The Black Tide

CHAPTER ONE

Dawn broke with ragged clouds streaming low ‘overhead and a lumpy sea. It was a grey world, visibility growing reluctantly but, as the light increased, gaps appeared in the overcast, glimpses of clear sky showing a greenish tinge. The dhow wallowed sedately, rolling as her bows ploughed into the waves, and the beat of the engine was unhurried and regular. We were at least ten miles from the shore. I could see it on the starb’d quarter, low down to the south and west of the familiar Group Flash Two of the Didamar light, the dark line of it turning an arid brown as the sun rose.

We were out into the Hormuz Straits, into the main shipping lanes. There was a tanker quite close with its steaming lights still showing white, another hull-down, and a third coming up astern. I had the binnacle box open and was steering a full point east of north. Choffel, when I had hauled him off the engine speed control linkage, had muttered about the tanker’s launch being very fast, powered by a single big outboard. But I thought it more likely they would be searching the inshore traffic zone, between the Didamar and Tawakkul lights, not right out here between the west and eastbound tanker lanes.

There was blood on the deck where Choffel had lain after collapsing at the helm, blood on the carved end of the helm itself. But he hadn’t bled where he had lain clutching the speed control lever, or in the vicinity of the thunderbox where he had hauled himself up by the rail to warn me we were driving on to the north side of the entrance. And when I had got him down to bin Suleiman’s hovel of a cabin and laid him out on a sleeping mat with a stinking salt-stiffened blanket to cover him, I didn’t think he had been bleeding then.

A pity Sadeq hadn’t killed him. Now it was up to me. I yawned, my eyes heavy-lidded, my body sagging with tiredness. I had had no sleep and I always found the first twenty-four hours at sea a little trying.

I couldn’t just pitch the man over the side. Or could I? Fate had delivered him into my hands as though of intent, so why didn’t I do it — now, while I was too tired to care whether he was a corpse or not? If I didn’t do it now, if I let him stay there, then I’d be responsible for him. I’d have to feed him. I’d have to do something about his wound. It was in his stomach, he’d said. And I’d have to clean him up. My God! acting as nurse and sick-bay attendant to the man who had sent Karen to her death! If that was what I’d have to do, then fate had played a dirty trick.

In the east the clouds were turning a flaming red, the sea catching fire as it had done that evening at Ras al Khaimah. It seemed a long time ago. A gap in the clouds took on the appearance of an open furnace, the ragged edges gleaming like red-hot clinkers. I saw a heraldic lion crouched in the cloud-gap. I blinked my eyes and it was a dragon breathing fire, its scales all crimson, and then the sun appeared, a bright red orb that slowly turned through vermilion and orange-yellow to a searing glare that changed the sea to a brilliant purple and the waves to glittering gold. Suddenly it was hot, the sun burning up the clouds, the fire-brown streak of the Musandam Peninsula lost in haze.

How far to Qisham, the big island on the north side of the Straits? I couldn’t remember. And there was Larak, and inside of that Hormuz itself, both of them much smaller islands. I stood leaning on the helm, swaying with it as I tried to remember the chart, my eyes drooping, half-closed against the glare. Surely I was far enough out? Why not turn now, head eastwards into the sun? The Straits were like a horseshoe facing north. As long as I kept to the middle, steering clear of all the ships, and of the islands and reefs of Ras Musandam, following the curve of the Iranian coast, there was no reason why the dhow should attract the attention of sea or air patrols from either side, and at an estimated six to eight knots we should reach the border between Iran and Pakistan some time tomorrow night. Gwadar. If I could anchor off Gwadar. Must check the fuel. I didn’t know whether we had enough to reach Gwadar. But that was the nearest place that had an air service to Karachi. Two days to Gwadar. And if we were short of fuel, then I’d have to sail the brute. Through slitted eyes I stared up at the great curved spar with the sun-bleached, heavily-patched sail bagged up round it. My head nodded and I caught myself, wondering whether one man could possibly set it alone. But my mind drifted away, abandoning any thought of how it could be done, unable to concentrate. I was thinking of Hals, and Sadeq — Baldwick, too. A kaleidoscope of faces and that little ginger-haired Glaswegian. Sadeq spraying bullets. Standing at the head of the gangway, very much the professional, a killer. I couldn’t recall the expression on his face, only the fact that he was about to cut me down and didn’t. I owe you my life, he had said, and now I couldn’t recall his expression. Not even when he’d lifted the barrel and fired at Choffel. Hate, pleasure, anger — what the hell had he felt as the bullets slammed into the poop?

There comes a moment when tiredness so takes hold of the body that the only alternative to sleep is some form of physical activity. When I opened my eyes and found the sun’s glare behind me and the dhow rolling along almost broadside to the waves, I knew that point had arrived. The sun was higher now, the time 08.23, and a big fully-loaded tanker was pushing a huge bow wave barely a mile away. I wondered how long I had been dreaming at the helm with the dhow headed west into the Persian Gulf. Not that it made much difference, with no chart and only the vaguest idea where we were. I hauled the tiller over, bringing the bows corkscrewing through the waves until the compass showed us headed east of north. There was a rusty iron gear lever set in the deck close by the engine control arm and after throttling right down, I put the lever into neutral. Lengths of frayed rope, looped through holes cut in the bulwarks either side of the tiller arm, enabled me to make the helm fast so that we were lying wind-rode with our bows headed east into the Hormuz Straits.

I went for’ard then, into the waist of the vessel, running my eye over the bundled sail as I relieved myself to leeward. Then I went round the ship, checking the gear. It was something I would have had to do sooner or later, but doing it then I knew it was a displacement activity, putting off the moment when I would have to go into the dark hole of the shelter under the poop and deal with Choffel.

The dhow was rolling heavily. With no cargo to steady her, she was riding high out of the water, heeled slightly to starb’d by the wind and wallowing with an unpredictable motion, so that I had to hold on all the time or be thrown across the deck. I was feeling slightly nauseous, dreading the thought of that dark hole as I made my way aft. The entrance to it was right by the steps leading to the poop, the door closed with a large wooden latch. I couldn’t remember closing it, but perhaps it had banged to on a roll. I pulled it open and went in.

It was the smell that hit me. Predominantly it was the hot stink of diesel oil, but behind that was the smell of stale sweat, vomit and excrement. At the stern of the cabin two shuttered windows either side of the rudder post showed chinks of light. I had settled Choffel on a mat on the starb’d side. We had been heeled to starb’d then, as we were now, but sometime during the night, or perhaps in the dawn when I was off-course, he must have been rolled right across the ship, for I found his body precariously huddled on the port side. I could only just see it in the dim light from the doorway, the blanket I had wrapped him in flung into a heap at his feet and his hands pressed against the timbers of the deck in an effort to hold himself steady.

He looked so lifeless I thought for a moment he was dead. I was not so much glad as relieved, his stubble-dark features white against the bare boards, his eyes wide and staring and his body moving helplessly to the sudden shifts of the ship wallowing in the seaway. I started to back away, the smell and the diesel fumes too much for me. The engine noise was much louder here, and though it was only idling, the sound of it almost drowned the groans of the ship’s timbers. They were very human groans, and seeing the man’s head roll as the deck lifted to a wave, I had a sense of horror, as though this were a ghost come to haunt me.

Suddenly I felt very sick.

I turned, ducking my head for the doorway and some fresh air, and at that moment a voice behind me murmured, ‘Is that you, Gwyn?’ I hesitated, looking back. The dhow lifted to the surge of a wave, rolled to starb’d and, as it rolled, his body rolled with it, his groan echoing the groan of the timbers. ‘Water!’ He suddenly sat up with a shrill gasp that. was like a scream suppressed. One hand was pressed against the boards to support him, the other clutched at his stomach. He was groaning as he called for water again. ‘Where are you now? I can’t see you.’ His voice was a clotted whisper, his eyes staring. ‘Water please.’

‘I’ll get you some.’ It was the salt in the air. I was thirsty myself. The salt and the stench, and the movement of the boat.

There was a door I hadn’t noticed before on the port side. It opened on to a store cupboard, oil cans and paint side by side with sacks of millet, some dried meat that was probably goat, dates and dried banana in plastic bags, a swab and buckets, bags of charcoal and several large plastic containers. These last were the dhow’s water supply, but before I could do anything about it, my body broke out into a cold sweat and I had to make a dash for the starb’d bulwarks.

It was very seldom I was sick at sea. The wind carried the sickly smell of the injured man to my nostrils as I leaned out over the side retching dryly. It would have been better if I had had more to bring up. I dredged up some seawater in one of the buckets. We were on the edge of a slick and it smelt of oil, but I washed my face in it, then went back to that messy cubby-hole of a store. There were tin mugs, plates and big earthenware cooking pots on a shelf that sagged where the supports had come away from the ship’s side. I had a drink myself, then refilled the mug and took it in to Choffel.

He drank eagerly, water running down his dark-stubbled chin, his eyes staring at me with a vacant look. It was only when he had drunk nearly the whole of a mugful that it occurred to me the water was probably contaminated and should have been boiled. In Karachi everybody boiled their water and I wondered where the containers had last been filled. ‘Where am I? What’s happened?’ He was suddenly conscious, his eyes searching my face. His voice was stronger, too. ‘It’s dark in here. Would you pull the curtains please.’

‘You’re on a dhow,’ I said.

The ship lurched and he nodded. ‘The shots — Sadeq.’ He nodded, again feeling at his stomach. ‘I remember now.’ He was quite lucid in this moment, his eyes, wide in the gloom, looking me straight in the face. ‘You were going to kill me, is that right?’

‘Do you want some more water?’ I asked him, taking the empty mug.

He shook his head. ‘You think Sadeq saved you the trouble.’ He smiled, but it was more a grimace. ‘I’ve shat my pants, haven’t I? Fouled myself up.’ And he added, ‘This place stinks. If I had something to eat now…’ The ship rolled and I had to steady him. ‘I’m hungry, but I can’t contain myself.’ He gripped hold of my arm. ‘It’s my guts, is it?’

My fingers where I had held him were a sticky mess. I reached for the blanket, wiping my hand on the coarse cloth. I could clean him up, but if I got water anywhere near the wound it would probably bleed again. I started to get to my feet, but the clutch of his hand on my arm tightened convulsively. ‘Don’t go. I want to talk to you. There are things… Now, while I have the strength… I was going to escape, you see. I was going to Iran, then maybe cross the Afghan frontier and get myself to Russia. But you can’t escape, can you — not from yourself, not from the past.’

His voice was low, the tone urgent. ‘No,’ he said, clutching hold of me tighter still as I made to rise. ‘The Lavandou. You mentioned the Lavandou. My third ship. A boy. I was just a boy and my mother dying, you see. Cancer and overwork and too much worry. She’d had a hard life and there was no money. My father had just died, you know. His lungs. Working in the mines he was when just a boy. The anthracite mines down in the Valleys. He was underground. Years underground. A great chest he had, and muscles, huge muscles. But when we laid him to rest he was quite a puny little chap — not more than six or seven stone.’ His voice had thickened and he spat into the mug, dark gobs of blood.

‘Better not talk,’ I said.

He shook his head urgently, still clutching me. ‘I was saying — about the Lavandou. I was twenty-two years old… and desperate.’ His fingers tightened. ‘D’you know what it is to be desperate? I was an only child. And we’d no relatives, you see. We were alone in the world, nobody to care a bugger what happened to her. Just me. God! I can still see her lying there, the whiteness of her face, the thinness of it, and all drawn with pain.’ His voice faltered as though overcome.

‘They knew, of course. They knew all about how desperate I was. She needs to go into a clinic. Private, you see — not waiting for the National Health. And me at sea, unable to make sure she got proper attention. It’s your duty, they said. And it was, too — my duty. Also, I loved her. So I agreed.’

He stared up at me, his eyes wide, his fingers digging into my arm. ‘What would you have done?’ His breath was coming in quick gasps. ‘Tell me — just tell me. What would you have done, man?’

I shook my head, not wanting to listen, thinking of Karen as he said, ‘The ship was insured, wasn’t she? And nobody got hurt, did they?’ His eyes had dimmed, his strength fading. I loosened his fingers and they gripped my hand, the cold feel of them communicating some deep Celtic emotion. ‘Just that once, and it went wrong, didn’t it — the Lloyd’s people twigged what I’d done, and myself on the run, taking another man’s name. God knows, I’ve paid. I’ve paid and paid. And Mother… I never saw her again. Not after that. She died and I never heard, not for a year. Not for over a year.’ He spat blood again and I could see his eyes looking at me, seeking sympathy.

What do you do — what the hell do you do when a creature like that is dying and seeking sympathy? At any moment he’d start talking about the Petros Jupiter, making excuses, asking my forgiveness, and I didn’t know what I could say to him. I thought he was dying, you see — his eyes grown dim and his voice very faint.

‘We’re wasting fuel,’ I said, unhooking his fingers from my hand. I think he understood that for he didn’t try and stop me, but as I got to my feet he said something — something about oil. I didn’t get what it was, his voice faint and myself anxious to get out into the open again, relieved at no longer being held by the clutch of his hand.

Clouds had come up and the wind had freshened. Back on the poop I put the engine in gear and headed east into the Straits. We were broadside to the waves, the dhow rolling and corkscrewing, spray wetting the parched timbers of her waist as the breaking seas thumped her high wooden side. I was hungry now, wondering how long the sbamal would blow. No chance of a hot meal until I could get the dhow to steer herself and for that I’d need almost a flat calm. But at least there were dates in the store.

I secured the helm with the tiller ropes and made a dash for it, coming up with a handful just as the bows swung with a jarring explosion of spray into the breaking top of a wave. I got her back on course, chewing at a date. It was dry and fibrous, without much sweetness, and so impregnated with fine sand that it gritted my teeth. They were about the worst dates I had ever eaten, but being a hard chew they helped pass the time and keep me awake.

Towards noon the wind began to slacken. It was dead aft now, for all through the forenoon hours I had been gradually altering course, following the tankers as they turned south through the last part of the Straits. Soon our speed was almost the same as the breeze, so that it was hot and humid, almost airless, the smell of diesel very strong. The clouds were all gone now, eaten up by the sun, the sky a hard blue and the sea sparkling in every direction, very clear, with the horizon so sharp it might have been inked in with a ruler. There were a lot of ships about and I knew I had to keep awake, but at times I dozed, my mind wandering and only brought back to the job on hand by the changed movement as the dhow shifted course.

