Kitabı oku: «The Dark Crusader», sayfa 3

CHAPTER 2

Tuesday 8.30 a.m.–7 p.m.

She slept serenely, like one dead, for over three hours, her breathing so quiet that I could hardly hear it. As the time slipped by, the rolling of the schooner became increasingly more pronounced until after one particular violent lurch she woke up with a start and stared at me, her eyes reflecting confusion and perhaps a touch of fear. Then understanding came back and she sat up.

‘Hallo,’ she said.

‘Morning. Feel better?’

‘Mmm.’ She grabbed a batten as another violent lurch sent some loose boxes banging about in the hold. ‘But I won’t be for long, not if this sort of thing keeps up. Nuisance, I know, but I can’t help it. What’s the time? Half past eight, your watch says. Must be broad daylight. I wonder where we’re heading?’

‘North or south. We’re neither quartering nor corkscrewing, which means that we have this swell right on the beam. I don’t remember much of my geography but enough to be pretty sure that at this time of the year the steady easterly trades push up an east – west swell. So, north or south.’ I lowered myself stiffly to my feet, walked for’ard along the central aisle to where the two narrow spaces, one on each side, had been left clear of cargo to give access to the ventilator intakes. I moved into those in turn and touched both the port and starboard sides of the schooner, high up. The port side was definitely warmer than the starboard. That meant we were moving more or less due south. The nearest land in that direction was New Zealand, about a thousand miles away. I filed away this piece of helpful information and was about to move when I heard voices from above, faint but unmistakable. I pulled a box down from behind its retaining batten and stood on it, the side of my face against the foot of the ventilator.

The ventilator must have been just outside the radio office and its trumpet-shaped opening made a perfect earphone for collecting and amplifying soundwaves. I could hear the steady chatter of morse and, over and above that, the sound of two men talking as clearly as if they had been no more than three feet away from me. What they were speaking about I’d no idea, it was in a language I’d never heard before: after a couple of minutes I jumped down, replaced the box and went back to Marie.

‘What took you so long?’ she asked accusingly. She wasn’t very happy down in that black and evil-smelling hold. Neither was I.

‘Sorry. But you may be grateful yet for the delay. I’ve found out that we’re travelling south, but much more important, I’ve found out that we can hear what the people on the upper deck are talking about.’ I told her how I’d discovered this, and she nodded.

‘It could be very useful.’

‘It could be more than useful,’ I said. ‘Hungry?’

‘Well.’ She made a face and rubbed a hand across her stomach. ‘It’s not just that I’m a bad sailor, it’s the fearful smell down here.’

‘Those ventilators appear to be no damned help in the world,’ I agreed.’ But perhaps some tea might be.’ I went for’ard and called for attention as I’d done a few hours earlier by hammering on the bulkhead. I moved aft and within a minute the hatch was opened.

I blinked in the blinding glare of light that flooded down into the hold, then moved back as someone came down the ladder. A man with a lantern-jawed face, lean and lined and mournful.

‘What’s all the racket about?’ Henry demanded wearily.

‘You promised us some breakfast,’ I reminded him.

‘So we did. Breakfast in ten minutes.’ With that he was gone, shutting the hatch behind him.

Less than the promised time later the hatch opened again and a stocky brown-haired youngster with dark frizzy golliwog hair came nimbly down the ladder carrying a battered wooden tray in one hand. He grinned at me cheerfully, moved up the aisle and set the tray down on the boxes beside Marie, whipping a dented tin cover off a dish with the air of Escoffier unveiling his latest creation. I looked at the brown sticky mass. I thought I could see rice and shredded coconut.

‘What’s this?’ I asked. ‘Last week’s garbage?’

‘Dalo pudding. Very good, sir.’ He pointed to a chipped enamel pot. ‘Here is coffee. Also very good.’ He ducked his head at Marie and left as nimbly as he had come. It went without saying that he had shut the hatch behind him.

The pudding was an indigestible and gelatinous mess that tasted and felt like cooked cowhide glue. It was quite inedible but no match for the fearful coffee, lukewarm bilge-water strained through old cement sacks.

‘Do you think they’re trying to poison us?’ Marie asked.

‘Impossible. No one could ever eat this stuff in the first place. At least, no European could. By Polynesian standards it probably ranks with caviare. Well, there goes breakfast.’ I broke off and looked closely at the crate behind the tray. ‘Well, I’ll be damned. Don’t miss much, do I? I’ve only been sitting with my back against it for about four hours.’

