Dictator's Way (28 page)

Peter had taken the precaution to bring into the wheel-house and keep dry there the yacht's stock of rockets. These he now began to send up, as signals of distress he hoped would be noticed by the watchers of the coast. The lights shone but palely in the pale dawn but they were seen and presently, rescuers began to gather on the shore – only just in time, for fatigue and exposure were beginning to tell on those on the yacht. The framework of the boat was showing signs, too, of breaking up under the assaults of the still heavy seas and the effect of the damage done by the rocks on which she had struck.

Olive was the first to be sent ashore and then the members of the crew, one by one in their turn.

“By all the rules of the sea,” Peter explained, as, deserting at last his post, he crawled along the slanting deck to Bobby's side, “passengers ought to go first and the skipper last. But this time I think the passenger that's you must be the last – for once you are on shore I do not know what you will do or say.”

Bobby made no answer. The same thought was in his mind, his numbed and frozen mind that yet was now and again shot through by it as by a thrusting flame he dared neither face nor quench. Indeed all that long night of waiting and endurance, broken only by moments of vivid awareness of peril when death hovered and was near at the chance of wind and wave, this question had kept pressing itself upon him. But at any rate he was in no condition physically to react against Peter's decision that he was to be the last to be rescued. Nor indeed did he greatly care. '

“Your bosses can't blame you for not getting ashore earlier,” Peter continued, “you're only one against us all and we're armed and you're not. I should hate to think I had got you into a row. But if you tell those chaps ashore I'm an escaping murderer, they might want to make a bother, and I've jolly well got to get in touch with my pals and let them know what's happened. After that, I shan't care what you may think you ought to do. Though I daresay the lads on shore wouldn't pay much attention. Probably they would think you were delirious or something from strain and exposure.”

“Perhaps they would,” agreed Bobby, who was not altogether sure they would not be right, so much like a nightmare mingling of terror and the glow of strange and deep emotion did the tangled events of the last few hours now seem to him.

“Not much to ask to let me go first,” argued Peter, evidently not at all liking the idea. “Look as though I funked it, I suppose. But it's got to be.” After a pause he added: “Olive says you and she have fallen for each other.”

“She said – that?” gasped Bobby, utterly overwhelmed to hear it, for surely that was an open and intentional admission.

“Quick work, if you ask me,” commented Peter. “Rummy night, too, for love making. Not my choice. Making love and waiting to be drowned. You know, I never expected to get through – if I had I mightn't have talked so much. Of course, I shall deny it all now.”

Bobby made no comment. He knew well that such a statement as Peter had made would need very strong corroboration before any use could be made of it. It could even be passed off quite easily, as a kind of joke, a pulling of the official leg.

“Olive a bit of a complication, eh?” Peter went on. “I didn't reckon on her. You never can reckon on a girl. A rummy lot. My turn next, there's the last of my chaps gone. You're thinking what you'll have to do. That's easy. Britishers always put duty first, don't they? ‘I could not love thee, dear, so well, loved I not duty more.'”

“Shut up,” said Bobby angrily.

“Why? It's true, isn't it? And it is a bit of a fix. I didn't reckon on it, you know. Olive never seemed to care a snap of her fingers about anyone before. But there it is. Well, what are you going to do about it?”

With that he laughed, and now that all the others had been safely landed, all except Bobby that is, he went next. After him Bobby was got safe to land, where he was received by a shocked and highly disapproving rescue party, who had been scandalized nearly out of their senses by Peter's airy remark that there was still someone else to come – a passenger.

“I never heard before of crew and skipper being saved before passengers,” one of them told him indignantly; “and wouldn't have been either if we had known.”

“Ah, but he's a very special kind of passenger,” Peter explained.

“Never mind that now,” interposed a tall, stout, bustling person, the doctor, who came up at that moment, “they might just as well have drowned if you're going to let 'em all die of pneumonia.”

