Two

 

It was a week before it suddenly dawned on the old man on Fleet where he had seen Willie before. He had spent seven sleepless nights worrying about it, racking his tangled brain as though he were searching into a junk room, restlessly shifting the rubbish there from side to side in search of a treasure. Then, when he was working in the office at the back of his store, he suddenly dropped his ledgers and dived for the shelf where he kept all the out-of-date newspapers that came to him from Brisbane and, flinging them open and casting them aside one after the other in a rumpled heap, he stopped dead at last, kneeling on the floor, his eyes fixed on a group of pictures on a centre-page spread. Willie’s face, blurred to dimness in a pumped-up snapshot, stared back at him from a frame of Rosa and Joe and the old Tina S.

Villiers crushed the paper into a ball and, stumbling down the wooden steps, set off running on his spindly legs towards the hut of Tavita Ohoa.

“The police,” he was yelling. “Get your set going and contact the police.”

Villiers’ incoherent message – somewhat garbled – reached Robert Flynn at Papeete. In the Teura To’oa he had searched from New Caledonia to the New Hebrides before eventually heading in disgust for Tahiti.

His brain still numb from a new demand for increased charter rates from Captain Seagull, who had not realized just how long his boat was to be required and was in consequence determined to get as much as possible for it while he could, Flynn had been in Papeete some time, contacting the outlying islands by radio and trying to decide his next move, when a motor car called to take him to the Préfecture de Police.

Half an hour later, he hurried out into the sunshine and took a taxi back to the hotel where he had left Voss, heading along the crowded waterfront where everything from a Hong Kong junk to the wealthy yachts that came in from America lay alongside. They were passing the trading schooners, lashed beam to beam in a maze of rigging, bowsprit after bowsprit pointing to the open sea away from the pink-flowered acacias that shaded the sea-wall, when a lorry loaded with food from Australia backed across the road and the taxi came to a stop. In his haste, Flynn paid off the driver and hurried the rest of the way on foot through the American tourists and the French servicemen who whistled at the dark-skinned girls.

He found the journalist among the ramshackle buildings that were hidden with cascades of flaming bougainvillaeas and hedges of hibiscus, sitting in a little café half obscured by oleanders and occupied in gesturing with a fly spray at a half-caste Tahitian waitress.

As he approached, Voss looked up, waved away the girl and ordered drinks for them both.

“We’ve got some real news at last,” Flynn said, dropping into a chair and mopping his face. “I think we’ve found the Salomios. Some old joker on Fleet in the George IIIs has spotted them.”

“The George IIIs!” Voss sat up and put the fly spray on the floor beside him. “God, and we’ve been searching round New Caledonia! They must have been hundreds of miles away while we were putting up with that lousy hotel where the bugs ate the pattern out of your hat band and that damned man tried to sing like Jean Sablon every other night. How do you know?”

Flynn thought bitterly of all the wasted miles they had covered; of weeks of patient, useless searching; of the airless streets of Noumea where they had listened to the flat Asiatic pipes mingling with the blare of jazz and the Melanesian voices intoning ‘I got sixpence’ with no knowledge of what it meant; the dusty hotel rooms with faulty fans chattering in the ceilings like nagging women as they stirred the thrice-breathed air; all the islands they had visited, questioning the priests and the native gendarmes who lorded it over the islanders, the schooner captains whose gin they had sipped, and the government officials.

“How do I know?” he said. “They put in for stores there. That’s how.”

“But the last we heard they were in Vila doing a bit of hard rowing to pick up food! Daughter-in-law Lucia in Sydney got an airmail from Vila.”

Flynn looked up, his neat bulk in direct contrast to the other’s untidy leanness. “Well, now they’re hundreds of miles away,” he said. “They’ve disguised the boat. They’ve stepped an extra mast.”

Voss sat back, staring at the blue half-circle of jagged peaks of Moorea across the bay. “What do we do now then? Send out a new description? Because if they’ve rigged an extra mast there’s nothing to stop ’em taking it down again if they feel like it.” He picked up the DDT spray and gave a few experimental squirts at the flies around him which paused only for a moment before returning refreshed to the assault.

Flynn was staring at the table. “I never thought I’d be reduced to this,” he said bitterly. “I feel like a hack man on a beat again. You wouldn’t think one slow old boat without radio or engine could put it across us with all the equipment we can muster, would you?”

“There’s one thing you forgot when you alerted all those police and officials and listening stations,” Voss pointed out. “The other side’s got brains, too. They’re doing a bit of dodging.”

“I expect Keeley put ’em up to that.” Flynn looked cheated and angry.

Voss waved the DDT spray at a fly. “I wonder if you’re meant to club ’em with it?” he mused. He turned to Flynn. “I expect he did,” he said. “He’s got good reason to. It’s getting a bit protracted, isn’t it?”

Flynn sat up, recovering his confidence. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll be back in Sydney before long.”

“Think so?”

“Someone on the Tina will crack. People from big cities can’t sail round these islands for ever, never seeing anyone, never talking to people, cooped up on an old boat, dodging civilization all the time. It’s just a fact that exists about the islands – just as you know there are sharks at Penrhyn and none at Manihiki. It’s something we all dream about but it doesn’t work. It might be the old man. It might be Keeley. But someone’ll crack sooner or later.”

