Read Ocean Prize (1972) Online

Authors: James Pattinson

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Ocean Prize (1972) (5 page)

BOOK: Ocean Prize (1972)
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He looked forward with gloomy foreboding to the time when the ship would arrive at Quebec, for that was where he feared the police would come on board and take him. And there was no way of escaping them; in the
Hopeful
Enterprise
he was as much a prisoner as he would have been in gaol. He was helpless, unable to do anything but wait for them to come and get him.

 

It was morning when they reached Quebec. The carpenter, a heavy-limbed, black-bearded man named Orwell, stood by the steam windlass on the forecastle and let the anchor go with a great rattling of chain through the hawsepipe. The ship swung with the current and finished with her stern pointing downstream. Wilson, under the bosun’s direction, lowered a Jacob’s-ladder over the side and saw the pilot-boat heading out from the shore. There was nothing in that to cause him any disquiet; it was normal procedure to change pilots at Quebec. But a moment later he saw the police launch and his heart began to hammer.

The launch was coming straight for the
Hopeful
Enterprise
and there was no doubt at all in Wilson’s mind that it was coming for him. He could see the police uniforms and he had an impulse to rush to the other side of the ship, jump overboard and swim for the opposite shore. But what good would that do? They would catch him before he could get half-way. There was nothing he could do, nothing.

“Oh, God!” he muttered. “Oh, God help me!”

He gripped the top of the bulwark and pressed his forehead to the cold iron, trembling.

A hand fell on his shoulder. He looked up and saw the bosun staring at him in no very friendly fashion.

“What’s up with you now? Taking forty bloody winks?”

“I feel sick.”

“Sick! So am I. Sick of useless tools like you.”

The pilot-boat had reached the ship. The new pilot began to climb the Jacob’s-ladder. Wilson saw that the police launch was less than fifty yards away. Suppose he were to run away and hide. But where? In the bilges? In one of the lifeboats? In the chain locker? All equally futile. They would find him wherever he was. It was inevitable.

Rankin snarled an order and Wilson moved as if in a trance. He could hear the stammer of the engine of the police launch and it seemed to be beating a tattoo in his brain. It came closer, louder, then, unbelievably, began to decrease. The launch slipped past the stern of the
Hopeful
Enterprise
and moved away.

Wilson felt weak with relief; there was sweat on his forehead and his hands were shaking. They had not been coming for him after all. So perhaps the body had not yet been discovered. He clutched gladly at this small reprieve and the receding sound of the launch was like sweet music in his ears.

Not so sweet was the bosun’s impatient voice snarling at him. “You’re dreaming again. Get moving.”

Wilson got moving.

T
he
Hopeful
Enterprise
hauled up her anchor and left Quebec astern. The St. Lawrence widened like a funnel with the water pouring through it in the wrong direction, and they steamed along the northern curve of the shore between Anticosti Island and the mainland, through the narrow Belle Isle Strait and out into the broad Atlantic.

And Madden’s engines had not given a single moment’s cause for alarm—except to Madden himself, who looked upon even the smoothness of their working as an evil omen, a sinister design on the part of that ill-favoured machinery to lull him into a false sense of security before springing the trap.

“It’s not going to last,” he confided to Mr. Loder. “It’s all going a sight too easily. But we’re not home yet, not by a long chalk. There’ll be a day of reckoning.”

The mate did not bother to disagree. Madden’s fussing provided him with a good deal of malicious amusement, and he was not above throwing in a word or two to fan the chief engineer’s resentment at Barling’s failure to pay sufficient attention to the needs of the engine-room.

“Perhaps,” Loder said, “there’s a day of reckoning coming for George Barling too. And not so very far away at that.”

Madden’s gloomy eyes stared at Loder and his eyebrows went up like animated question-marks. “And what might you be meaning by that?”

Loder dropped his voice to a conspiratorial level. “I fancy there’s a crash coming for the Barling and Calthorp line.”

Madden looked even gloomier. “You’ve heard something?”

“No, I haven’t heard anything. I’m just using my own powers of observation and deduction. It’s sticking out a mile. What do B. and C. add up to when all’s said and done? One rusty old ship with worn-out engines.”

“They may have other assets.”

“Do you believe that?” Loder gripped Madden’s lapel and pulled him closer; so close that he could see in detail all the unsightly blotches that littered the surface of Loder’s face like so many bits of rubbish littering a public park after a Bank Holiday. “Do you think if they had there’d be all this penny-pinching over ship’s stores? Dammit, they don’t buy enough paint to keep an auxiliary ketch in decent trim.”

“So you really think they’re going under?”

“I look at the signs, and if you want my opinion they all point that way.” He drew Madden even closer, so that their noses almost touched. “It seems to me, Chief, that you and I are likely to be looking for new berths before we’re very much older.”

