The Island Where Time Stands Still (30 page)

During the two intervening days they zigzagged about the East China Sea making fair progress in a generally north-westerly drection; but the weather had at last turned against them, and it seemed as though Wu-ming's unhappy end had been the signal for both nature and circumstances to prevent Gregory and A-lu-te deriving further pleasure from the voyage.

In a private explanation with her uncle, although their code made it impossible for him to apologise to her, he tacitly admitted to having allowed righteous indignation at her admission to carry him away; but he insisted that for the future she should show greater circumspection in her dealings with Gregory, never spend more than a quarter of an hour alone with him, and in no circumstances whatever again allow him to enter her cabin. Added to this prohibition, driving rain and the discomforts inseparable from a high sea drove them from the stern lounge even in daytime; so, after their one talk following Wu-mings' death, they had little opportunity to exchange more than a few words, except in the presence of others.

On the second night of the storm they had both gone to bed early, leaving Kâo up in the lounge with the Chief Engineer,
happily engaged in a game of spillikins played with beautifully engraved slithers of mother of pearl, upon the skilful handling of which they were making a succession of heavy side bets.

About an hour later a piercing scream rang out above the storm. It was followed by a bellow of rage and a spate of curses. Once more, a number of people, mostly in hastily-pulled-on dressing-gowns, ran out of their cabins and swiftly converged on the place from which the commotion was coming.

This time it was Kâo. On leaving the upper deck lounge he had pitched from top to bottom of the companion-way. Owing to his weight, as, in fact, the so-called companion-way was no more than a steep narrow ladder he might easily have broken his neck; but, fortunately, he had landed feet first and had sustained nothing worse than a sprained ankle. Foo was beside him and, although endeavouring to support him, was the object of his curses.

Their accounts of what had occurred were contradictory. Kâo said that just as he was about to set foot on the ladder the ship had given a lurch; so he had put out a hand to steady himself, but before he could grasp the side rail Foo had given him a swift push. Foo maintained that, seeing Kâo stumble, and fearing he was about to fall he had grabbed at his arm in an attempt to save him.

That Foo had a right to be where he was at the time was indisputable, as it was customary for the personal servants to take turns in helping the steward on late duty to wash up the glasses and little tea-cups last thing at night. It had been his evening on, and having just completed his task he had followed Kâo out of the lounge. But that in no way mitigated Kâo's rage, or his belief that Foo had deliberately attempted to injure, or even kill, him.

Foo was escorted away under temporary arrest, and Kâo helped to his cabin; where Ah-moi, the Chief Engineer and Gregory joined him to hold another inquiry, while the Doctor was summoned to treat his injured ankle.

As was inevitable, the unsolved mystery of Wu-ming's
death came up again. The fact that Foo had been among the first to appear out of the darkness near the scene of the tragedy now seemed to hold a new and sinister significance. Kâo was quick to link the two events together, and he and his companions began to seek a common motive which might lie behind both.

Gregory could not help wondering now if A-lu-te was not right in her belief that Foo was an agent of Quong-Yü's; yet he still found it next to impossible to believe that such a happy-natured, pleasant young fellow could be a professional assassin. In consequence he refrained from further prejudicing Foo's case by telling the others about the poisoned cocktail, or informing them of A-lu-te's theory.

Nevertheless, their deliberations led them to formulate a new theory which, in essentials, was not far from hers. They argued that as Foo was a young man of some education, about whose background they knew nothing, he might quite probably be a Communist; and that to reach Communist China might well have been his reason for stowing away, rather than the laudable one he had given of wanting to perform the rites at the tombs of his ancestors. During the early part of the voyage he could easily have picked up from members of the crew some garbled version of the mission on which they were engaged. Like all the other islanders, the crew had expected the Princess Josephine to return as their new Empress with Kâo after his first trip to San Francisco. It could hardly have been kept from the stewards, in snatches of overheard conversation, that they were still searching for her. Possibly Foo had misinterpreted the little he had learned and reached the conclusion that they meant to use the Princess as a figure-head for a counter-revolution in China. If so, and he was a Communist fanatic, that would account for his attempts to do away with the principal persons of the mission before it could land and begin operations against the so-called People's Republic.