They were indeed all in sorry plight. Olive was already in bed in the nearest farmhouse, protesting feebly that she had no need of hot drinks, hot blankets, hot-water bottles, and having them relentlessly administered by a capable and determined housewife. Bobby distinguished himself by fainting, for the first time in his life, as soon as he got on shore, and only recovered consciousness to find himself in a warm and comfortable bed in a nearby cottage. Perhaps it was a subconscious wish for delay, for time to think and to decide, that at once sent him off again into a heavy sleep. When he wakened it was dark, and night once more, so evidently there was nothing to be done till morning, as his host pointed out when he began to ask about a 'phone. There was one in a farm two miles away, he was told, but he must wait till day, and till the doctor had seen him again, and how about a bite of something to eat?

It was a welcome suggestion, and Bobby made an excellent meal, and then slept again, and when he woke in the morning was once more his own man.

He inquired about his companions and was informed they had all departed in a private 'bus that had been ordered for them from the nearest town. A separate car had come for the young lady and she had departed in it alone. Peter, described as the skipper and profoundly unpopular as having disgraced the tradition of the sea by not being the last man to leave his boat, had spent a good deal of time telephoning, and had left not with the young lady but with the others of the crew. He had also given the name of a firm of lawyers in London who had undertaken, through their Edinburgh agents, to answer all inquiries and make all necessary arrangements.

Evidently the local population thought it all a very queer affair and equally evidently there were a good many rumours in circulation. But those were no concern of Bobby's, and as soon as possible he got across to the farm and secured there the use of the 'phone. He had at first some difficulty in persuading Headquarters it was himself and not his ghost that was speaking. His identity established, however, he was instructed to report at the earliest possible moment and his statement that he had been in the company of Peter Albert was received with evident excitement.

There had been developments in the Macklin case, he was informed. Mr. Albert might have valuable information to give. He must be found as quickly as possible. The department indeed had been busily searching for him all the time all this had been going on at sea. The sooner Bobby got to London and reported in person, the better.

He was even authorized to hire a car to take him to the nearest point where he could catch a southbound express. By that time, it was to be hoped Mr. Albert would have been found.

Bobby hung up and went out to see about a car, wondering to himself if Peter had only escaped perils so many and so manifold at sea in order to stand his trial for murder on land.

Olive, too.

What was her position?

And his own position, and his duty, the duty that he owed and must perform.

The last question Peter had asked him echoed in his mind. What indeed was he going to do about it?

Not till Bobby was safely seated in the London express did it become fully clear to him that in his confused and troubled mind the real question tormenting him was not what he himself was to do, for his own course of action circumstances clearly marked out for him, but what Olive intended?

Never indeed had he felt more depressed than as he sat gloomily in his corner, staring blankly at the landscape slipping by.

What, he wondered, too, were the developments he had been told of?

What was going to happen to Peter? What would the authorities think of his confession? It had been made deliberately and of purpose aforethought that no risk might exist of suspicion attaching to the innocent, but also Bobby felt as a kind of challenge, perhaps, too, in an effort to soothe a conscience less easy about the taking of life than Peter wished it to appear. Not that the Yard would trouble about questions of conscience. The Yard was a machine for carrying out certain duties and Bobby reflected again that Peter, telling his story, had had small conception of how efficient was that machine.

“I did it,” Peter had said, and in effect had added: “What are you going to do about it?”

A good deal probably.

Peter had an alibi, he said. Bobby, remembering that, only felt the gloomier. The fake alibi could almost always be broken down and when broken down often provided the best evidence of guilt.

Bobby thought again of Peter as he remembered him through that long night of terror when the lives of all on the little yacht had hung upon his unfailing hand and nerve and eye. He remembered, too, the passion with which Peter had spoken of his country, of what he held to be a fight for freedom, that freedom of thought and will on which rests man's supreme claim to have been made in the image of God. Once more, too, he remembered that tale Peter had told of his brother flying the length and breadth of his native land, ignoring danger, despising escape, one against five hundred, a dove of peace as it were bearing an olive branch through skies dark with hawk and vulture, till had come the inevitable end – that end which is always also a beginning.

