Offshore (14 page)

Ideally
it should be west facing, a vantage point from which he could watch
the sun drop to the horizon at the end of the day to kiss the sea
goodnight, before sinking slowly out of sight, leaving behind high
clouds tinged pink and purple and a once blue sky a violent fiery
orange streaked with red. Shifting palette of golds, blues and
mauves, would slowly morph into the darkest blue black scattered
with shards of light, those oh so clichéd diamonds on
velvet.

For a
hardened company man with oil under his fingernails and petroleum
in his veins, Eddie Capstan had a deeply sentimental romantic
nature; one could almost say it verged on the poetic.

For him,
true splendour, true beauty, true poetry, lay in the simple
pleasure of a sunset so unutterably magnificent it brought tears to
his eyes.

Yet
today even Eddie’s soft heart remained untouched. There was to be
no sunset to mark the end of this day, only greyness and death; a
day he really did wish had never dawned.

He
picked at his dinner before retiring to his cabin to lay on his
bunk, distracting his thoughts by reading until sleep came upon
him; a shallow restless sleep which tormented him with the
knowledge that tomorrow he would have to stand up in front of the
remaining hands at the daily briefing and encourage them to muddle
through their duties as best they could being one man short,
because they still had a schedule to keep.

They
would, of course, look back at him with faces full of contempt, as
if he had just suggested they roast freshly killed babies on a
spit, and he would justly deserve it.

Chapter 16

Euterich, safely installed in the reprehensible Reynolds’
body, had to work hard to keep up an act of being upset at Lonny’s
loss.

He did
not, however, have to work hard at carrying out the tasks allocated
to his new host – locating, testing, making safe the nearly three
miles of electrical cables running throughout the
structure.

Although
he had never done this type of work before, having good cause to
have a healthy distrust of electricity once he dragged Reynolds’
appropriate memories to the fore and let them guide him, he found
he was rather enjoying it and developed a new appreciation for the
electrician’s craft.

At
lunchtime the party gathered in the galley to take a break from
their labours, and eat. No one apart from himself appeared to have
much of an appetite and there were plenty of reformed ham and
plastic cheese sandwiches going spare.

Having
polished off one round he returned to the servery for another, and
seeing an opportunity to ingratiate himself, took the empty seat
next to a still clearly distressed Lydia.

Most of
her sandwich sat untouched on her plate and she was worrying the
nearly cold tea in her mug with a spoon.

He
offered a genial demonstration of Reynolds’ cock-eyed smile. “What
happened to Lonny, it weren’t your fault Ms Ellis,” he said. “You
shouldn’t be upset about it. Nobody is blaming you. Shit
happens.”

To his
surprise, despite the impoliteness of his statement, she returned
the smile. “Thank you, Mr Reynolds. It’s very kind of you to say
so.”

He felt
a stirring in his chest, genuinely happy that she condescended to
speak to him at all, and so cordially too.

She
consented to them sitting together in companionable silence for a
full ten minutes, him wolfing down his sandwiches, she picking hers
apart, before she rose, refilled her cup from the teapot and left
in a slipstream of delicate vanilla fragrance, citing her need to
return to work.

His
greedy eyes followed her, appreciating the way she carried herself,
neat and erect, a slight swing to her hips, her steps light and
dainty, until she passed through the doors and out of sight. Even
when bowed by responsibility and enveloped in near shapeless
overalls, the female form was a thing of beauty to
behold.

Alone at
the table Euterich chewed on his tasteless food as he thought back
to the one time he had toyed with integrating with a female, to
satisfy a burning curiosity, for the experience.

He had
been on a trip to London, one of the most populous cities in Europe
at the time, and he thought it would be easy pickings. Not
so.

Women of
his class, educated and refined with cultured intelligent minds,
were plentiful enough.

Unfortunately for him, they were cloistered by overprotective
males, making access to them all but impossible.

Repeated
failure to integrate into that closed section of society left his
selection somewhat limited and meant if he wanted to pursue his
experimentation he would have, reluctantly, to cast his net further
afield, to the underclass, to ones he could practise on, to those
who could disappear without a trace without anyone raising so much
as an eyebrow.

He would
start at the bottom and keep it simple, that way he could cultivate
trust among the sex and then work his way up through the ranks
until he reached the porcelain skinned - blue blooded nobility he
aspired to.

Euterich
found samples aplenty in the seedy district of Whitechapel, where
the tarts and toots would lift their skirts and drop their drawers
for him in exchange for a swig of gin and a handful of coins, and
he considered he would be doing them a favour by putting them out
of the misery of their low hopeless lives by slicing them open from
gizzard to pubis, searching through them for something, anything to
satisfy his need, even accused of taking two in one night. A
coincidence. He’d only had time for the one.

From
each of his … he didn’t like to call them victims, preferring the
term quarry, he had taken away parts on which to feed in private,
but found them all to be sour and bitter; tainted bodies ravaged
with venereal disease, their livers dirty and cirrhotic and with
kidneys pickled with gin and brandy. Each specimen more disgusting
than the other except for the last one.

She was
surprisingly different and would have been the ideal first step if
it hadn’t been for the net closing in. His recent activities had
not gone unnoticed and having a policeman on every corner curtailed
him somewhat. He had to be careful, and being careful spoiled the
mood.

Mary
Jane Kelly lifted his mood.

A dainty
young thing with lovely red hair and a delightful Welsh accent, she
was poor and dirty, but chirpy and naive and eager to please for
her pennies.

