“So I threw the propeller shaft out of gear and cut off the engine ignition. Over me shoulder I saw Mr Ericson stand up in the cockpit behind his chair, and then step up on the gunwale.
“ ‘Put that gun away, Canadian Jack,’ he said, and at the same time he tells him that he whips out an automatic out of a pocket.
“But Malone had the advantage. What happened was too quick for me to follow, but Malone fired one shot and Mr Ericson went at the knees and he dropped straight down over the side, the pistol still held in his right hand. Although the launch propellers ain’t biting the water, the craft are still moving forward fairly fast, and astern of us I seen the bubbles rising from Mr Ericson and the water stained with his blood. I can’t look at nothing else but them bubbles getting farther and farther astern, and then over ’em and among ’em was that mako shark, and the fins of the other two less’n two fathoms away. The water blackened a bit, and I knew them three brutes were fighting over Mr Ericson.
“Me and Bob, here, began to curse Malone for the dirty murdering swine he is; but he keeps cool and says if we don’t go aboard the Dolfin, quick and easy, he’ll put us down with the sharks, too. We can’t do nothing but obey his orders, and Marshall comes with ropes and binds our hands behind our backs so hard that it hurt. Then they takes us below and locks us into a cabin apiece.
“After that I heard the Dolfin’s propeller bite water and the engine accelerate, and I looked out of the port. I couldn’t see nothing, and I couldn’t think of much else beside this act of piracy on the high sea and the murder of poor Mr Ericson. Then the Dolfin got a bump. She was being made fast to the Do-me, I guessed. A minute later the Dolfin went ahead, and I knew by the way she was labouring that she was towing my launch. I could hear hammering going on, and it didn’t seem to be on the Dolfin.
“Presently we crossed the water road above Swordfish Reef, and I seen then that we were heading east and out to sea. I stayed by the port wondering what was going to happen next. Judging by the speed of the Dolfin, and guessing the time we’d been towing the Do-me, I had seen that we’d crossed Continental Reef and was well out in the extra deep water beyond the Continental Shelf, where the bottom’s miles below. Then the Dolfin slowed down and stopped.
“There was another bump when the Do-me coming on behind hit her stern. I could hear Malone talking to Marshall, and then Marshall shouts ‘right-ho’, and the Dolfin gets away again as fast as she could. After a while she slews to starboard, and that brings me looking out at the Do-me lying still a quarter of a mile off. Then the Dolfin stops again.
“I was wondering what it all meant when the Do-me gave a kind of shudder and the water sort of boiled up around her. Soon after that, she began to settle, and I knew they’d blown out her bottom. She went down by the bow. They’d taken Mr Ericson’s rod away from the chair, and I sort of knew they had put it into the cabin, with all other movable things, and then had hammered shut the cabin door. There wasn’t to be no wreckage floating.”
Spinks ceased speaking, and Bony watched the bright drops of water trickle down his ashen face into his black beard. He said nothing, and Spinks went on with heartbreak in his voice:
“She went down bow first. I saw her go down. She was my launch, was the Do-me. I built her. Mother christened her with a bottle of wine. We’d got it all right, mother and me and Marion, just sort of settled down. Owed nothing, you see. And then they come along and kill my angler and sink my launch.”
Bob Garroway began to shout oaths and curses against Rockaway and his men, and Spinks sprawled forward towards him and shouted at him to “shut up”. Confinement for more than three months had made almost beasts of them, and Garroway, still shouting his vile oaths, ran away on his hands and knees like a loathsome spider. Bony could hear him whimpering in a dark corner of the cavern, and he could see Spinks’s face working whilst he fought to regain control of himself.
“He’s getting on my nerves, is Bob. He’s given me a bit of trouble, like. Always growling as though it’s my fault we’re chained in here like a couple of mad dogs.”
“Roll me a cigarette,” Bony asked, soothingly. “What happened after the Do-me sank?”
