Solomons Seal

Chapter Four

The last night watch is always a lonely one, but at 04.00 that morning I felt lonelier than usual. Tiredness may have had something to do with it. I had been on the bridge until past midnight and had had very little sleep. But that wasn’t the real reason. It was the strangeness of the ship, the crew all islanders who didn’t speak my language, and a coast I had never seen before. As I stood there on the bridge, the night dark and overcast, a black helmsman at the wheel and only the lights of that coaster ahead for company, the sense of isolation was very strong.

My eyelids gradually became heavy, almost gummed together with sleep, and to keep myself awake, I began thinking about Bougainville, what future the island might hold for me. Then my mind switched involuntarily to the trucks we were going to load off that beach and to Perenna Holland — wondering whether she had got my message in time, what she would do. Would she stay with her aunt in Perth or fly on to Sydney, hire a car and drive up to Tin Can Bay? I knew so little about her, I didn’t even know whether she had a licence and could drive. And if she did manage to locate us in the dark, what prospect was there for the development of any close relationship here on board, with her brother and his problems always present? Even my memory of her was now overshadowed by that vivid drunken picture he had given me of her wielding a cleaver in the blood-bespattered kitchen where their mother had been murdered. An outbreak of native hysteria, the lawyer had called it. But hysteria is a symptom; there had to be a cause for such an outbreak of violence.

Luke relieved me as dawn broke reluctantly under the overcast, the ship tramping steadily on over a leaden sea and the coast of New South Wales just visible, a dark line on the horizon to port. He had a reasonable command of English, and I stayed with him for a while. He was from a village at the eastern end of New Britain. He showed me the position of it on the Pacific Ocean chart. It was on the coast facing towards Hixon Bay and a high mountain called The Father. He was an important figure in his village, he said, but to retain his position he had to return at reasonable intervals to hold a feast and give presents. ‘I have two worlds, you see.’ He was smiling a little sadly. ‘They do not understand this world. They know I am a navigator and have a ship. That they can understand, for we have always lived partly by the sea. But they can only see that I am a navigator if I go there and prove to them I am rich. It is a very poor village.’ And he added quickly, ‘But the life there is good.’

I asked him why he wouldn’t stand a night watch or navigate out of sight of land. He hesitated a long time before replying. Finally he said, ‘Mr Sling’by, believe me, I can do it.’ His deep voice was suddenly urgent. ‘But I do not have confidence when the Captain is all time watching me. In the islands he know I am a good navigator, but at night, or on a long voyage like from Louisiade Archipelago to Sandy Cape, he has no trust, so I am afraid I don’t do it right and make some very abominable mistake.’ He looked at me then, his black, broad-nosed face reflecting a deep-felt sense of wrong. ‘It is a long time since you serve in a ship like this, but he does not watch over you.’ He said it almost accusingly.

Looking into his face, I realised that beneath that black, markedly different shell was a very proud man. ‘Would it help,’ I said cautiously, ‘if you shared a night watch with me? Later in the trip.’ And I added, ‘It would certainly help me if you did. I don’t know these waters, and I’d appreciate having you check my navigation.’

He hesitated, his large brown eyes fixed on me intently. Finally he nodded. ‘Yes, I do that.’ And suddenly he was smiling at me, a great broad smile that had extraordinary warmth in it. ‘I think you understand.’

I left him then to find the wardroom empty, breakfast already over and the table littered with the remains of the meal. I was tired and didn’t feel like food anyway. I slipped down the companionway to the main deck, got a mug of tea from the galley and took it to my cabin, turning in straight away. Holland was having a long lie-in in preparation for the night ahead, and I was due on the bridge again at noon.

Luke called me a little before twelve so that I had time to eat before going on watch. There was nobody else in the wardroom, and Samson, the big, burly steward, served me in lonely splendour. When I finally joined Luke in the wheelhouse, I found the weather had deteriorated. There was no sign of the coast now, visibility down to about 2 miles. ‘This evening I think it rain,’ he said.

‘You’ve got a new forecast, have you?’

He shook his head, laughing. ‘Don’t need forecast to tell me what this weather will be. I know.’

I was to discover that in this, and in many other things, his instinct was infallible. But he knew nothing about sorcery, or pretended not to, though he admitted it existed and that it was still practised in the islands. Talking to him, I found him a complicated mixture of pride and diffidence. He was also one of the most likeable men I had ever met.

He relieved me again at four, and by then there were rain clouds building up to the east of us. ‘Compass course is due north,’ I said, ‘and the radar shows the coast six-and-a-half miles off. Have you had some tea?’

‘No, I have coffee.’

I got some tea from the galley and took it up to the wardroom. There was nobody there, and when I had finished it, I started on a tour of the ship. It was the first opportunity I had had to look around. I started with the engine-room. They were still clearing up after the overhaul, but already the copper and brasswork gleamed and the whole hot mass of machinery had a cared-for look. The chief engineer was from Rabaul, an old grey-haired man who introduced himself as Ahab Holtz. Of mixed German blood, and German-trained, he was a cheerful, friendly man, and his regard for his engines was in the nature of a love affair. The others in the engine-room were different. They were from Buka, and I was unpleasantly conscious of the sullenness of their manner.

Outside of the engine-room the ship was in a poor state, dirt and rust everywhere and no sign of anything having been painted for a long time. Even essential gear looked neglected, and nothing seemed to have been done to clean up on deck after the period in dock. The galley on the main deck of the bridge housing was far from clean, and in the crew’s mess for’ard I sensed that same sullenness. They were most of them from Buka, and the coxs’n was there with them, a squat bearded man, the skin of his face so glossy black it looked like polished ebony. He said his name was Teopas, and when I asked him why he didn’t stick to his own mess aft, he affected not to understand, though I learned later he had been to school at a Marist Mission and spoke quite good English. I told him to come with me and check some of the things that urgently needed attention, but he just stood there staring at me with surly insolence, not saying a word, and the devil of it was there was no way I could enforce the order.

I went aft then to what had been the sergeants’ mess, which was where he should have been. The only occupant was the bos’n and when I asked him about the attitude of the Buka men, he said, ‘Buka bilong Solomons. No laikim Papua Niugini gavman. Buka pipal laik ind’pendence. Bougainville tu.’ He was from Kieta, and he said something about his father’s having been killed by the Australians during the war. At least, I think it was that. He said, ‘Papa bilong mi and ol Australia maikim dai.’

Finally I went up to my cabin feeling distinctly uneasy. A ship with a political bombshell ticking away in its guts, that wasn’t what I had been looking for when I had come out to her in Darling Harbour. As I lay on my bunk, thinking about it, it was hard to realise it was only thirty-six hours since I had come on board.

I was back on the bridge at 20.00 after a greasy, overdone steak, apple pie and coffee. Holland was there, pacing restlessly back and forth. Nobody else except the helmsman. ‘We’re closing the coast now,’ he said. ‘I altered course about an hour and a half back, shortly after we came on to the continental shelf. I’m not sure, but I think I’ve got the loom of Double Island light fine on the port bow. We’re in sixty-five fathoms at the moment. When you get below thirty fathoms, put the engines at Slow Ahead and give me a call.’

‘What’s your ETA at the beach?’ I asked him.

‘Between midnight and o-four-hundred was what I told them. I guess we should be there about o-one-hundred, probably a little before.’ He went over to the chart. ‘That’s our position.’ He had pencilled in a cross with 20.00 against it. ‘When you raise the light keep it fine on the port bow, and whatever the depth call me at twenty-three-thirty. We should be less than an hour’s run from the beach then.’ He turned to me with a quick, nervous smile. ‘I hope you’re enjoying yourself. It’s a great help to have you on board, and I’m grateful.’

I nodded. ‘Glad I’m of use.’ I turned to him then, and the smile faded as I said, ‘There’s just one thing. Those two trucks you’re lifting off the beach, what’s in them?’

