North Star

CHAPTER ONE

It was March, the wind cold from the north-east and the Fisher Maid plunging down the waves with a wicked twist to her tail. I shut the door of the bridge behind me, leaving the skipper to listen to the forecast, and went down the ladder, heading aft to check the gear. I knew the forecast would be bad. But it couldn't be any worse than the weather we had had off Bear Island. I paused in the shelter of the superstructure. Here on the starboard side I was out of the wind and I took out my pipe, filling it automatically, standing there staring out across the darkening sea.

I had seen to the stowage of the gear myself, a thousand miles back when we had finished trawling; it was just an excuse to be out in the open, away from the smell of oil and stale food, the blare of the radio and the company of men I had been locked up with for too long. On a trawler it's bloody difficult to be alone when you want to.

Shetland was still just visible, the black humps of the distant hills like wave patterns against a cold green strip of sky, and the light on Sumburgh Head blinking above the hard line of the horizon. Only that pale green strip to mark the bitter cold we'd been steaming through; the rest of the sky was clouded over now. A flurry of sleet drove like a veil across the starboard navigation light. Inside of two days we would be back in Hull, and still I hadn't made up my mind, the shadowy figures, the crash of glass, the sudden blaze of bottled petrol, and that child's face at the upstairs window… It had haunted me throughout the voyage.

Slowly the pale light faded in the west. I stood there watching it until that last vestige of the dying day was engulfed by night, wondering whether the strike would still be on, what the hell I was going to do. Waves were breaking against the stern, the driven spume white in the gathering dark, and the wind whistling in the top hamper. I was thinking of my father then, wondering what he would have done, giving his life for a cause in a country not his own. Would he have allowed his principles to be totally destroyed by a single cruel and senseless action?

The match made a small flared arc as I tossed it over the side, my hands gripping the rail, the metal cold to the touch, my eyes staring westward to Shetland, fifteen miles away. He had been born in Shetland, and I had never been there. I hadn't even known him, only the legend. My mind slipped back, my life in flashes, and always that legend, a guiding light to everything I had done — and I wasn't sure any more. A door opened, the muffled sound of the radio reminding me of the industrial world just two days' steaming away, the docks, the stuffy smoky meetings, the arguments, the pickets, the turmoil of over-population, man in the mass. Christ! How could one man, one individual speck, find his way in the tangle of motives and pressures?

'Mike!'

I turned, glancing upwards to see Sparks standing at the top of the ladder, his thin hair blowing in the wind. The bridge door slammed behind him as he came down to stand beside me, a sheet of paper thrust towards me.

I pushed it away. 'I don't need a forecast to tell me it'll be Force 9 before the night's out.'

'It's not the forecast.' His thin, rather high-pitched voice was half blown away by the wind. 'A message for the skipper.'

'Well, give it to him then,' I said irritably.

'I have. But since it concerns you-' I could smell the beer on his breath as his pale face thrust closer, the eyes bright behind his glasses. 'You in trouble?'

'How d'you mean?'

'Look, Mike,' he said, 'you were shipped at the last minute after Les Sinclair had gone down with a virus. You and the skipper — you're not buddies like Les, so he may not tell you. I thought I'd warn you, that's all. The police will be waiting for you when we dock. A Detective-Sergeant Wright. Here's a copy of the message.' And he pressed the piece of paper into my hands.

'Thanks.'

'They want to interview you. I suppose you know why?'

'Yes, I know why.' I stuffed the paper into my pocket, staring out into the night, saying nothing. I had been afraid of this all through the voyage. Somebody must have recognized me, and now, when I stepped ashore, the police would be there, wanting a statement. And if I gave it to them, if I admitted I knew who the men were, then I would be a witness for the prosecution, and the decision would no longer be a personal one, something between me and my conscience and made of my own volition. It would be the result of police interrogation. At least it would seem like that to everybody but me.

'D'you want any sort of a message sent, a private message — lawyers or anything like that?' He was still standing there at my elbow, a man whose world was the ether, who fed on information dragged out of the air on invisible wavelengths, his curiosity glowing in his owlish eyes.

'No,' I said. 'There's nothing a lawyer can do.'

He hesitated, standing there beside me, waiting. Doubtless it was kind of him, but radio operators are all the same. They want to be in everybody's confidence. In the end he left me and I was alone again, watching as the ice-battered trawler plunged southward down the North Sea, each surge and twist carrying me closer to the moment of decision. But you don't change the whole direction of your life because a child is nearly burned alive. Or do you?

The storm was rising, and in the end I gave up thinking about it and went to my cabin, lying there, sleepless and fully clothed, the ship's plates writhing to the violence of the movement. I was back on the bridge in time to get the news. It came right at the end, the talks broken off and the strike still on. Weeks now and every shipyard in Hull at a standstill. Did that mean Pier son & Watt were out, too?

The skipper was there and he turned and looked at me. 'You hear that? And the poomps going full bat.'

They'd been going flat out ever since we'd hit the ice. They'll get us home,' I said.

He didn't answer, moving to the port side of the bridge, his carpet slippers flapping loosely. He wasn't a big man, but there was a lot of strength in that short, long-armed body, the round bullet head almost neckless on broad shoulders. And he had an inner strength, his silences more telling than words. He stood there for a while, staring out into the murk ahead. 'Better get some sleep. It's going to be a long night.'

I nodded. It was his watch now and I went below, checking the engine-room and the hold. The fish pounds were just about full, almost 2,000 kit — that would be about 20,000 stone landed, a lot of it high-priced. Worth the bashing we had taken up there on the edge of the pack and my share as mate looking good. The fact that she was low in the water did not matter now. We were running with a quartering sea and the pumps were holding. If we'd been steaming into it things might have been different.

It was a long night all right. At four in the morning I was back on the bridge, visibility almost nil and the big deckle they called the Porpoise with his eyes glued to the radar screen. The skipper was in the chartroom working out a Decca position. His thick hairy hands juggled with the parallel rule, pencilling a cross just east of our intended course. 'Wind's veered a point,' pooshing us more than I thought.' He ordered a correction to the helm as he entered up the log, and then, instead of leaving me to my watch, he slid the chart-room door shut. 'Three weeks now. You heard what they said on the news. Every yard in Hooll at a standstill.' He had his broad bottom wedged against the chart table, his slightly protuberant eyes fixed on me. 'Every blasted yard.' He pulled his pipe and and began to fill it. 'When did you first go into trawling?'

'Some years back now.'

'Ah asked when.'

'Spring of 1969 — the Lady Betty.'

'Old Harcourt. Shipped as a deckie, did you?'

I nodded.

'And your mate's ticket four years later.' He lit his pipe, solid and immovable as the ship fell off a wave-top, sending the rule and dividers skidding across the chart. 'Ah doan't understand you, and that's the truth. A bloke with your education-' He shook his head, frowning. 'Still got your union card an' all?'

'Yes.'

'But not the Hooll Trawlers' Officers — shipyard, isn't it?'

I didn't say anything and he grunted. 'What made you switch to trawling?'

'My own business,' I said.

'Aye.' He took the pipe out of his mouth, his eyes staring. 'But just tell me. Ah'd laike t'knaw.'

I laughed. What could I tell him? 'The sea,' I said. 'It's in my blood, I suppose.'

'You were at the Marston Yard on Clydebank, a member of the strike committee in 1968. And before that you were in prison, result of a demo that tangled with the police.'

'That's a long time ago.'

'You're still the same bloke, aren't you?'

'Come to the point,' I said.

'Orl raight, Ah will. Pierson & Watt now, if they've coom oot… Sounds laike it, an' they're non-union, all of them. Young Watt won't employ union men. So where do we go for a refit?'

'Not my problem,' I said.

'No. Not your problem. But you're doing, I reck'n.'

'Then you're wrong.'

He shook his head, an obstinate look on his face. 'You're a good mate. I grant you that. But you're a trouble-maker. I wouldn't have shipped you if-' He stuffed his pipe firmly back into his mouth.

'If what?' I asked.

'I was doing you a favour.'

'You were short of a mate.'

'Aye. But it didn't have to be you.' And then he shrugged and said, 'Orl raight, Ah'll tell you — Jimmy Watt asked me to take you. Get the bugger off our backs, that's how he put it.' And then his big forefinger was jabbing me in the chest. 'Do you deny you were on the Committee?'

'Not on the Committee. I was called in to advise them.'

'Advise them, eh?' His voice was still quiet and under control, but the Hull accent was stronger now, something building up in him, an undercurrent of menace. 'Advise them on what? Intimidation?' He leaned his round head closer, the grey eyes cold and fishlike in the hard light. 'Or did they call you in to get at Jimmy's foreman, to get Bob Entwhisle to-'

'What the hell are you talking about?' I was suddenly angry, remembering how I'd walked out of that crowded meeting, the little Congregational Hall thick with smoke and full of violence. 'You know nothing about it.'

'Doan't I? Well I know this-'

'You listen to me.' I was shouting and I reached out and grabbed hold of his shoulder.

'Doan't you dare.' He slammed his big fists down on my arms, wrenching himself free. 'Keep your hands off.'

'Just listen,' I said. 'It was the economics of the strike — the future of the yards, the financial state of shipbuilding in the North East. They were scared about their jobs.'

He glared at me. 'They doan't care about their jobs. They doan't care about anything — just so long as they can smash us all to hell.'

'You may be right.' What was the point of arguing with him? I suddenly felt tired. 'My watch,' I said. 'You'd better get some sleep yourself now.'

'Why would they ask you about the financial state of the shipbuilding industry?'

'I was trained as an economist. London School of Economics. You know so much about me you should know that.' I turned to the chart. 'What do you intend to do? You can't make another trip without a refit. There's a leak for'ard where we hit that growler-'

'Ah doan't need you to tell me that.' He relit his pipe, staring down at the chart. 'There's no roosh. Ah'll have a word with Jimmy in the morning. Aye.' He nodded to himself. 'We've a little time yet.' And he turned abruptly, without another word, and left me alone to my watch.

It was a long four hours; nothing to relieve the monotony but the slowly changing position of an oil rig seen only as a blip on the radar screen. The wind was gusting fifty knots, the ship standing on her head and no visibility in the blinding murk of sleet and spray. Plenty of time to think, and my brain too tired, too numbed by the battering to work out what I was going to tell the police when we docked. There had been two of them, two shadowy figures, and then the crash of glass, the sudden blaze, their faces lit as they turned and ran.

I switched on the Decca Navigator, concentrating on the clicking dials to get a fix, doing it automatically, knowing I could identify them both and worrying about Bucknall. Claxby I didn't care about; he was an older man, a hardline militant brought in to cause trouble. If it had been just Claxby, there on his own, I wouldn't have hesitated. But young Harry Bucknall was the son of a good honest shipyard worker who had marched to London with the Jarrow boys in the thirties. A post-graduate university student, intelligent and an anarchist. At least he had done it out of conviction, believing that violence was the path to revolution. And I had no doubt who had been the ringleader.

I entered up the fix and went back to stand by the wheel, staring out into the black night. All I had to do was tell the police. Tell them the truth. But it was the charge that worried me. If I hadn't been there, if the little girl had died in that fire, it would have been murder. The charge could still be attempted murder and myself in the witness box, the full glare of publicity, and everybody knowing I had been interrogated by the police. It would be my evidence, my evidence alone, that convicted them. I would be cast in the role of a Judas. And they hadn't meant to harm the little girl. They hadn't known she was there.

All this time I was pacing up and down, the bridge tumbling under my feet, the noise of the storm beating at my ears, the elements in tune with my mood — everything in chaos, the world, my life, everything. Was this a sort of crossroads in the long journey from womb to grave? If only there were somebody I could turn to, somebody to lean on, to give me strength, to tell me what the hell to do.

I Was thinking of Fiona then, wishing to God that just something in my life had turned out right. And then a rogue wave came out of the night, hitting us on the quarter, water roaring along the port side, and as the ship fell off the top of it with a slam that hurled me against the man at the wheel I heard him cursing under his breath. Our eyes met and his big mouth opened in a grin: 'Them lads ashore… all toocked oop in bed with their womenfolk. Makes me laff on a night like this.'

'Why?'

"Cos they doan't know when they're well off, always itching for something. Me, I joost want what they've got — raight now I'd settle for the missis, all warm and cosy laike, naice soft bed that didn't move unless I made it.' He grinned, winking an eye, the longing of weeks at sea on his face.

My watch ended and I went to my bunk, lying in the dark, thinking wearily. I was an idealist, and idealists get cut down to size when ideals are transposed into politics. Maybe I wasn't tough enough. When it came to the crunch… Was I a coward then, my ideals shattered by a petrol bomb? But the doubts had started long before that. When was it? At that Clydeside meeting when a small group of militants screamed 'Fascist!' at me because I had tried to spell out for them what would happen? I had dried up and handed the mike over to a man who talked their language, not the logic of falling orders and redundancies. Was that when the doubts had started? I couldn't be sure. It was such an accumulation of things.

It was just on ten when I went back on to the bridge, daylight now, a grey world, cloud and sea all one in colour and the whitecaps rolling in from dead astern. I glanced at the gyro and then at the skipper. 'You've altered course.'

'Aye.'

'Aberdeen?'

He nodded, his eyes on a small freighter headed for Norway and making heavy weather of it as she butted the tail end of the storm.

'Did you talk to Watt?'

He didn't answer me and after a moment I ducked out of the bridge to the door of the radio room. The fug in that little cubbyhole was overpowering, the air thick with smoke. Sparks was thumbing the key, tapping out a message in his shirt sleeves, a cigarette burning beside him in a rusty tobacco tin full of stubs. I waited, sweating there, until he had finished. 'Any news for me?' I asked.

He picked up his cigarette, turning in his chair and looking at me, his dark eyes large behind the steel-rimmed glasses. 'You know we're headed for Aberdeen?' Morse crackled from the loudspeaker and he reached out tobacco-stained fingers for his message pad, listening with his pencil poised. Then he relaxed. 'That rig again. So much traffic for Redco 2 I've hardly been able to send at all, and the old man desperate to jump the queue and get us slipped.'

'He hasn't notified the Aberdeen police?'

'Not his job to do that. The office knows, of course, so maybe they have.' He leaned back, his eyes fixed on me, but half his mind on the Morse. 'They're waiting to haul anchors so I suppose they got no joy on the Bressay Bank. Les is fit again, by the way.' And he added, 'Sorry about that. The old man'll be sorry, too, in a way. Les isn't the best mate in the fleet. What'll you do when we get in?'

I hesitated, wondering whether the police would be waiting for me at Aberdeen. 'Go on the club again, I suppose.' One trip in six months. I was hating myself for being so dependent on trawler owners for employment, conscious of a deep-seated urge to start something on my own.

'Why don't you switch to oil — supply ships, something like that? That's where the future is. Trawling…' He shrugged his shoulders. 'Doesn't matter to me. I go where Marconi send me. But a man like you, with a master's certificate, you want to go where the future is.' He jerked his head at the sound of the Morse. 'He's talking to the tug owners now, a big German job steaming north from Heligoland. The forecast's good, so they'll be under tow tomorrow night. Every trip it's the same; down past Brent and Auk, all this area of the North Sea, nothing but rig talk — Bluewater, Staflo, North Star, Glomar. Take my advice — I listen and I know. There'll be more rig supply ships than trawlers soon.'

'Maybe.' I stood there for a moment listening to the crackle of the Morse. Clydebank, Newcastle, Hull, all the political involvement of my life… My mind switched to Shetland, to the islands now far down below the horizon. Was it the island blood in my veins that had made me abandon capitalist America as a kid? Was that why I had started on my wanderings, seeking the values I could hot find in the rich world my mother had embraced? Or was it the legendary IS figure of my father? Had I built him up as a hero in my mind simply because she had tried to bury him? I didn't know. My mind was confused. All I knew for certain was that everything I had done, everything I had believed in, had suddenly turned sour.

And then Sparks murmured, 'The offshore capital of the world.' He coughed over his cigarette. 'Aberdeen — you know it?'

I shook my head. 'Never been there.'

He smiled. 'Well, that's what they call it.' The Morse ceased and he glanced at the clock, his fingers reaching for the dials, turning to the emergency waveband. 'Take a walk round the harbour when you get there. Have a look at the pipe storage depots, the diving outfits, all the clutter of stuff the oil rigs need. You'll get the message then all right. Aberdeen's no longer a fish port. It's an oil rig supply base, and if I were in your shoes…' He stopped then, his body suddenly tense as a ghostly voice, calling in clear, began repeating the single word — 'Mayday, Mayday, Mayday…' The voice was urgent, giving details now… It was a trawler with its engines out of order being swept on to a rock-bound coast in heavy seas.

'Shetland.' Sparks was scribbling it down on his pad, and as the voice began to repeat the vessel's position, he glanced up at a large-scale map. 'Looks like he'll drive ashore on Whalsay Island.' He ripped the sheet off his pad and got to his feet. 'Nothing we can do about it, but the old man better know.' And he hurried past me through into the bridge.

The name of the trawler was the Duchess of Norfolk. We looked her up out of curiosity. She was just under 200 tons, built at Lowestoft in 1939 and owned now by G. Petersen of Hamnavoe, Shetland. New engines 1968, Paxman diesels, so what had gone wrong? All the Chief said was, 'Bloody Shetlanders, they wouldn't know a crankshaft from a camshaft.' He didn't like the Shetlanders, having been stuck there once with gales and a leaking ship.

The Duchess of Norfolk was in fact south of Whalsay and, with the wind backed into the north-east, she drove towards South Nesting. We caught snatches of radio talk, very faint, as the trawler Ranger steamed to her assistance. It gave me something to occupy my mind, following her progress on the Shetland Isles chart No. 3059. She cleared Muckle Fladdicap, a bare three cables to the eastward, drifted inside Muckla Billan and Litla Billan, missed the rock islet of Climnie by a shift of the tide and hit Fiska Skerry at 13.46. By then the trawler Ranger was almost up with her and inside of half an hour had a line aboard. That was the last I heard of her, for we were already in sight of Aberdeen's North Pier, with the city showing grey through the murk above the pale line of the Links, and I was busy getting ready to dock.

The skipper took us in, heading straight for Albert Basin, where the trawlers lay. As we approached Point Law, a survey vessel sweeping past us began to open up. Sparks appeared at my elbow. 'See what I mean?' He nodded towards a cluster of tanks to starboard with supply ships moored alongside. 'Mud silos,' he said. The area beyond was being developed, the sound of reconstruction work coming to us across the water. 'That's the future you're looking at.'

