What the hell, was I still trying to find a way out for her? Of course they hadn’t wanted her as long as there was a chance she would lead them to Macaulay. Her information about the plane would be second-hand, and they’d only taken her as second choice after Macaulay was dead. She was all they had left.
Well, I thought, they didn’t have much.
Barclay had me set a course for west of Scorpion Reef. Barfield watched me plot it in the chartroom.
I gave Barclay the corrected course, and he let her fall off another point.
“Now,” he said, “ever handle a sailboat, George?”
“No,” Barfield replied, across from me. “But if your nipple-headed friend can do it, anybody can.”
“Well, you won’t have to,” Barclay said. “Manning and I will split the watches. You’ll be on deck when he has it and I’m asleep. Mrs Macaulay can have the forward part of the cabin; you, I, and Manning can sleep in the two bunks in the after part. And Manning won’t go down there when one of us is asleep.
“It’s after twelve now,” he went on. “Get some sleep, George. Manning can stretch out here in the cockpit and I’ll take the first watch, until six. When Manning relieves me, you’ll have to come on deck.”
I sat down, as near Barclay as I dared, and lit a cigarette. “It would be tragic,” I said, “if he blew his stack and killed me before I found your lousy plane for you and the two of you could take turns at it.”
“Why should we kill you?”
“Save it,” I said. “I knew all along you wouldn’t. Just give me a letter of recommendation. You know, something like: ‘This will introduce Mr Manning, the only living witness to the fact that we killed Macaulay and that his widow is innocent—” ’
“Not necessarily,” he said. “You can’t go to the police. You’re wanted for murder yourself.”
He knew I’d have everything to lose and nothing to gain. But if I were dead and lying somewhere in two hundred fathoms of water there was no chance at all. And .45 cartridges were cheap.
I moved a little nearer, watching his face. It was calm and imperturbable in the faint glow from the binnacle. I could almost reach him.
The eyes were suddenly full of a mocking humor. “Here,” he said. He handed the .45 automatic to me butt first. “Is this what you want?”
For a fraction of a second I was too startled to do anything. Then I recovered myself and grabbed it out of his hand.
“You really wanted it?” he asked solicitously.
“Come about,” I said. “Take her back to the seabuoy.”
“What an actor!” His voice was amused.
“You don’t think I’d kill you?”
“No.”
“So it’s not loaded?” Completely deflated, I pulled the slide back. I stared. It was loaded.
“You won’t pull the trigger,” he said, “for several reasons. You can’t go back to Sanport, because of the police. You couldn’t shoot a man in cold blood. You aren’t the type—”
“Go on,” I said.
“The third reason is that Barfield is down there in the cabin with another gun, with Mrs Macaulay. If you try anything, she gets it.”
“I don’t give a damn what happens to Mrs Macaulay,” I said.
He smiled. “You think you don’t, but that would change with the first scream. You don’t have the stomach for that either.”
“I’m the original gutless wonder. Is that it?”
“No. You’re just weak in a couple of spots where you can’t be in a business like this. I’ve sized you up since that afternoon at the lake.”
“Then you knew what she was up to? That’s the reason you shoved off and left us?”
“Naturally. Also the reason we roughed you up without really hurting you, that night on the beach. We wanted you to hurry and get this boat for them so we could find where Macaulay was hiding. It worked, except that he forced us to kill him. That’s that, and now I’ll take my gun back.”
Sweat broke out on my face. I had only to squeeze the trigger, ever so gently, and there would be only one of them. He watched me coolly, mockingly.
My finger tightened. I didn’t care what happened to her, did I? I cursed her silently, bitterly, hating her for being alive, for being here.
“George,” Barclay said quietly.
I went limp. I handed the gun to him, feeling sick and weak all over.
“What is it?” Barfield’s voice asked from the companionway.
“Nothing,” Barclay said.
I lit a cigarette. My hands shook.
He had wanted me to realize the futility of jumping one of them to get his gun as long as she was where the other could get her. I detested her. Maybe I even actively hated her. She and her lying had ruined everything for me, I was sick with contempt when I thought of her, and yet he’d known he could tie my hands completely by threatening her with violence. I was “weak” all right.
“The hell with Mrs Macaulay,” I said. “What did Macaulay do?”
“He stole three-quarters of a million dollars’ worth of diamonds from us. Since you were in the salvage business,” he went on, “you must have known the Shetland Queen.”
I looked up suddenly. “Sure. I remember her.”
She had gone down in about ten fathoms, off Campeche Bank last fall, and the underwriters had let a contractor salvage as much of the cargo as wasn’t ruined. They had saved some machinery and several thousand cases of whiskey that somehow hadn’t been smashed. The crew had been saved.
“So that’s the first time your diamonds were dunked,” I said. “But where does Macaulay fit in?”
I began to get the connection. Salvage – underwriters; the part about his being in the marine insurance business was true.
“They were aboard the Shetland Queen,” continued Barclay. “But they didn’t appear on the cargo manifest or any of the Customs lists. They were in some cases of tinned cocoa which were going to a small importing firm in New Orleans. A cheap way to ship diamonds but tough to explain if something happens to the ship, as in this case. The cocoa was insured, for two or three hundred dollars. We would have looked stupid trying to collect three-quarters of a million dollars from the underwriters when we’d paid a premium on a valuation of three hundred dollars. We couldn’t explain that to Customs either.
“Benson & Teen had paid off all claims, including ours, and were salvaging what they could, but they weren’t going to waste time bringing up a few dollars’ worth of tinned cocoa. They paid, and wrote it off. We made a few feelers. Since they were working inside the ship anyway, why not bring up our cocoa and let us drop our claim? They brushed us. We let it drop, before they got suspicious. We had to wait until they were finished and then do our own salvaging.
“But then some – uh – competitors of ours got wise and also tried to buy the cocoa from Benson & Teen. This was a little too much for Macaulay, who was in charge of the operation. He sent a confidential agent down to the salvage operations to look into this chocolate business on the quiet. This guy asked to have the cocoa brought up and, since he was acting for Benson & Teen through Macaulay, they brought it up. He found out what made it so valuable, devalued it, and phoned Macaulay.
“They had two problems. The first was getting the stones into the States without paying duty or answering any embarrassing questions as to where they had come from. The second was to keep us from getting them. We had two men in the Mexican port keeping an eye on the cargo that was brought in. Macaulay solved both problems at once. He’d been a bomber pilot in the Second World War, and held a pilot’s license. He came down to the Gulf Coast, chartered a big amphibian, and came after his agent and the stones. They were to meet in a laguna some ten or fifteen miles east of the Mexican port. They did, but our men were there too. They’d followed Macaulay’s man and lost him in the jungle, but saw the plane coming in and got there just as the man was climbing aboard. They recognized Macaulay and opened fire, killing the other man, but Macaulay got away in the plane.”