I heard her cry out, a cry of shock or fear. A moment’s silence, a heavy soft thump as of falling bodies, a scream of agony from Susan, and then that silence again.
They weren’t there. When I reached the spot where they had been struggling, they weren’t there. For a second I stood still in that impenetrable darkness, bewildered, then my hand touched the top of the three-foot baffle and I had it: In their wrestling on that crazily careening deck they’d staggered against the baffle and toppled over on to the floor of the hold. I was over that baffle before I had time to think, before I knew what I was doing: the bo’sun’s knife was in my hand, the needle-pointed marlinespike open, the locking shackle closed.
I stumbled as the weight came on my left leg, fell to my knees, touched someone’s head and hair. Long hair. Susan. I moved away, and had just reached my feet again when he came at me. He came at me. He didn’t back away, try to keep out of my reach in that darkness. He came at me. That meant he’d lost his gun.
We fell to the floor together, clawing, clubbing, kicking. Once, twice, half a dozen times he caught me on the chest, the side of the body, with sledgehammer short-arm jabs that threatened to break my ribs. But I didn’t really feel them. He was a strong man, tremendously strong, but even with all his great strength, even had his left arm not been paralysed and useless, he would have found no escape that night.
I grunted with the numbing shock of it and Carreras shrieked out in agony as the hilt of MacDonald’s knife jarred solidly home against his breast-bone. I wrenched the knife free and struck again. And again. And again. After the fourth blow he didn’t cry out any more.
Carreras died hard. He’d stopped hitting me now, his right arm was locked round my neck, and with every blow I struck the throttling pressure of his arm increased. All the convulsive strength of a man dying in agony was being brought to bear on exactly that spot where I had been so heavily sandbagged. Pain, crippling pain, red-hot barbed lances of fire shot through my back and head, I thought my neck was going to break. I struck again. And then the knife fell from my hand.
When I came to, the blood was pounding dizzily in my ears, my head felt as if it were going to burst, my lungs were heaving and gasping for air that wouldn’t come. I felt as if I were choking, being slowly and surely suffocated.
And then I dimly realised the truth. I was being suffocated, the arm of the dead man, by some freak of muscular contraction, was still locked around my neck. I couldn’t have been out for long, not for more than a minute. With both hands I grasped his arm by the wrist and managed to tear it free from my neck. For thirty seconds, perhaps longer, I lay there stretched out on the floor of the hold, my heart pounding, gasping for breath as waves of weakness and dizziness washed over me, while some faraway insistent voice, as desperately urgent as it was distant, kept saying in this remote corner of my mind, you must get up, you must get up.
And then I had it. I was lying on the floor of the hold and those huge crates were still sliding and crashing around with every heave and stagger of the Campari. And Susan. She was lying there too.
I pushed myself to my knees, fumbled around in my pocket till I found Marston’s pencil flash and switched it on. It still worked. The beam fell on Carreras and I’d time only to notice that the whole shirt-front was soaked with blood before I involuntary turned the torch away, sick and nauseated.
Susan was lying close in to the baffle, half on her side, half on her back. Her eyes were open, dull and glazed with shock and pain, but they were open.
“It’s finished.” I could scarcely recognise the voice as mine. “It’s all over now.” She nodded, and tried to smile.
“You can’t stay here,” I went on. “The other side of the baffle—quick.”
I rose to my feet, caught her under the arms and lifted her. She came easily, lightly, then cried out in agony and went limp on me. But I had her before she could fall, braced myself against the ladder, lifted her over the baffle and laid her down gently on the other side.
In the beam of my torch she lay there on her side, her arms outflung. The left arm, between wrist and elbow, was twisted at an impossible angle. Broken, no doubt of it. Broken. When she and Carreras had toppled over the baffle she must have been underneath: her left arm had taken the combined strain of their falling bodies and the strain had been too much. But there was nothing I could do about it. Not now. I turned my attention to Tony Carreras.