‘Well. You haven’t eyes in the back of your head,’ she said reasonably. I didn’t reply, I’d already unhitched the torch and was peering through the inch cracks between the spars of the crate. ‘Looks like lemonade bottles or some such to me.’

‘And to me. Are you developing scruples about damaging Captain Fleck’s property?’ she asked delicately.

I grinned, latched on to my anti-rat club, pried off the top spar, pulled out a bottle and handed it to Marie. ‘Watch it. Probably neat bootleg gin for sale to the natives.’

But it wasn’t, it was lemon juice, and excellent stuff at that. Excellent for thirst, but hardly a substitute for breakfast: I took off my jacket and began to investigate the contents of the schooner’s hold.

Captain Fleck appeared to be engaged in the perfectly innocuous business of provision carrier. The half-filled spaces between the two sets of battens on either side were taken up by crates of food and drink: meat, fruit and soft drinks. Probably stuff he loaded up on one of the larger islands before setting off to pick up copra. It seemed a reasonable guess. But, then, Fleck didn’t seem like an innocuous man.

I finished off a breakfast of corned beef and pears – Marie passed it up with a shudder – then began to investigate the contents of the boxes and crates packed ceiling high between the two outer rows of battens and the sides of the schooner. But I didn’t get very far. The battens in those rows weren’t of the free-sliding type in the inboard rows but were hinged at the top and were designed to lift upwards and inwards: with their lower halfs jammed by the boxes in the inner rows, this was quite impossible. But two of the battens, the two directly behind the lemonade crate, were loose: I examined their tops with the torch and could see that there were no hinges attaching them to the deckhead: from the freshness of the wood where the screws had been, the hinges appeared to have been recently removed. I pushed the battens as far apart as possible, wrestled the top box out of position without breaking my neck – not so easy as it sounds for the boxes were heavy and the rolling of the schooner pretty violent by this time – and placed it on the platform where we’d spent the night.

The box was about two feet long, by eighteen inches wide and a foot deep, made of oiled yellow pine. On each of the four corners of the lid was the broad arrow property mark of the Royal Navy. At the top a stencil, which was semi-obliterated by a thick black line, said ‘Fleet Air Arm’. Below that were the words ‘Alcohol Compasses’ and beneath that again ‘Redundant. Authorized for disposal’, followed by a stencilled crown, very official looking. I pried the top off with some difficulty and the stencils didn’t lie: six unmarked alcohol compasses, packed in straw and white paper.

‘Looks O.K. to me,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen those stencils before. “Redundant” is a nice naval term for “Obsolete”. Gets a better price from civilian buyers. Maybe Captain Fleck is in the legitimate ex-Government surplus stock disposal trade.’

‘Maybe Captain Fleck had his own private stock of stencils,’ Marie said sceptically. ‘How about the next one?’

I got the next one down. This was stencilled ‘Binoculars’ and binoculars it contained. The third box had again the Fleet Air Arm marking, semi-obliterated, and the stencil ‘Inflatable Lifebelts (Aircraft)’, and again the stencil didn’t lie: bright red lifebelts with CO2 charges and yellow cylinders marked ‘Shark repellant’.

‘We’re wasting our time,’ I said. Having to brace oneself against the heavy rolling of the schooner made the lifting and prying open of the boxes heavy work, the heat of the hold was building up as the sun climbed in the sky and the sweat was pouring down my face and back. ‘Just a common-or-garden second-hand dealer.’

‘Second-hand dealers don’t kidnap people,’ she said tartly. ‘Just one more, please. I have a feeling.’

I checked the impulse to say that it was easy enough to have a feeling when you didn’t have to do the sweating, lugged a fourth and very heavy box off the steadily diminishing pile and lowered it beside the others. The same disposal stencils as before, contents marked ‘Champion Spark Plugs. 2 gross’.

It took me five minutes and a two-inch strip of skin from the back of my right hand to get the lid off. Marie carefully avoided looking at me, maybe she was a mind-reader, maybe she was just getting good and seasick. But she turned as the lid came clear, peered inside then glanced up at me.

‘Maybe Captain Fleck does have his own stencils,’ she murmured.

‘Maybe he does at that,’ I acknowledged. The case was full of drums, but the drums weren’t full of spark plugs: there was enough machine-gun belt ammunition inside the case to start off a fair-sized revolution. ‘This interests me strangely.’