I could still see the Omani shore, the mountains a brown smudge to the south-west. The wind died and haze gradually reduced visibility, the sun blazing down and the dhow rolling wildly. The sea became an oily swell, the silken rainbow surface of it ripped periodically by the silver flash of panicked fish. The heat ripened the stench from the lazarette beneath my feet. Twice I forced myself to go down there, but each time he was unconscious. I wanted to know what it was he had said about oil, for the exhaust was black and diesel fumes hung over the poop in a cloud. I began listening to the engine, hearing strange knocking sounds, but its beat never faltered.

Water and dates, that was all I had, and standing there, hour after hour, changing my course slowly from south to sou’sou’east and staring through slitted eyes at the bows rising and falling in the glare, the mast swinging against the blue of the sky, everything in movement, ceaselessly and without pause, I seemed to have no substance, existing in a daze that quite transported me, so that nothing was real. In this state I might easily have thrown him overboard. God knows there were fish enough to pick him clean in a flash, and skeletons make featureless ghosts to haunt a man.

I can’t think why I didn’t. I was in such a state of weary unreality that I could have had no qualms. I did go down there later, towards the end of the afternoon watch — I think with the conviction he was dead and I could rid myself of the source of the stench.

But he wasn’t dead. And he wasn’t unconscious either. He was sitting up, his back braced against the stern timbers and his eyes wide open. It just wasn’t possible then. I couldn’t pick him up and toss him overboard, not with his eyes staring at me like that. And as soon as he saw me he began to talk. But not sensibly. About things that had happened long, long ago — battles and the seeking after God, beautiful women and the terrible destruction of ancient castles.

He was delirious, of course, his mind in a trance. And yet he seemed to know me, to be talking to me. That’s what made it impossible. I got some sea water and began cleaning him up. He was trembling. I don’t know whether it was from cold or fever. Maybe it was fear. Maybe he’d known and that’s why he was talking — you can’t throw a man to the fishes when he’s talking to you about things that are personal and take your mind back, for he was talking then about his home in Wales, how they had moved up into the old tin hills above a place called Farmers, a tumble-down longhouse where the livestock were bedded on the ground floor to keep the humans warm in the bedroom above. It was odd to hear him talking about Wales, here in the Straits with Arabia on one side of us, Persia on the other. ‘But you wouldn’t know about the Mabinogion now, would you?’ he breathed.

I told him I did, that I had read it, but either he didn’t hear me or he didn’t take it in. His mind was far away on the hills of his youth. ‘Carreg-y-Bwci,’ he murmured. ‘The Hobgoblin Stone. I’ve danced on it as a kid in the moonlight, a great cromlech on its side — and the Black Mountain visible thirty miles away. It never did me any harm,’ he added in a whisper. Then his hand reached out towards me. ‘Or am I wrong then? Was I cursed from that moment?’ The dhow rolled, rolling him with it, and he clutched at his guts, screaming.

I steadied him and he stopped screaming, gulping air and holding on to me very tightly. I got his trousers open at the fly and in the light of my torch could see the neat hole the bullet had punched in his white belly. He wasn’t bleeding now and it looked quite clean, only the skin round it bruised and bluish; but I didn’t dare turn him over to see what was the other side, in the back where it must have come out.

I cleaned his trousers as best I could and all the time I was doing it he was rambling on about the Mab-inogion, and I thought how strange; the only other person ever to talk to me about it was Karen. She’d got it from the travelling library, asking for it specially. And when she had read it she had insisted that I read it, too, the four branches of it containing some of the oldest stories of the Welsh bards. A strange book full of fighting men who were always away from home and wives that gave themselves to any valiant passerby, and everything, it seemed, happening three times over, all the trickery, the treachery, the blazing hopes that led to death. Some of its eleven stories had borne a strange resemblance to the tribal life in the hills where my mother’s people had come from — the feuds, the hates, the courage and the cruelty. And this man talking of the country above Lampeter where Karen and I had stayed one night in a wretched little inn with hardly a word of English spoken to us.

It was just after we were married. I had been on leave from the Gulf and had borrowed her father’s car to drive up to the Snowdonia National Park. Just short of Llanwrtyd Wells I had turned north to look at the Rhandirmwyn dam and we had come out of the wild forested country beyond by way of an old Roman road called the Sarn Helen. I could even remember that huge cromlech lying on its side, the sun shinning as we stopped the car and got out to stand on the top of the earth circle in which it lay, and the late spring snow was like a mantle across the rolling slopes of distant mountains to the south. And as I was zipping up his trousers, hoping he wouldn’t mess them up again, I saw him in my mind’s eye, a wild Welsh kid dancing on that stone in the full light of the moon. A demonstration of natural wickedness, or had he really been cursed? I was too tired to care, too tired to listen any longer to his ramblings. And the stench remained. I left him with some water and dates and got out, back into the hot sun and the brilliance of sea and sky.

By sundown the sea was oily calm, the dhow waddling over the shallow swells with only a slight roll. She would now hold her course for several minutes at a time, so that I was able to examine the rusty old diesel engine in its compartment below the lazarette. I found the fuel tank and a length of steel rod hung on a nail to act as a dipstick. The tank was barely a quarter full. It was quite a big tank, but I had no idea what the consumption was, so no means of calculating how far a quarter of a tank would take us.

The sunset was all purples and greens with clouds hanging on the sea’s eastern rim. Those clouds would be over Pakistan and I wondered whether we’d make it as I stood there munching a date and watching the sun sink behind the jagged outline of the Omani mountains and the colour fade from the sky. To port, night had already fallen over Iran. The stars came out. I picked a planet and steered on that. Lighthouse flashes and the moving lights of passing ships, the dark confusion of the waves — soon I was so sleepy I was incapable of holding a course for more than a few minutes at a time.

Towards midnight a tanker overhauled us, outward-bound from the Gulf. I was steering southeast then, clear of the Straits now and heading into the Gulf of Oman. The tanker passed us quite close and there were others moving towards the Straits. Once a plane flew low overhead. Sometime around 02.00 I fell into a deep sleep.

I was jerked awake by a hand on my face. It was cold and clammy and I knew instantly that he’d come back to me out of the sea into which I’d thrown him. No. I didn’t do it. You must have fallen. I could hear my voice, high-pitched and scared. And then he was saying, ‘You’ve got to keep awake. I can’t steer, you see. I’ve tried, but I can’t — it hurts so.’

I could smell him then and I knew he was real, that I wasn’t dreaming. I was sprawled on the deck and he was crouched over me. ‘And the engine,’ he breathed. ‘It’s old. It eats oil. I can hear the big ends knocking themselves to pieces. It needs oil, man.’

There were cans of oil held by a loop of wire to one of the frames of the engine compartment. The filler cap was missing and there was no dipstick. I poured in half a can and hoped for the best. The engine certainly sounded quieter. Back on the poop I found him collapsed again against the binnacle box and the dhow with its bows turned towards the north star. A tanker passed us quite close, her deck lights blazing, figures moving by the midship derricks which were hoisting lengths of pipe. How I envied the bastards — cabins to go to, fresh water showers, clean clothes and drinks, everything immaculate, and no smell. I couldn’t make up my mind whether it was food I wanted most or some ice-cold beer. The cold beer probably. My mouth was parched with the salt, my eyes gritty with lack of sleep. Choffel lay motionless, a dark heap on the deck and the minutes passed like hours.

Strange how proximity alters one’s view of a person, familiarity fostering acceptance. I didn’t hate him now. He was there, a dark bundle curled up like a foetus on the deck, and I accepted him, a silent companion, part of the ship. The idea of killing him had become quite remote. It was my state of mind, of course. I was no longer rational, my body going through the motions of steering quite automatically, while my mind hovered in a trance, ranging back over my life, reality and fantasy all mixed up and Karen merging into Pamela. And that black-eyed girl with a cold cursing me in French and spitting in my face. Guinevere. How odd to name a girl Guinevere.

‘That’s my daughter,’ he said.

I blinked my eyes. He was sitting up, staring at me. ‘My daughter,’ he said again. ‘You were talking about my daughter.’ There was a long silence. I could see her very clearly, the pale clear skin, the square strong features, the dark eyes and the dark hair. ‘She tried to stop me. She didn’t want me to go to sea again — ever.’ He was suddenly talking about her, his voice quick and urgent. ‘We have some caves behind our house. Champignons! Parfait pour les champignons, she said. So we grew mushrooms, and it worked, except we couldn’t market them. Not profitably. She would keep us. That was her next idea. She was a typist. She did a course, you see — secretarial — after she left school. I can earn good money, she said. But a man can’t be kept like that, not by his daughter. He’s not a man if he can’t stand on his own feet…’ His voice faded, a despairing whisper that was thick with something he had to bring up. ‘The Petros Jupiter,’ he breathed. A fish rose, a circle of phosphorus on the dark water behind him. ‘She was in tears she was so angry. They’ll get at you, she said. They’ll get at you, I know they will. And I laughed at her. I didn’t believe it. I thought the Petros Jupiter was all right.’ He choked, spitting something out on to the deck. ‘And now I’ve got a bullet in my guts and I’ll probably die. That’s right, isn’t it? You’ll see to that and she’ll say you murdered me. She’ll kill you if you let me die. She’s like that. She’s so emotional, so possessive. The maternal instinct. It’s very strong in some women. I remember when she was about seven — she was the only one, you see — and I was back from a year’s tramping, a rusty old bucket of a wartime Liberty called St Albans, that was when she first began to take charge of me. There were things to mend — she’d just learned to sew, you see — and cooking… living in France girls get interested in the cuisine very young. She’d mother anything that came her way, injured birds, stray puppies, hedgehogs, even reptiles. Then it was people and nursing. She’s a born nurse, that’s why she works in a clinic, and beautiful — like her mother, so beautiful. Her nature. You know what I mean — so very, very beautiful, so…’ His voice choked, a sobbing sound.

He was crying. I couldn’t believe it, here on this stinking dhow, lying there with a bullet in his guts, and he was crying over his daughter. A beautiful nature — hell! A little spitfire.

‘It was after the Stella Rosa. You know about the Stella Rosa, don’t you?’

‘Speridion.’

‘Of course, you mentioned him.’ He nodded, a slight movement of the head in the dark. ‘Speridion had been paid to do it, only the thing went off prematurely, blew half his chest away. There was an Enquiry and when that was over I went home. She was still at school then, but she’d read the papers. She knew what it was all about, and she’d no illusions. You’re a marked man, Papa. She never called me Dad or Daddy, always Papa. That was when she began to take charge, trying to mother me. Jenny wasn’t a bit like that. Jenny was my wife’s name. She was a very passive, quiet sort of person, so I don’t know where my daughter got it from.’ He stopped there, his voice grown weak; but his eyes were open, he was still conscious and I asked him about the Aurora B. ‘Did you know it was the Aurora B?’

He didn’t answer, but I knew he’d heard the question, for I could see the consciousness of it in his eyes, guessed in the wideness of their stare his knowledge of what my next question would be. Yes, he knew about the crew. He nodded slowly. He knew they were kept imprisoned in the chain locker. ‘You couldn’t help but know, not living on board as I was for over a week.’ And then, when they’d called for power to the main anchor winch, he’d known they’d have to bring the prisoners up out of the chain locker and he had come on deck to see what happened to them. ‘You saw it, too, did you?’ His voice shook. And when I nodded, he said, ‘That’s when I decided I’d have to get away. I could see the dhow and I knew it was my last chance. In the morning it would be gone. That was when I made up my mind.’ His voice dropped away. ‘Always before I’ve stayed. I never believed it could happen — not again. And when it did—‘ He shook his head, murmuring — ‘But not this time. Not with a cold-

blooded bastard like Sadeq. And there was you. Your coming on board—‘ His voice died away completely.

‘There are two ships,’ I said. ‘Did you know that?’

I thought he nodded.

‘What happened to the other?’

He didn’t answer.

‘The seizing of Aurora B,’ I said, catching hold of him and almost shaking him. ‘That went wrong, didn’t it? That was the first one, and it went wrong.’

He stared up at me, his eyes wide, not saying anything. ‘And then they grabbed the second ship, the How do Stranger. Did you see her?’

‘No.’ He said it fiercely, an urgent whisper. ‘I don’t know anything about it. Nothing at all.’

‘Are they going to meet up? Is that why they’re getting the Aurora B officered and ready for sea?’ His eyes had closed, his body limp. ‘Where are they going to meet up? Where are they going to spill their oil? They’re going to spill it on the coast of Europe. Isn’t that the plan?’ I was shaking him violently now, so violently that he screamed out with the pain of it like a shot rabbit.

‘Please, for God’s sake!’ His voice was thick with blood and hardly audible.

‘Where?’ I shouted at him.

But he had fainted away, mumbling something about the salvage, which I didn’t understand, his body collapsing in the grip of my hand. I cursed myself for having been too rough, the man in a coma now, his body shifting limply to the movement of the ship. I went back to the helm then, and though I called him several times, repeating my questions over and over again, he never answered. I passed the time watching the fish rise, pools of brightness in the dark, and our wake a fading lane of sparkling brilliance. We were well into the Gulf of Oman now, the fish more numerous than ever and the sea’s phosphorescence quite spectacular. Sharks went under us leaving torpedo-like wakes and shoals of fish broke up like galaxies exploding. It was a fantastic pyrotechnic show of brilliant white lights forming below the surface of the sea and then bursting, constantly vanishing only to reappear, another patch of dark water suddenly illuminated.

Dawn came at last, a greying in the east, on the port bow. My second dawn at the dhow’s helm and still nothing hot to eat, only dates and unboiled water. It came quickly, a magic burst of violent colour thrusting in flame over the horizon and then the sun like a great curved crimson wheel showing its hot iron rim and lifting fast, a visible movement.

I had parted company with the tanker traffic at the beginning of the dawn watch, steering a course just south of east that I hoped would close the coast in the region of the Pakistani-Iranian frontier. There were moments when I thought I could see it, a vague smudge like a brown crayon line away to port just for’ard of the thunderbox. But I couldn’t be sure, my eyes playing me tricks and the sun’s rapidly growing heat drawing moisture from the sea, the atmosphere thickening into a milky haze. Another eighteen hours! I went below and dipped the fuel tank. It was almost empty. Smears of dried blood marked the poop deck.

Choffel’s eyes were closed, his head lolling. His features, his whole body seemed to have shrunk in the night, so that he was like a wax doll curled up there by the binnacle.

