It rolled across the water after our tiny dinghy racing for the schooner. The Bells of St Mary's! They weren't bells; it was a monstrous death-rattle in the wind's breathing, some undefined weirdness choking out its life behind us in the fog. And Mercury lay behind. The rumble ended with a paroxysm, as if boulders had been shaken together for a poker-dice throw. Koeltas shuddered.
'Bells?' I rasped. 'The Bells of St Mary's…?'
His dead panic made the oaths come tumbling from Koeltas's lips. 'The sonofabitch, the bladdy sonofabitch Shelborne! He makes the Bells back there on Mercury. It is his name for them, the Bells of St Mary's. He tells the skipper so. He kills us with them. He knows the Malgas comes…'
I recalled Shelborne's vigilant flag-hoist; he would always be on the alert. Shelborne's attitude towards intruders was pretty rough — there was no doubt now that he had sent the Praying Mantis to her doom — and it would be rougher still towards the likes of Koeltas and the Mad Goose. I wished now I had got more out of Shelborne when he had talked out in the dunes. He'd spoken freely because — I thought grimly — dead men tell no tales. From now on I'd need men of the ruthless calibre of Koeltas, Johaar and Kim. I didn't intend to be so gentle myself when I returned to Mercury.
I tried to quiet Koeltas's fear. 'He can't see any of us, or your ship, in this fog. Pull yourself together, man. These Bells — it's something quite simple, we'll find out.'
Shelborne must have played somehow on the superstitions of the Coloured and Malay fishermen — I had had an example on the passage to Mercury when I found my Malay helmsman changing course against orders to pass to windward of a school of porpoises. They were; he told me, the angels of the sea and to pass to leeward was an insult to the sea-dead. I suspected Shelborne of rigging some sort of loudspeaker gear.
Koeltas snarled, 'Shut your trap! What the hell do you know about the Bells? They'll kill us all if we don't get out quick!'
Fear sharpened his uncanny instinct for the whereabouts of his ship. In a few moments the Malgas was right ahead. She was a schooner of about 150 tons with very long hardpine masts, painted an indeterminate khaki to merge into the dun background — like the disguise of Namib plants whose young leaves exude a stickiness to which blown sand clings and camouflages them with a fine rough-cast which makes them indistinguishable from the desert. The foremast had been stepped right forward into the eyes of the schooner I had a glimpse of her heavy sparring as we vaulted over the low rail. It was enough to tell what the Malgas was: a strandloper of the ocean, the sea-going equivalent of the starving carrion scavengers of the Sperrgebiet beaches.
Johaar left the dinghy to trail astern while he shot below. Half a dozen men, Coloureds and Malays, were hauling on the sheets before they had rubbed the sleep from their eyes. Johaar did not have to spur them on, the Bells did that. The whole operation of running up the fore and mizzen sails, the jib and flying jib above the bowsprit, was done in silence. Each knew he appointed task. No orders were given. Kim took the wheel, came forward to watch the luff of the big mainsail, ochre-coloured like the others. The wind was fluky. Koeltas went over to Kim and spoke in a low voice. They got the foregaff on her as Kim brought her round on to the port tack — her heading struck a chord of fear into me.
'You're crazy, Koeltas — you can't beat out by the southern passage!'
He stood by the rail, listening, peering into the fog.
'Shut up!' he snapped in a low urgent voice. There was a flicker in the thin eyes above the Tartar cheekbones. 'Who says so — Shelborne?'
'Yes!'
He gave a derisive, harsh little chuckle. He came close. He was sweating. The smell of fear blended with the bitter, repugnant stench of the oilskin. 'In a moment, we see a rock — there!' He thrust an arm out to starboard. 'We are on course, then — dead between Mercury and Sudhuk. Sudhuk blocks the wind. Past the rock we get a little more wind, maybe. Look for the rock!'
I looked. It wasn't a rock I saw. It was Shelborne's face.
The flatboom was right under our forefoot. Shelborne was at the tiller. He half-rose in the sternsheets. The Malgas was upon him.
'Jesus!'