‘I don’t think that need concern you.’ His tone was abrupt, slightly defensive.

‘That depends,’ I said. ‘You’re loading off a deserted beach at night, no Customs Officer present, and if it’s contraband …’

‘The cases will be Customs-sealed, papers, everything dealt with.’

‘Yes, but what’s in them?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.’

‘Does that mean you don’t know? You’re accepting cargo off a deserted beach and you don’t know what it is?’

He stared at me uneasily, then turned away. ‘It’s simply to save them trucking it all the way down to Sydney.’

‘You could have picked it up at Brisbane.’

‘I don’t know why they chose this method,’ he said irritably. ‘I didn’t fix it. But I need that extra cargo to cover my fuel bills.’

‘If you didn’t fix it, who did?’

‘My partner.’

‘Through your agents in Sydney?’

‘It’ll be on the manifest. I don’t know what agent he used.’

‘And you don’t know what the cargo is.’

He turned on me then. ‘Look, Mr Slingsby, either you’re a passenger on my ship or you’re acting first officer. Whichever it is, you’re under my orders. The cargo is nothing to do with you. But if you feel there’s something wrong, then there’s nothing to stop you going ashore as soon as we’re on the beach and the ramp down.’ He was facing me, his head down, his voice trembling on a high note. ‘It’s up to you,’ he added, and went quickly out as though afraid I’d persist with my questions.

I stood there for a moment, staring at the chart and thinking over what he had said. I was certain that there was something illegal about those trucks. All the time I had been questioning him I had sensed his doubt. But, as he had said, no reason why I should be a party to it. I was free to walk off the ship as soon as we reached the beach, except that I had radioed that message to his sister. ‘Kepten!’ The helmsman was pointing. ‘Lukluk, Kepten. Double Island lait.’

I picked up the glasses and went out to the bridge wing. The night was very dark. Away to the north a flash of lightning lit the low cloud base. It was some time before I saw it, picking up the flash as the old tub crested a swell. It was too low on the horizon for positive identification, but it couldn’t be anything else. During the next half-hour the echo-sounder recorded a gradual decrease in depth, finally steadying at between 39 and 34 fathoms. By then the light was very clear. But during the next hour it became increasingly difficult to see as rain came in from the north, very heavy at times so that it even blurred the trace of the coast I was getting on the radar screen. At 23.30 I called Holland. We were then in 32 fathoms, the indistinct radar trace showing us 6 miles off.

I got him some coffee, then stayed with him in the wheelhouse, but we didn’t talk. He was completely absorbed in his navigation. However, when we were barely 2 miles off, at a point when I would have expected the ship to have his full attention, he came across to me and said, ‘I think I should tell you something. When we bought this ship, it was a question of survival. It still is. I’ve never been much of a businessman. It was Hans who saw the advantages of landing craft that could bring copra and coffee cargoes direct from the plantations. He bought a war surplus RPL and traded with it so successfully that within a year he had bought another. He’s over in England now, arranging finance for this new ship. That’s the sort of man he is, and when he puts something my way, I know it will be to my advantage and all the details thoroughly worked out.’ He looked at me sideways. ‘I’ve been thinking over what you said, and I felt I ought to tell you the position.’

I thanked him, not sure whether this explanation wasn’t in part to convince himself. ‘Of course, mostly the cargoes are arranged by Mr Shelvankar. He does it by radio. All the isolated plantations have radio now; some of the bigger ones even have their own airfield.’ He reached for his oilskins. ‘Think I’ll con us in from the upper bridge. It’s not going to be too easy to see the track down to the beach in this muck.’ Dressed, he tightened the strings of his hood. ‘Hope I’ve set your mind at rest. I wouldn’t want to lose you just as we’re starting the long haul across to the Solomons.’ His smile was friendly but tense as he pushed back the door and went out into a drenching downpour of rain.

The rain was so heavy now it had completely blotted out the scanned outline of the coast. The upper bridge telegraph rang for Slow Ahead, and the revs died to a sluggish beat. We were half a mile from the shore and nothing visible, the circling illumination of the Double Island lighthouse no more than an intermittent glimmer in the darkness. Ahead of us was nothing, only blackness. A few minutes later he signalled Slow Astern and called the crew to stations on the ship’s loudspeakers. We backed and filled with constant alterations of course. Luke came through the wheel-house on his way to the upper bridge, barely recognisable in his oilies, and for’ard I could see oilskin-clad figures flashing torches as they got ready to open the bow doors and lower the ramp. I heard the stern anchor let go, and almost immediately afterwards the gleam of headlights showed through the rain. The telegraph rang for Stop Engines, and a moment later there was a slight lurch as the ship grounded.

There was an oilskin coat and sou’wester hanging on a peg at the back of the wheelhouse. They were too small for me, but at least they gave some protection as I climbed down to the tank deck. By the time I reached the bows the doors were open and the ramp was being lowered. Fortunately the sea was calm, flattened by the rain, for we were grounded at least a dozen yards from the shoreline, and the ramp, when it touched bottom, was half under water. Holland waded out to the end of it with the water up to his knees as he tested the bottom with his feet. Apparently it was firm, for he signalled them to drive on with his torch.

There was no difficulty with the first vehicle. The driver took it slowly in low gear and four-wheel drive, coming up the ramp without a check and parking himself neatly against the steel side of the hold, nose right against the wheels of the first Haulpak. He didn’t get out of his cab, and when I went over to him and asked whether he had seen anything of a young woman, he said, ‘Sure. That beach is crowded with them, all in bikinis.’ He had a broad-brimmed hat on his head and a hard-bitten face. ‘You think I carry a harem around with me, an’ in this weather?’ He grinned down at me. ‘You expect a lot with this sort of a consignment.’ The second vehicle was already coming down the beach, and I had to move out of the way. It came too fast, had to check at the ramp, and the engine died. After that it was a winching job.

It took the better part of half an hour, winching and manhandling, to get it positioned. Finally it was done, and the two drivers waded ashore to the backup car that was waiting for them at the top of the beach. No sign of Perenna Holland. Either she hadn’t been able to make it or she hadn’t got my message. Maybe Shelvankar had never sent it. I went up to the signals office and asked him again, but he assured me he had sent it at once, looking offended that I should doubt his word. He was busy checking the papers the drivers had brought on board. ‘What’s the cargo?’ I asked him.

‘Japanese outboard engines.’ He showed me the manifest. ‘You see. They are all cleared by Customs.’ I had already checked that myself. The trucks had been stacked with heavy wooden crates, each crate wired round and sealed with a little leaden seal. Back in the wheelhouse I found the bow doors closed, the ramp up and the ship already moving astern as Holland hauled her off the beach on engines and stern anchor winch. Ten minutes later we had recovered the anchor and were headed out to sea. He came down then from the upper bridge.

‘Went quite well really.’ He looked tense, the muscle on the side of his jaw twitching slightly, his oilskins dripping water. ‘Rain’s taking off now.’ I could almost feel him trying to unwind. ‘Didn’t like it running in. Lot of tide around here. Not too sure of the chart. Conditions didn’t help either.’ He was pulling off his oilskins. ‘What about some coffee?’

‘I’ll go and see about it,’ I said.

‘Thanks, and put something in it. You’ll find a bottle of Scotch in my cabin.’ He was already at the chart table, leaning over it and at the same time keeping an eye on the echo-sounder. Luke was standing by the helmsman.

‘Coffee?’ I asked him, and he nodded.

When I got back with four mugs, some sandwiches and the bottle of whisky, the rain had almost stopped and the light on Double Island Point showed as a distant flash low down on our starboard quarter. Our course for the gap between the Saumarez and Frederick reefs took us close inshore the whole 100-mile length of Fraser Island. Only when Sandy Cape was abeam would we be in deep water. Holland drained his coffee, put the mug on the chart table and turned to me. ‘I’ll relieve you at four. That all right with you?’

