The Titanic Secret (33 page)

Then he returned to his cabin and locked away the code book and the signal in his safe, and for a few minutes simply sat on his narrow bunk, wondering yet again exactly what the Admiralty was playing at.

14 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

Gunther Voss looked at the man standing in front of him and weighed up his chances.

Voss knew he had at least one more card left to play and that Tremayne had made one mistake, because he hadn’t searched or restrained him in any way. Voss was still wearing his jacket, and tucked into the right-hand pocket was something he never travelled without: a forty-one calibre Deringer pocket pistol. Possibly the ultimate close-range concealed weapon, it was so small it could be held in the palm of the hand, but contained two loaded chambers.

Although it was inaccurate at a range of more than a few feet, Voss had no doubt he could hit Tremayne with it. What he had to do was divert the Englishman’s attention away from him, for the bare second or two it would take to draw and fire the pistol. Voss knew he would only get the one chance.

‘She’s still alive,’ he blurted out, ‘and she’s being held by my bodyguard, in his stateroom down on E-Deck.’

‘What number?’ Tremayne demanded.

‘I can never remember,’ Voss said. ‘It’s written in a notebook in the pocket of the jacket I’m wearing.’

He lifted his right arm to reach for the breast pocket of his jacket, but Tremayne immediately stopped him.

‘Not like that,’ he snapped. ‘Use your left hand, just the finger and thumb, and toss the book over to me.’

That was precisely what Voss had hoped he would say, because he needed to draw the pistol with his right hand, and Tremayne’s attention would – with any luck – be held by the notebook he was going to lob across the floor of the stateroom.

Voss lowered his right hand to his side, where it was only an inch or two away from the pistol, and lifted up his left hand to slowly reach for his breast pocket. He slipped his finger and thumb inside and pulled out a small notebook.

‘Throw it over here,’ Tremayne instructed.

Voss tossed the book through the air, angling it so that it passed over to Tremayne’s right.

But then something completely unexpected happened. He’d been hoping – and expecting – that the Englishman would switch his glance to the book as it fluttered towards him, and then Voss would be able to seize his chance.

The Englishman’s gaze hadn’t wavered, not even for a split second, and Voss was still looking straight down the barrel of the silenced Colt automatic.

‘Now I have a bit of a problem,’ Tremayne said. ‘It could be you’re telling me the whole, absolute, plain and unvarnished truth, and that in this little notebook I’ll find a few room numbers and when I go and check them I might find Maria sitting in one of the cabins waiting for me. On the other hand, she might already be dead, floating in the ocean fifty miles behind us. Or maybe you’ve already killed her and your man is waiting until it’s dark so that he can dispose of her body without anyone noticing.

‘And because of what I know about you, I think the chances of you actually telling me the truth are really pretty slim. Now, for you, that’s actually a good thing, because it means that I won’t kill you, or not yet, anyway. First, I have to go and see if I can find Maria. If I can’t find her, I’ll be back to talk to you again. If I do find her, or discover that she’s already dead, I’ll be back to kill you. So now I need to make sure that you won’t run away, because I’d hate you to miss our appointment.’

Tremayne gestured with the muzzle of the pistol for Voss to stand up.

‘Put your hands behind your back,’ he ordered, ‘then turn around and face the wall.’

Voss did as he was told, because he knew that in order for Tremayne to be able to tie his hands, he would have to put down the pistol. Tying a rope or cord required the use of both hands, and that was a fact.

Voss stood up slowly and turned away, moving both hands behind his back as he did so, preternaturally alert for the slightest sound that would indicate that Tremayne had lowered his weapon, because that was the moment when he would make his move.

But Tremayne had no intention of trying to lash Voss’s wrists together while the man was still conscious. That, he knew, would be a recipe for disaster. Instead, he shifted the pistol to his left hand, drew the cosh and cracked Voss sharply over the back of the head with it, enough to daze him, but not to knock him out.

