THURSDAY'S ORCHID (15 page)

“Wait here,” I said. “I’ll get you a jacket.”

I raced back to the cabin, grabbed my parka, and was back out to him in seconds.

“Here,
” I said. “Put this on and head up towards the bow. I’ll catch you up in a couple of minutes. Just let me get my other jacket.”

I usually
carried two raincoats with me: the short one that I had given to Pete and a much longer one that went down past my knees. Pete had finished up with the short jacket simply because it was handy, lying at the bottom of the cupboard where I had thrown it after returning from our first walk around Cairns.

The other jacket was still packed away in one of my suitcases. I found it in the second case that I searched and it was five minutes or more before I came back out on deck. The deck lights
didn’t give off much of a glow and I couldn’t see Pete, so I went back for my torch, wasting a few more minutes.

He was still nowhere to be seen
when I returned. He must have taken my advice and headed off along the rain-soaked deck towards the bow.

He shouldn’t have been
too hard to pick out. The parka was brilliant yellow; with the letters
F_ CK
scrawled in red across the top of the back, and underneath that the words:
The Only Thing Missing Is You
. The entire crew had giggled like idiots in Cairns as soon as one of them got the joke and passed it on to the others. They had made me wear it as we stepped down the gangway, and it wasn’t until we were out of sight behind the wharf sheds that I was able to take the blasted thing off.

I moved forward, away from the glow of the small deck-light above the doorway and peered about, but there was still no sign of him. I walked around the main hatch-coaming and then around both winch-houses
, thinking that he might have taken shelter in one of them, but he wasn’t in either. He must have followed my instructions to the letter and kept right on going. I didn’t bother to search any of the other winch-houses and began to walk directly towards the bow, calling his name softly every ten metres or so.

But there was no answer.

I hoped to hell the silly bastard hadn’t fallen overboard. Not that there was much chance of that. The bulwarks were fairly high off the deck. As I got closer to the bow I started to call out louder, knowing that the wind would carry my cries out to sea and away from the officers up on the bridge.

Still no reply, and panic started to set in.

He should have been able to hear me by now. I was shouting at the top of my voice. I cursed myself for not having made him wait whilst I fetched the other coat. Up until then I hadn’t used the torch for fear that it would be seen from the bridge, but I was past worrying about his feelings now and took it from my pocket.

S
uddenly there was a sound from up forward: metal scraping on metal. I raced along the deck, and then I saw him. The drunken idiot lay sprawled on the deck by the ladder leading up on to the bow itself. The whisky must have hit him with a thud as he had taken hold of the rail, climbed, and then tilted his head up as he got to the top of the ladder.

I walked up and kicked the sole of his shoe.

“Come on, Pete! Get up on your feet!”

He didn’t move. I leaned down towards him. His eyes were open; head twisted back;
arms by his sides; his body still; no movement, no sign of breathing; and those staring, questioning eyes looking up at me, unblinking.

He wasn’t drunk. He wasn’t unconscious.

He was dead.

The clouds
had cleared; the rain now gone; the quietness deafening.

I bent down and touched the dark-red stain on the deck
. The blood felt warm and sticky, but was no longer oozing from the wound in his head. It had stopped pumping when his heart had ceased to beat. I gazed down at the tousled head lying in that pool of thick dark liquid and felt sad.

I felt for his pulse. Nothing. The only thought passing through my mind as I bent over him was that I was a hell of a way to cure a dose of the clap. The thought went over and over in my mind, and I felt ashamed.

If only he hadn’t had the whisky. If only I hadn’t suggested the game of cards; or even joked about his dose of clap; but it was too late for recrimination; it was too late for anything. His parents had been right. Pete’s venture into the world of business had been doomed to disaster from the start. Fate had been against him. God only knew what they would do to his uncle: the one who had lent him the money.

Pete wouldn’t be going home with a pocket full of cash now. He would be lucky to return at all; and even then it would be in a box, parcel
led up like his merchandise. Fifteen minutes earlier he had been alive; not in perfect health, but alive. And now he was as dead as his dream. It was that damn receptionist in Cairns, and the nurse. If we had left them both alone this would never have happened.

I knelt down beside him again; my throat choking up. We hadn’t known each other for long, not much more than a week, but we had formed a mateship. We were the odd men out on this ship full of silent Chinamen and miserable Malays.

I stood and stepped around him and looked up at the companionway, the steel ladder he must have toppled down from. I didn’t want to look any more at those staring eyes; those sightless eyes that seemed to be accusing me, blaming me.

As a gesture of farewell, of apology, I bent down to touch his hair. The parka was still part-way up over the back of his head and, as I reached over to move it away from his forehead, a light mist began to drift across the deck.

The hood slipped sideways. As it moved I caught sight of a stain on the outside of the material, slightly above the level of the shoulder – right where the back of his neck would have been. It hadn’t been there earlier. There hadn’t been any mark on the jacket when the crew caught sight of it when we went into Cairns; and I hadn’t worn it since. Either he had leaned against something, or…, or what?

I leant down
and touched the stain – rough and dry; and part of the grime came off on my fingers. I put them to my nose and there was no doubting the smell of paint and grease. The inside of the parka had a faint mark where the stain had come right through. There was a smudge on his neck. Unthinkingly, I wiped it off with the back of my hand.

Whatever had caused the grime to push through the close-weave material must have had force behind it. He hadn’t simply leaned against a winch-house or one of the hatch-coamings. There was nothing protruding from the deck he could have fallen against, and besides, he had fallen face down. The crushed forehead made that plain.