I glanced at the clock at the back of the wheel-house. ‘That gives you barely two hours’ sleep.’

He nodded. ‘Can’t be helped. It’s the same for both of us. Just keep your eye on the depth and the radar. Call me if you’re in any doubt. The Double Island light gives you a perfect back bearing, and if the rain holds off, you should have it in sight until just before I relieve you.’

It gave me a certain sense of satisfaction that a man who spent his whole life navigating the island-infested waters of the South West Pacific should have sufficient confidence in my navigation to leave me in charge of his ship running close along the shore of an island I had never seen before. ‘Just don’t go to sleep, that’s all,’ he added as he went out.

I sent Luke to check that the bow doors had been properly secured. He was gone a long time, finally reporting that he had had to root out the crew again and oversee the job himself. ‘They don’t think it important.’

‘And you?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘We never do it before.’

‘That’s because you could always run for shelter under the lee of an island. This voyage you can’t.’

He stayed with me for the first hour of my watch. It was a help, for once the effect of the coffee had worn off the whisky in it took over, and I began to have difficulty keeping my eyes open. The rain, the constant strain of peering into the darkness, the nervous tension of the beaching and the fact that I had been on watch now for almost seven hours, all in a climate that was quite different from England, had made me very sleepy. I was sorry when he finally left me. We hadn’t talked much, but his company had been comforting.

Alone, I paced back and forth, thinking about Holland’s problems, wondering where his sister was, vague fantasies flitting through my mind. Oddly enough, it was those damned stamps and the fate of the Holland Trader that were the recurring theme of my thoughts. There had to be some connection, some connection that was relevant, not just to what had happened in 1911, but to now, to this ship, to Jona Holland, Perenna, that wretched arrowhead, all those masks and pictures in the Aldeburgh house.

My brain went round and round, chewing at it like a mincing machine, like the echo-sounder interminably making its trace. Periodically I stood watching it, half mesmerised — 22 fathoms, 21, 24, 18, 20 … and then I would go out on to the bridge wing, take a bearing with the hand compass on the Double Island light, now barely showing above the horizon. And all the time my mind half occupied with strange thoughts that gradually resolved themselves into the conviction that what had happened to the Holland Trader would happen to the Perenna, that we’d mysteriously disappear to become a ghost ship, a latter-day Flying Dutchman damned for ever to steam the South West Pacific, always heading for Bougainville and the Buka Passage, but never making it. Lost in the Coral Sea — 19 fathoms, 20, 18, 17 … I was back at the echo-sounder but couldn’t remember how I got there. A coral reef? But that would have left her a wreck with at least her mast and her upper works showing. A volcanic disturbance? That would account for it. And there was a volcano on Bougainville, something about Rabaul also; hadn’t it been half destroyed about the turn of the century? Or the sea cocks, perhaps they had been opened, in error, or purposely. There could have been an explosion in the engine-room, boilers bursting, something that had blown a hole in her bottom. But the stamps. And that cover. There would have been a letter inside it. What the hell had it said? To get that stamp, the man must have been on board the ship, and I wondered whether that half-breed aborigine up in Cooktown still had the letter or could remember what it said. Even if he couldn’t read, his mother might have told him. I wished Perenna Holland were here. So many questions, and the need of somebody to talk to, somebody to share the half-formed fears that had begun to take root in my imagination.

‘Lait, Kepten.’

I turned, peering vaguely towards the helmsman, my eyes barely open, my thoughts still confused. ‘Where? On the port bow?’ But the Sandy Cape light was still 50 miles away.

‘Lukluk!’ He was pointing to starboard.

I saw it then, two tiny pinpoints widely separated. A ship south-bound down the coast. I noted it in the log, and the time, which was 03.47. Only another thirteen minutes before I called Holland. Watching the slowly changing bearing of that ship gave me something to occupy my mind, and ten minutes later I went to Holland’s cabin and gave him a shake. He started up abruptly, his eyes looking wild. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’

‘Your watch,’ I said.

He shook his head, smiling thinly, his hair hanging over his eyes limp with sweat. ‘Dreaming.’ He pushed his hand up over his face. ‘I dreamed we were aground and then … ’ He shook his head again. ‘What’s the time?’

‘Just coming up to o-four-hundred.’

He nodded. ‘I’ll be glad of some air.’ He swung his legs off the bunk and sat there staring at me. ‘You all right?’

‘Tired, that’s all. Everything’s okay. We’re in seventeen fathoms with the coast about eight miles off.’ I left him then, and a few minutes later he came into the wheelhouse, his hair slicked back and looking fresher. The helmsman had already been relieved and I didn’t linger.

Back in my cabin I didn’t bother to switch on the light, undressing quickly, dumping my clothes on the foot of the bunk. And then, as I went to get into it, my bare feet stumbled against something on the floor. I just managed to save myself, cursing, my hand on the bunk and something moving under it. Then the bunk reading light went on, and I was standing there in my vest and pants, staring at her stupidly. She was sitting up, the orange-red hair falling across her face, her eyes blinking in the light. ‘Sorry if I startled you.’ She wasn’t wearing much, some sort of a slip, and she was smiling a little uncertainly. ‘I borrowed your bunk. I was a bit tired. I hope you don’t mind.’

I shook my head, still feeling dazed. It was her bag I had stumbled against. ‘How did you get here? You weren’t at the beach.’

‘Yes, I was. I was on that first truck. You talked to the driver, remember? I kept low because I was afraid Jona would send me ashore if he knew.’

‘You were taking a chance with a man like that,’ I muttered, remembering the hard-bitten face, that crack about a harem. She laughed and shook her head, her hand reaching up to a leather thong round her neck. ‘How did you persuade him to smuggle you on board?’

I don’t know what she replied, I was too astonished at the sight of her sitting up in my bunk, the freckled face still flushed with sleep, her hair a tousled mop, and dangling from its thong like a barbaric pendant between those thrusting breasts a native knife in a worn leather sheath. ‘I was quite safe, you see.’ She was smiling at me. ‘You look almost as shocked as that Aussie driver.’ She slipped it back and said in that husky voice, ‘Buka isn’t quite the same as Aldeburgh, you know.’ She pulled the coverings back, shifting herself close against the partition. ‘Come on. You’d better get some sleep. You’re almost dead on your feet.’

‘I’ll take one of the blankets and kip down in the wardroom,’ I told her.

‘No. That would look odd.’ She didn’t want her brother to know she was on board until we were clear of the coast. I was looking around, wondering where else I could put myself in that tiny cabin when she said, ‘Don’t be silly. Are you afraid I’ll seduce you? You look too tired for that. I know I am. I worked till I dropped on that cruise ship, every day an endless delay, thinking of Tim all the time, wondering … And the men on board,’ she added, seeing me still hesitating, ‘I’ve had all the men I need for the moment.’

The brazenness of her admission shocked me more than the knife. ‘You mean you’ve been sleeping-’ I checked myself. It was none of my business who she slept with. ‘I’m sorry.’

She laughed, an angry snort. ‘What did you expect on a cruise?’ Her tone was one of contempt. ‘And after being cooped up in that house, I’d have had every justification — except that I had other things on my mind.’ She patted the bunk. ‘Now come on. You look silly standing there in your underclothes.’

There was just room on the bunk, and she had no intention of vacating it. I was too tired to argue. I got in beside her and was instantly aroused by the warmth of her body close against my back. ‘I haven’t thanked you,’ she said. I could feel her hair against the back of my neck, the soft whisper of her breath, and I thought she said something about her brother, but I lost it, my brain gone blank, my body tumbling into sleep.

