Scend of the Sea

CHAPTER TEN

The ragged rectangle of aluminium, about the size of a bathmat, looked strangely dull against the polish of the colonel's wooden desk. The edges were scolloped as if they had been hacked off with some inadequate instrument. The metal, section of an aircraft fuselage, did not lie flat and streamlined but was buckled and uneven. Painted orange letters, discoloured and faint but still readable, spelled 'b-o-k'. The upright stroke of the ‘b' was half obliterated by the torn edge. Fastened through the aluminium by its corroded strap was a gold wristwatch.

Tafline was with me at Railways and Harbours Police Headquarters the next morning. The day was bright and mild; we had lingered a little in the street before the building to admire the glorious proteas, the over-early yellow ixias and Tyrian purple babianas of the Malay women flower-sellers. She was quiet and serious and refused flowers after we came out again.

She had been that way ever since I had told her about my sighting of the old-fashioned sailing ship in the path of Walvis Bay. She had not, as I feared, derided it; she simply did not refer to it again, but she had been abstracted from time to time during the evening.

Both our consternation and perplexity at Mr Hoskins' news-I had gone out and bought newspapers with their screaming headlines — had been heightened by a second telephone call hard on the heels of his. The caller had been Colonel Joubert, head of the Railways and Harbours Police. He had first made sure it was Tafline he was speaking to, and then had requested-in a way which made it clear it was more a command than a request-that both of us should meet him next day. Why Tafline? What had she to do with the finding of a section of fuselage purporting to have come from my father's airliner? How, I asked myself uneasily, did Colonel Joubert know in the first place to find me at her flat? It presupposed that the authorities had a close eye on me. The papers stated that the Navy had found the panel floating at sea when the last warship (unnamed) was returning to Simonstown after a stay on the coast more than a week after the search had finally been abandoned. At first, the floating panel was thought to have been part of the Buccaneer; when it was realized that it was not, it was turned over to the Railways Police as falling within their sphere of investigation.

By some tacit understanding, Tafline and I did not discuss the Waratah or the panel or the hundred questions which thronged our minds that evening after the two telephone calls. After supper, we had sat on the floor of her flat, in one another's arms, and, as the lighthouse flash came and went, she had told me of her night's vigil and the dawn of her love; she took the pain, from my wounds; we lost ourselves in each other. I would wait with a kind of unbelieving impatience for the light flash to come and tell me that the lovely face was real, close to my face; when it was gone, the warmth of her lips against mine would underwrite the moment's vision with a searching tenderness.

Now, Colonel Joubert said tersely, 'Usually the sort of thing we have to cope with is an old bottle with a tear-jerker message in it, supposed to have been set adrift in an emergency which existed only in the joker's imagination. This has an original slant to it.'

He lit another cigarette off the one he was smoking and placed it, ash towards himself, on the desk's pock-burned inner camber.

A police major, sitting to one side of the colonel, said sarcastically, 'At least your father doesn't claim to have met your grandfather aboard the Waratah.'

The policemen looked as if they had listened to too many woes to accept anything at face value; several civilian aircraft experts, whose exact function I did not know, seemed strained.

'Not so fast,' I started to say. 'The only information I have is from the newspapers, but first I want to know why …'

'Why the juffrou has been brought into it?' The colonel swung back on his chair and blew a cloud of smoke towards the ceiling.

'She sent a very strange telegram to you.'

'Strange? There was nothing strange about it!'

He picked out a photocopy from a file in front of him.

' "Until we see each other, please keep away from the Waratah. Tafline."'

There was certainly nothing wrong with the Navy's staff-work. First, the record of my interview with the C-in-C which had been turned over to Musgrave, and now a private telegram to mel

'In view of what is written on that panel, I want a lot of explanations. .'

