Алистер Маклин - The Golden Rendezvous

“There’s an emergency set,” Bullen said hoarsely. “In the cupboard under the table there. The one with the petrol generator. He’ll have missed that.”

But the murderer hadn’t missed it, he wasn’t the type to miss anything. And he certainly hadn’t missed with that hammer. If anything, he’d done an even more thorough job on the emergency set than on the main set: and, just for good measure, he’d smashed up the armature of the patrol generator.

“Our friend must have been listening in on his receiver again,” MacDonald put in quietly. “So he came out either to stop the message or smash up the sets, so that no more messages could go through. He was lucky, had he been a bit later and the radio officer back on watch my men would have been holystoning the decks outside and there would have been nothing he would be able to do.”

“I don’t associate luck with this killer in any way,” I said. “He’s too damned efficient for that. I don’t think any more messages which might have worried him had come through, but he was afraid they might. He knew both Peters and Jennings were off watch at the burial, and he probably checked that the wireless office was locked. So he waited till the coast was clear, came out on deck, unlocked the office and went inside. And Dexter, unfortunately for himself, saw him going in.”

“The key, Mister,” Bullen said harshly. “The key. How come?”

“The Marconi-man in Kingston who checked the sets, sir. Remember?” He remembered all right: the Marconi-man had telephoned the ship asking if servicing facilities were required and Bullen had seized on it as a heaven-sent opportunity to close down the radio office and refuse to accept any more embarrassing and infuriating messages from London and New York. “He spent about four hours here. Time to do anything. If he was a Marconi-man, I’m the Queen of the May. He had a nice big impressive tool-kit with him, but the only tool he used, if he could call it that, was a stick of wax, heated to the right temperature, to take an impression of the Yale – even if he had managed to pinch the Yale and return it unseen it would have been impossible for him to cut a new one, those special Yales are far too complicated. And my guess is that that was all he did while he was there.”

And my guess was completely wrong. But the thought that this fake Marconi-man might have employed himself in another way during his stay in the wireless office did not occur to me until many hours later: it was so blindingly obvious that I missed it altogether, although two minutes’ constructive thought would have been bound to put me on to it. But those hours were to elapse before I got around to the constructive thought: and by that time it was too late. Too late for the Campari , too late for its passengers, and far far too late for all too many of the crew.

We left young Dexter lying in the wireless office and secured the door with a new padlock. We’d talked for almost five minutes about the problem of where to put him before the simple solution occurred to us: leave him where he was. Nobody was going to use that wireless office any more that day: he was as well there as anywhere till the Nassau police came aboard.

From the wireless office we’d gone straight to the telegraph lounge. The teleprinters in there were coupled to receiver-transmitters on fixed wavelengths to London, Paris and New York, but could be adapted by men who knew what they were doing, such as Peters and Jenkins, to receive and transmit on practically any wavelength. But not even Peters and Jenkins could do anything about the situation we found: there were two big transmitters in the telegraph lounge, cleverly designed to look like cocktail cabinets, and both had received the same treatment as the sets in the wireless office: the exteriors intact, the interiors smashed beyond repair. Somebody had been very busy during the night: the wireless office must have been the last item on the list.

I looked at Bullen.

“With your permission, sir, MacDonald and I will go and have a look at the lifeboats. We might as well waste our time that way as in any other.”

He knew what I meant all right, and nodded. Captain Bullen was beginning to look slightly hunted. He was the ablest, the most competent master in the Blue Mail: but nothing in his long training and experience had ever been designed to cope with a situation like this.

And so MacDonald and I duly wasted our time. There were three lifeboats equipped with hand-cranked transmitters for emergency use if the Campari sank or had otherwise to be abandoned. Or they had been equipped with them. But not any more. The transmitters were gone. No need to waste time or make a racket smashing up sets when all you have to do is to drop them over the side. Our murderous friend hadn’t missed a single trick.

When we got back to the captain’s cabin, where we had been told to report, there was something in the atmosphere that I didn’t like at all. They say you can smell fear: I don’t know about that but you can sense it and you could certainly sense it in that cabin at nine o’clock that morning. The fear, the atmosphere of trapped helplessness, the sense of being completely at the mercy of unknown and infinitely powerful and ruthless forces made for an atmosphere of nervously brittle tension that I could almost reach out and touch.

McIlroy and Cummings were there with the captain and so, too, was our second mate, Tommy Wilson. He had had to be told, the stage had been reached now where every officer would have to be told, so Bullen said, in the interests of their own safety and self-defence: I wasn’t so sure. Bullen looked up as we came through the door: his face was grim and still, a thinly opaque mask for the consuming worry that lay beneath.

“Well?”

I shook my head, took a seat. MacDonald remained standing but Bullen gestured him irritably to a chair. He said, to no one in particular: “I suppose that accounts for all the transmitters on the ship?”

“As far as we know, yes.” I went on: “Don’t you think we should have White up here, sir?”

“I was about to do that.” He reached for the phone, spoke for a moment, hung up then said roughly: “Well, Mister, you were the man with the bright ideas last night. Got any this morning?” Just to repeat the words makes them sound harsh and unpleasant: but they were curiously empty of any offence, Bullen didn’t know which way to turn and he was grasping at straws.

“None. All we know is that Dexter was killed at eight twenty-six this morning, give or take a minute. No question about that. And that at that moment most of our passengers were at breakfast: no question about that either. The only passengers not at breakfast were Miss Harcourt, Mr. Cerdan and his two nurses, Mr. and Mrs. Piper from Miami and that couple from Venezuela – old Hournos and his wife, and their daughter. Our only suspects, and none of them makes any sense.”

“And all of those were at dinner last night when Brownell and Benson were killed,” McIlroy said thoughtfully, “except the old man and his nurses. Which leaves them as the only suspects, which is not only ridiculous but far too obvious: I think we’ve already had plenty of proof that whatever the people behind all this are guilty of, being obvious is not one of them. Unless, of course,” he added slowly, “some of the passengers are working in collusion with each other.”

“Or with the crew,” Tommy Wilson murmured.

“What?” Old Bullen gave him the full benefit of his commodore’s stare. “What did you say?”

“I said the crew,” Wilson repeated clearly. If old Bullen was trying to frighten Tommy Wilson he was wasting his time. “And by the crew I also include the officers. I agree, sir, that I heard – or knew – of those murders for the first time only a few minutes ago, and I admit I haven’t had time to sort out my thoughts. On the other hand, I haven’t had a chance to become so involved as all the rest of you are. With all respects, I’m not so deeply lost in the wood that I can’t see the trees. You all seem to be convinced that it must be one or more of the passengers responsible – our chief officer here seems to have set this bee firmly in all your bonnets – but if a passenger were in cahoots with one of the crew then it’s quite possible that that member of the crew was detailed to hang around in the vicinity of the wireless office and start laying about him when necessary.”