The Black Tide

CHAPTER ONE

Twelfth Night and it was after lunch, after the fog had lifted, that the first oil-sodden bodies began to come ashore. I had just left the rough board table where I did my writing and was out with spade and pick breaking up a little patch of new ground above the cottage. The air was cold and very still, a high hanging over us with the pressure close on 1040 and the sea lying like pewter against a white, opaque sky, no horizon and the remains of a westerly swell barely creaming the base of the Brisons.

From the new ground, where I was planning to grow sorrel and lamb’s lettuce, possibly some bush tomatoes close under the rocks that sheltered it, I looked straight down on to the sloping roof of our cottage, and beyond it, beyond the rock outcrop that looked like the head of an elephant, the grey granite tower of the Longships lighthouse was just beginning to emerge. a dim, blurred finger still wreathed in mist.

And almost alongside it, that bloody tanker looking like a ghost ship, the fog still swirling about it.

I stopped digging and lit my pipe, thinking once again about how it must have been up on the tanker’s bridge that night almost a week ago when the gale had stranded her on Kettle’s Bottom. A faint breeze stirred the peat smoke of our cottage chimney and the fog rolled back from the Longships so that the wreck, the rocks that held her pinned at the stern and all the attendant ships were suddenly revealed in startling clarity against the white miasma glimmering now in pale sunlight. The Petros Jupiter was all of three miles away, but in that strange watery brightness every detail of her seemed magnified, so that even at that distance I could identify the salvage equipment littering her deck, the pumps, compressors, hose and coils of rope and wire.

Incredibly, because of the unseasonable quietness of the weather during the days following the gale, she was still intact and, except that she was down by the stern and her after deck almost awash, she might have been anchored there. All this side of the wreck the sea was a flat oily brown. I left my spade and went up to the knoll above the elephant head rock. When I had been out to the wreck on the Friday the spillage had all been to seaward and I was hoping it would prove to be some trick of the iridescent light. But it wasn’t. It was oil all right. Two anti-pollution vessels were spraying close inshore along Whitesand Bay and the slick ran in a long dirty line from the tanker right across the bay until it disappeared from sight below the cliffs on which I was standing.

Karen must have been looking at it, too. From the door of the cottage you could see straight down the rocky pathway to the little patch of sand wedged into the rocks of the gully where we kept our inflatable. The anguish of her cry cut the stillness. She was out of the door, searching wildly and calling to me: ‘Trevor! Trevor!’ She looked up to where I stood. ‘D’you see it?’

‘See what?’ I called down to her, though I knew damn well what she’d seen.

She turned. ‘There! On the sand.’ Her voice was high like the screech of a gull. We had been expecting ifais for almost a week now. ‘By that rock.’ She was standing in the cold, watery sunlight, her left hand shading her eyes, her right stretched out, pointing down into the cove.

From where I stood I couldn’t see it, the little cove blocked from my view by the top of the elephant rock.

‘I can see it moving.’ She had turned, looking up at me again, the smooth rounded beauty of her face shattered by the violence of her emotions — a fishergirl’s face, I had described it in a magazine piece, with the high-necked fisherman’s jersey she wore in winter and the blue scarf tied in a bandeau round her head. And then she was running, her feet flying on the grass slope to the path. ‘Careful!’ I shouted. She was a big girl and running like that, at such a crazy pace, I was afraid she’d go flying head first down among the rocks.

But it was no good. She took no notice. She never did. Once her emotions took charge, nothing stopped her. The cottage, the birds, everything — our whole way of life, it was all hers. She was so impossibly lovable, so damnably difficult, and now I was running after her, and it seemed to me, in exasperation, I’d always been adapting myself, excusing myself, ever since she’d faced me, holding on to the handlebars of her bike, eyes wide and spitting like a cat. That had been at the back end of Swansea docks, our first meeting, and a gang of teenagers using a puppy for a football. They’d broken its back and instead of going after them, I’d got hold of the jerking little rag of a body and put it out of its misery with a hand chop to the back of its neck. The teenagers were Arab, and she had thought I was one of them.

Now, as I joined her on the little V-shaped patch of sand, she was in the same sort of mood. ‘Look at it!’ She thrust the feebly flapping bird at me. Her hands were wet and covered with oil, her dark brown eyes gone almost black with anger.

The bird lifted its head, squirming and opening its beak. It was a razorbill, but only recognizable by the strangely bulbous shape of its beak. The beautiful black and white plumage was coated with a thick film of heavy, black oil. No sound came and its movements were so feeble that it was almost certainly near the point of death.

‘How many more?’ Her voice trembled on the edge of hysteria. ‘Last time — remember? November it was. The night we had that bonfire on the beach. Mrs Treherne’s little boy found it flapping in the shallows, and the very next day they began coming ashore.’ Her breath smoked in the cold air, her eyes wide and very bright. ‘Dead birds, dead fish — I can’t take it.’ Her lips were trembling, tears of anger and frustration starting. ‘Spilling their filthy oil, ruining our lives, everything… I can’t take it. I won’t take it.’ And then, gripping hold of me, holding my arm so tight I could feel her fingernails through the thick sweater, ‘We’ve got to do something, fight back…’

‘I’m doing what I can, Karen.’ I said it gently, keeping a tight hold on myself, but she thought I was on the defensive.

‘Talk, talk, talk, nothing but talk. That silly little committee of yours—‘

‘There’s an Under-Secretary coming with our MP this evening. I told you, be patient. It’s a big meeting. The press and the media, too. We’re trying for the same rules and sea routes that the French established after the Amoco Cadiz, and tonight…’

‘Tonight he’ll say yes; tomorrow, at Westminster, he’ll have forgotten all about it.’ She said it bitingly, her eyes contemptuous. She looked down at the razorbill. ‘Remember that first time? And last March, how many was it we took into the cleansing station — twenty-seven? All those people working for hours. Three hours to clean each bird. And they all died, every one of them.’ The bird lay passive now, no longer struggling. ‘We’ve got to stop them — do something — make them realize.’

‘Do what?’ I asked. ‘What can we do that we’re not doing?’

‘Bomb that bloody ship, set the oil ablaze. Destroy it. That’s what. Make the government act. And if the government won’t do it, then do it our bloody selves.’

‘But I’ve told you…’ It was ridiculous, arguing there in that tiny cove with the waves lapping at our feet and Karen still clutching that limp bundle of oil-soaked feathers. I had told her before that it wouldn’t work. The experts had said it wouldn’t, that the effect would be to produce an even worse mousse, a thick mess of black, long-lasting globules of tar, big as cow pats. But she wouldn’t listen.

‘Just do something,’ she screamed at me. ‘Or are you afraid?’

‘Of what?’ My voice had risen, the lilt that was always there increasing — I could hear it. ‘Why should I be afraid?’

But she backed away from that, her eyes wide, sensing the violence of my reaction if she put it into words. Only I knew, we both knew, what had been on the tip of her tongue. Once the blood’s mixed it can always be thrown in your face. And the sensitivity, the stupid bloody helpless sensitivity… ‘You want me to do something…’ I said it slowly, keeping a tight hold on myself. ‘But what? I’m not Cornish, you know. Indeed, to the local people we’re both of us foreigners. So what is it you want? What do you expect me to do?’

She shook her head quickly. ‘No good asking me. Work it out for yourself.’ She was staring at me then as though she hated me. I could see it in her eyes. They were blazing as she said, ‘This is a man’s job.’ And then, standing there, the bird held in her two hands and spitting the words out — ‘But I’ll tell you this, Trev, if I were a man…’

‘Go on,’ I said, for she had suddenly stopped. ‘If you were a man you’d do what?’

‘Set fire to it myself.’ Her teeth were gritted. ‘I’d do something…’

‘And how do you set fire to an oil slick? Use a box of matches like you’d light a fire, or a torch of newspapers? Oil doesn’t burn that easily, not crude mixed with sea water.’

‘Of course it doesn’t. I’m not that stupid. But there are other things, that old paraffin flame-thrower thing Jimmy Kerrison was using a few years back to burn the weeds off his drive. Don’t tell me that wouldn’t set the stuff alight. Or a bomb, like that man Hals in Africa — that got results.’

‘It got him the sack.’

‘But he forced them to act, didn’t he? And that American, flying his own slick patrol. All over the world there are people fighting back. If you won’t do anything…’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ I didn’t take her seriously and suddenly she seemed to give up, standing there very still with a frozen look on her face. ‘Perhaps it’s my fault,’ she breathed. ‘I shouldn’t have persuaded you—‘ She was gazing seaward. ‘Tourists seemed the only pollution we had to fear. I never thought of oil. Oh yes, I know you warned me. But it was all so clean, so perfect — so very, very beautiful. Something I’d always dreamed of, brought up in Swansea, amongst all the squalor—‘ She was staring down at the bird. ‘Here, you take it.’ She thrust it into my hands so violently that its muscles contracted in an effort to beat its wings and it turned its head and stabbed at my hand with its powerful beak. ‘I’m going up to the cottage. I’m going to bed. And I’m going to stay in bed until that slick’s dispersed. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to know about it. This time I’m going to pretend it isn’t there. And when it’s gone, when you’ve stirred yourself out of your lethargy and done something about it—‘

‘I’ve told you, I’m doing what I can. All of us, we’re all doing everything—‘

‘Balls! You’re in love with the sound of your own voices, you and Jimmy and that fellow Wilkins. A visit from a junior minister and you’re over the moon, so full of your own importance you forget—‘

‘Shut up!’

‘I won’t shut up. I’m telling you the truth for once.’

We were shouting at each other and I was so angry I could have hit her. The bird was struggling and I took hold of its neck and wrung it. Anything to stop her yelling and put the wretched thing out of its misery, but my hands slipped on the oil and I botched it, so that I had to finish it off by slamming its head against a rock.

She flew at me then, shouting at me to stop, and I had to hold her off. I held her off until the bird was dead and then I flung the mangled corpse of it back into the sea. ‘Now go to bed,’ I told her. ‘Bury your head in the sand and don’t come out until it’s all over and the slick gone.’

She didn’t move for a moment, standing there, staring at me as though seeing me for the first time. “You bastard!’ she said quietly. ‘I’ll show you.’ And she turned and walked slowly off up the path, back to the cottage.

I stayed there for a moment, thinking back over all that had been said, wishing I could have handled it differently. But it had been building for several days now, ever since the Petros Jupiter had stranded within sight of our home. I was out of understanding, totally exhausted by her emotional behaviour and her refusal to accept that everything was being done that could be done. She was so impractical. She knew about ships. She’d been brought up with them, her father a crane driver in the docks, but she’d never understood the a, how cruel it could be — not until she had come to live here.

My gaze lifted from the lifeless razorbill sloshing back and forth like an oily rag in the suck and thrust of the wavelets to the edge of the slick, pushing a dirty brown tongue round the rocks that hid the tanker from view. Something moved in the film of oil, a wing flapping. I turned away in disgust, climbing the path slowly, but not to the cottage. I struck away to the right, across the knoll above the elephant rock, striding out furiously as I reached the top.

I was cursing under my breath — not at Karen, not entirely, but at the whole sodding bloody mess, the way our idyll of a simple life was breaking up under the pressure of outside events. I could remember so clearly the day we had first seen Balkaer snugged into the grass and wild flowers and rocks above the cove, so remote, so peaceful on that still, sunny day in early spring two years ago. Doubtless that was why it was being offered at such a reasonable price. For a quick sale, they had said, but it was really the lack of any amenities. Who wants a cottage perched on an exposed coast with no services and the nearest track for vehicles over 500 metres away? Only people like ourselves. Karen from the dust and polyglot overcrowding of a Welsh port, and me with my earliest memories of a tiny hospital on the edge of the desert. For us that Atlantic coast, its soft salt air, the solitude of the cottage perched above the cove, it was all irresistible. We had put our deposit down that afternoon, moved in a week later, and for almost a year we had been sublimely happy. The tourists hadn’t bothered us as much as we had feared, I had sold several magazine pieces and had started on a book, Mate of the Balkaer. And then, at the tail end of a March gale, the first oil had come ashore and we had spent hours clearing up the beach.

That was when I discovered how unreasonable Karen could be, how taut her nerves were under that beautiful, smooth, rain-soft skin. The birds that came ashore that first time were all dead and whenever she found one she’d hold it out to me in mute accusation. Perhaps she didn’t mean it that way, but that’s how it had seemed to me. And though she said she remembered my warning, I doubt if she really remembered what I had told her that day when we had stood in the cottage doorway and decided Balkaer was what we wanted. Three years tramping round the world, then two on the Gulf-Karachi-Bombay run; I knew the sort of men who manned the smaller, older vessels. There’ll be engineers, I had told her, who’ll pump the bilges out whatever the regulations, tanker skippers who’ll turn a blind eye to tank cleansing at sea, even order it, and sooner or later Cornwall will have another oil spillage disaster like the Torrey Canyon. But she was happy, dreaming dreams. She hadn’t been listening, she hadn’t really taken it in. And then, when it happened…

I had slowed my pace, staring ahead beyond the white sand sweep of the bay, beyond the road slanting down to Sennen and its cluster of houses, to Land’s End and the rocks off, and that tanker sitting there, stern-on to the rocks and leaking oil. The slick now stretched in a great smooth, brown, greasy layer right cross the bay, the spraying vessels moving through it with scarcely a ripple like two water beetles. I was dunking back to the other spillages then. The first one hadn’t been too bad, a minor slick that had stayed offshore. But the second, which had happened sometime in the early hours of the morning, had been very different — bigger, longer-lasting, heavy, black glutinous oil that stuck to the rocks like glue, and because it was spring and the start of the breeding season many more birds had been involved. A shift of wind had brought them ashore, some of them still very much alive so that we had spent time and money getting them to the cleansing centre.

Now, here, staring me in the face, was the thing I had dreaded. I wondered how much of her cargo they had managed to pump out. Three small tankers festooned with fenders had been working in relays to lighten her all through the quiet weather period. Doubtless they’d tell us at the meeting tonight. But the glass had started to fall and now that the sky was visible I could see mares’ tails showing high up to the south-west. If it started to blow… I stopped and stared back along the coast to Cape Cornwall and beyond. In the stillness and the cold slanting sunlight it all looked green and fresh, everything washed clean as though waiting for the spring. But for us it wouldn’t be a spring like our first spring. If it were going to blow and she broke up, if the Petros Jupiter split open, spilling the rest of her oil, all that lovely shoreline would be polluted, the marine life killed off and birds that should be nesting coming ashore again as oil-sodden bundles. It would drive Karen out of her mind.

Bloody stupid, incompetent bastard! I was thinking of the master, risking a ship like that so close to Land’s End just for the sake of a few miles and a tiny saving in bunker fuel. Or had it been deliberate? First the boiler out of action, then the secondary reduction gear stripped. If it wasn’t an accident, then the chief engineer would have to be in on it — one of the engineers, anyway. Would any man in his senses deliberately cause a tanker breakdown close off such a notorious headland? But then if the money was right…

I shrugged. No doubt the Enquiry would produce the answer and we’d probably be told tonight when it would be held.

I walked as far as Sennen, where I had a word with Andy Trevose, the lifeboat’s relief cox’n. One of the salvage boys had told him in the pub that if the weather held there was a chance they’d float the Petros Jupiter off on Monday’s tide. Apparently she’d been given enough buoyancy for’ard to lift most of her hull dear of the rocks. Only her stern remained fast on Kettle’s Bottom. He also told me there was a rumour die second engineer had jumped a foreign trawler off Porthcurno and disappeared.

The sun had set by the time I got back to Balkaer, night closing in and the mares’ tails gone, the sky clear again and beginning to turn that translucent green that indicates cold. The door was on the latch, but Karen wasn’t there. I thought at first she had gone up to see old Mrs Peever. She did that sometimes when she was upset about something. Or Jean Kerrison perhaps. Jean ras more her own age and they got on well enough, It would have been natural considering what had happened and the mood she was in.

It wasn’t until I went out to the stone cleit I’d built above the path to get peat to bank up the fire that I thought of looking down into the cove. I saw her then, out in the rubber dinghy. She was paddling it along the edge of the slick, not using the outboard, though she had it mounted. I called to her and she looked up, but she didn’t wave. I thought she was out there to pick up any live birds caught in the slick and I went back into the cottage, banked up the fire and got my things. The meeting was at six in Penzance and Jimmy had said he would pick me up at the bottom of the lane at five-fifteen.

I called to her again as I left, but she didn’t answer. The light was fading as I went off up the path to the lane, but I wasn’t worried about her. She knew how to handle the inflatable and, like me, she enjoyed being on her own sometimes. It’s not easy when people are cooped up in a lonely little Cornish tin-miner’s cottage in winter. You tend to get on each other’s nerves, however much you’re in love. Even so, if it hadn’t been for that bloody tanker… But Karen would get over it. They’d get the tanker off and then, when the spring came — everything would look different in the spring.