Madden put a hand on Loder’s chest and pushed him away. The mate was a little too close to be pleasant; his breath was offensive and what he was saying had a depressing effect on the chief engineer. Madden had no desire to go looking for a new appointment; in his heart of hearts he was not at all certain that he could get one, not at his age.
He had hoped to serve out his time with Barling and Calthorp, whatever the shortcomings of that company might be regarding engine overhauls. But if Loder’s deductions were correct it looked as though Barling himself might soon be on the beach, and that was a dismal outlook indeed.

“You could be wrong,” he said, but without conviction.

“I could be, but I don’t think I am. Everything points that way, everything. If you’ve been counting on new boilers, Chief, or anything in that line, my advice to you is to forget it.”

“Barling promised—” Madden began.

“Yes?” Loder cocked his head on one side. “What did he promise?”

“He said this was the last trip he’d be taking in this ship with the engines like they are. He—” Madden stopped again, aghast at the sudden realisation of the double meaning those words could have had.

Loder was quick to seize on this revelation. “He said that, did he?”

“Something of the kind.”

“Well now, that’s interesting; that’s very interesting indeed. It bears out just what I’ve been saying.”

“I don’t see—”

Loder gave his twisted smile. “Oh, but I think you do, Chief. I think you see very well. Don’t you?”

Madden turned away. He did see, and he did not wish to. It was too bleak a prospect.

“Last voyage for the
Hopeful
Enterprise,
” Loder said softly. “Make the most of it.”

 

At about the same time as the
Hopeful
Enterprise
was leaving Montreal a much newer ship was setting out from Philadelphia with a cargo of electrical and other machinery
destined for Reykjavik in Iceland. The s.s.
India
Star
was a vessel of 8,700 tons owned by a Greek millionaire, registered in Monrovia, flying the Liberian flag, manned by an Asiatic crew and commanded by a Dutch captain named van Donck.

The fact that the
India
Star,
by reason of her higher cruising speed and the course on which she was steaming, would, if all went according to plan for both ships, pass within a hundred miles or less of the
Hopeful
Enterprise
somewhere between the thirtieth and fortieth parallels of longitude, was something of which neither Captain Barling nor Captain van Donck was aware. Not that the knowledge, even had they possessed it, would have been likely to excite either of them to any noticeable extent, since it was in the natural order of things that ships should pass other ships even in mid-ocean at no great distance. Yet to Barling at least the fact was to be of the utmost interest, and the
India
Star,
of which he had scarcely even heard, was destined to float into his life and occupy a place of supreme importance in his plans.

But all that was yet several days ahead, and as he stood on the bridge of his ship gazing at the grey wastes of the North Atlantic his thoughts were only of the uncertain future, of his daughter Ann and what was to happen to her when Barling and Calthorp went into liquidation and he was thrown up on the beach with nothing but a few hundred pounds to call his own. His thoughts were sombre indeed, the thoughts of a man who sees that all his labours, all his schemes, all his expectations have ended in one thing—failure. And he was at the age when the realisation of failure is perhaps hardest to bear. A younger man could have started again with fresh hope; an older man might have accepted the situation with resignation; he could do neither.

As the
Hopeful
Enterprise
headed eastward the weather was good, the winds moderate and the sea unusually calm for the time of year. The much maligned engines continued to give no trouble, despite Madden’s forebodings, and the ship steamed on at a steady speed of ten knots, while the patent log, streaming from the taffrail, reeled off the long sea miles of this last ocean voyage of the thirty-year-old vessel so that they might be recorded faithfully to the end.

Watches came and went, the chronometer was adjusted to the changing longitude, and all the set routine of a ship at sea was carried out from day to day. Now and then memories of an earlier voyage drifted into Barling’s mind, and looking down from the bridge he remembered the Bofors gun in the bows and the paravanes lying under the bulwarks; he remembered the degaussing cables and the Lewis guns and the black-out curtains. There had been company in those days, a small city of ships keeping together for mutual protection, the destroyers and corvettes out on the perimeter and maybe an armed merchant cruiser in the centre; sometimes a Sunderland or a Catalina circling round if you were near enough to base; zigzagging, the continual flutter of signal flags and pennants, the winking of Aldis lamps, the rumble of depth-charges and the sudden explosion in the night bringing the heart into the mouth.

Dangerous times; the threat of death constantly there; and yet he had loved it. He had been young then; he had had youth and had taken it all in his stride. Now he was older; the ship was older; the guns had gone and the convoys had dispersed. Above all, youth had gone. It would never be the same again.

 

It was two days after they had lost sight of land when
Jonah Madden came to Barling’s cabin. Madden had come ostensibly to report that all was well so far in his department. Barling had not asked for a report and there was no reason why Madden should have made one at that particular time; but the real purpose of the chief engineer’s visit was a rather different one: he wanted information. Ever since his talk with Loder the question had been nagging him: were Barling and Calthorp going down the drain? He could not sleep for worrying about it; it plagued his mind; it even made him sick in the stomach. He could not remain in suspense any longer; he had to know for certain, one way or the other. That was why he had come to see Barling.

Yet, now that he was there, he still found difficulty in getting to the point. It was not the kind of question you asked a man straight out. Madden lingered, remarked on the strangely clement weather, other inconsequential matters, wearing out Barling’s patience.

