Royce, Royce, the People's Choice

by Peter Hawes

  He’d dreamed desultorily on until about a quarter to eight when he was hit in the face by a plank that turned out to be a glass of water. He woke up immobilised with stiffness from a night spent on two old coats, a crashing headache, a mouth filled with mushroom spores and a fearful thirst for anything but alcohol. His eyes had dust in them and wouldn’t focus and when they did, the first thing they saw, apart from Bob’s horrible, angry face, was the nice big comfy mattress on Bob’s bed. Damn dream had forgotten it was there! If it’d remembered, Linda Harvey wouldn’t be a virgin right now. Not in dreamland, anyway.

  IT WAS A day of big wrenching changes of importance. Linda had been in the throbbingly sore forefront of his mind when he awoke; then within a few seconds it was the Zephyr that was there. It’d been sunk, run over by the Aurora, and he, Royce, was the prime suspect.

  ‘You must’ve heard something!’ Bob had roared, on a number of occasions, prompting Royce to hobnail across the raw flesh of his memory once again.

  Not a skerrick; not a friggin’ sausage. And not surprising – because it turns out Marjorie Shaw had been on board with him last night too, and he was completely unaware of it! Her bag was sitting up by the wheel, Bob said. He’d thrown the handbag to Royce. It was full of American money. But Christ, how mullocked are you when you can’t remember … holy kermoley! What didn’t he remember? What had he done in his state of oblivion? Ironically enough, this shock brought back a memory. A memory of Doddy Wold getting Brian Ohern off a drunk-driving case by proving he was so pissed he didn’t know if he was driving or not. Maybe he could use that defence if it turned out that he and Marjorie Shaw had …

  ‘Would you stop screaming at bit, Bob, so I can have a shower?’ he croaked.

  He didn’t get the shower until over an hour later. He was swamped by callers and he faced them all, smelling like a brothel.

  First on board were Tip Casey and Alf Cotterell, the cops, then big Scoop Phelan from the paper wanted a story – which Royce didn’t have. Harbourmaster wanted all the details of the sinking after that – he took about six pages of details, not one of which was about the sinking, because Royce had zero details to give. Oh well, insurance people would learn that he’d slept on two old railways overcoats and that he’d woken up at about quarter to eight.

  Royce found out that the Zephyr wasn’t insured at about the same time he learnt the fish had been stolen and Betty was missing too.

  GEORGE MAYBURY HAD been pretty good about it: took his word for it he hadn’t done it.

  ‘Aye, theere’s a lort o’ th’ de’il in you, Royce, an’ a lort o’ stupidness,’ he drawled in his old-fashioned Scottish voice, ‘bit ee doon’t think theere’s malice. An ect o’ malice is this, t’ rrram a man’s crrraft.’

  Real nice bastards like Harry Reynolds (and what the hell’s it got to do with a traffic cop, anyway – is this a driving offence?) said that it didn’t have to have been done maliciously. If someone could be pissed enough not to remember taking a woman back to his boat to shag her, why would he remember ramming a fishing boat?

  But good old George was really staunch. ‘Nay,’ he said, his head shaking the stained old sailor’s cap he wore, ‘e’m a furim believer in th’ integrrrity o’ th’ soul, orfficer. If a man’s soul won’t lit him sin whin he’s soberrr, it’ll naw lit him sin when he’s dronk. Thiz bin cases shawn, Harry, wheere people underrr hypnosis ha’ rrrefused tay commit creams whin orderrred ta do so.’

  Harry Reynolds had given a big sigh and rolled his eyes, and probably muttered ‘Bullshit’ in his mind – just like Royce did. But Captain Calmwater wasn’t going to have a bar of him having done it, intentionally or not. So Royce couldn’t be charged with any crime, which really pissed the cops off.

  ‘Christ, George,’ snapped Tip Casey, ‘the only law this little shitbag doesn’t break is the law of averages. And with his track record, the law of averages says he did it.’

  ‘Y’ ken wart they sey aboot gi’ing a dorg a bad neme, Sergeant,’ said George in that old voice – which could probably sound quite irritating to someone who didn’t agree with it.

