“Doesn’t sound like a man at death’s door to me,” I said.
“Nobody’s wanting to kill him off, just to ask him a few questions. Or the nurses.” White opened his mouth to protest again, but I pushed roughly past him and knocked at the door. No answer. I waited all of thirty seconds and then knocked again, loudly. White, beside me, was stiff with outrage and disapproval. I ignored him and was lifting my hand to put some real weight on the wood when I heard a movement and suddenly the door opened inwards. It was the shorter of the two nurses, the plump one, who had answered the door. She had an old-fashioned pull-string linen cap over her head and was clutching with one hand a light woollen wrap that left only the toes of her mules showing. The cabin behind her was only dimly lit, but I could see it held a couple of beds, one of which was rumpled. The free hand with which she rubbed her eyes told the rest of the story. “My sincere apologies, miss,” I said.
“I had no idea you were in bed. I’m the Chief Officer of this ship and this is Mr. Cummings, the purser. Your chief steward is missing and we were wondering if you may have seen or heard anything that might help us.”
“Missing?” she clutched the wrap more tightly. “You mean -you mean he’s just disappeared?”
“Let’s say we can’t find him. Can you help us at all?”
“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 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. One of the crew is missing, and delay doesn’t increase his chances.”
“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 bed light illuminating a crimson tasselled nightcap 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 out live 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 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 keys from White and started on the remaining four suites 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 the 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 that cost 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.”
Chapter 3
Susan Beresford was a beauty, all right. A perfectly oval shaped face, high cheekbones, 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 back into place and pulled the wardrobe door to.