He shouldn’t have been too hard to pick out. The parka was brilliant yellow; with the letters F_ CK scrawled in red across the top of the back, and underneath that the words: The Only Thing Missing Is You. The entire crew had giggled like idiots in Cairns as soon as one of them got the joke and passed it on to the others. They had made me wear it as we stepped down the gangway, and it wasn’t until we were out of sight behind the wharf sheds that I was able to take the blasted thing off.
I moved forward, away from the glow of the small deck-light above the doorway and peered about, but there was still no sign of him. I walked around the main hatch-coaming and then around both winch-houses, thinking that he might have taken shelter in one of them, but he wasn’t in either. He must have followed my instructions to the letter and kept right on going. I didn’t bother to search any of the other winch-houses and began to walk directly towards the bow, calling his name softly every ten metres or so.
But there was no answer.
I hoped to hell the silly bastard hadn’t fallen overboard. Not that there was much chance of that. The bulwarks were fairly high off the deck. As I got closer to the bow I started to call out louder, knowing that the wind would carry my cries out to sea and away from the officers up on the bridge.
Still no reply, and panic started to set in.
He should have been able to hear me by now. I was shouting at the top of my voice. I cursed myself for not having made him wait whilst I fetched the other coat. Up until then I hadn’t used the torch for fear that it would be seen from the bridge, but I was past worrying about his feelings now and took it from my pocket.
Suddenly there was a sound from up forward: metal scraping on metal. I raced along the deck, and then I saw him. The drunken idiot lay sprawled on the deck by the ladder leading up on to the bow itself. The whisky must have hit him with a thud as he had taken hold of the rail, climbed, and then tilted his head up as he got to the top of the ladder.
I walked up and kicked the sole of his shoe.
“Come on, Pete! Get up on your feet!”
He didn’t move. I leaned down towards him. His eyes were open; head twisted back; arms by his sides; his body still; no movement, no sign of breathing; and those staring, questioning eyes looking up at me, unblinking.
He wasn’t drunk. He wasn’t unconscious.
He was dead.
The clouds had cleared; the rain now gone; the quietness deafening.
I bent down and touched the dark-red stain on the deck. The blood felt warm and sticky, but was no longer oozing from the wound in his head. It had stopped pumping when his heart had ceased to beat. I gazed down at the tousled head lying in that pool of thick dark liquid and felt sad.
I felt for his pulse. Nothing. The only thought passing through my mind as I bent over him was that I was a hell of a way to cure a dose of the clap. The thought went over and over in my mind, and I felt ashamed.
If only he hadn’t had the whisky. If only I hadn’t suggested the game of cards; or even joked about his dose of clap; but it was too late for recrimination; it was too late for anything. His parents had been right. Pete’s venture into the world of business had been doomed to disaster from the start. Fate had been against him. God only knew what they would do to his uncle: the one who had lent him the money.
Pete wouldn’t be going home with a pocket full of cash now. He would be lucky to return at all; and even then it would be in a box, parcelled up like his merchandise. Fifteen minutes earlier he had been alive; not in perfect health, but alive. And now he was as dead as his dream. It was that damn receptionist in Cairns, and the nurse. If we had left them both alone this would never have happened.
I knelt down beside him again; my throat choking up. We hadn’t known each other for long, not much more than a week, but we had formed a mateship. We were the odd men out on this ship full of silent Chinamen and miserable Malays.
I stood and stepped around him and looked up at the companionway, the steel ladder he must have toppled down from. I didn’t want to look any more at those staring eyes; those sightless eyes that seemed to be accusing me, blaming me.
As a gesture of farewell, of apology, I bent down to touch his hair. The parka was still part-way up over the back of his head and, as I reached over to move it away from his forehead, a light mist began to drift across the deck.
The hood slipped sideways. As it moved I caught sight of a stain on the outside of the material, slightly above the level of the shoulder – right where the back of his neck would have been. It hadn’t been there earlier. There hadn’t been any mark on the jacket when the crew caught sight of it when we went into Cairns; and I hadn’t worn it since. Either he had leaned against something, or…, or what?
I leant down and touched the stain – rough and dry; and part of the grime came off on my fingers. I put them to my nose and there was no doubting the smell of paint and grease. The inside of the parka had a faint mark where the stain had come right through. There was a smudge on his neck. Unthinkingly, I wiped it off with the back of my hand.
Whatever had caused the grime to push through the close-weave material must have had force behind it. He hadn’t simply leaned against a winch-house or one of the hatch-coamings. There was nothing protruding from the deck he could have fallen against, and besides, he had fallen face down. The crushed forehead made that plain.
The obvious hit me like a body blow.
He must have been at the top of the ladder, turned to see if I was coming, and been struck on the back of the neck with some heavy object. As he collapsed, the assailant would have thrust him forward, away from the ladder – straight down to the steel deck.
This wasn’t an unprovoked attack. Someone had gone out of his way to kill him.
This couldn’t be the result of the sly looks he had been giving the wives, nor of his snide remarks to the crew about his containers. It was deeper than that.
