North Star (12 page)

Gertrude came at me as I was zipping up my oilskin jacket. You are not going to bring them ashore?’ Her voice was high and strident, her eyes blazing. ‘You can’t. I forbid it.’

‘Just leave it to me,’ I told her. ‘It’s my responsibility.’ I reached for my cap and put it on. Then I went across to Sandford. ‘You’ve been to a lot of trouble over this – why?’

‘You got that ship by a trick.’

‘It’s not the ship you’re after now,’ I said. ‘It’s the crew. You want your own men on board. Why?’

He hesitated, his eyes gone dead and I knew there was something else, something he hadn’t told me. ‘It should be a Shetland crew,’ he murmured. ‘Shetlanders have a right to exploit their own oil.’ But he couldn’t look me in the face, his eyes shifting. ‘I offered to help, that’s all. Crews aren’t easy to get.’

‘But you have one willing and ready to take over. Your own skipper, too?’ There was something here I didn’t understand. But I couldn’t take hold of him and shake the truth out of him, not with the constable standing there. I glanced at Gertrude. Her long dress looked suddenly incongruous, the candles behind her guttering in the draught from the open door. ‘I’ll tell them,’ I said, and I went out, walking quickly down to the landing beach with the aid of my torch. It was very dark now, a soft rain falling and only the riding light of the trawler showing blurred in the night. The constable came with me and helped me launch the Zodiac.

‘How long before we get the permits?’ I asked him.

‘Normally it’s a matter of a few days. But in this case –’ He straightened up, facing me in the darkness. ‘It’s politics, you see, sir.’

‘You mean Sandford is right and the applications will be refused.’

‘It’s only what I hear.’

‘And who instructed your sergeant to send you down at this time of the evening?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘But it was Sandford who was pressing the matter.’

‘Several councillors, too.’

I was in the boat then. Fortunately he didn’t insist on coming with me. He pushed me off clear of the boulders and then I was out from the land, rowing towards the ship. Halfway there I stopped and lit my pipe, the rain drifting in the flare of the match. The sound of an accordion and men’s voices singing came to me across the water. I sat there for a moment thinking about what I was going to do, about Shetland politics and how I would stand in law. But Block 206 was in international waters. Out there I was my own master, and if the permits were refused, then I could still send the men ashore when Gertrude had found replacements. I started rowing again, the rain coming in flurries, hissing on the bowl of my pipe.

It was Duncan who answered my hail as I came alongside. He helped me climb aboard and I told him to get the engines started. ‘We’ll be leaving as soon as we’ve fetched our anchor.’

He didn’t argue, just nodded and said, ‘Aye. But ye’d better break it gently to the lads. They’ve got a bellyfull of beer and they’ll no’ think much of the idea.’

They were crammed into the mess room aft, their faces sweating in the naked light, the table littered with beer cans and young Per swaying to the tune he was squeezing out of the box. The song died as I looked at Johan sitting by the galley hatch. ‘You’ve got out of here at night before, haven’t you?’ I asked him.

‘You want to leave now?’

‘If we don’t go now, we don’t go at all.’ And I told him what had happened.

He finished the can of beer he was drinking and got slowly to his feet. ‘Ja. We can try.’ He pushed his hand up over his face, rubbing at his eyes and swaying slightly. ‘What is the weather?’

‘Dark,’ I said. ‘And raining.’

‘And the wind?’

‘Still from the south-west.’

‘Gud. Then we know when we clear Houss Ness.’ The thrum of the diesels started and he turned. ‘Lars. Henrik.’ He said something to them in Norwegian, then went down the alleyway, pushed open the door to the deck and went out into the night, not bothering about oilskins. Henrik followed him and Lars came up to the bridge with me. I didn’t switch the deck lights on. We needed night vision. It was very dark, so dark I could barely see them working on the foredeck, the winch clattering and the chain beginning to come in.

A light shone out from the shore. Gertrude had drawn the curtains back, and when the winch had stopped and Johan had joined me in the bridge, he got us out past the end of The Taing on compass bearings taken on the faint glimmer of that light. We lost it as soon as we were out into Clift Sound, a slight swell under us and everything black. We headed south on a compass course of 175° with myself at the radar and Johan watching the glimmer of the waves breaking against the cliffs. I think he distrusted electronics, for he conned the ship by eye, and when we began to feel the full weight of the sea, he ordered a change of course to the west.

