The Black Tide (36 page)

‘And where do you think those tankers are going to meet up?’

‘You asked me that before. I don’t know.’

‘Have you thought about it?’

‘Not really. I’ve had other things—’

‘Well, I have. So’s Michael.’ He turned to Pamela. ‘We discussed it for quite a while after you’d left. We even got the charts sent up. If the destination is Europe—’ He turned back to me. ‘That’s what you think, isn’t it – that the target is somewhere in Europe? If it is, then it’s over twelve thousand miles from the Hormuz Straits to the western approaches of the English Channel. That’s about forty days slow steaming or just over twenty-eight at full speed; and they could meet up at countless points along the west coast of Africa.’ And he added, ‘The only alternative would be the Cape, but I am not aware the Iranians have ever shown any interest in Black Africa. So I agree with you, if there is a target, then it’s somewhere in Europe where several countries hold Iranian prisoners, the Germans and ourselves certainly.’

We discussed it for a while, then he left, taking Pamela with him. He had his car outside, and when he said he had arranged to meet her father for a drink at their club, she immediately got her coat. ‘Can I take this?’ She had picked up the typescript and was holding it gripped under her arm.

I nodded dumbly, standing there, watching, as the lawyer helped her on with her coat. ‘I’m glad you didn’t kill the man,’ he said, looking at me over his shoulder and smiling. ‘His daughter was quite positive the
Lavandou
was the only ship he wrecked.’

‘She was bound to say that,’ I told him angrily.

He nodded. ‘Nevertheless, I found her very convincing. She said he had paid dearly for that one criminal action.’

That phrase of his struck a chord, and after they had left,
when I was standing at the window, staring up at the street and thinking about the way she had accepted his offer of a lift, as though coming to see me had been just an interlude and her own world so much more congenial than this bare little room and the company of a man who might at any moment be charged with murder, it came back to me. Choffel had used almost identical words –
God knows I’ve paid
, he had said, and he’d repeated the word
paid
, spitting blood. Had he really become so desperate he’d taken jobs he knew were dubious and then, when a ship was sunk, had found himself picked on, a scapegoat though he’d had no part in the actual scuttling? Could any man be that stupid, or desperate, or plain unlucky? The
Olympic Ore
, the
Stella Rosa
, the
Petros Jupiter
– that was three I knew about, as well as the
Lavandou
, and he’d used three different names. It seemed incredible, and yet … why lie to me so urgently when he must have known he was dying?

I thought about that a lot as I sat alone over my evening meal in a crowded Chinese restaurant. Also about his daughter, how angry she had been, calling him an innocent man and spitting in my face because I didn’t believe her. If she could more or less convince a cold-blooded solicitor like Saltley …

But my mind shied away from that, remembering the
Petros Jupiter
and that night in the fog when my whole world had gone up in flames. And suddenly I knew where I would lie up while waiting for those tankers to re-emerge. If they wanted to arrest me, that’s where they’d have to do it, with the evidence of what he’d done there before their eyes.

I didn’t tell the police. I didn’t tell anyone. I left just as dawn was breaking, having paid my bill the night before, and was at Paddington in time to catch the inter-city express to Penzance. And when I arrived at Balkaer, there it was just as I had left it, the furniture and everything still in place, and no board up to say it was for sale. It was dark then and cold, hardly any wind and the sea in the cove below only a gentle murmur. I got the fire going, and after hanging the bedclothes round it to air, I walked back up to the Kerrisons and had a meal with them. They had met me at Penzance and Jean had seemed so pleased to see me I could have wept.

That night I slept on the sofa in front of the fire, unwilling to face the damp cold of the empty bedroom upstairs. The glow of the peat was warm and friendly, and though memories crowded in – even the sofa on which I lay conjured a picture of Karen, her dark eyes bright with excitement as it was knocked down to us for next to nothing at the tail end of a farmhouse sale – they no longer depressed me. Balkaer still felt like home and I was glad I had come, glad I hadn’t put it up for sale immediately, the key still with the Kerrisons.

There was no wind that night, the air very still and the wash of the sea in the cove below muted to a whisper. The place was snug and warm and homely, my mind at peace now. Choffel was dead. That chapter of my life was closed; it was the future that mattered now.

