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“What is it, Rusty?” Age-old convention said that cadets should always be addressed by their surnames, but everyone called Rusty just that. It seemed impossible not to.
“The captain’s compliments, sir. Could he see you on the bridge, please, Mr. Carter?”
“I’ll be right up.” Rusty turned to leave and I caught the gleam in Susan Beresford’s eye, a gleam that generally heralded some crack at my expense. This one, predictably, would be about my indispensability, about the distraught captain sending for his trusty servant when all was lost, and although I didn’t think she was the sort of a girl to say it in front of a cadet I wouldn’t have wagered pennies on it so I rose hastily to my feet, said “Excuse me, Miss Harrbride, excuse me, gentlemen,” and followed Rusty quickly out of the door into the starboard alleyway. He was waiting for me.
“The captain is in his cabin, sir. He’d like to see you there.”
“What? You told me——”
“I know, sir. He told me to say that. Mr. Jamieson is on the bridge”—George Jamieson was our third officer—“and Captain Bullen is in his cabin. With Mr. Cummings.”
I nodded and left. I remembered now that Cummings hadn’t been at his accustomed table as I’d come out although he’d certainly been there at the beginning of dinner. The captain’s quarters were immediately below the bridge and I was there in ten seconds. I knocked on the polished teak door, heard a gruff voice and went in.
The Blue Mail certainly did its commodore well. Even Captain Bullen, no admirer of the sybaritic life, had never been heard to complain of being pampered. He had a three-room and bathroom suite, done in the best millionaire’s taste, and his day-cabin, in which I now was, was a pretty fair guide to the rest—wine-red carpet that sunk beneath your feet, darkly-crimson drapes, gleaming sycamore panelling, narrow oak beams overhead, oak and green leather for the chairs and settee. Captain Bullen looked up at me as I came in: He didn’t have any of the signs of a man enjoying the comforts of home.
“Something wrong, sir?” I asked.
“Sit down.” He waved to a chair and sighed. “There’s something wrong all right. Banana-legs Benson is missing. White reported it ten minutes ago.”
Banana-legs Benson sounded like the name of a domesticated anthropoid or, at best, like a professional wrestler on the small town circuits, but in fact, it belonged to our very suave, polished and highly-accomplished head steward, Frederick Benson: Benson had the well-deserved reputation of being a very firm disciplinarian, and it was one of his disgruntled subordinates who, in the process of receiving a severe and merited dressing-down had noticed the negligible clearance between Benson’s knees and rechristened him as soon as his back was turned. The name had stuck, chiefly because of its incongruity and utter unsuitability. White was the assistant chief steward.
I said nothing. Bullen didn’t appreciate anyone, especially his officers, indulging in double-takes, exclamations or fatuous repetition. Instead I looked at the man seated across the table from the captain. Howard Cummings.
Cummings, the purser, a small plump amiable and infinitely shrewd Irishman, was next to Bullen, the most important man on the ship. No one questioned that, though Cummings himself gave no sign that this was so. On a passenger ship a good purser is worth his weight in gold, and Cummings was a pearl beyond any price. In his three years on the Campari friction and trouble among—and complaints from—the passengers had been almost completely unknown. Howard Cummings was a genius in mediation, compromise, the soothing of ruffled feelings and the handling of people in general. Captain Bullen would as soon have thought of cutting off his right hand as of trying to send Cummings off the ship.
I looked at Cummings for three reasons. He knew everything that went on on the Campari, from the secret take-over bids being planned in the telegraph lounge to the heart troubles of the youngest stoker in the boiler-room. He was the man ultimately responsible for all the stewards aboard the ship. And, finally, he was a close personal friend of Banana-legs.
Cummings caught my look and shook his dark head.
“Sorry, Johnny,” I’m as much in the dark as you. I saw him shortly before dinner, about ten to eight it would have been, when I was having a noggin with the paying guests.” Cummings’s noggin came from a special whisky bottle filled only with ginger ale. “We’d White up here just now. He says he saw Benson in cabin suite 6, fixing it for the night, about 8.20—half an hour ago, no, nearer forty minutes now. He expected to see him shortly afterwards because for every night for the past couple of years, whenever the weather was good, Benson and White have had a cigarette together on deck when the passengers were at dinner.”
