Operation Piracy

by Paul Somers

  “We obviously think along the same lines,” I said. “It’s an affinity. I always knew we were made for each other.”

  She gave me a charming smile.

  I said, “I assume you’re interested in Spindrift.”

  “Mildly.”

  “The way you’re interested in me!” She ignored that.

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I was just thinking of going out to her. What about suspending hostilities for half an hour and making it a joint trip?”

  “I suppose we might as well,” she said, “Just for half an hour. But after that it’ll be war to the knife again.”

  “Oh, I know the rules,” I said.

  We soon found a fisherman to take us out, and a few minutes later we were alongside Spindrift. The two men aboard her certainly didn’t look in the least piratical. One was white-haired, rubicund, and sixtyish—he could have been a retired Army man. His upper lip was so stiff that his speech was barely articulate. The other, who turned out to be his son, had the accents of a B. B.C. announcer. We introduced ourselves and they asked us aboard, politely, but with no great warmth. They proved to be an impossible pair to pump. Their name was Erskine-White, they were on a holiday cruise, they had known Bruce Attwood for several years, and they thought the raid on Wanderer was a very bad show—and that, it appeared, was about as far as we could hope to get without forceps. Naturally what I really wanted to know was whether, on going ashore, one of them had got in touch with an accomplice and given him particulars of Wanderer’s sailing time and course, but it was scarcely a question one could ask! I did explain how we’d come to the conclusion that the raiders must have had late knowledge of Wanderer’s plans, and Mollie followed up by asking if either of them had happened to mention the matter to anyone at St. Mawes after their arrival. They said they hadn’t, rather stiffly, and that virtually ended the interview.

  “Cagey, weren’t they?” I said as the little boat took us back to the quay.

  “Or else just stuffy,” Mollie said.

  “I suppose we ought to try and find out whether they telephoned anyone while they were at the Crown? Or met anyone they seemed to know?”

  “That’s going to be a tricky inquiry,” she said.

  “I know. Perhaps it would be better if only one of us went.”

  She nodded. “Let’s toss up. The loser can go.”

  I said, cautiously, “I take it war to the knife doesn’t start again until after this interview?”

  “Agreed!”

  I spun a coin, and she lost. She was in the Crown so long that I began to wish I’d lost. I wondered what tarradiddle she was making up to explain her questions.

  At last she emerged, looking rather thoughtful. “Well,” she said, “apparently the younger one did ring someone up.”

  “Really!” I said. I’d scarcely expected it.

  “Not that it gets us anywhere,” she added. “He was probably ringing Mamma at Bournemouth!”

  “It was a coin box, I suppose?”

  She nodded. “He had to get change for it—that’s how they knew.”

  “Anstey could probably get the call traced.”

  “M’m!” She didn’t sound very enthusiastic. “I think I shall let it ride for a while—I don’t believe they had anything to do with it. But you do as you like, of course.”

  I said, “What I’d like to do is take you to lunch, now we’re here.”

  “No, I’d better get back,” she said, “I’ve got a lot of loose ends to clear up. Thanks all the same.”

  “If the Courier didn’t squander so much on you,” I said, “they might be able to afford to send someone down to help you!”

  “Do I seem to need help?” she said, and smiled. “Good luck, Hugh—see you later.”

  It was nearly half past one when I got back to Falmouth, and I went straight to the Anchor. Lawson was in the bar.

  “Ah, there you are!” he said. “I was just wondering what had happened to you.” The sea air had given his pallid face a touch of colour, and I thought I detected an undertone of excitement in his manner. He bought me a bitter, clutched my arm, and took me off conspiratorially into a corner. “Well, did you get anywhere?”

  I told him about my talk with Harris and my trip to St. Mawes. He listened, but only, I thought, with half an ear.

  “Well, now, old boy,” he said as I finished, “I think I may be on to something.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, I’ve got a theory that might tie the whole thing up. Including why Scott was killed. Especially that.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  He dropped his voice. “You know what I always say—‘cherchez la femme!’”

