Redcap (18 page)

Sir Donald nodded. “I’ll see to it if you want me to. But if he’s a wrong ’un they’ll be in some sort of code, of course.”

“Yes, but it might help.” Shaw leaned forward. “Look, sir. You say
if
he’s a wrong ’un. He’s no more a refrigerator salesman than I am! There can’t be any more doubt about him now.”

The Captain rubbed his chin thoughtfully, sighed. “Possibly, but it doesn’t help much. There’s still nothing conclusive to go on.”

Shaw said savagely, “No, and I’m trying very, very hard to make myself see that we’ll get further in the end by giving him all the rope he wants now. All the same, I’d dearly love to take a swipe at him. And then put him under arrest and land him here in Aden, whatever my chief says. My God, sir—when I think about that filthy tower, and what may be in that man’s mind. . .

“What about the ship—what about the chances of some sort of explosion aboard, Shaw? Isn’t it time we had a search made, now so much more has happened?”

“No, sir, not in my opinion. Give me a little more time yet. I don’t believe that will happen now—I reckon they’ve got a better use for REDCAP than just blowing it up.” He lit a cigarette. “It won’t happen while Karstad—Andersson’s— aboard anyway. He’s not immortal.”

“Suppose he goes ashore in Colombo? We’ll be in there all day, you know.”

“Well, sir, if he does, we can always think again. Most of the passengers’ll go ashore, I take it, and that’ll make it easier for the crew to search the ship quickly if necessary. If he has planted anything, he’ll have allowed himself plenty of time to get well clear of an atomic blast from your reactor, sir!” Shortly after, the liner left Aden and that night Shaw was having a quiet drink by himself in the tavern when Anders-son approached, immaculate as ever in cream sharkskin, seemingly cool despite the close, crushing heat. Shaw, looking up, met his eye.

Andersson smiled genially. He asked, “Do you mind if I join you, Commander?”

“Do.”

Andersson eased his heavy body into a chair, snapped his fingers at a steward, called for a whisky and soda. Then he asked, “A few little—ah—adventures in Port Said, no doubt?”

Shaw said coolly, “Yes. A few little adventures.”

The man gave a guttural, coarse laugh. He said, “Ah, my friend, I understand! I myself was young once.” His drink came then and he took a gulp, wiped his lips and his forehead with a silk handkerchief. He asked, “And the young lady, Miss . . . Dangan?”

Shaw’s hand jerked a little as he heard the significant hesitation. He said sharply, “What d’you mean?”

Andersson sniggered, making a lewd, suggestive sound of it. “She did not object?”

“Object?” Shaw’s face hardened. “I don’t understand, I’m afraid. What’s it got to do with you anyway, Mr Andersson?”

Andersson stared out across the lighted decks, into the darkness of the sea swishing faintly past below. He said, “Oh . . . nothing, nothing. Forgive me.” Then he turned his head, and the penetrating eyes held Shaw’s as he went on in a soft, enfolding tone: “There are things, are there not, which it is better not to pry into. There can be danger in so doing, is that not so?”

“I don’t think I quite follow.”

“No?” Andersson leaned close and Shaw smelt stale cigar smoke. “Then let us make a hypothesis, Commander. Things have happened aboard this ship . . . poor Gresham’s death, your—ah-—little misadventure in Port Said.” He held up his glass, looked quizzically through it to the lights beyond. “I am a man of the world, Commander. And it seems to me that perhaps—some one—is sticking out his neck a little far, and that this is irritating to another party. Now then. Let us suppose further—suppose that the sticker out of necks has a lady friend ... let us, for simplicity’s sake, call her Miss Dangan. That name is as good as any other, is it not? Now it could be that the third party, this angry one, while having of course no personal interest in Miss Dangan, might be tempted to bring harm to her unless the first man began to mind his own business. In which case, whatever might happen to the young lady would be the fault of this sticker out of necks. Q.E.D.l” Andersson smiled. “However, enough of such supposings! I wished merely to say how very sorry I was to hear of your troubles in Port Said—and to express the hope that such need not occur again. Also to say that possibly you are fond of the young girl.” Taking up his glass, he finished the whisky and soda and got to his feet. He said, “This hypothetical third party of ours, the angry one. There would be nothing which could be done about him.”