Without Gregory being consulted, the discussion was terminated by Ah-moi's declaring that he intended to keep Foo in the cells until the yacht returned to the island and
he could be dealt with there as had always been intended. Turning to Gregory he added that instead of Foo he could have Che-khi, who had originally been Tsai-Ping's servant, and until recently Wu-ming's, to look after him. They then wished Kâo peaceful sleep and left him to sniff up the scented blue smoke of the joss-sticks that the Doctor had lit to protect him against further calamity.

A-lu-te was already sound asleep at the time of her uncle's fall and, owing to the boisterousness of the wind, had not been roused by the commotion that followed it; so she knew nothing of the matter till she was told of it by Gregory and two officers with whom he was sitting, when she entered the lounge next morning. When she learned of Ah-moi's decision to keep Foo locked up indefinitely, she gave Gregory a quick look which showed how heartily she endorsed the Captain's judgment; but she refrained from putting forward her own theory, that Quong-Yü had planted Foo on board.

With the coming of daylight the storm had eased; and now that they were in the middle of the East China Sea they no longer had occasion to pursue a zigzag course, as they had passed well beyond the great shipping lanes. Next day they again had to proceed with caution, as they were entering the arc followed by coastal traffic, and Gregory was amused to see that Ah-moi had substituted the Hammer and Sickle of the Soviet Union for the White Ensign; but they met with no misadventure. On leaving their cabins the following morning—their twenty-first out from San Francisco—they saw the yacht had at last arrived off the coast of China.

It was far from an inviting prospect, as not a single house or tree broke the low, desolate coastline; but that suited their purpose. By eleven o'clock the ship was moving slowly up a broad estuary about seven miles wide, and Ah-moi summoned his passengers to the bridge to show them on a chart the place to which he had brought them.

They were entering the old mouth of the Hwang-ho, which lies about two hundred miles north of Shanghai, and from which the nearest towns of any consequence, Haichow
and Hwaianfu, are a good fifty miles distant. Until just over a hundred years ago the lower reaches of the mighty two thousand five hundred mile long river had flowed through the province of Kiang-Su to issue there, but in 1852 a terrible flood had caused it to burst its banks just below the city of Kai-feng. Causing appalling devastation, it had taken a new course so that it had since poured into the sea hundreds of miles further north, on the far side of the great Shan-Tung peninsula.

As Ah-moi explained, the lower reaches of the old river were no longer navigable; so all commercial activities on it had died and its once prosperous towns had dwindled to villages. But it still carried off the local rains, and in some stretches it had been converted into a canal; so boats could proceed up it to the city of Kai-feng, near which it joined the true river. From there they could proceed onward by boat to the city of Tung-kwan, from which they would have to finish their journey by caravan.

The two stages of the water journey were of about three hundred and fifty and two hundred and fifty miles respectively; so it would have been very much quicker to make for the nearest railway and take a series of trains to Tung-kwan; but that would mean having frequently to show papers, and a constant risk of being detained by some Communist official who proved unbribable, whereas the junks and sampans that frequented the great waterways were so numerous that their occupants were rarely questioned.

Kâo agreed that precautions against interference must take precedence over speed, then Ah-moi went on to outline his further plans for them. His Second Officer and Third Engineer had both made two voyages to China since the Communists had seized power there in 1949; so they knew something of the new regime. He proposed that they should proceed in the launch up river to the nearest town, Antung-Ku, which lay about sixty miles inland; that there they should try to buy suitable papers, and in any case hire a motor sampan which they would bring back with them; and that they should then accompany the mission to assist in any
further negotiations which might prove necessary on the journey.

To the first part of these proposals Kâo readily gave his consent, but he rejected absolutely the idea of the two officers coming with them. He pointed out that with A-lu-te, Gregory and himself, together with their three servants, the passenger capacity of an ordinary sampan would be fully occupied, and damnably uncomfortable, without quite unnecessary crowding for such a long and tedious journey. He added tersely that having travelled the world on his own for twenty-five years he needed no young men to make his arrangements for him; so Ah-moi did not press his suggestion further.