It was an extraordinary sight, the whole harbour area crowded with ships, drilling ships, survey vessels, seismic ships, tugs and ancillary craft all jam-packed among the fishing vessels. And; upriver from Torry Harbour, a litter of pipes and buoys, equipment of all sorts, lay piled up on the quay, more mud silos and a new berth nearly completed. As we moved slowly into Albert Basin we passed very close to Point Law and the supply ship bunkering there. It was the first time I had been really close to one of these flat-bottomed, tug-like vessels that keep the rigs drilling.

'I only know trawlers,' I said. Moored there, the ship looked very sleek, very efficient, but I had seen one once heading out to the Brent in a strong westerly gale, seas breaking over the flat, open afterdeck. 'I'd rather have the Fisher Maid up around Bear Island than one of those in a North Sea gale.'

He shrugged, his eyes smiling behind his glasses. 'All I'm saying is, if you got in on the act, you wouldn't be short of a ship for years, not the way new rigs are coming into service.'

A trawler passed us very close, another just ahead of us, as we nosed our way down the length of Albert Quay, searching for a berth. I could see the fish market now, and then a gap opened up and the skipper said quietly, 'Looks a laikely hole. Reckon there's just room for us.' He ordered port wheel, our bows swinging, and I took the loudhailer out on to the wing of the bridge.

We were tied up by 14.00, the lumpers offloading the catch. Since Aberdeen was not our home port, there was no pay, only subs from the local agent to see the boys home. They had a long rail journey ahead of them and most of them were away by the time the first pound boards were being replaced and the emptied compartments hosed down. The skipper called me to his cabin. He was packing his bag. 'You in a hurry to get back?' He knew I was the only officer who hadn't got a wife waiting for him in Hull.

I shook my head.

He was standing holding a shirt and a bundle of dirty socks in his hand, a slug of whisky on the locker behind him. 'Ah thought not.' The bulging eyeballs stared at me. 'Take it then you won't object to staying the night aboard. We've no ship's husband here, you see, and Les doesn't arrive till tomorrow.' He waited a moment and then nodded. 'Good. That's settled then. Better use my cabin so's you can keep an eye on things laike.'

The lumpers packed it in shortly before 19.00 and then I had the ship to myself. I sat on the bridge smoking a pipe and watching the lights come on as dusk descended over the city and the high land behind it. A stillness had settled on the Basin, the quay deserted except for the occasional figure moving along the shadowed wall of the sheds. A siren blared briefly and a trawler up near the entrance started backing out. I watched her as she backed for the open sea, thinking of the mate preparing his gear and the ice ahead and the skipper wondering where the hell he'd get a catch that would satisfy his gaffers.

After that the port seemed dead, nothing stirring. Night had closed down on Aberdeen. I tapped out my pipe and went to the galley to collect a plateful of shepherd's pie and veg the cook had left for me. The galley stove was still warm and I put a kettle on for coffee. With the coffee I had a glass of brandy from the officers' ex-bond locker. A cat had come aboard and as I drank I watched it stalk its prey in the shadows cast by the deck lights.

To be suddenly alone on a ship gives one an odd feeling of isolation. All during the voyage the Fisher Maid had been alive with men, an organized unit of activity, her hull vibrating to the pulse of her engines, resounding to the noise of the sea. Now it was deserted, a hollow shell, inactive, still and strangely quiet. I had time to think now, but somehow I seemed unable to concentrate. I was tired, of course, but I think it was' the stillness and the quiet that prevented my mind from focusing clearly. I finished my drink, went down to my cabin and packed my gear, shifting it to the skipper's cabin in the bridge housing. Then I turned in.

I was in my pyjamas, having a last smoke, when I heard footsteps crossing the gangway, the murmur of voices. I went through into the bridge and out on to the wing. Two figures stood talking on the deck below. 'Looking for somebody?'

They turned at the sound of my voice, their faces pale in shadow, something slightly menacing as they stared up at me. Then one of them moved, coming out of the shadows to the foot of the ladder. 'Heard you were still aboard. We'd like a word with you.' He started up the ladder, a short, burly figure, his round, pugnacious face framed in dark sideburns, eyes deep-set and a full-lipped mouth. 'Remember me?'

I nodded, the sight of him taking me back to that angry meeting in Hull. He was a Newark man and nothing to do with the shipyards. His name was Bob Scunton and he had confronted me when I was still trying to address the meeting, prodding me in the stomach and telling me to belt up and stop talking a load of statistical rubbish the lads didn't want to know. The other man I had never seen before. 'All right,' I said. 'You can come up.' And I led them into the bridge. There was only one seat, so we stood facing each other, and I didn't like it. I had the feeling of being cornered. 'Well, what is it?'

'Last month, the night of the shipyard workers' meeting.' Scunton's voice was slow and deliberate, his eyes watching me. 'You got a little girl out of a burning house and handed her over to the neighbours. Didn't give your name. Just handed her over and slipped away. Right?'

I didn't say anything, standing there, waiting, conscious of the other man with a slight cast in the left eye that made his gaze oddly disconcerting.

'Thought no doubt you wouldn't be recognized.'

My mouth felt dry, all my fears now suddenly realized. I knew Scunton, knew his reputation. These were men who operated in the shadows, manoeuvring and motivating others, controlling events. They weren't union men. They weren't members of any political party. But they were always there, in the background, whenever there was trouble. 'Come to the point,' I said.

'All right, I will.' He licked his lips, his eyes darting round the bridge. 'What about a drink while we're discussing it?'

'It's been a hard trip,' I told him. 'I'm tired.'

'So are we,' he growled. 'Soon as we heard you weren't putting into Hull we came north.' He thrust his head forward. 'You haven't talked to the police yet, have you?'

'No.'

He nodded. 'Okay, but when you do, what are you going to tell them? That's what we want to know.'

'It's no business of yours.' But I knew it was. I could see it in the way the two of them glanced at each other, and suddenly all the turmoil and the doubts exploded in anger. 'You bastards put them up to it, is that it? Is that what you're scared of — that I'll identify them and they'll involve you?'

Scunton moved towards me. 'You shop them and we'll-'

But the other man interrupted him. 'I'll handle this, Bob.' His voice was quiet, a hard, flat voice. 'You were recognized. One of the neighbours, a man. The police will expect a statement.' He paused, the disconcerting gaze sliding past me. Then suddenly he asked, 'What were you doing standing there in the rain outside No. 5 Washbrook Road?'

I hesitated, unwilling to explain myself to men I knew would never understand. 'You weren't at the meeting that night.'

'No.'

'There was a mood of violence,' I said. 'A lot of threats were made, mainly directed at Pierson &c Watt and the yard foreman-'

'We believe in solidarity,' Scunton growled in that thick voice of his. 'Pierson & Watt were the one yard-'

'You believe in violence,' I told him.

'All right. Maybe we do, when it's necessary.'

I turned back to face the other man. 'If I hadn't been there, Bucknall and that fellow Claxby might well be facing a murder charge.'

'So you know who it was," Scunton cut in.

'Yes.' I said. 'I know who they were.' And suddenly I didn't care. 'If you want to throw petrol bombs, why the hell don't you have the guts to do it yourselves? And to risk innocent lives — a little girl…"

'You threw it.' His voice was so quiet it stopped me like a bucket of ice-cold water. 'That's what we came to tell you.'

Staring at him, seeing the hard, bitter line of his mouth, the cold grey eyes glinting in the gleam of deck lights, I felt suddenly scared of him. 'Who are you?' I asked him.

He gave a little shrug, a shut look on his face. 'We have a witness.' He pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and offered me one, and when I pushed it away, he said, 'You were alone, nobody to corroborate your evidence.' He took out a cigarette and lit it, the movement of his hands deliberate. He was giving me time to take it in. 'So it will be your word against his, and the man who will say you threw the petrol bomb is a local man. He'll make a good witness.'

'Get out!' My hands were clenched, the words coming through my teeth.

He didn't move, drawing in a lungful of smoke and staring at me. 'Bucknall doesn't matter. But Claxby is too useful a man to be thrown away.'

'Get out of here!'

'You could be useful, too.' He said it reflectively, as though considering the matter. Then he shrugged. 'But at the moment we're concerned with the East Coast yards. We've failed with the trawlermen. The fisheries officer of their union won't play. But if we can hold the strike long enough, then there'll be very little fish coming in anyway. That will give the unions the leverage they need in their negotiations. A trial, with two militants in dock, wouldn't suit us at all.' He paused, and then added, 'We were able to have a word with your radio operator before coming here. In a pub. You're out of a job again, it seems.' And when I didn't say anything, he smiled. 'He told us he thought you ought to be commanding a supply ship. That's where the future lies, isn't it?'

He was looking at me again and the expression of his eyes had a speculative quality. 'Get into oil,' he said quietly. 'And forget about what you saw in Washbrook Road.' He stubbed out his cigarette, then turned abruptly towards the door, jerking his head at Scunton.

'Think about it,' he said over his shoulder. 'All you need tell the police is that it was too dark to see who they were.'

'And if I tell them the truth?'

He swung round on me. Then you'd be a fool.' And he added, 'You keep your mouth shut and I'll see our witness does the same. You understand?' He stared at me a moment. Then he nodded and went out, Scunton following, their footsteps sounding hollow as they went down the ladder and across the deck to the gangway. And after that I was alone again, still in my pyjamas and feeling cold.

I got myself a drink, my hands trembling, wishing, as I had done so often in my life, that I had somebody to fall back on, not just the legendary figure of my father, but somebody, something, to give me strength. And suddenly I was thinking of the islands seen the previous evening black against that green strip of sky. Shetland, the land where my father had been born. I had never been so close to Shetland before, and sitting there, the brandy warming my guts, it gradually came to me that now was the moment. I would go north to the islands — now while I had the chance.

CHAPTER TWO

My first sight of Shetland was a lighthouse sliding by the window and green lawn slopes falling from rock outcrops, everything fresh and clean, touched with the luminosity of evening light. The Highlander landed and I saw the remains of old wartime buildings as we taxied in to park beside a large British Airways helicopter. There was a light drizzle falling, and as I stood waiting on the apron for my baggage, the smell of the grass and the sea all about me, I had a deep sense of peace, something I hadn't felt for a long time.

Most of my fellow passengers were oil men returning to the Redco rig. For ten minutes or so they filled the little prefab terminal with colour and the babble of their accents; then they trooped out to the waiting chopper and in a buzz-saw whirr of engines and blades they were lifted up and whirled away. Suddenly everything was very quiet, only the rattle of crockery as a woman went round the tables collecting empty cups, the murmur of voices from the BA desk where the dispatch clerk was talking to the crew of the Highlander. There was an Ordnance Survey map on the wall. I got myself another cup of coffee and stood looking at it, refreshing my memory based on the Shetland charts I had pored over on the bridge of Fisher Maid.

Sumburgh Head is the southernmost point of the whole island chain, the tip of a long finger of mountainous land jutting south from the main port of Lerwick. The distance by road looked about thirty miles. A voice at my side said, 'Can I help you?' He was a small man in blue dungarees, dark-haired with bright blue eyes and a ruddy face.

'I want to get to Hamnavoe,' I said and pointed to the little port, which was at the north end of the island of West Burra, a little below Lerwick, but on the west coast.

He ran a car hire business, but when I said I couldn't afford to rent a car, that didn't seem to worry him. 'Hamnavoe.' He shook his head. 'Don't know anyone going to Hamnavoe. You'll have to go to Lerwick first. There's a bus in the morning, or maybe I can fix you a lift. Either way it means staying the night.' And he added, 'My wife can fix you bed and breakfast if that's any help.'

His name was Wishart and I stayed the night with them, in a small house above Sumburgh village with breeze-block outbuildings in which he kept his cars. He had been a mechanic servicing local farm vehicles until the oil companies started drilling off Shetland.

'Now I've got a real good business, not just tourists, you see — it's all the year round, oil executives, contractors, technicians, commercial travellers. We've never known it so good.' His face was beaming.

'Yes, but how long is it going to last?' his wife said quietly, and behind her words was the experience of hard times.

'Ah!' His eyes glanced quickly round the neat little parlour with its gleaming new furniture and bright chintz curtains. 'That's the question, isn't it?' We had finished the meal and were sitting drinking whisky out of a gin bottle. The whisky had a strong peaty flavour. 'You being from Aberdeen, maybe you know the answer to that.'

I shook my head. 'I'm a trawlerman.'

'Trawlers, eh? You looking for a job up at Hamnavoe?'

'Maybe,' I replied cautiously.

'It's a lot smaller than Lerwick, you know. You'd do better in Lerwick.' He poured himself another finger of the pale liquor, topping my glass up at the same time. 'Only this morning I rented a car to a man wanting to get hold of a trawler chap — something to do with one of the rigs. But there aren't any big boats up here, only peerie ones, and there's none of them going cheap. Anyway, the fishermen here, they hate the oil companies. They're scared of what could happen. The Torrey Canyon was bad enough, but suppose one of these production rigs blows? Particularly if they strike oil to the west; then all of the Shetland fisheries could be destroyed, millions of tons of oil polluting the seas for miles around. That's what scares them.' He looked at me, his eyes very bright. 'Dangerous bloody game, anyway. Trawling, I mean. There's just been one of them wrecked, went ashore yesterday in a north-easterly gale. Skipper dead and two of the crew injured.'

The Duchess of Norfolk?'

He nodded. That's right. Drifted into South Nesting Bay… Hear they beached her in the East Voe of Skellister. That's all right until another north-easter piles the seas in. You mentioning Hamnavoe reminded me of it. The skipper came from Hamnavoe. Now what the hell was his name? Not a Shetlander. Norwegian, I think. You ever been up to Graven?' And when I told him I had never been in Shetland before, he nodded, staring into his glass. 'An old wartime base, like Sumburgh here. But bigger. They had seaplanes — Catalinas — and a big airfield. And Scalloway, that's where the Norwegian boats were based after they moved from Lunna, landing men and arms in Norway, bringing refugees out. I was only a peerie boy at the time, but my Dad was up there. A blacksmith, fixing armaments, all sorts of odd jobs.' And he went on to talk of his father, the stories he had told, until it was almost midnight and his wife chased him off to bed.

It rained all night. I could hear it drumming on the slates. But in the morning the sun was shining, a magnificent view of sea and rocks and greensward, all sparkling in the freshness of that early northern light. I left with the post van that had brought the mail down from Lerwick, the washed brightness of land and sea calling to something deep within me. We passed under Ward of Scousburgh, Mosey Hill and Hallilee, the road dropping down to the sea, vistas of blue water stretching away to Bressay and the Isle of Noss. It was all new, an island world, yet I felt at home, and the remoteness of it seemed suddenly to cut me off from all the rest of my life. It was a strange feeling, and I sat there beside the postman hardly saying a word.

He dropped me about three miles from Lerwick, where the Scalloway road came in from the west. 'You won't have to wait long. Anybody will give you a lift.' A breeze had sprung up, a cold little wind from the north. I lit my pipe, watching the red van disappear. I was alone then, the hills all around me, sheep noises and the sea down in the valley. Would anybody at Hamnavoe remember my father? I didn't even know when he had left the place. My mother might have been able to tell me, but I hadn't written to her in years, and anyway she was dead now. She had never been to Shetland, never talked to me about his early life.

A builder's truck loaded with breeze-blocks took me to the outskirts of Scalloway, where the road to Hamnavoe turned off to the south along the placid waters of the East Voe. A small drifter was anchored under the castle, sea birds lying to their own reflections, and I could see water stretching away beyond the bridge that joined Trondra Island to the Mainland shore. I was there about twenty minutes before a tourist gave me a lift into Hamnavoe. It was lunchtime then. I bought some biscuits and cheese, left my bags at the stores, and strolled up a grass track to sit on a bank below some cottages. A purse-seine fishing boat was coming in round the headland, another moored at the concrete pier, both of them wooden-hulled and painted black.

The woman in the stores had told me there was nobody of the name of Randall in Hamnavoe now. She had said something about a plaque in the church, but when I went there after my lunch, it was locked. There was no pub and the few people I met had never heard of him. It was the teacher up at the school who suggested I talk to Miss Manson, an elderly spinster living at Brough, about a mile down the road towards Grund Sound. But the wind had backed westerly and it was raining then. I found lodgings in a little house on the hill that had a Bed and Breakfast sign in the window and was full of children. It was a bleak place looking north to a scattering of islands half hidden in the rain. The man was away at sea, the woman uncommunicative, and the radio blared incessantly.

As darkness fell I walked down to the pier. But there was nobody there, the two fishing vessels silent and deserted, and Hamnavoe itself a dead place wrapped in a wet blanket of low cloud. I was walking slowly back, my head tucked into the collar of my anorak, when a shaft of light shone out from a cottage doorway and a voice said, 'You the stranger been asking about Alistair Randall?'

'Yes,' I said, and he invited me in. He was a beaky, tired-looking man with thin white hair and a nervous blink to his eyes. The door closed behind me and I was in a cosy little room with a peat fire. A little old woman, very plump, sat in her knitting chair, the needles clicking, bright eyes watching me out of a round face that showed scarcely a wrinkle.

'My wife,' he said and I was conscious of an atmosphere in the room, an undercurrent of strain. 'Mrs Sandford knew the Randalls.'

She nodded, an almost imperceptible movement of the head, the knitting needles clicking away and her eyes fixed on me with a strange eagerness.

'Can you tell me about Alistair Randall?' I asked.

Her eyes dropped to her knitting and there was an uncomfortable silence. Her husband smiled at me blinking his eyes. 'He was here all one summer.'

It was very warm in the room and I unzipped my anorak. 'You did know him then?'

The knitting needles stopped, the room very still, and she was staring at me again. 'Who are you?' she asked.

I hesitated before replying. Since leaving the Fisher Maid I had been using my mother's maiden name of Fraser — just in case they tried to follow me. But now… 'My name is Mike Randall,' I said. 'Alistair Randall was my father.'

The sound of her breath was like a sigh and she nodded slowly. 'Yes, I see now — the eyes, of course. We did wonder, Albert and me — when we heard you had been making enquiries…' That strange eagerness was back in her eyes as she gazed up at me. 'From America, aren't you?'

'I was brought up there. I left when I was twenty.'

She seemed disappointed. 'But your mother.. She went out as governess to a rich businessman and then married him. During the war I think.'

'Yes, during the war.'

'Muriel.' She nodded. 'Her name was Muriel. Is she still alive?' I didn't say anything and she turned to her husband. 'Give Mr Randall a chair, Albert. And a glass of whisky to keep out the damp.'

She asked me a lot more questions then, about myself and what I had done with my life. 'So you didn't come to see me?'

'I came to find out about my father.'

'Did you know I wrote to your mother?'

'No.'

'It must be three or four years ago now.'

'She shouldn't have written like that,' her husband said, his voice gentle, almost apologetic. 'I told her not to.'

