Алистер Маклин - The Golden Rendezvous

He looked at me gravely then went away without saying anything. I looked across at Bullen and MacDonald. Both of them were awake, both of them carefully not looking in my direction. And then I looked at Carreras.

At first glance he looked exactly the same as he had a couple of days ago. At first glance, that was. A second and closer inspection showed the difference: a slight pallor under the tan, a reddening of the eyes, a tightening of the face that had not been there before. He had a chart under his left arm, a slip of paper in his left hand.

“Well,” I sneered. “How’s the big bold pirate captain this morning?”

“My son is dead,” he said dully.

I hadn’t expected it to come like this, or so soon, but the very unexpectedness of it helped me to the right reaction, the reaction he would probably expect from me anyway. I stared at him through slightly narrowed eyes and said: “He’s what ?”

“Dead.” Miguel Carreras, whatever else he lacked, unquestionably had all the normal instincts of a parent, a father. The very intensity of his restraint showed how badly he had been hit. For a moment I felt genuinely sorry for him. For a very short moment. Then I saw the faces of Wilson and Jamieson and Benson and Brownell and Dexter, the faces of all those dead men, and I wasn’t sorry any more.

“Dead?” I repeated. Stocked puzzlement, but not too much shock, it wouldn’t be expected of me. “Your son? Dead? How can he be dead? What did he die of?” Almost of its own volition, before I suddenly checked the movement, my hand started reaching for the clasp-knife under the pillow. Not that it would have made much difference even if he had seen it – five minutes in the dispensary steriliser had removed the last traces of blood.

“I don’t know.” He shook his head and I felt like cheering; there were no traces of suspicion in his face. “I don’t know.”

“Dr. Marston,” I said. “Surely you–”

“We haven’t been able to find him. He has disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” It was Captain Bullen making his contribution and his voice sounded a shade stronger, a little less husky, than it had the previous night. “Vanished? A man just can’t vanish aboard a ship like that, Mr. Carreras.”

“We spent over two hours searching the ship. My son is not aboard the Campari . When did you last see him Mr. Carter?”

I didn’t indulge in guilty starts, sharp upward glances or anything daft like that. I wondered what his reactions would have been if I’d said: “When I heaved him over the side of the Campari last night.” Instead, I pursed my lips and said: “After dinner last night when he came here. He didn’t linger. Said something like ‘Captain Carreras making his rounds,’ and left.”

“That is correct. I’d sent him to make a tour of inspection. How did he look?”

“Not his usual self. Green. Sea-sick.”

“My son was a poor sailor,” Carreras acknowledged. “It is possible–”

“You said he was making rounds,” I interrupted. “Of the whole ship? Decks and everything?”

“That is so.”

“Did you have life-lines rigged on the fore- and after-decks?”

“No. I had not thought it necessary.”

“Well,” I said grimly, “there’s your possible answer. Your probable answer. No lifelines, nothing to hang on to. Felt ill, ran for the side, a sudden lurch–” I left the sentence hanging.

“It is possible, but not in character. He had an exceptional sense of balance.”

“Balance doesn’t help much if you slip on a wet deck.”

“Quite. I also haven’t ruled out the possibility of foul play.”

“Foul play?” I stared at him, duly grateful that the gift of telepathy is so very limited. “With all the crew and passengers under guard, lock and key, how is foul play possible? Unless,” I added thoughtfully, “there’s a nigger in your own woodpile.”

“I have not yet completed my investigations.” The voice was cold, the subject was closed and Miguel Carreras was back in business again. Bereavement wouldn’t crush this man. However much he might inwardly mourn his son, it wouldn’t in the slightest detract from his efficiency or his ruthless determination to carry out exactly the plans he had made. It wasn’t, for instance, going to make the slightest difference in his plans to send us all into orbit the following day. Signs of humanity there might be but the abiding fundamental in Carreras’s character was an utter and all-excluding fanaticism that was all the more dangerous in that it lay so deeply hidden beneath the smooth urbanity of the surface.

“The chart, Carter.” He handed it across to me along with a paper giving a list of fixes. “Let me know if the Fort Ticonderoga is on course. And if she is running on time. We can later calculate our time of interception if and when I get a fix this morning.”

“You’ll get a fix,” Bullen assured him huskily. “They say the devil is good to his own, Carreras, and he’s been good to you. You’re running out of the hurricane and you’ll have clear patches of sky by noon. Rain later in the evening, but first clearing.”

“You are sure, Captain Bullen? You are sure we are running out of the hurricane?”

“I’m sure. Or, rather, the hurricane is running away from us.” Old Bullen was an authority on hurricanes and would lecture on his pet subject at the drop of a hat, even to Carreras, even when a hoarse whisper was all the voice he could summon. “Neither wind nor sea have moderated very much – they certainly hadn’t – but what matters is the direction of the wind. It’s from the northwest now, which means that the hurricane lies to the north-east of us. It passed us by to the east, on our starboard hand, some time during the night, moving northwards, then suddenly swung northeast. Quite often when a hurricane reaches the northern limits of its latitude and then is caught up by the westerlies it can remain stationary at its point of recurvature for twelve or twenty-four hours – which would have meant that you would have had to sail through it. But you had the luck: it recurved and moved to the east almost without a break.” Bullen lay back, close to exhaustion. Even so little had been too much for him.

“You can tell all this just lying in your bed there?” Carreras demanded.

Bullen gave him the commodore’s look he would have given any cadet who dared question his knowledge, and ignored him.

“The weather is going to moderate?” Carreras persisted.

“That’s obvious, isn’t it?”

Carreras nodded slowly. Making his rendezvous in time and being able to trans-ship the gold had been his two great worries: and now both of those were gone. He turned abruptly, walked out of the sick-bay.

Bullen cleared his throat and said formally, in his strained whisper: “Congratulations, Mr. Carter. You are the most fluent liar I’ve ever known.”

MacDonald just grinned.

The forenoon, the afternoon came and went. The sun duly appeared, as Bullen had prophesied, and later disappeared, also as he had prophesied. The sea moderated, although not much, not enough, I guessed, to alleviate the sufferings of our passengers, and the wind stayed where it was, out of the north-west. Bullen, under sedation, slept nearly all day, once again relapsing into his incoherent mumblings – none of them, I was relieved to note, were about Tony Carreras – while MacDonald and I talked or slept. But we didn’t sleep before I told him what I hoped to do that night when – and if – I managed to get loose on the upper deck.

Susan I hardly saw that day. She made her appearance after breakfast with her arm in plaster and in a sling. There was no danger of this arousing any suspicion, even in a mind like Carreras’s: the story was to be that she had gone to sleep in a chair, been flung out of it during the storm and sprained her wrist. Such accidents were so commonplace in heavy weather that no one would think to raise an eyebrow. About ten o’clock in the morning she asked to be allowed to join her parents in the drawing-room, and stayed there all day.