When I woke, sunlight was streaming in through the porthole, and somebody was calling, ‘Breakfast.’ I sat up, and there she was, fully clothed, opening the door. McAvoy came in with a tray, his hands trembling and the cups rattling. He put it down on the shelf table, then looked at me, his bloodshot eyes creased up in his wizened face. ‘I wouldn’t be doing this for anyone but Perenna, you understand.’ He turned to her. ‘He’s asleep now, so you can move around the ship without his knowing. By the time he wakes for his midday meal we’ll be a good twenty miles clear of the coast. You can tell him then.’

‘Is that far enough?’ she asked.

‘Aye. He’ll not go twenty miles back on his tracks. It’d cost him too much in fuel.’ He hesitated. ‘Do you want anything in your coffee, to perk you up?’

She shook her head, smiling at him. ‘Thank you, Mac.’ And she added, ‘It takes me back, seeing you. It really does — reminds me of the good things. Thank you for the breakfast. And I’m so glad to find you’re still with him.’

He didn’t say anything, nodding dumbly and staring at her with those watery blue eyes. Then he seemed to pull himself together, starting for the door, but pausing with it half open. ‘Last time you were at Madehas wasn’t so good. Let’s hope it’s better this time.’ The way he said it he seemed to be sounding some sort of warning.

‘That man,’ she said when the door had closed behind him, ‘he used to be skipper on one of my grandfather’s schooners. I’ve known him all my life.’ She handed me a plate of bacon and eggs, and then, as she was pouring the coffee, she said, ‘When we were children, we’d go down to Port Moresby and he’d be there waiting for us. Every year we’d sail to Madehas, the whole family, all except my father, of course. He was running Kuamegu. I used to look forward to those voyages. We’d be anything up to a week at sea, sometimes more, putting in at all sorts of places. And when I was bigger, I was allowed to join my brothers on trading runs through the Solomons, to Choiseul, Santa Isabel and New Georgia, once as far as Guadalcanal and San Cristóbal. And always with Pat McAvoy. My grandfather wouldn’t allow me to sail with anybody but Mac. He was the best skipper he had. I didn’t mind the stink of the copra. I was most of the time on deck anyway. I even slept on deck. It was marvellous lying there, watching the sails against the stars on a hot tropical night.’

I couldn’t make up my mind whether she was talking to cover her embarrassment that we’d spent the night together in the same bunk, or because she was nervous at the prospect of meeting her brother. ‘What about school?’ I asked. ‘Presumably you went to school in Australia.’

She shook her head, the cap of orange hair brilliant in the sunlight slanting in through the cabin porthole. ‘Jona was educated at a boarding school in Sydney. Tim followed three years later. But I never had any proper schooling. Mother was my teacher. That’s probably why we were so close. And there was a Mission not far away. That helped. Then, of course, I read a lot. My grandfather had a very good library.’ She paused, sitting in the chair there, her head bent over her coffee, lost in thought. ‘It was a marvellous life, so free. And the Chimbu village was quite near so that I grew up with their children, looking after the pigs and cassowaries, attending their sing-sings, learning how to shoot with bow and arrow, how to throw knives, spears, axes, and at the Mission how to nurse the sick, how to keep accounts and barter for trade.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘You know, I sometimes think I had a far better education than my brothers. What’s the use of learning to read if you aren’t given the right books, or doing algebra when you’ve no experience of trading? And ball games, football, for instance, that’s no substitute for the real thing — two fight leaders in armed combat with their supporters behind them, all roaring encouragement.’ She looked at me, smiling. ‘Remember, when you came to Aldeburgh, I said I was born to colour and excitement. I don’t think you believed me, but I really did have a very full, very exciting childhood.’ And she added, ‘It didn’t exactly prepare me for all the time I had to spend in that dull little seaside town.’

‘And now?’ I asked.

‘Now …?’ She hesitated, her mouth hardening, the crease-lines deepening. ‘How long will it be, before we get there? Four days?’

I nodded. ‘About four.’

‘Ships,’ she murmured, draining her coffee and getting to her feet. ‘I love them. And this is mine, partly mine. But they’re so slow. In that aircraft, I felt I was moving then, getting there fast. But now — four days! Do you think he’ll let me send a cable? By radio. All this time … I don’t even know whether Tim’s still alive.’ And then she added, her hands clenched, ‘Yes, I do. I’d know if Tim were dead. I’d know it instantly.’

She had turned and was looking out of the porthole. ‘Strange! Tim, that house — now, with the sea out there sparkling in the sun, and the warmth, the sense of movement, it seems like another world, another life … so far away, almost unreal. But it is real, isn’t it?’ Her hands were clasped together, the fingers locked tight. ‘All those years — Father dying, then Tim …’ Her voice faded, and she stood silent for a moment, her eyes staring out at the sea with great fixity, as though by concentration she could leap the distance of half a world and talk with her brother. Suddenly she turned to me, a quick gesture of the hands, and smiling now. ‘I’m sorry. I haven’t thanked you. First you got me the money; then you told me how to find the ship. I can’t tell you what it meant to me. Those weeks on the Lemnos, struggling towards Buka … It’s there, you see, on Buka Island, whatever it is that’s killing Tim. And I hadn’t the money, no hope of getting there before-’ She gave an awkward little shrug. ‘I tried to thank you last night, but you were asleep.’ Her lips spread in a smile, a conscious effort. ‘You went out, just like that.’ She clicked her fingers almost gaily. ‘More coffee?’ She reached for the pot. ‘Four days! I’m going to try and relax now. Nothing I can do will get us there any sooner.’ She was refilling my cup. ‘I had no idea those stamps could be worth so much.’

I told her briefly how their value had escalated, about my visit to Josh Keegan, but I don’t think she took it in. ‘Where did your brother get them?’ I asked. But she didn’t know. She was back at the porthole then, staring out at the water, and it was only when I produced the letter the stamp dealer in Sydney had given me that she showed any real interest. ‘Lewis?’ She had turned, frowning in concentration. ‘Didn’t you say Carlos Holland had those ship’s stamps specially printed? That means the father of that abo was on board the Holland Trader with him.’ She looked down at the letter. ‘Cooktown. And you were in Queensland. I wish you’d gone up there.’

‘I hadn’t time.’

‘No, of course not. But to have killed a man called Holland. Black Holland. It’s such a coincidence. Do you think he still has his father’s letter?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘But you said the dealer only received the envelope.’

‘The aborigine’s mother was dead. I don’t imagine he kept the letter.’

‘But if he had … It’s so strange. I’ll ask Mac whether my grandfather ever said anything about that mine. The Dog Weary gold mine. You can just imagine a man at the end of a long trek into the Australian outback calling it Dog Weary. Or perhaps there were two of them.’ She was silent then, thinking it over. ‘I’ve often wondered where Carlos got the money to buy a steamship. A gold mine would explain it.’ She laughed, handing me back the letter and turning to the porthole again. ‘I can still see the coast.’ And then she asked about her brother. ‘How is he?’ And when I didn’t answer, she said, ‘You’ve been standing in on the night watches. You must have formed some impression.’

‘He’s tired,’ I said. ‘We’re both tired.’

‘Yes, I know.’ Her voice was sharper. ‘But that doesn’t explain why he radioed advising me to stay with my aunt in Perth. He didn’t want me on board, and he didn’t want me in Buka — why?’

I hesitated. But it wasn’t for me to tell her he was scared of something. ‘You’re part owner of this ship, aren’t you?’

She nodded.

‘Maybe that’s the trouble.’

‘The ship’s still losing money, is it?’

‘I think so.’ And then I asked her about the partner her brother had gone in with. ‘D’you know anything about him?’

‘Yes.’ Her face had suddenly altered, the jaw clenched, the lips a tight line and her eyes coldly staring. ‘What’s Hans got to do with it?’

‘He seems to handle the business end, and I thought perhaps-’ I left it at that, shocked at the violence of her reaction, standing there staring straight at me, gripping hold of the back of the chair so tight that her knuckles showed white.

