He signed to me. “Take the helm for a while Manning.”
I set the coffeepot on the cockpit deck and moved back. He slipped past and I took the tiller. The sun was low in the west and the breeze had subsided to a light air scarcely filling the sails. Barclay sat down on the weather side beyond Barfield and took one of the sandwiches from the plate. A lock of brown hair was breeze-blown across his forehead and he looked more like a young poet or student than ever, if you forgot the heavy sag of the jacket and didn’t look too closely at the cool deadliness of the eyes.
He glanced at me and then at Shannon. “If you’ll be kind enough to give me your attention I shan’t have to say this more than once. We are now at least fifty miles from the nearest land. Obviously, any further attempt to swim ashore is futile. I have thrown overboard the oars to the dinghy, so you can’t get away in that. Any attempt at upsetting the status quo will be met with a pistol-whipping.”
He stopped. Barfield had leaned forward to take a sandwich from the plate on her lap, and while he was about it he patted her on the knee. She stared at him with icy contempt.
“Listen to the nice man, baby,” he said.
“You are listening, aren’t you, Mrs. Macaulay?” Barclay asked coldly. “I was speaking primarily to you, since you will be the recipient of the pistol-whipping if Manning tries to get out of hand.”
She was superb. She turned and regarded him calmly. “I hear you. But you don’t have to impress me; you forget, I’ve already seen you at work.”
He shrugged. “That being the case, shall we get down to business? Your husband told you where his plane crashed. I should like you to tell us exactly what he said.”
“Of course I’ll tell you,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I? But I fail to see why you had to bring me out here to ask a simple question like that.”
“Obvious, isn’t it?” he said. “But go ahead.”
“All right. It was late in the afternoon, he said, near sunset, when he picked up Scorpion Reef. He changed course slightly so as to hit the Florida coast somewhere above Fort Myers. A few minutes later he began to have trouble with his starboard engine. Then it caught fire. He couldn’t put it out, and he knew he was going to crash. He had noticed a reef or shoal below him just a minute or two before, and tried to get back so he could land on the downwind side of it, where the sea wouldn’t be so rough, but he couldn’t make it. He crashed on the east side of it, about two miles off, and the plane sank almost immediately. He just had time to climb out on a wing, and throw the raft in the water. As you probably know, he couldn’t swim at all.”
“Why didn’t he try to get the diamonds off with him?”
“He had stowed the box in a locker so it wouldn’t go flying around if the weather got rough. And the locker was aft, already under water.”
“What about the other man? The diver?”
This was the only part of it that hurt her. She hesitated for a moment, and I could see the sickness in her eyes. “He said the man didn’t have his belt fastened, and was killed in the crash.”
You could take your choice, I thought. He might have been alone, already a murderer, or he could have left an injured man to drown. Or possibly there was just a slim chance he was telling the truth. She could hold onto that, anyway.
“Very well,” Barclay said. Then he lashed at her suddenly: “Now. Why was he so sure of his exact bearing from that reef? He didn’t have time to take a compass reading before the plane went down, and he didn’t have a compass on the raft.”
She was quite calm. “It was late afternoon, I said. The sun was setting. The plane, the very northern end of the surf on the shoal, and the sun were all in one straight line.”
She looked around suddenly at me. “I remember now, you asked me that, didn’t you, Bill? Whether he could see surf from the raft. And I’d forgotten.”