So I comforted myself. I was really quite cheerful as I approached the lane, the black mood dissipated by the walk to Sennen. It would be the same for Karen, I thought. I didn’t realize how her emotions had been working on her imagination this past week, what depths of passion and desperation had been building up inside her.

Jimmy was already waiting for me in his battered blue van and I didn’t think any more about her as we drove across the moor to Penzance. He farmed a few acres, pigs and chickens mainly, but mostly he made his living out of the tourists, renting two cottages he owned in Sennen, so that he had a vested interest in the coastal environment.

The meeting, which was in the Town Hall, proved to be a much bigger affair than anything Wilkins, the secretary of our Preservation Society, had so far been able to organize locally. Just about every organization involved was represented, and since it was open to the public the place was packed. The local MP was in the chair and the chief speaker was the Under-Secretary for the Marine Division of the Department of Trade whose theme, of course, was that everything was being done that could be done. He pointed out that his own emergency information room, his Ops Room, which was on the top floor of the Marine Division’s HQ in Holborn, had been activated and continuously manned since January 1, the day the Petros Jupiter had been stranded. The local anti-pollution plan had been put into operation immediately, including the setting up of a pollution operation control room at Land’s End; the oil company involved had had tankers and pumps available for transferring cargo within fourteen hours; and the owners and Lloyd’s had had salvage teams, ships and equipment on the spot the following day. Of the 57,000 tons of crude oil carried in the ship’s tanks, 39,000 had already been pumped out. It was estimated that no more than 9,000 tons had leaked into the sea and this was being dissipated by spraying from the ships everyone could see from Land’s End. ‘With luck the salvage operators hope to have the Petros Jupiter off the rocks tomorrow or the day after.’

Andy Trevose, a few feet in front of me and talking to another Sennen Cove fisherman, suddenly got to his feet, ‘Tedn’t laikly th’all get ‘er off’n tamorrer.’

‘The salvage operators assure me—‘

‘Then th’are kidding themsel’, an’ thee — t’ll be blawing tamorrer, d’you see.’

‘Have it your own way,’ the Under-Secretary said mildly. ‘I’m not an authority on local weather and I can only repeat what the salvage operators have told me. They are optimistic — very optimistic — of getting the ship off on tomorrow’s tide.’ And on that he sat down.

His speech, which had lasted almost half an hour, was followed by a question and answer session. Here he was at his best, combining an air of authority with a touch of humour that had the effect of softening his slightly offhand manner and making him more human. Yes, he thought the Minister would be giving close consideration to the setting up of some sort of committee to reconsider the question of tanker routes in the sea area between the Scillies and Land’s End. This in answer to a question by the representative of the International Tanker Owners’ Pollution Federation. Both Nature Conservancy and the local representatives of the inshore fishermen pressed him hard on this point, but all he would say was, ‘I will convey your observations to the Minister.’

Nobody seemed to think this was good enough. The demand was for a tightening of regulations in the waters between Land’s End and the Scillies, and regular patrols to ensure that tankers and other bulk carriers of dangerous cargoes reported in as they had to on the French side off Ushant. And, similarly, they wanted them routed outside the Scillies. The Under-

Secretary said, ot course, it would take time, that there were a great number of interests to be considered, as well as the whole legal question of the freedom of the seas. At this point he was shouted down, first by local fishermen and their wives, then by some of the coastal farmers; finally a group of boarding house operators led by Jimmy joined in. There was so much noise for a time that even the local MP couldn’t get a hearing. In the end the Under-Secretary departed with nothing settled, only his promise that he would convey the reelings of the meeting most forcefully. It was by then almost eight-thirty. Jimmy and I, and several others from the Whitesand area, talked it over in the bar of a nearby pub. Most of us felt nothing had been achieved. Andy Trevose said he reckoned nothing would be done until we got a disaster as big as the Amoco Cadiz. ‘An’ tedn’t no use pretending — tha’ll paid to the inshaaw fishing for a generation.’ And he went off to phone his wife.

When he returned we had another round, and then Jimmy and I left. It was very still by then with wisps of sea fog trailing up from the direction of the harbour. ‘Looks like the man from London could be right.’ Jimmy was crouched over the wheel, straining to see the road. ‘If this weather holds they’ve a good chance of getting her off.’ The mist was thick on the moor, but when we reached his house the barometer was already falling. It was as we were standing there, staring at it, that Jean handed me a printed card. ‘Give that to Karen, will you? I said I’d try and find it for her, but it’s so long since we used it…’

‘Used what?’ I asked.

‘That flame weedkiller. But it’s very simple and I told her how it worked.’

‘You told her—‘ I was staring down at the instructions card, my mind suddenly alerted, seeing Karen out in the cove and remembering there had been something beside her in the dinghy, something with a bell-shaped end like a blunderbuss resting on the bows. It must have been the flame guard, but the light was so dim by then I hadn’t been able to see it clearly. ‘When was this? When did she borrow it from you?’

‘This afternoon. She was up here… Oh, it would have been about three — well before tea anyway.’

‘God Almighty!’ I breathed. ‘You gave her that thing?’

‘It’s all right,’ she added quietly. ‘I explained it all to her, how to pressurize the tank and get the flame ignited. I even lent her a pump and some meths.’

‘She didn’t say why she wanted it?’

‘No.’

‘You didn’t ask her?’

‘Why should I? It’s for burning off weeds.’

I turned to Jimmy then and asked him to drive me down to the end of the lane, and when we got there he insisted on coming down the path with me to the cottage. The mist had thickened, a blank wall of vapour blocking the beam of my torch. ‘What are you worried about?’ he asked. ‘She wouldn’t be fooling about with it at this time of night.’

‘She didn’t want it for weeds,’ I said.

‘What then?’

That oil slick.’

“Oh, I see.’ He laughed. ‘Well, you can relax. Even if she did get it going it wouldn’t do much good. That’s pretty heavy stuff that slick.’

The cottage loomed, a darker grey in the fog. No sign of a light. The door was locked and I was shouting for Karen before I had even got it open. But there was noi answer. The cottage was still and dead, wrapped in the fog, and only the faintest glow from the peat fire in the big chimney place. ‘Karen! Karen!’ I searched quickly. There was nobody there. Then I was running, stumbling through the fog, down into the cove. The little stone boathouse was empty, the door hanging open and no sign of the inflatable anywhere on the sands. only the marks where she had dragged it into the water.

I stood stock still for a moment, my heart hammering and trying to think, trying to prove to myself that what I feared couldn’t be, that she couldn’t be such a fool. But I knew she could. The fog swirled on a breath of wind and I turned, the path and the cottage suddenly clear in the long-throwing beam of my torch. Andy Trevose! That would be the quickest, Drive to Sennen and get Andy to take me out in his beat. I called to Jimmy, climbing the path in long strides, not bothering to lock the cottage, heading for the van, and behind me Jimmy said, ‘You think she’s going to use that flame-thrower on the slick?’ “Yes,’ I panted.

‘*But I told you, that stuff’s too heavy—‘ ‘The ship then — something. She wanted to make a gesture, blow the thing up. I’m afraid she’ll hurt herself.’

We reached the van. ‘Sennen?’ he asked as he started the engine.

‘Yes, Andy Trevose.’ He should be back by the time we got there.

‘She’s probably stranded on the sand somewhere. If the outboard broke down… Shall I stop for Jean?’

‘No. Hurry.’

But he stopped all the same, to tell her where we were going, and then we were feeling our way up on to the Sennen road, with the mist closed down and getting thicker. It seemed an age, both of us peering into the murk and the refracted beam of the headlights, but at last we were down by the hard and pulling up at the Trevose cottage near the lifeboat station. Andy was back and he had his oilskins on. ‘Seen your wife?’ he asked. ‘Is Karen home?’

‘No.’

‘She was here,’ he said. And his wife, behind him, added, ‘Karen came up from the quay abaht eight-thirty, asked me what Andy thawt would be the result of the meeting, and when Ah told her he’d promised to phone she asked to stay. She was that urgent to knaw what happened.’

‘And when you told her, what did she say?’

‘Nothing much. She’d been very withdrawn, all the taime we were waiting. Very edgy-laike, knaw what I mean. And then, when Ah tauld her nothing had been decaided, she laughed. I knew it, she says, the laugh a little wild and her voice a bit high laike. Very white, she was. Very tuned-up — laike she wanted to scream but was managing to throttle it back.’ She gave a big, full-breasted shrug. Tha’s all. She went out then.’ ‘She didn’t say where she was going?’ ‘No. The only thing she said was, Ah’ll show ‘em. At least, Ah think that was it. She was muttering to herself as she flung out of the door. I ran after her, but the mist had thickened and she was already gawn.’ ‘Rose thinks she’d be off to the ship’, Andy said, and his wife nodded. ‘Tha’s right. Ah don’t know why, but tha’s what Ah think.’

And Andy Trevose in oilskins and sea boots. ‘You were going to take your boat out,’ I said. ‘You were going to look for her?’

‘Aye, but not my boat. The ILB, I think.’ I thanked him, glad I didn’t have to waste time trying to convince him of the urgency of it. ‘You’ll need oilskins,’ he said as we started down towards the lifeboat station, a single street light shining dimly and a cold breeze swirling the mist over the roofs of the cottages. Away to the south-west the Longships’ explo-sive fog signal banged twice and far away I could just hear the moaning of the Seven Stones’ diaphone. Rack’n we’ll take the inshore boat,’ he said. ‘Tha’ll be quicker.’ He had the key of the lifeboat house and after issuing Jimmy and myself with lifejackets, oil-skins and seaboots, he motioned us to take the stern of the high speed rubber boat and the three of us dragged it out and ran it down into the water. Visibility was virtually nil as we went out from under the stone breakwater on a compass bearing, Andy crouched in the stern over the big outboard, Jimmy and I in the bows. I have only a vague recollection of the passage out, my mind concentrated on Karen, trying to visualize what she was doing, where she would have got to by now. Maybe Jimmy was right. Maybe she was just lost in the fog. But the double bang from the Longships light made it seem unlikely. Andy hadn’t thought she was lost. He’d put on his oilskins as soon as Rose had told him, prepared to go out after her alone. I could just see him, a dark shadow in the stern leaning forward away from the engine, a VHF handset to his ear.

Through The Tribbens it was only about a mile and a half from Sennen to Kettle’s Bottom, and before we had gone half that distance the five minute fog signal from the Longships was audible even above the roar of the outboard. Another ten minutes and Andy was throttling back, listening out on his walkie-talkie. ‘Tha’s one of the tugs. Rack’ns he’s seen a laight by the starn o’ that tanker. Farg cawms an’ goes, he says. He’s got a searchlight trained on ‘er an’ he’ll keep it so till we get than’

He opened up the throttle again and we bounced across what appeared to be a small tide rip. The tide would be ebbing now, pulling us down towards the rocks. There was movement in the fog, an iridescent glimmer of light. The light was there for a moment, then it was gone, the fog closed up again.

‘Getting close now,’ Andy shouted, leaning forward and passing me the big torch. ‘As soon as ‘ee see the wreck—‘ He shouted a warning and swung the boat lover in a hard turn. The slop of wavelets running over rocks slid by to port, just visible in the beam of the torch. The fog signal on the Longships cracked out, sharp and very clear, and in the same instant the landward-facing fixed red peered at us through thinning mist like some demented Cyclops, and to the right of it the shadowy shape of the stranded tanker showed black in silhouette against the brightening beam of a searchlight.

I don’t know how far away the wreck was — four, five hundred yards, three cables perhaps. But it was near enough for me to see that all the huge length of her was clear of the water, save for the stern, which was right against the rocks and sunk so low that the deck was awash. It was only a few seconds that we saw her clearly, then the fog closed in again. But it was still long enough for me to see a rubber boat snugged against the after rail and a figure moving along the sloping deck pinpointed by a flickering light. I shouted. But at that distance and with the engine running… what the hell did she think she was doing? It had to be her. Nobody else would be out to the wreck in a fog like this. I turned to Andy. ‘Did you get a bearing?’ I screamed at him.

He nodded. “Bout three-one-O. We’re in among the rocks.’ He had cut the engine right down, manoeuvring slowly. ‘Gi’ us some laight.’ I switched on the torch again, swinging the beam of it in a wide arc. Ripples everywhere, the white of little waves breaking as the tide ripped the shallows.

‘Was that a torch she had?’ Jimmy asked. But he knew it wasn’t. There had been no beam and a faint, flickering light like that, it could only be that damned flame-thrower. The beam from the tug’s searchlight was growing, the fog like a luminous curtain getting brighter all the time. Then suddenly it was swept away completely and we had a clear view of the tanker again, a little nearer now, her decks deserted, no sign of anyone. Had I dreamed it, that figure with the ghostly flame? But then I saw her, coming out from the shadow of the superstructure, a small shape high up the sloping deck and holding out ahead of her that tiny flame of light.

There was an open hatch and my eyes, staring through the cold humidity of the atmosphere, were beginning to water. It had to be a hatch, the entry hatch to one of the fuel tanks, and a void opened up inside me, my breath held and my body trembling. Oh God, no! And nothing I could do, no way I could stop her. I saw her reach it and she paused, crouched down on the deck. ‘She’s pumping,’ Jimmy breathed. ‘She’s pumping up the pressure, building up the flame.’

She stood up, the flame much brighter as she pushed it forward. That’s what I shall never forget, that I could see her pushing that flame towards the hatch and nothing I could do to stop her. I may have screamed. I don’t know. We were too far away, the engine roaring, and nothing I could do, nothing. I could see her, but I couldn’t stop her. The mist closed in and I sat there, my mouth open, dumb and appalled, waiting.

And then, as the silhouette of the tanker faded to a shadow, it came — a great whoosh of flame burning the fog to a blazing incandescent fire that shot upwards with a terrible roaring sound.

The engine was idling again and we sat there, stunned and in a state of shock as the heat of it hit us through the fog glare. And the noise — it was a roar like a thousand trains going through a tunnel, a great eruption of sound.

I remember Jimmy suddenly yelling, ‘It’s gone. The whole bloody ship’s gone, my God!’ And Andy muttering close behind me, ‘Tha’ll show ‘em, arl raight, poor gal.’ His hand gripped my arm, a touch of sympathy. ‘She’ll be remembered a long taime for this.’

I didn’t move. I didn’t say anything. I was thinking of Karen, wondering if she’d really known what she was doing, what the result would be. But she must have. She must have known. Oil and air, the fumes an explosive mixture. She wasn’t a fool. She’d known. Christ! And I’d let her go. I’d seen her, down there in the cove in the dim evening light, the flame-thrower there, in the bows, and I’d waved to her, and gone off up the path to that useless meeting.

The heat was burning up the fog now. I could see the bright white heart of the fire and the great billowing cloud of smoke rising like a volcanic eruption. I couldn’t see the wreck, only the rocks of the Kettle’s Bottom all red with the glare. Either it was sunk or else the smoke and flames had engulfed it completely. The effect was terrifying, the thunderous roar, the whole appalling conflagration seeming to burst up from the surface of the sea as though fuelled by some underwater vent. Lightning flashed in the smoke and I sat there, thinking of Karen, trying to imagine… I think I must have been crying, for my eyes became crusted with salt and I could feel my mouth trembling. But the intensity of the heat burned up my tears, so that I stared, dry-eyed, at the pyre she had made for herself.

I should have known. After three years — God! I should have known. And we’d been here almost two — two years living in expectation, waiting for just such a catastrophe.

The heat was scorching my face and there was wind. Jimmy’s hand gripped my arm. ‘Hold it!’ he said urgently. ‘Nothing you can do.’ I realized then that I had been struggling to my feet. ‘Nothing at all.’ His face was close to mine. ‘Not now. Just sit there…’

Just sit, do nothing. The tanker blazing and Karen’s body — her lovely, soft body burned to nothing. Had it been quick? An explosion like that, such a holocaust of flame — she wouldn’t have known? Surely to God it wouldn’t have hurt? I tried to imagine myself there beside her when it happened, but it was no use — my mind couldn’t grasp what it would have been like, what the impact of it would have been on flesh and bone. The nerves… it would have been her nerves that took the full shock of it, reacting like a seismograph, shrieking information to the brain in that split second of exploding flames.

My head was turned, still facing the lurid heat-glow. But it was over the stern now. Andy had swung the inflatable away from it. The wind was growing, whipping the surface of the water to spray, and it was cold — cold air being sucked in by the rising heat of the flames.