'Life hasn't been easy for us,' she muttered angrily. 'Both of us getting old now, and Albert hasn't worked in twenty years. It was my son insisted I write. Did your mother never mention I had written to her? Mrs Graber, Bay View, Narragansett, Rhode Island, USA. That's right, isn't it?'

I think she must have written to her for money, and because she was disappointed that I hadn't come to Hamnavoe in answer to that letter, it took time and patience to get her to talk about my father. Her husband hardly said a word. He was from Scalloway and I don't think he had ever met Alistair Randall. But she had virtually grown up with him, for the Randalls had had a small farm at Houss on East Burra and her eldest brother had kept a lobster boat down in the Voe of North Houss. 'Alistair often came out in the boat with us.' The softness of her voice, the faraway look in her eyes… I sensed there was something more, but all she said was, 'He was a very wild boy.'

He had gone to sea at the age of fifteen, on an inshore boat fishing out from Hamnavoe. Then his father had died, the farm was sold and his mother had gone to live at Easter Quarff, which was where she had come from. 'I didn't see him for a long time after that. He got a job on a Lerwick drifter. And when the Shetland Times printed his views on the working conditions of the island drifters he started writing for the papers regularly, you see.'

She produced some faded cuttings from her work bag, and while I was glancing through them, she told me how he had shipped in a Danish cargo boat bound for Svendborg and hadn't come back for a long time.

'Did he go on to Russia?' I asked, for the last of the cuttings was about whaling in the Barents Sea.

But she didn't know. 'He only spoke of Denmark and Norway. Oh, and Finland — he had been to Finland.'

'How long was he away?'

'Almost three years.'

'And then he came back to Lerwick?'

'No, to Hamnavoe. Of course I was married by then…'

'But you saw him again?'

She glanced across at her husband, a smile that had a quality of sadness. 'Yes, I saw him again.'

'Did he talk about Russia at all? He was a Communist, you know.'

She shook her head. 'No, he never talked to me about Russia.'

'How old was he then?'

She paused while she worked it out. 'He was a year younger than me, so he would have been twenty-three.'

That made it 1930, for he had been born in 1907. I asked her how long he had stayed in Hamnavoe. 'Just the summer, that was all. He was writing most of the time — a book, I think. But I never heard it was published. And he was gone before winter. He was a very restless man.'

'Was that when he went to America?'

But she wasn't sure. 'I never heard from him again — only at the end.' She delved into her work bag again, an envelope this time. She held it out to me, her small hand trembling slightly. 'It was because of this I asked Albert to bring you in. I thought you must be a relative, you making enquiries of him here. He will have written it just before he was killed. You can read it if you like. I don't mind.'

The envelope was dirty and torn and it had no stamp on it. The address was in pencil, barely readable. Mrs Anna Sandford, Hamnavoe, Shetland. The letter inside consisted of two sheets of ruled paper taken from some sort of notebook, a thin pencilled scrawl that had obviously been written under great tension.

It was was headed 'Somewhere outside Madrid' and dated February 25, 1939.

Darling Anna -

We are cut off and being shelled to hell. We have held on now for twenty-eight weary months. Not much food and bitterly cold. The Communists have pulled back, our flank exposed. Tomorrow or the next day I shall probably be dead. In these last hours I think of Shetland, and of you. There's not been much of happiness in my life, and what little there has been I had with you. A pity I ever left the islands, but a man's destiny lies in himself and is unavoidable. It has led me inevitably to Spain where we have played out the overture for a new world war, the bright hopes of youth lost in this mess of blood and cordite.

You may think it strange that my thoughts are with you now and not with my wife. But Muriel is a realist, whereas you are the essential woman, the Mother Earth of my native islands. God keep you, and Shetland, in peace during the holocaust to come. I pray for you as I hope you will sometimes pray for me.

Your loving

Alistair

I read it through twice, trying to visualize his circumstances at the time of writing, crouching in a trench on the crumbling perimeter of Madrid. And the writing, so overcharged with emotion — the Highland half of him crying out for pity. For prayer, too.

I looked across at the woman so still beside the fire. 'My mother said he used to write poetry.'

She took the letter from me, staring down at the two faded pages. 'During that summer… Yes, I suppose it was poetry. It didn't rhyme and I didn't understand it, you see. So he never showed me any more.' Her eyes were beginning to weep and she turned away, stuffing the letter back into her work bag. 'One of his brigade brought it more than a year later… That was just after our troops had been evacuated from Norway. He was an RAF sergeant then, stationed up at Graven. Brought us some sugar, too, didn't he, Albert?'

Her husband blinked and nodded. 'His name was Pettit. A kind man.'

'We were very short of sugar, you see, and with a growing boy…' Her voice trailed away. 'Those were difficult times here in Shetland, you know.' And she began knitting again. 'It's for my son,' she said. 'He was here today.' And her husband said, 'The first time in more than a year.'

That undercurrent again, and as soon as I had finished my whisky I left them, hurrying back to my lodgings while the words of that letter were still fresh in my mind. In the bare little room I wrote it down, I think exactly, and then I went to bed and for a long time lay awake in the dark thinking of his disillusionment and how it matched my own. To die on a battlefield for something you no longer believed in… And his last letter, not to my mother, but to this woman in Shetland. The Mother Earth of my native islands. The call of his homeland perhaps. Is that what we cling to at the point of death?

The only picture I had ever seen of him was in my mother's sitting-room in the big house on Rhode Island. It had been tucked away in a drawer full of odds and ends, a photograph taken outside the Registry Office in Edinburgh where they had been married. I remember my mother coming in and finding me standing there with it in my hand, the cold, contained fury with which she had whipped it away from me and torn it up. So long ago now that I could barely remember what he looked like, only the eyes, which had seemed to stare at me out of the print, and the fact that he was shorter than she was and his suit crumpled.

The wind blew all night. It was still blowing in the morning, but the clouds broken now and fitful gleams of sunshine. I started out for Brough shortly after nine, walking south along the back of West Burra, the grass all green and the sea sparkling. I found Miss Manson feeding chickens in the backyard of her cottage, a tall gaunt woman with steel-rimmed spectacles and a waspish tongue. The schoolteacher had warned me she was 'as full of gossip as a cat with kittens', so I didn't tell her who I was, only that I was a relative. It didn't satisfy her, of course, but she couldn't stop talking — chiefly about Anna Sandford and the dance she had led her husband, running all over the island after Alistair Randall so soon after they were married. 'And that son of hers — serves her right. He was always a hard boy and now he's up in Unst and hardly bothers with them at all… Well, there's little of Albert there, you know, the poor devil.'

I don't think she had known my father at all, only the gossip. She was a good deal younger. But she could remember the farm being sold and she showed me the dower chest her mother had bought at the auction, a plain oak piece carefully polished. Some people called Eunson lived there now and she told me how to find it. She also told me that the plaque I had heard about was not in Hamnavoe church, but in Grund Sound.

Grund Sound was another mile down the road. There was a little war memorial where the road to Houss branched off to the left across a stone bridge and the view down the South Voe was a bright vista of water, flat as a mirror in the sun. The church was just beyond the bridge, a small stone building close by the school. Fresh-dug earth, black as peat, was piled in one corner of the graveyard and the church door stood open. It was dark inside and stark in its plainness. The plaque was at the west end and the inscription, etched black on the plain brass, read:

ALISTAIR MOUAT RANDALL Journalist and soldier who died in the Spanish Civil War, 1939

'No, when the fight begins within himself, A man's worth something.' — Browning

I stared at it a long time, wondering who had put it there — the date of death not given, nor the side he had fought on, and those lines from Browning. Was it my mother? Had she made that strange choice of an epitaph? I turned to the nearest pew and sat down, wishing I knew the rest of that poem.

Footsteps on the gravel outside and a single bell in the roof struck an uncertain note. It struck again, and then again, a slow toll, rhythmic as the strokes of an oar. The door swung open, the sunshine flooding in, and then four men bearing a coffin on their shoulders. There was no music, only the tread of their feet to act as a dirge. They laid the coffin down before the altar, the daffodils on it a blaze of spring in a shaft of sunlight. The men took a pew to the left and then a Presbyterian minister came in, followed by a young woman in a tweed skirt and a monkey jacket, a brown scarf tied over her head. Her face was set and very brown. Behind her was a shambling giant of a man, blond and bearded, and several others, all ill-at-ease in their Sunday best.

They were fishermen by the look of it. The girl didn't notice me, her gaze on the coffin, but the big man did, his eyes steel blue and his huge hands clenched. I waited until they had settled and then slipped away out into the sunshine, back to the little war memorial where I sat on the grass looking down the long vista of the voe to Houss Ness.

I was still there when they came out of the church. I saw the coffin laid to rest in its grave, and then they all left in a Land Rover, heading south down East Burra towards Houss, the girl driving. The minister locked up and followed them in his car, leaving only the gravedigger shovelling at the peat-black earth.

The sad little scene and the two lines of that poem… Death the solution to everything. Who had known him so well that he had revealed to them an inner conflict that matched my own? Who had cared enough to blazon it to the world, and understood enough to claim that, and not his death for a cause, as the real worth? Not Anna Sandford surely. Not my mother. But somebody. I stared blindly at the stone cross, bare against the blue sky, and wished I had known him. And then a car came from the direction of Hamnavoe and stopped in front of me, its bright red body blocking the view.

'You're Randall, aren't you?' The driver was a man of about my own age, perhaps a little more, his dark hair greying at the temples and blown by the wind. He wore a fisherman's jersey and his face was round and plump, the eyes slightly bloodshot. 'I was told I'd find you along the road to Grund Sound. Can I give you a lift?' And he pushed the door open for me. 'I'm Ian Sandford.'

I hesitated, wondering what he wanted. 'I'd as soon walk,' I said.

'Aye, it's a fine day, and we've not had many of those this last fortnight.' He was leaning towards me across the passenger seat, his face framed in long sideburns. 'Mother said you were a trawlerman. That right?'

I didn't say anything, trying to recall what else I had told her, the islands were an enclosed world and gossip travelled fast.

'Would you know the worth of a trawler lying beached with a hole in her bottom?' There was a speculative glint in his eyes.

'Depends how badly she's holed and what it's going to cost to get her off.'

He nodded. 'Jump in then and I'll drive you over. Take about an hour, that's all.'

I hesitated, thinking it was probably just an excuse to find out more about me. But the wind was blowing from the north-west now. It was cold, and anyway it would be interesting to have a look at that trawler; there couldn't be more than one beached on Shetland. I got in beside him, but instead of turning the car, he said suddenly, 'What made you come to Grund Sound?'

'There's a plaque in the church here. I wanted to see it.'

He stared at me suspiciously. Then he laughed. 'Oh, that.' He nodded towards the graveyard and the man shovelling earth. 'There was a funeral here today. I thought perhaps.. You saw it, did you?' And he added, 'It was the trawler's skipper they buried. Old man Petersen. Owed money in Lerwick, a finance company mortgage.' He backed and turned the car. 'The wreck's up for sale now.'

Just outside Hamnavoe we turned right, across the bridge to Trondra. 'You ever been to Unst?' he asked. 'I've got a bit of a hotel at the end of Burra Firth where the north road stops. Trolls, Vikings and stone circles, that's what they come for. And it's only two miles to the top of Herma Ness. They can see Muckle Flugga from there and go home with pictures of the northernmost point of the British Isles.' He had a quick, energetic way of talking, as though needing to convince himself all the time that he was possessed of a dynamic personality. 'Birdwatchers in summer. Gales in winter.' He laughed. 'It's a bloody hell of a place.'

'Then why are you up there?' I asked.

'Oil. I'm waiting for the oil to come ashore, that's why.' He leaned towards me, his manner becoming confidential. 'I've got a company now. And I've just landed a contract to supply two of the rigs — food mainly. But to ship the stuff out I need a boat, you see.'

We crossed the Scalloway-Lerwick road, heading north alongside Loch of Tingwall towards the eastern shore. It was shortly after midday when we drove through Skellister, South Nesting Bay blue under a blue sky and the voes, sheltered in the lee of the land, calm as silk. The Duchess of Norfolk lay in the East Voe, so close against a narrow spit of land she might have been moored there. She was low in the water aft, but still neat and trim, not too much rust and her brasswork gleaming in the sun.

'Looks in good condition,' Sandford said.

I nodded, thinking of the men following that coffin. So much care, and their ship stranded here and up for sale. 'She's holed below the waterline, is she?' I couldn't see any damage, part of her bulwarks stove in, that was all.

'It's on the other side,' he said, and we left the car, walking through little mounded hills of sheep-cropped grass until we stood on the spit only a few yards from her. I could see it then, a ragged tear in the plating by the stern. It was about five feet long and only just showing above the surface of the water.

'Well, what do you think?'

I barely heard him. I was day-dreaming — thinking how it would be possible to repair that rent and get her off. Down by the stern like that, her engine-room would be flooded. But if that was the only damage a single pump would soon float her, once the hole was patched. 'You don't know how far the damage extends below the water, do you?'

'About two feet — three feet at the after end.'

'Somebody took you out?' There was no sign of a boat.

He laughed. 'Nobody here last night. It was almost dark. I just stripped off my clothes and swam out.' There were ropes trailing from her deck aft, but he had not climbed on board. 'Well, what do you reckon she'll fetch at auction?' He was watching me closely.

She was soundly built and those Paxmans… 'Have you got enough money?' I was wishing to God I had.

'No,' he said. 'Of course I haven't. But I can borrow it, can't I? Same as I did when I converted those old wartime buildings up at Burra Firth.'

I stood there, looking at the chunky vessel with her high straight stem, the rounded stern. She had been drifting before the gale all the time until she struck. It was the bulwarks for'ard that were damaged, nothing much else — a window broken and one of the trawl doors missing, that was all I could see. And if a man who'd never been to sea in his life could borrow the money…

'How much would she be worth down south?' His voice was eager, greed in his eyes as he stared at me. 'Slipped and repaired with the engines in proper order.'

'She was built in 1939.' I was remembering prices paid for old trawlers in Hull, but most of them distant water boats and much bigger than this one. 'Somewhere around fifty thousand,' I said. 'Sixty at the most.'

'And lying here, just as she is, beached in the voe and her engines full of seawater?'

He wanted a low figure, of course, hoping for a bargain. 'It depends if anybody else is as keen as you. You might get her for as low as fifteen. But you'd be lucky.'

'Fifteen — that's about what I thought. Less maybe.' He was staring at the black hull and I knew he was working out the probable cost of repairs. He didn't see her as a ship, only as a means of making money.

'When will they fix the date for the auction?' I asked.

'It's fixed already — next Monday.' And this was Friday. The haste seemed almost indecent, but as he pointed out, it only needed a strong nor'easter, and the finance company wanted their money. 'They don't care what she fetches so long as it covers the mortgage. That's the beauty of it.'

We walked back to the car then, both of us too preoccupied with our thoughts to say much as we drove back through Skellister and along the road to the south. We were in country that was as much water as land, loch and sea all quiet in the lee, the hills smiling in the sun, and my mind on that trawler resting on her bed of boulders. If he hadn't been so coldblooded about it, regarding her, not as a ship, but simply as a means of making money, I don't think I would have done what I did. Or if he had asked me to skipper her… But he was so bloody anxious to get to his bank before it closed that he hardly said a word as he drove straight to Lerwick and parked the car on the Esplanade not far from the steamer quay. 'Meet me here in an hour's time and I'll drive you back.'

But by then I had made up my mind. 'Don't bother,' I said. 'I have to see somebody here anyway.'

'Just as you wish.' He hesitated, then slammed the car door. 'Well, thanks for your help.' And he hurried away, across the road and up a steep little alley.

It was a crazy idea. I had rather less than £100 in my pocket. But to hell with that. To hell with the police. Hull was a long way away and I was thinking of the future now, and Providence in the shape of that trawler beckoning irresistibly. A bank might not give me a loan, but there were companies operating up here now that had the cash if I could provide them with what they wanted. I walked along the Esplanade to the Queen's Hotel, got myself a beer and a sandwich and phoned Wishart in Sumburgh. I was lucky, he was in and he knew where the oil man who had rented a car from him was staying — at the Lerwick Hotel. 'His name's Fuller and he's got it till Monday.'

'Monday evening?' I asked.

'No, morning. He's booked out on the early flight to Dyce.'

'And he hasn't changed his booking?'

But he didn't know about that. 'If he has, he can't have the car.'

I thanked him and rang off. Either Fuller didn't know about the auction, or else he wasn't interested. An oil company looking for a trawler would hardly concern itself with a wreck, and wanting one on the cheap was a relative term. I had another beer, enquired the way to the hotel, and set off up the hill behind the port.

The Lerwick Hotel was out by the hospital, a low building standing well back, with Bressay and the open sea behind it. Fuller wasn't there. He had left immediately after breakfast, taking a packed lunch with him. I wrote him a note telling him I would call back at six that evening and went down to the port again. In the raised pedestrian way above the Esplanade I found a newsagent's and bought an Ordnance Survey map and a copy of the Shetland Times. The local paper was datelined 28th March. It had come out that morning and the wreck of the Duchess of Norfolk was its lead story.

I read about the wreck sitting on a bollard with the gulls screaming above the fish quay. The engines had apparently been shut down due to overheating, the pipe supplying seawater to the cooling system having sprung a leak. They had been used briefly in an attempt to get her past Fiska Skerry, but had generated insufficient power and a big sea had slammed her sideways against the rock. The Ranger had towed her off and got her as far as the East Voe of Skellister, but had had to abandon the tow just short of Vadill of Garth. The engines had been used again to beach her in the lee of the spit. Unfortunately, both the chief engineer and his assistant were in hospital. They were the two men who had been injured, so there was no indication as to whether the overheating had seriously damaged the engines. At least they had not seized up solid.

The most surprising information in the report was that the insurance on the vessel had been allowed to lapse. It was owned apparently by Gertrude Petersen and skippered by her father-in-law, Olav Petersen, eighty-one, who had died of a heart attack during the gale while they were steaming south between Whalsay and the Out Skerries. It was the lack of insurance that had decided the mortgagees to foreclose. 'We naturally presumed the insurance had been maintained,' the manager was reported as saying. 'When we learned that the premium had not been paid we had no alternative.' The amount of the mortgage was not given.

On,the back page, under 'Auctioneers' Announcements',' was a notice of the sale — At the Queen's Hotel on Monday, 31st March, at 12 noon, the trawler Duchess of Norfolk of 190 tons presently lying aground in the East Voe of Skellister, by order of the owner, Mrs G. Petersen of Taing House, East Burra, and of the mortgagees, North Scottish Land and Securities.