“Regular time?” I interrupted.
“Very. Eight-thirty, near enough, never later than 8.35. But not tonight. At 8.40 White went to look for him in his cabin. No sign of him there. Organised half a dozen stewards for a search and still nothing doing. He sent for me and I came to the captain.”
And the captain sent for me, I thought. Send for old trusty Carter when there’s dirty work on hand. I looked at Bullen.
“A search, sir?”
“That’s it, Mister. Damned nuisance, just one damned thing after another. Quietly, if you can.”
“Of course, sir. Can I have Wilson, the bo’sun, some stewards and A.B.s?”
“You can have Lord Dexter and his board of directors just so long as you find Benson,” Bullen grunted.
“Yes, sir,” I turned to Cummings. “Didn’t suffer from any ill-health, did he? Liable to dizziness, faintness, heart attacks, that sort of thing?”
“Flat feet, was all,” Cummings smiled. He wasn’t feeling like smiling. “Had his annual medical check-up last month from Doc Marston. One hundred per cent. The flat feet are an occupational disease.”
I turned back to Captain Bullen.
“Could I have twenty minutes, perhaps half an hour, for a quiet look around, sir, first? With Mr. Cummings. Your authority to look anywhere, sir?”
“Within reason, of course.”
“Everywhere?” I insisted. “Or I’m wasting my time. You know that, sir.”
“My God! And it’s only a couple of days since that Jamaican lot. Remember how our passengers reacted to the Customs and American Navy going through their cabins? The board of directors are going to love this.” He looked up wearily. “I suppose you are referring to the passengers’ quarters?”
“We’ll do it quietly, sir.”
“Twenty minutes, then. You’ll find me on the bridge. Don’t tramp on any toes if you can help it.”
We left, dropped down to “A” deck and made a right-left turn into the hundred-foot central passageway between the cabin suites on “A” deck: there were only six of those suites, three on each side. White was about half-way down the passageway, nervously pacing up and down. I beckoned to him and he came walking quickly towards us, a thin, balding character with a permanently pained expression who suffered from the twin disabilities of chronic dyspepsia and over-conscientiousness.
“Got all the pass-keys, White?” I asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Fine.” I nodded to the first main door on my right, number one suite on the port side. “Open it, will you?”
He opened up. I brushed past him, followed by the purser. There was no need to switch on the lights, they were already on; asking the Campari’s passengers, at the prices they were paying, to remember to turn off the lights would have been a waste of breath and an insult.
There were no bunks in the Campari’s cabin suites. Four-posters and massive four-posters at that, with concealed and mechanically operated side-boards which could be quickly raised in bad weather; such was the standard of modern weather reporting, the latitude allowed Captain Bullen in avoiding bad weather and the efficiency of our Denny-Brown stabilisers that I don’t think those side-boards had ever been used. Seasickness was not allowed aboard the Campari.
The suite was composed of a sleeping cabin, an adjacent lounge and bathroom, and beyond the lounge another cabin. All the plate-glass windows faced out over the port aide. We went through the cabins in a minute, looking beneath beds, examining cupboards, wardrobes, behind drapes, everywhere. Nothing. We left.
Out in the passageway again I nodded at the suite opposite. Number two.
“This one now,” I said to White.
“Sorry, sir. Can’t do it. It’s the old man and his nurses, sir. They had three special trays sent up to them when now, let me see, yes, sir, about 6.15 tonight, and Mr. Carreras, the gentleman who came aboard today, he gave instructions that they were not to be disturbed till morning.” White was enjoying this. “Very strict instructions, sir.”
“Carreras?” I looked at the purser. “What’s he got to do with this, Mr. Cummings?”
