I suppose I contributed to his freedom by not reminding him that it was usually acquired at the expense of somebody else. I needed a tot of Nash’s brandy to pin my eyelids back.
He waved a fly off the table. ‘Keep contact with the ship.’
‘I will.’
‘Every hour.’ He looked around the small room, as if surprised at its reality. ‘Is Armatage back?’
‘Not yet.’
His grimace was a positive reaction. ‘The flying boat isn’t large enough to accommodate a guardroom, but he won’t just get a strip torn off him. He’s deserted while on active service.’
I should have walked out. ‘He’s only been gone three hours.’
‘Four.’ He sweated as if starting to rot. ‘Have you ever seen an execution?’
He knew the devil intimately, and I was listening to him. ‘I can’t see that I’m going to.’
‘You may well, before this trip is out. There’s no discipline. Without it we won’t survive.’
I laughed. ‘Is it that bad?’
His eyes maintained a steadiness that was without life. ‘It is. And I can’t have that. You’d better get back on watch.’
I wondered whether I shouldn’t send an SOS, and not care who heard as long as he was put somewhere safe. This engine-house of precision was no longer where I wanted to be. It was as if chaos and order had declared on each other the war to end wars, and I was being crushed in between, and fed into a darkness out of which I could not possibly return. I went down the steps to the galley.
‘I suppose the news made him happy?’ said Nash, trying to complete a crossword puzzle he’d started three weeks ago.
‘He asked if Armatage was back. I said he wasn’t, but would be soon. It’s best if he stays away. Bennett intends to kill him.’
Appleyard gripped the plate, while he ate with the other hand. ‘He’ll kill nobody.’
The skipper was under a strain, Nash said, and who could blame him? I’ve only two more clues left. It was bound to show. He was surprised at me repeating what I had been told in confidence, but I argued that Bennett wouldn’t have spilled anything that he expected to be kept secret. Nash agreed, and said I should attach no importance to it. Bennett had been known in the squadron for practical jokes. That’s a fact, said Appleyard. He would say things just to observe the reaction.
‘Apart from that,’ Nash went on, and I wondered why he was going on at such length, ‘he might not be feeling all that well. Can you imagine the pressure this trip puts him under? You can rely on him doing the right thing as far as his job is concerned, which is fair enough when you think of where we are. Bennett’s only fault is his talent for organizing forlorn hopes. He could set up an asylum tea party on the far side of the moon and bring everybody back without a scratch! Only Bennett could have done this job, believe you me. You’ve got to play God a bit to pull this thing off. Stands to reason. He used to be a shade like that in the old days, but it never got out of hand. Nor will it now. Anyway, we’ll be off in the morning, and twenty-four hours later we’ll make a landfall and be our old selves again. I can’t bloody wait, I can tell you.’
Appleyard lit a cigarette. ‘I don’t believe anything I can’t see, and I wouldn’t mind seeing a good football match right now.’
‘Like when Charlton beat Burnley, you mean?’ Rose came down from his exertions at the navigation table.
‘They needed extra bloody time, though, didn’t they?’ He only ever lost his temper in arguments about football.
‘They rubbed their noses in the shit, all the same.’
‘I’d prefer a good boxing match.’ Nash filled in the penultimate answer.
I left them talking. On Rose’s desk courses were drawn, and dead reckonings calculated, to get us to Perth, and I thought what a shame to have worked so much for nothing. No doubt people were waiting there to take over the gold, but Bennett, with his especial flair, had probably organized a stunt to keep it for himself. He could no more vanish and live like a millionaire in a place of his choosing than a pools winner who had been interviewed by all the papers. And if he did give the slip to those who had put up the money to get the gold from this godforsaken ashcan of the earth, they would surely not rest until they had it back, and killed one by one those who had helped him to – as they would suppose – steal it. Yet I found his audacity exhilarating, knowing that we had no option but to relish the same mad dream.
Armatage was missing, and I wondered if he had contacted those who were so anxious to locate us that they had equipped themselves with seaplanes. Was he in league with Shottermill? In which case even the innocent scheme of going to Perth would be perilous, never mind that of making for Ceylon. Bennett perhaps assumed that Armatage had climbed above the mist and signalled the planes, reason enough to think that he should die. The reward for Armatage would be far bigger than that promised by Bennett – and with a safe exit guaranteed. Now that Bull and Wilcox were dead, we were unable to go out and bring him back.
Though Bennett might be a more than competent captain, he knew little about people as human beings, otherwise how could he imagine that another member of our crew would betray us? Armatage had gone too far on his foraging, and stayed longer than he should. In such visibility he might have overshot the flying boat on his way back from the shore. Nothing more than that.
As soon as I let my next K sign loose, the letter L sprang onto its back, and both went off into the ether like grasshoppers mating, a perfect meeting that led me to disregard all misgivings and feel glad to be a member of the Aldebaran’s crew.
12
They were determined to find us.
‘Who can blame them?’ asked Nash. We did not question who or what controlled the weather, which had so far been on our side. There would have been no point. Such a force was beyond discovery. ‘We’ll shoot ’em out of the sky.’ He rubbed his large hands together, as if he’d only come for the fireworks.
‘They’ll have a go at doing the same to us.’
‘And see the gold sink to the bottom of the sea?’
Rose looked up from writing on small sheets of blue paper. ‘Time is getting short, that’s all I know.’
No one took him up on that fact, so he went back to his letter, as if to be finished before the post left at six o’clock. The complicated form of the land was also in our favour, and as for who had made that, none of us cared to speculate. To say we couldn’t care less to each other was as far as we’d go.
‘Do you know what the skipper used to say?’ Nash mused.
‘Tell me.’
‘He used to say: “Anything’s possible that’s happened.”’
A grunt of scepticism came from Rose.
‘That’s why he don’t say much now,’ said Appleyard.
‘He doesn’t need to,’ said Nash. ‘You can only say so much. Anyway, we know it all.’
‘I don’t know about that.’ Appleyard passed around tea and sandwiches. ‘He said a lot more in the old days, and we liked it better, if I remember.’
‘He did a lot more, as well,’ said Nash.
Rose scooped up his closely-written letter and threw it in the trash bin. ‘He’d take us through the Valley of the Shadow, and we, being other ranks, non-substantive anyway, had perforce to follow. They referred to him as “Jack Flak”.’