Алистер Маклин - The Golden Rendezvous

So, “A” or “B” decks. Both of them would have to go through the sieve tomorrow. I prayed for good weather to tempt our passengers out on to the sun-decks to give the stewards, in the course of making up beds and cleaning out the cabins, the chance to carry out a thorough search. The Customs in Jamaica, of course, had already done this; but they had been looking for a mechanism over six feet in length, not a radio which, in those days of miniaturisation, could easily have been hidden in, say, one of those hefty jewel-boxes which were the run of the mill among our millionaires’ wives.

We were running almost due north-east now, under the same indigo sky ablaze with stars, the Campari rolling gently as it sliced along the line of the long slow swell. We’d taken almost half an hour to make an eighty degree change of course so that no night-owl passenger abroad on deck could see the changing direction of our wake: not that those precautions were going to be of any use if any of our passengers had the faintest idea of stellar navigation or, come to that, the very elementary ability to locate the Pole Star.

I was walking slowly up the boat-deck, port side, when I saw Captain Bullen approaching. He lifted his arm, motioned me into the deep shadow cast by one of the ship’s lifeboats.

“Thought I would find you here or hereabouts,” he said softly. He reached under his jacket and pressed something cold and hard into my hand. “I believe you know how to use one of those.”

Starlight glinted dully off the blued metal in my hand. A Colt automatic, one of the three kept on a locked chain in a glass cabinet in the captain’s sleeping cabin. Captain Bullen was certainly taking things seriously at last.

“I can use it, sir.”

“Right. Stick it in your belt or wherever you stick those damned things. Never realised they were so blasted awkward to conceal about your person. And here’s a spare magazine. Hope to God we don’t have to use them.” Which meant the captain had one also.

“The third gun, sir?”

“I don’t know.” He hesitated. “Wilson, I thought.”

“He’s a good man. But give it to the bo’sun.”

“The bo’sun?” Bullen’s voice sharpened, then he remembered the need for secrecy and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial growl. “You know the regulations, Mister. Those guns to be used only in times of war, piracy or mutiny – and never to be issued to anyone other than an officer.”

“The regulations don’t concern me half as much as my own neck does, sir. You know MacDonald’s record – youngest-ever sergeant-major in the Commandos, a list of decorations as long as your arm. Give it to MacDonald, sir.”

“We’ll see,” he grunted, “we’ll see. I’ve just been to the carpenter’s store. With Doc Marston. First time I’ve ever seen that old phoney shaken to the core. He agrees with you, says there’s no doubt Brownell was murdered. You’d think he was up in the dock of the Old Bailey with the alibis he’s giving himself. But I think McIlroy was right when he said the symptoms were about the same.”

“Well,” I said doubtfully. “I hope nothing comes of it, sir.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know old Doc Marston as well as I do, sir. The two great loves of his life are Jamaica rum and the desire to give the impression that he’s on the inside of everything that goes on. A dangerous combination. Apart from McIlroy, the purser, yourself and myself the only person who knows that Brownell didn’t die a natural death is the bo’sun, and he’d never talk. Doc Marston is a different proposition altogether.”

“Not to worry, my boy,” Bullen said with something like relish in his voice. “I told our worthy surgeon that, Lord Dexter’s pal or not, if he as much as lifted a glass of rum before we arrived in Nassau, I’d have him on the beach, for good, within the week.”

I tried to imagine anyone telling the venerable and aristocratic doctor anything of the sort: my mind boggled at the very thought. But they hadn’t made old Bullen company commodore for nothing. I knew he’d done exactly as stated.

“He didn’t take off any of Brownell’s clothes?” I asked. “His shirt, for instance?”

“No. What does it matter?”

“It’s just that it’s probable that whoever strangled Brownell had his fingers locked round the back of the neck to give him leverage, and I believe that police today can pick up fingerprints from practically any substance, including certain types of clothes. They shouldn’t have much trouble picking up prints from those nice shiny starched collars Brownell wore.”

“You don’t miss much,” Bullen said thoughfully. “Except that maybe you’ve missed your profession. Anything else?”

“Yes. About this burial at sea tomorrow at dawn.”

There was a long pause, then he said with the blasphemously weary restraint of a long-suffering man who has already held himself in check far too long: “What bloody burial at dawn? Brownell is our only exhibition for the Nassau police.”

“Burial, sir,” I repeated. “But not at dawn. About, say, eight o’clock, when a fair number of our passengers will be up and about, having their morning constitutional. This is what I mean, sir.”

I told him what I meant and he listened patiently enough, considering. When I was finished he nodded slowly, two or three times in succession, turned and left me without a word.

I moved out into a lane of light between two lifeboats, and glanced at my watch. Twenty-five minutes past eleven. I’d told MacDonald I’d relieve him at midnight. I walked across to the rail and stood there by a life-jacket locker, staring out over the slow shimmering swell of the sea, hands at arms’ length on the rail, vainly trying to figure out what could possibly lie behind all that had happened that evening.

When I awoke, it was twenty minutes to one. Not that I was immediately aware of the time when I awoke: I wasn’t immediately and clearly aware of anything. It’s difficult to be aware of anything when your head is being squeezed between the jaws of a giant vice and your eyes have gone blind, to be aware of anything, that is, except the vice and the blindness. Blindness. My eyes. I was worried about my eyes. I raised a hand and fumbled around for a while and then I found them. They were filled with something hard and encrusted and when I rubbed the crust came away and there was stickiness beneath. Blood. There was blood in my eyes, blood that was gumming the lids together and making me blind. At least, I hoped vaguely it was blood that was making me blind.

I rubbed some more blood away with the heel of my hand, and then I could see. Not too well, not the way I was used to seeing, the stars in the sky were not the bright pin-points of light to which I was accustomed, but just a pale fuzzy haze seen through a frosted glass window. I reached out a trembling hand and tried to touch this frosted glass but it vanished and dissolved as I reached out, and what my hand touched was cool and metallic. I strained my eyes wide open and saw that there was indeed no glass there, what I was touching was the lowermost bar of the ship’s rail.

I could see better now, at least better than a blind man could. My head was lying in the scuppers, inches away from one of the lifeboat davits. What in God’s name was I doing there with my head in the scuppers, inches away from the davits? I managed to get both hands under me and, with a sudden drunken lurch, heaved myself into a semi-sitting position with one elbow still on the deck. A great mistake, a very great mistake, for at once a blinding agonising pain, that never-recorded pain that must be experienced in the final shattering milli-second of awareness as a plunging guillotine slices through bone, flesh and muscle before crashing into the block beneath, slashed its paralysing way across head, neck and shoulders and toppled me back to the deck again. My head must have struck heavily against the iron of the scuppers, but I don’t think I even moaned.