The Black Tide (25 page)

‘Aboot a lassie Ah’ll sing a song,

Sing Rickety-tickety-tin;

Aboot a lassie Ah’ll sing a song,

Who didna have her family long –

Not only did she du them wrong,

She did every one o’ them in – them in,

She did every one o’ them in …’

By the time she’d set her sister’s hair on fire and danced around the funeral pyre— ‘Playing a violin – olin’, we were all of us laughing. The Ball of Kirriemuir followed and then he had switched to Eskimo Nell, verse after verse— ‘Roond and roond went th’ bluidy great wheel, In and oot …’ The sweat was shining on his face, dark patches under his arms, and when I got up to go to my cabin he was suddenly between me and the door. ‘Where yu think yu’re goin’? Is it tha’ yu don’t like ma singin’, or is it the song?’ He was almost dancing with sudden rage. ‘Yu a prude or somethin’?’

‘I’m just tired,’ I said, pushing past him. I must have done it clumsily for he lost his balance and came bouncing back at me, his arms flailing, mouthing obscenities. Somebody hauled him back, but I barely noticed. I wanted to be on my own and think things out. The fire doors closed behind me, their voices fading as I went along the alleyway to my cabin. Inside it was desperately hot, the air conditioner not working and no fans. I stripped off and had a cold shower. There was no fresh water, only sea water, which was tepid and left me feeling hotter than ever and sticky with salt. I lay on my bunk, just a towel over my stomach, listening to the sounds of the ship – the deep-buried hum of the generator, the occasional footstep in the alleyway as somebody went to the heads opposite.

It must have been about half an hour later and I was still
there on the bed, when there was a knock on the door. ‘Mind if I come in?’

I sat up, suddenly very wide awake, for the door was opening and I could see his head in silhouette against the light outside, the stubble growth on his cheek shading the line of the jaw. ‘What is it? What do you want?’

‘A word with you. That’s all.’ He stood there, hesitating. ‘You’ve got it all wrong, you see. I have to talk to you.’

I switched on the light and Choffel’s face leapt into view. He came in and shut the door. ‘I didn’t know, you see … about your wife, I mean.’ His face was pale, his hands clasping and unclasping. ‘Only just now – my daughter wrote to me …’ He shrugged. ‘What can I say? I’m sorry, yes, but it’s nothing to do with me. Nothing at all.’ He moved closer, coming into the cabin, his voice urgent. ‘You must understand that.’

I stared at him, wondering at the nerve of the man. I didn’t say anything. What the hell did one say? Here he was, the man who had put the
Petros Jupiter
on the rocks – and by doing so he had been as much the cause of Karen’s death as if he’d taken her out there and killed her with a blow torch. But what could I do – leap from my bed and throttle him with my bare hands?

‘May I sit down please? It’s a long story.’ He pulled up a chair and a moment later he was sitting there, leaning forward, his dark eyes fixed on mine, and I thought, My God, this isn’t at all how it should be, the little bastard sitting there and me still on my bunk. ‘Get out!’ I said hoarsely. ‘Get out, d’you hear?’

But he shook his head. ‘I have to tell you—’ He held his hand up as though to restrain me. ‘Gwyn has got it into her head you’re planning to kill me, you see. She is being over-dramatic, of course. But it is what she says in her letter, so I thought it best to have a word with you. If it is true, and you think I had something to do with what happened to the
Petros Jupiter
, then I understand how you must feel.’ His hands finally clasped themselves together, locked so tight the knuckles showed white. ‘First, I must explain that the
Petros Jupiter
was not at all a good ship. Not my choice, you
understand. The skipper was all right, but a man who did everything by the book, no imagination at all. The deck officers were much the same, but I only saw them at meals. It was the chief engineer – he was the real trouble. He was an alcoholic. Whisky mostly, about a bottle and a half a day – never drunk, you understand, but always slightly fuddled, so that nothing ever got done and I was expected to cover for him all the time. I didn’t know about that until we were the better part of a week out from Kuwait. He was a Greek and a cousin by marriage of the skipper. I knew then why I had got the job. Nobody who knew the ship would touch it, and I’d been on the beach, you know, for a long time …’