‘He should never have gone in with Hans Holland,’ she said in that husky voice, her mouth clenched tight. ‘I knew it wasn’t right. Tim was against it, and that day when-’ She shook her head, her eyes very wide. ‘But Jona came over to England specially. He talked Father into it. Said the sins of the fathers shouldn’t be visited on the children, that Hans and he were another generation, and if they wanted to join forces and build a new Holland Line together, the past of the two families shouldn’t be thrown in their faces. I haven’t seen Jona since.’

‘And what were the sins?’ I asked.

She let go of the chairback and turned to stare out at the sea again. ‘I’m not sure. It was something that happened during the war, but Grandpa wouldn’t talk about that — ever. Nor would Mac. All Grandpa ever told me was that Hans’s father handed the Holland schooners over to the Japanese.’

‘A collaborator?’

She nodded. ‘He went over to the Japs. That’s why he was killed. I think maybe my grandfather had a hand in that. And Hans — the same red hair, but he’s Buka really.’ She paused there, frowning, and when I asked her if it was Hans who had visited them in Aldeburgh some months back, she nodded vaguely, muttering to herself, ‘Buka through and through.’ And then she seemed to jerk herself out of her reverie, lifting her head and looking straight at me again as she abruptly changed the subject. ‘So Jona’s in financial difficulties, is he?’

‘He needed this cargo. That’s all he told me.’ I got off the bunk and reached for my clothes. It was up to her to find out about that. ‘Talk to Shelvankar,’ I said. ‘He’s radio officer and cargo agent all in one, and I would imagine the best source of information on board. And if you know any of the crew … Do you understand the Buka language?’

She shook her head. ‘Not Buka. But Pidgin is the same all through the islands. I’m sure that will come back to me quite easily.’

‘Then have a look round the ship, talk to some of the crew while I get dressed.’

‘And what about Jona? You haven’t told me what impression you’ve formed of him.’

‘No, and I’m not going to.’ I had my back to her, rootling around for my shaving kit. ‘I’m a visitor on board this ship, and if he has problems, it’s none of my business.’ I was still tired, and her persistence irritated me. The old belief that a woman on board meant trouble may have had something to do with it.

Silence for a moment; then she said, ‘Very well, I’ll leave you to dress now.’ I heard the door close. She was gone, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I went to the heads then and had a shower. By the time I was shaved and dressed it was past 10.30. I lay on my bunk and tried to read, but my mind wouldn’t concentrate, wondering how well she knew her brother, how much he had told her in letters. It was five years since she had last seen him. A long gap, and some time in the next two hours she would confront him with the fact of her presence here on board this ship. And those two trucks. Like me, she must be wondering what the hell was in them, why the secrecy?

She had flown from Sydney to Brisbane and then hitched lifts up to within a few miles of the beach. That much I got out of her when I went into the wardroom for a quick bite of food before going on watch. But that was all. Holtz was there, and Shelvankar, both of them treating her very formally, and beneath the formality I sensed a mood of caution as though she were something to be handled with extreme care. Shelvankar, in particular. He was unusually silent, his eyes every now and then glancing at her furtively. And she herself was not at all communicative, sitting there quite still as though bracing herself for the moment when her brother would come in.

The steward brought me my coffee and then went along the alleyway to give Holland a shake. It was just past noon and time for me to relieve Luke. I excused myself and took my coffee along to the bridge. The course was due north, visibility good and the sea calm, a long shallow swell coming in from the south. We were already clear of the continental shelf, no reading now on the echo-sounder and no sign of any land. I took a sun sight and was pleased when my calculations coincided almost exactly with our DR position. There was little for me to do then, and the watch passed slowly.

Any moment I expected Holland to come in and ask me why the hell I had gone behind his back and sent that message to his sister. Maybe she dissuaded him, but nobody came on the bridge during the whole of the afternoon watch, and when he relieved me at 16.00, he never mentioned it. He didn’t even refer to her presence on board. He was tight-lipped and very tense, the lines on his forehead deep creases, and he had been drinking. I could smell the whisky on his breath. ‘Have some tea, then get your head down,’ he said tersely. ‘You’re on again at twenty hundred hours.’

‘What about McAvoy?’ I asked.

‘No.’ And when I suggested he had looked sober enough to stand a watch, he almost shouted at me. ‘I tell you, no.’

The door to McAvoy’s cabin was open as I went down the alleyway to the wardroom. He was standing there, a glass in his hand, staring at his bunk, which had an open suitcase on it and a pile of clothes. An empty drawer lay upside down at his feet. He turned slowly, sensing my presence in the doorway. ‘You’re out of luck.’ He smiled at me slyly. ‘She’s having my cabin tonight.’ He waved the glass at me. ‘Thought you’d cleaned me out, didn’t you?’ The smile broadened to a grin, but behind the grin he looked old and tired. ‘Care to join me in a drink? It’s here somewhere.’ He looked vaguely round for the bottle. ‘Well, say something, can’t you?’ His voice was suddenly petulant. ‘Bloody amateur doing my job.’

‘It’s your own fault,’ I murmured.

‘My own fault, you say.’ He nodded slowly. ‘Aye. Maybe it is.’ He looked down at the glass still clutched in his bony hand and smiled. But it was only a drawing back of the lips from yellowed teeth. There was no humour in the smile. ‘I haven’t the guts, you see, to make an end of it. Not alone. I’ve tried, but I canna do it. So …’ He lifted the glass to his lips, swallowing quickly. ‘You’re lucky. No dark Celtic streak in you.’

He stood there staring at me, and I didn’t know what to say. But there were things I wanted to ask him, and in his fuddled state I thought perhaps it was as good a moment as any. ‘You knew Colonel Holland very well, I believe.’ His bloodshot eyes were suddenly wary and hostile. ‘Miss Holland said you were his best skipper.’

‘Aye. He wouldn’t let Perenna sail with anyone but me.’ His voice was firmer, a touch of pride.

‘Would you tell me something then? As I understand it, Colonel Holland took a canoe and sailed off into the Pacific. Why?’

I thought at first he wasn’t going to answer. He was glaring at me angrily. Then, as though it were being dragged out of him, his voice quivering, he said, ‘It was the custom. When you’re too old … to lead and fight … it’s the way the old Polynesian navigators used to go when they’d come to the end of their lives. God damn it! It’s better than dying in bed, to sail away, to the horizon, going on and on until in the end you meet your Maker, still proud, still active, sailing the way you’ve always sailed.’ And he added, ‘He loved the sea. He had courage. He was the finest man … ’ He jerked back the words, turning away, tears in his eyes. ‘Blast you!’

‘I’m sorry,’ I murmured. ‘But what I need to know is why he suddenly decided his time had come. Was he ill?’

‘No.’ He was staring down at the empty glass in his hand.

‘Then what decided him?’

There was a long silence. Then he raised his hand and smashed the glass on the floor. ‘I told you,’ he shouted, turning on me. ‘When a man’s too old to fight any more … he was eighty-three.’ He was glaring at me. ‘You — you’re in the prime of life. You’re hard, callous — you think the world’s at your feet; if you want anything, it’s there and you grab it. But you wait. You just wait. Wait till you’re old and tired and can’t face youngsters. Can’t fight the world any more. Then you’ll understand. An old bull … he was like an old bull … too proud to go under … too old to fight.’

‘To fight what?’ I asked.

But he had turned away, surveying the cabin. ‘I have to clear up here,’ he murmured. ‘Perenna won’t like it if it isn’t tidy.’

I hesitated, but he was already kneeling on the floor, picking up the pieces of broken glass with trembling fingers. I left him then and went to my cabin, lying on my bunk and trying to visualise the world towards which the monotonous throb of the ship’s engines was steadily driving me, the world that Colonel Holland had been too old to fight. Across the alleyway I could hear sounds of movement and Perenna’s voice.

