The Loss of the Jane Vosper Read online

  THE LOSS OF THE JANE VOSPER

  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.

  THE LOSS OF THE JANE VOSPER

  FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS

  THE LANGTAIL PRESS

  LONDON

  This edition published 2011 by

  The Langtail Press

  www.langtailpress.com

  The Loss of the Jane Vosper © 1936 The Society of Authors

  ISBN 978-1-78002-047-1

  CONTENTS

  1 SEA HAZARD

  2 SEA RISK

  3 SEA LAW

  4 SEA JUSTICE

  5 A FURTHER PUZZLE

  6 FRENCH TAKES CHARGE

  7 GEORGE HISLOP

  8 THE DISPATCH OF THE SETS

  9 THE SHED IN REDLIFF LANE

  10 THE ELECTRIC RUNWAY

  11 SCRAPS OF PAPER

  12 THE TUNNEL

  13 THE ‘ARM C’ SCRAP

  14 MUTE WITNESS

  15 THE TIMBER

  16 THE WEAK LINK

  17 FIRE ALARM

  18 THE STORY OF THE CRIME

  For the sake of verisimilitude the scenes of this story have been laid in real places. All the characters introduced, however, are wholly imaginary, and if the name of any living person has been used, this has been done inadvertently and no reference to such person is intended.

  -1 -

  SEA HAZARD

  Captain James Hassell, master of the SS Jane Vosper, lay wakeful in his bunk. He had turned in shortly before eleven and now it was getting on to four in the morning, and he had not yet closed an eye.

  It was not the motion of the ship that had kept him awake, which, though considerable, had many times been vastly worse. He was accustomed to being pressed by her corkscrew roll first to one side of his bunk and then to the other. It was nothing strange to him to have his head and his heels alternately though irregularly elevated, and to see his oilskins and other hanging objects sweep backwards and forwards through a thirty-degree arc. Nor was his rest affected by the howl of the wind and the crash and jar of seas striking the ship’s hull. Except in a full gale or worse he was scarcely conscious of such sounds, for so many years had he listened to them. And now out there it was nothing like a full gale. Dirty a bit undoubtedly, but no more.

  Captain Hassell’s trouble was not from without, but from within. He was suffering from a sharp attack of the blues. A feeling of depression and foreboding had taken possession of him. The present seemed empty and futile, the future dark with intangible but inevitable calamity. Grimly he thought that he had not had such a premonition of evil since that night long ago when a typhoon had so nearly overwhelmed his ship in the China Sea…

  But Hassell was a materialist and he did not allow these dark imaginings to weigh unduly on his mind. He scorned presentiments and scouted occult influences. His thoughts turned rather towards his supper, and he mentally damned the cook as the real cause of his distress.

  However, whether due to indigestion or not, he had never felt less like sleep in his life. He was sick of lying rolling about in his bunk. He must get up. He would go out on the bridge for an hour or two, and turn in again later if he became drowsy.

  He switched on his light, and sitting on the edge of his bunk, looked round his cabin as he felt for his clothes. Considering the age and size of the Jane Vosper, it was not too bad a little place. Indeed he felt for it a sort of mild affection. It was his home, the only home he had. He had lived there now for eight years, since he had been transferred from the Mary Clayton, and he would probably live there till the end of his sea life.

  For James Hassell was getting old. He was due to retire in a couple of years’ time. And it was unlikely that he would get another ship in those two years. When the Ann Blount was laid down a year ago he had hoped…But Red Mackail had got her. Nothing against Mackail; he was a good fellow and young. That’s where he had the pull. Young! The Jane Vosper was old too: twenty, if she was a day, and her plates had worn thin. She wouldn’t last much longer. But she would last his time. A couple of years would do them both.

  He put on his sea boots and oilskins, for though the sea was rapidly going down, spray was still coming pretty solidly over the bridge. Then he passed from his cabin, which was on the starboard side, into the swaying chart room amidships, and out through the wheel-house into the night.

  It was not wholly dark. The sky was clear of clouds and the stars were bright, though there was no moon. The sea all around was black as jet, but black bearing innumerable smudges of a ghostly whiteness, moving smudges, growing, fading, changing form and position. In front and below a deeper blackness outlined the ship’s forward well-deck and fo’c’sle. A faint green shimmer came from the weather sidelight casing.

  In the navigation shelter near the green light was the motionless figure of the officer of the watch, motionless save for an easy sway to the lurch of the ship. Henry Arlow, first mate, was entirely competent at his job, but like his skipper, he was growing old. He had had his master’s ticket for many years, but he had never had a ship. He was beginning to believe he never would have a ship, and only the thought of the numbers of men with master’s certificates who were walking the streets ashore without a job of any kind prevented him from becoming bitter in his disappointment.

  It chanced that both men came from the same little watering-place, Beer, in Devon. They had known each other as youngsters and they had always been friends as well as shipmates. In private they were James and Harry to one another, though before the men the first officer was Mr Arlow, and he addressed his captain as ‘sir’. Hassell now moved close to the other.

