“It is possible, but not in character. He had an exceptional sense
of balance.”
“Balance doesn’t help much if you slip on a wet deck.”
“Quite. I also haven’t ruled out the possibility of foul play.”
“Foul play?” I stared at him, duly grateful that the gift of
telepathy is so very limited. “With all the crew and passengers under
guard, lock and key, how is foul play possible? unless,” I added
thoughtfully, “there’s a nigger in your own woodpile.”
“I have not yet completed my investigations.” the voice was cold;
the subject was closed, and miguel carreras was back in business again.
Bereavement wouldn’t crush this man. However much he might inwardly
mourn his son, it wouldn’t in the slightest detract from his efficiency
or his ruthless determination to carry out exactly the plans he had
made. It wasn’t, for instance, going to make the slightest difference
to his plans to send us all into orbit the following day. Signs of
humanity there might be, but the abiding fundamental in carreras’
character was an utter, an all-excluding fanaticism that was all the
more dangerous in that it lay so deeply hidden beneath the smooth
urbanity of the surface. “The chart, carter.” he handed it across to
me along with paper giving a list of fixes. “Let me know if the fort
ticonderoga is on course. And if she is running on time. We can later
calculate our time of interception if and when I get a fix this
morning.”
“You’ll get a fix,” bullen assured him huskily. “They say the
devil is good to his own, carreras, and he’s been good to you. You’re
running out of the hurricane and you’ll have clear patches of sky by
noon. Rain later in the evening, but first clearing.”
“You are sure, captain bullen? you are sure we are running out of
the hurricane?”
“I’m sure. Or, rather, the hurricane is running away from us.”
old bullen was an authority on hurricanes and would lecture on his pet
subject at the drop of a hat, even to carreras, even when a hoarse
whisper was all the voice he could summon. “Neither wind nor sea have
moderated very much”-and they certainly hadn’t”but what matters is the
direction of the wind. It’s from the northwest now, which means that
the hurricane lies to the northeast of us. It passed us by to the east,
on our starboard hand, sometime during the night, moving northwards,
then suddenly swung northeast. Quite often when a hurricane reaches the
northern limits of its latitude and then is caught up by the westerlies
it can remain stationary at its point of recurvature for twelve or
twenty-four hours-which would have meant that you would have had to sail
through it. But you had the luck: it recurved and moved to the east
almost without a break.” bullen lay back, close to exhaustion. Even so
little had been too much for him.
“You can tell all this just lying in your bed there?” carreras
demanded.
bullen gave him the commodore’s look he would have given any cadet
who dared question his knowledge and ignored him.
“The weather is going to moderate?” carreras persisted.
“That’s obvious, isn’t it?”
carreras nodded slowly. Making his rendezvous in time and being
able to transship the gold had been his two great worries, and now both
of them were gone he turned abruptly, walked out of the sick bay.
bullen cleared his throat and said formally, in his strained
whisper, “congratulations, mr. carter. You are the most fluent liar
i’ve ever known.”
macdonald just grinned.
the forenoon, the afternoon came and went. The sun duly appeared,
as bullen had prophesied, and later disappeared, also as he had
prophesied. The sea moderated, although not much, not enough, I
guessed, to alleviate the sufferings of our passengers, and the wind
stayed where it was, out of the northwest. Bullen, under sedation,
slept nearly all day, once again relapsing into his incoherent
mumblings-none of them, I was relieved to note, were about tony carreras
while macdonald and I talked or slept. But we didn’t sleep before I
told him what I hoped to do that night when-or if I managed to get loose
on the upper deck. Susan I hardly saw that day. She made her
appearance after breakfast with her arm in plaster and in a sling.
There was no danger of this arousing any suspicion, even in a mind like
carreras’; the story was to be that she had gone to sleep in a chair,
been flung out of it during the storm, and sprained her wrist. Such
accidents were so commonplace in heavy weather that no one would think
to raise an eyebrow. About ten o’clock in the morning she asked to be
allowed to join her parents in the drawing room and stayed there all
day.
fifteen minutes after noon carreras appeared again. If his
investigations into possible foul play connected with his son’s death
had made any progress, he made no mention of it; he did not even refer
to the disappearance again. He had the inevitable chart-two of them
this time-with him and the noon position of the campari. Seemingly he’d
managed to get a good fix from the sun. “Our position, our speed, their
position, their speed, and our respective courses. Do we intercept at
the point marked x?”
“I suppose you’ve already worked it out for yourself?”
“I have.”
“We don’t intercept,” I said after a few minutes. “At our present
speed we should arrive at your rendezvous in between eleven and eleven
and a half hours. Say midnight. Five hours ahead of schedule.”
“Thank you, mr. carter. My own conclusion exactly. The five-hour
wait for the ticonderoga won’t take long in passing.”
I felt a queer sensation in my middle; the phrase about a person’s
heart sinking may not be physiologically accurate but it described the
feeling accurately. This would ruin everything, completely destroy what
little chance my plan ever had of succeeding. But I knew the
consternation did not show in my face.
“Planning on arriving there at midnight and hanging round till the
fly walks into your parlour?” I shrugged. “Well, you’re the man who’s
making the decisions.”
“What do you mean by that?” he asked sharply. “Nothing much,” I
said indifferently. “It’s just that I would have thought that you would
want your crew at the maximum stage of efficiency for transshipping the
gold when we met the fort ticonderoga.”
“So?”
“So there’s still going to be a heavy sea running in twelve hours’
time. When we stop at the rendezvous, the campari is going to lie in
the trough of the seas and, in the elegant phrase of our times, roll her
guts out. I don’t know how many of that crowd of landlubbers you have
along with you were seasick last night, but i’ll bet there will be twice
as many to-night. And don’t think our stabilisers are going to save you
-they depend upon the factor of the ship’s speed for their effect.”
“A well-taken point,” he agreed calmly. “I shall reduce speed, aim
at being there about four a.m.” he looked at me with sudden
speculation. “Remarkably co-operative, full of helpful suggestions.
Curiously out of the estimate I had formed of your character.”
“Which only goes to show how wrong your estimate is, my friend.
Common sense and self-interest explain it. I want to get into a proper
hospital as soon as possible-the prospect of going through life with one
leg doesn’t appeal. The sooner I see passengers, crew, and myself
transferred aboard the ticonderoga the happier i’ll be. Only a fool
kicks against the pricks; I know a fait accompli when I see one. You
are going to transfer us all aboard the ticonderoga, aren’t you,
carreras?”
“I shall have no further use for any member of the campari’s crew,
far less for the passengers.” he smiled thinly. “Captain teach and
blackbeard are not my ideals, mr. carter. I should like to be
remembered as a humane pirate. You have my word that all of you will be
transferred in safety and unharmed.” the last sentence had the ring of
truth and sincerity, because it was true and sincere. It was the truth,
but it wasn’t, of course, the whole truth: he’d left out the bit about
our being blown out of existence half an hour later.
about seven o’clock in the evening susan beresford returned and
marston left, under guard, to dispense pills and soothing words to the
passengers in the drawing room, many of whom were, after twenty-four
hours of continuously heavy weather, understandably not feeling at their
best.
susan looked tired and pale-no doubt the emotional and physical
suffering of the previous night together with the pain from her broken
arm accounted for that-but I had to admit for the first time, in an
unbiassed fashion, that she also looked very lovely. I’d never before
realised that auburn hair and green eyes were a combination that