‘Maybe not alive.’ Bristow shivered again and glanced apprehensively over his shoulder. ‘Maybe the other kind.’
Keeton swore at him, for his own nerves were sufficiently on edge without Bristow’s fancies. ‘Snap out of it, can’t you? You start that sort of thing and you’ll soon be ready for the looney bin. Let’s find that grub.’
There was water in the galley also. It had collected at the lower end, where it was trapped in a filthy pool. A cork floated in it, two lemons, an empty beer can, all black with coal dust that had been washed out of the cold stove.
And then Keeton saw the cat. It was standing on the stove and eating out of a saucepan that was prevented from sliding off the inclined surface only by the iron fiddles that were fitted to it. The cat looked up and mewed. It stretched itself, jumped off the stove, and avoiding the water with disdainful paws, walked up to Keeton and began rubbing itself against his leg. He reached down and stroked it. The cat began to purr.
‘Well, what do you think of that?’ Bristow said. ‘They even left the cat. Just shows, don’t it? Bastards!’
He took an aluminium dipper from a hook and went to the fresh water pump over the sink. He filled the dipper and took a long drink.
‘I never knew water could taste so good. Ship’s water at that.’
Keeton also took a drink and they began to hunt for food. There was no shortage. They ate slabs of corned beef and hunks of stale bread washed down with more water. They sat on boxes and the cat watched them and rubbed against their legs and purred, grateful for this human company. The ship rolled and the scummy tide came towards them and retreated again, slapping against the sides of the galley and washing under the dead stove.
When they left the galley the cat followed them, as though unwilling to let the men out of its sight, stepping gingerly and shaking its paws whenever the water touched them.
‘We’ll have a look at the engine-room‚’ Keeton said. ‘That’s where she took the damage. Some of it anyway.’
‘You aren’t thinking of getting the engines started again, are you?’ Bristow was feeling better with the food inside him.
‘Funny man. You should go on the stage. You’d kill them — if they didn’t kill you first.’
The engine-room was a wreck. Keeton wondered whether this was all the result of the shell that had demolished the funnel or whether another had also pierced the upper decks and spread its havoc here in the heart of the ship. Standing on one of the iron gantries that was still remaining he was able to look up and see the sky through a jagged hole, and then he could look down and see the tangle of metal that had been the engines.
There was water at the bottom; it was like the dark, muddy pool in the depths of a pit. The body of a man lay there half-submerged, and his hair floated like a weed on the surface. Another body was caught between two iron rods, once handrails, that had been twisted round his chest so that they held the man suspended in mid-air as in a kind of rigid gibbet. His arms and legs hung free, and his head was flung back with the mouth wide open, so that Keeton, looking down upon it, could see the white teeth and the dark cavern of the throat.
He knew this man; it was the third engineer, young, not more than twenty-five; a man who had loved life, now dead, crucified on his own machinery.
‘He died with his teeth clean‚’ Keeton said.
‘God, Charlie‚’ Bristow said. ‘How can you make a laugh of a thing like that?’
‘If I didn’t laugh I might cry. It’s better to laugh.’
The cat jumped on Keeton’s shoulder and rubbed itself against his ear. He could hear its purring like an engine running inside the animal. The cat was happy even if the men were not.
‘We’ll see what the boat is like‚’ Keeton said. ‘We may need it.’
The boat, as he had feared, was in no state to be used; it scarcely needed a close inspection to make that apparent. A hole had been ripped in one side as big as a cask, and the rest of it was perforated with smaller punctures. Some of the boards were splintered and their edges charred, as though a small fire had started but had gone out, perhaps extinguished by the rain. As it was, this boat was as useless as the one that had been cut in halves.
‘Nice work‚’ Bristow said. ‘Mr Rains left us the best of everything.’
All around were strewn the jagged pieces of the funnel, and in the boat-deck was the gaping hole that led down into the engine-room; but forward of this the ship appeared to have suffered less damage. The bridge was intact and the two Oerlikons pointed their naked barrels at the sky, thin and black, like the scrawny fingers of prophets giving warning of the wrath to come.
They picked their way through the wreckage and came to the ladder up to the bridge, and climbed this and stood where the navigating officer might have been standing if there had been a navigating officer on board. The windows of the wheelhouse had been shattered by the blast and broken glass was scattered inside.
‘Mind your step‚’ Bristow said. ‘That stuff could give your feet a nasty gash.’
The cat, still accompanying them, jumped on to the binnacle and began to wash itself.
‘There’s one boy that’s not worrying‚’ Bristow said. He sounded envious. ‘Wish I had his nerve. This ship gives me the willies.’
It was the sense of desertion that frayed the nerves. The ship was at sea and there should have been men on the bridge, directing her course, keeping watch, steering. Instead, there was nothing — just the broken glass and the abandoned wheel, the cat perched on the binnacle and the silence.
They went into the chart-room, and that too was deserted. A few charts lay on the table, some instruments, drawing pins, an india-rubber. On the bulkhead the brass chronometer was still going. The time was twenty minutes past eleven.
‘They’ll have taken the log‚’ Keeton said. ‘They’d have to take the ship’s papers. Even Mr Rains wouldn’t forget that.’
Strewn about were the fragments of a broken coffee cup and a ham sandwich, one bite taken out of it, the bread curling back as it dried. The spilt coffee had painted a dark stain on the boards.
They went next into the wireless cabin, driven by a kind of compulsion to see all. No one was there.
Keeton looked at the transmitter. ‘Know anything about using one of these, Johnnie?’
‘Not me‚’ Bristow said. ‘Do you?’
Keeton shook his head. ‘Not a thing. It’s a pity. We might have sent out an S.O.S.’
‘I wonder whether Sparks did that before he left?’
‘Could have. But we must have drifted a hell of a way in the night; we’ll be miles off the mark by now. Besides, if anybody is picked up from the boats they’re bound to say the ship was sunk. Couldn’t say anything else, could they? Nobody’s going to hunt for us, so you can put that idea out of your head for a start.’
‘I expect you’re right.’ Bristow’s shoulders drooped and he moved towards the door. Then suddenly he turned and gripped Keeton’s arm, shaking it in his excitement. ‘I just thought of something.’
‘What?’
‘The gold. It’s all there and it’s all ours, yours and mine, Charlie. We’re rich, rich.’
Keeton said roughly: ‘Don’t talk like a fool. What’s the use of gold to us? How do we make use of it? Put it in a leaky boat and row home with it? Or do we use it to buy a yacht? Talk sense.’
The fire went out of Bristow. ‘You’re right again, Charlie. You’re always right. There’s a fortune down there for the taking and we can’t take it.’
‘Forget it‚’ Keeton said. ‘Let’s go over the rest of the ship.’
They went out of the wireless cabin with the cat at their heels.
Keeton felt like an intruder when he went into the captain’s cabin. It was a room he had never entered before, and the contrast between it and the gunners’ quarters was marked. Here there was a carpet underfoot, curtains over the scuttle, a mahogany book-case, pictures, comfortable chairs; in fact, all the marks of civilised living that were conspicuously absent from the improvised accommodation aft.