The Wreck of the Mary Deare

CHAPTER ONE

I was tired and very cold; a little scared, too. The red and green navigation lights cast a weird glow over the sails. Beyond was nothing, a void of utter darkness in which the sea made little rushing noises. I eased my cramped legs, sucking on a piece of barley sugar. Above me the sails swung in a ghostly arc, slatting back and forth as Sea Witch rolled and plunged. There was scarcely wind enough to move the boat through the water, yet the swell kicked up by the March gales ran as strong as ever and my numbed brain was conscious all the time that this was only a lull. The weather forecast at six o'clock had been ominous. Winds of gale force were reported imminent in sea areas Rockall, Shannon, Sole and Finisterre. Beyond the binnacle light the shadowy outline of the boat stretched ahead of me, merging into the clammy blackness of the night. I had dreamed of this moment so often. But it was March and now, after fifteen hours at sea in the Channel, the excitement of owning our own boat was gone, eaten up by the cold. The glimmer of a breaking wave appeared out of the darkness and slapped against the counter, flinging spray in my face and sidling off into the blackness astern with a hiss of white water. God! It was cold! Cold and clammy — and not a star anywhere.

The door of the charthouse slammed back to give me a glimpse of the lit saloon and against it loomed Mike Duncan's oilskin-padded bulk, holding a steaming mug in either hand. The door slammed to again, shutting out the lit world below, and the darkness and the sea crowded in again. 'Soup?' Mike's cheerful, freckled face appeared abruptly out of the night, hanging disembodied in the light from the binnacle. He smiled at me from the folds of his balaclava as he handed me a mug. 'Nice and fresh up here after the galley,' he said. And then the smile was wiped from his face. 'What the hell's that?' He was staring past my left shoulder, staring at something astern of us on the port quarter. 'Can't be the moon, can it?'

I swung round. A cold, green translucence showed at the edge of visibility, a sort of spectral light that made me catch my breath in sudden panic with all the old seamen's tales of weird and frightful things seen at sea rushing through my mind.

The light grew steadily brighter, phosphorescent and unearthly — a ghastly brilliance like a bloated glow-worm. And then suddenly it condensed and hardened into a green pin-point, and I yelled at Mike: 'The Aldis — quick!' It was the starboard navigation light of a big steamer, and it was bearing straight down on us. Her deck lights were appearing now, misted and yellow; and gently, like the muffled beat of a tom-tom, the sound of her engines reached out to us in a low, pulsating throb.

The beam of the Aldis lamp stabbed the night, blinding us with the reflected glare from a thick blanket of mist that engulfed us. It was a sea mist that had crept up on me in the dark without my knowing it. The white of a bow wave showed dimly in the brilliance, and then the shadowy outline of the bows themselves took shape. In an instant I could see the whole for'ard half of the ship. It was like a ghost ship emerging out of the mist, and the blunt bows were already towering over us as I swung the wheel.

It seemed an age that I watched Sea Witch turn, waiting for the jib to fill on the other tack and bring her head round, and all the time I could hear the surge of that bow wave coming nearer. 'She's going to hit us! Christ! She's going to hit us!' I can still hear Mike's cry, high and strident in the night. He was blinking the Aldis, directing the beam straight at her bridge. The whole superstructure was lit up, the light reflecting back in flashes from the glass windows. And the towering mass of the steamer kept on coming, thundering down on us at a good eight knots without a check, without any alteration of course.

The main and mizzen booms swung over with a crash. The jib was aback now. I left it like that for a moment, watching her head pay off. Every detail of Sea Witch, from the tip of her long bowsprit to the top of her mainmast, was lit by the green glow of the steamer's starboard light now high above us. I let go the port jib sheet, hauling in on the starboard sheet, saw the sail fill, and then Mike screamed, 'Look out! Hold on!' There was a great roaring sound and a wall of white water hit us. It swept over the cockpit, lifting me out of my seat, tugging at my grip on the wheel. The sails swung in a crazy arc; they swung so far that the boom and part of the mainsail were buried for a moment in the back of a wave whilst tons of water spilled across our decks; and close alongside the steamer slid by like a cliff.

Slowly Sea Witch righted herself as the water poured off her in a white foam. I still had hold of the wheel and Mike was clutching the backstay runner, shouting obscenities at the top of his voice. His words came to me as a frail sound against the solid thumping of the ship's engines. And then another sound emerged out of the night — the steady thrashing of a propeller partly clear of the water.

I shouted to Mike, but he had already realised the danger and had switched the Aldis on again. Its brilliant light showed us plates pitted deep with rust and a weed-grown Plimsoll mark high above the water. Then the plates curved up to the stern and we could see the propeller blades slashing at the waves, thumping the water into a swirling froth. Sea Witch trembled, sails slack. Then she slid off the back of a wave into that mill race and the blades were whirling close along our port side, churning white water over the cabin top, flinging it up into the mainsail.

It was like that for a moment and then they flailed off into the darkness beyond the bowsprit and we were left pitching in the broken water of the ship's wake. The Aldis beam picked out her name — MARY DEARE — Southampton. We stared dazedly at her rust-streaked lettering while the stern became shadowy and then vanished abruptly. Only the beat of her engines remained then, throbbing gently and gradually dying away into the night. A faint smell of burning lingered on for a while in the damp air. 'Bastards!' Mike shouted, suddenly finding his voice. 'Bastards!' He kept on repeating the word.

The door of the charthouse slid back, and a figure emerged. It was Hal. 'Are you boys all right?' His voice — a little too calm, a little too cheerful — shook slightly.

'Didn't you see what happened?' Mike cried.

'Yes, I saw,' he replied.

'They must have seen us. I was shining the Aldis straight at the bridge. If they'd been keeping a lookout—'

'I don't think they were keeping a lookout. In fact, I don't think there was anybody on the bridge.' It was said so quietly that for a moment I didn't realise the implication.

'How do you mean — nobody on the bridge?' I asked.

He came out on to the deck then. 'It was just before the bow wave hit us. I knew something was wrong and I'd got as far as the charthouse. I found myself looking out through the window along the beam of the Aldis lamp. It was shining right on to the bridge. I don't think there was anybody there. I couldn't see anybody.'

'But good God!' I said. 'Do you realise what you're saying?'

'Yes, of course, I do.' His tone was peremptory, a little military. 'It's odd, isn't it?'

He wasn't the sort of man to make up a thing like that. H. A. Lowden — Hal to all his friends — was an ex-gunner, a colonel retired, who spent most of the summer months ocean racing. He had a lot of experience of the sea.

'Do you mean to say you think there was nobody in control of that ship?' Mike's tone was incredulous.

'I don't know,' Hal answered. 'It seems incredible. But all I can say is that I had a clear view of the interior of the bridge for an instant and, as far as I could see, there was nobody there.'

We didn't say anything for a moment. I think we were all too astonished. The idea of a big ship ploughing her way through the rock-infested seas so close to the French-coast without anybody at the helm… It was absurd.

Mike's voice, suddenly practical, broke the silence. 'What happened to those mugs of soup?' The beam of the Aldis lamp clicked on, revealing the mugs lying in a foot of water at the bottom of the cockpit. 'I'd better go and make another brew.' And then to Hal who was standing, half-dressed, his body braced against the charthouse: 'What about you, Colonel? You'd like some soup, wouldn't you?'

Hal nodded. 'I never refuse an offer of soup.' He watched Mike until he had gone below and then he turned to me. 'I don't mind admitting it now that we're alone,' he said, 'but that was a very unpleasant moment. How did we come to be right across her bows like that?'

I explained that the ship had been down-wind from us and we hadn't heard the beat of her engines. 'The first we saw of her was the green of her starboard navigation light coming at us out of the mist.'

'No fog signal?'

'We didn't hear it, anyway.'

'Odd!' He stood for a moment, his long body outlined against the port light, and then he came aft and seated himself beside me on the cockpit coaming. 'Had a look at the barometer during your watch?' he asked.

'No,' I said. 'What's it doing?'

'Going down.' He had his long arms wrapped round his body, hugging his seaman's jersey. 'Dropped quite a bit since I went below.' He hesitated and then said, 'You know, this gale could come up on us pretty quickly.' I didn't say anything and he pulled his pipe out and began to suck on it. 'I tell you frankly, John, I don't like it.' The quietness of his voice added strength to his opinion. 'If the forecast turns out right and the wind backs north-westerly, then we'll be on a lee shore. I don't like gales and I don't like lee shores, particularly when the lee shore is the Channel Islands.'

I thought he wanted me to put back to the French coast and I didn't say anything; just sat there staring at the compass card, feeling obstinate and a little scared.

'It's a pity about the kicker,' he murmured. 'If the kicker hadn't packed up—'

'Why bring that up?' It was the only thing that had gone wrong with the boat. 'You've always said you despise engines.'

His blue eyes, caught in the light of the binnacle, stared at me fixedly. 'I was only going to say,' he put in mildly, 'that if the kicker hadn't packed up we'd be halfway across the Channel by now and the situation would be entirely different.'

'Well, I'm not putting back.'

He took his pipe out of his mouth as though to say something and then put it back and sat there, staring at me with those unwinking blue eyes of his.

'The real trouble is that you're not used to sailing in a boat that hasn't been kept up to ocean racing pitch.' I hadn't meant to say that, but I was angry and my nerves were still tense from the steamer incident.

An awkward silence fell between us. At length he stopped sucking on his pipe. 'It's only that I like to arrive,' he said quietly. 'The rigging is rusty, the ropes rotten and the sails—'

'We went over all that in Morlaix,' I said tersely. 'Plenty of yachts cross the Channel in worse shape than Sea Witch.'

'Not in March with a gale warning. And not without an engine.' He got up and went for'ard as far as the mast, bending down and hauling at something.

There was the sound of splintering wood and then he came back and tossed a section of the bulwarks into the cockpit at my feet. 'The bow wave did that.' He sat down beside me again. 'It isn't good enough, John. The boat hasn't been surveyed and for all you know the hull may be as rotten as the gear after lying for two years on a French mud bank.'

'The hull's all right,' I told him. I was calmer now. 'There are a couple of planks to be replaced and she needs restopping. But that's all. I went over every inch of her with a knife before I bought her. The wood is absolutely sound.'

'And what about the fastenings?' His right eyebrow lifted slightly. 'Only a surveyor could tell you whether the fastenings—'

'I told you, I'm having her surveyed as soon as we reach Lymington.'

'Yes, but that doesn't help us now. If this gale comes up on us suddenly… I'm a prudent mariner,' he added. 'I like the sea, but it's not a creature I want to take liberties with.'

'Well, I can't afford to be prudent,' I said. 'Not right now.'

Mike and I had just formed a small salvage company and every day we delayed getting the boat to England for conversion was a day lost out of our diving season. He knew that.

'I'm only suggesting you steer a point off your direct course,' he said. 'Close-hauled we can just about lay for Hanois on Guernsey Island. We'll then II be in a position to take advantage of the wind when it backs and run for shelter to Peter Port.'

Of course… I rubbed my hand over my eyes. I should have known what he was driving at. But I was tired and the steamer incident had left me badly shaken. It was queer the way the vessel had sailed right through us like that.

'It won't help your salvage venture if you smash the boat up.' Hal's voice cut across my thoughts. He had taken my silence for refusal. 'Apart from the gear, we're not very strongly crewed.'

That was true enough. There were only the three of us. The fourth member of the crew, Ian Baird, had been sea-sick from the time we had left Morlaix. And she was a biggish boat for three to handle — a forty-tonner. 'Very well,' I said. 'We'll head for Guernsey.'

He nodded as though he'd known it all along. 'You'll need to steer North 65 degrees East then.'

I turned the wheel, giving her starboard helm, and watched the compass card swing to the new course. He must have been working out the course in the charthouse just before the steamer came up on us. 'I take it you worked out the distance, too?'

'Fifty-four miles. And at this rate,' he added, 'it'll be daylight long before we get there.'

An uneasy silence settled between us. I could hear him sucking at his empty pipe, but I kept my eyes on the compass and didn't look at him. Damn it, I should have thought of Peter Port for myself! But there'd been so much to do at Morlaix getting the boat ready… I'd just about worked myself to a standstill before ever we put to sea.

'That ship.' His voice came out of the darkness at my side, a little hesitant, bridging the gap of my silence. 'Damned queer,' he murmured. 'You know, if there really was nobody on board…' He checked and then added, half-jokingly, That would have been a piece of salvage that would have set you up for life.' I thought I sensed a serious note underlying his words, but when I glanced at him he shrugged his shoulders and laughed. 'Well, I think I'll turn in again now.' He got up and his 'good night' floated back to me from the dark gap of the charthouse.

Shortly afterwards Mike brought me a mug of hot soup. He stayed and talked to me whilst I drank it, speculating wildly about the Mary Deare. Then he, too, turned in and the blackness of the night closed round me. Could there really have been nobody on the bridge? It was too fantastic — an empty ship driving pell mell up the Channel. And yet, cold and alone, with the pale glimmer of the sails swooping above me and the dismal dripping of mist condensed on the canvas, anything seemed possible.

At three Hal relieved me and for two hours I slept, dreaming of blunt, rusted bows hanging over us, toppling slowly, everlastingly. I woke in a panic, cold with sweat, and lay for a moment thinking about what Hal had said. It would be queer if we salvaged a ship, just like that, before we'd even… But I was asleep again before the idea had more than flickered through my mind. And in an instant I was being shaken and was stumbling out to the helm in the brain-numbing hour before the dawn, all recollection of the Mary Deare blurred and hazed by the bitter cold.

Daylight came slowly, a reluctant dawn that showed a drab, sullen sea heaving gently, the steepness flattened out of the swell. The wind was northerly now, but still light; and some time during the night we had gone over on to the other tack.

At ten to seven Hal and I were in the charthouse for the weather report. It started with gale warnings for the western approaches of the Channel; the forecast for our own area of Portland was: Wind light, northerly at first, backing north-westerly later and increasing strong to gale. Hal glanced at me, but said nothing. There was no need. I checked our position and then gave Mike the course to steer for Peter Port.

It was a queer morning. There was a lot of scud about and by the time we had finished breakfast it was moving across the sky quite fast. Yet at sea level there was scarcely any wind so that, with full main and mizzen set and the big yankee jib, we were creeping through the water at a bare three knots, rolling sluggishly. There was still a mist of sorts and visibility wasn't much more than two miles.

We didn't talk much. I think we were all three of us too conscious of the sea's menace. Peter Port was still thirty miles away. The silence and the lack of wind was oppressive. 'I'll go and check our position again,' I said. Hal nodded as though the thought had been in his mind, too.

But poring over the chart didn't help. As far as I could tell we were six miles north-north-west of the Roches Douvres, that huddle of rocks and submerged reefs that is the western outpost of the Channel Islands. But I couldn't be certain; my dead reckoning depended too much on tide and leeway.

And then Mike knocked the bottom out of my calculations. 'There's a rock about two points on the starboard bow,' he called to me. 'A big one sticking up out of the water.'

I grabbed the glasses and flung out of the chart-house. 'Where?' My mouth was suddenly harsh and dry. If it were the Roches Douvres, then we must have been set down a good deal farther than I thought. And it couldn't be anything else; it was all open sea between Roches Douvres and Guernsey. 'Where?' I repeated.

'Over there!' Mike was pointing.

I screwed up my eyes. But I couldn't see anything. The clouds had thinned momentarily and a queer sun-glow was reflected on the oily surface of the sea, merging it with the moisture-laden atmosphere. There was no horizon; at the edge of visibility sea and air became one. I searched through the glasses. 'I can't see it,' I said. 'How far away?'

'I don't know. I've lost it now. But it wasn't more than a mile.'

'You're sure it was a rock?'

'Yes, I think so. What else could it be?' He was staring into the distance, his eyes narrowed against the luminous glare of the haze. 'It was a big rock with some sort of tower or pinnacle in the middle of it.'

The Roches Douvres light! I glanced at Hal seated behind the wheel. 'We'd better alter course,' I said. The tide is setting us down at about two knots.' My voice sounded tense. If it was the Roches Douvres and the wind fell any lighter, we could be swept right down on to the reef.

He nodded and swung the wheel. 'That would put you out by five miles in your dead reckoning.'

'Yes.'

He frowned. He had taken his sou'wester off and his grey hair, standing on end, gave his face a surprised, puckish look. 'I think you're under-rating yourself as a navigator, but you're the boss. How much do you want me to bear up?'

'Two points at least.'

'There's an old saying,' he murmured: 'The prudent mariner, when in doubt, should assume his dead reckoning to be correct.' He looked at me with a quizzical lift to his bushy eyebrows. 'We don't want to miss Guernsey, you know.'

A mood of indecision took hold of me. Maybe it was just the strain of the long night, but I wasn't sure what to do for the best. 'Did you see it?' I asked him.

'No.'

I turned to Mike and asked him again whether he was sure it was rock he'd seen.

'You can't be sure of anything in this light.'

'But you definitely saw something?'

'Yes. I'm certain of that. And I think it had some sort of a tower on it.'

A gleam of watery sunlight filtered through the damp atmosphere, giving a furtive brightness to the cockpit. 'Then it must be the Roches Douvres,' I murmured.

'Look!' Mike cried. 'There it is — over there.'

I followed the line of his outstretched arm. On the edge of visibility, lit by the sun's pale gleam, was the outline of a flatfish rock with a light tower in the middle. I had the glasses on it immediately, but it was no more than a vague, misty shape — a reddish tint glimmering through the golden haze. I dived into the charthouse and snatched up the chart, staring at the shape of the Roches Douvres reef. It marked drying rock outcrops for a full mile north-west of the 92ft light tower. We must be right on the fringe of those outcrops. 'Steer north,' I shouted to Hal, 'and sail her clear just as fast as you can.'

'Aye, aye, skipper.' He swung the wheel, calling to Mike to trim the sheets. He was looking over his shoulder at the Roches Douvres light as I came out of the charthouse. 'You know,' he said, 'there's something odd here. I've never actually seen the Roches Douvres, but I know the Channel Islands pretty well and I've never seen any rock that showed up red like that.'

I steadied myself against the charthouse and focused the glasses on it again. The gleam of sunlight had become more positive. Visibility was improving all the time. I saw it clearly then and I was almost laughing with relief. 'It's not a rock,' I said. 'It's a ship.' There was no doubt about it now. The rusty hull was no longer blurred, but stood out clear and sharp, and what I had taken to be a light tower was its single funnel.