I couldn’t leave him there, I knew I couldn’t leave him there. When Miguel Carreras found out that his son was missing he’d have the Campari searched from end to end I had to get rid of him, but I couldn’t get rid of him in that hold. There was only one place where I could finally, completely and without any fear of re-discovery put the body of Tony Carreras. In the sea.
Tony Carreras must have weighed at least two hundred pounds, that narrow vertical steel ladder was at least thirty feet high, I was weak from loss of blood and sheer physical exhaustion and I’d only one sound leg, so I never even stopped to think about it. If I had, the impossibility of what I had to do would have defeated me even before I had begun.
I hauled him to the ladder, dragged him up to a sitting position against it, hooked my hands under his shoulders and jerked up his dead-weight, inch by inch, until his shoulders and hanging head were on a level with my own, stooped quickly, caught him in a fireman’s lift and started climbing.
For the first time that night, the pitching, corkscrewing Campari was my friend. When the ship plunged into a trough, rolling to starboard at the same time, the ladder would incline away from me as much as fifteen degrees and I’d take a couple of quick steps, hang on grimly as the Campari rolled back and the ladder swung out above me, wait for the return roll and repeat the process. Twice Carreras all but slipped from my shoulder, twice I had to take a quick step down to renew my purchase. I hardly used my left leg at all, my right leg and both arms took all the strain. Above all, my shoulders took the strain, I felt at times as if the muscles would tear, but it wasn’t any worse than the pain in my leg, so I kept on going. I kept on till I reached the top. Another half-dozen rungs and I would have had to let him drop for I don’t think I could ever have made it.
I heaved him over the hatch-coaming, followed, sank down on deck and waited till my pulse rate dropped down to the low hundreds. After the stench of oil and the close stuffiness of that hold, the driving gale-born rain felt and tasted wonderful I cupped the torch in my hand—not that there was more than a very remote chance of anyone being around at that hour, in that weather—and went through his pockets till I found a key tagged “Sick Bay.” Then I caught him by the collar and started for the side of the ship.
A minute later I was down in the bottom of the hold again. I found Tony Carreras’s gun, stuck it in my pocket and looked at Susan. She was still unconscious, which was the best way to be if I had to carry her up that ladder, and I had. With a broken arm she couldn’t have made it alone, and if I waited till she regained consciousness she would be in agony all the way. And she wouldn’t have remained conscious long.
After coping with Carreras’s dead weight, the task of getting Susan Beresford up on deck seemed almost easy. I laid her carefully on the rain-washed decks, replaced the battens and tied the tarpaulin back in place. I was just finishing when I sensed rather than heard her stir.
“Don’t move,” I said quickly. On the upper deck again I had to raise my voice to a shout to make myself heard against the bedlam of the storm. “Your forearm’s broken.”
“Yes.” Matter-of-fact, far too matter-of-fact. “Tony Carreras? Did you leave——”
“That’s all over. I told you that was all over.”
“Where is he?”
“Overboard.”
“Overboard?” The tremor was back in her voice now and I liked it much better than the abnormal calmness. “How did he——”
“I stabbed him God knows how many times,” I said wearily. “Do you think he got up all by himself, climbed the ladder and jumped—
—Sorry, Susan. I shouldn’t—well, I’m not quite my normal, I guess. Come on. Time old Doc Marston saw that arm.”
I made her cradle the broken forearm in her right hand, helped her to her feet and caught her by her good arm to help steady her on that heaving deck. The blind leading the blind.
When we reached the for’ard break of the well-deck I made her sit in the comparative shelter there while I went into the bo’sun’s store. It took me only a few seconds to find out what I wanted: two coils of nylon rope which I stuck into a canvas bag, and a short length of thicker manilla. I closed the door, left the bag beside Susan, and staggered across the sliding, treacherous decks to the port side and tied the manilla to one of the guard-rail stanchions. I considered knotting the rope, then decided against it. MacDonald, whose idea this was, had been confident that no one, in this wild weather, would notice so small a thing as a knot round the base of a stanchion, and even if it were noticed Carreras’s men would not be seamen enough to investigate and pull it in: but anyone peering over the side and seeing the knots might have become very curious indeed. I made the knot round that stanchion very secure indeed for there was going to depend on it the life of someone who mattered very much to me—myself.