Then the horrible truth of it came to me. There was no reason for anyone to kill Pete. But there was a reason for someone to kill me – the cargo! He was wearing my parka. The whole crew knew it. With the hood pulled up over his head the killer wouldn’t have been able to see his face, let alone the blonde hair. The clouds would have blotted out the moonlight and, with the way he walked bent over, we were both about the same height.
It had to be the cargo! Neither of us were carrying any cash. Pete had some travellers cheques, and so did I, but they were locked away in the captain’s quarters.
Nobody could hate this much. Nobody could have had this bad a grudge against us.
It was me they were after. My heart pounded; my breath hoarse and loud in my ears.
How would this help them get to the cargo? Maybe they intended to have the lot unloaded somewhere and needed me out of the way. But that would mean the entire ship’s complement was in on it; and that didn’t make sense. I could see some of them as thieves, but not as murderers.
I was back at the panic stage, trying to tell myself to take it easy, to calm down.
What should I do? What could I do?
I took a deep breath.
The first thing was not to let anyone know that this was anything other than an accident. The killer would know, but that was incidental at the moment. A killing would bring in the authorities, and that would bring an investigation. They would look for a motive. It wouldn’t help me and it wouldn’t do Pete any good. He was going to stay dead no matter what official enquiries were made.
The mark had to be removed from his neck. There was no bruising that I could see, just the smudge – or what was left after I had wiped it with the back of my hand. After two or three strokes with my handkerchief it looked like he had simply neglected to wash his neck. The parka wasn’t so easy, but I managed to get rid of most of the stain.
I considered taking the parka, but it would look suspicious. His trousers were saturated with the rain whilst the rest of him was still quite dry, and the light mist now swirling about wasn’t heavy enough to compe
nsate.
Squatting next to him on the deck, I tried to reason it out. Who had been responsible? Why had they done it? What did they really hope to gain? If I had been carrying a couple of dozen kilos of heroin or cocaine in my luggage, then maybe I could have understood it. But not for fifty tonnes of marijuana!
Bells started to tinkle in the back of my brain. My cabin. What if it hadn’t been the nurse who had been through my cabin? It could have been someone else on the ship, a member of the crew, or even one of the officers. It could have happened at any time during the hours Pete and I had spent ashore that first evening. I hadn’t paid any attention to my luggage until the next morning.
Whatever they might have been looking for, they wouldn’t have found. Perhaps with me out of the way they reckoned they might have time to make a more thorough search.
This was getting me nowhere. Pete was lying on the deck and I was trying to solve riddles. What I was doing wasn’t normal. A normal person finding his friend lying dead in a pool of blood wouldn’t be squatting on the deck, poking about his clothes. The ordinary person wouldn’t think of murder. There was nothing to suggest it; nothing that would spring to the eye of the casual observer – as if any witness to death can be called casual.
I sprang up and ran to the side, pretending to puke into the sea, just in case anybody from the bridge had spotted me and wondered what I was doing. My next move was a mad dash down towards the accommodation section.
Bursting into the officers lounge, I screamed incoherently, yelling that Pete was dead. It took them a minute or two to calm me down and, after what I considered to be sufficient histrionics, I told them there had been a terrible accident and that Pete was dead.
I kept using the word accident.
They stared at me in silence, mouths unmoving, some agape, all of them stunned. I tried to watch each one, hoping that one would make a slip, that I might catch a guilty look, or see eyes that quickly turned away. But they all appeared shocked. And they were dry. None of them had been out on deck.
Suddenly there was a rush towards the door by the men. The two wives present stood undecided, and then a few whispered words in Chinese from one of the husbands and they shuffled off to their cabins.
As we moved down the stairway the second officer sent one of the others to fetch the captain, then turned to me and asked what had happened. I tried to explain the situation with as much hysteria as I thought would fit the atmosphere, and hoped to hell I wasn’t overdoing it.
We moved through the doorway in a bunch and hurried along the deck towards the bow.
I was still shocked at the sight of Pete’s body lying on the deck, alone, the mist clearing, moisture beading the side of his face. It didn’t seem true; more like a dream from which I would soon awaken; but I knew that this wasn’t any nightmare; this was for real. Pete wouldn’t get up, laugh, and then walk away.
It could have been me lying there. It should have been me.
Flint arrived: dishevelled and smelling of whisky; rudely disturbed from the peace and quiet of his cabin and the evening’s bottle. He had put the ship to bed for the night, leaving his junior officers to look after her. Still, for all that, he seemed sober.
There was no doctor on board, which was normal for a ship of this size, and there was nothing that a doctor could have done. We stood around, the crowd swelling as the crew arrived in their two’s and three’s. Somebody fetched a stretcher and we rolled Pete’s body on to it and carried him into the accommodation section, out of the weather.
Pete’s cabin seemed to be the logical place, so we placed him on the bunk and covered him with a blanket; as if hiding him would make the tragedy any less.
“All right!” the captain barked. “Everybody back to where you were before this happened! Let’s get back to normal.”
He was expecting too much. They would be talking about it until late into the night. He turned to one of the officers. “Cheng, see that two of the crew stand watch over the bow area. I don’t want anybody up past the number two hatch until after I’ve had a chance to make an inspection in the morning. And tell whoever goes on watch not to touch or move anything either – and tell them to keep well clear of the blood!”