I don’t know what happened after that, my mind seemed to blank out, so that I wasn’t conscious of anything until we were inside the Sennen breakwater and carrying the ILB up to the boathouse. The sea mist was almost gone, torn to shreds, and out where the ship had been there was nothing but billowing smoke lit by a red internal glow. The fog signal on the Longships banged again, the red light glaring fixedly, Somiebody was talking to me, asking questions, and I became aware of a small crowd gathering. There was a police car there and a young helicopter pilot I knew. ‘It was your wife, was it, sir — the young woman they saw went out to blow up the ship? Can you give me her name please, her full name…’ And another voice, a camera reporter from one of the TV companies that had been waiting to film the ship being hauled off the rocks, said, ‘What the hell did she do it for, going out to a wrecked oil tanker with a thing like a minia-ture flame-thrower? Did she want to kill herself?’ His eager, hungry little eyes stared up at me, the camera cradled on his arm. I could sense his excitement. ‘Did you see her? Was she really out there?’ And then, as I told him to go to hell, he stepped back, the camera raised, and his mate switched a spotlight on, suddenly blinding me. ‘Just tell it to us in your own words, Mr Rodin. Why did she do it?’ I started towards him, but Andy stopped me. I thought better of it then. At least it was a chance to tell people… ‘Are you recording this?’ I asked him.

‘Yes. You tell us. Now.’ And I heard the whirr of the camera. So I told them — I told them what the quiet and beauty of Balkaer had meant to Karen, to us both — and how cheap flag-of-convenience ships, badly officered, badly equipped, were destroying the coastline, ruining everybody’s lives. ‘And that tanker spilling oil. Nothing came of the meeting tonight, only an assurance they’d get her off tomorrow. But Karen knew… she knew the pressure was falling and a storm due. She knew they’d do nothing, so she…’ I heard the hesitation in my voice — ‘so she must have made up her mind—‘ I couldn’t go on, my voice caught on a sob, my words unintelligible. ‘She just — decided — she’d do it herself. Set the slick alight. Nobody was going to do anything, so she’d—‘ I was conscious of the silence around me, everybody hanging on my words, the camera whirring. ‘That’s all,’ I muttered. ‘She didn’t realize — she didn’t mean to kill herself — only to save the coast and the seabirds.’ I heard him say ‘Cut’ and the camera stopped.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘You’ll wring a lot of hearts with that stuff. Pity your wife isn’t here too.’ He gave my arm a quick pat. ‘Sorry. Terrible shock for you. But thanks. Thanks a lot.’

I shook my head, feeling dazed, the world going on around me and myself not part of it. The camera crew were packing up. The police officer was at my elbow again, asking more questions, writing it down.

‘You say she didn’t mean to blow the ship up and herself with it?’

I turned my head, seeing his eyes blue like gem-stones in the beam of a car’s headlights. ‘She was killed,’ I said dully. ‘It was accidental.’ It didn’t mean anything to me now. It was as though talking to the camera had got the shock of it out of my system for the moment. ‘She loved life,’ I told him. ‘Why should she want to kill herself? She went out there with only one thought, to burn up that oil slick.’ He took it all down, then he read the statement back to me and I signed it, resting the paper on the warm bonnet of the police car. After that I was able to get away, back to the Trevose cottage. I didn’t go in. I just stood outside by the parked van. I wanted to get away, to be with Karen — back to the cottage, to the memories… all I’d got left. Jimmy says I didn’t utter a word all the way back, except to ask him to drive me straight down to the bottom of the lane. He wanted me to stay the night with them, of course, but I wouldn’t. ‘I’ll be all right.’ I thanked him and got my torch out of the back. Then I was going down the path to Balkaer, alone now and on my own for the first time since it had happened. The chickens stirred in their shed at my approach and in the dark cleft of the cove the suck and gurgle of waves lapping against the rocks came to me on an updraught of wind. There were no stars, the night dark and the sky overcast. It would be blowing from the sou’west by morning. The cottage door was unlocked, the peat fire glowing now in the wide chimney, the place warm and snug, but terribly empty, as though it knew she wouldn’t be back.

I remember thinking — it will always be empty like this now. But there was movement on the far side, under the table. I lit the lamp and in its bright flame I saw five of the cardboard boxes they’d given us to carry the oil-soaked birds when driving them to the cleansing centre. It hit me then. It hit me so hard that I just sat down, a sort of strangled cry coming from inside me, tears falling. I was remembering that scene down in the cove with her holding the wretched bird out to me. If only her tongue could be scolding at me again. Anything rather than this deadly quiet.

And that night, lying alone in the big untidy bed, my eyes wide and staring into the dark, the loneliness of it unbearable. Without Karen what was there to life? She was all I had, all I’d ever had. She was this cottage, Balkaer, the life we’d been leading. It was her idea — the way we lived, everything. Without her it had no meaning. I was back to the nothingness of my existence before we met. Ever since I’d stowed away on that dhow in Dubai, got myself across to Gwadar and up to Peshawar by way of Quetta, ever since then I’d been tramping the world, living out of suitcases, owning nothing, belonging nowhere — no one belonging to me. Only Karen had ever belonged…

The wind was rising. In the end I couldn’t stand it, lying there staring into the dark, listening to the wind and seeing her figure moving along the sloping deck of that tanker, the flickering flame held out in front of her, and then the flash of the explosion, the roaring holocaust that had followed. Poor darling! Poor wonderful, adorable, emotional darling! If only I’d gone down into the cove, instead of waving and climbing the path and leaving her there. She must have tried to ignite the slick with that garden flame-thrower right after I had left. And when she’d failed, she’d motored across the bay to Sennen to wait with Rose to hear the result of the meeting. I should have known. If I hadn’t been so angry… God! If — if — if… I flung off the bedclothes and got the bottle of Armagnac I kept for emergencies at the back of the kitchen cupboard. It was the last of the bottles I had brought with me when I had finally come ashore to become self-employed instead of a salaried ship’s officer. There wasn’t much of it left, but it was over the remains of that bottle, sitting in the rocking chair with two oiled-up cormorants and three razorbills in boxes under the table beside me, listening to the roar of the wind outside, the crash of the rollers in the cove below, sensing the movement of the stone walls round me in the gusts, that I began to come to terms with what had happened. Times like this we’d have had each other — talking together, working together, going to bed together, making love; one way and another we’d always kept the gales at bay, locking ourselves into our own little world and shutting out tbe wind.

But now there was only myself. And with Karen gone I was intensely conscious of every battering blast of wind, so that the cottage seemed no longer a protection, the wind entering it and the waves beating at its foundations. And my love out there by the Kettle’s Bottom. Tomorrow or the next day, a week, a fortnight maybe, somewhere along the coast they’d find the charred remains of her floating in the sea, or smashed up on the rocks — and I’d be expected to identify her. Or would that rounded, full-breasted form have been reduced to ashes? If it had been cremated beyond recognition… I could see her still, sitting in the wing chair on the opposite side of the chimney piece. We had bought that chair in a gale, junk from a nearby homestead that had gone for nothing, no dealers there, and she had laboriously re-covered it with material from an old Welsh cardden that had belonged to her mother.

I could see her now, sitting there like a ghost with one hand propping her chin, the other holding a book, or sitting staring intently at the fire as I read aloud to her what I had written during the day. She was doing the typing for me, of course — she was a trained typist — but I think it was my reading to her that developed her interest in books. She had never been much of a reader before, but then she started borrowing from the travelling library, always wildlife books or stories about animals. Sometimes she would borrow a book about Wales, but mostly it was wildlife, and because much of what I was writing was about the birds and seals that visited our coast, she became in a sense my sounding box, our relationship deeper, more intimate, so that now, for the moment, I could still see her, sitting there in that empty chair.

That was really the start of it, that was when I saw the pattern of my life, how it all added up — so that what had been without purpose before suddenly became purposeful.

It’s hard to explain, for in the hours I sat there, sleepless, with the noise of the front coming in out of the Atlantic steadily increasing, I went through several stages. I had already passed through shock and had reached the point of feeling sorry for myself when I came down seeking the comfort of the Armagnac. But then, as the fire of it gave me courage to face my loss and the loneliness that would follow, I came to feel that Karen wasn’t dead, that she still existed, not in her own body but in mine — that she had become part of me.

It was a strange feeling, for my thinking immedi-ately became different. It was as though death had opened the door for me so that life had a new meaning, a new dimension — all life, not just human life. I was beginning to think like her. I suddenly felt at one with the Greenpeace movement and all those people who had tried to stop the harp seal killers of Canada or to prevent the slaughter of the dolphins by the fishermen off Iki.

The world as I drank seemed to be shrieking aloud the cruelty of humans — not just to themselves, but to all living things. Greed, and a rage against nature. Karen was right. A rogue species. She’d read that somewhere. And about vested interests, too. There’d always be vested interests, always be reasons for not interfering, for allowing another species to be wiped out, for letting them cut down another rain forest, pollute another stretch of coast, another sea, an ocean even, with oil or nuclear waste. She’d seen it. Now I was seeing it. And I hadn’t reasoned it out — it was just suddenly there in my mind, as though she had put it there.

A gust shook the walls, the wind tugging at the door and a sheet of spray lashing at the windows. The peat fire glowed and I saw her face in it, the long black hair let down and burning like a torch. Slumped in the old rocker, I relived the moment, the holocaust, confusing the peat-glow and seeing her body shrivel in the heat of it, and with that hallucinatory sight the anger that was there, deep inside me, boiled over, vengeance then my only thought. An eye for an eye, a life for a life. Somebody had put that bloody ship on the rocks, somebody had been responsible — for the pollution, for Karen’s death.

Speridion? Another gust, the cottage trembling, and I spoke the name aloud. Aristides Speridion. And he’d got away in a boat. That’s what the marine consultant, an oil pollution specialist from Cardiff, had said at the meeting, that the second engineer of the Petros Jupiter was missing and they’d traced him through a Penzance fisherman to a stolen dinghy and a Breton fishing boat. I’d hunt him down. I’d kill the bastard. The wind howled and I emptied my glass, hugging that thought to me.

A bloody little Greek — they were always Greek. I’d find him and I’d get the truth out of him, and if he was responsible, if he’d deliberately caused that damned tanker to go on the rocks…

Dawn was breaking as I finished the. last of the bottle and began to dress. The razorbills were dead by then, only the cormorants still alive, and the room was very dark, a lot of noise. There always was a lot of noise with a gale blowing out of the west and a big sea running. Lloyd’s! That was what was in my mind now as I shaved and dressed. With an insurance claim in, Lloyd’s would know where the man had gone to earth if anybody did. Lloyd’s of London — I’d phone them as soon as I had banked up the fire and got myself some breakfast.

CHAPTER TWO

I didn’t bother to clear up, I just got my anorak, picked up the containers holding the two live cormorants and shouldered my way out into the gale. One night. One single night. A split moment of time, and now everything had changed, my whole life. Clear of the cottage the wind took hold, thrusting me up the path. It was blowing a good force 9 and I could hardly breathe, the collar of my anorak whipping against my chin with a harsh whirring sound, and the waves thundering below me, the cove a white maelstrom of broken water thrown back by the rocks.

It was quieter when I reached the lane, a grey, miserable morning with ragged wisps of cloud flying in the wind, the moors all hidden. A herring gull sailed past my head, a scrap of paper blown by the gale. She would have liked that — one bird at least without oil on its feathers.

The blue van was parked in the yard of the Kerri-sons’ place and I found Jimmy cleaning out the chicken roost at the back of the outbuildings. I handed him the cardboard containers holding the cormorants. ‘The last thing she did,’ I said.

‘Okay, I’ll see they get to the cleansing centre.’ ‘Can I use your phone?’

He nodded and took me through into the house.

Jean called down to see if I was all right. The phone was at the foot of the stairs and she leaned over the banisters to ask if I could use a cup of coffee. I answered her automatically, trying to remember the departmental details given in Lloyd’s Nautical Year

Book. I didn’t want underwriters or salvage experts; I wanted the people who dealt with fraudulent claims.

But I couldn’t remember what the section was called, only that it was located outside London.

By the time I had been through Directory Enquiries and Lloyd’s of London switchboard I was sweating, my nerves on edge, tiredness coming in waves. Colchester, the girl said — Intelligence Services. And she gave me the number.

‘You all right, Trevor?’ It was Jean, looking anxious and holding a cup of coffee out to me.

‘Yes, I’m all right.’ There were beads of sweat on my forehead. ‘It’s very warm in here, nice and warm after being outside.’

‘Come and sit down then. You can phone after you’ve had your coffee.’

‘No. No thanks. I’ll get this over, then I’ll sit down for a moment.’ I dialled the Colchester number, mopping the sweat from my forehead, and when I told the girl I was enquiring about the engineer of the

Petros Jupiter she put me through to a quiet, friendly-sounding voice: ‘Ferrers, Special Enquiries Branch. Can I help you?’ But as soon as I asked him whether it was negligence, or if the tanker had been put ashore deliberately, his manner changed. ‘Have you any reason to suppose it was deliberate?’

‘The engineer,’ I said. ‘A Greek named Speridion. He took a dinghy from Porthcurno. They say he was picked up by a Breton fishing boat.’

‘It doesn’t prove anything,’ the voice said. ‘A man who’s been shipwrecked…’ There was a pause, and then the inevitable question. ‘May I know your interest in the matter? Are you representing anyone in particular?’

‘No. Only myself.’ I told him my name then and where I was speaking from, and he said ‘Trevor Rodin’, repeating it slowly. ‘It was your wife…’ The voice trailed away, embarrassed, and I heard him say, ‘I’m sorry.’ After that there was a long silence. And when I asked him for information about the engineer, where he lived, or where the fishing boat had taken him, he said, ‘I can’t answer that. There’s nothing through yet. Why not try the police, or maybe the solicitors…’ He hesitated, ‘May I have your address please?’

I gave it to him, also the Kerrisons’ telephone number. ‘Could you ring me here if it turns out to be a scuttling job?’

‘What makes you think it might be?’

‘He’s fled the country, hasn’t he?’ And when he didn’t answer, I said, ‘Well, hasn’t he? Somebody put that bloody tanker on the rocks.’

‘That’s a matter for the courts.’ His voice sounded suddenly a little distant. Silence then. I thought he’d cut me off, but when I said ‘Hullo’, he answered at once. ‘Just a moment.’ A long pause. Then he went on, ‘Sorry — I’ve got a telex here, and I was just looking at a newspaper report of what happened last night… you’ve been a ship’s officer, I see. Gulf, and Indian Ocean. You know Mina Zayed?’

‘The Abu Dhabi port?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is that where he’s headed?’

‘It’s where the tanker was loaded. Do you know it?’ And when I told him I’d been into it only once since it was built, he said, ‘Well, that’s more than most ships’ officers have.’ And he asked me whether I was ever in London.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not for a long time.’ But then I remembered about the book and the publishers I had sent it to. I’d have to sort that out, think about what I was going to do. ‘Maybe now…’ I murmured.

‘You’ll be coming to London then?’

‘I expect so.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know — soon. It depends.’

‘Well, let me know.’ He repeated the number I had given him, promised to phone me if they heard anything definite, then hung up.

I drank the rest of my coffee there by the phone, wondering why he wanted to know if I’d be in London.

There was nothing I could tell him. I took the empty cup through into the kitchen. Jean was there, looking a little tearful as she insisted I lunch with them. ‘You’re going to leave Balkaer now, aren’t you?’

I nodded. There was a sort of extra-marital closeness between us. Perhaps it was her mixed Romany blood, but she always seemed to know what was in my mind. ‘Yes, time to leave now.’ Time to go back to the superficial companionship of officers’ quarters on some tramp.

‘Back to sea?’

I nodded, not relishing the thought.

‘What about the book?’

I shook my head. It was over a month since I had sent it to the publishers and not a word. ‘It’ll be back to the Gulf again, I suppose. But first—‘ I stopped there, my hands trembling, my mind on that engineer. I couldn’t tell her what I planned to do. I couldn’t tell anybody. ‘I’ll take a break first.’ My voice sounded faint, little more than a mumble. ‘Try and sort things out.’

She put the saucepan down carefully and caught me by the arm. ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right, Trevor. They never did.’ And she added, ‘I know how you feel, but… just leave it be, love. The thing’s done. Leave it be.’ And then, without waiting for an answer, she said, ‘Now go on down to the cottage, clean things up and come back here for lunch just after twelve. Cold ham and salad. And I’ll do you some meringues.’ She knew I liked meringues.

‘All right,’ I said.