The cabin door opposite me was closed when I went along to the wardroom for the evening meal. She didn’t appear, nor did her brother. Luke had taken the last Dog watch, and I relieved him at 20.00. The sky had clouded over and beyond the lights of the ship all was darkness. The watch passed slowly. I wasn’t accustomed to a helmsman who had no English, and I couldn’t even take star sights to pass the time.

I had just entered up the log for 22.00 and was working out the DR position on the chart when I became conscious of somebody else in the wheelhouse. Perenna was standing on the starboard side, staring straight ahead at the reflection of herself in the glass of the porthole. She was dressed in jeans and an open-necked shirt, the same clothes I think she had been wearing when she had first opened the door to me on that sunny summer morning back in England. She turned her head as I crossed towards her. ‘Mind if I share your watch for a bit?’

‘Of course not.’ She was no more than a shadow in the darkened wheelhouse, and though I couldn’t see her features clearly, I was conscious of a withdrawn mood. ‘How did it go?’

‘Oh, all right. At least he didn’t throw me off the ship.’ She had turned back to the porthole. ‘It’s very dark tonight. Do you think there are sharks out there? In the islands the crew used to catch sharks. For sport, not to eat. They’d tie their tails together and push them back into the sea. Sprit-sailing, they called it.’ She went on talking like that for a time, about nothing that touched either of us, treading cautiously as though unwilling to destroy the quiet peace of the night with the questions that were in her mind. ‘Where are we now?’

I took her over to the chart table and showed her, conscious of the effort she was making to behave normally, not to show her impatience at the slow progress towards Buka. ‘Another six hours and we should pick up the light on the north-east edge of Saumarez Reef.’

‘Is that named after the admiral who served with Nelson? His descendants live in Suffolk.’

‘How do you know about Admiral Saumarez?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘At Aldeburgh I had a lot of time for reading, especially at night. I got books out of the library, sea books mainly. I think I take after my grandfather. He started in the City of London, the family shipbroking business, but his real interest was the sea. Jona’s the same. It’s in the blood.’ She paused then, and there was a long silence. ‘I’m sorry you don’t know Tim,’ she said suddenly. ‘He’s different, very different.’ Silence again. ‘Has he told you anything about this voyage? The cargo, I mean, and where he’s delivering it.’

‘No.’

She nodded. ‘I can’t get anything out of him either.’ All this time she’d been staring down at the chart. Now, suddenly, she turned to me. ‘Those trucks. While we were waiting on the track leading down to the beach, I had a look in the back. They were full of crates. Do you know what’s in them?’

‘Outboard engines.’

‘Are you certain?’

‘It’s on the manifest.’

She nodded. ‘That’s what Jona said.’

‘And you don’t believe him?’

She was silent for a moment. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to believe.’ And then in a whisper, speaking half to herself: ‘Japanese outboards. It makes sense. It’s the sort of equipment that would sell well in the islands …’

‘Well then?’

‘It’s the secrecy I don’t understand. And those drivers. I don’t know what sort of men go in for trucking in Australia, but they didn’t seem like ordinary truck drivers to me. And the back-up vehicle to take them home wasn’t a ute or anything ordinary like a Holden. It was an English Jaguar.’

‘Did you find out anything about them?’

‘No. They weren’t the sort of men you ask about their backgrounds. I did ask Nobby, the one who drove me on board, where his home was, and all he said was, “You want my telephone number, too?”’ And then after a long pause: ‘There’s only one way to find out what’s in those crates.’ And when I reminded her they were Customs-sealed, she smiled. ‘It wouldn’t be the first piece of cargo that got dropped and fell open by accident.’

I didn’t say anything, and after a moment she asked about the watches. ‘It’s just you and Jona then?’

‘During the hours of darkness, yes.’

‘So we either do it now or just before dawn.’

I told her it was out of the question, that the cargo he carried was his own affair, and anyway, I was his guest on board. She stared at me. ‘I’ve a right to know. And so have you.’ I thought she was about to press me further, but then with a quick goodnight she was gone.

There was less than an hour of the watch to go, and I spent it pacing up and down, my mind going over and over what he had said that first evening when I had come on board in Darling Harbour, remembering how scared he had been, his conviction that I had been sent by somebody. Who? And why had he been scared, so scared that he had set out to drink himself into a stupor?

Midnight came and went. I entered up the log, then went to his cabin to wake him. But he wasn’t asleep. He was sitting there, a glazed look in his eyes, a glass of whisky beside him. His face looked pale, almost haggard, beads of sweat on his forehead. He lifted his arm, a slow, deliberate movement, and peered at his watch. ‘Thirteen minutes after midnight.’ I could see him struggling to pull himself together. ‘You should have called me before.’

‘No hurry,’ I told him and went back to the wheelhouse.

It was about five minutes before he came in. He had had a wash and seemed more or less himself. I gave him the course and was turning to go when he said, ‘Has Perenna been talking to you?’

‘She was here for a while.’

‘What did she say?’

‘Nothing very much; she talked about the sea, about the schooners she used to sail in.’

He was staring at me, his eyes unblinking, holding himself very carefully. ‘Anything else?’

I hesitated. I was on watch again in less than four hours, and I wanted to get my head down. But then I thought, to hell with it, the moment was probably as good as any to get the truth out of him, now, when he was still mentally exhausted by his sister’s suspicions. ‘She was asking me about those two trucks,’ I said.

He turned away from me then, to the high chair that was still in the wheelhouse, relic of the ship’s Service life. ‘God in Heaven!’ He slammed his hand down on the wooden back of it. ‘Why did she have to come now? If she’d done what I told her, stayed in Perth … ’ I thought he was about to reproach me for sending that cable, but instead, he asked me in a very quiet voice, ‘What did you tell her?’

‘That the crates contained outboard engines.’

He nodded. ‘Did she believe you?’

‘No.’

‘And you?’ He turned suddenly and faced me. ‘You think I’m smuggling something, don’t you?’

I shrugged. ‘It’s none of my business. You made that perfectly clear.’

‘Well, understand this. I don’t know what’s in those crates any more than you do. They may be outboards. They could equally be full of cigarettes, or whisky. It’s nothing to do with me. I’m being paid to put them ashore on Buka Island. If she wants to know what’s in them, she’ll have to ask Hans. He fixed it. It’s his responsibility.’

‘What if it’s drugs?’

He shook his head firmly. ‘Hans wouldn’t ship drugs.’

‘Stolen silver then, something like that?’ In Sydney the papers had been full of a wave of silver thefts by armed raiders. ‘It’s your ship that’s delivering them to Buka, and if the police find out, start an investigation …’

‘They won’t. Buka is a long way from the centre of the Civil Administration at Arawa.’

‘And there’s no Customs?’

‘No. Not where I’m going to put those trucks ashore.’

Again I was remembering that first meeting with him, and now that same driven look. ‘Why did you ask if I was going to Bougainville to stir up trouble?’ I said it quietly, not wishing to push him too far.

‘Did I?’ He was staring at me, shaking his head. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘When I came on board that first time.’

‘I wasn’t myself. I was very tired.’

‘You were worried about something.’

‘Yes, I remember now. You said I was scared.’ His voice had suddenly risen, his face flushed, his eyes angry. ‘You’d no right to say that. I was worried about the ship, about my ability to stay awake for five nights. It’s not so bad this way, but coming south, it’s a long haul to the two reefs we’ll be threading our way through in a few hours’ time. Even so, there’s the Louisiade Archipelago. There aren’t any lights on the Louisiades. Yes, I was scared if you like. I didn’t want to lose my ship the way Carlos Holland did.’

He hadn’t answered my question, but I didn’t feel this was the moment to ask him about the sullenness of the Buka element on board. ‘We’ll talk about it tomorrow,’ I said. ‘But if I were in command of this ship, I’d certainly want to know what was in those crates. If it’s drugs-’

‘It’s not drugs,’ he said quickly. ‘Hans would never handle drugs.’

