He moved on behind his guide, deep into that glittering world of luxury and service, the world of the first-class section of a modern liner. As he went up the main staircase towards his stateroom on A deck, the liner’s topmost accommodation deck immediately below the main lounges of the veranda deck, he saw a man leaning nonchalantly back against a bulkhead in the square at the top, smoking a cigar. Just for a second, their eyes met and then Shaw had passed on.
But he had an uncomfortable feeling that the man knew him and was now looking at his back. He had noticed the eyes; curiously penetrating eyes which were, in some vague way, almost familiar. The eyes apart, there was nothing in the least outstanding about the man — he was heavily built, pasty, expensively dressed, going a little bald. Very ordinary really; liners were full of such people. But all at once Shaw’s tautened nerves seemed to detect a note of unease in the customary throb of a ship… he looked back over his shoulder. The man had gone, and he shrugged slightly. A few moments later they reached his stateroom, a big compartment with a small entrance lobby and a private shower in a bathroom leading off it, and a square port which looked out on to the promenade deck.
Shaw looked round. The cabin was as luxurious as he might have expected from what he had already seen of the ship, luxurious and sophisticated enough to attract wealthy men and women on holiday and business. And yet, despite the elegance, Shaw felt the beginnings of a sense of apprehension, almost a fear of the unknown… there was something wrong in the air, a tenseness. The steward who’d brought him along, for one thing… the man had been perfectly attentive, but there had been a curious lack of warmth, the warmth which one learns to associate with cabin stewards in liners. The efficiency was there all right, but it was a little machine-like, glum and cold, unsmiling. The man had seemed like a soulless automaton.
Shaw sighed and began to unpack.
Two hours later a bugle sounded over the loudspeakers, calling the crew to stations for leaving harbour. Fifteen minutes after that the engines of the New South Wales throbbed into life, a cufuffle formed beneath her stem and she came off the pierhead and turned slowly, ponderously, headed outwards, faster and faster under the tremendous power of her nuclear reactor’s energy. She headed out of Naples Bay past Capri, and into the Tyrrhenian Sea to come south into the Mediterranean and set her course for Port Said and the Suez Canal, a mighty ship with over three thousand men, women, and children in her Captain’s charge. And — as it seemed to Shaw it must be regarded — the future of the world crated in her hold.
And under threat.
The first, the incredible, thing happened shortly after the ship had cleared the berth.
Shaw was in his cabin when the tap came at his door and when the girl walked in he could scarcely believe his eyes. He said harshly, “What the devil are you doing here?” He felt his hackles rising, nails digging into his palms. He stared down at her, long jaw thrust out, face stiff with anger. Then, remembering her purposeful look back in his flat, he said with thin-lipped bitterness: “You’d planned this from
the start, hadn’t you! You’ve no right—”
“No right? Of course I’ve a right!” Judith Donovan’s dark eyes flashed up at him angrily. She pushed her hair away from her forehead, gave her head a determined little toss. “I can go just where I please, and there’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it. There.” She opened her handbag, produced a folder similar to the one Latymer had given Shaw. “Here’s the carbon of my ticket. Naples to Sydney. It’s fully paid for, and my passport’s in order.” The girl’s eyes glistened a little as she went on, “There was money in my name at the bank and there was no reason why I shouldn’t come.”
Shaw sighed in exasperated fury, clenched his fists, relaxed them. This was a difficult young woman to get angry with, especially in the circumstances of that night in France so short a while ago. He swallowed his anger, told her to sit down. He stood over her, asked:
“Don’t you realize this game’s dangerous?”
“Yes, of course I do.”
“You’ll be mucking up my chances of finding anything out.”
She said defensively, “No, I won’t. I needn’t even know you at first. If we happen to get friendly on board… well, that’s quite natural, isn’t it, aboard a liner?” Suddenly, Shaw thought with a pang, she sounded forlorn again, alone and friendless. She went on, “I… want to be in on this all the way now, Commander Shaw. My father was going to do what he could to help, and — well, I suppose I just want to carry on, that’s all.” She looked up at him appealingly, her small, serious face framed by that darkly curling hair. “You’re not really angry, are you?”
He answered heatedly. “Of course I am! You’re being damned inconvenient and thoughtless, if you want to know what I think — and that’s putting it mildly. You deserve to be spanked within an inch of your life!” He walked up and down, stopped and swung round on her. “How did you get away? I thought my chief had put a man on you and Debonnair.”
“Yes, he had,” she agreed in a dead tone. “But I’m used to that sort of thing and I slipped him without any trouble. They’ll only just about be ticking over that I’ve gone— Debonnair had to go away for a night and she won’t know till she gets back from her office. The man thinks I’m in the flat at Albany Street.” She turned to him impulsively. “Don’t you see? I’m not just any girl! I know this business a little. Maybe I can help. I want to.”
“Help!” he repeated bitterly. “All you’re going to do is to draw attention to me, if there’s anybody aboard who knows you’re John Donovan’s daughter.”
She said quietly, “They won’t know that. I’m Judith Dan-gan. The only people Daddy ever let me meet were his own friends, and they knew me as Donovan. I always went back to that name when I was with Daddy.”
Shaw grunted. “Tell me something else, then. How did you know I was coming here?”
She said simply, “I guessed. You see, I knew — what was aboard the liner.”
Shaw went rigid. “You… what?”
“Karstad told Daddy that.”
“For God’s sake — how many other people know?”
“I can’t tell you that. I expect only Karstad, and whoever he got it from. That was what Daddy told me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me all this before?”
She gave him a quick look. “Because I meant to come, and I thought if you knew I knew, you’d find a way of stopping me.”
Shaw’s face was white and grim now. He said through his teeth, “You’re an irresponsible little fool.” He took her arm, asked roughly: “D’you know anything else, while we’re about it?”
She shook her head. “That’s all I ever found out. Daddy let that slip. Normally he never told me anything. But he was… he wasn’t himself after Karstad came.”
“Did you ever meet Karstad?”
“No. He only came that once, and I didn’t know anything about it till he’d gone. But Daddy was in a foul temper afterwards, and—”
“Why was that?”
“I don’t know, he just was.” She fiddled with her handbag.
“And — I wanted to help him, and I talked to him. Then he let it out that — the thing — would go on the New South Wales, and Karstad had come to see him. He shut up like a clam after that — he realized pretty quick he’d had a lapse and he didn’t say any more about it till he got me to contact you in Fouquier’s some while after.”