Читать книгу The Golden Rendezvous - Alistair MacLean, Alistair MacLean, John Denis - Страница 9

I didn’t get a great deal of investigating done that night. I’d figured out how to start, all right, but the devil of it was I couldn’t start till the passengers were up and about in the morning. Nobody likes being turfed out of his bed in the middle of the night, a millionaire least of all.

After having cautiously identified myself to the bo’sun to ensure that I didn’t get the back of my head stove in with a marline-spike, I spent a good fifteen minutes in the vicinity of the wireless office relating its position to other offices and nearby accommodation. The wireless office was on the starboard side, for’ard, immediately above the passengers’ “A” deck accommodation—old man Cerdan’s suite was directly below—and on the basis of my assumption that the murderer, even if he didn’t wait for the last few words of the message to come through, could have had no more time than ten seconds to get from wherever the hidden receiver was to the wireless office, then any place within ten seconds’ reach of the wireless office automatically came under suspicion.

There were quite a few places within the suspected limits. There was the bridge, flag office, radar office, chart-room and all the deck officers’ and cadets’ accommodation. Those could be ruled out at once. There was the dining-room, galleys, pantries, officers’ lounge, telegraph lounge, and, immediately adjacent to the telegraph lounge, another lounge which rejoiced in the name of the drawing-room—it having been found necessary to provide an alternative lounge for our millionaire’s wives and daughters who weren’t all so keen on the alcoholic and ticker-tape attractions of the telegraph lounge as their husbands and fathers were. I spent forty minutes going through those—they were all deserted at that time of night—and if anyone had yet invented a transistor receiver smaller than a matchbox, then I might have missed it: but anything larger, I’d have found it for sure.

That left only the passengers’ accommodation, with the cabins on “A” deck, immediately below the wireless office, as the prime suspects. The “B” deck suites, on the next deck below, were not out-with the bounds of possibility: but when I ran a mental eye over the stiff-legged bunch of elderly crocks on “B” deck, I couldn’t think of a man among them who could have made it to the wireless office in under ten seconds. And it certainly hadn’t been a woman: Because whoever had killed Brownell had not only also laid out Benson but removed him from sight, and Benson weighed a hundred and eighty pounds if he weighed an ounce.