The Titanic Secret (23 page)

There was nothing he could do about his shirt, which had heavy bloodstains on the right side, and was in any case ripped open by the knife, but he pulled it back on and tucked it into his trousers. Then he slipped his jacket on and did up the buttons to hide as much of the shirt from view as possible, he was going to have to return to the lounge to collect Maria, and that meant appearing in the full view of perhaps fifty people. He had to look as normal and natural as possible. Dripping blood from an open wound would obviously lead to questions being asked.

Tremayne looked around the lavatory to make sure that he’d cleaned up properly, that no drops of blood were visible on the floor or the sink, took the towel he’d used to clean his wound and rolled it up so that none of the bloodstains were showing, tucked it under his arm and then stepped back into the corridor.

He walked back out onto the Promenade Deck, checked that nobody was in sight, and dropped the towel over the side of the ship. He looked around again, then re-entered the superstructure and in a few seconds was walking back into the first-class lounge. As he threaded his way between the tables, nobody appeared to take the slightest notice of him.

Maria was still sitting at the end of the table, playing poker, but looked up as he approached and then sat down beside her.

‘You’ve been a long time,’ she said, looking at him carefully.

Tremayne nodded. ‘I know,’ he replied. ‘In fact,’ he added, feeling an increased dampness from his wound which suggested that the bleeding had started again, ‘I don’t feel all that well, actually. Perhaps I’ve eaten something that didn’t agree with me. I think I’d better go back to the stateroom and lie down.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Maria said immediately. ‘Gentlemen, I’m sorry but you must excuse us. Another time, perhaps.’

She threw her cards down onto the table, picked up the money she had been gambling with and tucked it into her purse, then stood up and took him by the arm.

In the lobby by the first-class staircase, Tremayne stopped.

‘Just give me one minute,’ he said. ‘There’s something I want to do.’

He strode forward, stepped into the smoking room and walked across to stand just a few feet away from the table where Voss and the other men were sitting. For a few moments none of them seemed to be aware of his presence, then Voss looked up and stared directly at him, the colour draining from his face as if he’d seen a ghost. Tremayne met his gaze and smiled slightly.

Then he turned away and walked out of the smoking room.

12 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

As they walked down the corridor on C-Deck, Tremayne glanced round, but again there was nobody in sight.

‘What happened? Are you hurt?’ Maria demanded.

‘I’ll tell you in a minute,’ Tremayne said, as they reached the door of their stateroom, ‘but for now, can you just grab a couple of towels from one of the ladies’ lavatories while I go inside?’

Maria immediately headed off down the cross passage while Tremayne took out the key and unlocked the door.

When she returned, a couple of minutes later, he had already taken off his jacket and hung it up. Tremayne heard, quite clearly, her sudden intake of breath as she saw the huge bloodstain for the first time.

‘Don’t worry,’ Tremayne said. ‘It looks a lot worse than it really is. It’s not very deep, but it’s bled a lot.’

He started to unbutton his shirt, but Maria walked straight across to him and stopped him.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Let me do it.’

She released the buttons down the front of the shirt, and removed his cufflinks, then eased the material away from his body. Under the shirt, there was an ominous red stain discolouring the towel he had used to cover the wound.

Maria undid the knots on the strips of towel holding the pad in place, and then gently peeled away the blood-soaked material from the untidy knife wound on his side. She used some water to dampen one end of the towel and carefully wiped away the dried blood from the edges of the cut. It was still bleeding, but the flow was obviously much reduced, thanks to Tremayne’s rudimentary attempt at first aid.

‘You’re right,’ Maria said. ‘It looks a lot worse than it is, and it’s probably going to hurt for a few days while the cut heals. But you don’t need stitches, which is good, because I suspect that a doctor would want answers to a few awkward questions. In fact, he’d want answers to the same questions that I’m going to ask you, starting with the big and obvious one: what the hell happened?’

While Tremayne explained the events that had taken place on the Promenade Deck, Maria cut one of the towels she had taken from the lavatory to form a pad, then rummaged around in her own portmanteau and removed a basic first-aid kit, which included both pads and bandages. She placed a cotton pad over Tremayne’s wound, put the piece of towelling over the top, and then wrapped bandages around his torso to hold the dressing in place.

