The Golden Rendezvous

by Alistair MacLean

  “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 those 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 around me now, still half supporting me, leading me for’ard 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 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—or he—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 were 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 just 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 closely 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 officer, to try to find out where the receiver was and to figure out 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—or 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 had 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 him—if we’d found him, we’d have known there was a murderer on board. 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 sun-deck 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 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—I 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 is as damned queer if I make no reference to it at all: but if I do mention it and pass it off as a lady-like 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 that there’s murder and mayhem abroad, 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 for’ard, which meant that we were still steaming north-east. 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 around 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 had 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 was 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 Hippocratic 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 even seem unduly worried about the fact that we carried aboard a passenger w
ho, 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 nor would be made until we arrived in Nassau and that when it was 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 anæsthetic, cleaned and sutured the wound, covered it with a sticking-plaster pad and wished me good morning. He was through for the day.

  It was quarter to eight. I dropped down the series of accommodation ladders that led to the fo’c’sle and made my way for’ard to the carpenter’s store. The fo’c’sle was unusually crowded for that time of the morning. There must have been close on forty members of the ship’s company gathered there, deck staff, engine-room staff, cooks and stewards, all waiting to pay their last respects to Brownell. Nor were these all the spectators. I looked up and saw that the promenade deck, which curved right round the for’ard superstructure of the Campari, was dotted with passengers, eleven or twelve in all: not many, but they represented close on the total male passenger compliment aboard—I could see no women there—with the exception of old Cerdan and possibly one or two others. Bad news travelled fast and even for millionaires the chance of seeing a burial at sea didn’t come along too often. Right in the middle of them was the Duke of Hartwell, looking nautical as anything in his carefully-adjusted Royal Yachting Club cap, silk scarf and brass-buttoned navy doeskin jacket.

  I skirted number one hold and thought grimly that there might indeed be something in the old superstitions: the dead cried out for company, the old salts said, and the dead men loaded only yesterday afternoon and now lying in the bottom of number four hold hadn’t been slow to get their company. Two others gone in the space of a few hours, near as a toucher three: only, I’d fallen sideways instead of toppling over the rail. I felt those ice-cold fingers on the back of my neck again, and shivered: then passed into the comparative gloom of the carpenter’s store, right up in the forepeak.

  Everything was ready. The bier—a hastily nailed together platform of boards, seven feet by two—lay on the deck: and the Red Ensign, tied to two corners of the handles at the top of the bier but free at the other end, covered the canvas-swathed mound beneath. Only the bo’sun and carpenter were there. To look at MacDonald you would never have guessed that he hadn’t slept the previous night. He had volunteered to remain on guard outside the wireless office until dawn: it had also been his idea that, though the chances of any trouble in daylight were remote, two men should be detailed for holystoning the deck outside the wireless office after breakfast, for the entire day if necessary. Meantime, the radio office was closed—and heavily padlocked—to allow Peters and Jenkins to attend the funeral of their colleague. There was no difficulty about this: as was common, there was a standard arrangement whereby a bell rang either on the bridge or in the chief wireless operator’s cabin whenever a call came through on the distress frequency or on the Campari’s call-sign.

  The slight vibration of the Campari’s engines died away as the engines slowed and the revs dropped until we had just enough speed to give us steerage-way in that heavy swell. The captain came down the companionway, carrying a heavy brass-bound bible under his arm. The heavy steel door in the port hand fo’c’sle side was swung open and back till it secured with a clang in its retaining latch. A long wooden box was slid into position, one end level with the opening in the side of the ship. Then MacDonald and the carpenter, bareheaded, appeared, carrying bier and burden and laid them on the box.

  The service was very brief, very simple. Captain Bullen said a few words about Brownell, about as true as words usually are in those circumstances, led the tattered singing of “Abide With Me,” read the burial service and nodded to the bo’sun. The Royal Navy did this sort of thing better, but we didn’t carry any bugles aboard the Campari. MacDonald lifted the inboard end of the bier, the canvas swathed mound slid out slowly from beneath the Red Ensign and was gone with only the faintest of splashings to mark its departure. I glanced up at the promenade deck and saw the Duke of Hartwell there standing stiffly at attention, right arm bent up to his peaked cap in rigid salute. Even allowing for the natural disadvantages lent him by his face, I had seldom seen a more ludicrous sight. No doubt to the unbiased observer he was putting up a more fitting show than myself but I find it hard to be at my reverent best when I know that all I’m committing to the deep is a length of canvas, large quantities of engine-room waste and a hundred and fifty pounds of rusty chain to give the necessary negative buoyancy.