Kim saw it too. He gave the wheel a spoke or two. The tower of sail eased. The schooner leaned away from the flatboom. Shelborne's face was white and taut against the sealskin collar. Then — faces, oars, rowers were gone, lost in the fog astern. My words would not come when I saw the rock seconds later. Koeltas, too, said nothing, but threw out his hand towards the key-point with the stiff, stylized motion with which the desert Bushman throws his scanty food into the eye of the desert wind to placate his gods. The Malgas, turning at the rock, hung in stays for an agonizing moment. Then her head came round and she moved silently under a full press of sail out to the open sea.
Koeltas said, without preliminary, 'How much diamant?' He seemed to be having second thoughts about my charter, which to him meant smuggling diamonds, not mining them. 'One of my fren's — also a schooner skipper — takes diamant out to the ships fishing out deep — there! Russian. Jan. Maybe Jap, I dunno. He gets five years in jail. Johaar!'
Koeltas fired a volley of crackling vowels and staccato consonants at him. Even for me it was too quick, but here and there I caught the word diamond. Johaar laughed when Koeltas mentioned the Praying Mantis. I was too raw over her loss to join in.
Koeltas said, 'Mister, Johaar, Kim and me like the job. But Shelborne chases us away, us all in the Malgas. Lots of trouble. When he sees the Malgas he shout, voetsak you Malay bastard, get to hell out of my bay.'
'It isn't his bay,' I replied. Simply, and in some detail, I explained that the Mary Zed project was under licence, legitimate, not outside the law. It was almost impossible to convey this last fact to him.
'I must get back to the wreck before Shelborne,' I told them: 'I want to see what I can salvage of my gear, the diving suits especially.'
I wondered how- much damage the Hydrodist had suffered. It was not irreplaceable but it would take time to get a new one. With or without it, by modem or old-fashioned methods, I intended to survey the bay. More than survey it — investigate it. Priority number one was the inside of the Glory Hole. The three of them grinned as I spoke, Kim from the wheel nearby. The wind had died away and the Malgas, despite the spread she was carrying, ghosted along, barely under way.
'I know about wrecks,' said Koeltas. That was the biggest understatement I had heard since coming aboard. I also wanted to find out what Shelborne had put in the binnacle.
Johaar was a jump ahead of me. 'I get the two diamonds in the magnetite?'
'Magnetite! Was that magnetite?'
He grinned. 'I am two years at Oranjemund, driving rotary bucket excavator. Lots of diamonds — too many, a few are meant for Johaar. But they are bladdy slim and clever at Oranjemund. They find my diamonds with an X-ray security check.' He laughed good-humouredly. 'Now I work for Koeltas. The pay is not so good, but it is more fun, eh?'
'What do you know about magnetite?'
'My English good,' he grinned. 'Magnetite inclusions, that is what the boss called it. Every Saturday night we get drunk and play the racehorse game with magnetite. Like a magnet. Little iron horses on the table and you pull the magnetite underneath and make the horses run. Fun!'
Shelborne had played a deep, subtle game to destroy me. Magnetite! In other words, he had put a piece of lodestone, which is a common matrix for diamonds, into the compass housing when he went to look at the barometer. It was a brilliant piece of opportunism, using the storm and wrong sailing directions. No wonder we had fetched up on a reef. No wonder, too, that he had been thoughtful when he had asked on Mercury whether I was the key figure in determining where the Mary Zed would operate. He was planning then to eliminate the kingpin. Shelborne! — I found myself using Koeltas's own savage oaths.
'Yes, Johaar,' I said slowly. And then, if Shelborne could afford to throw away two fair-sized diamonds in a chunk of magnetite, he knew where he could get plenty more. I recalled the Borchardt's magazine also. 'Yes, you can have the two diamonds when we go back.'
He turned to Kim. 'Maybe two, three carat. Aaaaaah! I get so drunk!'
'Johaar,' said Kim. 'Give me five quid. I need a woman bad.'
Koeltas laughed. 'You mean, a bad woman, you bastard you! You see what honest money does, mister? It makes us bad.'
