Rice shrugged. ‘Oh, very well then. I suppose I shall have to see him another time.’
But the interview with Tomlinson was not to be thus postponed, for the man himself at that moment appeared in the forecastle doorway. Seeing Rice, he stepped out on to the deck.
‘Good evening, sir. Taking a bit of fresh air?’
Tomlinson was a cheerful young man with red hair, his face and hands a mass of freckles like splashings of paint. When he smiled his blue eyes seemed to light up.
‘I was bringing this book for you,’ Rice said, ‘but it appears I am not allowed in the fo’c’sle.’
Tomlinson took the book, glanced at the black-haired man, who scowled back, and began to walk with Rice along the foredeck.
‘Who’s the unpleasant customer?’ Rice asked.
‘Oh, that’s Pickering,’ said Tomlinson. ‘Bosun. Proper old nasty and no mistake.’
They came to a halt and leaned on the bulwark, watching the water as it flowed hissing past the ship’s side.
Suddenly Tomlinson said: ‘Queer business last night, sir. That man, Schmidt. Not the sort of feller I’d have expected to fall overside.’
Rice turned and faced Tomlinson, his interest awakened. ‘You knew him then?’
‘By sight, sir, very well.’
‘What was he like?’
‘A big florid sort of man with very fair hair, like straw, cropped close. Proper Jerry type, if you know what I mean. Wore glasses—rimless ones with big round lenses.’
‘How did you come to know him?’
‘How? Why, he was friends with Pickering. Schmidt used to come down to the bosun’s cabin. Used to drink and play cards together, I reckon.’
‘In spite of regulations?’
Tomlinson grinned. ‘Mebbe it’s different rules for bosuns. Him and Pickering were bosom pals. P’raps that’s why the bosun is so sour he’s gone.’
‘Perhaps so,’ Rice said. ‘I wish I’d seen this Schmidt. If you could find out anything about him from Pickering—in a discreet way, you understand—I should be glad to hear it.’
Barton Rice was enjoying a cigarette in the first class smoke room after lunch the following day when one of the stewards brought him a letter.
‘For you, sir.’
Rice took the letter, slit open the envelope and glanced rapidly over the few lines of untidy handwriting.
‘Thank you,’ he said to the steward. ‘That will be all.’
The letter read:
‘Come to my cabin at 8.30 this evening. Third door on the left, crew’s alleyway. I’ve something important to tell you, something queer. My cabin mate will be on duty, so we won’t be disturbed. Look out for the bosun.—A.T.’
At 8.30 p.m. Barton Rice was walking quietly across the dimly lighted foredeck, making his way to Tomlinson’s cabin and keeping a wary eye open for Pickering. It was not a pleasant evening; scuds of chilly rain were hitting the ship and Rice could hear the slap of waves against the bows as the big liner sliced her way through the Atlantic.
He bent his head to the weather and was glad to come under the shelter of the forecastle. Peering inside, he saw that the alleyway was deserted, and without hesitation he stepped inside.
Third door on the left—that was what Tomlinson had said in his note. Rice did not pause to knock; he turned the handle and walked in, closing the door silently behind him.
It was a small cabin, the steel bulkheads painted white and a naked electric bulb burning overhead. Along one side were two bunks, one above the other.
There was a man lying on the lower bunk with his back to the room. He did not stir as Rice came in.
Rice said: ‘Good evening, Bert. Wake up.’
But still the seaman made no movement, and suddenly Rice noticed the man’s neck and knew the reason why. With a swift movement he put out his hand and pulled the man over on to his back. It was Tomlinson all right, his sightless, bulging eyes staring from the purple face at the bunk above.
Rice looked down at the bruised neck and distorted features and muttered softly, very softly: ‘Strangled.’
Suddenly he put his hands into the folds of the disturbed bed-cover and picked up a fragment of glass, rounded on one edge, jaggedly broken on the other. Holding the glass carefully by the edges, he opened his cigarette case and slipped it inside.
Then he switched the light off, opened the cabin door, glanced quickly up and down the alleyway to make sure that no one was in sight, and closed the door behind him.