‘Is – is it safe? If Captain Fleck –’

‘What’s Captain Fleck ever done for me? Let him come if he wants to.’ I lugged out a fifth case, sneered at the ‘Spark plug’ stencil, wrenched off the lid with a combination of leverage and a few well-chosen kicks, stared down at the writing on the heavy blue paper wrapped round the contents, then replaced the lid with all the gentle tenderness and reverent care of a Chicago gangster placing a wreath on the grave of his latest victim.

‘Ammonal, 25 per cent aluminium powder!’ Marie, too, had glimpsed the writing. ‘What on earth is that?’

‘A very powerful blasting explosive, just about enough to send the schooner and everybody aboard it into orbit.’ I lifted it gingerly back into position and fresh sweat came to my face when I thought of the élan with which I had hammered it open. ‘Damn tricky stuff, too. Wrong temperature, wrong handling, excessive humidity – well, it makes quite a bang. I don’t like this hold so much any more.’ I caught up the ammunition crate and returned that also: thistledown never felt so light as that box did on top of the ammonal.

‘Are you putting them all back?’ There was a tiny frown between her eyes.

‘What does it look like to you?’

‘Scared?’

‘No. Terrified. The next box might have had nitroglycerine or some such. That really would be something.’ I replaced all the boxes and battens, took the torch and went aft to see what else there was. But there wasn’t much. On the port side, six diesel oil drums, all full, kerosene, D.D.T. and some five-gallon water drums shaped and strapped for carrying over the shoulders – Fleck, I supposed, would need these when he topped up water supplies in the more remote islands where there were no other loading facilities. On the starboard side there were a couple of square metal boxes half-full of assorted and rusted ship’s ironmongery – nuts, bolts, eyebolts, blocks, tackles, bottle screws, even a couple of marline-spikes. I eyed the spikes longingly but left them where they were: it didn’t seem likely that Captain Fleck would have overlooked the possibility, but, even if he had, a marline-spike was a good deal slower than a bullet. And very difficult to conceal.

I walked back to Marie Hopeman. She was very pale.

‘Nothing there at all. Any ideas about what to do now?’

‘You can do what you like.’ she said calmly. ‘I’m going to be sick.’

‘Oh, Lord.’ I ran for the cabin, hammered on the bulkhead and was standing below the hatch when it opened. It was Captain Fleck himself, clear-eyed, rested, freshly-shaved and clad in white ducks. He courteously removed his cheroot before speaking.

‘A splendid morning, Bentall. I trust you –’

‘My wife’s sick,’ I interrupted. ‘She needs fresh air. Can she come up on deck?’

‘Sick?’ His tone changed. ‘Fever?’

‘Seasick.’ I yelled at him.

‘On a day like this?’ Fleck half-straightened and looked around what he probably regarded as an expanse of flat calm. ‘One minute.’

He snapped his fingers, said something I couldn’t catch and waited till the boy who’d brought us breakfast came running up with a pair of binoculars. Fleck made a slow careful 360° sweep of the horizon, then lowered the glasses. ‘She can come up. You, too, if you like.’

I called Marie and let her precede me up the ladder. Fleck gave her a helping hand over the edge of the hatch and said solicitously: I’m sorry to hear that you are not too well, Mrs Bentall. You don’t look too good, and that’s a fact.’

‘You are most kind, Captain Fleck.’ Her tone and look would have shrivelled me, but it bounced right off Fleck. He snapped his fingers again and the boy appeared with a couple of sunshaded deck-chairs. ‘You are welcome to remain as long as you wish, both of you. If you are told to go below you must do so immediately. That is understood?’

I nodded silently.

‘Good. You will not, of course, be so foolish as to try anything foolish. Our friend Rabat is no Annie Oakley, but he could hardly miss at this range.’ I turned my head and saw the little Indian, still in black but without his jacket now, sitting on the other side of the hatch with his sawn-off shotgun across his knees. It was pointed straight at my head and he was looking at me in a longing fashion I didn’t care for. ‘I must leave you now,’ Fleck went on. He smiled, showing his brown crooked teeth. ‘We shipmasters have our business to attend to. I will see you later.’

