The Pirate Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  Robin looked at Tom and gave him a dazzling smile; he realised he had been outmanoeuvred. It was the price of allowing the conversation to drift into quasi-medical areas as he tried to explain some general principles to someone who did not possess the vocabulary needed. But being outmanoeuvred was a small price to pay for that smile. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘That’s exactly the situation Richard is in. We have to help him remember. You have to help him remember.’

  ‘Very well,’ he capitulated. Secretly he smiled a little himself. Robin Mariner had a much more positive air about her now. That was all to the good: he did not want her to be added to the list of his patients. And when it came right down to it, as a fully trained doctor, he would go through the set routines and make up his mind for himself no matter what possibilities he was willing to discuss now.

  ‘What I would like you to do,’ said Tom gently, ‘is to try and tell me the absolute truth. Whatever it is. At all times.’

  ‘Right-ho,’ said the Sulu Queen’s survivor. He smiled up at the doctor and the expression in his eyes was as bright, and as shallow, as sunlight on glass.

  This was an extremely bad beginning, thought Tom. But immediately he wiped such preconceptions from his mind. Watch and record; don’t judge. He smiled supportively. ‘Good,’ he said. He sat down opposite his patient and put a small personal tape-recorder on the plain, painted wood. ‘Do you mind?’

  The survivor shrugged amenably but silently. The sudden cessation of spoken communication was not lost on Tom either. He remembered all too vividly the way that Thomas, the religious fanatic with several pounds of commercial explosive had also been playing mind games, apparently without reason, while he was building himself a cross. Tom switched the machine on and watched the little tape spool running for a moment while he cleared his mind again. Then, ‘Just for the record,’ he said, apparently casually, ‘could you tell me your name?’

  *

  Robin was fit to explode, but she saw the logic in Tom Fowler’s asking her to stay away from the first interview at least. After dropping him off at the hospital, she took her taxi on down to the Heritage Mariner office. She had lots of things she could be getting on with the first of which involved Mr Feng. Mr Feng was slight and bald. His whole head was dominated by an enormous pair of black-rimmed spectacles. The impact of this eyewear was intensified by the fact that the thick lenses were light-sensitive and even in cloudy conditions or shade, they remained darkly tinted. He had the appearance and furtive air of a night creature caught out in the day. John Shaw drily suggested that night was a time when Mr Feng came into his own: he and Mrs Feng had ten children, though he was sending the eldest ones abroad to relatives all over the world just at the moment, in case things went badly here after the handover.

  But the fact was that Mr Feng was a well-connected, astute and efficient businessman and even though he kept short and precise office hours, he did a first-rate job. Robin was impressed. It seemed to her that she had to expend so much time and energy to get anything done at all that the effortless ease with which Mr Feng performed made her shake her head and sigh to herself.

  In the absence of half of their China Seas fleet, Mr Feng had perforce moved the focus of their operations into brokerage and he was currently engaged in finding cargo space for a whole range of goods which he could no longer fit on the Seram Queen whose holds would be fully laden when she passed through Hong Kong in the wake of her stricken sister. Further, a great deal of extra work had landed on his desk because of the absence of Anna Leung and the effective closure of the China Queens office in Singapore. And even more work had been heaped upon his frail shoulders by the fact that Robin wished to set up a far more efficient and comprehensive series of communications channels between Hong Kong, Singapore and head office in London. She had seen all too quickly that the offices here regarded themselves as subsidiary members of Heritage Mariner only very distantly indeed. If communications had been better, she would have been in possession of a full itinerary of Richard’s movements.