  “I know you always practise it,” I said. I couldn’t begin to guess what he was talking about, but I had a notion he was about to embark on one of the wildly defamatory reconstructions for which he was notorious in the office—and I was right.

  “To start with,” he said, “nobody’s been paying enough attention to Bob Crisp—except me. He’s an intelligent lad, and he doesn’t miss much. He came back with Quigley, remember, after Quigley had fetched the tools that night, and he was in the corridor when Harris and Quigley unjammed the doors, and he saw and heard everything that happened. And do you know what did happen?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” I said.

  “Then I’ll tell you. When Scott’s door was opened, and our Charmian saw him lying there in a pool of blood, she gave a cry and dropped down on her knees beside him and said, ‘Oh, David!’”

  “What would you expect her to say—‘Oh, Jonathan!’”

  “Be your age, old boy—according to young Crisp she was in a frightful state. Trembling and crying—all that stuff. She was obviously very fond of him.”

  “He was probably quite a stout chap.”

  “That’s not all, either. I’ve been putting in a lot of work this morning. I managed to get Sylvia Rankin on her own, and I steered the conversation round to this scene in the corridor and I made it pretty plain what was in my mind.”

  “I bet you did,” I said.

  “I thought she’d freeze me, but she didn’t. Between you and me and the gatepost, old boy, I don’t think she likes Charmian very much. It’s the husbands that are pally, not the wives. Anyway, when I hinted that Charmian and David must have been on pretty good terms, she gave me a bitchy, meaning sort of look and said, ‘Well, Mr. Lawson, David was a very charming man, and Mr. Attwood isn’t as young as he was, is he?’”

  “Delightful woman!” I said.

  “Sure—but why should we complain?”

  “Anyway, what’s your theory?”

  Lawson leaned forward earnestly. “Suppose Charmian and David Scott were having an affair—been having one for years. Suddenly Attwood finds out about it, the way people do. He’s beside himself with jealousy and rage. He makes up his mind to get rid of the lover. But he daren’t do it in any of the straightforward ways, because if the story of the affair leaks out he’s got too much motive. So he thinks up a clever plan. What he does is, he hires a couple of tough characters who’ll come and raid his ship and bump off Scott—in return for the jewels, don’t you see? It’s a good proposition from all their points of view—the raiders get a lot of lolly, and as the jewels are insured Attwood doesn’t lose either. In fact, he’s absolutely nothing to worry about. All he has to do is brief the chaps about Wanderer’s lay-out, and then tip them off about her sailing time—which is easy, because he’s the boss, he’s the one who makes the decisions—and they look after everything else … Well, what do you think of it?”

  “Let’s phone it right away,” I said.

  “Don’t be an ass, old boy—I’m serious. I don’t mean I’ve thought it all out to the end, but what’s wrong with it as a working theory?”

  “Well, you haven’t got anything very solid to back it up with, have you?” I said. “This idea of yours that Charmian and Scott were having an affair is the wildest speculation—and probably quit
e untrue. She’d naturally have been cut up if she’d known him a long time, and liked him, and suddenly found him lying dead on the floor. She didn’t have to be his mistress to show a bit of feeling. And she certainly didn’t behave like a bereaved mistress to-day—my impression was that she was bearing up pretty well.”

  “Yes, old boy, I dare say,” Lawson said knowingly, “but don’t forget she was once an actress. A model, anyway—it’s all the same thing. She’s got herself in hand now, that’s all. In the corridor she was caught off guard and showed what she really felt. There’s no smoke without fire, you know.”

  “Well, I’d need a lot more evidence,” I said. “Besides, even if there was something between them there’s no reason to suppose that Attwood found out. That’s just speculation again. And if he did, I still can’t see him in the role you’ve given him.”