‘On moral grounds?’

He didn’t answer for a moment, standing there, thinking it out. Finally he said, ‘I don’t think he’d necessarily see it that way. He’s a businessman. It’s just that there’d be no profit in it. There’s no demand for drugs in the islands.’

‘But he could be shipping the crates on — South East Asia, Singapore and no questions, even if the contents had been stolen.’

He shook his head, frowning, and that muscle moving on his cheek.

‘Well, if I were you, I’d check.’

I turned to go then, but he stopped me. ‘I’ve told the coxs’n nobody is to go on the tank deck without my permission. You understand? That includes you, and Perenna.’

It was so utterly illogical that I was on the point of telling him it didn’t make sense, one minute convincing himself that the crates were no more than innocent contraband, the next giving orders to ensure that he couldn’t be faced with the hard evidence of their contents. But seeing him standing there, gripping the back of the high chair, so tense that his hands were shaking, I thought better of it. ‘See you at o-four-hundred,’ I said.

He didn’t seem to hear me, his head turned to the porthole facing for’ard, his eyes wide, and I realised he was staring at those trucks, their tops just visible above the cab roofs of the Haulpaks. I didn’t bother about a warming drink. I went straight to my bunk, and was asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow.

Dawn was beginning to break when I woke. He hadn’t called me at 04.00, and when I went into the wheelhouse, he was at the chart table. He nodded to me. ‘Just managed to get a bearing on the Saumarez light while it was still dark enough.’ His face looked pale and drawn, but he seemed pleased, and he was quite relaxed now. He was a man who thrived on navigation, his mind totally absorbed in the necessity of picking up that light. ‘Had to rely on dead reckoning. No star sights. Thick cloud all night.’ The course hadn’t changed. ‘I’ll send Luke up to keep you company as soon as he’s fed.’

I have never liked the dawn watch. There is a timelessness about it, daylight spreading but the day not yet come, the world in limbo, everything a little unreal. I went out on to the bridge wing and climbed the ladder to the upper bridge, letting the wind blow the sleep out of me. It had freshened. Away to starboard the clouds were greying. A glimmer of whitecaps showed in the dark blur of the sea, and a light drizzle touched my face, clinging to my sweater like dew on a cobweb. Once I thought I caught a glimpse of a light away to port, but the drab dawn was strengthening all the time, and I couldn’t be sure. For’ard I could just see the trucks, dim, canvas-covered shapes.

I thought of all the times I had been at sea, sometimes wet and cold, sometimes frightened, but never before with any doubts about the purpose of the voyage or my own involvement in it. And now, standing in the boxed-in area of the open bridge, watching the coming of that reluctant dawn, I knew she was right. Somehow Holland had to be persuaded to check that cargo, and if he wouldn’t do it himself, then we’d have to do it. Cigarettes or liquor was one thing, but I wasn’t going to be party to the delivery of stolen goods, drugs, any of the things the police might investigate.

Back in the wheelhouse I found Luke poring over the chart. He looked up and smiled, a flash of white teeth in a broad black face. ‘Not very good morning, Mr Sling’by. I think it blow soon.’ He nodded to the barograph. ‘Pressure already falling.’ And this was the Coral Sea. When Shelvankar came in with the latest forecast, it was for strong to gale force winds, sou’sou’east veering sou’westerly, rain heavy at times with moderate to poor visibility.

The sea was already getting up by the time I went off watch, the movement uncomfortable and the fiddles fixed to the wardroom table. The others had finished breakfast, Holland sitting beside his sister, smoking a cigarette. ‘Any sign of the Frederick Reef on the radar?’

I shook my head. ‘The trace is getting blurred by the break of the waves, and the rain is quite heavy now.’

He pushed the bell for the steward and got to his feet. ‘When you’ve finished, take a look round the ship and see that everything’s secure, will you? Particularly the Haulpak fastenings. They may need tightening. I’ll tell Teopas to go with you.’ He poured himself another cup of coffee and took it with him to the wheelhouse.

The steward came in with my bacon and eggs. This time there was no fat. ‘I hope you like it,’ Perenna said. ‘I’ve had him grill the bacon instead of frying it.’ She smiled. ‘Getting him to cook vegetables properly may be more difficult.’ She seemed unaffected by the movement, face fresh and the freckles very noticeable with no make-up.

‘We’ll be hove-to before the day is out,’ Holtz said gloomily. ‘It’s not so good down below when she’s hove-to.’

I didn’t think it would be much better up top. I could remember how I’d felt last time I’d been hove-to in one of these ships. We had been off South Uist then, and I’d been sick as hell. I hoped I wasn’t going to be sick this time. An LCT is very different from a sailing boat. It never conforms to the wave pattern.

We were already slamming heavily by the time I started my tour of inspection. Down on the tank deck I found the coxs’n already tightening up on the securing chains of the first Haulpak. We were about a quarter of an hour checking the other three; then we came to the trucks, and I glanced up at the bridge. I could just see the top of the helmsman’s head, nobody else. ‘I’ll look after these,’ I told Teopas. ‘You check the bow doors and ramp.’ It meant he would have to go up to the catwalk and through past the workbench to the platform above the cross-members. As soon as he had vanished from sight, I unfastened the back of the starb’d truck. The movement up here in the bows was very violent, and as I clambered in with the bag of tools, the slam of the bows plunging into a breaking wave pitched me against the first of the crates. It took me a moment to recover myself, and then, as I was searching the bag for a cold chisel and hammer, my ankle was gripped. I turned to find Teopas staring up at me angrily. ‘Ol bilong mi pipal.’ He was shouting to make himself heard above the noise of the sea. ‘What you doing there?’

For a moment I considered trying to persuade him to help me, but the dangerously hostile look in his eye made me think better of it. ‘Just checking to see that the crates haven’t shifted.’ But he had seen the hammer in my hand, and he didn’t believe me.

‘You come down. Nobody go inside truck. Kepten’s orders.’

I jumped down, landing heavily on the deck beside him. ‘They seem okay,’ I said. ‘I told you to check the bow doors.’

He reached into the truck for the tools and then fastened the canvas back of it. ‘First we check the trucks. Then we check the doors, ugh? Together.’ The deep guttural voice was solid and unyielding, and I turned away, uncomfortably aware that this was a man of considerable authority in his own world.

‘Well, let’s get on with it.’ I felt I had lost face, and my voice sounded peevish. Perhaps it was the movement, the constant slamming. By the time we had finished I was suffering from nausea and a feeling of lassitude.

I got used to it, of course, but the constant plunging and twisting, the bracing of muscles against the staggering shock of breaking waves was very exhausting. There was no let-up in the tension, even when I was flat on my back in my bunk, and though we were never actually hove-to, I was conscious all the time that we were steaming close to the limit for an old vessel of this type.

The gale lasted a full two days, something I had never experienced during my National Service, and when the wind finally died, it left us wallowing in an uncomfortable swell, no slamming, but the movement equally trying. One thing I remembered afterwards — the appearance of McAvoy on the bridge. It was in the early hours of the second day. I was on watch, and he was suddenly there beside me. He didn’t say anything; he just stood there, his face very pale, his eyes staring wildly. He stood there for a long time, quite silent, staring into the black darkness out of which the brilliant phosphorescence of broken wave tops rushed at us. God knows what he saw out there, but something, some haunting product of his drunken imagination.

‘What is it?’ I asked, unable to stand it any longer. ‘What are you staring at?’