But instead of going back to Balkaer, I went with Jimmy in his van to the cleansing station. We helped there for a while, getting back just in time for lunch. And afterwards I stayed on, enjoying the warmth of their company, the cosy heat of the coal fire. The wind had dropped, but there was still cloud over the moors and it got dark early. I didn’t think about it when they switched the television on for the news, but then, suddenly, I was sitting up, electrified, seeing it all over again through the eyes of the camera — the red glow of the blazing tanker and the ILB coming into the slipway, the three of us caught against the furnace glare of the burning oil with ragged wisps of fog in the background, and myself, dazed and speaking slowly, as though in a trance, trying to answer their questions, telling them what had happened. The wind was blowing in my hair and my face had the pallor of death in the hard glare of the spotlight.

Back at the cottage, with the aftermath of the gale beating into the cove, it was my own TV shadow, my wild, ghostly appearance that stayed in my mind, not the words I had spoken. I was tired by then, so emotionally exhausted that I fell asleep by the fire. I spent most of the night there and in the morning, when I went up to the top, above the elephant rock, and looked across to the Longships, all that remained of the Petros Jupiter was the blackened bridge housing half sunk and leaning drunkenly against the Kettle’s Bottom.

It was a bright, sparkling morning, the sort of morning that would have had Karen bubbling with that almost childishly excited Welsh enthusiasm of hers. I walked on, across the fields and down the road into Sennen, and there I found the story of what she had done plastered all over the papers with eye-witness accounts and statements from the salvage boss and pollution experts, also from several politicians.

Reading about it, I found it all strangely remote, as though it hadn’t been Karen out there, but somebody else. Reporters came and a girl from the local radio station with a portable tape recorder. But by then I was in a daze, answering their questions automatically. It didn’t seem real, any of it, the seas now rolling in unobstructed to break on the Shark’s Fin, only the top of the hull’s twisted wreck just showing at low water and no slick, the oil all burned up or driven ashore. It only seemed real when I was back at Balkaer. Then the emptiness of the cottage was like a constant nagging ache. Or when I was down in the cove. Wreckers from far and wide were prowling the shores of Whitesand Bay, searching all the headlands. They were picking up bits and pieces of the Petros Jupiter as far north as Cape Cornwall.

I began to get a stack of mail, letters from all sorts of people, conservationists chiefly, though some of them attacked me for encouraging Karen to sacrifice herself unnecessarily or accused me of standing by while she committed suicide. They were from women mainly, the bulk of them praising what she had done. Saturday, the mail included several invitations to speak at conservationist meetings and a letter from the publishers. This I saved until after my return from

Penzance, where I saw the agents and put Balkaer up for sale. The letter was signed Ken Jordan, Senior Editor. He wanted me to go up to London and see him, but with Karen gone, the cottage for sale, that part of my life was ended. It didn’t seem important any more, the book no longer meaning very much to me. And on the Sunday, which was sunny with an easterly breeze, families wandered down the path from the lane to stand and point, and giggle in embarrassment when I told them to bugger off. There was even a man who pushed open the cottage door to take pictures of the interior. He was quite upset when I slammed it in his face. Because he had seen Balkaer on TV in his own home he seemed to think in some curious way that he owned the place.

And then, about dusk, when all the gawpers and souvenir hunters had gone, there was a knock at the door and I opened it to find a man dressed in a sheepskin jacket and a polo-necked sweater standing there. He had a fur cap rammed tight down on his bullet head.

I recognized him at once, though it must have been three years or more since I had last seen him; those broad powerful shoulders, the beer-barrel belly, the little pig eyes and the round heavy face. He was of that breed of Englishman that has made Brits a word of contempt.

I didn’t ask him in. I just stood there, waiting. The last time I’d seen him was at a shipboard party on a Liberian tanker waiting to load at Bahrain. ‘Remember me?’

I nodded. I had met him several times, on different ships, in different ports, and in hotel bars where he was always flush with money, always buying rounds of drinks. The word was that he was front man for a drug-smuggling ring.

‘Len Baldwick,’ he said, holding out a big paw. ‘Can I have a word with you?’

‘What about?’

‘You. The future.’ The small grey eyes were watching me, the whites as clear as if he’d never touched a drop of alcohol in his life. ‘You’ll be thinking of a ship now?’

‘Will I?’

He ducked his head, pushing his way in. ‘Saw you on the telly.’ He unzipped the sheepskin jacket, pushing the fur cap to the back of his head. ‘Peat fire, eh? You always were a bit simple-like. I told you, way back, didn’t I — being honest and licking the arses of the owners don’t pay. Now look where it’s got you. You lost your wife. She’s gone and you’re on your own. You got nothing, laddie, nothing at all.’

‘What the hell do you want?’ Any ordinary man I’d have thrown out. But he was well over six foot, massive as a rock. ‘Why are you here?’

‘To offer you a job.’ And he went on to explain that he was head-hunting for a consortium going into the tanker business. ‘Oil money,’ he explained, drooping an eyelid. ‘You know how it is. Bubbles out of the arse of any Muslim in the Gulf. These people are starting their own fleet, see, an’ while crew’s no problem, it’s not so easy to find officers. The right sort, that is.’ He was watching me out of the corner of his eyes. ‘The money’s good. Double British rates.’ He hesitated. ‘And a bonus at the end.’

‘End of what?’ I asked. ‘What’s the bonus for?’

He shrugged. ‘For getting the ship there. End of voyage bonus.’ He was standing with his legs apart, staring at me. ‘Air passage out, of course. Everything provided.’

The two years since I’d come to England fell away. I was back in the Gulf, back in a world where promises are seldom met, nothing is what it seems and men like Baldwick scavenge the hotels and clubs fomenting bar talk that is the never-never land of salesmen’s dreams. Nothing would have induced me to accept an offer from him, but I didn’t tell him that. I excused myself on the grounds that I had written a book and would be seeing the publishers shortly.

‘Jesus!’ he exclaimed and burst out laughing. ‘I come here offering you the job of first officer on a hundred thousand tonner, and you talk about a bloody book. You out of your mind?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Just a question of values. I know what I want to do with my life.’

‘Pollution. On the telly you was talking about pollution and crooked tanker owners, the need for government to introduce new laws.’ He hesitated, eyeing me speculatively. ‘Maybe these people can help.’ He said it tentatively and I nearly burst out laughing it was so damned silly. Baldwick of all people on the side of the angels! Quick as a flash he sensed my reaction. ‘So you won’t even discuss it?’

I shook my head.

‘I come all the way from Bristol to make you an offer most men would jump at—‘

‘Then why haven’t they? Why come to me?’

‘I told you. I saw you on the telly.’ And he added, ‘These people, they understand about pollution. They can afford to run their ships so there won’t be any. The idea is to improve the tanker image, and they’ll put pressure on any government that doesn’t behave sensibly.’

‘What pressure?’ I asked.

‘How the hell do I know? Political pressure, I imagine. Anyway, Pieter Hals is one of the skippers. He wouldn’t have signed on if he hadn’t believed they were serious about it.’

Hals was the man who had stood on the deck of a flag-of-convenience tanker in the Niger River with a bomb in his hand threatening to blow it up, and himself with it, if the effects of a collision weren’t remedied before he sailed. She was scored along one side and leaking oil. The account I had read had commented that he was wilder than the Greenpeace movement or the union leader in Brest who’d called his men out to stop a Greek cargo vessel sailing with an oil leak in the stern gland. ‘Who are these people?’ I asked.

He shook his head, laughing and telling me he wasn’t here to gossip about the consortium, just to offer me a job and if I didn’t want it, what the hell did it matter to me who the owners were. ‘They operate in the Gulf, of course, and they want ships’ officers, deck as well as engineers.’ He stood there for a moment, feet apart, with his back to the fire watching me out of his bright little button eyes. ‘Tonight I’ll be in Fal-mouth,’ he said. ‘I’ll be talking to the captain of the Petros Jupiter. He’ll be looking for another job I wouldn’t wonder.’ He waited, and when I didn’t say anything, he nodded. ‘Okay, suit yourself.’ He pulled a business card from his wallet, took out what looked like a real gold pen, and after copying some entries from a leather diary on to the back of the card, he handed it to me. ‘If you change your mind, those are my immediate movements.’ The card described him as Consultant. On the back he had written down dates and telephone numbers for Liverpool, Nantes, Marseilles, Dubai.

He stood there a moment longer, pointedly surveying the stone-walled room and the junk furniture. Then he turned and zipped up his fleece-lined jacket. I opened the door for him and as he was going out he paused, looking down at me. ‘You’re not a company man any longer. You want a berth, you got to go out into the market and face all the other ships’ officers that’s out of a job.’ His little eyes were cold, his lips a hard line. ‘I’m warning you, Rodin, you’ll find the going rough. A VLCC — you never had anything like that. It’s the chance of a lifetime for a man like you.’ He stood there a moment longer, staring down at me as though to check that his words had sunk in. Then he nodded. ‘Okay. It’s your loss. But if you change your mind, ring me before I leave for France.’

He left then and I stood there, watching him as he climbed the path, leaning his body into it, and thinking how odd it was, the power of the media. First the publishers, conjured out of the blue because of the publicity, and now Baldwick, appearing like some evil genie and talking of pollution as though oil slicks could be eliminated by rubbing a few gold coins together.

I went back into the cottage, to another night of loneliness with only the memory of Karen for company. The next day I had a service for her in the local church.

There was still nothing to bury. Nothing had been found of her, nothing at all, so it was just a sort of memorial service to a girl who had immolated herself in protest against oil pollution. Most people seemed to regard it as a futile gesture, but they were kind and they turned up in force. The environmentalists made a bit of a demo out of it, the local press were there and two BBC men from Bristol. The little church was packed and it was raining.

The service was very moving, I think because of all the people and the strength of feeling that reached out to me. And afterwards, when one of the reporters started questioning me about her motives, I was in such an emotional state that I just let my feelings rip, telling him I’d get the bastard who put the Petros Jupiter on the rocks, killing Karen, killing the birds, ruining our bit of Cornwall. ‘If the government won’t stop it, I will.’ There was a camera running, everybody staring, and when somebody asked me if I meant to take on the oil companies I answered him, ‘No, the ship owners — the tanker owners — the bastards that switch names, companies, ownership — the whole stinking, sodding mess of corrupt tanker dealing…’ Somebody pulled me away then, Andy I think. I was in tears, coming out of the church, straight from the service. And that night they had a brief flash of that interview on Nationwide. I watched it in the lounge of a Penzance hotel over a farewell drink with the Kerrisons, shocked as much by the haggard look of my face, and the tears streaming down it, as by the violence of my words. Then they drove me to the station and I caught the night train to London.

It was five days since it had happened, five miserable days alone at the cottage. On the Saturday, when I had seen the estate agents in Penzance, I had told them they could deal with the contents when they liked, but to leave the cottage until the spring, when the evenings would be drawing out and the daffodils in bloom in the sheltered patch behind the elephant rock. It would sell better then. But though it wouldn’t be on the market immediately, the mere fact of having arranged to sell it had had the effect of making me feel an interloper, the place we had striven for and loved so much suddenly no longer part of my life. It added to the bitterness of my departure as the wheels rattled me eastwards through the night.

I hadn’t bothered about a sleeper. I sat up all the way, dozing fitfully, thinking about the Petros Jupiter and what I’d do to that dirty little Greek when I caught up with him. It was either that or start thinking about Karen, and I couldn’t face that, not any more. Not after that service. I felt drained, too nervously exhausted to plan ahead. I didn’t even think about the letter from the publishers. That meant thinking constructively, about my writing, about the future. I didn’t want to think about the future. I didn’t want to face up to a future alone. And so I sat there, my mind drifting on the edge of consciousness, nerves taut and the wheels hammering the name Speridion into my tired brain. Aristides Speridion. Aristides Speridion.

Dawn broke, cold and grey, the wind blowing out of the north, a curtain of sleet beginning to whiten the roofs of the buildings backed on to the railway. It was much too early to ring the solicitors when we pulled into Paddington, so I took the Circle Line to Liverpool Street, checked my two cases into a lock-up and just had time to buy some papers before catching the next train for Colchester.

Except for a brief paragraph in the Telegraph headed oil slick demo at cornish church, the Petros Jupiter seemed to have dropped right out of the news. The lead story in all the papers was the arrest of four more terrorists at the GB Shahpur Petrochemical Company’s offices in the City. They were charged with being implicated in the Piccadilly Underground explosion that had killed eleven people just before Christmas.

Feeling drowsy as the train ran into the flat Essex countryside, I went into the buffet for some coffee. There was a queue and, while I was waiting, the guard came through checking tickets. The buffet car was full, every seat occupied, and when I finally got my coffee I took it through into the next coach and sat down in an almost empty first class compartment. There was one occupant only, a neat elderly man with rimless half-glasses who sat hunched in an overcoat in the far window seat reading the Economist. He was making notes and on the seat beside him several articles on insurance lay on top of a slim black leather briefcase. Outside the windows, the drizzle had turned to snow, a thick driving veil of white. I held the paper cup in both hands, sipping the hot coffee and wondering whether I was wasting my time travelling all the way down to see Ferrers when it would have been so much simpler to phone. Quite probably Lloyd’s Intelligence Services wouldn’t know anything more than had already been released to the press. And if they did, would he tell me?

One thing I was sure about, however… if they did know anything more, then I had a far better chance of getting it out of him if I saw him personally. Also, by going to their offices I could see the set-up, form some idea of what their sources of information were. I knew they had agents all over the world, but though I had been conscious of the extraordinary global network controlled by Lloyd’s of London ever since I had become a ship’s officer, I had no real idea how the organization worked, least of all how its Intelligence Service operated. And from Colchester of all places! Why not London?

The answer to that was supplied by the man opposite me. As we neared Colchester he put his Economist carefully away in his briefcase and began gathering his things together. I asked him if he could direct me to Sheepen Place and he looked at me quickly with a little smile. ‘Lloyd’s Shipping Press?’

‘No, Intelligence Services,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Same thing. You’re a ship captain, are you?’

I shook my head. ‘Mate only, though I’ve got my master’s certificate. I left the sea a few years back.’

‘Ah, you work for marine solicitors, eh?’ He glanced out of the window. ‘Snowing quite hard now. My wife’s meeting me with the car. We can give you a lift.’ And when I said I could get a taxi, that I didn’t want to take them out of their way, he said, ‘No trouble. It’s quite close. Within walking distance.’ He gave a little laugh. ‘Except that it’s not a good day for walking, eh?’

The train was slowing now, and as we took our place in the corridor, I asked him why such a vital part of Lloyd’s should be tucked away in an East Anglian coastal town. He looked at me, frowning. ‘I suppose because members of Lloyd’s traditionally live in East Anglia. The best of ‘em, anyway,’ he added, smiling. ‘In the great days of the railways Liverpool Street was a handy way of getting out into the country. Now a lot of the big insurance companies, some of the largest of the Lloyd’s brokers, have moved their administrative organizations out of the City, to Colchester, Ipswich, even as far north as Norwich. Costs are a lot less than in the City and staff don’t have to commute so far.’ The train jerked to a stop and we got out into a bitter wind.

It was much colder than it had been in London, the snow small-flaked and hard like ice. The car his wife was driving was a brand-new Mercedes, their background a whole world away from mine. We drove down under the railway bridge, the road curving away to the right. The snow was heavier now, the Town Hall tower, which marked the centre of Colchester, only just visible on its hill. The insurance man turned from answering his wife’s queries about a frozen tap and said, ‘You know, I envy you ships’ officers who handle marine solicitors’ enquiries. Not only does it take you all over the world, but you’re dealing all the time with case histories, all the exciting side of insurance. Whereas people like me, we make money, of course, but broking, looking after Names, dealing with accounts, finances, that sort of thing — it’s all very humdrum, you know. Down here I’ve got an office employs between two and three hundred, and all the time flogging back and forth to London.’ We were on a new road, crossing a big double culvert where the Colne ran between banks of snow. ‘Across the A12 roundabout, then left and left again at the next,’ he said to his wife, and she answered sharply, ‘I know where it is, Alfred.’

He waved a hand to the ruins of a colossal flint and tile wall that climbed away from us as the car swung. ‘That’s the outer remains of Camulodunum, the Roman centre of East Anglia.’ Sheepen Place appeared on a name-plate edged with snow, an industrial estate doubling back towards the A12 roundabout and the meadow land beyond. The car slowed, turned right into the entrance of a printing works. ‘Don’t forget the ramps,’ he said. ‘Two of them.’

‘I haven’t forgotten.’ She almost stalled the car as we bumped over the first, which showed only as the slightest hump in the wind-drifted snow. A board announced Lloyd’s Shipping Press and I saw there was a three-storey brick building beyond the printing works. No mention of Intelligence Services.

‘You’ve not been here before?’ He was watching for the next ramp, not looking at me, and I guessed it was just an idle question.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Anybody in particular?’

‘A Mr Ferrers.’

We bumped over the second ramp. The Shipping Press building was stretched over the car park on steel pillars. ‘What department?’