He wasn’t a navigator. He couldn’t handle a sextant. He could barely plot a course on the chart. But he came from Luro and had learned how to pilot a boat fishing the Inner Lead up towards the Lofotens. We passed so close to Houss Ness that we could hear the roar of the waves breaking against the Stacks. He came in from the starboard gangway then. ‘Okay. We are clear now on due west. In one mile Groot Ness is to starboard.
After that there is nothing between you and the bottom of Greenland.’

Lars was already steering 270°. I went into the chart recess and switched on the light. Foula was the obvious choice. ‘What’s the holding like in Ham Voe?’

‘In this wind, gud.’ He leaned over the chart beside me, his jersey sodden. ‘Foula is okay. Nobody bother us there.’

He went below then and I switched on the bridge radio. It was 23.36 and I got the tail-end of the late news, something about an oil slick off the Northumberland coast and the local MP to table a motion in the House about pollution and firmer Government control of oil rigs.
In Hull a meeting of shipyard workers to consider the latest offer was disrupted by militants
.
With fish being imported to augment supplies and prices soaring the Government is being pressed to intervene in the dispute
… I switched on one of the heaters and removed my oilskins, waiting for the inshore forecast. The news seemed remote, another world, as I listened to the sounds of the ship, the slam of the bows as she fell off the tops of the waves. All your life you work for something you believe in, then three weeks of hard, concentrated effort, and it means nothing. I crossed to the radar set, but nothing showed and I stood there, staring out at the black night with the waves coming at us as smudges of grey in the darkness, the radio drowning the plunging impact of the bows. Three months, and what at the end of it? I was thinking of Gertrude, wondering what our relationship would have been now if Sandford hadn’t turned up. A partnership, she had said, but the only experience I had had of partnership with a woman had disintegrated into ideological arguments and recriminations.

I switched the Decca to maximum range and as the radius lines changed the outline of Foula appeared little more than 22 miles ahead. Speed 7 knots. In three hours’ time …
Gale warnings Hebrides
,
Rockall and Malin: westerly gale Force 8 may be expected in the next 2 hours
… We would have to anchor close in to be under the lee and Ham was sure to have
a police station. Why was it that everything I did seemed to lead inevitably to a clash with authority? And Sandford – there was something about him, something familiar that I didn’t understand. I tried to see behind the bright aggressive eyes, the truculence of his manner, but instead I found my mind switching to the entry in that exercise book.
An agent
,
but not one of ours.
And he had been on this ship, in the cabin for’ard of the galley.
A matter for Intelligence.
Somewhere, in some record office, there would be an Intelligence report. I tried to imagine what it said, but I couldn’t think clearly. I was tired, my stomach queasy. It was always like this at the start of a voyage. Just nausea. I was never sick. I leaned on the chart shelf, pushing back my cap and wiping the sweat from my forehead.

Two hours later, the large comforting bulk of Johan appeared at my side. He had been into Ham Voe before, so I left it to him, and at 03.07 we let go our anchor about a cable off the end of the pier. It was still and very peaceful in the lee of the towering mass of Hamnafjeld and I went to my bunk, thinking I was clear of trouble tucked away here under Foula.

We lay there all Saturday and nobody bothered us until a fishing boat came in late that afternoon. She had the letters LK and her number painted white on her bows, and instead of making for the pier, she headed straight for us, the crew on deck putting fenders out. I watched her come alongside, and as Henrik and Lars took her warps, I called down to the skipper to ask him where he came from, what he wanted.

‘From Scalloway,’ he said, leaning his head out of the wooden wheelhouse. ‘You’re Randall, are you? I’ve brought a Mr Stevens to see you.’ He said something over his shoulder and a man came out of the door at the back of the wheelhouse, a short man with thinning hair dressed in a dark suit. He looked up at me and I saw the steel-trap mouth, the hard unfriendly eyes, the slight cast of the eye. He didn’t ask permission to come on board, but went straight to the side and hauled himself
up on to our deck. A moment later he was on the bridge facing me. Johan was there, and Henrik, too. We had been playing cribbage. ‘These two of your Norwegians?’ The same quiet voice, hard and flat, and the odd sidelong look of the left eye, ‘You should have put them ashore.’