“He could always be arrested, Mr Andersson.”

“No doubt, Commander Shaw. But think how stupid that would be.”

“Why?”

“Work it out for yourself, my dear fellow! And in case you should be tempted to jump to certain conclusions, I had perhaps better tell you that I, Sigurd Andersson, am an unofficial agent of the Swedish Government, for whom I hold a watching brief on . . . certain matters concerning their interest in MAPIACCIND.”

Shaw stared at the man. Andersson looked into his face and laughed. He said, “When you check that, you will find it is quite genuine, I assure you.” He laughed again and then moved away, leaving Shaw to stare after him with murder in his heart and a claustrophobic feeling of impotence, of acknowledged inability to pull the man in. Of course it would be genuine; Karstad was too experienced at the double agent game, would have taken great pains to give himself unbreakable cover. It would be a tricky business, to interfere with the agent of another Power, however ‘unofficial’ he might be—especially when there was no proof of anything at all. And now it looked as though Andersson might have tumbled to Judith’s real identity.

The liner took her departure from Guardafui, last point of land in Africa, headed out across the Arabian Sea past Socotra for Colombo and Australia. And during the next few days odd and disquieting rumours—and they were still no more than rumours really—trickled into the world’s capitals and appeared in short summaries in the roneo-ed sheets of the liner’s wireless Press News. Shaw read these reports with his early morning tea, saw how they were beginning to confirm what Latymer had told him about the movements of troops in the Far East. His imagination wandered northeast across the seas to the unknown lands, recalled the almost astronomical numbers of the armies which could now be mobilizing, visualized the paddy-fields and the shops and the modem factories emptying day by day as men were called up for service and concentrated in the assembly areas, saw in his imagination the movements along the rutted, terrible tracks, men and pack-mules force-marching, the mechanized and armoured divisions moving faster and more easily for the ports and the airfields, the technical units converging on the areas where the nuclear stockpiles lay. Maybe he was exaggerating, giving his imagination too much play, but what he saw in his mind as he read those sketchy reports was a mixture of Gresham and Latymer and himself, and it worried him. When news grew scarcer the reports indicated, as unconfirmed rumours, that some foreign newspaper correspondents had been arrested, cut off from their news outlets except for the transmission of presumably prepared bulletins approved by the Central Government.

It appeared that something was building up; or at least it appeared that way until the morning before the liner reached Colombo. That day the wireless Press News reported that an Official Spokesman had been dug out from some quiet corner in Hongkong and his dictum was: “There is no cause for alarm whatever. The troop movements are entirely in accord with the requirements of the training programme.”

Which was precisely what Latymer had had to put up with.

Shaw chucked the Press News sheets away, got up and shaved angrily. Official Spokesman indeed . . . those gentry specialized in lulling the world to sleep, into a false sense of security. The trouble was, so many well-meaning millions of people were always so anxious to believe them—until it was too late.

It was that same morning that a cable came from Latymer, in response to Shaw’s request for a routine check on Andersson’s standing with the Swedes. His credentials appeared to be genuine, as Shaw had known they would be. Latymer added that this had not emerged earlier because his contacts in Sweden had never heard of Sigurd Andersson. The man’s employment appeared to be very hush-hush, probably because the Swedes, until they’d been approached direct by Latymer, had been reluctant to advertise putting an agent aboard a British ship. But it was none the less genuine for all that; while it complicated things considerably, it did not, however, in the light of recent happenings, lessen the likelihood of Andersson and Karstad being one and the same man.

Shaw was standing at the after end of the veranda deck with Judith Dangan as the
New South Wales
made her midnight departure from Colombo. It was close, airless; Shaw’s tropic-weight jacket clung to him, his thin shirt and collar were sticky with sweat. The day had passed off well enough, if a trifle boringly. Most of the passengers had gone ashore for a full day’s sight-seeing around Ceylon, going out to Kandy and the Temple of the Tooth, or to Mount Lavinia; and ending up with dinner at the Galle Face Hotel, and then dancing at the hotel’s Gala Ball, looking out from the terraces over the Indian Ocean; and finally, tired but happy, they’d come back by rickshaw to the wharf. There they had gone aboard the tender and out to the huge, lighted bulk of the
New South Wales
, whose floodlit funnel dominated the harbour as the tender pushed through a fairyland of lights which glittered on the black water.

