‘What about Aunt Beckie?’ Dring asked. ‘She’ll raise Cain if you don’t turn up.’
‘I don’t think so. You see, I told her I was coming.’
‘You’re not‚’ Keeton said.
She looked at him calmly. ‘Do you want to lose those two days?’
Keeton thought of Rains, perhaps already getting a boat, a sea-going launch maybe with a better turn of speed than the Roamer.
Dring said: ‘I don’t see why she shouldn’t stay now that she’s here. We can make her work her passage.’
Keeton was caught in two minds. He turned to the girl. ‘What about clothes?’
‘I’ve got everything I need. I didn’t swim out in these, you know. I put the lot in a waterproof bag and carried it on my shoulders.’
‘You had it all worked out, didn’t you?’
‘I knew you’d need someone to change the dressing on your chest.’ She was still looking at him with a certain air of amusement, as though she knew that she had him in a corner and was enjoying the situation. ‘Are you going to let me stay?’
Keeton surprised himself by bursting suddenly into laughter. ‘All right then, all right. You stay. But you work too. Before we’ve finished you may wish you’d stayed at home with Aunt Beckie.’
‘May I have something to eat and drink?’ the girl said. ‘I’ve had nothing since yesterday.’
She slept on a mattress in the spare cabin. She cooked the meals and washed the dishes. Keeton, though he would not admit as much, found life a great deal easier than it had been when he sailed the yawl alone. He even enjoyed having the dressing on his chest changed, the touch of her fingers on his skin, the closeness of her.
‘The cuts are healing nicely‚’ she said. ‘You won’t need any bandage soon.’
“My chest itches‚’ Keeton said. ‘I want to scratch it.’
‘You mustn’t. You’ll pull the scabs off.’ She looked at him as though puzzled by something in his character.
‘Tell me, Charlie, how much longer would you have let those men torture you before you told them what they wanted to know?’
Into Keeton’s mind suddenly came a picture of the dead men lying on the Valparaiso’s poop, of Bristow with his bloody head and his body arched over the thwart. His face hardened and the cold, steely look came into his eyes.
‘If they had taken all the skin off my chest‚’ he said, ‘I still wouldn’t have told them that. You don’t know what it cost. My God, you don’t know what it cost.’
The expression on his face made the girl shiver. She turned her head away, avoiding his eyes, as though she had caught there a glimpse of some picture that made her afraid.
Chapter Eight
Oyster
They came to the reef in the evening of a day that had been like all the rest, without incident.
‘Here?’ Dring said.
‘Here.’
Keeton had been afraid throughout the voyage that Rains might have got there before him, that he would see another vessel anchored off the reef, a diver coming up out of the sea. But there was nothing of the kind; nothing but the ripple of water over the coral and the scarcely visible masthead of the Valparaiso.
Valerie looked at the mast and Keeton saw her shiver slightly, as though a cold hand had touched her shoulders.
‘And there’s a ship down there?’
‘Yes, a ship.’
‘So this is what you came for‚’ Dring said. ‘This is your pearl.’
‘My oyster. Does it scare you?’
‘Why should it?’
‘It’s a coffin too.’
The girl shivered again. ‘It scares me. Are you going down into it?’
‘I didn’t come all this way to look at the masthead.’
‘What ship is it?’ Dring asked.
‘One I once served in. Do you want to know the name?’
Dring answered slowly, looking into Keeton’s eyes: ‘I think I already know. I ought to have guessed sooner what this was all about. There was an item in the paper not long back, a story about a survivor. I’d forgotten the man’s name was Keeton. This is the Valparaiso, isn’t it?’
One corner of Keeton’s mouth went up in a kind of grin. He said nothing.
‘There was something else in the story too. You were supposed to have lost your memory. You were picked up from a lifeboat nearly a year after the Valparaiso was sunk and you couldn’t remember a thing.’
‘There’s not much wrong with your memory‚’ Keeton said drily.
Dring half-closed his eyes. ‘Come to think of it, I remember something else. There were two other survivors from the Valparaiso in Sydney. I forget their names. Wouldn’t be Rains and Smith by any chance?’
‘What do you think, Ben?’
‘And you were supposed to be sailing round the world. But you slipped back. Maybe you wanted help.’
‘Maybe I did.’
Dring sucked in a deep breath. ‘Your pearl is a golden one, isn’t it, Skipper? How much is there down there?’
‘Rains said it was a million pounds.’ Keeton’s voice was flat and casual. ‘I imagine he knew the facts. He was the mate.’
‘But he doesn’t know where the ship is?’
‘He didn’t. Whether he knows now depends on how much Ferguson found out.’
‘Ferguson?’
‘He came on board while I was asleep. I surprised him taking a dekko at the charts. I had a shot at him but he got away.’
‘When was this?’
‘The same day I was carved up.’
The girl was staring at Keeton. She seemed to be seeing for the first time the hard, brutal, grasping world of which he was a part.
‘So this is the information they were trying to get from you?’
‘It is. Men will go to great lengths for the sake of a million pounds.’
‘Yes‚’ she said, still looking into his face. ‘They will.’
He found it impossible to meet her eyes; he had to turn away. Somehow she made him feel dirty.
Dring took out a cigarette and lit it. Keeton could almost fancy he heard the man’s brain ticking over.
At last Dring said: ‘Let’s get this straight. If you can lift that gold — with my help — what do you intend to do with it?’
‘Dispose of it.’
‘Yet — I just want to make the point — legally it belongs to the Australian government, doesn’t it?’
‘It belongs to anyone who can salvage it.’
‘Is that the law?’
‘Whether it’s the law or not, that’s the way it’s going to be.’ Keeton’s voice hardened. ‘I’ll tell you something: I was left on board that ship to die. When Rains and his heroes abandoned her I was trapped in the magazine. They thought the ship was a goner. I did too. It took me a day to get out. The ship had a list to port and there were shell holes you could drive a cart through. The gun’s crew were lying dead on the poop and I had to pitch them overboard — my mates — the men I’d lived with. There were other dead men in the engine-room; when the ship ran aground on this reef they rotted. Have you ever smelt a man rotting?’
‘Yes‚’ Dring said, ‘I have.’ And his jaw was hard.
‘I lived on board for eight or nine months. Then I got away in a patched-up boat. I nearly died.’
‘I see‚’ Dring said.
‘But do you? Do you really see why this gold is mine? Why I don’t give a damn for the Australian government. And why I’ll see that murdering swine Rains burning in hell fire before I’ll let him get his filthy hands on a single ounce of it.’
He felt the girl’s hand on his arm. He turned and saw that the expression on her face had softened. There were tears of compassion in her eyes, and her voice was gentle.