Sea Fury (1971) (10 page)

Grade made a soft hissing sound through his teeth. “Now that, Nick, boy, doesn’t look like any tea I ever saw. You know something? I begin to think your Mr. Saunders wasn’t being altogether honest with you. Not strictly on the up and up, if you get my meaning. Fact is, I think you got a crook deal.”

He lifted the bag out of the box. It was fastened with a piece of fine string. Grade untied the string and opened the bag. He took a little of the powder on his finger and touched it with the tip of his tongue.

“Bitter taste. What does that tell you, Nick?”

“Nothing.”

“It tells me something. It tells me this is heroin for a cert.”

“Heroin! Are you sure?”

“I’d lay a thousand to one.”

“It can’t be,” Holt said; but he was thinking it very well could be just that. And he did not like it.

“Just look at it this way,” Grade said. “This comes from Hong Kong. Red China is just across the border. In China the poppies grow that opium is extracted from. Morphine comes from opium. Heroin is a derivative of morphine. Are you with me?”

“I’m with you,” Holt said, and wished he wasn’t.

Grade weighed the bag in his hand. “You any idea what this little lot would be worth on the black market?”

Holt shook his head.

Grade appeared to be making a mental calculation. Then he said, “I’m guessing, mind, but if this is heroin—and somehow I can’t see Mr. Saunders bothering to hide a bag
of salt away like that; if it is heroin I’d say at a low estimate it’d be worth not less than somewhere around forty thousand Australian dollars. Say twenty thousand pounds sterling.”

“You must be joking. Twenty thousand pounds for that.”

“You can get anything between one and four pounds a grain, so they tell me.”

Holt wondered just who “they” were, but he did not ask.

“So that’s why Mr. Roylance was going to be so willing to meet me in Fremantle. Nothing to do with China tea.”

“Oh, he may have a taste for that too.” Grade re-tied the bag with the thin string. “Seems to me, Nick, you were the stooge. If the customs found that junk you were the one who got caught. Not Mr. Saunders, who is probably not really Mr. Saunders anyway, and not Mr. Roylance, who is likewise probably not Mr. Roylance; just you, chum, just you.”

“Joe Soap.”

“You said it. But the chances were good that you’d get through without even having the box opened. You got that innocent look. It was a good play. How was Saunders to know that you’d have such a suspicious bastard for a cabin mate? I wonder how many innocent suckers he uses like this.”

“So much for the job in Australia,” Holt said. He could see now that there never would have been a job. He was just being used; and when he had served his purpose he would have been discarded. He no longer believed there had been any accident about that spilt beer; it had all been planned.

“Cheer up,” Grade said. “Plenty other jobs. What are you going to do about this?” He indicated the bag of heroin.

Holt picked up the bag and put it back in the box. He pushed the false bottom into place and began to scoop up the tea and refill the box.

“I’m going to hand it over to the customs when we reach port.”

“They’ll ask questions.”

“I’ll answer them. I haven’t got anything to hide.”

He folded the tinfoil over the tea, picked up a shoe and began to hammer the lid on with the heel. When he had finished the box looked almost exactly as it had when Saunders had given it to him.

Grade was looking thoughtful. “You could still get that through customs with no questions asked.”

“Are you suggesting I should play Saunders’ game for him? Take the box to Roylance.”

“Who said anything about taking it to Roylance?”

Holt stared at Grade. “Now what exactly do you mean by that?”

“For a share of the takings,” Grade said coolly, “I could introduce you to a customer for that stuff. A fifty-fifty share. Of course we’d have to go to Sydney; that’s where the market is. We could get a better price in London or New York maybe, but we might have trouble getting the merchandise there.
Sydney
’s the best bet.”

Holt wondered whether the Australian was joking, but when he looked into Grade’s eyes he knew there was no joke about it. So what sort of a man was this, who knew people who were in the market for smuggled drugs?

“You must be mad. Do you think I’m a crook?”

Grade lit a cigarette. There was a steely glint in his eyes. “I never knew the man who wasn’t crook enough to pick up ten thousand pounds lying at his feet.”

Holt put the box back in his wardrobe and closed the door. He was sweating. He didn’t want to listen to Grade. He wanted to get out of the cabin, get away from Grade,
anywhere
. But he stayed where he was. Grade’s voice had a harsh, slightly nasal intonation, and yet it was as seductive as the Sirens’ song. He stayed and listened.

“Ten thousand pounds sterling,” Grade said. “All that clear profit. No income tax.”

Victor Maggs sat in the wireless cabin and listened to the weather report. There was a smile on Maggs’s face as he heard the storm warning. He had heard quite a lot about Jessie since that first report, and by Maggs’s reckoning there was now little doubt that Jessie and the
Chetwynd
would in the not too distant future come to grips.

