A Death in Geneva (26 page)

An unreasonable chill blowing off the North Sea had the gold-and-crimson sign of the Lord Nelson swinging from its hinges when Sweetman pushed his way through the double doors of the waterfront pub on the evening of June 29. The loss of the oil rig
Topic Universe
had pointed him to Great Yarmouth. The London files had been far more detailed than the information scratched together by Fisker. It had been rough, and Connie Burdette had been in the bull's-eye, loss of the rig, loss of the diver, several injuries, work stoppage, then the unsolved death of the rig crew chief.

“Over here!” A cane jabbed into the smoky haze. Sweetman spotted it over the capped heads and made his way through the jabbering crowd to a booth in the far corner. “You told me you'd be tall and bald, and that you are. Sit down.” The old union leader, crippled with arthritis, used both damaged hands to lift the pint to his lips. “Throat still works, God be praised. You want to talk about the wreck of the
Topic Universe
? A bloody, sorrowful business.” He set the mug down, his weathered face looking hard at Sweetman through watery eyes. “A villainy, death brought on by greed!” His voice, a shout, was lost in the din of the pub.

“Harry? . . . ”

“That's right, Harry.”

“What can you tell me about those two deaths, the diver and the rig chief?”

“Two? . . . In good time, Sweetman. Here!” He poked a hole in the smoke again. “Two pints—two!” He caught the barmaid's eyes. “Now, these are very unhappy times, Sweetman. For all the talk of progress, the working bloke gets shoved further and further to the rear. And”—his head trembled as he framed his thoughts—“this is not something that has come on us overnight! Nor is it unique to that one rig!”

He batted at the empty mug. “Go to the west; ask the miners. Take a
look
at the idle cranes, the empty building ways on the Clyde. Ask the factory sods in Glasgow and Clydebank. They'll tell you, Sweetman, tragic unemployment, in the double digits.”

“Come down the coast a wee bit. Stick that fine nose of yours into Hull. This nation, you know”—he paused to hoist the fresh pint to his face for a long, slow pull—“this nation is no more than a lump of coal surrounded by fish! The Hull fishing fleet was the finest. But,
stick your nose in there today and you will see a tragedy, a dying city, closed factories, rusted, idle ships, empty of catches, an entire fishing industry vanishing—mismanagement and the curse of government!”

“Drink up, Sweetman . . . and, who suffers? You know before I tell you . . . I like your look . . . and it's the likes of you and me. The blokes who work the foredecks, the nets, the flaming engine rooms—the blokes who work the wharves, the waterfront, the freezer works. God help us. The wives, the aged grandparents, the wee boys and girls, the worker and his family suffer.

“And then, you continue south to Yarmouth”—he cleared his throat, spat on the wood floor—“the great boom city of North Sea energy—oil and gas flowing like liquid gold—rubbish! Another tragedy, not a boom, Sweetman, another pustule of worker exploitation.

“Hear these blokes?” He glared into the mass of bodies. “The bloody laughter of despair, half of them unemployed, on the dole, unable to look their families in the eye.” He drank again, clanked his pint with the American. “Now the crime of the
Topic Universe.
What brings you from the States to the Lord Nelson these years later—still settling insurance claims, lawsuits, is that your business?”

“On May thirtieth, the former president of TOPIC, Constance Burdette, was murdered.”

“Aye. The news flowed like quicksilver through this wretched port.”

“Harry, I don't know what if anything the loss of that rig had to do with her death. I am an investigator—”

“So you said.”

“I need you to tell me, Harry.” Sweetman pushed his mug forward for another clank. “I need to know as much as possible.” The empty pint in his upraised arm brought two more.

“There were no tears, Sweetman. God rest her soul, there were no tears. She was a greedy bitch, a foreigner—unlike yourself, concerned only with profit.” He rubbed the wrinkled brow beneath his shaggy yellow-white hair. “Profit to the exclusion of all else—including human life!

“She has gone to her grave, Sweetman, with the blood of Yarmouth on her hands—and the hatred of those of us still living within us.” He thumped his heart with a gnarled paw.

“This is where you can help me, Harry.”

“What do you want to know about the
Topic Universe
?”

“You tell me.”

“Right.” Harry Jones steered the mug to his mouth. “The
Universe
was a four-legger, a jack-up rig about thirty-eight miles out.” Sweetman knew the off-shore business. He let Jones talk. “The jack-ups, the semisubmersibles, the drill ships, the fixed platforms each have their uses. The jack-up, you see, gives you the benefit of feet on the ground, so to speak, stability when she's on site with her legs planted in the seafloor. And, she lets you raise the legs and float her away to a new site when the first job is done. Simple enough, and very nice, if you know what you're doing.”

“The jack-up has her drawbacks, too. Those long legs, some three hundred to four hundred feet you know, can lead you into a tremendous thicket of troubles. Each of the legs bears a tremendous weight, which pushes them into the muck, down into the seafloor. When it comes time to pack up and move, if you've sunk too deep you must fight a terrible suction—fight with the risk of one or more of those spidery legs crumpling!

“Mind you, Sweetman, no rig's invulnerable. The semis have their perils, too. But the jack-up, she's in a delicate stage on the up and on the down. The companies have their experts, the marine geogra—no, geo
lo
gy blokes, the engineers paid so handsomely for their calculations. Down the hatch, Sweetman . . . calculations to keep the rigs drilling with great profit, as advertised to the investor.

“Well, Sweetman, they covered it up; the late Mrs. TOPIC and her lieutenants. A bit here, a bit there. The
Topic Universe
was cutting corners, shaving the safety edges to keep the front office happy, hap-py—two syllables, Sweetman, four letters, C-A-S-H.