I was tired and I didn't want the unpredictable little skipper changing his mind while I was asleep. The diamonds in the Knight's Cross hung round my neck were enough to make them cut my throat.
'What are you going to do with your share of the diamonds, Koeltas?' I asked.
He paused, as if trying to remember something. What he said was by rote from the catalogue: 'A ship, schooner-rigged, ninety feet long, twenty feet beam, ten feet of hold. Bows like a knife. Planking, American elm and teak. Sail plan…'
I said to myself, in English. 'And a star to steer her by!'
Kim crackled. 'Bugger me!' he said.
Johaar grinned. 'If we hadn't been there when we pulled him off the reef, I'd say he was walking two rows of brandy tracks!'
'Ag, this white lightning — it makes a man do anything,' added Koeltas" 'Pick up your backsides, you lot of Sperrgebiet gamats and get the sails in!'
The Malgas lay in the long swell.
Koeltas said, 'We go in the night, eh?'
He probably knew his way round the bay better by night than by day anyhow. And I needed sleep during that day.
'Good,' I replied. 'Get my clothes dry for me while I sleep, will you? Are you taking the Malgas out to sea until we make the bay?'
Koeltas shrugged. 'We lie up today.'
'Where?'
'There are places. Shelborne won't find us.'
Kim led me below to a stuffy little cubby-hole to take off my sodden, torn clothes. He gave me a doggy blanket and I threw myself down on the hard bunk. I was too exhausted to sleep. There was no doubt that Shelborne had tried to do away with me. Yet there was a curious element of reluctance, of compassion, in his attitude towards me which would not let me write him off as a cold-blooded killer. He himself had hinted that he was on the trail of something. What? Had he killed Caldwell for it. If it were a pocket of diamonds in the Glory Hole there was no need for his elaborate play about a lifetime's search. He could wash enough stones to keep him well-off for life. If it wasn't big, there was no point in trying to do away with me and thus thwart or prevent the arrival of the Mazy Zed. If Shelborne had come along with a strike, Rhennin would have welcomed him liberally; moreover, he might have swayed the court in his favour had he made any attempt to show that he had prospected as his concession entitled him to. He had, by contrast, played down his efforts. Why his concern and thanks about Mary Caldwell — was it reparation for what he had done to her father? Then there was the curious side issue of the U-boat's Knight's Cross. Who was the Rhennin who had been at Mercury in the war? I had to get back to Angras Juntas to equip myself for a new thrust into Shelborne's territory; I would find out from Felix Rhennin then. Last of all, what were the dreaded Bells of St Mary's and why did Mercury shake?
I slept.
It was dark when Kim's rough hand shook me awake. 'Dry togs. I hang them in the rigging all day. Damn' fine pants.'
They didn't look so fine to me — creased, torn and stained with sea water and mud. I judged the schooner to be under full sail, the way she lay over.
'Where are we?'
'Off Saddle Hill. Come on deck and see.'
The night was clear towards the land, but seawards the great black bank of nightly fog blocked the horizon. The landmark, Saddle Hill, stood out. A jagged fissure cut across its gaunt 1000-foot height, like a tooth kicked out in a street brawl. Northwards to Sudhuk ran eleven miles of threatening cliffs. We were so close inshore that I could see white water. Koeltas was picking his way through the maze of foul ground with consummate seamanship: I would not have dared to take a ship under power where he did under sail.
Koeltas said, without greeting, 'Lots of fog off Sudhuk.'
'You're not going in again through the southern channel — in the dark, under sail?'
He laughed his thin, harsh laugh. 'No one sees the Malgas because I hide behind Sudhuk — just like a big spook.'
Johaar was there with the laughs. 'And you look like a spook with your knife and your Standard Police Issue revolver.'
Kim chipped in: 'Man, that silencer!'
I had not noticed the heavy.38 calibre Smith and Wesson police revolver, undoubtedly stolen, in Koeltas's belt. It had attached an ancient bulbous Maxim silencer. He was naive enough to think a revolver can be silenced; in fact only a hand-loaded, locked-breech weapon can. I, too, laughed — for my own reasons.
