The Golden Rendezvous

  “But why?” Captain Bullen demanded. He still couldn’t believe it all. “Why, why, why? Why was he killed? Why was that message so desperately important? The whole damned thing’s crazy. And what in God’s name was in that message anyway?”

  “That’s why we’ve got to go to Nassau to find out, sir.”

  Bullen looked at me without expression, looked at his drink, evidently decided that he preferred his drink to me—or the ill news I brought with me—and knocked back the contents in a couple of gulps.

  McIlroy didn’t touch his. He sat there for a whole minute looking at it consideringly, then he said: “You haven’t missed much, Johnny. But you’ve missed one thing. The wireless officer on watch—Peters, isn’t it? How do you know the same message won’t come through again? Maybe it was a message requiring acknowledgment? If it was, and it’s not acknowledged, it’s pretty certain to come through again. Then what’s the guarantee that Peters won’t get the same treatment?”

  “The bo’sun’s the guarantee, Chief. He’s sitting in black shadow not ten yards from the wireless office with a marlin-spike in his hand and Highland murder in his heart. You know MacDonald. Heaven help anyone who goes within a Sunday walk of the wireless office.”

  Bullen poured himself another small whisky, smiled tiredly and glanced at his single broad commodore’s stripe.

  “Mr. Carter, I think you and I should change jackets.” It was as far in apology as he could ever go and about twelve hours ahead of par. “Think you’d like this side of my desk?”

  “Suit me fine, sir,” I agreed. “Especially if you took over entertaining the passengers.”

  “In that case we’ll stay as we are.” Another brief smile, no sooner there than vanished. “Who’s on the bridge? Jamieson, isn’t it? Better take over, First.”

  “Later, sir, with your permission. There’s still the most important thing of all to investigate. But I don’t even know how to start.”

  “Don’t tell me there’s something else,” Bullen said heavily.

  “I’ve had some time to think about this, that’s all,” I said. “A message came through to our wireless office, a message so important that it had to be intercepted at all costs. But how could anybody possibly know that message was coming through? The only way that message could have come into the Campari was through a pair of earphones clamped to Brownell’s head, yet someone else was taking down that message at the same instant as Brownell was. Must have been. Brownell had no sooner finished transcribing that message on to his pad than he reached for the phone to get the bridge, and he no sooner reached for the phone than he died. There’s some other radio receiver aboard the Campari tuned into the same wave-length and wherever it is it’s not a hop, skip and jump from the wireless office, for wherever the eavesdropper was he got from there to the wireless office in seconds. Problem, find the receiver.”

  Bullen looked at me. McIlroy looked at me. They both looked at each other. Then McIlroy objected: “But the wireless officer keeps shifting wave-lengths. How could anybody know what particular wave-length he was on at any one moment?”

  “How can anyone know anything?” I asked. I nodded at the message pad on the table. “Until we get that deciphered.”

  “The message.” Bullen gazed at the pad, abruptly made up his mind. “Nassau it is. Maximum speed, Chief, but slowly, over half an hour, so that no one will notice the step up in revs. First, the bridge. Get our position.” He fetched chart, rules, dividers while I was getting the figures, nodded at me as I hung up. “Lay off the shortest possible course.”

  It didn’t take long. “047 from here to here, sir, approximately 220 miles, then 350.”

  “Arrival?”

  “Maximum speed?”

  “Of course.”

  “Just before midnight tomorrow night.”

  He reached for a pad, scribbled for a minute, then read out: “‘Port authorities, Nassau, s.s. Campari, position such-and-such, arriving 2330 tomorrow Wednesday. Request police alongside immediate investigation one murdered man, one missing man. Urgent. Bullen, Master.’ That should do.” He reached for the phone. I touched his arm.

  “Whoever has this receiver can monitor outgoing calls just as easily as incoming ones. Then they’ll know we’re on to them. God only knows what might happen then.”

