Alistair MacLean - The Golden Rendezvous

Bullen looked at me. Mcllroy looked at me. They both looked at each other. Then Mcllroy objected: “But the wireless officer keeps shifting wave lengths. How could anybody know what particular wavelength he was on at any one moment?”

“How can anyone know anything?” I asked. I nodded at the message pad on the table. “Until we get that deciphered?”

“The message.” Bullen gazed at the pad, abruptly made up his mind.

“Nassau it is. Maximum speed, chief, but slowly, over half an hour, so that no one will notice the step-up in revs. First, the bridge. Get our position.” He fetched chart, rules, dividers while I was getting the figures, nodded at me as I hung up. “Lay off the shortest possible course.”

It didn’t take long. “047 from here to here, sir, approximately 220 miles, then 300.”

“Arrival?”

“Maximum speed?”

“Of course.”

“Just before midnight to-morrow night.”

He reached for a pad, scribbled for a minute, then read out: “‘Port authorities, Nassau. S.S. Campari, position such-and-such, arriving 23.30 tomorrow Wednesday. Request police alongside immediate investigation one murdered man, one missing man. Urgent. Bullen, Master.’ That should do.” He reached for the phone. I touched his arm.

“Whoever has this receiver can monitor outgoing calls just as easily as incoming ones. Then they’ll know we’re on to them. God only knows what might happen then.” Bullen looked slowly first at me, then at Mcllroy, then at the purser, who hadn’t spoken a word since I’d arrived in the cabin, then back at me again. Then he tore the message into tiny shreds and dropped it into the wastepaper basket.

I didn’t get a great deal of investigating done that night. I’d figured out how to start, all right, but the devil of it was I couldn’t start till the passengers were up and about in the morning. Nobody likes being turned out of his bed in the middle of the night, a millionaire least of all.

After having cautiously identified myself to the bo’sun to ensure that I didn’t get the back of my head stove in with a marlinespike, I spent a good fifteen minutes in the vicinity of the wireless office, relating its position to other offices and nearby accommodation. The wireless office was on the starboard side, left immediately above the forward “A” deck accommodation and Cerdan’s suite was directly below — and on the basis of my assumption that the murderer, even if he didn’t wait for the last few words of the message to come through, could have had no more than ten seconds to get from wherever the hidden receiver was to the wireless office, then any place within ten seconds’ reach of the wireless office automatically came under suspicion. There were quite a few places within the suspected limits. There was the bridge, flag office, radar office, chart room, and all the deck officers’ and cadets’ accommodation. Those could be ruled out at once. There was the dining room, galleys, pantries, officers’ lounge, telegraph lounge and, immediately adjacent to the telegraph lounge, another lounge which rejoiced in the name of the drawing room — it having been found necessary to provide an alternative lounge for our millionaires’ wives and daughters who weren’t all so keen on the alcoholic and ticker-tape attractions of the telegraph lounge as their husbands and fathers were.

I spent forty minutes going through those — they were all deserted at that time of night — and if anyone had yet invented a transistor receiver smaller than a match box, then I might have missed it; but anything larger, I’d have found it for sure. That left only the passengers’ accommodation, with the cabins on “A” deck, immediately below the wireless office, as the prime suspects. The “B” deck suites, on the next deck below, were not out with the bounds of possibility; but when I ran a mental eye over the stiff-legged bunch of elderly crocks on “B” deck, I couldn’t think of a man among them who could have made it to the wireless office in under ten seconds. And it certainly hadn’t been a woman: because whoever had killed Brownell had not only also laid out Benson, but removed him from sight, and Benson weighed a hundred and eighty pounds if he weighed an ounce.

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 onto 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 these days of miniaturisation, could easily have been hidden in, say, one of those hefty jewel boxes which were run of the mill among our millionaires’ wives.

We were running almost due northeast 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 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 phony 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 Mcllroy 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 Mcllroy, 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.”