by Peter Tonkin
He took his number two wood and patted the grass behind the tee with its varnished head, glancing up speculatively. At the last two holes he had taken practice swings and then sliced both drives. Perhaps he would do better just to let rip. With no further comment, he swung back and hit the ball. The hole was three hundred and eighty yards. The first three hundred yards went uphill steeply and the last eighty fell away sharply. His drive did not gain the height he had hoped and thumped rather hard into the left of the fairway. At least it didn’t vanish into the rough.
Sir William took his number three wood and sat his ball on a high tee. ‘It’s not just a question of money,’ he observed as he, like Harcourt, settled the rough grass behind the little plastic pin by patting it with his club head. ‘We have insurance, as you know, and we could under normal circumstances afford a couple of comparable hulls. I am worried, however, that there may be more to this thing than meets the eye.’
He stopped talking and squared up properly for his shot. The conversation was important, but there was no sense in losing the match because of it. His tee shot lifted far higher than Harcourt’s had, very nearly reaching the crest. He watched the white dot bounce and rest. Neat little five iron down to the green from there, he thought. He would win this hole too if the weather held.
‘As we’ve stated in the submissions already before the court, the case against Heritage Mariner is quite simple,’ said Harcourt, not for the first time, as they rocked their clubs up onto the trollies and began to pull them onwards and upwards. ‘The Italian company, CZP, owned the ship. Richard does not dispute that he was on board CZP’s ship, nor that he was notionally in charge of her. He agrees that, just before the ship sank, he was actively engaged in setting explosive charges with the expressed intention of sinking the ship. But he maintains that the ship went down in the final analysis because of the action of the cargo, which effectively ate its way through the sides. His defence is simply that he was prevented from scuttling the ship by the fact that she sank herself. That’s all there is to it. I must say, these are late days to be having second thoughts, old chap. I mean, we have agreed the pleadings before the judge already; there’s only the final liability to settle now. You should have brought up any worries weeks ago, before I took it to the judge in his chambers.’
They came up to Harcourt’s ball at this point and he squinted up the hill, which looked much steeper from this vantage point. It had hit the ground so hard that it had bounced and was sitting on top of a clump of grass just at the edge of the fairway. Harcourt reckoned he could risk a three wood from here. Certainly it looked as though they had better finish the hole as quickly as possible — it might be their last. Although this was a late weekend in May, the weather was still behaving as though it was an early weekend in March. There were tall black clouds sweeping down over the Borders towards them.
Bill waited until Harcourt had bashed his ball up over the ridge before he asked, ‘You’re sure about the case? If it’s just a question of buying CZP a new hull, we can probably stretch to it. But after the bomb in Belfast, we have all the spare cash we possess tied up in refitting and reinsuring.’
‘All the spare cash,’ echoed Harcourt speculatively.
‘We’ve signed away all the family possessions — houses, cars; unlimited liability. We’re counting on you. If it’s just the hull of Napoli then our insurance will cover it. Costs enough, God knows. But if there’s anything further, we could be stretched too far.’
They were up with Sir William’s ball now and he didn’t even pause before pulling out his number five iron. He was so caught up in what he was saying to his barrister — his silk, as the jargon had it — that he didn’t even calculate his shot. The five iron whispered through the grass with a sound like a headsman’s axe and the ball went flying up over the ridge.
‘No,’ said Harcourt firmly. ‘You have nothing to worry about. I have it all worked out and, but for the final aspects to be dealt with in open court, it’s all settled. You can rely on me, old chap.’
He strode on up to the top of the hill and looked down onto the green. Sir William’s ball was still running, so the barrister had no trouble in seeing that his own ball lay a two-inch putt from the hole. A sense of achievement welled up inside him. The game was turning his way.
As the thought came, so did the first of the rain.