  Frankly, no one probably did know what they say about giving a dog a bad name, but it was really big of George to defend him, and when Royce found out about the insurance – well, the lack of it – he made himself a promise he’d pay off the old bugger’s expenses, one way or another.

  After the first wave of people had passed over him, Royce’d gone down the stern to think about things. He’d just heard, from Bob, about Betty and the fish going AWOL and it was really to think about this that he’d come down here – although he found himself feeling the mattresses for wetness and smell, and wondering if putting the black plastic over them would do the trick … You really had to give it to Linda: through all these crises there was a part of his mind always on her, and sometimes he got little tremors of butterflies at the prospect. Tonight! At nine o’clock!

  MEANWHILE THERE WAS his missing fish.

  ‘Five hundred US dollars she paid for a coupla dockets!’ blared Dooley.

  It was later that day, when he and Royce were having a cup of tea in his office. Jeez, talk about ‘I told you so’ time.

  ‘You think she really took those photos?’ fumed Dooley. ‘You check it out – there’ll be one picture in that camera, and that will be of bloody Marjorie Shaw standing next to that fish on the weigh-out. Only proof there is of who it was accredited to.’

  He set about rolling a rollie – which wasn’t easy with his bad hand. He had to smoke left-handed and light them left-handed too. He’d just about set fire to his bandage a couple of times.

  ‘Why do you steal a fish, Dooley?’

  ‘Cos you can probably get thousands for it on the Tokyo market.’

  ‘Cost you thousands to get it there!’

  ‘Yeah, maybe, but she’s not dumb, is she? There’ll be something in it for her. Never trusted her from the moment I set eyes on her.’

  ‘Yeah, you said.’ About a million times.

  ‘Tell you something for bloody nothing, too – it’s not so cut and dried it’s your fish either, even if we do find it. I mean, Marjorie Shaw did as much of the work on the wharf as I did. She issues a landing docket, I issue a landing docket. Companies are pinching other people’s fish all the time – ask me how I know.’ It was the nearest he’d come to humour since yesterday morning. ‘If it turns out that fish’s worth ten grand or something and Marjorie says it’s a Merlord fish and waves that photo around, you may miss out, kid.’

  ‘Nah, she’s not like that, Dooley. And anyway, no fish is worth ten thousand.’

  ‘Yeah? So why half-inch it?’

  Same old question, always coming around to get asked again. Both of them spent some time in silence, thinking about how they didn’t have an answer.

  Then Royce’s brain moved on to Betty herself. No wonder she’d made them take such care to get the fish home undamaged. She’d been planning to steal it from the moment she first saw it! Royce paused in his thoughts, amazed at the co-ordination of the criminal mind.

  During the pause another thought was momentarily exposed, then disappeared again behind bigger things. There was something else on his mind. To do with women. He clicked onto his Linda thoughts and examined them. No, it wasn’t to do with her. He gave her a little fondle while he was there, though, and she rolled luxuriously towards him. The black plastic crackled. Shit.

  ‘That’s where the bitch will be heading,’ snarled Dooley. ‘Market in Tokyo.’ His feet were now on his ex-bureaucratic desk, his baccy pouch on his little pot belly as he struggled with the rollie. ‘Makes you sick, dunnit? Foreign bastards have been pinching fish outa the sea off Westport for years, but never this blatant.’

  The other thing on Royce’s mind, he realised, was this business with Marjorie …

  MARJORIE WAS NOT in a receptive mood when he went into her Merlord office. On the walls were the same photos of boats coming over the bar that he’d looked at yesterday.
Some of them were perfectly level, some on such terrifying angles they looked like they were somersaulting across the dreadful thing. One was so deep in a trough you could just see the top of the gantry.

  Point was, Marjorie was looking about as well as if she’d been on all of those tossing, pitching boats at once. Her skin was sallow; hell, even her eyes were sallow. And unfriendly.

  ‘What do you want? They all think I’m a cradle-snatcher because of you.’

  ‘Yeah, sorry about that, Marjorie. I know nothing happened.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you say so? You were so pissed you can’t be sure, and that’s putting suspicion on me!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I wouldn’t touch you with a bargepole. Jesus, it’s so ironic. Here’s me not believing that Penny Turton could be so stupid as to do a thing like that, then I get lumbered with it!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Shut up about sorry! You’re like a cracked record.’