But in the morning, when I walked up to the headland and stood staring out across the quiet sea at the Longships light and the creaming wash of the Atlantic swell breaking on the inshore rocks, the wretched man’s words came back to me –
you can’t escape, can you, from either yourself or the past
. I knew then that the chapter of my life that had started out there in the fog that night was not closed, would never be closed.

This was the thought that stayed with me as I tramped the clifftop paths alone or went fishing off Sennen in Andy’s boat. The weather was good for late January, cold with little wind and clear pale skies. It was on the fourth day, when I was fishing out beyond The Tribbens, that I felt Choffel’s presence most. The swell was heavier then and the boat rocking; I suppose it was that which conjured up the memory of that dhow and what had happened. And his words … I found myself going over and over those rambling outbursts of his, the face pale under the stubble, the black curly hair, and the stench, the dark eyes staring. It all came back to me, everything he had said, and I began to wonder, And wondering, I began to think of his daughter – in England now and hating my guts for something I hadn’t done.

The line tugged at my hand, but I didn’t move, for I was suddenly facing the fact that if I were innocent of what she firmly believed I had done, then perhaps he was innocent, too. And I sat there, the boat rocking gently and the fish tugging at the line, as I stared out across the half-tide rocks
south of the Tribbens to the surf swirling around the Kettle’s Bottom and the single mast that was all that was left above water of the
Petros Jupiter. I’ve paid and paid
. And now the girl was accusing me of a murder I hadn’t committed.

I pulled in the line, quickly, hand-over-hand. It was a crab of all things, a spider crab. I shook it loose and started the engine, threading my way back through the rocks to the jetty. It was lunchtime, the village deserted. I parked the boat and took the cliff path to Land’s End, walking fast, hoping exertion would kill my doubts and calm my mind.

But it didn’t. The doubts remained. In the late afternoon a bank of fog moved in from seaward. I just made it back to Sennen before it engulfed the coast. Everything was then so like that night Karen had blown herself up that I stood for a while staring seaward, the Seven Stones’ diaphone bleating faintly and the double bang from the Longships loud enough to wake the dead. The wind was sou’westerly and I was suddenly imagining those two tankers thundering up the Atlantic to burst through the rolling bank of mist, and only myself to stop them – myself alone, just as Karen had been alone.

‘Think about it,’ Saltley had said. ‘If we knew where they were meeting up …’ And he had left it at that, taking the girl’s arm and walking her down the street to where he had parked his low-slung Porsche.

And standing there, down by the lifeboat station, thinking about it, it was as though Karen were whispering to me out of the fog –
find them, find them, you must find them
. It was a distant foghorn, and there was another answering it. I needed an atlas, charts, the run of the pilot books for the coasts of Africa, dividers to work out distances and dates. Slow-steaming at eleven knots, that was 264 nautical miles a day. Forty days, Saltley had said, to Ushant and the English Channel. But the
Aurora B
would be steaming at full speed, say 400 a day, that would be 30 days, and she had left her hidey-hole by the Hormuz Straits nine days ago. Another twenty-one to go … I had turned automatically towards Andy’s cottage above the lifeboat station, something nagging at my mind, but what I didn’t know, conscious only that
I had lost the better part of a week, and the distant foghorn drumming at my ears with its mournful sense of urgency.

It was Rose who answered the door. Andy wasn’t there and they didn’t have a world atlas. But she gave me a cup of tea and after leaving me for a while returned with the
Digest World Atlas
borrowed from a retired lighthouse keeper a few doors away, a man, she said, who had never been outside of British waters but liked to visualize where all the ships passing him had come from. I opened it first at the geophysical maps of Africa. There were two of them right at the end of Section One, and on both coasts there were vast blanks between the names of ports and coastal towns. The east coast I knew. The seas were big in the monsoons, the currents tricky, and there was a lot of shipping. The Seychelles and Mauritius were too populated, too full of package tours, and the islands closer to Madagascar, like Aldabra and the Comores Archipelago, too likely to be overflown, the whole area liable to naval surveillance.

