The Coffin Ship (13 page)

“And has he?”

“No! Not as far as I can find out. But there is something. And he still does the strangest things…”

“Like buying the oil?”

“Like waiting until I took the first holiday in years and
then
buying the oil. I was halfway to the Seychelles when I found out. It was quite by accident. I’d forgotten to tell my secretary I wanted complete rest and he telexed me the news. He had my itinerary—he’d booked all my flights—and the message caught up with me on Bahrain. I came south instead of heading on east. Came onto
Prometheus
instead of onto the beach.”

“Some holiday!”

“Some lifeguard.”

There was a silence, then she continued. “If he was his old self, I might have suspected it all as a convoluted plot to bring us together…”

“With what object?”

“To bring you back,” she conceded. But there was no reluctance about the concession.

“Explain.”

“Well, as I see it, it really takes two to run the company. One in London and one at sea. I can take care of either end. But if he feels he can’t handle the other end, for what ever reason…”

“All this, just because he wants me back as son and heir? Gambling much more than he can afford to lose, if the papers are correct?”

“No. It’s not just that. It’s me, too. It’s what I’ve always wanted. He knows that. He would never have risked it all for himself. But for me…”

Silence.

“I’m all he has left…”

Silence.

“And there’s so much there, Richard! So much to be done.”

A lesser man might have used Crewfinders as an excuse. Someone not so deeply in love, less involved than he. Someone wishing to keep his distance, to retain a sense of proportion; to hold on to a little sanity. But Richard had been too sane for too long. There would be a way to guard his own beloved company and still to help the Heritages.

And she was right. There was so much to be had. It was breathtakingly exciting.

As was she…

So, at 09.20. Cape time, August 17, with Robin still on watch, seemingly unaware of his hot gaze on her back, Richard pulled himself up out of his big captain’s chair and crossed to the chart table. For a few moments he stood studying the chart lying under the clear plastic sheet: the chart of the Southwest Atlantic. It was time to turn north for home.

During the first ten days of sailing north they covered four thousand miles. As the long, glass-green Atlantic swells passed with monotonous regularity under her giant keel,
Prometheus
returned also to routine—except in one area: during that time she was redecorated from stem to stern, from keel to truck, wherever storm had damaged or sickness soiled her.

Only the Pump Room remained untouched.

The routine, of course, centered around the captain and his day. The routine had come into being early in the voyage. It had varied according to circumstance but it was honed to peak efficiency now. Even though he was surrounded by properly qualified officers, the quiet Englishman seemed to be involved with everything, available at all hours.

Richard’s day began at 06.30 when the chief steward brought him his teak-dark morning tea. At 07.00 he would appear on the bridge and relieve John Higgins of the last hour of his watch. At 08.00, when Robin came on watch, the captain went down to breakfast. He ate and chatted for half an hour then retired to his dayroom to put the finishing touches to the agenda for his daily conference, which began at nine on the dot and was attended by all officers except those on watch. It was a
rigid ninety minutes long and concerned every aspect of the day-to-day running of the ship. It was here that the exhaustive—exhausting—work schedules for the ship’s redecoration originated; and everything else that affected the lives of all aboard.

At 10.30 coffee was served, and, in the more relaxed atmosphere, any other problems could be brought to the captain’s notice. At 11.00, Richard returned to his day-room to centralize and generate the paperwork arising from these meetings—notices read quietly but clearly over the ship’s PA system; notices punctiliously typed and individually signed to be displayed on the various notice boards.

At noon precisely, the PA would sound and the gentle but compelling tones would say, “Your attention. Your attention, please. This is the captain speaking…” and everything would come to a halt while officers and crew alike would listen to the daily notices; any items of news that Tsirtos passed up from the World Service of the BBC; the official figures of miles sailed since yesterday, exact position now, time left before destination was reached; the exact bearing of Mecca for the Moslems among the seamen; and—most importantly (at least, so suspected C. J. Martyr watching these eccentric English officers)—the latest score in the current test match.

He lunched lightly from a tray in his dayroom but always appeared on the bridge at one o’clock, when the first officer went to lunch. He would hold the bridge watch until three, pacing up and down, his eyes everywhere, restless fingers setting everything just as he liked it. Restless hands clearing the chart table of everything except the current chart (only on the rarest occasions was there anything else there: his officers respected his neatness in a way that many captains would envy to the
foundations of their souls), setting out the pencils in regimented rows like Guards on parade. At first even Ben Strong thought this endless adjusting and readjusting petty and irritating. Then it occurred to him that in an emergency, the captain would know where everything was, right down to the smallest item that he might need.

