The Dark Crusader

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Forcing the hatch-cover was easy. Either the wood of the cover was old and dry or the screws holding the bolt in position were rusted for I’d only given the central shank of the bottle-screw half a dozen turns, the counter-threaded eye-bolts steadily forcing themselves farther apart, when I heard the first creak of the wood beginning to give way and splinter. Another half-dozen turns and suddenly all resistance to my turning hand ceased. The bolt had come clear of its moorings and the way out was clear – if, that was to say, Fleck and his friends weren’t standing there patiently waiting to blow my head off as soon as it appeared above the level of the hatch. There was only one way to find out, it didn’t appeal much but at least it was logical. I would stick my head out and see what happened to it.

I handed down the battens and the bottle-screw, checked that the two water drums were conveniently to hand, softly told Marie to switch off the torch, eased the hatch-cover open a few inches and cautiously felt for the bolt. It was just where it ought to have been, lying loose on top of the hatch-cover. I lowered it gently to the deck, bent my back as I took another two steps up the ladder, hooked my fingers over the edge of the hatch-cover and straightened both back and arm in one movement so that the hinged cover swung vertically open and my head was suddenly two feet above deck level. A jack-in-the-box couldn’t have done any better. Nobody shot me.

Nobody shot me because there was nobody there to shoot me, and there was nobody there to shoot me because no one but a very special type of moron would have ventured out on that deck without an absolutely compelling reason. Even then he would have required a suit of armour. If you were willing to stand at the bottom of Niagara Falls and to say to yourself that it was only raining, then you could have said it was raining that night. If anyone ever gets around to inventing a machine-gun that fires water instead of bullets I’ll know exactly what it will be like at the receiving end. Enormous cold drops of water, so close together as to be almost a solid wall, lashed the schooner with a ferocity and intensity I would not have believed possible. The decks were a welter of white seething foam as those cannonball giant drops disintegrated on impact and rebounded high into the air, while the sheer physical weight, the pitiless savagery of that torrential rain drumming on your bent back was nothing short of terrifying. Within five seconds I was literally soaked to the skin. I had to fight the almost overwhelming impulse to pull that cover over my head and retreat to the haven of that suddenly warm and dry and infinitely desirable hold. But then I thought of Fleck and his knock-out drops and of a couple of nice new shiny skeletons on the floor of the sea, and I had the hatch-cover fully back and was on deck, calling softly for the water-drums, before I was properly aware of what I was doing.

Fifteen seconds later Marie and the two drums were on deck and I was lowering the hatch-cover back into position and placing the bolt in approximately the original position in case someone did venture out later on a tour of inspection.

With the darkness and the blinding rain visibility didn’t exceed a few feet and we felt rather than saw our way to the stern of the schooner. I leaned far over the rail on the port counter to try to establish the position of the screw, for although the schooner was making hardly any more than three knots now – I supposed the lack of visibility must have forced Fleck to reduce speed – even so that screw could still chop us up pretty badly. At least that.

At first I could see nothing, just a sea surface that was no longer that but a churned and hissing expanse of milky white froth, but my eyes were gradually becoming more adjusted to the darkness and after a minute or so I could clearly make out the smooth black water in the rain-free shelter under the long overhang of the schooner’s stern. Not quite black – it was black flecked with the sparkling iridescence of phosphorus, and it wasn’t long before I traced the area of maximum turbulence that gave rise to the phosphorescence. That was where the screw was – and it was far enough forward to let us drop off over the sternpost without any fear of being sucked into the vortex of the screw.

Marie went first. She held a water drum in one hand while I lowered her by the other until she was half-submerged in the water. Then I let go. Five seconds later I was in the water myself.

No one heard us go, no one saw us go. And we didn’t see Fleck and his schooner go. He wasn’t using his steaming lights that night. With the line of business he was in, he’d probably forgotten where the switch was.

CHAPTER 3 (#u03a9e4b6-f376-52fc-bd04-20de0e9a040a)

Tuesday 7 p.m.–Wednesday 9 a.m. (#u03a9e4b6-f376-52fc-bd04-20de0e9a040a)

After the numbing stinging cold of that torrential rain the water in the sea was almost blissfully warm. There were no waves, any that dared show its head was beaten flat by that deluge, and what little swell there was was long enough to be no more than a gentle undulation on the surface of the sea. The wind still seemed to be from the east: that was if my assumption that the schooner had still been travelling south had been correct.

