Алистер Маклин - The Golden Rendezvous

Slowly, infinitely slowly, consciousness came back to me. Consciousness of a kind. Where clarity and awareness and speed of recovery were concerned I was a man chained hand and foot, surfacing from the bottom of a sea of molasses. Something, I dimly realised, was touching my face, my eyes, my mouth: something cold and moist and sweet. Water. Someone was sponging my face with water, gently trying to mop the blood from my eyes. I made to turn my head to see who it was and then I vaguely remembered what had happened last time I moved my head. I raised my right hand instead and touched someone’s wrist.

“Take it easy, sir. You just take it easy.” The man with the sponge must have had a long arm, he was at least two miles away, but I recognised the voice for all that. Archie MacDonald. “Don’t you try moving now. Just you wait a bit. You’ll be all right, sir.”

“Archie?” We were a real disembodied pair, I thought fuzzily. I was at least a couple of miles away, too. I only hoped we were a couple of miles away in the same direction. “Is that you, Archie?” God knows I didn’t doubt it, I just wanted the reassurance of hearing him say so.

“It’s myself, sir. Just you leave everything to me.” It was the bo’sun all right, he couldn’t have used that sentence more than five thousand times in the years I’d known him. “Just you lie still.”

I’d no intention of doing anything else. I’d be far gone in years before I’d ever forget the last time I moved, if I lived that long, which didn’t seem a bit likely at the moment.

“My neck, Archie.” My voice sounded a few hundred yards closer. “I think it’s broken.”

“Aye, I’m sure it feels that way, sir, but I’m thinking myself maybe it’s not as bad as all that. We’ll see.”

I don’t know how long I lay there, maybe two or three minutes, while the bo’sun swabbed the blood away until eventually the stars began to swim into some sort of focus again. Then he slid one arm under my shoulders and under my head and began to lift me, inch by inch, into a sitting position.

I waited for the guillotine to fall again, but it didn’t. This time it was more like a butcher’s meat-chopper, but a pretty blunt chopper: several times in a few seconds the Campari spun round 360 degrees on its keel, then settled down on course again. 047, I seemed to recall. And this time I didn’t lose consciousness.

“What time is it, Archie?” A stupid question to ask, but I wasn’t at my very best. And my voice, I was glad to hear, was at last practically next door to me.

He turned my left wrist.

“Twelve forty-five, your watch says, sir. I think you must have been lying there a good hour. You were in the shadow of the boat and no one would have seen you if they had passed by this way.”

I moved my head an experimental inch and winced at the pain of it. Two inches and it would fall off.

“What the hell happened to me, Archie? Some kind of turn or other? I don’t remember–”

“Some kind of turn!” His voice was soft and cold. I felt his fingers touch the back of my neck. “Our friend with the sandbag has been taking a walk again, sir. One of those days,” he added thoughtfully, “I’m going to catch him at it.”

“Sandbag!” I struggled to my feet, but I’d never have made it without the bo’sun. “The wireless office! Peters!”

“It’s young Mr. Jenkins that’s on now, sir. He’s all right. You said you’d relieve me for the middle watch, and when twenty past twelve came I knew something was wrong. So I just went straight into the wireless office and phoned Captain Bullen.”

“The captain?”

“Who else could I phone, sir?” Who else, indeed. Apart from myself the captain was the only deck officer who really knew what had happened, who knew where the bo’sun was concealed and why, MacDonald had his arm around me now, still half supporting me, leading me for’ard to the cross-passage that led to the wireless office. “He came at once. He’s there now, talking to Mr. Jenkins. Worried stiff – thinks the same thing might have happened to you as to Benson. He gave me a present before I came looking for you.” He made a movement and I could see the barrel of a pistol that was all but engulfed in his huge hand. “I am hoping that I get a chance to use this, Mr. Carter, and not the butt end, either. I suppose you realise that if you had toppled forward instead of sideways, you’d most likely have fallen over the rail into the sea.”

I wondered grimly why they – or he – hadn’t, in fact, shoved me over the side, but said nothing, just concentrated on reaching the wireless office.

Captain Bullen was waiting there, just outside the door, and the bulge in the pocket of his uniform jacket wasn’t caused only by his hand. He came quickly to meet us, probably to get out of earshot of the wireless officer, and his reaction to my condition and story of what had happened were all that anyone could reasonably have wished for. He was just mad clear through; I’d never seen him in such a mood of tightly-controlled anger since I’d first met him three years ago. When he’d calmed down a bit, he said: “But why the devil didn’t they just go the whole hog and throw you overboard while they were at it?”

“They didn’t have to, sir,” I said wearily. “They didn’t want to kill me. Just to get me out of the road.”

He peered closely at me, the cold eyes speculative.

“You talk as if you knew why they coshed you.”

“I do. Or I think I do.” I rubbed the back of my neck with a gentle hand. I was pretty sure now there weren’t any vertebrae broken, it just felt that way. “My own fault. I overlooked the obvious. Come to that, we all overlooked the obvious. Once they’d killed Brownell and we’d deduced, by association, that they’d also killed Benson, I lost all interest in Benson. I just assumed that they’d got rid of him. All I was concerned with, all any of us was concerned with, was to see that there was no further attack made on the wireless officer, to try to find out where the receiver was and to figure out what lay behind it all. Benson, we were sure, was dead and a dead Benson could no longer be of any use to us. So we forgot Benson. Benson belonged to the past.”

“Are you trying to tell me that Benson was – or is – still alive?”

“He was dead all right.” I felt about ninety, a badly crippled ninety, and the vice round my head wasn’t easing off any I could notice. “He was dead, but they hadn’t got rid of him. Maybe they hadn’t had a chance to get rid of him. Maybe they had to wait till it was real good and dark to get rid of him. But they had to get rid of him – if we’d found him, we’d have known there was a murderer on board. They probably had him stashed away in some place where we wouldn’t have thought of looking for him anyway, lying on top of one of the offices, stuck in a ventilator, behind one of the sun-deck benches, it could have been anywhere. And I was either too near where they’d stashed him, so that they couldn’t get at him, or they couldn’t chuck him overboard as long as I was standing by the rail there. Barring myself, they knew they were safe enough. Going at maximum speed, with a bow-wave like we’re throwing up right now, no one would have heard anything if they had dropped him into the sea: and on a dark moonless night like this, no one would have seen anything either. So they’d only me to deal with – and they didn’t find that any trouble at all,” I finished bitterly.

Bullen shook his head. “You never heard a thing? Not the faintest fall of a footstep, not even the swish of a cosh coming through the air.”

“Old flannel-feet must be a pretty dangerous character, sir,” I said reflectively. “He didn’t make the slightest whisper of sound. I wouldn’t have thought it possible. For all I know, I might have taken a fainting turn and struck my head on the davit as I fell. That’s what I thought myself – I even suggested it to the bo’sun here. And that’s what I’m going to tell anyone who wants to know tomorrow.” I grinned and winked at MacDonald, and even the wink hurt. “I’ll tell them you’ve been overworking me, sir, and I collapsed from exhaustion.”