He turned then, facing me reluctantly, his features crumpled by the intensity of the emotions that gripped him. He mumbled something, gripping hold of my arm, but the sound of his voice was lost in the crash of a wave. The shock of it flung us against the front of the wheelhouse. Involuntarily I ducked as spray spattered the portholes like flung pebbles, and when I had recovered myself, he was gone, leaving me with the odd feeling that his presence there had been nothing more than a ghostly apparition. I was thinking about him all the rest of that watch, and it was during those black lonely hours that I began to understand the depth of the man’s attachment, the terrible burden he carried in his heart, living all the time in the past. I was certain that what he had seen out there was the corpse of an old man alone in a canoe.

I was on duty every four hours during the gale, sharing the watches with Holland. He wouldn’t trust Luke to know when to heave to. In the end I was too tired to keep anything down, living on coffee and falling into my bunk dead to the world the instant my watch ended. Sometimes Luke was in the wheelhouse with me, but he didn’t talk much, and I was only vaguely conscious of his presence. And Perenna. She’d stand there for hours on end during the day, staring dumbly ahead as though searching the grey line of the dipping horizon for the imagined outline of Bougainville. But everything was so chaotic, a vague blur of sleeplessness and tumbling waves, that I don’t remember whether we said anything to each other.

And when it was finally over, it took time for body and mind to adjust, muscles still tensing for the slams that no longer came, eyes bleared and heavy with sleeplessness. We were all of us exhausted. That afternoon the sun came out and I was able to get a fix. Within an hour the clouds were lying in a cottonwool pile to the north of us and we were steaming in a bright blue world, blue sea, blue sky, the surface of the water oily calm, and it was suddenly hot.

Perenna was in the wheelhouse then, looking fresh and bronzed in shorts and a sleeveless shirt. She came over to the chart table, leaned her bare arms on it and watched as I entered up our position. It put us at least 20 miles to the west of our dead reckoning and 30 miles ahead of it. We were getting very close to the Louisiade Archipelago now. She reached for the dividers and measured off the distance to Bougainville. ‘About three hundred miles to go,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘So this is our last night at sea.’

‘Not quite. There’ll be another night as we work our way up the coast to Buka.’ I had forgotten all about those damned cases. ‘Better leave it till then.’ I pushed my hand up over my eyes and through my hair. I was too tired to care.

‘No. We must do it tonight.’ Even whispering, her voice was implacably determined. ‘Tonight, while everybody’s still exhausted.’ And she added urgently, ‘I must know.’

‘Tonight,’ I said, ‘all that matters is getting safely round the end of the Louisiades.’

‘He’s been worrying about that all morning.’ She ran the point of the dividers along the 300-mile outline of the archipelago. ‘Do you think that’s where my Great-uncle Carlos went down?’ She was tapping gently with the dividers, leaning forward and staring at the chart, and for no apparent reason I was suddenly reminded of McAvoy. Perhaps it was the Holland Trader he had seen out there in the luminous break of the waves, and not Colonel Holland at all. ‘Tonight,’ she said. ‘It must be tonight.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ I said. ‘Leave it till we’re off the coast of Bougainville. Tonight we’ve more immediate problems.’

She put her hand on my arm, gripping it urgently. ‘Please. This is our best chance. Jona comes off watch at midnight. You’ll be alone then.’

‘He won’t leave the bridge, not until we’re past the Louisiades.’

‘And that will be when?’

I pointed to the eastern tip of the archipelago. ‘Rossel Island is nearly three thousand feet high. We should pick that up on radar within the next four hours.’ I glanced at the bulkhead clock. ‘That means we’ll clear Cape Deliverance around o-two-hundred.’

‘And once we’re past the Cape it’s open sea again.’ She looked up from the chart. ‘Then he’ll go to his bunk till he relieves you again at four.’

‘Probably.’

‘That means you’ll have two hours alone here.’ She straightened up. ‘All right then. I’ll check with you at o-two-hundred, and if there’s nobody about … ’ She turned to go, but then she said, her voice a little cold and distant, ‘No need for you to be involved. I should be able to manage it on my own.’

Cape Deliverance was broad on the beam when I came into the wheelhouse at midnight, the radar trace showing our distance off 9 miles. Holland had already altered course to 350°. The tension had eased out of him, and he stayed chatting to me until we were clear of the Cape and into the open waters of the Solomon Sea. Then he went below, leaving me with nothing to do except admire the brightness of the stars. The port bridge wing door was open, a warm breeze ruffling the pages of the Admiralty Pilot.

I had just entered up the log for 02.00 when Perenna appeared, dressed in jeans and a dark top. ‘I’ve had a look round. Everybody’s asleep.’ Her voice was low, a little strained.

‘Have you got a torch?’

‘Yes, and tools. They’re in my cabin.’

I hesitated, but only for a moment. The wire fastenings might be difficult for her, and now that I was rested the urge to know what was in those crates had returned. ‘Tell the helmsman I’m going to check the vehicles. I’ll be gone about ten minutes, quarter of an hour.’ He was a Buka Islander, and she relayed the message in Pidgin; then I followed her to her cabin, picked up the tools, and we climbed down into the tank deck. It was very quiet down there, the sound of the sea rushing past the ship’s sides muted. Somewhere a chain was rattling, and the black bulks of the Haulpaks, outlined against the stars, seemed to sway with the movement of the ship. There was nobody anywhere for’ard of the bridge housing to challenge us. I chose the starb’d truck, knowing the canvas back was easy to unfasten. Once inside I shone the torch on the first of the crates and set to work with hammer and chisel.

It took longer than I had expected. The top of the crate was very securely fastened, long 4-inch nails, and the steel walls of the tank deck echoed to the sound of my hammering, the reverberations magnified in the still night. I felt nervous, remembering the way Teopas had hauled me out of the back of the truck two days before, so that I found myself glancing up every now and then, half expecting that deep voice to challenge me out of the darkness. Before I could prise open the wooden top, the two securing wires had to be severed. There were no wire cutters in the toolbag she had borrowed from the engine-room. I had to use a hacksaw, and it took time. ‘Hurry,’ she whispered as the first wire parted with a twang. ‘The helmsman comes from the same village as Teopas.’

Her face was very close to mine, sweat shining on her freckles in the torchlight as she levered at the top of the case, using the long cold chisel. ‘Is that important?’ I asked.

She pushed her hair away from her eyes. ‘They’re in a funny mood. You must have noticed it.’ And she added in a fierce undertone, ‘I don’t trust the Buka people when they’re like that.’

With her hair pushed back I could see the scar in the beam of the torch. ‘Is Teopas responsible for their mood?’

‘He’s their leader, yes.’ She straightened up for a moment, easing her back. ‘There’s something brewing. I don’t know what. Something …’

The second wire parted. I took the hammer and chisel from her, and in a moment the nails were pulling out, the whole top of the case lifting. I put all my weight on the chisel, and my end came loose, enabling me to get my hands under it and force it back, the nails at the other end tearing out of the wood. Whatever it was in the case it wasn’t bottles, and it wasn’t anything in cartons. The thick brown covering paper yielded to the touch. She tore at it with her hands, ripping it clear. ‘Oh, my God!’ She stood frozen, shocked into immobility, staring at the contents. ‘Guns!’

They were neatly chocked into wooden supports, half a dozen machine pistols in the top layer, the plastic grips gleaming, the dull steel coated with grease.

She looked up at me. ‘Do you think he knew? He must have known.’

‘He probably guessed.’

‘All these cases. And another truckful of them.’ She was peering into the back. ‘And there’ll be ammunition, too.’ She turned to me. ‘Who’s getting them? Where are they being sent?’

‘No idea.’ I started folding the lid back. ‘If you’re in the armaments business, I don’t imagine you ask yourself questions like that.’

‘He’ll have to ditch them.’ Her voice was trembling. ‘I won’t be a party to it. Automatic weapons like that. They’ll land up in the hands of terrorists — innocent people getting killed. God! What a fool! No wonder he didn’t want me here. What a bloody stupid mindless fool to get mixed up in a thing like this!’ And before I could stop her, she had jumped to the deck and disappeared among the black shapes of the Haulpaks.