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“My, my,” she said admiringly. “Aren’t we efficient? Phoning here, phoning there, crisp and commanding, General Carter planning his campaign. This is a new chief officer to me.”
“A lot of unnecessary fuss,” I said apologetically. “Especially for a steward. But he’s got a wife and three daughters who think the sun rises and sets on him.”
She coloured right up to the roots of her auburn hair and for a moment I thought she was going to haul off and hit me. Then she spun on her heel, walked across the deep-piled carpet and stood staring out through a window to the darkness beyond. I’d never realised before that a back could be so expressive of emotion.
Then Captain Bullen was on the phone. His voice was as gruff and brusque as usual, but even the metallic impersonality of the phone couldn’t hide the worry.
“Any luck yet, Mister?”
“None at all, sir. I’ve a search party lined up. Could I start in five minutes?”
There was a pause, then he said: “It has to come to that, I suppose. How long will it take you?”
“Twenty minutes, half an hour.”
“You’re going to be very quick about it, aren’t you?”
“I don’t expect him to be hiding from us, sir. Whether he’s sick or hurt himself, or had some urgent reason for leaving the passengers’ quarters, I expect to find him in some place pretty obvious.”
He grunted and said: “Nothing I can do to help?” Half-question, half-statement.
“No, sir.” The sight of the captain searching about the upper deck or peering under lifeboat covers would do nothing to increase the passengers’ confidence in the Campari.
“Right then, Mister. If you want me, I’ll be in the telegraph lounge. I’ll try to keep the passengers out of your hair while you’re getting on with it.” That showed he was worried all right, and badly worried; he’d just as soon have gone into a cageful of Bengal tigers as mingle socially with the passengers.
“Very good, sir.” I hung up. Susan Beresford had re-crossed the cabin and was standing near, screwing a cigarette into a jade holder about a foot in length. I found the holder vaguely irritating as I found everything about Miss Beresford irritating, not least the way she stood there confidently awaiting a light. I wondered when Miss Beresford had last been reduced to lighting her own cigarettes. Not in years, I supposed, not so long as there was a man within a hundred yards. She got her light, puffed out a lazy cloud of smoke and said: “A search party, is it? Should be interesting. You can count on me.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Beresford.” I must say I didn’t sound sorry. “Ship’s company business. The captain wouldn’t like it.”
“Nor his first officer, is that it? Don’t bother to answer that one.” She looked at me consideringly. “But I could be unco-operative, too. What would you say if I picked up this phone and told my parents I’d just caught you going through our personal belongings?”
“I should like that, lady. I know your parents. I should like to see you being spanked for behaving like a spoilt child when a man’s life may be in danger.”
The colour in the high cheek-bones was going on and off like a neon light that evening. Now it was on again; she wasn’t by a long way as composed and detached as she’d like the world to think. She stubbed out the newly-lit cigarette and said quietly: “How would it be if I reported you for insolence?”
“Don’t just stand there talking about it. The phone’s by your side.” When she made no move towards it I went on: “Quite frankly, lady, you and your kind make me sick. You use your father’s great wealth and your privileged position as a passenger on the Campari to poke fun, more often than not malicious fun, at members of the crew who are unable to retaliate. They’ve just got to sit and take it, because they’re not like you. They have no money in the bank at all, most of them, but they have families to feed, mothers to support, so they know they have to keep smiling at Miss Beresford when she cracks jokes at their expense or embarrasses or angers them, because if they don’t, Miss Beresford and her kind will see to it that they’re out of a job.”
“Please go on,” she said. She had suddenly become very still.
“That’s all of it. Misuse of power, even in so small a thing, is contemptible. And then, when anyone dares retaliate, as I do, you threaten them with dismissal, which is what your threat amounts to. And that’s worse than contemptible, it’s cowardly.”
I turned and made for the door. First I’d look for Benson, then I’d tell Bullen I was quitting. I was getting tired of the Campari anyway.
“Mr. Carter.”
“Yes?” I turned, but kept my hand on the door-knob. The colour mechanism in her cheeks was certainly working overtime, this time she’d gone pale under the tan. She took a couple of steps towards me and put her hand on my arm. Her hand wasn’t any too steady.
“I am very, very sorry,” she said in a low voice. “I had no idea. Amusement I like, but not malicious amusement. I thought—well, I thought it was harmless, and no one minded. And I would never never dream of putting anyone’s job in danger.”
“Ha!” I said.
“You don’t believe me.” Still the same small voice, still the hand on my arm.
