The Pirate Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  With almost boyish excitement, Andrew looked across at his companion in adventure, but that one glance sobered him at once. He thought he had never seen a face more grimly determined in his life. Irrespective of her sex, here was a person taking a desperate gamble in the full knowledge of the terrible magnitude of the stakes. There was a kind of gritty heroism here which even the carefully applied make-up could not conceal. He breathed in, stretching his ribs until his sides ached, unconsciously making himself larger, like a threatened animal.

  The lift car stopped with a jerk. The door wheezed open.

  Still slightly inflated, Andrew stepped out, his shoulder and side eclipsing his companion protectively. He took three steps along a long corridor and he stopped. Four doors down on the right, a man in uniform sat at attention outside a doorway. He held a square black gun which Andrew did not recognise as a Heckler and Kock SP5 across his lap. At the sound of the lift doors opening, the man looked down the corridor and Andrew found himself the subject of a cold, unmoving stare. When Robin stepped round him he felt an almost uncontrollable urge to hold her back, but he failed to move fast enough.

  ‘We are here to see Captain Richard Mariner,’ she said crisply in an unexpectedly loud, carrying voice. ‘Please let us in at once.’

  The uniformed guard stood up, lifting the gun into prominence simply by moving it across his chest into a sort of ‘slope arms’ position. In spite of the fact that he was armed, he was not obviously threatening. He did not seem to be undecided, thought Andrew; he was simply waiting for something else to happen. The solicitor hurried a little, trying to keep up with the human dynamo in front of him.

  ‘Captain Richard Mariner,’ she said again in that piercing, carrying voice. Abruptly Andrew realised she was calling to him, asking him to reply, to alert them to his whereabouts. ‘We are here to see Captain Richard Mariner.’ The last near-bellow drowned out the sound of the second lift door opening, but as it echoed into silence, there came all too audibly one word and a metallic click. The guard sprang to attention and suddenly his gun was no longer simply across his breast. It was pointed at them. There came another click as he, too, flicked off the safety.

  There was a moment of absolute stillness. Then, from behind them, came a quiet, beautifully modulated voice which carried effortlessly over the hiss of the closing lift doors.

  ‘Captain Mariner, Mr Balfour,’ it said. ‘My name is Daniel Huuk. I am a captain in the Royal Hong Kong Naval contingent and I have been detailed to guard the accused Richard Mariner tonight. Captain Mariner is not available for interview at this time, I’m afraid. May I escort you back to the foyer?’

  *

  Robin held herself in check until he turned back onto Gascoigne Road, heading south towards Tsim Tsa Tsui Tong East, Hong Chong Road and the cross-harbour tunnel. Then she simply started to shake. Andrew did not look at her, feeling terribly deflated — defeated — himself, suddenly at the verge of exhaustion, extremely worried about losing concentration and doing something silly with the car. ‘It’s been a bad day,’ he said, soothingly, desperately keen to give her something to cling to.

  ‘Let me tell you, Andrew Atherton Balfour,’ she said, her voice thick and husky with tears. ‘Let me tell you about my day.’ She fell silent, and he risked a glance, fearing she was losing control of herself. The bright signs directing them to Kai Tak illuminated her face, making it seem to be made of marble. It was set, still, apart from the twin floods of liquid glistening on her cheeks. With that vision in front of his eyes, he looked back at the road, signalling the right turn and pulling into the right lane for the feeder into Hong Chong Road and preparing for the near U-turn down between the polytechnic and the railway station to the Kowloon entrance to the tunnel.

  ‘Let me tell you about my day,’ she repeated, clearly taking herself in hand. ‘Since the last time I enjoyed a decent night’s sleep, I have driven down the full length of England with two irate six-year-olds in the back seat. I have had a fight with my son, destroyed a letter from my husband and discovered that all his telephone calls have been wiped off the answerphone. I have had a plate of beans, a glass of whisky and two hours’ sleep. I have received the most terrifying phone call of my life. I have arranged for my children to be sent back up the full length of England and then driven my husband’s E-type for the first and last time in my life.’ She took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘I have ridden in the Eurostar express to Paris and caught the Concorde. I have talked to one nice man and one exceedingly nasty one, eaten two croissants and one rather chewy salmon steak. I have consumed, I guess, six cups of coffee. I have been subjected to what I believe you called “tight security” and I have come through a typhoon. All for no reason. I have had three hours’ sleep in forty-eight. I have eaten beans, croissants and a sliver of fish. I have come halfway round the world. All for no reason at all.’

