by J. S. Law
Natasha could see inside it.
Some of the notes were still in there, but now there was other stuff, too, notes and papers and even sweet wrappers that should have been in the trash bin.
Cox held up a chocolate bar wrapper and Black looked sheepish, taking it and ditching it in the bin across the room.
“It’s just where I keep my crap,” he said.
Cox rifled through, finding some notes that were in Natasha’s handwriting, but also many that were from others.
“I think this needs a clear-out. What do you think?” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Black.
“Natasha, where did you see the pictures?” asked Cox.
Natasha stepped forward and flicked through the suspension files with her fingers until she caught a glimpse of her hair.
Cox gestured for her to step away and pulled the pictures out. On the top was a photo of Natasha, her blond hair loose and blowing in the wind that was cutting across the flight deck. Next to her in the picture was Gary Black. He was holding a can of beer and smiling at the camera, his massive arm over Natasha’s shoulders.
“That wasn’t the one,” said Natasha. “It was more of a close-up.”
Cox flicked through the pile.
They were all of Gary Black with people from Defiance or previous ships. Some were of a woman Natasha didn’t recognize but suspected was his ex-wife. There were more of him in uniform at parades or military presentations and some of Black with sports teams, several of them at powerlifting competitions when he looked much younger, showing him straining as he lifted a bar with numerous colored disks on each end.
“It’s just my memories,” he said, his lisp making him sound vulnerable as he spoke. “I thought that that one of us was a nice picture, so I printed it out,” he said, looking at Natasha. “It was on the drive. I really didn’t think you’d mind. I’m sorry.”
Cox looked at Natasha and then at Black.
“Gary,” Cox said, and Natasha couldn’t help but notice that she had slipped into first-name terms with him. “Why would you fish these out of the bin and keep them?”
She held out the crumpled pages of signatures.
He hesitated, seemed about to stutter.
“I saw them in the bin,” he began, looking from one woman to the other. “And I thought Nat’d regret throwing them away. I thought when she got married we could frame some of them for her, a gift from the ship’s company, like something to keep and to show Jason how much Nat thought about him when she was away at sea.”
He was still looking continuously from Cox to Natasha and back again as he spoke.
“I thought it would be really thoughtful,” he said. “I thought you’d really love it, Nat. We could’ve got a nice frame, given it to you and Jason from all of us.”
Natasha was shaking her head. She made to speak, but Cox silenced her.
“Gary, would you please go outside and close the door? In fact, would you meet me in my cabin in ten minutes, please?”
Black nodded, looked at Natasha, and then walked out of the stores office in silence.
Cox waited until the door was shut and then sat down on Black’s chair.
“Sit down,” she said to Natasha.
“I can’t,” said Natasha, her body charged with adrenaline. “This isn’t how it should be. It’s not right.”
“Look. You’ve had a really shitty day. What happened between you and Jason, and then coming down and seeing this. It’s easy to see how you’ve gotten yourself into a state.”
“No,” began Natasha, but she was told to be silent again.
“I believe you, Tasha. I believe that something isn’t right. I’m going to speak to Gary now and sort this out. Okay?”
Natasha’s shoulders slumped. She sat down on her chair, spun around to face her desk, and put her head into her hands. She didn’t know what else to do, who else to turn to.
Black had rearranged the stuff in the drawers, had moved things to make her look stupid and paranoid, a troublemaker. Natasha was certain of it.
23
Tuesday, February 3
Commander Ward, Defiance’s commanding officer, was somewhere on board.
Dan hadn’t seen him, but she could tell by the tight atmosphere, people moving around with purpose.
John was making some calls on the flight deck, standing at the edge of the ship next to the collapsible barriers. In port, they were always up—safety first—and he leaned against them, his form black against the scene behind him as he looked out on the seaward side of Defiance.
Dan was just inside the hangar. She checked her phone repeatedly, a bad habit that was becoming an obsession. She wasn’t sure what she was waiting for, whether it was an update from Roger about the NCA investigation, or from Felicity perhaps, telling her some news about what Hamilton had said. She knew she really did need to take a break from Ryan Taylor, too, needed to leave him be, wherever he was, unhunted for a few weeks at least—Harrow-Brown would be watching.
She thought about the fingers that were turning up at the NCA, about the missing women they belonged to. She looked across at John as he wandered across the deck toward her.
“Sorry, Boss,” he said. “So, Josie’s working on finishing off the CCTV footage back at the office. She’s top-notch and she’s on duty tonight so she’ll stay late if it takes longer than we think. She’s rechecking the seaward cameras, too, just in case we missed an overboard, but I don’t think that’s likely.”
“Did we find her bag?” Dan asked.
“No. Well, I guess she must have had one.”
Dan managed not to roll her eyes.
“I don’t mean a handbag, John. I mean she was carrying a bag when she arrived, wasn’t she? The image that was on Josie’s desk this morning showed her carrying a bag over her shoulder, a little daysack, but no one’s mentioned it yet.”
“Okay, I’ll check her bunk space and ask around. Where’re you going now?”
“I’ll try to find this Petty Officer Black. You can meet me down there when you’re done.”