I secured the helm and went up into the thunderbox to squat there with my bottom hung out over a slat and bare to the waves, my head poked out above the wood surround, looking at the dhow and the injured man and the water creaming past. Afterwards I stripped off and sluiced myself down with buckets of sea water. And then I carried him back to the lazarette.

It was too hot for an injured man on the deck. That’s what I told myself anyway, but the truth was I couldn’t stand him there. He had begun mumbling to himself. Jenny! He kept on saying Jenny, so I knew he was talking to his wife. I didn’t want to know the intimate details of their life together. I didn’t want to be drawn closer to him through a knowledge of his own private hell. Jenny, oh my darling — I can’t help. He choked over the words. I’ve nothing left to give you. And then he whispered, The stomach again, is it? He said he’d bring more pills. He nodded, playing the part. Yes, the doctor’s coming, darling. He’ll be here any minute. His eyes were closed, his voice quite clear, trembling with the intensity of recollection. Doctor! His eyes were suddenly open, staring at me, but without sight. Have you brought them? For the pain. It’s in the belly… I put him down quickly and fled, back into the sunlight and the sanity of steering.

A few minutes later the engine gave its first tentative cough. I thought perhaps I was mistaken, for it went on as before giving out full power. But it coughed again, checking, then picking up. It picked up on the dip of the bows, so I knew it was now dependent on the last vestige of fuel being slopped back and forth in the bottom of the tank. I suppose we covered another two or three miles under increasingly uneven power, then suddenly all was quiet, only the splash and gurgle of water along the ship’s side. The engine had finally died, the tiller going slack as we lost way.

The air was heavy and very still, only occasional cat’s-paws ruffling the oily calm that stretched away on all sides until lost in the white glare of the heat haze. A sudden whisper of spray to starb’d and the whole surface of the sea took off, a thousand little skittering slivers of silver breaking the surface, and behind the shoal a dozen king mackerel arched their leaping bodies in pursuit, scattering prisms of rainbow colours in the splash of a myriad droplets. Again and again they leaped, the shoals skittering ahead of them in a panic of sparkling silver; then suddenly it was over, the oily surface of the sea undisturbed again, so undisturbed that the voracious demonstration of the hard piscatorial world below might never have been.

It was very humid, unseasonally so, since it was still the period of the north-east monsoon, and now that we were into the Arabian Sea we should have had the benefit of at least a breeze from that direction. The current, which was anticlockwise for another month, would have a westerly set and would thus be against us. I spent over an hour and all my energy unfurling and setting the heavy lateen sail. To do this I had to shin up the spar with a butcher’s knife from the store and cut the rope tie-ers. The rest was relatively simple, just a matter of hard work, using the block and tackle already attached to the spar and another that acted as a sheet for the sail. With so little wind it hung over me in folds, flapping to the slow motion of the ship. But it did provide some shade on deck and in an instant I was wedged into the scuppers fast asleep.

I woke to the sound of water rushing past, opening my eyes to see the great curved sail bellied out and full of wind. Even as I watched, it began to shiver. I leaped to my feet, wide awake and diving up the steps to the tiller, hauling it over just in time to avoid being taken aback. The wind was north-west about force 3, still in the shamal quarter, so that I could only just lay my course. The coast was clearly visible now. The haze had gone, the day bright and clear, the sea sparkling, and the sun was almost overhead. I glanced at my watch. It was 13.05. I couldn’t believe it. I had been asleep for something like four hours.

We were making, I suppose, about three knots and as the afternoon wore on the Iranian coast vanished from my sight. And since yisibility was still good I thought it probable I was opposite Gwadar Bay which is on the frontier between Pakistan and Iran. It is a deep bay with salt flats and the bed of a river coming in from Baluchistan. Visualizing the chart I had so often had spread out before me on the chart table, I reckoned we were less than forty miles from Gwadar.

No shipping now to point the way, the sea empty to the horizon, except once when a sperm whale blew about half a mile away and shortly afterwards shot vertically out of the water like some huge submarine missile, leaping so high I could just see the flukes of its tail before it toppled with a gigantic splash back into the sea. At sunset I thought I could make out a line of cliffs low on the port bow. They were of a brilliant whiteness, wind-carved into fantastic towers and minarets so that it was like a mirage-distorted view of some incredible crystal city. Was that the Makran coast of Baluchistan?

Night came and I was still at the helm, the wind backing and getting stronger, the dhow thundering along at six knots or more. Suddenly it was dark. I had to start thinking then, about what I was going to do, how I was going to make it from dhow to shore. I had only a rough idea how far I had come, but at this rate, with the wind still backing and freshening, and the dhow empty of cargo, it looked as though I could be off Gwadar about one or two in the morning — presuming, of course, that the disappearance of the coast in the late afternoon really had been the bay and river flats that marked the frontier. I wondered how far off I would be able to see Gwadar at night. In daylight it was visible for miles, a great 500-ft high mass of hard rock sticking up out of the sea like an island. It was, in fact, a peninsula, shaped like a hammer-headed shark with its nose pointing south, the body of it a narrow sandspit with the port of Gwadar facing both ways, east and west, so that there was safe anchorage in either monsoon — always provided a vessel could weather the rock and cliffs of the peninsula’s broad head.

My years at sea told me that the prudent thing to do would be to lower the great lateen sail and let the dhow drift through the night, hoisting again at dawn when I could see where I was. But what if the wind went on increasing? What if I couldn’t hoist the bloody thing? Seeing it there, bellied against the stars, I knew it needed several men on the tackle to be sure of taming the power of that sail. And I was tired. God! I was tired.

Prudence can’t compete with the lethargic urge to leave things as they are, and so I went plunging on into the night, relying on being able to pick up the automatic light on top of the headland, ignoring the nagging doubt in my mind that said it was probably out of order. If I hadn’t been so tired; if I hadn’t had the urgent need to contact the authorities and get a message out to the world about the Aurora B; if the wind had only died — at least, not backed so much into the south where it shouldn’t have been at this time of the year; if the light had been working or I had taken into consideration that with the wind south of west there might be an onshore set to the current… If — if — if! Disasters are full of ifs, and I was a trained deck officer with a master’s certificate — I should have known, even if I wasn’t a sailing man. The sea never forgives an error of judgment, and this was an error due to tiredness. I was so goddam weary, and that brute of a sail, bellied out to port like a black bat’s wing against the stars.

It came at me when I was half asleep, the roar of breaking waves and a darkness looming over the bows, blotting out the stars. In an instant I was wide awake, my heart in my mouth and the adrenalin flowing as I hauled on the tiller rope, dragging the heavy steering bar over to port. Slowly, very slowly the dhow turned its high bow into the wind. I thought she’d never make it, that she’d fall off and go plunging away down-wind and into the cliffs, but she came up into the wind at last, and there she hung. She wouldn’t go through it on to the other tack. And if she had, then I realized the lateen rig required the whole spar to be tipped up vertically and man-handled round the mast. An impossible task for one man with the wind blowing 5 or 6.

I didn’t move fast enough. I can see that now. I should have secured the helm and hauled in on the sheet until the sail was set flat and as tight in as it would go. But even then I don’t know that she’d have completed the tack. Not with just the one sail, and anyway I couldn’t be in two places at once. The wind, close inshore, was so strong it was all I could do to manage the tiller, and when she wouldn’t go through the wind, I just stayed there, my mind a blank, the sail flogging in giant whipcracks, the sea and the waves all contributing to the confusion of noise, and the dhow taken virtually aback, driving astern towards the surf breaking in a phosphorescent lather of light.

And while I crouched there, hauling on the tiller which was already hard over, I watched appalled as the bows fell away to port, the lateen filling with a clap like thunder and the dhow lying over, driving virtually sideways into a maelstrom of broken water, and the cliffs above me looming taller and taller, half the stars in the sky blotted out and the movement of the deck under me suddenly very wild.

We struck at 02.27.1 know that because I checked my watch, an action that was entirely automatic, as though I were in the wheelhouse of a proper ship with instruments to check and the log to fill in. We had hit a rock, not the cliffs. The cliffs I could vaguely see, a black mass looming above white waters. There was a thud and the rending sound of timbers breaking, and we hung there in a welter of broken waves with spray blowing over us and the dhow pounding and tearing itself to bits.

I had no idea where I was, whether it was the Gwadar Peninsula we had hit, or some other part of the coast. And there was nothing I could do. I was completely helpless, watching, dazed, as the prow swung away to port, everything happening in slow motion and with a terrible inevitability, timbers splintering amidships, a gap in the deck opening up and steadily widening as the vessel was literally torn apart. Years of neglect and blazing heat had rendered the planks and frames of her hull too brittle to stand the pounding and she gave up without any pretence of a struggle, the mainmast crashing down, the great sail like a winged banner streaming away to drown in the boiling seas. Then the for’ard half of the dhow broke entirely away. One moment it was there, a part of the ship, the next it was being swept into oblivion like a piece of driftwood. For a moment I could see it still, a dark shape against the white of broken water, and then suddenly it was gone.

I heard a cry and looking down from the poop I saw Choffel’s body, flushed out from the lazarette by the wash of a wave and floundering in what little of the waist remained. I had my torch on and in the beam of it I saw his face white with his mouth open in some inarticulate cry, his hair plastered over his forehead and his arm raised as a wave engulfed him. I remember thinking then that the sea was doing my work for me, the next wave breaking over him and sweeping him away, and the same wave lifting the broken stern, tilting it forward and myself with it. There was a crash as we hit the rock, and a scraping sound, the mizzen falling close beside me and the remains of the dhow, with myself clinging to the wooden balustrade at the for’ard end of the poop, swept clear and into the backwash of broken water close under the cliff.

There was no sign of Choffel then. He was gone. And I was waist-deep in water, the deck gyrating wildly as it sank under me, weighed down by the engine, and then a wave broke over me, right over my head, and my mouth was suddenly full of water, darkness closing in. For a moment I didn’t struggle. A sort of fatalism took charge, an insh’Allah mood that it was the will of God. Choffel had gone and that was that. I had done what I had intended to do and I didn’t struggle. But then suddenly it came to me that that wasn’t the end of it at all, and as I sank into the surge of the waves and quiet suffocation, Karen seemed to be calling to me. Not a siren song, but crying for all the life that would be destroyed by Sadeq or the twisted mind of Hals when those two tankers released their oil on the shores of Europe. I struggled then. I started fighting, threshing at the engulfing sea, forcing myself back to the buffeting, seething white of the surface, gulping air and trying desperately to swim.

CHAPTER TWO

The sun was burning holes in my head, my eyelids coloured blood and I was retching dribbles of salt water. I could hear the soft thump and. suck of waves. I rolled over, my mouth open and drooling water, my throat aching with the salt of it, my fingers digging into sand. A small voice was calling, a high piping voice calling to me in Urdu — Wake up, sahib. You wake up plees. And there were hands on my shoulders, shaking me gently.

I opened my eyes. There were two of them, two small boys, half naked and dripping water, clutching at their sodden loin-cloths, their eyes round with the shock of finding me, their bodies burnt brown by the sun and the salt. Behind them was a boat drawn up on the sand, a small open boat, the wood bleached by the sun to a faded grey, the hull black with bitumen. Slowly I pushed myself up, my eyes slitted against the sand-glare. The wind had gone, the sea calm and blue with sparkling wavelets falling lazily on the sloping shore. Away to the left, beyond the boat, a very white building sprawled hull-down among some dunes. Behind the dunes I could see the brown tops of mud brick houses and in the far distance the vague outline of a headland. Two mules were grazing on the sparse grass of the dunes behind me. ‘What’s the name of that village?’ I asked.

The dark little faces stared at me uncompre-hendingly. I pointed towards the white building and the roofs beyond. ‘Name? You tell me name of village.’ They laughed, embarrassed. I switched to Urdu then, speaking slowly since these were Baluchi and I knew my accent would be strange to them.

‘Coastguards,’ they said, speaking almost in unison. ‘Gwadar Coastguards.’

Gwadar! I sat with my head in my hands, feeling drained. So I had made it. And now there was a new battle to fight. I had to explain myself — on the telephone to Karachi — talk to officials, to the Lloyd’s agent, to all the people who had to be alerted. And I was tired, so deadly tired. It wasn’t just my body that was exhausted — it was my brain, my mind, my will. Vaguely I remembered swimming clear of the wreck, hanging on to a piece of the dhow’s broken timbering and the seas breaking over me, rocking me into the oblivion of total exhaustion. A piece of timber, part of a mast by the look of it, lay half-submerged a little way along the dark sands, rolling gently back and forth in the wash of the small waves breaking.

A man appeared, a bearded, wrinkled face under a rag of a turban peering down at me. He was talking to the boys, a quick high voice, but words I could not follow and they were answering him, excitedly gesturing at the sea. Finally they ran off and the old man said, ‘I send them for the Havildar.’

He knew there had been a dhow wrecked during the night because bits of it had come ashore. He asked me whose it was, where it had come from, how many others had been on board — all the questions I knew would be repeated again and again. I shook my head, pretending I didn’t understand. If I said I was alone they wouldn’t believe me. And if I told them about Choffel… I thought of how it would be, trying to explain to a village headman, or even some dumb soldier of a coastguard, about the Aurora B, how we had taken the dhow, cutting it free in a hail of bullets… How could they possibly accept a story like that? They’d think I was mad.

I must have passed out then, or else gone to sleep, for the next thing I knew the wheel of a Land Rover was close beside my head and there were voices. The sun was hot and my clothes, dry now, were stiff with salt. They lifted me up and put me in the back, a soldier sitting with his arm round me so that I didn’t fall off the seat as we jolted along the foreshore to the headquarters building, which was a square white tower overlooking the sea. I was given a cup of sweet black coffee in the adjutant’s office, surrounded by three or four officers, all staring at me curiously. It was the adjutant who did most of the questioning, and when I had explained the circumstances to the increasingly sceptical huddle of dark-skinned faces, I was taken in to see the colonel, a big, impressive man with a neat little moustache and an explosive voice. Through the open square of the window I found myself looking out on the brown cliffs of the Gwadar Peninsula. I was given another cup of coffee and had to repeat the whole story for his benefit.

I don’t know whether he believed me or not. In spite of the coffee I was half asleep, not caring very much either way. I was telling them the truth. It would have been too much trouble to tell them anything else. But I didn’t say much about Choffel, only that he’d been shot while we were trying to get away in the dhow. Nobody seemed to be concerned about him. His body hadn’t been found and without a body they weren’t interested.

