took out the four items lying inside: colt revolver, torch, screw
driver, and master key. I stuffed the colt into my belt, the torch in
one pocket, the screw driver in the other. I looked at white, but he
didn’t look at me. He was staring down into one corner of his cubicle
as if I didn’t exist. He had his hands clasped tightly together, like
one in prayer. I hoped he was praying for me. Even with his hands
locked he couldn’t stop them from shaking uncontrollably. I left him
without a word and ten seconds later was inside cerdan’s suite with the
door locked behind me. On a sudden instinct I switched on my torch and
played the beam round the edges of the door. The door was pale blue
against a pale-blue bulkhead. Hanging from the top of the bulkhead,
dangling down for a couple of inches over the top of the door, was a
pale-blue thread. A broken pale-blue thread: to the people who had put
it there, an unmistakable calling card that visitors had been there. I
wasn’t worried about that, but I was worried by the fact that it showed
that someone was suspicious, very, very suspicious. This might make
things very awkward indeed. Maybe we should have announced dexter’s
death.
I passed straight through the nurses’ cabin and the lounge into
cerdan’s cabin. The curtains were drawn, but I left the lights off:
light could show through curtains, and if they were as suspicious as I
thought, someone might have wondered why I had left so suddenly and
taken a walk outside. I hooded the torch to a small pencil beam and
played it over the deck head. The cold-air trunking ran fore and aft,
and the first louvre was directly above cerdan’s bed. I didn’t even
need the screw driver. I shone the torch through the louvre opening and
saw, inside the trunking, something gleaming metallically in the bright
spot of light. I reached up two fingers and slowly worked that
something metallic down through the louvre. A pair of earphones. I
peered into the louvre again. The earphones lead had a plug on the end
of it and the plug was fitted into a socket that had been screwed on to
the upper wall of the trunking. And the radio office was directly
above. I pulled out the plug, rolled the lead round the headphones, and
switched off my torch.
white was exactly as I had left him, still vibrating away like a
tuning fork. I opened his desk, returned key, screw driver, and torch.
The earphones I kept. And the gun.
they were into their third cocktails by the time I returned
to the drawing room. I didn’t need to count empty bottles to guess
that; the laughter, the animated conversation, the increase in the
decibel ratio was proof enough. Captain bullen was still chatting away
to cerdan. The tall nurse was still knitting. Tommy wilson was over by
the bar. I rubbed my cheek and he crushed out the cigarette he was
holding. I saw him say something to miguel and tony carreras at twenty
feet, in that racket, it was impossible to hear a word he said -saw tony
carreras lift a half-amused, half-questioning eyebrow, then all three of
them moved towards the bar.
I joined captain bullen and cerdan. Long speeches weren’t going to
help me here, and only a fool would throw away his life by tipping off
people like those. “Good evening, mr. cerdan,” I said. I pulled my
left hand out from under my jacket and tossed the earphones onto his
rug-covered lap. “Recognise them?”
cerdan’s eyes stared wide, then he flung himself forwards and
sideways as if to clear his encumbering wheel chair, but old bullen had
been waiting for it and was too quick for him. He hit cerdan with all
the pent-up worry and fury of the past twenty-four hours behind the
blow, and cerdan toppled over the side of his chair and crashed heavily
to the carpet.
I didn’t see him fall; I only heard the sound of it. I was too
busy looking out for myself. The nurse with the sherry glass in her
hand, quick as a cat, flung the contents in my face at the same instant
as bullen hit cerdan. I flung myself sideways to avoid being blinded,
and as I fell I saw the tall, thin nurse flinging her knitting to one
side and thrusting her hand deep into the string knitting bag.
with my right hand I managed to tug the colt clear of my belt
before I hit the ground and squeezed the trigger twice. It was my right
shoulder that hit the carpet first, just as I fired, and I didn’t really
know where the bullets went, nor, for that one nearly blinding instant
of agony as the shock of falling was transmitted to my injured neck, did
I care; then my head cleared and I saw that the tall nurse was on her
feet. Not only on her feet but raised high on her toes, head and
shoulders arched sharply forwards, ivory-knuckled hands pressed deep
into her midriff; then she swayed forward, in macabre slow-motion
action, and crumpled over the fallen cerdan. The other nurse hadn’t
moved from her seat: with captain bullen’s colt only six inches from her
face, and his finger pretty white on the trigger, she wasn’t likely to,
either.
the reverberations of my heavy colt, painful and deafening in their
intensity in that confined metal-walled space, faded away into a silence
that was deathly in more ways than one, and through that silence came a
soft highland voice saying gently: “if either of you move I will kill
you.”
carreras senior and junior, who must have had their backs to the
bar, were now turned round halfway towards it, staring at the gun in
macdonald’s hand. Miguel carreras’ face was unrecognisable, his
expression changed from that of a smooth, urbane, and highly prosperous
businessman into something very ugly indeed. His right hand, as he had
whirled round, had come to rest on the bar near a cut-glass decanter.
Archie macdonald wasn’t wearing any of his medals that night, and
carreras had no means of knowing the long and bloodstained record the
bo’sun had behind him, or he would never have tried to hurl that
decanter at macdonald’s head. Carreras’ reactions were so fast, the
movement so unexpected, that against another man he might have made it;
against macdonald he didn’t even manage to get the decanter off the
counter and a split second later was left staring down at the shattered
bloody mess that had been his hand.
for the second time in a few seconds the crashing roar of a heavy
gun, this time intermingled with the tinkle of smashed and flying glass,
died away and again macdonald’s voice came, almost regretfully: “i
should have killed you, but I like reading about those murder trials.
We’re saving you for the hangman, mr. carreras.”
I was climbing back to my feet when someone screamed, a harsh, ugly
sound that drilled piercingly through the room. Another woman took it
up, a sustained shriek like an express, whistle wide open, heading for a
level crossing, and the stage seemed all set for mass hysteria.
“Stop that damned screaming,” I snarled. “Do you hear? stop it at
once. It’s all over now.”
the screaming stopped. Silence again, a weird, unnatural silence
that was almost as bad as the racket that had gone before. And then
beresford was coming towards me, a bit unsteadily, his lips forming
words that didn’t come, his face white. I couldn’t blame him; in his
well-ordered and wealth cushioned world the entertainments offered his
guests couldn’t often have ended up with bodies strewn all over the
floor.
“You’ve killed her, carter,” he said at length. His voice was
harsh and strained. “You’ve killed her. I saw it; we all saw it. Aba
defenceless woman.” he stared at me, and if he had any thought of
offering me a job again I couldn’t see it in his face. “You murdered
her.”
“Woman my foot!” I said savagely. I bent down, yanked off the
nurse’s hat, then ruthlessly ripped away a glued wig to show a black
close-cropped crew cut. “Attractive, isn’t it? the very latest from
paris. And defenceless!” I grabbed her bag, turned it upside down,
emptied the contents on the carpet, stooped, and came up with what had
originally been a full-length double-barrelled shotgun: the barrels had
been sawn off until there was no more than six inches of them left, the
wooden stock removed and a roughly made pistol-type grip fitted in its
place. “Ever seen one of those before, mr. beresford? native product
of your own country, I believe. A whippet or some such name. Fires
lead shot, and from the range our nurse friend here intended to use it,
it would have blown a hole clear through my middle. Defenceless!” I