The Abigail Affair (5 page)

He became aware that Julia was beside him. “Sorry about that,” she said. “You’ll get used to it—it’s all for show. He’s not even as drunk as he makes out.”

“He sacked me,” Toby said. “Thank God.”

“No, he would have frogmarched you down the gangway and off the ship if he had fired you. You’ve actually done well, believe it or not.”

Toby pondered this. “Not apparent so far.”

“Wrong again. I was watching from out here. He likes you. I think you remind him of someone. His own son, maybe.”

“Is the Boss like this all the time?”

“Pretty much. Think of the money and keep out of the firing line.”

“Difficult when you’re standing behind a bar and get assaulted.” He took a chance and said, “ Do you have a cigarette by any chance? I’m gagging for one.”

Julia stole a glance over her shoulder. Toby followed her gaze. Through the tinted windows, he could see Krigov and Walther back at the dining table, heads bent over, discussing something earnestly. The girls had drifted off to a coffee table some distance away and were plainly snorting coke. “OK, but watch where you smoke. Don’t get caught on deck.” She produced a cigarette and lighter from inside her waistcoat. Toby leaned forward. She clicked the lighter and lit it for him.

He inhaled gratefully. “Nice to find a fellow smoker,” he said. “And you’ve been great this evening. Boy, I’ll work hard for you.” She had already loosened up from earlier. He dragged on the cigarette again. “Is it true about the bosun being laid out and needing to be hospitalised?”

Julia looked at him sharply. “You heard about that already? From Scotty? Yes, it’s true. But the man was flagrantly disobeying orders and Krigov only punched him once. He was unlucky to get hurt and he’s doing fine now.”

“That’s no excuse for the owner to seriously injure him.” Now that she had confirmed this story, Toby was certain he had to get off the ship. A pity, because Julia was an attractive challenge, with the added allure of being an older woman. But there were women everywhere. He didn’t need to risk his neck for this one. “How long have you been with the Boss?” Toby asked.

“Nine months. That makes me one of the longer-serving crew.”

“Where do you hail from? You’re not British, are you?”

Julia glanced over her shoulder to check that the owner and his party were still amusing themselves. She narrowed her eyes and drew on her cigarette. “Questions, questions. Don’t get familiar with me just because I gave you a cigarette. Let’s just say I’m an international citizen. I’m off to catch some sleep,” she said. “You’re on watch at 3am. Did you get briefed yet?”

Toby almost choked on a lungful of smoke. “On at 3am? You mean I can’t go to bed? I’ve been up for days.”

“You can get a nap for …” she consulted her wristwatch “One hour, thirty minutes. Set your alarm. Scotty will call you anyway, but you need to be ready in deckhand gear.”

“What do I have to do?”

“Just watch the monitors on the bridge, make sure no one starts lurking around on the dock or approaches by water. People are always swimming around from the fishing village to this marina, then they try and get aboard a yacht and steal whatever. You’re there to stop them. And you’ll do a tour of this deck every twenty minutes, look over the side and all around, because there are blind spots the cameras don’t cover. Scotty will give you a briefing at the change of watch. Whatever you do, don’t drop that on the deck. Let me show you.”

“Hey, I haven’t finished it!” Toby protested. But she reached out and took the burning cigarette from his fingers. She held it, together with her own, at arm’s length over the side of the yacht and dropped them. “Never put them out on the deck or you’ll be kebabed. Throw them right out. If you’re not careful, they can blow in on a lower deck. Then you spend half an hour trying to find them and an hour sandpapering the scorch mark off the teak in the middle of the night.” She smiled—the first time he had seen her do so. He smiled back.

“OK, I’m out of here,” Toby said. “Sleep well.”

The night stint was his chance, Toby realised. If he was on watch, no one would be watching
him,
and he could split. The only problem was his passport. He wouldn’t get far without it. The Immigration people knew he had enlisted on the
Amelia
. Would they arrest him for being absent without leave, or for mutiny even? Surely not, on a pleasure yacht in harbour. Would they march him straight back here? Then he’d be at the mercy of the owner.

No, he had to get his passport.

He’d find a way.