  ‘Sor … There is another thing I wanted to say.’

  ‘What? Say it and get out.’

  ‘Well, Bob found your purse and showed it to me. And I saw all that American money.’

  She put her head in her hands. Her fingers stuck out of her short thick hair like horns. ‘How I could have left it there, I don’t know. I must have been as pissed as you.’

  ‘Dooley says you sold Betty an FLD and an FTD for $US500?’

  She sat up, crossly. ‘I was perfectly entitled to do that. There’s no crime in that, and it’s nobody’s business but mine. How was I to know she was going to pinch your goddamn fish?’

  ‘But weren’t you a bit suspicious?’

  ‘No. Why? Why should I have been? She didn’t ask how much a docket cost, she offered me $500. I just assumed that where she came from, that’s what they cost.’ She spread her hands. ‘Okay, if she thinks an FLD is $500, who am I to tell her otherwise? Business is business, okay? You think Dooley wouldn’t have taken her money? If he’s pissed off about it, it’s only cos I made a fortune and he didn’t. Okay? That answer your questions?’

  ‘Um, nearly … Thing is, there was 600 bucks in the purse.’

  She turned in her old-fashioned swivel chair. She was wearing black baggy pants instead of jeans, as if she was punishing all the blokes on the wharf by covering her butt. On top she had a blouse and you could just see ribs because her breasts weren’t very big. She was livid. Literally. The skin over her ribs was sort of mottling into a rash. It was a tense moment. Then she clenched her mouth in a tight stretch that was either a smile or a hiss.

  ‘You know where I got that other hundred? It was a present from Stan Prescott. He was on one side of you, I was on the other when we steered you back to your boat, and you were too pissed to remember either of us. After we got you aboard I popped over to the Buller Lion for a drink with Stan. Okay? Stan would be my alibi right off, and right now I’m weighing up which is worse – having the world think I slept with a seaman for money, or having it thinking I slept with a kid!’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  THE SUN WAS setting. It was setting behind the sea off Westport, between the two rock walls of the Tip Head. It looked like a big red penalty goal by Alan Hewson, sailing over the uprights.

  It was the only bit of calm Royce’d had all day and he’d wandered down, past the harbourmaster’s office, just to get out of the way and watch the sun go down. Behind him the lagoon, the river, the trauma; to his right the tidal swamp and the remains of a wharf so old no one could remember what it had been for. Ahead and to the left, the river, bloodied by the sun.

  The sun sank and lost its shape as it did so, shimmering into nebulosity, grappling for control of itself before it shuddered apart. Shit, were they in for a little Big Bang? Noddy Somerville’s look of helpless blankness in the face of big questions about the universe floated across the surface of the unsettled sun. Then it disappeared, spreading itself like crimson egg yolk across the horizon as it did. Gone.

  A second later there was an explosion of green light, right where the sun had been. It blatted both ways down the line of the horizon as if it were a tightrope, then surged upwards and made a point, blindingly green, about a million miles up. Jupiter’s Needle, they called it. He’d seen it for the first time in his life.

  He stayed, staring out to sea and fitting the black negative of the needle – burnt into his retina – onto the spot where the positive green image had been. He stayed looking until the blackness of the sky matched the negative. Then he turned, knowing more than he had before.

  DOING SOMETHING BECAUSE you’ve got a shrewd idea it’s right is called a hunch. Why’s it called a hunch? Royce gave a shrug. He realised he’d just hunched his shoulders to do it.

  A darkening mosaic of asphalt, dust, grey wooden sleepers and copses of reedy grass. Ancient brown metal lay everywhere, in the semi-completed shapes of old train parts – boilers, funnels, coal boxes, pistons. Steel wagon wheels lay like ringworm in the coarse, rustling grass. The darkness smelt of tar, ozone and mud.

  Royce loped down the wharf towards the Buller Lion.

  The three big cement silos still radiated whiteness somehow, in the near dark. From this close they looked like Saturn rockets at Cape Canaveral with gantries joined to them, spuming rocket smoke made of cement dust. Blazing lights at the foot of the buildings were the flames of ignition. The lift-off illusion was completed by the roar of fan pumps, pushing cement into the bowels of the ship.