* * *
Some fifteen minutes elapsed before Barton Rice was again opening the door of Tomlinson’s cabin. Now he had Captain Perry with him.
Rice stepped inside the cabin, felt for the light switch and snapped it on. Then he stared in amazement at the lower bunk. Perry also stared at it.
‘Damn it all! Is this your idea of a joke?’
Rice did not answer. He moved over to the bunk and fingered the smooth surface of the neatly tucked-in bed-cover. In the cabin there was no longer any sign of violence. He glanced at his wrist-watch.
‘They lost no time,’ he said.
Perry was shifting his feet impatiently. ‘What’s the idea of bringing me here on a fool’s errand? You said Tomlinson had been strangled. Well, I don’t see him. Where is he?’
‘At a rough guess,’ Rice answered in his gentle voice, ‘I should say he is at least a mile astern in a place where dead men certainly tell no tales.’
The Liverpool dock in which the Southern Star lay was almost deserted. It was a misty November evening, and in the pearly light of electric lamps the ships, the cranes and the transit sheds looked dark and gloomy.
A man, making his careful way down the gangway, seemed to feel the cold after so recent an experience of tropical warmth. He was dressed in a thick overcoat, the collar of which was turned up to his ears, and he wore a brown felt hat pulled low over his forehead.
As he reached the ground, two policemen, a sergeant and a constable, stepped out of the shadow of a transit shed and accosted him.
‘Shore pass, please.’
The man felt in his pocket and held out a slip of paper. The sergeant took it and began reading out in a slow toneless voice: ‘Charles Pickering. Boatswain.’
He looked up. ‘Would you take your hat off?’
The man shifted his feet nervously, but made no attempt to remove the hat.
Then Barton Rice stepped from behind a packing case. ‘Come, Mr Schmidt,’ he said. ‘For a man who has been five days drowned you are surprisingly reluctant to face the light. Come, let us see beneath the hat.’
And as he spoke, Rice neatly flicked the hat from the man’s head and sent it rolling on the ground.
‘Fair hair, cropped short,’ observed Rice in his gentle voice. ‘Eyes obviously short-sighted and in need of glasses.’
The man’s breath was coming hard and short; it was like an animal panting. His head was thrust forward as though he were peering into a hazy background, trying to distinguish blurred objects. Suddenly, with a quick, darting movement, he pulled an automatic pistol from his pocket and fired. Rice, in what was almost a reflex action, flung himself to one side and the bullet went whining and ricochetting among the cranes and buildings.
Schmidt fired once more, then turned and ran along the dockside, Rice and the two policemen hard after him, dodging bollards and mooring ropes, crates and packing-cases. For a heavy man Schmidt had a surprising turn of speed, and for a few moments he gained on his pursuers; but the thick overcoat hampered him, and soon the gap narrowed. Feeling the chase close at his heels, he turned and fired three times. The constable stumbled and fell clutching at his chest, and the sergeant tripped over his outstretched legs, falling headlong.
Rice went grimly after Schmidt who turned again to fire on the run. The shot whined harmlessly away, but Schmidt’s foo
t caught in a ring-bolt and his own momentum flung him over the side of the dock. He fell with a scream.
Rice ran to the edge and shone a torch into the dark chasm formed by the concrete side of the dock and the steel hull of a ship made fast there. At the bottom of the chasm was a narrow channel of oily, scum-covered water with empty bottles, pieces of orange peel, and all manner of filth.
Schmidt was wedged head downwards just above the water as securely as if he had been riveted.
His screams came up, echoing hollowly in that narrow space; they rose to a crescendo of terror and agony; then ceased for ever.
‘I still don’t quite understand it,’ said Captain Perry, holding his glass of whisky up to the light.