Voss tumbled forward and fell on the carpet. Immediately, Tremayne pulled a length of cord from his pocket, grabbed the man’s right hand, wrapped the cord around his wrist, and swiftly tied the ends around his left wrist as well. He pulled the knots tight, and made sure that Voss couldn’t reach the cord with his fingers.

Then he stood up and looked round the suite. There was no obvious sign of the pouch that he guessed would contain further copies of the documents he’d already recovered from Kortig. But he remembered that the other man had kept them in his jacket, and that when he had previously searched Voss’s stateroom he’d found no trace of them, which suggested they’d probably all kept the copies with them at all times.

He spotted Voss’s dinner jacket hanging over the back of a chair, ready to wear for the evening. Tremayne walked across and felt around in the pockets. In one of them, he found two envelopes, one already opened, and the other one slightly larger, sealed and inside a heavy-duty pouch. He checked the contents of both. In the open envelope were the copied documents he’d already seen, and inside the sealed envelope he found the originals.

He tucked everything into one envelope, slipped that into the pouch and resealed it, and put it in his own jacket pocket.

He glanced back towards Voss, who had now recovered his senses and was staring at him with hate-filled eyes.

‘I’ll just hang on to these for safe keeping,’ Tremayne smirked. ‘I’d hate them to fall into the wrong hands.’

He ripped the page out of the notebook, took a final look round the sitting room to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, stepped out of the stateroom, closed the door behind him and started walking quickly down the corridor, heading for the staircase that would take him down to E-Deck.

At the foot of the staircase, Tremayne eased the Browning pistol out of his pocket and held it just inside his open jacket, then with his left hand he knocked firmly on the door of the first stateroom listed on the page. There was no response, so he waited a few seconds and then tried again, but with the same result.

He checked the number of the next one, and walked a few yards down the corridor until he reached it. He repeated the same sequence of knocks, and this time he also said: ‘It’s Voss. Open up,’ in an American accent.

Now he heard a faint noise from inside the stateroom, then the unmistakable click as the lock was released, and the door opened just a crack.

Tremayne levelled his pistol and was about to kick the door wide open, when through the gap he saw a pair of grey eyes staring at him, and realized he was looking down the muzzle of another weapon.

14 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

The door swung wide open, and Maria stood in front of him, the pistol now held loosely in her right hand, and a slight smile playing over her lips.

‘Well, buster, you certainly took your time,’ she said. ‘What have you been doing?’

Tremayne smiled back at her, a tidal wave of relief washing over him. ‘Oh, this and that, you know.’ Then he grabbed her in his arms and squeezed her tight. ‘God,’ he said, ‘it’s good to see you again.’

‘That’s quite enough of that,’ Maria said. ‘We’ve got company.’

Tremayne looked behind her, at the bed, where a bulky man lay on his side, his hands between his legs, breathing heavily and apparently in pain.

‘What happened?’ Tremayne asked.

‘The usual. What you would probably expect to happen to a woman who finds herself in the clutches of a group of men who decide to kill her. They thought they’d have a little fun with me first.’

‘Did they touch you?’ Tremayne asked, the grip on his pistol tightening.

Maria shook her head. ‘No. The moment a man – any man – starts thinking with the equipment he keeps below the belt instead of with his brain, they’re usually quite easy to handle. I just undid a few buttons and waited for him to get close to me. Then it was just a matter of a knee in the groin, followed by a sharp punch in the throat. He was already over by the bed, where I was waiting for him, so I just pushed him onto it, snapped on the handcuffs he’d used on me, then walked back over here and picked up his gun to wait for either you or Voss to appear. He hasn’t moved since, oddly enough.’

‘How did you know that I wasn’t dead?’

‘I didn’t, for sure anyway, but it was something Voss said that suggested you might not be. He was listing the weapons he’d taken off you – your pistol, a garrotte, and so on – but he never mentioned your stiletto, and I remember that when he searched you he made you put your arms in the air. I knew the stiletto was strapped to your left forearm, and so when Vincent took you off for your early morning swim, I somehow doubted if it was you who had gone over the side of the ship.’