  Bullen looked slowly first at me, then at McIlroy, then at the purser, who hadn’t spoken a word since I’d arrived in the cabin, then back at me again. Then he tore the message into tiny shreds and dropped it into his waste-paper basket.

  IV.

  Tuesday 10.15 p.m—Wednesday 8.45 a.m.

  I didn’t get a great deal of investigating done that night. I’d figured out how to start, all right, but the devil of it was I couldn’t start till the passengers were up and about in the morning. Nobody likes being turfed out of his bed in the middle of the night, a millionaire least of all.

  After having cautiously identified myself to the bo’sun to ensure that I didn’t get the back of my head stove in with a marline-spike, I spent a good fifteen minutes in the vicinity of the wireless office relating its position to other offices and nearby accommodation. The wireless office was on the starboard side, for’ard, immediately above the passengers’ “A” deck accommodation—old man Cerdan’s suite was directly below—and on the basis of my assumption that the murderer, even if he didn’t wait for the last few words of the message to come through, could have had no more time than ten seconds to get from wherever the hidden receiver was to the wireless office, then any place within ten seconds’ reach of the wireless office automatically came under suspicion.

  There were quite a few places within the suspected limits. There was the bridge, flag office, radar office, chart-room and all the deck officers’ and cadets’ accommodation. Those could be ruled out at once. There was the dining-room, galleys, pantries, officers’ lounge, telegraph lounge, and, immediately adjacent to the telegraph lounge, another lounge which rejoiced in the name of the drawing-room—it having been found necessary to provide an alternative lounge for our millionaire’s wives and daughters who weren’t all so keen on the alcoholic and ticker-tape attractions of the telegraph lounge as their husbands and fathers were. I spent forty minutes going through those—they were all deserted at that time of night—and if anyone had yet invented a transistor receiver smaller than a matchbox, then I might have missed it: but anything larger, I’d have found it for sure.

  That left only the passengers’ accommodation, with the cabins on “A” deck, immediately below the wireless office, as the prime suspects. The “B” deck suites, on the next deck below, were not out-with the bounds of possibility: but when I ran a mental eye over the stiff-legged bunch of elderly crocks on “B” deck, I couldn’t think of a man among them who could have made it to the wireless office in under ten seconds. And it certainly hadn’t been a woman: Because whoever had killed Brownell had not only also laid out Benson but removed him from sight, and Benson weighed a hundred and eighty pounds if he weighed an ounce.

  So, “A” or “B” decks. Both of them would have to go through the sieve tomorrow. I prayed for good weather to tempt our passengers out on to the sun-decks to give the stewards, in the course of making up beds and cleaning out the cabins, the chance to carry out a thorough search. The Customs in Jamaica, of course, had already done this; but they had been looking for a mechanism over six feet in length, not a radio which, in those days of miniaturisation, could easily have been hidden in, say, one of those hefty jewel-boxes which were the run of the mill among our millionaires’ wives.

  We were running almost due north-east now, under the same indigo sky ablaze with stars, the Campari rolling gently as it sliced along the line of the long slow swell. We’d taken almost half an hour to make an eighty degree change of course so that no night-owl passenger abroad on deck could see the changing direction of our wake: not that those precautions were going to be of any use if any of our passengers had the faintest idea of stellar navigation or, c
ome to that, the very elementary ability to locate the Pole Star.

  I was walking slowly up the boat-deck, port side, when I saw Captain Bullen approaching. He lifted his arm, motioned me into the deep shadow cast by one of the ship’s lifeboats.

  “Thought I would find you here or hereabouts,” he said softly. He reached under his jacket and pressed something cold and hard into my hand. “I believe you know how to use one of those.”

  Starlight glinted dully off the blued metal in my hand. A Colt automatic, one of the three kept on a locked chain in a glass cabinet in the captain’s sleeping cabin. Captain Bullen was certainly taking things seriously at last.

  “I can use it, sir.”