He left us to fix up the deck-chairs and went for’ard into the wheelhouse beyond the wireless cabin. Marie stretched herself out with a sigh, closed her eyes and in five minutes had the colour back in her cheeks. In ten minutes she had fallen asleep. I should have liked to do the same myself, but Colonel Raine wouldn’t have liked it. ‘External vigilance, my boy’ was his repeated watchword, so I looked round me as vigilantly as I could. But there was nothing much to be vigilant about.

Above, a white-hot sun in a washed-out blue-white sky. To the west, a green-blue sea, to the east, the sunward side, deep green sparkling waters pushed into a long low swell by the warm twenty-knot trade wind. Off to the south-east, some vague and purplish blurs on the horizon I that might have been islands or might equally well have been my imagination. And in the whole expanse of sea not a ship or boat in sight. Not even a flying fish. I transferred my vigilance to the schooner.

Perhaps it wasn’t the filthiest vessel in all the seven seas, I’d never seen them all, but it would have taken a good ship to beat it. It was bigger, much bigger, than I had thought, close on a hundred feet in length, and everyone of them greasy, cluttered with refuse, unwashed and unpainted. Or there had been paint, but most of it had sun-blistered off. Two masts, sparred and rigged to carry sails, but no sails in sight, and between the mastheads a wireless aerial that trailed down to the radio cabin, about twenty feet for’ard from where I sat. I could see the rusted ventilator beyond its open door and beyond that a place that might have been Fleck’s charthouse or cabin or both and still further for’ard, but on a higher elevation, the closed-in bridge. Beyond that again, I supposed, below deck level, would be the crew quarters. I spent almost five minutes gazing thoughtfully at the superstructure and fore part of the ship with the odd vague feeling that there was something wrong, that there was something as it shouldn’t have been. Maybe Colonel Raine would have got it, but I couldn’t. I felt I had done my duty by the colonel, and keeping my eyes open any longer wouldn’t help anyone, asleep or awake they could toss us over the side whenever they wished. I’d had three hours’ sleep in the past forty-eight. I closed my eyes. I went to sleep.

When I awoke it was just on noon. The sun was almost directly overhead, but the chair shades were wide and the trade winds cool. Captain Fleck had just seated himself on the side of the hatchway. Apparently whatever business he had to attend to was over, and guessing the nature of that business was no trick at all, he’d just finished a long and difficult interview with a bottle of whisky. His eyes were slightly glazed and even at three feet to windward I’d no difficulty at all in smelling the Scotch. But conscience or maybe something else had got into him for he was carrying a tray with glasses, a bottle of sherry and a small stone jar.

‘We’ll send you a bite of food by-and-by.’ He sounded almost apologetic. ‘Thought you might like a snifter, first?’

‘Uh-huh.’ I looked at the stone jar. ‘What’s in it? Cyanide?’

‘Scotch,’ he said shortly. He poured out two drinks, drained his own at a gulp and nodded at Marie who was lying facing us, her face almost completely hidden under her windblown hair. ‘How about Mrs Bentall?’

‘Let her sleep. She needs it. Who’s giving you the orders for all of this, Fleck?’

‘Eh?’ He was off-balance, but only for a second, his tolerance to alcohol seemed pretty high. ‘Orders? What orders? Whose orders?’

‘What are you going to do with us?’

‘Impatient to find out, aren’t you, Bentall?’

‘I just love it here. Not very communicative, are you?’

‘Have another drink.’

‘I haven’t even started this one. How much longer do you intend keeping us here?’

He thought it over for a bit, then said slowly: ‘I don’t know. Your guess isn’t so far out, I’m not the principal in this. There was somebody very anxious indeed to see you.’ He gulped down some more whisky. ‘But he isn’t so sure now.’

‘He might have told you that before you took us from the hotel.’

‘He didn’t know then. Radio, not five minutes ago. He’s coming through again at 1900 hours – seven o’clock sharp. You’ll have your answer then. I hope you like it.’ There was something sombre in his voice that I didn’t find very encouraging. He switched his glance to Marie, looked at her for a long time in silence, then stirred. ‘Kind of a nice girl you got there, Bentall.’

‘Sure. That’s my wife, Fleck. Look the other way.’

He turned slowly and looked at me, his face hard and cold. But there was something else in it too, I just couldn’t put my finger on it.

