The Devil in Amber Read online

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘A young girl,’ he translated.

  I affected nonchalance, concentrating on the drawing for a full minute before asking: ‘In a convent, you mean?’

  Corpusty nodded. ‘Funny old place. Out on a causeway.’

  My heart thumped in my chest. ‘St Bede’s?’

  Corpusty frowned. ‘Dunno. Least ways, don’t ring no bells. Though, if it’s a convent, I s’pose it does! Rings bells, that is! Ha ha! St Bede’s. Suppose it could be. Why? You heard of it?’

  ‘Read about it in some gazetteer or other,’ I said with a dismissive shrug.

  Corpusty folded his arms and looked up at the low ceiling, where a hurricane lamp swung restlessly to and fro. ‘Funny to recall how I first clapped eyes on one of them holy sisters. All black and white like a puffin bird. I wor only a boy and I thought it wor a spook! I says to old Ben–he wor cap’n of this ship afore me–just put that thar crate down, Ben, and lookee yonder, for there’s a ghost a-drifting’ cross the pier towards us or I’m a Dutchman.’

  I nodded indulgently.

  ‘“Well,” says he. “Reckon you’d better break out your clogs, young’un,’cos that’s one o’ them bloomin’ brides of Christ!”’

  Corpusty slapped his thigh again, then drifted off into a brown study. ‘Poor old Ben. Basking shark took him. Funny, that. I mean, they’s harmless creatures and I ain’t never heard of no one dying’cos of ’em, but this shark sort of sucked him to death and…’

  He roused himself. ‘Funny buggers, in’t they?’

  ‘Basking sharks?’

  ‘Nuns! Fancy wasting their lives on that all that tosh. I ain’t never had much truck with Jesus.’

  ‘You do surprise me.’ I shaded in the shadows beneath the captain’s drooping earlobes. ‘So how did Aggie get from being lodged at the convent to sitting below decks on the Stiffkey darning your socks?’ I continued. ‘Ran away to sea, did she?’

  Corpusty smiled, relishing the pleasure of slowly unfolding the tale, like a grandfather telling ghost stories round a Christmas fireside.

  ‘Not quite,’ he said at last. ‘Not quite. I was…approached one day. On the quay. The Mother Superior it was, and…’ He clapped his pipe into his mouth. ‘Well, that’s another story.’

  Feigning indifference, I yawned and stretched. ‘I’m done for now, Captain. Might snatch a nap before dinner.’

  Corpusty nodded and, with a contented hum, absorbed himself in some chart or other.

  I had retreated to my cabin, somewhat fagged out, when Aggie’s familiar light knock sounded at the door.

  ‘Come!’

  Ribbons of fog drifted inside with the girl, creeping around the jamb like the tentacles of a spectral sea-beast.

  ‘A bad fog is coming up, Mr Volatile,’ she said, shaking her head.

  ‘Well,’ I said cheerily. ‘Don’t fret.’

  There was no response. Clearly the vernacular hadn’t penetrated the walls of the convent. ‘You’ll be glad to be getting home soon, I expect,’ I continued at length.

  ‘Home? Norfolk is not my home,’ she replied, mournfully, like something out of Chekhov.

  ‘You favour New York?’

  She shook her head, still glum. ‘The Stiffkey is my only home.’

  I sat down on the bunk, gesturing round at the grim interior. ‘I can understand that. I mean, why would you want to live anywhere else?’

  She looked at me with her huge, tragic eyes. ‘Yes. I would miss the bright lights.’ Suddenly she grinned and her melancholy beauty was instantly transformed into something altogether delightful. The smile was infectious and I returned it with enthusiasm.

  Aggie knew nothing of my planned escape–as far as she was concerned I was simply a fare-paying passenger to be landed at Cromer with the rest of their cargo. Yet at that moment I had a tremendous urge to confide in her. I simply didn’t want to say goodbye to this fascinating creature. As I’ve already indicated, and happily for me, I’ve always taken whatever’s pretty whenever it comes along. Makes life so much more interesting, don’t you know?

  ‘Look,’ I said gently, ‘you’ve been awfully good to me these last days. Before we part forever, isn’t there something I can do to say thanks?’

  Her eyes bored into mine, suddenly serious again, then she bounded onto the bunk, knocked me flat on my back and kissed me with somewhat startling fervour.

