'Safe from sinking, yes. But not safe from being taken over.'
'But you just said — '
'All they have to do is to bring up another U-boat and they'll have us cold. With two U-boats we have no chance. If we go after one the other will parallel our course and pump shells into us at their leisure. Not the engine-room, of course, they want to take us under our own steam to Norway. The hospital area. First shell in there and the white flag flies — if we've any sense we'd fly it before the first shot. Next time I go up to the bridge I'll take a nice big bedsheet with me.'
'There are times, Bo'sun,' Jamieson said, 'when I wish you'd keep your thoughts to yourself.'
'Merely answering a question, sir. And I have another thought, another question, if you like. Only a tiny handful of people would have known of this operation, the plan to use the San Andreas as a bullion carrier. A cabinet minister or two, an admiral or two. No more. I wonder who the traitor is who sold us down the river, //we get back and if some famous and prominent person unaccountably commits suicide, then we'll know.' He rose. 'If you'll excuse me, I have some work to do.'
'What work, Archie?' It was Janet. 'Haven't you done enough for one day?'
'A bo'sun's work is never done. Routine, Janet, just routine.' He left the mess-deck.
'Routine,' Janet said. 'What routine?'
'Curran's dead.'
She looked puzzled. 'I know that.'
'Curran was the sailmaker. It's the sailmaker's job to sew up the dead.'
Janet rose hastily and left the table. Patterson gave Jamieson a sour look.
'There are times, Second, when I wish you would keep your thoughts to yourself. You do have half an eye, I take it.'
True, true. Delicacy? A water buffalo could have done it better.'
THIRTEEN
Patterson finished speaking — by this time he was getting quite professional at reading burial services — planks tilted and the shrouded forms of Curran and Ferguson slid down into the icy wastes of the Norwegian Sea. It was then that the engine-room noise faded away and the San Andreas began to slow.
Nearly all the crew were on deck — the dead men had been an amiable enough couple and well liked. The cooks and stewards were below, as were the nursing staff and three stokers. Trent and Jones were on the bridge.
Jamieson was the first to move. 'It looks,' he said, 'as if we have made a mistake.' He walked away, not quickly, with the air of a man who knew that this was not a moment that called for any particular urgency.
Patterson and McKinnon followed more slowly. Patterson said: 'What did he mean by that? That we've made a mistake, I mean?'
'He was being kind, sir. What he meant was that the all-wise bo'sun has made another blunder. Who was on watch down below?'
'Just young Stephen. You know, the Polish boy.'
'Let's hope he's not the next to go over the side.'
Patterson stopped and caught McKinnon by the arm. 'What do you mean by that? And what do you mean — 'blunder'?'
'The one thing ties up with the other.' McKinnon's voice sounded dull. 'Maybe I'm tired. Maybe I'm not thinking too well. Did you notice who wasn't at the funeral, sir?';
Patterson looked at him for a few silent moments, then said: 'The nursing staff. Kitchen staff. Stewards. Men on the bridge.' His grip tightened on the Bo'sun's arm. 'And McCrimmon.'
'Indeed. And whose brilliant idea was it to let McCrimmon roam around on the loose?'
'It just worked out the wrong way. You can't think of everything. No man can. He's a slippery customer, this McCrimmon. Do you think we'll be able to pin anything on him?'
'I'm certain we won't. Nevertheless, sir, I'd like your permission to lock him up.' McKinnon shook his head, his face bitter. 'There's nothing like locking the door when the horse has bolted.'
Stephen was lying on the steel plates, covered with oil still gushing from a severed fuel line. There was a rapidly forming bruise, bleeding slightly, behind his right ear. Sinclair finished examining his head and straightened.
'I'll have him taken to hospital. X-ray, but I don't think it necessary. I should think he'll waken up with nothing more than a sore head.' He looked at the two steel objects lying on the deck-plates beside Stephen. 'You know who did this, Bo'sun?'
'Yes.'
'The Stilson wrench that laid him out and the fire-axe that slashed the fuel line. There could be fingerprints.'
'No.' With his toe McKinnon touched a clump of engine-room waste. 'He used that and there'll be no prints on that. He looked at Patterson. 'This line can be replaced, sir?'
'It can. How long, Second?'
'Couple of hours,' Jamieson said. 'Give or take.'
McKinnon said: 'Would you come along with me, Mr Patterson?'
'It will be a pleasure, Bo'sun.'
'You could have killed him, you know,' McKinnon said conversationally.
From his bench seat in the mess-deck McCrimmon looked up with an insolent stare.
'What the bloody hell are you talking about?'
'Stephen.'
'Stephen? What about Stephen?'
'His broken head.'
'I still don't know what you're talking about. Broken head? How did he get a broken head?'
'Because you went down to the engine-room and did it. And cut open a fuel line.'
' 'You're crazy. I haven't left this seat in the past quarter of an hour.'
'Then you must have seen whoever went down to the engine-room. You're a stoker, McCrimmon. An engine stops and you don't go down to investigate?'
McCrimmon chewed some gum. 'This is a frame-up. What proof do you have?'
'Enough,' Patterson said. 'I am putting you under arrest, McCrimmon, and in close confinement. When we get back to Britain, you'll be tried for murder, high treason, convicted and certainly shot.'
'This is absolute rubbish.' He prefaced the word 'rubbish' with a few choice but unprintable adjectives. 'I've done nothing and you can't prove a thing.' But his normally pasty face had gone even pastier.
'We don't have to,' McKinnon said. 'Your friend Simons or Braun or whatever his name is — has been, well, as the Americans say, been singing like a canary. He's willing to turn King's evidence on you in the hope of getting less than life.'
'The bastard!' McCrimmon was on his feet, lips drawn back over his teeth, his right hand reaching under his overalls.
'Don't,' Patterson said. 'Whatever it is, don't touch it. You've got no place to run, McCrimmon — and the Bo'sun could kill you with one hand.'
'Let me have it,' McKinnon said. He stretched out his hand and McCrimmon, very slowly, very carefully, placed the knife, hilt first, in the Bo'sun's palm.
'You haven't won.' His face was both scared and vicious at the same time. 'It's the person who laughs last that wins.'
'Could be.' McKinnon looked at him consideringly. 'You know something that we don't?'
'As you say, could be.'
'Such as the existence of a transmitting bug concealed in the wireless office?'
McCrimmon leapt forward and screamed, briefly, before collapsing to the deck. His nose had broken against