  The door in the ship’s side clanged shut, Captain Bullen handed over the Bible to a cadet, the engine revs mounted and the Campari was back in business again. And the first item on the agenda was breakfast.

  In my three years aboard the Campari I had rarely seen more than half a dozen passengers in the dining-saloon for breakfast. Most of them preferred to have it served in their suites or on the private verandas outside their suites. Barring a few apéritifs, followed by Antoine’s or Henriques’s superb cooking, there was nothing to beat a good funeral to bring out the sociable best in our passengers. There could only have been seven or eight missing altogether.

  I had a full complement at my table except, of course, for the invalid, Mr. Cerdan. I should have been on watch but the captain had decided that, as there was a very able quartermaster on the wheel and no land within seventy miles, young Dexter, who usually stood the watch with me, could stand it alone for the length of breakfast.

  No sooner had I pulled in my chair than Miss Harrbride fixed her beady eyes on me.

  “What on earth’s happened to you, young man?” she demanded.

  “To tell you the truth, Miss Harrbride, I don’t really know myself.”

  “You what?”

  “It’s true.” I put on my best shamed-face. “I was standing up on the boat-deck last night and the next thing I knew I was lying in the scuppers with my head cut—I must have struck it against the davit when I fell.” I had my story all prepared. “Dr. Marston thinks it was a combination of sunstroke—I was loading cargo most of the day yesterday and I can assure you that the sun was very hot—and the fact that owing to our troubles in Kingston and the delay caused by it, I haven’t had very much sleep in the past three days.”

  “I must say things do keep happening aboard the Campari,” Miguel Carreras said. His face was grave. “One man dead from a heart attack or whatever it was, another missing—they haven’t found our chief steward yet, have they?”

  “I’m afraid not, sir.”

  “And now you get yourself banged up. Let’s sincerely hope that’s the end of it.”

  “Troubles always happen in threes, sir. I’m sure this is the end of it. We’ve never before——”

  “Young man, let me have a look at you,” a peremptory voice demanded from the captain’s table. Mrs. Beresford, my favourite passenger. I twisted round in my seat to find that Mrs. Beresford, who normally sat with her back to me, had herself completely turned round in hers. Beyond her, the Duke of Hartwell, unlike the previous night, was having no trouble at all in devoting his entire attention to Susan Beresford: the usual counter-attraction on his right, in the best traditions of the theatrical world, rarely rose before noon. Mrs. Beresford studied me in silence for the best part of ten seconds.

  “You don’t look well at all, Mr. Carter,” she pronounced finally. “Twisted your neck, too, didn’t you? You didn’t have to turn around in your chair to talk to me.”

  “A little,” I admitted. “It’s a bit stiff.”

  “And hurt your back into the bargain,” she added triumphantly. “I can tell from the peculiar way you sit.”

  “It hardly hurts at all,” I said bravely. It didn’t, in fact, hurt me in the slightest, but I hadn’t yet got the hang of carrying a gun in my waistband and the butt kept sticking painfully into my lower ribs.

  “Sun-stro
ke, eh?” Her face held genuine concern. “And lack of sleep. You should be in bed. Captain Bullen, I’m afraid you’re overworking this young man.”

  “That’s what I keep telling the captain, ma’am,” I said, “but he doesn’t pay any attention to me.”

  Captain Bullen smiled briefly and rose to his feet. His eyes, as they roved slowly over the room, held the expression of one who wanted both attention and quiet: such was the personality of the man that he got it in three seconds flat.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began. The Duke of Hartwell regarded the tablecloth with that smell-of-bad-fish expression he reserved for tenants wanting a cut in rent and merchant navy captains who forgot to preface public addresses with the words “Your Grace.”

  “I am most distressed,” the captain went on, “as I am sure you are all distressed by the events of the past twelve hours. That we should lose our chief wireless officer through death by natural causes is, God knows, bad enough: but that our chief steward should vanish the same evening—well, in thirty-six years at sea I have never known anything like it.

  “What happened to Chief Steward Benson we cannot say with any certainty: but I hazard a guess and at the same time issue a warning. There are literally hundreds of recorded cases of men vanishing overboard during the night and I have little doubt but that Benson’s death is due to the same reason which probably accounts for 99 per cent, of all the other cases. Even on the most experienced sailors the effect of leaning over the rail at night and watching the black water passing below has a weirdly hypnotic effect. I think it’s something akin to the vertigo that affects a great number of people, people who are convinced that if they go near, say, the parapet of a high building, some strange force will make them topple over, no matter what their conscious minds may say. Only, with leaning over the rails of a ship, there is no fear. Just a gradual mesmerism. A man just leans farther and farther over until his centre of gravity is suddenly displaced. And then he is gone.”