“Of course I believe you,” I said unconvincingly. And then I looked into her eyes, which was a big mistake and a very dangerous thing to do for those big green eyes, I noticed for the first time, had a curious trick of melting and dissolving that could interfere very seriously with a man’s breathing. It was certainly interfering with my breathing. “Of course I believe you,” I repeated and this time the ring of conviction staggered even myself. “You will please forgive my rudeness. But I must hurry, Miss Beresford.”
“Can I come with you, please?”
“Oh, damn it all, yes,” I said irritably. I’d managed to look away from her eyes and start breathing again. “Come if you want.”
At the for’ard end of the passageway, just beyond the entrance to Cerdan’s suite, I ran into Carreras Senior. He was smoking a cigar and had that look of contentment and satisfaction that passengers invariably had when Antoine was finished with them.
“Ah, there you are, Mr. Carter,” he said. “Wondered why you hadn’t returned to our table. What is wrong, if I may ask? There must be at least a dozen of the crew gathered outside the accommodation entrance. I thought regulations forbade——”
“They’re waiting for me, sir. Benson—you probably haven’t had the chance to meet him since you came aboard, he’s our chief steward—is missing. That’s a search-party outside.”
“Missing?” The grey eyebrows went up. “What on earth—well, of course you haven’t any idea what has happened to him or you wouldn’t be organising this search. Can I help?”
I hesitated, thought of Miss Beresford, who had already elbowed her way in, realised I’d now no way of stopping any or all of the passengers from getting into the act if they wanted to and said: “Thank you, Mr. Carreras. You don’t look like a man who would miss very much.”
“We come from the same mould, Mr. Carter.”
I let his cryptic remark go and hurried outside. A cloudless night, with the sky crowded with the usual impossible number of stars, a soft warm wind blowing out of the south, a moderate cross-swell running, but no match for our Denny-Brown stabilisers that could knock 25 degrees off a 30-degree roll without half trying. A black shape detached itself from a nearby shadowed bulkhead, and Archie MacDonald, the bo’sun, came towards me. For all his solid fifteen stone bulk he was as light on his feet as a dancer.
“Any luck, Bo’sun?” I asked.
“No one saw anything: no one heard anything. And there were at least a dozen folk on deck tonight, between eight and nine.”
“Mr. Wilson there? Ah, there. Mr. Wilson, take the engine-room staff and three A.B.s Main deck and below. You should know where to look by this time,” I added bitterly. “MacDonald, you and I will do the upper decks. Port side you, starboard side me. Two seamen and a cadet. Half an hour. Then back here.”
I sent one man to examine the boat positions—why Benson should have wished to get into a boat I couldn’t even imagine except that lifeboats have always a queer attraction for those who wished to hide, although why he should wish to hide I couldn’t guess either—and another to scour the top superstructure abaft the bridge. I started going through the various cabins on the boat-deck, chart-house, flag and radar cabins, and had Mr. Carreras to help me. Rusty, our youngest apprentice, went aft to work his way for’ard, accompanied by Miss Beresford, who had probably guessed, and rightly, that I was in no mood for her company. But Rusty was. He always was. Nothing that Susan Beresford said to or about him made the slightest difference to him. He was her slave and didn’t care who knew it. If she’d asked him to jump down the funnel, just for her sake, he’d have considered it an honour: I could just imagine him searching about the upper decks with Susan Beresford by his side, his face the same colour as his flaming shock of hair.
As I stepped out of the radar office I literally bumped into him. He was panting, as if he’d run a long way, and I could see I had been wrong about the colour of his face: in the half-light on the deck it looked grey, like old newspaper.
“Radio office, sir.” He gasped out the words, and caught my arm, a thing he would never normally have dreamed of doing. “Come quickly, sir. Please.”
I was already running. “You found him?”
“No, sir. It’s Mr. Brownell.” Brownell was our chief wireless operator. “Something seems to have happened to him.”
I reached the office in ten seconds, brushed past the pale blur of Susan Beresford standing just outside the door, crossed over the storm-sill and stopped.
Brownell had the overhead rheostat turned down until the room was less than half-lit, a fairly common practice among radio operators on duty night watches. He was leaning forward over his table, his head pillowed on his right forearm, so that all I could see was his shoulders, dark hair and a bald spot that had been the bane of his life. His left hand was outflung, his fingers just brushing the bridge telephone. The transmitting key was sending continuously. I eased the right forearm forward a couple of inches. The transmitting stopped.
