Convoy (39 page)

In Uncle’s office at the Citadel it had sounded funny enough; the very remoteness of it even happening added to the humour. Now it was here; the diplomatic incident was only as far away as Omelette and Cornflower the names by which he found himself thinking of Ohlson and Pahlen. What was going on out there? In half an hour it would be dark and by now the
Penta
had probably caught up with the convoy – the slowing down three miles astern, the slow creep up into position – and yes, Mills had noticed it too: a further slowing down, very slight but noticeable to an engineer or someone like himself whose nerves were on edge. Mills walked over to him.

‘Dropping only a few revs. Maybe a knot in speed,’ he said, anticipating Yorke’s question and watching as Yorke wrote down another entry in his notebook against the time, 1711.

In London it would be dark already; office workers would be folding up their four-page evening newspapers and squeezing out of trains in the suburbs, queueing up for buses, fumbling for their pennies while the conductresses tried to issue tickets by the light of small blue bulbs… Some people would be setting out early to see a film, wives cooking suppers, children trying to find excuses for putting off doing their homework or going to bed. Clare would be off duty by now unless there had been another change which put her on nights. She would probably have supper at the hospital and perhaps go round to Palace Street to see his mother.

Curious that he never felt any jealousy. He had noticed some men going through agonies when they thought about their girlfriends, fiancées or wives, afraid they were out with other men. More than ‘out with’, all too often ‘in bed with’. Real love had to be based on trust; anything else was just a physical attraction or a one-sided affair. Perhaps that was not fair to all those lonely women: he was sure of Clare because she had suffered, and had thought never to fall in love again. Now she had done so (there was no conceit in stating that) it was ridiculous to suppose she would be unfaithful. At least, he supposed it was ridiculous. She was a beautiful woman and any man could be forgiven…he turned to Mills with a question which would stop that train of thought.

‘Engines still seem to be running smoothly?’

‘Sewing machines,’ Mills said. ‘The chief engineer of this schnapps bottle must be a happy man. Probably pretty cross at being stuck in a six-knot convoy when he can make sixteen or so and probably with an economical cruising speed of twelve, but still…’

Suddenly all the lights went out. Yorke was just registering that there had been no explosion when he realized what was happening. ‘Someone’s opened the door,’ he called out to the men, who were scrambling up from their mattresses, and a moment later the lights came on again and Yorke looked up at the narrow grating at the top of the ladder and saw the young officer who had greeted him at the top of the net.

‘You!’ the Swede shouted, pointing down at Yorke: ‘To the bridge!’

‘Keep talking,’ Yorke told Mills, ‘it’s time this fellow was taught manners.’

‘Aye, he’s a cheeky booger,’ Mills agreed. ‘Treated us like sheep-stealers being transported when we were brought down here. I took him to one side and said that if he ever wanted to see Stockholm again he’d better ease down.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Said he came from Malmö. He was serious, too. But he got the point.’

The Swede had repeated his shout while Mills was talking but no one looked up at him and a minute or two later Yorke heard the clatter of leather shoes on the steel rungs of the ladder. Then he felt a hand pulling at his shoulder. He turned his head and looked up at the Swedish officer. Two gold bands on his sleeve, face flushed with anger, a heavy gold ring on the ring finger of his right hand elaborately carved.

‘You, English, up to the bridge!’

Yorke looked at the man’s hand and suddenly stood up, facing him, and said quietly: ‘It is a long way to the bridge and it is dark out there.’

‘You’re not afraid of the dark, are you, English?’

‘No,’ Yorke said evenly, ‘but you will be, in a minute. Have you ever fallen over the side at night in bad weather with the ship making six knots, you can’t call for help and you’re not wearing a lifejacket?’

‘No, of course not!’ But the voice was less sure now, and the man slowly looked round. Every man in the cabin was standing round in a ring and watching him, their very silence a menace.

Yorke waited a full minute while the Swede realized that the only noise was the
Penta
’s engines and the hum of her propeller shafts, and that he was alone at the extreme after end of the ship with fourteen – strangers.

Yorke reached out and suddenly chucked the Swede under the chin as though he was a child. ‘Imagine that that was a fist, and now you are unconscious. Two of these men carry you up on deck and drop you over the side. How long before you are missed? By then, what will you care, because you will be dead.’

