“Ahoy, there, Firecrest! Ahoy there !” Thump, thump, thump on the boat’s side. “Can I come aboard? Ahoy, there! Ahoy, ahoy, ahoy !”
I cursed this nautical idiot from the depths of my sleep-ridden being, swung a pair of unsteady legs to the deck and levered myself out of the bunk. I almost fell down, I seemed to have only one leg left, and my neck ached fiercely. A glance at the mirror gave quick external confirmation of my internal decrepitude. A haggard unshaven face, unnaturally pale, and bleary bloodshot eyes with dark circles under them. I looked away hurriedly, there were lots of things I could put up with first thing in the morning, but not sights like that,
I opened the door across the passage. Hunslett was sound asleep and snoring. I returned to my own cabin and got busy with the dressing-gown and Paisley scarf again. The iron-lunged thumping character outside was still at it, if I didn’t hurry he would be roaring out “a vast there “any moment. I combed my hair into some sort of order and made my way to die upper deck.
It was a cold, wet and windy world. A grey, dreary, unpleasant world, why the hell couldn’t they have let me sleep on. The rain was coining down in slanting sheets, bouncing inches high on the decks, doubling the milkiness of the spume-flecked sea. The lonely wind mourned through the rigging and the lower registers of sound and the steep-sided wind-truncated waves, maybe three feet from tip to trough, were high enough to make passage difficult if not dangerous for the average yacht tender.
They didn’t make things in the slightest difficult or dangerous for the yacht tender that now lay alongside us. It maybe wasn’t as big – it looked it at first sight – as the Firecrest, but it was big enough to have a glassed-in cabin for’ard, a wheelhouse that bristled and gleamed with controls and instrumentation that would have been no disgrace to a VC-10 and, abaft that, a sunken cockpit that could have sunbathed a football team without overcrowding. There were three crewmen dressed in black oilskins and fancy French navy hats with black ribbons down the back, two of them each with a boat-hook round one of the Firecrest’s guardrail stanchions. Half ‘a dozen big inflated spherical rubber fenders kept the Firecrest from rubbing its plebeian paintwork against the whitely-vamished spotlessness of the tender alongside and it didn’t require the name on the bows or the crew’s hats to let me know that this was the tender that normally took up most of the after-deck space on the Shangri-la..
Amidships a stocky figu«j clad in a white vaguely naval brass-buttoned uniform and holding above his head a golf umbrella that would have had Joseph green with envy, stopped banging his gloved fist against the Firecrest’s planking and glared up at me.
“Ha!” I’ve never actually heard anyone snort out a word but this came pretty close to it. “There you are at last. Took your time about it, didn’t you? I’m soaked, man, soaked!” A few spots of rain did show up quite clearly on the white seersucker. “May I come aboard?” He didn’t wait for any permission, just leaped aboard with surprising nimble-ness for a man of his build and years and nipped into the Firecrest’s wheelhouse ahead of me, which was pretty selfish of him as he still had his umbrella and all I had was my dressing-gown. I followed and closed the door behind me.
He was a short, powerfully built character, fifty-five I would have guessed, with a heavily-tanned jowled face, close-cropped iron-grey hair with tufted eyebrows to match, long straight nose and a mouth that looked as if it had been closed with a zip-fastener. A good-looking cove, if you liked that type of looks. The dark darting eyes looked me up and down and if he was impressed by what he saw he made a heroic effort to keep his admiration in check.
“Sorry for the delay,” I apologised. “Short of sleep. We had the customs aboard in the middle of the night and I couldn’t get off after that.” Always tell everyone the truth if there’s an even chance of that truth coming out anyway, which in this case there was: gives one a reputation for forthright honesty.
“The customs?” He looked as if he intended to say “pshaw”or “fiddlesticks”or something of that order, then changed his mind and looked up sharply. “An intolerable bunch of busybodies. And in the middle of the night. Shouldn’t have let them aboard. Sent them packing. Intolerable. What the deuce did they want?” He gave the distinct impression of having himself had some trouble with the customs in the past.