Tafline startled us. After the stiff, formal introductions she had been silent. Now she stood up, walked to the desk, and ran a finger over the twisted, sea-marked panel, as if to establish some contact. She might have been quite alone. She did not react to the colonel's demand. The circle of watching men was stilled? she was oblivious. What was she seeking from the panel which itself had been in the physical presence of the world's greatest sea mystery, probably even seen the corroded hulk of what had been Captain Ilbery's pride, the metal coffin which had broken so many hearts so long ago and tantalized so many minds since?

She took up the watch, too, and turned it round in her hands. Her unspeaking action seemed to have taken the initiative from the colonel and his peremptory demand about the telegram.

He reddened and snapped. 'That watch and all the rest of it looks like something picked up from the films.'

'It isn't a fantasy,' Tafline said, not looking up. She turned the panel this way and that to catch the light.

'It is a will.'

Addressing only me, she read out in her soft, clear voice: — ’"To my son Ian Fairlie I bequeath wreck Waratah south Bashee …”"

I gasped. 'It's. . it's. . too fantastic! A will-written on a piece of metal! He bequeaths me the Waratahl How. . where did he find her?'

My flow of words died at the colonel's cool, professional scrutiny. I felt he was logging every reaction of mine, almost every eye-blink.

That is exactly what I want to know. That is why I asked you to come and explain. Both of you.'

'I … I simply don't know! I've never heard of such a thing. .'

'Nor have I,' he retorted. The more one goes into it, the more incredible it becomes. Not only the panel itself, but the circumstances surrounding it. All of which involve you.'

I did not know what to reply.

Tafline came to the rescue. 'There is more writing. But the wording becomes very indistinct. There are some figures, too. It looks like — no, I can't make it out.'

One of the civilians, his plain clothes contrasting with the smart blue uniforms and white collars of the police, said. ‘We cleared it up, in order to read it. Warren and I have been working most of the night on it. Eh, Warren?'

A heavy-eyed, bearded civilian nodded. 'Waratah was plain enough. Aluminium, of course, doesn't rust in seawater.'

Colonel Joubert said. 'Please leave that alone, juffrou, and sit down again.'

Tafline put it down gently. As she did so, she swung round and looked full at me. Gone was her earlier abstraction; her eyes were shining, as if she had come to some big decision. I was bewildered, the move was so deliberate.

The telephone rang and the colonel answered in Afrikaans, deferentially but firmly.

He put down the receiver. 'Pretoria!' he exclaimed. 'What am I doing about the Waratah? The powers in Pretoria want to know! What do the preliminary investigations show? The press wants to know-the whole world wants to know! Already this morning I've had four calls from London, one from Munich, and two from New York. You've got a lot of questions to answer, Captain Fairlie!'

I didn't care for his overbearing attitude. I gestured at the panel. 'I've got a right to know first what all this is about.'

'Tell him, major, you took the first call.'

He said, This panel was picked up about twelve miles offshore, north of East London, by the frigate Natal…'

Lee-Aston!

I broke in. 'What was she doing there ¹?' The major looked surprised. The colonel leaned forward expectantly. I saw the flash of suspicion. 'Why?'

'Well. . Natal towed me in to Cape Town. I thought the frigate was damaged. Her captain said he was going to Simonstown for repairs. The search area was to the north of the Bashee. Lee-Aston told me so himself.'

'Natal was damaged,' replied the major. 'But Commander Lee-Aston joined the search in its final stages. However, when it was called off, the damage to Natal was found to be more extensive than at first thought. Natal did not return to base. She stayed over at East London for more repairs. That took some time. She was on her way back when she spotted the panel..

It slipped out before I could check myself. 'But if she was making for Simonstown, she would not have been north of East London but south …'

Lee-Aston was not the cold, inflexible machine I had thought him to be after all. The main search having failed, he had gone straight to the area I had urged him to search 1 And he had found part of the Gemsbok.

Both the colonel and the major were staring at me.

Joubert said thoughtfully, 'You're very clever about these things, Captain Fairlie.'