“You haven’t heard? No, I don’t suppose so. Seems like Mr. Carreras—the father—is the senior partner in one of the biggest law firms in the country, Cerdan & Carreras. Mr. Cerdan, founder of the firm, is the old gentleman in the cabin here. Seems he’s been a semi-paralysed cripple—but a pretty tough old cripple—for the past eight years. His son and wife—Cerdan Junior being the next senior partner to Carreras—have had him on their hands all that time, and I believe the old boy has been a handful and a half. I understood Carreras offered to take him along primarily to give Cerdan Junior and his wife a break. Carreras, naturally, feels responsible for him so I suppose that’s why he left his orders with Benson.”
“Doesn’t sound like a man at death’s door to me,” I said. “Nobody’s wanting to kill him off, just to ask him a few questions. Or the nurses.” White opened his mouth to protest again, but I pushed roughly past him and knocked on the door.
No answer. I waited all of thirty seconds, then knocked again, loudly. White, beside me, was stiff with outrage and disapproval. I ignored him and was lifting my hand to put some real weight on the wood when I heard a movement and suddenly the door opened inwards.
It was the shorter of the two nurses, the plump one, who had answered the door. She had an old-fashioned pull-string linen cap over her head and was clutching with one hand a light woollen wrap that left only the toes of her mules showing. The cabin behind her was only dimly lit, but I could see it held a couple of beds, one of which was rumpled. The free hand with which she rubbed her eyes told the rest of the story.
“My sincere apologies, miss,” I said. “I had no idea you were in bed. I’m the chief officer of this ship and this is Mr. Cummings, the purser. Our chief steward is missing and we were wondering if you may have seen or heard anything that might help us.”
“Missing?” She clutched the wrap more tightly. “You mean—you mean he’s just disappeared?”
“Let’s say we can’t find him. Can you help us at all?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been asleep. You see,” she explained, “we take it in three-hour turns to be by old Mr. Cerdan’s bed. It is essential that he is watched all the time. I was trying to get in some little sleep before my turn came to relieve Miss Werner.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated. “You can’t tell us anything, then?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Perhaps your friend Miss Werner can?”
“Miss Werner?” She blinked at me. “But Mr. Cerdan is not to be——”
“Please. This might be very serious.”
“Very well.” Like all competent nurses she knew how far she could go and when to make up her mind. “But I must ask you to be very quiet and not to disturb Mr. Cerdan in any way at all.”
She didn’t say anything about the possibility of Mr. Cerdan disturbing us, but she might have warned us. As we passed through the open door of his cabin he was sitting up in bed, a book on the blankets before him, with a bright overhead bead-light illuminating a crimson tasselled night-cap and throwing his face into deep shadow, but a shadow not quite deep enough to hide the hostile gleam under bar-straight tufted eyebrows. The hostile gleam, it seemed to me, was as much a permanent feature of his face as the large beak of a nose that jutted out over a straggling white moustache. The nurse who led the way made to introduce us, but Cerdan waved her to silence with a peremptory hand. Imperious, I thought, was the word for the old boy, not to mention bad-tempered and downright ill-mannered.
“I hope you can explain this damnable outrage, sir.” His voice was glacial enough to make a polar bear shiver. “Bursting into my private stateroom without so much as by your leave.” He switched his gimlet eyes to Cummings. “You You there. You had your orders, damn it. Strictest privacy, absolutely. Explain yourself, sir.”
“I cannot tell you how sorry I am, Mr. Cerdan,” Cummings said smoothly. “Only the most unusual circumstances——”
“Rubbish!” Whatever this old coot was living for it couldn’t have been with the object of outliving his friends; he’d lost his last friend before he’d left the nursery. “Amanda! Get the captain on the phone. At once!”
The tall thin nurse sitting on the high-backed chair by the bedside made to gather up her knitting—an all but finished pale blue cardigan—lying on her knees, but I gestured to her to remain where she was.
“No need to tell the captain, Miss Werner. He knows all about it—he sent us here. We have only one very small request to make of you and Mr. Cerdan——”
“And I have only one very small request to make of you, sir.” His voice cracked into a falsetto, excitement or anger or age or all three of them. “Get the hell out of here!”