As he listened to the flat, metallic voice coming through the headphones Maggs experienced a fluttering sensation in his stomach. Tremors of excitement rippled through his body, not unmingled with dread. But even in the dread he took a certain masochistic pleasure, and however much afraid he might be, the fear was more than counter-balanced by the thought of revenging himself on Captain Leach.

And not only on Leach but on all the rest of them; on that Major Lycett with his damned public school accent which grated on Maggs’s ear; on that snooty Mrs. Lycett who only had time for the mate; on the mate too; yes, especially on the mate, whom Maggs hated for his handsome face, his physical perfection, his self-assurance, even for his nationality.

Maggs chuckled softly. They didn’t know what was coming to them. Only he knew; only he could avert the disaster; and he did not wish to do so. He felt like a god, controlling the fate of so many people. The chuckle became louder; it grew to laughter; the laughter shook Maggs’s stunted body; it was wild, insane. He laughed until the tears rolled down his cheeks. A god! He, a god!

M
R
. J
OHANSEN
attacked his breakfast with zest. There was nothing, he always maintained, like the morning watch to give a man an appetite for the first meal of the day. And the mate was not fussy about what he ate: curry and rice, bacon and eggs, toast and marmalade, it all disappeared into his voracious mouth. However little sleep he might have had during the night, he did not look tired. He had not shaved and there was golden bristle on his chin, but his eyes were clear and wide awake.

Lycett watched him covertly with distaste. Lycett had very little appetite; he merely pecked gloomily at his food, as though he suspected that the Chinese cook might have slipped some deadly poison into it.

Moira Lycett was not present; she seldom appeared for breakfast, preferring to sleep on until a later hour. Captain Leach was not in the dining saloon either, but his reasons for absence were different. Leach’s breakfast took the form of whisky and he consumed it in the privacy of his own quarters. The Mensteins and the Easts were there, Nick Holt and Tom Grade, Mr. Prior, the engineers at their separate table, and Radio Officer Maggs. Mr. Finch, whose watch it was, was on the bridge.

Two large overhead fans revolved at no great speed and with a slight, monotonous creaking sound, as though after so many years of service their joints had developed arthritis. The portholes along one side had been open all night and the air, stirred by the fans, was a little fresher than it would become later in the day. Conversation was desultory, with long pauses when nobody seemed to have anything to say and the only sounds were the rattle of the cutlery and china, the creaking of the fans and the clicking of Mr. Prior’s teeth.

Perkins ate with his head close to his plate, as though he had made a time and motion study and had decided that this saved a lot of work for the arms. From this bowed position he shot secret glances across at the mate on the other table and then at Lycett; and now and then, in the intervals between chewing, the shadow of a smile twisted his thin lips.

Johansen chanced to notice the smile. He said, “You find something funny, Mr. Perkins? You grin so much.”

Perkins raised his head and his beady eyes regarded the mate for a moment or two, the smile still hovering about his lips. “Thoughts, Mr. Johansen. Just thoughts.”

“Mighty funny thoughts, mebbe. You tell us what these so funny thoughts are. Give us all a laugh.”

“I don’t think you’d find them quite so amusing. In fact I think you wouldn’t laugh at all if I told you.”

“No? So you don’t tell us, how we know? Not right to keep good things to yourself.”

Perkins drank some coffee, put the cup down. “Other people keep these good things to themselves.”

Lycett was looking at Perkins. There was something behind the little engineer’s words, some hidden meaning; he was sure of it. Perkins had a secret, and Lycett, with sudden intuition, had the idea that that secret might be of concern to him as well as the mate. He noticed that there were some scratches
on the engineer’s cheek and he wondered how they had got there.

Johansen perhaps also had some inkling of what was in Perkins’s mind, for he broke off the exchanges abruptly and turned his attention to Pearl East.

“I see you practising on deck. You keep your hand in.”

“We have to keep in practice, Mr. Johansen.”

“Is good act. I see plenty acts; I know what I talk about. Is mighty fine act. Sure.”

“I’m glad you think so.”

Sydney East ate in silence. He did not care for the way Johansen looked at his wife; it was something he had noticed before; when Johansen talked to her his eyes seemed to be saying other things, things that made him, Syd East, burn inside. Why could Johansen not be content with turning his charm on one woman, on Mrs. Lycett? But there were men like that, men who would go for any attractive woman, no matter whose wife she might be. And there could be no doubt that Johansen had charm; you had to admit that, even if you hated the man’s guts.