“What’s on your mind, Chief?”

“On my mind?” Madden was startled, blissfully unaware that he had been revealing any uneasiness. “What makes you think there’s anything on my mind?”

“There’s always something on your mind,” Barling said. “It’s usually engines. But you’ve just told me there’s no trouble there, so it must be something else.”

Madden rubbed his nose, cleared his throat and stared hard at a framed photograph of the
Hopeful
Enterprise
screwed to the bulkhead, a photograph he had seen many times before and could have little interest in now. “It’s a bit delicate.”

“What is? Your health?”

“No,” Madden said, taking the question with perfect seriousness. “I’m in good shape physically.”

Barling would have considered that highly questionable,
but he did not say so. He said: “I’m glad to hear it. So it it’s not your health that’s delicate, what is?”

Madden cleared his throat again and turned his melancholy eyes on Barling. “The question I want to ask you.”

“Oh, yes. What question?”

Madden coughed. “There’s a rumour.”

Barling’s chin jerked up. So it was out. He did not need to be told what rumour, but he asked just the same.

“Well,” Madden said, “there’s talk that you may be—er—retiring.”

He was putting it as tactfully as he could.

Barling’s eyes probed his, and Barling had the kind of eyes that seemed to be capable of digging very deeply; hard, steely, disconcerting when you were forced to look into them, as Madden was at that moment.

“No more than that?” Barling asked.

Madden wriggled his shoulders, distinctly uncomfortable. “There’s a bit more. The way I heard it—and I’m not saying I believe it—but the way I heard it is that the Company is—er—going out of business.”

“Why don’t you say what you really mean?” Barling’s voice had become as hard and steely as his eyes. “Why don’t you say you think Barling and Calthorp are on the rocks? That they’re going bust.”

“I don’t think that.”

“Don’t you? Are you quite sure you don’t?”

Madden did not know where to look. He tried to avoid Barling’s eyes. “Of course I’m sure.”

“Well, that’s nice to know.” Barling’s tone was faintly sarcastic. “As the sole representative of the Company present, I thank you for your vote of confidence.”

Madden flushed. “You don’t have to take it like that.”

Barling felt that perhaps he had been a little rough with
the chief engineer. It did not require any very deep insight to see why Madden was worried; he was no more eager to go looking for a new job than Barling himself was. He was seeking reassurance, almost begging for it. And that, unfortunately, was just what Barling could not give.

“I suppose you’ve been talking to Adam Loder?”

“I did have a word or two with him.”

It was as Barling would have guessed: Loder had sniffed out something or had deduced it from observation. And then he had passed on his conclusions to poor old Madden, knowing that the merest hint of anything of that kind would be enough to worry the chief engineer sick. It was like Loder. He would have to get rid of that man, engage a new chief mate.

But that was a stupid idea; after this trip he would not be needing a mate or any other officers; he would not be engaging anyone. And Loder would be laughing up his sleeve, not caring a damn about the loss of his own position if it meant the downfall of his superior. That would please him; it was the kind of mean-minded character he was.

“So he told you B. and C. were finished?”

“No, no; he didn’t say that, not exactly.” Madden looked alarmed. “You mustn’t think—”

“I’ll decide what I may or may not think,” Barling said curtly. “And let me tell you this: I don’t confide the Company’s business to you, to Mr. Loder or to anyone else. Is that clear?”

Madden looked hurt; he was like a whipped dog, a dog unjustly whipped. Barling felt a twinge of conscience; Madden had reason to be concerned; after all, his future was at stake too. But it would not have helped to tell him the truth; this way at least he could hope, even if the hope must be short-lived.

“Is there anything else you wished to speak to me about, Chief?”

“No,” Madden said. “Nothing else.”

He walked to the door and left the cabin, shoulders hunched. One thing was certain: his mind was very far from having been put at ease.

 

Charlie Wilson’s mind was not at ease either. He had watched with a feeling of relief the land fading astern; but even the knowledge that he was away from Canada, more than a thousand miles from the scene of his crime, could not banish the fear that held him in its grip. The day of reckoning had not been eliminated; it had simply been postponed.

He wondered whether there had been any signal over the radio concerning the affair, a warning perhaps that Able Seaman Wilson was wanted in Montreal on a murder charge and was to be watched. They would not tell him, of course; it might be kept a secret between the radio officer and Captain Barling, not even shared with the other officers.

Wilson made a point of intercepting the radio officer whenever the opportunity occurred, trying to read in his face any hint that he knew something. Mr. Scotton was a young, slightly-built man with very fair hair and a silky beard that looked sadly under-nourished. He had a habit of stroking the beard with his left hand, perhaps in the belief that a course of massage might encourage growth, but the results were disappointing. Mr. Loder had been heard to remark that Sparks’s beard was beyond hope and that the best thing to do would be to shave it off and give it a decent burial at sea, because it would never amount to anything. But Scotton was a persevering young man and refused to give up.

BOOK: Ocean Prize (1972)
11.53Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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