We were all of us laughing with the sense of relief as we turned back on to the course. 'Hove-to by the look of it,' Mike said as he stopped hauling in on the main-sheet and began to coil it down.

It certainly looked like it, for now that we were back on course her position didn't seem to have altered at all. She was lying broadside on to us as though held there by the wind and, as we closed with her and her outline became clearer, I could see that she was stationary, wallowing in the swell. Our course would leave her about half a mile to starboard. I reached for the glasses. There was something about the ship… something about her shape and her rusty hull and the way she seemed a little down at the bows.

'Probably pumping out her bilges,' Hal said, his voice hesitant as though he, too, were puzzled.

I focused the glasses and the outline of the vessel leaped towards me. She was an old boat with straight bows and a clean sweep to her sheer. She had an old-fashioned counter stern, an untidy clutter of derricks round her masts, and too much superstructure. Her single smoke stack, like her masts, was almost vertical. At one time she had been painted black, but now she had a rusty, uncared-for look. There was a sort of lifelessness about her that held me with the glasses to my eyes. And then I saw the lifeboat. 'Steer straight for her, will you, Hal,' I said.

'Anything wrong?' he asked, reacting immediately to the note of urgency in my voice.

'Yes. One of the lifeboats is hanging vertically from its davits.' It was more than that. The other davits were empty. I passed him the glasses. 'Take a look at the for'ard davits,' I told him and my voice trembled slightly, the birth of a strange feeling of excitement.

Soon we could see the empty davits with the naked eye and the single lifeboat hanging from the falls. 'Looks deserted,' Mike said. 'And she's quite a bit down by the bows. Do you think—' He left the sentence unfinished. The same thought was in all our minds.

We came down on her amidships. The name at her bows was so broken up with rust streaks that we couldn't read it. Close-to she looked in wretched shape. Her rusty bow plates were out of true, her superstructure was damaged and she was definitely down by the bows, her stern standing high so that we could see the top of her screw. A festoon of wires hung from her mast derricks. She was a cargo ship and she looked as though she'd taken a hell of a hammering.

We went about within a cable's length of her and I hailed her through our megaphone. My voice lost itself in the silence of the sea. There was no answer. The only sound was the sloshing of the swell against her sides. We ran down on her quickly then, Hal steering to pass close under her stern. I think we were all of us watching for her name. And then suddenly there it was in rust-streaked lettering high above our heads just as it had been during the night: MARY DEARE — Southampton.

She was quite a big boat, at least 6,000 tons. Abandoned like that she should have had a salvage tug in attendance, ships standing by. But there wasn't another vessel in sight. She was alone and lifeless within twenty miles of the French coast. I glanced up along her starboard side as we came out from under her stern. Both davits were empty, the lifeboats gone.

'You were right then,' Mike said, turning to Hal, his voice tense. 'There wasn't anybody on the bridge last night.'

We stared up at her in silence as we slipped away from her, awed by the sense of mystery. The rope falls hung forlornly from the empty davits. A thin trailer of smoke emerged incongruously from her funnel. That was the only sign of life. 'They must have abandoned ship just before they nearly ran us down,' I said.

'But she was steaming at full ahead,' Hal said, speaking more to himself than to us. 'You don't abandon ship with the engines going full ahead. And why didn't she radio for help?'

I was thinking of what Hal had said half-jokingly last night. If there was really nobody on board… I stood there, my hands braced on the guardrail, my body tense as I stared at her, searching for some sign of life. But there was nothing; nothing but that thin wisp of smoke trailing from the funnel. Salvage! A ship of 6,000 tons, drifting and abandoned. It was unbelievable. And if we could bring her into port under her own steam… I turned to Hal. 'Do you think you could lay Sea Witch alongside her, close enough for me to get hold of one of those falls?'

'Don't be a fool,' he said. 'There's still quite a swell running. You may damage the boat, and if this gale-'

But I was in no mood for caution now. 'Ready about!' I called. And then, 'Lee ho!' We came about on to the other tack and I sent Mike below to get Ian out of his bunk. 'We'll jog up to her close-hauled,' I told Hal. 'I'll jump for the ropes as you go about.'

'It's crazy,' he said. 'You've a hell of a height to climb to the deck. And supposing the wind pipes up. I may not be able to get you—'

'Oh, to hell with the wind!' I cried. 'Do you think I'm going to pass up a chance like this? Whatever happened to the poor devils who abandoned her, this is the chance of a lifetime for Mike and myself.'

He stared at me for a moment, and then he nodded. 'Okay. It's your boat.' We were headed back for the ship now. 'When we get under her lee,' Hal said, 'we'll be pretty well blanketed. I may have some difficulty—' He stopped there and glanced up at the burgee.

I had done the same, for there was a different feel about the boat now. She was surging along with a noise of water from her bows and spray wetting the foredeck. The burgee was streamed out to starboard.

II I checked with the compass. 'You'll have no difficulty standing off from her,' I said. 'The wind's northwesterly now.'

He nodded, his eyes lifting to the sails. 'You're still determined to go on board?'

'Yes.'

'Well, you'd better not stay long. There's some weight in the wind now.'

'I'll be as quick as I can,' I said. 'If you want to recall me in a hurry signal on the fog-horn.' We were doing all of four knots now and the ship was coming up fast. I went to the charthouse door and yelled to Mike. He came almost immediately. Ian was behind him, white-faced and still sweaty-looking from his bunk. I gave him the boat-hook and told him to stand by in the bows ready to shove off. 'We'll go about just before we get to her. That'll take the way off her and you'll be all set to stand-off again.' I was stripping off my oilskins. Already the rusty sides of the Mary Deare were towering above us. It looked a hell of a height to climb. 'Ready about?' I asked.

'Ready about,' Hal said. And then he swung the wheel. Sea Witch began to pay off, slowly, very slowly. For a moment it looked as though she was going to poke her long bowsprit through the steamer's rusty plates. Then she was round and I made up the starboard rudder as the boom swung over. There was little wind now that we were close under the Mary Deare. The sails flapped lazily. The cross-trees were almost scraping the steamer's sides as we rolled in the swell. I grabbed a torch and ran to the mast, climbed the starboard rail and stood there, poised, my feet on the bulwarks, my hands gripping the shrouds. Her way carried me past the for'ard davit falls. There was still a gap of several yards between me and the ship's side. Hal closed it slowly. Leaning out I watched the after davit falls slide towards me. There was a jar as the tip of our cross-trees rammed the plates above my head. The first of the falls came abreast of me. I leaned right out, but they were a good foot beyond my reach. 'This time!' Hal shouted. The cross-trees jarred again. I felt the jolt of it through the shroud I was clinging to. And then my hand closed on the ropes and I let go, falling heavily against the ship's side, the lift of a swell wetting me to my knees. 'Okay!' I yelled.

Hal was shouting to Ian to shove off. I could see him thrusting wildly with the boat-hook. Then the end of the boom hit me between the shoulder-blades, the jar of it almost making me lose my hold. I hauled myself upwards with desperate urgency, afraid that the stern might swing and crush my legs against the ship's side. There was the slam of wood just below my feet and then I saw Sea Witch was clear and standing out away from the ship. 'Don't be long,' Hal shouted.

Sea Witch was already heeling to the wind, the water creaming back from her bows and a white wake showing at her stern as she gathered speed. 'I'll be as quick as I can,' I called back to him, and then I began to climb.

That climb seemed endless. The Mary Deare was rolling all the time, so that one minute I'd be swung out over the sea and the next slammed against the iron plates of her side. There were moments when I thought I'd never make it. And when, finally, I reached the upper deck, Sea Witch was already half a mile away, though Hal had her pointed up into the wind and was pinching her so that her sails were all a-shiver.

The sea was no longer oil-smooth. Little waves were forming on the tops of the swell, making patterns of white as they broke. I knew I hadn't much time. I cupped my hands round my mouth and shouted: 'Mary Deare! Ahoy! Is there anybody on board?' A gull shifted his stance uneasily on one of the ventilators, watching me with a beady eye. There was no answer, no sound except the door to the after deckhouse slatting back and forth, regular as a metronome, and the bump of the lifeboat against the port side. It was obvious that she was deserted. All the evidence of abandonment was there on the deck — the empty falls, the stray pieces of clothing, a loaf lying in the scupper! a hunk of cheese trampled into the deck, a half-open suitcase spilling nylons and cigarettes, a pair of sea boots; they had left her in a hurry and at night.

But why?

A sense of unease held me for a moment — a deserted ship with all its secrets, all its death-in-life stillness — I felt like an intruder and glanced quickly back towards Sea Witch. She was no bigger than a toy now in the leaden immensity of sea and sky, and the wind was beginning to moan through the empty ship — hurry! hurry!

A quick search and then the decision would have to be made. I ran for'ard and swung myself up the ladder to the bridge. The wheelhouse was empty. It's odd, but it came as a shock to me. Everything was so very normal there; a couple of dirty cups on a ledge, a pipe carefully laid down in an ash-tray, the binoculars set down on the seat of the captain's chair — and the engine-room telegraph set to Full Ahead. It was as though at any moment the helmsman might return to take his place at the wheel.

But outside there was evidence in plenty of heavy weather. All the port wing of the bridge had been stove in, the ladder buckled and twisted, and down on the well-deck the seas had practically stripped the covering from the for'ard holds and a wire hawser was lying uncoiled in loops like dannert wire. And yet that in itself didn't account for her being abandoned; another tarpaulin hatch cover had been partly rigged and fresh timbering lay around as though the watch on deck had just knocked off for a cup of tea.

The chartroom at the back of the wheelhouse shed no light on the mystery; in fact, the reverse, for there was the log book open at the last entry: 20.46 hours — Les Heaux Light bearing 114 degrees, approximately 12 miles. Wind south-east — Force 2. Sea moderate. Visibility good. Altered course for the Needles — north 33 degrees east. The date was March 18, and the time showed that this entry had been made just an hour and three-quarters before the Mary Deare had almost run us down. Entries in the log were made every hour so that whatever it was that had made them abandon ship had occurred between nine and ten the previous night, probably just as the mist was closing in.

Checking back through the log I found nothing to suggest that the ship would have to be abandoned. There had been constant gales and they had taken a bad beating. But that was all. Hove-to on account of dangerous seas, waves sometimes breaking against bridge. Making water in No. 1 hold. Pumps not holding their own. That entry for March 16 was the worst. Wind strength was given as Force 11 for twelve solid hours. And before then, ever since they had left the Mediterranean through the Straits, the wind had never fallen below Force 7, which is moderate gale, and was several times recorded as Force 10, whole gale. The pumps had been kept going all the time.

If they had abandoned ship in the gale of March 16 it would have been understandable. But the log showed that they had rounded Ushant on the morning of March 18 in clear weather with seas moderate and the wind Force 3. There was even a note — Pumps making good headway. Clearing wreckage and repairing Number One hatch cover.

It didn't make sense.

A companion-way led to the upper or boat-deck level. The door to the Captain's cabin was open. The room was neat and tidy, everything in its place; no sign of hurried departure. From the desk a girl's face in a big silver frame smiled at me, her fair hair catching the light, and across the bottom of the picture she had scrawled: For Daddy — Bans voyages, and come back soon. Love — Janet. There was coal dust on the frame and more of it on the desk and smudged over a file of papers that proved to be the cargo manifest, showing that the Mary Deare had loaded cotton at Rangoon on January 13 and was bound for Antwerp. On top of a filing tray filled with papers were several air mail letter-cards slit open with a knife. They were English letter-cards postmarked London and they were addressed to Captain James Taggart, SS Mary Deare at Aden, addressed in the same uneven, rather rounded hand that had scrawled across the bottom of the photograph. And below the letters, amongst the mass of papers, I found report sheets written in a small, neat hand and signed James Taggart. But they only covered the voyage from Rangoon to Aden. On the desk beside the tray was a sealed letter addressed to Miss Janet Taggart, University College, Gower Street, London, WC1. It was in a different hand and the envelope was unstamped. All those little things, those little homely details… I don't know how to express it — they added up to something, something I didn't like. There was that cabin, so quiet, with all the decisions that had driven the ship throughout her life still there in the atmosphere of it — and the ship herself silent as the grave. And then I saw the raincoats hanging on the door, two blue Merchant Navy officers' raincoats hanging side by side, the one much bigger than the other.

I went out and slammed the door behind me, as though by closing it I could shut away my sudden, unreasoned fear. 'Ahoy! Is there anyone on board?' My voice, high and hoarse, echoed through the vaults of the ship. The wind moaned at me from the deck. Hurry! I must hurry. All I had to do was check the engines now, decide whether we could get her under way.

I stumbled down the dark well of a companion-way, following the beam of my torch, flashing it through the open doorway of the saloon where I had a glimpse of places still laid and chairs pushed hastily back. A faint smell of burning lingered on the musty air. But it didn't come from the pantry — the fire was out, the stove cold. My torch focused on a half-empty tin of bully lying on the table. There was butter, cheese, a loaf of bread with the crust all covered in coal dust; coal dust on the handle of the knife that had been used to cut it, coal dust on the floor.

'Is there anybody about?' I yelled. 'Ahoy! Anyone there?' No answer. I went back to the 'tween-decks alley-way that ran the length of the port-hand midships section. It was as silent and as black as the pit of a mine. I started down it, and then I stopped. There it was again — a sound I had been conscious of, but had not thought about; a sound like the shifting of gravel. It echoed within the ship's hull as though somewhere the steel plates were shifting on the bottom of the sea. It was a strange, uncanny sound, and it stopped abruptly as I walked on down the alley-way so that, in the vacuum of abrupt silence, I heard the wind's howl again.

The door at the end of the alley-way swung open to the roll of the ship, letting in a glimmer of daylight. I started towards it, conscious that the acrid smell of burning had increased until it quite overlaid the fusty mixture of hot oil, stale cooking and sea water dampness that permeates the 'tween-decks of all cargo ships. A fire-hose, fixed to a hydrant near the engine-room door, snaked aft through pools of water and disappeared through the open door, out on to the well-deck beyond. I followed it. Out in the daylight I saw that Number Three hatch was burned and blackened, eaten half away by fire, and Number Four had been partly opened up. Fire hoses curled round the deck, disappearing into the open inspection hatch of Number Three hold. I went a few rungs down the vertical ladder, flashing my torch. But there was no smoke, no lurid glow, and the acrid fumes of fire had a stale, washed-out smell, mixed with the pungent odour of chemicals. An empty foam extinguisher toppled on its side, clattering against the steel of the bulkhead plating. My torch showed the black pit of the hold piled high with charred and sodden bales of cotton and there was the sound of water slopping about.

The fire was out — dead — not even a wisp of smoke. And yet the ship had been abandoned. It didn't make sense. I was thinking of last night, how the smell of burning had lingered in the mist after the ship had gone past us. And there was the coal dust on the captain's desk and in the galley. Somebody must have put that fire out. I ran back to the engine-room door, remembering the grating sound of gravel shifting. Could it have been coal? Was there somebody down in the stoke-hold? Somewhere in the ship a hatch slammed, or maybe it was a door. I went in, on to the catwalk that hung over the black abyss of the engine-room, criss-crossed with the steel of gratings and vertical ladders. 'Ahoy!' I yelled. 'Ahoy there!'

No answer. My torch showed a glint of polished brass and the duller gleam of burnished steel amidst the shadowy shapes of the engines. No movement either… only the sound of water that made little rushing noises as it slopped about to the roll of the ship.

I hesitated, wondering whether to go down to the stoke-hold, held there by a sort of fear. And it was then that I heard the footsteps.

They went slowly along the starboard alley-way — boots clanging hollow against the steel flooring; a heavy, dragging tread that passed the engine-room door, going for'ard towards the bridge. The sound of the footsteps gradually faded away and was lost in the slapping of the water in the bilges far below me.

It couldn't have been more than twenty seconds that I remained there, paralysed, and then I had flung myself at the door, dragged it open and dived out into the alley-way, tripping over the step in my haste, dropping my torch and fetching up against the farther wall with a force that almost stunned me. The torch had fallen into a pool of rusty water and lay there, shining like a glow-worm in the darkness. I stooped and picked it up and shone it down the passage.

There was nobody there. The beam reached the whole shadowy length as far as the ladder to the deck, and the corridor was empty. I shouted, but nobody answered. The ship rolled with a creak of wood and the slosh of water, and above me, muffled, I heard the rhythmic slamming of the door to the after deckhouse. And then a faint, far-distant sound reached me, a sound that had a note of urgency in it. It was Sea Witch's fog-horn signalling me to return.

I stumbled for'ard and as I neared the ladder to the deck, the fog-horn's moan was mingled with the noise of the wind soughing through the superstructure. Hurry! Hurry! There was a greater urgency in it now; urgency in the noise of the wind, in the foghorn's blare.

I reached the ladder, was starting up — when I saw him. He was outlined for an instant in the swinging beam of my torch, a shadowy figure standing motionless in the recess of a doorway, black with a gleam of white to his eyes.

I checked, shocked into immobility — all the silence, all the ghostly silence of that dead ship clutching at my throat. And then I turned the beam of the torch full on him. He was a big man, dressed in reefer and sea boots, and black with coal dust. Sweat had seamed his face, making grime-streaked runnels as though he had wept big tears and the bone of his forehead glistened. All the right side of his jaw was bruised and clotted with blood.

He moved suddenly with great rapidity, came down on me with a rush. The torch was knocked from my hand and I smelt the stale smell of sweat and coal dust as his powerful fingers gripped my shoulders, turning me like a child, twisting my head to the cold daylight that came down the ladder. 'What do you want?' he demanded in a harsh, rasping voice. 'What are you doing here? Who are you?' He shook me violently as though by shaking me he'd get at the truth.

'I'm Sands,' I gasped out. 'John Sands. I came to see—'

'How did you get on board?' There was a note of authority, as well as violence, in the rasp of his voice.

'By the falls,' I said. 'We sighted the Mary Deare drifting and when we saw the lifeboats gone, we came alongside to investigate.'

'Investigate!' He glared at me. 'There's nothing to investigate.' And then quickly, still gripping hold of me: 'Is Higgins with you? Did you pick him up? Is that why you're here?'

'Higgins?' I stared at him.

'Yes, Higgins.' There was a sort of desperate violence in the way he said the man's name. 'But for him I'd have got her safe to Southampton by now. If you've got Higgins with you…' He stopped suddenly, his head on one side, listening. The sound of the fog-horn was nearer now and Mike's voice was hailing me. 'They're calling you.' His grip tightened convulsively on my shoulders. 'What's your boat?' he demanded. 'What sort of boat is it?'