By midday, with many careful soundings, the yacht had nosed her way into a creek flanked by miles of desolate marshes, and dropped anchor. Soon afterwards the launch set off on its way up river, and everyone else settled down to the three or four days wait which must elapse before it could be expected to return.

Gregory, meanwhile, had been feeling a growing concern for Foo. The more he thrashed the matter over in his mind, the more convinced he became that the young man was the victim of unfortunate coincidence which had twice brought him on the scene at the time of happenings that could not be satisfactorily explained. In this Gregory knew that he was to some extent swayed by Foo's pleasant manner and, apparently, open nature, but his conclusion had a basis of strictly practical analysis. A-lu-te's theory rested on Quong-Yü's having put Foo aboard. Surely it was inconceivable that the aged and wily Tong boss should have chosen for such desperate work a youngster scarcely out of his teens. The theory of the others rested on Foo's being a Communist. Even if he were, and that was his real reason for wanting to get to China, surely it was highly improbable that single-handed he would pit himself against a whole ship-full of political enemies? Finally, in either case, if his object were to prevent the mission reaching China, why should he risk his neck by attempting to murder a few individuals,
when he could have stopped the ship by going below and, not once but several times, sabotaged her engines? It did not make sense.

And there was another point that weighed with Gregory. If he had not caused Foo to be moved from the stoke-hold in the first place, the youth would never have had the same opportunities to commit the crimes of which he was now suspected. That, Gregory felt, made him more than ever responsible for ensuring that Foo should not suffer unjustly. Lastly, he had decided from the beginning that, by hook or by crook, he would see to it that Foo got ashore when they reached China. It was one thing for a man of his age, while in the depths of despair, to accept the idea of having his memory obliterated; but quite another to stand by and see a young and promising individual turned against his will into a clod-hopper.

By the evening of their first day, lying in the mouth of the Hwang-ho, he had definitely made up his mind that Foo must be given the benefit of the doubt. To plead for his release, let alone for permission for him to land, was obviously futile; but, with his long experience in such matters, Gregory did not think he would find any great difficulty in freeing him.

Towards two o'clock in the morning he left his cabin. The ship was again blacked out. As she was at anchor there was no one on the bridge, and he had already ascertained that the only people he was likely to encounter were one of the two lookout men who had been stationed at the stem and stern of the vessel.

From several strolls round the lower decks that he had made during the voyage, he knew that the cells lay under the crew's sleeping quarters in the fo'c'sle. Going down the ‘midship's companion-way he walked softly forward. No one was about, and when he reached the dimly-lit passage in which the cells lay he switched on his torch. He felt certain that, except in the event of a mutiny having occurred, the keys would, for convenience sake, be kept somewhere handy; and after flashing his torch for a few minutes along
the bulkheads and girders, he found them hanging on a nail driven into the side of a short ladder that led upwards.

Taking them, he moved quietly back to the double row of cells and listened at each door in turn until he detected a faint snoring. At first he knocked very gently, then a little louder, until he heard the sounds of movement and Foo called out from behind the steel panel:

‘What is it? Who is there?'

‘Speak lower!' Gregory warned him quickly. ‘Can you swim?'

‘Yes, Sir!' came the excited reply.

‘Good. Now listen carefully to everything I say. We are lying in the old mouth of the Hwang-ho. The duty officer is in his cabin and there is no one on the bridge; but there are lookouts posted fore and aft. Your best chance of getting away without being spotted is to tie a rope to the rail just aft of the bridge and lower yourself by it, so that you don't make a splash going into the water; then swim ashore as quietly as possible. Go over the starboard side and you will have only about two hundred yards to swim. You have two hours to go before the watch is changed, and nobody is likely to be moving about till then; so take your time. It never pays to rush this sort of thing. I am now going to unlock the door; but you are to count a thousand slowly—one hundred for each of your fingers and thumbs—before you leave this cell, so that I can get back to my cabin before you start. Is that all clear?'