The Golden Rendezvous

by Alistair MacLean

  As I stepped out of the radar office I literally bumped into him. He was panting, as if he’d run a long way, and I could see I had been wrong about the colour of his face: in the half-light on the deck it looked grey, like old newspaper.

  “Radio office, sir.” He gasped out the words, and caught my arm, a thing he would never normally have dreamed of doing. “Come quickly, sir. Please.”

  I was already running. “You found him?”

  “No, sir. It’s Mr. Brownell.” Brownell was our chief wireless operator. “Something seems to have happened to him.”

  I reached the office in ten seconds, brushed past the pale blur of Susan Beresford standing just outside the door, crossed over the storm-sill and stopped.

  Brownell had the overhead rheostat turned down until the room was less than half-lit, a fairly common practice among radio operators on duty night watches. He was leaning forward over his table, his head pillowed on his right forearm, so that all I could see was his shoulders, dark hair and a bald spot that had been the bane of his life. His left hand was outflung, his fingers just brushing the bridge telephone. The transmitting key was sending continuously. I eased the right forearm forward a couple of inches. The transmitting stopped.

  I felt for the pulse in the outstretched left wrist. I felt for the pulse in the side of the neck. I turned to Susan Beresford, still standing in the doorway, and said: “Do you have a mirror.” She nodded wordlessly, fumbled in her bag and handed over a compact, opened, the mirror showing. I turned up the rheostat till the radio cabin was harsh with light, moved Brownell’s head slightly, held the mirror near mouth and nostrils for maybe ten seconds, took it away, glanced at it and then handed it back.

  “Something’s happened to him all right,” I said. My voice was steady, unnaturally so. “He’s dead. Or I think he’s dead. Rusty, get Dr. Marston right away, he’s usually in the telegraph lounge this time of night. Tell the captain, if he’s there. Not a word to anyone else about this.”

  Rusty disappeared, and another figure appeared to take his place beside Susan Beresford in the doorway. Carreras. He stopped, one foot over the storm-sill, and said: “My God! Benson.”

  “No, Brownell. Wireless officer. I think he’s dead.” On the off-chance that Bullen hadn’t yet gone down to the lounge I reached for the bulkhead phone labelled “Captain’s Cabin” and waited for an answer, staring down at the dead man sprawled across the table. Middle-aged, cheerful, his only harmless idiosyncrasy being an unusual vanity about his personal appearance that had once even driven him to the length of buying a toupee for his bald spot—public shipboard opinion had forced him to discard it—Brownell was one of the most popular and genuinely liked officers on the ship. Was? Had been. I heard the click of a lifted receiver.

  “Captain? Carter here. Could you come down to the wireless office? At once, please.”

  “Benson?”

  “Brownell. Dead, sir, I think.”

  There was a pause, a click. I hung up, reached for another phone that connected directly to the radio officers’ cabins. We had three radio officers and the one with the middle watch, from midnight to 4 a.m., usually skipped dinner in the dining-room and made for his bunk instead. A voice answered: “Peters here.”

  “First mate. Sorry to disturb you, but come up to the radio room right away.”

  “What’s up?”

  “You’ll find out when you get here.”

  The overhead light seemed far too bright for a room with a dead man in it. I turned down the rheostat and the white glare was replaced by a deep yellow glow. Rusty’s face appeared in the doorway. He didn’t seem so pale any more but maybe the subdued light was just being kind to him.

  “Surgeon’s coming, sir.” His breathing was quicker than ever. “Just picking up his bag in the dispensary.”

  “Thanks. Go and fetch the bo’sun, will you. And no need to kill yourself running, Rusty. There’s no great hurry now.”

  He left, and Susan Beresford said in a low voice: “What’s wrong? What —what happened to him?”

  “You shouldn’t be here, Miss Beresford.”

  “What happened to him?” she repeated.

  “That’s for the ship’s surgeon to say. Looks to me as if he just died where he sat. Heart attack, coronary thrombosis, something like that.”