At three, Strong returned to the bridge to complete the last hour of his watch and Richard was released to prowl the ship on an unofficial captain’s inspection. Between three and four, everyone aboard who was involved in anything of importance could expect a visit from the captain and a few quiet words of encouragement. On the rare occasions when something was not up to standard, corrections would be suggested mildly: only if corrections had not been instituted by the next visit was censure actually employed. Richard didn’t want them to think he was trying to catch them out. Actually, they thought nothing of the sort, vying like students with a popular professor, each trying to outdo the others and impress him most.

At four he returned to his dayroom to complete the day’s paperwork, sometimes visiting the bridge to check the logs, but never interfering at that time; “Not actually there at all,” as he put it.

At six, 18.00 hours, he and Martyr, newly showered and shaved, in clean uniforms, proceeded like some theatrical double act down to the Officers’ Lounge for Pour Out. Like the noon announcements, this was an unvarying ritual of the day. They drank and chatted for three-quarters of an hour. Dinner was served at 6.45. At 7.30, they would return to the Officers’ Lounge. Richard had not been absolutely idle—or utterly lovestruck—when in Durban. His negotiations with the owner had resulted in a laden relief ship coming out, as was routine,
from Cape Town bearing all sorts of goodies, most welcome among them a library of two hundred books and a selection of watchable videos. Having arranged for them, however, Richard did not avail himself of them. He would chat for a further half hour, then go up to the bridge. From 20.00 to 22.00, while she had dinner and watched the film if she wanted, he kept the third officer’s watch. But Robin never actually watched a film either. Instead, she would eat as quickly as possible and return to the bridge.

Nobody made any comment about this. You would have thought it was the rule rather than the exception for captains and junior navigation officers to share two quiet hours of each others’ company around sunset each evening. Between 10.00 and 10.30—the only timing that was not particularly precise in the routine—the captain would silently leave the bridge.

In his dayroom, he would do paperwork or read until 11.55; then he would rise again and return to the bridge one last time. At the end of her watch, at midnight, Robin would accompany him below. Silently, almost like children about some secret adventure, they would creep down to the Officers’ Galley and make themselves a cup of cocoa.

Then if the third officer came back to his cabin with her captain, there was never any evidence of it next morning when the routine began all over again.

In the bustle of redecoration, Tsirtos found it easy enough to wander round the ship at odd hours without arousing too much suspicion. But he was always wary. A willing part of the late Captain Levkas’s plans, with responsibility for some action, he felt increasingly isolated from the rest of the crew as the time to take that action
came inexorably nearer. As he had said to Martyr on the night the old officers died, Nicoli had found him this berth, got him involved in this lucrative business. But Nicoli had also been his only contact with what had been planned and now that he and the others had been replaced, nobody at all seemed to know what was going on. Tsirtos became nervous, then genuinely scared. He began to wander around the ship trying to discover—without asking too directly—who else was involved. Nobody at all rose to his bait. In the grip of an increasing sense of unreality, he began a systematic search of the ship, for he knew that, in secret places, there were things like life rafts hidden, left by those dead men who had wanted to make assurance double sure. It seemed to Tsirtos that if he were going to act alone and abandon ship alone, a life raft would serve him better than one of the lifeboats in any case.

He first became convinced that there were ghosts following him at 03.27 on the morning of the 19th, just as he found the life raft hidden on the forecastle head. He had risen sometime earlier, determined to make a thorough examination of the deck, starting with the forecastle head. It was dangerous, he knew, to go wandering around out there in the dark with too large a torch—he would be seen by the officer of the watch. He took the smallest of lights, therefore, secure in the knowledge that there was no watch in the forecastle head to night and that the light he was carrying was unlikely to cast its beam ten feet, let alone a thousand, when he switched it on.

There was no question of his creeping down the catwalk. That was far too risky. Instead he slipped out of the starboard side door of A deck and tiptoed stealthily forward, guided between the various obstacles by the
light of the stars and a nail-paring moon. It was a sultry night. They were north of Walvis Bay at that time, though well out, and heading back into the heat. There was a faint, salt-smelling wind, just enough to whisper over any obstacle or irregularity. The Benguela current pushed them over the Walvis Ridge and the great long Cape swells rose higher, became busier against the hull. There was an air of stealthy activity about the ship that only became apparent when one left the antiseptic confines of the bridge. Though from the bridge, carried magically to him by the whispering wind, came the haunting music one of the stewards played nightly on some strange Oriental flute.