She took
him to her humble dwelling, a single room in a dirty yard called
Miller’s Court where they had rough unsophisticated sex.

Afterwards, as she sat on the edge of her tiny uncomfortable
bed, easing a stocking over a milk white thigh, he took her from
behind, drawing a scalpel-sharp blade across her throat, almost
severing her head, cutting off her cheerful music hall ditty and
soaking the bed and himself in a hot scarlet fountain.

He
disembowelled the delightful child, allowing himself a few choice
pieces of her viscera and her dear fresh heart, savouring their
unadulterated sweetness, looking forward to seeing her pretty elfin
face looking back at him in the broken mirror over the wash bowl,
to running his hands over the feminine swell of breasts and hips,
when the harsh blast of a police whistle pierced the night, cutting
short his venture, the shrill alarm forcing him to flee mid feed,
leaving poor Mary’s lifeless corpse to be found next morning by her
landlord’s messenger, sent to collect rent arrears.

When
news of the discovery of Mary Kelly’s dreadfully mutilated body
reached him next day, via a headline in the daily paper, for the
first time in his long life he felt real terror. Yes, he had killed
her.

Yes, he
had eaten parts of her, but the rest, the despicable corruptions of
her flesh described in the newspaper and displayed in the grainy
photograph of the virtual ripping apart of her body, the flaying of
her flesh and scattering of chunks of it around her room, her
almost total exsanguination, those were not his work. He never did
more than was necessary for his needs. This was the work of a
madman and although he may be many things, mad he most certainly
was not.

The
police alert had been a false alarm, a fight between gangs of
dockers two streets away, but with the publicity, the increased
police presence, and public awareness and suspicion racked up to
hysterical fever pitch, he knew his time there was over. The longer
he stayed, the more the odds were stacked against him. A good
gambler knows when to quit.

Time to
give up on his quest for the female experience, to dismiss it as a
silly frivolous whim. A dangerous whim. If he was meant to be
female he would have been created that way, wouldn’t he? He would
make good his escape while he still could.

Two days
later he boarded a ship for France and the far continent, and left
the dreadfulness behind.

He also
left behind a legacy which would find its way into the history
books, a legacy based on gossip, scandal and rumour, embellished
out of all proportion, yet would endure to be discussed and
dissected for the next 125 years by a group of scholars who would
emerge to dedicate themselves to the study of the methods and
motives of the bloodthirsty fiend who ripped open
prostitutes.

Their
expertise would be based on every kind of speculation, myth and
conspiracy, the finger pointing eventually to fifteen suspects in
all, from royalty to a fake American doctor, and all of them
completely and utterly wrong.

Euterich
got away by the skin of his teeth, and in the time since that
horrendous period had given little thought to changing sex again.
It wasn’t worth it merely to satisfy a curiosity, considering the
troubles it brought with it. He would stick with what he knew, with
being male, and be satisfied with his lot.

And he
had, until he saw Lydia, and the madness of obsessive desire came
upon him again.

Chapter 17

The ear
bleeding honk of the klaxon in the dark and still of 3:15 am
grabbed the attention of everyone. Whether sleeping, awake or in
between, it pushed attentiveness to a hundred and ten percent, and
scared the crap out of even the most experienced hand because it
was the last sound anyone wanted to hear.

Awooooooogah! Awooooooogah!

The
abandon rig alarm!

From the
first hoot of the electronic horn, the clock was ticking. Fifteen
minutes to get to the lifeboat or you get left behind. Move your
arse! In cabins the main lights activated automatically, waking
their occupants, and in the corridors squares of fluorescent light
blinked and brightened.

From
crow’s nest to waterline, from the depths of the stores to high up
on the helideck, the siren wailed into the night, and every
spotlight - fog light and nightlight, blazed into life,
illuminating the entire platform like a monstrous funfair
attraction.

Not one
member of the crew could fail to be aware of the alarm, and every
one of them knew what to do; drop whatever or whoever they were
doing without a second’s thought, and head for the nearest
lifeboat. Driven into self preservation mode by the doom laden
warning, the crew in various states of undress exploded from their
rooms to stampede en masse down the corridors and stairs towards
the locker room and their survival suits.

To
accompany the alarm other warning lights burst into life, spinning
inside their glass bells and strafing the walls, ceiling, floor and
faces with alternate flashes of red and dark, their meaning clear -
action or death. Above it all an automated recorded voice played
out over the public address system.

Attention all hands! Immediate evacuation! proceed to nearest
evacuation station. This is not a drill!

Forget
sleep, forget dressing, forget collecting valuables, only one thing
mattered - getting to the lifeboat by whatever means
possible.

If it
went without them, and it would if they didn’t make it on time,
there would be no other alternative to plunging into the North Sea,
where even in an immersion suit time to death from cold exposure
could be measured in minutes. It was not an alternative anyone
would willingly take.

The
warning blared again, in case someone failed to hear.

All
eight of the crew arrived at the locker room simultaneously and
stumbled through the narrow doorway to grab their suits from the
hangers.

To the
untrained eye it was a scene of organised chaos, but the drill had
been rehearsed so many times it put each man on automatic pilot as
he poured himself into his thermal undergarments, zipped himself
into his suit, and checked the seals.

Life
jackets and rubber boots followed. Everybody had their own way of
coping with the life threatening situation; McDougal mumbled a
stream of impressive oaths, Brewer chanted out the periodic table,
and McAllister resorted to reciting Mary Had A Little Lamb. Each
man’s little foible concentrated his mind on the task at
hand.