It took me the rest of the afternoon to track down the equipment I thought I might need and to establish some sort of relationship with the yards. The smallest proved the most helpful. It was out beyond the breeze-block plant on a dirt road that led to the old gun emplacements on Green Head. The owner, a cheerful, bald-headed man named Jim Halcrow, had been an engineer in the Navy. It was little more than a workshop with no slip and only four men employed. He serviced engines and deck gear, and as luck would have it one of the boats he was working on at the moment was an oil rig supply vessel in for emergency replacement of a fractured prop shaft. 'We'll be going for trials about a week from now, and who's to care if I take her up to South Nesting on test? If I did, an' if we hapt on yon trawler lying afloat, it'd be natural for us to take her in tow, now wouldn't it?' He gave me a broad wink. 'Provided, of course, we're doing the engine repairs for you.'

'How much?' I asked.

'Say fifty for the tow, cash and nobody breathing a word, and the rate for the job on her engines.'

It was a little after six before I got back to the hotel. Fuller was waiting for me in the entrance lounge, a solid man with grey hair and a grey face. He smiled when I asked him if he had found the trawler he was looking for. 'We'll be needing two and with summer coming there's not many owners interested in chartering. I've got the offer of one, but it's old and available only at the end of July. That's too late.' He offered me a drink, and when he had given the order, he enquired whether I was a trawler owner.

'Not at the moment,' I said.

'Your note said you had a proposition.' He had a faintly harassed air.

For answer I handed him my copy of the Shetland Times. But he had already seen it and he knew about the auction. Briefly he explained his requirements: a vessel in commission and complete with crew to act as watchdog to a drilling rig his company would start operating in Shetland waters about a month from now. It would probably be drilling through into the late summer, early autumn; the stand-by boat was required to keep station, whatever the weather, which was why he had wanted trawlers rather than small coasters. 'And we don't want to own them. We just want to charter.'

'I wasn't suggesting you bought it.' The drinks came and I asked him what the charter rate would be. His figure was too low and I told him so. 'You loan me twenty thousand for six months at a nominal 2 per cent and I'll accept the charter at your rate.' And I went on to give my qualifications and the general outline of how I thought I could get the stranded trawler serviceable enough to pass survey inside of a month.

His questions were mainly financial. I think he had been trained in accountancy. He had that sort of a mind and he knew very little about ships. But he was desperate to get something settled. That was obvious when he invited me to stay on for dinner. The reason emerged during the meal. He worked at the head office of a shipping line that had just been taken over by a City finance company run by a man who, as he put it, had a flair for getting into the right thing at the right moment. This man was arriving at Sumburgh next day, flying his own plane, and as soon as he mentioned the name I understood his need to have something to show for the two days he had been up here. Vic Villiers had been acquiring a reputation for the ruthless exploitation of under-developed assets when I was still at the LSE. This was his first venture into oil.

'One of our subsidiaries has a rig operating in the North Sea. The present contract has less than a month to run. After that Mr Villiers plans a crash exploration programme of the two licences we acquired in 1971, both of them licences to drill on the continental shelf west of Shetland.'

I didn't care what their plans were. All I wanted was the money to bid for the Duchess, but when I suggested he take Villiers down to see the trawler tomorrow, he smiled at me sourly. 'I don't think he'd appreciate that. He'll have the chairman of one of the big merchant banks with him and will be travelling on to Unst for a weekend's birdwatching. He's a very keen ornithologist.'

Then come down and see it for yourself,' I said. 'Now, tonight — then at least you'll be able to tell him what the proposition is.'

He was a creature of settled habits and not at all keen on a night visit to a lonely inlet. But he was even less enthusiastic about my coming with him to Sumburgh in the morning and putting my proposition to Villiers direct. He borrowed a torch from the management and half an hour later we were walking the grass verge of the voe. The hills to our left were black against the night sky, the trawler a dark shadow in the pale sheen of the water. I took him out to the spit, playing the beam of the torch over the hull and superstructure explaining again, and in detail, how I thought I could salvage her.

He didn't say much, but I hardly noticed I was so keyed up; a mood of excitement, of elation almost, that I hadn't felt in years. And suddenly I was stripping off my clothes. If Sandford could swim out to her, then so could I, and the desire to stand on her bridge for a moment was urgent and overwhelming. Also I wanted to check the size of the hole in her hull and make certain there was nothing else seriously wrong with her.

'Wait here,' I said. 'I won't be long.'

I think he tried to dissuade me, but by then I was wading naked into the water. It was cold, but not as cold as it had been on the edge of the pack up by Bear Island. It didn't take more than a few strokes to bring me alongside the hull. The torch was rubber covered, virtually watertight, so that I was able to dive down and examine the rent. It was much as Sandford had described it, but the plates were buckled over a wider area. I dived to the bottom, saw that she was grounded at the stern, and then swam all round her, checking the hull. But that was the only damage. I came back to the rent, cold now and feeling tired. I wasn't at all sure I could pull myself up by the rope dangling over the side, and with the hole gaping in front of me, I took a chance and swam through, wary of the jagged edges of the plating.

I surfaced in the engine-room, the taste of oil on my lips, the water black and scummy, full of floating debris. The two banks of diesels were awash, the coupling to the single screw completely submerged. I floated cautiously to the ladder leading up past the header tank into the crew's quarters and clambered out. The air was warm and stale, smelling faintly of diesel oil. I stayed there for a moment, wondering how the hell those diesels had functioned at all with the engine-room half under water. But then, of course, she was on the bottom now and the tide making. Afloat, most of that rent would have been above the waterline.

I was beginning to shiver; rubbing my hands over my body, I could feel the goose-pimples below the film of oil. I started up the ladder then, unwilling to dive down again into the black murk of dirty water out of which the engines protruded like rocks awash. The ladder led up to an alleyway, and I went aft, past the galley and the messroom, to a door that opened on to the deck, with toilet and showers right in the stern. I moved for'ard, making a quick tour of the ship, careful of my feet and trying to memorize every item of damage. It was dark now, a cold breeze fluttering the flag of a dan buoy, all the nets neatly stowed along the inside of the bulwarks. Up on the road a car's headlights blazed and then vanished.

'You all right?' Fuller called.

I shouted back to him that I wouldn't be long and made my way to the bridge. It was an old-fashioned lay-out, a telegraph on the starboard side and the wheel at the back. But new equipment had been added, most of it ranged haphazardly under the half-circle of insloping windows — Decca radar, navigator and recorder, echo-sounder, log and speed indicator. The skipper's seat was fixed to a piece of metal piping socketed into the floor, and on the wall behind was the VHP set and the Warden receiver.

It was old equipment, probably secondhand. Leading off the starboard gangway, to the right of the companionway down to the quarters, was an enclosed space with a shelf for chartwork, and on it was the main R/T set, a big Cresta-Vega double-sideband. The door to the master's cabin was not locked. Inside, I found the bedding neatly piled on the bunk, all vestige of its dead occupant removed. Somebody — the girl probably, or that shambling giant of a man, who might well be the mate — had been on board and collected the old man's things, all except an aged reefer jacket hanging on the back of the door, salt marks white on the dark cloth and traces of mildew. I put it on and went back into the bridge, standing for a moment with my hands on the wheel, trying to visualize how she would be in a seaway with the diesels at half ahead and her crew shooting the trawl, myself the owner and skipper. It was a dream, no more, and I was too cold to think very clearly, but the longing was there, deep inside me.

It was only a moment I stood at the wheel, but I can still remember the odd feeling of companionship I experienced, as though there was a presence beside me in the darkness of the bridge. Not hostile, just watchful. I let go of the wheel and it was gone, as though it were the helm itself that had communicated with me. How long, I wondered, had the 81-year-old Olav Petersen been master on this bridge?

I went back to the radio shelf outside the skipper's cabin, remembering I had seen charts there. I thought perhaps the log might be there too, hoping that, if it went back far enough, it might give some indication of why Petersen's daughter-in-law had become the owner. Had her husband also died on board?

But there was no log book, only the charts. These were the two Shetland Isles charts, Nos. 11 ISA and B, and I opened them out, laying them flat along the shelf and following the pencil marks of their last cruise. They had been trawling off Ramna Stacks on the 23rd, off Gloup Holm and The Clapper on the 24th, and had started south down Bluemull Sound at 05.35 on the 25th. It was all there, every fix, every change of course, the pencilled figures thin and shaky. But on the 25th the writing had changed. It was larger, firmer, and there were erasures, as though whoever had taken over was unaccustomed to making chart entries.

I was shivering by then, my teeth chattering uncontrollably. I put the charts back in the drawer and with a last glance round the bridge, I went out along the starboard gangway into the chill of the night breeze. I had forgotten about the reefer and I took it off and 5S hung it in the shower compartment at the stern. The freeboard was so small with the tide near the high that I did not bother about a rope, but dived straight over the side and headed for the spit. The coldness of the water took my breath away and I was gasping for air as my feet touched bottom. I heard Fuller speaking, but I didn't catch the words. Then the beam of a torch stabbed the night and a voice demanded, 'Who are you? What are you doing here?' It was a woman's voice, loud and very clear, vibrant with anger.

I stopped, blinded by the glare and shivering. 'I've no clothes on,' I said, feeling foolish.

She laughed, a furious snorting sound. 'Do you think I haven't seen a man naked before? Now come on. Get out and explain what you've been up to.' And she kept the torch full on me all the time I was stumbling ashore over the boulders. I heard Fuller trying to explain, but by then I was past caring. I just reached for my clothes and dragged them on without bothering to dry myself. I thought she was some farmer's wife out after sheep or ponies, and then I heard her say, 'Sharks. You're like sharks, coming out here in the dark-' Her voice was wild and high — 'sniffing round the ship as though it is a bloody carcass.'

I grabbed the torch and turned it on her, the violence of her emotions warning me. Her face was no longer that of the young woman I had seen following the coffin that morning. Gone was the serenity, the tight-lipped control. 'I'm sorry,' I said. What else? I knew how she must feel. I could see it in her eyes, the blaze of anger brightened by tears. And she was right.

Sandford, Fuller, myself, others probably — all of us for our different reasons wanting to know whether the trawler could be floated again. 'You shouldn't have come-'

'Shouldn't have come! My ship, an' you tell me-'

'Feeling the way you do about her.' I lowered the beam of the torch, not wishing to intrude into the private world of her emotions. 'We'll go now.' I heard a sob in the darkness. That was all. She didn't say anything. 'If I had known…' I murmured, then left it at that. No good making excuses when to her we were sharks with our teeth into the prey. But whether the ship was just an outlet for her grief, or something more, I don't know. Men grieve over the loss of their ships, but for a woman…

I was thinking about her most of the time Fuller was driving me back to Hamnavoe. I'd never met a woman owner before. I was still thinking about her next morning as I took the road to Brough again, walking through a light drizzle. Fuller had said he would put my proposition to Villiers and I was remembering the blaze of anger in her eyes, wondering whether she would attend the auction. I was quite sure she had been on board when her father-in-law had died, and this I was able to confirm when I stopped at Miss Manson's cottage. 'She has always gone out with them, even when Jan was alive. He was her husband and she had to, him being so sickly, you see.'

She couldn't tell me very much. The Petersens had only been on East Burra four or five years. Jan Petersen had died about two years ago — of pneumonia, she thought. He had been in hospital at Lerwick, and after his death the trawler had been anchored between voyages in the shelter of The Taing instead of at Hamnavoe. 'So it's not often we see Gertrude now.' And she added, 'She's Norwegian, you know. The old man, too, and most of the crew, they're all Norwegians.'

I walked on then to Grund Sound and the little church, but it was the grave with its bunches of daffodils I saw; I wasn't thinking about my father. I paused for a moment on the bridge, gazing across at the mound of fresh earth. I think I had half hoped to find her there. I could have explained to her then.. But perhaps not. I went slowly on and ate my lunch in a field with three Shetland ponies watching me and a view of the calm circle of water sheltered by a tongue of land that was marked on my map as The Taing. Her house, which was an old farmhouse little bigger than a cottage, stood at the base of the tongue. It was built of stone with a slate roof, superbly set against the steep backdrop of the hills beyond Clift Sound. I could just imagine how it would have been for her, coming back after a week's trawling and waking up in the morning to look out of the window at her own ship lying snug to its reflection. But the inlet was empty now and the house looked deserted, no sign of life.

I walked on through Houss, across Ayre Dyke and over the Ward of Symbister to a view of the Stacks of Houssness and South Havra beyond, and all the time I was thinking about the ship, how much she would fetch at auction, what it would feel like to be an owner and in business for myself. The urge to achieve something constructive, that creative instinct I had ignored for so long… It had all suddenly become focused on that trawler.

I was so full of plans that it never occurred to me Villiers would turn down my proposition. God! How simple everything is when you are walking alone with the sea all round you and dreaming dreams!

But when I got back to my lodgings late in the afternoon I found a long envelope waiting for me; inside were documents for signature with a note from Fuller explaining them. Instead of a loan, Villiers had instructed him to acquire the mortgage. This he had done and he was now offering to assign it to me as advance payment for a three-month charter on the terms I had already turned down. But after that he would be prepared to renew it monthly at progressively higher rates. The documents enclosed with his letter were the Charter Agreement and the Deed of Assignment for the mortgage, and there were three copies of each. All copies require the signature of both yourself and the legal owner of the vessel, one copy to be retained by her, one by yourself and the third to be returned to me at the Lerwick Hotel by tomorrow evening at the latest. And the letter went on: We think it best that you negotiate direct with Mrs Petersen. She may well be reluctant to accept you as the mortgagee, or — and this is equally essential to what Mr Villiers and I have in mind — to agree to your captaining the vessel once it is in commission again. In which case, the auction will proceed and the vessel will become the property of the highest bidder.

The mortgage was for £12,000 at 12 per cent interest, and sitting in my bare little room, going over those documents in the fading light, I found it difficult to concentrate on the legal phrases. Was it Villiers or Fuller who had devised the scheme? Not that it mattered, but Villiers I thought — it was so simple, so damnably clever. A cheap charter that committed me to getting the trawler into commission by 20th April and then running her on a shoestring to keep out of debt… and leaving me to fix it all with Gertrude Petersen.

I saw her the following morning and by then I had been over all the arguments. To my surprise she was waiting for me when I came down the track to Taing House. It was blowing hard from the south-west, her fair hair flying in the wind as she took me inside. 'I was told to expect you.' She didn't offer me a chair, and she didn't sit down herself, but stood facing me, her legs slightly apart as though the floor of the sittingroom was a deck that might heave under her feet at any moment. 'I saw Mr Fuller yesterday. In the evening. He explained the arrangement to me.' Her manner was cold and distant and her voice controlled. 'You have the deeds with you?'

'Yes,' I said, surprised and relieved that I didn't have to explain it all to her. 'What made you see Fuller?'

'I heard he was looking for a trawler.' No emotion now, and the grey eyes fixed on me, hard and businesslike. 'You're not the only one with ideas about refloating her. Johan is down there working on her now and I have talked with Jim Halcrow.'

'I see.' So she had reached some other arrangement with Fuller. But when I suggested this, she shook her head. 'You think I cut you out?' A flicker of a smile showed at the corners of her mouth. 'Hardly. I do not have a master's ticket, nor does Johan, and neither of us has worked in a shipyard. Jim Halcrow says you have. Is that right, Mr Randall?' And she added, her eyes narrowed as though trying to make up her mind about me, 'It is Randall, isn't it? I understand when you arrived in Sumburgh-'

'Randall,' I said. 'Mike Randall.'

She gave a little shrug. 'Well, Mr Randall, the question is, can you get her sufficiently watertight to float her off?'

'I think so,' I said.

She looked at me a moment and then she nodded. 'Good. Then let us start with the Deed of Agreement. I am told it is the simpler of the two.'

She made room on the table by the window and I spread the three copies out for her. 'I should warn you,' I said, 'there is a clause in it making its validity dependent on your signing the Charter Agreement.'

'Of course.' She was bending over the documents and she didn't look up, her hair falling over her face. Her hands, palms down on the table, supporting her weight, were short and capable, the skin burned brown with salt, the nails cut short, and the gold circle of her wedding ring glinting in the light. Directly in front of her was a photograph in a plain oak frame. The print, blotched with damp mould, faded by exposure to light, showed a man with a thin face under a peaked cap bent over the gun of a whale catcher. Beside him an older man, head thrown back and roaring with laughter. 'My husband, Jan,' she said. 'With his father. It was just after the war, the first whale he harpooned after he became schutter. They were very happy then I think.' She signed her name quickly on all three copies. 'Now the other documents please.' And she held out her hand.

But this time she did not sign her name as soon as she had read it through. Instead, she looked up at me. 'Do you agree with the terms these people are offering?'

'I haven't much choice.'

'No?' She stared at me, the eyes gone cold again and the hostility back in her voice. 'Well, I do have a choice, Mr Randall, and they need a stand-by boat very badly. All rigs operating in the North Sea have to have one, by law. I check on that before I see Mr Fuller.' She nodded emphatically, as though expressing satisfaction at her good sense. 'So, he has agreed to some alterations. I am to write them on all the copies, each alteration to be initialled by both of us.'

What she had got out of him was a small increase in the charter rate and an interest-free loan sufficient to cover salvage, repairs, insurance, and with luck most of the victualling. 'I do not intend, you see, to get into the hands of the money-lenders again.'

'I wonder you ever did,' I murmured.

'You think I get into their hands?' There was sudden bitterness in her voice. 'You think I forget the insurance premium! Oh, no! But business — that is a man's job. So my father-in-law always say. My husband, too. They must deal with the chandlers, the buyers, everything to do with money. And they never haggle. She gave an exasperated laugh. 'Too proud to behave like fishwives, I guess. But now…' She stared at me very determinedly. 'You captain the ship. But that is all. You understand? I look after the business.'

I hesitated, thinking of all that had to be done to get the trawler on station by 20th April. It would be hard, slogging work, and the one thing I would have fought Fuller over she hadn't even raised. 'You realize you have committed the ship to standing by the rig for three months in all weathers without any relief boat.'

'That is why I was able to get an improved charter rate.'

'No crew will stand for it. Three months out there-'

'Johan says they agree. I have offered a bonus of course.'

'And the engineers?'

'Per is already discharged. Some burns, that is all. Duncan has two cracked ribs. I saw him at the hospital last night.'

'And he undertakes to keep those engines running for three months?'

She nodded, a little defiantly I thought. 'Yes, he does.' I forebore to mention that it was a failure of the engines that had lost her ship, but she must have guessed what was in my mind for she said quickly, 'Duncan was away sick for almost a month. Per Kalvik, the assistant engineer, is not so good. He is a young man and on his own he do not maintain the engines properly.' And she added, 'Duncan has never been away from the ship before, not since we installed the new engines.'