Koeltas joined in. 'You goddamned gamat!'
'Ag, Gawd, we've got to have our fun,' roared Johaar.
Koeltas drew the weapon. 'Softy, softly, if Shelborne is on the reef.'
'I also got something to show you,' Johaar told me. He slipped below and came back carrying a NATO-type FN Rifle.
He grinned proudly. 'This is good. Automatic.'
'I know,' I answered grimly, taking it from him. 'Where did you steal this?'
He was amused. 'My brother is a fisherman at Walvis Bay… Soldiers are there… you know…'
'I don't. What else have you hidden away below?'
'Not much.' They grinned at my concern. 'You like a pistol for tonight or a knife — special knife?'
'A knife.'
Special it was — a long sealing-knife, tapered and razor-sharp.
Two hours later we were off Sudhuk, very close in. Koeltas seemed unafraid of the swell bursting heavily against the towering cliff. The water was deep and we had not yet got the protection of Dolphin Head, Sudhuk's northern extremity. The fog was closing but not as quickly as Koeltas would have liked. He stood listening, tense, head forward. I knew that if the Bells he dreaded were sounding it would be hopeless to expect him to enter the bay and inspect the wreck.
Conversation had fallen away to whispers — out of deference, it seemed, to Mercury.
'What about a leadsman?' I asked Koeltas anxiously. The shoreline was death: he seemed overconfident.
'Nine fathoms for two cables out to sea here,' he replied curtly.
I saw the light then.
It was burning at the seaward side of the cliff near where I had calibrated the.Hydrodist. That seemed a long time ago, somehow. I took Koeltas's arm and gestured silently.
'Shelborne!' he muttered under his breath. 'Shelborne — he clears out from Mercury when he makes the Bells so that they don't kill him along with us. Now he camps on Sudhuk, waiting.'
Kim and Johaar stared balefully at the flickering light.
Kim said under his breath, 'He'll see us and start the Bells.'.
Koeltas's nerves were iron. Take the ship in — close! I want to feel the breakers.'
Johaar slid forward and ropes ran silently through their well-greased sheaves. The schooner creaked as she turned shorewards. I caught my breath, she drove in so far. The water was already white before she resumed her previous course.
Kim doused the binnacle light. He steered by the soles of his feet and the wind on his neck. 'Fog thick behind Sudhuk,' he consoled me. 'Here, the wind blows it away.'
Furtively, noiselessly, every nerve on edge, we inched past Dolphin Head under Shelborne's fire. To see us, he would have had to lean right over the edge. Then Kim put the helm down until we were moving almost due east, following the cliffs beyond the point. The fog thickened, as he had predicted, and we turned north again, presumably into the channel. It was not the moisture of fog I felt when my hand clenched the mizzen shrouds — it was the sweat of cold fear and of colder anger and delayed shock at Shelborne's callous murder of the fifteen men of my crew with whom I had worked and lived. At that moment, I could not think of anything else.
We stole across the bay.
A lighter patch may have been the loom of Mercury. We stole past it, making for a point known only to Koeltas's instinct. As stealthily, Koeltas brought the Malgas to anchor off the Hottentots' Reef — I do not know how he found it. Then the sails were off her, the anchor down, and she hung shrouded in the fog, as invisible as her namesake, the mad goose, over a shoal of pilchards.
Johaar and Kim were first at the wrecked bridge of the Praying Mantis after a quick pull in the dinghy from the Malgas.
'Look!' exclaimed Johaar, grinning and shining his torch cautiously. 'Shelborne not come.'
The diamonds gleamed balefully in their black matrix in the compass housing.
Kim sighed. 'Plenty of women now. Bad women.'
Johaar held the lodestone. 'This plays racehorse games with the compass.' The needles followed it as he moved it around. 'See?'
Koeltas nodded at the diamonds. 'It cost him plenty, that little trick.'
'It still is going to cost him plenty — plenty,' I replied savagely. 'Have you been inside the Glory Hole?'
'It is a bastard,' Koeltas summed up. 'No. Much better caves on the shore.' That is what Shelborne had said, too. The fleas in them make you scratch like a mongrel. But good hiding-places.'