He glanced at his wife. She was looking at Johansen and smiling radiantly. So was even she attracted by this big, blond Dane? He dismissed the idea; Pearl was not like that, not like Mrs. Lycett; she was just being polite. Try as he might, however, he could not altogether quench the flame of jealousy that had spurted up inside him. She need not surely have smiled quite so much.

“Some day,” Johansen was saying, “mebbe I see you on stage. I give you big hand-clap. Sure.”

Pearl gave her little musical laugh. “I’ll look foward to that.”

“I send bouquet to dressing-room.”

“Don’t waste your money,” East said, and his voice was
so hard, so bitter, that even the Mensteins, who had been talking quietly to each other, became suddenly silent and looked at him in surprise.

There was a brief, awkward pause before Johansen gave a laugh. “Waste to give flowers to a lovely lady? How so?”

East took a piece of toast and broke it in his hands. “Flowers die.”

“All things die,” Lycett said, and he was looking at Johansen.

Maggs gave a snigger. “You’re right, Major. Oh, how right you are.”

Conversation flagged. A blight seemed to have fallen on the breakfast table. The fans creaked on.

Maggs had just left the dining saloon when he felt a tap on the shoulder. He turned his head and saw Johansen
towering
over him. Maggs disliked being tapped on the shoulder; he disliked being forced to look up to people as tall as the mate.

“A word with you, Sparks,” Johansen said.

“A word! What word?”

Johansen grasped Maggs’s arm and drew him away from the saloon, out of earshot of the passengers.

“What d’you want?” Maggs demanded. He liked the mate’s grip on his arm even less than the tap on the shoulder. He even felt vaguely alarmed. Johansen was so big and strong. Nobody had a right to be so husky.

Johansen stopped propelling Maggs along the alleyway. Maggs had his back against a handrail and Johansen stood facing him.

Maggs felt surrounded.

“The glass is falling,” Johansen said.

Maggs felt a sense of relief, and was angry with
himself
 
for having been nervous enough to feel relieved. Had he imagined the mate was going to beat him up? What a
ridiculous
idea. And yet it had been in his head.

“So the glass is falling. What of it?”

“When glass fall, bad weather about. Fall a lot, mebbe bloody bad.”

“Has it fallen a lot?”

“Not yet. I think mebbe later.”

“Why tell me?”

“You are Sparks. You take weather reports.”

“So what?”

“All weather reports say weather set fine?”

“That’s right.”

“No storms around? No bloody big winds?”

“Nothing.”

Johansen looked puzzled. “Is strange. Me, I smell something. I feel something in my bones. Sure.”

“I wouldn’t trust too much in bones,” Maggs said. “I never heard of a met man forecasting from the feel of his bones.”

Johansen’s face hardened. “You laugh at me, huh?”

Maggs shook his head. “Not me. I’m just saying I put more trust in the weather reports than in any man’s feelings. The reports say no storms.”

But he was thinking: You bet I’m laughing at you, you great bonehead. I’m laughing at the whole flaming lot of you. Me, Victor Maggs, the little runt. I’m laughing.

“Strange,” Johansen said. “Mighty strange. Mebbe my bones tell me wrong. Mebbe I get old.” He left Maggs and walked away shaking his head.

Maggs wanted to let out a hoot of derision at the mate’s receding back, but he restrained the impulse. The time would come, and it would not be long now, not long at all. Mr. Johansen’s bones were better prophets than even he suspected.

Lycett was about to open his cabin door and step inside when Perkins stopped him.

“I’d like to speak to you. Major.”

Lycett closed the half-opened door. “On what subject?” He could think of nothing that Perkins could have to say that could possibly interest him.

“A subject of some importance.”

“Fire away then. I’m listening.”

“Not here, Major. Somewhere private. My cabin.”

“Your cabin? Now, look here, what the devil is this all about?”

“I’ll tell you when we get there. Are you coming?”

“I’m damned if I see why I should.”

“I said it was important.” Perkins put a hand on Lycett’s arm. Lycett looked down at it as he might have looked at some repulsive insect that had alighted on his sleeve. It was a scarred, knocked-about sort of hand with broken, blackened finger-nails. It was not difficult to divine that Perkins’s work had to do with machinery; dirty machinery at that. “Important to you, Major.”

Lycett was startled. He had begun to imagine that Perkins was going to ask him some kind of favour, but apparently it was nothing of the sort. He looked into Perkins’s eyes and did not like what he saw. There was something evil there. Whatever Perkins wished to speak to him about, Lycett had a feeling that it was not going to be pleasant to listen to. He had half a mind to tell the fellow to go to the devil; but he did not.

“Very well,” he said. “Lead the way.”

