The Strode Venturer (8 page)

“Did he say where he was going?”

“No, and I didn’t ask him. But he mentioned something about it being quite a long voyage so I imagine it was by sea. He was due for a long leave anyway.”

“When exactly did he go?”

“As far as we’re concerned the Friday before last. Would you like me to check for you?” He reached for the phone and rang Legrand’s house. Ferguson was a very thorough individual. He not only produced the time at which Legrand had left—shortly after ten on the Sunday morning—but also the fact that his car was still at the house. He’d left in a taxi with almost no luggage, just an old bed-roll, a cardboard box containing some books, sextant and chronometer and a roll of charts. “Not unnaturally the house-boy didn’t take the number of the taxi and I’m afraid he doesn’t know the driver. My guess is that Charles was planning a trip up the coast on a native boat.”

It was a shrewd guess on his part and entirely in keeping with what I knew of the man. If he’d gone on a native craft he might be anywhere—on the Malay coast or Burma or up the east side of the archipelago to Siam, even China. And there were all the Indonesian islands. It seemed hopeless. “Have you got a list of sailings?” I asked.

He rang for his clerk and a few minutes later the list was in my hands. The s.s.
Montrose
and the m.v.
Nagasaki
—those were the only two ships that had sailed on Sunday, 17th March. Four had left on the Monday and suddenly my quest seemed less hopeless, for one of them was a Strode ship. “Do you happen to know where the
Strode Venturer
was bound for?” I asked.

“She’s on a regular run. From here she normally goes to the Maldives—to Addu Atoll. Provided, of course, she’s got cargo on board for R.A.F. Gan. It’s a somewhat irregular service, but still a service.”

“Who are the agents?”

“Strode & Company. But she’s under charter to a Chinese outfit, the Tai Wan Shipping Company.”

A Strode ship and her destination the Maldives. Remembering the paper he had written for the R.G.S. I felt certain he was on board. “And she sails direct for Addu Atoll—no stops between?”

“Aye, direct. It usually take her about a week. She should be there this evening or to-morrow morning at the latest.”
And he added, “Since it’s urgent the best thing for you to do is cable her.”

But a cable wouldn’t be any use if he didn’t want anybody to know he was on board. “How long will the ship stay at Addu Atoll?” It was now 25th March and I was thinking that if I could get a flight to-morrow I might still catch up with him. Gan was the first stage on Transport Command’s Singapore-U.K. run.

But he couldn’t tell me that. “You’d better ask Strode & Company. It depends how much cargo she’s got on board for Gan.”

I thanked him and went out again into the torrid heat of Battery Road. The Strode offices were only a short distance away and I had to be certain before I committed myself to Transport Command, for I didn’t think they’d fly me back to Singapore. It would be Gan and on to the U.K. But at Strode & Company I came up against a blank wall. The manager, a man named Alexander who looked half Chinese, assured me that no passengers were carried on the
Strode Venturer.
He was far less helpful than Ferguson and when I suggested he telephoned the charterers he simply said, “The
Strode Venturer
is a cargo vessel.”

“My information is that Legrand joined the ship on the morning of Sunday, 17th March—the day before she sailed,” I told him. But it was only after I’d informed him that I was acting on the direct instructions of Mr. George Strode that he reluctantly picked up the phone. The conversation was in Chinese and I sat in the worn leather chair facing the desk and waited. The office was a large panelled room hung with pictures of Strode Orient ships that had long since gone to the breaker’s yard. Models of two of them stood under glass cases in the window recesses. The room looked dusty and neglected. So did the frail, dried-up little man behind the desk. “I spoke with Mr. Chu Soong personally,” he said as he put the phone down. “He is manager of the Tai Wan Shipping Company. He assured me that Mr. Legrand is not a passenger on the ship. There are no passengers on board.”

“He may be on board as a guest of the captain,” I suggested.

The sallow face seemed to reflect a momentary glint of humour; it flickered for an instant in the brown eyes, touched the corners of his colourless lips, and then was gone. “Captain Deacon is not the sort of man to encourage guests,” he said, his voice expressionless.

I hesitated. There was only one other possibility. “He may have shipped as a member of the crew.”

The manager shook his head. “There is nobody of that name amongst the crew.”