‘Special Enquiries.’

He nodded. ‘Ah yes, of course, Marine Frauds.’ He turned in his seat, eyeing me curiously as the car slid to a stop outside the plate glass entrance doors. ‘Which particular marine casualty are you investigating — or aren’t you at liberty to say?’

I hesitated. ‘I’ve come to see him about the Petros Jupiter.’

He nodded. ‘That was an odd one, eh?’ He turned to his wife. ‘Remember, Margaret? A young woman — she blew it up and herself with it.’

‘Yes, I remember, Alfred.’

‘An odd way to end your life.’

‘She didn’t—‘ I began, but then I stopped myself.

Better leave it at that. No good trying to explain about oil slicks and pollution and seabirds dying. I began to get out and he said, ‘Intelligence Services is on the second floor.’

I thanked him. I thanked them both and stood there in the bitter wind until their car was out of sight round the other side of the building. Now that I was here I wasn’t quite certain how to proceed. A muddy Triumph pulled into a parking place and a big fair man in a rumpled suit and no top-coat got out. I pushed open the plate glass door. There was a lift and some stairs and it was warm. I took the stairs. The swing doors facing the lift on the first floor were clearly marked Shipping Press. Through glass panels I could see men working at their desks, some in their shirt sleeves. It was an open-plan office covering virtually the whole floor and there were visual display units scattered about so I knew the operation was computerized.

The swing doors on the second floor were completely anonymous, no mention of Intelligence Services. As on the floor below, the offices were open-plan with a lot of electrical equipment, VDUs and telex machines, particularly on the far side where the wind, blowing straight in off the North Sea, drove the snow in near-horizontal white lines across the large, clear, sheet-glass windows. The lift doors opened behind me. It was the big fair man in the rumpled suit, and as he was pushing past me, he paused briefly, holding the swing doors open with his shoulder. ‘Looking for somebody?’

‘Ferrers,’ I said.

‘Barty Ferrers.’ He nodded and I stepped inside. ‘Expecting you?’ He was already slipping his jacket off.

‘Yes,’ I said and gave him my name.

The big, open-plan floor was very warm. A lot of men there, most of them in their shirt sleeves, the desks flat tables littered with books and papers. A few women on the far side and one girl sitting with seven or eight men at a big table with a card on it marked Casualty Room.

I could see he was a bit doubtful and I said quickly, ‘It’s about the Petros Jupiter.’

His eyes widened then, a sudden glint of recognition. ‘Yes, of course. The Petros Jupiter.’ He gave me a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. ‘I’m Ted Fairley. I run Lloyd’s Confidential Index.’ He gave me a big jovial smile. ‘That’s the prudent insurers’ index to vessels of doubtful virtue.’ He turned and surveyed the room. ‘Can’t see Barty at the moment. But Tim Spur-ling, the other half of the Marine Fraud twins, he’s there.’ He had his jacket off now and I followed him between the crowded tables. ‘Barty contacted you, did he?’

‘No. Was he going to?’

‘Yes, I think the legal boys want to talk to you.’ He stopped at a desk with a typewriter and a litter of books and tossed his jacket on to the empty chair. ‘That’s my square foot or so of lebensraum. Casualty History on one side, Casualty Reporting on the other. Very convenient and never a dull moment. Ah, there’s

Barty.’ He veered towards an area of the floor jutting out to the north and full of the clatter of telexes and operators keying information into visual display units. ‘Information Room,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘This is where our two thousand agents all over the world report in by telex. Barty!’ He had to raise his voice against the clatter.

Barty Ferrers wasn’t in the least what I had expected. He was a plump, jolly-looking man with a round, babyish face and thick horn-rimmed glasses that were bifocal. He looked up from the telex he was reading, and when he realized who I was, his eyes seemed to freeze behind the thick glasses. They were pale blue, the sort of cold blue eyes that Swedes often have. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I started to explain, but he cut me short. ‘Never mind. I’ve been trying to get you at that Sennen number.’

‘The ship was wrecked deliberately then?’

‘We don’t know that.’

‘Why were you phoning me then?’

‘Marine solicitors. They want to see you.’

‘Why?’

He shook his head. ‘Can’t talk here. First — read that.’ He handed me a telex slip one of the operators had passed across to him. ‘Came in last night.’

It was from Lloyd’s agent at La Rochelle and dated the previous day, January 11:

The telex then went on to describe Choffel as short with dark hair -

Time and occupation right, the Breton fishing boat, too. I was remembering a list I had read in one of the papers giving the names of French boats operating off the Cornish coast. I was almost certain one of them had been the Vague d’Or. Only the man’s name was different. ‘He must have had two passports,’ I said.

Ferrers nodded, handing me another telex. ‘This just came in.’ It was from Bahrain:

So by now he would have gone. Ferrers took the telexes from me and passed them to one of the operators with instructions to transmit the information to Forthright & Co. ‘They’re the solicitors.’ He gave me a quick, searching glance, then jerked his head towards the far corner of the floor. ‘We don’t encourage visitors,’ he said as we got away from the clatter of the telexes. ‘So I’d be glad if you’d keep it to yourself that you’ve been here.’

‘It doesn’t give the ship’s destination,’ I said.

‘No, but I can soon find that out.’ He pushed past a man with an armful of the Lloyd’s List, and then we were in his little corner and he had plonked himself down at a table with a VDU on it. ‘Let’s see what the computer says.’ While his fingers were busy on the keyboard he introduced me to Spurling, a sharp-featured, sandy-haired man with a long freckled face and bushy sideburns. What the computer said was instruction incorrect. ‘Hell!’ He tried it again with the same result. ‘Looks as though our fellow in Bahrain got the name of the ship wrong.’

Spurling leaned over his shoulder. ‘Try the French spelling — with an “e” at the end, same as in his telex.’

He tried it and immediately line after line of print began coming up on the VDU screen, everything about the ship, the fact that it was French and due to sail today, also its destination, which was Karachi. He glanced up at me and I could see the wheels turning. ‘That ship you were mate on, plying between Bombay and the Gulf — based on Karachi, wasn’t she?’

I nodded.

‘And the crew, Pakistani?’

‘Some of them.’

‘So you speak the language.’

‘I speak a little Urdu, yes.’

He nodded, turning his head to stare at the windows and the driving lines of snow. ‘Choffel,’ he murmured. ‘That name rings a bell.’ He turned to Spurling. ‘Remember that little Lebanese freighter they found waterlogged but still afloat off Pantelleria? I suddenly thought of her in my bath this morning. Not in connection with Choffel, of course. But Speridion. Wasn’t Speridion the name of the ship’s engineer?’

Spurling thought for a moment, then shook his head. ‘Speridion, Choffel — not sure.’ He was frowning in concentration as he lit a cigarette from the butt of his last and stubbed out the remains in the tobacco tin beside his in-tray. ‘It’s quite a time back. Seventy-six, maybe seventy-seven.’ He hesitated, drawing on a cigarette. ‘The crew abandoned her. Skipper’s name, I remember—‘

‘Never mind the skipper. It’s the engineer we want.’

‘It’ll be on the file. I’m certain I put it on the file.’ He reached over to a small steel cabinet, but then he checked. ‘I need the ship’s name. You know that. Just give me the name…’

But Ferrers couldn’t remember the name, only that there had been a Greek engineer involved. From what they said I gathered the cabinet contained confidential casualty information that included the background of ships’ officers and crew members known to have been involved in fraud. Then Spurling was muttering to himself, still frowning in concentration: ‘A crook Lebanese company owned her. Can’t recall the company’s name, but Beirut. That’s where the ship was registered. A small tanker. I’m sure it was a tanker.’ And he added, ‘Pity you can’t remember the name. Everything in that file is listed under the name of a ship.’

‘I know that.’

‘Then you’d better start searching again.’

‘I’ve been through two years of casualty records already this morning. That’s seventy microfiches.’

‘You love it.’ Spurling grinned at me, nodding to a shelf full of thick loose-leafed volumes on the wall behind us. ‘All our casualty records are micro-filmed and filed in those binders. The VDU there acts as a viewing box and you can get a print-out at the touch of a button. It’s Barty’s own personal toy. Try the winter of seventy-five, seventy-six.’

‘Back to where we first started keeping records?’ Ferrers got slowly to his feet. ‘It’ll take me an hour to go through that lot.’

Spurling smiled at him wickedly. ‘It’s what you’re paid for, isn’t it?’

Ferrers gave a snort. ‘May I remind you we’re supposed to be keeping tabs on over six hundred vessels for various clients.’

‘They’ll never know, and if you pull the information Forthright want out of the box who’s to say you’re wasting your time?’ Spurling looked at me and dropped an eyelid, his face deadpan. ‘Come to think of it, I doubt if it was winter. They were several days in an open boat. Try March or April, seventy-seven.

She had her tanks full of arms, that’s why you remember her.’

Ferrers nodded, reaching down the second volume from the far end of the shelf. I watched him as he searched quickly through the fiche pockets, extracted one and slipped it into the scanning slot. Immediately the VDU screen came alive with information which changed quickly as he shifted from microfilm to microfilm. And when he had finished with that fiche, I put it back in its pocket for him, while he began searching the next. Each fiche, measuring about 6x4 inches, was imprinted with rows of tiny little microfilms hardly bigger than pinheads.

He was over half an hour, working first forwards through 1977, then backwards into ‘76. He worked in the silence of total concentration, and with Spurling’s attention divided between his typewriter and the telephone, they seemed to have forgotten all about me. At one point Spurling passed me a telex giving the latest report on the Petros Jupiter salvage situation. Smit International, the Dutch salvage people, had announced their intention of withdrawing from any further attempt to salvage the wreck. Their divers had only been able to operate for two days since the explosion, a total of 8 hours. But apparently this had been sufficient to establish the general condition of the wreck, which was now lying in three sections to the north of Kettle’s Bottom with only the skeletal remains of the superstructure awash at low tide. The effect of the explosion, followed by the intense heat generated by the ignition of the five tanks containing oil, had been such that they regarded any attempt to salvage the remains of the vessel as quite profitless. And they added that, in its present position, they did not consider it a danger to shipping. Further, all tanks were now completely ruptured and empty of oil.

There were three sheets of the telexed report and I had just come to the end of it when Ferrers suddenly exclaimed, ‘Got it! The Stella Rosa. March 20, 1976.’ Spurling looked up and nodded, smiling. ‘Of course. The Stella Rosa.’

‘Outward bound from Tripoli to Algiers.’ Ferrers was reading from the scanner, his face close to the screen. ‘Arms for the Polisario — Sam-7s and Kalashni-kovs.’ He straightened up, pressing the button that gave him the print-out, and when he had it, he passed it to Spurling. But by then Spurling had the Stella Rosa file out and was running quickly through it; ‘Skipper Italian, Mario Pavesi from Palermo. Ah, here we are. Second engineer Aristides Speridion. No address given. Not among the survivors. First engineer — now we have something — guess who? None other than Henri Choffel, French. He was picked up and is described here as suspect on his past record. He was chief engineer of the Olympic Ore and is thought to have been implicated in her sinking in 1972. At the Enquiry into the sinking of the Stella Rosa he claimed it was Speridion who opened the sea cocks.’ He passed the file to Ferrers. ‘Good hunch of yours.’

Ferrers gave a little shrug. ‘No indication then that Speridion got away in a boat?’

Spurling shook his head. ‘No. And no record that he managed to land on Pantelleria. All it says is — no indication that he is still alive.”

‘So Choffel knew he was dead. He must have known otherwise he wouldn’t have used the man’s name. And to use Speridion’s name he’d need his papers.’ Ferrers was staring down at the file. ‘I wonder what really happened to Speridion? It says here — At the Enquiry held at Palermo Chief Engineer Henri Choffel stated that he and two of his men tried to stop the flow of water into the engine-room, but the cocks on the sea water inlet to the cooling systems had been opened and then damaged. Speridion had been on duty. Choffel thought he had probably been paid to sink the ship by agents of the Moroccan government.” Ferrers shook his head, sucking in air through his teeth. ‘And on the Petros Jupiter he was using the name Speridion. That means it’s almost certainly sabotage.’

‘And if he did have the Greek’s papers and the police start looking into the Stella Rosa sinking—‘ Spurling hesitated. ‘It could be murder, couldn’t it?’

I thought he was jumping to conclusions. But perhaps that was because I had been thinking all the time in terms of Speridion. Choffel was something different, something new. It took time for my mind to switch. But murder as well as sabotage… ‘God Almighty!’ I said. ‘Nobody who’d killed his second engineer, and then accused him of sabotaging the ship, would dream of using the man’s name.’

‘Wouldn’t he?’ Spurling had turned to his typewriter, the file beside him. ‘If I let you loose on that filing cabinet, you’d be surprised at the stupidity of some of the marine frauds and the damn fool things men do. They’re amateurs, most of them, not professionals. Remember the Salem, sunk off the West African coast right within sight of a BP tanker. They never seem to realize it takes time to sink a really big ship. I tell you, they do the craziest things.’

‘If they didn’t,’ Ferrers said, ‘there isn’t a member of any marine syndicate at Lloyd’s who’d be making money. They’d be losing their shirts instead.’ He turned as Fairley appeared at his elbow, a telex in his hand.

‘Just come in,’ he said. ‘Michael Stewart’s box. Anything we can tell him about the Howdo Stranger. It’s gone missing.’ He placed the telex on Spurling’s typewriter. ‘I’ve checked the Confidential Index. Nothing. Hardly surprising. It’s owned and run by Gulf Oil Development.’

‘A tanker then?’ Spurling picked up the telex and began reading it.

Fairley nodded. ‘About the same size as the Aurora B, the GOD CO ship that went missing two months ago.’ He leaned over Spurling’s shoulder, checking the telex. ‘This one’s 116,000 tons. She had a full cargo for Japan. Same destination, you see. And loaded out of the same port, Mina Zayed.’ He straightened up with a shrug. ‘She’s ten years old, but she’d just passed survey Al, yet now, suddenly, she fails to report on schedule.’

‘Where?’ Ferrers asked.

‘Estimated probable position somewhere southwest of Sri Lanka.’

‘And the radio schedule.’

‘Twice weekly. Same as Aurora B.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll look up the Aurora B details, let them have a print-out of that. Then we’ll see what else we can cobble together.’

Standing there, totally ignored now, I was surprised at the speed with which their attention had switched, Spurling already hunched over the VDU checking with the computer, Ferrers reaching for the nearest binder, searching for the fiche on which the microfilmed details of the Aurora B casualty had been stored. ‘Two of them can’t have blown up.’ Fairley pushed a hand up through his fair hair, which was now as rumpled as the rest of him. ‘Two GODCO tankers in two months, it’s not possible.’

‘What about the Berge Istra and the Berge Vanga? Ferrers said without looking round. ‘Norwegian and just as good a stable as GODCO.’

Spurling looked up from the telex he had been reading and said, ‘She left the Abu Dhabi port of Zayed 18.00 hours January 5.’ He turned to Fairley. ‘When did she miss her radio schedule?’

‘Yesterday afternoon. It’s in the telex.’

‘Yes, but it doesn’t give the time.’

‘I checked the Aurora B schedule,’ Fairley told him. ‘She was reporting in at 14.00 hours Tuesdays and Fridays.’

‘So this one could be the same time, but Mondays and Thursdays.’ Spurling had the Lloyd’s Maritime Atlas open at the Indian Ocean page and was pencilling figures on a slip of paper. ‘That’s it then. West or south-west of Sri Lanka. Just about where the Aurora

B missed her schedule. Previous schedule would have been roughly between Muscat and Karachi, so if she really is a casualty, then it could have happened anywhere between there and Sri Lanka.’

Fairley nodded. ‘You’re thinking it could be fraud.’

‘We’ve had radio frauds before. It became quite fashionable a couple of years back.’

‘That was cargo,’ Ferrers said over his shoulder. ‘Cargo that didn’t exist, shipped in vessels that didn’t exist or else had their names borrowed for the occasion. And all of them owned by companies Lloyd’s wouldn’t consider insuring. But GODCO. That’s something entirely different.’ His machine suddenly rolled out a sheet of paper, which he tore off and handed to Spurling. ‘That’s the Aurora B casualty information. Not very much to go on.’ He suddenly seemed conscious of the fact that I was still standing there. ‘I’d better run you up to the station. You’re not supposed to be here and this doesn’t concern you.’

‘You’ve nothing more you can tell me about the Petros Jupiter}’ I asked.

‘No, nothing.’

‘Except,’ Spurling said, ‘that the lead underwriter for the Petros Jupiter is the same as for these two tankers. Same solicitors, too.’

‘That’s confidential,’ Ferrers cut in sharply.

