Charles Williams by And the deep blue sea

Author:And the deep blue sea
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Modern fiction, Juvenile Fiction, Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780304938964
Publisher: Cassell
Published: 1972-05-21T07:00:00+00:00

8

Goddard went out. The crew members in the doorway stepped back to let him pass, but they did it silently, and there was no longer any friendliness or recognition in their eyes. As he went down the passageway, he heard the muttering behind him.

‘This bucket’s beginning to give me the creeps.’

‘—ever since we picked that guy up—’

He was being cast as a Jonah; he’d lost his own ship, and now he’d brought his contamination of doom aboard this one. No seaman would admit to being that superstitious, but there was always some dark residue of it, even in the twentieth century. He paid no attention as he went outside and up the ladder; his mind was still trying to come to grips with questions attacking him from all sides at once.

Karen Brooke was walking the port side of the promenade deck. She always managed to look lovely and cool and completely self-possessed, he thought. She smiled. ‘Is there any change in Mr. Krasicki’s condition?’ At the same moment Captain Steen came hurrying down the ladder from the boat deck. He went on without speaking. She looked after him, puzzled.

‘Yes,’ Goddard answered. ‘He’s dead. He hanged himself.’ Or maybe I killed him, he added silently.

‘Oh, how awful!’ She shook her head, winking back the tears. ‘It’s not fair! His whole life was just one long tragedy.’

‘I know,’ Goddard said. Apparently she was prey to no doubts or suspicions, and he had no intention of raising any. He’d found himself beginning to like her, sensing in her some of the same loneliness that had marked his own life for the past five months, and he felt an urge to protect her if he could.

But from what, he asked himself after he had walked forward. Didn’t Krasicki’s death prove he’d been wrong? Didn’t it demonstrate once and for all that the whole affair had been just what it seemed to be? Of course it did—unless it had been designed to do just that.

The trouble was, he reflected, that his thought processes and Lind’s were too much alike, and they’d been on a collision course from the beginning. If Mayr’s death had been a hoax, for it to work at all there could be no doubt, now or ever. That, of course, was the reason for the elaborately staged shooting in front of five witnesses instead of something simple like a heart attack. So now, if Lind had sensed his suspicions of it, the mate was backed into a corner; Krasicki still had to disappear, but there was no longer any possibility of getting away with a second fake sea burial. If Goddard had suspected the first, he would already have forecast the second. So Krasicki had been expendable, and Lind had killed him to plug this hole in the dike.

But that wasn’t all, Goddard thought; the diabolical bastard ran a test on me at the same time, and I may have flunked it. If I had forecast the second fake and guessed how he’d carry it out, he knew exactly how I would react.

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