“May I see the list please?” I should have asked him for it in the first place. Although there was no change in the impassivity of his features I sensed his reluctance to produce it. Finally he got to his feet and went to the filing cabinet in the corner. The list he produced showed the vessel to be manned on the usual scale for a British ship with a Chinese crew. His name did not appear among the twelve Europeans. But then it was unlikely he’d be qualified to ship as an officer. I glanced at the names of the Chinese crew and nearly missed it because I was looking for the name Legrand. He was down as an ordinary sailor—Strode, Peter Charles. I looked up at the manager. “You knew Mr. Strode was on board?”

He stared at me without any change of expression in his eyes. “One of my staff engaged the crew—in the presence of the Mercantile Marine Officer.”

“Of course. But you know very well who he engages.” The list here on his files and the name Strode—he must have known it was one of the family. I got to my feet. “I understand the ship is sailing direct to Gan and that the voyage takes about a week. Is that correct?”

He nodded.

“Exactly when is she due to arrive?”

“This evening.”

“And she leaves when?”

“That depends on the R.A.F.—how quickly they unload her.”

I thanked him and he rose from his chair and gave a little bow as I made for the door. “If there’s any message you’d like sent?”

“No, no message.” But I thought he’d send one all the same and I wondered what Strode would make of the information that I was inquiring about him. But the thing that really puzzled me was the reason for his visit to Addu Atoll. Why would a man who had been offered a large cash sum for his share in the family business suddenly go rushing off to a coral atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean? I was thinking about this all the way out to Changi, the R.A.F. base. But thinking about it produced no obvious answer. That he’d been forced to use his own name because it was the name on his passport didn’t alter the fact that there was an element of secrecy about his movements. In fact, everything about the man had a curious twist to it, as though he were impelled by some strange inner urge. But at least I’d traced him and since I was still officially a serving officer I had access to a means of transportation which would enable me to catch up with him.

At Changi I saw the Senior Movements Officer. “Gan? Well, yes, I expect it could be arranged … We usually keep a certain number of seats open for men getting on there. But I’ll have to contact the C.O. at Gan. How long do you want to stay?”

“Two days, that’s all.”

“And then home to the U.K.?”

“If that’s possible.”

He nodded. “It’ll be an indulgence passage, of course, and on a space available basis. I’ll give you a buzz to-morrow morning. Okay?”

I gave him the Symingtons’ telephone number and drove back to their house for lunch. There was the business then of clearing up my personal affairs. The bank, lawyers, Naval H.Q.—it wasn’t until after dinner that I could settle down to the most important job of the lot—explaining it all to the children. Those two letters were just about the most difficult I had ever had to write and it was almost midnight before
I had finished. Alec gave me a drink then. He also gave me my first briefing on Addu Atoll. I had never been there. All I knew of it was a description given me by one of the Britannia pilots—“Like a huge aircraft carrier stranded on a coral reef.” But that was just the island of Gan, not the whole atoll. Alec, on the other hand, had been on a destroyer that had refuelled there during the war when it was known as Port “T.” “It’s the finest natural harbour I’ve ever seen—a hundred square miles of water entirely protected by reefs and only four navigable channels between them.” He hadn’t been there since, but without my asking he had borrowed from a destroyer the Admiralty Pilot for the West Coast of India which includes the Maldives. He had also borrowed charts 2898 and 2067—the first a general chart of the whole 500-mile chain of islands, the second a large-scale chart of Addu Atoll itself.

These I took up to bed with me and since it might be the last opportunity I had of studying them I worked at them for almost an hour. The charts were like no charts I had ever seen before, for the Maldives are not islands in the normal sense, but groups of coral growth forming lace-like fringes around shallow seas dotted with islets. There were altogether nineteen groups extending from Addu Atoll, which was almost on the equator, 470 miles north to a position west of Ceylon. Some of these groups were over a hundred miles in circumference. It was a great barrier reef with only a few deep-water channels through it—the Equatorial Channel, the One and a Half Degree Channel, the Eight Degree Channel.