Perkins’s cabin was small and rather squalid. It had an odour of stale cigarette smoke, stale sweat and oil. There was one chair. Perkins offered it to his guest. Lycett sat down only
because it would have seemed ridiculous to have remained standing.

“Like a beer?” Perkins asked.

“No, thank you.”

“Cigarette?”

“No.” Lycett was becoming impatient. He believed Perkins was deliberately delaying, keeping him in suspense for sheer devilment. Damn the fellow!

Perkins lit a cigarette for himself and sat on the bunk. For a while he remained silent, just staring at Lycett.

“Well?” Lycett said testily. “Let’s have it. Something of importance, you said.”

“It’s about your wife.”

Lycett’s head jerked up. It was what he had been half expecting, for what else could Perkins have to talk to him about that would be of importance to him? And Perkins was the kind of sly, crafty devil who would be certain to ferret out something unsavoury if there was anything to ferret.

Lycett knew that he should have got up and left the cabin then. It would have been the honourable thing to do, for an honourable man would have refused to hear anything about his wife from such a creature. But honour was a dead duck. Lycett wanted to know what Perkins had to say.

“What about my wife?”

Perkins watched the smoke drifting away from his cigarette. But he was watching Lycett too. “I saw her last night.”

“That’s not surprising. I imagine a lot of other people saw her too.”

“Not where I saw her.”

Lycett felt an almost irresistible desire to plant his fist in Perkins’s mean little mouth. But he did not move.

“Oh,” he said.

“Do you want to know where it was?”

“You’re going to tell me anyway. That was the object of bringing me here, I imagine.”

Perkins looked a little put out. “Well, you don’t have to take that tone‚ Major. I’m only trying to help you.”

“Help me, be damned!” Lycett said. “You know as well as I do that you’re only doing this for the pleasure it gives you to tell tales. And maybe because you want to get your own back on somebody. But go on.”

“I’m not so sure that I will go on now.” Perkins had an injured air. “You try to do what’s right and that’s all the thanks you get.”

“Go on, damn you!”

“No, to hell with it,” Perkins said. “I won’t go on.”

Lycett got up from the chair, grabbed the front of Perkins’s shirt in both hands and shook him. He even banged Perkins’s head on the bulkhead behind the bunk. Perkins gave a howl. Lycett was really hurting him.

“All right. All right. I’ll tell you.”

Lycett released him and sat down again, breathing heavily.

Perkins said sulkily, “You didn’t have to do that. There was no need for violence. I was going to tell you anyway, like you said. She was going into the mate’s cabin.”

He had been expecting it, but it was like a stab in the heart all the same. But he kept his voice under control. “What time was this?”

“About nine-fifteen.”

Lycett’s eyes narrowed. It fitted. At nine-fifteen he had already been playing cards with Grade for a quarter of an hour. She had waited until he was safely out of the way. Damn her!

“You want to know what time she came out?” Perkins asked.

“At eleven forty-five,” Lycett said.

Perkins looked like a man who had just seen his ace trumped. “You knew?”

“No, I didn’t know.” He looked contemptuously at the engineer. “Do you mean to say you kept watch all that time?”

Perkins smirked. “I felt I had a duty.”

“You bloody little hypocrite,” Lycett said.

The smirk vanished from Perkins’s face and he looked vicious. “I don’t have to take insults from you. I could call you worse names.”

“Possibly you could.” Lycett stood up. “Don’t bother to show me out. I can find my own way.”

“What are you going to do?”

Lycett stopped with his hand resting on the door-knob. “Do?”

“About what I just told you. About her. About—them.”

“I don’t think it’s any of your business. I don’t think it was any of your business right from the start.”

“But you’ll do something? You can’t just let things slide. You won’t let them get away with it?”

Perkins seemed strangely insistent and Lycett wondered why. What was it to him? Perhaps he owed the mate a grudge and was using this roundabout way of getting his own back. It did not occur to Lycett that it might be the woman in the case who had earned Perkins’s enmity.

Without bothering to answer, he opened the door and left the cabin. He was boiling with anger. It was not only Moira’s infidelity that incensed him, but that fact that a louse like Perkins should have been the one to tell him about it. He felt a small degree of satisfaction for having beaten the engineer’s head against the bulkhead, but he would have liked to beat the little wretch’s brains out.

A thought came into his mind; suppose Perkins had been lying. He clutched at the possibility. She had said she had
been with the Mensteins for part of the evening, and if that were true she could not have been in Johansen’s cabin from nine fifteen to eleven forty-five; in which case Perkins must certainly have lied. Well, there was one way of finding out the truth about that. He would speak to the Mensteins.