A Hidden Heart of Fire

by Edna Dawes

  “All right—when I’ve eaten my meal!” she said crossly. She hadn’t had a chance to have a talk with Ben since this afternoon’s events and it looked as if she wasn’t going to have that chance now. Rod kept up a flow of idle chatter while Nancy and Ben ate, and as soon as they had finished, he hustled her on to the veranda.

  The minute they were outside the pool of light round the office, her arm was taken in a tight grip, and instead of going across to the mess-room, Rod marched her down past the laboratory, towards the sea.

  “What’s going on?” she asked sharply.

  “You’ll find out.” His voice had hardened.

  “Now, just a minute!”

  At the first indication that she was about to put up some resistance, Rod’s arm went round her, to grip her other elbow, making it impossible for her to struggle.

  “You are wasting precious energy,” he told her coldly. “You may need it before the night is over.”

  How mistaken she had been to imagine he was an unwilling participant in this awful business! Since escape was out of the question, she tried bluff. “Getting rid of me won’t help. I have told Ben all I know.”

  “That’s not true.” He sounded supremely unconcerned as he pushed her on to the planks of the jetty.

  “He’ll know I went off with you.”

  “I can soon fix him,” was the reply. “At the moment he is in no fit state to take me on single-handed.”

  “So you’d be prepared to finish off what you started?”

  “What I started?”

  “That incident you staged with the sea-snakes. I have to own you were clever to be so sure I would panic and get Ben to go to your rescue, but to play on a friendship in order to lure a man beyond a safe depth in the belief that you were in danger is contemptible!”

  His grip on her arm tightened, and there was an edge to his voice when he said: “That’s enough! I won’t answer for the consequences if you say any more in that vein.”

  “I thought the consequences had already been decided.”

  “They have,” he assured her grimly. “It’s time you realized it is unwise to go around involving yourself in things you should leave well alone.”

  Chapter Five

  They reached the end of the jetty, but Nancy was neither given a violent push off the edge nor forced into a boat. Rod opened the door of the boathouse and they both went in. A kerosene lamp illuminated the interior, throwing long shadows on the shelves and paraphernalia hanging on hooks around the walls. The whole place smelt of petrol, paint, and salt-water dampness. Sitting on an upturned box was David Russell, his hair gleaming brightly in the harsh light which threw shadows to emphasize the bruised look beneath his eyes.

  “You got her, then?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Rod told him. “She put up a bit of a struggle.”

  “I haven’t stopped yet. I don’t frighten easily.” Her words were braver than the tone. In this small wooden building, with the boom of water echoing beneath it, her voice sounded high and small.

  “We have noticed your persistence, Nancy. Both Rod and I wanted you to keep out of this, but as you are insensitive to obvious hints, we have reluctantly decided there is only one way of stopping you from wrecking the whole scheme.”

  Her few remaining shreds of confidence were fast leaving her. Whatever had made her imagine she could pit her wits against men of this type?

  David was continuing: “I have put off taking this course, despite Rod’s conviction that you would go on probing until we were forced to take drastic action, but when he told me just now that you had slipped out and followed us this afternoon, I agreed to his terms. I’m sorry, Nancy, but you have left us no alternative. Go ahead, Rod.”

  There was movement behind her and she spun round, her heart thumping frantically. Real fright weakened her limbs and robbed her of any further courage to face up to these men. As Rod advanced on her, she backed away.

  “I haven’t really told anyone,” she cried desperately, “and I promise not to—” Her voice faltered and died as she saw Rod’s face clearly in the pool of light. He was trying very hard not to smile!

  He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her round to face David. Amusement was in his voice as he said: “Miss Martin, it is my duty to introduce you to Inspector Russell of Sydney C.I.B. In the absence of a cell in which to lock you, he has agreed with me that we have no course than to take you into our confidence. It was obvious you were about to pass on all your suspicions to my dear and trusting friend, Ben Garrett, and this is the only way we can possibly stop you.”

  “Inspector!” She couldn’t take it all in. “You mean a police inspector? But I heard you say—”

  The seated man smiled at her ruefully. “You might have heard me say a good many things, my dear girl, but heaven knows what construction you put on them. I have met a few amateur sleuths, but none quite as persistent as you. I knew you would spell trouble, the first time I met you.” He indicated a box beside him. “You’d better sit down. It’s quite a story.”

  “Go on, sit down,” said Rod gently. “He won’t bite you!”

  She turned on him in a blaze of temper. “You can say that, after all you threatened to do to me and Ben! You forced me to come here with an excuse about breakfast arrangements; when I tried to get away you became quite brutal; you threatened to finish off Ben. Then when I—”

  “I resent your implication that I caused Ben’s condition deliberately,” he said soberly.

  “Not only Ben, but Uncle Matt!” she flung at him. “I heard you say two were out of the way and there were only three more to deal with.”

  “You what!”

