Count Backwards to Zero

by Brett Halliday

  Brett Halliday

  Count Backwards To Zero

  CHAPTER 1

  The first two days out of Southampton, rain was incessant. But gradually, as the Queen Elizabeth II swung south into warmer waters, the sea began to smooth out and the weather improved. This was the big ship’s final westward crossing of the year. For the next few months she would be cruising out of Miami, and that was her present destination.

  Dr. Quentin Little, in a corner of the first-class bar, hadn’t noticed the changes in the weather. He had eaten nothing since leaving England. He was drinking vodka gimlets.

  “Waiter,” he said, indicating his empty glass.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Little looked at his watch, staring at the figures until what they were telling him succeeded in penetrating through the vodka haze. With a ballpoint pen, he made a calculation on a soggy cocktail napkin.

  He had seventy-one hours to live.

  The waiter turned at the bar. A dark-haired girl spoke to him, picked the gimlet off his tray and brought it across to Little. Her name was Anne Blagden. She was amazingly pretty, with an enthusiastic style and the figure of a very good gymnast or ballet dancer. She was an American, in her mid-twenties, and in spite of her striking good looks, Little was beginning to find her a bit of a pest. He didn’t want or need conversation. All he wanted was to sit exactly where he was and blot out seventy-one hours. Drinking and going to the bathroom now and then—that was program enough.

  “Dr. Little,” Anne said firmly, “we have crossed the fortieth parallel. The weather has broken at last. Come out in the sun and talk to me. It’s permitted to take our drinks.”

  “I don’t like the glare on deck. I don’t feel like talking to anybody.”

  He reached for his glass, but she moved it away.

  “You don’t want to show up in Miami looking like a mushroom. Everybody there believes in the year-round tan. They’ll think you’re a security risk.”

  “Anne, go away, please. Torment somebody else.”

  “Look around. All you see is couples. Elderly couples. You and I are the only unattached people in the bar, so we have to torment each other.”

  He sighed and stood up. “I wonder when you Americans are going to learn some manners.”

  “Never, I hope.” She picked up the napkin on which he had worked out his limited life expectancy. “You don’t want to leave secret formulas lying around.”

  He corrected her. “Formulae. In my specialty there are no longer any secrets. Only money.”

  “Seriously.”

  “I’m quite serious. Give the Eskimos money enough and a few high-school textbooks and they can make their own atomic explosion. They don’t need us.”

  She frowned at the blurred marks on the napkin. “Seventy-one hours till what?”

  “I was scribbling,” he said wearily.

  He blinked like an owl as they came into the sunlight. The atmospheric pressure seemed to change, and for an instant he almost lost his balance. Anne steered him to an unoccupied deck chair and watched critically as he lowered himself.

  “You’re in fantastically poor shape, Doctor. You’re no argument for the healthful properties of vodka.”

  “As I’ve been telling you,” he said, “I oppose physical exercise. I don’t really like the way fresh air tastes.”

  He put on a badly smeared pair of wraparound dark glasses, and settled back. Now the sky was a less intense and disturbing color.

  “Did you remember my drink?”

  She put it in his hand. By tilting the glass carefully, he managed to drink without sitting up. For a moment, feeling the sun’s warmth through his clothes, he was able to forget the minutes ticking away.

  Anne had stretched out beside him with an erotic wriggle, tipped her face to the sun and closed her eyes. To do justice to the sudden cruiselike weather, she was wearing a sleeveless jersey and very abbreviated shorts. A narrow strip of flesh showed above the top of the shorts. Suddenly, for some inexplicable reason, Little felt like laying his hand palm down against her young and somehow vulnerable stomach. He hadn’t been stirred by this kind of impulse for a long time.

  Her eyes opened. She smiled at him.

  “Now let’s talk.”

  “About what?”

  “I’m not very good at mental arithmetic, but I just figured it out. In seventy-one hours we dock in Miami.”

