* * *
—
At midnight the deck lights were dimmed. The strollers began to thin out. Val stayed out, for he was not sleepy. For hours he had been thinking about Nancy Fraser and this new bit of business. Who was so interested in her? What did it mean?
In other professions one might have shrugged the whole matter aside until something else happened. But not in his and Nancy Fraser’s. If they didn’t think at least two jumps ahead of the other party the results might be disastrous.
A steward passed with a tray holding a pot of coffee.
“Bring me a pot of coffee,” Val told him.
And the steward touched his cap. “Yes, sir. Soon as I get back, sir.”
Val leaned on the rail and stared out at the vast expanse of sea heaving slowly under the moonlight. Light steps came to his side. It was Nancy Fraser.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said under her breath. “I wondered if I would find you out here.”
“I’m having coffee in a few minutes. Care for some?”
“Sounds good. It might help my memory. I’ve been lying in bed trying to think of any suspicious move I’ve seen since I came aboard. I’m stymied.”
“Ditto,” Val admitted.
They waited there at the rail, talking low. Nancy said finally: “I thought you had ordered coffee.”
Val looked at his wrist watch and saw that twenty-five minutes had passed as they lingered at the rail. “That steward must have forgotten it,” he said irritably. “Let’s look him up.”
They walked slowly back along the deck. And suddenly, without warning, a woman screamed with shrill hysterical fear!
Nancy Fraser stopped short, her hand gripping Val’s arm convulsively. “What’s wrong?” she gasped.
The scream had come from ahead of them. Near the rear of the dimly lighted promenade Val saw two feminine figures backing toward the rail.
“I’ll see,” he jerked out under his breath, and leaving Nancy Fraser to follow, he ran toward the spot. He met the two women hurrying toward him. Two middle-aged spinsters. He had noticed them before during the trip. And now they were badly frightened. One was near hysteria as she turned and pointed back to the spot where Val had first seen them.
“There’s something wrong there!” she cried shrilly. “I s-stumbled over an arm sticking out of the doorway! I—I think someone is d-dead!”
“Wait here!” Val ordered sharply. “If anyone’s dead you can’t be hurt!”
He found the door a moment later, and as he came up to it saw an arm thrust out at the bottom. A white-clad arm, sticking straight and motionless into the dim light of the deck. An arm that lay on the floor, its rigid fingers grasping talonlike at the empty air.
Val swore softly under his breath. It was a ghastly sight. For that arm seemed to be reaching, groping with desperate futility for something that had withdrawn beyond reach.
He stooped and lifted the hand. The flesh was clammy and cooling already. It was flaccid, limp, with that slackness which comes only from one thing. Whatever the arm had been reaching for, it had found only—death.
The door was ajar. The cabin inside was dark, silent.
Doors were opening along the deck; passengers were looking out. Nancy Fraser joined him.
“What is it?” she asked breathlessly.
Val reached inside for the light switch. “You’d better not look,” he advised. “This won’t be nice.”
“I’ve probably seen worse sights,” she retorted coolly, and looked in past his shoulder as the light flashed on inside.
* * *
—
Whatever sights Nancy had witnessed before, they had not hardened her enough to stop the gasp of horror which burst from her. Even Val himself could not take it coolly. The steward whom he had accosted half an hour before was lying there on the floor before them. Lying, twisted on his side, knees pulled half up, one hand clutching the front of his white jacket and the other reaching out through the door in that frantic, gruesome gesture. And on the doorsill his face was turned up to them drawn and crimsoned with congested blood, mouth open, tongue protruding, and bulging eyes set in a horrible sightless stare.
“He’s dead!” Nancy said huskily.
Val nodded. “Yes. Dead all right. This is the man I ordered coffee from. No wonder he didn’t bring it!”
Looking beyond the body, he saw on the floor the tray the steward had been carrying. It had been dropped. Cup and saucer were shattered into bits. The pot lay on its side, the dark brown contents making a long stain on the rug, surrounded by a snowy sprinkling of sugar.
“He died almost as soon as he entered,” Val muttered. “Didn’t even have a chance to put his tray down. Dropped it cold.”
His eyes ran over the body as he said that. There was no sign of blood. And no marks of a struggle either. Except for the spot in front where the starched white cloth was caught in convulsive fingers, the coat was neat and trim. Even the man’s carefully combed black hair was in place. It had been smoothed down with hair dressing, and was as sleek as it had been when he had walked along the deck.
Nancy noticed all that too, for she said: “It must have been heart failure.”
“Looks that way,” Val agreed.
A deck officer came running up in the van of half a dozen passengers closing in on the spot. “What is it?” he panted.
“One of your stewards must have had a heart attack,” Val said, standing aside so that the officer could get a good look.
The bronze-cheeked, broad-shouldered young man pushed the door open all the way and stepped inside.
“Here’s what’s this?” he uttered in a startled voice. “Wake up, sir!” And over his shoulder: “The man must be a sound sleeper!”