Rice settled himself more comfortably in his armchair. ‘It is simple enough,’ he said. ‘Schmidt met Pickering in Buenos Aires and between them they arranged this little pantomime. No doubt the bosun was paid pretty heavily for his trouble. Schmidt was very keen to get to England, as you know; but he also knew that the police would be looking out for him when the ship docked, especially as he was travelling under his correct name. That was all part of the plan. The idea was this:
‘Schmidt was supposedly to disappear overboard, but in reality he would be hiding in Pickering’s cabin until the ship docked. Then he would go ashore on Pickering’s pass, which he could easily send back through the post, and nobody would be any the wiser. The police would not be looking for a man who had been lost at sea.
‘It was a good plan, and it might have worked if poor Tomlinson hadn’t chanced to see him after he was supposed to be dead. That, of course, was what Tomlinson wanted to tell me about, and that was what cost him his life. Men like Schmidt stop at nothing.
‘But in the struggle with Tomlinson, Schmidt’s glasses were broken and he did not find all the pieces. It was one of them I found when I visited Tomlinson’s cabin; and that must have been just at the moment when Schmidt had gone to fetch Pickering to help him dispose of the body.’
‘But Miss Leblanc,’ Perry said. ‘How was she concerned in it?’
Rice smiled. ‘Miss Leblanc was an integral part of the plan. Miss Leblanc is in reality Mrs Walter Schmidt, now widowed. She had removed her wedding ring but unfortunately the sun had not had time to cover up the evidence of where it had been.’
Rice sipped his drink. ‘So much for a pleasant holiday cruise,’ he said.
Seasprite
Andrew Garve
Andrew Garve was the principal pen-name of Leicester-born Paul Winterton (1908–2001), whose father Ernest Winterton was a journalist and, from 1929 to 1931, a Labour Member of Parliament. Paul studied economics at the LSE before himself moving into journalism. His first novel, Death Beneath Jerusalem (1938) appeared under the name Roger Bax; he published several Bax novels and also as Paul Somers, but his most successful crime fiction was written as by Garve.
Garve’s love of small boat sailing is evident in many of his stories. A notable example is The Megstone Plot (1956), which was filmed with James Mason, George Sanders, and Vera Miles as A Touch of Larceny. Life on a boat is integral to the storyline of the rather less celebrated Murderer’s Fen (1966), a.k.a. Hide and Go Seek, a fast-paced variant of the ‘inverted mystery’ invented by Richard Austin Freeman. This story first appeared in the Evening Standard in March 1963, as part of a series of ten tales by authors whose novels were published by Collins Crime Club. Puzzled bibliographers should note that we have changed the title to ‘Seasprite’, on the basis that the original was too much of a spoiler. For those who are curious and wish to do a little detective work of their own, the clue is that Garve’s one-word title summarised Jones’s motivation.
Guy Lunt tied up his smart motor cruiser Seasprite at the quay of the West Country harbour and went ashore to get stores.
He was a handsome man of 30, with a well-heeled, carefree look. His appearance was misleading. In fact he was worried—about money.
His problem was how to make ends meet till his former companions, Gurney and Franks, came out of gaol.
In particular, how to raise enough cash to pay the instalments on the cruiser. He knew he’d no chance of pulling off a lucrative job single-handed—smuggling was a tough racket and you needed a reliable crew.
He missed Gurney and Franks badly—and it would be four months before they came out. Damn bad luck all round.
His thoughts went back to the disastrous March trip. There’d been four of them then—himself and Gurney and Franks, and a new man named Jim Haines, a dour middle-aged fisherman from up the coast. They’d taken Haines because he had a boat and Seasprite was in dock with gearbox trouble. Gurney had met him in a pub and talked him into it.
Everything had gone fine until they’d been a mile from home. Then, out of a thick night, had come a challenge from a revenue launch. Their chances had seemed slight. In a patch of fog, they’d decided to split up; Gurney and Franks had taken to the dinghy—and by sheer mischance had blundered straight into the launch and been caught.
Haines had stuck to his boat and Lunt had stayed with him. For a while they’d played hide-and-seek in the fog.
Then as the launch had approached again, there’d come the tragedy. A lurch, a slippery deck—and Haines had gone overboard.
Later, Lunt had learned that he’d managed to reach the shore but had died in hospital next day. Which was just as well, Lunt thought, because otherwise he might have talked and given me away. A new, untried man.