  She shivered, made no reply. Dead men were no new thing to me but the faint icy prickling on the back of my neck and spine made me feel like shivering myself. The warm trade wind seemed cooler, much cooler, than it had a few minutes ago.

  Doctor Marston appeared. No running, no haste even, with Dr. Marston: a slow measured man with a slow measured stride. A magnificent mane of white hair, clipped white moustache, a singularly smooth and unlined complexion for a man getting so far on in years, steady clear keen blue eyes with a peculiarly penetrating property, here, you knew instinctively, was a doctor who you could trust implicitly, which only went to show that your instinct should be taken away from you and locked up in some safe place where it couldn’t do you any harm. Admittedly, even to look at him made you feel better, and that was all right as far as it went: but to go further, to put your life into his hands, say, was a very different and dicey proposition altogether for there was an even chance that you wouldn’t get it back again. Those piercing eyes had not lighted on the Lancet or made any attempt to follow the latest medical developments since quite a few years prior to the Second World War. But they didn’t have to: he and Lord Dexter had gone through prep school, public school and university together and his job was secure as long as he could lift a stethoscope. And, to be fair to him, when it came to treating wealthy and hypochondriacal old ladies he had no equal on the seven seas.

  “Well, John,” he boomed. With the exception of Captain Bullen, he addressed every officer on the ship by his first name exactly as a public school headmaster would have addressed one of his more promising pupils, but a pupil that needed watching all the same. “What’s the trouble? Beau Brownell taken a turn?”

  “Worse than that, I’m afraid, Doctor. Dead.”

  “Good lord! Brownell? Dead? Let me see, let me see. A little more light if you please, John.” He dumped his bag on the table, fished out his stethoscope, sounded Brownell here and there, took his pulse and then straightened with a sigh. “In the midst of life, John … and not recently, either. Temperature’s high in here but I should say he’s been gone well over an hour.”

  I could see the dark bulk of Captain Bullen in the doorway now, waiting, listening, saying nothing.

  “Heart attack, Doctor?” I ventured. After all he wasn’t all that incompetent, just a quarter century out of date.

  “Let me see, let me see,” he repeated. He turned Brownell’s head and looked closely at it. He had to look closely. He was unaware that everyone in the ship knew that, piercing blue eyes or not, he was as short-sighted as a dodo, and refused to wear glasses. “Ah, look at this. The tongue, the lips, the eyes, above all the complexion. No doubt about it, no doubt about it at all. Cerebral hæmorrhage. Massive. And at his age. How old, John?”

  “Forty-seven, eight. Thereabouts.”

  “Forty-seven. Just forty-seven.” He shook his head. “Gets them younger every day. The stress of modern living.”

  “And that outstretched hand, Doctor?” I asked. “Reaching for the phone. You think——”

  “Just confirms my diagnosis, alas. Felt it coming on, tried to call for help, but it was too sudden, too massive. Poor old Beau Brownell.” He turned, caught sight of Bullen looming in the doorway. “Ah, there you are, Captain. A bad business, a bad business.”

  “A bad business,” Bullen agreed heavily. “Miss Beresford, you have no right to be here. You’re cold and shivering. Go to your cabin at once.” When Captain Bullen spoke in that tone, the Beresford millions didn’t seem to matter any more. “Doctor Marston will bring you a sedative later.”

  “And perhaps Mr. Carreras will be so kind!——” I began.

  “Certainly,” C
arreras agreed at once. “I will be honoured to see the young lady to her cabin.” He bowed slightly, offered her his arm. She seemed more than glad to take it and they disappeared.

  Five minutes later all was back to normal in the radio cabin. Peters had taken the dead man’s place, Dr. Marston had returned to his favourite occupation of mingling socially and drinking steadily with our millionaires, the captain had given me his instructions, I’d passed them on to the bo’sun and Brownell, canvas-wrapped, had been taken for’ard to the carpenter’s store.