The major resumed, not taking his eyes from my face. 'Commander Lee-Aston first thought he had found part of the Buccaneer.'

'Why didn't he say something!' I burst out.

‘You've been a great deal in the news lately, Captain Fairlie,' replied Joubert. ‘How the press must love you! One drama on top of another! Fortunately Commander Lee-Aston chose his duty above publicity. He kept his mouth shut until he reached Simonstown and the origin of the panel could be established.'

There was an innuendo about the colonel's words which should have warned me.

He threw away his cigarette. 'If you listen hard, you can hear the reporters grinding their teeth outside the door waiting to interview you. Howling, in fact. How did they know?'

He eyed me searchingly.

'Are you trying to imply …?'

‘I am implying nothing, Captain Fairlie-at this stage. All I can say is that the way one drama is piling on after another. .' He shrugged. 'It gets like a drug, being in the headlines. There was a man I wanted once whom we chased all over the country. Every day he had the headlines. He got away. He was quite safe where he holed up. The papers cooled off. He couldn't bear it. So he arranged with the papers that he would give himself up at a particular spot and they'd be there — reporters, photographers, the lot. He was perfectly happy when we arrived to arrest him. He was back again on the front page. It is quite amazing how co-operative the press proves on these occasions …'

To the other side,' growled the major.

I looked from one to the other. They had not accused me

of a put-up job with the press, but they were pretty close to the wind.

I bit back my reactions. 'Is that panel really part of the Gemsbok?’

One of the civilians — Warren, the aircraft manufacturer's representative-said wearily from the depths of his shaggy beard, That section of fuselage comes from a Viscount, you can take it from me. The rivet style and metallurgical content correspond with the Gemsbok mark. It is certainly not a Buccaneer.’

Another civilian, a Transport Ministry Inspector of Crashes, was about to speak when the door was opened by a sergeant, who showed in an officer in Air Force uniform.

'Sorry, colonel.'

"We hadn't gone far,' said Joubert shortly. 'This is Captain Fairlie.'

Major Bates's handshake was firm but uncommitted. 'I saw your ship from my Shackleton the other day. My crew were laying bets how long you would stay afloat.' He looked inquiringly at the metal panel, at the colonel, at Tafline. No one spoke. He found himself a chair in the silence.

The Inspector of Crashes broke the uncomfortable atmosphere.

'The style of stencil and type of paint is the same as we use for our Airways planes. No doubt. Of course, we haven't yet had time to make a full chemical analysis but it looks good at first glance.'

Tafline broke in. 'Those other words and scratches — they run into one another. What do they mean?'

'We've tried them and the figures also, but they look pretty hopeless,' Warren replied. 'Most of them are on top of each other. We could try some specialized photography and the handwriting experts, but I'm not very hopeful. It seems as if the man who wrote this was either dying or injured.' He turned to me. 'Sorry, I forgot for the moment he was your father. One becomes impersonal about these things.'

'I don't accept that,' snapped Joubert. 'Anyone could have fabricated a thing like that. Who ever heard of a will being scratched on a chunk of metal by a pilot who died at the controls of a plane which vanished without trace?'

'I might agree with you, except that panel came from a Viscount,' answered Warren. 'No question about it.'

'Is that all you can tell?'

Warren glanced at the Inspector of Crashes and grinned. 'I said we were busy on it all night. It tells a whole story.'

The colonel flushed with annoyance when Tafline said quickly, 'Such as?'

Some of the tiredness seemed to ease out of Warren as he warmed to his explanation. 'One works backwards in these matters. The buckling of the panel forward where the Gemsbok's name was shows that the force of the crash was underneath and upwards; in other words, the Viscount did not crash nose-first into some obstacle. It also shows that there was no explosion in the turbines on the port side, or else there would be blackening. We can pretty well rule out fire.'

'The sea would put out a fire anyway.' Joubert tried to halt Warren's exposition.

