Fatal Venture

Born in 1879, Freeman Wills Crofts was an Irish engineer and one of the preeminent writers of Golden Age detective fiction. Educated in Belfast, he was apprenticed at eighteen to his uncle, who was chief engineer of the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway. Marrying in 1912, he was to hold various positions in railway engineering before becoming Chief Assistant Engineer, and it was during an illness-induced absence from work that he wrote his first novel,
The Cask
(1920), which became an international success. Considered a classic of the detective genre, it was followed by a steady production of more than thirty novels, most of which featured the meticulous Inspector French of Scotland Yard. An influential and key pioneer of the genre, Crofts became an early member of the legendary Detection Club in London along with Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley and other established mystery writers. He also wrote numerous plays for the BBC, dozens of short stories, a number of true crime works, and a religious book. Known for tight plots and scrupulous attention to detail, his work set new standards in detective fiction plotting. In 1939, the author was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In retirement from engineering he continued to write and pursued music, carpentry, gardening and travel. He died in 1957.

FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS

THE LANGTAIL PRESS
L
ONDON

It was while acting as courier to a Boscombe Travel Agency touring party that Harry Morrison first met Charles Bristow.

Morrison was normally a clerk in the firm’s head office in Lower Regent Street. Usually he spent his time arranging for other people the enthralling journeys he so much longed to take himself. He was well acquainted with the world, and particularly with Europe, in what might be called a theoretic or paper fashion. Asked the route from Copenhagen to Constanta or from Archangel to Archachon, he would say before ever opening a book: “Oh, yes. The best way is via such and such towns and it will take you so many hours.” He was as much at home with a Continental
Bradshaw
as the normal Englishman is with Test Match scores, and always carried in his head the sterling equivalent of the principal currencies of the world.

Harry Morrison had been intended for the diplomatic service and had gone to Cambridge from a good school. But before he had taken his degree his father had died, leaving, instead of the expected fortune, debts which practically wiped his legacy out, the result of secret speculation. His mother was also dead, and at the age of twenty he found himself alone in the world, with his future dependent on his own efforts. Foreign travel had always been his dream, and he now moved heaven and earth to get a start in the Boscombe office. His good French and German and his smattering of Italian and Spanish had stood to him, together with the fact that he had been to certain of the Alpine winter sports centres and knew some of the ropes of Continental travel. That had been five years earlier, and since then he had put his whole soul into his work, so that if the chance of foreign service should occur, he should be in a position to seize it.

Now in his five-and-twentieth year, this chance had come. Captain Holdsworth, one of the couriers, had fallen ill, and there was no understudy to take his place. Morrison was asked if he could undertake the work. His answer needn’t be recorded.

He was to conduct a party of seventy to Lucerne, see them settled in their various hotels, and then go on to Marseilles to meet a small but more select cruising party and convoy them home. It was rather a job for him, but he had copious directions from Holdsworth, as well as a stout heart and a high courage.

He had managed with less difficulty than he had expected; indeed, as they left Paris on the return journey, he was congratulating himself that he had made a success of the trip. His easy manner and his obvious pleasure in what was happening had not only seen him through, but had made him mildly popular with both sets of travelers.

Charles Bristow was a member of the second set, the cruising party. Morrison had come specially in contact with him over a suitcase which had disappeared during the transit across Paris, and which Morrison had triumphantly rescued as it was being borne away by an alien porter. Later in the Calais train the two had begun to chat, and it was then that Bristow dropped the remark which was to change the whole of Morrison’s life, and lead him, as a crime reporter put it afterwards, into the very shadow of the gallows.

Morrison was passing down the swaying corridor when Bristow hailed him.

“Jolly good getting that suitcase,” he said. “How did you twig the porter had taken it?”

“Orange label caught my eye,” returned Morrison, pausing at the door of the first class compartment. “Some people don’t like to have tourist agency labels on their luggage, but” – he smiled – “they have their advantages.”

“Swank that objection,” Bristow pronounced. He held out a case. “Cigarette?”

“Thanks.” Morrison helped himself.

Bristow moved a paper from the opposite seat. “Chap sitting here gone to lunch,” he explained. “Won’t you sit down for a moment?”

The compartment was empty save for a man sitting on the same side as Bristow. As he glanced up momentarily from his paper, Morrison was conscious of a pair of dark, suspicious eyes and one of those thin-lipped mouths which suggest a trap. A man of force of character, he thought idly, though probably not wont to be too much handicapped by scruples.

He dropped into the corner seat and a desultory conversation began. After the weather, the crowd on the train, and the chances of a smooth crossing had been duly dealt with, Bristow became more personal.

“Interesting job, this of yours,” he essayed. “You’ve not being doing it long, I imagine?”

Morrison smiled. “That’s rather a blow,” he declared. “As a matter of fact, it’s my first trip, but I thought I was doing it as if bred in the bone. What has given me away?”