‘If I were ten years younger or maybe even half a bottle of whisky soberer,’ he said without animosity, ‘I’d have your front teeth for that, Bentall.’ He looked away across the green dazzle of the ocean, the glass of whisky forgotten in his hand. ‘I got a daughter just a year or two younger than her. Right now she’s in the University of California. Liberal Arts. Thinks her old man’s a captain in the Australian Navy.’ He swirled the drink around in his glass. ‘Maybe it’s better she keeps on thinking just that, maybe it’s better that she never sees me again. But if I knew I would never see her again …’

I got it. I’m no Einstein but I don’t have to be beaten over the head more than a few times to make me see the obvious. The sun was hotter than ever, but I didn’t feel warm any more. I didn’t want him to realize that he had been talking to me, too, not just to himself, so I said: ‘You’re no Australian, are you, Fleck?’

‘No?’

‘No. You talk like one, but it’s an overlaid accent.’

‘I’m as English as you are,’ he growled. ‘But my home’s in Australia.’

‘Who’s paying for all this, Fleck?’

He rose abruptly to his feet, gathered up the empty glasses and bottles and went away without another word.

It wasn’t until about half past five in the evening that Fleck came to tell us to get below. Maybe he’d spotted a vessel on the horizon and didn’t want to take the chance of anyone seeing us if they approached too closely, maybe he just thought we’d been on deck long enough. The prospect of returning to that stinking hole was no pleasure, but apart from the fact that both of us had slept nearly all day and felt rested again, we weren’t too reluctant to go: black cumulus thunderheads had swept up out of the east in the late afternoon, an obscured sun had turned the air cool and the rain wasn’t far away. It looked as if it were going to be a black and dirty night. The sort of night that would suit Captain Fleck very well indeed: the sort of night, I hoped, that would suit us even better.

The hatch-cover dropped in place behind us and the bolt slid home. Marie gave a little shiver and hugged herself tightly.

‘Well, another night in the Ritz coming up. You should have asked for fresh batteries – that torch isn’t going to last us all night.’

‘It won’t have to. One way or another we’ve spent our last night on this floating garbage can. We’re leaving this evening, just as soon as it’s good and dark. If Fleck has his way we’ll be leaving with a couple of iron bars tied to our feet: if I have mine, we’ll leave without them. If I were a betting man, I’d put my money on Fleck.’

‘What do you mean?’ she whispered. ‘You – you were sure that nothing was going to happen to us. Remember all the reasons you gave me when we arrived on board last night. You said Fleck was no killer.’

‘I still don’t think he is. Not by nature, anyway. He’s been drinking all day, trying to drown his conscience. But there are many things that can make a man do what he doesn’t want to do, even kill: threats, blackmail, a desperate need for money. I was speaking to him while you slept. It seems that whoever wanted me out here no longer needs me. What it was for I don’t know, but whatever it was the end appears to have been achieved without me.’

‘He told you that we – that we –’

‘He told me nothing, directly. He merely said that the person who had arranged the kidnap thought that he no longer wanted me – or us. The definite word is to come through at seven but from the way Fleck spoke there wasn’t much doubt about what the word is going to be. I think old Fleck’s got a soft spot for you and he spoke of you, by inference, as if you already belonged in the past. Very touching, very wistful.’

She touched my arm, looked up at me with a strange expression I’d never seen before and said simply: ‘I’m scared. It’s funny, all of a sudden I look into the future and I don’t see it and I’m scared. Are you?’

‘Of course I’m scared,’ I said irritably. ‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t think you are, it’s just something to say. I know you’re not afraid – not of death, anyway. It’s not that you’re any braver than the rest of us, it’s just that if death came your way you’d be so busy figuring, planning, calculating, scheming, working out a way to beat it that you’d never even see it coming except in an academic sort of way. You’re working out a way to beat it now, you’re sure you will beat it: death for you, death that even one chance in a million might avoid, would be the supreme insult.’ She smiled at me, rather self-consciously, then went on:

‘Colonel Raine told me a good deal about you. He said that when things are completely desperate and there’s no hope left, it’s in the nature of man to accept the inevitable, but he said you wouldn’t, not because it was any positive thing, but just because you wouldn’t even know how to set about giving up. He said he thought you were the one man he could ever be afraid of, for if you were strapped to an electric chair and the executioner was pulling the switch, you’d still be figuring a way to beat it.’ She’d been abstractly twisting one of my shirt buttons until it was just about off, but I said nothing, one shirt button more or less wasn’t going to matter very much that night, and now she looked up and smiled again to rob her next words of offence. ‘I think you’re a very arrogant man. I think you’re a man with a complete belief in himself. But one of these days you’re going to meet up with a situation where your self-belief is going to be of just no help at all. ’

‘Mark my words,’ I said nastily. ‘You forgot to say, “Mark my words.”’