  They had rumbled down into the tunnel long before she had finished this monologue, and Andrew was driving with owlish concentration by the time they came out of it up into the restless air past the Yacht Club and, aptly, the Police Officers’ Club. All he could think of was that he had to get her to the Mandarin up on Connaught Road Central. He guided the Vantage onto Gloucester Road through Wanchai and, for the first time in his life found that he had the windblown thoroughfare all to himself. It was fortunate that this was the case, for he would never have managed the one-way system round onto Connaught Road had his not been the only vehicle involved in the manoeuvre.

  It was with something akin to surprise that he pulled up outside the Mandarin and found himself looking up at the expensive frontage of the exclusive hotel. ‘Here we are,’ he announced cheerily.

  No reaction. Except, perhaps, just the faintest snore.

  ‘Captain Mariner …’ He leaned across and shook her gently.

  The wind thundered in past Jardine House and he wondered briefly whether she had been correct in her weather forecast after all.

  He leaned across and said with fatigue-slurred urgency, ‘Robin!’

  No reaction. She was dead to the world. Catatonic; as good as.

  ‘ROBIN!’ he bellowed.

  There was no reaction at all.

  Andrew slumped back into his seat and looked from right to left. On his right was one of the most exclusive hotels in Hong Kong. The doors were closed. He would have to summon the night porter in order to get in. The thought of turning up at that forbidding door with an insensible blonde draped over his arms was more than he would readily face. He took Robin by the shoulder and shook her with such energy that it would have had him sent off a rugby field for inappropriate use of force. She snored. She did not stir.

  He sat back with the impression that his mind was racing, though in fact he was thinking with almost drunken sluggishness. OK, he thought. He had a comatose woman whom he wished to get into her suite in the Mandarin Hotel. There were only two ways in which he was going to achieve this. He would have to carry her to the door and then into the reception area, or he was going to have to get a night porter to carry her. That was it. Those were the alternatives. It was difficult for him to calculate which would be more dreadful.

  ‘I’m sorry, Robin,’ he said, loudly and seriously, ‘I’m going to have to take you home. But don’t worry,’ he added bracingly, ‘I know you’re going to love Repulse Bay.’

  *

  As he guided the Aston Martin Vantage back across Central and then out through Wanchai, past Happy Valley and on up the hill, heading south through Magazine Gap and away into the stormy night, Andrew Atherton Balfour tried to work out what he was going to do. Robin Mariner and her mysterious husband had rather turned his life on its head, and all at an amazing speed. He would have to talk things through as a matter of some urgency with his senior partner Gerry Stephenson. He would have to start making detailed arrangements to lean on the police and the Royal Navy very hard indeed. There had better be very, very good reason for the armed guards and the continued refusal to allow access to his cl
ient. Then he needed to start looking into the background of the case as a whole and find out just what the hell was going on — what had already gone on aboard the unfortunate ship the Sulu Queen and, perhaps most importantly, what would go on in seven weeks’ time if the case toppled over into the jurisdiction of the new Chinese Basic Law.

  Put at its most simplistic, the nightmare scenario was this: there was a distinct possibility that a man found guilty of murder on 30 June could expect to be deported to England and put in prison there; but a man found guilty of the same crime on 1 July might expect to be taken to Beijing and executed.

  As though she could read his mind, Robin stirred and groaned. It was the saddest sound he had ever heard. ‘Robin?’ he called.

  No response.