  “Right. Stick it in your belt or wherever you stick those damned things. Never realised they were so blasted awkward to conceal about your person. And here’s a spare magazine. Hope to God we don’t have to use them.” Which meant the captain had one also.

  “The third gun, sir?”

  “I don’t know.” He hesitated. “Wilson, I thought.”

  “He’s a good man. But give it to the bo’sun.”

  “The bo’sun?” Bullen’s voice sharpened, then he remembered the need for secrecy and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial growl. “You know the regulations, Mister. Those guns to be used only in times of war, piracy or mutiny—and never to be issued to anyone other than an officer.”

  “The regulations don’t concern me half as much as my own neck does, sir. You know MacDonald’s record—youngest-ever sergeant-major in the Commandos, a list of decorations as long as your arm. Give it to MacDonald, sir.”

  “We’ll see,” he grunted, “we’ll see. I’ve just been to the carpenter’s store. With Doc Marston. First time I’ve ever seen that old phoney shaken to the core. He agrees with you, says there’s no doubt Brownell was murdered. You’d think he was up in the dock of the Old Bailey with the alibis he’s giving himself. But I think McIlroy was right when he said the symptoms were about the same.”

  “Well,” I said doubtfully. “I hope nothing comes of it, sir.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know old Doc Marston as well as I do, sir. The two great loves of his life are Jamaica rum and the desire to give the impression that he’s on the inside of everything that goes on. A dangerous combination. Apart from McIlroy, the purser, yourself and myself the only person who knows that Brownell didn’t die a natural death is the bo’sun, and he’d never talk. Doc Marston is a different proposition altogether.”

  “Not to worry, my boy,” Bullen said with something like relish in his voice. “I told our worthy surgeon that, Lord Dexter’s pal or not, if he as much as lifted a glass of rum before we arrived in Nassau, I’d have him on the beach, for good, within the week.”

  I tried to imagine anyone telling the venerable and aristocratic doctor anything of the sort: my mind boggled at the very thought. But they hadn’t made old Bullen company commodore for nothing. I knew he’d done exactly as stated.

  “He didn’t take off any of Brownell’s clothes?” I asked. “His shirt, for instance?”

  “No. What does it matter?”

  “It’s just that it’s probable that whoever strangled Brownell had his fingers locked round the back of the neck to give him leverage, and I believe that police today can pick up fingerprints from practically any substance, including certain types of clothes. They shouldn’t have much trouble picking up prints from those nice shiny starched collars Brownell wore.”

  “You don’t miss much,” Bullen said thoughfully. “Except that maybe you’ve missed your profession. Anything else?”

  “Yes. About this burial at sea tomorrow at dawn.”

  There was a long pause, then he said with the blasphemously weary restraint of a long-suffering man who has already held himself in check far too long: “What bloody burial at dawn? Brownell is our only exhibition for the Nassau police.”

  “Burial, sir,” I repeated. “But not at dawn. About, say, eight o’clock, when a fair number of our passengers will be up and about, having their morning constitutional. This is what I mean, sir.”

  I told him what I meant and he listened patiently enough, considering. When I was finished he nodded slowly, two or three times in succession, turned and left me without a word.

  I moved out into a lane of light between two lifeboats, and glanced at my watch. Twenty-five minutes past eleven. I’d told MacDonald I’d relieve him at midnight. I walked across to the rail and stood there by a life-jacket locker, staring out over the slow shimmering swell of the sea, hands at arms’ length on the rail, vainly trying to figure out what could possibly lie behind all that had happened that evening.

  When I awoke, it was twenty minutes to one. Not that I was immediately aware of the time when I awoke: I wasn’t immediately and clearly aware of anything. It’s difficult to be aware of anything when your head is being squeezed between the jaws of a giant vice and your eyes have gone blind, to be aware of anything, that is, except the vice and the blindness. Blindness. My eyes. I was worried about my eyes. I raised a hand and fumbled around for a while and then I found them. They were filled with something hard and encrusted and when I rubbed the crust came away and there was stickiness beneath. Blood. There was blood in my eyes, blood that was gumming the lids together and making me blind. At least, I hoped vaguely it was blood that was making me blind.