Ten minutes later we were back outside the sick-bay. I need not have worried about the sentry. Head bent low over his chest, he was still far away in another world and showed no signs of leaving it. I wondered how he would feel when he came to. Would he suspect he had been drugged—or would he put any unusual symptoms down to a combination of exhaustion and sea-sickness? I decided I was worrying about nothing, one sure guess I could make and that was that when the sentry awoke he would tell no one about his sleep. Miguel Carreras struck me as the kind of man who might have a very short way indeed with sentries who slept on duty.
I took out the key I’d found on Tony Carreras and unlocked the door. Marston was at his desk, the bo’sun and Bullen were both sitting up in bed. This was the first time I’d seen Bullen conscious since he’d been shot. He was pale and haggard and obviously in considerable pain, but he didn’t look as if he were on his last legs. It took a lot to kill off a man like Bullen.
He gave me a long look that was pretty close to a glare.
“Well, Mister. Where the hell have you been?” Normally, with those words, it would have come out like a rasp, but his lung wound had softened his rasp to a hoarse whisper. If I’d had the strength to grin, I’d have done just that, but I didn’t have the strength: there was hope for the old man yet.
“A minute, sir. Dr. Marston, Miss Beresford has——”
“I can see, I can see. How in the world did you manage” Close to us now, he broke off and peered at me with his short-sighted eyes. “I would say, John, that you’re in the more immediate need of attention.”
“Me? I’m all right.”
“Oh, you are, are you?” He took Susan by her good arm and led her into the dispensary. He said, over his shoulder: “Seen yourself in a mirror recently?”
I looked in a mirror. I could see his point. Balenciagas weren’t blood-proof. The whole of the left side of my head, face and neck was covered in blood that had soaked through hood and mask, matted in thick dark blood and even the rain hadn’t been able to remove: the rain, if anything, had made it look worse than it really was. It must all have come from Tony Carreras’s bloodstained shirt when I’d carried him up the ladder of number four hold.
“It’ll wash off,” I said to Bullen and the bo’sun. “It’s not mine. That’s from Tony Carreras.”
“Carreras?” Bullen stared at me, then looked at MacDonald. In spite of the evidence in front of his eyes, you could see that he thought I’d gone off my rocker. “What do you mean?”
“I mean what I say. Tony Carreras.” I sat heavily on a, chair and gazed down vacantly at my soaking clothes. Maybe Captain Bullen wasn’t so far wrong: I felt an insane desire to laugh. I knew it was a climbing hysteria that came from weakness, from over-exhaustion, from mounting fever, from expending too much emotion in too short a time, and I had to make a physical effort to fight it down. “I killed him tonight down in number four hold.”
“You’re mad,” Bullen said flatly. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Don’t I?” I looked at him, then away again. “Ask Susan Beresford.”
“Mr. Carter’s telling the truth, sir,” MacDonald said quietly. “My knife, sir? Did you bring it back?”
I nodded, rose wearily, hobbled across to MacDonald’s bed and handed him the knife. I’d had no chance to clean it. The bo’sun said nothing, just handed it to Bullen, who stared down at it for long unspeaking moments.
“I’m sorry, my boy,” he said at length. His voice was husky; “Damnably sorry: But we’ve been worried to death.”
I grinned faintly. It was an effort even to do that. “So was I, sir, so was I.”
“All in your own good time,” Bullen said encouragingly.
“I think Mr. Carter should tell us later, sir,” MacDonald suggested. “He’s got to clean himself up, get those wet clothes off and into bed. If anyone comes——”
“Right, Bo’sun, right.” You could see that even so little talk was exhausting him. “Better hurry, my boy.”
“Yes.” I looked vaguely at the bag I’d brought with me. “I’ve got the ropes, Archie.”