Sir William paused, lost in thought, part-way through the action of putting his number five iron back into his golf bag. Was there anything more he wanted to check with Harcourt? The case came to court in less than two weeks and, as he had said, mistakes were likely to come very expensive. But no. There was nothing else he needed to know — beyond the fact that he trusted his barrister with the absolute confidence of long association. And he needed to. One mistake here and Heritage Mariner would go to the wall with a vengeance.
He settled the club in the golf bag and turned, just as the first great raindrops spattered into his face. At the top of the rise, Harcourt was just putting up his umbrella. Wise man, thought Sir William, and considered following suit. But just at the moment he turned, a column of light seemed to leap between the sky and his friend’s umbrella. As long as he lived, he would never be able to say whether the light went up from the umbrella or came down from the sky. But in the second it took him to settle his club and turn, a massive power of light connected Sir Harcourt Gibbons to the sky. It persisted, crackling like crisp cellophane and smelling like a distant barbecue borne on a fresh sea breeze, then it was gone. Sir William didn’t stand still to watch it but when he went to run forward he found he was falling down.
When he pulled himself, shakily, to his feet, his old friend Harcourt was lying curled up on the crest of the hill and his umbrella was on fire.
CHAPTER FIVE - Day Four
Saturday, 22 May 06:00
Ann Cable had never felt so isolated in all her life. Alone in her cabin, unable to sleep, disturbed by the constant background throbbing of the ship’s generators, she would try to lighten her thoughts in the loneliest hours of the dead watch by making ridiculous comparisons. She felt like the first black householder in an all white neighbourhood, she would tell herself. Like the first Chinese to open a restaurant in Paris. Like the first gay footballer out of the closet. Like a lone female reporter on an all male ship which had something to hide.
She felt more than isolated, she felt threatened. Anything seemed possible. Just the way most of the crew men looked at her made her flesh crawl with its combination of lust and financial speculation: she was good-looking and rich — would it be possible to get into her pants and her purse, her bed and her bank balance? She knew the answer most of them would make: she was a woman, only good for one thing; and it would be a nice change if they made money out of the deal rather than being parted from it, which was what most of them were used to. But the sexual threat — only implied, so far — was less disturbing than the other.
She did not know all that much about ship handling, in spite of the fact that she had made her name and fortune writing about the loss of the Napoli. She had only ever been aboard one ship for any length of time — Napoli herself — and it was now becoming obvious that the way that the ship had been run, under a Heritage Mariner captain, was very different from the way Atropos was being run. Napoli had been an old rust bucket rapidly rotting away, crewed by a polyglot collection of southern European ruffians, but there had been an air of common purpose and mutual respect aboard. Atropos was brand spanking new, equipped like a space shuttle and crewed by men hand-picked by the owners in Sept Isles, but there were undercurrents of mystery aboard which had set her short hairs to prickling as though the ship were full of ghosts. She was burning to investigate. But in those dark hours of the dead watches, sitting in her bunk in the darkness feeling Atropos buck and shoulder north-westwards through the St Lawrence, it was all too easy to imagine that if she actually discovered anything, then she would end up lost at sea. Just another maritime mystery; just another Mary Celest
e. And there was no one she could call on for help. Or no one less than three thousand miles away.
She was very strongly tempted just to lock herself safely in her cabin and stay there right through the voyage. That would be the sensible thing to do.
Her day began at six. This was the fourth aboard, though only the second afloat, really. They had sailed more than twenty-four hours behind schedule because of some panic of the captain’s, and because of the grannies demonstrating at the dockside. She knew she would begin to tell the time by bells and changing watches soon, but for now she relied on her watch and was up by six. The cooks and the deck officer on watch were the only other people up at that time, she had discovered; and that fact was important. She loved to exercise but had brought with her only a tight grey body stocking and a high-cut one-piece exercise suit. Her first attempt to run down to the weights room had drawn so many eyes that it had also drawn an acid reprimand from the skeletal Captain Black. If she wished to flaunt herself — he hadn’t quite used the words but his meaning had been clear enough — she should do so when none of his men could be distracted by her. So now she only exercised when she would be alone. And that meant between six and seven in the morning.