John laughed. “He’s not hard to find, they call him the Silver-Black Gorilla.”
Dan did roll her eyes this time.
“Exceptionally hairy?”
“You’ll know why when you see him.” said John. “I’ll meet you at the stores office in a little while, then. You know where it is?”
“I’ll find it.”
Dan left him and walked back onto the ship.
Defiance had a subtly different layout from that of Dan’s previous ships, with a central passage, 2-deck, that ran more or less the length of the ship from bow to stern, as opposed to the ring-road arrangement of her previous ships with a deck that ran down each side and linked at either end. In various different places there were hatches and ladders that let you move up and down the levels.
Dan walked along 1-deck and then took a ladder down to 2-deck.
She looked down a passageway that was eerily familiar to the last, and then turned around on herself.
“Lost” felt like too strong a word to use, as she thought about where exactly she might be.
“You looking for me, ma’am?”
Dan turned around again and immediately stepped backward, moving away from the sailor who’d spoken to her.
The man in front of her was enormous. He reached out a hand.
“Gary Black,” he said. “I think you’ve gone a section too far. The stores office is back in 3-Gulf, you’ve come into 3-Hotel.”
She was well aware that the ship was divided by numbered decks from top to bottom, and by lettered sections forward to aft. She looked around at the markings in the compartment; he was right.
“I must have been in a bit of a daze,” said Dan.
Dan took his hand, hers disappearing inside it, and shook it.
He shook gently, firmly, but not squeezing as some men tended to do, and then he stepped back, and Dan was grateful for the space.
She co
uld see now how he’d earned his nickname. He was easily six feet six inches tall, but his real size was in his build. Everything about him was oversized, and he must’ve been three hundred pounds or more of nearly solid muscle.
Dan introduced herself.
“I’ll take you to the office,” he said.
He spoke with a slight lisp, then turned away, gesturing for her to follow.
She noted how considerate he seemed, stepping back so as not to crowd her when they went through hatches and bulkhead doors, and not trying to “prove” anything in the handshake.
Eventually they ended up in the stores flat, a lobby-type compartment, and off to their left was the large main storeroom.
Black led her through, and Dan saw row after row of silver-colored stores racks, all numbered and lettered and many with items in cream-colored cotton bags placed on shelves next to bigger items, all of the equipment and spare parts that would be needed to keep Defiance operating at sea.
She followed him through a door and turned left into the stores office.
She was surprised at the size of the space.
Cupboards and desks ran around the compartment on three sides, and there was enough space and computers for three or four people to work comfortably. There was a calendar up on the wall, Harley-Davidson motorcycles, but the woman atop the bike had been colored in, censored with black marker pens, and had a large black mustache and a sombrero drawn on her for good measure.
“Got girls working down here now,” Black said, nodding at the pictures. “But we all like the bikes, so we just censor the pictures so no one gets offended.”
Dan tried not to think about how that would make her feel.
He looked back at her. “Tea, ma’am?” he asked, his soft voice sounding odd coming out of such a large man.
“No, thank you.”
Dan looked for a seat and Black immediately grabbed a chair for her, clearing some coats off the back of it and dusting it down before stepping back so she could sit.
Dan waited for him to sit down first, not wanting to feel even smaller than she already did.
He seemed like a nice guy, aware of his size, and she felt sure that his lisp in some way dented his confidence, but it was still hard not to be intimidated in a space like this with someone who so clearly dwarfed her.
“So, ma’am, you want to talk about Nat?”
“I do, yes, please, but I thought her nickname was Tasha.”
He smiled and his cheeks flushed red.
Dan immediately caught on.
“I don’t say that word very well,” he said. “We agreed I’d call her Nat.”
Dan nodded an apology. “Of course.”
“Well,” he began without prompting, “Nat works for me and has done since she joined Defiance about four months ago. She was supposed to come to work on Friday and she did. We had a cup of tea in here at about eight. Then I needed to go and do some stuff at the main stores offices, inboard. Nat was supposed to be chasing up a load of maintenance stores for the engineers, as well as starting to audit our sea stock.”
Dan watched him speak, noted how he talked about Natasha so easily, almost as though they were partners, rather than her working for him.
“I knew she had a meeting with Lieutenant Cox at ten thirty and I wasn’t expecting her back for at least an hour.”
“At least an hour?”
“Yeah, those two can really talk when they get going. You know”—he paused, looking at Dan and thinking—“what people are like.”
“I do,” agreed Dan. “Some people love to talk, but it still seems a long time for a simple divisional catch-up. Do you know what the meeting was about? Did SA Moore tell you?”
“No, but she had regular meetings. Lieutenant Cox liked to talk to her.”
“Go on,” Dan prompted him.
“When she didn’t come back by twelve, lunchtime. I called up and Ma’am said she’d left her cabin a good hour or more ago. We normally eat lunch in here together on a Friday, right before we go weekenders. So I was surprised when she didn’t show up, but I thought she might have nipped inboard, maybe met a friend and grabbed lunch there. So I just ate mine on my own.”