I thought about taking a deep breath to calm myself but even that two or three seconds’ delay would only have precipitated another explosion, so I said at once: “Very good, sir. But first I would like to know if either yourself or Miss Werner here heard any strange or unusual sounds inside the past hour or saw anything that struck you as unusual: Our chief steward is missing. So far we have found nothing to explain his disappearance.”
“Missing, hah?” Cerdan snorted. “Probably drunk or asleep.” Then, as an afterthought: “Or both.”
“He is not that sort of man,” Cummings said quietly. “Can you help us?”
“I’m sorry, sir.” Miss Werner, the nurse, had a low husky voice. “We heard and saw nothing. Nothing at all that might be of any help. But if there’s anything we can do——”
“There’s nothing for you to do,” Cerdan interrupted harshly, “except your job. We can’t help you, gentlemen. Good evening.”
Once more outside in the passageway I let go a long deep breath that I seemed to have been holding for the past two minutes and turned to Cummings.
“I don’t care how much that old battle-axe is paying for his stateroom,” I said bitterly. “He’s still being undercharged.”
“I can see why Mr. and Mrs. Cerdan, Junior, were glad to have him off their hands for a bit,” Cummings conceded. Coming from the normally imperturbable and diplomatic purser, this was the uttermost limit in outright condemnation. He glanced at his watch. “Not getting anywhere, are we? And in another fifteen, twenty minutes the passengers will start drifting back to their cabins. How about if you finish off here while I go below with White?”
“Right. Ten minutes.” I took the keys from White and started on the remaining four suites of cabins while Cummings left for the six on the deck below.
Ten minutes later, having drawn a complete blank in three of the four remaining suites, I found myself in the last of them, the big one on the port side, aft, belonging to Julius Beresford and his family. I searched the cabin belonging to Beresford and his wife—and by this time I was really searching, not just only for Benson, but for any signs that he might have been there—but again a blank. The same in the lounge and bathroom. I moved into a second and smaller cabin—the one belonging to Beresford’s daughter. Nothing behind the furniture, nothing behind the drapes, nothing under the four-poster. I moved to the aft bulkhead and slid back the roll doors that turned that entire side of the cabin into one huge wardrobe.
Miss Susan Beresford, I reflected, certainly did herself well in the way of clothes. There must have been about sixty or seventy hangers in that wall cupboard, and if any one hanger was draped with anything less than two or three hundred dollars I sadly missed my guess. I ploughed my way through the Balenciagas, Diors and Givenchys, looking behind and beneath. But nothing there.
I closed the roll doors and moved across to a small wardrobe in a corner. It was full of furs, coats, capes, stoles; why anyone should haul that stuff along on a cruise to the Caribbean was completely beyond me. I laid my hand on a particularly fine full-length specimen and was moving it to one side to peer into the darkness behind when I heard a faint click, as of a handle being released, and a voice said:
“It is rather a nice mink, isn’t it, Mr. Carter? That should be worth two years’ salary to you any day.”
III. Tuesday 9.30 p.m.–10.15 p.m. (#ulink_c4c10448-c5c2-550d-ac79-59f565cc0afb)
Susan Beresford was a beauty, all right. A perfectly oval-shaped face, high cheek-bones, shining auburn hair, eyebrows two shades darker and eyes the greenest green you ever saw, she had all the officers on the ship climbing the walls, even the ones she tormented the life out of. All except Carter, that was. A permanent expression of cool amusement does nothing to endear the wearer to me.
Not, just then, that I had any complaint on that ground. She was neither cool nor amused and that was a fact. Two dull red spots of anger—and was there perhaps a tinge of fear?—touched the tanned cheeks and if the expression on her face didn’t yet indicate the reaction of someone who has just come across a particularly repulsive beetle under a flat stone you could see that it was going to turn into something like that pretty soon, it didn’t require any micrometer to measure the curl at the corner of her mouth. I let the mink drop into place and pulled the wardrobe door to.
“You shouldn’t startle people like that,” I said reproachfully. “You should have knocked.”
“I should have——” Her mouth tightened, she still wasn’t amused. “What were you going to do with that coat?”