  But the communication she had come to check on had been moving the other way down the newly-cleared channels to London. Slowly spooling, page by page, out of the fax machine on Mr Feng’s desk was the whole of the bulky Heritage Mariner file on Richard. The last time she had looked at it, that file had been nearly fifty pages long, comprising as it did a whole series of documents accumulated in the range of companies and situations Richard had worked his way through. Helen DuFour had also sent Audrey, the night secretary from Crewfinders and one of their oldest friends, down to Ashenden. The result of Audrey’s research was that, as a kind of appendix, there was a whole pile of family stuff — birth certificates, wedding lines, letters and photographs — which traced Richard’s life from his earliest years as the son of a country vet who had done his war service in the Navy, married the daughter of a Momingside solicitor, and set up an idyllic practice in the village of Bolingbroke at the heart of the Lincolnshire fens.

  Unable to stop herself, Robin picked up the last sheet which had spooled out of the machine and found herself looking at the photograph of a small, vibrantly excited boy dressed in shorts and a T-shirt standing outside a long, low-fronted stone building. In her neat, precise writing, his mother had written ‘Richard arrives at Summersend, August 1950’. He was as proud as a king, the glow of his joy emphasised by his halo of near-white hair.

  His hair had become so black that Robin sometimes forgot that he had been blond as a child. As, indeed, were her own two children. Summersend, the Mariners’ big old bungalow overlooking the North Sea, was where the twins were now.

  She looked at the ceiling, refusing to sniff or sob, and let the hot tears run back into her hair. Mr Feng concentrated absolutely on the records he was typing into his computer and for a moment there was quiet in the office. Then the phone began to ring.

  Mr Feng was concentrating so hard on his computer that Robin answered. ‘Mariner.’

  There was that slight time lapse which tells of very long distances, then, ‘Robin? It’s Audrey here. Are all the faxes through? The last sheet I sent was the picture of Summersend.’ Audrey could not really bring herself to trust these machines for all they sent automatic confirmation sheets.

  ‘All here, thanks, Audrey.’

  ‘Good. There’s something else, too.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You might want to check the China Queens office again. After all this fuss, I’ve been trying at odd hours. It gives me something to do during the long night watches. Well, I don’t know how important this is, but I finally got through on the number you gave me. It must have been about eight thirty in the morning Singapore time.’

  ‘And?’ Hope sprang up in Robin’s heart. Perhaps Anna Leung was back after all and she could put that whole section of the business firmly out of her mind. She looked automatically at her watch. Three hours ago.

  ‘I got this nice policeman who informed me that the China Queens offices were now under police guard pending an investigation. Is that important?’

  ‘We knew about the investigation, not the police guard. Thanks.’

  *

  ‘Yes, Mrs Mariner, that is correct. The office is under police guard.’ Inspector Sung chose his words carefully. ‘It is not accessible to anyone. Should a senior executive of the company require entry, that would be taken under consideration, of course. But in the meantime the office has been closed and sealed.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘As part of our investigation into the disappearance of Miss Anna Leung. As I have said, there is a question of financial impropriety.’

  Robin abruptly wished that she was calling from Andrew’s office; it would have been useful to have had access to a solicitor at this point in the conversation. But she had no one to refer to except Mr Feng.

  ‘Just a moment, please, Inspector. Mr Feng, when is the Seram Queen due in Singapore?’

  ‘Ten day.’ She noticed that he did not even have to refer to his computer for the info
rmation.

  ‘Might I ask, Inspector, whether this investigation is simply a missing persons case, or is there some suggestion that Miss Leung’s financial improprieties might involve the whole company?’

  ‘Too early to say. The paperwork in the China Queens office will guide us further, I am sure.’

  ‘Thank you, Inspector.’ She hung up, deep in thought. ‘Mr Feng, what is the name of the China Queens solicitor in Singapore?’

  ‘China Queens a respectable company, missy. No need solicitor in Singapore!’ He sounded genuinely outraged at the suggestion.

  She stood, wrapped in thought. So there was no company associate in Singapore that she could contact in order to look after their interests and find out what was going on. And she needed to know for certain in ten days’ time or they could lose the Seram Queen as easily as they had lost access to the China Queens office. And, she muttered grimly to herself, when things are already this bad, you really have to plan on them getting worse.