For the first thirty seconds or so I couldn’t see Marie. I knew she could be only yards away but the rain bouncing off the water raised so dense and impenetrable a curtain that nothing at sea level could be seen through its milky opacity. I shouted, twice, but there was no reply. I took half a dozen strokes, towing the can behind me, and literally bumped into her. She was coughing and spluttering as if she had swallowed some water, but she still retained hold of her water drum and seemed otherwise unharmed. She was high in the water so she must have remembered to operate the CO

release switch on her lifebelt.

I put my head close to hers and said: ‘All right?’

‘Yes.’ She coughed some more and said: ‘My face and neck. That rain – they feel cut.’

It was too dark to see whether her face was, in fact, cut. But I could believe it, my own face felt as if it had blundered into a wasps’ nest. Black mark for Bentall. The first and most obvious thing that I should have done after opening that hatch and feeling the lash of that cannonading rain should have been to dig some of the left-over clothes out of our suitcases and wrap them round our heads, bandanna-fashion. But too late for tears now. I reached for the plastic bag attached to my drum, ripped it open and spread the blanket over our heads. We could still feel the impact of that rain like a shower of huge hailstones but at least our skins were no longer exposed. It was better than nothing.

When I’d finished arranging it Marie said: ‘What do we do now? Stay here in our tent or start swimming?’

I passed up all the obvious remarks about wondering whether we should swim for Australia or South America, they didn’t even begin to seem funny in the circumstances, and said: ‘I think we should try to move away from here. If this rain keeps up Fleck will never find us. But there’s no guarantee that it will last. We might as well swim west, that’s the way the wind and the swell are running, and it’s easiest for us.’

‘Isn’t that the way Fleck would think and move to the west looking for us?’

‘If he thinks we’re only half as twisted as he is himself, he’ll probably figure we’ve gone in the other direction. Heads you win, tails you lose. Come on.’

We made poor speed. As she’d said, she was no shakes as a swimmer, and those two drums and the soggy heavy blanket didn’t help us much, but we did cover a fair bit of ground in the first hour, swimming for ten minutes, resting for five. If it hadn’t been for the thought that we could do this sort of thing for the next month and still not arrive anywhere, it would have been quite pleasant: the sea was still warm, the rain was beginning to ease and the sharks stayed at home.

After an hour and a half or what I guessed to be approximately that, during which Marie became very quiet, rarely speaking, not even answering when I spoke to her, I said: ‘Enough. This’ll do us. Any energy we have left we’ll use for survival. If Fleck swings this far off course it’s just bad luck and not much that we can do about it.’

I let my legs sink down into the sea, then let out an involuntary exclamation as if I had been bitten or stung. Something large or solid had brushed my leg, and although there are a lot of large and solid things in the sea all I could think of was of something about fifteen feet long with a triangular fin and a mouth like an unsprung bear-trap. And then it came to me that I’d felt no swirl or disturbance in the water and I cautiously lowered my legs again just as Marie said: ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

‘I wish old Fleck would bring his schooner by here,’ I said yearningly. ‘That would be the end of both of them.

It wasn’t that something large and solid had brushed by my leg, it had been my leg brushing by something large and solid, which was a different thing altogether. ‘I’m standing in about four feet of water.’

There was a momentary pause, then she said: ‘Me, too.’ It was the slow dazed answer of one who cannot believe something: more accurately, of one who can’t understand something, and I found it vaguely puzzling. ‘What do you think –?’

‘Land, dear girl,’ I said expansively. I felt a bit light-headed with relief, I hadn’t given tuppence for our chances of survival. ‘The way the sea-bed is sloping up it can be nothing else. Now’s our chance to see those dazzling sands and waving palms and the brown-skinned beauties we’ve heard so much about. Give me your hand.’

There was no answering levity or even gladness from her, she just took my hand in silence as I transferred the blanket to my other hand and started feeling my cautious way up the rapidly shelving sea-floor. In less than a minute we were standing on rock, and on any other night we would have been high and dry. In that rain, we were high and wet. But we were high. Nothing else mattered.

We lifted both water drums on to the shore and I draped the blanket over Marie’s head: the rain had slackened, but slackening on that night was a comparative thing only, it was still fierce enough to be hurtful. I said: ‘I’m just going to take a brief look round. Back in five minutes.’

‘All right,’ she said dully. It didn’t seem to matter whether I came or went.

I was back in two minutes, not five. I’d taken eight steps and fallen into the sea on the other side and it didn’t take me long to discover that our tiny island was only four times as long as it was broad and consisted of nothing but rock. I would have liked to see Robinson Crusoe making out on that little lot. Marie hadn’t moved from where I had left her.

It’s just a little rock in the middle of the sea,’ I reported. ‘But at least we’re safe. For the present, anyway.’