The colonel asked me a number of questions, mostly about the nationality of the men on the tanker and where I thought they were taking it. Finally he picked up his hat and his swagger stick and called for his car. ‘Follow me please,’ he said and led me out into the neatly white-washed forecourt. ‘I now have to take you to the Assistant Commissioner who will find it a difficult problem since you are landed on his lap, you see, with no passport, no identification, and the most unusual story. It is the lack of identity he will find most difficult. You say you have been ship’s officer in Karachi. Do you know somebody in Karachi? Somebody to say who you are?’

I told him there were a lot of people who knew me — port officials, shipping agents, some of those who worked at the Sind Club and at the reception desk of the Metropole Hotel. Also personal friends. He nodded, beating a tattoo on his knee with his stick as he waited for his car. ‘That will help perhaps.’

The car arrived, the coastguard flag flying on the bonnet, and as we drove out of the compound, he pointed to a long verandahed bungalow of a building just beyond an area of sand laid out with mud bricks baking in the sun — ‘Afterwards, you want the hospital, it is there.’

‘I’ll be all right,’ I said.

He looked at me doubtfully. ‘We get the doctor to have a look at you. I don’t like you to die with me when you have such an interesting story to tell.’

We passed one of those brilliantly colourful trucks, all tinsel and florid paintings, like an elaborately decorated chocolate box; conclusive proof to the wandering haziness of my mind that I really was in Pakistan. From fine-ground sand and a cloud of dust we moved on to tarmac. Glimpses of the sea, long black fishing boats anchored off, their raked masts dancing in the sun — this was the eastern side of the Gwadar Peninsula, the sea still a little wild, the shore white with surf. There was sand everywhere, the sun glaring down.

‘We have a desalination plant, good water from the sea, all by solar.’ The colonel’s voice was far away, the driver’s forage cap perched on his round black head becoming blurred and indistinct against the moving backcloth of open bazaar booths and mud-brick buildings. ‘We see Ahmad Ali Rizivi now.’ The car had stopped, the colonel was getting out. ‘This is what you call the town hall. It is the house of the Assistant District Commissioner.’

We were in a dusty little open space, a sort of square. A janitor in long robes sat in the doorway. I was vaguely conscious of people as I followed the colonel up the steps and into the dark interior. A clerk sat on a high stool at an old-fashioned desk, another ushered us in to an inner office where a man rose from behind a plain wooden desk that might have been a table. He waved us to chairs hastily placed. It was cooler and there were framed maps and texts on the wall — texts from the Koran I presumed. And the inevitable picture of Jinna — Quaid-i-Azam, the man who had led Pakistan out of the Empire, out of India, to independence and partition. The pictures came and went, the voices a dark murmur as a hot wave of weariness broke over me, my head nodding.

Coffee came, the inevitable coffee, the colonel’s hand shaking me, the Assistant District Commissioner gesturing to the cup, a bleak smile of hospitality. He wanted me to tell it again, the whole story. ‘From the beginning please.’ His dark eyes had no warmth. He didn’t care that I was exhausted. He was thinking of me only as a problem washed up by the sea on to his territory, the survivor of a wreck with an improbable story that was going to cause him a lot of trouble. There was a clerk there to take notes.

‘He is Lord of the Day,’ the colonel said, nodding at Rizivi and smiling. ‘He is the Master here. If he says off with his head, then off with his head it is.’ He said it jokingly, but the smile did not extend to his eyes. It was a warning. Who was the Lord of the Night, I wondered, as I drank the hot sweet coffee, trying to marshal my thoughts so there would be some sort of coherence in what I had to tell him.

I have only the vaguest memory of what I said, or of the questions he asked. Afterwards there was a long pause while he and the colonel talked it over. They didn’t seem to realize I understood Urdu, though it hardly made any difference since I was beyond caring whether they believed me or what they decided to do about me, my eyes closing, my mind drifting into sleep. But not before I had the impression that they were both agreed on one thing at least — to pass the problem to higher authority just as soon as they could. People came and went. The colonel was alone with me for a time. ‘Mr Rizivi arrange air passage for you on the next flight.’ The Assistant District Commissioner came back. He had spoken to Quetta on the R/T. ‘You go to Karachi this afternoon. Already we are consulting with Oman to see if your story is true.’

I should have made the point then that the Aurora B would probably have sailed by the time arrangements had been made for a reconnaissance flight over the kbawr, but my mind was concentrated entirely on the fact that I was being flown to Karachi. Nothing else mattered. We were in the car again and a few minutes later the colonel and his driver were thrusting me along a verandah crowded with the sick and their relatives to an office where an overworked doctor in a white coat was examining a man whose chest was covered in skin sores. He pushed him away as we entered, peering at me through thick-lensed glasses. ‘You the survivor of the wrecked dhow?’

I nodded.

‘They talk of nothing else.’ He jerked his head at the crowded verandah. ‘Everybody I see today. They all have a theory, you see, as to how it happened. How did it happen? You tell me.’ He lifted my eyelids with a dark thumb, brown eyes peering at me closely. ‘They say there is no naukbada, only a solitary English. Is you, eh?’

I nodded, feeling his hands running over my body. ‘No fractures. Some bruising, nothing else.’ He pulled open my shirt, a stethoscope to his ears, his voice running on. Finally he stood back, told me there was nothing wrong with me except lack of sleep and nervous exhaustion. He gave me some pills and made me take one of them with a glass of water right there in the stuffy confines of his little consulting room. After that I don’t remember anything at all until I was in a Land Rover being driven out to the airfield, the wind and dust blowing, the land flat, a desert scene with passengers and officials standing in the glare of the sun, baggage lying around them on the ground.

The plane came in, a Fokker Friendship bright as a dragon-fly against the hard blue of the sky, the gravel airfield spouting long streamers of dust as its wheels touched down. The adjutant himself saw me on to the plane and remained beside it until the door of the fuselage was finally closed. We took off and from my window I had a good view of Gwadar as we climbed and banked, the hammer-headed peninsula with an area of water and green trees like an oasis on one corner of its barren top, and below it, in the sand, the glass-glinting square of the desalination plant, then the town, neat acres of brown, the white of the coastguards’ buildings, and the sea on either side with the fishing boats lying off or drawn up on the sand. And against it all I suddenly saw Choffel’s face, his mouth wide open, the black hair plastered to his white forehead and his arm raised as he sank from sight in the wash of a wave. Somewhere down there his body floated in the blue sea, pale skeleton bones beginning to show as the fish picked him clean.

I remember thinking about the eyes and that I should have done something to help him. His features were so appallingly vivid as I stared through the window at the line of the coast stretching away far below.

And then the wheels touched down and I opened my eyes to find we had landed in Karachi. One of the pilots came aft from the flight deck insisting that nobody moved until I had got off the plane. There was a car waiting for me and some men, including Peter Brown, the Lloyd’s agent. No Customs, no Immigration. We drove straight out through the loose-shirted untidy mob that hung around the airport entrance, out on to the crowded Hyderabad-Karachi road, the questions beginning immediately. Sadeq — I had referred to a man called Sadeq. Who was he? What did he look like? But they knew already. They had had his description from the oil company’s Marine Superintendent in Dubai. They nodded, both of them, checking papers taken from a coloured leather briefcase with a cheap metal clasp. Peter Brown was sitting in front with the driver, neatly dressed as always in a tropical suit, his greying hair and somewhat patrician features giving him an air of distinction. He was a reserved man with an almost judicial manner. It was the other two, sitting on either side of me in the back, who asked the questions. The smaller of them was a Sindhi, his features softer, his dark eyes sparkling with intelligence. The other was a more stolid type with a squarish face heavily pock-marked and horn-rimmed glasses slightly tinted. Police, or perhaps Army — I wasn’t sure. ‘He had another name.’

‘Who?’ I was thinking of Choffel.

‘This Sadeq. A terrorist, you said.’ The small man was riffling through the clipful of papers resting on his briefcase. ‘Here — look now, this telex. It is from Mr Perrin at the GODCO offices in Dubai.’ He waved it at me, holding it in thin dark fingers, his wrist as slender as a girl’s. ‘He said — that’s you, I’m quoting from his telex you see… He said Sadeq was an Iranian terrorist, that he had another name, but that he did not know it, which may be true as it is several years back during the Shah’s regime.’ He looked up. ‘Now you have met him again perhaps you recall his other name.’ He was peering at me sideways, waiting for an answer, and there was something in his eyes — it is difficult for eyes that are dark brown to appear cold, but his were very cold as they stared at me unblink-ingly. ‘Think very carefully please.’ The voice so soft, the English so perfect, and in those eyes I read the threat of nameless things that were rumoured of the security section of Martial Law prisons.

‘Qasim,’ I said, and he asked me to spell it, writing it down with a gaudy-coloured pen. Then both of them were asking questions, most of which I couldn’t answer because I didn’t know what offences Qasim had committed against the Shah’s regime before the Khomeini revolution or what he was doing on board the Aurora B under the name Sadeq, why he had hi-jacked the ship, what the plan was. I didn’t know anything about him, only his name and the fact that the dead Shah’s police had said he was a terrorist. But they didn’t accept that and the questioning went on and on. I was being grilled and once when I nodded off the little man slapped my face. I heard Brown protest, but it didn’t make any difference, the questions continuing and becoming more and more searching. And then, suddenly, when we were into the outskirts of Karachi on the double track of the Shahrah-e-Faisal, they stopped. ‘We will take you to the Metropole now so you can sleep. Meanwhile, we will try to discover some more about this man Choffel.’ He leaned over to Peter Brown. ‘Let us know please if you have any information about these ships from London.’

The Lloyd’s agent nodded. ‘Of course. And you will let me know the result of the Omani airforce reconnaissance.’

The little man pursed his lips, a smile that was almost feminine. ‘You’re finding this story difficult to swallow, are you?’ Brown didn’t answer and the man leaned forward. ‘Do you believe him?’ he asked.

Brown turned and looked at me. I could see the uncertainty in his eyes. ‘If he isn’t telling the truth, then he’s lying. And I don’t at the moment see any reason for him to lie.’

‘A man has disappeared.’ The cold dark eyes gave me a sideways glance. He took a newspaper cutting from the clip of papers. ‘This is from the Karachi paper Dawn, a brief news item about a tanker being blown up on the English coast. It is dated ninth January. Karen Rodin. Was that your wife?’

I nodded.

‘It also says that a French engineer, Henri Choffel, accused of sabotaging the tanker and causing it to run aground, is being hunted by Interpol.’ Again the sly sideways glance. ‘The man who is with you on this dhow — the man you say is shot when you were escaping from the Aurora B — his name also is Choffel… What is his first name, is it Henri?’

‘Yes.’ I was staring at him, fascinated, knowing what he was thinking and feeling myself suddenly on the edge of an abyss.

‘And that is the same man — the man Interpol are looking for?’

I nodded.

‘Alone on that dhow with you, and your wife blown up with the tanker he wrecked.’ He smiled and after that he didn’t say anything more, letting the silence produce its own impact. The abyss had become a void, my mind hovering on the edge of it, appalled at the inference he was drawing. The fact that I hadn’t done it was irrelevant. It was what I had planned to do, the reason I was on the Aurora B. And this little man in Karachi had seen it immediately. If it was such an obvious conclusion… I was thinking how it would be when I was returned to the UK, how I could avoid people leaping to the same conclusion.

The car slowed. We were in Club Road now, drawing into the kerb where broad steps led up to the wide portico of the Metropole. We got out and the heat and the dust and noise of Karachi hit me. Through the stream of traffic, beyond the line of beat-up old taxi cars parked against the iron palings opposite, I glimpsed the tall trees of the shaded gardens of the Sind Club. A bath and a deck chair in the cool of the terrace, a long, ice-cold drink… ‘Come please.’ The big man took hold of my arm, shattering the memories of my Dragonera days as he almost frogmarched me up the steps into the hotel. The little man spoke to the receptionist. The name Ahmad Khan was mentioned and a key produced. ‘You rest now, Mr Rodin.’ He handed the key to his companion and shook my hand. ‘We will talk again when I have more information. Also we have to decide what we do with you.’ He gave me a cold little smile and the Metropole seemed suddenly a great deal more luxurious. ‘Meanwhile Majeed will look after you.’ He nodded in the direction of his companion who was talking now to an unshaven loosely-dressed little man who had been hovering in the background. ‘Can I give you a lift?’ he asked the Lloyd’s agent.

Peter Brown shook his head. ‘I’ll see Rodin settled in first.’

‘As you wish.’ He left then and I watched him go with a sense of relief, his slim silhouette changing to powder blue as the glare of the street spotlighted his pale neat suit. ‘What is he — Intelligence?’ I asked.

Brown shrugged. ‘Calls himself a Government Information Officer.’

‘And the other?’

‘Security, I presume.’

We took the lift to the second floor, tramping endless cement-floored corridors where bearers, sweepers and other hangers-on lounged in over-employed idleness. The Metropole occupies a whole block, a great square of buildings constructed round a central courtyard. The first floor is given over to offices, almost every room with a sign over it, the names of countless small businesses and agencies. I glanced at my watch. It was still going, the time 17.36. We stopped at a door and the policeman handed the key to the unshaven little man who had accompanied us. He in turn handed it to the bearer who was now in close attendance. The room was big and airy, with a ceiling fan turning slowly and the windows open and looking out on to the huge courtyard. Kites were coming in to roost on the trees and window ledges, big vulture-like birds, drab in the shadows cast by the setting sun. ‘You will be very comfortable here.’ The policeman waved his hands in a gesture that included the spartan beds and furniture, the big wardrobes and tatty square of carpet, a note of envy in his voice. The Metropole to him was probably the height of glamour.

He searched the drawers and the wardrobes, checked the bathroom. Finally he left, indicating the unshaven one and saying, ‘Hussain will keep watch over you. And if there is something more you have to tell us, he knows where to find me.’

‘Is there?’ Brown asked as the door closed behind him.

‘Is there what?’

‘Anything more you have to tell them.’

‘No.’