Chapter 3

Pleased with his resolve, Toby retreated to his cabin. He pulled off his jacket, tie, shirt and trousers, and kicked off his shoes. He changed immediately into his deckhand shorts, lay down on the narrow bunk, and was asleep in an instant.

He was awakened what seemed like minutes later by hammering on his cabin door. “Come on, Robinson!” came Scott’s sharp South African twang from outside. He pronounced the name “Ribb-in-son.” “You’re late on watch. And on your first duty turn.”

Toby fumbled for the light and sat up. He felt groggy and disoriented. “Coming!” he shouted. He pulled on his white uniform deckhand’s polo shirt. Barely a minute later, he was on the bridge with Scott.

The officer gave him a garbled lightning tour of the bridge and explained that one person could control and navigate the vessel from the helmsman’s chair. He rattled off instructions about monitors and demonstrated how you controlled the cameras with a little joystick. He told Toby the code for the keypad that guarded access to the bridge. Toby wrote it on his wrist with a ball-point pen he found, nodded enthusiastically, and suppressed his yawns. He thought of an intelligent question relevant to him and his plan. “Is the lift locked?”

“Elevator is the word. Yes, here is the control,” Scott said. “It’s locked with a code. No one can get in. Or out,” he added pointedly.

Toby tried to sound nonchalant. “There must be a stairway down too? In case of emergency?”

“Of course. That’s locked too. In the event of emergency, you set off this alarm on the console or by any exit. That sounds a general wakeup call to the whole ship and, of course, opens everything so people can get in and out. So don’t have an emergency. You’d be amazed at the stunts the local chancers play. They will call on the VHF saying they’ve seen a fire somewhere on the ship, trying to get you to sound the alarm so they can slip aboard in the confusion. Don’t be fooled. Anything at all suspicious, anything, abso-bloody-lutely anything, call me on this phone.”

“Right you are, sir. One other thing,” Toby said. “I think they made a mistake at the airport with my passport. No one stamped it. Could I just have it to check, because I don’t want to get in trouble with the authorities.”

Scott took a paper handkerchief from his jacket pocket. Toby noticed beads of sweat on the man’s forehead, even though the bridge was air-conditioned down to a very cool temperature.

“What, now?” He unfolded the tissue and dabbed his brow.

“It’s been bothering me all night. I don’t want to hold things up when we leave harbour.”

“Commendable. Now if I were suspicious, I would say you were planning to jump ship.”

“No sir, not at all, sir. Absolutely not. You couldn’t be wronger. Sir.”

“Then why do you want your passport now, at three in the morning?”

“Just like I said, sir.” Toby cast his eyes down. His clumsy attempt had failed, as he knew it must. All he had achieved was alerting the first officer.

“We’re leaving the dock at 7am, in four hours’ time. I’ll go ashore at 6am and round up the Customs and Immigration chap. You can come with me. If there’s any problem with your passport, you can explain yourself in person. All right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now I’m off to get some shut-eye. Remember—anything untoward, you call me. And don’t touch anything except what I’ve shown you.”

“Yes, sir.”

Scott turned and left the bridge, leaving Toby all alone.

He looked around. The lights were low, presumably so you could see the instruments and monitors better. From all sides, little LEDs flashed on and off. There was a large flat monitor displaying a colour map—no,
chart
—of the harbour. It was incredibly detailed, showing all sort of lights, buoys and even the jetties. There were little numbers everywhere. What were they? Oh yes—the depth of the water. A black ship graphic sat at the centre of the screen, marking their position at the end of the main pier nearest the harbour mouth. There were lots of buttons underneath the display. One read “AIS Overlay.”

Toby pushed it warily.

A number of other little ship graphics now appeared. Next to each was a box with the vessel’s name, type, cargo, destination and other information. He pressed “Zoom Out” until St Helen’s shrank to a quarter of its original size. Now he could see the ships at sea. There was the
Queen Mary II
, way out.

Cool.

He nosed around more. A radar monitor bathed his face in green light as he bent over to look at it. “The aliens have landed,” he intoned under his breath.

The helmsman’s seat had a wheel, but to Toby’s mind it was disappointingly small, more like a car steering wheel, not a proper great big carved wooden wheel that you could spin round.