  “Let’s take things as they come, shall we?” put in David sharply. “Once you hear the story, all your eavesdropping might make sense, but I am sure Rod has never threatened you.” David leant forward, so that the light shone full on his face. “You read what, you wanted to read into our deliberately ambiguous remarks. After that affair this afternoon, you must surely have realized that we are dealing with dangerous people. I have a broken rib and a slash in my stomach which was not intentionally off-target. We know what we are up against, but you plunged into it as if it were a sophisticated party game. For your own safety we have to let you know the truth—although I had strict orders that Rod is the only person to be told—but we both agreed to give you such a fright that you’d never attempt this sort of thing again. We seem to have succeeded very well.”

  “Then all that drama was just a joke!”

  “But not what happened this afternoon. Although we both admire your intelligence and tenacity, you have been creating danger for yourself and us. Don’t ever play amateur detective again. It only works successfully in films. I think it will be best if I start at the beginning and answer your queries as we come to them. It may even be that you can tell us something we don’t know.”

  “Despite your lecture, you won’t spurn any clues the amateur sleuth can give,” she declared slyly. “I still can’t grasp the fact that you are a policeman. I knew you were a hopeless photographer, but imagined you were a villain who had some sort of hold over Rod. The day you arrived, I heard you telling him that although he was the head of the research station, you were running things from then on.”

  Rod looked astonished. “You had begun snooping at that stage?”

  “I wasn’t snooping,” she defended herself. “I went up to your office to explain why I had asked Ben to give me diving lessons, and to apologize for taking up valuable working time. I couldn’t help overhearing.”

  “You were going to apologize? How very uncharacteristic!”

  “I admit my curiosity was already aroused by your discovery of Jim Maitland’s camera three months after he was washed up on some nearby island. Ben recognized it, and told me the story behind it. He also knew that David was no underwater photographer. Why did you take on a cover that was so easy to disprove?” she asked him.

  “Someone had to get on Wonara witho
ut arousing suspicion, so as I had done a fair amount of skin-diving I was selected for the job. The vacancy for an underwater photographer provided the perfect excuse to join the research team, but I knew I’d have to watch the photography side. I hadn’t counted on your being here, nor for Ben being an ex-professional. I could have wrung your neck when you started probing about camera techniques.”

  “You slid out of it very well. Now I know who you are, it’s easy to see why you are so expert at talking your way out of awkward situations.”

  He shifted his position painfully. “But how on earth did you discover what we were doing?”

  “It was pure accident which made me walk along that path at dawn one morning. I don’t sleep well and I was restless enough to get up for a walk on the beach. I found the route along there by accident and followed it, lost in thought. You were just surfacing after your dive, so I watched you come in to shore and climb the path. You were discussing me,” she added caustically.

  “We often did,” put in Rod, equally caustically. “You were our biggest worry.”

  Nancy ignored him and concentrated on David. “Does your explanation include revealing what is at the bottom of the sea that interests you so?”

  He nodded. “Oh, yes, we shall have to tell you everything now.”

  “Is it a wrecked galleon with treasure on board?”

  He half-smiled. “I’m afraid it’s not quite as romantic as that—but I think Rod should start off, since it was he who contacted my headquarters and set the whole investigation in motion.”

  Rod stood with one foot on a barrel, leaning on his bent knee as he talked, amongst the dangling wetsuits and a hotchpotch of diving tackle and boat accessories.

  “As you rightly supposed, I was very upset by Jim Maitland’s death, but not through any feeling of guilt. You had been told I was mad because he ruined valuable film—and that was true enough. It was the second time he had done it! But when he was missing, and Sheila told me he had gone out at dusk to get another set of pictures, I began to feel uneasy. Jim was far too experienced to go diving alone against my instructions, and in dangerously rising seas. It seemed to me there was more behind his recent behaviour than was apparent. In the twelve months or more that I had known him, he had done excellent photography. I might have accepted one careless piece of work, but two ruined films in such a short space of time was nonsense.” He shifted his weight.

  “At first I tried to find out from Sheila if Jim had been feeling ill or was worried about anything. I drew a blank there, but it was something she said which put an idea in my head and led to all this. In explaining why he took such risks to get replacement pictures, she said he felt guilty about wasting film when supplies were so tightly restricted. For a couple of days I tossed that idea around in my mind, until it occurred to me that if he had wanted to do any photography of his own, the only way he could do so was to pretend he had ruined a reel—to give him the excuse to draw another one.”

  He gave Nancy a dark look. “This place is run on a shoestring, as you so quickly noticed. In the sort of set-up he had worked in previously it would be possible to obtain perks without anyone noticing, but every item here is accounted for by Ben, who keeps the keys of all the store-rooms. Once I hit on that, I began searching for the reel he claimed had been ruined, and eventually I found it in a container beneath his bungalow. It was a perfect record of the work he had been doing the day before he disappeared.”

  “That was very sharp of you,” commented Nancy. “Another amateur sleuth in the making.”

  Rod sighed heavily and continued: “Although I had to do my normal work, I began going out alone to see if I could find what Jim was up to. Ben didn’t like being left behind on those expeditions, so I had to pull rank on him—which didn’t go down very well after all the years of friendship, but he accepted my behaviour and left well alone.”

  Nancy blinked at him in the bright kerosene light but said nothing.