I felt for the pulse in the outstretched left wrist. I felt for the pulse in the side of the neck. I turned to Susan Beresford, still standing in the doorway, and said: “Do you have a mirror.” She nodded wordlessly, fumbled in her bag and handed over a compact, opened, the mirror showing. I turned up the rheostat till the radio cabin was harsh with light, moved Brownell’s head slightly, held the mirror near mouth and nostrils for maybe ten seconds, took it away, glanced at it and then handed it back.
“Something’s happened to him all right,” I said. My voice was steady, unnaturally so. “He’s dead. Or I think he’s dead. Rusty, get Dr. Marston right away, he’s usually in the telegraph lounge this time of night. Tell the captain, if he’s there. Not a word to anyone else about this.”
Rusty disappeared, and another figure appeared to take his place beside Susan Beresford in the doorway. Carreras. He stopped, one foot over the storm-sill, and said: “My God! Benson.”
“No, Brownell. Wireless officer. I think he’s dead.” On the off-chance that Bullen hadn’t yet gone down to the lounge I reached for the bulkhead phone labelled “Captain’s Cabin” and waited for an answer, staring down at the dead man sprawled across the table. Middle-aged, cheerful, his only harmless idiosyncrasy being an unusual vanity about his personal appearance that had once even driven him to the length of buying a toupee for his bald spot—public shipboard opinion had forced him to discard it—Brownell was one of the most popular and genuinely liked officers on the ship. Was? Had been. I heard the click of a lifted receiver.
“Captain? Carter here. Could you come down to the wireless office? At once, please.”
“Benson?”
“Brownell. Dead, sir, I think.”
There was a pause, a click. I hung up, reached for another phone that connected directly to the radio officers’ cabins. We had three radio officers and the one with the middle watch, from midnight to 4 a.m., usually skipped dinner in the dining-room and made for his bunk instead. A voice answered: “Peters here.”
“First mate. Sorry to disturb you, but come up to the radio room right away.”
“What’s up?”
“You’ll find out when you get here.”
The overhead light seemed far too bright for a room with a dead man in it. I turned down the rheostat and the white glare was replaced by a deep yellow glow. Rusty’s face appeared in the doorway. He didn’t seem so pale any more but maybe the subdued light was just being kind to him.
“Surgeon’s coming, sir.” His breathing was quicker than ever. “Just picking up his bag in the dispensary.”
“Thanks. Go and fetch the bo’sun, will you. And no need to kill yourself running, Rusty. There’s no great hurry now.”
He left, and Susan Beresford said in a low voice: “What’s wrong? What—what happened to him?”
“You shouldn’t be here, Miss Beresford.”
“What happened to him?” she repeated.
“That’s for the ship’s surgeon to say. Looks to me as if he just died where he sat. Heart attack, coronary thrombosis, something like that.”
She shivered, made no reply. Dead men were no new thing to me but the faint icy prickling on the back of my neck and spine made me feel like shivering myself. The warm trade wind seemed cooler, much cooler, than it had a few minutes ago.
Doctor Marston appeared. No running, no haste even, with Dr. Marston: a slow measured man with a slow measured stride. A magnificent mane of white hair, clipped white moustache, a singularly smooth and unlined complexion for a man getting so far on in years, steady clear keen blue eyes with a peculiarly penetrating property, here, you knew instinctively, was a doctor who you could trust implicitly, which only went to show that your instinct should be taken away from you and locked up in some safe place where it couldn’t do you any harm. Admittedly, even to look at him made you feel better, and that was all right as far as it went: but to go further, to put your life into his hands, say, was a very different and dicey proposition altogether for there was an even chance that you wouldn’t get it back again. Those piercing eyes had not lighted on the Lancet or made any attempt to follow the latest medical developments since quite a few years prior to the Second World War. But they didn’t have to: he and Lord Dexter had gone through prep school, public school and university together and his job was secure as long as he could lift a stethoscope. And, to be fair to him, when it came to treating wealthy and hypochondriacal old ladies he had no equal on the seven seas.
“Well, John,” he boomed. With the exception of Captain Bullen, he addressed every officer on the ship by his first name exactly as a public school headmaster would have addressed one of his more promising pupils, but a pupil that needed watching all the same. “What’s the trouble? Beau Brownell taken a turn?”
“Worse than that, I’m afraid, Doctor. Dead.”
“Good lord! Brownell? Dead? Let me see, let me see. A little more light if you please, John.” He dumped his bag on the table, fished out his stethoscope, sounded Brownell here and there, took his pulse and then straightened with a sigh. “In the midst of life, John … and not recently, either. Temperature’s high in here but I should say he’s been gone well over an hour.”
I could see the dark bulk of Captain Bullen in the doorway now, waiting, listening, saying nothing.
