Алистер Маклин - Bear Island

‘He’d his bloody great long nose stuck in the big fridge there, that was what he was doing. Caught him red-handed, I did.’

I opened the refrigerator door. Inside it was packed with a large number of items of very restricted variety – butter, cheeses, long-life milk, bacon and tinned meats. That was all. I said to Sandy: ‘Come here. I want to look through your clothes.’

‘ You want to look through my clothes?’ Sandy had taken heart from his providential deliverance from the threat of physical violence and the knowledge that he would not now be reported to those in authority. ‘And who do you think you are then? A bleedin’ cop? The CID, eh?’

‘Just a doctor. A doctor who’s trying to find out why three people died tonight.’ Sandy stared at me, his eyes widening behind his rimless glasses, and his lower jaw fell down. ‘Didn’t you know that Moxen and Scott were dead? The two stewards?’

‘Aye, I’d heard.’ He ran his tongue over his lips. ‘What’s that got to do with me?’

‘I’m not sure. Not yet.’

‘You can’t pin that on me. What are you talking about?’ Sandy’s brief moment of truculence was vanished as if it had never been. ‘I’ve nothing to do–’

‘Three men died and four almost did. They died or nearly died from food poisoning. Food comes from the galley. I’m interested in people who make unauthorized visits to the galley.’ I looked at Haggerty. ‘I think we’d better have Captain Imrie along here.’

‘No! Christ, no!’ Sandy was close to panic. ‘Mr Gerran would kill me–’

‘Come here.’ He came to me, the last resistance gone. I went through his pockets but there was no trace of the only instrument he could have used to infect foodstuffs in the refrigerator, a hypodermic syringe. I said: ‘What were you going to do with those tins?’

‘They weren’t for me. I told you. What would I want with them? I don’t eat enough to keep a mouse alive. Ask anyone. They’ll tell you.’

I didn’t have to ask anyone. What he said was perfectly true: Sandy, like Lonnie Gilbert, depended almost exclusively upon the Distillers Co., Ltd to maintain his calorific quota. But he could still have been using those tins of meat as an insurance, as a red herring, if he’d been caught out as he had been.

‘Who were the tins for, then?’

‘The Duke. Cecil. I’ve just been to his cabin. He said he was hungry. No, he didn’t. He said he was going to be hungry ’cos you’d put him on tea and toast for three days.’ I thought back to my interview with the Duke. I’d only used the tea and toast threat to extract information from him and it wasn’t until now that I recalled that I had forgotten to withdraw the threat. This much of Sandy’s story had to be true.

‘The Duke asked you to get some supplies for him?’

‘No.’

‘You told him you were going to get them?’

‘No. I wanted to surprise him. I wanted to see his face when I turned up with the tins.’

Impasse. He could be telling the truth. He could equally well be using the story as a cloak for other and more sinister activities. I couldn’t tell and probably would never know. I said: ‘You better go and tell your friend the Duke that he’ll be back on a normal diet as from breakfast.’

‘You mean – I can go?’

‘If Mr Haggerty doesn’t wish to press a charge.’

‘I wouldn’t lower myself.’ Haggerty clamped his big hand round the back of Sandy’s neck with a grip tight enough to make the little man squeal in pain. ‘If I ever catch you within sniffing distance of my galley again I won’t just squeeze your neck, I’ll break the bloody thing.’ Haggerty marched him to the door, literally threw him out and returned. ‘Got off far too easy if you ask me, sir.’

‘He’s not worth your ire, Mr Haggerty. He’s probably telling the truth – not that makes him any less a sneak-thief. Moxen and Scott ate here tonight after the passengers had dinner?’

‘Every night. Waiting staff usually eat before the guests – they preferred it the other way round.’ With the departure of Sandy, Haggerty was looking a very troubled and upset man, the loss of the two stewards had clearly shaken him badly and was almost certainly responsible for the violence of his reaction towards Sandy.

‘I think I’ve traced the source of the poison. I believe the horseradish was contaminated with a very unpleasant organism called clostridium botulinum , a sporing anaerobe found most commonly in garden soil.’ I’d never heard of such a case of contamination but that didn’t make it impossible. ‘No possible reflection on you – it’s totally undetectable before, during and after cooking. Were there any leftovers tonight?’

‘Some. I made a casserole for Moxen and Scott and put the rest away.’

‘Away?’

‘For throwing. There wasn’t enough to re-use for anything.’

‘So it’s gone.’ Another door locked.

‘On a night like this? No fear. The gash is sealed in polythene bags, then they’re punctured and go over the side – in the morning.’

The door had opened again. ‘You mean it’s still here?’

‘Of course.’ He nodded towards a rectangular plastic box secured to the bulkhead by butterfly nuts. ‘There.’

I crossed to the box and lifted the lid. Haggerty said: ‘You’ll be going to analyse it, is that it?’

‘That’s what I intended. Rather, to keep it for analysis.’ I dropped the lid. ‘That won’t be possible now. The bin’s empty.’

‘Empty? Over the side – in this weather?’ Haggerty came and unnecessarily checked the bin for himself. ‘Bloody funny. And against regulations.’

‘Perhaps your assistant–’

‘Charlie? That bone-idle layabout. Not him. Besides, he’s off-duty tonight.’ Haggerty scratched the grey bristle of his hair. ‘Lord knows why they did it but it must have been Moxen or Scott.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It must have been.’

I was so tired that I could think of nothing other than my cabin and my bunk. I was so tired that it wasn’t until I had arrived at my cabin and looked on the bare bunk that I recalled that all my blankets had been taken away for Smithy and Oakley. I glanced idly at the small table where I’d left the toxicological books that I had been consulting and my tiredness very suddenly left me.

The volume on Medical Jurisprudence that had provided me with the information on aconitine was lying with its base pressed hard against the far fiddle of the table, thrown there, of course, by one of the violent lurches of the Morning Rose . The silken bookmark ribbon attached to the head of the book stretched out most of its length on the table, which was an unremarkable thing in itself were it not for my clear and distinct recollection that I’d carefully used the bookmark to mark the passage I’d been reading.

I wondered who it was who knew I’d been reading the article on aconitine .

I suddenly didn’t fancy my cabin very much any more. Not, that was, as a place to sleep in. The eccentric shipping millionaire who’d had the Morning Rose completely stripped and fitted for passenger accommodation had had a powerful aversion to locks on cabin doors and, having had the means and the opportunity to do so, had translated his theories into practice. It may have been just a phobia or it may have stemmed from his assertion that many people had unnecessarily lost their lives at sea through being trapped in locked cabins as their ships went down – which, in fact, I knew to be true. However it was, it was impossible to lock a cabin door in the Morning Rose from the inside: it didn’t even have a sliding bolt.