Stepping in too, Val saw what he had missed with the door partly closed and his attention centered around the doorway. The bed was occupied by a man clad in blue silk pajamas.
“That man’s not sleeping!” Val said sharply.
The young deck officer swore softly. “He—he’s dead too!” he said shakily.
In fact, it was hard to see how the officer had been mistaken in the first place. No man would be sleeping that way. For the occupant of the bed lay in a twisted, contorted position also. One hand clutched his throat. The other had hooked around a pillow drawing it tightly against his side as if he had grabbed wildly at the nearest thing. The covers had been kicked down. One more roll would have taken the body off on the floor. And the mouth was open, the tongue protruding, the features congested with blood exactly as the steward’s were.
Both men had died the same way.
All that Val got in a glance. And in the same moment he recognized the man on the bed with dumbfounded surprise. It was Carmody, the cheerful British book salesman!
* * *
—
Carmody’s body bore no marks of violence either. No wounds. No blood. The death that had come to him as he lay in bed was the more ghastly and mysterious because of it.
“I’ll get the captain and the ship’s doctor here!” said the deck officer hoarsely. “Watch the cabin will you, please? Keep these people out.” And as he stepped out, the young man closed the door as far as he could and said appealingly to the passengers gathering outside: “Please return to your cabins.”
But by the excited remarks that drifted in, none of them paid any attention to the request. Val bent over the bed and touched the arm clutching the pillow. It was rigid. Frowning, he tested one of the legs. Rigor mortis had already set in. The flesh was cold.
It was not logical. He turned to the steward. That body was still flaccid, and the flesh was warm in comparison with the body on the bed.
Val fumbled for a cigarette, and then thought better of it and stood staring from one to the other. Both men had died in
the same manner. One body was cold and set with rigor mortis and the other was warm and limp. It did not make sense.
There were cases, Val knew, where rigor mortis set in quickly. But this death that had come in the same manner to both men would not react so differently. There was only one conclusion to draw. The steward had been dead for half an hour—Carmody had been dead for hours.
And yet both had died in the same manner! Both had died horribly, yet without marks of violence! The door opened and Nancy slipped in and closed it behind her. “They’re gabbling out there like a flock of excited chickens and roosters,” she whispered. “What’s the explanation of all this?”
Val shrugged helplessly. “I’m wondering.” He told her what he had discovered. “D’you know this man?” he asked, jerking a thumb toward Carmody.
“No.”
Carmody’s coat and trousers were neatly hung up; his shoes were together on the floor, his shirt and tie and underwear on a chair as he had taken them off and arranged them. Under the bed was a gladstone bag, apparently undisturbed. Everything else in the cabin was in order.
The window was closed. A fragment of memory sent Val to the door. In the outside of the lock was a key with a small wooden handle to it—the steward’s master key which he had apparently used to open the locked door.
Val shook his head in answer to the questions that were thrown at him by the people outside, and closed the door again.
“It’s got me stumped,” he confessed to Nancy. “There’s a gruesome mystery here.”
And when, a few moments later, the captain and the ship’s surgeon entered, Val explained how he and Nancy happened to be in there, and pointed out what he had found.
Captain MacCreagh was a burly, weather-beaten man who still carried the dogged gruff manner of old sailing days. Doctor Simms, the ship’s doctor, was short and slender, with a neat Vandyke and shell-rimmed glasses. He made a swift examination of the bodies, and then pulled the steward’s outstretched arm in enough to let the door close tightly.
Captain MacCreagh had been watching impatiently. Now he demanded: “What do you think of it, doctor?”
The doctor polished his glasses with the middle of a handkerchief. “Mr. Easton is right,” he said slowly. “These men did not die at the same time. That one on the bed has been dead for hours. And this steward died very recently.”
“What killed them?”
* * *
—
The doctor fitted his glasses precisely on his nose, glanced at the bodies, and then at the captain. “I would suggest an autopsy, captain. Neither of them has been wounded in any manner, as far as I can see. They have all the appearance of dying from suffocation, yet there are no marks about their throats to indicate any violence which would cause that.”
“In other words,” the captain snorted, “you don’t know anything about it.”
The doctor was unruffled. “Precisely,” he answered calmly. “I have never seen anything quite like it. The window is closed. The door was apparently locked, or the steward would not have used his key from the outside.”
“That means,” Val pointed out quickly, “that the steward was delivering an order to a man who had been dead in his locked cabin for hours.”
The captain glared at him. “Then who ordered it?” he snapped.
“Perhaps the autopsy will show that,” Val smiled.
“Hmmmmph!”
The captain stepped to the door, opened it, beckoned the deck officer, and growled: “Check up on the order that was brought here by this steward. Find what time it was given and who ordered it.” And when he closed the door again, the captain said: “I wonder who this chap is.”
Val mentioned what he knew of Carmody, which was little enough.
“We’ll search his effects and see if there’s anything more,” the captain decided. “He ought to have his passport and some papers. His people will have to be notified by radio, and asked what to do with the body. Blast it, I hate a business like this! It’s bad for a ship’s reputation.”