‘And it’s true, is it — about the Aurora BV

I nodded, wondering how I could get rid of him, wanting nothing except to get my head down now and sleep while I had the chance. It was more important to me even than food. He moved to the phone, which was on a table between the two beds. ‘Mind if I ring the office?’ He gave the switchboard a number and I went into the bathroom, where the plumbing was uncertain and the dark cement floor wet with water from a leaking pipe. When I had finished I found the unshaven Hussain established on a chair in the little entrance hall and Brown was standing by the window. ‘I think I should warn you, a lot of people are going to find this story of yours a pretty tall one. You realize we’ve no record of a tanker ever having been hi-jacked. Certainly no VLCC has been hi-jacked before. That’s straight, old-fashioned piracy. And you’re saying it’s not one, but two — two tankers boarded and taken without even a peep of any sort on the radio. It’s almost inconceivable.’

‘So you don’t believe me?’

He shook his head, pacing up and down the tattered piece of carpeting. ‘I didn’t say that. I just think it’s something people will find difficult to accept. One, perhaps, but two—‘

‘The first one went wrong.’

‘So you said. And you think a bomb was thrown into the radio room, a grenade, something like that?’

‘I don’t know what happened,’ I said, sitting on the bed, wishing he would go away as I pulled off my shoes. ‘I’ve told you what I saw, the radio shack blackened by fire and a hole ripped in the wall. I presume they met with resistance on the bridge, discovered the radio operator was going to send a Mayday and dealt with the situation the only way they knew.’

‘And this happened, not in the Indian Ocean, but when the Aurora B was still in the Gulf?’

‘Yes. When she was in the Straits probably.’

‘So the radio contact with the owners, made when the ship was supposed to be somewhere off the coast of Kutch, was entirely spurious. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? — that it never happened, or rather it was made from a quite different locality and was not the captain reporting to the owners, but the hi-j ackers conning them.’ He nodded to himself. ‘Ingenious, and it’s been done before. But usually with non-existent ships or cargoes, and not on this scale, not with oil involved and big tankers. Fraudulent insurance claims, we know a lot about those now, I’ve had instances myself. But always general cargo ships. Small ones, usually old and in poor condition. Four at least I can remember, all single-vessel owners, two of them had only just changed hands. They were all cargo frauds based on forged documents.’ He began describing the intricacies of the frauds, bills of lading, packing lists, manufacturers’ certificates in two cases, even EEC certificate of origin in one case, all forged.

‘I’m tired,’ I said irritably.

He didn’t seem to hear me, going on to tell me a complicated story of trans-shipment of car engines from a small freighter at the height of the port’s congestion when there were as many as eighty ships anchored off Karachi awaiting quay space. But then he stopped quite suddenly. ‘Of course, yes, I was forgetting — you’re tired.’ He said it a little huffily. ‘I was simply trying to show you that what you’ve been telling us is really very difficult to believe. These are not small ships and GODCO is certainly not a single-vessel owner. They are, both of them, VLCCs, well-maintained and part of a very efficiently operated fleet.’ He was gazing out of the window at the darkening shadows. ‘Maybe they picked on them for that reason.’ He was talking to himself, not me. ‘Being GODCO vessels, maybe they thought their disappearance would be accepted — something similar to the disappearance of those two big Scandinavians. They were in ballast and cleaning tanks with welders on board or something. An explosive situation. That’s what I heard, anyway.’

‘It’s got nothing to do with it,’ I said. ‘This is quite different.’

‘Yes, indeed. Quite different. And it doesn’t sound like fraud.’ He had turned from the window and was staring at me. ‘What do you reckon the purpose is?’

‘How the hell do I know? I was only on board the ship a few hours.’

‘And the cost of it,’ he muttered. ‘They’d need to have very substantial backers, particularly to escalate the operation to a second tanker at short notice.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘You want to rest and it’s time I was getting back to the office. There’ll be people at Lloyd’s who’ll be greatly cheered to know the Aurora B at any rate is still afloat. I’ll telex them right away.’

‘You’ll be contacting Forthright’s, will you?’

He nodded. ‘They’ll have a full account of it waiting for them in their office tomorrow morning. Mr Saltley can then take what action he thinks fit.’ He lifted his head, looking at me down his long nose. ‘If they locate this ship, the one you say is the Aurora B, then there’ll be all sorts of problems. Maritime law isn’t exactly designed to cope with this sort of thing. And you’ll be in the thick of it, so much depending on your statement.’ And he added, ‘On the other hand, if she’s sailed and the subsequent search fails to locate her…’ He paused, watching me curiously. ‘That’s why I stayed on, to warn you. What happens if they don’t believe you? If they think you’re lying, then they’ll want to know the reason and that may lead them to jump to conclusions.’ He smiled, ‘Could be awkward, that. But let’s take things as they come, eh?’ He clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Have a good rest. I’ll see you in the morning.’

Sleep came in a flash and I woke sweating to a surge of sound, red lights flickering and a wild voice. My body, naked under the coarse sheets, felt battered and painful, my limbs aching. I had no idea where I was, staring wide-eyed at the big fan blades above my bed, revolving slowly to reflect a kaleidoscope of colours and that voice. I sat up. A woman was singing, a high Muslim chanting, and the surging sound was an Eastern band, the shriek of pipes and tam-tams beating.

I pulled back the sheet and stumbled to the window, conscious of the stiffness of my muscles, the ache of a deep bruise in the pelvis, staring down into the courtyard, which was a blaze of light, girls in richly coloured saris, tables piled with food and drink. A wedding? So much tinsel decoration, balloons and lanterns, and the men loutish and ill-at-ease in their bright suits. The singing stopped. The music changed to Western jazz played fast and the crowd mingling, men and women clinging uncertainly, dancing double time. A bird swirled up like a great bat, the lights red, yellow and green and somebody pointing so that I drew back quickly, conscious that I was standing there stark naked. But it was the bird they were pointing at.

A shadow moved beside me. ‘You all right, sahib?’ It was my watchdog.

I couldn’t sleep for a long time after that, listening to the band and the high chatter of voices, the lights flickering on my closed eyes, and thinking about what was going to happen when they found the ship. Would they arrest her on the high seas? Who would do it — the British, the Americans, who? And what about me?

Nobody was going to thank me for handing them such a problem. I wondered what Sadeq would do when the Navy came on board, what explanation he would give. Would he still be flying the hammer and sickle? And Baldwick — I suddenly remembered Baldwick. Baldwick wouldn’t be able to leave without the dhow. He’d still be on board. What would his explanation be, or would Sadeq dispose of him before he had a chance to talk? I could see Sadeq, as I had glimpsed him when I was crouched below the poop, the gun at his waist, the bearded face fixed in what was almost a grin as he sprayed bullets with cold professional accuracy and Baldwick thrown backwards, his big barrel of a stomach opened up and flayed red. Choffel — my mind was confused. It was Choffel whose stomach had been hit. And I was in Pakistan with information nobody was happy to hear… except Pamela and those two sailing men, her father and Saltley. If I was in England now, not lying here in Karachi with a wedding thumping out jazz and Eastern music…

I suppose I was in that limbo of half-coma that is the result of shock and exhaustion, my mind in confusion, a kaleidoscope of thoughts and imaginings all as strange as the lights and the music. Darkness came eventually, and sleep — a sleep so dead that when I finally opened my eyes the sun was high above the hotel roof and Hussain was shaking me. He was even more unshaven now and he kept repeating, ‘Tiffin, tiffin, sahib.’ It was almost ten o’clock and there was a tray on the small central table with boiled eggs, sliced white bread, butter, marmalade and a big pot of coffee.

My clothes had gone, but the notes and traveller’s cheques that had been in my hip pocket were on the table beside me. Kites wheeled in a cloudless sky. I had a quick shower and breakfasted with a towel wrapped round my middle. A copy of Dawn lay on the table. Founded by Quaid-i-Azam Mohammed AH Jinnah, it said — Karachi, 21 Safar, 1400. The lead story was about Iran, the conflict between the IRP and the left-wing Mujaheddin. I could find no mention of a dhow being wrecked off Gwadar or of anybody being washed ashore there. The bearer came with my clothes, laundered, ironed and reasonably dry. As soon as I was dressed I rang the office of Lloyd’s agents down near the Customs House, but Peter Brown was out and the only other person I knew there, a Parsi, had no information to give me. I sat by the window then, reading the paper from cover to cover and watching the kites. Hussain refused absolutely to allow me out of the room and though I had a telephone call from Brown’s office it was only to say he would contact me as soon as he had any information. I could have done with a drink, but the hotel was under strict Islamic laws and drier than the sands of Baluchistan.

Just after midday Ahmad Khan arrived, the jacket of his blue suit slung over his shoulder, his tie loosened. ‘There is no ship,’ he said in his rather high lilting voice. He was standing in the middle of the room, his dark eyes watching me closely. ‘Muscat report their aircraft have overflown all the khawrs of the Musandam Peninsula. There is no tanker there.’ He paused to let that sink in. ‘Also, Gwadar report no body being washed onto the coast.’

‘Was there any sign of the man who jumped overboard?’ I asked.

‘No, nothing. And no sign of the ship.’

‘I told you they would have sailed the morning after we escaped. Have they made a search along the tanker route?’

‘Oman say they are doing it now. I have told my office to let me know here as soon as we receive a report.’ He threw his jacket on to the nearest bed, picked up the phone and ordered coffee. ‘You want any coffee?’

I shook my head. Just over two days at full speed, the ship could be nine hundred, a thousand miles from the Straits, clear of the Oman Gulf, and well out into the Indian Ocean — a hell of a lot of sea to search. ‘What about other ships? Have they been alerted?’

‘You ask Mr Brown that. I have no information.’

His coffee came, and when the waiter had gone he said, ‘You don’t wish to amend your statement at all?’

I shook my head. ‘No, not at all.’

‘Okay.’ And after that he sat there drinking his coffee in silence. Time passed as I thought about the route the tanker would have taken, and wondered why he was here. It was just on twelve-thirty that the phone rang. It was Brown and after a moment he handed it to me. All shipping had been alerted the previous night. So far nothing had been reported. ‘I’ve just been talking to the Consul. I’m afraid they’re a bit sceptical.’

‘Do you mean they don’t believe me?’

‘No, why should they? I don’t think anyone’s going to believe you unless the tanker actually materializes.’

‘Do you?’

There was a moment’s hesitation. ‘I might if it wasn’t for your story about Choffel. Let’s wait, shall we? If the body turns up, or we get a sighting of that tanker…’ His voice drifted away apologetically. ‘Anyway, how are you feeling now — rested?’

‘Yes, I’m all right.’

‘Good, good.’ There was a pause while he searched around for something else to say. ‘Glad you’re all right. Well, if I hear anything I’ll give you a ring.’ There was a click and he was gone.

The conversation left me feeling lonely and disconsolate. If he didn’t believe me, the little Sindhi intelligence man sipping noisily at his coffee certainly would not. Hussain arranged for lunch to be brought up from the cafe below, a spiced rissole, chilli hot, with slices of white bread and some tinned fruit. Ahmad Khan hardly spoke and I was speculating what was going to happen to me when it was realized the tanker had vanished. Obviously, once outside the Gulf of Oman, it would be steering well clear of the shipping lanes. Clouds were building in the white glare above the rooftops and the kites were wheeling lower.

Suddenly the phone rang. It was Ahmad Khan’s office. Muscat had reported both reconnaissance planes back at base. They had been in the air over 3V2 hours and had covered virtually the whole of the Gulf from the Straits right down to Ras al Had, south-east of Muscat, and had also flown 300 miles into the Arabian Sea. Of all the tankers they had sighted only five or six had approximated to the size of the Aurora B, and none of those had answered to the description I had given. Also, most of the ships sighted had been contacted.by radio and none had reported seeing anything resembling the Aurora B. All the ships sighted had been in the normal shipping lanes. They had seen nothing outside these lanes and the search had now been called off. The same negative report had been made by seaborne helicopters searching the Mus-andam Peninsula and the foothills of the Jebel al Harim. That search had also been called off.

He put the phone down and picked up his jacket. ‘I am instructed to escort you to the airport and see that you leave on the next flight to the UK. Please, you will now get ready.’

‘Any reason?’

He hesitated, then gave a little shrug. ‘I don’t think it matters that you know. Your allegations have been discussed in the highest quarters. They are regarded as very sensitive. Accordingly your Consul has been informed that you are persona non grata in this country. You understand?’

I nodded. I felt suddenly as though I had some contagious disease, everybody distancing themselves from me. But at least I was being allowed to leave.

‘You come now please.’ Ahmad Khan had his jacket slung over his shoulder and was standing waiting for me. I had nothing, only the shirt and trousers in which I had arrived. ‘I’ll need a sweater, something warm. It’s winter in London.’

But all he said was, ‘That is for your Consul. Come please.’ Hussain was standing with the door open. We went back down the cement corridors, the room bearer following us a little forlornly. We left him at the lift muttering to himself. A driver was waiting for us at the reception desk, a big, serious-looking man with a black moustache and a sort of turban, who led us out to an official car. We went first to the Abdullah Haroon Road Bazaar, where I had passport photos taken, and after that we drove out on the Khayaban-i-Iobal road to the British Consulate, which was close to the Clifton seaside resort. I had been there once before. It was up a long drive through a well-tended estate and gardens.

I asked to see the Consul himself, but he, too, was distancing himself from the whole affair. He wasn’t available and I had to be content with a grey-haired, harassed-looking Pakistani, who issued me with temporary papers and then, by raiding some emergency stores, produced a pair of patched grey flannel trousers and a blue seaman’s jersey, socks and a pair of boots.

It was in this peculiar rig that thirteen hours later I arrived at Heathrow. Ahmad Khan had stayed with me until I was actually on the plane. In fact, he saw me to my seat, accompanied by the senior steward. It was a PIA aircraft full of emigrants going to join relatives in Britain, a bedlam of a journey with the toilets awash and one or two children who had never seen a flush lavatory before in their lives. I don’t know what chief steward was told about me, but he and the i ardess kept a very careful watch over me with the result that I had excellent service, my every want attended to immediately.

Brown had not seen fit to see me off and I had been refused permission to telephone. However, I was told he had been informed of my time of departure and flight number, and I presumed he would have passed this on to Saltley so that he would know my ETA at Heathrow. But there was nobody there to meet me and no message. I was delayed only a few moments at Immigration and then I was through and just one of the great flood of humanity that washes through Heathrow Airport. There is nothing more depressing than to be on your own in one of the terminals, all of London before you and nobody expecting you, no plans. The time was 08.27 and it was Sunday. Also it was blowing hard from the north-west and raining, the temperature only a little above freezing — a typical late January day. I changed my salt-stiffened franc notes and Emirate currency, got myself a coffee and sat over it, smoking a duty-free cigarette and thinking over all that had happened since I had left for Nantes ten days ago. No good ringing Forthright’s, the office would be closed and I hadn’t Saltley’s home number.

