“Mr. Fletcher, sir.”
It was a fairly large room with a lot of window space along one side. There were some solid chairs and a solid mahogany desk and a street map of Jamestown hanging on the wall on the right. There were some red-topped pins stuck in the map at various points, which might have been marking the scenes of crimes or trouble spots, or anything else if it came to that.
Colonel Arthur W. Vincent was sitting at the desk with a pen in his hand and a sheaf of papers in front of him. He was a little dried-up strip of a man with skin the colour of cold ashes. He did not look like a high-ranking police officer; he was wearing a rumpled brown cotton suit and he looked more like an office clerk or possibly the proprietor of a fifth-rate used-car saleyard. He had the keen, calculating, slightly shifty eye of a used-car salesman, and Fletcher’s immediate impression was that Colonel Vincent was not a man he would have trusted with half an ounce of boiled sweets — or fourteen grammes if you were using the metric system of weights and measures.
“Ah!” Vincent said; and he gave a smile that revealed some gold fillings in his teeth and looked about as genuine as a bottle of Japanese Scotch whisky. “So you are Mr. Fletcher. Please sit down.” He flipped a couple of bony fingers in the general direction of one of the solid chairs, and Fletcher walked over to it and sat down. Captain Green remained standing.
“I understand,” Vincent said, “that you came to report finding a sunken boat.”
“And five dead men.”
“Yes.” There was a sibilant hiss as Vincent spoke the word, as though he had held on to the final letter as long as possible, reluctant to let it escape. “Five men shot through the head. Is that correct?”
“It is.”
Vincent was playing with the pen, setting it up on end, allowing it to fall almost to the desk, and then catching it just before it could do so. It was rather like a cat playing with a mouse.
“Mr. Fletcher,” he said, “why were you diving out there? In that particular place.”
“I told the captain—”
“And now I should like you to tell me. You don’t mind?”
“Why should I mind?”
“Exactly. Why should you?”
“I was looking for the ship.”
“Oh, the ship. Yes, of course. And you found the ship, and the boat was there also?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you want to find the ship?”
“No particular reason. Just curiosity; nothing more.”
“You had been told about it?”
“Yes, of course. How else would I have known it was there?”
“How else indeed. And who told you?”
“Mr. Thomas.”
“Mr. Thomas, with whom you are lodging?” Colonel Vincent was very correct in his grammar.
“Yes.”
“And it was Mr. Thomas who took you out in his boat?”
“It was.”
“Do you do much skin-diving, Mr. Fletcher?”
“I don’t know what you’d call much. I do a fair amount of it.”
“I understand you are a writer,” Vincent said.
“Well, yes, I am.” Fletcher failed to see the point of all these questions. What possible bearing could such personal details have on the matter of the five dead men in the sunken boat? “But I don’t see—”
“Had the search for the ship anything to do with your writing?”
“No, not really.”
“This book that you told Captain Green you came here to write — what is it about?”
“I don’t know.”
Vincent let the pen fall and trapped it under his right hand as though arresting it in the act. “You don’t know?”
Fletcher was faintly embarrassed. “That is to say, I haven’t actually started on it yet. I’m still casting about for a subject.”
“And how long have you been here?”
“About six months.”
“Six months and you still haven’t found a subject! Isn’t that taking rather a long time?”
“Perhaps. But I still don’t see what this has to do with—”
“What kind of a writer are you, Mr. Fletcher?”
“How do you mean — what kind?”
Vincent picked up the pen and rolled it between his fingers. “I mean would you, for instance, describe yourself as a political writer?”
Fletcher began to see what Vincent was getting at. But he still could not see why. Why should his political views have any bearing on the subject of the five dead men?
“The fact is,” he said, “I’m not really a writer at all. That is, not yet. I mean I haven’t written anything so far. Nothing that’s been published.”
Colonel Vincent looked as though he found that rather hard to believe. “Are you telling me that it’s not your profession?”
“Not at the moment. It could be — some time in the future. You understand?”
“So what do you do for a living?”
“Nothing just now. I had some money left me.”
“Very nice,” Vincent said, a trifle sardonically. “That sounds an easy kind of life. It must have been a lot of money.”
“Not as much as you might think. I may have to start looking for a job before very long.”
“You should get on with writing that book, Mr. Fletcher,” Vincent said.
Fletcher nodded. “I might just do that. After all, I’ve got something to write about now, haven’t I?”
Vincent gave him a sharp look. “What do you mean by that?”
“Five men shot through the head, all together in the cabin of a motor-boat ten fathoms down. That’s a good basis for a plot, wouldn’t you say?”
“Mr. Fletcher,” Vincent said, “let me give you a word of advice. Leave that plot alone. Touch that and you could be in trouble. It’s not your business; it’s ours. Leave it to us. Don’t you think that would be best?”
“Perhaps so. It was just a thought.”
“Let it stay just a thought.”
“Are you warning me?” Fletcher asked.
Vincent smiled, and there were those gold-filled teeth flashing again like danger signals. “I’m advising you — as a friend.”
Fletcher reflected that if he ever became so short of friends he needed Colonel Arthur W. Vincent for one, he would really be down to the bedrock; but he did not say so, did not even hint as much; because Vincent might have been offended, and the last thing he wanted to do was to give offence to this little man with his ash-grey face and his probing eyes. Vincent as a friend might not be all that was to be desired, but as an enemy he could be deadly poison.
“In that case,” he said, “I’ll take the advice.”
“That would be wise.”
“Are you going to fish the bodies up?”
“We’ll do all that is necessary. Don’t worry; you’ve done your part and now we’ll do ours.”
“You don’t want me any more, then?”
“If we do we’ll get in touch.”
It seemed to be the end of the interview. Fletcher stood up.
“By the way,” Vincent said, “you didn’t get a look at the name on the boat, I suppose?”
Fletcher paused. “Well, yes, as a matter of fact I did. It was rather a funny name.”
“Funny?”
“Unusual.”
“Ah!”
“It was Halcón Español, which I believe means ‘Spanish Hawk’.”
“Yes,” Vincent said, “that is unusual. But I should not have called it funny. No, certainly not funny. Good-bye, Mr. Fletcher. And don’t talk about this.”
“Who would I talk to?” Fletcher said.