He didn't elaborate.
'Let's take a look at the rest,' I said. I did not care for the business of stripping my own ship for the benefit of these professional wreckers, but that was the bargain. Koeltas had already prised off some of the bridge instruments with a jemmy. The afterhold was a shambles, but three Scuba suits and their air bottles were intact. There was no sign of the Hydrodist. My cabin was half-flooded, but I managed to extract a shirt or two and another pair of trousers. My drawing instruments and parchment chart blanks were under six feet of water. Johaar unearthed a case of whisky and some clothes. We could not penetrate the flooded engine-room, but a submerged arm in a white overall like Sven used to wear told its own tale.
As I stood staring at it, Koeltas said, 'If I don't kill Shelborne, then you do, eh?'
I wondered whether it was as simple as that. Then Koeltas froze. Like the tail-end of a muttered curse, the strange reverberation came across the water from Mercury, not loud as before, but soft, sinister. Maybe it was the sight of the dead arm or the dead ship, or maybe I, too, had become infected by fear of the Bells, but I was in the dinghy as soon as the others. We set all sail for Angras Juntas.
Angras Juntas — the bay of the meeting of the captains! After a day's beat down the Sperrgebiet from Mercury, the dune-backed bay named by the first Portuguese navigators was in sight. Malgas tacked between two guano islands, one of which, Kim pointed out with relish, was called Black Sophie Rock in honour of a dead-and-gone Cape Town whore. The sea was dead calm.
'Jesus!' Koeltas was not exclaiming at the scenery, — he was seeing the Mazy Zed for the first time. The floating diamond mine — cumbersome, unshiplike, like a Showboat stage prop of a Mississippi sidepaddler — lay in a welter of foam from her own pumps. Forrad — or aft, it was hard to tell which — a massive derrick cradled what looked like a tanker's oiling hose. This was to link the ship to the sea-bed like an umbilical cord. Around it, to a height of twenty or thirty feet, clustered a collection of steel masts, crudely red-leaded platforms and thick pipes; crowning all was a curious object like a hopper bin. This conglomeration took up half the vessel's length; flat-like living quarters, broken by high ventilators, occupied the rest. Along the superstructure was painted, in garish six-foot letters, Mazy Zed.
The thud of powerful pumps and the splash of water came across the bay. The Mazy Zed looked like an elephant giving itself a shower-bath with its trunk.
Koeltas ran his eye over the Malgas's slim lines. It was not so much pride as reassurance. 'In a wind — look, six anchor cables out!'
'She'll need them all in a blow,' I said. 'The water is supposed to break right over her — that's the theory, anyway.'
Kim said, 'She sucks up the diamonds just like a bloody calf sucking milk!'
'You gamat, always sucking on the hind tit!' jeered Johaar.
It had been a long, tough beat from Mercury to Angras Juntas, hard inshore, dodging blinders and sandbars as Koeltas conned the Malgas from the bowsprit, which he had straddled like some strange figurehead in his yellow oilskin. His way of navigating had enabled me to see every feature of the Sperrgebiet: the desert wilderness, yellow-grey as smoke seen through a periscope; the iron-bound coast, indented, vicious; the glaring white mirror of a saltpan; a valley where the sand moved uncannily northwards in a broad, slow stream, almost as if of its own will. Koeltas had sailed almost under a great 170-foot high natural arch of rock known as Bogenfels, a gigantic crocodile's mouth held agape by an equally gigantic rock resembling a half-open flick-knife. Next to it was an angled patch of smooth white sand, perhaps half a mile long and a quarter broad. This crescent-shaped storm beach helped to create the legend of sudden, untold riches in South-west Africa; from it came diamonds worth a royal exchequer in a couple of months.
Later, my heart had been in my mouth when Koeltas took the Malgas among an awe-inspiring nightmare of rocks known as Die Doodenstadt — The Town of the Dead. Doodenstadt has never been inhabited; there are houses, streets and churches, but they are solid inside, solid rock; they have been fashioned as if by humans by a curious, macabre trick of the south-west wind. Among the dead rocks lay a dead ship, the British City of Baroda, a U-boat torpedo in her side.