Her cabin was on C deck, one level below the navigation bridge. She shared the deck of four cabins with day rooms and showers en suite with only the captain and the chief engineer, who seemed to hate each other. Neither of them ever appeared before late breakfast at nine. Nevertheless, she found herself behaving as though she were the victim of a voyeur. She had always slept naked; now she wore briefs and a T-shirt. She stripped and dressed with the cabin lights off. She looked each way along the corridor before exiting. Like a child about some mischief, she tiptoed along the corridor, used the stairs rather than risk any noise from the lift, and gasped with fright when the sole of her trainer squealed against the linoleum of the top stair. Three decks down, in the great lateral A deck corridor, she hesitated. There was an internal route to the gym but it would take her past the ship’s galley, past the only other people aboard awake. Under the eyes of the men. It would be better to run round outside, unless it was raining.
The bulkhead door at the end of the corridor swung open silently and Ann stepped out into the early morning. The icy wind made her catch her breath but the clean cut of it in her lungs was heavenly. It was just getting light, and she found herself looking across a steel-grey vista of sharp waves, all seeming to run the same way as Atropos was heading, as though the ship were grinding down the back of some huge flat file. She stood, legs a little spread, hands on hips, breathing deeply, drinking in the vista. Behind the water rose a rugged grey coastline, dark slate where the water was light steel, almost black at the edges of the snowfields which clung to the hilltops sawing at the white sky. She was on the port side of the ship, looking northwards towards the coast of Labrador, but had she been on the starboard looking south, the view would not have been very different: Atropos was pounding slowly through the Strait of Belle Isle between the mainland of Canada and the island of Newfoundland.
Abruptly, her steady progress faltered, as though the five-hundred-foot vessel had stumbled. Ann staggered sideways and forward, her movements dictated by the movement of the ship. The deck heaved upwards slightly towards the bow, then settled back. Ann knew the motions Atropos made when she pitched over waves now and this had been something new. She continued to move towards the rail and looked down into the hissing, foam-streaked water just in time to see a large lump of ice heave by. It looked too small to be a floe. What did they call them? Growlers. Yes, it was a growler. Half a growler, by the look of things, already turning turtle, readjusting to its new state having been chopped in two by Atropos’ ice-breaking bow. It was surprisingly white and its sides, moving through the water, showed shades of luminous blue which settled back to steadfast grey as the ice settled, only to be whirled into the ship’s pale wake to clash against its other half as though trying to heal the breach.
Still watching the restless ice and trying not to think about Titanic, Ann pounded back along the deck just inside the rail. She considered going round the deck a few times but decided against it after twenty or so steps —the icy air was just too cold. She was a health nut, not a masochist.
The outer door to the gym extended a great long window overlooking the swimming pool area on the after deck. The pool had facilities to be heated and covered so that it could be used in most weathers, but Captain Black had ordered it to be battened down for the duration of the voyage. He seemed to look upon all provision for the welfare of his men as a waste of time and a dangerous temptation towards idleness and slackness. ‘I run a tight ship!’ The arcane phrase had been the first she had heard him use and it had not taken her long to learn that the crew, officers and men alike, called him ‘Tightship’ behind his back. The fact that they often changed the last letter, replacing the ‘p’ with a ‘t’, made her suspect that this was not a mark of respect or affection. But, in spite of having lived in Italy for many years, she was not an expert on men’s games and macho, so the nickname could have held some grudging appreciation, for all she knew. There was no doubt about First Officer Timmins, however. Everyone definitely despised him.