‘Yes.’ She rubbed the rock with the toe of her sandal. It’s coral, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose so.’ As with many others, the sun-drenched coral islands of the Pacific had formed a staple part of my earlier reading diet but when I incautiously sat down to take the weight off my feet and stock of the situation my youthful enthusiasms vanished pretty rapidly. If this was coral it felt like the sort of thing an Indian Fakir might graduate to after he’d mastered the easier stuff, like sleeping on a bed of red-hot nails. The rock was hard, broken, jagged and with frequent spiny razor-sharp edges. I pushed myself quickly to my feet, careful not to cut my hands on the coral, picked up the two drums and set them down on the highest part of the reef. I went back for Marie, took her arm and we sat down side by side on the drums with our backs to the wind and the rain. She offered me part of the blanket as protection, and I wasn’t too proud to take it. It at least gave me the illusion of shelter.

I talked to her for some time, but she only had monosyllables to offer in return. Then I dug a couple of cigarettes out from the packet I’d stowed in my water drum and offered her one, which she took, but that wasn’t very successful either for the blanket leaked like a sieve and inside a minute both cigarettes were completely sodden. After ten minutes or so I said: ‘What’s the matter, Marie? I agree that this is not the Grand Pacific Hotel, but at least we’re alive.’

‘Yes.’ A pause, then matter-of-factly: ‘I thought I was going to die out there tonight. I expected to die. I was so sure I would that this – well, it’s a sort of anticlimax. It’s not real. Not yet. You understand?’

‘No. What made you sure you were going to – ?’ I broke off for a moment. ‘Don’t tell me that you’re still thinking along the same daft lines as you were last night?’

She nodded in the darkness. I felt the movement of the blanket rather than saw that of her head.

‘I’m sorry, I really am. I can’t help it. Maybe I’m not well, it’s never been like this before,’ she said helplessly. ‘You look into the future but almost all the time there isn’t any but if you do catch glimpses of it you’re not there yourself. It’s a kind of curtain drawn between you and tomorrow, and because you can’t see past it you feel that there is none. No tomorrow, I mean.’

‘Superstitious rubbish,’ I said shortly. ‘Just because you’re tired and out of sorts and soaked and shivering, you start having recourse to those morbid fancies. You’re no help to me, just no help at all. Half the time I think Colonel Raine was right and that you would make a first-class partner in this god-forsaken racket of ours: and half the time I’m convinced that you’re going to be a deadweight round my neck and drag me under.’ It was cruel, but I meant to be kind. ‘God knows how you managed to survive this business until now.’

‘I told you it’s new, something completely new for me. It is superstitious nonsense and I’ll not mention it again.’ She reached out and touched my hand. ‘It’s so terribly unfair to you. I’m sorry.’

I didn’t feel proud of myself at all. I let the subject go and returned to the consideration of the South Pacific. I was coming to the conclusion that I didn’t much care for the South Pacific. The rain was the worst I’d ever known: coral was nasty sharp dangerous stuff: it was inhabited by a bunch of homicidally-minded characters: and, another shattered illusion, the nights could be very cold indeed. I felt clammy and chilled under the clinging wetness of that blanket and both of us were shaken by uncontrollable bouts of shivering which grew more frequent as the night wore on. At one stage it seemed to me that the sensible and logical thing for us to do would be to lie down in the very much warmer sea water and spend the night like that but when I went, briefly, to test this theory, I changed my mind. The water was warm enough, what changed my mind was a tentacle that appeared from a cleft in the coral and wrapped itself round my left ankle: the octopus to which it belonged couldn’t have weighed more than a few pounds but it still took most of my sock with it as I wrenched my leg away, which gave me some idea of what to expect if its big brother happened by.

It was the longest, the most miserable night I have ever known. It must have been about midnight when the rain eased off but it continued in a steady drizzle until shortly before dawn. Sometimes I dozed off, sometimes Marie did, but when she did it was a restless troubled sleep, her breathing too shallow and quick, her hands too cold, her forehead too warm. Sometimes we both arose and stumbled precariously on the rough slippery rock to get our circulation moving again, but mostly we sat in silence.

I stared out into the rain and the darkness and I thought of just three things during the interminable hours of that night: the island we were on, Captain Fleck and Marie Hopeman.

I knew little enough about Polynesian islands, but I did recall that those coral islets were of two types: atolls, and barrier reefs for larger islands. If we were on the former, a broken, circular and probably uninhabited ring of coral islets, the future looked bleak indeed: but if it were part of a reef enclosing the lagoon round a large and possibly inhabited island, then we might still be lucky.