She had it all worked out, the crew, the engineers, everything, quite prepared to ignore the fact that under the terms of the agreement we had to provide a replacement if for any reason I was forced to run for shelter. But when I pointed this out to her, she flared up at me: 'It is you who are raising difficulties, nobody else. Fuel and stores, anything you want, is to be delivered free of any transport charge by the supply ship, and I have arranged for the transportation of men on leave by helicopter from the rig, also free. Since you will not be fishing you will need less crew. Minimum crew for stand-by boats is six — captain, mate, chief engineer, assistant engineer, cook and one deckhand. You, Duncan and Johan will not get relief.' She had been talking very fast. Now she stopped abruptly, standing staring at me, her manner suddenly awkward. 'It is a very difficult situation, between us. We do not know anything about each other. And this agreement-' She made a motion of her hand towards the document. 'As soon as I sign, then you are the mortgagee and I am in your hands. Even the loan I arrange — it is made to you, not to me. He insists on that.'

It was certainly an odd arrangement and the division of any profits was left to us. 'I imagine you will require some sort of an agreement drawn up between us,' I said.

She didn't seem to hear me, her head turned to the window, gazing out at the water. 'These businessmen are very clever.' There was a long pause, and then suddenly she was facing me again. 'Two complete strangers. And they have hung us round each other's neck.' She smiled, a gleam of humour that was gone in a flash. 'Well, there it is. Neither of us can argue, we have no money.' She pulled up a chair and sat down. 'I agree. We shall need to have an agreement. But not now. Later.' And she began writing in the alterations.

She wrote fast, as though by concentrating on the words she could relieve the tension and frustration that was in her, initialling each alteration as she made it and signing the copies at the bottom. Then she pushed the whole lot over to me. When I had signed she said, 'Johan is living on board. I suggest you do the same now.'

'And the crew?'

'They are at the Seaman's Mission, available whenever you want them.' She collected the papers together and put them in the envelope. 'Now if you are ready, we will pick up your things and I will drive you down to the boat.'

CHAPTER THREE

It took me four days to complete the welding of a steel patch. The biggest problem was rigging a secure platform on which to work in the cramped space between the starboard engine and the hull. After that it was a question of following each tide down as the water poured out of the engine-room through the rent in the hull. The job was slow and dirty, and though we had spring tides, the last six inches or so of steel sheet had to be left unwelded. It was on the Tuesday morning, just as Johan and two of the crew were holding the first sheet in position and I was spot-welding it to the hull plates, that Sandford arrived.

No doubt he called my name several times before he tapped me on the shoulder. The arc of the welding torch-made a hell of a row in the confined space of the engine-room. I swung round, the arc sputtering in my hand so that I nearly knocked him off the single plank we had rigged as a walkway from the ladder. 'What do you want?'

'That mortgage. I'm told you own it.' He had to yell to make himself heard. 'I'll buy it off you.'

I turned back towards the hull plating. With the tide falling, and the sheet not yet fixed, this was no time for interruptions. His hand gripped my shoulder. 'How much do you want?'

I pushed my visor up. 'Talk to Mrs Petersen,' I said. 'She's the business brains.' His eyes, bright in the spotlight, reminded me of the way his mother had looked when she thought there might be money in my visit.

'I have. I saw her last night.'

Then you know the answer.'

'She isn't the mortgagee.'

I glanced at my watch. Just over an hour of tide to go. I turned my back on him, pulling the visor down and flicking the jet full on. He shouted something at me as I bent to my welding again, the bearded face of Johan watching with his big hands on the plate, dangerously close as the gobs of molten steel flew out. I forgot about him then, my mind concentrated on the job.

Before the tide was up again I had the whole plate welded, except for the last six inches which had still been underwater at the bottom of the tide. It was late afternoon then and we went up to the bridge, the four of us sweating and tired and dirty. 'You want tea?' Johan asked as we reached the top of the ladder and felt the cold air of the deck.

'No, beer I think.'

'Ja. Beer.' His blond beard, all grimed with oil and slightly singed, cracked open in a grin. 'Beer for me also. Lars? Henrik?' The two seamen nodded and he sent Lars to raid the pantry. We had left our jerseys in the bridge and we entered to find Sandford seated in the skipper's chair, a pile of cigarette butts in the ashtray behind the wheel housing. 'I've been watching the tide on the rocks. Thought you wouldn't be able to work down there much longer.'

I pulled on my jersey, chilled now with the sweat drying on me. 'You been waiting here all the time?'

He nodded. 'Can't discuss business with a man waving a welding torch in my face.'

'There's no business to discuss,' I said.

'No?' He swivelled the chair as though enjoying the feel of being in the master's seat. 'I've been thinking. It was clever of you. I never thought of buying the mortgage. Nor did any of us. There were five of us turned up at the auction yesterday morning, all of us with money to bid for her, and nobody was exactly pleased when they told us it was off.' He lit a cigarette from the butt of the one he had just finished and stubbed the old one out in the ashtray. 'Can we go somewhere where we can talk?'

'I'm living on board,' I told him. 'If you want to talk it will have to be here.' Lars appeared with four cans, of beer.

Sandford got to his feet. 'Come into the master's cabin then. We can talk there.'

'There's nothing to talk about,' I said. But he insisted and in the end I followed him. 'Well, what is it?' I said as we faced each other alone with the door closed.

'It took me most of yesterday to find out just how you'd fixed it.'

'I didn't fix it.'

'No, it was that oil man Fuller. But you're the mortgagee and I'm willing to buy you out.'

'It's all tied up with the charter agreement.'

'I know that. But it suits my plans. I'll give you a thousand — cash. So long as you get her floated.'

Within two minutes he had raised his offer to fifteen hundred and I wondered why. Cash meant he knew all about fiddling tax. It wasn't only that I was suspicious; it went against the grain. And when I asked him who would skipper her, he said he had his own man and a crew as well.

'You'd still have to complete the charter,' I said.

He nodded. 'Of course.'

It didn't make sense. 'What's behind your offer?'

He laughed. 'I told you. I need a ship. And this is the only one available.' And he added, 'Fifteen hundred isn't a bad offer just for getting her afloat and towed into Bressay Sound.'

'You're wasting your time,' I said. 'Money doesn't mean very much to me.' And it was true. If I had stayed in the States I could have had all the money I wanted, but not on my terms. And what the hell is life about if you don't live it on your own terms? But to explain that to Sandford, who had inherited a solid streak of peasant greed from his mother, would be like explaining Marxism to a Hull trawler owner. I pulled the door open. 'I need another beer,' I said.

He stood for a moment uncertainly. But he knew it was no good. 'I thought you were clever.' His voice reflected his disappointment. 'You're just a bloody fool,' he said angrily. And then, as he was going out, he turned and asked me why, after all these years, I had come to Shetland making enquiries about my father. 'You never knew him. You never cared what happened to him. Why now?'

'That's my business,' I said and I pushed him out into the gangway, ordering Henrik to take him ashore in the work boat we now had alongside. Gertrude Petersen arrived shortly afterwards with a meal she had prepared at home, and when I told her what had happened, she said, 'I don't like that man. I don't like the people he employs. Last December, when we are stormbound in Burra Firth for two days, we are in the hotel and there is this Irish behind the bar — he make trouble for Johan.' She didn't say what trouble, but there was a slight flush on her face as she added, 'It is the last time we drink in his hotel.'

I forgot about Sandford after that. We lived by the tide, our heads aching after every shift, falling into our bunks as soon as we had fed and sleeping until the alarm woke us. And when, in the early hours of the Friday morning, it was done and we began pumping, I just stood there on the deck staring at the dark shadow of the hills, feeling utterly exhausted. I was like a surgeon who has performed a difficult operation. All I wanted now was for the patient to live, and so identified had I become with the ship that I felt it was part of me.

We breakfasted late to the racket of the pump, and afterwards Gertrude drove me to Halcrow's yard. They were behind schedule, and with the drilling contractors screaming for their supply ship, the trials were set for Sunday afternoon. That gave us two clear days. We got the anchor out on the port beam, with the chain linked by a big block and tackle to the trawl winch hawser, then at low water on the Saturday morning, with the Land Rover hitched to the tail end of the purchase guy, and all of us pulling, some of the locals as well, we managed to roll her about twelve degrees. This list to port was just sufficient to bring the whole patch clear of the water at the bottom of the tide. But it still took two tides to cut the plate edges of the hull, beat out the dents and weld the last six inches of the patch. Even when that was done the pump could only just hold its own.

'We'll have to slip and patch her properly from the outside,' I told Gertrude as we stood that evening in the engine-room, the sound of the pump drumming at the deck overhead and the water gurgling in the bilges. She didn't argue. On the port side the floor gratings ran down into water. Even when we had released the purchase tackle and the trawler was floating upright on the top of the tide, water sloshed and gurgled over the gratings as the ship moved in the wind, dancing to a slight swell coming in round the end of the spit. She knew the hull had to be absolutely watertight if we were to keep the sea in all weathers for three weary months.

All this time the wind had been westerly and the water in the voe quiet under the lee of mainland. Now the forecast was for changeable weather, the last of the depressions moving away towards Iceland and a high coming in behind it, with a low over France. That slight swell was a warning of north-easterly winds. Duncan appeared at my side and stood sniffing the air as though he, too, sensed the change. He was a dour man with a long nose and a sandy moustache. The hospital had discharged him the previous afternoon and he had been down in the engine-room ever since, cleaning the place up with the help of his assistant, Per, and the youngest member of the crew, a big bull of a boy known as Sperm. 'Pump holding?' I asked him.

'Aye.'

'And the engines?'

They'll no get her oot o' here, if that's what you mean.'

So we just had to hope Jim Halcrow would risk bringing the supply ship right in on the tide. 'Mrs Petersen told you the parts you ordered have arrived by air?' He nodded and I asked him how his ribs were.

'Strapped so tight I can't hardly breathe. But it's the electrics I'm worried aboot. That pipe to the cooling system is nothing by comparison. It could be the dynamos will have to be stripped down, or even replaced, and God knows what's happened to the wiring.' He sniffed again at the breeze coming in down the voe. 'Ach weel, I'll get back doon again noo. That bluidy boy dinna ken the difference between an oil line and a fuel pipe.'

'You'd better get some sleep," I told him.

'A week in that bluidy morgue — what the hell ye think I been doing?' And he disappeared into the night, heading for the door to the engine-room, his left arm held awkwardly to his body.

It was still only a breeze when dawn broke. But by 09.00 it had strengthened to Force 4 and there were waves breaking on the seaward side of the spit. We grounded shortly afterwards, the keel bumping on boulders. The grating and clanging lasted almost half an hour. All we could do after that was wait, and hope that the wind wouldn't increase before high water, which was at 16.05.

But by then I had something else to worry about. Gertrude arrived just as we were completing the lifting of the anchor and she came aboard as soon as the work boat had dropped the anchor and chain under the bows. 'Jim Halcrow says he will bring the supply ship in whatever the weather. He has the power and the manoeuvrability, also he draws much less than we do. But he needs to know the exact time you expect to be afloat.'

'Tell him we'll be bumping the bottom at about 15.35 and clear to tow off any time after 16.00.'

She nodded. 'Okay. I tell him that.' There was a pause and then she said, There was a man at the yard this morning. He was making enquiries.'

We were standing in the starboard bridge gangway, watching the crew heaving in on the anchor chain, the trawler lying still now and the hills behind a diorama of shirting light as the clouds scudded over. An island scene, and all so peaceful that the industrial world I had lived in seemed unreal. 'What sort of a man?'

'A police inspector, but in plain clothes.'

Not Bob Scunton then or the other man. That was something. Unless this inspector insisted on my going back to Hull. 'What did he want?'

'Just enquiring about you. What you were doing.'

'Did he ask you any questions?'

'No. He did not need to. He had already talked to me the previous day.'

'Where?'

'At Taing.'

'You didn't tell me.'

'No.'

'Why?'

She looked at me then. 'Why do you think? I don't want to distract you.' And she added, 'He will see you when the ship is afloat and lying off the yard.'

God! What a practical, soulless woman she was, not caring a damn about anything but her trawler.

'What is it about?' she asked. 'You have done something?'

I looked at her, feeling suddenly cold and hard 'inside. Was this what a whaling station did to you? She had been brought up in the stench of the flensing deck, and her father had rubbed his hands with glee and said it smelled of money. She had told me that herself, laughing, and I had seen her in my mind as a young girl with the guts and urine of dead whales spilling out at her feet, and her father beaming and rubbing his hands. 'A little girl was nearly killed,' I said.

'And you were involved?'

'No.'

'Then why is this inspector here from London?'

'Better ask him,' I said, and went down the ladder to give a hand for'ard.

Gertrude Petersen left shortly after that. The warps were all ready aft, the anchor stowed and the chain flaked neatly on the foredeck, heaving lines and fenders handy. Nothing to do after lunch but watch the tide making and the sea slowly building as the wind increased — and think about what happened next, why they should have sent an inspector from London. In the privacy of my cabin I poured myself a stiff whisky. I should have been worrying about the tow. Instead, I was thinking how hard she was, my mind going back to the problem that had been with me ever since that night in Hull. A local matter surely, not something for Scotland Yard. Unless.. But I shied away from the thought. It was just a matter of intimidation. Intimidation that had got out of control. I must concentrate on that. Did I identify the men or not? That was all that mattered.

Johan poked his head round the door. 'We can see the tug now. It is steaming out in the bay. fixed courses, so he is making speed trials.'

I followed him into the bridge, relieved to get away from my thoughts. The sky had cleared, the whitecaps in the bay bright in the sun. The supply ship was just turning at the extremity of her northward run up by Stany Hog. The high superstructure for'ard and the flat run aft certainly gave her the look of a tug. She completed the turn and started south. The time was 14.55. Less than an hour to go. I went all round the ship with Johan, checking that everything was ready and that each man knew what he had to do. Then I went back to the bridge and tested the loudhailer. No sign of the ship. She was lost to view behind the dune-like hills of Ward of Brough.

Ten minutes later she poked her bluff fendered bows round Cunning Holm islet, moving slowly now, coming in on her echo-sounder. A few minutes and she was in full view, turning and pointing her bows straight at us. And at almost the same moment I felt a slight lift to the deck under my feet, heard the first faint rumble of the keel knocking on boulders. She came in very slowly, feeling her way, until her bows were level with the spit. She hung there for a while, her engines throwing a froth of water for'ard along her sides as she maintained station against the wind funnelling down the voe. I could see Jim Halcrow seated at the controls high up in the little glass wheelhouse, Gertrude Petersen beside him. He put a microphone to his lips and loud across the water came his query — 'Are you off the bottom yet?'

I was out on the bridge gangway then and I called through the loudhailer for him to come and get us. He gave me a thumbs-up and drifted round the end of the spit, turning on his own axis and bringing his stern right against ours. I had never seen one of these vessels operating in a confined space; it was like driving a Dodgem. We didn't need heaving lines. Johan just passed the end of our big warp straight into the hands of the man hanging out over the stern roller. He hitched it on to the winch hawser and my men hardly had time to make fast before the supply ship was going ahead, rope and hawser taking the strain. There was an ugly grinding noise, a jar on the soles of my feet as we came up against rock, then we were off, our bows swinging away downwind.

It was the neatest thing; one moment we were aground, hammering on boulders, the next we were out in the channel, clear of the spit and stern-on to the voe. The supply ship had 6,000 h.p. and Jim Hal-crow used the wind to get us positioned, then he just plucked us out stern-first into the bay. The tail end of our warp was already made fast at the bows. All we had to do was cast off astern. As soon as our bows were round the tow began.

We had to go round Bressay and enter Lerwick from the south, but even so, we were anchored off the Halcrow yard before dark. A constable in uniform was standing on the boat jetty watching us.

By the time we had finished flaking down the tow warp the work boat was alongside, Jim Halcrow coming on board, followed by Gertrude Petersen, her eyes shining. 'It worked,' she said laughing. 'Your patch is all right.'

'So long as the pump keeps going.' My voice sounded sharp. I was quite incapable of responding to her mood. I hadn't expected a constable. Trials go off satisfactorily?' I asked Halcrow.

'Fine. Manoeuvring and towing made a good test for the new shaft.' He glanced at the sky upwind of us, then at his watch. 'Well, let's have a look at your problems. Where's your Chief, in the engine-room?'

I nodded and led him below. We could hear the water sloshing about in the bilges as we went down the ladder. The sound of it was loud now the ship was floating to her marks. Duncan appeared out of the gloom. 'Ye'll have to have a resairve pump on board.' Apparently we had made five inches during the tow. I introduced him to Halcrow and left them to it. When I got back to the deck the yard boat had arrived and the constable was waiting for me. He was a big, tow-headed young islander with a friendly face. 'You the captain?'

'Yes.'

He had his notebook open in his hand. 'Michael Mouat Randall. Would that be the name?' And when I nodded, he said, 'I must ask you to accompany me to the station.'

'Any reason?'

'No, sir. Only that Inspector Garrard would like a word with you.'

So their witness hadn't perjured himself yet and there was no warrant. 'I've a lot to do,' I said. 'If the Inspector wants to talk to me he's welcome to come on board.'

The young man hesitated. 'I'll tell him that if you like, sir. But he's not one of us, y'know, so I'd advise you to come along and see what it's all about.'

I didn't like it. Sending a constable to fetch me to the station, instead of coming down to the ship himself… 'Oh, for God's sake!' Gertrude Petersen exclaimed. 'Go on down to the station with him and get it over. We've got a lot to do.'

'Well, you get on with it then,' I told her. I wasn't in the best of moods as I went ashore. The constable had his police car parked behind the yard, and as we started down the shore road, I asked him what branch Inspector Garrard was assigned to.

'Ye'll have to ask him, sir.'

'Does that mean you don't know?'

I think he knew, but he had his orders and he didn't talk as we drove into Lerwick.

The police station was in the County Buildings up on Town Hall Brae, a brown sandstone building opposite the Garrison Theatre. I was taken straight through into a small bare room. The constable switched the light on. 'I'll tell the Inspector ye're here.' The door closed and I resigned myself to a long wait. Stupidly I had left my pipe on the bridge. I felt lost without it now that my mind had to grapple once again with problems of conscience and expedience. Did they really have a local witness who would get up in court and swear he'd seen me throw that petrol bomb? I could remember the hard line of the man's mouth, the shut face pale in the deck lights, and Aberdeen harbour glimmering in the rain. Where was he now, I wondered?

I was still thinking about him, and why an inspector was checking on my movements, when the door opened and a slightly stooped man in a tweed jacket entered. 'Sorry to keep you waiting.' He had the tired air of a man who has been up all night, but his eyes were bright as he put the briefcase he was carrying down and sat at the table, waving me to the chair opposite. 'I gather you're busy trying to get that wrecked trawler back into commission.'

I nodded.

'Any particular reason?'