  She rolled on one hip and said in a rush, “You’re being so damn taciturn and British, it’s ridiculous! Didn’t you ever hear of Dr. Freud? He said it helps to talk about it. I know I’m being a bit of a menace—”

  “Which is putting it mildly.”

  “Quentin, maybe this isn’t an accident. I know you don’t believe in astrology—”

  “My God.”

  “A brainy scientist like you, of course not. You don’t believe in anything you can’t see with a microscope. That’s where we’re different. When I took science in high school I could never see anything under that damn thing. I couldn’t get it adjusted. If I hadn’t been on this boat you would have said just two words the whole trip. ‘Another gimlet.’”

  “Another gimlet, please. Three words.”

  “And what am I doing here, have you asked yourself? The only reason I didn’t fly is that the horoscope in one of the London papers said Gemini people should stay out of airplanes for a few weeks.”

  “That astrologer gets a subsidy from the Cunard Line. They told him the Queen wasn’t fully booked.”

  “I believe it. Regardless. I’ve had some bad luck with men lately, but that doesn’t mean I’ve sworn off completely. I dropped into the bar the first night to look the situation over, and what did I find? Ecch. There was only one halfway interesting-looking man, and he was very English and aloof, in addition to being smashed on vodka gimlets.”

  Little finished his drink and summoned a hovering steward. “Another gimlet, please. Tell Harry it’s for Dr. Little, and to use a touch more lime juice in this one.”

  “You won’t die of scurvy, that’s one thing,” Anne remarked. “Malnutrition, but not scurvy. Quentin, reticence is a fine character trait, but honestly. You’ve got a great new job, and let’s assume it’s the kind of work you like. They didn’t have to twist your arm to take it, did they? You ought to be striding up and down or challenging people to a spirited game of badminton. When an unaffiliated chick sits down beside you and indicates shyly that she’d like to make friends, you ought to respond. After the way you’ve been snapping at me, I think it’s heroic of me to persevere. You know you don’t drink this much normally—how could you hold a job? You’re worrying about something. Tell me. I’ll put my chin in my hand and make soothing suggestions.”

  “I do think the human race is on the point of packing it in. I wouldn’t say I was exactly worrying about it.”

  She touched his wrist. “The human race is going to make out OK. This isn’t generalized existentialist angst. It’s something specific. What’s going to happen in seventy-one hours? I mean, why should a British atomic physicist be carrying a gun in his pocket?”

  “Anne, for the love of God,” Little said irritably, “if you keep nipping at my heels I’m going to fold you up in a deck chair and drop you in the Atlantic.” He looked around. “I’m thirsty. What’s keeping the steward?”

  Anne plunged into the pool. She had changed into one of the skimpiest and most attractive bathing costumes Little had seen outside the pages of the popular picture magazines. She swam two lengths of the pool in a smooth, effortless crawl, came out dripping, adjusted the bottom portion of her bikini and plunged in again.

  Little had already noticed that he wasn’t the only man at poolside who was being pleasantly agitated by the s
ight of Anne Blagden in her miniscule bathing suit. Most of the others, as Anne had observed, had their wives with them. Little, at 42, was the youngest man there, but he was also—to face facts—the ugliest, the least prepossessing. Nevertheless, when Anne came out of the pool again, Little was the man she would drop down beside. He found the prospect amazingly agreeable. Considering his predicament, the fact that he could be thinking along these lines was amazing enough.

  She had persuaded him—browbeaten him, actually—into a pair of gaudy bathing trunks she had insisted on buying for him at the men’s shop on A deck. That he looked a clown, he well knew. He hadn’t been exaggerating his opposition to physical exercise; he loathed it. As a boy he had been skinny and undersized, marked with acne, nearsighted. He had sat down most of his life. He won prizes in school. At the University, he went into particle physics and took a First. Accepted instantly at the Camberwell Experimental Facility, he had remained there ever since, becoming, in due course, Deputy Director. He was still skinny, still small, still nearsighted, his face pocked with acne scars, his knees knobby. He was not, in short, and nobody knew it better than he, the kind of man an attractive young woman would ordinarily notice at the side of the pool on a luxurious ocean liner.