  I stayed in the wireless office for a few minutes, talking to a very shaken Peters, and looked casually at the latest radio message that had come through. All radio messages were written down in duplicate as received, the original for the bridge and the carbon for the daily spiked file.

  I lifted the topmost message from the file, but it was nothing very important, just a warning of deteriorating weather far to the south-east of Cuba which might or might not build up into a hurricane. Routine and too far away to bother us. I lifted the blank message pad that lay by Peters’s elbow.

  “May I have this?”

  “Help yourself.” He was still too upset even to be curious as to why I wanted it. “Plenty more where that came from.”

  I left him, walked up and down the deck outside for some time, then made my way to the captain’s cabin where I’d been told to report when I was through. He was in his usual seat by the desk with Cummings and the chief engineer sitting on the settee. The presence of McIlroy, a short, stout Tynesider with the facial expression and hair style of Friar Tuck, meant a very worried Captain and a council of war. McIlroy’s brilliance wasn’t confined to reciprocating engines, that plump laughter-creased face concealed a brain that was probably the shrewdest on the Campari, and that included Mr. Julius Beresford, who must have been very shrewd indeed to make his three hundred million dollars or whatever it was.

  “Sit down, Mister, sit down,” Bullen growled. The “Mister “didn’t mean I was in his black books, just another sign that he was worried. “No signs of Benson yet?”

  “No sign at all.”

  “What a bloody trip!” Bullen pushed across a tray with whisky and glasses on it, unaccustomedly open-handed liberality that was just another sign of his worry. “Help yourself, Mister.”

  “Thank you sir.” I helped myself lavishly, the chance didn’t come often, and went on: “What are we going to do about Brownell?”

  “What the devil do you mean ‘What are we going to do about Brownell’? He’s got no folks to notify, no consent to get about anything. Head office has been informed. Burial at sea at dawn, before our passengers are up and about. Mustn’t spoil their blasted trip, I suppose.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to take him to Nassau, sir?”

  “Nassau?” He stared at me over the rim of his glass, then lowered it carefully to the table. “Just because a man has died you don’t have to go off your blasted rocker, do you?”

  “Nassau or some other British territory. Or Miami. Some place where we can get competent authorities, police authorities, to investigate things.”

  “What things, Johnny?” McIlroy asked. He had his head cocked to one side like a fat and well-stuffed owl.

  “Yes, what things?” Bullen’s tone was quite different from McIlroy’s. “Just because the search party hasn’t turned up Benson yet, you——”

  “I’ve called off the search-party, sir.”

  Bullen pushed back his chair till his hands rested on the table at the full stretch of his arms.

  “You’ve called off the search party,” he said softly. “Who the hell gave you authority to do anything of the kind.”

  “No one, sir. But I——”

  “Why did you do it, Johnny?” McIlroy again, very quietly.

  “Because we’ll never see Benson again. Not alive, that is, Benson’s dead. Benson’s been killed.”

  No one said anything, not for all of ten seconds. The sound of the cool air rushing through the louvres in the overhead trunking seemed abnormally loud. The captain said harshly: “Killed? Benson killed? Are you all right, Mister? What do you mean, killed?”

  “Murdered is what I mean.”

  “Murdered? Murdered?” McIlroy shifted uneasily in his chair. “Have you seen him? Have you any proof? How can you say he was murdered?”

  “I haven’t seen him. And I haven’t any proof. Not a scrap of evidence.” I caught a glimpse of the purser sitting there, his hands twisting together and his eyes staring at me, and I remembered that Benson had been his best friend for close on twenty years. “But I have proof that Brownell was murdered tonight. And I can tie the two together.”

  There was an even longer silence.