“Nothing against the way you’ve done it. If I may say so, we’ve been jolly well looked after. It was something else. You were enjoying yourself too much.”

Morrison laughed outright. “And why shouldn’t I? I’m fond of traveling: foreign sights and sounds and all that. Just the very feel of another country thrills me.”

“Just my point. When you’ve done the journey
x
to the
n
th times, you won’t be so thrilled over it.”

“I won’t do it x to the nth times. Long before that I’ll be taking our clients round the world, Canada, the Rockies, Rio, India, the Far East. Lord, what wouldn’t I give to see it all!”

“I envy you,” Bristow declared, with a half-sigh, “I wish I was as keen as that about my work.”

“The very names of the places draw you,” went on Morrison unheedingly. “Java, Borneo, Surabaya, Krakatoa, just to mention one corner of the world. Can you hear those names and not want to go?”

“I know: I’ve felt the same. Do your people do much of that? What I call big cruise work?”

“More than any firm, I think. We have three round-the-world trips running at this moment. And it’s seldom we’ve less than two.”

Bristow grew more serious. “I’m interested in that,” he explained. “Not that I could afford it myself. This little cruise to the Greek Islands is about my limit. But I’m interested in an abstract way in big-ship cruising.”

“Some people say that to read the folders is half the fun.”

“There’s something in it. But I’ve often felt that the mere being on a big ship at sea would be a treat to a lot of people.”

“You mean apart from the places they call at?”

“Yes. Given reasonable weather, I think a lot of people would go cruising just for the sea and the ship alone, irrespective of where they were being taken.”

“We do advertise that side of it: all the agencies do.”

“You mean deck games and sun and swimming pools?”

“Yes. The life of the sea. Even the eleven o’clock soup has its advertising value.”

“I include all those things, but even more I mean the sea itself: the fresh wind, the salt on one’s lips, watching the waves, even the gentle roll of a big ship. There must be a lot of people who would delight in it.”

“I expect you’re right. A lot of people would probably try it if they could. But there aren’t many who can, you know. Big-ship cruising is expensive.”

Bristow had grown more serious still. “Suppose,” he went on, “you could give big-ship cruising on moderate terms, how do you think it would go? Could you fill a ship? And would it pay?”

Morrison was surprised at the other’s eagerness. “I think you could fill a ship if your rates were low enough and if one could book for short enough periods. But I question if it would pay.”

“You mean the running expenses are so high?”

“Yes, that and the overhead – depreciation and so on. It’s been tried, you know.”

Bristow’s face fell to an astonishing degree. “Tried?” he repeated. “I didn’t know that. When or where?”

“Well, several lines do it or have done it. The Booth Line, for instance, have a heavy trade between Lisbon and South America. But they start from London. From London to Lisbon they are running comparatively light. They can therefore offer cheap and excellent trips between England and Lisbon.”

Bristow seemed slightly relieved. “Ah, yes,” he said, “but that isn’t quite what I meant.”

“The same thing happens with lines going to the East. They pick up a number of their passengers at Marseilles or Toulon or Genoa. They can offer cheap trips between home and these ports.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Yes, it’s done in several parts of the world. And the very cheap fares pay – but only for one reason: because you’ve already provided the heavy items: the ship, the fuel, the staff. Practically all that these fill-up passengers cost is their food.”

“Yes, I see that,” Bristow returned, speaking as if a load had been removed from his mind. “But it’s not quite what I meant. Those are small ships and they take people abroad, even if it’s not round the world.”

“The Booth Line ships are not very large, but some of the others run up to twenty thousand tons. I don’t know that I’d call that such a small ship.”

“I meant even larger than that: the big North Atlantic ships. What was really in my mind was big American liners cruising round the British Isles. That has never been done, has it?”

Morrison smiled. The idea seemed fantastic. “Not exactly. Some of the big cruising boats – I’m not sure that it wasn’t the
Arandora Star
herself – have done short local Whitsuntide or August Bank Holiday trips. For instance, I remember one to Kenmare – or was it Bantry? – for Killarney, you know. A three-day trip between their ordinary cruises.”

“And they paid?”

“Oh, yes. Full up as a rule.”

Bristow moved uneasily. “That’s not,” he pointed out, “exactly what I had in mind. Suppose you had a big Atlantic liner cruising round Britain – continuously. Up and down the Channel and the Irish Sea, and perhaps about the Scottish Islands. Keeping in sheltered water and calling every day or two to take up and set down. What do you think of that idea?”

Morrison’s surprise grew. Bristow was taking the conversation dead seriously. “I never heard of that being done,” Morrison admitted cautiously.

“What I had in mind,” Bristow continued eagerly, “was an hotel which moved about: a floating hydro if you like. People could go to it for a couple of days, a week or a number of weeks, just as they do to hotels. Well, there’s the idea. What do you think of it – from a financial point of view?”