Alistair MacLean - The Golden Rendezvous

“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 round me now, still half supporting me, leading me forward 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 happened 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 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 was 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 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 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 office, to try to find out where the receiver was, and to figure 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 — 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. May be they hadn’t 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 himself we’d found him, we’d have known there was a murderer aboard. 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 sundeck 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 and 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 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.”

“Why tell anyone?” Bullen wasn’t amused. “It doesn’t show where you have been coshed; that wound is just above the temple and inside the hairline and could be pretty well camouflaged. Agreed?”

“No, sir. Someone knows I had an accident the character responsible for it — and he’s going to regard it as damned queer if I make no reference to it at all. But if I do mention it and pass it off as a ladylike swoon, there’s an even chance he may accept it, and if he does we’re still going to have the advantage of being in the position of knowing there’s mayhem and murder aboard, while they will have no suspicion we know anything of the kind.”

“Your mind,” said Captain Bullen unsympathetically, “is beginning to clear at last.”

When I awoke in the morning the already hot sun was streaming in through my uncurtained window. My cabin, immediately abaft the captain’s, was on the starboard side, and the sun was coming from forward, which meant that we were still steaming northeast. I raised myself on my elbow to have a look at the sea conditions, for the Campari had developed a definite if gentle pitching movement, and it was then that I discovered that my neck was rigidly bound in a plaster cast. At least it felt exactly like it. I could move it about an inch to either side and then a pair of clamps took hold. A dull steady ache, but no pain worth mentioning. I tried to force my head beyond the limits of the clamps, but I only tried once. I waited till the cabin stopped swaying round and the red-hot wires in my neck had cooled off to a tolerable temperature, then climbed stiffly out of my bunk. Let them call me stiff-neck Carter if they wanted. That was enough of that lot.

I crossed to the window. Still a cloudless sky with the sun, white, glaring, already high above the horizon, striking a glittering, blinding path across the blueness of the sea. The swell was deeper, longer, heavier than I expected and coming up from the starboard quarter. I wound down the window and there was no wind I could notice, which meant that there was a fair breeze pushing up from astern, but not enough to whiten the smoothly roiled surface of the sea.

I showered, shaved — I’d never before appreciated how difficult it is to shave when the turning motion of your head is limited to an arc of two inches — then examined the wound.

Seen in daylight, it looked bad, much worse than it had in the night: above and behind the left temple, it was a two inch gash, wide and very deep. And it throbbed heavily in a way I didn’t much care for. I picked up the phone and asked for doc Marston. He was still in bed but, yes, he would see me right away, an early-bird Hippocratical willingness that was very much out of character, but maybe his conscience was bothering him about his wrong diagnosis of the previous night. I dressed, put on my hat, adjusted it to a suitably rakish angle till the band just missed the wound, and went down to see him. Dr. Marston, fresh, rested, and unusually clear of eye no doubt due to Bullen’s warning to lay off the rum didn’t look like a conscience-stricken man who’d tossed and turned the sleepless night long. He didn’t seem unduly worried about the fact that we carried aboard a passenger who, if he’d truthfully listed his occupation, would have put down the word “murderer.” all he seemed concerned about was the entry in last night’s log, and when I told him no entry about Brownell had been made or would be made until we arrived in Nassau, and that when it was made no mention of my name would appear in connection with the diagnosis of Brownell’s death, he became positively jovial. He shaved off a few square inches of hair, jabbed in a local anaesthetic, cleaned and sutured the wound, covered it with a sticking plaster pad, and wished me good morning. He was through for the day.