  Not that he cared about all that, he reminded himself. Given a choice between the emotional and the intellectual life, he had long since chosen. The passionate side of his nature had atrophied, and he now knew that he was one of those occasional individuals who manage to go through life without feeling any real emotions at all.

  Anne glided up through the water. She flicked a few drops up at him. The expression in her green-flecked eyes was unreadable.

  “Coming out?” he asked.

  She shook her head. Suddenly, reaching out, she took his foot in both hands and bit his big toe.

  It was no playful nip, but a real bite. He yelled in surprise and pain. Heads came around. Somebody’s glass smashed on the tile.

  Anne kept her teeth clamped together at the base of Little’s toe and tried to worry him into the water. He resisted the pull, unable to believe that anything as appalling as this could be happening. She seemed determined to get down to the bone. He felt a dreadful embarrassment—most of the others at poolside were English—and at the same time a queer kind of elation, a rush and prickling that was almost sexual. She had singled him out.

  “For a variety of reasons,” Little said stiffly, gripping the rail very hard, “what you suggest is impossible. Pleasant, no doubt. But impossible.”

  They were on the boat deck, looking out at the moon’s path trembling across the water. The air was warm and soft, almost tropical. It was after midnight, and it seemed to Little that his brain, which had brought him this far, had contracted to the width of a laser beam.

  Anne touched her lips to his shoulder. “Impossible’s a big word. If everybody’d thought things were impossible, we’d still be riding in canoes, and here we are on the Queen Elizabeth.”

  “The Queen Elizabeth is possible. I concede that. It’s what you suggest that’s impossible.”

  She turned him, her arms inside his unbuttoned jacket. The touch of her fingers, against his first sunburn in twenty years, was pleasantly painful.

  “What’s wrong with trying?” she whispered.

  They were in bed together, in the narrow bunk in Little’s cabin. Anne’s finger ran down his breastbone and ticked along his ribs.

  “Sweet Jesus, you’re thin. No muscles at all. How do you manage to twirl the knob of that microscope?”

  “We don’t use microscopes. We guess.”

  “Quentin, baby, what made you think you couldn’t?”

  He drew away slightly. “Everyday occurrence and all that. It isn’t an everyday occurrence with me. It isn’t an every-month occurrence. The last time it happened—”

  “A wife and two children. That argues a certain sexual normality.”

  “A wife, true. Surely we don’t want to talk about my domestic sexual arrangements?”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ll give you one word on the subject of Delia. She’s beyond belief.”

  “Then why did you marry her?”

  “I’m a little hard to believe myself at times.”

  Anne plumped up the pillows and rearranged herself. “If I didn’t know you think it’s weak-minded, I’d have a cigarette.”

  “Have one. I’ll join you.”

  She made a small ceremony out of lighting the two cigarettes. Little had given up smoking many years ago, when the statistics proved beyond any possible shadow of doubt that the innocent little things would kill you. But now, he told himself, it hardly mattered, did it? He looked at his watch. Fifty-eight hours.

  “Now,” he said, breathing out smoke. “It’s time to settle accounts.”

  She said quickly, turning, “Quentin, before you say anything. You know I promised myself I was going to find out what was eating you, if it was the last thing I did. And you dared me! I’ve never been able to turn down a dare. I used to break bones all the time. When I’m halfway through a mystery story I always turn to the last page to see who did the killing.”

  “I fully intend to tell you. I know I’m obligated.”

  “I said wait. I’m letting you off the hook.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I mean it. I know—I was willing to seduce you to get it out of you! But things have changed. I’m still curious about your wife. You’re really crazy if you think I’ll be satisfied to be told she’s beyond belief. You can get away with that kind of tight-lipped crap in jolly England. Not here. But as far as the rest of it goes, forget it.”