‘Not the neatest job I’ve ever done,’ she said, taking a pace backwards and looking at her handiwork, ‘but I think it’ll do the trick. I’ll unwrap it again in the morning, just to check that there’s no sign of any infection, but the wound looks quite clean to me. Does it hurt much?’

‘It’s pretty numb at the moment, but I suppose it’ll start to ache soon. It won’t be a problem. It’s not the first knife wound I’ve ever had.’

‘I noticed that,’ Maria said. ‘You’ve got one or two old scars.’

She packed away her first-aid kit, then turned back to Tremayne. ‘One question, before we go any further. You tossed the two bodies over the side, and the knife one of them was carrying, so there’s nothing obvious for anyone to find up there. But was there any blood on the deck that I need to go and clean up?’

Tremayne ran over the sequence of the fight in his mind’s eye before he replied. ‘I don’t think so, no,’ he said. ‘There might be the odd spot from the knife blade when I was stabbed, but that would be all, and they are hardly going to be noticed, even in daylight. Certainly there were no pools or smears of blood, nothing to show what had happened there.’

Maria nodded briskly. ‘Good. Now, you’d better get your pyjamas on,’ she said. ‘I know you probably feel perfectly well, but there’s bound to be some shock in the aftermath so what you need is a good night’s sleep. And tonight you’ll be sleeping in the bed, because you need to be comfortable.’

Tremayne shook his head. ‘There’s no need for that, Maria. I’ll be perfectly all right on the couch. I can’t ask you to change places with me.’

‘I said you’ll be sleeping in the bed. If you recall, I didn’t actually say that I would be sleeping on the couch. Now stop arguing and get undressed.’

Fifteen minutes later, they were lying in bed side by side, separated from each other under the covers by a chaste six inches, the lights out and both staring up at the ceiling.

‘I was really worried about you tonight,’ Maria said. ‘Once you left I had no idea what you were doing or where you’d be. For all I knew it could have been you who’d gone over the side of the ship. I can’t tell you how relieved I was when you walked back into the lounge, even though you did look a bit the worse for wear.’

‘I still don’t know how it happened,’ Tremayne replied, after a few seconds, ‘but obviously Voss or one of the others must have discovered who we are. Or at least, they know that we have an interest in what they’re planning to do. Maybe they saw me breaking into Voss’s suite, or coming out of it afterwards.’

‘I didn’t see anybody, but maybe one of his men did see us.’

‘Well, it really doesn’t matter now. However they found out, Voss and his friends will certainly be on their guard from now on, which is going to make our job a lot more difficult. The only good news is that I managed to eliminate two of his bodyguards. So at least I’ve evened the odds a little.’ Tremayne paused and then chuckled softly.

‘What?’ Maria asked.

‘I was just remembering the expression on Voss’s face when I walked back into the smoking room. I swear he went white, because right then, at that very moment, he knew something had gone badly wrong and that his ambush had failed, and I was still very much alive.’

Maria rolled sideways, leant over and kissed Tremayne softly on the cheek.

‘And I’m really glad that you are,’ she said. ‘Now shut up and get some sleep.’

13 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

‘So what do we do now?’ Maria asked. ‘Voss obviously knows that we’re onto him, so he and the others are bound to be on their guard from now on. If I was him, I’d be carrying one of those Luger pistols you said he had in his stateroom, just in case we turn up anywhere near him.’

They were sitting at a table on one side of the dining saloon, finishing their breakfast, cups of coffee in front of them. There were only about twenty passengers still in the saloon, and since they’d been sitting there, they had seen no sign of either their three targets or any men who might have been the two remaining bodyguards.

In view of what happened the previous evening, both Tremayne and Maria were now carrying their Browning pistols, cocked and ready to fire, and with the suppressors already screwed on to the ends of the barrels. The weapons were much bulkier like that – Tremayne’s only just fitted in his pocket – but if they had to use them, they knew that the sound of the shots would be enormously reduced.

