up with him. He would build a new wing, make a pleasure garden of fountains and statuary. He would show her!
Andrew paused before he turned the page. Overleaf there was only one entry, and that at the end of the week.
“It is terrible here without Ruth. Why doesn’t she come home?”
But that was an isolated phenomenon. For the other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year, the incredible possibility that self-love might not be all was quite discounted.
The diary for the next day went on as usual. John Q. was right back on form, sacking servants, vilifying acquaintances, starting lawsuits, buying things cheap.
Andrew stopped reading. He wanted to think about Ruth Meriden, to see her against this monstrous background. It was important to him. It was far more important than any search for a lost fishing craft. For the background threw the girl into relief, and the more he learned of it, the more she stepped out in front of it, detached, disowning it, insisting upon her own identity. She was a good person.
Perhaps there had been moments when John Quayle Meriden might have been pitied, but it was difficult to make any allowances when you remembered those heroic, badly painted canvases of the mayor and the yachtsman. One should go no further than to say that, as a psychological study, he was mildly interesting.
The girl was very interesting, and not as a psychological study. He saw her as she went down the road to Cheriton Shawe, waving a friendly hand.
He closed his eyes and the haze of contemplation thickened into darkness. He awoke with a start when the diary slipped from his knee and hit the carpet.
It was very late, but there wasn’t much left of the year 1948. He was determined to finish it off before he went to bed.
He found his lost place with some difficulty and read on. Meriden had devoted ’48 to tracing and retrieving property in the war torn countries, and the diary was full of incomprehensible details with a free use of abbreviations and meaningless initials.
Andrew thought he would have to give it up after all. He was too sleepy; couldn’t keep alert enough. Blinking, he turned a page. Then his eyes came wide open and he jerked up in his chair. It was there at last, in the first entry on the new page.
F. reports tender to Moonlight found at Bova Marina. Last heard from Dubrovnik it was missing, believed sunk. How the devil did it get from Zavrana to Calabria? Asking F. send full details.
There was another entry five days later:
Heard from F. in Naples. Says escaping Italians seized tender at Zavrana and sailed it to Calabria where made “present” of it to fisherman. Present indeed! Instructing F. insist on return of my property, take up with Italian authorities and British representatives if necessary. Compensation?
Meriden had been interested. It seemed that he had had enough imagination to appreciate this extraordinary case of his tender to the lost Moonlight. He recorded every detail he could gather, and the odd bits of information that reached him over the next month told the full story.
Five deserters from the Italian Army of Occupation along the Dalmatian coast had made for Zavrana, had seized the yawl, had stolen provisions, and slipped from the port at night without difficulty.
Luck had sailed with them, for no patrol boat of any navy challenged them, and they had reached their objective, a lonely spot along the toe of Italy. They had found help there. The father of one of them was a Calabrian fisherman. The deserters had taken to the fastnesses of the Aspromonte, and vanished. The old fisherman had appropriated the yawl after securing false papers and distributing a few bribes. He had claimed to have acquired the craft in Reggio, from a Sardinian who had bought it in Corsica.
This involved invention had caused Meriden’s agent some trouble, but finally he had taken a firm line with the fisherman. The old man had had no resources to meet a threat of proceedings from an Englishman with all the evidence of ownership. He had changed his tune and claimed salvage. He had found a derelict, drifting helplessly on a stormy sea towards the savage shore. At the risk of his life he had saved it. He had looked after it, kept it in order, painted it in bright colours twice a year. Fifty thousand lire would scarcely compensate him for the trouble and expense he had been to. It was true he had used the craft now and then, but merely to give the engine a run and to maintain the sails in good repair.
The sails were shreds and patches, no paintbrush had touched the yawl, it had been worked continuously, but the hull was sound and the engine still running. The old boy had loved engines more than anything in the world. He had claimed to have been devoted to this one.
Meriden had been unmoved. Rather than pay one penny of ransom, he would see the tender at the bottom of the Mediterranean. He had issued a final warning. Then he had changed his mind and made a concession. On the last day of the year he had written:
Tired of F.’s arguments. Have agreed to pay Calabrian bandit?5. Sending E.J. to pick up tender and bring home. Not worth the expense, but E. pestering me for job with sick wife. Very dissatisfied with F. Anyone would think had no right to my own property. Pity Moonlight gone. Tender would have been useful. Get E. repair landing stage mill if draught all right for depth. Don’t want to dredge. Can’t waste more money over old tub unless survey proves her bargain.
That was all. Andrew looked closely through the first three months of the next year’s diary, but found no further reference to the yawl; nothing to indicate whether E.J. had picked her up at Bova Marina, no jubilant note of homecoming. The tender had dropped right out of the consciousness of John Quayle Meriden. Possibly the survey had proved her no bargain. In any case, Mr. Meriden had been busy with other affairs, writing to the War Office about damage done to Walden House, fighting with his lawyers over the extent of his claims, threatening to put the government out of office unless he were paid right down to the last penny. Only at the end of March was there an item that might be related, not to the yawl, but to the last entry about the yawl. It said:
E.J. pestering me again. Am sick of that whining Norski. Now wants to take his sick wife to Algiers. Says he can get a job there. Told him he won’t get another penny out of me.
In the interval E.J. may have made the trip to Calabria. Most likely he had, since the hunt for the craft had focused on England. All the rest was surmise.
If it was safe to come to any conclusion, it was that Meriden had placed no special value on the yawl. If the craft contained a treasured object-something to start a chase across Europe and cause a murder in Brussels- Meriden could not have known about it, or he would never have haggled over the few pounds that fifty thousand lire represented at the time of the Calabrian’s demand. Yet the lure for Kusitch and the others must have been placed in the yawl while she was at Zavrana or in Dalmatian waters, or Kusitch would not have known of it.
War loot? That’s what it looked like. Kusitch was the expert, employed by his government, devoting all his time to the tracing of war loot. The trail of some stolen object had led to the yawl, and it was to be assumed that the object had remained on board through all the vicissitudes endured by the little craft.
It was a difficult assumption. The yawl had been repaired, launched again by some local authority, used in the port and nearby waters; it had been stolen by the Italian fugitives, sailed to Bova Marina, used by the old fisherman, and, possibly, brought back to England as the property of Meriden. An object would have to be pretty small to remain hidden under those circumstances.
Perhaps it had not remained hidden. Yet Kusitch had been so certain that he had staked his future on it; others had been so sure that they had used the desperate expedient of abduction from a hotel and followed it up with murder. The motive must be material gain, though it could be the suppression of a menace, the destruction of documents that threatened newly achieved careers. Treacheries, betrayals, treasons had smeared Europe in the wake of the Nazis. Men who had compromised themselves were anxious to forget; more anxious that others should never know about it. Documents stolen from archives could bring ruin. Documents could be safely hidden in a small