  She smoked for a moment in silence. “I don’t know how to say it. You’re such a fascinating person. I’ve never met anybody remotely like you. I still don’t know why I bit your toe. There it was at the edge of the pool, big and homely, and it had nothing to do with your intelligence or anything else. Just a fact of life, and I bit it. What I’m trying to say—you aren’t a dare any more. You’re a living, breathing, copulating human being, and probably if I hit you over the head hard enough, you’ll become unconscious. If you don’t want to tell me, don’t tell me. Sigmund Freud didn’t know everything. Maybe it doesn’t help to talk about it. Anyway, do we want to waste our time talking?”

  He felt a stab of irritation. “You’re muddying the waters, Anne. We didn’t put it in writing, but it was a perfectly clear-cut arrangement, and I have no intention of welshing. First sex. Then conversation.”

  She kissed him hard. “Shut up. Keep your goddamn secrets.”

  He pushed her away. “You asked for it. You’re going to get it, the whole thing from the first day. But I warn you, you won’t believe much of it.”

  He hadn’t succeeded in holding onto his cigarette. He brushed it out of bed before the sheets could catch fire. His fumbling attempt at returning to cigarettes struck him as both symbolic and funny. He laughed. It was more of a cough than a laugh, but in an instant it took hold and he couldn’t stop laughing. Even to his own ears it sounded hysterical. Laughter, like sex, was something else he hadn’t done much of recently.

  “And the comical thing,” he said, “is that if I’d known I was capable of this it might not have happened. But nobody can do a damn thing about it now.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The police sedan pulled into the dock area. Ian Cameron, a cop who was very tough, even brutal, but one of the few of the type who realized that criminals were people, reached into the back seat for a paper bag containing a bottle of cognac. He gave it to Michael Shayne.

  “Souvenir of Bermuda. Sorry things worked out this way, Mike.”

  “So am I.”

  The big, ruggedly built private detective still wore the same clothes in which he had arrived on the island. He had passed the last five hours in police offices, answering questions. It sometimes seemed to Shayne that he spent most of his time in that setting, and it was always alike—the same cigar smoke, the same filing cabinets
, the same meaty faces.

  Two people were dead. One, a woman Shayne had known for ten years, had a habit of acting on impulse. This time she had agreed impulsively to come to Bermuda for a two-week vacation with a man she had just met. She didn’t know much about him, and one of the many things she didn’t know was that the reason he wanted to be in Bermuda was to take delivery of a consignment of heroin.

  But she shouldn’t have been killed. Everybody involved in the incident agreed it had been a mistake.

  “I didn’t want to say this with the commissioner listening,” Cameron said. “We should have let you handle it yourself.”

  “My fault,” Shayne grunted.

  “I don’t see that, Mike. Communications got fouled up. The commissioner is a little too prickly about protocol sometimes. And you didn’t have much of a choice, did you? I heard him tell you point-blank to stay out of his hair. It’s his island, after all.”

  Shayne unlatched the door. “I always like to think I have a choice. Next time I won’t bother to check in.”

  Two newspapermen had learned that instead of returning to the mainland by plane, Shayne had made last-minute plans to go by boat. His picture was taken as he came out of the car.

  One of the reporters said politely, “Mr. Shayne, is it true that the woman who was killed this morning was a client of yours?”

  “She was a client once,” Shayne said. “She was also a friend. Talk to the cops about it.”

  “We’ve tried that. They’re refusing to make any statement about your connection with the case. Are you satisfied with the way the police handled it?”

  “They blew it,” Shayne said briefly.

  “Can we quote that, Mr. Shayne?”

  “Put it in big type.”

  He went up the boarding ramp, and as soon as he was aboard, two sailors drew in the ramp and the tugs began to nudge the big ship away from the dock.

  Shayne asked for directions to the shopping arcade. On the way he was the object of more than one unfriendly look. His fellow passengers clearly believed that paying for first-class accommodations on the world’s most famous passenger liner should spare them the sight of somebody who hadn’t shaved for four days and who had obviously slept in the clothes he was wearing.