock, long past my usual time for relief, but then I’d deprived Jamieson, who had the afternoon watch, of much free time that morning. A tray came up to me from the galley, and for the first time ever I sent an offering by Henriques back untouched. When Jamieson took over the bridge he didn’t exchange a word with me except routine remarks about course and speed. From the strained, set expression on his face you would have thought he was carrying the mainmast of the Campari over his shoulder. Bullen had been talking to him; he’d probably been talking to all the officers. That would get them all as worried as hell and jittery as a couple of old spinsters lost in the casbah; I didn’t see that it would achieve anything else.

I went to my cabin, closed the door, pulled off shoes and shirt, and lay down on my bunk — no four-posters for the crew of the Campari — after adjusting the louvre in the overhead cold-air trunking until the draught was directed on my chest and face. The back of my head ached and ached badly. I adjusted a pillow under it and tried to ease the pain. It still ached, so I let it go and tried to think. Somebody had to think and I didn’t see that old Bullen was in any state for it. Neither was I, but I thought all the same. I would have bet my last cent that the enemy — I couldn’t think of them as anything else by this time — knew our course, destination, and time of arrival almost as well as we did ourselves. And I knew that they couldn’t afford to let us arrive in Nassau that night, not, at least, until they had accomplished what they had set out to accomplish, whatever that might be. Somebody had to think. Time was terribly short.

By three o’clock I’d got nowhere. I’d worried all round the problem as a terrier worries an old slipper; I’d examined it from every angle; I’d put forward a dozen different solutions, all equally improbable, and turned up around dozen suspects, all equally impossible. My thinking was getting me nowhere. I sat up, careful of my stiff neck, fished a bottle of whisky from a cupboard, poured a drink, watered it, knocked it back, and then, because it was illegal, helped myself to another. I placed this second on the table by my bunk and lay down again.

The whisky did it. I’ll always swear the whisky did it; as a mental lubricant for rusted-up brains it has no parallel. After five more minutes of lying on my back, staring sightlessly up at the cold-air trunking above my head, I suddenly had it. I had it suddenly, completely and all in a moment, and I knew beyond doubt that I had it right. The radio! The receiver on which the message to the wireless office had been intercepted! There had been no radio. God, only a blind man like myself could have missed it; of course there had been no radio. But there had been something else again. I sat bolt upright with a jerk, Archimedes coming out of his bath, and yelped as a hot blade skewered through the back of my neck.

“Are you subject to these attacks often or do you always carry on like this when you are alone?” A solicitous voice enquired from the doorway. Susan Beresford, dressed in a square-necked white silk dress, was standing in the entrance, her expression half amused, half apprehensive. So complete had been my concentration that I’d never even heard the door open.

“Miss Beresford.” I rubbed my aching neck with my right hand. “What are you doing here? You know passengers are not allowed in the officers’ quarters?”

“No? I understood my father had been up several times in the past few trips talking to you.”

“Your father is not young, female, and unmarried.”

“Pfui!” she stepped into the cabin and closed the door behind her. All at once the smile was no longer on her face. “Will you talk to me, Mr. Carter?”

“Any time,” I said courteously. “But not here…” my voice trailed away. I was changing my mind even as I spoke.

“You see, you’re the only person I can talk to,” she said.

“Yes.” a beautiful girl alone in my cabin and plainly anxious to speak to me and I wasn’t even listening to her. I was figuring out something; it did involve Susan Beresford but only incidentally.

“Oh, do pay attention,” she said angrily.

“All right,” I said resignedly. “I’m paying.”

“You’re paying what?” she demanded.

“Attention.” I reached for my whisky glass. “Cheers!”

“I thought you were forbidden alcohol on duty?”

“I am. What do you want?”

“I want to know why no one will talk to me.” She lifted a hand as I made to speak. “Please don’t be facetious. I’m worried. Something’s terribly wrong, isn’t there? You know I always talk more to the officers than any of the other passengers” — I passed up the pleasure of loosing off a couple of telling shafts — "and now nobody will talk to me. Daddy says I’m imagining it. I’m not. I know I’m not. They won’t talk. And not because of me. I know. They’re all dead scared about something, going about with tight faces and not looking at anyone but looking at them all the time. Something is wrong, isn’t there? Terribly, terribly wrong. And Fourth Officer Dexter he’s missing, Isn’t he?” “What would be wrong, Miss Beresford?”

“Please.” This was something for the books, Susan Beresford pleading with me. She walked across the cabin — with the size of the accommodation old Dexter saw fit to provide for his chief officers that didn’t require more than a couple of steps — and stood in front of me. “Tell me the truth. Three men missing in twenty-four hours — don’t tell me that’s coincidence. And all the officers looking as if they’re going to be shot at dawn.”

“Don’t you think it strange you’re the only person who seems to have noticed anything unusual? How about all the other passengers?”

“The other passengers!” The tone of her voice didn’t say a great deal for the other passengers. “How can they notice anything with all the women either in bed for their afternoon sleep or at the hairdresser’s or in the massage room and all the men sitting around in the telegraph lounge like mourners at a funeral just because the stock exchange machines have broken down? And that’s another thing. Why have those machines broken down? And why is the radio office closed? And why is the Campari going so fast? I went right aft just now to listen to the engines and I know we’ve never gone so fast before.”