'A yacht.' And I added inconsequentially: 'You nearly ran us down last night.'

'A yacht!' He let go of me then with a little gasp like a sigh of relief. 'Well, you'd better get back to it. Wind's getting up.'

'Yes,' I said. 'We'll have to hurry — both of us.'

'Both of us?' He frowned.

'Of course,' I said. 'We'll take you off and when we reach Peter Port…'

'No!' The word exploded from his lips. 'No. I'm staying with my ship.'

'You're the captain, are you?'

'Yes.' He stooped and picked up my torch and handed it to me. Mike's voice came to us faintly, a strangely disembodied shout from the outside world. The wind was a low-pitched, whining note. 'Better hurry,' he said.

'Come on then,' I said. I couldn't believe he'd be fool enough to stay. There was nothing he could do.

'No. I'm not leaving.' And then a little wildly, as though I were a foreigner who had to be shouted at: 'I'm not leaving, I tell you.'

'Don't be a fool,' I said. 'You can't do any good here — not alone. We're bound for Peter Port. We can get you there in a few hours and then you'll be able.

He shook his head, like an animal at bay, and then waved an arm at me as though signalling me to go.

'There's a gale coming up.'

'I know that,' he said.

'Then for God's sake, man… it's your one chance to get clear.' And because he was the captain and obviously thinking about his ship, I added, 'It's the one hope for the ship, too. If you don't get a tug out to her soon she'll be blown right on to the Channel Islands. You can do far more good—'

'Get off my ship!' He was suddenly trembling. 'Get off her, do you hear? I know what I have to do.'

His voice was wild, his manner suddenly menacing. I stood my ground for a moment longer. 'You've got help coming then?' I asked. And when he didn't seem to understand, I said, 'You've radioed for help?'

There was a moment's hesitation and then he said, 'Yes, yes, I've radioed for help. Now go.'

I hesitated. But there was nothing else I could say, and if he wouldn't come… I paused halfway up the ladder. 'Surely to God you'll change your mind?' I said. His face showed in the darkness below me — a strong, hard face, still young but with deep-bitten lines in it, made deeper by exhaustion. He looked desperate, and at the same time oddly pathetic. 'Come on, man — whilst you've got the chance.'

But he didn't answer; just turned away and left me there. And I went on up the ladder to meet the weight of the wind howling along the deck and find the sea a mass of whitecaps with Sea Witch pitching violently two cables off.

CHAPTER TWO

I had stayed too long. I knew as soon as Sea Witch turned to pick me up. She came roaring downwind, the big yankee jib burying her bows deep into the wind-whipped waters, her long bowsprit thrusting into the backs of the waves, spearing them and coming out in a welter of spray. Hal had been right. I should never have boarded the ship. I ran to the falls, damning the crazy madman who'd refused to be taken off. If he had come with me, there would have been some point.

Sea Witch heeled over in a gust as Hal fought the wheel, bringing her round through the wind, all her sails flogging madly. The big yankee filled with a crack like a pistol shot, heeling the boat over till all the weed-grown boot-topping showed in the trough of a wave; and then the big sail split across and in an instant was blown to tatters. The wind was strong to gale in the gusts and she should have been reefed by now, but they hadn't a hope of reefing, just the three of them. It was madness for them to attempt to come alongside. I had never seen a sea whipped up so quickly. But Mike was waving to me, signalling downwards with his hand, and Hal was braced at the wheel, edging her up towards the ship's side, mainsail shivering, barely filled, the remnants of the yankee fluttering in streamers from the forestay. I caught hold of one of the falls then and swung myself out over the side, slithering down hand over hand until the surge of a wave soaked me to the waist and I looked up and saw that the rusty plates stood above me, high as a cliff.

I could hear Sea Witch now, hear the slap of her bows as she hit a wave and the solid, surging noise of her passage through the water. There were shouts and over my shoulder I saw her coming up into the wind, very close now, her head unwilling to pay off, the bowsprit almost touching the steamer's sides. A gust of wind buffeted me, the main boom slammed over, sails filling suddenly, and she went surging past me a good twenty yards out from where I clung, swinging sickeningly in mid-air. Hal was shouting at me. 'The wind… strong… the ship turning round.' That was all I caught and yet he was so close I could see the water dripping off his oilskins, could see his blue eyes wide and startled-looking under his sou'wester.

Mike eased the sheets and the boat roared off down-wind. Hanging there, soaked with sea water thrown up from the wave tops breaking against the ship's side, I felt the weight of the wind pressing me in towards the rusty hull. At each roll I had to brace myself to meet the shock of my body being flung against her. Gradually I realised what had happened. The wind was swinging the Mary Deare broadside on; and I was on the windward side, exposed to the full force of the rising gale.

Sea Witch went about again and I wanted to shout to Hal not to be a fool, that it was no good. Now that the Mary Deare had swung, it was dangerous to come alongside with the wind pressing the yacht down on to the ship. But all I did was pray that he'd make it, for I knew I couldn't hang there much longer. The ropes were getting slippery with water and it was bitterly cold.

I don't know how Hal managed it, but despite the lack of headsails to bring her bow round, he got her about with almost no way on her a short stone's throw from where I was clinging. Then he let her drift down-wind. It was a superb piece of seamanship. There was a moment when her stern was almost within my reach. I think I might have made it, but at that moment the roll of the Mary Deare swung me against her sides and I was held fast against the wet chill of her hull, whilst the familiar counter of my boat slid away as Hal got her moving again to prevent her from being battered to pieces against the ship. 'No good… daren't… too dangerous… Peter Port.' The ragged snatches of Hal's shouts reached me through the wind as I was freed from the ship's side and swung out over the water, right over the spot where Sea Witch's stern had been only a few seconds before. I wanted to shout to him to try again, just once more. But I knew it was risking the boat and their lives as well. 'Okay,' I yelled. 'Make Peter Port. Good luck!'

He shouted something back, but I couldn't hear what it was. Sea Witch was already disappearing beyond the steamer's bows, going fast with all her sheets eased and the wind driving at the great spread of her mainsail. I glanced up quickly at the towering wall of iron above my head and then I began to climb whilst I still had some strength left.

But each time the ship rolled I was flung against the side. It gave me extra purchase, flattened hard against the rusty plates, but it battered me, knocking the wind out of me. And each time I was swung clear the loss of purchase almost flung me off, for my fingers were numbed with cold and my arms and knees trembled with the strain of clinging there too long. The waves broke, engulfing me in ice-cold spray, and sometimes green water sloshed up the side of the ship and gripped me about the waist, plucking at me as it subsided.

I made only a few feet, and then I was finally halted. I could climb no farther. Flattened against the ship's side, I gripped the rope with my shaking legs and, letting go with one hand, hauled up the free end, pulling it up between my legs and wrapping it over my shoulder. It took the strain off my arms. But it didn't get me back on to the ship's deck. I began to shout then, but the sound of my voice was whipped away by the wind. I knew the man couldn't possibly hear me, but I still went on shouting, praying that he'd come. He was my only hope. And then I stopped shouting, for I had no breath left — jarred and bruised, swung one moment out over the tumbled waters, the next slammed against the ship's side, it came to me slowly that this was the end.

It is difficult to be scared of something that is inevitable. You accept it, and that is that. But I remember thinking how ironical it was; the sea was to me a liquid, quiet, unruffled world through which to glide down green corridors to the darker depths, down tall reef walls with the fish, all brilliant colours in the surface dazzle, down to the shadowy shapes of barnacle-crusted wrecks. Now it was a raging fury of a giant, rearing up towards me, clutching at me, foaming and angry.

And then hope came suddenly in the graze of my hand against the rusty plates. Blood oozed in droplets from my knuckles, to be washed away by a blinding sheet of spray, and I stared, fascinated, as a flake of rust was peeled off by the upward scrape of my body. I didn't look up. I didn't move for fear I had imagined that I was being hauled up. But when the sea no longer reached me as it burst against the ship's side, I knew it was true. I looked up then and saw that the davits had been hauled in-board, saw the ropes move, taut, across the rail-capping.

Slowly, a foot at a time, I was hauled up, until at last my head came level with the deck and I looked into the haggard face and the wild, dark eyes of the Mary Deare's captain. He dragged me over the side and I collapsed on to the deck. I never knew till then how comfortable iron deck plates could be. 'Better get some dry clothes,' he said.

He pulled me to my feet and I stood there, trying to thank him. But I was too exhausted, too numbed with cold. My teeth chattered. He got my arm round his neck and half dragged me along the deck and down to one of the officers' cabins. 'Help yourself to what you want,' he said as he lowered me on to the bunk. 'Rice was about your height.' He stood over me for a moment, frowning at me as though I were some sort of a problem that had to be worked out. Then he left me.

I lay back, exhaustion weighting my eyelids, drowning consciousness. But my body had no warmth left in it and the cold cling of sodden clothes dragged me up off the bunk, to strip and towel myself down. I found dry clothes in a drawer and put them on; woollen underwear, a shirt, a pair of trousers and a sweater. A glow spread through me and my teeth stopped chattering. I took a cigarette from a packet on the desk and lit it, lying back again on the bunk, my eyes closed, drawing on it luxuriously. I felt better then — not worried about myself, only about Sea Witch. I hoped to God she'd get safe to Peter Port.

I was drowsy with the sudden warmth; the cabin was airless and smelt of stale sweat. The cigarette kept slipping from my fingers. And then a voice from a great distance off was saying: 'Sit up and drink this.' I opened my eyes and he was standing over me again with a steaming mug in his hand. It was tea laced with rum. I started to thank him, but he cut me short with a quick, angry movement of his hand. He didn't say anything; just stood there, watching me drink it, his face in shadow. There was a strange hostility in his silence.

The ship was rolling heavily now and through the open door came the sound of the wind howling along the deck. The Mary Deare would be a difficult tow if it blew a gale. They might not even be able to get a tow-line across to us. I was remembering what Hal had said about the Channel Islands as a lee shore. The warmth of the drink was putting new life into me; enough for me to consider what faced me, now that I was marooned on board the Mary Deare.

I looked up at the man, standing over me, wondering why he had refused to leave the ship. 'How long before you expect help to reach us?' I asked him.

'There won't be any help. No call went out.' He leaned suddenly down towards me, his hands clenched and his jaw, thrust into the grey light coming in through the porthole, showing hard and knotted. 'Why the hell didn't you stay on your yacht?' And then he turned abruptly and made for the door.

He was halfway through it when I called after him. 'Taggart!' I swung my legs off the bunk.

He spun round on his heels as though I'd punched him in the back. 'I'm not Taggart.' He came back through the doorway. 'What made you think I was Taggart?'

'You said you were the captain.'

'So I am. But my name's Patch.' He was standing over me again, a dark shadow against the light. 'How did you know about Taggart? Are you something to do with the owners? Is that why you were out there…' The wildness went out of his voice and he wiped his hand across the coal dust grime of his face. 'No. It couldn't be that.' He stared at me for a moment and then he shrugged his shoulders. 'We'll talk about it later. We've plenty of time. All the time in the world. Better get some sleep now.' He turned then and went quickly out.

Sleep! Five minutes ago that was what I'd wanted most in the world. But now I was wide awake. I won't say I was scared; not then. Just uneasy. That the man should behave oddly was not surprising. He had been twelve hours alone on the ship. He'd put out a fire single-handed and he'd stoked furnaces till he was on the brink of exhaustion. Twelve hours of hell; enough to unbalance any man. But if he was the captain, why wasn't he Taggart? And why hadn't the ship radioed for assistance?

I got up stiffly off the bunk, pulled on a pair of sea boots that were lying under the desk and staggered out into the corridor. There was a lot of movement on the ship now. Lying broadside to the seas, she was rolling heavily. A rush of cold air brought with it the battering noise of the wind. I went straight up to the bridge. It was raining and visibility was down to less than a mile; the whole sea was a dirty white of breaking water with the spray smoking from the crests and streaming away before the wind. It was already blowing gale force in the gusts.

The compass showed the ship lying with her bows to the north. The wind had backed into the west then; almost a dead run to Peter Port. I stood there working it out, listening to the thundering of the gale, staring out at that bleak waste of tumbled water. If Hal made it — if he got under the lee of Guernsey and made Peter Port… But it would take him several hours and he wouldn't realise at first that no distress signal had been sent out. Even when he did, the lifeboat would have to fight the gale to reach us; it would take them six hours at least, and by then it would be dark. They'd never find us in the dark in this sort of weather.

I turned abruptly and went through into the chart-room. A new position had been marked on the chart; a small cross two miles north-east of the Roches Douvres with 11.06 pencilled against it. It was now eleven-fifteen. I laid off the line of our drift with the parallel rule. If the wind held westerly we should drive straight on to the Plateau des Minquiers. He had discovered that, too, for a faint pencil line had been drawn in and there was a smudge of dirt across the area of the reefs where his fingers had rested.

Well, at least he was sane enough to appreciate the danger! I stood, staring at the chart, thinking about what it meant. It wasn't a pleasant thought. To be driven ashore on the rocky cliffs of Jersey would have been bad enough, but the Plateau des Minquiers….

I reached out to the bookshelf above the chart table, searching for Part II of the Channel Pilot. But it wasn't there. Not that it mattered. I knew them by reputation: a fearful area of rocks and reefs that we call The Minkies.

I was thinking about the Minkies and how it would feel to be on board a ship being pounded to pieces in such a maelstrom of submerged rocks when I noticed the door at the back of the chartroom with W/T stencilled on it. There was a steep ladder with no door at the top and as soon as I entered the radio shack I knew why no distress call had been sent out. The place had been gutted by fire.

The shock of it halted me in the doorway. The fire in the hold, and now this! But this was an old fire. There was no smell of burning, and planks of new wood had been nailed over the charred gaps that the fire had burned in roof and walls. No attempt had been made to clear the debris. The emergency accumulators had come through the burned-out roof and lay on the floor where they had fallen; one had smashed down on to the fire-blackened table and had crushed the half-melted remains of the transmitter. Bunk and chair were scarcely recognisable, skeletons of blackened wood, and the radio equipment fixed to the walls was distorted beyond recognition and festooned with metal stalactites where solder had dripped and congealed; more equipment lay on the floor, black, twisted pieces of metal in the debris of charred wood. Whatever had caused the fire, it had burned with extraordinary ferocity. Water had seeped in through the gaps in the walls, streaking the blackened wood. The wind stirred the sodden ashes, shaking the rotten structure as it howled round the bridge.

I went slowly back down the ladder to the chart-room. Maybe the log book would tell me something. But it was no longer open on the table. I went through to the wheelhouse and was halted momentarily by the sight of a shaggy comber rearing up out of the murk on the port bow, spindrift streaming from its crest. It crashed down on to the iron bulwarks, and then the whole fore part of the ship, all except the mast and derricks, disappeared beneath a welter of white water. It seemed an age before the shape of the bows appeared again, a faint outline of bulwarks rising sluggishly, reluctantly out of the sea.

I hurried down the companion-way and made straight for the captain's cabin. But he wasn't there. I tried the saloon and the galley, and then I knew he must be down in the stoke-hold again. There was no doubt in my mind what had to be done. The pumps had to be got going. But there was no light in the engine-room, no sound of coal being shovelled into the furnaces. I shouted from the catwalk, but there was no answer; only the echo of my voice, a small sound lost in the pounding of the waves against the outside of the hull and the swirl of water in the bilges.

I felt a sudden sense of loss, a quite childish sense of loneliness. I didn't want to be alone in that empty ship. I hurried back to his cabin, the need to find him becoming more and more urgent. It was empty, as it had been before. A clang of metal aft sent me pushing through the door to the boat deck, and then I saw him. He was coming towards me, staggering with exhaustion, his eyes staring and his face dead white where he had wiped it clean of sweat and coal dust. All his clothes were black with coal and behind him a shovel slid across the deck. 'Where have you been?' I cried. 'I couldn't find you. What have you been doing all this time?'

'That's my business,' he muttered, his voice slurred with fatigue, and he pushed past me and went into his cabin.

I followed him in. 'What's the position?' I asked. 'How much water are we making? The seas are breaking right across the bows.'

He nodded. 'It'll go on like that — all the time now — until the hatch cover goes. And then there'll only be the shored-up bulkhead between us and the sea-bed.' It was said flatly, without intonation. He didn't seem to care, or else he was resigned.

'But if we get the pumps going…' His lack of interest checked me. 'Damn it, man,' I said. 'That was what you were doing when I came aboard, wasn't it?'

'How do you know what I'd been doing?' He suddenly seemed to blaze up, his eyes hard and angry and wild. He seized hold of my arm. 'How do you know?' he repeated.

'There was a wisp of smoke coming from the funnel,' I said quickly. 'And then all that coal dust;

you were covered with it.' I didn't know what had roused him. 'You must have been down in the stokehold.'

'The stoke-hold?' He nodded slowly. 'Yes, of course.' He let go of my arm, his body gradually losing its tautness, relaxing.

'If the pumps could keep her afloat coming up through the Bay…' I said.

'We had a crew then, a full head of steam.' His shoulders dropped. 'Besides, there wasn't so much water in the for'ard hold then.'

'Is she holed?' I asked. 'Is that the trouble?'

'Holed?' He stared at me. 'What made you…' He pushed his hand up through his hair and then down across his face. His skin was sallow under the grime; sallow and sweaty and tired-looking. The ship lurched and quivered to the onslaught of another wave. I saw his muscles tense as though it were his own body that was being battered. 'It can't last long.'

I felt suddenly sick and empty inside. The man had given up hope. I could see it in the sag of his shoulders, hear it in the flatness of his voice. He was tired beyond caring. 'You mean the hatch cover?' He nodded. 'And what happens then?' I asked. 'Will she float with that hold full of water?'

'Probably. Until the boiler-room bulkhead goes.' His tone was cold-blooded and without emotion. That hold had been flooded a long time. The ship had been down by the bows when we had sighted her through the mist. And last night… I was remembering the draught marks high out of the water at her stern and the blades of the propeller thrashing at the wave tops. He had had time to get used to the idea.

But I was damned if I was going to sit down and wait for the end. 'How long would it take to get steam up — enough to drive the pumps?' I asked. But he didn't seem to hear me. He was leaning against the deck, his eyes half-closed. I caught hold of his arm and shook him as though I were waking him out of a trance. 'The pumps!' I shouted at him. 'If you show me what to do, I'll stoke.'