Warren ignored him. 'The style of curvature of the buckling shows that the airliner went in at full power, hit something hard like the sea, bounced, and then hit something else with the starboard or opposite wing. That something did the real damage. Probably tore off the wing and killed most of the passengers.'

'You can't possibly tell me you can find out all this from one piece of metal,' objected Joubert.

The Inspector of Crashes rushed to the support of his technical colleague.

'We have a set number of things we look for in every crash.’

'Listen. .' exclaimed the red-faced colonel, but the Inspector and Warren continued to ignore him.

"There was no explosion in this case, or else the pilot couldn't have written the message.'

'Scratched,' corrected Warren. ‘It was then prised loose with some instrument — after the disaster.'

The Inspector remained in full flight. 'Could there have been misreading of the altimeter by the pilot, or simply an error in the instrument itself.. '

‘I'd rate the chances of an altimeter fault high,' argued Warren. 'It's pretty certain that he hit the sea at full power and that he was confident that he was flying high enough not to encounter any obstacles.'

Major Bates, the Air Force man, said, 'My squadron searched all that area with everything we had. Sonar and electronic instruments aren't the whole answer, though. But visual sightings and spottings are difficult in a sea which is murky from all the sand the current brings with it and the mud from all those rivers.'

Colonel Joubert thumped the table with his fist.

'This isn't an inquiry into the loss of the Gemsbok. That was held years ago,' he grated. 'It found that the pilot died at the controls-and that is good enough for me. I'm a policeman, and I say there is little proof that this inscription was made by Captain Fairlie's father.'

Take it or leave it, that panel is from a Viscount — probably the Gemsbok,' replied Warren.

The colonel glared at the two experts, at Tafline, and then let his gaze rest on me. Slowly, deliberately, he lit a cigarette and watched me through the cloud of smoke.

'I don't deny it,' he said. 'I'll accept that it was the Gemsbok' He eyed me fixedly. 'Captain Fairlie, the C-in-C gave me a transcript of your interview with him.' He indicated the pile of typescript in front of him. There were newspapers in the collection, too, sensationalizing Musgrave's questions about the Waratah. Waratah Found?' asked one headline. 'Did Fairlie Brothers have a Treasure Tryst?' I squirmed at the sight of them. Musgrave had known just the right note to strike for the press.

'There are pages and pages here about your views on the search for the Waratah . .' He stopped and looked at me inquiringly.

'Yes?'

'Do you not find it strange that after your ship had nearly sunk in that big storm, you were sent a telegram which didn't say anything about your escape, or wish you safe, but only told you to stay away from the Waratah’

'I understood what was meant.’

'Did you, Captain Fairlie? Did you?'

'I mean, we had talked about the Waratah, we shared something over the old ship.' 'What did you share?'

Tafline interrupted. 'It was the thing which really brought us together. It was a kind of starting-point, our first common ground. .'

Joubert eyed us both. ⁴A very strange form of introduction, I may say. It struck me as so strange that I felt it necessary to ask you to come along here today and tell me more. "Keep away from the Waratah until I see you". Why keep away? What did you intend to discuss about the ship when you met Captain Fairlie again? If you keep away from something, you must know where the something is, not so?’

Tafline blushed and was confused. 'It-it was a form of expression. I didn't know Captain Fairlie very well at that stage. I…'

'You were in the area recently where the panel was found, were you not, Captain Fairlie?'

The faces round me turned blank at Joubert's tone of interrogation. It seemed, too, that the friendly surge of professional interest by the civilian experts had dimmed.

'Yes, but. .’

'But what?'

I gestured towards the documents on the desk. 'I explained it all to the C-in-C. I tried to at the Buccaneer inquiry. I have long believed that the clue to Waratah's disappearance was the answer to safety for oil rigs in that area.'