She didn’t miss much and that was a fact. I said, “Why come to me?”

“Daddy suggested it.” She hesitated, then half smiled. “He said I was imagining things and that for a person suffering from delusions and a hyperactive imagination he could recommend nothing better than a visit to Chief Officer Carter, who doesn’t know the meaning of either.”

“Your father is wrong.”

“Wrong? You — ah — suffer from delusions?”

“About your imagining things. You aren’t.” I finished my whisky and got to my feet. “Something is wrong, far wrong, Miss Beresford.”

She looked me steadily in the eyes, then said quietly, “Will you tell me what it is? Please?” The cool amusement was now completely absent from both face and voice: a completely different Susan Beresford from the one I’d known, and one I liked very much better than the old one. For the first time, and very late in the day, the thought occurred to me that this might be the real Susan Beresford: when you wear a price ticket marked umpteen million dollars and are travelling in a forest alive with wolves looking for gold and a free meal ticket for life, some sort of shield, some kind of protective device against the wolves, is liable to be very handy indeed, and I had to admit that the air of half mocking amusement which seldom left her was a most effective deterrent.

“Will you tell me, please?” She repeated. She’d come close to me now; the green eyes had started to melt in that weird way they had, and my breathing was all mixed up again. “I think you could trust me, Mr. Carter.” “Yes.” I looked away it took the last of my will power, but I looked away and managed to get my breathing working again, in-out, in-out; it wasn’t too difficult when you got the hang of it. “I think I could trust you, Miss Beresford. I will tell you. But not right away. If you knew why I say that you wouldn’t press me to tell you. Any of the passengers out taking the air or sunbathing?”

“What?” the sudden switch made her blink, but she recovered quickly and gestured to the window. “In this?”

I saw what she meant. The sun had gone, completely, and heavy dark cumulus clouds coming up from the southeast had all but obscured the sky. The sea looked rougher than it had been, but I had the feeling that the temperature would have fallen away. I didn’t like the look of the weather. And I could quite understand why none of the passengers would be on deck. That made things awkward. But there was another way.

“I see what you mean. I promise you I’ll tell you all you want to know this evening” — that was a pretty elastic time limit — "if you in turn promise you won’t tell anyone I’ve admitted anything is wrong — and if you will do something for me.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“This. You know your father is holding some sort of cocktail party for your mother in the drawing room tonight. It’s timed for seven forty-five. Get him to advance it to seven thirty. I want more time before dinner never mind why now. Use any reason you like, but don’t bring me into it. And ask your father to invite old Mr. Cerdan to the party also. Doesn’t matter if he has to take his wheel chair and the two nurses along with him. Get him to the party. Your father’s a man of very considerable powers of persuasion — and I imagine you could persuade your father to do anything. Tell him you feel sorry for the old man, always being left out of things. Tell him anything, only get old man Cerdan to the cocktail party. I can’t tell you how vital that is.”

She looked at me in slow speculation. She really had the most extraordinary eyes; three weeks she’d been with us and I’d never really noticed them before, eyes of that deep yet translucent green of sea water over sand in the windward isles, eyes that melted and shimmered in the same way as when a cat’s-paw of wind riffled the surface of the water, eyes that I dragged my own eyes away. See Carter, old Beresford had said. There’s the man for you. No imaginative fancies about him. That’s what he thought. I became aware that she was saying quietly, “I’ll do it. I promise. I don’t know what track you’re on, but I know it’s the right track.”

“What do you mean?” I said slowly.

“That nurse of Mr. Cerdan’s. The tall one with the knitting. She can no more knit than fly over the moon. She just sits there, clicking needles, botching every other stitch and getting practically nowhere. I know. Being a millionaire’s daughter doesn’t mean that you can’t be as slick with a pair of knitting needles as the next girl.”

“What!” I caught her by the shoulders and stared down at her. “You saw this? You’re sure of it?”

“Sure I’m sure.” “Well, now.” I was still looking at her, but this time I wasn’t seeing the eyes; I was seeing a great number of other things and I didn’t like any of them. I said, “This is very interesting. I’ll see you later. Be a good girl and get that fixed with your father, will you?” I gave her shoulder an absentminded pat, turned away, and stared out of the window.

After a few seconds I became aware that she hadn’t yet gone. She’d the door opened, one hand on the handle, and was looking at me with a peculiar expression on her face.

“You wouldn’t like to give me a toffee apple to suck?”

If you can imagine a voice both sweet and bitter at the same moment, then that is how hers was. “Or a ribbon for my pigtails?” With that she banged the door and was gone. The door didn’t splinter in any way, but that was only because it was made of steel.

I gazed at the closed door for a moment, then gave up. Any other time I might have devoted some minutes to figuring out the weird and wonderful working of the female brain. But this wasn’t just any other time. Whatever it was, this just wasn’t any other time. I pulled on shoes, shirt, and jacket, pulled out the colt from under the mattress, stuck it in my waist belt, and went off in search of the captain.