“After she sank! Oh, we went on out to sea. The Dolfin just pottered about for hours. Once Malone put on speed for half an hour—she can do about sixteen knots, you know—and I thought it was likely that she was getting out of the way of a steamer. She could that, you see, with the haze lying low on the water and her painted dark grey, without the steamer people spotting her. After dark she ran east for coast, and it must have been after eleven that night when we got over the Wapengo bar. Soon as we moored to the jetty I heard Rockaway say to Malone:
“ ‘Did you manage it, Dan?’
“ ‘Yes,’ said Malone. ‘But Ericson drew a gun and I was forced to drop him.’
“ ‘You would be,’ says Rockaway, sneering like. ‘And, I suppose, you were obliged to shoot the launchmen, too?’
“ ‘No, we got ’em down below,’ says Malone. ‘Anyhow, you needn’t worry. There’s no evidence afloat. We sunk the Do-me and watched for flotsam. We left nothing. A school of mako sharks took charge of Ericson’s body.’
“ ‘Ah, well, I suppose you always will be a fool, Dan,’ says Rockaway. ‘Having committed one murder you might just as well have committed two more and have done the job properly.’
“ ‘Oh!’ says Malone. ‘If that’s all that’s necessary to please you, we can soon take the two below out to sea and drown ’em.’
“ ‘And get back here about dawn and have daylight showing us getting the kalsomine off the Dolfin,’ sneers Rockaway. ‘Every time I’m not with you to lead you as if you were a sheep you go and half do a job. You were always like that. You and Marshall take the men along to the cave and chain them as was arranged, and then come back here quick and get the kalsomine off. It’ll be light in four hours.’
“And so,” continued Spinks, “they brought us here. The entrance is ’way back there. They levered a great boulder against the entrance, and since then they’ve lowered tucker down to us through that hole in the roof. If we could have broken these chains one could have got atop the shoulders of the other and climbed free through that hole, but the chains won’t let us stand up, and they took good care to bar off all loose rock we could have broken the chains with. They had everything nicely worked out, and Mr Ericson might have been with us today if he hadn’t draw’d his pistol on Malone.”
“We got cramp in our legs at first,” cried Garroway from the corner to which he had run.
“Yes, we got cramp in our legs,” Spinks said. “It was bad at times. Used to make us howl, it did, but afterwards we didn’t get the cramp. But our knees got sore crawling about on ’em. Passing time was about the worst. I asked Malone one day for something to read, and he said we needn’t bother ’cos Rockaway was getting to believe we’d be better off drowned.
“We lost count of the days, too. I don’t know the month it is now. Then we played five-stones and after that we played at irrigation with the stream flowing across the place, thinking the sand patches either side was paddocks. Then Bob got so that he thought I was to blame for us being here. He lost his block once or twice and took to me. I had to keep a holt on myself, or perhaps Rockaway would have had to drown only one of us. It’s been crook all right. Like being in the condemned cell, I should say, not knowing when they would be coming to take us to sea and drown us in deep water.”
Bony could not see Garroway, but he could hear him muttering. Spinks, squatting beside Bony, became silent. He stared upward at the jagged hole in the roof as, likely enough, he had stared for hours. Then Garroway began to cry, miserably, and Spinks shouted:
“Stop that, Bob, or I’ll dong you one.”
Bony shivered. His head still pained badly; but it was not the pain that made him shiver.
Chapter Twenty-one
Joe Is Unleashed
IT WAS quite dark when, a few minutes after ten o�
�clock, Jack Wilton took the Marlin over the bar and into Wapengo Inlet under the command of his mate who stood beside the mast and issued his steering orders by stamping his feet in accordance with an arranged code. The stars were cool and faintly masked by a high-level haze, and the wind was blowing steadily from the south. The roar of the ocean obliterated the cries of water birds and the plopping of surface fish.
Inside the bar, the Marlin’s engine was stopped, and whilst still moving she was steered into the lee of a land bluff and there anchored. This operation produced no noise, because Joe had replaced the chain with a two-inch rope. Now protected by the bluff from the wind and the ocean surges by the bar, the launch rode easily and safely.
The two men launched a small dinghy, and lowered themselves into it. Wilton took the oars and Joe the tiller. Fifteen minutes later they were at Rockaway’s private jetty.