'Polisie!'
Koeltas's astonishment turned to a snarl. He pointed. Astern, from behind a cluster of broken reefs, raced two motor-boats. On reaching open water, they rose up on what looked like water-skis on each side of the hull, and, keel clear of the sea, they arrowed forward. Hydrofoils! They broke company and made to circle the schooner, like two lions spreading for the kill
'We've got nothing to worry about,' I assured Koeltas. Maybe Duvenhage had sea patrols as well as his smart security land force at Oranjemund. 'Rhennin will vouch for me.'
Koeltas replied laconically. 'For you, yes, but not for me, or this ship.'
The schooner had to tack to clear Black Sophie Rock. Our innocuous change of course brought instant reaction. Like one, the two craft rose higher in the water; throttles were rammed wide open. One on either beam, they screamed past the Malgas.
'Look!' I exclaimed.
Tarpaulins were whipped off forward mountings. Heavy quick-firing guns followed us round. I realized then that they were not police craft but Rhennin's watchdogs, the fast patrol boats he had spoken of in court. My eye went to the top of Sinclair Island and there was the complementary half of the Mazy Zed's defence — a radar post. What looked like an enlarged version of the Hydrodist's cathode ray dish was tracking the schooner.
One of the boats throttled back and eased alongside the Malgas. The loudhailer snapped on. The voice was very English.
'Who are you and what do you want?'
I took Koeltas's hand megaphone. 'Tregard here. John Tregard. Tell Rhennin, the Praying Mantis, repeat Praying Mantis, has been lost off Mercury Island. No survivors except myself. This schooner is under my charter. She's okay.'
'She'd better be,' the voice replied. 'Keep away until I have presented your credentials. Especially, keep clear of the Mazy Zed. Today's the day,'
'You look bloody warlike.' I called.
'Have to be, old boy.' It was pure Royal Navy. 'Guarding the Bogenfels Approaches and all that, don't you know. You're the surveyor chappie, aren't you?'
'Was,' I corrected.
'Is the old whaler sunk?'
'That's what I said. Most of the equipment too.' I heard his whistle of surprise. 'You should have taken us along to keep your pants dry. Dirty work at the crossroads?'
'Plenty,' I replied grimly. 'It's a long story — later.'
'Good-oh! Anything to relieve the monotony, I say. Thanks for making our day with tales of pirates and deep water. Your clapped-out sailer is the first to try and run my blockade.'
'Others may.'
The voice became more cheerful. 'Greetings then to the bearer of joyful tidings. Now get those sails stowed, or what ever you do aboard the ancient mariner.'
We dropped anchor half a mile north of the low island. Angras Juntas was a replica of what we had seen all day: a rock-bound coast flanked by steep cliffs, inland, notched ridges and stark chains of naked hills, running north-south, and backing on to a drear, sand-shot infinitude of awe-inspiring desolation.
Inside ten minutes the patrol boat was back. 'Rhennin wants you aboard the Mazy Zed right away,' called the Royal Navy voice.
The sleek craft edged close. Hands grabbed me as I landed on the immaculate deck. The Royal Navy man eyed me quizzically. My trousers were shrunk to half-calf length and most of my shirt buttons were missing. My last shave had been aboard the Praying Mantis.
'Some people have all the fun,' he grinned. 'Rough house?'
I told my story briefly. He grinned again. 'Bob Sheriff's the name. I must admit to noticing a slight pong of seal now that you've come aboard.'
We sped towards the Mazy Zed. Smoke was now pouring from her curious high twin stacks. Diesels thumped heavily. A group of men were gathered round the heavy hose which led, pulsing and shaking, from the gantry into the sea. Where it entered the 'hopper bin' high up, another group was busy. Water cascaded everywhere.
Sheriff said, 'Your untimely arrival has held up the proceedings.'
'You mean…?'
'First diamond run, old boy. Carats in the morning, carats in the evening, carats at supper-time; I hope-so, anyway.'