In any case, I thought the rendezvous would have been planned much nearer to the target, and if that were Europe then it must be somewhere on the west coast. I turned then to the main maps, which were on a larger scale of 197 miles to the inch, staring idly at the offshore colouring, where the green of the open Atlantic shaded to white as the continental shelf tilted upwards to the coastal shallows. I was beginning to feel sleepy, for we were in the kitchen with the top of the old-fashioned range red-hot, the atmosphere overwhelming after the cold and the fog outside. Rose poured me another cup of tea from the pot brewing on the hob. Tristan da Cunha, St Helena, Ascension – those were all too far away. But on the next page, the one for North and West Africa, there was Hierro, Gomera, Palma, all out-islands of the Canaries and on the direct route. The Selvagens, too, and the Desertas, and Porto Santo off Madeira. Of these, only the Selvagens, perhaps the Desertas, could be regarded as possibles, the others being too well populated.

The tea was strong and very sweet, and I sat there wrapped in the cosy warmth of that hot little kitchen, my head nodding as my mind groped for something I knew was there
but could not find. Andy came back and I stayed on and had a meal with them. By the time I left, the fog had cleared and it was very close to freezing, the stars bright as diamonds overhead and the flash of the Longships and other lights further away, the glimmer of ships rounding Land’s End, all seemingly magnified in the startling clarity.

Next morning I went up to the main road at first light and hitched a ride in a builder’s van going to Penzance. From there I got the train to Falmouth. I needed charts now and a look at the Admiralty pilots for Africa, my mind still groping for that elusive thought that lurked somewhere in my subconscious, logic suggesting that it was more probably a rendezvous well offshore, some fixed position clear of all shipping lanes.

The first vessel I tried when I got to the harbour was a general cargo ship, but she was on a regular run to the Maritimes, Halifax mainly, and had no use for African charts. The mate indicated a yacht berthed alongside one of the tugs at the inner end of the breakwater. ‘Round-the-worlder,’ he said. ‘Came in last night from the Cape Verdes. He’ll have charts for that part of the African coast.’ And he went back to the job I used to do, checking the cargo coming out of the hold.

The yacht was the
Ocean Brigand
. She flew a burgee with a black Maltese cross with a yellow crown on a white background and a red fly. Her ensign was blue and she had the letters RCC below her name on the stern. She was wood, her brightwork worn by salt and sun so that in places bare wood showed through the varnish, and her decks were a litter of ropes and sails and oilskins drying in the cold wind. The skipper, who was also the owner, was small and grey-haired with a smile that crinkled the wind-lines at the corners of his eyes. He had charts for most of the world, the pilots, too. ‘A bit out of date, some of them,’ he said. ‘But they cost a fortune now.’

He sat me down at the chart table with a Bacardi and lime and left me to find what I wanted. ‘Still some clearing up to do.’ He smiled wearily. ‘We had it a bit rugged off Finisterre and the Bay was mostly between seven and nine. Silly time of
year really to return to England, but my wife hasn’t been too good. Packed her off to hospital this morning.’

I had never been on a real ocean-going yacht before, the chart table so small, tucked in on the starb’d side opposite the galley, yet everything I’d ever needed in the way of navigation was there – except radar. He hadn’t got radar, or Decca nav. And there was no gyro compass. But everything else, including VHF and single-sideband radio.

I went through all his charts that showed any part of Africa and in the end I was no better off than I had been with the lighthouse keeper’s atlas. It had to be the last stretch, even as far north as the Bay of Biscay, but more likely somewhere in the neighbourhood of those Spanish and Portuguese islands off the coast of Spanish Sahara and Morocco. And of these the Desertas and the Selvagens, being without water and therefore more or less deserted, seemed most likely. But even then, with the pilot book open in front of me, I didn’t see it. Like the chart, it referred to both groups of islands by their Portuguese names. There was no indication that there might be an anglicized version of the name Selvagen.

A pair of sea boots appeared in the companionway to my right and the owner leaned his head down, peering over my shoulder. ‘Ah, I see you’re reading up on the Madeira–Canaries passage, but I doubt whether your friends would have put into either the Desertas or the Selvagens. No water, no safe anchorage and both of them bloody inhospitable groups of islands by all accounts. Never been there myself, but our vice-commodore now, he went to the Selvagens I seem to remember – 1980, I think …’ He went past me into the saloon, putting on a pair of half-spectacles and peering along a battened-in shelf of books. ‘Here we are.’ He handed me a carefully plastic-wrapped copy of the Royal Cruising Club Journal. ‘There’s a glimpse of what he calls the Salvage Islands. A little more descriptive than the Pilot.’