Free The Strode Venturer by Hammond Innes

dwelling on this or giving the name of the man I cited as co-respondent. I knew him quite well and even liked him. The only reason I have referred to my personal affairs at all is because my break with Barbara had a considerable influence on my subsequent actions. For one thing it left me entirely free of any encumbrance. The children were taken care of—they would spend the holidays with my sister in Scotland as they did whenever they couldn’t come out to join us. Barbara could now fend for herself. For another, it induced in me an urgent desire to involve myself in something that would effectively take my mind off my own affairs. In other words, I was in the right frame of mind to give myself whole-heartedly to any project, however outlandish or fantastic. Such a project was ready to hand.
    Charles Legrand was in the phone book, but when I rang him from the hotel on Sunday morning his house-boy told me he was away. I spent part of the day clearing my own personal belongings out of the house. The Symingtons—Alec was an old friend from destroyer days—put a room at my disposal and I moved in with them that evening. On the Monday morning I phoned Guthrie’s. I had presumed “Legrand” was merely away for the week-end. Instead, I discovered he had been gone over a week.
    I drove into town then. Battery Road is on the waterfront and as usual the river was thronged with tongkangs lightering goods out to the ships in the Roads. Peter Strode was on the general imports side of the business and I was passed to his boss, a man named Ferguson whose office looked across the river to the godowns on the North Boat Quay. He told me Charles Legrand was on indefinite leave.
    “Did he say where he was going?”
    “No, and I didn’t ask him. But he mentioned something about it being quite a long voyage so I imagine it was by sea. He was due for a long leave anyway.”
    “When exactly did he go?”
    “As far as we’re concerned the Friday before last. Would you like me to check for you?” He reached for the phone and rang Legrand’s house. Ferguson was a very thorough individual. He not only produced the time at which Legrand had left—shortly after ten on the Sunday morning—but also the fact that his car was still at the house. He’d left in a taxi with almost no luggage, just an old bed-roll, a cardboard box containing some books, sextant and chronometer and a roll of charts. “Not unnaturally the house-boy didn’t take the number of the taxi and I’m afraid he doesn’t know the driver. My guess is that Charles was planning a trip up the coast on a native boat.”
    It was a shrewd guess on his part and entirely in keeping with what I knew of the man. If he’d gone on a native craft he might be anywhere—on the Malay coast or Burma or up the east side of the archipelago to Siam, even China. And there were all the Indonesian islands. It seemed hopeless. “Have you got a list of sailings?” I asked.
    He rang for his clerk and a few minutes later the list was in my hands. The s.s. Montrose and the m.v. Nagasaki —those were the only two ships that had sailed on Sunday, 17th March. Four had left on the Monday and suddenly my quest seemed less hopeless, for one of them was a Strode ship. “Do you happen to know where the Strode Venturer was bound for?” I asked.
    “She’s on a regular run. From here she normally goes to the Maldives—to Addu Atoll. Provided, of course, she’s got cargo on board for R.A.F. Gan. It’s a somewhat irregular service, but still a service.”
    “Who are the agents?”
    “Strode & Company. But she’s under charter to a Chinese outfit, the Tai Wan Shipping Company.”
    A Strode ship and her destination the Maldives. Remembering the paper he had written for the R.G.S. I felt certain he was on board. “And she sails direct for Addu Atoll—no stops between?”
    “Aye, direct. It usually take her about a week. She should be there this evening or to-morrow morning at the latest.”And he