The Wreck of the Mary Deare (22 page)

More technical evidence followed, and then Bowen-Lodge adjourned the court. ‘Tomorrow at ten-thirty, gentlemen.'

As I followed Hal into the corridor, a hand plucked at my sleeve. ‘You're Mr Sands, aren't you?' A little, grey-haired woman was smiling up at me a little uncertainly.

‘Yes,' I said. There was something about her face that I seemed to recognise.

‘I thought you were, but I'm never quite certain about people—my eyes, you know. I just wanted to tell you how glad I am he has one good friend in all this terrible business. You were splendid, Mr Sands.'

I saw the likeness then. ‘You're his mother, aren't you?' I was looking round for Patch, but she said, ‘Please. He doesn't know I'm here. He'd be terribly angry. When he came down to see me at Bridgewater, he didn't tell me anything about it. But I knew at once that he was in trouble.' She gave a little sigh. ‘It was the first time I had seen him in seven years. That's a long time, Mr Sands, for an old body like me. I only had the one, you see—just Gideon. And now that his father's dead . . .' She smiled and patted my arm. ‘But there, you don't want to hear about my troubles. I just wanted you to know that I'm glad he's got one good friend.' She looked up at me. ‘It will be all right this time . . . you do think so, don't you, Mr Sands?'

‘I'm sure it will,' I murmured. ‘Sir Lionel Falcett is obviously concentrating on the cargo and the Company.'

‘Yes. Yes, that's what I thought.'

I offered to see her to her hotel, but she wouldn't hear of it and left me with a brave little smile, moving along with the crowd. Hal joined me then and we went out to his car. I caught a glimpse of her standing, waiting for a bus. She was off-guard then, and she looked lonely and a little frightened.

Hal offered to put me up for the night and we collected my suitcase from the station and drove down to his house at Bosham, a small, thatched place with a lawn running down to the water. I had bought an evening paper in Southampton; it was all over the front page and three columns of it inside—
Captain's Daughter Breaks Down at Enquiry; Strange Story of Loss of Mary Deare
.

It wasn't until after dinner that Hal began to ask me specific questions about Patch. At length he said, ‘That day you rejoined us at Peter Port—you didn't say very much about him.' He was standing by the window, looking out across the lawn to where the water was a milky blur in the dusk. There were a couple of yachts moored out there and their masts were bobbing to the lop and the wind gusts. He turned and looked at me. ‘You knew about the
Belle Isle
business then, didn't you?'

I nodded, wondering what was coming. It was very cosy in that room with its lamps and its glimmer of Eastern Brass and the big tiger skins on the floor, very remote from all that I had lived with during the past two months. Even the glass of port in my hand seemed part of the illusion of being in another world.

He came and sat down opposite me. ‘Look, old chap,' he said. ‘I don't want to pry into what, after all, is your concern. But just how sure are you about this fellow?'

‘How do you mean?'

‘Well, you've got to be damn' sure about a man . . . I mean . . .' He hesitated, searching for the words he wanted. ‘Well, put it this way. If Patch wrecked that ship—deliberately wrecked her—then it was murder. They may only be able to pin a charge of manslaughter on him in law, but before God he'd be guilty of murder.'

‘He didn't do it,' I said.

‘You're sure of that?'

‘Absolutely.' And having said that, I sat back, wondering why I'd said it, why I was so certain?

‘I'm glad,' Hal said. ‘Because, you know, all the time you were in the witness box, I was conscious that you were defending him. You were selecting your evidence, keeping things back, and at times you were a little scared. Oh, you needn't worry. I don't think anybody else noticed it. I noticed it because I know you and because at Peter Port, when you'd had less time to think it all out, you were so obviously covering up.' He paused and sipped his port. ‘Go carefully, though,' he added. ‘I know Lionel Falcett. Member of my club. Seen him in action, too. Don't let him get his claws into you.'

IT WAS STILL
blowing and the streets were wet as we drove to the court the following morning. Proceedings started sharp at ten-thirty with evidence about the cargo. And then a doctor was called who showed that it was quite possible for a man who lived on nothing but liquor to die for lack of it. Through all this the courtroom was restless as though waiting for something. The public gallery was packed, the Press desk crammed. And then at last Holland called ‘Alfred Higgins' and, as Higgins thrust his huge bulk into the witness box, there was a sudden, expectant hush, so that the sound of a clock striking eleven was quite audible through the taking of the oath.