  He shook himself, suddenly aware that he had been bowling along the road at the better part of a ton effectively sound asleep. The wind tore a rent in the hurrying cloud cover and a low, bright moon lit up the countryside all around him. The wet slopes glinted as though the hillsides were covered with ice or snow. Ma Kong Shan gleamed precipitously on his left, its top chopped off by the Aston’s low roof. Far behind, Jardine’s Lookout glimmered spectrally in his rearview mirror, then vanished with the moonlight. Andrew hunched forwards and followed the tunnel of the headlights down to the southside coast.

  It was after 1 a.m. when the Vantage grumbled into Repulse Bay. Andrew swung it left, up the hill towards the little enclave where his house stood overlooking the restless sea beside that of his senior partner and wife. As the massive car pulled up the steep hill, it moved more and more slowly. This was not because of any failure of power but because of a mixture of various types of confusion in the mind of its driver. His own, relatively modest, residence stood shuttered and dark at the end of a short drive on his right. The much larger house owned by Gerry and Dottie Stephenson stood on the left, with bars of light blazing round the edges of the storm shutters and reaching out like odd-shaped searchlights, given body by the last of the rain. The contrast between the houses gave Andrew pause for thought. The broad wheels rolled to a stop and Andrew pulled up the handbrake as he calculated what it would be best to do.

  The problem was this. His amah Su Lin did not live in. She would arrive with the Sunday papers in less than seven hours’ time. She was a lively and intelligent woman but he knew from past experience that she was also an inveterate gossip. No matter how innocent the actual explanation, the discovery of a strange woman asleep in his bedroom while he camped on the sofa would give Su Lin untold licence for sexual speculation. It was a little like something out of a French farce, but he was all too well aware — as who in his profession was not — that there are not many laughs in sexual misunderstandings in real life. Especially as Su Lin’s brother was a stringer for the Standard newspaper and several Chinese language dailies. He could just see the headlines: ‘BLONDE WIFE OF MASS MURDER SUSPECT DISCOVERED IN LOCAL SOLICITOR’S BED’. And that was just the way the conservative English-language papers would put it. What the Chinese press would say went beyond even his lurid imaginings. No. If Gerry and Dottie were still up, then he had better impose on their good nature a little.

  *

  Gerry and Dottie Stephenson were more than up, they were in the middle of a rave-up. The weather was a perfect excuse for the first typhoon party of the season, and the Stephensons were throwing it.

  Andrew, all unaware, drew the car onto their forecourt, left the lights on and ran through the spitting rain and the jumble of other vehicles to their front door. He pushed the bell and then hammered on the wet wood. The wind grumbled up from the bay but it was no longer powerful enough to drown out the thunder of music from inside. The big solicitor frowned and began to look around, the penny slowly beginning to drop. Too late. The door burst open and there was Gerry, hair awry, in his shirtsleeves with his collar wide and his tie at half mast. ‘Why, it’s Andrew! Come you in, my boy, come you in!’ He waved Andrew inwards a little unsteadily with a hand holding a tumbler full of whisky. Behind him, the Stephensons’ hallway seethed with bodies pushing through from the sitting room to the kitchen and back. The stairs rose up like the terraces at Twickenham packed for the Oxbridge match. Warmth rushed out and the wind rushed in. Knowing he was going to regret this, Andrew went in as well. Gerry at once draped himself affectionately round Andrew’s shoulders and bellowed, ‘What’ll it be?’

  Long experience had taught Andrew that abstinence begat argument in the Stephenson household, so he said, ‘Carlsberg, if you have …’

  ‘See what I can do,’ said his host cheerfully and plunged left to the bar in the kitchen. Andrew pushed right, nodding and waving to everyone he knew — which was almost everyone there. He found Dottie by the piano surrounded, as always, by her boys from the Cricket Club. ‘Andrew,’ she cooed, her voice carrying over the hubbub after years of practice. ‘Darling, where have you been?’

  ‘Dottie, I have to talk to you. It’s an emergency, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Should you be telling this to Gerry, darling?’

  ‘Not that sort of emergency. Look, can we go somewhere?’

  ‘I say, Balfour, old man, are you still driving that beast of a Vantage?’ asked one of the Cricket Club, a slight, whip-strong man who was a demon wicketkeeper.