  “Why not? We know he’s crazy about his wife. We know he gets violent at the drop of a hat—remember that car incident when he took a poke at some inoffensive chap? Strong passions, powerful emotions—that’s Attwood. And he’s just the type to enjoy working out a complicated plan—it’s the breath of life to these tycoons.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think he’s the type to hire ruffians to do a job for him. I just can’t see it. And anyway, why go to all that trouble to organise a fake piracy when Scott could easily have been waylaid and knocked on the head by the same blokes on land …?”

  “That would have cost Attwood much more. No insured jewels.”

  “He could have arranged a fake burglary when Scott was staying at his home … Anyway, there’s a vital point you’ve forgotten. You say Attwood could have tipped off the chaps about Wanderer’s sailing time, but he couldn’t have told them her course. It was Harris who laid off the course, and after that Attwood didn’t go ashore.”

  “According to you,” Lawson persisted, “Harris said the raiders could have taken a chance without knowing the course. Maybe they did.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” I said, “but I can’t buy it. I couldn’t be less convinced.”

  Lawson looked a bit sulky. “I suppose you’ve got a better theory?”

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I think I’ve got one that’s just as good.”

  “Oh? Well, let’s hear it.”

  I took a long drink, enjoying his impatience. “Scott was a crook,” I said. “He wormed his way into Attwood’s confidence because he was a crook. He wanted the jewels—a third share, anyway. He planned the raid with two other crooks. The accomplices were waiting around here the night Wanderer sailed. Scott knew about the course, sailing time, lay-out, everything. He went ashore, ostensibly to post a letter, and told them all they needed to know. They had their cruiser handy in some convenient creek and they dashed off to it and put to sea. They carried out the raid, and when they got aboard Wanderer they shot up Scott because they didn’t want to have to split the loot three ways. How’s that?”

  Lawson stared at me. “Do you believe that?”

  “No,” I said, “but it’s not impossible, is it?”

  “Old boy,” he said solemnly, “I’m surprised at you speaking ill of the dead!”

  Chapter Six

  It was well into the afternoon when we called at police headquarters again to see how the search for the missing cruiser was progressing. The visit was nicely timed, for it seemed that Superintendent Anstey had just received a final report from the naval authorities. He didn’t look very happy about it, either. The naval launches, he said, had visited every creek in the Fal estuary and every creek in the Helford river; they’d checked with every harbour between Falmouth and Penzance; they’d patrolled the whole of the rugged Lizard coast to make sure the cruiser hadn’t been tucked away among the rocks of some inaccessible cove. But they’d found nothing. Every boat remotely resembling the raider had been satisfactorily accounted for by its owner. Assuming that she’d started her trip from some part of the neighbouring coast, it was possible that inquiries would produce in the end someone who had knowledge of her, someone who remembered seeing her, but whether she was ultimately remembered or not the fact remained that she was not in the area now.

  The only possible conclusion seemed to be that she’d managed after all to escape the notice of the Search and Rescue aircraft, and by now was far away—in France, or perhaps in Eire. The R.A.F. people, Anstey said, were reluctant to accept this—according to them their search had been so thorough and the weather conditions so good that it was almost inconceivable the cruiser could have been overlooked. But Anstey made it pretty clear that he himself accepted it. The scope of the search had been widened, he said, to take in Continental and Irish ports, and the French and Irish police were co-operating. The two men who’d carried out the raid might appear to have got away temporarily, but it was almost certain that their boat would be traced in the end, and then the trail would be taken up again.

  That, of course, was Anstey’s sop to the public. To us, the failure of the search came very much as an anticlimax. Indeed, it began to look as though the case would have little more to offer us, once we’d filed our stories for the day.

  Then, in the early evening, there was a new and most intriguing development. Lloyds, it appeared, had succeeded in identifying the big cargo ship that Harris had reported seeing in the vicinity shortly before the raid took place. She was the Northern Trader, a British ship of about five thousand tons. Her captain, Frank Watts, had been radioed through the owners to see if he could give any information about the incident. He’d replied that both he and his second mate, who’d been on the bridge with him at the time, had seen the lights of a biggish motor yacht that had almost certainly been Wanderer, but that was all. They’d seen no other navigation lights, no searchlight, and no flare. If they’d seen a flare, Watts said, they’d have stopped to investigate.

