in these days of miniaturisation, could easily have been hidden in, say,
one of those hefty jewel boxes which were run of the mill among our
millionaires’ wives.
we were running almost due northeast 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 of stellar navigation or, come 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 phony 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 qld
bailey with the alibis he’s giving himself. But I think mcllroy 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 mcLlroy, 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, and for good, within the week.”
I tried to imagine anyone telling that venerable and aristocratic
doctor anything of the sort: my mind boggled at the very thought. But
they hadn’t made 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 leverage, and I
believe that police today can pick up fingerprints from practically any
substance, including certain types of clothes. They shouldn’t have too
much trouble picking up prints from those nice shiny, starched collars
that brownell wore.”
“You don’t miss much,” bullen said thoughtfully. “Except 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 had 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 round 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 millisecond 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