A Maze of Murders by Roderic Jeffries Page A

Cap’n?’
    It had never occurred to him to wonder whether ’Cap’n’ was touched with sarcasm rather than respect. He visually searched the sea. The island was some five kilometres to the north, most of its details scrambled by the heat haze; between it and them were two yachts, ghosting along in the lightest of breezes. He considered yachtspeople the greatest of bores, preferring to talk of sheets, halyards, tacks and greybeards, rather than indexes, futures, scrip issues, and P/E rates. On the port beam was a ship, hull down. ‘Stop engines.’
    Milne reached forward to bring both engine control joysticks back to neutral, then switched off. The faint noise of the boat’s movements and the water gently slapping against her hull became audible.
    â€˜Keep a good lookout,’ Pascoe ordered.
    â€˜Aye, aye, Cap’n.’
    He adjusted the rake of his cap, made his way down the companionway and into the saloon, then aft to the open deck where a tarpaulin had been rigged to give shade. Several men and women were gathered, drinking with the enthusiasm of poor relations.
    â€˜Must be eight bells,’ Kerr said.
    â€˜How d’you mean?’
    â€˜The end of the watch.’
    Pascoe was annoyed by his failure to understand. ‘I’ve decided we’ll lie idle for a bit,’ he said pompously. He disliked Kerr, who was more or less permanently drunk and also one of them; however, his brother was a noted landowner in Scotland. He moved to the centre of the deck, braced his feet against a nonexistent swell, cupped his hands about his mouth to overcome a nonexistent gale, and called out: ‘Who’s for a swim before lunch?’
    Monica, over made-up, under-dressed, her décolletage only just giving imagination work to do, said in her husky voice: ‘I didn’t think we’d be swimming. I haven’t brought a costume.’
    Turner could be relied upon to make the obvious comment. ‘Then go in skinny.’
    She fluttered her eyelashes. ‘And have you ogling me?’
    â€˜I promise not to look.’
    â€˜My mother told me never to believe a man’s promise unless he’s got his legs crossed.’
    â€˜Very wise,’ said Hilda Pascoe. Plump, cheerful, content with whatever life offered, she regretted her husband’s thrusting social ambitions since it meant she had so often to mix with people she would rather not have done. ‘And there’s no call for anyone to get excited because we’ve several costumes in the cabins and I’m sure one of them will fit you nicely.’
    â€˜That’s what I call optimism,’ Turner said.
    Hilda and Monica went into the saloon and for’d to the cabins, others followed. Within five minutes, most were in the water.
    It was Turner, a couple of hundred metres from the boat, who suddenly began to shout and to wave his arms. The other swimmers, unable to see him clearly, if at all, assumed he was fooling and someone called out to enquire whether he had been foul-hooked by Monica. Milne, however, up on the flying bridge and able to look down and judge the sense of panic in Turner’s movements, grabbed a pair of binoculars and looked through them. It was immediately clear that Turner had not been attacked by cramp because he had begun to swim back to the boat with a stylish crawl. Milne visually searched the surrounding sea, remembering the authenticated stories of great white sharks in the Mediterranean; he made ready to start the motors, accepting that should this be a shark attack, he’d never get the boat under way in time. He picked out something that floated so close to the surface that from time to time parts of it broke through to become clearly visible. For a while he could not identify what it was; when he did, he swore.
    *   *   *
    Few moments were filled with such blissful satisfaction as when, on a boiling Saturday afternoon, having dined and