  ‘Yes, I am, Jeremy. Look, Dottie, please, I’m sorry but I need your help.’

  ‘Of course, darling. Follow me.’ Dottie caught up her glass with one hand and her cigarette holder with the other.

  She waved the Cricket Club aside with an imperial gesture, then she plunged through her guests and he followed in her wake. Jeremy the wicketkeeper tagged along behind unnoticed.

  Out through the sitting room door they went, Andrew pausing only to reach across and relieve Gerry of the lager glass he was waving, down through the hall and to the door of the cloakroom beside it. They jumped the little queue waiting there and Dottie slapped the door with an open hand until a sheepish girl in a rumpled miniskirt came out and then the pair of them crushed into the tiny room and closed the door behind them, unaware that Jeremy the wicketkeeper had gone on out to look at the car. Andrew pressed his back against the mass of coats dripping against the wall and took an extremely welcome pull from the glass. Dottie put the lid down and perched on the loo. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘tell me all about it, dear.’

  He had only just begun when everything outside suddenly went absolutely still. Wind thundered loudly, but all music and conversation stopped dead. ‘Now what?’ snapped Dottie, pushing past Andrew to open the cloakroom door.

  Her action revealed the packed hall, with everyone facing the stairs. And it revealed, halfway up the stairs, Jeremy the wicketkeeper with his hands wide and his face white.

  ‘Swear to God,’ he was yelling at the top of his voice, ‘swear to God and I kid you not. Balfour’s got a strange blonde in his Aston Martin, and I do believe she’s dead!’

  Chapter Ten

  Next morning, Robin was awoken by a combination of sunlight striking through pink silk curtains and the gentlest of knocking at a door. She looked around herself with profound disquiet, for the last thing she remembered was falling asleep in Andrew Balfour’s car on the way to the Mandarin Hotel. And this was not the Mandarin Hotel. This was nowhere that she recognised at all. This was not a bed she knew. This was not a duvet she had ever seen before. And, perhaps most worryingly, the nightdress she was wearing was not one she knew either.

  She sat up, looking around. The room was reassuringly feminine and a little cluttered. Her cases were piled on an armchair, both closed. Her coat and travelling clothes were neatly folded on them and her underwear was still in place beneath the peach chiffon of the strange nightie.

  The knocking was repeated and a slightly plummy, husky voice called, ‘Mrs Mariner, are you awake?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Please come in.’

  A middle-aged woman in a beige wool suit, pearls and a neat little hat came in followed by a younger, Oriental woman carrying a tray.
At once the fragrance of brewing tea filled the air and Robin’s mouth began to water. ‘I’m sorry,’ she began, more in confusion than actual apology.

  ‘I know, my dear, you have no idea who I am or where you are. You’re worried and I can’t blame you.’

  The tray went onto a little kidney-shaped vanity table and the lady in the beige wool suit perched on the bed while the tea was being poured. Robin noticed that she was wearing tan kid gloves. At no time did she stop talking.

  ‘My name is Dorothea Stephenson but everyone calls me Dottie. My husband is Andrew’s senior partner and you are in the spare room of our house in Repulse Bay. One lump or two?’

  ‘Just a little milk, thank you. I —’

  ‘Andrew brought you here last night when he couldn’t wake you up. I don’t think he was particularly concerned about that, you understand, though we did ask Dr Towne to look at you after that idiot Jeremy announced that you were dead. No, it was quite obvious that you were simply exhausted. But I’m afraid the thought of carrying you into the Mandarin in that condition was simply too much for the poor boy …’

  Robin accepted the tea and sipped it. Her expression was one of absolute concentration, but she let Mrs Stephenson’s words wash over her, content to pick out one in ten and think her own thoughts.

  She was in Repulse Bay. That was no good at all. She had to be back in Central where she could get to the police and the navy and pop across to Kowloon if need be. She had a name now: Daniel Huuk. She wanted him for a start. And she wanted the name of the man who had put armed guards on Richard’s door. That would have to be a senior police officer, the man in charge of the case. And she wanted the name of, and an interview with, whichever doctor in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital was treating Richard.