The Killing Ship

by Simon Beaufort

  Contents

  Cover

  Titles by Simon Beaufort from Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Titles by Simon Beaufort from Severn House

  THE MURDER HOUSE

  THE KILLING SHIP

  The Sir Geoffrey Mappestone Series

  MURDER IN THE HOLY CITY

  A HEAD FOR POISONING

  THE BISHOP’S BROOD

  THE KING’S SPIES

  THE COINERS’ QUARREL

  DEADLY INHERITANCE

  THE BLOODSTAINED THRONE

  A DEAD MAN’S SECRET

  THE KILLING SHIP

  Simon Beaufort

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2016 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  This eBook edition first published in 2016 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2016 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD

  Copyright © 2016 by Simon Beaufort.

  Map copyright © 2016 by Severn House Publishers Ltd.

  The right of Simon Beaufort to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8639-2 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-717-3 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-805-6 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  In fond memory of Kenneth Owler Smith – mentor and dear friend

  PROLOGUE

  28 February, Livingston Island,

  South Shetland Islands, Antarctica

  An icy wind gusted across the escarpment, making the dust swirl. Squinting against it, Dr Andrew Berrister fought his way slowly towards the weather gauges that had been damaged in the previous night’s storm. Malcolm ‘Freddy’ Fredericks, who had offered to go with him, tried to stay in his lee.

  ‘Well?’ Freddy asked, watching him prise off the inspection panel. ‘Can you fix it?’

  ‘Some of it.’ Berrister began to sort through the jumble of wires and circuits. ‘But the wind meter’s gone. Probably halfway to Chile by now.’

  Freddy gazed around idly while he waited for the biologist to finish. He was one of the team’s two field hands, hired for the austral summer as cook and general dogsbody. Although Australian, he had worked at a Polish base for three seasons, and had considered himself an old Antarctic hand. Berrister’s little field camp had taught him otherwise. Sleeping under canvas was a vastly different experience from a bunk in a heated hut, and he was looking forward to returning to the comforts of home. Only another two weeks – then the camp would be dismantled and every trace of their stay would be carefully eliminated. No one coming the day after would ever know they had been there. It felt a bit excessive to Freddy, but the Antarctic was protected by some serious laws and international agreements, and Berrister clearly had every intention of following them to the letter – as he had done each summer for the last fifteen years.

  In the aftermath of the storm, the sun shone brightly enough to warrant wearing sunglasses, although the temperature was still well below zero. Far below, their camp was a collection of tiny green and yellow tents huddled behind an outcrop of rocks. Around it, the rest of the team were collecting the supplies that had been scattered by the winds, which had gusted up to 150 kilometres an hour. Beyond the camp, the sea was a vivid royal blue, and the snow-dusted mountains and the smooth dome of the glacier so brilliantly white that they hurt the eyes.

  ‘What’s that?’ Freddy asked suddenly.

  Berrister glanced where he was pointing, then leapt to his feet in excitement. It was a whale – and not just any whale, but the most rare and vulnerable of them all: a blue. As he watched, spellbound, another surfaced. Then another – six in all.

  ‘A pod!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ve never seen so many together before – they’re almost extinct. My God! This is incredible!’

  ‘Will they stay around here for long?’ asked Freddy, watching them through his binoculars.

  ‘They might, if there’s enough food.’

  The biggest whale blew, spouting a geyser of mist that hung across the shifting sea for several seconds before slowly fading away. Then the pod began to move off. The two men watched until they were out of sight, then Berrister turned his attention back to the instruments. He finished eventually, and packed away the tools.

  ‘I think I’ll wait here a while, to see if they come back,’ he said. ‘Do you want to stay or go back to camp?’

  ‘I’ll have to stay if you are,’ said Freddy, a little resentfully. He was cold, and had been looking forward to huddling over the stove for a bit, preparing dinner. ‘It’s against the rules – your rules – for anyone to be up here alone.’

  Berrister hesitated. He did insist that the team always worked in pairs when they were away from the camp, lest there was an accident, and in a place where the nearest help was a hundred kilometres away – and depended on the vagaries of the weather – such precautions might mean the difference between life and death. But blue whales … it was just too rare an opportunity to miss.

  ‘Just this once,’ he said. ‘Be careful.’

  Relieved, the Australian began to scramble down the long, steep slope. Berrister watched him go, then turned to scan the horizon for tell-tale spouts.

  Three hundred kilometres north-east, a rust-coloured ship was doing battle with mountainous waves, tossed about like a cork in a bath. First mate Evgeny Yablokov was worried – Lena was old and in poor repair, and he was not sure she could take such a battering. One of her holds was flooded, and warning lights on the bridge showed that her engines were labouring dangerously. More alarming yet was the state of her cargo: the barrels strained at their holding chains and a couple had torn loose. He did not like to think about what might happen if more broke free and started to roll around.