  ‘Couldn’t sleep,’ he explained, though explanation of his appearance on the bridge at any hour was not called for. ‘Must have been that damned stuff we had at supper. Sea’s falling?’

  ‘Yes, and about time too,’ Arlow agreed.

  As if begging leave to doubt the men’s statement, a higher line of foam at that moment shone dimly across the sky on the Jane Vosper’s starboard bow, borne on a black hillock of water which moved menacingly forward towards the vessel. She put her nose down and went at it like a charging bull. There was a crashing thud, and as her bows swung up into the sky, the ocean seemed to rise in foam above her. The fo’c’sle was blotted out in white, while water poured in tons down into the well-deck and spray hit the dodger canvas with cracks like the spitting of a machine-gun. Gradually the black fo’c’sle emerged like a rock with water running off it in all directions, and stopping its climbing, plunged down into the following trough, as if over the edge of
a precipice. The jar of the racing engines came up through the planking of the bridge as the screw lifted out of the water, followed by a sudden cessation of vibration, as the engineers throttled down. Another heavy plunge and she settled down once again to more reasonable pitching.

  ‘There are fewer like that,’ Arlow remarked when the wave had passed.

  Hassell nodded. He devoutly hoped the wind would fall. Not that there was anything in the sea that was running to hurt the Jane Vosper, but against that head wind she could not keep her speed. At best it was only nine knots, but with the wind she was meeting she averaged but little over five. Already they were nearly thirty-six hours late.

  They had left the London Docks on Saturday afternoon, the 21st of September, just six and a half days earlier, and had made good speed to Ushant. There they had run into fog, and for twelve hours had had to creep along with horns and sirens going all round them. This twelve hours of blind sailing, surrounded by great ships whose reduced speed would still have cut them in two as a knife cuts cheese, had taken it out of Hassell. Conditions had then improved. The Bay had smiled on them, and going down Northern Portugal was like a pleasure cruise. But off the Burlings they had met a heavy head wind. This had continued ever since, though now at last it was dropping.

  At this hour on this Saturday morning they should have been abreast of the Madeira Islands, but instead these were still something like 300 miles ahead. Captain Hassell was worried about the delay, though it was not in any way his fault. His company’s boats ran on a regular schedule, and a captain who could not keep time was unpopular at headquarters.

  The Jane Vosper was a small freight liner of some 2500 tons register, which worked back and forward between London and Buenos Aires, calling at Pernambuco, Bahia, Rio, Santos and Montevideo. She was a sound, well-built steamer of the three-island type, that is to say, with a high fo’c’sle forward, a high boat-deck amidships, and a high poop aft. Between these three heights or ‘islands’ were the comparatively low well-decks with their cargo hatchways. Indeed her long, rather narrow hull was practically all cargo space except for the block amidships, which, starting with the engine room and stokehold below, rose through the officers’ quarters to the chart-house and bridge above. Her single screw was operated by triple expansion engines, and she was divided into six compartments by five watertight bulkheads. She had one tall funnel, painted with the company’s red and green colours, and her hull was black, relieved only by the white of her boats and upper fittings. She was a fine sea boat, and in bad weather rode easily, recovering quickly when she rolled, and rising nimbly enough to a head sea.

  Though Captain Hassell would dearly have liked, before his time was up, to have skippered a passenger liner, or at least a larger cargo ship, he could not but recognize the good qualities of the Jane Vosper. Though she was small for regular ocean work, many a larger and more important vessel was a lot worse found. Nor could he complain of his crew. Without exception they were good men. There was no one he would have preferred to Arlow for first mate, and the second officer, Blair, a Scot from Dundee, was also an efficient seaman. The engineer, Mactavish, hailed from Clydeside. He was a genius in the engine room, though inclined to take a sombre view of life. Both he and Hassell treated their respective staffs well, and both got loyal service in return. In short, the Jane Vosper was what is usually called a happy ship.

  Hassell, pacing the bridge, paused at the wheel-house to look at the clock. Ten minutes to four. Eight bells and the change of the watch would be immediately. He would stay and have a word with Blair, and then after a few minutes he would lie down again and try to sleep.

  He had just come to this conclusion and was turning back to rejoin Arlow at the end of the bridge, when there came a sudden vibration beneath his feet, followed by a dull roar from somewhere in the interior of the ship. Both officers leaped forward and their hands met on the engine-room telegraph. But for a moment neither moved the handle. Both instinctively waited for some indication of what had happened.

  Thoughts raced through Hassell’s brain. The engine room! A boiler burst? The crankshaft broken? Or the tail-shaft, or a connecting rod? Or had the screw gone altogether?

  No. A moment sufficed to tell him that it was none of these things. The beat of the engines continued normal and tranquil. Nothing vital in the engine room.