In the end I took the tube to Stepney Green and just over an hour later I was back in the same basement room, lying on the bed, smoking a cigarette with the legs of passers-by parading across the top of the grime-streaked window. I was looking at the typescript of my book again. ‘You left it her,’ Mrs Steinway had said to me when she brought it down from her room at the back of the ground floor. ‘The girl found it lying on the floor underneath the bed after you’d gone.’ From flipping idly through the pages I began to read, then I became engrossed, all our life together and Balkaer, Cornwall, the birds — it all flooded back, the bare little basement room filled with the surge of the Atlantic breaking against the cliffs, the cry of sea-birds and Karen’s.-voice. There was a strange peacefulness in the words I had written, a sense of being close to the basics of life. In this moment, in retrospect, it seemed like a dream existence and I was near to tears as the simplicity and richness of our lives was unfolded, so vividly that I could hardly believe the words were my own. And at times I found myself thinking of Choffel, those bare hills and the simplicity of his boyhood, Cornish cliffs and Welsh hills, the same thread and at the end the two of us coming together on that dhow.

Next day I phoned Forthright’s, but Saltley’s secretary said he would be at the Law Courts all morning. He was expecting me, however, and she said I could see him in the late afternoon, around four if that was convenient. I was back in the world of marine solicitors, insurance and missing tankers.

CHAPTER THREE

Yes, but what’s the motive?’ I was sitting facing Saltley across his desk and when I told him I didn’t know, he said it was a pity I hadn’t stayed on board instead of jumping on to the dhow just because I was determined to destroy Choffel. ‘If you’d stayed, then you’d have discovered their destination, and sooner or later you would have had an opportunity to get a message out by radio.’

‘Unlikely,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘There are always opportunities.’ And when I pointed out that at least he now knew the tanker was still afloat, which was more than he could have expected when he employed me, he said, ‘I appreciate that, Rodin, but I’ve only got your word for it.’

‘You don’t believe me?’ My voice trembled on the verge of anger.

‘Oh, I believe you. You couldn’t have made it up, not all the people and the astonishing sight of a tanker against cliffs at the head of that inlet. But the ship isn’t there any longer. To get a claim for millions of dollars set aside we’ve got to be able to prove the Aurora B is still afloat.’

‘And my word isn’t good enough?’

‘Not in law. Now if Choffel were still alive…’ He was leaning on his desk, his hands locked together on top of the thick file his secretary had left with him. ‘Is there anything else he told you that’s relevant? Anything at all? You were two days on that dhow together.’

‘He was wounded and a lot of the time he was unconscious, or nearly so.’

‘Yes, of course.’ But then he began to take me through every exchange of words I had had with the man. I found it very difficult to recall his exact words, particularly when he had been rambling on about his boyhood and his life up there in the bare Welsh hills, and all the time those dark eyes staring at me unblinking. Finally Saltley asked me why I thought he had seized the dhow. ‘Surely it wasn’t just to get away from you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Were you really going to kill him?’

‘Possibly. I can’t be sure, can I?’

‘You said his daughter had told him, in that letter of hers, that you were going to kill him. Is that right?’

‘Yes, that’s what he said.’

He was silent for a long time, thinking. ‘If I put you in court, as a witness, they’d dig that out of you right away. They’d say you were mentally unhinged at the time, that you weren’t responsible for your actions, and that you now don’t know what is true and what is the product of your imagination.’

‘They’ll know soon enough,’ I told him angrily. ‘In a few weeks from now the Aurora B will appear in some port or other and Sadeq will carry out his mission. They’ll know then all right.’

He nodded. ‘And Choffel gave no hint to you at any time what that mission might be?’

‘No.’

‘Or the destination?’

‘I tell you, no.’

‘Did you ask him?’

‘About the destination?’

‘Yes. Did you specifically ask him what it was?’

‘I think so,’ I murmured, staring at him and trying to remember, feeling as though I were already in the witness box and he was cross-examining me. ‘I think it was during that first night at sea. We were through the Straits then and into the Oman Gulf and he’d somehow dragged himself up to the poop to tell me the engine needed oil. He started talking then, about the ships he’d been in, the Stella Rosa and the engineer whose name he’d taken. I asked him about the Aurora B and the other ship, and what they were going to do with the oil, where they were going to spill it. It had to be something like that and I thought it was probably a European port, so I asked him where. I remember I kept on asking him where and shaking him, trying to get it out of him.’

‘And did you?’

‘No, I was too rough with him. He was screaming with pain, his mind confused. He said something about salvage, at least that’s what I thought he said. It didn’t make sense unless he was harking back to the first ship he destroyed, the Lavandou, which was supposed to have sunk in deep water but drifted on to a reef instead.’

‘Salvage.’ Saltley repeated the word, staring past me into space. ‘No, I agree. It doesn’t make sense. Do you think he knew what the destination was?’

But I couldn’t answer that, and though he kept on at me, probing in that soft voice, the blue eyes fixed on mine in that disconcerting stare, it wasn’t any good. ‘Oh well,’ he said finally, ‘we’ll just have to accept that he hadn’t been told the ship’s destination.’ He relaxed then, that crooked mouth of his breaking into a smile that made him suddenly human. ‘Sorry. I’ve been pressing you rather hard.’ He took his hands from the file and opened it, but without looking down, his mind elsewhere. Finally he said almost briskly, ‘If we accept your story as correct, then there are certain assumptions that can be made. First, the Aurora B is afloat with a full cargo of oil. Second, since the Omani air search has failed to sight her, she has sailed from the inlet where she has been hiding and is at sea somewhere in the Indian Ocean. The Pakistan airforce also flew a search. Did you know that?’

I shook my head and he tapped the file. ‘A report came in yesterday. Search abandoned, no sighting. Now we come to the main assumption.’ He hesitated. ‘Not so much an assumption as a pure guess, I’m afraid. The Aurora B, you think, is headed for a Euro-

pean port, which means she will pass south of the Cape and head up the Atlantic coast of Africa. We will say, for the purpose of our assumptions, that the Howdo Stranger is well ahead of her — has, in fact, passed the Cape into the Atlantic. Is that your reading of the situation?’

‘It could be anywhere,’ I said guardedly. The man was a lawyer and I wasn’t going to commit myself.

He smiled. ‘The first hi-jack was bungled. That’s your theory, isn’t it? The evidence being the damaged radio room and the crew imprisoned in the chain locker. Incidentally, there’s no report of that man who jumped overboard being found, so we’ll have to presume that he’s dead. They then hi-jacked a second tanker and the operation is successful. They now have two tankers. One is despatched on its mission. The other is to follow when it is crewed-up with what one might call Baldwick’s mercenaries. And since the second one has now sailed it seems obvious that the plan is for a joint operation. That means a rendezvous. You agree?’

I nodded. ‘That’s what I was trying to get out of Choffel.’

‘You said it was the destination you were trying to get out of him — the target in other words.’

‘That and where the two ships were going to meet.’

‘And he said something about salvage.’

‘I think that’s what he said. But he was confused and in pain. I can’t be certain. I was very tired,’

‘Of course.’ There was a moment’s silence, then he said, ‘That’s it then. They’ll meet up somewhere and then they’ll act in concert, the two of them together.’ He leaned back and stretched his arms, yawning to relieve the tension of the half hour he had spent taking me step-by-step through my story. ‘We don’t know where they’ll meet. We don’t know the target or what the motive is. And unless the ships are sighted, or alternatively that man is found alive on the Musandam Peninsula, there’s absolutely nothing to substantiate your quite extraordinary story — and I use the word there in its original and exact meaning.’ He took a slip of paper from the open file and handed it to me. ‘That was posted in the Room at Lloyd’s yesterday. The Times and the Telegraph both carried it this morning on their foreign news pages.’

The slip was a copy of a Reuters report from Muscat referring to rumours emanating from Pakistan that a Russian tanker was concealed on the Omani coast south of the Hormuz Straits. It stated that the airforce, having carried out a thorough search of the coast and of the Arabian Sea adjacent to Oman, had proved the rumours to be quite unfounded.

‘And this came in this morning.’ He handed me another Reuters message datelined Karachi. This referred to me by name as the source of the rumour — a shipwrecked Englishman Trevor Rodin has been repatriated, his story of a tanker concealed in an inlet on the Omani side of the Gulf having been proved incorrect. It is considered possible that Rodin may have had political motives and that his story was intended to damage the friendly relations existing between Pakistan and Oman, and also other countries.

‘I think you may find yourself the focus of a certain amount of official attention,’ he added as I handed it back to him. ‘The whole area is very sensitive.’

Saltley’s warning proved only too accurate. The following day, when I returned from buying some clothes after opening an account at the local bank and paying in the cheque he had given me, Mrs Steinway informed me the police had been asking for me. ‘Haven’t done anything wrong, have you, luv?’ She was a real Eastender, and though she said it jokingly, her eyes watched me suspiciously. ‘Cos if you have, you don’t stay here, you understand?’

They had asked when I would be back, so I was not surprised to have a visit from a plain clothes officer. I think he was Special Branch. He was quite young, one of those shut-faced men who seem to rise quickly in certain branches of the Establishment. He wasn’t interested in what I could tell him about the hidden tanker or about Choffel, it was the political implications that concerned him, his questions based on the assumption that the whole story was a concoction of lies invented to cause trouble. He asked me what my political affiliations were, whether I was a communist. He had checked with the Passport Office that I was the holder of a British passport, but was I a British resident? Was there anybody who knew me well enough to vouch for me? He was a little more relaxed after I had told him I owned a cottage on the cliffs near Land’s End and that my wife had died in the Petros Jupiter explosion. He remembered that and he treated me more like a human being. But he was still suspicious, taking notes of names and addresses and finally leaving with the words, ‘We’ll check it all out and I’ve no doubt we’ll want to have another talk with you. when we’ve completed our enquiries. Meanwhile, you will please notify the police if you change your address or plan to leave the country, and that includes shipping as an officer on board a UK ship. Is that understood?’ And he gave me the address of the local police station and the number to ring. ‘Just so we know where to find you.’

It was dark by the time he left, a cold, frosty night. I put on the anorak I had bought that morning and walked as far as the river. I was feeling isolated and very alone, quite separated from all the people hurrying by. Lights on the far bank were reflected on a flood tide and the sky overhead was clear and full of stars. I tried to tell myself that an individual is always alone, that the companionship of others is only an illusion, making loneliness more bearable. But it’s difficult to convince yourself of that when loneliness really bites. And what about my relationship with Karen? I leaned on the frosted stonework of an old wharf, staring at the dark flowing water and wishing to God there was somebody I could talk to, somebody who knew what it was like to be alone, totally alone.

I was very depressed that evening, staring at the river shivering with cold and watching the tide mark. And then, when I went back to pick up the typescript so that I would have something to read over a meal, Mrs Steinway came out of her back room with the evening paper in her hand. ‘I just been reading about you. It is you, isn’t it?’ she asked, pointing to a paragraph headed: Missing Tanker Man Returned to UK. It was the Reuters story datelined Karachi. ‘No wonder you’ve got the law keeping tabs on you. Is it true about the tanker?’

I laughed and told her I seemed to be about the only one who thought so.

‘They don’t believe you, eh?’ The bold eyes were watching me avidly. ‘Well, can’t say I blame them. It’s a funny sort of story.’ She smiled, the eyes twinkling, the heavy jowls wobbling with delight as she said, ‘Never mind, luv. Maybe there’s one as will. There’s a young woman asked to see you.’

‘Me?’ I stared at her thinking she was having a bit of fun. ‘Who? When?’

‘Didn’t give her name. I didn’t ask her, see. You’d been gone about ten minutes and she said it was urgent, so I told her she could wait in your room. ‘Course she may be a newspaper girl. But she didn’t look it. I’ve had them before, see, when there was that Eddie Stock here and they mistook him for the fellow that did the Barking shotgun hold-up…’

But by then I had turned and was hurrying down the basement stairs. It had to be her. There was nobody else, no girl at any rate, that could have found out where I was. Unless Saltley had sent his secretary with a message. I don’t know whether the eagerness I felt stemmed from my desperate need of company or from a sexual urge I could hardly control as I jumped down the last few stairs and flung open the door of my room.

She looked up at my entrance, the jut of her jaw just as determined, but the squarish, almost plain face lit by a smile. There were other parts of her that jutted, for she was wearing slacks and a very close-fitting jersey-knit sweater. A fleece-lined suede coat lay across the bed and she had the typescript of my book in her hands. She got up and stood facing me a little awkwardly. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’ She held up the dog-eared typescript. ‘I couldn’t resist.’ She was unsure of herself. ‘Salt was very stuffy about it at first — the address, I mean. But I got it out of him in the end. Such an incredible, marvellous story. I just had to see you.’ She had a sort of glow, her eyes alight with excitement.

‘You believe it then?’

‘Of course.’ She said it without the slightest hesitation. ‘Salty said nobody could possibly have invented it. But then of course,’ she added, ‘we want to believe it, anyway Daddy, Mother, me, Virgins Unlimited… I told you about the syndicate, didn’t I? The rude name they call it. The other syndicates, too.’ She was nervous, talking very fast. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ She put the typescript carefully down beside her coat. ‘I read a couple of chapters, that’s all, but I’ve learned so much — about you and what you want out of life. I’d like to take it with me. It’s so moving.’

‘You like it?’ I didn’t know what else to say, standing there, gazing at her and remembering that letter I’d received at Ras al Khaimah.

‘Oh, yes. What I’ve read so far. If I could borrow it… there’s a publisher, a friend of ours, lives at Thorpe-le-Soken…’ Her voice trailed away. ‘I’m sorry. I’m being bossy. Daddy says I’m always trying to run other people’s lives for them. It’s not true, of course, but I’m afraid I sometimes give that impression. Do sit down please.’ She looked quickly round the room and I could almost see her nose wrinkling at the bare bleakness of it. ‘Did you get a letter from me?’ She said it in an offhand way, busying herself with picking up her coat and hanging it on the hook of the door. ‘Perhaps the bed will be more comfortable. That chair’s an arse-breaker, I can tell you.’ She plumped herself down on the far side of the bed. ‘Well, did you?’ She was watching me intently, her eyes bright. ‘Yes, I see you did. But you never replied.’