The smile faded and she turned away as the hatch opened. It was the brown-skinned Fijian boy, with soup, some sort of stew and coffee. He came and left without a word.

I looked at Marie. ‘Ominous, eh?’

‘What do you mean?’ she said coldly.

‘Our Fijian friend. This morning a grin from ear to ear: tonight the look of a surgeon who’s just come out to tell you that his scalpel slipped.’

‘So?’

‘It’s not the custom,’ I said patiently, ‘to crack gags and do a song-and-dance act when you’re bringing the last meal to the condemned man. The better penitentiaries frown on it.’

‘Oh,’ she said flatly. ‘I see.’

‘Do you want to sample this stuff?’ I went on. ‘Or will I just throw it away?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said doubtfully. ‘I haven’t eaten for twenty-four hours. I’ll try.’

It was worth the try. The soup was good, the stew better, the coffee excellent. The cook had made a miraculous recovery from the depths he’d plumbed that morning: or maybe they’d shot the old one. I’d more to think of. I drained my coffee and looked at Marie.

‘You can swim, I take it?’

‘Not very well,’ she said hesitantly. ‘I can float.’

‘Provided there are no iron bars tied to your feet.’ I nodded. ‘That’ll be enough. Would you like to do a little listening while I do a little work?’

‘Of course.’ She was getting round to forgiving me. We went for’ard and I pulled down a couple of boxes for her to stand on, just below the opening of the port ventilator.

‘You won’t miss much of what they say up top,’ I said. ‘Especially, you’ll hear everything that’s said in or by the radio room. Probably nothing much before seven, but you never know. I’m afraid you’re going to get a bit of a crick in the neck but I’ll relieve you as soon as I’m through.’

I left her there, went back to the after end of the hold, climbed three steps up the iron ladder and made a rough estimate of the distance between the top rung and the bottom of the hatch-cover above. Then I came down and started rummaging around in the metal boxes in the starboard corner until I found a bottle-screw that suited me, picked up a couple of hardboard battens and stowed them away, together with the bottle-screw, behind some boxes.

Back at the platform of wooden boxes where we’d spent the night I pushed aside the two loose battens in the outboard row, cautiously lifted down the boxes with the compasses and binoculars, shoved them to one side, took down the box with the aircraft-type lifebelts and emptied out the contents.

There were twelve of the belts altogether, rubber and reinforced canvas covers with leather harness instead of the more usual tapes. In addition to the CO₂ bottle and shark-repellant cylinder, each belt had another waterproof cylinder with a wire leading up to a small red lamp fixed on the left shoulder strap. There would be a battery inside that cylinder. I pressed the little switch on one of them and the lamp at once glowed a deep bright red, indication that the equipment, though obsolete, was not old and good augury for the operating efficiency of the gas and water-tightness of the inflated belts. But it wasn’t a thing to be left to chance: I picked out four belts at random and struck the release knob on the first of them.

The immediate hiss of compressed gas wasn’t so terribly loud, I supposed, but inside that confined space it seemed as if everybody aboard the schooner must hear it. Certainly Marie heard it, for she jumped off her box and came quickly back into the pool of light cast by the suspended torch.

‘What’s that?’ she asked quickly. ‘What made the noise?’

‘No rats, no snakes, no fresh enemies,’ I assured her. The hissing had now stopped and I held up a round, stiff, fully inflated lifebelt for her inspection. ‘Just testing. Seems O.K. I’ll test one or two more, but I’ll try to keep it quiet. Heard anything yet?’

‘Nothing. Plenty of talk, that is, Fleck and that Australian man. But it’s mostly about charts, courses, islands, cargoes, things like that. And their girl friends in Suva.’

‘That must be interesting.’

‘Not the way they tell it,’ she snapped.

‘Dreadful,’ I agreed. ‘Just what you were saying last night. Men are all the same. Better get back before you miss anything.’

She gave me a long considering look but I was busy testing the other lifebelts, muffling the noise under the two blankets and the pillows. All four worked perfectly and when, after ten minutes, none showed any sign of deflation the chances seemed high that all the others were at least as good. I picked out another four, hid them behind some boxes, deflated the four I’d tested and replaced them in the box with the others. A minute later I’d all the battens and boxes back in place.