Death on a Pale Horse - By Donald Thomas Page 0,133

the port side of the after-saloon, beckoning me on.

Then came that damned voice again! Was he such a fool as to believe he could torment our nerves until one of us shouted out or fired blind?

“Why could you not do as you were advised, doctor? Why could you not go back and heal the sick, as you were trained to do? Why could you not be content to marry your little sweetheart, Mary Morstan, or invest your little nest-egg in old Mr. Farquhar’s Paddington practice? Even now it is not too late. I could wish you well and dance at your wedding, but you have given me no chance.… Oh, doctor, doctor!”

In those few seconds, I became badly frightened by this buffoonery. How it was, I knew not—but he had watched every moment and knew every secret. Miss Morstan and I were dear friends. Who knows what the future might hold? How did Moran know of her—and what could he know? Her name was now on the lips of a man who would send her to her death without scruple. Had he not sent Emmeline Putney-Wilson and almost the maid Seraphina—and others, perhaps, by his own hands? The brute need only watch patiently until that one minute in a thousand days when a woman was not under the immediate protection of a lover or her family. However constant the guard, such a moment always comes to one who watches patiently enough. Holmes was right. There was no safety except in the destruction of Rawdon Moran.

“Oh, doctor, doctor!”

Now there was laughter in that voice again, laughing at itself, laughter that was unhinged. Of course he judged me to be weaker than Holmes, and so aimed at me. He would break my nerve, frighten me to answer back, pleading for a chance to bargain, giving away our position. Then he would have us both. But I felt a sudden anger and determination. I accepted his challenge. Where was he? A brief luminance from Ruytingen across the waves lay upon the fog without piercing it. The wide surface of that cold sea was still and calm, except for the occasional wash of a wave against the listing wreck of the Comtesse de Flandre.

I heard him again as I followed Holmes round the side of the after-saloon. Now it was my friend’s turn to be taunted.

“Have no fear, Mr. Holmes. As a man of honour, I do not take my opponent’s life by an act of murder. I would not treat a beast of the jungle so. Stand your ground, both of you, and you shall both have your chance. Run like cowards and you must accept the consequences. Even you, my dear Mr. Sherlock Holmes! Would you prefer the readers of the obituaries and the penny papers to learn that, at the last, you had been a ninny, shot in the back running away?”

Despite the worst I had heard of him, I never expected this gibbering of the madhouse cell, for that was what it had become. The voice now seemed to echo from the starboard side and we were moving like ghosts towards the stern, under the port shelter of the after-saloon, keeping our backs to its wall. Then a fragment of deck planking snapped and splintered just beside my right foot. It was the impact of a shot at random from his silent pistol. He had moved round and was behind us suddenly. We continued to edge sideways towards the stern, presenting the smallest possible target. But in a moment we must leave the shelter of the saloon and come into the view of Moran’s seamen by the winch. Holmes had instinctively drawn the Webley revolver, but it was useless to us now.

I had a mad idea that we could save ourselves by swimming for our lives. Without shoes and heavier outer clothing, we might dive from the rail and support ourselves if necessary on one of the floating planks. After a few strokes from the ship’s side, the fog would close round us again. It could not be more than two hundred yards to the ropes that hung down the sides of the Princesse Henriette for survivors to clutch at. Could we do it? I could swim further than that as a schoolboy or at Battersea baths as a medical student. But this dark sea held a bitter chill, and its unknown currents might carry us away from safety.

Holmes seemed intent upon his own plan. With long supple fingers that