  “You’re mad,” Bullen said at length with harsh conviction. “So now Brownell’s been murdered too. You’re mad, Mister, off your bloody trolley. You heard what Dr. Marston said? Massive cerebral hæmorrhage. But of course he’s only a doctor of forty years’ standing. He wouldn’t know——”

  “How about giving me a chance, sir,” I interrupted. My voice sounded as harsh as his own. “I know he’s a doctor. I also know he hasn’t very good eyes. But I have. I saw what he missed. I saw a dark smudge on the back of Brownell’s uniform collar—and when has anybody on this ship ever seen a mark on any shirt that Brownell ever wore? They didn’t call him Beau Brownell for nothing. Somebody had hit him, with something heavy and with tremendous force, on the back of the neck. There was also a faint discoloration under the left ear—I could see it as he lay there. When the bo’sun and I got him down to the carpenter’s store we examined him together. There was a corresponding slight bruise under his right ear—and traces of sand under his collar. Someone sandbagged him and then, when he was unconscious, compressed the carotid arteries until he died. Go and see for yourselves.”

  “Not me,” McIlroy murmured. You could see that even his normally monolithic composure had been shaken. “Not me. I believe it—absolutely. It would be too easy to disprove it. I believe it all right—but I still can’t accept it.”

  “But damn it all, Chief!” Bullen’s fists were clenched.

  “The doctor said that——”

  “I’m no medical man,” McIlroy interrupted. “But I should imagine the symptoms are pretty much the same in both cases. Can hardly blame old Marston.”

  Bullen ignored him, gave me the full benefit of his commodore’s stare.

  “Look, Mister,” he said slowly. “You’ve changed your tune, haven’t you? When I was there, you agreed with Dr. Marston. You even put forward the heart failure idea. You showed no signs ——”

  “Miss Beresford and Mr. Carreras were there,” I interrupted. “I didn’t want them to start getting wrong ideas. If word got around the ship—and it would have been bound to—that we suspected murder, then whoever was responsible might have felt themselves forced to act again, and act quickly, to forestall any action we might take. I don’t know what they might do, but on the form to date it would have been something damned unpleasant.”

  “Miss Beresford? Mr. Carreras?” Bullen had stopped clenching his hands but you could see that it wouldn’t take much to make him start up again. “Miss Beresford is above suspicion. But Carreras? And his son? Just aboard today—and in most unusual circumstances. It just might tie up.”

  “It doesn’t. I checked. Carreras Senior and Junior had both been in either the telegraph lounge or the dining-room for almost two hours before we found Brownell. They’re completely in the clear.”

  “Besides being too obvious,” McIlroy agreed. “I think, Captain, it’s time we took our hats of to Mr. Carter here: he’s been getting around and using his head while all we have been doing is twiddling our thumbs.”

  “Benson,” Captain Bullen said. He didn’t show any signs of taking off his hat. “How about Benson? How does he tie up?”

  “This way.” I slid the empty telegraph book across the table. “I checked the last message that was received and went to the brid
ge. Routine weather report. Time, 2007. But later there was another message written on this pad: original, carbon, duplicate. The message is indecipherable—but to people with modern police equipment it would be child’s play to find out what was written there. What is decipherable is the impression of the last two time figures. Look for yourself. It’s quite clear. 33. That means 2033. A message came through at that moment, a message so urgent in nature that, instead of waiting for the routine bridge messenger collection, Brownell made to phone it through at once. That was why his hand was reaching for the phone when we found him, not because he was feeling ill all of a sudden. And then he was killed. Whoever killed him had to kill. Knocking Brownell out and stealing the message would have accomplished nothing for as soon as he would have come to he would have remembered the contents of the message and immediately sent it to the bridge. It must,” I added thoughtfully, “have been a damned important message.”

  “Benson,” Bullen repeated impatiently. “How about Benson?”

  “Benson was the victim of a lifetime of habit. Howie here tells us how Benson invariably went out on deck between half past eight and twenty-five to nine for a smoke, while the passengers were at dinner. The radio room is immediately above where he would have been taking his promenade—and the message came through, and Brownell was killed, inside those five minutes. Benson must have seen or heard something unusual and gone to investigate. He might even have caught the murderer in the act. And so Benson had to die too.”