  Captain Garik slouched in his chair, his oilskins still wet from his last foray onto the spray-drenched bridge-wing. His ‘adviser’, Imad Hasim, stood nearby, clearly seasick and clinging to a door to prevent himself from
being hurled off his feet. Yablokov did not like the smooth-talking Hasim, and was uncharitably grateful to see him so miserable. Garik barked an order to the helmsman, and the ship veered away from a mat of ice that glowed green on the radar.

  Yablokov joined several other officers who were scanning the sea for chunks of ice that might be dashed against the ship. When an especially large wave lifted Lena, he could see the craggy peaks of Elephant Island, a desolate scrap of rock where nothing lived but birds and seals. He shuddered. Its jagged skyline looked menacing, and it was surrounded by frothing water that could kill in minutes with its searing coldness.

  He glanced around as the communications officer came to hand Garik a message. The man was grinning, cap pushed back at a jaunty angle. When Garik read the note, he smiled, too, and handed the paper to Hasim.

  Hasim was too seasick to look at it for long. ‘We’d better go, then,’ was all he said.

  ‘Set a course for Livingston Island,’ Garik told the helmsman. He rubbed his hands together gleefully. ‘At last! I was beginning to think we’d wasted our time.’

  ‘How long will it take to get there?’ asked Hasim weakly.

  Garik shrugged. ‘Depends on the weather. A couple of days, maybe.’

  ‘No,’ snapped Hasim. ‘It needs to be sooner, or we’ll be too late.’

  ‘It’ll take as long as it takes,’ retorted Garik. He had been drinking again, and Yablokov could smell the vodka on his breath. ‘We’ll do our best, but in these seas … well, you can see for yourself that they’ll slow us down.’

  Wordlessly, Hasim left the bridge. The door slammed behind him as the ship pitched violently, sending coffee cups and charts flying.

  ‘What did the message say?’ asked Yablokov curiously.

  ‘Whales,’ replied Garik. He grinned, baring teeth that were a combination of metal crowns and nicotine-stained originals. ‘All feeding happily off Livingston Island.’

  ONE

  3 March, Hannah Point, Livingston Island

  Freddy stood at the top of the scarp and looked around him. The sea was a dull, milky silver, the sky was grey, the glacier was white and the mountains were dusted with snow. If it were not for his yellow jacket and the flapping ends of his red bandanna, he might have thought he had lost all sense of colour.

  Although a natural outdoorsman, the Australian had not enjoyed camping out in temperatures that regularly dropped below freezing, and thought the Hannah Point camp was a grim place to be. He had been so cold that day that, when he had finished his duties around the camp, he had hiked up the scarp, hoping to see the blue whales again. Making what was a strenuous climb alone – and without a radio – was against regulations, but everyone else was out working, so who would know? Breathing hard from his exertions, he walked along the crest, scanning the horizon for the flash of white that would tell him the whales were about.

  Not far offshore, a white plume shot upwards, and he glimpsed a smooth blue-grey back. He nodded in satisfaction. They were still there, feasting on krill – Antarctic shrimp. They had been feeding in South Bay – the inlet east of Hannah Point – for three days now, moving among the grounded icebergs.

  He was beginning to think of them as his personal property. Berrister had talked with passion about them – their biology, feeding habits and the fact that they teetered on the edge of extinction – but Freddy felt he knew them better. Berrister had lent him a book on them, too, a dull affair with too many words and graphs, and too few pictures, but reading about them wasn’t nearly as interesting as watching.

  One whale sounded so close to shore that he fancied he could hear it breathe. It lay on the surface for a few moments before slipping out of sight again. He wondered how long they would stay. Of course, that question would have been irrelevant if Berrister hadn’t vetoed his request for a trek west to the Byers Peninsula. Everyone else had wanted to go, but Berrister was officially camp leader, and his ‘no’ carried more weight than seven ‘yeses’. Freddy scowled. Why couldn’t one of the other scientists have been in charge? They would have gone in an instant. Freddy had been angry about it ever since, which was why he had stuck two fingers up at Berrister that day by climbing the scarp on his own. He half wished the camp leader would find out – a row would give him another chance to explain how much he wanted the trek, and give the others a chance to say that they did, too.

  Pushing his irritation aside, he turned his attention back to the whales. As he watched, he glimpsed something else move out of the corner of his eye. At first, he thought he was mistaken, but seconds later he saw it again.