  “The whole area around the lagoons was well and truly searched when we found Jim was overdue—that was where he should have been if he’d been re-filming the ruined shots—so I knew that whatever had interested him must be outside the cove and round Disaster Point.” He gave a ghost of a smile. “It’s easy to forget the vastnesses of the ocean until it’s a matter of finding something—especially when you don’t know what to look for. It took me three months to find the first clue.”

  “Thank heaven you are the type who perseveres, or we’d never have got on to all this,” said David.

  “What sort of clue?” Nancy was anxious to get to the point.

  “I had pretty well covered the stretch near the shore and was fanning out nearer and nearer the edge of the shelf, when I spotted something white half-buried by sand—Jim’s breathing set. That was the day you arrived, Nancy, so I was not in the mood for criticism that evening.”

  No wonder he had so quickly dismissed her as empty and frivolous!

  “The following day I came across something quite astounding. I discovered Jim’s camera lodged in a mass of rock leading down the side of the drop. You see,” he explained to the girl, “where the shelf ends, it drops away very sharply, like a cliff edge, and the surface is similarly jagged and creviced, making it treacherous.”

  She suppressed shivers at the thought as Rod continued: “The discovery of the camera convinced me that Jim had been after something which was out beyond the shelf; and sure enough, beneath an overhang, I came upon the answer. It’s a lot darker down there and I didn’t have a flashlight with me, but there was no doubt there was the wreck of a light aircraft lodged nose-down on the rocks. I could just make out the tail sticking up, and despite the covering of algae, the number and a small red motif of a galah carrying a stone in its beak were clear enough to strike a chord in my memory. I went straight back and searched through my pile of outdated newspapers until I found what I was looking for; then I radioed the police at Sydney. David arrived by seaplane in the guise of a replacement for Jim.” He looked across to the other man. “I think you should take over the narrative now.”

  “Sure, but before I do, how about the cook making some tea on that small stove there?”

  “I’ll do it on condition that you continue the story while it is being made. Having got this far, I’m desperate to hear the rest. Am I correct in thinking the wrecked aircraft made news of some kind?” Nancy asked.

  “Too right it did,” confirmed David. “That galah motif on the tail is the trade symbol of Jamieson Wainwright. a firm of international gem dealers. The Wainwright side of the business died out after World War Two, and is now—was—owned by two Jamieson brothers, dealing mainly with the American and Japanese markets. Somewhere around six months ago, the Jamiesons took off in a company plane bound for Hawaii with a collection of black opals. They never arrived. Two weeks later, Ken Jamieson, the younger brother, staggered out from the dense jungle of New Guinea. When he recovered, several days later, he said the aircraft had run into a storm, been blown off course and had crashed, killing his brother, who was piloting it at the time. It then burst into flames and he himself blacked out. After that, his memories consisted of swamps and trees, hunger, thirst and hostile natives. He had lost all sense of direction or time and was surprised to hear he had survived for two weeks in that remote interior.”

  “From what I’ve heard and read about the country, I’m amazed, too,” commented Nancy as she poured boiling water on to the tea.

  “The doctor who examined Jamieson said he had certainly endured hardship and his body was emaciated and covered with bites from insects found only in that part of New Guinea. But how did an aircraft which burst into flames in New Guinea transfer itself to the waters around Disaster Point? That was the problem which made Rod get in touch with us. You see, Nancy, by his brother’s death Ken Jamieson inherits the entire company—a matter of millions of dollars.”

  She stopped in the middle of pouring the tea and frowned at David. “But how did he get in the New Gui
nean jungle if the plane is here?”

  “That’s what I aim to find out. It is definitely the company aircraft in the sea here—I’ve checked it myself—so Ken either jumped out over New Guinea, because he had advance knowledge that the plane would crash, or he was in it at the time it went beneath the waves, and built up a false story to cover up a crime.”

  Enlightenment dawned. “In which case, someone on Wonara must have seen him,” Nancy said.

  “Yes. Rod has discreetly questioned the village people, and no one remembers seeing a white man hire a boat, so we must assume it was a member of the research station staff.”

  “Jim Maitland?”

  “Possibly—but he has been dead for three months.”

  “And?”

  Rod took a beaker from her. “Someone has been visiting that wreck just recently. You saw him this afternoon.”

  There was a short silence while all three recalled the incident. Nancy took her tea to the upturned box, and sat down thoughtfully.

  “All right,” she said to David at last, “explain to me why he needed to do all that. If the elder brother was murdered, his death could easily be faked, so that it looked like a result of the air crash.”

  “Fair enough, but you are forgetting the other purpose of their journey. Opals! A hundred thousand dollars’ worth of midnight stone with a hidden heart of fire! Ken Jamieson has already put in an insurance claim for the full amount—which looks like being paid, since the investigators are raking the accessible parts of New Guinea for wreckage they’ll never find. He can afford to wait until the research team vacates Wonara, then he’ll have divers down for the stones as soon as he can.”

  Nancy looked at David in amazement. “How can you be sure about all this? It’s simply conjecture.”

  He smiled. “I’ve seen some bizarre things done in order to obtain money.”