And was the climax of all that to be, Bobby asked himself, the dock in the sordid and shameful surroundings of the Central Criminal Court?

Then again he wondered gloomily where Olive was? what she was doing? why she had gone like that without a word of farewell? what she had meant by what she had said to Peter? Had that acknowledgement, confession, declaration, whatever it was, had that been intended as a farewell, a renunciation – or encouragement?

Little wonder, what with so many doubts and fears making a recurrent sequence in his mind, what with, too, the strain of all he had been through, that it was a very pale-looking, washed-out wreck of himself that Bobby presented when finally he reported at Headquarters.

Superintendent Ulyett was waiting for him he was told, and Bobby was to go at once to his room to repeat his story.

“We thought,” Inspector Ferris told Bobby, “you had been done in for good when your bike was picked up and no trace of you. Looked as if you had been dumped in the sea.”

“Nearly was,” Bobby answered, thinking how often by how few inches the threatening bows of their pursuer had missed crashing upon them. “I hear there have been developments”

Ferris nodded.

“Waveny,” he explained. “The Honourable Charles Waveny. Make a splash when he's pulled in – ought to be any moment now. Don't know myself what they are waiting for.”

“Waveny – Charley Waveny,” Bobby repeated very much surprised. “You mean there's proof, –?”

“That's the development,” Ferris told him and then there was no time to say more, since superintendents are not people to be kept waiting.

To Ulyett, Bobby gave a full account of his adventures, and, in view of the suspicions now apparently attaching to Waveny, had the less hesitation not only in repeating Peter's confession but in emphasising that it had impressed him as being entirely truthful.

But Ulyett was by no means convinced.

“How about his having been pulling your leg?” he demanded.

“I can't think that for one moment, sir,” Bobby answered gravely. “I don't think any man could have told that story as he did unless it had been what really happened. And I don't see why he should invent it.”

“Wants to make fools of us,” Ulyett suggested. “Wants the Special Branch to try a fall and get the worst of it and then have to leave him alone. Suppose he's arrested and the charge breaks down, what a chance he would have to cry out about police persecution if we tried to get him over any of this political business. God knows,” said Ulyett with a sigh, “we don't want to persecute anyone, all we want is a quiet life and a chance to get home and see the family now and then, but the public will never believe it. The S.B. has had an eye on Mr. Albert for a very much longer time than he let on to you.”

“I understand there is new evidence against Waveny,” Bobby ventured to remark.

Ulyett nodded.

“Not quite good enough yet, but not far off,” he said. “It was what happened at Miss Farrar's cottage put us definitely on to him. Judson has owned up he gave Macklin a job to please the Etrurian Government. They owe him a pile and things will be difficult for him if they don't pay up, which they won't unless he does what he is told. But he swears black and blue he knew nothing about what Macklin did after office hours – or in them sometimes. He tries to argue still that Macklin wasn't in any way connected with Etrurian Secret Service activities here. His idea is that Macklin had a pull with the Etrurians, really believed in their ideas, and on their part they were glad to have someone in City circles to stand up for them. Judson admits he did drive Macklin to The Manor that afternoon. He says Macklin told him he had arranged to meet someone there, but didn't say who, and Judson didn't ask. Judson says Macklin had a perfectly free hand so long as he produced results. He also says he thinks it may have been Waveny Macklin was to meet, because he knows Macklin was bothered about Waveny and wanted to put things right with him. He told Judson about Waveny having threatened him and said it was all a misunderstanding and he would make an appointment with Waveny to clear it up. We've got evidence, too, that Judson's own story of his drive into the country is O.K. He and his car were seen and recognized by two A.A. scouts. So he's out.”