On a panel next to the wheel, he noticed a set of four little joysticks like game controllers. These were labelled
Bow Port—Bow Starboard—Aft Port—Aft Starboard.
Toby had no idea what they did.

He sat in the helmsman’s seat and grasped the wheel. Which was the accelerator? Maybe the joysticks were throttles. He fancied himself as Cap’n Toby. He put his finger on the joystick labelled
Aft Port
. “Engaging Space Warp Drive,” he droned in his robot voice and tweaked the control to one side in what he thought was a cool, casual gesture.

A distant whining noise was followed by what sounded like churning water. Then suddenly the big yacht lurched to one side, as if a large wave had struck her.

Shit!
Toby snatched his hand off the joystick. The noises ceased. His heart thumped. What a silly tosser he was! He had activated some sort of thruster. Surely Scott would have heard or felt that.

He held his breath, waiting for the clang of doors, the pounding of running footsteps and a tirade from Scott.

A minute passed.

Nothing.

Looked like the man was asleep.

A minute more, and still all was quiet.

Toby sighed with relief. No more tampering. He got up and resumed his inspection of the bridge.

His eye ran over radios with handsets, telephones like in an office, and banks of instruments more suggestive of an airliner than a boat. It was almost perfectly quiet—even the air-conditioning was barely audible.

He opened the side bridge door and stepped out on to the deck. The air was humid, compared to inside. Now he could hear some sounds. From the direction of the shore, he made out the thump of a bass speaker from a night club.

He couldn’t hack this, he already knew. But what would his father say when he turned up at home again? He wouldn’t be impressed—and Toby would be broke again, and without a mobile phone. He’d have to work weeks at the Goose to afford anything decent. Perhaps his sister, Kate, would have an old phone she would lend him. She changed her phone almost as often as she changed her underwear.

But it wasn’t going to be easy doing a bunk. There was the passport problem.

Toby’s ears hummed with tiredness and jet lag. He went inside, shut himself in, sat in front of the security station and scanned the bank of nine flat-screen monitors. He pressed the buttons, as Scott had shown him, to change the cameras displayed. He panned and tilted a couple experimentally. There was nothing to see except dimly lit corridors. On Monitor 7 he could see the gangway on the quayside where he had hesitated before stepping on board. It seemed like a lifetime ago already. His eyes drooped and he felt his head loll forward. Must keep awake on watch. He opened his eyes as wide as he could and pulled his bottom eyelids down with his fingers.

Then he heard something. He snapped his head around and there was the Russian girl Irina, the one who had taunted and slapped him, standing outside the glazed bridge entry door. She was in her nightwear—a silky turquoise wrap with decorations of Chinese dragons.

He felt his mouth drop open. She beckoned to him.

He got up and went to the door. Should he let her in? The bridge was out of bounds to guests and the door was secured by the coded keypad.

“Let me in,” the girl hissed through the door.

“I can’t. Go to bed, madam,” Toby said urgently.

“Please help me,” said the girl in a low voice. Toby hesitated. “Quickly, man. Life and death.”

“No, I mustn’t.”

“Do it! I order you!”

Reluctantly, he reached up and pressed the release. The door slid silently open. The girl had her hands behind her back in a submissive attitude.

“What’s up, madam? You’re not supposed to be here,” Toby said.

“Let me off the ship, Hugh Grant. I’m sorry I hit you. I like you much.”

“Let you off? I can’t! Why? It’s the middle of the night. And you’re in your jim-jams! What are you scared of?”

Never mind her—Toby was starting to feel distinctly panicky himself.

“I fear he will hurt us. We mean nothing to him.” Her bottom lip quivered a little. She reached out her hand and touched Toby lightly on his bare arm. Toby noticed her pupils were well dilated. She was stoned. This was dangerous. She went on, “I get dressed, bring my case and you open the elevator, yes? Please Mr Steward.”

She certainly looked convincingly scared. Toby asked, “What’s been going on since you went below?”

Irina pushed her hair back behind her ears. She suddenly looked much younger, a girl rather than a woman. “First we put on music, then we do a little dancing together ... you know ... us two girls?” Toby nodded. “But after a little bits, he lose interest. He certainly do not want to join in.”