We swung on to the steel deck. The air of tension was obvious. There were no gunnels and the deck was barely a foot or two above the water. Where the rough coat of red lead had been chipped, the steel had rusted from the corrosive sea fogs. We picked our way though a confusion of metal platforms, derricks, pumps, hoses, pipes and men into a dank corridor which smelt like the deep ocean and was as wet as a submarine. Condensation showed in the light of a weak bulb set into a steel beam, where red-leaded rivets nestled in rows like frogs' eggs. I pulled open a watertight door. The strip lighting was bright after the corridor. About half a dozen men in white overalls stood round a dull steel table like an operating theatre. Rhennin was in faded khaki overalls and a red sweater.
Mary spun the circular hand sieve and, with a peculiar deft movement, upturned it and emptied its gravelly contents on the table.
In the centre lay a handful of diamonds.
I didn't hear the hubbub of congratulations as the men leaned forward, peering eagerly at the first stones ever won from the sea in all man's long quest for riches.
I was oblivious of the superb machinery in the sorting-room — the six-foot-high glass retorts and six-inch-diameter transparent tubes through which sea water, still carrying its deep-sea life in the shape of lobsters and small fish, made its way to the gravitational sorter; the grease table with its greasy yellow roller to catch the stones; the surrealist electro-static separator flickering with a savage blue charge of 25,000 volts; the aluminium-decked vibrator shaking stones into fourteen categories at a rate faster than the eye could follow… I saw none of these. I saw a man with a sieve standing where his daughter stood now, skilfully swilling the diamond-bearing gravel round in the old-fashioned way on the Oyster Line, and I was sensible of the presence of Destiny, his inescapable, malign fellow-traveller, who had snatched his life's-search from the precious gravel not once, but three times in a short life.
'You should have used Caldwell's trommel.' The words thudded in my brain like the pulse of the Mazy Zed's pumps.
They all turned and looked at me. The wash of water in the tubes and the heart-beat of the pumps filled the long silence.
Then Mary said, wide-eyed, 'Why do you say that?'
The forceps in her fingers played idly, unseeingly, in the pile of diamonds before her.
We stared at one another. 'The first diamonds from the sea — a Caldwell has made history again. Perhaps you've killed the Caldwell jinx, too.'
Rhennin frowned. 'You've had a going-over, John. Better get a change and clean-up. Draw some fresh clothes from the stores.' He turned to Mary. 'You're the wardrobe mistress — Mike and Jim can go ahead with the sorting — will you fix John up?'
I said, 'Shelborne would have called it the slop-chest, not wardrobe.'
Mary was puzzled, uncertain, but excitement brought a remarkable clarity to her hazel eyes. She undid a top button of her surgeon's smock, pulled out a magnifying glass, the sort jewellers use, and held it out on a thin gold chain to me. I walked over to her, frowning, for something which had been dredged up in my mind at the sight of those first sea-diamonds now eluded me, something important on the point of definition. But it was gone now.
Mary held a stone in her forceps. There was an intricate tracery of fine lines which seemed at first glance to be a blurring.
She cupped the diamonds into a small pile. 'Look! They're frosty!'
The blurring, on looking closer, resolved into a mass of fine cobwebs. There was a green at the heart of it like the green I had seen in Shelborne's eyes.
I handed back the glass. 'Felix, I want to tell you how Shelborne
There's plenty of time to talk. Get Mary to find you the clothes first. How many carats are there, Mary?'
Twenty, thirty maybe.'
Rhennin spoke to the group at the sorting-table. 'We've found sea-diamonds, and that's a pretty big thrill for all of us. Remember, though, that what's here on the table isn't a quarter enough to pay her way for one day.
You all know that it could simply be an isolated pocket…'
Mary gestured to me and we went to a big room in the Mazy Zed's 'flatland' which was filled with shirts, overalls, jackets, jerseys, trousers, shoes, socks. It looked like a small department store for men.
'Is this really part of your job?' I asked.
She laughed. 'Woman's touch and all that. Being the only female aboard, Mr Rhennin put the slop-chest, as you call it, in my care.' She looked at me appraisingly. 'Sixteen collar, forty vest?'