  I rubbed some more blood away with the heel of my hand, and then I could see. Not too well, not the way I was used to seeing, the stars in the sky were not the bright pin-points of light to which I was accustomed, but just a pale fuzzy haze seen through a frosted glass window. I reached out a trembling hand and tried to touch this frosted glass but it vanished and dissolved as I reached out, and what my hand touched was cool and metallic. I strained my eyes wide open and saw that there was indeed no glass there, what I was touching was the lowermost bar of the ship’s rail.

  I could see better now, at least better than a blind man could. My head was lying in the scuppers, inches away from one of the lifeboat davits. What in God’s name was I doing there with my head in the scuppers, inches away from the davits? I managed to get both hands under me and, with a sudden drunken lurch, heaved myself into a semi-sitting position with one elbow still on the deck. A great mistake, a very great mistake, for at once a blinding agonising pain, that never-recorded pain that must be experienced in the final shattering milli-second of awareness as a plunging guillotine slices through bone, flesh and muscle before crashing into the block beneath, slashed its paralysing way across head, neck and shoulders and toppled me back to the deck again. My head must have struck heavily against the iron of the scuppers, but I don’t think I even moaned.

  Slowly, infinitely slowly, consciousness came back to me. Consciousness of a kind. Where clarity and awareness and speed of recovery were concerned I was a man chained hand and foot, surfacing from the bottom of a sea of molasses. Something, I dimly realised, was touching my face, my eyes, my mouth: something cold and moist and sweet. Water. Someone was sponging my face with water, gently trying to mop the blood from my eyes. I made to turn my head to see who it was and then I vaguely remembered what had happened last time I moved my head. I raised my right hand instead and touched someone’s wrist.

  “Take it easy, sir. You just take it easy.” The man with the sponge must have had a long arm, he was at least two miles away, but I recognised the voice for all that. Archie MacDonald. “Don’t you try moving now. Just you wait a bit. You’ll be all right, sir.”

  “Archie?” We were a real disembodied pair, I thought fuzzily. I was at least a couple of miles away, too. I only hoped we were a couple of miles away in the same direction. “Is that you, Archie?” God knows I didn’t doubt it, I just wanted the reassurance of hearing him say so.

  “It’s myself, sir. Just you leave everything to me.” It was the bo’sun all right, he couldn’t have used that sentence more than five thousand times in the years I’d known him. “Just you lie stil
l.”

  I’d no intention of doing anything else. I’d be far gone in years before I’d ever forget the last time I moved, if I lived that long, which didn’t seem a bit likely at the moment.

  “My neck, Archie.” My voice sounded a few hundred yards closer. “I think it’s broken.”

  “Aye, I’m sure it feels that way, sir, but I’m thinking myself maybe it’s not as bad as all that. We’ll see.”

  I don’t know how long I lay there, maybe two or three minutes, while the bo’sun swabbed the blood away until eventually the stars began to swim into some sort of focus again. Then he slid one arm under my shoulders and under my head and began to lift me, inch by inch, into a sitting position.

  I waited for the guillotine to fall again, but it didn’t. This time it was more like a butcher’s meat-chopper, but a pretty blunt chopper: several times in a few seconds the Campari spun round 360 degrees on its keel, then settled down on course again. 047, I seemed to recall. And this time I didn’t lose consciousness.

  “What time is it, Archie?” A stupid question to ask, but I wasn’t at my very best. And my voice, I was glad to hear, was at last practically next door to me.

  He turned my left wrist.

  “Twelve forty-five, your watch says, sir. I think you must have been lying there a good hour. You were in the shadow of the boat and no one would have seen you if they had passed by this way.”

  I moved my head an experimental inch and winced at the pain of it. Two inches and it would fall off.

  “What the hell happened to me, Archie? Some kind of turn or other? I don’t remember——”