His eyes flicked open and he stared at me. He didn't say anything.

'You're just about all in,' I told him. 'You ought to get some sleep. But first you must show me how to operate the furnace.'

He seemed to hesitate, and then he shrugged his shoulders. 'All right,' he said, and he pulled himself together and went out and down the companion ladder to the main deck. The weight of the wind was heeling the ship, giving her a permanent list to starboard. Like that she rolled sluggishly with an odd, uneven motion that was occasionally violent. His feet dragged along the dark, echoing alley-way; at times he seemed uncertain of his balance, almost dazed.

We turned in through the engine-room door, crossed the catwalk and descended an iron ladder into the dark pit of the engine-room, the beams of our torches giving momentary glimpses of vast shadowy machinery, all still and lifeless. Our footsteps rang hollow and metallic on the iron gratings as we made our way for'ard through a litter of smaller machinery. There was a sound of water moving in little rushes and heavy thuds echoed up the tunnel of the propeller shaft.

We passed the main controls with the bridge telegraph repeaters and then we reached the doors leading in to the boiler-room. Both doors were open, and beyond, the shapes of the boilers loomed bulky and majestic, without heat.

He hesitated a moment, and then moved forward again. 'It's this one,' he said, pointing to the port-hand of the three boilers. A dull red glow rimmed the furnace door. 'And there's the coal.' He swung the beam of his torch over the black heap that had spilled out of the coal-box opening. He had half-turned back towards the furnace, when he checked and stood staring at the coal as though fascinated, slowly lifting the beam of his torch so that the white circle of it shone on plate after plate, all black with dust, as though he were tracing the line of the coal coming down from the bunkering hatch at deck level. 'We'll work two-hour shifts,' he.said quickly, glancing at his watch. 'It's nearly twelve now. I'll relieve you at two.' He seemed suddenly in a hurry to go.

'Just a minute,' I said. 'How do you operate the furnace?'

He glanced impatiently back at the boiler with its temperature gauge and the levers below that operated the furnace doors and the dampers. 'It's quite simple. You'll get the hang of it easily enough.' He was already turning away again. 'I'm going to get some sleep,' he muttered. And with that he left me.

I opened my mouth to call him back. But there seemed no point. I should probably find out easily enough and he needed sleep badly. For a moment, as he passed through the stoke-hold doors, his body was sharply etched against the light of his torch. I stood there listening to the sound of his feet on the steel ladders of the engine-room, seeing the faint reflection of his torch limning the open doorway. Then it was gone and I was alone, conscious suddenly of the odd noises about me — the murmur of water, the queer booming of waves breaking against the ship's hull and the sudden little rushes of coal tipping in the chutes as she rolled; conscious, too, of a sense of claustrophobia, of being shut in down there below the waterline. Beyond the boilers were the baulks of timber shoring the bulkhead, and beyond the rusty plates was water. I could see it trickling down the seams.

I stripped off my borrowed jersey, rolled up my sleeves and went over to the furnace. It was barely warm. I could put my hands on the casing of it. I found the lever and flung open the furnace door. A pile of ash glowed red. There was no rush of flame, no sign of it having been stoked in hours. I picked up one of the crowbar-like slices that lay about and prodded the glowing mass. It was all ash.

I had a look at the other two furnaces then, but their draft vents were all wide open, the fires burned out, the boilers cold. There was just that one furnace still alive, and it was alive because the dampers were shut right down. I remembered then how his footsteps had dragged past the engine-room door that first time I had stood on the catwalk calling into the abyss below. He hadn't been down here — then or at any time. Yet he was covered in coal dust. I stood there, leaning on my shovel, thinking about it until the noise of the waves booming against the hollow hull reminded me that there were other, more urgent matters, and I began shovelling in coal.

I piled it in until it was heaped black inside the furnace. Then I shut the door and opened all the dampers. In a few minutes the furnace was roaring, the bright light of flames showing round the edges of the door and lighting the stoke-hold with a warm glow, so that the shapes of the boilers emerged, dim and shadowy, from the darkness that surrounded me. I opened the door again and began shovelling hard, the shovel and the black coal lit by the lurid glow. Soon I was stripped to the waist and the sweat was rolling off me so that my arms and body glistened through their coating of coal dust.

I don't know how long I was down there. It seemed like hours that I shovelled and sweated in the cavernous inferno of the stoke-hold. The furnace roared and blazed with heat, yet it was a long while before I noticed any change in the pressure gauge. Then slowly the needle began to rise. I was standing, leaning on my shovel, watching the needle, when faint above the furnace roar I heard the slam of metal against metal and turned.

He was standing in the rectangle of the stokehold doors. He didn't move for a moment and then he advanced towards me, reeling drunkenly to the movement of the ship. But it wasn't the rolling that made him stagger. It was exhaustion. I watched him as he came towards me with a sort of fascination. The furnace door was open and in the glow I saw his face sweating and haggard, the eyes sunk into shadowed sockets.

He stopped as he saw me staring at him. 'What's the matter?' he asked. There was a nervous pitch to his voice, and his eyes, turned now to catch the furnace glow, had a wild look in them. 'What are you staring at?'

'You,' I said. 'Where have you been?'

He didn't answer.

'You haven't been to sleep at all.' I caught hold of his arm. 'Where have you been?' I shouted at him.

He shook me off. 'Mind your own damn' business!' He was staring at me wildly. Then he reached for the shovel. 'Give me that.' He snatched it out of my hand and began to feed coal in through the open furnace door. But he was so exhausted he could hardly balance himself to the roll of the ship. His movements became slower and slower. 'Don't stand there watching me,' he shouted. 'Go and get some sleep.'

'It's you who need sleep,' I told him.

'I said we'd take it in two-hour shifts.' His voice was flat, his tone final. Coal spilled suddenly out of the chute, piling over his feet to a heavy roll. He stared at it with a sort of crazy fascination. 'Get out of here,' he said. And then, shouting: 'Get out! Do you hear?' He was leaning on the shovel, still staring down at the coal spilling out of the chute. His body seemed to sag and he brushed his arm across his sweaty face. 'Go and get some sleep, for God's sake. Leave me here.' The last almost a whisper. And then he added, as though it were a connected thought: 'It's blowing full gale now.'

I hesitated, but he looked half-crazed in that weird light and I picked up my jersey and started for the door. I checked once, in the doorway. He was still watching me, the furnace-glow shining full on his haggard face and casting the enormous shadow of his body on the coal chute behind him.

Clambering up through the gloom of the engine-room I heard the scrape of the shovel and had one last glimpse of him through the open door; he was working at the coal, shovelling it into the furnace as though it were some sort of enemy to be attacked and destroyed with the last reserves of his energy.

The sounds of the gale changed as I climbed up through the ship; instead of the pounding of the waves against the hull, solid and resonant, there was the high-pitched note of the wind and the hissing, tearing sound of the sea. Cold, rushing air hit me in a blast as I stepped out into the corridor and made my way for'ard to my borrowed cabin. I had a wash and then lay back on the bunk, exhausted.

But though I was tired and closed my eyes, I couldn't sleep. There was something queer about the man — about the ship, too; those two fires and the half-flooded hold and the way they had abandoned her.

I must have dozed off, for, when I opened my eyes again, I was suddenly tense, staring at the dim-lit unfamiliarity of the cabin, wondering where I was. And then I was thinking of the atmosphere in that other cabin and, in the odd way one's mind clings to a detail, I remembered the two raincoats hanging on the door, the two raincoats that must belong to two different men. I sat up, feeling stale and sweaty and dirty. It was then just after two. I swung my feet off the bunk and sat there staring dazedly at the desk.

Rice! That was the name of the man. Less than twenty-four hours ago he had been on board, here in his cabin, perhaps seated at that desk. And here was I, dressed in his clothes, occupying his cabin — and the ship still afloat.

I pulled myself up and went over to the desk, drawn by a sort of fellow-feeling for the poor devil, wondering whether he was still tossing about on the sea in one of the lifeboats. Or had he got safe ashore? Maybe he was drowned. Idly I opened the desk top. There were books on navigation; he'd been an orderly man with a sense of property for he had written his name on the fly-leaf of each — John Rice, in the same small, crabbed hand that had made most of the entries in the bridge log book. There were paperbacks, too, mostly detective fiction, exercise books full of trigonometrical calculations, a slide rule, some loose sheets of graph paper.

SS It was under these that I found the brand-new leather writing case, the gift note still inside — To John. Write me often, darling. Love — Maggie. Wife or sweetheart? I didn't know, but staring up at me was the last letter he had written her. My darling Maggie it began, and my eyes were caught and held by the opening of the second paragraph: Now that the worst is over, I don't mind telling you, darling, this has been a trip and no mistake. Nothing has gone right.

The skipper had died and they had buried him in the Med. And out in the Atlantic they had run into heavy weather. On March 16 they were hove-to — a real buster — the pumps unable to hold their own, Numbers One and Two holds flooded, and a fire in the radio shack whilst they were trying to shore up the boiler-room bulkhead, with the crew near panic because that bastard Higgins had told them that explosives formed part of the cargo, whatever the manifest said. A Mr Dellimare, whom he referred to as the owner, had been lost overboard that same night.

Patch he described as having joined the ship at Aden as first officer in place of old Adams who was sick. And he added this: Thank God he did or I don't think I'd be writing this to you. A good seaman, whatever they say about his having run the belle isle on the rocks a few years back. And then this final paragraph: Now Higgins is first officer and honestly, Maggie, I don't know. I've told you how he's been riding me ever since we left Yokohama. But it isn't only that. He's too thick with some of the crew — the worst of them. And then there's the ship. Sometimes I think the old girl knows she's bound for the knacker's yard. There's some ships when it comes to breaking up…

The letter ended abruptly like that. What had happened?

Was it the shout of Fire? There were questions racing through my mind, questions that only Patch could answer. I thrust the letter into my pocket and hurried down to the stoke-hold.

I had got as far as the engine-room before I stopped to think about the man I was going to question. He'd been alone on the ship. They'd all abandoned her, except him. And Taggart was dead — the owner, too. A cold shiver ran through me, and on the lower catwalk I stopped and listened, straining my ears — hearing all the sounds of the ship struggling with the seas, all magnified by the resonance of that gloomy cavern, but unable to hear the sound I was listening for, the sound of a shovel scraping coal from the iron floors.

I went down slowly then, a step at a time, listening — listening for the scrape of that shovel. But I couldn't hear it and when I finally reached the door to the stoke-hold, there was the shovel lying on the coal.

I shouted to him, but all I got was the echo of my own voice, sounding thin against the pounding of the seas. And when I flung open the furnace door, I wondered whether he existed at all outside of my imagination. The fire was a heap of white-hot ash. It looked as though it hadn't been stoked since I had left it.

In a frenzy, I seized the shovel and piled on coal, trying to smother my fears in physical exertion, in satisfaction at the sound of the coal spilling out of the chute, at the roar of the furnace.

But you can't just blot out fear like that. It was there inside me. I suddenly dropped the shovel, slammed the furnace door shut and went rushing up through the ship. I had to find him. I had to convince myself that he existed.

You must remember I was very tired.

He wasn't on the bridge. But there were pencil marks on the chart, a new position. And the sight of the seas steadied me. They were real enough anyway. God! they were real! I clung to the ledge below the glass panels of the wheelhouse and stared, fascinated, as a wave built up to port, broke and burst against the ship's side, flinging up a great column of smoking water that crashed down on the foredeck, blotting everything out. The sea rolled green over the bows. And when the outline of the bulwarks showed again and she struggled up with thousands of tons of water spilling off her, I saw that the for'ard hatch was a gaping rectangle in the deck.

There was no litter of matchwood. The deck was swept clear of all trace of the hatch covers. They had been gone some time. I watched the water spilling out of the hold as the ship rolled. But as fast as it spilled, the angry seas filled it up again. The bows were practically under water. The ship felt heavy and sluggish under my feet. She didn't feel as though she could last much longer.

I glanced round the bridge, rooted to the spot by the strange emptiness of it and the sudden certainty that the ship was going to go down. The spokes of the wheel were flung out in a forlorn circle. The brass of the binnacle gleamed. The telegraph pointers still stood at Full Ahead. The emptiness of it all… I turned and went down to the captain's cabin. He was there, lying back in the arm-chair, his body relaxed, his eyes closed. A half-empty bottle of rum stood on the desk at his elbow. The glass was on the floor, spilling a brown wet stain across the carpet. Sleep had smoothed out the lines of his face. Like that he seemed younger, less tough; but he still looked haggard and his right hand twitched nervously where it lay against the dark leather arm of the chair. The two blue raincoats still hung incongruously side-by-side on the back of the door. The girl still smiled at me sunnily from her silver frame.

A big sea broke against the ship's side, darkening the portholes with upflung water. His eyelids flicked back. 'What is it?' He seemed instantly wide awake, though his face was still puffed with sleep, flushed with the liquor he'd drunk.

'The for'ard hatch covers have gone,' I said. I felt a strange sense of relief. He was real and it was his responsibility, not mine. I wasn't alone after all.

'I know that.' He sat up, pushing his hand across his face and up through his black hair. 'What do you expect me to do about it — go out and rig new ones?'

His voice was a little slurred. 'We did that once.' He pulled himself up out of the chair and went over to the porthole and stood there, looking at the sea. His back was towards me, his shoulders slightly hunched, hands thrust into his pockets. 'It was like this all the way up through the Bay — heavy seas and the ship making water all the time.' The daylight filtering through the porthole shone cold and hard on his exhausted features. 'And then that storm! God! What a night!' He stared out through the porthole.

'You'd better get some more sleep,' I said.

'Sleep?' His hand went to his eyes, rubbing them, and then pushing up through his hair again. 'Maybe you're right.' His forehead wrinkled in a frown and he smiled so that his face had a surprised look. 'You know, I can't remember when I last slept.' And then he added: 'There was something…' He was frowning. 'God! I can't remember. Something I was going to look up.' He stared down at the chart and books that lay on the floor beside the arm-chair. The chart was Number 2100, the large-scale chart of the Minkies. And then he was looking at me again and in an odd voice he said, 'Who exactly are you?' He was a little drunk.

'I told you that earlier,' I replied. 'My name is—'

To hell with your name,' he shouted impatiently. 'What were you doing out there in that yacht? What made you board the ship?' And then, before I had time to say anything, he added, 'Are you something to do with the Company?'

'What company?'

'The Dellimare Trading and Shipping Company — the people who own the Mary Deare.' He hesitated. 'Were you out there, waiting to see if—' But then he shook his head. 'No, it couldn't have been that. We weren't steaming to schedule.'

'I'd never heard of the Mary Deare until last night,' I told him. And I explained how we'd almost been run down. 'What happened?' I asked him. 'How was it that the crew abandoned her with the engines still running and you on board? Was it the fire?'

He stared at me, swaying a little on his feet. And then he said, 'She was never meant to make the Channel.' He said it with a sort of smile, and when I asked him what he meant, he shrugged his shoulders and turned back to the porthole, staring out at the sea. 'I thought we were in the clear when I'd got her round Ushant,' he murmured. 'God damn it! I thought I'd taken all the knocks a man could in the course of a single voyage. And then that fire.' He turned and faced me again then. He seemed suddenly to want to talk. 'It was the fire that beat me. It happened about nine-thirty last night. Rice rushed in here to say that Number Three hold was ablaze and the crew were panicking. I got the hoses run out and part of Number Four hatch cleared so that we could play water on the bulkhead. And then I went down the inspection ladder into Number Four to check. That's how they got me.' He pointed to the bloodied gash on his jaw.

'You mean somebody hit you — one of the crew?' I asked in astonishment.

He nodded, smiling. It wasn't a pleasant smile. 'They battened the inspection hatch down on top of me when I was unconscious and then they drove the crew in panic to the boats.'

'And left you there?'

'Yes. The only thing that saved me was that they forgot we'd cleared part of the hatch cover. By piling bales of cotton up—'

'But that's mutiny — murder. Are you suggesting Higgins…'

He lurched towards me then, sudden violence in his face. 'Higgins! How did you know it was Higgins?'

I started to explain about the letter Rice had written, but he interrupted me. 'What else did he say?' he demanded. 'Anything about Dellimare?'

'The owner? No. Only that he'd been lost overboard.' And I added, 'The Captain died, too, I gather.'

'Yes, damn his eyes!' He turned away from me and his foot struck the overturned glass. He picked it up and poured himself a drink, his hands shaking slightly. 'You having one?' He didn't wait for me to reply, but pulled open a drawer of the desk and produced a glass, filling it almost to the brim. 'I buried him at sea on the first Tuesday in March,' he said, handing the drink to me. 'And glad I was to see the last of him.' He shook his head slowly. 'I was glad at the time, anyway.'

'What did he die of?' I asked.

'Die of?' He looked up at me quickly from under his dark brows, suddenly suspicious again. 'Who the hell cares what he died of?' he said with sudden truculence. 'He died and left me to face the whole…' He made a vague gesture with the hand that held his glass. And then he seemed suddenly to notice me again, for he said abruptly: 'What the hell were you doing out there in that yacht of yours last night?'

I started to tell him how we'd bought Sea Witch in Morlaix and were sailing her back to England for conversion into a diving tender, but he didn't seem to be listening. His mind was away on some thought of his own and all at once he said: 'And I thought it was decent of the old bastard to get out and make room for a younger man.' He was laughing again as though at some joke. 'Well, it's all the same now. That bulkhead will go soon.' And he looked at me and added, 'Do you know how old this ship is? Over forty years old! She's been torpedoed three times, wrecked twice. She's been rotting in Far Eastern ports for twenty years. Christ! She might have been waiting for me.' And he grinned, not pleasantly, but with his lips drawn back from his teeth, A sea crashed against the ship's side and the shudder of the impact seemed to bring him back to the present. 'Do you know the Minkies?' He lunged forward and came up with a book which he tossed across to me. 'Page three hundred and eight, if you're interested in reading the details of your own graveyard.' It was the Channel Pilot, Part II.

I found the page and read: PLATEAU DES MINQUIERS. - Buoyage. - Caution. - Plateau des Minquiers consists of an extensive group of above water and sunken rocks and reefs, together with numerous banks of shingle, gravel and sand… The highest rock, Maitresse lie, 31 feet high, on which stand several houses, is situated near the middle of the plateau… There were details that showed the whole extent of the reefs to be about 17 and a half miles long by 8 miles deep, and paragraph after paragraph dealt with major rock outcrops and buoyage.