'Reason?' It wasn't the opening I had expected.

'Yes. Why are you doing it?'

'I don't see that it concerns the police.'

'No? Well, maybe it doesn't.' He reached into the briefcase, pulled out several files and laid them on the table in front of him. 'But motivation is something that does concern me. If you know what motivates a man, then you are at least halfway to solving a case — or avoiding trouble.' He was soft-spoken, his manner quiet and relaxed, almost conversational. 'We'll come back to that in a moment. Meanwhile- He opened the slimmest of the files in front of him — 'let us take a look at your record.' He fished out a pair of gilt-rimmed half-glasses; these and the slight stoop gave him a somewhat academic air. 'I would guess you have never done anything without strong motivation.' He looked across at me. 'Not perhaps the right word. Without ideological convictions. Would that be a reasonable assessment of your somewhat unusual shifts of work and environment?' He was staring at me over the half-glasses. 'I see you don't want to admit to that. Is it the word ideological you object to?'

'My ideological convictions, presuming I have any, are my own concern.'

He nodded. 'Perhaps. But there are things I don't understand and I would appreciate your co-operation.'

'What about?'

'Why you suddenly decided to come up here, for instance?' The academic air had receded, the pale eyes watching me. 'You know the Hull police were waiting to interview you — a question of intimidation.'

'I had nothing to do with that.'

'Then what were you doing there?' He didn't seem surprised at my not answering. 'Lucky you were,' he murmured. 'For the little girl, anyway.' He paused, letting the silence run on. Finally he said, 'Would you like to tell me about it?'

'Not your department,' I said. 'You're not from Hull.' That question about ideological convictions… 'What department are you — Special Branch?'

He smiled. 'Let us say I am a police officer who knows quite a lot about you, has learned more since he has been here and now wants to know what the hell you're up to.'

'Do I have to be up to something?' But he'd see it differently, of course. Once a man has been in trouble with the police… 'You're part of the Establishment,' I said. 'You don't have to worry about finding a job. It's always there. But for others it's different. Do you find that difficult to understand?' I was being sarcastic, but it didn't seem to upset him.

'You don't have to worry about a job either, Randall. You're not just a trawlerman. You're a highly intelligent, highly trained individual. But your record, if I may say so, is a somewhat unusual one.' He picked up the top page of the file, leaning back with it in his hand. 'This is a summary. Shall I read it to you?' He did not wait for me to reply, but went straight on: 'You were born on 2nd April, 1937. Your mother, Muriel Caroline Randall, taught in kindergarten in Aberdeen. In November 1938, following the Munich crisis, she took a course in nursing at Glasgow Infirmary. There she met Henry Wilkin Graber, a wealthy American businessman. In fact, she was one of the nurses who looked after him when he was brought into the hospital in February 1939 following a car accident. Shortly after his return to the States he offered her the job of governess to his two children. She turned him down then, but just over a year later, in July 1940, she took passage on one of the refugee ships to the States. That was after the fall of France, so presumably her concern was for you. Would that be right?'

'You work out your own answers,' I said.

He smiled. 'I'm only trying to get at the motivation. Your father, for instance. Have you ever visited Shetland before?' And when I shook my head, he said, 'Now, suddenly, you go to West Burra, where he was born, and start making enquiries. Why?'

'A man ought to know something about his father,' I murmured.

'He was a Communist. But you knew that before you came up here.'

'Yes.'

'Where is he now?' He was leaning forward, his eyes on my face.

'Don't be silly,' I said. 'You've been to Hamnavoe. and to Ground Sound too. You know damn well he died just before Madrid fell to Franco's forces.'

He nodded. 'Of course. The plaque. Who put it there?'

'I've no idea.'

'Your mother perhaps?'

'I don't think so.'

'And you're an only child — no brothers or sisters.'

'No.'

'But it was somebody who knew him well, eh? That line from Browning — the conflict within himself. Are you sure you've never met him?' My bewilderment must have shown, for he added, 'The plaque was sent to the Clerk of the Presbytery of Shetland in 1958 by an anonymous donor with instructions where it was to be placed and a sum that more than covered the cost of the work.'

'I only saw it just over a week ago. I had no idea how it came to be up there.'

He stared at me for a moment, looking me straight in the eyes. He was still staring at me when he suddenly said, 'Are you a Communist?'

'No.'

'But you believe in Communism?'

'I also believe in Christianity.'

He smiled and I caught a flicker of interest, even sympathy, in those pale eyes. 'And there is a difference between the Christian faith and the Christian church. Is that what you mean?'

I shrugged.

'Just as there is a difference between the Communist ideal and Communism itself, say the Russian brand?'

'You don't need to get me down to a police station to state the obvious.'

He laughed, leaning back in his chair and relaxing again. 'Well, let's get back to your file. And please pick me up if they've got it wrong at all. In January 1941 your mother took up residence in Graber's house on Rhode Island. You were then three-and-a-half years old. Did you like Henry Graber?'

'I don't remember.'

'And you don't remember your father either?'

'No.'

'Yet you accepted the one and rejected the other. Was that because of your mother's marriage? Were you jealous of Graber?'

I reached into my pocket for my pipe, realized it wasn't there and heard him say something about the physical relationship of a mother and her only son. 'For Christ's sake, where's this leading?' I demanded angrily.

His strangely quiet face looked suddenly grim. 'I'll tell you where it's leading — to your record. It's here in this file, two dozen separate items at least — shop floor convener, agitator, union organizer and militant.

You've been in prison, you've been charged with inciting others to create a disturbance, resisting arrest, intent to cause grievous bodily harm, and in your public speeches, your writings, in the way you have incited pickets and moved bodies of strikers, you've demonstrated a degree of violent reaction to or from something that is quite abnormal. Now, let's get back to your mother's marriage. It was her second marriage and Graber's third. The date is given here as 5th November, 1944 — is that right?'

I nodded. 'I think my stepfather was very lonely. His wife had just died.' But it had started before then. 'She had been ill for a long time — a mental illness. And my mother-' I checked myself. No point in telling him about that moment of appalment when, as a little boy, I had discovered she didn't regard me as her entire world. 'It was natural enough, I guess.'

'But a shock to you?'

'I imagine so.'

'He had an explosives and small arms factory and made a fortune out of the war. Is that why you suddenly left home?'

'I wanted to travel.'

'To Calcutta — Dusseldorf?'

I felt my muscles tense, the past turning over in my mind. 'My God, you've done your homework.'

'Not me,' he said. 'It's all here.' And he reached for the second file. 'You were educated very expensively — the Phillips Exeter Academy, then Princeton. At Princeton you studied economics. Do you remember a Professor Hansbacher?'

as I nodded, the thick glasses, the round beaming face leaping to mind, his brilliant lectures on the nature and defects of capitalism.

'You should, because he remembered you. One of the cleverest students I ever had. That's how he describes you. He was a Communist, wasn't he?'

'I've no idea. I was just a kid.'

'That was what he was accused of. He lost his job in the McCarthy witch-hunt.' He leaned towards me. 'You were at an impressionable age. He must have had considerable influence on you.'

'He had a very logical, very clear mind.'

'A brilliant teacher, in fact. Yet within a year you left. Why?'

'I told you. I wanted to travel.'

'To Calcutta? Isn't that where the dropouts go? What did you use for money?' I don't think he expected an answer and I sat there, silent, knowing what was coming: '4th January, 1957 — you were twenty then and in Dusseldorf. What were you doing in Dusseldorf?'

'Why ask me since you've got it all there?'

He nodded. 'You were charged with being in the possession of drugs and you had one of the leading German advocates to defend you. Who paid for that? Was it your stepfather?'

'His lawyers. Yes, he paid for it.'

'You got three months. A year later you had reached India. And then, suddenly, you pulled yourself together. You came to England and studied at the London School of Economics. Did he pay for that too?'

But by then I'd had enough. 'I don't have to sit here going over my past with you.' I got to my feet. 'It's over and done with, and I've got work to do.'

'You're here quite voluntarily.'

'You sent an officer to bring me in.'

He sighed. 'Well, if you're not prepared to cooperate, why did you come?' He leaned back, the pale eyes staring up at me. 'Was it because you knew I'd been making enquiries about you?'

'Why should that worry me? And if you want to know, I paid my own way while studying at the LSE. Nothing to do with Graber.'

'And when you got your degree you joined the staff of a national daily as a financial journalist.'

'I specialized in industrial relations.'

'You were earning good money. Then suddenly you abandoned your well-paid job, moved to the Clyde and became a shipyard worker. Any particular reason?'

'I found I only knew the management side. I didn't know what it was like from the worker's point of view.'

'Nothing to do with your father?'

'No.'

'And two years later you were a convener, fomenting wildcat strikes and organizing picket lines. Three charges in four years and a short prison sentence. Then you dropped out of that, went to Grimsby and got a job on a trawler. That was after your marriage had broken up. Four years later you had your mate's ticket, then your master's. And now you've dropped out again — into Shetland, enquiring about your father, refloating an old trawler with a contract to act as stand-by boat to an oil rig.' He put the sheet of paper down. 'What was your motive in all this?' He got to his feet then and stood facing me. 'That's all I want to know — your motive.'

'Does there have to be one?'

'I think so.'

'Life isn't like that,' I told him. There's no logic in human behaviour.'

'Not always, I agree. But there's often a pattern.' He paused, looking meditatively down at the file. 'I could pull you in for questioning,' he said.

'You've got no warrant.'

He looked at me. 'I could get one.' His voice was suddenly hard. 'Did you start that blaze?'

'No.'

'But you were there. You know who did.'

I didn't answer.

'And you've no intention of going to Hull to help the police in their enquiries.'

'I've got a job to do and there's a lot of work getting that trawler ready for use.'

He nodded. 'I'll tell them. They may issue a warrant or they may not.' He considered me for a moment, frowning, as though uncertain what to do next. 'All right. We'll leave it at that then. But if they make an arrest, you'll be called as a witness. You realize that?' He gave me time to think about it, and then he said, 'I'm going to give you some advice. A warning, rather.' He was suddenly very still, the pale eyes fixed on me. 'The stakes up here in the North Sea are big now,' he said, speaking slowly and with emphasis. 'Big enough to attract a lot of interest, not all of it welcome. Do you understand what I'm talking about?'

'I think so.' I suddenly wanted to get out of there, the little office very quiet and his eyes fixed on me.

'Good.' He hesitated, then reached for the pad and pencil on the desk and wrote down a number. 'If you find yourself getting out of your depth-'

'Why should I?'

He looked at me for a moment. Then he said, 'You're vulnerable, that's why. You're tough physically, but you're vulnerable.' He didn't explain. He didn't have to. 'If you want to talk to me again, go to any police station and have them ring that number. Or you can telephone direct.' He handed me the sheet of paper. It was an 01 number — London. 'What's the name of the rig you're going to work with?'

'North Star.'

'And the company?'

'Star-Trion, a subsidiary of Villiers Finance and Industrial.'

He nodded. 'Well, just remember what I said, and stay out of trouble.' He went to the door and opened it for me. But as I was going out he stopped me. 'One other thing. Your father. He wasn't killed in 1939.'

I stared at him incredulously. 'What the hell are you talking about?'

'Just that. They picked him up in Norway in 1942.' The door closed and I was in the passage leading out of the County Buildings, past the flagpole into Town Hall Brae.

CHAPTER FOUR

I should have gone back and asked him what else he knew. But I was scared. Those files, that dossier on me. The offences I had committed were all minor ones, but he had made them sound formidable, stringing them together like that. A pattern… Of course, there had been a pattern. And once the authorities get their teeth into you — Christ! they had taken a lot of trouble.

And my father… That plaque. Who the hell had erected that plaque? And why? Why should anybody do that if he hadn't been killed in the defence of Madrid?

He would have been sixty-eight now, if he were still alive. Too old to be involved in anything very active. But in 1942, when Norway was occupied by the Germans and the Russians were our allies… So many questions, and my mind in turmoil as we sweated to get that trawler fit for sea. And all the time that feeling of something hanging over me, a frightening sense of insecurity as I tried to grapple with a mental change of life that seemed to have altered my whole outlook. Work was a panacea, and God knows there was plenty of that.

We slipped on the evening of Friday, llth April, working through the weekend to get her off at dawn on the Monday. It was the only patent slip in Lerwick and we were lucky to get the use of it, even though it meant doing most of the work ourselves. By then I had had a telegram from the Star-Trion office in Aberdeen requesting confirmation that we would be on station by 20th April as required under the terms of the charter. The location was also given — 60°22′ N, 2°40′ W, which was some thirty miles west of Papa Stour, in Block 206/17. We went for sea trials on the Thursday immediately after survey, steaming north as far as Rams Ness, the southern point of Fetlar, in a nor'westerly Force 5–6 with a dirty sea spilling down through Colgrave Sound.

There was still a lot that needed doing. But the repairs to the hull stood up to it and the engines gave full power. We were back off Halcrow's yard by 10.30 on the Friday morning and Gertrude got a telegram off to Star-Trion confirming. We were in business, provided we could keep the vessel going for three months at a stretch.

I was at the chart shelf outside my cabin, working out an ETD based on steaming time required to reach the location, when she returned. 'You'll go south round Sumburgh Head?'

'Yes.'

'Then you can anchor at Taing and sail out to the rig from there.'

It was a thought. A last peaceful night and the chance of a final check on the way round. We could even get delivery of anything we had forgotten.

'Then perhaps you will have time to discuss the agreement between us.'

I looked at her, standing in the doorway at the top of the companionway, a solid figure in an oilskin jacket. Clouds were scudding in over the brown stone smudge of Lerwick town. I couldn't see the expression on her face, but her voice had sounded a little tense. 'I'm afraid I had forgotten about that.'

'You are not very businesslike.' There was a pause, and then, a little hesitantly, she said, 'How do I know you will not go off with the ship?'

'You have Johan, Duncan, the crew — I'm the only outsider.'

'Three months is a long time.'

I turned on her, flinging down my pencil. 'We both signed that charter agreement,' I said, keeping a tight hold on my tongue.

'A piece of paper.'

'Any agreement we draw up between us is still only a piece of paper.'

'Ja.' She had turned back into the bridge, leaning on the telegraph and staring out through the windows. The forecast was bad and a rainstorm was curtaining the higher part of the town. 'I'm sorry.' She made a little movement of her hand. 'We do not work very easily together. My fault, I think. But this ship has so many memories. We come to Shetland in her, Jan and I. When Selmvaag Vaal closed down. Jan bought her in Bergen. It cost us every penny we had, and some of our friends' money as well.'

'What was a Lowestoft trawler doing in Bergen?'

'She was an MFV I think you call them. Right at the beginning of the war she was brought north to Scapa Flow as a fleet supply ship. Later she did some patrols and after that she was with the fleet in Norway. I have the logs at Taing. Then, in 1941, she is in Shetland, sailing again to Norway. It was this ship that brought Far Petersen off, from one of the fjords just east of Tromso. He had Jan with him. They often talked about that voyage. They were almost trapped by a patrol boat, but the fog saved them. A thick fog just when the bullets were hitting all round. There are some marks if you know where to look.'

'When was this?' I asked.

'In 1942. It was winter. I remember the date — 27th January. That was when they land in Shetland that first time.'

'And you have the logs?'

'Yes. The early ones. Jan found them, tucked away at the back of a locker in the cabin there. I'll show you when you bring her into Taing.' She turned abruptly, moving a step towards me. 'You will bring her in? Please.'

'In case I run off with her?'

But she didn't smile. 'I'll feel easier, that's all.' And she added, 'I saw Sandford when I was ashore. He was driving past me along the Esplanade in a red car. Has he been on board?'

'No.'

'You haven't seen him again?'

I shook my head, turning back to the chart shelf and measuring off the distance to Clift Sound.

'What is he doing here in Lerwick, do you think?'

'If you run a hotel I suppose you need supplies.' Just over forty miles to The Taing. Say five hours' steaming. 'If we left at noon tomorrow-'

'He doesn't need to come to Lerwick for stores. He can order by telephone.' Her voice had risen slightly, a note of tension. 'Why does he need a ship so badly he is prepared to buy the mortgage?'

'I told you, he's got a contract to supply two rigs.'

'Do you believe him?' She had moved towards me and I could see her face now in the chart cabin light. She was frowning. 'I think he is here because we are ready to sail.' And, on a note of urgency, she added, 'You must leave for Taing now. Immediately. Can you do that? Otherwise, I think perhaps we are not permitted to sail at all.'

'Nonsense,' I said. 'She may not be classed Al, but the survey went off all right. And even if she didn't pass survey, we would still have our temporary certificate of seaworthiness.'

But it wasn't the survey she was worried about. It was the crew. Apparently she had been warned by her local councillor that Johan and the three other Norwegians might be ordered to leave Shetland. 'Somebody has been enquiring about their work permits. We never bother about work permits before. Not for fishing. But, now that we are going to work for an oil rig, it may be different.'

'Then you'd better apply for them.'

She nodded. 'Of course. I have the papers already. But Mr Tulloch thinks it will be opposed and they will be ordered to leave.'

'But if they didn't need work permits before-'

'He says it is politics. The fishermen here are a very strong community and they don't like the oil companies. So, you see, it is not very difficult to stir op trouble.'

'And you think Sandford is behind it?'

She gave a little shrug. 'Perhaps. I don't know. But it is one way of ensuring that we lose this charter,' She was so urgent about it that I agreed to sail as soon as we had taken on fuel and water.

We moored at the quay, alongside a Lerwick trawler, shortly after 13.00. I think we were lucky in that it was lunch-time and the rain teeming down. All the offices were closed. Nobody bothered us and at 14.42 we slipped our warps and stood out into Bressay Sound. Visibility was bad in low cloud and rain squalls, but by 15.05 we were clear of Kirkabister Ness with Bard Head a grey lump bearing 85°.

Sea conditions were fairly good as we steamed south under the lee of the long mountain spine running down to Sumburgh Head and I had time to take a look at the Admiralty Sailing Directions. I had never before had need of Part I of the North Sea Pilot, which covers the Faroes, Shetlands and Orkneys, and I was appalled at the force of the tidal streams. The main stream was south-east-going and between Orkney and Shetland it reached a speed of eight to ten knots at the margin headlands of North Ronaldsay and Sumburgh Head. The result, of course, was violent tide races. Known as roosts in Shetland, they were to be encountered off all the major headlands, with the Sumburgh Roost the most dangerous of all — 'As in the confused, tumbling and bursting sea, vessels often become entirely unmanageable, and sometimes founder, while others have been tossed about for days in light weather, the roost should be given a wide berth.'