Dan almost felt sorry for him when he said this, imagining him sitting in the chair like a massive lost child, eating his sandwiches in silence.
“But then she didn’t show up for the thirteen hundred hours muster either, and that’s not right. Nat always shows up on time, and so I started looking for her. I called around and checked the main stores in the dockyard. I made some pipes over the ship’s main broadcast and I called her mobile and stuff, but she didn’t answer. No one had seen her.”
He seemed to be speaking more quickly now, his lisp less prevalent.
“By fourteen hundred I knew something was wrong. It’s just not like her. So I spoke to Lieutenant Cox. We decided that Nat’d gone weekend and not managed to say good-bye. I wasn’t happy. Nat didn’t answer my calls all weekend, and she wasn’t at home, either. Then she didn’t come in on Monday. That’s when I went back to Ma’am and then to the skipper, Commander Ward. He took it serious from the off and we searched all the compartments, you know, in case she’d been looking for something and got hurt or trapped or whatever. But nothing, nothing at all, and I’d already been round the stores areas anyway, so I knew she wasn’t there.”
“How was she when you saw her on Friday morning?” asked Dan, wondering if she could get that question recorded and play it on a loop.
“She was fine,” he said. “Just normal, we had a cup of tea together, chatted and stuff, she was just like she always is.”
“Has she ever done this before?” asked Dan.
“No, never,” said Black, surprising Dan with his certainty.
“Are you sure? I understood that she’d missed a morning muster once, but that Lieutenant Cox had sanctioned retrospective leave.”
He looked genuinely surprised, but Dan wasn’t sure how honest he was being. It was clear from the way he spoke that he was fond of Moore, and it was highly likely he’d cover for her if he could. Also, as Dan well knew, senior rates could be wilier than younger, less seasoned officers like Sarah Cox, less likely to show their hand if they knew they couldn’t be discovered, less likely to come clean and face unnecessary music.
“I never heard of that,” he said. “But I’m sure Lieutenant Cox is right. I mean, Nat’s been a few minutes late before now, but who hasn’t been, right?”
Dan nodded agreement.
“A moment ago you said she’s never late. What do you do when she is, then?”
He shrugged.
“Nothing. Everyone has the odd bad morning. It’s no biggie, and she makes the time up, no problems.”
“But wouldn’t she get pulled up on the gangway for being adrift?”
He smiled again, the same shy smile, his eyes dropping away from Dan.
“Well, ma’am, you know the score. We all know each other on here. Got to look after each other, right?”
“Right,” agreed Dan.
There was a knock at the door and she turned to see John coming in.
She watched the two men shake hands, noting yet again that there weren’t many men around who dwarfed John Granger, but Black did. She watched how John reacted to it, seeming to lean into Black, invading his personal space, whether consciously or subconsciously, forcing Black to be the one to move away.
John looked at Dan, and she knew there was something he needed to tell her, but he looked around and grabbed another seat to let her finish.
“Were you due to be here, in office, all day on Friday, PO Black?” she asked.
“No, ma’am, I was going to be in and out fairly often. I was supposed to be inboard most of the morning. I did have to pop back and forth in the end, though. Loads of stores to move on and off, it’s easier if I’m there to supervise.”
“Okay, thanks, PO,” said Dan, standing up.
Dan turned to the door to see Sarah Cox standing at th
e entrance to the office.
“Hello,” said Cox stepping inside. “All okay?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Black.
Dan watched the interaction between Sarah and Black.
It was odd, the way Sarah, who seemed relaxed, put Black on edge as soon as she arrived, his body language changing, tensing. It wasn’t odd that he called her “ma’am”—she was his boss, after all—but Dan doubted that Natasha had called her that. It was also the way he did it that caught Dan’s eye, as though Sarah Cox had just sucked all of the wind out of his sails.
There was a moment’s pause, no one speaking, before Dan nodded at John and they made to leave.
“Just one thing,” said Dan, turning to look at Cox and Black. “I understand that I should speak to the club swinger. What’s his name?”
“LPT Mark Coker,” said Cox.
Next to her, PO Black’s eyes narrowed and he looked hard at Dan.
“He’s away on tour with the command rugby team,” said Cox.
Dan nodded. “When did he leave?”
“He flew off a few days ago,” said Cox. “The rugby tour started before we were due to get back alongside, so Commander Ward let him helo-transfer back as soon as we were close enough to land, so he could travel with the team.”
“Was he a good friend of SA Moore’s?”
“No,” said Black, his eyes dark.
Cox turned to look at him but said nothing.
“So Moore wouldn’t be likely to be with him?”
“I really don’t think so, not on a rugby tour,” said Cox.
“Okay, thanks,” said Dan.
She left the office and followed John out of the stores flat.
“I want to show you something in the girls’ cabin,” said John, as soon as they were alone. “Might be nothing.”
Dan followed him up and over, climbing ladders, heading aft along 2-deck until they dropped back down to Natasha’s accommodation flat.
“It’s so different from how I remember,” said Dan.
“It is,” agreed John. “I bet you remember the days when you had a wrens’ mess, with its own mess square and loads of gulches leading off it with six or more pits in each?”