  He reached for his binoculars, and saw someone walking along the South Bay beach far below. The man was at a point where the ice cap ended in a tumbling cliff – waves lapped at its foot when the tide was in, but it was out now, so there was a wide, sandy beach. However, the cliff was very unstable – Freddy would not have walked there. Indigo-blue gashes were scored into its face, marking weak points that would soon collapse, and anyone caught beneath when they fell would be killed.

  Freddy frowned. No one from camp should have been down there. Or had another team arrived during the night? But that was unlikely. First, they would have radioed. And second, people did not appear out of the blue in the Antarctic, especially this late in the season.

  Puzzled to begin with, then with a growing sense of unease, he watched the man pick his way along the beach. Cursing himself for an idiot, he ducked behind a rock, out of sight. Who was the man, and what did he think he was doing?

  When the second report cracked out, sending sharp echoes across the bay, the little huddle of penguins fell eerily silent, then brayed with even greater vigour. Nearby, an elephant seal snapped awake and sniffed the air. He shuffled forward, waking the moulting bull next to him, so that irritable roars soon drowned out the noise of the birds.

  Andrew Berrister glanced up to see John Graham watching him meaningfully, eyes narrowed to slits against the wind and the flurries of snow it carried. Graham was slightly built, with pale blue eyes and auburn hair, which had grown wild and shaggy during the three months that they had been at Hannah Point. He was the second of the team’s two field hands, hired to help whichever of the four scientists happened to need him. It was usually Berrister, as his work with seals tended to require an extra pair of hands. Berrister was tall and looked bulky in his cold-weather clothing. Despite the inconvenience, he still shaved every day and kept his light brown hair neatly trimmed.

  ‘It wasn’t gunfire,’ he said firmly. ‘It was cracking ice.’

  The anaesthetised seal in front of him gave a sudden jerk, knocking the syringe from his hand. He swore under his breath as he fumbled to retrieve it with cold-numbed fingers, while Graham pulled out binoculars and trained them on the glacier, trying to see which part might be about to calve. It was a bitter day, with a spiteful wind carrying flurries of snow. Summer was over and winter was on its way, as attested by the fact that most of the birds and seals had already gone. Only a few breeding bulls, always the last to moult and return to sea, and a handful of late-fledging penguin chicks remained. Berrister and his colleagues were fast reaching the point where there would be nothing left for them to study. He was glad the season was almost over, and was counting the days – only ten now – until the RRS Frank Worsley came to take them home.

  That year, Berrister had chosen to work at Hannah Point, a finger of land that curved into the sea like a hook. It was a stunning place to be, not only because it boasted several large penguin and seabird colonies and was a popular haul-out site for seals, but because of its beauty. It had two long, sandy beaches, one to the west and one to the east, separated by a towering ridge they called ‘the scarp’. To the north was the ice cap that covered most of the island, a towering dome reaching 1,700 metres at Mount Friesland.

  Graham put his field glasses away and watched Berrister draw a blood sample from the seal. Its eyes snapped open when there was a third report. It shook itself, trying to eliminate the lingering e
ffects of the sedative, then aimed unsteadily for the sea.

  ‘Ice,’ said Berrister, before Graham could claim it was gunfire again.

  Graham was about to argue when the radio crackled. It was one of the two students, Lisa White.

  ‘She says she just heard a boat,’ reported Graham.

  ‘Unlikely,’ said Berrister, aware that theirs was the only camp on Livingston still working, and that the nearest base was a hundred kilometres away. ‘She probably heard a seal.’

  Graham relayed his opinion to Lisa. An aggrieved barking issued from the handset, and Graham laughed.

  ‘She says she and Sarah will be back at camp early today – probably by three o’clock,’ he said tactfully, when Berrister raised questioning eyebrows.

  Berrister nodded approvingly. ‘Good. It’s important to keep each other informed of changes in plans.’

  Personally, Graham thought Berrister’s obsession with safety was a royal pain in the arse, and knew the others did as well. According to Lisa, he had been a lot more relaxed about it before he had had an accident on the ice three years earlier. No one knew what had happened, and he stubbornly refused to discuss it, but it had changed him for good – and as he was in charge of the camp, the others had no choice but to follow the rules he set. Graham was all for caution – he had been hired for his experience in mountain rescue, and no one knew better than him the danger of complacency – but Berrister took it too far.

  Graham pondered the situation as he continued to scan the ice. It was common practice, at the end of the season, for people to do something fun for a few days – a hike to a new area, or a visit to another base. Three days ago, Freddy had suggested a trek to the Byers Peninsula, an area of outstanding natural beauty about thirty-five kilometres to the west. Everyone had been excited by the prospect, but Berrister had refused. His excuse had been that there was still work to do, even though they had already exceeded expectations.