But neither the charts nor the Pilot, which as usual went into considerable detail about the topography and inhabitants of the islands, gave me the slightest clue to Peter Strode’s interest in the area. The Adduans were described as “great navigators and traders,” but the only things they exported were dried fish and cowrie shells, their existence dependent on what they harvested from the sea and from the soil of pitifully small islands that were nowhere more than five or six feet above sea level. There was nothing there
to attract the attention of a trading concern like Guthrie’s—the islands were far too poor, far too remote. And if he had been going there for purely scientific reasons why ship as crew in circumstances that suggested a desire for secrecy?

The element of mystery surrounding his journey distracted me from my personal problems. The man was beginning to fascinate me and this mood of fascination was still with me in the morning when Movements rang up shortly after ten to say that a seat would be available for me on the flight leaving at 1600 hours. Jilly Symington very kindly drove me out to Changi after lunch and an hour later I was in the air.

The flight from Singapore to Gan crosses Sumatra and the off-lying islands; after that there is nothing but sea. At first the sky was clear. But as the sun set in a blaze of flaming red, thunderheads of cu-nim began to appear black like anvils along the horizon ahead. Darkness closed in on us and the oil-flat surface of the sea below faded as wisps of cloud swept across the wings, obscuring the blink of the navigation lights.

My first sight of Addu Atoll was a cluster of red lights in the blackness of the night. These marked the radio masts of the transmitter on Hittadu, the largest island of the group. The lights vanished abruptly, obscured by rain. We were over the lagoon then, but though I strained my eyes into the darkness I could see no sign of the
Strode Venturer.
There wasn’t a glimmer of a light visible anywhere. The plane tilted, the angle of descent steepening. The runway lights appeared, fuzzed by rain. It was sheeting down and as our wheels touched a great burst of spray shot up into the glare of the landing lights. The humid, earthy smell of that tropical downpour had seeped into the fuselage before we finished taxi-ing and when the doors were finally opened we were swamped by the equatorial warmth of it. And then suddenly the rain stopped as though a tap had been turned off and as I went down the steps to be greeted by Jack Easton, the station adjutant, I was overwhelmingly conscious of two things—the isolation of the place and the feel of the sea all about me. A breeze had come up behind
the rain, salt-laden and full of the smell of exposed reefs.

“Is the
Strode Venturer
still here?” I asked.

“Yes, she’s still here.” He had an R.A.F. Land-Rover waiting and as we drove off, he said, “Would you like to go out to her straight away?”

I nodded. “If that’s possible?”

The control tower loomed up in the light. The road was tarmac, everything neat and ordered; it might have been an aerodrome anywhere—except for the equatorial warmth and the smell of the sea. “I arranged for Corporal Slinger to stand by with the launch—just in case.” Easton glanced at me curiously. “I think the C.O. would appreciate it if I could give him some idea of why you’re here. All we’ve had so far is a signal saying you’re interested in somebody on board the vessel.”

“That’s all I can tell you at the moment.”

He nodded as though he had expected that. “We feel a little isolated here sometimes. Hence our curiosity. Anything out of the ordinary has an exaggerated importance for us.” We swung left and then right; long, low buildings and the green of well-kept grass. “Do you know the
Strode Venturer
?” he asked.

“No.”

“She’s an odd vessel. Damned odd.”

“How do you mean?”

He laughed. “Oh, I wouldn’t like to spoil your first vivid impression of her. But when you’ve been on board I think you’ll understand our curiosity.”

T
HE
Strode Venturer
lay anchored about half a mile out from the jetty. Beyond her were the lights of another vessel—the
Wave Victor, a
derelict old tanker used by the Navy as a floating bunker for ships in the Indian Ocean. Far away across the blackness of the lagoon the red warning lights of the Hittadu transmitter hung like rubies in the sky. The air was remarkably clear after the rain, the clouds all gone and the night sky brilliant with stars. “Ugly old bitch, ain’t she, sir?” Slinger shouted in my ear as we roared out across the slight chop produced by the breeze.

The shape of the
Strode Venturer
was standing out now against the horizon and I could see that she was a typical “three-islander” of pre-war vintage. She looked about five thousand tons and her outline, with the single vertical smoke stack set amidships, was uncompromisingly utilitarian. She came of a long line of economical vessels designed and built by British yards for tramping cargoes in and out of a far-flung empire’s more primitive ports. “When was she built?” I asked.