back?”
“Listen, Johnny.
Me, I’ve done some damned awful bloody things - but I never killed a man or a woman - ever.
He said no killing. Fine, I go along. Then I hear the plastique blow. I know you two in conveyor room. I think the hell with it.
Now, I climb off the wagon - but she’s going too fast. I get bum full of buckshot.” They were silent for a while. Tracey was absorbed in patching the shot-wounds with adhesive tape.
Johnny broke the silence. “Was there a big diamond, Sergio? A
big blue diamond?” “Si.” Sergio sighed. “Such a diamond you will never see again.”
“Benedict had it?”
“Si. Benedict had it.”
“Did he have it on him?”
“In his coat. He put it in his coat pocket.” Tracey stepped back. “That’s all we can do for now,” she murmured and caught Johnny’s eye, shaking her head slightly and frowning with worry. “The sooner we get him to a doctor the happier I’ll be.” A little before noon Sergio took Kingfisher in through the entrance to Cartridge Bay, handling the mud-filled ship with all the aplomb of the master mariner, but as they approached the first turning in the channel he sagged gently to the deck and the wheel spun out of his hands.
Before Johnny could reach the helm, Kingfisher had yawed wearily across the channel. She had so little way on her that when she went up on the sand bank there was only a small jolt and she listed over a few degrees.
Johnny pulled the engine telegraph to STOP’.
“Help me, Tracey.” He stooped over Sergio and took him under the armpits. Tracey grasped his ankles. Half dragging, half carrying, they got him through to his cabin and laid him on his bunk.
“Hey, Johnny. Sorry, Johnny,” Sergio was mumbling.
“First time I put ship on bank - ever! Idiot! So close - then wop! Sorry, hey, Johnny.” The motor launch left the jetty and came down the channel towards the sand bank on which Kingfisher lay stranded. The launch was crowded, and the whine of the outboard engine raised a storm of water fowl into a whirlwind of frightened wings.
As it drew closer Johnny recognized some of the occupants. Mike
Shapiro and with him Robin Sutherland, but there were also two uniformed policemen and another person in civilian clothes who stood up in the launch as it came within hail and cupped his hands about his mouth.
“I am a police officer. I have a warrant for the arrest of
Benedict-” Mike Shapiro touched the man’s arm, and spoke softly to him.
The officer hesitated and glanced up at Johnny again, before nodding agreement and settling back on to his seat.
“Robin, get up here as quick as you can,“Johnny shouted down at the launch, and when Robin came over the side Johnny hustled him towards the bridge, but Mike Shapiro hurried after them.
“Johnny, I must talk to you.”
“It can wait.”
“No, it can’t.” Mike
Shapiro turned to Tracey. “Won’t you take care of the doctor, please? I must speak to Johnny before the police do.” Mike led Johnny down the deck and offered him a cigarette, while the three policemen hovered at a discreet distance.
“Johnny, I have some dreadful news. I want to break it to you myself.” Johnny visibly braced himself. “Yes?”
“It’s about Ruby,” Johnny made his statement to the police inspector in Kingfisher’s guest cabin. It took two hours for him to relate the full story, and during that time one of the uniformed policemen discovered the crew locked in the paint store below decks. They were half poisoned with paint fumes but able to make their statements to the police.
while he finished his interrogation of Johnny.
The inspector kept them waiting in the next-door cabin
“Two more questions for now, Mr. Lance. In your opinion was the collision between the two ships accidental or deliberate?” Johnny looked into the steel-grey eyes and lied for the first time.
“It was unavoidable.” The inspector nodded and made a note on his pad.
“Last question. The survivors from the trawler, what were their chances?”
“In that storm they had none. There was no hope of effecting a rescue with Kingfisher almost disabled, and considering the condition of the surf in the passage between the islands.”
“I understand.” The inspector nodded. “Thank you Mr. Lance. That is all for the present.”
Johnny left the cabin and went quickly to the upper deck. Tracey and
Robin were still working over Sergio’s bunk, but Robin looked up and came immediately to Johnny as he stood in the doorway.
“How is he, Robin?”
“He hasn’t a chance,“Robin replied, keeping his voice low.
“One lung has collapsed, and there appear to be perforations of the bowel and intestine. I suspect a massive peritonitis. I can’t move him without risking a secondary haemorrhage.”
“Is he conscious?”
Robin shook his head. “He’s going fast. God knows how he has lasted this long.” Johnny moved across to the bunk and placed his arm about
Tracey’s shoulders. She moved closer to him and they stood looking down at Sergio.
His eyes were closed, and a dark pelt of new beard covered the lower part of his face. His breathing sawed and hissed loudly in the quiet cabin, and the fever lit bright spots of colour in his cheeks.
“You magnificent old rogue.” Johnny spoke softly, and Sergio’s eyes blinked open.
Quickly Johnny stooped to him.
“Sergio. Your crew - your boys are safe.” Sergio smiled. He closed those dark gazelle eyes, then opened them again and whispered painfully, “Johnny, you give me job when I come out of prison?”
“They won’t have you in prison - you’d lower the tone of the place.” Sergio tried to laugh. He managed one strangled chuckle, then he came up on his elbows in the bunk with his eyes bulging, his mouth gaping for breath. He coughed once, a harsh tearing Sound, and the blood burst from his lips in thick black clots and a bright red spray of droplets.
He fell back on the pillows, and was dead before Robin reached his side.
Tracey was asleep in the bedroom next door. Robin had sedated her heavily enough to keep her that way for the next twelve hours.
Johnny lay naked on the narrow bunk in the second guest room of the Cartridge Bay depot, and when he switched on the beside lamp his wrist watch showed the time as 2.46 in the morning.
He looked down at his own body. The bruises were dark purple and hot angry red across his ribs and flanks from where the mud had battered him against rough steel plating.
He wished now that he had accepted the sleeping pills Robin had offered him, for the ache of his body and the whirl of his thoughts had kept him from sleep all that night.
His mind was trapped on a nightmare roundabout, revolving endlessly the two deaths which Benedict van der Byl must answer for in the dark places to which he had surely gone.
Ruby and Sergio. Ruby and Sergio. One he had seen die, the other he could imagine in all its gruesome detail.
Johnny sat up and lit a cigarette, seeing a istraction from the tortured images with which his overexcited brain bombarded him.
He tried to concentrate on reviewing the practical steps that would be necessary to clear up the aftermath of these last disastrous days.
He had spoken that evening by radio to Larsen, and received from him a promise of complete financial support during the time it would take to clear the mud from Kingfisher’s hull and recover the diamonds in the conveyor tunnel, and to tide over the period of salvage and repair before the dredger was ready to begin once more harvesting the rich fields of Thunderbolt and Suicide.
