The Golden Rendezvous

“I don’t know. I’ve been asleep. You see,” she explained, “we take it in three-hour turns to be by old Mr. Cerdan’s bed. It is essential that he is watched all the time. I was trying to get in some little sleep before my turn came to relieve Miss Werner.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated. “You can’t tell us anything, then?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Perhaps your friend Miss Werner can?”

“Miss Werner?” She blinked at me. “But Mr. Cerdan is not to be——”

“Please. This might be very serious.”

“Very well.” Like all competent nurses she knew how far she could go and when to make up her mind. “But I must ask you to be very quiet and not to disturb Mr. Cerdan in any way at all.”

She didn’t say anything about the possibility of Mr. Cerdan disturbing us, but she might have warned us. As we passed through the open door of his cabin he was sitting up in bed, a book on the blankets before him, with a bright overhead bead-light illuminating a crimson tasselled night-cap and throwing his face into deep shadow, but a shadow not quite deep enough to hide the hostile gleam under bar-straight tufted eyebrows. The hostile gleam, it seemed to me, was as much a permanent feature of his face as the large beak of a nose that jutted out over a straggling white moustache. The nurse who led the way made to introduce us, but Cerdan waved her to silence with a peremptory hand. Imperious, I thought, was the word for the old boy, not to mention bad-tempered and downright ill-mannered.

“I hope you can explain this damnable outrage, sir.” His voice was glacial enough to make a polar bear shiver. “Bursting into my private stateroom without so much as by your leave.” He switched his gimlet eyes to Cummings. “You You there. You had your orders, damn it. Strictest privacy, absolutely. Explain yourself, sir.”

“I cannot tell you how sorry I am, Mr. Cerdan,” Cummings said smoothly. “Only the most unusual circumstances——”

“Rubbish!” Whatever this old coot was living for it couldn’t have been with the object of outliving his friends; he’d lost his last friend before he’d left the nursery. “Amanda! Get the captain on the phone. At once!”

The tall thin nurse sitting on the high-backed chair by the bedside made to gather up her knitting—an all but finished pale blue cardigan—lying on her knees, but I gestured to her to remain where she was.

“No need to tell the captain, Miss Werner. He knows all about it—he sent us here. We have only one very small request to make of you and Mr. Cerdan——”

“And I have only one very small request to make of you, sir.” His voice cracked into a falsetto, excitement or anger or age or all three of them. “Get the hell out of here!”

I thought about taking a deep breath to calm myself but even that two or three seconds’ delay would only have precipitated another explosion, so I said at once: “Very good, sir. But first I would like to know if either yourself or Miss Werner here heard any strange or unusual sounds inside the past hour or saw anything that struck you as unusual: Our chief steward is missing. So far we have found nothing to explain his disappearance.”

“Missing, hah?” Cerdan snorted. “Probably drunk or asleep.” Then, as an afterthought: “Or both.”

“He is not that sort of man,” Cummings said quietly. “Can you help us?”

“I’m sorry, sir.” Miss Werner, the nurse, had a low husky voice. “We heard and saw nothing. Nothing at all that might be of any help. But if there’s anything we can do——”

“There’s nothing for you to do,” Cerdan interrupted harshly, “except your job. We can’t help you, gentlemen. Good evening.”

Once more outside in the passageway I let go a long deep breath that I seemed to have been holding for the past two minutes and turned to Cummings.

“I don’t care how much that old battle-axe is paying for his stateroom,” I said bitterly. “He’s still being undercharged.”

“I can see why Mr. and Mrs. Cerdan, Junior, were glad to have him off their hands for a bit,” Cummings conceded. Coming from the normally imperturbable and diplomatic purser, this was the uttermost limit in outright condemnation. He glanced at his watch. “Not getting anywhere, are we? And in another fifteen, twenty minutes the passengers will start drifting back to their cabins. How about if you finish off here while I go below with White?”

“Right. Ten minutes.” I took the keys from White and started on the remaining four suites of cabins while Cummings left for the six on the deck below.

Ten minutes later, having drawn a complete blank in three of the four remaining suites, I found myself in the last of them, the big one on the port side, aft, belonging to Julius Beresford and his family. I searched the cabin belonging to Beresford and his wife—and by this time I was really searching, not just only for Benson, but for any signs that he might have been there—but again a blank. The same in the lounge and bathroom. I moved into a second and smaller cabin—the one belonging to Beresford’s daughter. Nothing behind the furniture, nothing behind the drapes, nothing under the four-poster. I moved to the aft bulkhead and slid back the roll doors that turned that entire side of the cabin into one huge wardrobe.

Miss Susan Beresford, I reflected, certainly did herself well in the way of clothes. There must have been about sixty or seventy hangers in that wall cupboard, and if any one hanger was draped with anything less than two or three hundred dollars I sadly missed my guess. I ploughed my way through the Balenciagas, Diors and Givenchys, looking behind and beneath. But nothing there.

I closed the roll doors and moved across to a small wardrobe in a corner. It was full of furs, coats, capes, stoles; why anyone should haul that stuff along on a cruise to the Caribbean was completely beyond me. I laid my hand on a particularly fine full-length specimen and was moving it to one side to peer into the darkness behind when I heard a faint click, as of a handle being released, and a voice said:

“It is rather a nice mink, isn’t it, Mr. Carter? That should be worth two years’ salary to you any day.”

