“They’ll be here long before midnight when they discover you’re gone,” I observed.
“It may be morning before they find out. Most nights I lock my cabin door. To-night I locked it from the outside.”
“That helps,” I said. “Standing about in those sodden clothes doesn’t. There’s no point in running away only to die of pneumonia. You’ll find towels in my cabin. Then we can get you a room in the Columba Hotel.”
“I had hoped for better than that,” The fractional slump of the shoulders was more imagined than seen, but the dull defeat in the eyes left nothing to the imagination. “You would put me in the first place they would look for me. There is no safe place for me in Torbay, They will catch me and bring me back and my husband will take me into that stateroom again. My only hope is to run away. Your only hope is to run away. Please. Can we not run away together?”
“No.”
“A man not given to evasive answers, is that it?” There was a lonely dejection, a proud humiliation about her that did very little for my self-respect. She turned towards Uncle Arthur, took both his hands in hers and said in a low voice: “Sir Arthur, I appeal to you as an English gentleman,” Thumbs down on Calvert, that foreign-born peasant. “May I stay? Please?”
Uncle Arthur looked at me, hesitated, looked at Charlotte Skouras, looked into those big brown eyes and was a lost man.
“Of course you may stay, my dear Charlotte.” He gave a stiff old-fashioned bow which, I had to admit, went very well with the beard and the monocle. “Yours to command, my dear lady.”
“Thank you, Sir Arthur.” She smiled at me, not with triumph or satisfaction, just an anxious-to-be-friendly smile. “It would be nice, Philip, to have the consent – what do you say? — unanimous.”
“If Sir Arthur wishes to expose you to a vastly greater degree of risk aboard this boat than you would experience in Torbay, that is Sir Arthur’s business. As for the rest, my consent is not required. I’m a well-trained civil servant and I obey orders.”
“You are gracious to a fault,” Uncle Arthur said acidly.
“Sorry, sir,” I’d suddenly seen the light and a pretty dazzling beam it was too. “I should not have called your judgment in question. The lady is very welcome. But I think she should remain below while we are alongside the pier, sir.”
“A reasonable request and a wise precaution,” Uncle Arthur said mildly. He seemed pleased at my change of heart, at my proper deference to the wishes of the aristocracy.
“It won’t be for long.” I smiled at Charlotte Skouras. “We leave Torbay within the hour.”
“What do I care what you charge him with?” I looked from Sergeant MacDonald to the broken-faced man with the wet blood-stained towel, then back to MacDonald again. “Breaking and entering. Assault and battery. ISlegal possession of a dangerous weapon with intent to create a felony — murder. Anything you like.”
“Well, now. It’s just not quite as easy as that.” Sergeant MacDonald spread his big brown hands across the counter of the tiny police station and looked at the prisoner and myself in turn. “He didn’t break and enter, you know, Mr. Petersen. He boarded. No law against that. Assault and battery? It looks as if he has been the victim and not the perpetrator. And what kind of weapon was he carrying, Mr. Petersen?”
“I don’t know. It must have been knocked overboard.”
“I see. Knocked overboard, was it? So we have no real proof of any felonious intent.”
I was becoming a little tired of Sergeant MacDonald. He was fast enough to co-operate with bogus customs officers but with me he was just being deliberately obstructive. I said: “You’ll be telling me next that it’s all a product of my fevered imagination. You’ll be wiling me next .that I just stepped ashore, grabbed the first passer-by I saw, hit him in the face with a four-by-two then dragged him up here inventing this tale as I went. Even you can’t be so stupid as to believe that.”
The brown face turned red and, on the counter, the brown knuckles turned ivory. He said softly: “You’ll kindly not talk to me like that.”
“If you insist on behaving like a fool 111 treat you as such. Are you going to lock him up?”
“If s only your word against his.”
“No. I had a witness. He’s down at the old pier, now, if you want to see him. Admiral Sir Arthur Arnford-Jason. A very senior civil servant.”
“You had a Mr. Hunslett with you last time I was aboard your boat.”
“He’s down there, too.” I nodded at the prisoner. “Why don’t you ask a few questions of our friend here?”
“I’ve sent for the doctor. He’ll have to fix his face first. I can’t understand a word he says.”
“The state of his face doesn’t help,” I admitted. “But the main trouble is that he speaks Italian.”
“Italian, is it? I’ll soon fix that. The owner of the Western Isles cafe is an Italian.”
“That helps. There are four little questions he might put to our pal here. Where is his passport, how he arrived in this country, who is his employer and where does he live,”
The sergeant looked at me for a long moment then said slowly: “It’s a mighty queer marine biologist that you are, Mr. Petersen.”
“And it’s a mighty queer police sergeant that you are, Mr. MacDonald. Good night.”
I crossed the dimly-lit street to the sea-wall and waited in the shadow of a phone booth. After two minutes a man with a small bag came hurrying up the street and turned into the police station. He was out again in five minutes, which wasn’t surprising: there was little a G.P. could do for what was plainly a hospital job.
The station door opened again and Sergeant MacDonald came hurrying out, long black mackintosh buttoned to the neck. He walked quickly along the sea wall, looking neither to left nor right, which made it very easy for me to follow him, and turned down the old stone pier. At the end of the pier he flashed a torch, went down a flight of steps and began to haul in a small boat. I leaned over the pier wall and switched on my own torch,
“Why don’t they provide you with a telephone or radio for conveying urgent messages?” I asked. “You could catch your death of cold rowing out to the Shangri-la on a night like this.”
He straightened slowly and let the rope fall from his hands. The boat drifted out into the darkness. He came up the steps with the slow heavy tread of an old man and said quietly: “What did you say about the Shangri-la?”
“Don’t let me keep you, Sergeant,” I said affably. “Duty before the idle social chit-chat. Your first duty is to your masters. Off you go, now, tell them that one of their hirelings has been severely clobbered and that Petersen has very grave suspicions about Sergeant MacDonald.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about)”he said emptily. “The Shangri-la – I’m not going anywhere near the Shangri-la.”
“Where are you going, then? Do tell. Fishing? Kind of forgotten your tackle, haven’t you?”
“And how would you like to mind your own damn business?” MacDonald said heavily.
“That’s what I’m doing. Come off it, Sergeant. Think I give a damn about our Italian pal? You can charge him with playing tiddley-winks in the High Street for all I care. I just threw him at you, together with a hint that you yourself were up to no good, to see what the reaction would be, to remove the last doubts in my mind. You reacted beautifully.”
“I’m maybe not the cleverest, Mr, Petersen,” he said with dignity. “Neither am I a complete idiot. I thought you were one of them or after the same thing as them.” He paused. “You’re not. You’re a Government agent.”
“I’m a civil servant.” I nodded to where the Firecrest lay not twenty yards away. “You’d better come to meet my boss.”
“I don’t take orders from Civil Servants.”
“Suit yourself,” I said indifferently, turned away and looked out over the sea-wall. “About your two sons, Sergeant MacDonald. The sixteen-year-old twins who, I’m told, died in the Cairngorms some time back.”
“What about my sons?” he said tondessly.
“Just that I’m not looking forward to telling them that their own father wouldn’t lift a finger to bring them back to life again.”
He just stood there in the darkness, quite still, saying nothing. He offered no resistance when I took his arm and led him towards the Firecrest.
Uncle Arthur was at his most intimidating and Uncle Arthur in full intimidating cry was a sight to behold. He’d made no move to rise when I’d brought MacDonald into the saloon and he hadn’t ask him to sit. The blue basilisk stare, channelled and magnified by the glittering monocles transfixed the unfortunate sergeant like a laser beam.