  I hardly had time to respond when she pulled away, licking her lips thoughtfully, and frowning.

  ‘So. This is how it is to kiss a man. I think it is disappointing.’

  She began to move off but I grabbed her arm to pull her back. ‘Hang on!’ I entreated. ‘You caught me off guard, my dear. It’s really much nicer if we both have a go.’

  So saying, I let her crumple into my embrace and planted a long, lingering smacker on her dark lips whilst running my hand over the knotty tufts of her cropped hair. She relaxed a little, then stretched out like a cat, pressing her body tightly to mine.

  After the appalling stresses and privations of the past weeks, I felt a kind of fuzzy warmth flood through me like an infusion of sunlight, and my hips moved instinctively forward to grind against the girl’s, our belt buckles scraping together. Then Aggie pulled away, giggling.

  She flopped back onto the pillow and leant her head on her hand, gazing at me, searchingly. ‘I have never in my life thought to do such a thing before.’

  Hang on, I thought, there’s plenty more still to do! One chaste kiss isn’t the bally be-all and end-all.

  I stroked the creamy curve of her jaw. ‘Aggie Daye,’ I murmured. ‘Short for Agatha, is it?’

  The girl said nothing but languorously closed and re-opened her eyes.

  I decided to press my advantage. ‘The captain tells me you were raised in a convent—’

  She sat up with an angry hiss. ‘He had no right to tell you that! No right at all!’

  ‘Hey, hey, hey!’ I soothed, slipping an arm round her waist. She resisted and wriggled towards the edge of the bed, trying to plant both feet on the cabin floor. ‘It’s all right, Aggie,’ I cried. ‘This isn’t an interrogation. I’m just interested, that’s all.’

  She turned her flushed face towards me, her lip turned down petulantly. ‘They did not raise me!’ she said proudly, sinking back against the wall, arms folded. ‘They imprisoned me!’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Aggie looked glum and her eyes suddenly swam with tears. She let them roll over her cheeks, then impatiently wiped them away. ‘All I wanted was to be like them. As good as them. But the sisters told me it was impossible. I was special. So special, they kept me locked up!’

  Gently, I pulled her back so that her head lay on my chest. She suddenly gave in to racking sobs and I stroked her head, making the soothing sounds one does on these occasions. I said nothing for a long time.

  This was all terribly mysterious. Sal Volatile knew of the Convent of St Bede. Indeed it was the only place he said he’d feel safe. But why? And was this beautiful girl somehow caught up in it all?

  I was mulling this over when I suddenly became aware that Aggie had stopped crying. At first I assumed she’d drifted into sleep but then I felt a soft fumbling at my fly buttons and an immediate tumescence in my moleskins.

  Aggie’s neat little hand slipped inside my trousers and I felt a thrill of desire as her cold fingertips connected with my thighs, instantly prickling the skin into goose-flesh.

  Lifting her head from my chest, I gazed into her night-black eyes and then leant to kiss her once more, my stubbly chin scratching her soft, downy face. Her lips parted with sudden ferocity, like a snarling lioness, and she bit at my face and tongue. I pushed her down onto the bunk and dragged the sweater from her body, revealing a long, marble-smooth neck and perfect, pert breasts, the nipples huge and brown as toffee.

  With practised ease, I slipped out of my trousers and wrenched down Aggie’s own till they reached her knees, passion preventing any further undressin
g.

  Must I burden you with the details of that night? Of how we thrashed about in the none-too-clean sheets, plunging towards ecstasy till almost dawn? Of my lean and lithe body (it still was, I swear!) conjoining with hers, our legs intertwining, our mad kisses, locked in a fevered embrace that for a few sweet stolen hours banished all thoughts of Sal Volatile, Percy Flarge, nuns, lambs and mysterious Cabalistic handkerchiefs?

  Well, it was shaping up to be a dashed good shag, is all I can tell you, when something rather uncommon occurred.

  Quite suddenly, the incessant pounding of the waves against the rusty hull fell quiet, as though I were in a kinema and the sound had suddenly shut off. Even the constant asthmatic grumbling of the ship’s engines stilled. I glanced down at Aggie’s face but her eyes were screwed tightly shut in pleasure, fully absorbed in the matter in hand. Yet I knew in my very bones that if I opened my mouth to cry out, not a sound would escape me.