No question now of getting anything more out of them. Ferrers hustled me out of the building and into his car, driving fast, in a hurry to get back. I envied him his total involvement. He really seemed to enjoy it. ‘We’re just back-room boys really, but when it’s a case of fraud — well, it gets quite exciting at times.’ We were crossing the Colne, now a black gut between the white of snow-plastered buildings. ‘Our job is to feed information to the marine solicitors, in extreme cases to the police.’ He grinned at me as we slithered on the roundabout. ‘When Lloyd’s is faced with marine crooks, then it’s our wits against theirs and every case different. It’s teamwork mainly, and sharp memories, a bloody good filing system and a computer.’

He skidded the car to a standstill outside Colchester station booking hall, then scribbled a name and a telephone number on one of his cards and handed it to me. ‘Forthright & Co., they’re the marine solicitors for the three syndicates run by Michael Stewart.’ He pushed open the door for me. ‘A Mr Saltley. Give him a ring while you’re in London. He wants to speak to you.’

‘About the Petros Jupiter?’

He hesitated. But all he said was, ‘Just give him a ring, that’s all.’ And he added, leaning across to talk to me as I pocketed his card and stepped on to the hard-packed snow, ‘He’s a nice guy is Michael Stewart. Lives only a few miles away, and if this tanker really has gone missing, then he’s in trouble. That’s what I hear anyway. So go and see Saltley, will you.’ He drove off then, slamming the door shut as the Cortina’s wheels churned the snow, and I went into the station wondering why he thought I could help when all I was interested in was the Petros Jupiter.

CHAPTER THREE

It was just after twelve-thirty when I got back to London. It had been a slow journey with several stops and as I made my way to a call box I was feeling tired and cold, my mind still on the Petros Jupiter, knowing I would have to move fast if I was to catch up with Choffel in Karachi. I hadn’t much money, and an advance on the book was the only chance I had of raising the air fare.

But when I phoned the publishers the man who had written to me had already left for lunch. I made an appointment for three that afternoon, and then, because it was still snowing and I didn’t imagine the sort of lodging I could afford would have a phone, I rang Forthright & Co. Again I was out of luck, Salt-ley’s secretary informing me he was out and she didn’t know when he would be back. She tried to discourage me from ringing later, but when I told her my name, she seemed to brighten up. Mr Saltley, she said, would definitely like to see me, and as soon as possible. He was attending a twenty-first birthday luncheon party at the Savoy and would be back by four at the latest. Could I ring again then?

I had some food at the station buffet, then got my suitcase out of the lock-up and took the tube to Stepney Green. Outside the station the Mile End Road seemed strangely quiet, the sound of the traffic muffled by a dirty carpet of salted slush. I crossed the road and headed south for a boarding house I had used before. It was in a long street of terraced houses down towards the river, and when I knocked at the door, it was opened by the same big-bosomed, bold-eyed landlady. I had forgotten her name until she reminded me. It was Mrs Steinway. She put me in the basement, which was the only room she had vacant and, after settling in and having a quick cup of tea with her, I walked back through the snow to Stepney Green station and took a train to South Kensington.

Jordans, the publishers to whom I had sent my book, were a small firm specializing in wildlife and natural history. It was just after three when I reached their office in Queen’s Gate, one of those white porti-coed buildings almost opposite the Natural History Museum. A pretty little girl with a streaming cold took me up to Ken Jordan’s office on the first floor, which was little bigger than a partitioned cubicle, the ceiling showing part of the ornate plaster design of a larger room. There was a window looking across to the Museum and the walls were lined with bookshelves that overflowed into stacked heaps on the floor.

Jordan proved to be a rather intense individual with sandy hair and eyes too close together, his face long and the lips turned up at the corners in what appeared to be a perpetual smile. He had my typescript on the desk in front of him, on top of an untidy litter of books, letters and galleys, and as soon as I was seated, instead of talking about my book he went into a long monologue about the one I ought to write. ‘You owe it to your wife.’ He said that several times. He wanted me to start again, writing the whole story of Balkaer from Karen’s point of view…

‘Write it in the first person. Imagine you’re really your wife, everything from her angle, right?’ His pale, rather protuberant eyes stared at me urgently. ‘I’m sure you can do it. Her feelings as she’s cleaning up those half-dead birds, what she thinks about the government, the oil companies, the men who run the tankers, how the idea gradually forms in her mind — immolation, a spectacular, suicidal gesture—‘

‘It wasn’t suicide,’ I said quickly.

‘No, no, of course not.’ He gave a high little laugh, almost a giggle. ‘But that’s how the public see it now. And it’s the public that buy books. So you give them what they want, use your imagination. A little invention. Dramatize it. Build it up.’ And then he had the nerve to ask me whether she had tried it before.

‘How do you mean?’ I could hear the hostility in my voice, feel anger building up inside me.

‘Just that. Had she tried it before—‘ He stopped there and opened the folder, leafing through the pages Karen had typed so carefully. ‘That oil slick you described. Not the first one.’ He found the page he was looking for. It was near the end. ‘The one in November. Now, if she tried to set fire to it and failed… you see what I’m getting at? It would make it so much more dramatic — her feelings when it didn’t work, the sense of anti-climax.’ He paused, staring at me. ‘A nice build-up, you see, to the end of the book — very exciting, very moving… the reader having been through it all before when it didn’t work, and then, the next time, knowing it’s for real, that she’s going to kill herself.’

‘She didn’t mean to,’ I said again. ‘She wasn’t thinking of suicide, only of setting light—‘

‘No, but you see what I’m getting at. So dramatic, eh? And that’s what you want, isn’t it, to make the point she was trying to make? The news story, that’s over, finished now. What we want is something much more personal, something deeply moving.’ He was leaning forward, his voice quiet and persuasive. ‘I’m sure you can do it, Mr Rodin. It’s just a question of putting yourself in your wife’s — er, sea boots—‘ he smiled, trying to lighten his words — ‘seeing it as she might have seen it, and building the whole thing up, dramatizing it, making it exciting, sensational even — it needs fictionalizing, you see.’

‘You aren’t interested then in what I’ve already written?’

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘No, not really.’ And he added quickly as I began to get to my feet, ‘It’s nicely written. Don’t misunderstand me. You can write. But these are difficult times. I don’t think we could sell it, not now. But the book I’ve just outlined… I’m sure we could sell that. It has excitement, emotional involvement, action — it could be a very moving book. We could try one of the Sundays too. It could make a good two or three-part serial.’

‘But not if I wrote it the way I saw it, the way it really happened?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’ He banged the typescript shut. ‘What we’re talking about is a first book. Trevor Rodin. Nobody’s heard of you, you see. You’re new, unknown. So we’ve got to give it depth, excite people, give the reader something to get his teeth into — husband writes the full intimate story of his wife’s final, terrible decision. See what I mean? It’s moving. It would tear at their hearts—‘

‘No.’ I was on my feet now, staring down at him, hating him for his callous rejection of all those months of work, for the way he was trying to get me to twist the truth to fit his own idea of what was marketable.

‘Please,’ he said, leaning forward again and gazing urgently up at me. ‘Don’t misunderstand me — I’m only trying to help. Our job as publishers is to produce books that authors like you write, and then to market them. Each book is a joint venture as it were, the author investing his time and his expertise, the publisher his money. It costs money to launch a book and my job is to see that the final product in each case is something people will want to buy.’ And he added, ‘Take my advice, Mr Rodin — I have some experience — write it the way I have suggested, from your wife’s point of view, building it up to the point where she is so emotionally desperate she goes out to blow the ship up, and herself—‘

‘It was an accident,’ I said angrily. I could see so clearly what he was driving at, and there was a part of me that was prepared to accept that he was right, that this was the way to handle it if it was to capture the imagination of the public. But it wasn’t the truth, it wasn’t the way it had happened. ‘She didn’t mean to kill herself.’

‘How do you know? You can’t be sure what was in her mind.’ And he added, ‘A little author’s licence… what difference does it make? Or can’t you do it? Is that the trouble, that you don’t feel you’re a good enough writer—‘

‘I could do it,’ I said angrily. ‘But I won’t.’ I reached across his desk and picked up the typescript. If I stayed in that untidy office any longer I knew I’d be tempted. Everything seen through her eyes, using my imagination — I’d always wanted to be a writer and I needed the money. Of course I could do it, the scenes already flashing through my mind. But in the end my memory of Karen would be blurred, the reality of her and what she had tried to do lost in a ghost creature of my own imagination.

‘You won’t do it then?’

‘No.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He pushed his chair back and stood facing me. ‘If you change your mind—‘

‘I shan’t.’

‘But if you do, don’t leave it too long. A few months and there’ll be another tanker on the rocks spilling oil somewhere else.’ He held out his hand, limp and cold, and I left him, hurrying down the stairs and out into the street, clutching the typescript. The pavements were tight-packed ice and the ornate Victorian edifice of the Museum facing the Cromwell Road was picked out in thick white snowlines.

I was so angry I felt like flinging the typescript into the snow-clogged gutter. I had been sure they would take it, ever since I had received Jordan’s letter. I had been so certain I would come out of that meeting with a contract and a cheque for the advance that I hadn’t even checked the tramp rates or looked at the Shipping Index; I hadn’t the slightest idea what the chances of a berth were for anyone who had been ashore as long as I had.

My breath smoked in the cold air and I became conscious of the traffic building up, moving sluggishly through the snow as London headed for home early. It seemed to be getting colder by the minute, the wind north-westerly now, the snowflakes like glass flying in horizontal lines past my face. How disappointed Karen would have been, all those evenings spent listening to me as I had read passages aloud in the lamplight, all the typing! She had felt at times almost as involved with it as I was. And now… How long would it be before the Corsaire reached Karachi? Or had the ship already arrived? Perhaps she would be anchored outside with all the other freighters waiting for a berth… But then I remembered the new harbour. It would be finished now and once the Corsaire docked, Choffel could disappear into the labyrinth of the bazaars. Or maybe he’d find a berth on some vessel headed for Japan, Australia, some distant part of the world beyond my reach.

The man’s escape and the book’s rejection became fused in my mind, the anger of despair gripping me as I tramped through the snow, the cold eating into me. And then suddenly there was a new thought in my head. Dramatize it, the man had said, so that’s what I’d do. I’d re-write it, the whole story, her death, everything. And the end of it would be my search for Aristides Speridion or Henri Choffel, or whatever he might be calling himself when I caught up with him. I’d find him somehow. I’d find the bastard, and when I’d done with him, then I’d write it all down, just as it happened — for Karen’s sake, for the sake of all those birds, for my own peace of mind. And reaching that decision, the emptiness, the hopeless feeling of depression was gone, determination taking hold.

I don’t know why, but I was suddenly remembering my mother, conscious of the same obstinate streak that had made her go it alone, bring up a child on a nurse’s pay in post-Mau Mau Nairobi, and later in the Gulf, in Dubai, where she had died of pulmonary pneumonia from overwork. I could hardly remember what she looked like, only that she was small and neat, and that she’d a lot of guts, a lot of nervous energy that had burned her up before she was forty. That and the climate, and the men she couldn’t resist.

Back at South Kensington station, I went straight to a call box and rang Forthright. Saltley was back from his luncheon at the Savoy, but he was on the phone. I hadn’t enough change to hang on, so I rang off and stood there, feeling very alone as I watched the milling crowd of office workers hurrying to get home before railway lines froze and roads became impassable. They were all so busy, so engrossed in their own worlds. I tried again a few minutes later and the girl said he was still talking. I had to ring twice more before she was finally able to put me through and a quiet, rather abrupt voice said, ‘Saltley here.’

Ferrers had clearly briefed him about me, and of course he had read the papers. He said he’d like to see me as soon as possible, but he had a rather urgent case on and would be tied up for a couple of hours at least. I suggested that perhaps I could see him at his office the following morning, but he said he would be preparing a brief and in court most of the day. He hesitated, then told me that, because of the weather, he had arranged to stay the night at his club. ‘You a sailing man, by any chance?’

‘I had the loan of a boat once in Karachi,’ I told him. ‘A dinghy really.’

He seemed relieved. ‘Then at least you won’t be entirely out of your depth.’ And he suggested I had supper with him at the Royal Ocean Racing Club in St James’s Place. ‘Seven-thirty suit you? And if the bar’s crowded, then we’ll go into the Fastnet Room and talk there.’

I had two and a half hours to kill. I went into the Science Museum, which being a government building was pleasantly warm, and stayed there until it closed, idling the time away activating all the working models, the steam engines and looms and laser beams. There was hardly anybody left when they pushed us out into the night. The wind had dropped, the air still and deathly cold. I took the Underground to St James’s Park, bought an evening paper and read it over a cup of coffee in a cafeteria off Victoria Street. The City page carried the year’s results of the Norwegian subsidiary of a large British shipping company. They had half their ships laid up and had been operating at a loss throughout the second half of the year.

I wished to God I hadn’t seen it, for it did nothing to lift my morale as I went out into the frozen streets of London again. They had a dead look now, hardly any traffic. I walked up to St James’s Park. There wasn’t a soul there. It was as though I were the ghost of somebody who had returned after some terrible science fiction disaster. The water was a black pit under the bridge. The ducks and wild geese stood motionless on the ice, the flat white covering of snow scuffed with the imprint of their feet. The scene matched my mood. I could no longer conjure the soft Welsh lilt of Karen’s voice, or see her standing there beside me. I was alone now, intensely, intolerably alone, with only anger and hatred for company.

I stayed there, keeping a frozen vigil with the birds, until Big Ben boomed out the quarter after seven. Then I walked slowly across the Mall and up past the Palace to St James’s Street. I seemed to be the only human being left alive. A taxi crept past me as I turned into St James’s Place. The Royal Ocean Racing Club was right at the end, past the Stafford Hotel where the taxi was now trying to turn. Somebody entered the Club ahead of me, the portholes of the inner doors momentarily revealed, two brass-rimmed eyes staring out at a dirty heap of snow piled against the railings.

Saltley was waiting for me in the bar, which was up the stairs past a nasty looking picture of the Fastnet Rock in a gale. It was a bright, cheerful place full of members locked into London by the state of the roads. He came forward to greet me, small, almost gnome-like, with pale, straw-coloured hair and thick glasses through which a pair of sharp, intensely blue eyes peered owlishly. He was younger than I had expected, mid-thirties, perhaps a little more, and as though to put me at my ease he said his odd appearance — those were the words he used, giving me a lopsided grin — was due to Swedish forebears, the name, too, originally Swedish, but bastardized to Saltley by dumb Anglo-Saxons who couldn’t get their tongues round it. The way he put it I thought he probably knew my father had been a Scot.

Even now I don’t know Saltley’s Christian name. Everybody seemed to call him by his surname, his friends shortening it to Salt or Salty, even Old Salt, but what his initials C. R. stood for I still don’t know. It didn’t take me long in the atmosphere of that club to realize why he had asked me if I were a sailing man. The conversation as we stood drinking at the bar was general, the talk all about sailing, ocean races mainly — last season’s and the Southern Cross series in Australia which had just finished with the Sydney-Hobart.

It was only when we went into the dining-room that his attention focused on me personally. Those blue eyes, that crooked, very sensitive mouth, the soft, quiet voice — instead of finding out what it was he wanted to see me about, I found myself telling him about my life with Karen and the strange urge that had taken hold of me very early in life, trying to explain why I had wanted to become a writer. I told him something of my background, too, the way I had been brought up. ‘So you never knew your father?’ He said it very quickly, reaching for the wine bottle.

‘No.’ Fortunately we had a table to ourselves, the background noise of conversation drowning my words as I added with that mixture of belligerence and frankness that I could never quite conceal, ‘And my mother never married.’

He filled my glass, smiling lopsidedly at me. ‘That worry you?’ He drank slowly, watching me and letting the silence run on. Oddly enough I felt no hostility toward him, no anger at the expert way in which he had manoeuvred me into blurting out more than I had intended. ‘It shouldn’t,’ he said. ‘Not now. But, of course, things were different in the fifties. Something we’re apt to forget. We live in the present and our memories are short. But scars — deep, emotional scars — they remain in all of us, rooted there and producing gut reactions.’ He cut into his steak, concentrating on his food for a moment. ‘So you ran pretty wild as a kid?’

I nodded.

‘Where?’

‘I told you, Nairobi, Dubai…’ I stopped there, remembering a scene on the waterfront, a little Baluch boy they’d drowned.

‘And Karachi?’ he asked. ‘Ferrers said something about Karachi.’

I nodded.

‘That was after your mother died.’

‘Yes.’

‘You were fourteen then. Was it to contact your father’s old regiment that you jumped a dhow headed for Karachi?’ He was suddenly looking straight at me.

‘I went to Gwadar,’ I said.

