“I mean what I say. Tony Carreras.” I sat heavily on a chair and gazed down vacantly at my soaking clothes. Maybe Captain Bullen wasn’t so far wrong: I felt an insane desire to laugh. I knew it was a climbing hysteria that came from weakness, from over-exhaustion, from mounting fever, from expending too much emotion in too short a time, and I had to make a physical effort to fight it down. “I killed him tonight down in number four hold.”
“You’re mad,” Bullen said flatly. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Don’t I?” I looked at him, then away again. “Ask Susan Beresford.”
“Mr. Carter’s telling the truth, sir,” Macdonald said quietly. “My knife, sir? Did you bring it back?”
I nodded, rose wearily, hobbled across to Macdonald’s bed, and handed him the knife. I’d had no chance to clean it. The bo’sun said nothing, just handed it to Bullen, who stared down at it for long, unspeaking moments. “I’m sorry, my boy,” he said at length. His voice was husky.
“Damnably sorry. But we’ve been worried to death.”
I grinned faintly. It was an effort even to do that. “So was I, sir, so was I.”
“All in your own good time,” Bullen said encouragingly. “I think Mr. Carter should tell us later, sir,” Macdonald suggested. “He’s got to clean himself up, get those wet clothes off and into bed. If anyone comes…”
“Right, bo’sun, right.” You could see that even so little talk was exhausting him. “Better hurry, my boy.”
“Yes.” I looked vaguely at the bag I’d brought with me. “I’ve got the ropes there, Archie.”
“Let me have them, sir.” He took the bag, pulled out the two coils of rope, pulled the pillow from his lower pillowcase, stuffed the ropes inside, and placed them under his top pillow. “Good a place as any, sir. If they really start searching, they’re bound to find it anyway. Now if you’d just be dropping this pillow and bag out the window…”
“I did that, stripped, washed, dried myself as best I could, and climbed into bed, just as Marston came into the bay.
“She’ll be all right, John. Simple fracture. All wrapped up and in her blankets and she’ll be asleep in a minute. Sedatives, you know.”
I nodded. “You did a good job to-night, doctor. Boy outside is still asleep and I hardly felt a thing in my leg.” it was only half a lie and there was no point in hurting his feelings unnecessarily. I glanced down at my leg. “The splints…”
“I’ll fix them right away.” He fixed them, not more than half killing me in the process, and while he was doing so I told them what had happened. Or part of what had happened. I told them the encounter with Tony Carreras was the result of an attempt I’d made to spike the gun on the afterdeck; with old Bullen talking away non-stop in his sleep, any mention of the twister would not have been clever at all.
At the end of it all, after a heavy silence, Bullen said hopelessly, “It’s finished. It’s all finished. All that work and suffering for nothing. All for nothing.”
It wasn’t finished; it wasn’t going to be finished ever. Not till either Miguel Carreras or myself was finished. If I were a betting man I’d have staked the last cent of my fortune on Carreras.
I didn’t say that to them. I told them instead of the simple plan I had in mind, an unlikely plan concerned with taking over the bridge at gun point. But it wasn’t half as hopeless and desperate as the plan I really had in mind. The one I’d tell Archie Macdonald about later. Again I couldn’t tell the old man, for again the chances were heavy that he would have betrayed it in his half-delirious muttering under sedation. I hadn’t even liked to mention Tony Carreras, but the blood had to be explained away.
When I finished, Bullen said in his hoarse whisper, “I’m still the captain of the ship. I will not permit it. Good god, mister, look at the weather, look at your condition. I will not allow you to throw your life away. I cannot permit it.”
“Thank you, sir. I know what you mean. But you have to permit it. You must. Because if you don’t…”
“What if someone comes into the sick bay when you’re not here?” he asked helplessly. He’d accepted the inevitable.
“This.” I produced a gun and tossed it to the bo’sun. “This was Tony Carreras’. There are still seven shots in the magazine.”
“Thank you, sir,” Macdonald said quietly. “I’ll be very careful with those shots.”
“But yourself, man?” Bullen demanded huskily. “How about yourself?”
“Give me back that knife, Archie,” I said.
Chapter 10
I slept that night and slept deeply, as deeply, almost, as Tony Carreras. I had neither sedatives nor sleeping pills; exhaustion was the only drug I needed.
Coming awake next morning was a long, slow climb from the depths of a bottomless pit. I was climbing in the dark, but in the strange way of dreams I wasn’t climbing and it wasn’t dark; some great beast had me in his jaws and was trying to shake the life out of me. A tiger, but no ordinary tiger. A sabre-toothed tiger, the kind that had passed from the surface of the earth a million years ago. So I kept on climbing in the dark and the sabre-toothed tiger kept on shaking me like a terrier shaking a rat and I knew that my only hope was to reach the light above, but I couldn’t see any light. Then, all of a sudden, the light was there, my eyes were open, and Miguel Carreras was bending over me and shaking my shoulder with no gentle hand. I would have preferred the sabre-toothed tiger any day.
Marston stood at the other side of the bed and when he saw I was awake he caught me under the arms and lifted me gently to a sitting position. I did my best to help him but I wasn’t concentrating on it; I was concentrating on the lip-biting and eye-closing so that Carreras couldn’t miss how far through I was. Marston was protesting.
“He shouldn’t be moved, Mr. Carreras. He really shouldn’t be moved. He’s in constant pain and I repeat that major surgery is essential at the earliest possible moment.” It was about forty years too late now, I supposed, for anyone to point out to Marston that he was a born actor. No question in my mind now but that that was what he should have been: the gain to both the thespian and medical worlds would have been incalculable.
I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and smiled wanly. “Why don’t you say it outright, doctor? Amputation is what you mean. He looked at me gravely, then went away without saying anything. I looked across at Bullen and Macdonald. Both of them were awake, both of them carefully not looking in my direction. And then I looked at Carreras.
At first glance he looked exactly the same as he had a couple of days ago. At first glance, that was. A second and closer inspection showed the difference: a slight pallor under the tan, a reddening of the eyes, a tightening of the face that had not been there before. He had a chart under his left arm, a slip of paper in his left hand. “Well,” I sneered, “How’s the big bold pirate captain this morning?”
“My son is dead,” he said dully.
I hadn’t expected it to come like this, or so soon, but the very unexpectedness of it helped me to the right reaction, the reaction he would probably expect from me anyway. I stared at him through slightly narrowed eyes and said, “He’s what?” “Dead.” Miguel Carreras, whatever else he lacked, unquestionably had all the normal instincts of a parent, a father. The very intensity of his restraint showed how badly he had been hit. For a moment I felt genuinely sorry for him. For a very short moment. Then I saw the faces of Wilson and Jamieson and Benson and Brownell and Dexter, the faces of all those dead men, and I wasn’t sorry any more. “Dead?” I repeated. Shocked puzzlement, but not too much shock it wouldn’t be expected of me. “Your son? Dead? How can he be dead? What did he die of?”
Almost of its own volition, before I suddenly checked the movement, my hand started reaching for the clasp knife under the pillow. Not that it would have made much difference even if he had seen it five minutes in the dispensary steriliser had removed the last of the traces of blood.
“I don’t know.” he shook his head and I felt like cheering; there were no traces of suspicion in his face. “I don’t know.”
“Dr. Marston,” I said. “Surely you…”