I hesitated, my blood beginning to throb at the invitation I thought I could see in her eyes. ‘Yes, the dhow brought it to me.’ I sat down on the bed beside her and touched her hand. ‘And I did reply to it. But if you believe my account of what happened you’ll realize the reply is still on board that tanker.’

Her fingers moved against mine. ‘I only know what Salty told me. Daddy and I were at his office late this afternoon. He gave us an outline, but very brief. Daddy was there to decide what action should be taken as a result of your report.’ She gripped my hand. ‘When I insisted Salty give me your address, and Daddy knew I intended seeing you, he said to give you his warmest thanks for risking your neck and achieving — well, achieving the impossible. Those were his words. And Salty thought the same, though of course he didn’t say so. What he said was that he’d only given you what had been agreed, but that if your information resulted in any of the GODCO claims being set aside, then there would be a proper recompense.’

‘I had my own motives,’ I muttered.

‘Yes, I know that. But it’s just incredible what you did, and all in little more than a week.’

‘Luck,’ I said. ‘I was following Choffel.’

She nodded. ‘Tell me what you said, would you please.’

‘To Saltley?’ I half shook my head, remembering that long cross-examination and not wanting to go over it all again. But then I thought it might help for her to know, so I started to tell her about Baldwick coming to see me at Balkaer. But that wasn’t what she wanted. It was the letter. ‘What did you say — in that letter I never received. Please tell me what you said.’

I shook my head. It was one thing to write it in a letter, another to say the same words to her face. I took my hand away and got up. ‘I don’t really remember,’ I muttered. ‘I was touched. Deeply touched. I said that. Also, that I was lonely — a little afraid, too — and your letter was a great comfort… to know that somebody, somewhere, is concerned about whether you live or die, that makes a great difference.’

She reached out and touched my hand. ‘Thank you. I didn’t know how you’d feel. It was so—‘ She hesitated, blushing slightly and half smiling to herself. ‘After I posted it — I felt a bit of a fool, getting carried away like that. But I couldn’t help it. That was the way I felt.’

‘It was nice of you,’ I said. ‘It meant a great deal to me at that moment.’ And I bent down and kissed her then — on the forehead, a very chaste kiss.

‘Go on,’ she said, and giggled because she hadn’t intended it as an invitation. ‘You started telling me about the man who came to your cottage. I interrupted, but please… I want to know everything that happened after I left you that day at Lloyd’s.’ She patted the coverlet beside her. ‘You went off the following day by air for Nantes…’

I took it up from there, and now she listened intently, almost hanging on my words, so that halfway through, when I was telling her about my eerie night walk the length of the tanker’s deck, I suddenly couldn’t help myself — I said, ‘I warn you, if you stay and listen to the whole thing I may find it very difficult to let you go.’

‘I could always scream the house down.’ She was suddenly laughing and her eyes looked quite beautiful. But then she said quickly, ‘Go on, do — how did you and Choffel land up alone on that dhow together?’

But at that moment footsteps sounded on the stairs. There was a knock at the door. ‘Can I come in?’ It was Saltley. He checked in the doorway, smiling at the two of us sitting on the bed, his quick gaze taking in the details of the room. ‘So this is where you’ve holed up.’

‘Why have you come?’ I was on my feet now, resenting the intrusion.

He unbuttoned his overcoat and seated himself on the chair. ‘Have the police been to see you?’ And when 1 told him about the Special Branch visit, he said, ‘That was inevitable, and I warned you.’ He was staring at me, the smile gone now and his eyes cold. ‘Are you sure you didn’t shoot Choffel?’

‘Why do you ask? I told you how it was.’

And Pamela, suddenly very tense, asked, ‘What’s happened?’

He turned to her and said, ‘It was just after you left. A girl came to see me, a dark-haired, determined, very emotional sort of person. A secretary at some clinic in France, she said, and in her early twenties. She had flown in from Nantes this morning and had been given my name and the address of the office by the Lloyd’s agent.’

I sat down on the bed again, conscious of his eyes on my face. ‘Choffel’s daughter.’

He nodded, and my heart sank, remembering her words as I had left for the airport. ‘She claims you killed him. Says she’ll go to the police and accuse you of murder. Did you kill him?’

‘No. I told you—‘

He waved aside my protest. ‘But you intended to kill him, didn’t you? That’s why you went to Colchester to check what other names he used, why you went to Nantes, why you got the Lloyd’s agent to take you to see his daughter. You were tracking him down with the intention of killing him. Isn’t that true?’

I didn’t say anything. There was no point in denying it.

‘So the girl’s right.’

‘But I didn’t kill him.’

He shrugged. ‘What does that matter? He’s dead.

You had the opportunity and the intention.’ He leaned forward and gripped my arm. ‘Just so that you see it from her point of view. I’d like you to get yourself lost for a time. Sooner or later the man’s body will turn up. They’ll find a bullet in his guts and you’ll be arrested.’ And he added, ‘I don’t want you charged with murder before those tankers materialize.’

‘And when they do?’ I asked.

‘We’ll see. If they do, then part of your story will be corroborated and they’ll probably believe the rest of it, too. At least, it’s what I would expect.’ He asked me to continue then with the account I had been giving Pamela. ‘There’s one or two things towards the end I’d like to hear again.’ His reason was fairly obvious; if I was lying, then it was almost inevitable I’d slip up somewhere, small variations creeping in with each telling.

The first thing he picked me up on was Choffel’s reference to the Lavandou and what had followed. ‘His mother was ill. That’s what you said in my office. She was dying, and it was to get her the necessary treatment that he agreed to scuttle the ship. Did he tell you he was only a youngster at the time, twenty-two or twenty-three?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Twenty-two he told me.’

‘That’s what his daughter said. Twenty-two and the only ship he ever sank. Did he say that to you?’

‘No, not in those words.’

‘But he implied it?’

I nodded, the scene coming back to me, the sound: the sea and the stinking lazarette, and the dhow wallowing. ‘Only once, he said, or something like that. He was talking about the Lavandou, how the operation had gone wrong and Lloyd’s had twigged it. I remember that because it was an odd way of putting it.’

‘You didn’t tell me that. Why not?’

‘Well, it’s what you’d expect him to say, isn’t it?’

‘You said that before, when you were trying to shake the destination out of him.’

‘Not the destination,’ I corrected him. ‘I’d been asking him that, yes. But when I was shaking him, and shouting Where? at him, it was where the two tankers were going to meet I was asking him.’

‘And he didn’t know.’

‘I’m not sure he even understood. His mind was wandering, not quite delirious, but bloody near it. I think he was probably referring back to one of the ships he’d wrecked. It might even have been the Petros Jupiter. There was a Dutch salvage outfit trying to get her off the Kettle’s Bottom before he’d even come ashore.’

‘And where do you think those tankers are going to meet up?’

‘You asked me that before. I don’t know.’

‘Have you thought about it?’

‘Not really. I’ve had other things—‘

‘Well, I have. So’s Michael.’ He turned to Pamela. ‘We discussed it for quite a while after you’d left. We even got the charts sent up. If the destination is Europe—‘ He turned back to me. ‘That’s what you think, isn’t it — that the target is somewhere in Europe?

If it is, then it’s over twelve thousand miles from the Hormuz Straits to the Western Approaches of the English Channel. That’s about forty days slow steaming or just over twenty-eight at full speed; and they could meet up at countless points along the west coast of Africa.’ And he added, ‘The only alternative would be the Cape, but I am not aware the Iranians have ever shown any interest in Black Africa. So I agree with you, if there is a target, then it’s somewhere in Europe where several countries hold Iranian prisoners, the Germans and ourselves certainly.’

We discussed it for a while, then he left, taking Pamela with him. He had his car outside, and when he said he had arranged to meet her father for a drink at their club, she immediately got her coat. ‘Can I take this?’ She had picked up the typescript and was holding it gripped under her arm.

I nodded dumbly, standing there, watching, as the lawyer helped her on with her coat. ‘I’m glad you didn’t kill the man,’ he said, looking at me over his shoulder and smiling. ‘His daughter was quite positive the Lavandou was the only ship he wrecked.’

‘She was bound to say that,’ I told him angrily.

He nodded. ‘Nevertheless, I found her very convin-cing. She said he had paid dearly for that one criminal action.’

That phrase of his struck a chord, and after they had left, when I was standing at the window, staring up at the street and thinking about the way she had accepted his offer of a lift, as though coming to see me had been just an interlude and her own world so much more congenial than this bare little room and the company of a man who might at any moment be charged with murder, it came back to me. Choffel had used almost identical words — God knows I’ve paid, he had said, and he’d repeated the word paid, spitting blood. Had he really become so desperate he’d taken jobs he knew were dubious and then, when a ship was sunk, had found himself picked on, a scapegoat though he’d had no part in the actual scuttling? Could any man be that stupid, or desperate, or plain unlucky? The Olympic Ore, the Stella Rosa, the Petros Jupiter — that was three I knew about, as well as the Lav-andou, and he’d used three different names. It seemed incredible, and yet… why lie to me so urgently when he must have known he was dying?

I thought about that a lot as I sat alone over my evening meal in a crowded Chinese restaurant. Also about his daughter, how angry she had been, calling him an innocent man and spitting in my face because I didn’t believe her. If she could more or less convince a cold-blooded solicitor like Saltley…

But my mind shied away from that, remembering the Petros Jupiter and that night in the fog when my whole world had gone up in flames. And suddenly I knew where I would lie up while waiting for those tankers to re-emerge. If they wanted to arrest me, that’s where they’d have to do it, with the evidence of what he’d done there before their eyes.

I didn’t tell the police. I didn’t tell anyone. I left just as dawn was breaking, having paid my bill the night before, and was at Paddington in time to catch the inter-city express to Penzance. And when I arrived at Balkaer, there it was just as I had left it, the furniture and everything still in place, and no board up to say it was for sale. It was dark then and cold, hardly any wind and the sea in the cove below only a gentle murmur. I got the fire going, and after hanging the bedclothes round it to air, I walked back up to the Kerrisons’ and had a meal with them. They had met me at Penzance and Jean had seemed so pleased to see me I could have wept.

That night I slept on the sofa in front of the fire, unwilling to face the damp cold of the empty bedroom upstairs. The glow of the peat was warm and friendly, and though memories crowded in — even the sofa on which I lay conjured a picture of Karen, her dark eyes bright with excitement as it was knocked down to, us for next to nothing at the tail end of a farmhouse sale — they no longer depressed me. Balkaer still felt like home and I was glad I had come, glad I hadn’t put it up for sale immediately, the key still with the Kerrisons.

There was no wind that night, the air very still and the wash of the sea in the cove below muted to a whisper. The place was snug and warm and homely, my mind at peace now. Choffel was dead. That chapter of my life was closed; it was the future that mattered now.

But in the morning, when I walked up to the headland and stood staring out across the quiet sea at the Longships light and the creaming wash of the Atlantic swell breaking on the inshore rocks, the wretched man’s words came back to me — you can’t escape, can you, from either yourself or the past. I knew then that the chapter of my life that had started out there in the fog that night was not closed, would never be closed.

This was the thought that stayed with me as I tramped the clifftop paths alone or went fishing off Sennen in Andy’s boat. The weather was good for late January, cold with little wind and clear pale skies. It was on the fourth day, when I was fishing out beyond the Tribbens, that I felt ChoffePs presence most. The swell was heavier then and the boat rocking; I suppose it was that *vhich conjured up the memory of that dhow and what had happened. And his words… I found myself going over and over those rambling outbursts of his, the face pale under the stubble, the black curly hair, and the stench, the dark eyes staring. It all came back to me, everything he had said, and I began to wonder, And wondering, I began to think of his daughter — in England now and hating my guts for something I hadn’t done.

The line tugged at my hand, but I didn’t move, for I was suddenly facing the fact that if I were innocent of what she firmly believed I had done, then perhaps he was innocent, too. And I sat there, the boat rocking gently and the fish tugging at the line, as I stared out across the half-tide rocks south of the Tribbens to the surf swirling around the Kettle’s Bottom and the single mast that was all that was left above water of the Petros Jupiter. I’ve paid and paid. And now the girl was accusing me of a murder I hadn’t committed.

I pulled in the line, quickly, hand-over-hand. It was a crab of all things, a spider crab. I shook it loose and started the engine, threading my way back through the rocks to the jetty. It was lunchtime, the village deserted. I parked the boat and took the cliff path to Land’s End, walking fast, hoping exertion would kill my doubts and calm my mind.

But it didn’t. The doubts remained. In the late afternoon a bank of fog moved in from seaward. I just made it back to Sennen before it engulfed the coast. Everything was then so like that night Karen had blown herself up that I stood for a while staring seaward, the Seven Stones’ diaphone bleating faintly and the double bang from the Longships loud enough to wake the dead. The wind was sou’westerly and I was suddenly imagining those two tankers thundering up the Atlantic to burst through the rolling bank of mist, and only myself to stop them — myself alone, just as Karen had been alone.

‘Think about it,’ Saltley had said. ‘If we knew where they were meeting up…’ And he had left it at that, taking the girl’s arm and walking her down the street to where he had parked his low-slung Porsche.

And standing there, down by the lifeboat station, thinking about it, it was as though Karen were whispering to me out of the fog — find them, find them, you must find them. It was a distant foghorn, and there was another answering it. I needed an atlas, charts, the run of the pilot books for the coasts of Africa, dividers to work out distances and dates. Slow-steaming at eleven knots, that was 264 nautical miles a day. Forty days, Saltley had said, to Ushant and the English Channel. But the Aurora B would be steaming at full speed, say 400 a day, that would be thirty days, and she had left her hidey-hole by the Hormuz Straits nine days ago. Another twenty-one to go… I had turned automatically towards Andy’s cottage above the lifeboat station, something nagging at my mind, but I didn’t know what, conscious only that I had lost the better part of a week, and the distant foghorn drumming at my ears with its mournful sense of urgency.

It was Rose who answered the door. Andy wasn’t there and they didn’t have a world atlas. But she gave me a cup of tea and after leaving me for a while returned with the Digest World Atlas borrowed from a retired lighthouse keeper a few doors away, a man, she said, who had never been outside of British waters but liked to visualize where all the ships passing him had come from. I opened it first at the geo-physical maps of Africa. There were two of them right at the end of Section One, and on both coasts there were vast blanks between the names of ports and coastal towns. The east coast I knew. The seas were big in the monsoons, the currents tricky, and there was a lot of shipping. The Seychelles and Mauritius were too populated, too full of package tours, and the islands closer to Madagascar, like Aldabra and the. Comores Archipelago, too likely to be overflown, the whole area liable to naval surveillance.