Tremayne smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t get to you sooner, but until I could get Voss by himself, I had no way of finding out where you were.’

‘I presume Voss is dead?’

‘Not quite. I wanted to make absolutely sure that I’d found you – that he’d told me the truth about where you were – before I finished the job. He’s tied up securely in his stateroom. I’ll go back there in a few minutes and sort him out. And I’ve recovered all three sets of copies, and the original documents, so we now know that Voss is a spent force, even if he somehow managed to get away. Once he’s dead, it doesn’t matter about the crates in the hold, because Cumming can arrange to have them collected in New York and the contents destroyed.’

‘Excellent,’ Maria said. ‘So now let’s stop wasting time and get that signal sent off to Mansfield.’

‘What about him?’ Tremayne pointed at the moaning figure lying on the bed.

‘I think we can leave him there. I’ve taken his weapon, and he’s not going anywhere in the near future. There was a certain amount of pent-up emotion in me when I kneed him in the groin. It’s quite possible he’ll never walk again.’

14 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

Lying on the carpeted floor of his suite, Gunther Voss was down, but not yet out. He thanked his lucky stars that Tremayne had been in such a hurry to go and find the woman, that he hadn’t bothered to search him. The Deringer was still in his jacket pocket, though at that moment he couldn’t reach it, but in his trouser pocket Voss carried a small knife with a very sharp blade. He normally used it to clip off the ends of his cigars, but it would cut through cord almost as easily as it sliced through tobacco. All he had to do was get it out.

With his wrists lashed together, it wasn’t going to be easy, but he knew he had to succeed simply because the alternative didn’t bear thinking about. He rolled onto his front and forced his bound wrists as far as he could over to the right-hand side of his body, but even arching his back and stretching his arms until he thought they would break, his fingers barely even touched the material at the top of his pocket, far less allowed him to feel inside it. He tried three times, but with the same result.

Then he had another thought: maybe gravity could help. He turned over onto his back, drew up his legs and then arched his back again so that his knees were in the air, but the knife stubbornly refused to fall out of his pocket. He rolled over, this time across to the side wall of his suite, lay on his back and walked his legs up the wall, until all the weight of his body was resting on his shoulders and bound arms. Then he wriggled his right leg up and down, trying to dislodge the knife.

And moments later, he heard a slight thud on the carpet beside him, and twisted round to look. There, lying right beside him, was the knife. He heaved a sigh of relief and brought his legs down from the wall as his fingers scrabbled to find the tiny instrument. His right hand closed around it, and then he knew that, as long as Tremayne didn’t come back within the next two minutes, he could cut himself free.

Holding the knife firmly, he rolled onto his side and used the finger and thumb of his left hand to pull the blade open. It clicked into place, and then he moved it cautiously up towards the cord which held his wrists tight together. The first couple of times he tried it, the blade met nothing, but the third time it landed on something solid, and he immediately began a gentle sawing action, up and down.

Something parted, but his wrists were still lashed together, so he repeated the process, the sharp blade cutting through another part of the bonds that held him. This time, he must have hit one of the longer pieces of cord, because within moments he was free, the cord dangling from one wrist. He cut away the remaining pieces in a few seconds, then snapped the knife closed and slid it into his pocket.

He checked his jacket pocket. The Deringer was still there, with a handful of rounds, but he needed something with a lot more range. He ran through into the bed chamber, pulled out the presentation case from under the bed, and swiftly unlocked it. He took out both of the Lugers, pressed the button to release the magazine on each weapon, and opened one of the drawers in the wardrobe. Tucked away at the very back was a box of ammunition, given to him along with the two pistols. He loaded both magazines to capacity, slid them back into the butts of the Lugers, and put the rest of the ammunition in his jacket pocket. He had no holsters, but that didn’t bother him. He tucked both weapons into the rear waistband of his trousers, where they would both be invisible and, more importantly, readily accessible.

Now all he had to do was find Tremayne, kill him, and make sure that he recovered the vital documents. Because, even with Bauer and Kortig gone, his plan could still work, and Voss had every intention of making sure that it did.