The infinitely distant music, the ghostly bustle, insinuated themselves into his subconscious as he crept along the deck; of such things, perhaps, are hauntings made—if of nothing more. Certainly by the time he reached the faint moon shadow of the Sampson post halfway down the deck, Tsirtos was beginning to suspect that he was not alone. Under the uncertain starlight, the deck stretched vastly away. The safety of the bridge was already distant; the lights already dim. The night gathered itself around him.

Of course, he had been used from childhood to the vagaries of the dark, raised in a Peloponnesian village south of Neapolis, overlooking Kíthera and Crete, which, even when he left to go to sea had still to be connected to any electricity supply. But this night was different from the sage-scented, cicada-singing nights of his childhood. This night smelled of salt and oil and cooling iron. There was nothing in it but the whispering of the wind, the chuckling of the sea, that lone flute like a lost soul crying. There were no familiar hillsides, bush-clothed and precipitous; only the geometric, unnatural planes of
the pipe-divided deck. The farther out he went, the more the steel claimed him, having a sort of spirit of its own: cold, inhuman, overpowering.

Conscious of none of this, he crept forward, his way illuminated only by the heavens, and that light shadowed now and then by the faintest trace of high scud.

The forecastle head was more lonely than he could ever have imagined, a great metal blade coming to its blunt point far from the rest of the ship, seemingly; far, far from the rest of humanity. Under only the sibilant wind and the faint, shrouded sky, like the last man at the most distant end of the world, a sort of rapture overcame him; like the rapture of the deep, of high places and great spaces. The sort of rapture that kills.

It crept up on him, however, for he was at first preoccupied with his search. On the forecastle head itself there was a maze of heavy equipment. The massive winches, one each side, which raised and lowered the anchors. The great posts, in pairs, to which the tow ropes had been connected on the way in to Durban, all sorts of equipment which, as radio officer, Tsirtos was rarely if ever called to deal with. But someone else was, regularly. That was the problem. Who would be stupid enough to hide something in or near a regularly used piece of equipment? If anything had been hidden in the winches, for instance, would it not have been discovered or destroyed when the South African tugs’ hawsers were being winched aboard? Where else was there out here in this terrible place? Increasingly nervously, he switched on his torch and flashed it around. And its weak beam fell upon the spare anchor.

Prometheus
had two anchors ready to be deployed, hanging from the massive hawse holes athwart the bow. Like most great ships, she had a third, for emergencies,
in case one of the others was lost. And it was kept out here, fastened securely to the deck. Tsirtos crossed to it at once, certainty flooding through him. Certainty well placed. Wedged under the anchor, well out of sight of all but the most prying eyes, was a large black canvas bag. Tsirtos pulled it out and opened it. Inside was a deflated rubber life raft, packed tight. On top of this was a box the size of a small hamper. It was locked, but the lock was weak. Inside the box was a radio, a neatly packed bundle of emergency rations, survival equipment, fresh-water distillation equipment, and a handgun. Tsirtos was tempted to take the gun, but thought better of it in the end. He would only have to find another hiding place for it, and he was not confident of finding one as good as this. Well, if the person who had hidden this were still aboard, he would have to move very fast indeed to beat Tsirtos down here when the crunch came. And if it belonged to one of the dead men, Tsirtos was sure he would not begrudge it.

He began to pack it away, still thinking about those dead men, unconsciously soaking up the atmosphere of the vast night around him. He could not begin to understand the forces within and without that held him as helplessly as Robin had been held by the bow wave against the side of the ship. Unable to comprehend the dark wonder of what was really happening to him, he translated what he was feeling into a superstition he could more readily accept.

On the vastness of the forecastle head he suddenly turned, breathless. “Nicoli?” he whispered.

But Nicoli did not answer, preferring to tease him with the almost-silence.

“NICOLI!” he screamed.

Nicoli, ghostly, chuckled in the darkness with a voice
like water on steel. And mad Gallaher was there in the shadows as he rose.

Tsirtos flashed the torch around increasingly wildly, not caring who might see it from the bridge. But they hid from him, Nicoli, Gallaher, Kanwar, and the others, lurking at the edges of shadows, always in the corners of his eyes. Their dead voices murmured just behind him; their dead fingers touched his neck. He suddenly realized just how far he was away from the light: how absolutely alone he was way out here in the dark.

Covered with sweat, fighting the shakes, using his torch to light every inch of the way and lucky to be overlooked by Ben Strong on watch, he stumbled all the agonizing, terrifying distance back into the brightness of the empty bridge where the accusatory murmurs lay just beneath the grumble of the generators.

In his cabin, he began to recover; and as he did so, he began to make his plan. No matter what the cost, he had to get to that life raft first, as soon as
Prometheus
began to sink.