  Had they fouled some floating debris? It hadn’t felt like it. Still less had it sounded like it. It was an explosion of some kind, somewhere. But what, and where?

  Though these considerations were passing through Hassell’s mind, he had not remained inactive. He had quickly rung for Slow Ahead – just enough speed to keep steerage-way on the ship – and had called to the helmsman to starboard thirty degrees, to bring the ship’s head to the sea. ‘Keep her to it,’ he had ordered as he whistled down the engine-room tube.

  ‘That you, Mac? What is it?’

  The chief had evidently already reached the engine room, for it was he who answered.

  ‘I couldna say. It sounded in No. 2 hold. Everything’s right enough here.’

  ‘Then better get your people out in case they’re wanted.’ He swung round to Arlow. ‘I’ll take charge. Get below and see what it was. And send Crabbe here.’

  Crabbe was the single wireless operator the Jane Vosper carried. As Arlow ran down the bridge ladder he met him hastening to the wireless room.

  ‘Old man wants you on the bridge,’ he cried as he hurried on.

  By this time the men of both watches were streaming from the fo’c’sle, driven out principally by the knowledge that anything wrong meant that all hands would be required, but also, in the threat of an unknown danger, because of that haunting fear of being drowned in a confined space which lies dormant in the mind of most seamen. Brought up into the wind, the Jane Vosper had steadied somewhat. She was still pitching a good deal, but her rolling was easier.

  Crabbe appeared beside the captain.

  ‘Get in touch with anything that’s near us,’ Hassell directed. ‘But no message as yet.’

  As Crabbe hurried away, the second officer appeared, hurriedly buttoning his coat. Hassell immediately ordered him to check up their exact position and then to go down and help Arlow to find out what had happened.

  Captain Hassell stood gripping the bridge rail with both hands, his mind tense and senses keenly alert. Gradually he grew more reassured. Nothing seemed to be wrong. The engines were carrying on steadily and rhythmically, the ship was steering correctly and riding easily, all apparently was as usual. The deck lights had been put on and he could see the hurrying figures of the men passing here and there. They were, he knew, sounding the wells, and if the ship proved to be dry they would follow that by a search in the various holds. Till he received Arlow’s report, there was nothing to be done.

  Suddenly, without the slightest warning, the shock was repeated. There was the same jar and quiver of the deck planking and rail, followed immediately by the same dull, muffled detonation from below. Certainly an explosion! An explosion in the engine room or hold!

  Hassell felt as if a huge hand had suddenly gripped his heart. Its beating seemed to fill the world and to be about to choke him. Then with a resolute effort he overcame his momentary paralysis and was once again his own alert and efficient self.

  Tensely he watched and listened and felt the planks beneath his feet and the rail he still gripped. In all his experience he had never known anything like this.

  But once again he couldn’t discover anything wrong. Still the gentle rhythm of the engines continued unbroken. Still the ship steered and rose and fell easily to the swells. To all outward appearance, everything remained as before.

  Quickly he moved to the engine-room tube and spoke down. There also everything appeared to be right. Mactavish was in the stokehold investigating, but so far as the speaker – the second engineer, Peebles – was aware, all in his department was in order. ‘Here’s the chief, sir,’ he went on, and in a moment Mactavish’s voice sounded.
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  ‘It’s in No. 2 hold, whatever it is,’ the engineer declared. ‘An explosion of some kind. But we’re right enough still.’

  As Hassell took his mouth from the tube, his eye caught the flying figure of Second Officer Blair approaching the bridge. He flung himself up the ladder and reported: Fire in No. 2 hold, sir.’

  Hassell nodded. Now that he knew what to do he was his own man. Coolly but decisively he gave his orders. The men to fire stations; pumps to be rigged, all to stand by to flood No. 2 hold. ‘And, Mr Blair,’ he went on, ‘I want you to get those boats swung out and make sure everything’s ready if we have to leave in a hurry. Then come back here and relieve me.’

  It has been said that the Jane Vosper was a ship of the three-island type, with five watertight bulkheads. These bulkheads were arranged as follows:

  The first was close to the bows, separating the forepeak, which contained stores, certain tanks, etc, from No. 1 cargo hold. The second was placed between Nos. 1 and 2 cargo holds, just under the stumpy foremast with its group of derricks and attendant winches. The third bulkhead was between No. 2 cargo hold and the stokehold. Then came the bulk of what might be called the operative part of the ship; boilers, engines, bunkers, galley, officers’ living and sleeping quarters; the whole centre of the vessel. Behind this and separating it from No. 3 cargo hold was the fourth bulkhead, the last bulkhead being placed near the stern, between this No. 3 hold and the aft peak.

  The part where the fire had broken out and where the explosions had evidently taken place was, therefore, just forward of the bridge, the hold beneath the after-half of the forward well-deck, between the bridge and the foremast. It was divided off from No. 1 hold and the stokehold respectively by solid steel partitions, so that with any reasonable luck it should be easy to prevent the fire from spreading.