‘
Gott im Himmel!
My apologies, sir,’ the Swede blurted. ‘The captain is angry and wants you on the bridge at once!’

‘My dear fellow, you should have said so,’ Yorke said amiably. ‘Now, let me find my coat and I’ll come with you. I’ll just have to visit the head a moment – the lavatory, you understand?’

The jacket he had borrowed from the
Marynal
’s second officer still felt a little damp but it was warm from having been tucked between the heating pipes. Pulling it on, Yorke went into the head, took his revolver from among the five or six nestling between the folds of a towel in a locker over the handbasin, checked that it was loaded and tucked it into the front of his trousers. Then he pulled his jacket straight and did up the buttons. The gun did not show in the mirror on the back of the door. He did not really need to carry it, but that it made him feel braver.

Omelette and Cornflower were both in the chartroom and but for the fact that it was now dark and the light went off and on as the door was opened and closed, neither man appeared to have moved since he had left them several hours earlier.

Ohlson was obviously angry but, dazzled by the lights in the cabin, Yorke could not for a moment see the expression on Pahlen’s face. Ohlson began speaking immediately.

‘Your vice-commodore,’ he said accusingly, ‘will not allow us to transfer you to another ship.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ Yorke said, resuming his placid, second-officer manner. ‘It’d mean stopping the convoy in the dark, because it’d be dangerous to stop only one or two ships. Still there’s all day tomorrow.’ That, Yorke thought, should start something.

‘Tomorrow!’ Pahlen exploded. ‘We are supposed to take you all the way to Freetown.’

Yorke shrugged his shoulders. ‘Sorry about that. We didn’t ask to be torpedoed.’

‘And we didn’t ask to pick you up!’ Pahlen snarled.

‘You did, though. Brotherhood of the sea, you know. Might be you one day. Leaving a lifeboat full of men to die of starvation and exposure is reckoned bad luck.’

Pahlen snapped something at Ohlson but the captain shook his head violently.

‘Look, old man,’ Yorke said, adopting the voice of sweet reason, ‘yours isn’t the only ship in the convoy carrying survivors. Nine ships sunk so far means nine sets of survivors. An average of fifty men per ship means 450 men distributed on board the remaining twenty-six ships. That works out at seventeen men per ship, mister, and you’ve got only fourteen. Supposing you get your lot tonight – how are you going to feel if some British ship’s master says he doesn’t want you on board, eh?’

‘That won’t happen to us!’ Pahlen said angrily and a moment later obviously regretted his hasty words and tried to correct himself. ‘I mean, no British ship would refuse to have us. It’s not the British tradition. Play the game you chaps, what-ho, by jove, chin-chin, bad show. You see? I know the British!’

‘Aye, I can see that,’ Yorke said stolidly. ‘And now it seems I’m getting to know the Swedish tradition. What is it you want? Money? The British Government will pay for our victuals. I didn’t bring any money with me as there was a bit of a rush, you see.’

His sarcastic tone made Pahlen go even whiter: the harsh overhead light threw shadows over his face from his high cheekbones, so it seemed even more cadaverous; a skull over which bleached parchment was stretched.

‘You talk too much!’ Pahlen snapped.

Yorke took a step towards him and spoke very slowly, as though to a child or a backward adult. ‘You called me up to the bridge. You told me the vice-commodore won’t let you transfer us to another ship. If I had been you, mister, my pride would have kept my mouth shut because what you wanted to do isn’t the usual way of treating survivors. Yet you told me. Still, you’re a neutral so we’ll let it slide. But what the bloody hell do you mean by blaming me for it? If the vice-commodore has to remind you what’s the honourable and decent thing to do, don’t expect
me
to wipe your eyes or congratulate you.’

‘Come, come, there’s no need for us to lose our tempers,’ Ohlson said soothingly. ‘Mr Pahlen and I are just worried about your comfort: fourteen men stuck in that miserable accommodation.’

‘We’re comfortable enough, captain,’ Yorke interrupted dourly. ‘It’s a lot more comfortable than a lifeboat, and providing we don’t get torpedoed tonight or any other night we’ll have no complaints.’

‘Ah, well, then let’s hope we have a good trip,’ Ohlson said with the heartiness of a doctor comforting the widow of a man who had just died because of his wrong diagnosis.

