Death Watch

Twine’s team searched the Rosa in twenty minutes: six decks down to the engine room, eighteen cabins, the forward stores, the galley, the mess room. Nothing. Then they did it again, this time using the plans on each deck to block off each room shown, and with a dog team they’d called in from St James’s. Nothing. The Port Authority got them a skeleton crew for the quayside so they could roll back the last pontoon to reveal the cargo – three separate holds brimful of grain, the surface of each as untouched as a beach at dawn. Then they edged down the side of the deck to the fo’c’s’le and checked that. Again nothing, just cable, anchors, and rope.

Shaw was back in the mess room when Twine reported in. ‘We’re doing it again.’ Shaw laid his hands out on the mess table, aware that stress was making his joints ache. If the operating room wasn’t on board, where was it? They hadn’t actually seen Andy and Neil Judd go aboard – perhaps they’d gone somewhere else, the surgeon too? The containers on the dock? That was possible. Metallic. Hot. But did they rumble and hum? The dockside cranes would make them vibrate. Or the HGVs edging past in first gear.

‘OK, Paul. Rustle up the dock manager – I want all the containers opened on the quayside. Now.’

Twine went, and Shaw was pretty sure he saw Samblant

He rang Birley at the dock gates. ‘Mark? Run the CCTV back to when the Rosa was in port last time – see if you can ID any of the containers on the dockside that night. Then compare that with what we’ve got out there now. OK – do it.’

He looked at the crew. One of them smiled, a fatal error, because you couldn’t fake a smile like that.

‘Stand up,’ said Shaw. They all stood, exchanging glances, and one or two now suppressing smiles. They thought they were safe, and that made Shaw certain they weren’t. Valentine came in with DC Lau.

‘Search them,’ he said. They did a two-hander, shuffling each one forward and then pushing them through to the galley. Nothing.

‘OK – strip off,’ said Shaw. They piled their clothes on the mess table and stood, their faces showing something else now – anger, betrayal, shame perhaps, so that the tension in the room was electric.

Six naked bodies. Six clean naked bodies. ‘Clean as whistles,’ said Valentine. All except for the white charity bracelets on each wrist. But they were clean, and that’s what Shaw had missed, until now.

‘The ship’s got two thousand tonnes of grain on it – the dust’s everywhere down by the hold, but everyone’s spotless,’ said Shaw. ‘The ship’s spotless.’ He ran a finger along the table top. ‘Why?’ he asked Samblant, stepping inside his personal space. ‘Why’s everything clean?’

‘We don’t touch the cargo,’ said Samblant. ‘It’s loaded,

Shaw thought about that, and the bloodwood dust in the captain’s shower room. He tried to call up a mental picture of the single sheet of A4 Twine had put together on the history of the Rosa – a ship’s CV. He couldn’t recall its original name, but he remembered its trade – running timber between São Paulo and Tilbury for five years in the early 1990s.

‘So why, and how, did the captain get covered in sawdust?’ he asked. He held up a finger, still smudged red. ‘Muirapiranga – bloodwood,’ he said. Samblant’s eyes faked confusion, but Shaw could see that the emotion he was trying to mask was fear. He didn’t get an answer to his question – but that didn’t matter. Because he knew now – not only why, and how, but where.