Voss swung round to face him and pointed with the fly spray. “I’ll bet it’s later rather than sooner. Mama Salomio’s a tough old bird. She won’t crack and she won’t let anyone else crack.”

Flynn frowned: “I hope to God we get ’em before they reach the Tuamotus,” he said. “The islands there look like the Milky Way. They’re not on a plane route either so we could write off our arrangement with the airline pilots to keep their eyes skinned. The whole thing becomes more difficult altogether. Besides–” he paused “–the Tuamotus are notoriously dangerous and if they run ashore there – and they could with only an atlas and a few throwaways to navigate with – the whole lot of ’em could be lost.”

Voss eyed him curiously. “And you wouldn’t be satisfied to see friend Keeley quietly drowned?”

I would. But the mother of the kid he murdered would rather see him hanged, I’m sure.”

“And the Salomios?”

“I don’t want the Salomios drowned in the Tuamotus any more than you do,” Flynn said. “But not for the same reason. To you, they’re a story. To me, they’re assisting Keeley to escape. I want them as much as I want Keeley. Quite apart from the fact that they’re dodging their debts, they’re breaking the law.”

“Do you realize how far they’ve come, Flynn?” Voss asked quietly. “I was working it out when you arrived.”

“I know how far they’ve come all right,” Flynn said shortly, thinking of the money and the time that had been wasted. “It’s a hell of a long way!”

“They could become the best-known couple in Australia,” Voss said, flipping at his newspaper. “We could get everybody screaming for photographs – even in America, and that’s big money. Lucia could sell the family album, if we could persuade her she’s got a saleable commodity. We’d have to get an option on all the pictures, of course,” he mused. “An appeal fund for them would go down well, too.”

“Do you usually run appeal funds for people who don’t pay their debts?” Flynn asked sarcastically.

Voss raised his eyebrows. “We do more,” he said. “We run polls and reader surveys and we’ll probably run one now to decide if the police in their mercy should follow like avenging angels or leave the Salomios alone merely because they’ve got guts. All the same–” he broke off and glanced at Flynn “–if some adventurous kid had sailed as far as these two old jokers – and in a leaky boat, too, he’d have got his name in the papers, wouldn’t he? Why shouldn’t they, at their age?”

“Why shouldn’t they? It’s just a pity they had to take my man along with ’em, that’s all.”

“Makes a better story,” Voss grinned. “You’ve got to blow ’em up a bit. If they hadn’t thought of it, damned if I wouldn’t have suggested it. Boy, with this angle, I can get the great reading public screaming for its before-breakfast blood-and-thunder in no time. Demanding the latest on them. If they keep it up much longer, they’ll be as famous as Josh Slocum. Everybody’ll take ’em to their hearts.”

“Will they take Keeley as well?” Flynn asked dryly.

Voss smiled. “Nobody would care two hoots about Keeley. I’d take good care to make it clear the Salomios don’t know who he is. And, if I guess right, so would all the other newspapers.”

“You can’t be certain they don’t know.”

“No, I can’t. But better men than me have told whoppers. Even Simon Peter fenced a little.”

Flynn began to get angry. “In other words, because of this newspaper campaign that’s being prepared, I’ve got to catch Keeley without upsetting the great reading public. You’ll make it damn’ difficult for me. I’d rather find him without all this damn’ nonsense clogging up the issues. You seem to have lost sight of the fact that the Salomios are hiding a murderer who stabbed a harmless if rather stupid kid.”

Voss subsided slowly into his chair and Flynn stood up, leaning on the table to point. “The sooner it’s finished the better – before the whole of Australia starts to swoon with emotion. We’ll get the radio hams on the job. There are plenty of them in the islands. All the schooners carry radios. They use ’em mostly to order their whisky, but for once they can use ’em on behalf of law and order. I’ll have every damn’ pair of eyes in the islands looking for ’em. They can’t go on for ever. Time’s on our side.”

“Is it?” Voss eyed him through his cigarette smoke. “With Seagull cutting up rough? He knows we can’t get anything else with the hurricane season on us. If he picks up any business, he’ll leave us flat. He’s always fiddling with that blasted pedal wireless in his cabin, talking to his buddies. Time’s not on our side. It’s on theirs. If they get out beyond the Tuamotus they’ll make for the Marquesas and if they make the Marquesas, they’ll try America. Bless ’em, they’ll never do it. But if they do, if they do, Flynn – you’ve had ’em. Murder or no murder. The Yanks’ll love ’em. They love the underdog there. If Bonnie Prince Charlie had fled to America instead of France, there’d still have been Stuarts on the throne in the Old Country. You’ve got to move.”

Flynn’s smile had grown hard. “I’ve moved,” he said triumphantly. “I did a lot of moving while I was at the Préfecture de Police. The French are going to search the Marquesas, the Societies, the Tubuais and the Gambiers. I’ve got things churning at last.” His voice rose slightly as Voss stared back at him. “They’re doing most of it by enlisting the islanders’ help. There’ll be launches and schooners and native outriggers looking for ’em. There’ll be every blasted boat that floats. And I’m going to take the Teura To’oa into the Tuamotus and search there myself. I’ve already contacted the Governor by wireless. I’ll drive that old bastard, Seagull, till he drops apart. The Salomios have got to keep going,” he concluded, “and, God help ’em, bucking the trade winds all the way as they are, it’s going to be tough.”