'Quite so, quite so. Yet the telegram says, "keep away from the Waratah"'

He let the silence fall, and then went on, 'I said before, I am a policeman, Captain Fairlie, and in order to get to the bottom of things, we look below what lies on the surface. There are a number of very strange undercurrents in all this. The juffrou's telegram is one of them.'

'It was just a simple message with no hidden or sinister meanings …' I began.

'What do you say, juftrou’

'It was an everyday thought wishing him well.'

Joubert smiled sarcastically. ' "Keep away from the Waratah" — a very ordinary thing for a young lady in love to say!'

'You're reading all sorts of things into this, colonel!' I protested.

There is nothing ordinary about a testament being scratched on a sheet of aluminium,' retorted Joubert. ‘It is less ordinary still for someone whom everyone believes was killed in an airliner crash to bequeath his son a non-existent ship. In all my experience, I have never heard of anything like it.'

I said, 'You've forgotten the watch, Colonel Joubert.'

'No, Captain Fairlie, I have not.'

The police major chuckled in the background like a jackal at a lion's kill.

'That watch is just the sort of extra fancy touch that rouses a policeman's deepest instincts of distrust. It makes the job look too right, too watertight. If it weren't for that watch, I might have had doubts. But look at it-it's one of those self-winding calendar types and the hand has been set at October 23, 1967. Not you notice, at the date of the crash, July, 1967, but a couple of months later. Very clever, very clever indeed!'

I checked my anger. 'You want proof-we can easily have the watch analysed. Or I can tell you myself-there was an inscription from the Air Force Association on the back. It was given to him when he became chief civilian pilot. The wording said something about his war-time raids.'

'I don't for a moment doubt it is your father's watch, Captain Fairlie, just as I don't doubt that it is a panel from the Gemsbok. What worries me is how all this surfaced at once, and why. And where that telegram about the Waratah fits into it.'

‘I’ve tried to explain. I've said over and over..

Joubert waved his hand in dismissal. ‘I want to think this thing over-a lot. You'll be hearing from me again.' He laughed in his overbearing way. 'If you really want people to be on your side, you produce the wreck of the Waratah, Until then, you still have a great deal of explaining to do to a lot of people, Captain Fairlie!'

I went cold at the thought. 'What do we say to the press?'

Joubert shrugged and laughed again. 'You say, Captain Fairlie! It's your story. You set the ball rolling.'

I turned to Tafline. She was unhappy, withdrawn. Again I wondered, what was all this Waratah suspicion and subtle accusation doing to her feelings?

Joubert added, 'That pretty face of yours will provide the press with the romantic interest on the story they love so, juffrou.''

An hour later, stunned by a barrage of reporters' questionings and blinded by a score of bursting flashbulbs, we stood by the great splash of colour which is the flower market. She had not spoken since we emerged into the street, but she asked the Malay woman for kalkoentjies ('little turkeys') — those tiny exquisite wild gladioli, daubed with colours as if they had just been painted and scented, which came from hidden places of the Western Cape. Because it was winter, they were difficult to obtain in the market, but the woman came back smiling with some of the earliest which had been gathered from some sheltered kloof. I pinned the bunch to her lapel without speaking, and she looked down into the brown-and-yellow splashed centre.

'They are like a woman in love.' she murmured. 'Beautiful by day, and her heart perfumed at night.'

Why did my father have to find the Waratah? I asked myself resentfully, looking at her lovely face. Why did they have to come between us, those puzzling, bitter, unanswerable questions?

She said, The Waratah is like the albatross hung round the Ancient Mariner's neck — for both of us. It has driven you into a corner, Ian. You are discredited, in danger of losing everything — your career, reputation, esteem.. '

The cold fear tugged at my heart as I waited for her next words.

'We can never realize our love properly while we carry this burden.'

The numb silence fell between us. I did not want it, but she was right and I knew that she was right.

I was afraid, though, when I saw Greatheart reach for the sword.

She said, 'We must go and look for the Waratah, you and I.'