He looked at me as though seeking sympathy, then gave a shrug. ‘But even when I knew about him, it never occurred to me there would have been a whole voyage, more than one probably, when the oil filters hadn’t been properly cleaned, almost no maintenance at all. You leave the oil filters dirty, you get lack of lubrication, you see – on the gears, both the primary and the secondary. The primary are double helical gears and the debris from them settles to the bottom and finishes up under the secondary reduction gear. In a seaway, rolling like we were that night, broadside-on to the waves, pieces of metal must have got sloshed up into the gears. We were all working flat out, you see, on the evaporator pipes. It had been like that all the voyage, the tubes just about worn out and always having to be patched up, so I didn’t think about the gears. I didn’t have time, the Chief mostly in his cabin, drinking, you know, and then, when we got steaming again …’ He gave a shrug. ‘I didn’t do anything. I didn’t put anything in the gears. It was the debris did it, the debris of bad maintenance. You understand? We were only a few miles off Land’s End when the noise started. It was the secondary reduction gear, the one that drives the shaft. A hell of a noise. The teeth were being ripped off and they were going through the mesh of the gears. Nothing I could do. Nothing anybody could do. And it wasn’t deliberate. Just negligence.’

He had been talking very fast, but he paused there, watching to see how I would react. ‘That was how it happened.’ He
passed his tongue round his lips. ‘My only fault was that I didn’t check. I should have gone over everything in that engine-room. But I never had time. There was never any time, man – always something more urgent.’

He was lying, of course. It was all part of the game. ‘What did they pay you?’ I asked him.

‘Pay me?’ He was frowning, his eyes wide.

‘For doing the job, then slipping away like that so that no one else could be blamed, only Speridion.’ A professional scuttler, he would only have done it for a straight fee. A big one, too, for there was the skipper of the Breton fishing boat to pay and then the cost of flying out to Bahrain and fixing passage on the
Corsaire
.

He shook his head, his dark eyes staring at me and his hands clasping and unclasping. ‘How can I convince you? I know how it must appear, but my only fault was I didn’t check. I thought we’d make it. After we got through Biscay I thought that junk yard of machinery would see me through to the end of the voyage.’ Again the little helpless shrug. ‘I did think of going to the captain and insisting we put in for complete refit, but it was a Greek company, and you know what Greek shipowners are like when you suggest anything that cuts into their profits, and after the Cape … Well, there was nowhere after that, so I let it go.’ And he added, his hands clasped very tight, ‘Only once in my life—’ But then he checked himself, shaking his head slowly from side to side, his eyes staring at me as though hypnotised. ‘Can’t you understand? When you’ve been without a job for a long time—’ He paused, licking his lips again, then went on in a rush of words: ‘You’ll take anything then, any job that comes along. You don’t ask questions. You just take it.’

‘Under an assumed name.’

His mouth opened, then closed abruptly, and I could see him trying to think of an answer. ‘There were reasons,’ he murmured. ‘Personal reasons.’

‘So you called yourself Speridion. Aristides Speridion.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you had a passport – Speridion’s passport.’

He knew what I was driving at. I could see it in his face. He didn’t answer, his mouth tight shut.

‘What happened to the real Speridion?’

He half shook his head, sitting there unable to say a word. ‘My God!’ I said, swinging my legs off the bunk. ‘You come here, telling me I don’t understand, but it’s not only my wife you’ve killed—’

‘No!’ He had leapt to his feet. ‘I took his papers, yes. But the ship was sinking and he was dead already, floating face down in the oily water that was flooding the engine-room.’ And he said again, urgently, ‘He was already dead, I tell you. He’d no use for the papers any more.’

‘And Choffel?’ I asked. ‘Henri Choffel, who fell into the harbour at Cayenne just when you needed a job.’ I, too, was on my feet then, tucking the towel around my waist. I pushed him back into the chair, standing over him as I said, ‘That was 1958, wasn’t it? Just after you’d sunk the French ship
Lavandou
’

He was staring up at me, his mouth fallen open, a stunned look on his face. ‘How do you know?’ He seemed on the verge of tears, his voice almost pathetic as he said hoarsely, ‘I was going to tell you – everything. About the
Lavandou
as well. I was just twenty-two, a very junior engineer and I needed money. My mother …’ His voice seemed to break at the recollection. ‘It all started from that. I said it was a long story, you remember. I didn’t think you knew. It was so long ago, and ever since—’ He unclasped his hands, reaching out and clutching hold of me. ‘You’re like all the rest. You’re trying to damn me without a hearing. But I will be heard. I must be.’ He was tugging at my arm. ‘I’ve done nothing, nothing to be ashamed of – nothing to cause you any hurt. It’s all in your imagination.’