“Nothing. I never wear mink, Miss Beresford. It doesn’t suit me.” I smiled, but she didn’t. “I can explain.”
“I’m sure you can.” She was half-way round the edge of the door now, on her way out. “But I think I would rather you made the explanation to my father.”
“Suit yourself,” I said easily. “But please hurry. What I’m doing is urgent. Use the phone there. Or shall I do it?”
“Leave that phone alone,” she said irritably. She sighed, closed the door and leaned against it, and I had to admit that any door, even the expensively-panelled ones on the Campari, looked twice the door with Susan Beresford draped against it. She shook her head, then gave me an up from under look with those startling green eyes. “I can picture many things, Mr. Carter, but one thing I can’t visualise is our worthy chief officer taking off for some deserted island in a ship’s lifeboat with my mink in the sternsheets.” Getting back to normal, I noted with regret. “Besides, why should you? There must be over fifty thousand dollars’ worth of jewellery lying loose in that drawer there.”
“I missed that,” I admitted. “I wasn’t looking in drawers. I am looking for a man who is sick or unconscious or worse and Benson wouldn’t fit into any drawer I’ve ever seen.”
“Benson? Our head steward? That nice man?” She came a couple of steps towards me and I was obscurely pleased to see the quick concern in her eyes. “He’s missing?”
I told her all I knew myself. That didn’t take long. When I was finished, she said: “Well, upon my word! What a to-do about nothing. He could have gone for a stroll around the decks, or a sit-down, or a smoke, yet the first thing you do is to start searching cabins——”
“You don’t know Benson, Miss Beresford. He has never in his life left the passenger accommodation before 11 p.m. We couldn’t be more concerned if we’d found that the officer of the watch had disappeared from the bridge or the quartermaster left the wheel. Excuse me a moment.” I opened the cabin door to locate the source of voices outside, and saw White and another steward some way down the passage. White’s eyes lit up as he caught sight of me, then clouded in disapproval when he saw Susan Beresford emerging through the doorway behind me. White’s sense of propriety was having a roller-coaster ride that night.
“I was wondering where you were, sir,” he said reprovingly. “Mr. Cummings sent me up. No luck down below, I’m afraid, sir. Mr. Cummings is going through our quarters now.” He stood still for a moment, then the anxiety came to the foreground and erased the disapproval from his face. “What shall I do now, sir?”
“Nothing. Not personally. You’re in charge till we find the chief steward, and the passengers come first, you know that. Detail the stewards to be at the for’ard entrance to the ‘A’ accommodation in ten minutes’ time. One to search the officers’ quarters for’ard, another for the officers’ quarters aft, the third for the galleys, pantries, store-rooms. But wait till I give the word. Miss Beresford, I’d like to use your phone, please.”
I didn’t wait for permission. I lifted the phone, got the exchange, and had them put me through to the bo’sun’s cabin and found I was lucky. He was at home.
“MacDonald? First mate here. Sorry to call you out, Archie, but there’s trouble. Benson’s missing.”
“The chief steward, sir?” There was something infinitely reassuring about that deep slow voice that had never lost a fraction of its lilting West Highland intonation in twenty years at sea, in the complete lack of surprise or excitement in the tone. MacDonald was never surprised or excited about anything. He was more than my strong right arm, he was deck-side the most important person on the ship. And the most indispensable. “You’ll have searched the passengers’ and the stewards’ quarters, then?”
“Yes. Nothing doing. Take some men, on or off watch, doesn’t matter, move along the main decks. Lots of the crew usually up there at this time of night. See if any of them saw Benson, or saw or heard anything unusual. Maybe he’s sick, maybe he fell and hurt himself, for all I know he’s overboard.”
“And if we have no luck? Another bloody search, sir, I suppose?”
“I’m afraid so. Can you be finished and up here in ten minutes?”
“That will be no trouble, sir.”
I hung up, got through to the duty engineer officer, asked him to detail some men to come to the passenger accommodation, made another call to Tommy Wilson, the second officer, then asked to be put through to the captain. While I was waiting, Miss Beresford gave me her smile again, the sweet one with too much malice in it for my liking.