'I should warn you that the so-called houses on Maitresse He are nothing but deserted stone shacks.' He had spread the chart out on the desk and was bending over it, his head in his hands.

'What about tide?' I asked.

'Tide?' He suddenly seemed excited. 'Yes, that was it. Something to do with the tide. I was going to look it up.' He turned and searched the floor again, swaying slightly, balanced automatically to the roll of the ship. 'Well, it doesn't matter much.' He downed the rest of his drink and poured himself another. 'Help yourself.' He pushed the bottle towards me.

I shook my head. The liquor had done nothing to the chill emptiness inside me — a momentary trickle of warmth, that was all. I was cold with weariness and the knowledge of how it would end. And yet there had to be something we could do. If the man were fresh; if he'd had food and sleep… 'When did you feed last?' I asked him.

'Oh, I had some bully. Sometime this morning it must have been.' And then with sudden concern that took me by surprise, he said, 'Why, are you hungry?'

It seemed absurd to admit to hunger when the ship might go down at any moment, but the mere thought of food was enough. 'Yes,' I said. 'I am.' Anyway, it might get him away from the bottle, put something inside him besides liquor.

'All right. Let's go and feed.' He took me down to the pantry, holding his glass delicately and balancing himself to the sluggish roll. We found a tin of ham — bread, butter, pickles. 'Coffee?' He lit a primus stove he'd found and put a kettle on. We ate ravenously by the light of a single, guttering candle; not talking, just stuffing food into our empty bellies. The noise of the storm was remote down there in the pantry, overlaid by the roar of the primus.

It's surprising how quickly food is converted into energy and gives a man back that desperate urge to live. 'What are our chances?' I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. 'Depends on the wind and the sea and that bulkhead. If the bulkhead holds, then we'll be driven on to the Minkies sometime during the night.' The kettle had boiled and he was busy making the coffee. Now that the primus was out, the pantry seemed full of the noise of the gale and the straining of the ship.

'Suppose we got the pumps working, couldn't we clear that for'ard hold of water? There was a good deal of pressure in the boiler when I was down there and I stoked before I left.'

'You know damn' well we can't clear that hold with the hatch cover gone.'

'Not if we ran her off before the wind. If we got the engines going…'

'Look,' he said. 'This old ship will be weeping water at every plate joint throughout her whole length now. If we ran the pumps flat out, they'd do no more than hold the water that's seeping into her, let alone clear Number One hold. Anyway, how much steam do you think you need to run the engines and the pumps as well?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'Do you?'

'No. But I'm damn' sure it would need more than one boiler; two at least. And if you think we could keep two boilers fired…' He poured the coffee into tin mugs and stirred sugar in. 'With one boiler we could have the engines going intermittently.' He seemed to consider it, and then shook his head. 'There wouldn't be any point in it.' He passed me one of the mugs. It was scalding hot.

'Why not?' I asked.

'For one thing the wind's westerly. Keeping her stern to the wind would mean every turn of the screw would be driving her straight towards the Minkies. Besides…' His voice checked, ceased abruptly. He seemed to lose himself in some dark thought of his own, his black brows furrowed, his mouth a hard, bitter line. 'Oh, to hell with it,' he muttered and poured the rest of his rum into his coffee. 'I know where there's some more liquor on board. We can get tight, and then who the hell cares?'

I stared at him, my bowels suddenly hot with anger. 'Is that what happened last time? Did you just give up? Is that what it was?'

'Last time?' He was frozen to sudden immobility, the mug of coffee halfway to his lips. 'What do you mean — last time?'

'The Belle Isle,' I said. 'Did she go down because…' I stopped there, checked by the sudden, blazing fury in his eyes.

'So you know about the Belle Isle. What else do you know about me?' His voice was shrill, uncontrolled and violent. 'Do you know I was on the beach for damn' near a year? A year in Aden! And this… This first ship in a year, and it has to be the Mary Deare, a floating bloody scrap-heap with a drunken skipper who goes and dies on me and an owner…' He pushed his hand up through his hair, staring through me, back into the past. 'Fate can play dirty tricks, once she's got her claws into you.' And then, after a pause: 'If I could keep this old tramp afloat…' He shook his head. 'You wouldn't think it would happen to a man twice, would you,' he murmured. 'Twice! I was too young and green to know what they were up to when I got command of the Belle Isle. But I knew the smell of it this time. Well, they got the wrong man.' He gave a bitter laugh. 'A lot of good it did me, being honest. I got her up through the Bay. God knows how I did it, but I did. And round Ushant I headed for Southampton.' His eyes focused on me again and he said, 'Well, now I don't care any more. You can't go on fighting a thing. This gale has finished me. I know when I'm licked.'

I didn't say anything, for there wasn't anything I could say. It had to come from him. I couldn't drive him. I knew that. I just sat there and waited and the silence tightened between us. He finished his coffee and put the mug down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The silence became unbearable, full of the death-struggle sounds of the ship. 'Better come and have a drink,' he said, his voice tense.

I didn't move. I didn't say anything either.

'It's tough on you, but you didn't have to come on board, did you?' He stared at me angrily. 'What the hell do you think I can do?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'You're the captain. It's for you to give the orders.'

'Captain!' He laughed without mirth. 'Master of the Mary Deare!' He rolled it round his tongue, sneeringly. 'Well, at least I'll have gone down with the ship this time. They said she was jinxed, some of them.' He seemed to be speaking to himself. 'They were convinced she'd never make it. But we're all jinxed when times get hard; and she's been kicked around the world for a good many years. She must have been a crack cargo liner in her day, but now she's just a rusty old hulk making, her last voyage. We'd a cargo for Antwerp, and then we were taking her across the North Sea to Newcastle to be broken up.' He was silent after that, his head on one side, listening. He was listening to the sounds of the ship being pounded by the waves. 'What a thing it would be — to steam into Southampton with no crew and the ship half-full of water.' He laughed. It was the drink in him talking, and he knew it. 'Let's see,' he said, still speaking to himself. 'The tide will be turning against us in a few hours. Wind over tide. Still, if we could hold her stern-on to the wind, maybe we could keep her afloat a little longer. Anything could happen. The wind might shift; the gale might blow itself out.' But there was no conviction in the way he said it. He glanced at his watch. 'Barely twelve hours from now and the tide will be carrying us down on to the rocks and it'll still be dark. If visibility is all right, we should be able to see the buoys; at least we'll know—' His voice checked abruptly. 'The buoys! That's what I was thinking about before I went to sleep. I was looking at the chart…' His voice had become animated, his eyes suddenly bright with excitement. And then his fist crashed against the palm of his hand and he jumped to his feet. That's it! If we were to hit the tide just right…' He pushed by me and I heard his feet take the steps of the ladder leading to the bridge two at a time.

I followed him up and found him in the chart-room, poring over a big book of Admiralty tide-tables. He looked up and for the first time I saw him as a leader, all the fatigue wiped out, the drink evaporated. 'There's just a chance,' he said. 'If we can keep her afloat, we might do it. It means working down in that stoke-hold — working like you've never worked in your life before; turn-and-turn about — the stoke-hold and the wheelhouse.' He seized hold of my arm. 'Come on! Let's see if we've got sufficient head of steam to move the engines.' A wave hit the side of the ship. Sheets of water fell with a crash, sluicing into the wheelhouse through the broken doorway leading to the port wing of the bridge. Out of the tail of my eye I saw water thundering green across the half-submerged bows. And then I was following him down the ladder again into the body of the ship and he was shouting: 'By God, man, I might cheat them yet.' And his face, caught in the light of my torch as it was turned momentarily up to me, was filled with a sort of crazy vitality.

CHAPTER THREE

The darkness of the engine-room was warm with the smell of hot oil and there was the hissing sound of steam escaping, so that the place seemed no longer dead. In my haste I let go at the bottom of the last ladder and was pitched a dozen feet across the engine-room deck, fetching up against a steel rail. There was a prolonged hiss of steam as I stood there, gasping for breath, and the pistons moved, thrusting their arms against the gleaming metal of the crankshaft, turning it — slowly at first, and then faster and faster so that all the metal parts gleamed in the light of my torch and the engines took on that steady, reassuring thump-thump of vitality and power. The hum of a dynamo started and the lights began to glow. The humming became louder, the lights brighter, and then abruptly they snapped full on. Brass and steelwork gleamed. The whole lit cavern of the engine-room was alive with sound.

Patch was standing on the engineer officer's control platform. I staggered down the catwalk between the two big reciprocators. 'The engines!' I shouted at him. 'The engines are going!' I was beside myself with excitement. For that one moment I thought we could steam straight into a port.

But he was already shutting off the steam, and the beat of the engines slowed and then stopped with a final hiss. 'Don't stand there,' he said to me. 'Start stoking. We want all the steam we can get.' For the first time he looked like a man in control of the situation.

But stoking was more difficult now; dangerous, too. The movements of the ship were unpredictable. One moment I would be flinging a shovelful of coal high up against the thrust of gravity, the next I would be pitched towards the flaming mouth of the furnace and the coal would seem to have no weight at all as it left the shovel.

I don't know how long I was working there alone before he joined me. It seemed a long time. I didn't see him enter. All my mind was concentrated on the coal and that gaping furnace door, concentrated on gauging the pitch of the ship, avoiding being flung against the red-hot fire. I felt a hand on my arm and I looked up to find him standing over me. I straightened up and faced him, panting, with the sweat pouring off my body. 'I've got the pumps going,' he said.

I nodded, too short of breath to waste it in speech.

'I've just been up to the bridge,' he went on. 'Half the time the bows are right under. Any moment that bulkhead may go. Do you think you could hear the engine-room telegraph from in here?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'I expect so.'

He took me through into the engine-room then and showed me the engine controls and the voice pipe that connected with the bridge. 'I'll go up to the bridge now,' he said. 'You go back to the boiler-room and start stoking. I'll give you a ring on the engine-room telegraph. If you don't hear it after two minutes come to the voice pipe. Okay?'

I nodded and he went clambering up the ladder, whilst I returned to the stoke-hold. Even in that short time my arms and back had stiffened. I had to force myself to start shovelling again. I was beginning to get very tired and I wondered how long we could keep this up. Faint above the roar of the furnace and the sounds of the engine-room came the jangling of the bridge telegraph. I flung the furnace door to and went through to the engineers' control platform. The pointer stood at Full Ahead. I spun the control wheel, opening up the steam valves, and for the first time I understood the thrill and pride an engineer officer must feel; the hiss of steam, the pistons moving and the engines taking up a steady, pulsating beat, vibrant with power. The heart of the ship had come alive, and it was I who had made it alive. It was satisfying.

Back in the stoke-hold the shovel felt strangely light. I barely noticed the aching of my arms. Confidence and the will to fight back had returned. I was suddenly full of energy.

It worked out that about every ten minutes or so the engines had to be run; it took about three minutes to get her stern-on again. Those three minutes produced a big drop in the pressure gauge. Only by keeping the furnace full and roaring could that pressure be built up again in time to meet the next demand from the bridge. At 15.30 he called me up to take over the wheel. 'Watch the spindrift,' he said. 'That will tell you the wind direction. Lay her exactly along the direction of the wind. If you're a fraction out the stern will swing almost immediately. And have full rudder on from the moment you order me to start the engines — and don't forget she'll carry way for a good five minutes after the engines have stopped.' He left me then and I was alone at the wheel.

It was a welcome relief to be able to stand there with nothing heavier than the wheel to shift. But whereas in the stoke-hold with the roar of the furnace and the periodic sound of the engines, there had been a sense of security and normality, here I was face to face with the reality of |he situation. A grim half light showed the bows so badly down in the water that they barely lifted above the marching wave tops even when running dead before the wind, and, as soon as the ship swung and I had to use the engines, the whole deck for'ard of the bridge became a seething welter of water. The sweat cooled on my body, an ice-cold, clammy coating to my skin, and I began to shiver. I found a duffle coat in the chartroom and put it on. A new position had been marked in on the chart. We were lying just about halfway between the Roches Douvres and the Minkies. The congested area of submerged reefs was looming rapidly nearer.

At 16.30 he relieved me. He stood for a moment looking out across the bows into the faded daylight of that wretched, gale-swept scene. His face and neck glistened with sweat and his eyes were deep-sunk in their sockets, all the bone formation of his face standing out hard and sharp. 'Come through into the chartroom a minute,' he said, taking hold of my arm — whether out of a need for the companionship of physical contact or to steady himself against the roll of the ship, I don't know. 'The wind is westerly now,' he said, pointing to our position on the chart. 'It will probably back farther into the south-west. If we're not careful we're going to be driven slap into the middle of the Minkies. What we've got to do now is to inch our way to the south'ard. Every time we run the engines we've got to make full use of them.'

I nodded. 'Where are you heading for — St Malo?'

He looked at me. 'I'm not heading anywhere,' he said. 'I'm just trying to keep afloat.' He hesitated and then added, 'In four hours the tide will start running against us. It'll be wind over tide then and throughout most of the night. It'll kick up a hell of a sea.'

I glanced out of the chartroom window and my heart sank, for it didn't seem possible that the sea could be worse than it was now. I watched him work out the dead reckoning and mark in another cross about five miles west and a little south of the other.

'We can't have moved that much in an hour,' I protested.

He flung down the pencil. 'Work it out for yourself if you don't believe me,' he said. 'The tide's running south-easterly three knots. Allow two miles for wind and engines, and there you are.'

I stared at the chart. The Minkies were getting very close. 'And in the next two hours?' I asked.

'In the next two hours the tide slacks off considerably. But my reckoning is that we'll be within a mile or so of the south-west Minkies buoy. And there we'll stay for the first half of the night. And when the tide turns…' He shrugged his shoulders and went back again into the wheelhouse. 'Depends whether we've managed to edge south at all.'

With this cheerful prospect I went below again, back to the familiar, aching grind and blazing heat of the stoke-hold. One hour in the stoke-hold; one on the bridge. Turn and turn about; it became a routine. Dazed with tiredness we did it automatically, unconsciously adjusting ourselves to the greater movement of the bridge and then readjusting ourselves to the quicker, less predictable and much more dangerous motion of the stoke-hold.

I remember being at the wheel when darkness fell. It seemed to steal up on us almost imperceptibly. And then suddenly I couldn't see the bows, couldn't tell where the wind was because I couldn't see the spume flying off the wave tops. All I could see was darkness shot with the white-tumbling wave tops. The deck sloped forward under my feet and, with broken water all round the ship, it was as though we were running the rapids of a giant river, slipping downhill at tremendous speed. I steered by the compass and the feel of the ship then, all the time pushing her towards the south with every burst of the engines.

At the helm just after midnight a glimmer of light showed for an instant in the rushing, wind-torn darkness beyond the bows. I hoped to God I had imagined it. I was very tired by then and it had just been a momentary gleam, indistinct and ephemeral. But a little later I saw it again, a flash of light about two points off the starboard bow. It showed intermittently, often obscured by the backs of the waves.

By the end of my watch it was possible to identify it as group-flashing two. The chart showed the southwest Minkies buoy as Gp.fl(2). 'About what we expected,' Patch said when he relieved me. His voice showed no lift of interest; it was flat and slurred with weariness, his face gaunt in the light of the binnacle.

And after that the light was always with us, getting a little nearer, a little clearer until it began to fade with the first grey glimmer of dawn as I took over the wheel at five-thirty in the morning. I was almost dead with exhaustion then, hardly able to stand, my knees trembling. The night in the stokehold had been hell, the last hour almost unendurable, shovelling coal with rivulets of water spilling across the floor and spitting steam as they swirled round the hot base of the furnace.

The tide had turned now and the double flash of the Minkies buoy began to come down on us fast, and on the wrong side of us. Soon, as the daylight strengthened, I could see the buoy itself, one of those huge pillar buoys that the French use, and, even above the wind, I thought now and then I could catch the mournful, funeral note of its whistle. We were going to pass at least half a mile inside it. I had a look at the chart and then got Patch on the voice pipe and told him to come up.

It seemed a long time before he appeared on the bridge, and when he came he moved slowly, his feet dragging as though he were just out of a sick bed. Changing watches during the night, he had been just a shadowy shape in the pale, reflected glow of the binnacle light. Now, seeing him suddenly in the cold light of day, I was shocked. He looked ghastly. 'You're just about out on your feet,' I said.

He stared at me as though he hadn't understood. I suppose I looked pretty bad myself. 'What is it?' he asked.

I pointed to the Minkies buoy, now almost four points on the starboard bow. 'We're passing too far inside it,' I said. 'At any moment we may hit the Brisants du Sud rocks.'

He went into the chartroom and I waited, expecting him to send me running below to get the engines going. He was gone a long time. Once I shouted to him, afraid that he must have gone to sleep. But he answered immediately that he was watching the buoy through the window and working something out. The tide had got a firm hold of us now. I watched the bearing of the buoy altering rapidly. It was almost abeam of us before he emerged from the chartroom. 'It's all right,' he said. 'There's water enough at this stage of the tide.' His voice was quite calm.

The wind had caught our stern now and we were swinging. Not two cables' length away an eddy marked a submerged rock and the heavy overfalls broke against each other in violent collision, sending up great gouts of water. And beyond was a cataract of broken water where the waves spilled in tumbled confusion, raging acres of surf. A big sea hit us, thudding against the ship's side and rolling in a white tide across the foredeck. Tons of water crashed down on the bridge. The whole ship shuddered. 'Aren't you going to get the engines started?' I demanded.

He was standing with his back to me, staring out to starboard. He hadn't heard me. 'For God's sake!' I cried. 'We're being carried right on to the Minkies.'

'We're all right for the moment.' He said it quietly, as though to soothe me.

But I didn't believe him. How could we be all right? All ahead of us was nothing but reefs with the seas pouring white across miles of submerged rock. Once we struck… 'We've got to do something,' I said desperately.

He didn't answer. He was staring through the glasses out beyond the starboard bow, his legs straddled against the sickening lunges of the ship.

I didn't know what to do. He seemed calm and in control of the situation, and yet I knew that he had gone physically beyond the limits of endurance — mentally, too, perhaps. 'We've got to get clear of the Minkies,' I told him. 'Once we're clear of the Minkies we're all right.' I let go of the wheel and started for the companion ladder. 'I'm going to start the engines.'

