“We haven’t been able to find him. He has disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” It was Captain Bullen making his contribution, and his voice sounded a shade stronger, a little less husky, than it had the previous night. “Vanished? A man just can’t vanish aboard a ship like that, Mr. Carreras.”
“We spent over two hours searching the ship. My son is not aboard the Campari. When did you last see him, Mr. Carter?”
I didn’t indulge in guilty starts, sharp upward glances, or anything daft like that. I wondered what his reactions would have been if I’d said: “when I heaved him over the side of the Campari last night.” Instead I pursed my lips and said, “After dinner last night when he came here. He didn’t linger. Said something like: ‘captain Carreras making his rounds,’ and left.”
“That is correct. I’d sent him to make a tour of inspection. How did he look?”
“Not his usual self. Green. Seasick.”
“My son was a poor sailor,” Carreras acknowledged. “It is possible — '
“You said he was making rounds,” I interrupted. “Of the whole ship? Decks and everything?”
“That is so.”
“Did you have life lines rigged on the fore and after decks?”
“No. I had not thought it necessary.”
“Well,” I said grimly, “There’s your possible answer. Your probable answer. No life lines, nothing to hang on to. Felt ill, ran for the side, a sudden lurch “ I left the sentence hanging.
“It is possible, but not in character. He had an exceptional sense of balance.” “Balance doesn’t help much if you slip on a wet deck.”
“Quite. I also haven’t ruled out the possibility of foul play.”
“Foul play?” I stared at him, duly grateful that the gift of telepathy is so very limited. “With all the crew and passengers under guard, lock and key, how is foul play possible? Unless,” I added thoughtfully, “there’s a nigger in your own woodpile.”
“I have not yet completed my investigations.” The voice was cold; the subject was closed, and Miguel Carreras was back in business again. Bereavement wouldn’t crush this man. However much he might inwardly mourn his son, it wouldn’t in the slightest detract from his efficiency or his ruthless determination to carry out exactly the plans he had made. It wasn’t, for instance, going to make the slightest difference to his plans to send us all into orbit the following day. Signs of humanity there might be, but the abiding fundamental in Carreras’ character was an utter, an all-excluding fanaticism that was all the more dangerous in that it lay so deeply hidden beneath the smooth urbanity of the surface. “The chart, Carter.” He handed it across to me along with paper giving a list of fixes. “Let me know if the Fort Ticonderoga is on course. And if she is running on time. We can later calculate our time of interception if and when I get a fix this morning.”
“You’ll get a fix,” Bullen assured him huskily. “They say the devil is good to his own, Carreras, and he’s been good to you. You’re running out of the hurricane and you’ll have clear patches of sky by noon. Rain later in the evening, but first clearing.”
“You are sure, Captain Bullen? You are sure we are running out of the hurricane?”
“I’m sure. Or, rather, the hurricane is running away from us.” old Bullen was an authority on hurricanes and would lecture on his pet subject at the drop of a hat, even to Carreras, even when a hoarse whisper was all the voice he could summon. “Neither wind nor sea have moderated very much” — and they certainly hadn’t ”but what matters is the direction of the wind. It’s from the northwest now, which means that the hurricane lies to the northeast of us. It passed us by to the east, on our starboard hand, sometime during the night, moving northwards, then suddenly swung northeast. Quite often when a hurricane reaches the northern limits of its latitude and then is caught up by the westerlies it can remain stationary at its point of recurvature for twelve or twenty-four hours — which would have meant that you would have had to sail through it. But you had the luck: it recurved and moved to the east almost without a break.” Bullen lay back, close to exhaustion. Even so little had been too much for him.
“You can tell all this just lying in your bed there?” Carreras demanded.
Bullen gave him the commodore’s look he would have given any cadet who dared question his knowledge and ignored him.
“The weather is going to moderate?” Carreras persisted.
“That’s obvious, isn’t it?” Carreras nodded slowly. Making his rendezvous in time and being able to tranship the gold had been his two great worries, and now both of them were gone he turned abruptly, walked out of the sick bay.
Bullen cleared his throat and said formally, in his strained whisper, “Congratulations, Mr. Carter. You are the most fluent liar I’ve ever known.”
Macdonald just grinned.
The forenoon, the afternoon came and went. The sun duly appeared, as Bullen had prophesied, and later disappeared, also as he had prophesied. The sea moderated, although not much, not enough, I guessed, to alleviate the sufferings of our passengers, and the wind stayed where it was, out of the northwest. Bullen, under sedation, slept nearly all day, once again relapsing into his incoherent mumblings — none of them, I was relieved to note, were about Tony Carreras while Macdonald and I talked or slept. But we didn’t sleep before I told him what I hoped to do that night when — or if I managed to get loose on the upper deck. Susan I hardly saw that day. She made her appearance after breakfast with her arm in plaster and in a sling.
There was no danger of this arousing any suspicion, even in a mind like Carreras’; the story was to be that she had gone to sleep in a chair, been flung out of it during the storm, and sprained her wrist. Such accidents were so commonplace in heavy weather that no one would think to raise an eyebrow. About ten o’clock in the morning she asked to be allowed to join her parents in the drawing room and stayed there all day.
Fifteen minutes after noon Carreras appeared again. If his investigations into possible foul play connected with his son’s death had made any progress, he made no mention of it; he did not even refer to the disappearance again. He had the inevitable chart — two of them this time — with him and the noon position of the Campari. Seemingly he’d managed to get a good fix from the sun. “Our position, our speed, their position, their speed, and our respective courses. Do we intercept at the point marked x?”
“I suppose you’ve already worked it out for yourself?”
“I have.”
“We don’t intercept,” I said after a few minutes. “At our present speed we should arrive at your rendezvous in between eleven and eleven and a half hours. Say midnight. Five hours ahead of schedule.”
“Thank you, Mr. Carter. My own conclusion exactly. The five-hour wait for the Ticonderoga won’t take long in passing.”
I felt a queer sensation in my middle; the phrase about a person’s heart sinking may not be physiologically accurate but it described the feeling accurately. This would ruin everything, completely destroy what little chance my plan ever had of succeeding. But I knew the consternation did not show in my face. “Planning on arriving there at midnight and hanging round till the fly walks into your parlour?” I shrugged. “Well, you’re the man who’s making the decisions.”
“What do you mean by that?” He asked sharply. “Nothing much,” I said indifferently. “It’s just that I would have thought that you would want your crew at the maximum stage of efficiency for transhipping the gold when we met the Fort Ticonderoga.”
“So?”
“So there’s still going to be a heavy sea running in twelve hours’ time. When we stop at the rendezvous, the Campari is going to lie in the trough of the seas and, in the elegant phrase of our times, roll her guts out. I don’t know how many of that crowd of landlubbers you have along with you were seasick last night, but I’ll bet there will be twice as many to-night. And don’t think our stabilisers are going to save you — they depend upon the factor of the ship’s speed for their effect.”
“A well-taken point,” he agreed calmly. “I shall reduce speed, aim at being there about four a.m.” He looked at me with sudden speculation. “Remarkably co-operative, full of helpful suggestions. Curiously out of the estimate I had formed of your character.”
“Which only goes to show how wrong your estimate is, my friend. Common sense and self-interest explain it. I want to get into a proper hospital as soon as possible — the prospect of going through life with one leg doesn’t