“The
Universe
was thirty-eight miles out, being jacked . . . down, at the end of a job when one of the legs held, wouldn't budge. Then came the next mistake. The crew was ordered to place too great a strain. A storm was coming now, you see—too great a strain, and the leg began to bend. So they stopped, and there she sat.

“It was as if you were taking your leave of a lady, Sweetman, and were obliged to stand motionless in the bedroom with your pants half up and half down . . .”

“What direction was the jacking, Harry?”

“The jacking, aye!” Jones roared his laughter, “Half up and half down, with the husband's keys jangling in the door; the wrong position to be in. Do you know of our storms, Sweetman?”

“The worst in the world, howling winds, shallow seas, tall waves, long fetch—”

“That's it; and that's what was closing on the
Universe,
There was a great deal of consulting going on between the rig and London. The chief, you see, was reporting the storm and the recommendations of the crew that the
Universe
be cleared, men off, until the blow passed. But, the chief was a lizard, trying to play both sides and come out smelling of roses. He was agreeing, you see, with the late Mrs. Burdette when she took the phone at the other end and gave the order to stay with the rig.

“Now, the biggest concern about
Universe,
save being blown flat over, was the swirling currents churning in the storm. The concern was they would scour away the seafloor from around the sick leg, the one with the bend. This meant divers, and the chief diver, chap named Renfro, God rest his soul . . .” Harry Jones gave a moment of silence, his watery eyes blinking past Sweetman, one paw nudging the mug handle back and forth on the pub table. “Retired Navy diver, the best in TOPIC's employ, prepared to go down.”

“He was the chief diver, you see. He knew it was too dangerous, but he knew his duty, absent orders to the contrary. . . . But . . . he ordered the rest of his crew to remain topside. He'd do it alone, you see. Down he went, one frail soul, into that bloody, roiling murk of a sea to pack—picture it, Sweetman, to pack great sacks of aggregate around the footing of the bent leg, to save it from the sea.”

“Long odds, Harry.”

“No odds at all. They sent him to the diver's grave. They had him rigged like one of them Punch and Judy mari, mari—bloody puppets, with one safety line running to the surface and another to be clipped to the cage delivering the aggregate. In twenty minutes, the winds were tearing. The support ship standing off the rig was reading thirty-five, forty, forty-five, fifty-foot waves, and rising . . . some would say seventy before it was over. Then the
Universe
buckled, not enough to collapse, but a sickening lurch which sent the rig crew off in their rescue gondolas. Not the diver's mates, mind you, but the rest of the crew. They bobbed around like so many apples until the support ship could maneuver to retrieve them.

“And, Renfro. That lurch tipped the loaded cage, binding the poor bloke in his own lines, and there he dangled, Sweetman, absolutely
cut in half, held together only by the rubber suit he wore. And, that's how his mates would find him! We'll have another.”

They drank. Sweetman allowed the old man to catch his breath, then moved him on again. “The rig went down, didn't she, Harry?”

“She did, turned turtle, capsized two days later. Cocked over as she was, the strain had been too much for her. The loss of the
Universe
was a scandal! Renfro's loss was a crime! But”—he worked the mug to his lips again—“there were to be no formal charges. The inquiry, orchestrated by the late Mrs. Burdette, was unable despite its deepest searching of the evidence to find fault.
Force majeure,
Sweetman, that's what they found.”

“On the words flowed from their mouths, through their typewriters, into the presses, and onto the tele. And, a deep and lasting bitterness settled on Yarmouth.” His eyes narrowed into a challenging squint. “You don't have to take my word for it, you know. The man you'd want to be talking to would be old Collie, Colonel Colin Tully, Royal Marines, knows more about the sordid mess by far, worked with the Navy, in charge of off-shore security.” A paw waved in the direction of the North Sea. “Old Collie, back in Scotland now with the Forty-fifth Commando, a friend of Renfro's, mourned his passing.”

“Harry, let's have another. You're looking half dry.” They drank, and Harry Jones recounted the turmoil that followed Renfro's death. “Tell me about the rig chief, Harry.”

“The rig chief? A short tale—mashed by a car one black and icy night; hit and run you'd call it . . . perhaps an accident, perhaps no. Few mourners; no witnesses came forward. But, by God, that was not the last of the dying. The diver's lovely wife, Mary Renfro, was destroyed by her loss. She gassed herself the morning after the inquiry findings were published, and, Sweetman, their child . . . a pretty girl, simply disappeared!”

While Harry Jones and Sweetman were shutting down the Lord Nelson, the
Towerpoint Octagon
was slowing to ten knots, coasting along toward her Virginia landfall. Only the twin wakes of the big ship's hulls indicated motion on the flat, glassy sea.

Leslie Renfro, Head, and Tonasi were sprawled on the starboard foredeck, taking a short break from the heavy, self-imposed trans-Atlantic training schedule, absorbing the glib gab of the ship's bosun.
His hands were working line and marlinspike. He gave an occasional turn to the glossy wood handle of the ship's boat hook he was dressing with coach whipping, a braid of flat sennit, to be finished at either end with Turk's head ropework. Oats Tooms appeared at the owner's deck railing with Tina and her coach, growled down an oblique greeting to his Maltese colleagues. “Better put that shutterbox to use, Tina, document the blood, sweat, and tears the team is putting into Chesapeake Divequest International: Filippo, research; Head, knowledge; and Princess Leslie, productivity, pardon the expression . . . three lizards baking in the sun.”

Tina trained her camera along the foredeck, bringing the viewfinder to rest on Tonasi. A turn of the telephoto lens brought up the rugged young face sharply. The brown eyes opened, as close to her as in the stateroom. The shutter clicked, clicked again. The eyes closed . . .