Imagination! I was suddenly shaking with anger. How dare the murderous little swine try and pretend he was misunderstood and all he had ever done was the fault of other people. ‘Get out of here!’ My voice was trembling, anger taking hold, uncontrollable. ‘Get out before I kill you.’

I shall always remember the look on his face at that moment. So sad, so pained, and the way he hung his head like a whipped cur as he pushed the chair away, stepping back and moving slowly away from me. And all the time his eyes on mine, a pleading look that seemed desperately trying
to bridge the gap between us. As the door closed behind him I had the distinct impression that he was like a drowning man calling for help.

Mad, I thought. A psychiatric case. He must be. How else could he try and plead his innocence when the facts stared him in the face? It was a Jekyll and Hyde situation. Only a schizophrenic, temporarily throwing off the evil side of his nature and assuming the mantle of his innocent self, could so blatantly ignore the truth when confronted by it.

God, what a mess! I lay back on the bunk again, anger draining away, the sweat cold on my body. I switched off the light, feeling exhausted and rubbing myself with the towel. Time stood still, the darkness closed around me. It had the impenetrable blackness of a tomb. Maybe I dozed. I was very tired, a mental numbness. So much had happened. So much to think about, and my nerves taut. I remember a murmur of voices, the sound of drunken laughter outside the door, and Rod Selkirk’s voice, a little slurred, singing an old voyageur song I had heard a long time ago when I shared a cabin with an ex-Hudson’s Bay apprentice. A door slammed, cutting the sound abruptly off, and after that there was silence again, a stillness that seemed to stretch the nerves, holding sleep at bay.

Thinking about the
Aurora B
and what would happen to us all on board during the next few weeks, I had a dream and woke from it with the impression that Choffel had uttered a fearful muffled scream as he fell to his death down the shaft of an old mine. Had he been pushed – by me? I was drenched in sweat, the stagnant water closing over his head only dimly seen, a fading memory. The time was 01.25 and the faint murmur of the generator grown to the steady hum of something more powerful – the auxiliary perhaps. I could feel it vibrating under me and some loose change I had put with my wallet on the dressing table was rattling spasmodically. I got up and put my eye to the little pinpoint of clear glass. There were men in the bows, dark shadows in the starlight, and there were others coming up through a hatchway to join them with their hands on top of their heads.

The crew! It was the crew, of course – the crew of the
Aurora B
. That’s why nobody had been allowed on the bridge, why there was a guard on the deck. They had been imprisoned in the chain locker, and now they were bringing them up and hustling them across to the starb’d rail at gunpoint. But why? For exercise? For air? They were at the rail now, a dozen or more, still with their hands on their heads, and above them the cliffs towered black against the stars.

I stood back from the peephole, resting my eyes and thinking about that chain locker, what it would be like down there in day time with the sun blazing on the deck above, the stifling heat of it, and nowhere to lie but on the coiled, salt-damp rusty links of the anchor chain. A hell hole, and nothing I could do about it, not for the moment at any rate.

The ship shuddered slightly, the beat of an auxiliary growing, a faint clanking sound. I put my eye to the peephole again. Everything was the same, the prisoners against the rail, their guards, three of them, standing watchful with automatics in their hands, the bows, lit by the flicker of torches, like a stage set with the cliffs a towering backdrop. There were two men by the anchor winch now, bending over it, and another with a hose playing a jet of water on the open vent of the hawse hole. The beat of the auxiliary slowed, it was labouring and I saw the cliffs moving.

And then it happened and the sweat froze on my body as one of the crew turned suddenly, another with him, their hands coming away from their heads, both of them reaching for the rail. Another instant and they would have been over, for the attention of the guards had been momentarily distracted by the winch and its turning and the anchor chain coming in. The first was half over the rail when a guard fired from the hip. The clatter of the automatic came to me faint as a toy, a distant sound like the ripping of calico, and in the same instant the man straddling the rail became an animated doll, his body jerking this way and that until suddenly it toppled over, falling into the widening gap between the ship and the cliff.