‘I don’t know that one of the Lugers would be that much use to him,’ Tremayne replied. ‘As I said, the pistols were clearly a presentation pair, and I saw no ammunition in the case with them. Of course, he could have a box of shells tucked away somewhere else, and I expect that his bodyguards are armed. The two I met last night were only carrying knives but they probably had pistols in their staterooms.’

‘That still doesn’t answer the question: what do we do now? If they’re carrying weapons and they’re on their guard, how are we going to kill them? We can’t just burst into their staterooms firing our own pistols, because we’d be seized and imprisoned on board, and while I don’t mind shooting Voss – in fact, it would be a pleasure after what his two goons tried to do to you – I’m not prepared to gun down some innocent ship’s officer.’

Tremayne nodded. ‘Right now,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what we should do. I don’t really have a plan. But ultimately, if we can’t devise some way of isolating these men, we may have no option but to find them and shoot them down. That has to be a last resort because if we do end up having a gun battle, it’s going to cause a huge diplomatic incident. And there’s still the other component of this situation which we have to sort out. Mansfield Cumming wants us to find the lever Voss is intending to use to make his foul plan work. Whatever it is, it has to be highly incriminating to somebody in the American government – maybe even the president himself – so it’s probably some kind of document or photograph, something like that. I didn’t find anything in Voss’s stateroom, so my guess is that, whatever it is, he carries it around with him.’

He fell silent and took a thoughtful sip of his coffee.

‘In fact, the only sort of plan I’ve come up with,’ Tremayne said, after a couple of minutes, ‘is for us to split up. I don’t know if Voss thinks you’re my partner, or just with me on the ship as some kind of camouflage, but I’m sure I’m going to be the focus of his attention. And if Voss and his men are occupied watching me, you can watch my back.’

Maria nodded. ‘That makes sense. Just tell me that you’re not going to wander about on the open decks at night, making yourself an obvious target.’

Tremayne shrugged and gave a rueful grin. ‘Not at first I’m not,’ he said, ‘but you know as well as I do that it might come to that in the end.’

He finished his coffee and stood up to leave.

‘Where to?’ Maria asked.

‘I thought I might go up to the first-class smoking room, and just see what Voss is up to. There’ll be plenty of people up there, I expect, and I really don’t think he’ll dare to try anything in such a public place.’

‘You hope. Still, it’s your funeral.’

‘Actually, I rather hope it isn’t,’ Tremayne said, leading the way out of the dining saloon.

13 April 1912
London

Mansfield Cumming stood in his office at Whitehall Court and looked down at the North Atlantic chart again. Then he switched his attention back to the piece of paper in his hand, a page covered with scribbled calculations. He’d done the sums four times now, and each time the overall result had been the same, albeit differing slightly in the details, depending upon the assumptions he’d made about some of the parameters.

The problem was that in these calculations there were no absolutes, only an infinite number of variables. The speed of the
Titanic
had been relatively consistent since the ship’s departure from Queenstown, and the course, too, had been more or less what he had expected. But some recent weather reports from other ships operating in the North Atlantic had stated that numerous icebergs had been sighted in the area the liner would be reaching the following day, and obviously that would force the captain to either reduce speed or alter course to avoid them, and quite possibly do both. That was one uncertainty.

The weather would also affect the speed of the submarine. The south-westerly swell was believed to be increasing, and it was possible that the captain of HMS
D4
would have to alter his heading to steer into the oncoming waves, which would inevitably force him to move to the south of the planned track.

The other variable affecting the boat was the length of time the second refuelling might take. According to the Admiralty, the first time the submarine had stopped to take on diesel from the oiler, the evolution had been extremely smooth, apart from the minor incident of the man overboard, which had happily ended with his recovery from the ocean. But that refuelling had taken place in a very calm sea, and Cumming expected that the next time the boat came alongside an oiler, the weather would have deteriorated significantly, and instead of taking perhaps two hours overall, from start to finish, it might easily take twice as long. And stopping for an additional two hours meant that the submarine would be over twenty miles behind its forecast position, assuming it was making in excess of ten knots on the surface. Of course, if the refuelling took even longer than this, then the discrepancy would be even greater.