‘What’s it got to do with you?’ My hands were clenched, my voice strained. ‘How did you know where to find me?’ I was remembering the cold-blooded way he had threatened me, wondering whether he thought I’d made a statement to the police as he stood there facing me, saying nothing. ‘What made you follow me out here?’

‘We’ll talk about that in your cabin.’ He turned abruptly and started down the companionway, then realized it was at the back of the bridge.

‘I don’t want you on board.’ But he had already disappeared inside, and the fishing boat had recovered her warps and was going astern. I watched her sheer away from our side and head for the pier, the name
Island Girl
on her stern, then I followed him to my cabin. He was sitting on my bunk with a packet of cigarettes in his hand. He didn’t offer me one this time. ‘Shut the door.’ He waved me to the single upright chair. ‘I take it you know something about the background of this drilling operation. Have you met Villiers?’

‘No.’

‘But you’ve heard of him – you know the way he operates, the sort of man he is?’

‘I know he runs a very successful finance company.’

‘You admire success?’ It wasn’t a question, more a sneer, the word success made to sound obscene. ‘He makes money – at the expense of others, of course. And ultimately it’s the workers who suffer.’

‘You don’t need to give me the propaganda line.’

‘No?’ He was watching me as he took a cigarette out of the packet and lit it. ‘Just thought I’d remind you, that’s all. It’s some time since you were a shipyard worker. You were one of the leaders then. A shop floor convener with a gift for
turning on the heat when it was needed.’ He paused, drawing on his cigarette. Then he said, ‘Before that you worked as a journalist in the City. You didn’t like it, did you?’

‘There are two sides to everything,’ I said, wondering where this was leading.

He smiled. ‘Seeing things two ways can be confusing.’

‘You didn’t come out here in a fishing boat to tell me that.’

‘No. But you’ve been confused for some time, and that’s a pity. You’re in a very unique position at the moment. Unique from our point of view.’ He was staring at me as though trying to make up his mind, and I wasn’t certain which of his eyes was focused on my face. ‘But then if you weren’t confused, you wouldn’t be here, would you?’ He said it reflectively, the sound of the radio on the bridge almost drowning his words. ‘You wouldn’t have come to Shetland, trying to find out about your father, and landed yourself with this trawler.’

So it was the trawler that had brought him here. ‘What’s the trawler got to do with it?’

But he ignored my question. ‘Villiers now,’ he murmured. ‘Would you say Villiers is typical of the City?’

‘One aspect of it, yes. But not the City as a whole. That’s pretty mundane.’

‘Of course. Banks and insurance and unit trusts.’ He smiled quietly to himself. ‘But that’s not how the public sees it. All they read about is the property developers, the land speculators, the ones that hit the headlines getting rich too quick, while workers are declared redundant or fight management and government for increased wages that never catch up with inflation. Look at Villiers, with his finance companies and his villa in Bermuda, as well as his Hampshire estate, two aircraft and a flat in Belgravia. That’s the capitalist image the public understands. Girls, parties, villas abroad – and who pays? They do in the end.’ He leaned suddenly forward. ‘That’s why we’re interested in Villiers. The face of capitalism at its ugliest.’

He was very different from the militants I had met – no
warmth, and talking in clichés. ‘Villiers is happily married with two kids,’ I said wearily. ‘And he works –’

‘I thought you said you’d never met him?’ He was still leaning forward, his eyes gone hard.

‘I haven’t. But I read the newspapers.’

‘I see.’ He stared at his cigarette, his mouth a thin line. ‘You
are
confused, aren’t you?’ He gave a little shrug. ‘Well, it can’t be helped. Villiers is very suitable to our purpose. And so are you. It doesn’t really matter that you think him so commendable.’

‘I didn’t say that. You’re twisting my words.’

A silence then, a long, uncomfortable silence. Finally he said, speaking slowly, ‘It may help you to understand the importance we attach to this if I fill you in on the background. You know, of course, that we can call on the services of quite a few journalists, wittingly or unwittingly. Recently we have had a very good man looking into the Villiers take-over technique and the companies he has grabbed. It’s the latest that concerns you, an offer by Villiers Finance and Industrial, known as VFI, for the whole of the capital of Neven-Clyde Shipping. The offer was very astutely timed – last January, when Neven-Clyde had just reported heavy losses on a harbour construction contract in Brazil.’