  And, all at once, the air in the cabin began to thicken. A strange bluey haze, like wood-smoke, began to bleed through it, hanging in trailing threads, one layer overlapping another like a formation of storm clouds. Deep, deep within the smoke there was a noiseless detonation, as though I was looking down the twin barrels of a shotgun, and two points of red light, glowing hellishly like coals, blossomed into life.

  I knew even before the smoke that surrounded them began to take on the vague, ectoplasmic structure of some nightmarish face that these ghastly, glowing embers were eyes.

  I choked in shock and ceased my coupling. Aggie stirred beneath me, and as I felt cold sweat trickle down my neck, the spectre began to take on more solid form, the blood-red eyes leering out from a long, goatish face, crazed with deep lines, black as gunpowder. There was no nose, only a hellish, skeletal hole edged about with scraps of mouldering fur. As for the mouth, it never seemed fully to form. Only a terrible, gaping, indefinite maw occupied the lower half of the face, the bluey smoke drifting in and out of its orbit like rank breath. But in its baleful black emptiness I seemed to see all the dismal, hateful things of the world distilled. I was seized by a sudden, blank terror, rolled off Aggie and curled up into a ball.

  I could feel the girl’s hands shaking me by the shoulders but still there was no sound.

  I glanced fearfully over her shoulder and the goatish face broke into a filthy heathen grin.

  Then I screamed.

  12

  Troubled Waters

  The pounding of the waves and the wheezing of the engines crashed back into my consciousness with the force of Dempsey’s right hook. I recall opening wide my eyes and calling out, before sinking into the cool embrace of the pillow, where I must have fallen into a deep, deep sleep.

  When at last I awoke, there was no sign of Aggie. Lord knows what she must’ve been thinking, pauvre petite, choosing me as her first tumble only for yours truly to screech into her lovely face some little way from any kind of, shall we say, resolution.

  My thoughts, though, were somewhat disarranged. I own I was in a total funk, trembling all over and covered in a sheen of cold sweat. What the hell had I seen? Or, indeed, what from hell had I seen? It could only have been some fevered hallucination. Perhaps the noxious fumes from the ship’s engines had finally taken their toll?

  I shuddered at the memory of that dreadful apparition and tried to dismiss it, yet even as my eyes closed the hateful, bestial face sprang back into my mind. Further sleep seemed impossible and I’d pretty much made up my mind to track Aggie down in order to apologize when I heard heavy footsteps in the passage outside.

  Staggering unsteadily from the bed and opening the door just a fraction, I caught sight of the woolly-headed sailor who’d taken my papers when first I’d come aboard. He was carrying one of the crates I’d seen in the hold, branded with a Maltese cross, though this one was small and knotted with tarry string.

  I let him pass from view, took several deep breaths to right myself, then slipped out of the cabin and followed.

  The corridors of the vessel were as stifling as rabbit warrens, swirling with oily vapour and shaking incessantly with the drumming of engines. Passing door after closed door, I suddenly flattened myself against the wall as Woolly-Head gave a stealthy look back and crept into the crew’s quarters.

  I waited a few moments, then bobbed my head around the jamb.

  It was almost completely dark inside but I could make out the sound of stifled giggles and, as my eyes grew accustomed to the murk, the Behemothal form of Bullfrog the cook, squatting on the floor clad only in his shatteringly awful underwear. Above the perished elastic waistline hung ropes of flabby flesh.

  Bullfrog was concentrating intently on something at his feet. I strained to see. It was the crate! The string had been sliced off and his meaty hand and rusted hook were busily scrabbling about inside. I could hear vague grinding sounds and for one crazed moment assumed he was preparing supper for his pals.

  Woolly-Head was giggling with a kind of manic glee. ‘In the name of the father,’ he said between hyena laughs. ‘And of the son…’

  ‘And of the holy ghost!’ chorused the others, Bullfrog making a horrible wet response as though swallowing a live eel.

  To my astonishment, I saw the mute lift a Communion wafer from the box and break it in two. Then he dropped the two halves into a little pot and began to grind up the stuff with a pestle.

  I looked on in fascination as he tipped the powder onto a tin tray and proceeded to divide it into neat lines.