He was forty-three years old, Higgins told the Treasury Counsel, and, when asked for his qualifications, he explained that he'd started life on his father's barge, sailing the East Coast ports until he was fifteen; then he'd got mixed up in some smuggling racket and had stowed away on a banana boat. He'd stayed at sea after that, moving from ship to ship across the traffic lanes of the world—square-riggers, tramps and liners, tugs and coasters; he rolled the names of them out of his great barrel of a body like pages picked at random from Lloyd's Register.

He began his story back where the
Mary Deare
steamed out of Yokohama. According to him, the ship was a floating death-trap of rattling rivets and clanging plates, a piece of leaking ironmongery taken off the junk-heap of the China Seas. Of the captain, he simply said, ‘The 'ole ship knew 'e was drinking 'isself ter death.' The first mate was sickening for jaundice and the third officer, Rice, was only a kid of twenty-four on his second voyage with a watch-keeper's certificate. The implication was that he, Higgins, was the only reliable deck officer on board, and though he looked like a bull about to charge, there was something impressive about him as he stood there and gave his evidence in a throaty rumble.

Singapore, Rangoon, Aden—and then he was covering the same ground that Patch had covered, but from a different angle. He thought the crew ‘not bad considerin' the moth-eaten sort o' a tub she was.' Patch he regarded as ‘a bit pernickity-like' and added, ‘But that's ter be expected when a man wiv 'is record gets command again.'

And then up through the Bay of Biscay the Court got little glimpses of Patch, nervous, over-bearing, at odds with the owner, with his officers—‘All 'cept Rice. 'E was the white-headed boy, as the sayin' is.' And when it came to the gale itself and the ship down by the bows and the radio shack gutted by fire, Higgins didn't give it graphically as Patch had done, but baldly, factually. He had been asleep in his bunk when the hold had started to flood. He had taken over the bridge and had remained on watch until 10.00 hours the following morning—eleven solid hours. He had then organised a more thorough search for Dellimare. No, Mr Patch hadn't ordered him to. He'd done it on his own initiative, having been relieved. He couldn't believe that Dellimare ‘who was Navy an' a good bloke on a ship' could have gone overboard. Altogether he had been forty-two hours without sleep.

‘You liked Mr Dellimare?' Holland asked him.

‘I didn't like or dislike 'im. I jus' said 'e was a good bloke, an' so 'e was.'

‘Did you advise Mr Patch at one stage to abandon ship?'

‘Well, yes, in a manner o' speakin'. We considered it, Mr Dellimare an' me.'

‘Why?'

‘'Cos we knew the sort o' ship she was. We'd bin through two gales already comin' across from Singapore. Patch 'adn't. An' the one in the Bay was a lot worse than wot we'd gone through before.'

‘And you thought an explosion had occurred in the for'ard hold?'

‘I didn't think nothin' of the kind. I knew she was rotten an' we were takin' a helluva pounding. We didn't think she'd stand much more.' And then he said, ‘If you're suggesting we were scared, just remember what it was like out there. Ten to one the boats wouldn't 've got launched in that sea, let alone stayed afloat. It took guts to even think 'o takin' ter the boats, pertikly fer Mr Dellimare who'd had a basinful o' that sort o' thing during the war. Later, when we 'ove-to, things was easier an' I thought maybe we had a chance.'

And then he was dealing with the night the fire had broken out in the after hold and they had abandoned ship. Yes, it had been about 21.20 hours. It was a stoker who had discovered it, a man called West. He'd come out of the after deckhouse and had seen smoke coming from the hatch of Number Three hold. He'd reported at once to the bridge by phone. Rice had been there at the time and Higgins had sent him to check the report and notify Mr Patch. Not once in his evidence did he refer to Patch as the captain.

‘And what happened then?' Holland asked him.