“Heart attack, Doctor?” I ventured. After all he wasn’t all that incompetent, just a quarter century out of date.
“Let me see, let me see,” he repeated. He turned Brownell’s head and looked closely at it. He had to look closely. He was unaware that everyone in the ship knew that, piercing blue eyes or not, he was as short-sighted as a dodo, and refused to wear glasses. “Ah, look at this. The tongue, the lips, the eyes, above all the complexion. No doubt about it, no doubt about it at all. Cerebral hæmorrhage. Massive. And at his age. How old, John?”
“Forty-seven, eight. Thereabouts.”
“Forty-seven. Just forty-seven.” He shook his head. “Gets them younger every day. The stress of modern living.”
“And that outstretched hand, Doctor?” I asked. “Reaching for the phone. You think——”
“Just confirms my diagnosis, alas. Felt it coming on, tried to call for help, but it was too sudden, too massive. Poor old Beau Brownell.” He turned, caught sight of Bullen looming in the doorway. “Ah, there you are, Captain. A bad business, a bad business.”
“A bad business,” Bullen agreed heavily. “Miss Beresford, you have no right to be here. You’re cold and shivering. Go to your cabin at once.” When Captain Bullen spoke in that tone, the Beresford millions didn’t seem to matter any more. “Doctor Marston will bring you a sedative later.”
“And perhaps Mr. Carreras will be so kind!——” I began.
“Certainly,” Carreras agreed at once. “I will be honoured to see the young lady to her cabin.” He bowed slightly, offered her his arm. She seemed more than glad to take it and they disappeared.
Five minutes later all was back to normal in the radio cabin. Peters had taken the dead man’s place, Dr. Marston had returned to his favourite occupation of mingling socially and drinking steadily with our millionaires, the captain had given me his instructions, I’d passed them on to the bo’sun and Brownell, canvas-wrapped, had been taken for’ard to the carpenter’s store.
I stayed in the wireless office for a few minutes, talking to a very shaken Peters, and looked casually at the latest radio message that had come through. All radio messages were written down in duplicate as received, the original for the bridge and the carbon for the daily spiked file.
I lifted the topmost message from the file, but it was nothing very important, just a warning of deteriorating weather far to the south-east of Cuba which might or might not build up into a hurricane. Routine and too far away to bother us. I lifted the blank message pad that lay by Peters’s elbow.
“May I have this?”
“Help yourself.” He was still too upset even to be curious as to why I wanted it. “Plenty more where that came from.”
I left him, walked up and down the deck outside for some time, then made my way to the captain’s cabin where I’d been told to report when I was through. He was in his usual seat by the desk with Cummings and the chief engineer sitting on the settee. The presence of McIlroy, a short, stout Tynesider with the facial expression and hair style of Friar Tuck, meant a very worried Captain and a council of war. McIlroy’s brilliance wasn’t confined to reciprocating engines, that plump laughter-creased face concealed a brain that was probably the shrewdest on the Campari, and that included Mr. Julius Beresford, who must have been very shrewd indeed to make his three hundred million dollars or whatever it was.
“Sit down, Mister, sit down,” Bullen growled. The “Mister “didn’t mean I was in his black books, just another sign that he was worried. “No signs of Benson yet?”
“No sign at all.”
“What a bloody trip!” Bullen pushed across a tray with whisky and glasses on it, unaccustomedly open-handed liberality that was just another sign of his worry. “Help yourself, Mister.”
“Thank you sir.” I helped myself lavishly, the chance didn’t come often, and went on: “What are we going to do about Brownell?”
“What the devil do you mean ‘What are we going to do about Brownell’? He’s got no folks to notify, no consent to get about anything. Head office has been informed. Burial at sea at dawn, before our passengers are up and about. Mustn’t spoil their blasted trip, I suppose.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to take him to Nassau, sir?”
“Nassau?” He stared at me over the rim of his glass, then lowered it carefully to the table. “Just because a man has died you don’t have to go off your blasted rocker, do you?”
“Nassau or some other British territory. Or Miami. Some place where we can get competent authorities, police authorities, to investigate things.”
“What things, Johnny?” McIlroy asked. He had his head cocked to one side like a fat and well-stuffed owl.
“Yes, what things?” Bullen’s tone was quite different from McIlroy’s. “Just because the search party hasn’t turned up Benson yet, you——”
“I’ve called off the search-party, sir.”
Bullen pushed back his chair till his hands rested on the table at the full stretch of his arms.
“You’ve called off the search party,” he said softly. “Who the hell gave you authority to do anything of the kind.”
“No one, sir. But I——”