  It seemed an extraordinary turn of events. I could understand that the navigation lights of a very small cruiser might not have been visible from the bridge of a largish ship—that, after all, was why so many small boats were run down at night in the sea lanes. I could even understand that Wanderer’s searchlight might not have been noticed if it had been directed straight down on to the cruiser on the side away from the cargo boat—as it would have been. But a flare at sea was another matter altogether; it would have been visible for miles, and could hardly have been mistaken for anything else. It seemed almost beyond belief that both the captain and mate of the Northern Trader would have failed to spot it.

  I suggested to Lawson that we should go back to Wanderer and see what Harris had to say about the new development, and presently we rowed out there. The Attwoods and their guests were ashore, but Harris and Quigley were both aboard, and we told them what had happened. They were quite baffled, for the same reason that I had been. The searchlight, Harris said, had only been on for a short time, because at close quarters the men on the cruiser would have been dazzled by it, so that was understandable; and as for the cruiser’s navigation lights, he and Quigley both agreed that they’d been rather dim as well as low in the water and could easily have been overlooked. But the flare, Harris said, should certainly have been seen. It had burned for a couple of minutes, with a yellowish sort of flame—the sort of flame you’d get by setting a light to paraffin-soaked rags. He wouldn’t be drawn into saying anything for publication about the Northern Trader’s skipper, but he made it pretty clear that he didn’t think Captain Watts could have been keeping much of a look-out.

  After that, Lawson and I returned to the pub to write our story. The material we had didn’t add up to any coherent picture, but there was plenty of it. There was the description of the cabins, the facts about Scott’s death, the mystery of why he had been shot at all, the interview with Charmian Attwood, the stuff I’d got about the difficulties of interception and the problem of how the raiders had procured their up-to-date information, the total disappearance of the cruiser, and now this latest puzzle about the Northern Trader. Some of it had to be handled c
autiously, for fear of libel, but in the end we knocked it all into a workmanlike story and phoned it. Then we relaxed. At least, I did. Lawson looked as though he hadn’t entirely discarded the theory he’d put forward earlier. Anyway, he seemed very preoccupied, and he turned in early.

  I didn’t see him at breakfast next morning. There was a note from him under my door saying he’d thought up a new angle and had gone off to make some inquiries and would see me at the inquest on Scott, which was timed for eleven. That gave me a leisurely hour with the papers. I read through our rivals’ efforts with the usual slight sense of apprehension, in case someone had discovered some major fact that had escaped us, but to-day no one had produced anything sensational. Most of the stories emphasised the new mystery aspects of the case—how it was that the raider hadn’t been found, or the flare seen. One paper had talked to the Search and Rescue people and got an emphatic statement scouting the idea that the cruiser had got to France. Another had arranged its own radio contact with the captain of the Northern Trader, though the results scarcely seemed to justify the expense—he’d merely repeated what Anstey had told us. As always, I read Mollie’s story with special care. Her pieces invariably gave the impression of having been written with effortless skill, but there was nothing very distinguished about this one. She’d covered the facts, like everyone else, and that was all. However, she’d still need watching. Her technique, as I knew only too well from personal experience, was to go ambling along quietly with all the rest of us, and then suddenly hurl herself and all her reserves through a gap that no one else had spotted. It was when she got a hunch that she was dangerous.

  At ten I went along to the inquest on Scott. There was quite a crowd, what with the reporters and the whole of Wanderer’s, passengers and crew and such of the public as could squeeze into the small room. Lawson arrived late, but he wouldn’t have missed anything if he hadn’t come at all. It was a long-drawn-out affair, but it produced absolutely nothing new in the way of evidence, and the verdict of murder against a person or persons unknown left us precisely where we were.