Gurney and Franks, of course, had kept mum. They were trustworthy. So Lunt had come out of it all right. He’d succeeded in beaching Haines’s boat and getting away unseen. So he was still free, with nothing against him, and Seasprite ready for a trip. But meanwhile there was the problem of the payments.
That evening, as Lunt was sipping whisky in his cockpit, a man appeared out of the darkness of the quay and stood looking down.
‘Nice boat,’ he commented.
Lunt exchanged some words with him, at first without much interest. Then, gradually, his interest grew.
The man was young and tough-looking and, it turned out, a seafarer. He had a powerful launch of his own which he used for lobster potting and, in the summer, for taking visitors out. Neither venture, Lunt gathered, was paying too well. In fact, the young man, whose name was Jones, seemed to have a financial problem, too.
Lunt wondered how he’d fancy a run to Cherbourg. He invited him aboard for a drink and cautiously sounded him out.
Jones, it soon appeared, had no moral objections to smuggling, but he thought it too risky for what you got out of it. ‘If we want quick dough there’s a better way,’ he said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Salvage. Last summer I towed in a yacht that was in distress. Got three hundred quid.’
‘I dare say—but you don’t find a yacht in trouble just when you want to.’
Jones grinned. ‘This boat insured?’
‘You bet.’
‘How much for?’
‘Three thousand.’
‘There you are, then. You take a trip up the coast when there’s an onshore wind blowing. I happen to be around tending my pots. You fix your engine so that it conks. You’re on a lee shore in a rough sea and if you strike there’s not a hope for you. I throw you a line and tow you in. I claim one third of the value as salvage. A thousand quid. And we split it. Can’t go wrong’
‘There’d be an inquiry,’ Lunt said.
‘So what? No one’s seen us together. No one will if we’re careful. Why should they suspect anything?
‘They’d check up on the engine failure. And water in the petrol. That could happen on any boat.’
Lunt grunted. ‘We’d have to make it all look genuine. Someone might have glasses on us. A coastguard.’
‘We’d choose a place away from coastguards. Off Black Rock, say six miles up the coast. Any rate, we
would make it look genuine. I tell you mate, we can’t go wrong.’
Lunt poured more whisky. ‘Let’s look at the chart,’ he said.
They had to wait 72 hours for the right weather. Then a southerly wind, force five, was forecast for the following day. They completed their plans in the darkness of the quay.
Lunt left at three o’clock next afternoon. The sea was uncomfortable, but safe enough away from the shore. Lunt cruised along slowly, looking out for the launch. Naturally, he wouldn’t tamper with his engine until Jones showed up.
By four he was approaching the rendezvous. Presently he spotted the launch, coming from the opposite direction. Everything was going according to plan. He steered Seasprite inshore till she was only three cables from the rocks. Soon he decided the launch was near enough for him to cut the engine safely.
He took the cap off the petrol tank and poured in a little water. Then he went below and dismantled the carburettor. That would show he’d been doing his best. Back on deck, he waved his shirt as a distress signal.
The launch turned towards him. Lunt watched the rocks. They were very close and the wind was dead on shore. But the timing was perfect. The launch closed in and stopped. Jones waved encouragingly from his foredeck, and threw a rope.
Lunt caught the coil—then stared at it in dismay. It was old and worn. ‘That’s no use!’ he shouted.
‘It’s all I’ve got,’ Jones called back. ‘Make it fast.’
Lunt tied it. Jones pulled away. There was a twang, and the rope parted.
Lunt gazed in panic at the closing shore. No time now to reassemble the carburettor.
‘You’ll have to take me off, Jones,’ he yelled.
The launch came alongside—but not close enough for Lunt to jump. Jones’s face was as hard as the rocks.
‘My name isn’t Jones,’ he said. ‘It’s Haines—remember him? I was with him in hospital when he died. He told me what happened. How you jerked him off the deck and didn’t even slow down. He told me your name and the name of your boat. So I found you. You meant to kill him, didn’t you?… Well, now I’m going to kill you. So long—see you in hell.’
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