Алистер Маклин - The Golden Rendezvous

“Benson,” Bullen repeated impatiently. “How about Benson?”

“Benson was the victim of a lifetime of habit. Howie here tells us how Benson invariably went out on deck between half past eight and twenty-five to nine for a smoke, while the passengers were at dinner. The radio room is immediately above where he would have been taking his promenade – and the message came through, and Brownell was killed, inside those five minutes. Benson must have seen or heard something unusual and gone to investigate. He might even have caught the murderer in the act. And so Benson had to die too.”

“But why ?” Captain Bullen demanded. He still couldn’t believe it all. “Why, why, why ? Why was he killed? Why was that message so desperately important? The whole damned thing’s crazy. And what in God’s name was in that message anyway?”

“That’s why we’ve got to go to Nassau to find out, sir.”

Bullen looked at me without expression, looked at his drink, evidently decided that he preferred his drink to me – or the ill news I brought with me – and knocked back the contents in a couple of gulps.

McIlroy didn’t touch his. He sat there for a whole minute looking at it consideringly, then he said: “You haven’t missed much, Johnny. But you’ve missed one thing. The wireless officer on watch – Peters, isn’t it? How do you know the same message won’t come through again? Maybe it was a message requiring acknowledgment? If it was, and it’s not acknowledged, it’s pretty certain to come through again. Then what’s the guarantee that Peters won’t get the same treatment?”

“The bo’sun’s the guarantee, Chief. He’s sitting in black shadow not ten yards from the wireless office with a marlin-spike in his hand and Highland murder in his heart. You know MacDonald. Heaven help anyone who goes within a Sunday walk of the wireless office.”

Bullen poured himself another small whisky, smiled tiredly and glanced at his single broad commodore’s stripe.

“Mr. Carter, I think you and I should change jackets.” It was as far in apology as he could ever go and about twelve hours ahead of par. “Think you’d like this side of my desk?”

“Suit me fine, sir,” I agreed. “Especially if you took over entertaining the passengers.”

“In that case we’ll stay as we are.” Another brief smile, no sooner there than vanished. “Who’s on the bridge? Jamieson, isn’t it? Better take over, First.”

“Later, sir, with your permission. There’s still the most important thing of all to investigate. But I don’t even know how to start.”

“Don’t tell me there’s something else,” Bullen said heavily.

“I’ve had some time to think about this, that’s all,” I said. “A message came through to our wireless office, a message so important that it had to be intercepted at all costs. But how could anybody possibly know that message was coming through? The only way that message could have come into the Campari was through a pair of earphones clamped to Brownell’s head, yet someone else was taking down that message at the same instant as Brownell was. Must have been. Brownell had no sooner finished transcribing that message on to his pad than he reached for the phone to get the bridge, and he no sooner reached for the phone than he died. There’s some other radio receiver aboard the Campari tuned into the same wave-length and wherever it is it’s not a hop, skip and jump from the wireless office, for wherever the eavesdropper was he got from there to the wireless office in seconds. Problem, find the receiver.”

Bullen looked at me. McIlroy looked at me. They both looked at each other. Then McIlroy objected: “But the wireless officer keeps shifting wave-lengths. How could anybody know what particular wave-length he was on at any one moment?”

“How can anyone know anything?” I asked. I nodded at the message pad on the table. “Until we get that deciphered.”

“The message.” Bullen gazed at the pad, abruptly made up his mind. “Nassau it is. Maximum speed, Chief, but slowly, over half an hour, so that no one will notice the step up in revs. First, the bridge. Get our position.” He fetched chart, rules, dividers while I was getting the figures, nodded at me as I hung up. “Lay off the shortest possible course.”

It didn’t take long. “047 from here to here, sir, approximately 220 miles, then 350.”

“Arrival?”

“Maximum speed?”

“Of course.”

“Just before midnight tomorrow night.”

He reached for a pad, scribbled for a minute, then read out: “ ‘Port authorities, Nassau, s.s. Campari , position such-and-such, arriving 2330 tomorrow Wednesday. Request police alongside immediate investigation one murdered man, one missing man. Urgent. Bullen, Master.’ That should do.” He reached for the phone. I touched his arm.

“Whoever has this receiver can monitor outgoing calls just as easily as incoming ones. Then they’ll know we’re on to them. God only knows what might happen then.”

Bullen looked slowly first at me, then at McIlroy, then at the purser, who hadn’t spoken a word since I’d arrived in the cabin, then back at me again. Then he tore the message into tiny shreds and dropped it into his waste-paper basket.

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

After having cautiously identified myself to the bo’sun to ensure that I didn’t get the back of my head stove in with a marline-spike, I spent a good fifteen minutes in the vicinity of the wireless office relating its position to other offices and nearby accommodation. The wireless office was on the starboard side, for’ard, immediately above the passengers’ “A” deck accommodation – old man Cerdan’s suite was directly below – and on the basis of my assumption that the murderer, even if he didn’t wait for the last few words of the message to come through, could have had no more time than ten seconds to get from wherever the hidden receiver was to the wireless office, then any place within ten seconds’ reach of the wireless office automatically came under suspicion.

There were quite a few places within the suspected limits. There was the bridge, flag office, radar office, chart-room and all the deck officers’ and cadets’ accommodation. Those could be ruled out at once. There was the dining-room, galleys, pantries, officers’ lounge, telegraph lounge, and, immediately adjacent to the telegraph lounge, another lounge which rejoiced in the name of the drawing-room – it having been found necessary to provide an alternative lounge for our millionaire’s wives and daughters who weren’t all so keen on the alcoholic and ticker-tape attractions of the telegraph lounge as their husbands and fathers were. I spent forty minutes going through those – they were all deserted at that time of night – and if anyone had yet invented a transistor receiver smaller than a matchbox, then I might have missed it: but anything larger, I’d have found it for sure.

That left only the passengers’ accommodation, with the cabins on “A” deck, immediately below the wireless office, as the prime suspects. The “B” deck suites, on the next deck below, were not out-with the bounds of possibility: but when I ran a mental eye over the stiff-legged bunch of elderly crocks on “B” deck, I couldn’t think of a man among them who could have made it to the wireless office in under ten seconds. And it certainly hadn’t been a woman: Because whoever had killed Brownell had not only also laid out Benson but removed him from sight, and Benson weighed a hundred and eighty pounds if he weighed an ounce.