III. Tuesday 9.30 p.m.–10.15 p.m. (#ulink_c4c10448-c5c2-550d-ac79-59f565cc0afb)

Susan Beresford was a beauty, all right. A perfectly oval-shaped face, high cheek-bones, shining auburn hair, eyebrows two shades darker and eyes the greenest green you ever saw, she had all the officers on the ship climbing the walls, even the ones she tormented the life out of. All except Carter, that was. A permanent expression of cool amusement does nothing to endear the wearer to me.

Not, just then, that I had any complaint on that ground. She was neither cool nor amused and that was a fact. Two dull red spots of anger—and was there perhaps a tinge of fear?—touched the tanned cheeks and if the expression on her face didn’t yet indicate the reaction of someone who has just come across a particularly repulsive beetle under a flat stone you could see that it was going to turn into something like that pretty soon, it didn’t require any micrometer to measure the curl at the corner of her mouth. I let the mink drop into place and pulled the wardrobe door to.

“You shouldn’t startle people like that,” I said reproachfully. “You should have knocked.”

“I should have——” Her mouth tightened, she still wasn’t amused. “What were you going to do with that coat?”

“Nothing. I never wear mink, Miss Beresford. It doesn’t suit me.” I smiled, but she didn’t. “I can explain.”

“I’m sure you can.” She was half-way round the edge of the door now, on her way out. “But I think I would rather you made the explanation to my father.”

“Suit yourself,” I said easily. “But please hurry. What I’m doing is urgent. Use the phone there. Or shall I do it?”

“Leave that phone alone,” she said irritably. She sighed, closed the door and leaned against it, and I had to admit that any door, even the expensively-panelled ones on the Campari, looked twice the door with Susan Beresford draped against it. She shook her head, then gave me an up from under look with those startling green eyes. “I can picture many things, Mr. Carter, but one thing I can’t visualise is our worthy chief officer taking off for some deserted island in a ship’s lifeboat with my mink in the sternsheets.” Getting back to normal, I noted with regret. “Besides, why should you? There must be over fifty thousand dollars’ worth of jewellery lying loose in that drawer there.”

“I missed that,” I admitted. “I wasn’t looking in drawers. I am looking for a man who is sick or unconscious or worse and Benson wouldn’t fit into any drawer I’ve ever seen.”

“Benson? Our head steward? That nice man?” She came a couple of steps towards me and I was obscurely pleased to see the quick concern in her eyes. “He’s missing?”

I told her all I knew myself. That didn’t take long. When I was finished, she said: “Well, upon my word! What a to-do about nothing. He could have gone for a stroll around the decks, or a sit-down, or a smoke, yet the first thing you do is to start searching cabins——”

“You don’t know Benson, Miss Beresford. He has never in his life left the passenger accommodation before 11 p.m. We couldn’t be more concerned if we’d found that the officer of the watch had disappeared from the bridge or the quartermaster left the wheel. Excuse me a moment.” I opened the cabin door to locate the source of voices outside, and saw White and another steward some way down the passage. White’s eyes lit up as he caught sight of me, then clouded in disapproval when he saw Susan Beresford emerging through the doorway behind me. White’s sense of propriety was having a roller-coaster ride that night.

“I was wondering where you were, sir,” he said reprovingly. “Mr. Cummings sent me up. No luck down below, I’m afraid, sir. Mr. Cummings is going through our quarters now.” He stood still for a moment, then the anxiety came to the foreground and erased the disapproval from his face. “What shall I do now, sir?”

“Nothing. Not personally. You’re in charge till we find the chief steward, and the passengers come first, you know that. Detail the stewards to be at the for’ard entrance to the ‘A’ accommodation in ten minutes’ time. One to search the officers’ quarters for’ard, another for the officers’ quarters aft, the third for the galleys, pantries, store-rooms. But wait till I give the word. Miss Beresford, I’d like to use your phone, please.”

I didn’t wait for permission. I lifted the phone, got the exchange, and had them put me through to the bo’sun’s cabin and found I was lucky. He was at home.

“MacDonald? First mate here. Sorry to call you out, Archie, but there’s trouble. Benson’s missing.”

“The chief steward, sir?” There was something infinitely reassuring about that deep slow voice that had never lost a fraction of its lilting West Highland intonation in twenty years at sea, in the complete lack of surprise or excitement in the tone. MacDonald was never surprised or excited about anything. He was more than my strong right arm, he was deck-side the most important person on the ship. And the most indispensable. “You’ll have searched the passengers’ and the stewards’ quarters, then?”

“Yes. Nothing doing. Take some men, on or off watch, doesn’t matter, move along the main decks. Lots of the crew usually up there at this time of night. See if any of them saw Benson, or saw or heard anything unusual. Maybe he’s sick, maybe he fell and hurt himself, for all I know he’s overboard.”

“And if we have no luck? Another bloody search, sir, I suppose?”

“I’m afraid so. Can you be finished and up here in ten minutes?”

“That will be no trouble, sir.”

I hung up, got through to the duty engineer officer, asked him to detail some men to come to the passenger accommodation, made another call to Tommy Wilson, the second officer, then asked to be put through to the captain. While I was waiting, Miss Beresford gave me her smile again, the sweet one with too much malice in it for my liking.