Standing up in the cockleshell of a boat, and balancing themselves and it by holding to the jetty, they were able to bring their eyes just above the decking and see the upper portion of the Dolfin and the several lights within the distant house on the hill-side. They saw, too, the reflection on the water of a light shining through one of the Dolfin’s ports, and from its position knew that it came from the engine-room.
“Someone aboard,” whispered Joe.
“Must be,” agreed Wilton. “They wouldn’t leave the light on needlessly.”
“What about prospectin’?” inquired Joe, and Wilton saw the movement of his hand down to the business end of a monkey wrench keeping company with his pipes thrust between his paunch and his belt.
“No rough stuff, you old idiot. We’ve got nothing on these people, remember. We’re just a couple of nosey parkers trespassing on other people’s property. To date I’m a fool acting on the beliefs of another one.”
“Then what do we do—stay ’ere all night?”
“We’ve got to find out who’s aboard the Dolfin, and then look into that cave you’ve been talking about. Sit down, and I’ll work the dinghy along closer to the launch.”
By hauling on the jetty decking, Wilton with his feet moved the dinghy under him along the jetty’s side farthest from the Dolfin until he drew opposite her cockpit. Here, when Joe stood up, his shoulders as well as his head were above the level of the decking. Somewhere below, probably in the engine-room as the light there was the only one switched on, a man was whistling the “Dead March in Saul”. Joe shifted his head nearer to his partner and whispered:
“Cheerful, ain’t ’e?”
Wilton hissed for silence. He wanted to listen to a peculiar noise ashore.
“Someone’s coming down with the hand-cart,” he said softly.
They could hear the crunching of the iron-shod wheels on the small gravel of the road leading from the house to the jetty. Inside the Dolfin a spanner was dropped, but the man there continued his doleful whistling. Then along the jetty timbers travelled the vibrations set up by the cart’s wheels passing over the cross planking.
“ ’E’s bringin’ the flamin’ cart out here,” whispered Joe.
“Yes, and we’re a bit too close. Move the dinghy seaward a fathom or two.” With their feet they pushed the boat along the jetty until they gained position opposite the Dolfin’s smart bow which was the farthest part of her from the shore. “That’s better,” Wilton said. “We can see and not chance being seen. They must be bringing stores or petrol aboard for the fishing tomorrow.”
“This time o’ night!” scoffed Joe.
The rumble of the wheels on the planking of the jetty steadily became louder, and presently they could make out the cart and the man who was pushing it. The cart pusher halted the vehicle opposite the Dolfin’s cockpit, raised the handles to slide something off it on to the jetty, and then drew the cart back for a yard or so. He called out loudly:
“Are you there, David?”
It was Rockaway’s butler, Tatter, the precise of speech. A spanner was tossed among others in a box down in the engine-room. The whistling of the Dead March ceased, followed by rubber-soled shoes applied lightly to wood, and then there appeared the man, Marshall.
“How is the work going?” asked Tatter.
“Oh, I found the perishing fault. A cog in the timing gear had broken and I’ve just about fixed another in its place. You got Malone out there?”
“Yes. Mr Rockaway says we are to treat Captain Malone with all respect. Captain Malone had many good points despite his mental cloudiness and inability to live right unless instructed. We are to put the Captain in Cabin One.”
“Captain me aunt’s bootlace,” snorted Marshall.
“He liked to be called Captain,” Tatter said gently. “Come now, let us take him to Cabin One.”
Joe thrust an elbow into Wilton’s ribs, and Marshall said:
“That’s a good job, any’ow. Is the Boss sticking to his plans?”
“He has effected slight alterations,” replied Tatter. “He thought it best to suggest to Miss Rockaway that she take a holiday in Melbourne, and so she left about five o’clock in the sports car. Her absence clears the decks as it were, and Mr Rockaway has become more himself. When we have attended to Captain Malone, I am to go to Bermagui for Mr Bonaparte’s brief-case which you and Captain Malone so stupidly overlooked. I anticipate no difficulty with the hotel safe.”
“How do we know it’s in the hotel safe and not in Telfer’s safe as Bonaparte said?” Marshall asked, surlily.