But he grabbed hold of my arm as I passed him. 'Don't you understand?' he said. 'We're sinking.' His face was as stony as the gaze of his dark eyes. 'I didn't tell you before, but water is flooding through that bulkhead. I had a look at it just before I relieved you.' He let go of my arm then and stared through the glasses again, searching for something in the grey, scud-filled dawn.

'How long—' I hesitated, unwilling to put it into words. 'How long before she goes down?'

'I don't know. A few minutes, an hour, maybe two.' He lowered the glasses with a little grunt of satisfaction. 'Well, it's a slender chance, but…' He turned and stared at me as though assessing my worth. 'I want pressure in that boiler for ten to fifteen minutes' steaming. Are you prepared to go below and continue stoking?! He paused and then added, 'I should warn you that you'll stand no chance at all if that bulkhead goes whilst you're down there.'

I hesitated. 'For how long?'

'An hour and a half I should say.' He glanced quickly away to starboard, half nodded his head and then caught hold of my arm. 'Come on,' he said. 'I'll give you a hand for the first hour.'

'What about the ship?' I asked. 'If she strikes on one of these reefs…'

'She won't strike,' he answered. 'We're drifting down just about a mile inside the buoys.'

Down in the stoke-hold there was a strange sense of remoteness from danger. The warmth and the furnace glow and the blaze of the lights were comfortingly normal. Now that I could no longer see the seas thundering over the reefs I was enveloped in a false sense of security. Only the boom of the waves crashing against the hollow sides of the ship and the bright rivulets of water streaming from the started rivet holes reminded us of the danger we were in; that and the forward slant of the decks and the water sluicing up out of the bilges, black with coal dust, filthy with oil.

We stoked like madmen, shoulder-to-shoulder, flinging coal into the furnace with utter disregard of exhaustion. It seemed an eternity, but that bulkhead held and finally Patch looked at his watch and flung his shovel down. 'I'm going up to the bridge,' he said. 'You'll be on your own now. Keep on stoking until I ring for full speed. Then, when you've got the engines going, come straight up to the bridge. All right?'

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. He was pulling his clothes on and I watched him as he staggered through to the engine-room and disappeared. The sound of the waves thundering against the hull seemed louder now. I looked down at my wrist watch. It was twenty past seven. I started to shovel coal again, conscious all the time of the hull plates towering above me and of the slope of the decks; conscious that at any moment this lit world might plunge below the seas. Water was sloshing about in the bilges, spilling over on to the plates and swirling round my feet.

Half-past seven! Quarter to eight! Would he never ring for the engines? Once I paused, leaning on my shovel, certain that the deck below my feet was at a steeper angle, watching that streaming bulkhead and wondering what the hell he was doing up there on the bridge. What was this slender chance he had talked of? Exhausted, my nerves strung taut with fear and the long wait, I suddenly wasn't sure of him any more. What did I know about him? My first impressions — of a man unbalanced by circumstances — returned, stronger now because more dangerous.

And then suddenly, faint above the booming of the waves, came the jangle of the telegraph. It was almost eight o'clock. I flung my shovel down, slammed the furnace door shut and, with my clothes in my hand, staggered quickly through into the engine-room. The telegraph indicator was at Full Ahead. I turned the steam full on and as I raced up the ladders, the whole steel-traceried vault of the engine-room became alive with the pounding of the engines.

He was standing at the wheel, steering the ship, as I panted up the ladder on to the bridge. 'Are we clear of the Minkies yet?' I gasped.

He didn't answer. His hands were gripped tight on the wheel, his whole body tense as he stared out ahead. The ship heeled in a long agonising roll and I staggered down the slope of the bridge-deck to the starboard windows. A buoy, painted red and white, was sliding past us. The bows were completely submerged.

'Almost there now.' His voice was taut, barely audible. His eyes looked out of their sunken sockets, staring fixedly. And then he shifted the balance of his feet and the wheel spun under his hands. I couldn't believe it for a moment. He was turning the wheel to port. He was turning the ship to port, turning her in towards the rock outcrops of the Minkies. 'Are you crazy?' I shouted at him. 'Turn to starboard! To starboard, for God's sake!' And I flung myself at the wheel, gripping the spokes, trying to turn it against the pressure of his hands.

He shouted something at me, but it was lost in the noise of a big sea crashing against the bridge. I wouldn't have heard him anyway. St Malo was only twenty miles away and the beat of the engines throbbed through the deck plates, beating a message of hope against the soles of my feet. We had to turn to starboard — away from the Minkies, towards St Malo. 'For Christ's sake!' I screamed at him.

Fingers gripped my hair, forcing my head back. He was shouting at me to let go of the wheel, and my eyes, half-closed with pain, caught a glimpse of his face, set and hard and shining with sweat, the lips drawn back from his teeth and the muscles of his jaw knotted. 'It's our only chance.' His voice was barely audible above the roar of the seas. And then the muscles of my neck cracked as he flung me back and I was caught on a downward plunge and fetched up against the window ledge with such force that all the breath was knocked out of me. A patch of broken water slid past on the port side and almost ahead of us the sea flung a curling wave-top round a little huddle of rocks that were just showing their teeth. I felt suddenly sick.

'Will you take the wheel now?' His voice was distant, quite cool. I stared at him, dazed and not understanding. 'Quick, man,' he said. 'Take the wheel.' He was on his own bridge, giving an order, expecting it to be obeyed. The acceptance of obedience was implicit in his tone. I dragged myself to my feet and he handed over to me. 'Steer north ten degrees east.' He fetched the hand-bearing compass from the chartroom and went out with it on to the starboard wing of the bridge. For a long time he stood there, quite motionless, occasionally raising the compass to his eye and taking a bearing on some object behind us.

And all the time I stood there at the wheel, holding the ship to ten degrees east of north and wondering what in God's name we were doing sailing straight in towards the reefs like this. I was dizzy, still a little sick, too scared now to do anything but hold on to the course I had been told, for I knew we must be in among the rocks and to try to turn the ship would mean certain disaster. And through the windows, out in that maelstrom of white water that filled all my horizon, there gradually emerged the shapes of more rocks, whole masses of rocks, getting nearer and nearer every minute.

'Steer due north now.' His voice was still calm. Yet all ahead of us was nothing but waves tumbling and falling and cascading on the half-exposed reefs. There was one lone island of rock nearer than the rest and, as the ship drove towards it, he was back at my side. 'I'll take her now.' There was a gentleness in the way he spoke and I let him have the wheel, not saying anything, not asking any questions, for his face had a strange, set look as though he were withdrawn inside himself, out of reach of any human.

And then we struck — not suddenly with an impact, but slowly, gently, a long grinding to a halt that sent me staggering forward until I was brought up against the window ledge. The ship checked, her keel making a noise that was felt in vibration rather than heard above the roar of the storm. For a moment she seemed to tear herself loose and go reeling on through the water; then she struck again and ground to a sudden, sickening halt. The engines continued without pause as though the heart of her had refused to recognise death.

It was a queer moment. Patch was still standing there at the wheel, still staring out ahead with set face and the knuckles of his hands white with the violence of his grip on the wheel spokes. The wheel-house looked exactly the same, and for'ard, through the glass windows, the bows remained submerged with the waves rolling across them. The deck under my feet still pulsed with life. Nothing had changed; only that we were now motionless and at rest.

Trembling, I wiped the cold sweat from my fore head with my hand. We were aground on the Minkies now. I felt a sense of finality. I turned and looked at him. He seemed dazed. His face, where it had been wiped clear of coal dust, was chalk-white, his dark eyes staring. He was gazing out across the tumbled waste of the sea. 'I did what I could,' he breathed. And then again, louder: 'God in heaven, I did what I could.' There was no blasphemy in the way he said it; only the sense of a man in torment. And finally his hands dropped slackly from the spokes of the wheel as though relinquishing at last his command of the ship and he turned away and walked, slowly and deliberately in the manner of a sleep-walker, through into the chartroom.

I pulled myself together then and followed him.

He was bent over the chart and he didn't look up. A wave crashed against the ship's side, throwing a solid mass of water against the chartroom window, momentarily blocking out the daylight. As it fell away he pulled the log book towards him and, picking up the pencil, began to write. When he had finished, he closed the book and straightened up, as though he had written Finis to that section of his life. His eyes came slowly round and met mine. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I should have explained what I was going to do.' He was like a man woken from a dream and suddenly rational. 'It was a question of hitting the tide just right.'

'But we should have headed towards St Malo.' I was still dazed, a little stupid — I didn't understand.

'In just over two hours, if we'd lasted that long, the tide would have turned and driven us north across the reefs.' He slid the chart along the table towards me. 'See for yourself,' he said. 'The only chance was to beach her here.' And he put his pencil on the spot where the ship was lying.

It was about a mile south of the main body of the reefs in an area showing 2V4 fathoms depth at low water. 'That rock away on the port bow is Grune a Croc,' he said. It was marked as drying 36 ft. 'And you'll probably find Maitresse He just visible away to starboard.' His pencil point rested for a moment on the high point to the east of the main reefs. 'At low water it should be reasonably sheltered in here.' He threw the pencil down and straightened up, stretching himself and rubbing his eyes. 'Well, that's that.' There was finality and the acceptance of disaster in the way he said it. 'I'm going to get some sleep.' He went past me then without another word, through into the wheelhouse. I heard his feet on the companion ladder descending to the deck below. I hadn't said anything or tried to stop him. I was too tired to question him now. My head throbbed painfully and the mention of sleep had produced in me an intense desire to close my eyes and slide into oblivion.

I paused on my way through the wheelhouse and stood looking out on the grey, desolate sea-scape of rock and broken water. It was queer to stand there by the wheel with the feel of the engines under my feet, knowing all the time that we were hard aground on the worst reef in the English Channel. Everything in the wheelhouse seemed so normal. It was only when I looked out through the windows and saw the rocks emerging from the tide and the ship's bows no more than a vague outline below the creaming break of the waves that I was able to comprehend what had happened.

But for six hours or more we should be safe; until the rising tide exposed us again to the full force of the seas. I turned and made my way below, moving as though in a dream, like a sleepwalker. Everything seemed vague and a little remote and I staggered slightly, still balancing automatically to the roll of a ship which was now as steady as a rock. As I reached my cabin I felt the beat of the engines slow and stop. Either we had exhausted the steam or else he had gone below and stopped the engines himself. It didn't seem to matter either way. We shouldn't be wanting the engines again, or the pumps. Nothing seemed to matter to me then but sleep.

That sleep should have been possible in those circumstances may seem incredible, but having thought him mad and then found him, not only sane, but capable of an extraordinary feat of seamanship, I had confidence in his statement that we should be sheltered as the tide fell. In any case, there was nothing I could do; we had no boats, no hope of rescue in the midst of those reefs, and the gale was at its height.

I woke to complete darkness with water running like a dark river down the corridor outside my cabin. It came from a broken porthole in the saloon — probably from other places, too. The seas were battering against the ship's side and every now and then there was a grumbling, tearing sound as she shifted her bottom on the shingle bed. I moved up to Patch's cabin then. He was lying on his bunk, fully clothed, and even when I shone my torch on him he didn't stir, though he had been asleep for over twelve hours. I made two trips below to the galley for food and water and the primus stove, and it was on the second of these that I noticed the little white rectangle of a card pinned to the mahogany of the door just aft of the captain's cabin. It was a business card: J.C.B. Dellimare, and underneath — The Dellimare Trading and Shipping Company Ltd. The address was St Mary Axe in the City of London. I tried the door, but it was locked.

It was daylight when I woke again. The wind had died down and the seas no longer crashed against the ship's side. A gleam of watery sunlight filtered in through the salt-encrusted glass of the porthole. Patch was still asleep, but he had taken off his boots and some of his clothes and a blanket was pulled round his body. The companion ladder leading to the saloon and the deck below was a black well of still water in which things floated. Up on the bridge, the sight that met my eyes was one of utter desolation. The tide was low and the rocks stood up all round us like the stumps of rotten teeth, grey and jagged with bases blackened with weed growth. The wind was no more than Force 5 to 6 and, though I could see the seas breaking in white cascades over the farther rocks that formed my horizon, the water around was relatively quiet, the broken patches smoothed out as though exhausted by their passage across the reefs.

I stood there for a long time watching the aftermath of the storm whirl ragged wisps of thin grey cloud across the sun, staring at the chaos of rocks that surrounded us, at the seas breaking in the distance. I felt a deep, satisfying joy at the mere fact that I was still alive, still able to look at sunlight glittering on water, see the sky and feel the wind on my face. But the davits were empty arms of iron uplifted over the ship's side and the boat that had been hanging by one of its falls was a broken piece of splintered wood trailing in the sea at the end of a frayed rope.

Patch came up and joined me. He didn't look at the sea or the sky or the surrounding rocks. He stood for a moment gazing down at the bows which now stood clear of the sea, the gaping hole of the hatch black and full of water. And then he went out to the battered port wing and stood looking back along the length of the ship. He had washed his face and it was white and drawn in the brittle sunlight, the line of his jaw hard 'where the muscles had tightened, and his hands were clenched on the mahogany rail capping.

I felt I ought to say something — tell him it was bad luck, that at least he could be proud of an incredible piece of seamanship in beaching her here. But the starkness of his features checked me. And in the end I went below, leaving him alone on the bridge.

He was there for a long time and when he did come down he only said, 'Better get some food inside you. We'll be able to leave in an hour or two.' I didn't ask him how he expected to leave with all the boats smashed. It was obvious that he didn't want to talk. He went and sat on his bunk, his shoulders hunched, going through his personal belongings in a sort of daze, his mind lost in its own thoughts.

I got the primus going and put the kettle on whilst he wandered over to the desk, opening and shutting drawers, stuffing papers into a yellow oilskin bag. He hesitated, looking at the photograph, and then he took that, too. The tea was made by the time he had finished and I opened a tin of bully. We breakfasted in silence, and all the time I was wondering what we were going to do, how we were going to construct a boat. 'It's no good waiting to be taken off,' I said at length. 'They'll never find the Mary Deare here.'

He stared at me as though surprised that anybody should speak to him in the dead stillness of the ship. 'No, it'll be some time before they find her.' He nodded his head slowly, still lost in his own thoughts. 'We'll have to build some sort of a boat.'

'A boat?' He seemed surprised. 'Oh, we've got a boat.'

'Where?'

'In the next cabin. An inflatable rubber dinghy.'

'A rubber dinghy — in Dellimare's cabin?' He nodded. That's right. Odd, isn't it? He had it there — just in case.' He was laughing quietly to himself. 'And now we're going to use it.'

The man was dead and I saw nothing funny about his not being here to use his dinghy. 'You find that amusing?' I asked angrily.

He didn't answer, but went to the desk and got some keys, and then he went out and I heard him unlock the door of the next cabin. There was a scrape of heavy baggage being moved and I went to give him a hand. The door was opened and, inside, the cabin looked as though a madman had looted it — drawers pulled out, suitcases forced open, their hasps ripped off, their contents strewn over the floor; clothes and papers strewn everywhere. Only the bed remained aloof from the chaos, still neatly made-up, unslept-in, the pillow stained with the man's hair oil.

He had the keys. He must have searched the cabin himself. 'What were you looking for?' I asked.

He stared at me for a moment without saying anything. Then he shifted the big cabin trunk out of the way, toppling it on to its side with a crash. It lay there, a slab of coloured hotel labels — Tokyo, Yokohama, Singapore, Rangoon. 'Catch hold of this!' He had hold of a big brown canvas bundle and we hauled it out into the Corridor and through the door to the open deck. He went back then and I heard him lock the door of Dellimare's cabin. When he returned he brought a knife with him. We cut the canvas straps, got the yellow dinghy out of its wrappings and inflated it.

The thing was about twelve feet long and five feet broad; it had paddles and a rudder and a tubular telescopic mast with nylon rigging and a small nylon sail. It even had fishing tackle. 'Was he a nervous sort of man?' I asked. For a shipowner to pack a collapsible dinghy on board one of his own ships seemed odd behaviour — almost as though he suffered from the premonition that the sea would get him.

But all Patch said was, 'It's time we got moving.'

I stared at him, startled at the thought of leaving the comparative security of the ship for the frailty of the rubber dinghy. 'The seas will be pretty big once we get clear of the reefs. Hadn't we better wait for the wind to drop a bit more?'

'We need the wind.' He sniffed it, feeling for its direction with his face. 'It's veered a point or two already. With luck it will go round into the northwest.' He glanced at his watch. 'Come on,' he said. 'There's four hours of tide with us.'

I tried to tell him it would be better to wait for the next tide and get the whole six hours of it, but he wouldn't listen. 'It would be almost dark then. And suppose the wind changed? You can't beat to windward in this sort of craft. And,' he added, 'there may be another depression following on behind this one. You don't want to be caught out here in another gale. I don't know what would happen at high water. The whole bridge deck might get carried away.'

He was right, of course, and we hurriedly collected the things we needed — food, charts, a hand-bearing compass, all the clothes we could clamber into. We had sou'westers and sea boots, but no oilskins. We took the two raincoats from the cabin door.

It was nine forty-five when we launched the dinghy from the for'ard well-deck. We paddled her clear of the ship and then hoisted sail. The sun had disappeared by then and everything was grey in a mist of driving rain, the rocks appearing farther away, vague battlement shapes on the edge of visibility; many of them were already covered. We headed for Les Sauvages and in a little while the flashing buoy that marked the rocks emerged out of the murk. By then the Mary Deare was no more than a vague blur, low down in the water. We lost her completely as we passed Les Sauvages.

There was still a big sea running and, once we cleared the shelter of the Minkies, we encountered the towering swell left by the gale. It marched up behind us in wall upon wall of steep-fronted, toppling water, and in the wet, swooping chill of that grey day I lost all sense of time.

For just over four hours we were tumbled about in the aftermath of the storm, soaked to the skin, crammed into the narrow space between the fat, yellow rolls of the dinghy's sides, with only an occasional glimpse of Cap Frehel to guide us. And then, shortly after midday, we were picked up by the cross-Channel packet coming in from Peter Port. They were on the look-out for survivors, otherwise they would never have sighted us, for they were passing a good half mile to the west of us. And then the packet suddenly altered course, coming down on us fast, the bows almost hidden by spray flung up by the waves. She hove-to a little up-wind of us, rolling heavily, and as she drifted down on to us rope ladders were thrown over the side and men came down to help us up, quiet, English voices offering words of encouragement, hands reaching down to pull us up. People crowded us on the deck — passengers and crew, asking questions, pressing cigarettes and chocolate on us. Then, an officer took us to his quarters and the packet got into her stride again, engines throbbing gently, effortlessly. As we went below I caught a glimpse of the dinghy, a patch of yellow in the white of the ship's wake as it rode up the steep face of a wave.