  A steep, narrow aluminium gangway, corrugated by footholds, was covered – would you believe it – in green carpet. They’d laid out the green carpet for him.

  An articulated Guardian Cement truck, bent like an accordion, was plugged into the bottom of a silo, presumably refilling the cement being blasted into the ship. The driver had leaned over a bollard to have a smoke, staring at something in the water of the wharf – probably a man-eating eel. Then he’d gone back to his cab.

  Royce, in the shadows of the railyard fence, was alone, profoundly alone, seemingly in complete possession – if he went up that gangplank – of the Buller Lion.

  He sidled aboard like a rat that had changed its mind.

  ALL NON-CREW MEMBERS MUST PROCEED TO VISITOR CONTROL said the first sign (there were to be many). FOLLOW THE RED ARROWS.

  As it happens there were no red arrows, but he wouldn’t have followed them anyway. He was not here as a registered visitor – his visit would remain unofficial.

  His hunch was pretty basic. Marjorie had been given American money by Betty, and then by Stan. Where did Stan get American money? From Betty. Where was Betty? Somewhere Stan had helped her to be, in exchange for American money. And Stan worked on the Buller Lion. End of hunch.

  The ship was a place of darknesses, blazing light and the hauntingly muted light of corridors. There were in fact people aboard but they were effortlessly avoided. Royce had traversed three storeys of ship – had even peered into the interior of the darkened bridge – without the faintest fear of detection. The only problem was the corridors. They were traps. But if he was going to find his fish, he’d have to go in. Maybe there were openings you could duck into if humanity materialised, but maybe not. And you had zero time to hide anyway, if someone emerged from a cabin or stairway.

  He had a sort of general plan of the ship by now. The ground floor was amenities; the first floor had cabins, kitchen, bar and telly; the top had one big cabin and the bridge. At the bow of the ship was another building from which you went down into the enginerooms.

  Royce stood at the big oval opening to the ground-floor corridor. Beside him was the open door, bristling with lockbolts like a stegasaurus. The square dull lights of the corridor had the effect of simply illuminating the darkness so you could see it better, but at the far end was a sign with what he thought was COLD on it. COLD PROV … the rest was obscure. At the near end was a similar sign: DRY PROVISION STORE. So, logically the far sign could well say COLD PROVISION STORE STORE. If so, that’s where he’d put a fish
if he had one.

  But it was down the other end, and he couldn’t sneak around the back to enter the far door because it was closed. What to do? Well, you use your 11.4 speed. With a good start you could be there in about four seconds.

  Are there people in there? CEMENT MACHINERY WORKSHOP. Is anyone using cement machinery right now? Compressor room – HEARING PROTECTION MUST BE WORN. Well, they wouldn’t hear him in there. He held his breath and listened over the hums and distant roars of machinery. No coughs, sneezes, farts or voices. No signs of life. He stepped onto the Welcome mat, over the raised step of the entrance, crouched, pushed off from the step and ran. Sprinted past fire extinguishers boots, stacks of earmuffs, signs and doorways.

  Four seconds later he was at the sign. Beside it a square box of buttons: DEAD MAN ALARM. Holy shit, what’s a dead man alarm? His heart was pounding. Alarmed. Alarmed at the prospect of capture and becoming a dead man. A doorway under the sign; within, three big metal doors: VEGE ROOM, MEAT ROOM, FISH ROOM. Fish room, that’ll be the one …

  ‘Yep, it’s in there, all right,’ said Stan cheerfully, from behind him. ‘Wanna have a look?’

  He grabbed Royce’s collar in quite a friendly way, but firmly – extremely firmly. He leaned over, hauled at the big handle of the fish room with his free hand and wrenched it open. Plumes of mist swirled out and sank onto Royce’s feet, chilling them instantly. Behind the mist were rows of shelves bearing polystyrene boxes. Under the shelves, hard against the iron wall, was the coffin.

  ‘Well, shall we cool you off in here till we sail? Could be worse, could be a freezer. No, might be a bit too drastic. What about in here?’ He marched Royce down the enclosure and opened the door to VEGE ROOM.

  Bad eaters, were seamen – didn’t eat their greens. Seemed to be a lot fewer vegetables than there had been fish. It was cool, but nowhere nearly as cold as the fish room.