I looked at the spine of the faded and dog-eared Pilot. It was dated 1921. Obviously the warning was for sailing vessels. I was checking the tide data on the chart when Johan appeared at my side. 'You take Sumburgh very close, ja. It is the last hour of the south-going tide, so the wind is with the tide and we get a lift on the eddy by Fitful.'

I left it to him and he took the wheel himself, turning the headland so close that we seemed in imminent danger of hitting the islet of Little Tind. The wind was westerly, force 6, the sea lumpy and full of holes, but not breaking heavily. It took us a long time to round Hog of the Holm and claw our way up to Head of the Holm with wind and tide both against us. But with Johan piloting I had no worries, except perhaps when we turned due north up the long sheer slate-grey line of Fitful Head. We were on a lee shore then, no place for an engine failure, and so close in that we were back-winded by the towering cliffs, the burst of the waves sounding like gunfire.

The tide turned and we were inside the Havras by 19.30 with the Stacks of Houssness just visible and Clift Sound opening up ahead. The light was fading, and, as we came into the shelter of East Burra, Johan sent Henrik for'ard to call the leading marks into the voe.

That first view of Taing from the sea will always remain, the evening light dulled by rain, the clouds sweeping low and the narrow tongue of land suddenly revealed as being separate from the green slopes behind. And then, as we nosed slowly in, the house suddenly appearing, a grey ghost of a building and the water below it a leaden sheet barely touched by the wind. And when we had let go our anchor, and the echo of the chain running out had died away, our engines stopped, everything so still, so absolutely quiet.

I thought Gertrude Petersen would have been down at the water's edge to welcome her ship home, but though there was a light on in the house, nothing stirred. I had the Zodiac inflated and got over the side and rowed myself ashore, not bothering about the outboard. It was warm rowing in oilskins and farther than I thought. The rain had stopped, the evening strangely luminous with fish rising. I could hear the slap of them hitting the water and the circles rippling out were so numerous that sometimes they interlocked. I couldn't see the entrance to the voe, it was blocked by the lit shape of the trawler, and with the low arm of The Taing stretching out from the shore, and the steep mountain slopes beyond, it was more like a loch than an indent open to the sea.

The beach below the house was sand and rock with a small boat jetty of cemented boulder. The cement was crumbling, the boulders loose, and it was already half awash on the tide. I pulled the inflatable up on to higher ground, made fast the painter and then stood for a moment looking back at the voe and the trawler lying there, the ship, the house, the land-encircled water, everything so perfect. I was thinking of Jan Petersen then, wondering how he had acquired such a place. And a wife who would go to sea with him, stand by him through thick and thin. A refugee from another country. And I had started with so much, achieved so little. No matter that the ship was mortgaged, the house, too, probably. They were his. He had owned them. And now he was dead and I was going up to his house to make an agreement with his wife, sitting probably at that table in the window with the photograph of him and his father on their catcher.

I got out my pipe and filled it. But I didn't light it. I just stood there, holding it in my hand as though for comfort in that quiet remoteness of the darkening landscape. The moment between light and dark, just as night closes in, is a time of silence when the soul is touched by doubts. I had that feeling now, the past a nothingness, the future all uncertain — and myself not knowing, or even understanding, what I was doing here.

I put my pipe away and turned abruptly, walking up to the house and knocking on the door. I wanted to get this over and get to sea. Three months in the loneliness of command, seeing nothing but the same patch of sea and the ugly superstructure of a floating rig — three months of that should be enough to sort myself out. The sound of my fist on the door was loud in the stillness and the lamplight streaming out from the window on my right became a muted glow as the curtains were drawn. The sound of footsteps clacking on stone, then the door opened and she was there. But not as I had expected her, in the denim slacks and faded jersey I had become accustomed to. Now she was wearing a long dress and high heeled shoes, and her fair hair, limned by the light of an oil lamp on the chest behind her, fell to her shoulders.

I stood there for a moment, not saying anything, her appearance so unexpected. She had always seemed to me a sturdy, solid Norwegian, and Fuller's phrase, 'the legal owner', had fitted her exactly. 'Well, are you coming in or not?'

I went in slowly, feeling uncomfortable. 'I'm afraid I haven't changed.'

'Does it matter?' She was smiling as she closed the door.

'No, I suppose not.' I was staring at her as she turned into the lamplight, her long dress flowing and her eyes bright. This was the first time I had seen her with any make-up on. 'Takes a bit of getting used to.'

She laughed. 'Tonight I am celebrating.' And she added over her shoulder as she took me into the living-room, 'I've not had much to celebrate these last few years. But when I saw the Duchess coming in round the end of The Taing…' She stopped, turning and facing me. 'You will never know what that meant to me.' And then she asked me whether I had fed. 'I hope you haven't.'

'No, I've come straight ashore as you suggested.'

'Good. Because otherwise you would have to eat two meals.'

'It's not impossible.'

She laughed. 'You don't know what I've cooked.' Her teeth flashed white, her eyes sparkling. It crossed my mind that she was a widow now and flying some sort of flag, with the table laid for two, lace mats and rough-carved wooden candlesticks. And then she said, 'If Jan were here, how he would have enjoyed it. Don't you feel you deserve a celebration after all the work you have done? Now, take off your oilskins please and we will have a drink.'

She went into the kitchen, returning with glasses and a bottle. 'I found this when I am going through Par's things — it is aquavit, real live aquavit. I think it came with the ship from Norway and he kept it against some happy day.'

She was in a mood of strange elation, gripped by a sort of feverish belief that now the ship was back at her old mooring everything would be all right. 'You bring me luck,' she said, raising her glass, the too-wide mouth smiling at me. 'Skal!' And she tossed the drink back, her eyes on me, watching to see that I did the same.

'Are you trying to drink me under the table?' I asked as she refilled my glass.

'Maybe. I don't know.' She was laughing, but at herself I think, at the invitation in her eyes that she didn't bother to conceal. 'You haven't wished us luck.'

I got up then, remembering how formal Scandinavian ships' officers could be, and made a little speech. She clapped her hands, and after she had drunk, she put her glass down carefully, holding it cupped in her capable brown hands, her head a little bowed so that the fair hair cascaded over her face. 'I think we are very strange partners, you and I, neither of us knowing what we want of life or where we are going. All I know is what I feel inside me, that tonight is different — the start of something. But I don't know what.' She raised her head and looked at me questioningly. 'Don't you feel that?'

I shrugged. 'Maybe,' I said guardedly.

'I think for you also this is a new beginning.'

'What about that agreement?' I asked her.

'Have you thought about it?'

'No. I haven't had time. But I think we should discuss it now, while we are still sober.'

'There is nothing to discuss.' Her hand reached out to the bottle. 'Will you have another drink?'

I shook my head. 'Not now. When we've settled this maybe.'

'There is some wine to follow. What you would call plonk, I think. I bought it at the stores this morning. But now-' She filled my glass again. 'Now I think we have one last aquavit and drink to a partnership.' She picked up her glass, not looking at me, but staring down into the heavy pale liquor. 'You see, I have had time to think about it. There is no way that I can see to draw up a legal document between us that is of any use. I am the owner. You hold the mortgage. Either we are partners or one of us must find the money to buy the other out. How much money have you got?'

'Less than fifty pounds.'

'You see? You cannot buy me out. And I have nothing. I am living on borrowed money. So what is the point of an agreement?'

'I thought you didn't trust me?'

'I don't. Your head is too full of strange ideas — about people and politics and economics of the world. Oh, don't think I have been spying on you, but they tell me everything, about what you eat, how much you sleep, what you talk about. And there is the gossip here, too. You came to see Hilda Manson, making enquiries about your father. The house where he was born is just up the road, and there is that tablet in the church, so I know something about him.' She was looking at me, a gleam of humour back in her eyes. 'I think probably you suffer from some sort of a father complex.' Her hand reached out and touched my arm. 'Do not please be offended. I am an expert on this subject. Jan, you see, had a father complex, so that in a sense I married two men. Far Petersen… I always called him that, it is the Norwegian word for Father… Far was with us always, from the very beginning of our marriage. But it did not matter. I loved that dear gentle old man very much, even though he is so stupid about money.' She moved her hand to the bottle. 'So, you see, I know,' she said, filling my glass, but not her own, and then rising to her feet. 'Now we will eat. It is fish, do you mind?'

I shook my head.

'Fish to start with, then meat.' She bent towards me, laughing. 'Cheer up! It is not the end of the world that another person knows something about what is going on in your mind. For me, it gives you a certain integrity. And because of that you get no agreement, but a celebration dinner instead.' And she turned to go to the kitchen.

I offered to help her, but she waved me back into my chair. 'Have your drink and relax. About five minutes I think. And if you are bored with your own company, there are the logs over there.' She indicated the table by the window. 'I looked them out for you this afternoon. The voyage which brought Far Petersen and Jan to Shetland is in the second book.'

I took my drink over to the table, moving the lamp so that it shone on the little pile of books tied up with string. There were seven of them, and all but two were hardbound books like ledgers. These covered the voyages from 1966, when Jan Petersen and his father began fishing out of Lerwick and Hamnavoe. Courses, speeds, fixes, weather, everything was recorded, including the time spent trawling and the catches for each voyage. Mostly they were fishing around Shetland, occasionally Orkney or Fair Isle. These voyages were a week, or ten days at the most. But in the summer they had fished up to Faroe and then the voyages had been longer.

I glanced only briefly at these logs. It was the two others, both exercise books, that interested me. They were not proper logs, but a personal record of patrols, incidents and voyages completed in the early part of the war. They had been kept by a Lt Adrian Farrant. The first covered the Scapa Flow period and the evacuation of British troops from the Narvik area of Norway in June, 1940. The second was a record of voyages made in the winter of 1941/42, mostly to rendezvous with local fishing boats off the coast of Norway, but a few to the coast itself north of the Arctic Circle. It was one of those that Gertrude had marked with a slip of paper: Three men and a small boy were taken off from Lyngenfjord at 01.00, the time agreed; Mark Johnston, a mining saboteur with SOE, Knut Hansen, a businessman from Trondheim, Olav Petersen, a whaling captain from Selmvaag, and Jan Petersen, his son, aged 8. The worst conditions possible, clear sky and bright moonlight. I wished the agent who had radioed a report of inshore fog could have been with me for we were spotted before we were even clear of the fjord..

No wonder Lt Farrant had hidden the books at the back of the locker. In every case he had given the names and occupations of those he had landed in Norway and those he had brought out, a highly secret record.

I began from the beginning then, turning the pages quickly, reading only the names with a growing certainty of what I would find. And in the voyage that began: Sailed from Graven at 19.00 on January 6, I found it: Arrived off the RV near Oksfjord in Finnmark at 21.33, weather ideal with low cloud and drizzle, wind light from WNW Took off Nils Storkson as arranged. He is an officer of the Company Linge, I think, but there is another man with him, Alistair Randall, who claims he is a British citizen. Storkson says he is an agent, but not one of ours, and insists I put him under guard. Both are suffering from exposure and Randall from slight frostbite. He is a much older man and badly scarred, an old injury. Only Storkson is armed. I have taken away his gun and given them the cabin for'ard of the galley.

Then followed a brief account of the voyage back to Shetland. It concluded: Berthed alongside the quay at Graven 09.45, January 12, and handed passengers over for interrogation. Both are fully recovered and both tell different stories. A matter for Intelligence. I am only the bus driver…

I sat back, staring at that page, reading it through again. Garrard had been right and the confirmation that my father had not died in Spain left me confused and more than a little puzzled. An agent, but not one of ours. Whose then? Not the Germans. Had the Russians had agents in North Norway at the beginning of 1942?

The door to the kitchen opened. 'Finish your drink and come and eat.' She put the plates she was carrying on the table. 'It is steamed halibut. I hope you like.' I sac down, remembering the presence I had felt on the bridge, that strange sense of companionship when I had stood alone at the wheel that first time. 'Is it all right?' she asked. 'You are very silent.'

'It's fine,' I said. Could it have been his presence I had felt? Had he been in such a state of nerves that it had left an indelible impression?

'You are thinking about their voyage to Shetland. It was very dangerous, to come right into the coast like that. The Duchess is not a Norwegian ship like the boats they had sailing out of Lunna and Scalloway. She was based at Graven in Sullom Voe and it was her speed and range that made them use her. But she only went in to the coast in an emergency or when it was something very important. It wasn't Far Petersen they went in to get on that trip, it was the man Johnston, an English agent; also to land explosives and equipment.'

If she had seen the name Randall in the log she didn't mention it. Probably she didn't remember, and when I had opened the bottle of red wine, and the joint of lamb was on the table, I forgot about it, too. I remember I talked a lot about my early life in America and how I had worked my way from Germany across the Middle East to India. She was curious about me, and in the candlelight, with the drink inside me and her large eyes staring, I even told her about Diisseldorf. To be able to talk freely like that, to have somebody listen — it was something I found I needed very badly. And to add to the enjoyment, there was the knowledge that the evening could only end one way, and that there was all the next day ahead of us. Our hands touched once as I took the tray with the coffee on it and a bottle of Glen Morangie. I felt the movement of her fingers and my blood leapt. We sat, very properly, on two separate chairs, facing each other, and sipped our coffee and our whisky, talking gently in the lamplight, each of us knowing what was going to happen and the delay making the sense of anticipation almost unbearable. I hadn't had a woman for a long time. And now, with all the work behind me…

The knock on the door was sudden and very loud. I thought it must be Johan or somebody from the ship. Gertrude must have thought so, too, for she said as she got up, 'They are becoming too dependent on you.' But it wasn't anybody from the ship. It was Sandford, and he had a policeman with him. He came in smiling, his sharp eyes taking in the cosy intimacy of the room at a glance. 'I thought we'd find you'd slipped round here.'

'What do you want?' I asked him, but with the constable there we both knew.

It was the same man who had escorted me to the police station. 'You have foreign nationals working on your boat. Is that correct?'

I nodded, and he read out the four names.

'They're Norwegian,' Gertrude said. 'I am Norwegian, too. We have residents' permits.'

'Aye, I know that. But what about work permits?'

'Those have been applied for.'

'Would that be for renewal, or are they new applications? We have checked with the Department of Employment and there is no record-'

'My fault,' she said quickly. 'Well, Mr Petersen's really, and nobody ever troubled us about it. But now the applications for permits are in and I have seen the Fisheries Inspector in Lerwick. He has agreed to recommend them, so you don't have to worry.'

'Not if you send the men ashore,' Sandford said. 'And when the Inspector has had time to think about it, I doubt very much if he will support your applications.' He looked pleased with himself as he turned to me. 'You're sailing tomorrow, or is it Sunday? You'll be short of a crew. I could help you there.'

'We'll manage,' I said.

'You can't act as stand-by boat to an oil rig if your manning strength is below the regulation minimum.'

I stared at him, wondering what was behind it. 'You're quite a sea lawyer,' I said. And then I turned to the constable. 'Have you a warrant?'

He shook his head. 'There'll be no charges so long as you send them ashore. Those are my instructions.' And when I asked him to produce them, his face took on a stolid look. 'Verbal instructions, from my sergeant,' he said. 'I'm to see that those four men are brought ashore. They may have to be deported.'

'But that's ridiculous,' Gertrude said. 'They live on board. It's their home.'

'It will be for the Home Office to decide.'

I got my oilskins from the door where I had hung them. I was boiling with anger, but I had too much experience of the slow inexorable process of the law to argue. I just wondered what that little bastard Sand-ford was up to.

Gertrude came at me as I was zipping up my oilskin jacket. 'You are not going to bring them ashore?' Her voice was high and strident, her eyes blazing. 'You can't. I forbid it.'

'Just leave it to me,' I told her. 'It's my responsibility.' I reached for my cap and put it on. Then I went across to Sandford. 'You've been to a lot of trouble over this — why?'

'You got that ship by a trick.'

'It's not the ship you're after now,' I said. 'It's the crew. You want your own men on board. Why?'

He hesitated, his eyes gone dead and I knew there was something else, something he hadn't told me. 'It should be a Shetland crew,' he murmured. 'Shetlanders have a right to exploit their own oil.' But he couldn't look me in the face, his eyes shifting. 'I offered to help, that's all. Crews aren't easy to get.'

'But you have one willing and ready to take over. Your own skipper, too?' There was something here I didn't understand. But I couldn't take hold of him and shake the truth out of him, not with the constable standing there. I glanced at Gertrude. Her long dress looked suddenly incongruous, the candles behind her guttering in the draught from the open door. 'I'll tell them,' I said, and I went out, walking quickly down to the landing beach with the aid of my torch. It was very dark now, a soft rain falling and only the riding light of the trawler showing blurred in the night. The constable came with me and helped me launch the Zodiac.

'How long before we get the permits?' I asked him.

'Normally it's a matter of a few days. But in this case-' He straightened up, facing me in the darkness. 'It's politics, you see, sir.'

'You mean Sandford is right and the applications will be refused.'

'It's only what I hear.'

'And who instructed your sergeant to send you down at this time of the evening?'

'I don't know, sir.'

'But it was Sandford who was pressing the matter.'

'Several councillors, too.'

I was in the boat then. Fortunately he didn't insist on coming with me. He pushed me off clear of the boulders and then I was out from the land, rowing towards the ship. Halfway there I stopped and lit my pipe, the rain drifting in the flare of the match. The sound of an accordion and men's voices singing came to me across the water. I sat there for a moment thinking about what I was going to do, about Shetland politics and how I would stand in law. But Block 206 was in international waters. Out there I was my own master, and if the permits were refused, then I could still send the men ashore when Gertrude had found replacements. I started rowing again, the rain coming in flurries, hissing on the bowl of my pipe.

It was Duncan who answered my hail as I came alongside. He helped me climb aboard and I told him to get the engines started. 'We'll be leaving as soon as we've fetched our anchor.'

He didn't argue, just nodded and said, 'Aye. But ye'd better break it gently to the lads. They've got a bellyful of beer and they'll no' think much of the idea.'

Ill They were crammed into the mess room aft, their faces sweating in the naked light, the table littered with beer cans and young Per swaying to the tune he was squeezing out of the box. The song died as I looked at Johan sitting by the galley hatch. 'You've got out of here at night before, haven't you?' I asked him.

'You want to leave now?'

'If we don't go now, we don't go at all.' And I told him what had happened.

He finished the can of beer he was drinking and got slowly to his feet. 'Ja. We can try.' He pushed his hand up over his face, rubbing at his eyes and swaying slightly. 'What is the weather?'

'Dark,' I said. 'And raining.'

'And the wind?'

'Still from the south-west.'

'Gud. Then we know when we clear Houss Ness.' The thrum of the diesels started and he turned. 'Lars. Henrik.' He said something to them in Norwegian, then went down the alleyway, pushed open the door to the deck and went out into the night, not bothering about oilskins. Henrik followed him and Lars came up to the bridge with me. I didn't switch the deck lights on. We needed night vision. It was very dark, so dark I could barely see them working on the foredeck' the winch clattering and the chain beginning to come in.