  ‘Mr Feng,’ she said, coming to an unwelcome decision, ‘where is the telephone number of that investigator in Singapore? What is his name? Edgar Tan?’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The problem with preparing for the worst, thought Robin glumly, was that you didn’t always know which direction the worst was coming from. She had no sooner set Edgar Tan onto the trail of Anna Leung, the facts about what had happened during those lost days in Singapore, and some kind of an estimation as to whether Seram Queen would be allowed out of the port again, than Tom Fowler called. They met in the coffee bar on the ground floor of the Queen Elizabeth.

  ‘It’s very much as we discussed,’ he said, stirring his coffee slowly with a biscuit and choosing his words with the utmost care, every inch the absent-minded professor. ‘He seems to have no clear idea of personal identity. He certainly has no memory which he can access for any part of his life before he woke up in hospital here.’ He pulled the biscuit out of his coffee just as it was beginning to crumble and sucked on it meditatively.

  ‘His general knowledge is quite wide, but I have no idea how wide it was before. Equally, he knows an awful lot more than I do about ships and shiphandling, but again, I don’t know how that measures up against his original knowledge. There are no personal memories there at the moment. No matter how far back I went, there was nothing we could get hold of. Business matters came and went. I can sense a pattern there, but I can’t see it. No real grasp of political events, nothing current about the cinema or television.’

  ‘He doesn’t watch much television as a rule.’

  ‘No, indeed.’ He reached for another biscuit and slid it into his increasingly lumpy coffee. ‘But it’s a standard indicator, you know.’

  ‘I have his whole file in my briefcase here. All sorts of stuff from home.’

  ‘Good. The problem as I see it is, that we don’t know exactly who got shot in the head.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Robin felt an obscure sense of outrage as though Richard’s truthfulness had been called into question. As though her most basic beliefs were being challenged.

  ‘I’m sorry, I phrased that badly.’ He sucked on his biscuit again. This time his timing was not quite so good. As he pulled it out of the cooling liquid it began to crumble. A fair amount of it landed on the table, looking like rusks and baby food.

  ‘Well,’ she asked, slightly mollified, ‘what did you mean to say?’

  He gave no appearance of having heard her. ‘What I meant to say,’ he popped the rest of the biscuit into his mouth and chewed, ‘what we have to ask — though I cannot at this moment begin to wonder where we will find an answer — what we have to ask is, was he already in some kind of hysterical amnesia when the captain shot him in the head?’

  There was a brief silence.

  ‘You brought up the question yourself almost as soon as we met,’ he continued. ‘And that’s what it seems at this stage to come down to. Was Richard Mariner shot, a fully sensible, perfectly functioning Richard Mariner. In which case this is a relatively simple case of post-traumatic amnesia resulting from a severe closed head wound. Or was the person who was shot in the head already in a state of hysterical amnesia and no longer your Richard at all? In which case we have … duck soup.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘An impenetrable mess.’

  ‘A bit like the mess you have in your coffee cup?’

  ‘A sickeningly accurate comparison. But it presents us with a further conundrum which you should be aware of.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘If the duck soup theory is the correct one and at the moment when he received the blow to the head which began the post-traumatic amnesia …’ he tailed off.

  ‘Yes?’ she prompted.

  ‘If, at that moment, your husband was already in the grip of hysterical amnesia brought on by the unacceptable intensity of whatever experience he had been through …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, in that case we will have to be very careful about how we proceed because, you see, it might, in the worst case, be possible just to jump him back not into full knowledge of himself, but into that moment when he first switched off. We could bring back not your Richard but the madman with the .44 calibre pistol whom Captain Huuk says he had to shoot in self-defence.’

  That gave Robin pause, but not for long. ‘I don’t believe Captain Huuk,’ she said. ‘And even if I believed he thought he was telling the truth, I reckon he probably panicked and misinterpreted what he saw in any case.’

