Alistair MacLean - The Golden Rendezvous

He hadn’t given my permission, but he hadn’t refused it either. I glanced at Cummings; he nodded and rose to his feet.

We had luck in the conditions for our search, the purser and I, in that we didn’t have to turf anyone out of their cabins: they were completely deserted. Radio reports in the morning watch had spoken of weather conditions deteriorating sharply to the southeast and bulletins had been posted warning of approaching bad weather; the sun decks were crowded with passengers determined to make the most of the blue skies before the weather broke. Even old Cerdan was on deck, flanked by his two watchful nurses, the tall one with a big mesh-string knitting bag and clicking away busily with her needles, the other with a pile of magazines, reading. You had the impression with them, as with all good nurses, that less than half their minds were on what they were doing; without stirring from their chairs they seeded to hover over old Cerdan like a couple of broody hens. I had the feeling that when Cerdan paid nurses to hover he would expect his money’s worth. He was in his wheel chair, with a richly embroidered rug over his bony knees. I took a good long look at that rug as I passed by, but I was only wasting my time: so tightly was that rug wrapped round his skinny shanks that he couldn’t have concealed a match box under it, far less a radio.

With a couple of stewards keeping watch we went through the suites on “A” and “B” decks with meticulous care. I had a bridge megger with me, which was to lend cover to our cover story, if we had to use one, that we were trying to trace an insulation break in a power cable; but no passenger with a guilty mind was going to fall for that one for a moment when he found us in his cabin, so we thought the stewards a good idea.

There should have been no need for any passenger aboard the Campari to have a radio. Every passenger’s cabin on the ship, with the Campari’s usual extravagance, was fitted out with not one but two bulkhead relay receivers, fed from a battery of radios in the telegraph lounge; eight different stations could be brought into circuit simply by pressing the eight pre-selector buttons. This was all explained in the brochure, so normally nobody thought of bringing radios along.

Cummings and I missed nothing. We examined every cupboard, wardrobe, bed, drawer, even my ladies’ jewel boxes. Nothing. Nothing anywhere, except in one place: Miss Harcourt’s cabin. There was a portable there, but then I had known that there had been one: every night when the weather was fine, Miss Harcourt would wander out on deck, clad in one of her many evening gowns, find a chair, and twiddle around the tuning knob till she found some suitable soft music. Maybe she thought it lent something to the air of enchantment and mystery that should surround a movie queen; maybe she thought it romantic; it could have been, of course, that she just liked soft music. However it was, one thing was certain — Miss Harcourt was hot our suspect: not to put too fine a point on it, she just didn’t have the intelligence. And, in fairness, despite her pretensions, she was too nice.

I retired, defeated, to the bridge and took over from Jamieson. Almost an hour elapsed before another defeated man came to the bridge: Captain Bullen. He didn’t have to tell me he was defeated: it was written on him, in the still, troubled face, the slight sag of the broad shoulders. And a mute head shake from me told him all he needed to know. I made a mental note, in the not unlikely event of Lord Dexter turning us both out of the Blue Mail, to turn down any suggestions by Captain Bullen that we should go into a detective agency together; there might be faster ways of starving, perhaps, but none more completely certain.

We were on the second leg of our course now, 10 degrees west of north, heading straight for Nassau. Twelve hours and we would be there. My eyes ached from scanning the horizons and skies; even although I knew that there were at least ten others doing the same thing, still my eyes ached. Whether I believed Mcllroy’s suggestion or not, I certainly behaved as if I did. But the horizon remained clear, completely, miraculously clear, for this was normally a fairly heavily travelled steamer lane. And the loud-speaker from the radar room remained obstinately silent. We had a radar screen on the bridge but rarely troubled to consult it: Walters, the operator on watch, could isolate and identify a blip on the screen long before most of us could even see it.

After maybe half an hour’s restless pacing about the bridge, Bullen turned to go. Just at the head of the companionway he hesitated, turned, beckoned me, and walked out to the end of the starboard wing. I followed.

“I’ve been thinking about Dexter,” he said quietly. “What would be the effect I’m past caring about the passengers now; I’m only worried about the lives of every man and woman aboard — if I announced that Dexter had been murdered?” “Nothing,” I said. “If you can call mass hysteria nothing.”

“You don’t think the fiends responsible for all this might call it off? Whatever ‘it’ is?”

“I’m dead certain they wouldn’t. As no mention has been made of Dexter yet, no attempt to explain away his absence, they must know we know he’s dead. They’ll know damned well that the officer of the watch can’t disappear from the bridge without a hue and cry going up. We’d just be telling them out loud what they already know without being told. You won’t scare this bunch off. People don’t play as rough as they do unless there’s something tremendous at stake.”

“That’s what I thought myself, Johnny,” he said heavily. “That’s just what I thought myself.” He turned and went below, and I had a sudden foreknowledge of how Bullen would look when he was an old man.

I stayed on the bridge until two o’clock, long past my usual time for relief, but then I’d deprived Jamieson, who had the afternoon watch, of much free time that morning. A tray came up to me from the galley, and for the first time ever I sent an offering by Henriques back untouched. When Jamieson took over the bridge he didn’t exchange a word with me except routine remarks about course and speed. From the strained, set expression on his face you would have thought he was carrying the mainmast of the Campari over his shoulder. Bullen had been talking to him; he’d probably been talking to all the officers. That would get them all as worried as hell and jittery as a couple of old spinsters lost in the casbah; I didn’t see that it would achieve anything else.

I went to my cabin, closed the door, pulled off shoes and shirt, and lay down on my bunk — no four-posters for the crew of the Campari — after adjusting the louvre in the overhead cold-air trunking until the draught was directed on my chest and face. The back of my head ached and ached badly. I adjusted a pillow under it and tried to ease the pain. It still ached, so I let it go and tried to think. Somebody had to think and I didn’t see that old Bullen was in any state for it. Neither was I, but I thought all the same. I would have bet my last cent that the enemy — I couldn’t think of them as anything else by this time — knew our course, destination, and time of arrival almost as well as we did ourselves. And I knew that they couldn’t afford to let us arrive in Nassau that night, not, at least, until they had accomplished what they had set out to accomplish, whatever that might be. Somebody had to think. Time was terribly short.

By three o’clock I’d got nowhere. I’d worried all round the problem as a terrier worries an old slipper; I’d examined it from every angle; I’d put forward a dozen different solutions, all equally improbable, and turned up around dozen suspects, all equally impossible. My thinking was getting me nowhere. I sat up, careful of my stiff neck, fished a bottle of whisky from a cupboard, poured a drink, watered it, knocked it back, and then, because it was illegal, helped myself to another. I placed this second on the table by my bunk and lay down again.