  And then I understood. I’d seen Corpusty deep in confab with Olympus Mons and now here was the connection that bound them together! Mons was behind the massive influx of cocaine into Manhattan–smuggled innocuously across the Atlantic in the form of Communion wafers!

  And now the Stiffkey’s crew were presumably enjoying the leftovers, the last few crates left unsold to Mons’s New York supplier. Woolly-Head, Bullfrog and the others bowed their heads as if in prayer and partook of the cocaine in a great snuffling orgy, like sweaty pigs round a truffle-rich tree.

  I used the distraction to creep past, but had gone no more than a few yards when a door flew open and Captain Corpusty was revealed, his bulk silhouetted against the glow of the hurricane lamp within.

  ‘Trouble sleeping?’ he said, cocking his head to one side.

  ‘’Fraid so!’ I extemporised. ‘Martyr to insomnia, alas. Do you…do you mind if I carry on with the picture?’

  The old bruiser didn’t seem more than faintly surprised and happily consented to this evening shift, busying himself with brewing tea and pouring booze as I sharpened my pencils with a pearl-handled knife.

  We sat in silence as I laboured steadily away, my mind racing the whole time, only Corpusty’s breathing and the scratch of the lead pencils disturbing the stillness. I had fallen into a kind of trance when there came a light double knock and Aggie’s be-capped head appeared around the door.

  I flashed her a reassuring look but she completely ignored me, merely announcing we would be in sight of the eastern coast of England that very night. Through busy contractions of my brows, I tried to telegraph my profoundest apologies but the girl didn’t even favour me with a glance as she ducked back into the corridor.

  Grumpily, I hastened to finish my picture of the captain, ending with a hasty flourish around his wiry eyebrows of which I wasn’t particularly proud. I called to the fellow and he craned over my shoulder, nodding appreciatively as I laid down my pencils for the final time.

  ‘Marvellous!’ he cried. ‘Marvellous, Mr Box! A ruddy triumph. I never dreamed I’d see this day! But there’s a little something you’ve neglected.’

  I frowned, looking the portrait over. ‘I don’t think so.’

  Corpusty chuckled. ‘Why, your signature, sir! Just scribble it at the bottom there.’

  ‘I thought you a student of my work, Captain,’ I said lightly. ‘Don’t you know I never sign?’

  He laughed and rubbed at his chin. ‘Of course, of course! I just wondered, perhaps
this one time. As a special favour…’

  ‘It would be very odd to make an exception, even for you.’

  Corpusty nodded, grunted and gestured helplessly with both hands. ‘But how else is it to be…?’ he began. Then, with a sudden burst of energy, he clapped one hand on my shoulder. ‘Forgive the hasty words of a mere amateur, Mr Box. For genius is visible in every line, every battered old contour you’ve rendered of this old mug o’ mine! And I shall treasure it, sir. Treasure it as long as I live. These past few days have been a joy to me. Now, let’s see about getting you home and safe.’

  He gave orders for the rowing boat to be prepared for launch just before dawn, we shook hands and I left him sizing up the sketch, pride lighting up his ravaged features. I made my way back, a mite unsteadily, to my own cabin and began to make ready for disembarkation.

  Firstly, I made sure the precious silk relic was still safely stowed within my money belt, then I turned my attention to Percy Flarge’s stolen automatic. I was wrapping it in oilskin and secreting it in a pea coat (another treasure the lovely Aggie had procured) when I straightened up, convinced that someone was standing on the other side of the woodwork. Throwing open the door, I revealed Aggie crouched low, her eye level with the keyhole.

  She turned at once on her heel but I dashed forward and jerked her back.

  ‘Now you wish to touch me!’ she cried. ‘Before, I disgust you so much that you flee from my embrace!’

  ‘No, no, no,’ I insisted. ‘It wasn’t like that at all—’

  Aggie wriggled about as I tried to restrain her. ‘Get off me! I do not wish to see you—’

  ‘Then why were you spying at my door, hm?’

  ‘I was not!’

  ‘Look!’ I yelled with finality. ‘Just listen for a moment, damn you!’

  I dragged her further into the cabin and kicked the door shut. Aggie looked a little shocked and fell silent.

  I rubbed my weary face. ‘What happened before, it was nothing to do with you. You’re divine, my dear, really you are. The cat’s pyjamas. But something dashed odd happened. I…I saw something. In the air above us. A…a sort of face.’