“They were looking for stolen chemicals. Stolen from some place in Ayrshire. Wrong boat.”
“Idiots!” He thrust out a stubby hand, he’d passed his final judgment on the unfortunate customs and the subject was now closed. “Skouras. Sir Anthony Skouras,”
“Petersen.” His grip made me wince, fess from the sheer power of it than from the gouging effects of the large number of thickly encrusted rings that adorned his fingers. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see some on his -thumbs but he’d missed out on .that. I looked at him with new interest “Sir Anthony Skouras. I’ve heard of you of course.”
“Nothing good. Columnists don’t like me because they know I despise them. A Cypriot who made his shipping millions through sheer ruthlessness, they say. True. Asked by the Greek Government to leave Athens. True. Became a naturalised British citizen and bought a knighthood. Absolutely true. Charitable works and public services. Money can buy anything. A baronetcy next hut the marker’s not right at the moment. Price is bound to fall. Can I use your radio transmitter? I see you have one.”
“What’s that?” The abrupt switch had me off-balance, no great achievement the way I was feeling.
“Your radio transmitter, man! Don’t you listen to the news? All those major defence projects cancelled by the Pentagon. Price of steel tumbling. Must get through to my New York broker at once!”
“Sorry. Certainly you may – but, but your own radio-telephone? Surely——”
“It’s out of action.” His mouth became more tight-lipped than ever and the inevitable happened: it disappeared. “It’s urgent, Mr. Petersen.”
“Immediately. You know how to operate this model?”
He smiled thinly, which was probably the only way he was capable of smiling. Compared to the cinema-organ job he’d have aboard the Shangri-la, asking him if he could operate this was like asking the captain of a transatlantic jet if he could fly a Tiger Moth. “I think I can manage, Mr. Petersen.”
.” Call me when you’re finished, 113 be in the saloon.” He’d be calling roe before he’d finished, he’d be calling me before he’d even started. But I couldn’t tell him. Word gets around. I went down to the saloon, contemplated a shave and decided against it. It wouldn’t take that long, It didn’t. He appeared at the saloon door inside a minute, his face grim.
“Your radio is out of order, Mr. Petersen.”
“They’re tricky to operates some of those older fobs,” I said tactfully. “Maybe if I——”
“I say it’s out of order. I mean if a out of order.”
“Damned odd. It was working——”
“Would you care to try it, please?”
I tried it. Nothing. I twiddled everything I could lay hands on. Nothing.
“A power failure, perhaps,” I suggested. “I’ll check——”
“Would you be so good as to remove the face-plate, please?”
I stared at him in perplexity, switching the expression, after a suitable interval, to shrewd thoughtfulness. “What do you know, Sir Anthony, that I don’t?”
“You’ll find out.”
So I found out and went through all the proper motions of consternation, incredulity and tight-lipped indignation. Finally I said: “You knew. How did you know?”
“Obvious, isn’t it?”
“Your transmitter,” I said slowly. “It’s more than just out order. You had the same midnight caller.”
“And the Orion.” The mouth vanished again. “The big blue ketch lying close in. Only other craft in the harbour apart from us with a radio transmitter. Smashed. Just come from there,”
“Smashed? Theirs as well? But who in God’s name – it must be the work of a madman.”
“Is it? Is it the work of a madman? I know something of those matters. My first wife——“He broke off abruptly and gave an odd shake of the head, then went on slowly: “The mentally disturbed are irrational, haphazard, purposeless, aimless in their behaviour patterns. This seems an entirely irrational act, but an act with a method and a purpose to it. Not haphazard. It’s planned. There’s a reason. At first I thought the reason was to cut off my connection with the mainland. But it can’t be that. By rendering me temporarily incommunicado nobody stands to gain, I don’t stand to lose.”
“But you said the New York Stock——“