Алистер Маклин - Bear Island

‘So this is what has taken you all this long time to lead up to? You think – you think it may have been deliberate, have been engineered by someone. That’s what you think?’ I hoped it was clear to her that the idea had just occurred to me for the first time.

‘I don’t know what to think. But yes – yes, that’s what I think.’

‘Who?’

‘Who?’ She looked at me in what appeared to be genuine astonishment. ‘How should I know who? Anybody, I suppose.’

‘You’d be a sensation as a prosecuting counsel. Then if not who, why?’

She hesitated, looked away, glanced briefly back at me, then looked at the deck. ‘I don’t know why, either.’

‘So you’ve no basis for this incredible suggestion other than your Communist-trained instincts.’

‘I’ve put it very badly, haven’t I?’

‘You’d nothing to put, Mary. Just examine the facts and see how ridiculous your suggestion is. Seven disparate people affected and all struck down completely at random – or can you give me a reason why so wildly diverse a group as a film producer, a hairdresser, a camera focus assistant, a mate, a bo’sun and two stewards should be the victims? Can you tell me why some lived, why some died? Can you tell me why two of the victims assimilated this poison from food served at the saloon table, two from food consumed in the galley and one, the Duke, who may have been poisoned in either the galley or the saloon? Can you, Mary?’

She shook her head, the straw-coloured hair fell over her eyes and she let it stay there. Maybe she didn’t want to look at me, maybe she didn’t want me to look at her.

‘After today,’ I said, ‘I’ve been left standing, I’ve been widely given to understand, among the ruins of my professional reputation but I’ll wager what’s left of it, together with anything else you care to name, that this wholesale poisoning is completely accidental and that no person aboard the Morning Rose wished to, hoped to or intended to poison those seven men.’ Which was a different thing entirely from claiming that there was no one aboard the Morning Rose who was responsible for the tragedy. ‘Not unless we have a madman aboard, and you can say what you like – you’ve already said it – about our highly – ah – individualistic shipboard companions, none of them is unhinged. Not, that is, criminally unhinged.’

She hadn’t looked at me once when I was speaking, and even when I’d finished, continued to present me with a view of the crown of her head. I rose, lurched across to the armchair where she was sitting, braced myself with one hand on the back of her chair and placed a finger of the other under her chin. She straightened and brushed back the hair from her eyes, brown eyes, large and still and full of fear. I smiled at her and she smiled back and the smile didn’t touch her eyes. I turned and left the lounge.

I was quite ten minutes late for my appointment in the galley and as Haggerty had already made abundantly clear to me that he was a stickler for the proprieties, I expected to find him in a mood anywhere between stiff outrage and cool disapproval. Haggerty’s attention, however, was occupied with more immediate and pressing matters, for as I approached the galley through the stewards’ pantry I could hear the sound of a loud and very angry altercation. At least, Haggerty was being loud and angry.

It wasn’t so much an altercation as a monologue and it was Haggerty, his red face crimson now with anger and his periwinkle blue eyes popping, who was conducting it: Sandy, our props man, was the unfortunate party on the other side of this very one-sided argument and his silent acceptance of the abuse that was being heaped upon him stemmed less from the want of something to say than from the want of air. I thought at first that Haggerty had his very large red hand clamped round Sandy’s scrawny neck but then realized that he had the two lapels of Sandy’s jacket crushed together in one hand: the effect, however, was about the same, and as Sandy was only about half the cook’s size there was very little he could do about it, I tapped Haggerty on the shoulder.

‘You’re choking this man,’ I said mildly. Haggerty glanced at me briefly and got back to his choking. I went on, just as mildly: ‘This isn’t a naval vessel and I’m not a Master-At-Arms so I can’t order you about. But I am what the courts would accept as an expert witness and I don’t think they’d question my testimony when you’re being sued for assault and battery. Could cost you your life’s savings, you know.’

Haggerty looked at me again and this time he didn’t look away. Reluctantly, he removed his hand from the little man’s collar and just stood there, glaring and breathing heavily, momentarily, it seemed, at a loss for words.

Sandy wasn’t. After he’d massaged his throat a bit to see if it were still intact, he addressed a considerable amount of unprintable invective to Haggerty, then continued, shouting: ‘You see? You heard, you great big ugly baboon. It’s the courts for you. Assault and battery, mate, and it’ll cost you–’

‘Shut up,’ I said wearily. ‘I didn’t see a thing and he didn’t lay a finger on you. Be happy you’re still breathing.’ I looked at Sandy consideringly. I didn’t really know him, I knew next to nothing about him, I wasn’t even sure whether I liked him or not. Like Allen and the late Antonio, if Sandy had another name no one seemed to know what it was. He claimed to be a Scot but had a powerful Liverpool accent. He was a strange, undersized, wizened leprechaun of a man, with a wrinkled walnut-brown face and head – his pate was gleamingly bald – and stringy white hair that started about earlobe level and cascaded in uncombed disarray over his thin shoulders. He had quick-moving and almost weasel-like eyes but maybe that was unfair to him, it may have been the effect of the steel-legged rimless glasses that he affected. He was given to claiming, when under the influence of gin, which was as often as not, that he not only didn’t know his birthday, he didn’t even know the year in which he had been born, but put it around 1919 or 1920. The consensus of informed shipboard opinion put the date, not cruelly, at 1900 or slightly earlier.

I noticed for the first time that there were some tins of sardines and pilchards on the deck, and a larger one of corned beef. ‘Aha!’ I said. ‘The midnight skulker strikes again.’

‘What was that?’ Haggerty said suspiciously.

‘You couldn’t have given our friend here a big enough helping for dinner,’ I said.

‘It wasn’t for myself.’ Sandy, under stress, had a high-pitched squeak of a voice. ‘I swear it wasn’t. You see–’

‘I ought to throw the little runt over the side. Little sneaking robbing bastard that he is. Down here, up to his thieves’ tricks, the minute any back’s turned. And who’s blamed for the theft, eh, tell me that, who’s blamed for the theft? Who’s got to account to the captain for the missing supplies? Who’s got to make the loss good from his own pocket? And who’s going to get his pay docked for not locking the galley door?’ Haggerty’s blood pressure, as he contemplated the injustices of life, was clearly rising again. ‘To think,’ he said bitterly, ‘that I’ve always trusted my fellow men. I ought to break his bloody neck.’

‘Well, you can’t do that now,’ I said reasonably. ‘You can’t expect me, as a professional man, to perjure myself in the witness box. Besides, there’s no harm done, nothing stolen. You’ve no losses to pay for, so why get in bad with Captain Imrie?’ I looked at Sandy, then at the tins on the floor. ‘Was that all you stole?’

‘I swear to God–’

‘Oh, do be quiet.’ I said to Haggerty: ‘Where was he, what was he doing when you came in?’