I thought of Captain Fleck. I thought of how much I would give for the chance of meeting him again, and what would happen then, and I wondered why he had done what he had done and who was the man behind the kidnap and attempted murder. One thing seemed certain and that was that the missing scientists and their wives were going to stay missing: I had been classified as redundant and would never now find out where they were or what had happened to them. Right then I wasn’t so worried about them, the longing to meet up with Fleck was the predominant emotion in my mind. A strange man. A hard callous ruthless man but a man I would have sworn was not all bad. But I knew nothing of him. All I did know now with certainty was his reason for deciding to wait till nine o’clock before getting rid of us: he must have known that the schooner had been passing a coral reef and if they’d thrown us overboard at seven o’clock we might well have been washed up before morning. If we had been found, identified and traced back to the Grand Pacific Hotel, Fleck would have had a great deal of explaining to do.

And I thought of Marie Hopeman, not as a person but as a problem. Whatever dark forebodings had possessed her had had no validity in themselves, they were just symptomatic of something else, and I no longer had any doubts about what that something else was. She was sick, not mentally but physically: the succession of bad flights from England to Suva and then the night on the boat and now all this all added up to far too little sleep and too little food, and the lack of those coupled with physical exhaustion had lowered her resistance till she was pretty open to anything that came along: and what was coming along was fever or chill or just plain old-fashioned ‘flu: there had certainly been plenty of that around when we had left London. I didn’t like to think what the outcome was going to be if she had to spend another twenty-four hours in sea-soaked clothes on this bare and exposed islet. Or even twelve.

Sometimes during the night my eyes became so tired from staring into the rain and the darkness that I began to have some mild forms of hallucination. I thought I could see lights moving in the rain-blurred distance, and that was bad enough: but when I began to imagine I could hear voices, I resolutely shut my eyes and tried to force myself into sleep. Sitting hunched forward on a water-can with only a soaking blanket for cover, falling off to sleep is quite a feat. But I finally made it, about an hour before the dawn.

I awoke with the sun hot on my back. I woke to the sound of voices, real voices, this time. I awoke to the most beautiful sight I had ever seen.

I flung back the overhanging blanket as Marie stirred and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. It was a gleaming glorious dazzling world, a peaceful sun-warmed panorama of beauty that made the long night just gone a dark nightmare that could never have been.

A string of coral isles and reefs, reefs painted in the most impossible greens and yellows and violets and browns and whites, stretched away on both sides from us in two huge curving horns that all but encircled and enclosed a huge lagoon of burnished aquamarine, and, beyond the lagoon, the most remarkably-shaped island I’d ever laid eyes on. It was as if some giant hand had cut a giant stetson down the middle, and thrown one half away. The island reached its highest point in the extreme north, where it plunged vertically down into the sea: from this peak, it sloped down steeply to the east and south – I could only guess that it would be the same on the west – and where the wide brim of the stetson would have been was a flat plain running down to beaches of dazzling white sand which, even at that hour of the morning and at a distance of three miles, was positively hurtful to the eyes. The mountain itself, a rich bluish-purple in that early sunlight, was bald and bare of any vegetation: the plain below was bare, too, only scrub bushes and grass, with scattered palm down near the water’s edge.

But I didn’t spend much time on the scenery, I’d like to think I’d be right in there with the next man when it came to appreciating the beauties of nature, but not after a rain-soaked and chilly night on an exposed reef: I was far more interested in the outrigger canoe that was coming arrowing in towards us through the mirror-calm waters of that green lagoon.

There were two men in it, big sturdy brown-skinned men with huge mops of crinkly black hair and their paddles were driving in perfect unison into and through the gleaming glass of those waters faster than I would have believed possible, moving so quickly that the flying spray from the paddles was a continuously iridescent rainbow glitter in the rays of the rising sun. Less than twenty yards away from the reef they dug their paddles deep, slowed down their outrigger canoe and brought it slewing round to a standstill less than ten feet away. One of the men jumped out into the thigh-deep water, waded towards us then climbed nimbly up the coral. His feet were bare but the sharp rock didn’t worry him any that I could see. His face was a comical mixture of astonishment and good humour, astonishment at finding two white people on a reef at that hour of the morning, good humour because the world was a wonderful place and always would be. You don’t see that kind of face often, but when you do you can never mistake it. Good humour won. He gave us a huge white grin and said something that meant nothing at all to me.

He could see that it meant nothing at all and he wasn’t the kind of man to waste time. He looked at Marie, shook his head and clucked his tongue as his eyes took in the pale face, the two unnaturally red patches on her cheeks and the purplish shadows under her eyes, then grinned again, ducked his head as in greeting, picked her up and waded out to the canoe. I made it under my own steam, lugging the two water drums along.