‘Aye, we can live in hope,’ Yorke said, adopting a Yorkshire accent, ‘even if we die in despair.’

Ohlson paused a moment, working out what had been said, and then he smiled. ‘You English, you have these wise sayings.’

‘Ah, there are plenty more where that came from: “He who hesitates is lost!”’ Yorke said, and a moment later could have bitten his tongue, but Ohlson merely nodded in agreement, and Yorke said goodnight to both men and left the cabin.

The young officer was waiting in the darkened wheelhouse. He was alone, but Yorke wondered if others were waiting below on the maindeck. The officer led the way down but once they were on the maindeck motioned Yorke to lead the way along the starboard side, which was the lee side. Instead Yorke turned, as though misunderstanding him, and ducked round the hatch and made his way aft in the darkness along the weather side, arriving at the door of the cabin a good minute before the other man, who arrived puzzled and out of breath.

‘Why did you go that way? I am your escort.’

‘I needed the exercise,’ Yorke said as he waited for the Swede to undo the door.

He went down the steel ladder as the men, alerted by the opening door extinguishing the light, were looking up at him, and he heard the door slam shut behind him and sensed that the Swede had not come inside. The men looked worried. Mills and young Reynolds obviously wanted to ask questions, but had learned the hard way that one did not question superior officers. However, it was better that the men knew exactly what was happening; there was nothing secret about it, and he had learned one thing in the war so far: men were usually frightened only of the unknown. Once they knew what threatened them, they were not scared. Fear was a question mark, and a good leader gave the answers as soon as possible.

He gestured to the men to gather round and brought them up to date, describing both visits to the
Penta
’s bridge and the attitude of the Swedish officers. He did not mention Cornflower’s comment that torpedoing ‘won’t happen to us’ – the man might have been one of those incurable optimists that believed only his neighbour’s car crashed, never his own.

The seamen seemed almost bored, and when Yorke finished and asked for questions, there was none; only a comment from Jenkins.

‘That door, sir,’ he said, gesturing to the top of the ladder. ‘I had a look at it while you were gone. Any time you want it opened, just pass the word.’

Yorke looked surprised. ‘I didn’t know you were a locksmith.’

‘I’m not, sir, but locks have to be fitted. That one, like most, is intended to stop anyone breaking
into
this cabin, which means it’s screwed into the wood from the inside, with no fastenings showing on the outside. I just have to undo four screws on our side and the lock either falls off or moves enough to open the door. The Swedes haven’t realized that!’

Yorke grinned with pleasure. Like most people (including these Swedes) he tended quite wrongly to regard a lock as a lock, thinking that whether you were standing on one side of the door or the other when you turned the key, the door was locked and that was that. But of course a lock could be smooth only on one side: the outside of the front door of a house but the inside of a cell door in a jail.

‘Screwdriver ready?’ He was only joking, but Jenkins held up the remains of a deck knife and Yorke saw he had broken the blade so that only a narrow sliver near the hilt remained, where the metal was thickest.

‘I took the liberty, sir,’ he said apologetically, ‘but I ’ad a word with Mr Mills first. I’ve just “started” all four screws on the lock. Nobody’ll notice and I haven’t scratched the paint, but it means I know all four will come out. Otherwise you risk getting three out and the last bleeder sticks like a limpet.’

Yorke thought of Ohlson and Pahlen, the Omelette and the Cornflower, both secure in the knowledge that ‘the English’ were locked down below. The best laid plans (whatever they were) of those two villains might yet be brought to nought because they forgot which side their lock was screwed.

But what
were
their plans? There was nothing on board the
Penta
that they felt had to be hidden from the eyes of the English officer: he had walked up to the bridge and back and it was obvious the escort was only concerned to fetch him and see him back to his quarters. There had been no attempt to hide anything on the bridge: he had seen the wheelhouse and the chartroom. So what could be done? There was no point in unscrewing that lock and turning the lads loose so they could take over the ship. He realized, with a sick feeling, that he was going to have to hear tonight’s attack on the convoy – and surely there would be one – from his prison and there was nothing he could do about it. The
Penta
might have something to do with these insider attacks, but it was damned obvious that whatever it was they did did not occur during the night: it must happen, over the horizon, in broad daylight, when no one from the convoy or escort could see the
Penta
.