‘Ah yes.’ He nodded. ‘Dubai-Baluchistan — the old pearls and slaves route. Quite a journey for a kid of fourteen on his own, down the Gulf, out through the Straits of Hormuz to Gwadar, then to Karachi and almost the length of West Pakistan to Peshawar.’

I stopped eating then, wondering how the hell he knew all that. ‘It was a long time ago,’ I said.

He gave me a little apologetic smile. ‘I’ve had somebody checking up on you.’

‘Why?’

He didn’t answer that. And when I asked him what else he had found out about me, he said, ‘Your father was a lieutenant in the Khyber Rifles. After Partition he joined the Trucial Oman Scouts. He was stationed near Sharjah. That’s how he met your mother. She was a nurse, an Anglo-Indian, I think.’

‘If you know all that,’ I said angrily, ‘then you’ll know that he was killed in the Muscat war. You’ll also no doubt know that my mother’s mother, my grandmother, was from the North West Frontier, an

Afridi.’ And I added, the tone of belligerence back in my voice, ‘My mother was hot-blooded, very beautiful, a wonderfully exciting person — but it’s nothing to do with you what she was. Nothing to do with the Petros Jupiter either.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He gave a shrug and the same little apologetic smile. ‘Force of habit. I make my living asking awkward questions.’ The strange, bony features were touched suddenly with humour, the eyes smiling at me. ‘Please — don’t let your food get cold.’ He waved his hand at my plate and switched the conversation to dinghy sailing. He navigated now for a man with a Class I ocean racer, but he’d started in dinghies.

It was after we had finished eating, sitting over our coffee, that he finally came to the point. ‘I think you know roughly what my job is, but probably not much about the way marine solicitors operate.’ And he went on to explain that there were only about a dozen firms in the City specializing in the legal side of marine insurance. At Forthright they concentrated on hull insurance. There were other firms that concentrated on cargoes. ‘But as I say, there are only a handful of us trying to sort out all the legal problems that occur when there is an incident — fire, collision, fraud, anything concerning ships or their cargoes that results in an insurance claim. It’s very specialist and often there is a great deal of money involved. We’re so specialist, in fact, that we’re involved worldwide, not just the London market.’ He suddenly got to his feet. ‘Sorry, you haven’t got a drink. Brandy or port?’

‘Rum, if I could,’ I said, and he nodded. ‘Good idea. Help keep the cold out.’

The bar was crowded and while he was getting the drink, I was wondering why he was taking all this trouble, what possible use I could be to such a specialized firm of solicitors operating in the City. I said as much when he handed me my drink and sat down again. He smiled. ‘Yes, well, let me explain. We have forty or so partners. I’m never certain what the exact number is. They’re solicitors, all of them. They each have their own clients, their own reputations. Then there are a number of trainees, a mass of articled clerks, lots of secretaries. In addition, we employ over a dozen ship captains, men who can go off to any port in the world where we have a problem and by their training and long experience can ask the right questions of the right people and assess what the answers are worth. Some of them develop a remarkable nose for ferreting out the truth. And, of course, each claim being different, and therefore requiring an individual approach, we use any method we feel may be necessary to protect our clients’ interests. And that,’ he added with a slight emphasis in his voice, ‘sometimes includes the employment of people whom we consider have special qualifications for getting at the truth of a particular case.’

He sipped his port, the blue eyes watching me behind the thick-lensed glasses. ‘You know Karachi. You speak Urdu. And you’ve been a ship’s officer. I think you’re the man I need.’

‘For what?’ I asked.

He laughed. ‘If I knew I wouldn’t need you, would I?’

‘But it’s not the Petros Jupiter.’

‘No, it’s not the Petros Jupiter. It’s another ship. In fact, it’s two now.’ And when I told him I was only interested in the Petros Jupiter, he said, ‘Yes, of course. I understand that.’ He was leaning forward, still watching me. ‘That’s why I wanted to meet you. Ninety per cent of the time I’m just a hardworking solicitor slogging through the paperwork. But there’s ten per cent of the time I’m operating by the seat of my pants, sleuthing out the truth like some amateur detective. That’s the fun side — or it can be when you get it right and a hunch pays off.’ He stopped there. ‘It’s not the ship you’re interested in. It’s the engineer, isn’t it?’ He said it tentatively, not looking at me now. ‘Did Ferrers tell you he’s changed his name, flown to Bahrain and is now on board a small freighter bound for Karachi?’

‘Yes, he showed me the telex. It was from the Lloyd’s agent in La Rochelle where the fishing boat landed him.’

‘Suppose we were to send you to Karachi, everything paid, and a fee… You fly out, you’d be there about the time the Corsaire arrives.’ He looked at me then. ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it? You want to talk to Aristides Speridion who now calls himself Henri Choffel.’ I nodded and he smiled. ‘One of our partners would be interested in that, too. He’s handling the Petros Jupiter case.’ He paused then, watching me. ‘Well, what do you say?’

I didn’t answer immediately. In fact, I was thinking of Baldwick and his proposition. This, in a way, was even odder. Saltley misinterpreted my silence. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Afraid I’ve put it to you very abruptly. Let me fill you in a bit. First, the seat of the pants side of it. Back in November the Aurora B disappeared. We don’t know where. All we know is she missed her radio schedule when she should have been west of Sri Lanka and hasn’t been heard of since. Now, just a few days ago, another VLCC, the Howdo Stranger, misses her schedule.’

‘I was with Ferrers when the news came through,’ I said. ‘They both missed their schedules in the same area.’

He nodded. ‘With a twice-weekly radio schedule it’s just guesswork where they disappeared. But yes, the same area roughly. Both insured at Lloyd’s, and the lead underwriter in each case Michael Stewart. He’s a member here and a friend of mine. In fact, I was at his daughter’s twenty-first today. We both started our racing together, you see, in the Lloyd’s yacht Lutine.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Not the best day to pick for a party. And the poor fellow wrote the slip for the Petros Jupiter as well, all three of them for the same syndicate, including the Sinister Syndicate, which is hard luck on the girls. He took quite a slice of it for them.’

I suppose he sensed I didn’t really understand what he was talking about, for he said, ‘You know how Lloyd’s work do you? The Members — Names, we call them — operate in syndicates. There are around twenty thousand Names and their personal financial commitment is total. Each is limited in the extent of the premium income he, or she, can underwrite, but if things go wrong, then there’s no limit at all to the amount they may be called upon to pay out, even to the point of complete bankruptcy.’ And he added, ‘One of the syndicates involved here is a rather special one. It’s a marine syndicate composed entirely of Members’ wives and daughters. My wife’s a member of it, so is Mike’s, and now his daughter Pamela. She’s one of his regular racing crew, and her birthday being on New Year’s Eve, the party today was really more to celebrate the start of her underwriting.’ He smiled wryly. ‘Virgins Unlimited, or the Sinister Syndicate, those are the tags the syndicate has got stuck with and I’m afraid it may prove more apt than intended. They could be facing a very big loss on these three vessels if all the claims are substantiated. And that won’t do Mike’s reputation any good. He might not even survive it.’

And then abruptly he switched back to the missing ships. ‘GODCO — that’s the company that owns the two missing VLCCs — operates right through the Gulf. They have offices not far from here, in Curzon Street of all places. But the centre of their operation is Dubai. If you went out, I’d see you had letters of introduction to Gulf Oil executives, the Lloyd’s agents of course, also some very useful contacts I’ve built up over the years. But,’ he added, ‘that’s on the official level. Much more important, I feel, is what you, with your knowledge of Urdu, might pick up unofficially, in the docks, or the bazaars, also in hotel bars. I’m thinking of Karachi, you see. I don’t know why, but ever since this second GODCO tanker went missing I’ve had a feeling…’ He hesitated, staring at me, then gave a little shrug and picked up his drink.

‘You think it’s sabotage?’ I asked.

‘It has to be, doesn’t it? Two GODCO ships in two months. They haven’t lost a VLCC in eight years. But even if I’m right, I’ve still got to prove it.’

‘And the Petros Jupiter}’ I asked. ‘Who owned her?’

‘A Dutch company.’

‘I thought it was Greek.’

‘It was, but they sold her a few months back. We’ll be checking on the Dutch company, of course, but I’m told it’s a perfectly reputable outfit.’ He didn’t know its name or anything about it. Another partner, a man named Pritchard, was handling the Petros Jupiter. And he explained that he’d been fully occupied recently preparing a briefing for arbitration in the matter of a £30 million claim where it was suspected that navigational negligence was a contributing factor in the loss of a giant tanker. But now, with the Howdo Stranger failing to keep its radio schedule, Stewart was pressing him to begin a full scale investigation of the Aurora B claim. That meant, not one, but two new casualties added to his work load. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ve made you a proposition. You go away and think about it. Tomorrow come along to our offices and have a look through the files.’ And he added, with a quick little smile, so that I knew he was baiting the hook for me, ‘The Petros Jupiter’s cargo was re-sold on the spot market the day before she was wrecked and the skipper’s statement makes it clear that his instructions to alter course for Rotterdam reached him when he was midway between Land’s End and the Scillies.’ And he added, ‘I can arrange for you to see that statement. In fact, the whole file, if you like.’

That was how, on the following morning, with the snow still falling and half England a no-go area because of blocked roads, I came to be sitting in the offices of Forthright & Co., marine solicitors, at Salt-ley’s desk, with the Petros Jupiter file in front of me. All I had been given on arrival were the papers relating to the Aurora B claim. There was nothing on the Howdo Stranger. At least, that was what I was told by the only girl I could find who knew her way around the files. Saltley’s secretary hadn’t made it to the office, nor had half the Forthright staff, so that the whole place had a slightly deserted air, particularly the reception area, which must have cost a fortune in rental it was so vast. A matronly, grey-haired woman in tweeds, standing in as receptionist because neither of the girls at the two big desks had arrived, took me down a long corridor through fire doors to Saltley’s empty office. ‘Phone me if you want anything.’ She gave me the number to dial on the internal phone, then shut the door on me so that I felt like a prisoner being locked into his cell.

It didn’t take me long to go through the Aurora B file — the failure to meet her radio schedule on November 7, details of loading at Mina Zayed, condition and rating of vessel, information about the recent installation of anti-explosion precautions, all the basic, humdrum details on which any assessment of what might have caused the vessel’s mysterious disappearance would depend. There was nothing about crew, no photograph, nothing — which was odd as GODCO always photographed and dossiered crew personnel before every voyage. I knew that because I had shipped a man once who had refused to sail on a GODCO tanker at the last moment because he wouldn’t be photographed. In the end, he told me the reason he was camera-shy was that he was bigamously married and afraid that his first wife, whom he described as a right bitch, might see it and come after him. Why we all leap so readily to fanciful conclusions I am not sure, but until then I was convinced that he was either one of the train robbers still on the run, or else a murderer.

There was an internal and an external telephone on the desk. I lifted the external receiver and asked the switchboard operator for a line. She didn’t ask who I was or who I was going to ring at the office’s expense, she just gave me the line. But when I got through to the GODCO offices in Curzon Street and asked for the current voyage Aurora B crew details and pictures, they said all crew information was held at their Dubai offices. They gave me the number and the man to contact.

I might not have followed it up, except that I had asked for the Petros Jupiter file and the girl had come back to say that it was with Mr Pritchard and he was asking who I was and why I wanted it. While I waited, hoping he’d let me see it, I asked the switchboard if it was possible to get me the Dubai number and in a matter of minutes I was through to the GODCO Marine Superintendent’s office. The man in charge of crew dossiers said that copies of all information concerning the Aurora B and the Howdo Stranger crews, including copies of the crew pictures, had been despatched airmail to London two days ago. But when I rang the London office again the man I had spoken to before finally admitted their staff was so depleted that morning that he couldn’t tell me whether the crew details had arrived or not.

After that there was nothing for me to do but sit there waiting in that empty office. It was an odd feeling, as though I was suspended in limbo — the frozen world outside, and here, encased in concrete and glass, an organization that fed upon disaster, encapsulating the realities of existence, the gales, the sand storms, the oiled-up beaches, the furnace heat of raging fires, into typed reports and telex messages compressed and neatly filed between plastic covers. Cargoes, ships, dockside greed and boardroom chicanery, the remote cold-bloodedness of owners whose decisions were based on money, not humanity, it was all there, neatly filed and docketed — remote, unreal. Legal cases, nothing more.

The previous night, just as I was leaving, Michael Stewart had come into the club with his wife and daughter. They had been to the theatre, but when Saltley introduced me to him I could see the evening had not been a success. The man was under intense strain. And that morning I had spent the first hour or so visiting two shipping offices close to the Baltic Exchange in St Mary Axe. Rates were low, a lot of vessels still laid up and the chances of employment very slight unless you happened to be in a place where the need of a ship’s officer was urgent.

Humans, not files — that was the real world. In the circumstances I could count myself lucky I’d had two offers of a job and hadn’t had to go looking for either of them. There was a tap at the door and a sharp-faced man with a little brushed-up moustache sidled in, a file under his arm. ‘Rodin?’ He had a tired voice that matched the weary look on his face. He gave the impression of having seen too much of the wrong side of life.

I nodded and he said his name was Pritchard. His eyes, which were dark, had a nervous sort of clockwork tick, shifting back and forth, left and right, avoiding contact, but at the same time examining me closely. ‘Salt told me you’d be asking for the Petros Jupiter file. Any particular reason, apart from your wife’s involvement?’

‘Isn’t that sufficient?’ I disliked the darting eyes, his lack of sensitivity, the coldness of his manner.

He put the file down on the desk in front of me, flipped open the plastic cover and pointed to the most recent item, a telex. ‘That arrived this morning.’ And he stood over me while I read it, watching me closely all the time, waiting no doubt to see how I would react to the news.

The telex was from the Lloyd’s agent at Karachi. The Corsaire had docked that morning at first light.

So he’d gone, got clear away. The chances of finding him now… I closed the file and sat staring at the phone. I could do as the Karachi agent advised, start ringing round the ports of the United Arab Emirates. But how would the Lloyd’s agent in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Doha, Bahrain or Kuwait know what dhow it was? There were so many in the Gulf.

‘You’ve seen all you want?’

I nodded.

‘Your only interest then was Choffel?’ He was leaning over me, his eyes darting.

‘Yes.’

‘Pity!’ He hesitated. T never had a case like this before. Stranding is one thing. We might have been able to claim negligence in their employment of a man like Choffel, particularly as he had assumed a different name. In any case, both the ship and its cargo could have been salvaged. That was what the Dutch said. But then your wife’s action… quite unprecedented. It introduced a new dimension altogether.’

‘She’s dead,’ I said.

The words meant nothing to him. ‘There’s no policy I’ve ever seen covers that sort of thing. You couldn’t call it sabotage, could you?’

I stared at him, disliking him intensely. No use telling him I’d seen her die, watched the ship go up, and the man who’d caused her death running free somewhere in the Gulf. I opened the file again, leafing through the thick wad of papers. It was similar to the Aurora B file, but much fuller, of course, since the vessel had been there on the rocks for all to see. Salvage reports were interspersed with newspaper cuttings and both shore and marine pollution assessments…

‘Salt said you might be going out there for us.’

‘Yes. I might.’ But where? Where would that dhow have taken him? Where the hell would he have gone? Dubai? Dubai was at least 100 miles from the Straits. Ras al Khaimah perhaps, or Khor al Fakkan, which was outside the Gulf on the shores of the Arabian Sea, or Muscat even. There were so many places and all of Arabia for him to get lost in. Iran and Pakistan, too. The dhow might have headed north to the coasts of either of those countries, or to one of the islands in the Gulf.

‘If you do go out there for Saltley—‘ I was searching back through the file as he went on, picking his words carefully: ‘He’ll be employing you on behalf of his own clients, to try and discover what happened to the Aurora B and this new one that’s disappeared.’ Another, longer pause. I wasn’t really listening. I had reached a wadge of newspaper clippings and was living again that night when I’d gone out with Andy in the ILB. ‘But you’ll keep me informed, won’t you? If you do find Choffel, I mean. That’s why you’re going, isn’t it? And if you find him, then try and get a written statement out of him.’

He was leaning right over me, his voice insistent, and I felt like throwing the file at him. Couldn’t he understand what I was feeling, reading through those cuttings? And his voice going on again, cold, incisive: ‘It could be worth quite a lot to you. I’m sure my clients would not be ungrateful. There’s usually a reward, something quite substantial, when an insurance claim is refuted. And the claim here is in the order of eleven million, so we’re not talking about—‘

I looked up at him then, hating him for his stupidity. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ My voice sounded high and uncontrolled. ‘Money! I’m not going after him for money.’

