Death Watch

Valentine walked home along the quayside. The incoming tide brought with it the remnants of the cool mist which had acted as a shroud for Gavin Peploe’s yacht. Out in mid-channel a freighter had slid in along the Cut from the sea, deck lights ablaze. The sound of a radio playing music to a Latin beat bounced over the water. The ship swung in the tide, the stern coming round towards the quayside so that she could enter the Alexandra Dock. The steel starboard side came to within fifty feet of the quay, towering over Valentine.

He stopped, lit a Silk Cut, and watched the ship glide towards him, skewed, the great mass edging sideways. The engines churned up chocolate-coloured water. On the side was painted a huge flag. Something exotic, thought Valentine; the Philippines, perhaps? Some banana republic? A blue flag, a yellow rhombus, within which was set a blue sphere of the night sky with studded stars, and a curving green band containing letters.

‘Tin-pot,’ he said to himself. You could always tell a country that had its arse hanging out by the fact that it had a flag cluttered with rubbish: coats of arms, emblems, flowers, you name it – they’d stuff it on the flag in the hope that no one would notice that the country was on its uppers.

The flag flying from the mast was different, something

Smoking, he read out the words on the coloured flag. ‘Ordem e Progresso.’ He thought it didn’t take his education to work that one out. Order and progress. Trite, he thought, flicking his cigarette end in the water, then turning away.

Fifty yards down the quay he stopped, in no hurry to get home. The house, despite the summer’s day, would be cold – especially the bathroom, which always offered up the worst moment of his life, the last look in the mirror each night. He lit another Silk Cut, and thought about Alex Cosyns – about the cheque from Robert Mosse, and who he knew on the regional fraud squad who could wriggle him access to Cosyns’s bank account. There’d been no complaint from Cosyns. Which was good news, but also unsettling. He shivered slightly, rolling his shoulders.

He looked back along the quay when he heard the odd, taut complaint of the buffers on the ship meeting the wooden piling which protected the concrete wharf; just a glance, a random moment which, he would later have to admit, probably saved his career, maybe even his life.

The name on the stern of the ship was written in blue letters ten feet high:

MV ROSA.