Алистер Маклин - Seawitch

Marina said, half in sadness, half in bitterness: ‘My idol with the feet of clay.’

Roomer said huskily: ‘Put out the light and then put out the light.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I didn’t say it. Chap called Othello. That’s the trouble with you millionaire’s daughters. Illiterate. First Mitchell puts out the lights. He’s got cat’s eyes. He can see in almost total darkness where an ordinary man is blind. Did you know that?’

‘No.’

‘Puts him at a tremendous advantage. And then he extinguishes another kind of light.’

‘I know what you mean and I don’t believe you. I saw him shaking.’

‘You poor, silly, stupid, foolish ninny. You don’t deserve him.’

She stared at him in disbelief. ‘What did you say?’

‘You heard me.’ Roomer sounded tired and the doctor was looking at him in disapproval. He went on in a sombre voice: ‘Kowenski and Rindler are dead men. They have minutes to live. He loves your sister almost as much as he does you, and I’ve been his closest friend and partner since we were kids. Mitchell looks after his own.’ He smiled faintly. ‘I’m afraid he takes care of things in a rather final way.’

‘But he was shaking – only cowards shake.’ Her voice was now lacking in conviction.

‘He’s afraid of nothing that lives. As for the shaking – he’s a throw-back to the old Scandinavian berserker. He’s just trying to contain his fury. He usually smiles. As for being a coward, quite a number of people have thought that of him – probably their last thought on earth.’ He smiled. ‘You’re shaking now.’

She said nothing.

Roomer said: ‘There’s a cupboard in the vestibule. Bring what you find there.’

She looked at him uncertainly, left, and returned in a few minutes carrying a pair of shoes. She held them at arm’s length and from the look of horror on her face might have been holding a cobra.

Roomer said: ‘Mitchell’s?’

‘Yes.’

‘Better return them. He’ll be requiring them quite soon.’

When she came back Melinda said: ‘Do you really think you could marry a man who kills people?’

Marina shivered and said nothing. Roomer said sardonically: ‘Better than marrying a coward, I should think.’

In the generator room Mitchell found what he wanted right away – a breaker marked ‘Deck Lights’. He pulled down the lever and stepped out on to the now darkened platform. He waited a half-minute until his eyes adjusted themselves to the darkness, then moved in the direction of the derrick crane where he could hear two men cursing in far from muted voices. He approached on soundless stockinged feet until he was less than two yards away. Still soundlessly, he laid his pencil flash on top of the barrel of the Smith & Wesson and slid forward the flash switch.

The two men swung round in remarkably swift unison, hands reaching for their guns.

Mitchell said: ‘You know what this is, don’t you?’

They knew. The deep-bluish sheen of a silenced .38 is not readily mistakable for a pop-gun. Their hands stopped reaching for their guns. It was, to say the least, rather unnerving to see an illuminated silenced gun and nothing but blackness beyond it.

‘Clasp your hands behind your necks, turn round and start walking.’

They walked until they could walk no more for the good reason that they had reached the end of the platform. Beyond that lay nothing but the 200-foot drop to the Gulf of Mexico.

Mitchell said: ‘Keep your hands even more tightly clasped and turn round.’

They did so. ‘You are Kowenski and Rindler?’

There was no reply.

‘You are the two who gunned down Lady Melinda and Mr Roomer?’

Again there was no reply. Vocal chords can become paralysed when the mind is possessed of the irrevocable certainty that one is but one step, one second removed from eternity. Mitchell squeezed the trigger twice and was walking away before the dead men had hit the waters of the Gulf. He had taken only four steps when a flashlight struck him in the face.

‘Well, well, if it isn’t clever-clever Mitchell, the scaredy scientist.’ Mitchell couldn’t see the man – and undoubtedly the gun behind the flash – but he had no difficulty in recognizing the voice of Heffer, the one with the sharp nose and rodentlike teeth. ‘And carrying a silenced gun. Whatever have we been up to, Mr Mitchell?’

Heffer had made the classic blunder of all incompetent would-be assassins. He should have shot Mitchell on sight and then asked the question: Mitchell flicked on his pencil torch and spun it upwards, where it spun around like a demented firefly. Heffer would have been less than human not to have had the automatic and instinctive reaction of glancing upward while either his conscious or subconscious mind speculated as to what the hell Mitchell was up to: whichever it was, the speculation was of very brief duration indeed because Heffer was dead before the flash fell back on to the platform.

Mitchell picked up the flash, still surprisingly working, dragged Heffer by the heels to join his friends at the bottom of the Gulf, returned to the sick-bay vestibule, donned his shoes and entered the sick-bay itself. Dr Greenshaw had both his patients on blood transfusion.

Roomer looked at his watch. ‘Six minutes. What took you so long?’

A plainly unnerved Marina looked at Roomer, half in disbelief, half in stupefaction.

‘Well, I’m sorry.’ Mitchell actually managed to sound apologetic. ‘I had the misfortune to run into Heffer on the way back.’

‘You mean he had the misfortune to run into you. And where are our friends?’

‘I’m not rightly sure.’

‘I understand.’ Roomer sounded sympathetic. ‘It’s difficult to estimate the depth of the water hereabouts.’

‘I could find out. It hardly seems to matter. Dr Greenshaw, you have stretchers? Complete with straps and so forth?’ Greenshaw nodded. ‘Please prepare them. Let them stay where they are meantime. Blood transfusions can be carried on in flight?’

‘That’s no problem. I assume you want me to accompany them?’

‘If you would be so kind. I know it’s asking an awful lot but, after you’ve handed them over to the competent medical authorities, I’d like you to return.’

‘It will be a pleasure. I am now in my seventieth year and thought there was nothing fresh left in life for me to experience. I was wrong.’

Marina stared at them in disbelief. All three men seemed calm and relaxed. Melinda appeared to have dropped off into a coma but she was merely, in fact, under heavy sedation. Marina said with conviction: ‘You’re all mad.’

Mitchell said: ‘That’s what the inmate of a lunatic asylum says of the outside world, and he may well be right. However, that’s hardly the point at issue. You, Marina, will be accompanying the others on the trip back to Florida. There you will be perfectly safe – your father will ensure that the most massive security guard ever mounted will be there. No president in history will ever have been so well protected.’

‘How splendid. I love being made a fuss of, being the centre of attraction. However, mastermind, there’s just one small flaw in your reasoning. I’m not going. I’m staying with my father.’

‘That’s exactly the point I’m going to discuss with him now.’

‘You mean you’re going out to kill someone else?’

Mitchell held out his hands, fingers splayed. They could have been carved from marble.

‘Later,’ Roomer said. ‘He appears to have some other things on his mind at the moment.’

Mitchell left. Marina turned furiously on Roomer. ‘You’re just as bad as he is.’

‘I’m a sick man. You mustn’t upset me.’

‘You and his berserker moods. He’s just a killer.’