The Golden Rendezvous (10 page)

"Yes. About this burial at sea tomorrow at dawn." there was a long pause, then he said with the blasphemously weary restraint of a long-suffering man who has already held himself in check far too long,

"what bloody burial at dawn? brownell is our only exhibition for the nassau police."

"Burial, sir," I repeated. "But not at dawn. About, say, eight o'clock, when a fair number of our passengers will be up and about, having had their morning constitutional. This is what I mean, sir." I told him what I meant and he listened patiently enough, considering.

When I was finished he nodded slowly, two or three times in succession, turned and left me without a word.

I moved out into a lane of light between two lifeboats and glanced at my watch. Twenty-five minutes past eleven. I'd told macdonald i'd relieve him at midnight. I walked across to the rail and stood there by a life-jacket locker, staring out over the slow shimmering swell of the sea, hands at arms' length on the rail, vainly trying to figure out what could possibly lie behind all that had happened that evening.

when I awoke, it was twenty minutes to one. Not that I was immediately aware of the time when I awoke; I wasn't immediately and clearly aware of anything. It's difficult to be aware of anything when your head is being squeezed between the jaws of a giant vice and your eyes have gone blind, to be aware of anything, that is, except the vice and the blindness. Blindness. My eyes. I was worried about my eyes.

I raised a hand and fumbled round for a while and then I found them.

They were filled with something hard and encrusted, and when I rubbed the crust came away and there was stickiness beneath. Blood. There was

blood in my eyes, blood that was gumming the lids together and making me

blind. At least, I hoped vaguely, it was blood that was making me blind.

I rubbed some more blood away with the heel of my hand, and then I could see. Not too well, not the way I was used to seeing; the stars in the sky were not the bright pin points of light to which I was accustomed but just a pale, fuzzy haze seen through a frosted-glass window. I reached out a trembling hand and tried to touch this frosted glass, but it vanished and dissolved as I reached out and what my hand touched was cool and metallic. I strained my eyes wide open and saw that there was indeed no glass there; what I was touching was the lowermost bar of the ship's rail.

I could see better now, at least better than a blind man could. My head was lying in the scuppers, inches away from one of the lifeboat davits. What in god's name was I doing there with my head in the scuppers, inches away from the davits? I managed to get both hands under me and, with a sudden drunken lurch, heaved myself into a semi-sitting position with one elbow still on the deck. A great mistake, a very great mistake, for at once a blinding, agonising pain, that never-recorded pain that must be experienced in the final shattering millisecond of awareness as a plunging guillotine slices through bone, flesh, and muscle before crashing into the block beneath, slashed its paralysing way across head, neck, and shoulders and toppled me back to the deck again. My head must have struck heavily against the iron of the scuppers, but I don't think I even moaned. Slowly, infinitely slowly, consciousness came back to me. Consciousness of a kind. Where clarity and awareness and speed of recovery were concerned,

I was a man chained hand and foot, surfacing from the bottom of a sea of

molasses. Something, I dimly realised, was touching my face, my eyes, my mouth: something cold and moist and sweet. Water. Someone was sponging my face with water, gently trying to mop the blood from my eyes. I made to turn my head to see who it was and then I vaguely remembered what had happened last time I moved my head. I raised my right hand instead and touched someone's wrist.

"Take it easy, sir. You just take it easy." the man with the sponge must have had a long arm; he was at least two miles away, but I recognised the voice for all that. Archie macdonald. "Don't you try moving now. Just you wait a bit. You'll be all right, sir."

"Archie?" we were a real disembodied pair, I thought fuzzily. I was at least a couple of miles away too. I only hoped we were a couple of miles away in the same direction. "Is that you, archie?" god knows I didn't doubt it. I just wanted the reassurance of hearing him say so.

"It's myself, sir. Just you leave everything to me." it was the bo'sun all right; he couldn't have used that sentence more than five thousand times in the years i'd known him. "Just you lie still."

i'd no intention of doing anything else. I'd be far gone in years before i'd ever forget the last time I moved, if I lived that long, which didn't seem likely at the moment.

"My neck, archie." my voice sounded a few hundred yards closer.

"I think it's broken."

"Aye, i'm sure it feels that way, sir, but i'm thinking myself maybe it's not as bad as all that. We'll see."

I don't know how long I lay there, maybe two or three minutes, while the bo'sun swabbed the blood away until eventually the stars began to swim into some sort of focus again. Then he slid one arm under my shoulders and under my head and began to lift me, inch by patient inch, into a sitting position.

I waited for the guillotine to fall again, but it didn't. This time it was more like a butcher's meat chopper, but a pretty blunt chopper: several times in a few seconds the campari spun round 360

degrees on its keel, then settled down on course again. 047, I seemed to recall. And this time I didn't lose consciousness.

"What time is it, archie?" a stupid question to ask, but I wasn't at my very best. And my voice, I was glad to hear, was at last practically next door to me.

he turned my left wrist.

"Twelve forty-five, your watch says, sir. I think you must have been lying here a good hour. You were in the shadow of the boat and no one would have seen you even if they had passed by this way."

I moved my head an experimental inch and winced at the pain of it.

Two inches and it would fall off.

"What the hell happened to me, archie? some kind of turn or other?

I don't remember

"Some kind of turn!" his voice was soft and cold. I felt his fingers touch the back of my neck. "Our friend with the sandbag has been taking a walk again, sir. One of these days," he added thoughtfully, "i'm going to catch him at it."

"Sandbag!" I struggled to my feet, but i'd never have made it without the bo'sun. "The wireless office! peters!"

"It's young mr. jenkins that's on now, sir. He's all right.

you said you'd relieve me for the middle watch, and when twenty past twelve came I knew something was wrong. So I just went straight into the wireless office and phoned captain bullen."

"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. Maybe 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.