Andersson, whose behaviour had been perfectly ordinary ever since that conversation in the tavern bar, had not been one of the landward-bounders and neither, therefore, had Shaw. On his advice Judith too had remained aboard once again, and he was aware that she’d had a pretty dismal day hanging around an almost deserted ship.

They leaned against the rail, feeling the faint throb of the engines against the soles of their feet, and watching the glimmer of Ceylon’s lights sparkling from beyond the dark line of forest which fringed the port until they faded away behind the streaming, tumbling path of the wake.

She looked up at him, rather mischievously, studying the strong line of his jaw. There was a dimple in her cheek. Her soft dark hair fanned against his shoulder and he felt her breath on his neck. She looked away then, and they stood like that, silent, as the liner cut through the water; then after a while she looked up at Shaw again, asked: “Isn’t there anything else I can do to help? I’ve convinced everyone long ago that you’re just a plain naval officer. They all believe that now—especially after I passed the word that you got tight in Port Said!”

He said, “Yes. I’m not sure that was such a good idea after all!”

She laughed. “What better cover could you have than that?”

“Well—perhaps you’re right.” He paused, then added: “I’d rather you kept out of this from now on. Really, Judith.” He told a white lie then. “Andersson doesn’t seem to have cottoned on to you, and that’s the way I want it to stay.”

“But surely—”

His hand closed over hers, hard. He said curtly, “Don’t ask me any more. Just trust me.”

She said in a disappointed voice, “Of course, if that’s what you want. . . ."

“It is.”

Somehow there wasn’t very much to say after that, and they just stood there, close together, looking out into the night and the dark sea beneath the stars which hung, lantern-like, so low over the whole sky; and then a little later he took Judith down to her cabin.

She turned at the foot of the stairway, turned her serious small face up to his. He looked at her and saw her eyes wide, the pupils dilating, sensed a kind of strain in her, heard the sharply-indrawn breath. Suddenly, Shaw took her face in his hands, bent and kissed her on the forehead. She came into his arms and seemed about to speak, but instead she drew away again, giving him a gentle little push with her hands, and then she turned and ran quickly along the alleyway.

She was gone. He hard the light tap-tap of her shoes and then that too faded.

Shaw swung away and walked along to his own cabin, frowning and troubled. She’d come to help, and he hadn’t let her, he’d turned her down. He knew he couldn’t have acted otherwise, but he was desperately sorry for the girl.

The following evening he booked a table for two in the restaurant on the boat deck. It would, he decided, be a change from the dining-room and it was time Judith had a little fun. After a drink in the tavern, they went up to the small tables tucked right away by themselves in a corner at the after end, where they could watch the pale, phosphorescent wake creaming away behind them until it was lost in the remote, star-filled night. Shaw ordered clear soup, fresh-frozen crayfish mayonnaise, steak, a bottle of Rheingold. Later, with the coffee and liqueurs, he lit a cigar and sat back, smiling across at Judith.

She said, “Quite the bloated capitalist.”

“Doesn’t hurt, once in a while! I like a bit of high life now and then.”

She said musingly, “Life’s funny, isn’t it. . . . I expect most people think it’s all high life in your line.”

“Yes, I expect they do.”

In a faraway voice she said, “Daddy used to say that was one of the hard parts. People didn’t know who you were, so you couldn’t tell them what a lousy, rotten life it was. You know what I mean—the people who used to see films and things about agents, and think how wonderful it must be, how exciting. The result, according to daddy, was that you could never let yourself go and get rid of the tension, let off steam. It gave you a kind of shut-in, isolated feeling.”

He said quietly, “Forget things, Judith. Just try and enjoy yourself.”

“That’s what I want to do.”

There was something in her tone which made Shaw look at her sharply. She hadn’t seemed quite herself all the evening, now he came to think about it. Of course, she must still be suffering from the shock of that terrible night in France. He felt a rush of sympathy for the girl, and he reached out across the table and took her hand. He asked gently, “Judith, what is it?”

She looked at him quickly and then turned her face away. She said, “Oh, nothing.” Then she added, “It’ll all be over soon—all this.”