Val suggested: “Right now it’s more to the point to find out what killed them.”
“You talk like a detective.”
“I’m not,” said Val calmly, and let the matter rest there. But he and Nancy Fraser stayed as the captain and the doctor hurriedly searched the cabin.
They found a billfold and some small change, a pocketknife, a fountain-pen flashlight clipped inside the coat, passport book and several letters, a key that opened the locked gladstone.
The captain’s thick fingers fumbled through the clothes inside. With a grunt he drew out an English army–model automatic pistol and two extra clips filled with cartridges.
“Hmmmph,” he said, tossing them on the bed. “What does he want to carry these for? Army model too. I guess that’s all. No—what’s this?”
The captain drew out a small thin black leather wallet. As he opened it a little silver badge dropped to the floor. He let it lie as he looked inside. The wallet was empty and he tossed it and the silver badge on the bed also.
“That’s all,” he said. “And not much. His address is on the passport. That will be enough for my purpose, I guess.”
Val hardly heard him. His glance had riveted in startled surprise on the badge the captain had picked up. And Nancy Fraser’s had done the same thing. Their eyes met for a moment and it would have taken many words to interpret the meaning that flashed between them.
For Carmody, the smiling book salesman, had been proved by that badge to be a Secret Service agent of the British government!
CHAPTER THREE
COLD STEEL—WELL DONE
There are times when terror can be quiet, insidious, hidden. So it was now. Murder had been done. Cold-blooded murder, unbelievably clever in its execution. How it had been done Val Easton did not pretend to know at the moment. Why, he might never know. But from the instant he was aware of Carmody’s real mission, he knew it hooked up with Nancy Fraser. The man who had been lurking outside her cabin window was the one to explain this.
And if Carmody had been removed so skilfully and ruthlessly, why not Nancy Fraser and her companion? Why not himself, now that he was identified with them?
The deck officer returned.
“The coffee’s easy to explain, sir,” he told Captain MacCreagh. “This chap Carmody left an order with the steward to bring him coffee around midnight every night. Seems he was troubled with insomnia, or something like that. Couldn’t sleep if he didn’t have his coffee in the middle of the night.”
“He’ll have no trouble sleeping now,” the captain remarked grimly. Doctor Simms fingered his Vandyke thoughtfully. “Queer. Mighty queer,” he murmured, glancing at the bodies.
“What?” the captain rasped.
“This steward’s death. Carmody had been dead for hours when the man arrived with the tray. The cabin was dark and the door was locked. It isn’t reasonable to suppose that the killer remained in here all that time.”
“No,” admitted the captain testily. “He’d be a fool to do it.”
“Exactly. The steward arrived, unlocked the door, stepped in—and died almost instantly. There was no struggle. There could not have been any noise, or someone out on the deck would have heard it. He simply died on the spot as Carmody had done. From the position of the body I would say he died as he was trying to back out the door.”
“Dammit, man, something happened to him!” the captain snorted impatiently.
“I can’t suggest what it was,” Doctor Simms remarked coolly.
And there the matter rested.
While preparations were being made to put the bodies in the morgue, Val casually glanced at the papers which had been taken from Carmody’s coat. He found nothing that might help him, and left the cabin a few moments later with Nancy Fraser.
“I think I’ll stay up tonight,” Nancy said calmly. “I don’t want to be found that way in the morning.”
Val shot her a quick look. “You think it touches you?”
“Don’t you?” she countered.
“Perhaps….”
Nancy said with conviction: “I’m not timid, but I have a hunch this is far worse than anything I’ve been up against before. This isn’t wartime. Murder isn’t on the cards now. An ordinary espionage agent wouldn’t try a thing like that. It’s creepy, ghastly.”
“American and British agents are out,” Val said soberly. “Carmody didn’t seem especially dangerous to me. I think you’re right. You’ve walked into something bigger than you think.”
“Big enough for—murder,” said Nancy slowly. She chuckled softly in a way that showed her nerve was unshaken, and laid a steady hand on Val’s arm. “At least, my friend, we should be thankful we know as much as we do. We might have gone ahead blindly—and drawn the same thing. Tomorrow is another day. We’ll see….”
* * *
—
Tomorrow was another day, of bright sunshine over the fantastic, serrated skyline of New York, as the big liner plowed slowly up the bay.
During the night the ship had been in the grip of suppressed excitement. The bodies had been removed to the ship’s morgue. The room had been locked and sealed. Wireless messages had crackled forth to shore. Passengers had been questioned, scrutinized. And at quarantine detectives hastily summoned from shore had come over the side with the ship reporters. Flashlight pictures of the cabin were taken: thumbprints were photographed. Passengers were diplomatically interrupted at their packing and last-minute preparations for going ashore, and questioned suavely. The newspapermen probed like hawks.
Val and Nancy were questioned by newspapermen and detectives. Their stories were brief and of little help. Of their business, or the man who had been lurking outside Nancy Fraser’s cabin window nothing was said.
The Big Book of Espionage Page 92
