David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

‘There’s no need for sarcasm.’

‘No point in not facing facts, either.’

‘Perhaps if we tell Nordvik about the mission he’ll keep it under his hat until we get to Helsingfors…?’

Valentine didn’t favour that with a response. Grunting instead, he pulled the knife out of Pinker’s chest, wiped it on the dead man’s clothes then drew the bedclothes back over him.

‘It’s a kitchen knife.’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Look.’

Valentine handed it to him. Paul saw the handle of the knife was impressed with the design of the Finland Steamship Company. The same design was all over the ship.

‘From the galley,’ Valentine said.

They had been silent for a while. Valentine was smoking, sitting in the only chair and leaving Paul no option but to climb back into his bunk unless he was to sit on the dead Pinker. He was waiting for Valentine to speak, unwilling to interrupt the man’s thought process.

‘Whoever did it will be expecting Pinker to raise the alarm,’ Valentine said eventually. ‘They’ll assume he’ll find you in the morning with a knife in your chest and start crying blue murder.’

‘And when he doesn’t?’

Valentine didn’t seem to hear. ‘It seems to me,’ he went on, ‘that whoever did it wouldn’t have tried for you this early unless they’d planned to get off at Copenhagen.’ He pulled on his cigarette and exhaled a stream of smoke. ‘The logical thing to do would be to push you overboard rather than use a knife. That’s the puzzler.’ He peered at Pinker as if expecting the corpse to sit up and provide the answer.

‘Maybe they were afraid they wouldn’t get the opportunity,’ Paul said. ‘After all, if this weather keeps up it’s not likely I’d be found strolling around on deck. Perhaps they took the first chance that offered.’

‘There is that,’ Valentine accepted. ‘And we have to remember we’re dealing with revolutionary fanatics here, not logical thinkers like you and me.’

It occurred to Paul that since arriving at his club last Saturday morning, he hadn’t actually seen too much logic demonstrated by anyone.

‘Logical or not,’ he said, ‘I still don’t understand why they’re not worried about my body being found. Even a sick Pinker would be expected to make a fuss when he found me in the morning.’

‘It’s reckless of them,’ Valentine agreed, ‘but they must be counting on the fact that Nordvik can’t do anything till we get to Copenhagen. There’s no Marconi wireless telegraph on this ship. That means he has no way of alerting the authorities in Copenhagen until we dock.’

‘Even so…’

‘And whoever it is must feel pretty confident of not being suspected. Perhaps using a kitchen knife was meant to throw suspicion on the crew.’

‘Look,’ Paul suggested. ‘Everyone knows Pinker was seasick, if we do nothing they might think he’s stayed in bed and didn’t find me. It might buy us some time and if I keep my head down…’

Valentine didn’t look convinced.

‘How long can we get away with that?’ he asked. ‘We’ll reach Copenhagen the day after tomorrow and Pinker was due to get off. When he doesn’t surface they’ll come looking for him. Then they really will think you did it.’

He took one last thoughtful pull on his cigarette and dropped the butt into the basin. It hissed unpleasantly in Pinker’s vomit.

‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s only one thing to do.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Pitch him over the side.’

‘We can’t do that!’

‘Why not?’ Valentine shrugged. ‘No body, no murder. Imagine their surprise when you turn up and Pinker doesn’t.’

‘They’ll try and kill me again, won’t they?’

‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’

Paul stared at him. It was all very well for Valentine to take a laissez-faire attitude. It wasn’t his skin they were after.

‘Then how do we explain Pinker’s absence?’

‘We don’t have to. Not us, anyway. Nordvik’s already warned us against going on deck because of the rough weather. He’ll assume poor old Pinker went up to get some air, lost his footing and heigh-ho…’

‘That’s a bit cold-blooded, isn’t it? What about his people? Without a Marconi we can’t even get in touch with C to pass on the bad news.’

Valentine started to laugh.

‘I don’t see what’s so funny.’

‘C would throw a fit if we tried to get in touch over something like this. He’d be ripping his trousers to shreds. You know what he’s like.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Didn’t he pull his parlour trick with you? The paperknife?’

Paul vaguely remembered the paperknife on Cumming’s desk; how he had grabbed it in a rage when he discovered the person he was trying to recruit wasn’t one man but two and that half of them was dead. Browning had calmed him down. He said something then about trousers…

‘What was that all about?’

‘His party trick. More of a music hall turn really.’ Valentine laughed again. ‘He pretends to get mad and stab himself in the leg. Disconcerts a fellow if he doesn’t know his leg is wooden, I can tell you.’

‘Wooden?’

‘Didn’t you know?’

‘I could see he had a gammy leg,’ Paul said. ‘I assumed that’s why he used that scooter of his.’

‘Goes through trousers like billy-o,’ said Valentine.

‘Did he lose it in the war?’

‘The leg? No, a motoring accident in the south of France. The car turned over and killed his son. C was trapped underneath. The story goes that he cut his own leg off with a penknife to get out.’

‘A penknife?’

‘I don’t think it’s true,’ Valentine said. ‘Just a story they tell to show what kind of man he is.’

‘Apocryphal, you mean.’

‘Do I?’ Valentine frowned.

‘From the Greek.’

‘Ah, bit of a duffer in the classical stakes, I’m afraid.’

‘You made all that up about us going to the same school, didn’t you?’ Paul said. ‘An invention, like the rest of that pitchblende business?’

Valentine smiled shyly, brushing aside a hank of blond hair that had fallen across his forehead.

‘All part of the ruse, old man. I mugged up on some of the fellows you would have known and you assumed I’d been there.’

‘So what school did you go to?’

Valentine flushed a little. He looked at Pinker again and glanced at his watch.

‘Hadn’t we best be getting on? If we’re going to pitch old Pinker over the side we’ll need to do it before anybody starts to stir. It’s gone three-thirty now. It’ll be light in an hour.’

He stood up and stepped to the cabin door.

‘You get him ready. I’ll pop up and make sure the coast is clear. Back in a jiff.’

Valentine poked his head into the corridor and slipped out. Paul climbed off the top bunk and looked down at Pinker. He could see blood on the sheets and supposed that they would have to dispose of them as well. He rolled Pinker over and wrapped the sheets around him. He had just finished parcelling the boot salesman up when Valentine returned.

‘Here,’ he said, grunting with the effort of getting his hands under the dead man’s shoulders, ‘grab his feet, will you?’

Wrapped in his shroud of bed sheets there seemed nothing to get hold of. It always amazed Paul how much a dead man weighed, so much more it seemed than a live one, as if death was fattening. Together they heaved the body off the bunk and laid him on the floor.

‘We’ll have to get him out of the sheets,’ Valentine said, ‘or we’ll never get him up the stairs.’

‘I’ve only just wrapped him up.’ It seemed the poor man wasn’t even going to be allowed the respectability of being buried in a shroud. ‘What about his people?’