It was a bit late to start issuing orders. There must have been at least fifteen people milling around the body as we had lifted it on to the stretcher. The crew’s heavy boots would have scuffed out any clues the captain hoped to find.
I started to move away, but he called out to me: “Mr. Rider, would you stay for a few minutes please.”
He sat down on the only chair in the cabin while I looked around for something to sit on, finally perching my backside on a corner of the chest of drawers. Neither of us wanted to sit on the bunk with Pete lying there under the blanket. He scratched his chin, fastened a couple of buttons on his shirt and looked towards the porthole.
“The damn ghouls would be out there soaking up the blood for a souvenir, given half the chance,” he muttered. “Why the bloody hell did this have to happen? I’ll have to make a full report; take statements and everything. If the bloody authorities find out the entire bloody crew were wandering all round the damn corpse there’ll be hell to pay!”
He sprang up from the chair and glared at me. “Bloody passengers! Nothing but bloody trouble. Jesus Christ! Fancy wandering around the decks on a dark, wet night! What the hell did he think he was doing? Stupid bastard.”
He didn’t give a damn about Pete. All he was upset about was the amount of trouble this was going to cause him. My fist was clenched and my backside was half-way up off the chest of drawers when he caught the look in my eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “You probably think I’m callous. Well, maybe I am, but running a ship like this hardens you to many things. I’ve had a long day, not to mention a hell of an argument with the chief engineer, and a dozen other things which have gone wrong as well.”
So, he had his troubles. We all did.
He asked me what had happened and how I had come to find the body. I gave him most of the details, omitting all reference to the marks on the parka and those on Pete’s neck. I kept quiet about the conversation we’d had concerning the girl in Cairns. That was personal. Pete wouldn’t have wanted them to know. I let him believe that it was strictly alcohol, compounded by seasickness.
I considered telling him that it looked like murder. With a bit of luck we might be able to establish whether any member of the crew had not been where he should have been at the time of the killing, but all that could do would be to warn the killer.
No, the only thing to do was to keep quiet. The sooner the captain came to the conclusion I was trying to paint, so much the better. He already believed it to be the staggerings of a drunken fool, so let him continue to believe it. Besides, if the killer didn’t know whether I knew the truth or not it might give me those few seconds advantage should he try again. Not that I thought he would try again. One death could be explained as an unfortunate accident. Two would be fetching gullibility a little too far.
But I wasn’t taking any chances.
All the way back to my cabin I kept stopping, listening for footsteps following mine, and keeping well clear of dark alcoves. I made sure the cabin door was securely locked. It had been locked whilst we had gone ashore in Cairns and that hadn’t stopped the bastard from searching my things. The flimsy lock wouldn’t have kept an honest person out. It could be sprung with a screwdriver without the slightest sound being made.
I propped the desk chair under the door handle and leaned the water jug into the back of the chair. It wouldn’t stop an intruder, but at least I would hear the mongrel. Not that I was expecting him to come sneaking in so soon after he had killed Pete, but it was better to be safe than dead.
Lying on my bunk in the dark I tried again to figure out why the killer, or killers – there didn’t have to be just the one – wanted me out of the way. I hadn’t pried into anything. I had kept well away from the wool. If I had gone down in
to the hold checking out the bales I could probably have understood it. But there was no way anybody could connect me with the cargo, even if they knew what was hidden away in the middle of each bale.
It was a mystery and yet it had happened, so there had to be a reason. And there was a reason; the only one there could be: the marijuana.
Who could the killer be working for? He couldn’t be a freelance operator, because there was no way he could have found out about the marijuana. Besides, one man couldn’t handle the amount we were shipping. There had to be an organization behind it. But which?
Could it be Nick? He had sounded worried when I spoke to him in Cairns. Was he worried that he was sending me to my death? No, he always sounded like that. And why kill me on the ship? He could have done it at any one of a hundred places and not waited until I was on board the ship; unless I was intended to go overboard and simply disappear. No, it wasn’t Nick’s style.
Sure, I was in for a share of the profits, but my share was small compared to the amount he was making. Killing me would be stupid and could jeopardise the whole project. For all he knew, I could have protected myself in some way; left a signed statement or some such thing.
There was no way it could have been Nick. He still needed me, now more than ever.
The only other person was Tek. And that didn’t make sense either; for much the same reasons. Besides, it had been his idea that I go along and baby-sit the cargo. It would have been much easier for him to have me murdered in some back street in Singapore. If Tek wanted to steal the cargo it would be simpler to take delivery in Singapore and refuse payment. There wouldn’t have been a lot that we could have done about it. If both the cargo and I disappeared in transit, the result would be the same. It would be the end of any further dealings as far as Nick would be concerned. He wouldn’t trust Tek again, nor the system. And Tek wanted the relationship to continue. There were too many millions of dollars involved.
There had to be some third party, some unknown organization. And that was the worst part. They knew all about me, what I was doing and where I was going. They had the edge and I was completely in the dark. Well, perhaps not completely. I did know something.
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