She swung the door to the gym open and crossed to the nearest of the two multi-gyms standing at the back of the big room, behind the basketball court. Between the multi-gyms was an exercise mat. Still lost in thought about the officers of Atropos and how she was going to describe them in print without spending the rest of her life fighting libel suits, she stood on the mat and began the routine she always used to loosen her muscles prior to putting them to serious work. It was a routine she had learned in ballet class at acting school when she had harboured dreams of dancing. She stood erect, then spread her legs until the muscles in her groin began to pull. She leaned forward from the hips and let her body relax so that the backs of her hands brushed the floor between her ankles. Eyes closed, concentrating with every fibre of her being, she pulled herself erect, allowing her arms to flow up above her head, stretching ever upwards as though attached by tightening lines to the ceiling. Then she flopped forward until she could feel the fibres down the backs of her thighs stretching, and began again.
The first officer was called Yasser Timmins. At first she had thought his given name denoted an Arabic mother — the scrawny little man was so wizened and weathered that it was impossible to tell what mixture of races his forebears might have sprung from. But no. Soon enough she discovered that ‘Yasser’ was another nickname and had nothing to do with race. It was a mocking echo of the words he used most often, especially when talking to Captain Tightship: ‘Yes, sir!’
Yasser seemed to have little or no character, motivation or understanding of his own. He existed to obey orders and to ensure that the orders he passed on were equally well obeyed by those unfortunate enough to be beneath him. While he grovelled before his captain, he lorded it over the others, enforcing his demands with petty, sadistic punishments. It was a miracle that he had ever risen to any kind of rank at all and the thought of him going further and actually gaining command of a ship simply made her blood run cold.
She stood up and began a series of exercises designed to loosen the muscles of her torso and lower back. These, too, were her own variations on ballet exercises. She put her hands on her hips and began to swing her torso from side to side, eyes closed as she concentrated on stretching the muscles in her sides and buttocks.
Next under Yasser was Hogg, and Fate had given him his nickname for real. All Hogg seemed to think about was food, though Ann suspected he might indulge in other fleshly delights too whenever he got the chance. He was not the youngest of the officers, but he seemed the most juvenile, with his childlike over-indulgence at meals and his legendary Dagwood multilayer sandwiches in between. There was something soft and faintly repulsive about his roly-poly, odorous, dough-boy body, and Ann had no trouble at all in imagining him spending all his nights between his watches abusing himself in his c
abin poring over the porno mags the Wide Boy had brought aboard to hire out among his shipmates.
Ann went into her last set of loosening-up exercises and thought about the Wide Boy. She sat with her back straight and spread her legs as far apart as they would go. Then she lowered her head until it all but touched her right knee. Extending her hands down her calf, she pulled gently, feeling the long muscles of her back stretching, all the way down to her bottom, while every tendon and fibre in her leg pulled, from toe-tip to the top of her thigh. After three on each leg, she rolled onto her back and pulled her legs, toes pointed, down towards her nose.
His name was Reynolds and he was third officer, but everyone called him the Wide Boy. He might have had a given name but she had never heard it. If he wasn’t called the Wide Boy, then it was Butch. Butch Reynolds. He was like a caricature from a gangster film, posing like Pacino or Mickey Rourke as though always ready to pull a comb out of his back pocket — a comb or a blade, or a gun. There seemed to be nothing he could not supply. Ann had seen enough war movies where some member of the command, some supply sergeant or junior officer, was always able to get his hands on anything. These fictional characters seemed to be pleasant enough, and useful, too. But not the Wide Boy. Reynolds was bad. And the stuff he could always get his hands on was not the kind of stuff they supplied in innocent old war movies. He was the one with the funny smokes, the pills, the little plastic packages and God alone knew what else. Of all the men aboard, Wide Boy Reynolds was the one, perhaps, who frightened her the most.
She sat up, pushed herself erect and crossed to the nearest machine. She was going to start on the peck pumper. It had two hinged pads which were pulled in from their positions either side of the ears to meet in front of the nose. The multi-gyms worked by a series of pulleys so that the pads and bars raised an adjustable column of weights varying from five kilos to fifty. She adjusted the weights carefully. She wanted light work which would build stamina not muscle bulk.