The canoe was fitted with a mast, but there was no wind yet, so we had to paddle across the lagoon to the island. At least the two brown men did and I was glad to leave it to them. What they did with that canoe would have had me gasping and wheezing in five minutes and in a hospital bed in ten. They’d have been a sensation at Henley. They kept it up non-stop for the twenty minutes it took us to cross the lagoon, churning up the water as if the Loch Ness monster was after them, but still finding time and energy to chatter and laugh with each other all the way. If they were representative of the rest of the island’s population, we had fallen into good hands.

And that there were others on the island was obvious. As we came close to the shore, I could count at least half a dozen houses, stilted affairs with the floor about three feet off the ground and enormously deep-eaved thatched roofs that swept down steeply from high ridge-poles to within four or five feet of the ground. The houses had neither doors nor windows, understandably enough, for they had no walls either, except for one, the largest, in a clearing near the shore, close in to a stand of coconut palms: the other houses were set farther back and to the south. Still farther south was a metal and corrugated iron eyesore, grey in colour, like an old-fashioned crushing plant and hopper in a quarry. Beyond this again was a long low shed, with a slightly sloping corrugated iron roof: it must have been a real pleasure to work under that when the sun was high in the sky.

We were heading in just to the right of a small pier – not a real landing-stage with anchored piles but a thirty-foot-long floating platform of bound logs, secured on the shore end by ropes tied round a couple of tree stumps – when I saw a man lying on the shore. A white man, sunbathing. He was a lean wiry old bird with a lot of white hair all over his face, dark spectacles on his eyes and a grubby towel strategically placed across his midriff. He appeared to be asleep, but he wasn’t, for when the bow of the canoe crunched into the sand he sat up with a jerk, whipped off this dark glasses, peered myopically in our direction, pawed around the sand till he located a pair of slightly-tinted spectacles, stuck them across the bridge of his nose, said, ‘God bless my soul!’ in an agitated voice jumped to his feet with remarkable speed for such an old duffer and hurried into a nearby palm-thatched hut clutching his towel round him.

‘Quite a tribute to you, my dear,’ I murmured. ‘You looking like something the tide washed up and the old boy about ninety-nine, but you can still knock him for six.’

‘He didn’t seem any too pleased to see us, I thought,’ she said doubtfully. She smiled at the big man who’d just lifted her from the canoe and set her on her feet on the sand and went on: ‘Maybe he’s a recluse. Maybe he’s one of those remittanceman beachcombers and other white people are the last he wants to see.’

‘He’s just gone for his best bib and tucker,’ I said confidently. ‘He’ll be back in a minute to give us the big hand.’

And he was. We’d hardly reached the top of the beach when he reappeared from the hut, dressed in a white shirt and white ducks, with a panama on his head. He’d a white beard, flowing white moustache and plentiful thick white hair. If Buffalo Bill had ever worn tropical whites and a straw hat, he’d have been a dead ringer for Buffalo Bill.

He came puffing down to meet us, his hand outstretched in greeting. I’d made no mistake about the warmth of welcome, but I had about the age: he wasn’t a day over sixty, perhaps only five-five, and a pretty fit fifty-five at that.

‘God bless my soul, God bless my soul!’ He wrung our hands as if we’d brought him the first prize in the Irish Sweepstake. ‘What a surprise! Morning dip, you know – just drying off – couldn’t believe my eyes – where in all the world have you two come from? No, no, don’t answer now. Straight up to my house. Delightful surprise, delightful.’ He scurried off in front of us, God-blessing himself with every other step. Marie smiled at me and we walked after him.

He led us along a short path, across a white-shingled front, up a wide flight of six wooden steps into his house: like the others, the floor was well clear of the ground. But once inside I could see why, unlike the other houses, it had walls: it had to have, to support the large bookcases and glass-covered showcases that lined three-quarters of the wall area of the room. The rest of the walls were given over to doors and window spaces, no glass in the windows, just screens of plaited leaves that could be raised or lowered as wished. There was a peculiar smell that I couldn’t place at first. The floor seemed to be made of the mid-ribs of some type of leaf, coconut palm, probably, laid across close-set joists, and there was no ceiling as such, just steep-angled rafters with thatch above. I looked at this thatch for a long and very interested moment. There was a big old-fashioned roll-top desk in one corner and a large safe against the inside wall. There were some brightly coloured straw mats on the floor, most of which was given over to low-slung comfortable looking rattan chairs and settees, each with a low table beside it. A man could be comfortable in that room – especially with a drink in his hand.