He had the grace then to say he was sorry, a muttered apology as he turned away and opened the door. I think he was suddenly a little scared of me. ‘I’ll leave the file — you might like to look through it…’ The clockwork eyes darted back and forth. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘I didn’t quite realize…’ The door closed, and he was gone, leaving me alone with those macabre cuttings.

A lot of the newspaper reports I hadn’t seen before. They were spread over several days, and there were pictures. For factual details the Telegraph coverage seemed the best, and both the Telegraph and The Times had run long articles on the problems of pollution. And then I came upon this, from a weekly magazine: Was she a nut-case, or just a totally imprac-

tical young woman determined to set fire to the slick? Or was it done in full command of her senses, an act of great courage undertaken with one aim in mind — to shock the country into taking action to deal with the terrible and growing menace that successive governments have swept under the carpet? And there was a headline I thought Karen would have appreciated — GIRL’S TANKER PYRE SAVES SEABIRDS. The pictures, too — the whole front page of the Sun, a night shot with the mist lit by flames, a photograph of Karen inset on one side and one of myself on the other, a clip probably from the TV interview after I’d come back with Andy, my hair plastered over my face, my mouth open and shouting, my eyes wild.

I glanced at them all, pausing here and there to read. And then I had passed beyond that terrible Twelfth Night, back to cuttings that reported the effects of the stranding, the damage to the environment, the probable cost of pollution control, the proportion of the insurance claim to be borne by the London market, Lloyd’s in particular. There were pictures from two of the Sunday papers of the wreck and the salvage ships taken from the air. And then I was looking at a picture of the crew being landed at Sennen Cove. They looked Chinese, all except the officers whose names were given in the caption below. Aristides Speridion, Second Engineer. It was the first time I had seen a picture of the man. He had a lined, rather sad face, squarish with a dark moustache and dark hair, and a hooked nose so that he might have passed as a member of almost any of the

Mediterranean races. He was wearing a sweater under his uniform reefer and his ears stuck out prominently on either side of the peaked cap, which he wore pushed up on to the back of his head and at a jaunty angle as though he was pleased with himself and to hell with everybody else. The picture also revealed that, if this were the full complement, officers and crew numbered only fifteen.

I was sitting with my chin in my hands, my elbows on the desk, concentrating all my mind on absorbing and retaining the image of the man I now knew to be Choffel, and then suddenly my attention was caught by the face of a bystander right on the edge of the crowd to the left of the picture — a big man, half a head taller than any of the others, broad-shouldered, thick-set. He was in profile, but even so I could see the heavy set of the jaw, the big jowls and the round bullet head. The size of the man alone, the way he stood, the arms slack but the body balanced and alert — I didn’t need a caption to tell me who it was. Bald-wick! And the date of that cutting was January 3, which meant he had come from Bristol immediately the news of the stranding broke. Why? That Sunday when he had come to Balkaer… he hadn’t said anything about having been in Sennen nine days before.

I leaned back, staring out of the window with its rime of snow, wondering why he had been there. Was it Choffel he had been after? At Balkaer all he had said was that he’d be in Falmouth that evening, to see the captain of the Petros Jupiter. No mention of the second engineer, no reference to the fact that he had been there, in Sennen, when the whole crew were brought ashore. In any case, it wasn’t the captain who’d put the engines out of action. No, it had to be Choffel, and if I was right, then the one man who knew where the little bastard would be now was Bald-wick. The card he had given me was in my pocket, but when I rang the Liverpool number he had scribbled on the back of it he had already left — for France, the hotel said, but they had no forwarding address.

His next destination was Nantes, a river port on the Loire, so probably Choffel had given him the names of possible ships’ officers he knew who needed money and were not too particular how they came by it. I phoned the Nantes number. It was the Hotel du Commerce. Yes, Monsieur Baldwick had a reservation, but he do not arrive yet. His room there was booked for two nights.

I leaned back again, staring out at the darkening sky, thinking about Len Baldwick and a story I had once heard of his early life in Sheffield, from a little rat-faced Sparks I’d met at an oil man’s flat in Basra. He’d been a shop floor convener in a privately owned steelworks then, a paid-up card-holding Communist, the man had said, and to his certain knowledge Baldwick had set fire to the home of a well-known Labour supporter who had accused him of intimidation. Was that what he’d done to Choffel, intimidated him? Had he fixed it all, the Vague d’Or, the Corsaire, the dhow in the Hormuz Straits? Was he the link by which I could catch up with the man?

My hand reached slowly out to the internal phone, trembling slightly as I lifted the receiver and dialled the grey-haired woman’s extension. Phone me, she had said, if you want anything… and Saltley the night before trying to insist that I went out to Karachi for him. The woman answered. I took a deep breath and asked her to contact their usual travel agents and have them book me on the next flight to Nantes. She didn’t argue. She just took it in her stride as though a sudden request like that from a total stranger was the most natural thing in the world. All she said was, ‘Return or single, Mr Rodin?’

‘Single,’ I said. I thanked her and put down the receiver, and after that I just sat there, not caring what Saltley would say, only wondering what the hell I was letting myself in for.

It must have been about ten minutes later that the door was pushed open and he came bustling in, a briefcase in one hand, a file of papers in the other, his face still pink with the cold outside and his overcoat glistening with melted snow. A bright red woollen cap was perched incongruously on his head. ‘So you’re going to Nantes.’ He dumped his papers and briefcase on the desk. ‘Mrs Shipton asked me to tell you they’ve booked you on tomorrow’s flight.’ He glanced at his watch, then passed me my anorak from the chair where I had thrown it. ‘We’ll be late, I’m afraid. I said one o’clock and it’s that already.’ He hurried me out, along a corridor that led to another set of lifts, explaining as we went that after I had left his club the previous night Michael Stewart had suggested we had lunch with him in the Captain’s Room at Lloyd’s.

‘That’s if you were going to work for us. I take it you are?’

‘So long as I have a free hand,’ I said.

He gave me a quick hard look. ‘The Petros Jupiter?’

I nodded.

The lift came. ‘I don’t think we’ll object to your running the enquiries in- tandem. I know Mike won’t. He knows now he slipped up on the Petros Jupiter. He should never have written the slips. As good as told me so last night. But it’s the other two claims… if he has to meet those—‘ He gave a little shrug. We were out into Lime Street, picking our way diagonally across the grey, churned-up slush of the roadway and into the great arched portals of Lloyd’s itself.

I couldn’t help it. I suddenly felt overwhelmed, a sense of excitement, of awe almost. All my life, ever since I had gone to sea, I’d always heard of Lloyd’s. It had always been there in the background, to initiate enquiries into any misadventure, any slip-up in navigation, to survey the ship, check seaworthiness, pay for damage, arrange salvage, the cargo too — and here I was entering the building, being taken to lunch in the Captain’s Room. A waiter took our coats, a magnificent figure in long scarlet greatcoat, black-collared and cuffed, the whole elaborate archaic paraphernalia topped off with a gold-banded tall black hat. The grandeur and opulence of that entrance; it was more like a museum, except the undercover roadway went through to the offices of the Baltic Exchange. ‘I said

I’d pick him up at his box,’ Saltley said. ‘Give you an opportunity to see the Room.’

We went through swing doors into a high room floored in black, white and grey marble, half a dozen flags flanking a stained glass window at one end, and at the other a scarlet-coated waiter sitting at a desk. Saltley said good morning to him, produced a plastic pass card and went on through revolving doors that were posted as Private — for the use of Members and their associates, through into a lofty, galleried room the size of a football field filled with dark-suited men armed with papers, books and files. They stood about, talking softly or hurrying between the ranks of ‘boxes’ that were the underwriters’ pitches and looked like old-fashioned, high-backed pews, except that the men sitting in them were writing busily or looking up information in the books and ledgers that were stacked on the shelves.

‘It goes on like this all day,’ Saltley said over his shoulder as he pushed his way to the far end of the Room. ‘Most of the fellows you see rushing about are brokers and their clerks busy getting underwriters to sign the slips that give insurance cover to whatever the business is they’re handling. Looks a madhouse, but the box arrangement is the most space-saving way of handling such a huge volume of business.’

The wall to the left was papered with telex sheets and typed information, the Stock Exchange news running into weather forecasts and sports results. There were three lifts, but Saltley turned away from them, threading his way quickly between ledger-piled boxes, heading out from under the balcony into the centre of the Room. Michael Stewart’s box was in the far corner. There were three men in it and a queue of three or four clerks waiting upon him with papers ready in their hands. He handed over to one of the others and came hurrying across. I saw him glance at Saltley, who gave a little nod, then he was greeting me. ‘We’ll have a quick drink first. I’ve sent my daughter up to grab a table. She insisted on lunching with us.’ His hand was on my arm, steering me to the lifts near the Lime Street entrance, and I was remembering my meeting with the girl the previous night. She had been quite plain-looking with a squarish face, very little make-up and no jewellery; a big, sensible girl with strong hands and a nice smile. ‘You’ve seen the files, have you? Got all the information you need?’ His voice sounded tense. ‘That’s the Casualty Board, incidentally.’ He nodded to two short display panels opposite the lifts peppered with yellow pages of typescript secured with bulldog clips. ‘That’s where all the bad news is posted. The Ulcer Board, a friend of mine calls it. Every year, it seems, the casualties get worse. When are you leaving?’

‘Tomorrow morning,’ Saltley answered for me. ‘He’s flying to Nantes.’

‘Nantes! Why Nantes?’

‘A contact,’ I told him. I turned to Saltley. ‘A hunch really.’ I knew he’d understand that.

‘And after Nantes?’ Stewart asked.

‘One of the Gulf ports. Dubai most probably since that seems to be my man’s present base. But from my knowledge of him I’d say he operates in any port of the Gulf where there’s drugs or arms or something equally nasty to be shipped. At the moment he’s headhunting officers for a consortium starting up in the tanker business. I think he’s recruited Choffel.’

‘And you’re going to let yourself be recruited, that it?’ His assumption came as a shock, though I suppose the thought had been there at the back of my mind. We were in the lift then and he was smiling, his manner suddenly easier and more relaxed. He turned to Saltley. ‘Looks like you’ve picked a flier.’ And then to me: ‘You don’t waste time. How did you hear this man was recruiting ships’ officers?’

I explained briefly and by then we had reached the second floor and were out into a big room with high narrow windows. It was very crowded, the waitresses bustling from table to table with trays of drinks. ‘Ah! There’s Pam, and she’s got a table.’ His face had brightened, his manner suddenly almost boyish. ‘Best of running a boat, even daughters do as they’re told.’

Pamela Stewart was holding the fort at a table in a large annexe guarded by white pillars. There was an oil painting above her head of the Room cleared of boxes with a diamond-spangled ball in formal swing. She jumped to her feet, her eyes lighting, and in that instant she looked quite lovely, brimming over with youth and vitality. Perhaps it was her presence, the way she leaned forward, her eyes on me all the time, but before I had even finished my Bloody Mary I had filled them in on Baldwick and how he and Choffel were a possible lead. And over lunch, in one of the wooden cubicles of the solid, rather old-fashioned restaurant they called the Captain’s Room after the room in the old Lloyd’s Coffee House where the insurance business had all started, I even talked about my book. And all the time I was conscious of Pamela’s brownish-green eyes watching me intently. She was dressed in a close-knit woollen dress, very plain with a high neck. It was the colour of autumn gold and there was a golden eagle clutching a round globe of some deep-red stone at her throat.

And afterwards, when we had finished our coffee, she insisted on taking me down to the Nelson Exhibition on the Gallery floor. It was a beautiful room, all rich woodwork and flanked by glass display cabinets full of Nelson letters and a lot of silver. There was an alcove to the left with a big oil canvas of Nelson by a painter called Abbott, and at the far end Hardy’s golden Trafalgar sword was displayed in a separate case below some more Nelson letters and a Hopner print of him. And then I was leaning on the only other glass table case in the room, staring at the log of HMS Euryalus covering the period 23 May to 11 March 1806. It was open at the page recording Nelson’s England expects signal.

‘Something I want you to understand…’ She wasn’t looking at the log book. She hadn’t commented on it, or on anything else in the room. The visit to the exhibition was just an excuse, and now, with her back to the priceless relic, leaning her handsomely shaped body against the case containing Hardy’s sword, she went on in a quiet, very throaty voice, ‘We’re in trouble, and after listening to you today, over drinks and during lunch, I’ve got a sort of feeling… I don’t know how to put this. But it’s like you are our only hope, if you see what I mean.’

She checked there, swallowing hard as though she was struggling to suppress some deep emotion. Then she went on, her voice more controlled. ‘If these claims stick, particularly the Aurora B and the Howdo Stranger claims, then I think Daddy’s finished. He’s underwriting the premium maximum and the family has always taken a lot of the GODCO insurance. I’m not affected, of course. I didn’t start underwriting till this month. But Mother’s been one of his Virgins for years, so both of them are in very deep.’ She put her hand out and gripped hold of my arm. ‘This is what I want you to understand. It’snot the money. The money doesn’t matter so much. We’ll survive, somehow. But I don’t think you quite understand what this means to my father. He’s the third generation. His father, and his father’s father, they were both underwriters here at Lloyd’s. In marine insurance they were the tops. It was their life, their raison d’etre. They lived and breathed Lloyd’s, totally dedicated to the Society.’ And she added, ‘You might even say obsessed. That’s how Daddy is. It’s his life, his whole world.’ She smiled. ‘That and sailing,’ she said, endeavouring to lighten the emotional intensity with which she had been speaking. ‘I didn’t want you to feel…’ She paused, shaking her head. ‘I don’t know how to put this. Our backgrounds must seem very different.’

‘You know nothing about my background.’

‘Oh, yes, I do.’ And when I laughed and told her not to make erroneous comparisons, she said quickly, ‘Last night, after you’d gone, Salty showed us a dossier on you somebody had got out for him — where you’d been, what you’d done. Daddy was impressed. So was I. Especially what you did after your mother died. Did you really go right through Baluchistan and the North West Frontier, to the Khyber and up into the Murree Hills — on your own, when you were only fourteen?’

‘Yes. But it wasn’t like it is today.’

She didn’t seem to hear. ‘And then — this morning — I went to the Overseas League and looked through the newspaper files. I’m only just back from Gib — we’ve got our boat down there, you see — so I didn’t know the details, about the Petros Jupiter, I mean. I’m sorry. It must have been quite terrible for you — seeing it.’

‘Yes, but I’ll get him.’ I said it without thinking, but all she did was nod her head, accepting it as though that were the inevitable sequel to what had happened. There was a long silence. Finally she said, ‘What I wanted to explain…’ She shook her head. ‘No, it’s too difficult.’ A moment’s pause and then she went on, ‘We’re just people, you see. Like anyone else really. I know we’ve got money, a big house, cars, a yacht — but it doesn’t mean anything. Not really. What I mean is… well, when you’re racing, in a force 8 gale with a big sea running, you don’t worry then about whether you’ve got more money than the next guy — you’re too tired, too battered, too bloody scared sometimes.’ She gave me that warm smile, the eyes large and fixed on mine, her hand touching my arm. ‘I just wanted you to understand. I’m afraid Salty may have got you into something…’

‘I got myself into it,’ I said. I could feel her fingers through my jacket. ‘So no need for you to worry.’

‘Yes, of course.’ She took her hand away, shifting her position, her mood suddenly changing. ‘Daddy will be back at his box now. And I have a boy I promised to see who’s desperate to crew with us in the Med this year.’ She gave a quick little laugh. ‘I’m not sure yet whether it’s me or the boat he’s interested in. Can you find your way back to Forthright’s?’

She left me almost immediately, and I didn’t think about her again until that night. I was all set then, tickets, traveller’s cheques, contacts, everything the marine solicitors could provide me with — a contractual letter, too. And then, alone on the hard iron bedstead in that dingy basement, unable to get to sleep, I found myself thinking about her. God knows, there’d been nothing sexy about her. Quite the reverse, in fact. Just a nice, plain English girl, hooked on sailing and probably half in love with her father. And yet…

There wasn’t a sound to disturb my thoughts. A little room in the East End of London and I might have been in space. Everything deathly still, frozen into silence. No sound of the sea now, no gulls screaming, no rollers thundering. The stillness of death, and my thoughts not on Karen, but on a lump of a girl propped against a case with a gold sword in it belonging to Captain Hardy of the Victory and talking endlessly about how they were just ordinary folk, while I stared at her tits and wondered what she’d do if I grabbed hold of them, in Lloyd’s of all places!

The next thing I knew it was daylight and the sun was streaming in out of a hard clear sky. It was still shining three and a half hours later when I took off from Heathrow in a half-empty Fokker Fellowship, flying over an England that was mantled deep in snow and brilliantly white. It was only when we were over the Channel and approaching the coast of France that we ran into cloud.