“Because, David, we know that after Mr Bonaparte returned to the hotel last night he did not again leave it. He persisted in saying that he had persuaded Telfer to lock it up in his safe so that we would be baffled. However, should I not find the case in the hotel safe I will have to look for it in Constable Telfer’s safe. Mr Rockaway must have the brief-case.
“I shall be back not later than three o’clock, when you and I are to bring the prisoners down on the cart. It may be necessary to quieten them with something. We need anticipate no trouble from Mr Bonaparte as he is extremely low: he had not recovered consciousness when I took the prisoners their day’s rations at one, or at seven when again I visited the jail. You struck him much too hard, David, and Mr Rockaway is greatly displeased.
“And so,” went on the somewhat remarkable Tatter, “having the evidence in our possession, that is the brief-case in Mr Rockaway’s hands and the prisoners down below on the Dolfin, all the evidence is to be destroyed. You are to take the Dolfin to sea as soon as it is light, and I am to go with you. We are to go beyond the Continental Shelf where the water is especially deep.”
“I don’t like it, Tatter,” Marshall said, slowly.
“I don’t like it either, David. But then I don’t like shaving and I don’t like reading morbid books. If Captain Malone had been a man of reasoning he would have done the work more thoroughly when he and you sank the Do-me, and we would have been spared this distasteful task of drowning three men in very deep water. Still, we ought not to think badly of Captain Malone now that he is dead.”
From their lower elevation, Wilton and Joe saw the men lift the corpse from the jetty flooring and carry it aboard the Dolfin. They could hear Marshall and Tatter talking like men moving a piano, and a light went on in Cabin One.
“By hell, they’re unholy swine,” Wilton whispered gratingly.
“Casual, ain’t they?” Joe said, cheerfully. “What did I tell you? They got Bill and young Garroway planted in that cave, and per’aps Mr Bonaparte’s with ’em. Now’s our chance to mop up them two down below. Then there’ll be only Jules and old Rockaway.”
At this moment of crisis Wilton was amazed by the clarity and the speed of his own mind. He clearly understood several significant facts and was able to appreciate the degree of their significance. On equal terms, he and Joe would be a good match for Tatter and Marshall. The element of surprise would be to their own advantage. But victory over these two was not assured, and if he and Joe met defeat the fate of Spinks and Garroway, and Bonaparte if he still lived
, would certainly be sure. He had in the dinghy beneath his feet a single-shot rifle, and Joe’s weapon was only a monkey wrench. And then Tatter was to leave immediately on a burgling expedition and would be away for several hours. He was the most dangerous of the bunch, and must be allowed to go. Then Marshall could be dealt with.
“You keep quiet and do nothing,” he fiercely whispered to Joe.
“We gotta begin somewhere and sometime,” argued Joe. Again he was commanded to keep quiet.
Shortly after that Tatter and Marshall reappeared on the jetty. Tatter said:
“It is eleven-thirty, David. I must be going. Report to Mr Rockaway when you have tested the engine and tidied up.”
“All right! I’ll have everything for the trip outside ready in less’n half an hour. And you go careful up in Bermagui. So long.”
Marshall turned back to the Dolfin and Tatter raised the handles of the cart and pushed it away along the jetty. Wilton waited anxiously, listening to the sound of the cart’s wheels until it left the jetty and began the short road journey to the house. Joe fidgeted, irritating his partner. Marshall began again the doleful whistling of the Dead March, and now and then dropped his tools loudly in the box containing others. And then the watchers saw a light glare from beside the house, and heard the throbbing of Tatter’s motor engine. Wilton waited until the noise of the engine was swallowed by the low roar of the surf outside the bar. At last he unleashed Joe.
“Now you can get aboard and take position on the cabin roof. Wait there for Marshall to come up. Make no mistake about him. If he starts yelling he’ll complicate matters.”
“Leave it to me,” pleaded Joe, and without sound he clambered up to the jetty, leaving Wilton to push with his feet the dinghy until it was directly opposite the Dolfin’s cockpit.
Bony - 07 - The Mystery of Swordfish Reef Page 21