A light shone out from the shore. Gertrude had drawn the curtains back, and when the winch had stopped and Johan had joined me in the bridge, he got us out past the end of The Taing on compass bearings taken on the faint glimmer of that light. We lost it as soon as we were out into Clift Sound, a slight swell under us and everything black. We headed south on a compass course of 175° with myself at the radar and Johan watching the glimmer of the waves breaking against the cliffs. I think he distrusted electronics, for he conned the ship by eye, and when we began to feel the full weight of the sea, he ordered a change of course to the west.

He wasn't a navigator. He couldn't handle a sextant. He could barely plot a course on the chart. But he came from Luro and had learned how to pilot a boat fishing the Inner Lead up towards the Lofotens. We passed so close to Houss Ness that we could hear the roar of the waves breaking against the Stacks. He came in from the starboard gangway then. 'Okay. We are clear now on due west. In one mile Groot Ness is to starboard. After that there is nothing between you and the bottom of Greenland.'

Lars was already steering 270°. I went into the chart recess and switched on the light. Foula was the obvious choice. 'What's the holding like in Ham Voe?'

'In this wind, gud.' He leaned over the chart beside me, his jersey sodden. 'Foula is okay. Nobody bother us there.'

He went below then and I switched on the bridge radio. It was 23.36 and I got the tail-end of the late news, something about an oil slick off the Northumberland coast and the local MP to table a motion in the House about pollution and firmer Government control of oil rigs. In Hull a meeting of shipyard workers to consider the latest offer was disrupted by militants. With fish being imported to augment supplies and prices soaring the government is being pressed to intervene in the dispute… I switched on one of the heaters and removed my oilskins, waiting for the inshore forecast. The news seemed remote, another world, as I listened to the sounds of the ship, the slam of the bows as she fell off the tops of the waves. All your life you work for something you believe in, then three weeks of hard, concentrated effort, and it means nothing. I crossed to the radar set, but nothing showed and I stood there, staring out at the black night with the waves coming at us as smudges of grey in the darkness, the radio drowning the plunging impact of the bows. Three months, and what at the end of it? I was thinking of Gertrude, wondering what our relationship would have been now if Sandford hadn't turned up. A partnership, she had said, but the only experience I had had of partnership with a woman had disintegrated into ideological arguments and recriminations.

I switched the Decca to maximum range and as the radius lines changed the outline of Foula appeared little more than twenty-two miles ahead. Speed seven knots. In three hours' time… Gale warnings Hebrides, Rockall and Malin: westerly gale Force 8 may be expected in the next two hours… We would have to anchor close in to be under the lee and Ham was sure to have a police station. Why was it that everything I did seemed to lead inevitably to a clash with authority?

And Sandford — there was something about him, something familiar that I didn't understand. I tried to see behind the bright aggressive eyes, the truculence of his manner, but instead I found my mind switching to the entry in that exercise book. An agent, but not one of ours. And he had been on this ship, in the cabin for'ard of the galley. A matter for Intelligence. Somewhere, in some record office, there would be an Intelligence report. I tried to imagine what it said, but I couldn't think clearly. I was tired, my stomach queasy. It was always like this at the start of a voyage. Just nausea. I was never sick. I leaned on the chart shelf, pushing back my cap and wiping the sweat from my forehead.

Two hours later, the large comforting bulk of Johan appeared at my side. He had been into Ham Voe before, so I left it to him, and at 03.07 we let go our anchor about a cable off the end of the pier. It was still and very peaceful in the lee of the towering mass of Hamnafjeld and I went to my bunk, thinking I was clear of trouble tucked away here under Foula.

We lay there all Saturday and nobody bothered us until a fishing boat came in late that afternoon. She had the letters LK and her number painted white on her bows, and instead of making for the pier, she headed straight for us, the crew on deck putting fenders out. I watched her come alongside, and as Henrik and Lars took her warps, I called down to the skipper to ask him where he came from, what he wanted.

'From Scalloway,' he said, leaning his head out of the wooden wheelhouse. 'You're Randall are you? I've brought a Mr Stevens to see you.' He said something over his shoulder and a man came out of the door at the back of the wheelhouse, a short man with thinning hair dressed in a dark suit. He looked up at me and I saw the steel-trap mouth, the hard unfriendly eyes, the slight cast of the eye. He didn't ask permission to come on board, but went straight to the side and hauled himself up on to our deck. A moment later he was on the bridge facing me. Johan was there, and Henrik, too. We had been playing cribbage. 'These two of your Norwegians?' The same quiet voice, hard and flat, and the odd sidelong look of the left eye. 'You should have put them ashore.'

'What's it got to do with you?' My hands were clenched, my voice strained. 'How did you know where to find me?' I was remembering the coldblooded way he had threatened me, wondering whether he thought I'd made a statement to the police as he stood there facing me, saying nothing. 'What made you follow me out here?'

'We'll talk about that in your cabin.' He turned abruptly and started down the companionway, then realized it was at the back of the bridge.

'I don't want you on board.' But he had already disappeared inside, and the fishing boat had recovered her warps and was going astern. I watched her sheer1 away from our side and head for the pier, the name Island-Girl on her stern, then I followed him to my cabin. He was sitting on my bunk with a packet of cigarettes in his hand. He didn't offer me one this time. 'Shut the door.' He waved me to the single upright chair. 'I take it you know something about the background of this drilling operation. Have you met Villiers?'

'No.'

'But you've heard of him — you know the way he operates, the sort of man he is?'

'I know he runs a very successful finance company.'

'You admire success?' It wasn't a question, more a sneer, the word success made to sound obscene. 'He makes money — at the expense of others, of course. And ultimately it's the workers who suffer.'

'You don't need to give me the propaganda line.'

'No?' He was watching me as he took a cigarette out of the packet and lit it. 'Just thought I'd remind you, that's all. It's some time since you were a shipyard worker. You were one of the leaders then. A shop floor convener with a gift for turning on the heat when it was needed.' He paused, drawing on his cigarette. Then he said, 'Before that you worked as a journalist in the City. You didn't like it, did you?'

'There are two sides to everything,' I said, wondering where this was leading.

He smiled. 'Seeing things two ways can be confusing.'

'You didn't come out here in a fishing boat to tell me that.'

'No. But you've been confused for some time, and that's a pity. You're in a very unique position at the moment. Unique from our point of view.' He was staring at me as though trying to make up his mind, and I wasn't certain which of his eyes was focused on my face. 'But then if you weren't confused, you wouldn't be here, would you?' He said it reflectively, the sound of the radio on the bridge almost drowning his words. 'You wouldn't have come to Shetland, trying to find out about your father, and landed yourself with this trawler.'

So it was the trawler that had brought him here. 'What's the trawler got to do with it?'

But he ignored my question. 'Villiers now,' he murmured. 'Would you say Villiers is typical of the City?'

'One aspect of it, yes. But not the City as a whole. That's pretty mundane.'

'Of course. Banks and insurance and unit trusts.' He smiled quietly to himself. 'But that's not how the public sees it. All they read about is the property developers, the land speculators, the ones that hit the headlines getting rich too quick, while workers are declared redundant or fight management and government for increased wages that never catch up with inflation. Look at Villiers, with his finance companies and his villa in Bermuda, as well as his Hampshire estate, two aircraft and a flat in Belgravia. That's the capitalist image the public understands. Girls, parties, villas abroad — and who pays? They do in the end.' He leaned suddenly forward. 'That's why we're interested in Villiers. The face of capitalism at its ugliest.'

He was very different from the militants I had met — no warmth, and talking in cliches. 'Villiers is happily married with two kids,' I said wearily. 'And he works-'

'I thought you said you'd never met him?' He was still leaning forward, his eyes gone hard.

'I haven't. But I read the newspapers.'

'I see.' He stared at his cigarette, his mouth a thin line. 'You are confused, aren't you?' He gave a little shrug. 'Well, it can't be helped. Villiers is very suitable to our purpose. And so are you. It doesn't really matter that you think him so commendable.'

'I didn't say that. You're twisting my words.'

A silence then, a long, uncomfortable silence. Finally he said, speaking slowly, 'It may help you to understand the importance we attach to this if I fill you in on the background. You know, of course, that we can call on the services of quite a few journalists, wittingly or unwittingly. Recently we have had a very good man looking into the Villiers take-over technique and the companies he has grabbed. It's the latest that concerns you, an offer by Villiers Finance and Industrial, known as VFI, for the whole of the capital of Neven-Clyde Shipping. The offer was very astutely timed — last January, when Neven-Clyde had just reported heavy losses on a harbour construction contract in Brazil.'

'It's of no interest to me,' I said. 'I'm running a trawler now.'

He jabbed a cigarette at me. 'You think you can escape after all these years?' He was watching me, the slant of his eyes more disconcerting than ever. 'It's not as simple as that, Randall. We all have our backgrounds, and the past produces its own obligations.' The hard mouth managed a smile. 'As a boy you can run away to sea. Not as a man.'

He leaned back slowly and his voice was quiet and relaxed as he continued: 'Neven-Clyde's trouble was that they diversified, mostly into fields where their expertise was limited. They lost money, and they lost the support of their shareholders. The VFI offer was declared unconditional on 14th March. The attraction for Villiers was the shipping offices in various parts of the world and the losses built up over the years, which he can now offset against profits for tax purposes. The construction business has already been sold off. N-C Ceramics is on the market. So, too, are N-C Textiles, a small company specializing in panties and bras with a factory in Belfast, N-C Plastics, producing dolls and garden furnishings, and N-C Musicals, a pop record company.'

It took me back to my days as a journalist, the wheeling and dealing that was part of the background to life in the City. It had coloured all my thinking, affected my whole outlook. But now — it didn't concern me now. Only the sea. The sea at least was clean, clear-cut, impersonal, without hate or greed or bitterness. An elemental force, nothing more, nothing complicated. But I couldn't explain it to a man like this, his voice droning on: 'All this is much too complicated to capture public imagination. Stripping, property-dealing, even redundancies — they've had it all before. And anyway a lot of it is above their heads. But an oil rig…' He paused, his eyes watching for my reaction as he drew on his cigarette. 'Two years ago Neven-Clyde bought their way into North Sea oil with the acquisition of a company called Star-Trion. Its only tangible asset was one of the first sea-going rigs built in this country — a rig called North Star which they purchased second-hand. This is the rig that will be drilling here in Block 206. Star-Trion operated it as drilling contractors. But as far back as the 1971 auction they put in a bid for two areas west of Shetland. At that time the major oil companies were concentrating on the North Sea proper. North East Atlantic areas were regarded as hazardous for the rigs then available. Also, geophysically, they were not fully evaluated. Star-Trion got them both on a very low bid.'

'Are you implying that the rig is unsafe in these waters?' I asked.

'Yes, I think so. Where they're going to drill the sea is almost two hundred metres deep — about the limit for North Star. Certainly the public can be made to see it that way. Fishermen particularly, if the result was heavy oil pollution.'

'Result of what?' I demanded. 'What the hell are you suggesting?'

'A strike on board. That for a start.'

'There's never been a strike on a sea-going rig, not that I've heard.'

'No — not yet, not a proper one.' He drew slowly on his cigarette. 'What did you think I meant?'

'Anybody who can arrange for a man's house to be deliberately set on fire-'

'You were never in Northern Ireland, were you? Anyway, they didn't know the little girl was in the house.'

'Would it have made any difference if they had?'

He shrugged, watching the smoke curling up from his cigarette. 'You send those four Norwegians ashore and replace them with our men,' he said quietly. 'That's all you have to do.'

I shook my head, Garrard's warning clear in my mind. 'It's not a strike you're calling, it's something else, isn't it?'

He raised his eyes and stared at me. 'Is it your future you're worrying about?' He didn't wait for me to reply but went straight on: 'You're wrong when you say there's never been a strike on a North Sea rig. There was one last October, but the contractor managed to keep it out of the papers. They were Scots mainly, so he flew in two new drilling crews, all Americans. There was a fight on board and one or two men got hurt. But he got the strikers off his rig.' He was smiling quietly to himself. 'The only trouble is nobody will work on the rig now, except foreigners, so it costs a lot more.'

'What rig was that?'

'Never mind what rig. We've infiltrated several drilling teams. As a result, we've got our foot in the door of three rigs, maybe four if North Star accepts our men as replacements for two roustabouts who've got into trouble ashore.'

'Then why do you want your men on board my ship?'

He looked at me, hesitating. Then he said, 'I told you, North Star is an old rig and unsuitable for the North East Atlantic. If it breaks loose and drags… The threat of a disaster at sea is always news and we get a chance to publicize our demands on grounds of danger. Drillers would be glad of some publicity on rates of pay. The public thinks even a roustabout gets paid a fortune. He doesn't. He works twelve hours on, twelve hours off and every other week he's ashore. He doesn't get paid for that, so you have to divide his weekly pay packet by two.'

'And your men will ensure that the anchors drag, is that it?'

He shrugged. 'They'll probably drag anyway.'

'But you're going to make sure they do.' I stared at him. Who was he, this cold, hard little man, always working in the background? That's sabotage.'

He didn't deny it. All he said was, 'Nobody's going to get hurt.'

'How do you know? How can you possibly know?'

'When you've seen the size of the rig, you'll realize it's out of the question. But it will make the headlines, and then Villiers will be seen as a capitalist gambler operating with obsolete equipment in dangerous waters.'

'It's not your neck you're risking,' I said.

'Nor yours.' The flat, hard voice was suddenly sharp. 'You send those four Norwegians ashore and replace them with our men. That's all you have to do.'

I shook my head, my hands sweating, my body cold inside. 'There's something more, isn't there?' That reference to Northern Ireland. He was cold-blooded enough for that, too. 'There has to be something more, or you wouldn't be going to all this trouble.'

He stubbed out his cigarette. 'Not for you. Not as we've planned it.' He was watching me, and now the squint had a strangely menacing quality, so that I had the feeling that it was this slight physical disability — and it was only slight — that had warped him mentally. 'A pay dispute, a halt to operations — that would focus attention on the rig. And if we can involve Villiers directly, so much the better. Then, if the rig drags at the moment they strike oil-' He shrugged. 'A lot of ifs… But the seismic survey, completed just after Villiers took the company over, makes an oil strike a strong possibility.' He was talking quietly, but there was an urgency in his voice, his mind locked on his plans. Then we could have a major environmental disaster and Villiers would be branded as a man intent on making millions by cashing in on oil without any regard to the environment, or to the fishermen who earn a living by the sea.' And he added, emphasizing his words, 'He's tailor-made to our purpose.'

He paused then, stubbing out his cigarette. 'I've told you more than I intended. But you would have to know in the end. And it's better that it comes from me, so that you understand what is at stake.' His head jerked forward. 'Something else you should understand. Nothing — not you or anybody else — is going to stand in the way.' His hand came down on the locker beside him. 'Nothing. You hear? This ship of yours, and you the master of it — we'll never have an opportunity as good as this again. You're on charter out here for three months. In less than a month nobody will even notice you're there. You'll be accepted as part of the scenery.' He got to his feet. 'The first hole will take about five weeks to drill. That's our information. I'll send the replacement crew and the equipment we'll need out by a local boat in about three weeks' time.'

I reminded him that Mrs Petersen was responsible for crew replacements. 'You won't get her to accept your men.'

But he brushed that aside. 'She'll have no alternative. Sandford will see to it that your Norwegians don't get their work permits, and with the pressure we'll be putting on the fishing community, no Shetlander will volunteer.'

I was standing facing him then, a deep void inside me. A small, insignificant little man with a cast in his eye, and I was afraid of him. Deep inside he had me scared. 'Who are you?' I asked him. A name didn't matter. But where had he come from? What was his background? His face was blank, not a muscle moved. 'That skipper said your name was Stevens.' Even a name might make him seem more human.

'Alf Stevens.' The voice so quiet and that thin smile. It might just as well have been Bill Smith.

'You realize the police know I'm here. An Inspector Garrard from London-'

'They've nothing against you.'

'They have my record, a dossier, several files.'

He laughed. 'It's like I told you. The past sticks with you. There's no escape.' And with brutal frankness, he added, They can't charge you, not unless our witness talks. And he won't do that so long as you cooperate. All right?' He looked at me, one-eyed, the left squinting off into the corner where I had been sitting.

'Now, if you'd sound two blasts on your siren…' He turned to the door then, so sure of me apparently that he didn't need an answer. It was that absolute blind assurance that turned my fear of him to anger.

Two steps and I had him by the shoulder, spinning him round, my face close to his. 'I could sail out of here, straight to Aberdeen, and hand you over.'

'You could indeed.' His face was without expression, no fear, nothing. 'My word against yours and political power behind me. You can try it if you like, but you wouldn't win.'

'There'll be fifty or more men on that rig. You expect me to endanger their lives…"

'I told you. Nobody is going to get hurt.' He took my hand from his shoulder, looking at me as though I was somehow to be pitied. 'Take after your father, don't you?'

'How do you mean?'

'I think you know. You've been making enquiries.'

'I know he was brought out of Norway-'

'He was compromised. And afterwards…' He shrugged. 'Rehabilitation can be a long process. Not many survived.'

I stood there, rooted to the spot. 'What are you trying to tell me?' My voice sounded strained, my mind gone numb. 'He's alive — is that what you're saying?'

He looked at me intently. 'Would that make any difference?' he asked softly. But I was too surprised, too shocked to say anything. 'Suppose you were able to talk to him?'

I couldn't believe it. I didn't want to believe it.

Those lines from Browning, the little plaque — 'It's not true,' I heard myself say and there was a tightness in my throat. 'It's not possible.'

He laughed. 'I think your Inspector Garrard. would tell you differently.' And he added, his voice gone hard again, 'But you can't go to him, can you? He knows too much about you. You can't go to the police, anybody. So you do as we tell you. Otherwise, you'll never know another moment's peace. And that's what you want, isn't it? To be left alone.' He nodded. 'Well, after this you will be, so long as you co-operate.' He stared at me a moment, then turned and went out of the cabin. I heard him ask Henrik to sound two blasts, the sound of his footsteps in the gangway, and I stood there, unable to move, unable to think.

I didn't go to the bridge until I heard the fishing boat alongside. He was already on board. He turned and looked at me, and then he disappeared into the wheelhouse and the boat pulled away from us. I watched as it steamed down Ham Voe, the tonk-tonk of its diesel echoing back until it disappeared beyond Baa Head. It was past six then and the crew were already feeding. I had mine on the bridge, alone, and afterwards I went to my bunk. But I didn't get much sleep, and at 03.30 we got our anchor and left Foula for our rendezvous with North Star.