CHAPTER FOUR

A hot shower, dry clothes and then we were taken into the officers' saloon and a steward was bustling about, pouring tea, bringing us plates of bacon and eggs. The normality of it — the incredible normality of it! It was like waking from a nightmare. The Mary Deare and the gale and the tooth-edged rocks of the Minkies seemed part of another life, utterly divorced from the present. And then the Captain came in. 'So you're the survivors from the Mary Deare.' He stood, looking from one to the other of us. 'Is either of you the owner of the yacht Sea Witch?'

'Yes,' I said. 'I'm John Sands.'

'Good. I'm Captain Fraser, I'll have a radio message sent to Peter Port right away. A Colonel Lowden brought her in. He was very worried about you. He and Duncan were on board yesterday, listening to the radio reports of the search. They had planes out looking for you.' He turned to Patch. 'I take it you're one of the Mary Deare's officers?' His voice was harder, the Scots accent more pronounced.

Patch had risen. 'Yes. I'm the master of the Mary Deare. Captain Patch.' He held out his hand. 'I'm most grateful to you for picking us up.'

'Better thank my first officer. It was he who spotted you.' He was staring at Patch, small blue eyes looking out of a craggy face. 'You say your name is Patch?'

'Yes.'

'And you're the master of the Mary Deare?'

'Yes.'

The iron-grey brows lifted slightly and then settled in a frown. 'I understood that a Captain Taggart was master of the Mary Deare.'

'Yes, he was. But he died.'

'When was that?' There was a sharpness in the way the question was put.

'Just after we cleared Port Said — early this month.'

'I see.' Fraser stared at him stonily. And then, consciously relaxing: 'Well, don't let me interrupt your meal. You must be hungry. Sit down. Sit down, both of you.' He glanced at his watch and then called to the steward to bring another cup. 'I've just time before we go into St Malo.' He sat down, leaning his elbows on the table, his blue eyes staring at us, full of curiosity. 'Well now, what happened, Captain Patch? The air has been thick with messages about the Mary Deare for the last twenty-four hours.' He hesitated, waiting. 'You'll be glad to know that a boatload of survivors was washed up on lie de Brehat yesterday afternoon.' Patch still said nothing. 'Oh, come; you can't expect me not to be curious.' His tone was friendly. 'The survivors report that there was a fire and you ordered the crew to abandon ship. That was Thursday night and yet Lowden told me—'

'I ordered them to abandon ship?' Patch was staring at him. 'Is that what they say?'

'According to a French report, yes. They abandoned ship shortly after 22.30 hours. Yet at 09.30 the following morning Lowden saw the Mary Deare…' He hesitated, silenced by Patch's hard, uncompromising stare. 'Damn it, man!' he said in sudden exasperation. 'What happened? Is the Mary Deare afloat or sunk or what?'

Patch didn't say anything for a moment. He seemed to be thinking it out. Finally he said, 'A full statement will be made to the proper authorities. Until then—' He was still staring at Fraser. 'Until then you'll excuse me if I don't talk about it.'

Fraser hesitated, unwilling to let it go at that. Then he glanced at his watch again, drank up his tea and rose to his feet. 'Very proper of you, Captain,' he said, his voice formal, a little huffed. 'Now I must go. We're just coming into St Malo. Meantime, please accept the hospitality of my ship. Anything you want, ask the steward.' As he went out, he paused in the doorway. 'I think I should tell you, Captain, that we have a young lady on board — a Miss Taggart. She's Captain Taggart's daughter. She flew out to Peter Port yesterday, and when she heard survivors had come ashore on the coast of France, she came on with us.' He paused, and then came back a few steps into the saloon. 'She doesn't know her father is dead. She's hoping he's amongst the survivors.' Again a slight hesitation. 'I presume you notified the owners?'

'Of course.'

'I see. Well, it's a pity they didn't see fit to inform his next-of-kin.' He said it angrily. 'I'll have my steward bring her to you.' And then in a softer tone: 'Break it to her gently, man. She's a nice wee thing and she obviously adored her father.' He left then and a silence descended on the room. Patch was eating with the concentration of a man shovelling energy back into his body. There was nothing relaxed about him.

'Well, what did he die of?' I asked him.

'Who?' He looked at me with a quick frown.

'Taggart.'

'Oh, Taggart. He died of drink.' He resumed his eating, as though dismissing the matter from his mind.

'Good God!' I said. 'You can't tell her that.'

'No, of course not,' he said impatiently. 'I'll just tell her he died of heart failure. That was probably the medical cause anyway.'

'She'll want to know details.'

'Well, she can't have them.' I thought he was being callous and got up and went over to the porthole. The engines had been slowed. We were coming into the Rade and I could see the tourist hotels of Dinard climbing the hill from the quay, deserted and forlorn in the rain. 'He was running around the ship, screaming like a soul in torment.' He pushed his plate away from him. 'I had to lock him in his cabin, and in the morning he was dead.' He pulled out the packet of cigarettes he had been given and opened it with trembling fingers, tearing at it viciously. His face was deathly pale in the flare of the match.

'DTs?' I said.

'No, not DTs. I only discovered afterwards…' He dragged on his cigarette, pushing his hand up through his hair. 'Well, it doesn't matter now.' He pulled himself to his feet. 'We're nearly in, aren't we?'

The ship was moving very slowly now. Lock gates glided past. Boots rang on the deck overhead and there was the clatter of a donkey engine. 'I think we're going into the basin now,' I told him.

'You're lucky,' he said. 'You're through with the Mary Deare now.' He had started pacing restlessly up and down. 'God! I almost wish I'd gone down with the ship.'

I stared at him. 'It's true then… You did order the crew to take to the boats. That story about your being knocked out—'

He turned on me, his face livid. 'Of course, I didn't order them to take to the boats. But if they stick to that story…' He flung away towards the other porthole, staring out at the grey daylight.

'But why should they?' I demanded. 'If it isn't true—'

'What's truth got to do with it?' He stared at me angrily. 'The bastards panicked and now they're saying I ordered them to abandon ship because they've got to cover themselves somehow. A bunch of damned cowards — they'll cling together. You'll see. When it comes to the Formal Enquiry…' He gave a little shrug of his shoulders. 'I've been through all this before.' He said it slowly, half to himself, his head turned away, staring out through the porthole again at the waste ground with the rusty railway wagons. He muttered something about it being a strange coincidence, and then a door slammed and there was the sound of voices, a medley of French and English. He swung round, staring at the door and said, 'You will, of course, confine yourself to a statement of the reasons for your presence on board the Mary Deare.' He spoke quickly, nervously. 'You are in the position of a passenger and any comments—' The door opened and he half turned, facing it.

It was Captain Fraser, and with him were two French officials. Smiles, bows, a torrent of French, and then the shorter of the two said in English: 'I regret, Monsieur le Capitaine, I have bad news for you. Since half an hour I have heard on the radio that some bodies have been washed ashore on Les Heaux. Also some wreckage.'

'From the Mary Deare?' Patch asked.

'Mais oui.' He gave a little shrug. 'The lighthouse men on Les Heaux have not identified them, but there is no other ship in distress.'

'Les Heaux is an island just north of the He de Brehat — about forty miles west of here,' Fraser said.

'I know that.' Patch moved a step towards the official. 'The survivors,' he said. 'Was there a man called Higgins amongst them?'

The officer shrugged. 'I do not know. No official list of survivors is yet completed.' He hesitated. 'Monsieur le Capitaine, if you will come to the Bureau with me it will assist me greatly. Also it will be more simple. The formalities, you understand…' He said it apologetically, but it was clear he had made up his mind.

'Of course,' Patch said, but I could see he didn't like it. His eyes glanced quickly from one to the other of them, and then he went across the room and passed through the lane they opened out for him to the door.

The official turned to follow him, but then stopped and looked back at me. 'Monsieur Sands?' he enquired.

I nodded.

'I understand your boat is waiting for you in Saint Peter Port. If you will give my friend here the necessary particulars and your address in England, I do not think we need detain you at all.' He gave me a quick, friendly smile. 'Bon voyage, mon ami.'

'Au revoir, monsieur,' I said. 'Et merci, mille fois.'

His assistant took the particulars, asked a few questions and then he, too, departed. I was alone, and I sat there in a sort of coma, conscious of the bustle and hubbub of passengers descending to the quay, yet not sure that it was real. I must have dozed off for the next thing I knew the steward was shaking me. 'Sorry to wake you, sir, but I've brought Miss Taggart. Captain's orders, sir.'

She was standing just inside the door; a small, neat girl, her hair catching the light from the porthole just the way it had done in that photograph. 'You're Air Sands, aren't you?'

I nodded and got to my feet. 'You want Captain Patch.' I started to explain that he had gone ashore, but she interrupted. 'What happened to my father, please?'

I didn't know what to say. She should have been asking Patch, not me. 'Captain Patch will be back soon,' I said.

'Was my father on the Mary Deare when you boarded her?' She stood there, very straight and boyish, and quite determined.

'No,' I said.

She took that in slowly, her eyes fixed steadfastly on mine. They were grey eyes, flecked with green; wide and startled-looking. 'And this Captain Patch was in command?' I nodded. She stared at me for a long time, her lip trembling slightly. 'My father would never have abandoned his ship.' She said it softly and I knew she had guessed the truth, was bracing herself for it. And then: 'He's dead — is that it?'

'Yes,' I said.

She took it, dry-eyed, standing there, stiff and small in front of me. 'And the cause of death?' She tried to keep it formal, impersonal, but as I hesitated, she made a sudden, small feminine movement, coming towards me: 'Please, I must know what happened. How did he die? Was he ill?'

'I think it was a heart attack,' I said. And then I added, 'You must understand, Miss Taggart, I wasn't there. I am only passing on what Captain Patch told me.'

'When did it happen?'

'Early this month.'

'And this Captain Patch?'

'He was the first mate.'

She frowned. 'My father didn't mention him. He wrote me from Singapore and Rangoon and the only officers he mentioned were Rice and Adams and a man named Higgins.'

'Patch joined at Aden.'

'Aden?' She shook her head, huddling her coat close to her as though she were cold. 'My father always wrote me from every port he stopped at — every port in the world.' And then she added, 'But I got no letter from Aden.' Tears started to her eyes and she turned away, fumbling for a chair. I didn't move and after a moment she said, 'I'm sorry. It's just the shock.' She looked up at me, not bothering to wipe away the tears, 'baddy was away so much. It shouldn't hurt like this. I haven't seen him for five years.' And then in a rush: 'But he was such a wonderful person. I know that now. You see, my mother died…' She hesitated and then said, 'He was always coming back to England to see me. But he never did. And this time he'd promised. That's what makes it so hard. He was coming back. And now—' She caught her breath and I saw her bite her lip to stop it trembling.

'Would you like some tea?' I asked.

She nodded. She had her handkerchief out and her face was turned away from me. I hesitated, feeling there ought to be something I could do. But there was nothing and I went in search of the steward. To give her time to recover I waited whilst he made the tea and brought it back to her myself. She was composed now and though her face still looked white and pinched, she had got back some of the vitality that there had been in that photograph. She began asking me questions and to keep her mind off her father's death I started to tell her what had happened after I boarded the Mary Deare.

And then Patch came in. He didn't see her at first. 'I've got to leave,' he said. 'A question of identification. They've picked up twelve bodies.' His voice was hard and urgent, his face strained. 'Rice is dead. The only one I could rely on—'

'This is Miss Taggart,' I said.

He stared at her. For a second he didn't know her, didn't connect her name; his mind was concentrated entirely on his own affairs. And then the hardness slowly left his face and he came forward, hesitantly, almost nervously. 'Of course. Your face…' He paused as though at a loss for words. 'It — it was there on his desk. I never removed it.' And then, still looking at her, as though fascinated, he added almost to himself: 'You were with me through many bad moments.'

'I understand my father is dead?'

The forthright way in which she put it seemed to shock him, for his eyes widened slightly as though at a blow. 'Yes.'

'Mr Sands said you thought it was a heart attack?'

'Yes. Yes, that's right — a heart attack.' He said it automatically, not thinking about the words, all his mind concentrated in his eyes, drinking her in as though she were some apparition that had suddenly come to life.

There was an awkward pause. 'What happened? Please tell me what happened.' She was standing facing him now and there was a tightness in her voice that betrayed her nervousness. I suddenly felt that she was afraid of him. A sort of tension stretched between them. 'I want to know what happened,' she repeated and her voice sounded almost brittle in the silence.

'Nothing happened,' he answered slowly. 'He died. That's all.' His voice was flat, without feeling.

'But how? When? Surely you can give me some details?'

He pushed his hand up through his hair. 'Yes. Yes, of course. I'm sorry. It was March 2nd. We were in the Med. then.' He hesitated as though searching in his mind for the words he wanted. 'He didn't come up to the bridge that morning. And then the steward called me. He was lying in his bunk.' Again a pause and then he added, 'We buried him that afternoon, at sea.'

'He died in his sleep then?'

'Yes. That's right. He died in his sleep.'

There was a long silence. She wanted to believe him, wanted to desperately. But she didn't. Her eyes were very big and her hands were pressed tightly together. 'Did you know him well?' she asked. 'Had you sailed with him before?'

'No.'

'Had he been ill at all — during the voyage, or before you joined the ship at Aden?'

Again the slight hesitation. 'No. He hadn't been ill.' He seemed to pull himself together then. 'I gather the owners didn't inform you of his death. I'm sorry about that. I notified them by radio immediately, but I received no reply. They should have notified you.' He said it without any hope that they would have done so.

'What did he look like — before his death? Tell me about him please. You see, I hadn't seen him—' The pleading sound of her voice trailed away. And then suddenly in a firmer voice she said, 'Can you describe him to me?'

He frowned slightly. 'Yes, if you want me to.' His tone was reluctant. 'I — don't quite know what you want me to tell you.'

'Just what he looked like. That's all.'

'I see. Well, I'll try. He was small, very small — there was almost nothing of him at all. His face was red — sun-burned. He was bald, you know, but when he had his cap on and was up on the bridge he looked much younger than—'

'Bald?' Her voice sounded shocked.

'Oh, he still had some white hair.' Patch sounded awkward. 'You must understand, Miss Taggart, he wasn't a young man and he'd been a long time in the tropics.'

'He had fair hair,' she said almost desperately. 'A lot of fair hair.' She was clinging to a five-year-old picture of him. 'You're making him out to be an old man.'

'You asked me to describe him,' Patch said defensively.

'I can't believe it.' There was a break in her voice. And then she was looking at him again, her chin up, her face white. 'There's something more, isn't there — something you haven't told me?'

'No, I assure you,' Patch murmured unhappily.

'Yes, there is. I know there is.' Her voice had suddenly risen on a note of hysteria. 'Why didn't he write to me from Aden? He always wrote me… every port… and then dying like that and the ship going down… He'd never lost a ship in his life.'

Patch was staring at her, his face suddenly hard and angry. Then abruptly he turned to me. 'I've got to go now.' He didn't took at the girl again as he turned on his heels and walked quickly out.

She looked round at the sound of the door closing, staring at the blankness of it with wide, tear-filled eyes. And then suddenly she slumped down into her chair and buried her head in her arms, her whole body racked by a paroxysm of sobs. I waited, wondering what I could do to help her. Gradually her shoulders ceased to shake. 'Five years is a long time,' I said gently. 'He could only tell you what he knew.'

'It wasn't that,' she said wildly. 'All the time he was here I felt—' She stopped there. She had her handkerchief out and she began dabbing at her face. 'I'm sorry,' she whispered. 'It was silly of me. I–I was just a schoolgirl when I last saw my father. My impression of him is probably a bit romantic.'

I put my hand on her shoulder. 'Just remember him as you last saw him,' I said.

She nodded dumbly.

'Shall I pour you some more tea?'

'No. No thanks.' She stood up. 'I must go now.'

'Is there anything I can do?' I asked. She seemed so lost.

'No. Nothing.' She gave me a smile that was a mere conventional movement of her lips. She was more than dazed; she was raw and hurt inside. 'I must go — somewhere, by myself.' It was said fugitively and in a rush, her hand held out to me automatically. 'Goodbye. Thank you.' Our hands touched, and she was gone. For a moment her footsteps sounded on the bare wood of the deck outside, and then I was alone with the sounds of the ship and the dock. Through the porthole I saw the bare, grey walls of St Malo glistening wet in a fleeting gleam of sunlight — the old walls of the city and above them the new stone and roofing of buildings faithfully copied to replace the shattered wreckage that the Germans had left. She was walking quickly, not seeing the passengers or the French or the sombre, fortress-like beauty of the ancient city; a small, neat figure whose mind clung to a girl's memories of a dead father.

I turned away and lit a cigarette, slumping wearily into a chair. The crane, the gangway, the passengers in their raincoats and the French dock men in their blue smocks and trousers; it all seemed so ordinary — the Minkies and the Mary Deare were a vague dream.

And then Captain Fraser came in. 'Well,' he said, 'what did happen? Do you know?' The curiosity in his blue eyes was unveiled now. The crew say that he ordered them to abandon ship.' He waited and when I didn't say anything, he added, 'Not just one of them; it's what they all say.'

I remembered then what Patch had said: They'll cling together… because they've got to cover themselves somehow. Who was right — Patch or the crew? My mind went back to that moment when we had grounded, when he had relinquished the wheel from the grip of his hands in the midst of that waste of sea and rock.

'You must have some idea what really happened.'

I was conscious of Fraser again and was suddenly and for the first time fully aware of the ordeal that Patch now faced. I pulled myself stiffly up out of the chair. 'I've no idea,' I said. And then, because I sensed in the man a sort of hostility towards Patch, I added quickly, 'But I'm quite certain he never ordered the crew to take to the boats.' It was an instinctive rather than a reasoned statement. I told him I was going ashore then to find a hotel, but he wouldn't hear of it and insisted on my accepting the hospitality of his ship, ringing for the steward and putting a cabin at my disposal.