‘I didn't hear nothin' further for about quarter of an hour. But I knew it was fire orl right 'cos the after derrick lights was switched on an' there was a lot of activity with men running about the deck. Then Mr Patch comes up to the bridge lookin' very wild and all covered in smoke grime an' says he's ordered the boats swung out just in case. I asked him whether he'd like me ter take charge of the fire-fighting party and he said No, Mr Rice was in charge. He stood aba't fer a bit after that as though he couldn't make up his mind aba't somethin'. An' after a bit Rice comes runnin' up to the bridge in a bit of a panic an' says the fire's getting worse. And at that Patch orders him to pass the word to stand by to abandon ship. “You notify the engine-room, Mr Higgins,” he says. “Then take charge of the fire-fighting party. Mr Rice, you'll have charge of the upper deck. See there's no panic when I give the word.” An' that's the last I saw of him,' Higgins added.

The rest was a pattern of disaster that comes from absence of command. Higgins and his men had fought the fire for a further fifteen minutes or so, and all the time it seemed to be gaining on them. The men were scared. They believed the ship was jinxed, that the cargo was explosives. Higgins sent Rice to tell Patch he couldn't hold the men much longer and Rice came back to say he couldn't find Patch anywhere. ‘By then the men were near ter panic. Some were already on the upper deck piling into Number Three boat. There weren't nothing I could do 'cept give the order to abandon ship.'

The order had resulted in a stampede for the boats. When he reached the upper deck, Higgins saw Number Three boat hanging by its bow falls with one man clinging to it. Number One boat had also been cleared. She was empty and being battered to pieces against the ship's side. By using his fists he'd got some sort of order out of the chaos on deck and he and the officers had organised the men into the two remaining boats. He had put Rice in charge of Number Four boat and had waited to see him safely clear. He had then lowered and released his own boat. Owing to the speed at which the ship was travelling he had lost contact with Rice by the time his boat hit the water and he never regained it.

‘Do you mean to say,' Holland asked, ‘that you took to the boats with the ship still steaming?'

‘Yes. Acting on Mr Patch's instructions I had ordered the engine-room staff to stand by to take to the boats. When I gave the order to abandon, they didn't 'ave no instructions about stopping the engines an' afterwards none o' 'em would go below to do it.'

‘But surely if you gave the order—'

‘What the hell use were orders?' Higgins growled. ‘Patch'd gone—vanished. One boat was already hanging in her davits, the men in her all tipped into the sea; another was bein' smashed up alongside. The men were panicking. Anybody who went below stood a good chance of coming up and finding the last two boats gone. It was as much as Rice an' I could do ter get those boats away orderly-like.'

‘But good heavens!' Holland exclaimed. ‘Surely, as an experienced officer, you had some control over your—'

But Higgins interrupted him again. ‘Ain't you got no imagination?' he burst out. ‘Can't you see what it was like—Patch gone and the crew in a panic and a fire raging on top of a cargo of explosives.'

‘But it wasn't explosives.'

‘'Ow were we ter know?'

‘You've heard the evidence proving that the cases loaded at Yokohama contained aero engines. There was no justification for believing—'

‘We know now they was full of aero engines,' Higgins said quickly. ‘But I'm telling you wot we thought at the time. We thought they was full of explosives.'

‘But you'd seen the manifest,' Holland reminded him. ‘Mr Patch even posted a copy of it on the crew's notice board.'

‘What difference does that make?' Higgins demanded angrily. ‘A crew don't 'ave ter believe everything that's posted on their notice board. An' let me tell you, mister, men that sail in ships like the
Mary Deare
don't go much by the manifest, pertickly in the China Seas. We may be uneddicated, but we ain't stupid. A manifest is just a piece of paper somebody's written what he wants believed on. Least, that's the way I look at it—an' I've me reasons for doin' so.'

There was no answer to that. The outburst called for a rebuke from the Chairman, but it was given mildly. Higgins was accepted for what he was, a piece of human flotsam speaking with the voice of experience. In a sense he was magnificent. He dominated that drab court. But not by the power of his personality, which was crude. He dominated it because he was different, because he was the obverse of the coin of human nature, a colourful, lawless buccaneer who didn't give a damn for authority.

‘In other words,' Holland said, ‘you've known a lot of strange things happen aboard ships around the world. Now, have you ever known a stranger set of circumstances than those that happened aboard the
Mary Deare
?'