“Let me have them, sir.” He took the bag, pulled out the two coils of rope, pulled the pillow from his lower pillowcase, stuffed the ropes inside and placed them under his top pillow. “Good a place as any, sir. If they really start searching, they’re bound to find it anyway. Now if you’d just be dropping this pillow and bag out the window. …”
I did that, stripped, washed, dried myself as best I could and climbed into bed, just as Marston came into the bay.
“She’s all right, John. Simple fracture. All wrapped up and in her blankets and she’ll be asleep in a minute. Sedatives, you know.”
I nodded. “You did a good job tonight, Doctor. Boy outside is still asleep and I hardly felt a thing in my leg.” It was only half a lie and there was no point in hurting his feelings unnecessarily. I glanced down at my leg. “The splints——”
“I’ll fix them right away.”
He fixed them, not more than half killing me in the process, and while he was doing so I told them what had happened. Or part of what happened. I told them the encounter with Tony Carreras was a result of an attempt to spike the gun on the afterdeck: with old Bullen talking away non-stop in his sleep, any mention of the Twister would not have been clever at all.
At the end of it all, after a heavy silence, Bullen said hopelessly: “It’s finished. It’s all finished. All that work and suffering for nothing. All for nothing.”
It wasn’t finished, it wasn’t going to be finished ever. Not till either Miguel Carreras or myself was finished. If I were a betting man I’d have staked the last cent of my fortune on Carreras.
I didn’t say that to them. I told them instead of the simple plan I had in mind, an unlikely plan concerned with taking over the bridge at gunpoint. But it wasn’t half as hopeless and desperate as the plan I really had in mind. The one I’d tell Archie MacDonald about later. Again I couldn’t tell the old man, for again the chances were heavy that he would have betrayed it in his half delirious muttering under sedation. I hadn’t even liked to mention Tony Carreras: but the blood had had to be explained away.
When I finished, Bullen said in a hoarse whisper: “I’m still the captain of this ship. I will not permit it. Good God, Mister, look at the weather, look at your condition. I will not allow you to throw your life away. I cannot permit it.”
“Thank you, sir. I know what you mean. But you have to permit it. You must. Because if you don’t …”
“What if someone comes into the sick-bay when you’re not here?” he asked helplessly. He’d accepted the inevitable.
“This.” I produced a gun and tossed it to the bo’sun. “This was Tony Carreras’s. There are still seven sho
ts in the magazine.”
“Thank you, sir,” MacDonald said quietly. “I’ll be very careful with those shots.”
“But yourself, man?” Bullen demanded huskily. “How about yourself?”
“Give me back that knife, Archie,” I said.
X.
Friday 9 a.m.—Saturday 1 a.m.
I slept that night and slept deeply, as deeply, almost, as Tony Carreras: I had neither sedatives nor sleeping pills, exhaustion was the only drug I needed.
Coming awake next morning was a long slow climb from the depths of a bottomless pit. I was climbing in the dark but in the strange way of dreams I wasn’t climbing and it wasn’t dark, some great beast had me in his jaws and was trying to shake the life out of me. A tiger, but no ordinary tiger. A sabre-toothed tiger, the kind that had passed from the surface of the earth a million years ago. So I kept on climbing in the dark and the sabre-toothed tiger kept on shaking me like a terrier shaking a rat and I knew that my only hope was to reach the light above, but I couldn’t see any light. Then, all of a sudden, the light was there, my eyes were open and Miguel Carreras was bending over me and shaking my shoulder with no gentle hand. I would have preferred the sabre-toothed tiger any day.
Marston stood at the other side of the bed, and when he saw I was awake he caught me under the arms and lifted me gently to a sitting position. I did my best to help him but I wasn’t concentrating on it, I was concentrating on the lip-biting and eye-closing so that Carreras couldn’t miss how far through I was. Marston was protesting.
“He shouldn’t be moved, Mr. Carreras, he really shouldn’t be moved. He’s in constant great pain and I repeat that major surgery is essential at the earliest possible moment.” It was about forty years too late now, I supposed, for anyone to point out to Marston that he was a born actor. No question in my mind now but that that was what he should have been: the gain to both the thespian and medical worlds would have been incalculable.
The Golden Rendezvous Page 20