I nodded. She put them into my hands.
'Why did you say "Caldwell's trommel" the way you did?'
'It seemed appropriate that what the father missed the daughter should have.'
She shook her head. 'That explains the words, yes. But not the way you said them.' She paused when I did not reply. 'And Shelborne?'
'When a man has just tried to kill you, it is difficult to get it out of your mind.'
'Kill your
I told her about the Praying Mantis and the Borchardt.
She said flatly, 'Shelborne isn't the type. There is some other explanation.'
'Are you trying to find excuses for your father's murderer?'
She flushed. 'I don't believe that either.'
'He made me a nice goodbye speech, practically saying it would be the last time we would meet. He was pleased, too, that I'd helped you get this job — why, I don't know. I think that was the reason he showed me over Mercury.'
She handed me a pair of shoes and socks. 'John, I know in my heart that Shelborne isn't a killer. He is complex, brilliant, and there's something inward-looking about him which I find hard to define or comprehend. And I feel an affinity — a rapport, you could call it that — with him which I cannot understand…'
The whole thing's quite simple: Shelborne got your father to Strandloper's Water, extorted the concession from him, and then did away with him. How, we shall never know.'
'He's not like that at all. I know it, I feel it. Shelborne lives on different planes — and one of them is an exalted state where it is difficult to come anywhere close to him. Rarefied, maybe, but exciting and unique, not murderous. If something on one plane stood in the way of his ideas on another…'
'In other words, Shelborne has his price, too. Like Strandloper's Water. I wish I knew what the price was — the concession wasn't the half of it.'
She said angrily, 'It isn't like that either, and you know it. You're oversimplifying. You're working the facts backwards to try to incriminate Shelborne. It doesn't work. He…'
'Look, Mary, I saw your father's own pistol, with his name engraved on it — F. W. Caldwell. Shelborne had it, but no one parts with a gun like that, custom-made for his own hand only…'
'You know a lot about guns,' she flashed at me.
'Yes,' I said, 'I do. I've collected them, studied them, used them…'
She remained silent and I went on: 'To act the way Shelborne is capable of acting, or think the way he thinks, you have to have a motive — a compulsive motive force. I sat on his stoep, his quarter-deck, and watched his mental processes at work not longer than a couple of days ago. He frightens me, just as his island frightens me. Look at the facts: a sea-bed diamond concession, some guano islands which are literally only for the birds, and he refuses a handsome offer to cooperate with the Mazy Zed outfit. It doesn't add up to the man who sat there with me on that grim little island. Caldwell
'Why do you keep bringing my father into it?'
'Because I feel him as a presence. In the sorting-room back there too. I know, I know — he's been dead thirty-odd years. But Caldwell is diamonds.'
'Now Mary Caldwell is diamonds too,' she added quietly.
I waited before I spoke. 'What if Shelborne has in his hands the luck that eluded Caldwell?'
She stared at me, wide eyes. 'What do you mean?'
'Caldwell became the legend because the world knew it was really he who found the great strikes, — but each was taken from him at the moment of putting the golden cup to his lips, so to speak, by a cruel stroke of luck. Oranjemund is the star example. He should have been a millionaire half a dozen times over.' I chose my words slowly, carefully. 'What if there were something else, his biggest strike of all?'
'What are you trying to say?'
'A great prospector with a kindly, gentle and, it seems, slightly credulous nature, walks out on his home, his child, on everything that is dear to him, vanishes, and is seen only once again at Strandloper's Water. He just went prospecting? No!'
'But he had the German concession for the sea-bed.'
'Why?' I demanded. 'Why the sea-bed, why, why, why?'
'Because he thought…'
'Caldwell didn't think, he didn't go on guess-work — he knew. Shelborne knows too.'
'What, John, for God's sake?'
I told her. Until that moment it had been undefined, uncrystallized in my mind.
She looked carefully at me. Then she burst out. 'No! No! You must be mad. It's too big…'
'That's just why,' I said. 'It's too big. Too big altogether. So was Caldwell's fate.'