  ‘So, even if there was hysterical amnesia, there was no madman with a pistol.’

  ‘No. Never.’

  ‘OK. I’ll go along with that. In the meantime the first thing we have to establish is how badly Huuk’s antipersonnel round damaged Richard’s brain. Then we can begin to estimate the relative strengths of the conditions he may be suffering from.’

  ‘So, how do we find out?’

  ‘Someone somewhere nearby already has a good idea, I think.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘This is a fine hospital, well equipped and modem. Richard is under close arrest here but even so he is owed a duty of care. He can’t remember having had one, but they must have done a brain scan on him and someone in this hospital must have seen the result. There must have been a series of careful clinical tests done on him and, again, someone here must have the results — probably the same person.’

  ‘Dr Chu!’ she said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Chu. I think that’s his name. Richard’s doctor here. Dr Chu. But surely all these records should be made available to us. Andrew Balfour said —’

  ‘Experience with the British police and the Crown Prosecution Service suggests that they all will, eventually. But I would like to see the records as soon as possible, and talk to the doctor too. I will need to do all that before I see your husband again, I think. And ideally I should go through the records you have brought with you.’ He leaned forward urgently and his professorial demeanour disappeared for the twinkling of an eye. ‘It will all take time, you understand, even after we agree on a course of action. Recovering his memory, getting some sense of what was lost particularly while he was on board the ship, recovering his past life and personality may be only the beginning. Further treatment may well prove necessary and will take time. You do realise that?’

  ‘What do you mean, agree on a course of action?’

  Tom sat back. He picked up the cold cup with its coffee-coloured gruel and sipped appreciatively. ‘I don’t know how hard the people here have been digging, trying to reconstruct his memory. They may not have been punctilious in passing on the records of standard treatment, but I assume they would have had to get permission to try anything else. And the only persons they can approach for such permission are his defence or his legal next of kin; in other words, you. Therefore it should be safe to assume that they have not used drugs or hypnosis yet. But we can’t be absolutely certain until we ask.’
/>   ‘Drugs?’ she said with something akin to horror. ‘Hypnosis?’

  ‘If they haven’t, then we must,’ he warned. ‘Either one, or a combination of both, is the next step. It’s the only way, for a start, that we have any chance of accessing the memories of what happened on the Sulu Queen.’

  ‘But he doesn’t remember.’

  ‘Oh yes he does. He just can’t access the memories, or bring himself to get in contact with them, that’s all. If I can put him in a deep hypnotic trance then I will be able to access them for him. But it isn’t something we want to rush into. We have to prepare the ground. There’s a lot we don’t know. A lot we desperately need to know. What was the name of this doctor?’

  ‘DrChu.’

  ‘Right.’ He emptied the last, thick contents of his coffee cup down his throat with every evidence of enjoyment and put it down with a decided chink. ‘Dr Chu. He’ll be here somewhere. Let’s go and find him.’

  *

  Dr Chu was striking in several ways. His hair was incredibly black, thick and lustrous; so heavy that it seemed to weigh his head down. His body was bird-like and slim, so that his white coat flapped like wide starched wings. His skin was a peculiar, almost smoky shade, as though he spent several hours each day soaking in a bath of strong tea. And his accent was purest Oxbridge.

  ‘Even from the simplest medical viewpoint this is a fascinating case,’ he was saying, alive with academic enthusiasm. ‘The subject was so dissociated when he first arrived that I really thought his scan would show massive damage. But no — well, not massive at any rate. Certainly nowhere near the amount I would have suspected in the face of such a condition.’

  ‘Hmram … said Tom Fowler, studying the scans with gimlet eyes.

  ‘How was he when he first came in?’ asked Robin.

  ‘Ah …’ Dr Chu was caught on the hop by having to speak to a non-specialist, and one to whom he might accidentally give the sort of information Inspector Lee had warned him against discussing. ‘He was awake …’