The obvious hit me like a body blow.

He must have been at the top of the ladder, turned to see if I was coming, and
been struck on the back of the neck with some heavy object. As he collapsed, the assailant would have thrust him forward, away from the ladder – straight down to the steel deck.

This wasn’t an unprovoked attack. Someone had gone out of his way to kill him.

This couldn’t be the result of the sly looks he had been giving the wives, nor of his snide remarks to the crew about his containers. It was deeper than that.

Then the horrible truth of it came to me. There was no reason for anyone to kill Pete. But there was a reason for someone to kill me – the cargo! He was wearing my park
a. The whole crew knew it. With the hood pulled up over his head the killer wouldn’t have been able to see his face, let alone the blonde hair. The clouds would have blotted out the moonlight and, with the way he walked bent over, we were both about the same height.

It had to be the cargo! Neither of us were carrying any cash. Pete had some travellers cheques, and so did I, but they were locked away in the captain’s quarters.

Nobody could hate this much. Nobody could have had this bad a grudge against us.

It was me they were after. My heart pounded; my breath hoarse and loud in my ears.

How would this help them get to the cargo? Maybe they intended to have the lot unloaded somewhere and needed me out of the way. But that would mean the entire ship’s complement was in on it; and that didn’t make sense. I could see some of them as thieves, but not as murderers.

I was back at
the panic stage, trying to tell myself to take it easy, to calm down.

What should I do? What
could
I do?

I took a deep breath.

The first thing was not to let anyone know that this was anything other than an accident. The killer would know, but that was incidental at the moment. A killing would bring in the authorities, and that would bring an investigation. They would look for a motive. It wouldn’t help me and it wouldn’t do Pete any good. He was going to stay dead no matter what official enquiries were made.

The mark had to be removed from his neck. There was no bruising that I could see, just the smudge – or what was left after I had wiped it with the back of my hand. After two or three strokes with my handkerchief it looked like he had simply neglected to wash his neck. The parka wasn’t so easy, but I managed to get rid of most of the stain.

I considered taking the parka, but it would look suspicious. His trousers were saturated with the rain whilst the rest of him was still quite dry, and the light mist now swirling about wasn’t heavy enough to compensate.

Squatting next to him on the deck, I tried to reason it out. Who had been responsible? Why had they done it? What did they really hope to gain? If I had been carrying a couple of dozen kilos of heroin or cocaine in my luggage, then maybe I could have understood it. But not for fifty tonnes of marijuana!

Bells started to tinkle in the back of my brain. My cabin. What if it hadn’t been the nurse who had been through my cabin? It could have been someone else on the ship, a member of the crew, or even one of the officers. It could have happened at any time during the hours Pete and I had spent ashore that first evening. I hadn’t paid any attention to my luggage until the next morning.

Whatever they might have been looking for, they wouldn’t hav
e found. Perhaps with me out of the way they reckoned they might have time to make a more thorough search.

T
his was getting me nowhere. Pete was lying on the deck and I was trying to solve riddles. What I was doing wasn’t normal. A normal person finding his friend lying dead in a pool of blood wouldn’t be squatting on the deck, poking about his clothes. The ordinary person wouldn’t think of murder. There was nothing to suggest it; nothing that would spring to the eye of the casual observer – as if any witness to death can be called casual.

I sprang up and ran to the side, pretending to puke into the sea, just in case anybody from the bridge had spotted me and wondered what I was doing. My next move was a mad dash down towards the accommodation section.

Bursting into the officers lounge, I screamed incoherently, yelling that Pete was dead. It took them a minute or two to calm me down and, after what I considered to be sufficient histrionics, I told them there had been a terrible accident and that Pete was dead.

I kept using the word
accident
.

They stared at me in silence
, mouths unmoving, some agape, all of them stunned. I tried to watch each one, hoping that one would make a slip, that I might catch a guilty look, or see eyes that quickly turned away. But they all appeared shocked. And they were dry. None of them had been out on deck.

Suddenly there was a rush towards the door by the men. The two wives present stood undecided, and then
a few whispered words in Chinese from one of the husbands and they shuffled off to their cabins.

As we moved down the stairway the second officer sent one of the others to fetch the captain, then turned to me and asked what had happened. I tried to explain the situation with as much hysteria as I thought would fit the atmosphere, and hoped to hell I wasn’t overdoing it.

We moved through the doorway in a bunch and hurried along the deck towards the bow.

I was still shocked a
t the sight of Pete’s body lying on the deck, alone, the mist clearing, moisture beading the side of his face. It didn’t seem true; more like a dream from which I would soon awaken; but I knew that this wasn’t any nightmare; this was for real. Pete wouldn’t get up, laugh, and then walk away.

It could have been me lying there. It should have been me.

Flint arrived: dishevelled and smelling of whisky; rudely disturbed from the peace and quiet of his cabin and the evening’s bottle. He had put the ship to bed for the night, leaving his junior officers to look after her. Still, for all that, he seemed sober.

There was no doctor on board, which was normal for a ship of this size, and there was nothing that a doctor could have done. We stood around, the crowd swelling as the crew arrived in their two’s and three’s. Somebody fetched a stretcher and we rolled Pete’s body on to it and carried him into the accommodation section, out of the weather.

Pete’s cabin seemed to be the logical place, so we placed him on the bunk and covered him with a blanket; as if hiding him would make the tragedy any less.

“All right!” the captain barked. “Everybody back to wher
e you were before this happened! Let’s get back to normal.”