In any case, I thought the rendezvous would have been planned much nearer to the target, and if that were Europe then it must be somewhere on the west coast. I turned then to the main maps, which were on a larger scale of 197 miles to the inch, staring idly at the offshore colouring, where the green of the open Atlantic shaded to white as the continental shelf tilted upwards to the coastal shallows. I was beginning to feel sleepy, for we were in the kitchen with the top of the old-fashioned range red-hot, the atmosphere overwhelming after the cold and the fog outside. Rose poured me another cup of tea from the pot brewing on the hob. Tristan da Cunha, St Helena, Ascension — those were all too far away. But on the next page, the one for North and West Africa, there was Hierro, Gomera, Palma, all out-islands of the Canaries and on the direct route. The Selvagens, too, and the Desertas, and Porto Santo off Madeira. Of these, only the Selvagens, perhaps the Desertas, could be regarded as possibles, the others being too well populated.

The tea was strong and very sweet, and I sat there wrapped in the cosy warmth of that hot little kitchen, my head nodding as my mind groped for something I knew was there but could not find. Andy came back and I stayed on and had a meal with them. By the time I left, the fog had cleared and it was very close to freezing, the stars bright as diamonds overhead and the flash of the Longships and other lights further away, the glimmer of ships rounding Land’s End, all seemingly magnified in the startling clarity.

Next morning I went up to the main road at first light and hitched a ride in a builder’s van going to Penzance. From there I got the train to Falmouth. I needed charts now and a look at the Admiralty pilots for Africa, my mind still groping for that elusive thought that lurked somewhere in my subconscious, logic suggesting that it was more probably a rendezvous well offshore, some fixed position clear of all shipping lanes.

The first vessel I tried when I got to the harbour was a general cargo ship, but she was on a regular run to the Maritimes, Halifax mainly, and had no use for African charts. The mate indicated a yacht berthed alongside one of the tugs at the inner end of the breakwater. ‘Round-the-worlder,’ he said. ‘Came in last night from the Cape Verdes. He’ll have charts for that part of the African coast.’ And he went back to the job I used to do, checking the cargo coming out of the hold.

The yacht was the Ocean Brigand. She flew a burgee with a black Maltese cross with a yellow crown on a white background and a red fly. Her ensign was blue and she had the letters RCC below her name on the stern. She was wood, her brightwork worn by salt and sun so that in places bare wood showed through the varnish, and her decks were a litter of ropes and sails and oilskins drying in the cold wind. The skipper, who was also the owner, was small and grey-haired with a smile that crinkled the wind-lines at the corners of his eyes. He had charts for most of the world, the pilots, too. ‘A bit out of date, some of them,’ he said. ‘But they cost a fortune now.’

He sat me down at the chart table with a Bacardi and lime and left me to find what I wanted. ‘Still some clearing up to do.’ He smiled wearily. ‘We had it a bit rugged off Finisterre and the Bay was mostly between seven and nine. Silly time of year really to return to England, but my wife hasn’t been too good. Packed her off to hospital this morning.’

I had never been on a real ocean-going yacht before, the chart table so small, tucked in on the starb’d side opposite the galley, yet everything I’d ever needed in the way of navigation was there — except radar. He hadn’t got radar, or Decca nav. And there was no gyro compass. But everything else, including VHF and single-sideband radio.

I went through all his charts that showed any part of Africa and in the end I was no better off than I had been with the lighthouse keeper’s atlas. It had to be the last stretch, even as far north as the Bay of Biscay, but more likely somewhere in the neighbourhood of those Spanish and Portuguese islands off the coast of Spanish Sahara and Morocco. And of these the Desertas and the Seivagens, being without water and therefore more or less deserted, seemed most likely. But even then, with the pilot book open in front of me, I didn’t see it. Like the chart, it referred to both groups of islands by their Portuguese names. There was no indication that there might be an anglicized version of the name Selvagen.

A pair of sea boots appeared in the companionway to my right and the owner leaned his head down, peering over my shoulder. ‘Ah; I see you’re reading up on the Madeira-Canaries passage, but I doubt whether your friends would have put into either the Desertas or the Seivagens. No water, no safe anchorage and both of them bloody inhospitable groups of islands by all accounts. Never been there myself, but our vice-commodore now, he went to the Selvagens I seem to remember — 1980, I think…’ He went past me into the saloon, putting on a pair of half-spectacles and peering along a battened-in shelf of books. ‘Here we are.’ He handed me a carefully plastic-wrapped copy of the Royal Cruising Club Journal. ‘There’s a glimpse of what he calls the Salvage Islands. A little more descriptive than the Pilot.’

It was a short piece, barely two pages, but it was the title that caught and held my attention — A Look at the Salvage Islands. ‘We sailed two days ago from Funchal…’ Averaging probably no more than 100 miles a day, that was in line with the Pilot which gave the distance from the southern-most of the Desertas to Selvagem Grande as 135 miles. The names were the same, too, except for the m where it was singular — Selvagem Grande and Selvagem Pequena and, so that there should be no doubt whatsoever, he had written, ‘I had always hoped to visit the Salvage (Salvagen) Islands.’ He must have got the English name from somewhere and my guess was the Navy — at some time in the distant past British sailors had anglicized it and called them the Salvage Islands, just as they had called He d’Ouessant off the Brittany coast of France Ushant. And looking at the Atlantic Ocean Chart 2127 I saw that there the group were named the Salvagen Is — an a instead of an e.

Was that what Choffel had meant when he talked of salvage? Was it the Salvagen Islands he had been referring to?

There was Selvagem Grande and Selvagem Pequena, and an even smaller one called Fora. And I remembered that a mate I had served under had once described them to me as we were steaming between Gibraltar and Freetown — ‘Spooky,’ he had said of the smaller Selvagem. ‘The most godforsaken spooky bit of a volcanic island I ever saw.’ And reading the Journal, here was this yachtsman’s daughter using almost the same words — ‘Spooksville,’ she had called it, and there had been the wrecked hulk of a supertanker hung on the rocks, her father claiming he had never seen a more dreadful place.

‘They were on their way to the Caribbean,’ the owner said. ‘Just two of them on the leg south from Madeira to the Canaries.’ He gave me another drink, chatting to me for a while. Then a doctor arrived and I left him to the sad business of finding out what was wrong with his wife. There had been just the two of them and it was the finish of their second circumnavigation.

I phoned Forthright’s from the station, making it a personal call on reverse charges. Fortunately Saltley was in, but when I told him about the Salvage Islands, be said he and Stewart had already considered that possibility and had read the piece in the RCC Journal. In fact, they had chartered a small plane out of Madeira to make a recce of the islands and he had received the pilot’s report that morning. The only unker anywhere near the islands was the wreck stranded on the rocks of Selvagem Pequena. ‘Pity you’ve no date for the rendezvous. It means somebody keeping watch out there.’ He checked that I was at Balkaer and said he’d be in touch when he’d spoken to Michael Stewart again.

It was almost dark when I got back to the cottage and there was a note pinned to the door. It was in Jean’s handwriting. Saltley had phoned and it was urgent. I trudged back up the hill and she handed me the message without a word. I was to take the next ferry out of Plymouth for Roscoff in Brittany and then make my way to Gibraltar via Tangier. ‘At Gibraltar he says you can hide up on a yacht called Prospero which you’ll find berthed in the marina.’ And Jean added, ‘It’s important, Trevor.’ Her hand was on my arm, her face, staring up at me, very serious. ‘Jimmy will drive you there tonight.’

‘What’s happened,’ I asked. ‘What else did he say?’

‘He didn’t want you to take any chances. That’s what he said. It’s just possible there’ll be a warrant issued for your arrest. And it was on the radio at lunchtime.’

‘On the radio?’ I stared at her.

‘Yes, an interview with Guinevere Choffel. She gave the whole story, all the ships her father had sailed in, including the Petros Jupiter — but differently to what you told us. She made him out a poor, unfortunate man trying to earn a living at sea and always being taken advantage of. Then, right at the end, she accused you of murdering him. She gave your name and then said she’d be going to the police right after the programme. It was an extraordinary statement to come over the radio. They cut her off then, of course. But the interview was live, so nothing they could do about it.’

I was in their sitting-room, leaning against the door, and I reached into my pocket for a cigarette. I felt suddenly as though the world of black and white had been turned upside down, Choffel declared innocent and myself the villain now. I offered her the packet and she shook her head. ‘Vengeance,’ she said, a look of sadness that made her gipsy features suddenly older. ‘That’s Old Testament stuff.’

‘I didn’t kill him.’ The match flared, the flame trembling slightly as I lit my cigarette.

‘It was in your mind.’

She didn’t need to remind me. I half closed my eyes, inhaling the stale duty-free nicotine, thinking of Choffel. She didn’t have to start lecturing me, not now when I was being hounded out of the country. I wondered how he had felt, making up stories nobody believed. And then to seize that dhow just because I was on board the tanker, confronting him with his guilt. Did that make me responsible for the bullet in his guts?

‘Would you like me to try and see her?’

‘What the hell good would that do?’

She shrugged, shaking her head. ‘I don’t know.’ There were tears in her eyes. ‘I just thought it might be worth a try. If I could get her to come down here. If she saw where the Petros Jupiter had been wrecked, what a threat it had been to all our lives — if I told her, woman-to-woman, the sort of person Karen was, what she had done and why… Perhaps she’d understand then. Don’t you think she would?’ Her voice faltered and she turned away. ‘I’ll go and see what Jimmy’s up to,’ she said. ‘You phone Plymouth and find out when the ferry leaves.’

In fact, there wasn’t one until noon next day so I had a last night at Balkaer and took the early train from Penzance. I felt very lost after saying goodbye to the Kerrisons, feeling I would never see them again, or Balkaer, and that I was now a sort of pariah condemned like Choffel to roam the world under any name but my own, always looking over my shoulder, half afraid of my own shadow. Even when I had boarded the ferry, my temporary papers given no more than a cursory glance, I positioned myself at the rail so that I could see everyone who boarded the ship, until at last the gangway was pulled clear and we sailed.

It was the same when I got to France. There was no trouble on landing, yet I still glanced nervously over my shoulder at the sound of footsteps, watchful and suspicious of anybody going in the same direction as myself. It was all in my imagination, of course, and a psychiatrist would probably have said I was developing a persecution mania, but it was real enough to me at the time, that sense of being watched. And so was the stupidity of it, the sheer craziness of it all. It was like a nightmare what was happening. A man wrecks a ship, your wife kills herself trying to burn up the oil spill he’s caused and you go after him — and from that simple, natural act, the whole thing blows up in your face, the man dead and his daughter accusing you of killing him. And nobody to prove you innocent.

Just as there had been nobody to prove him innocent. That thought was in my mind, too.

How quickly you can be brainwashed, by changing circumstances or by the behaviour of other human beings. How strangely vulnerable is the human mind when locked in on itself, alone with nobody to act as a sounding box, nobody to say you’re right — right in thinking he’d sunk those ships, right to believe he was the cause of Karen’s death, right to believe in retribution.

Alone, the nagging doubt remained. An eye for an eye? The Old Testament, Jean had said, and even she hadn’t thought I was right, insisting that I do what Saltley said. The best friends a man could hope for and they had not only helped me run away, but had insisted I had no alternative. A lawyer, the media, two such good friends — and I hadn’t killed him. The stupid little bitch had got it wrong, leaping to conclusions. I could have thrown her father overboard. I could have taken him back to the tanker. Instead, I had cleaned him up, given him water… I was going over and over it in my mind all the way to Tangier, and still that sense of unreality. I couldn’t believe it, and at the same time that feeling of being watched, expecting some anonymous individual representing Interpol or some other Establishment organization to pick me up at any moment.

I reached Tangier and nobody stopped me. There was a levanter blowing through the Straits and it was rough crossing over to the Rock, Arabs and Gibraltar-ians all being sick amongst a heaped-up mass of baggage. Nobody bothered about me. There was no policeman waiting for me on the jetty at Gibraltar. I got a water taxi and went round to the marina, the top of the Rock shrouded in mist and a drizzle of rain starting to fall.

Prospero, when I found her, was about fifty feet long, broad-beamed with a broad stern and a sharp bow. She looked like a huge plastic and chrome dart with a metal mast against which the halyards flapped unceasingly in the wind, adding to the jingling metallic symphony of sound that rattled across the marina. Terylene ropes lay in tangled confusion, the cockpit floorboards up, the wheel linkage in pieces. A man in blue shorts and a blue sweater was working on what looked like a self-steering gear. He turned at my hail and came aft. ‘You’re Trevor Rodin, are you?’ He had broad open features with a wide smile. ‘I had a telex this morning to expect you. I’m Mark Stewart, Pamela’s brother.’

He didn’t need to tell me that. They were very alike. He took me below into the wood-trimmed saloon and poured me a drink. ‘Boat’s a bit of a mess at the moment, but with luck we’ll get away by the end of the week.’ They had originally been planning to make Malta in time for the Middle Sea Race, but his father hadn’t been able to get away and Saltley, who usually navigated for them, was tied up on a case he felt he couldn’t leave. ‘So we’re still here,’ he said. ‘Lucky really.’ And he added, ‘Pamela and the old

Salt will be here tomorrow. There’s Toni Bartello, a Gibraltarian pal of mine, you and me. That’s the lot. Anyway, going south we shouldn’t get anything much above seven or eight, so it should be all right. Pam’s not so good on the foredeck — not so good as a man, I mean — but she’s bloody good on the helm, and she’ll stay there just about for ever, no matter what’s coming aboard.’

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘Didn’t Salt brief you?’

I shook my head. No point in telling him I’d been offered the boat as a hide-out for a fortnight or so until somebody somewhere sighted those tankers.

He took me over to the chart table and from the top drawer produced Chart No. 4104, Lisbon to Freetown. He spread it out. ‘There. That’s where we’re going.’ He reached over, putting the tip of his forefinger on the Selvagen Islands.

We finished our drink then and he took me on a tour of the ship. But I didn’t take much of it in. I was thinking of the Selvagens, the bleakness of that description I’d read, wondering what it would be like hanging round the islands in the depth of winter waiting for two tankers which might never appear.