I saw Patch once more before I took the plane for Guernsey. It was at Paimpol, twenty or thirty miles to the west of St Malo, in a little office down by the bassin. There were fishing vessels there, packed two-and three-deep along the walls — tubby wooden bottoms, all bitumen-black, nudging each other like charladies, with mast-tops nodding, gay with paint and the water of the bassin was poppled with little hissing waves, for it was blowing half a gale again. As the police car that had brought me from St Malo drew up I saw Patch framed in the fly-blown office window; just his face, disembodied and white as a ghost, looking out like a prisoner on to the world of the sea.

'This way plees, monsieur.'

There was an outer office that served as a waiting-room with benches round the wall and a dozen men were seated there, dumb, apathetic and listless — flotsam washed in by the sea. I knew instinctively that they were all that remained of the Mary Deare's crew. Their borrowed clothes breathed shipwreck and they huddled close together, like a bunch of frightened, bewildered sheep; some that were clearly English, others that might be any race under the sun. One man, and one man alone, stood out from the motley bunch. He was a great hunk of a brute with a bull's neck and a bull's head, all hard bone and folds of flesh. He stood with his legs spread wide, solid as a piece of sculpture on the pedestal of his feet, his huge meaty hands thrust inside his trousers, which were fastened with a broad leather belt that was stained white with a crust of salt and had a big square brass buckle that had turned almost green. He held his hands there as though trying to prevent the great roll of fat, like a rubber tyre, that was his belly escaping entirely from the belt. His clothes were borrowed — a blue shirt that was too small for him and blue trousers that were too short. His thighs and legs tapered away like a bull terrier's hind quarters so that they looked on the verge of buckling under the weight of that great barrel of a body.

He started forward as though to bar my way. Tiny eyes, hard as flint, stared at me unwinking over heavy pouches of flesh. I half checked, thinking he was going to speak to me, but he didn't; then the gendarme opened the door to the inner office and I went in.

Patch turned from the window as I entered. I couldn't see his expression. His head and shoulders were outlined against the window's square of daylight and all I could see was the people in the road outside and the fishing Boats moving restlessly in the bassin beyond. There were filing cabinets ranged against the walls under faded charts of the harbour, a big, old-fashioned safe in one corner, and, seated at an untidy desk facing the light, was a ferrety little man with twinkling eyes and thinning hair. 'Monsieur Sands?' He held out a thin, pale hand. He didn't rise to greet me and I was conscious of the crutch propped against the wooden arm of his chair. 'You will excuse me please for the journey you make, but it is necessary.' He waved me to a seat. 'Alors, monsieur.' He was staring at the sheet of foolscap in front of him that was covered with neat, copper-plate writing. 'You go on board the Mary Deare from your yacht. C'est ca?'

'Oui, monsieur.' I nodded.

'And the name of your yacht, monsieur?'

'Sea Witch:

He began to write slowly and with meticulous care, frowning slightly and biting softly at his underlip as the steel nib scratched across the surface of the paper. 'And your name — your full name?'

'John Henry Sands.' I spelt it for him.

'And your address?'

I gave him the name and address of my bank.

'Eh bien. Now, you boarded the Mary Deare how long after the crew had abandoned the ship?'

'Ten or eleven hours after.'

'And Monsieur le Capitaine?' He glanced at Patch. 'He was still on the ship, eh?'

I nodded.

The official leaned forward. 'Alors, monsieur. It is this that I have to ask you. In your opinion, did Monsieur le Capitaine order the crew to abandon ship or did he not?'

I looked across at Patch, but he was still just a silhouette framed in the window. 'I can't say, monsieur,' I replied. 'I wasn't there.'

'Of course. I understand that. But in your opinion.

I want your opinion, monsieur. You must know what had happened. He must have talked about it with you. You were on that ship through many desperate hours. It must have occurred to you both that you might die. Did he not say anything that would enable you to form some opinion as to what really happened?'

'No,' I said. 'We didn't talk very much. There wasn't time.' And then, because it must seem extraordinary to him that we hadn't had time to talk in all the hours we had been on board together, I explained exactly what we had had to do.

He kept on nodding his small head whilst I was talking, a little impatiently as though he weren't listening. And as soon as I had finished, he said, 'And now, monsieur, your opinion. That is what I want.'

By then I had had time to make up my mind. 'Very well,' I said. 'I am quite convinced that Captain Patch never ordered his crew to abandon ship.' And I went on to explain that it was impossible to believe that he had done so since he himself had remained on board and, single-handed, had put out the fire in the after hold. Ail the time I was talking the steel pen scratched across the surface of the paper, and when I had finished the official read it through carefully and then turned the sheet towards me. 'You read French, monsieur?' I nodded. 'Then please to read what is written there and sign the deposition.' He handed me the pen.

'You understand,' I said, when I had read it through and signed it, 'that I wasn't there. I do not know what happened.'

'Of course.' He was looking across at Patch. 'You wish to add anything to the statement you have made?' he asked him. And when Patch merely shook his head, he leaned forward. 'You understand, Monsieur le Capitaine, that it is a very serious charge that you make against your crew — your officers also. Monsieur 'Iggins has sworn that you gave the order to him, and the man at the wheel — Yules — has confirmed that he heard you give the order.' Patch made no comment. 'I think perhaps it will be best if we have Monsieur 'Iggins and the other man in here so that I can—'

'No!' Patch's voice trembled with sudden violence.

'But, monsieur.' The official's voice was mild. 'I must understand what—'

'By Christ! I tell you, no!' Patch had come forward to the desk in two strides, was leaning down over it. 'I won't have my statement queried in front of those two.'

'But there must be some reason—'

'No, I tell you!' Patch's fist crashed down on the desk. 'You have my statement and that's that. In due course there will be an Enquiry. Until then neither you nor anybody else is going to cross-examine me in front of the crew.'

'But, Monsieur le Capitaine, do you understand what it is you accuse them of?'

'Of course, I do.'

'Then I must ask you—'

'No. Do you hear me? No!' His fist slammed the desk again. And then he turned abruptly to me. 'For God's sake, let's go and have a drink. I've been in this wretched little office…' He caught hold of my arm. 'Come on. I need a drink.'

I glanced at the official. He merely shrugged his shoulders, spreading his hands out palm upwards in a little gesture of despair. Patch pulled open the door and strode through the outer office, not glancing to left or right, walking straight through the men gathered there as though they didn't exist. But when I started to follow him, the big man blocked my path. 'Well, wot did you tell 'em?' he demanded in a throaty voice that was like steam wheezing up from the great pot of his belly. 'I suppose you told 'em that he never ordered us to abandon ship. Is that wot you said?'

I tried to push past him, but one of his great paws shot out and gripped me by the arm. 'Come on. Let's have it. Is that wot you told 'em?'

'Yes,' I said.

He let go of me then. 'God Almighty!' he growled. 'Wot the hell do you know about it, eh? You were there I s'pose when we took to the boats?' He was grinning, truculent, and the stubble mat of his face, thrust close to mine, was still grey with salt and dirt. For a man who had been shipwrecked he looked oddly pleased with himself. He oozed self-confidence like a barrel oozes lard and his small, blood-shot eyes glittered moistly, like a pair of oysters, as he said again, 'You were there, eh?' And he guffawed at his own heavy humour.

'No,' I told him. 'Of course I wasn't there. But I don't—'

'Well, we was there.' His voice was raised and his small eyes darted to the half-open door behind me. 'We was there an' we know damn' well wot orders were given.' He was saying it for the benefit of the French official in the inner office. 'It was the right order, too, with the ship half full of explosives and a fire on board. That's wot we felt at the time — me and Rice and the old Chief… everybody.'

'If it was the right order,' I said, 'how was it possible for Captain Patch to put the fire out on his own?'

'Ah. You'd better ask him that.' And he turned and looked at Patch.

Patch came slowly back from the street door. 'What exactly do you mean by that, Higgins?' he demanded. His voice was quiet, but it trembled slightly and his hands were clenched.

'Wot a man's done once, he'll do again,' Higgins said, and there was a gleam of triumph in his eyes.

I thought Patch was going to hit him. So did Higgins, for he stepped back, measuring the distance between them. But Patch didn't hit him. Instead, he said, 'You deserve to be strung up for murder. You killed Rice and those others as surely as if you'd taken a gun to them and shot them down in cold blood.' He said it through clenched teeth and then turned abruptly to walk out.

And Higgins, stung, shouted hoarsely after him: 'You won't get away with it at the Enquiry — not with your record.'

Patch swung round, his face white, and he was trembling as he looked at the pitiful little gathering, his eyes passing from face to face. 'Mr Burrows.' He had picked on a tall, thin man with a sour, dissipated face. 'You know damn' well I never gave any orders to abandon ship.'

The man shifted his feet nervously, not looking at Patch. 'I only know what was passed down to me on the blower,' he muttered. They were all nervous, doubtful, their eyes on the floor.

'Yules.' Patch's gaze had switched to an undersized little runt of a man with a peaked, sweaty face and shifty eyes. 'You were at the wheel. You heard what orders I gave up there on the bridge. What were they?'

The man hesitated, glancing at Higgins. 'You ordered the boats swung out and the men to stand by to abandon ship,' he whispered.

'You damned little liar!' Patch started to move towards him, but Higgins stepped forward. And Yules said, 'I don't know what you mean.' His voice was high-pitched on a note of sudden spite.

Patch stared at him a moment, breathing heavily. And then he turned and went out quickly. I followed him and found him waiting for me on the pavement outside. His whole body was shaking and he looked utterly drained. 'You need some sleep,' I said.

'I need a drink.'

We walked in silence up to the square and sat at a little bistro that advertised crepes as a speciality. 'Have you any money?' he asked. And when I told him Fraser had lent me some, he nodded and said, 'I'm a distressed seaman and a charge on the Consul. It doesn't run to drinks.' There was a note of bitterness in his voice. And then, when we had ordered cognac, he suddenly said, 'The last body wasn't brought in until two o'clock this morning.' His face looked haggard as it had done on the Mary Deare, the bruise along his jaw even more livid against the clean-shaven pallor of his face.

I gave him a cigarette and he lit it with trembling hands. 'They got caught in the tide-rip off the entrance to Lezardrieux.' The drinks came and he knocked his back and ordered two more. 'Why the hell did it have to be Rice's boat?' The palm of his hand slapped viciously against the table. 'If it had been Higgins…' He sighed and relapsed into silence.

I didn't break it. I felt he needed that silence. He lingered over his second drink and every now and then he looked at me as though trying to make up his mind about something. The little square bustled with life, full of the noise of cars hooting and the quick, excited chatter of French people as they hurried along the pavement outside. It was wonderful just to sit there and drink cognac and know that I was alive. But my mind couldn't shake itself free of the Mary Deare, and watching Patch as he sat, staring down at his drink, I wondered what had really happened on that ship before I boarded her. And that little huddle of survivors in the office overlooking the bassin… 'What did Higgins mean — about your record?' I asked. 'Was he referring to the Belle Isle?'

He nodded, not looking up.

'What happened to her?'

'Oh, she ran aground and broke her back… and people talked. That's all. There was a lot of money involved. It's not important.'

But I knew it was. He'd kept on talking about it, saying you wouldn't think it could happen to the same man twice. 'What's the connection between the Belle Isle and the Mary Deare?' I asked.

He looked up at me quickly. 'How do you mean?'

'Well…' It wasn't easy to put it into words with him staring at me like that. 'It's a pretty strange story, you know — the crew saying you ordered them to abandon ship and you saying you didn't. And there's Taggart's death,' I added. 'Dellimare, too.'

'Dellimare?' The sudden violence of his voice shook me. 'What's Dellimare got to do with it?'

'Nothing,' I said. 'But…'

'Well, go on. What else are you thinking?'

It was a question that had been in my mind for a long time 'That fire…' I said.

'Are you suggesting I started it?'

The question took me by surprise. 'Good God, no.'

'What are you suggesting then?' His eyes were angry and suspicious.

I hesitated, wondering whether he wasn't too exhausted to answer rationally. 'It's just that I can't understand why you put the fire out and yet didn't bother to get the pumps going. I thought you'd been stoking that boiler. But it hadn't been touched.' I paused there, a little uncertain because of the strange look on his face. 'What had you been doing?'

'God damn you!' His eyes suddenly blazed. 'What's it got to do with you?'

'Nothing,' I said. 'Only…'

'Only what? What are you getting at?'

'It was just the coal dust. You were covered with it and I wondered…' I saw his hand clench and I added quickly, 'You can't expect me not to be curious.'

His body relaxed slowly. 'No. No, I suppose not.' He stared down at his empty glass. 'I'm sorry. I'm a little tired, that's all.'

'Would you like another drink?'

He nodded, sunk in silence again.

He didn't speak until the drinks came, and then he said, 'I'm going to be quite honest with you, Sands. I'm in a hell of a spot.' He wasn't looking at me. He was looking down at his glass, watching the liquor cling to the sides of it as he swirled it gently round and round.

'Because of Higgins?'

He nodded. 'Partly. Higgins is a liar and a blackguard. But I can't prove it. He was in this thing right from the start, but I can't prove that either.' He looked at me suddenly. 'I've got to get out to her again.'

'To the Mary Deare?' It seemed odd that he should think that it was his responsibility. 'Why?' I asked. 'Surely the owners will arrange—'

'The owners!' He gave a contemptuous little laugh. 'If the owners knew she was on the Minkies…' And then abruptly he changed the subject and began questioning me about my own plans. 'You said something about being interested in salvage and converting that yacht of yours into a diving tender.' That had been up in his cabin when he'd been half-doped with liquor and exhaustion. I was surprised he remembered it. 'You've got all the equipment, have you — air pumps and diving suits?'

'We're aqualung divers,' I said. His sudden interest had switched my mind to the problems that lay ahead — the conversion, the fitting out, all the business of starting on our first professional salvage operation.

'I've been thinking…' He was drumming nervously on the marble-topped table. 'That boat of yours — how long will it take to convert her?'

'Oh, about a month,' I said. And then it dawned on me. 'You aren't suggesting that we take you out to the Mary Deare, are you?'

He turned to me then. 'I've got to get back to her,' he said.

'But, good God — why?' I asked. 'The owners will arrange for the salvage—'

'Damn the owners!' he snarled. 'They don't know she's there yet.' He leaned urgently towards me. 'I tell you, I've got to get out to her.'

'But why?'

His eyes gradually dropped from my face. 'I can't tell you that,' he muttered. And then he said, 'Listen, Sands. I'm not a salvage man. But I'm a seaman, and I know that ship can be refloated.'

'Nonsense,' I said. 'Another gale and she'll be flooded — she'll probably break up.'

'I don't think so. She'll have water in her, but she won't be flooded. It isn't as though she's sunk,' he added. 'At low water you could get pumps operating from her deck and, with all the apertures sealed up…' He hesitated. 'I'm trying to put it to you as a business proposition. That ship is lying out there and you and I are the only people who know she's there.'

'Oh, for God's sake!' I said. The effrontery of the proposition staggered me. He didn't seem to understand that there were laws of salvage, that even if it were possible to refloat the Mary Deare, it involved agreement between the owners, the insurance people, the shippers — everybody.

'Think it over,' he said urgently. 'It may be weeks before some fisherman finds her there.' He gripped hold of my arm. 'I need your help, Sands. I've got to get into that for'ard hold. I've got to see for myself.'

'See what?'

'That hold didn't flood because the ship was unseaworthy. At least,' he added, 'that's what I believe. But I've got to have proof.'

I didn't say anything, and he leaned towards me across the table, his eyes on mine, hard and urgent. 'If you won't do it…' His voice was hoarse. 'I've nobody else who'll help me. Damn it, man! I saved your life. You were dangling at the end of that rope. Remember? I helped you then. Now I'm asking you to help me.'

I looked away towards the square, feeling a little embarrassed, not understanding what it was that he was so worried about. And then the police car that had brought me to Paimpol drew up at the kerb, and I watched with relief as the gendarme got out and came into the bistro.

'Monsieur — if you wish to catch your aeroplane…' He nodded towards the car.

'Yes, of course.' I got to my feet. 'I'm sorry. I've got to go now.'

Patch was staring up at me. 'What's your address in England?' he asked.

I gave him the name of the boatyard at Lymington. He nodded, frowning, and looked down at his empty glass. I wished him luck then and turned to go.

'Just a minute,' he said. 'You've got a bank, I suppose?' And when I nodded, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a package and tossed it on to the table. 'Would you have them lock that up for me?'

'What is it?' I asked as I picked it up.

He moved his hand in a vague, impatient gesture. 'Just some personal papers. Afraid they may get lost.' And then, without looking up at me, he added, 'I'll collect them when I see you.'

I hesitated, wanting to tell him it was no good his coming to see me. But he was sitting there, slumped in his chair, lost apparently in his own thoughts. He looked drawn and haggard and ghastly tired. 'You better get some sleep,' I said, and my words took me back again to the Mary Deare. He didn't answer, didn't look up. I slipped the package into my pocket and went out to the car. He was still sitting there slumped over the table as I was driven away.

Two hours later I was in the air, high up over the sea. It was like a corrugated sheet of lead, and out beyond the starboard wingtip was an area all flecked with white.

The Frenchman in the next seat leaned across me to peer out. 'Regardez, regardez, monsieur,' he whispered eagerly. 'C'est le Plateau des Minquiers.' And then, realising I was English, he smiled apologetically and said, 'You will not understand, of course. But there are rocks down there — many, many rocks. Tres formidable! I think it better we travel by air. Look, monsieur!' He produced a French paper. 'You 'ave not seen, no?' He thrust it into my hands. 'It is terrible! Terrible!'

It was opened at a page of pictures — pictures of Patch, of Higgins and the rest of the survivors, of a dead body lying in the sea, and of officials searching a pile of wreckage washed up on some rocks. Bold black type across the top announced: MYSTERE DU VAISSEAU BRITANNIQUE ABANDONNE.

'Interesting, is it not, monsieur? I think it is also a very strange story. And all those men…' He clicked his tongue sympathetically. 'You do not understand how terrible is this region of the sea. Terrible, monsieur!'

I smiled, overwhelmed by a desire to laugh — to tell him what it had been like down there in the Minkies. But by now I was reading the statement made to the authorities by le Capitaine Gideon Patch, and suddenly it was borne in on me that he had not stated the Mary Deare's position. He hadn't even mentioned that the ship was stranded and not sunk. '… And you and I are the only people who know she's there.' His words came back to me and I sat staring down at the paper, knowing suddenly that this wasn't going to be the end of the Mary Deare. 'A strange affair, is it not, monsieur?' I nodded, not smiling now. 'Yes,' I said. 'Very strange.'