Death Ship

by Jim Kelly

  Tom Coram climbed on to the stage, the fluid, relaxed body language a counterpoint to the white hair and the reading glasses slung round his neck on a cord. To ‘clear the air’, as he put it, he read a short prepared statement condemning the sabotage on the MV Telamon which had affected more than a dozen workers, two of whom were still in a hyperbaric facility at Peterborough City Hospital. BBC Radio had already broken the news that work at the pier head was suspended while an inquiry was held into the failure of decompression procedures. A Blue Square team from Rotterdam was due on site later that day. A government health inspector would follow.

  ‘We condemn such sabotage unequivocally,’ said Coram. ‘But the suspension of work is nonetheless welcome, as it provides all sides with that most precious of commodities: time.’ A wave of dutiful applause followed this artfully balanced summary of the situation.

  Coram introduced a barrister hired by the campaign to try to reverse the allocation of EU funds to the pier project.

  Shaw, standing at the back, saw Valentine at one of the side exits, beckoning with a slight inclination of his hatchet-like skull. A strange, tawdry corridor led them to the rear of the stage, the scenery suspended above their heads, and then on, through a door Valentine unlocked, so that they could ascend a steep wooden staircase. Shaw lit his iPhone to bathe the way ahead in a lurid light. Distantly, they heard applause, and a muffled, unintelligible PA system.

  ‘Best seats in the house,’ said Valentine, opening a door which until the moment it swung out had been perfectly secreted within the panelling. Beyond lay a box, twenty feet above the stalls, crammed with six seats covered in worn red velvet. As they sat, Valentine pointed out the CCTV camera fixed to the wall, just out of reach.

  ‘I’ve told Mark. He’s monitoring the crowd. The Met’s animal rights expert’s sitting in beside him in case any of the real nutters have joined up.’

  On stage, Coram was back on his feet. ‘This is our big chance,’ he said, holding up a council poster with the slogan Big Bang Day.

  The army bomb disposal unit had dug down on the beach and uncovered the three anomalies identified on the electromagnetic sweep. Each turned out to be a 1,100-pound bomb of the type delivered to the Zeppelin factory at Friedrichshafen in 1915, manufactured – ironically – at Vickers Armstrong’s armament complex on the Tyne. Rust had reduced the casings to fragile shells; the interior chemicals were almost certainly now a harmless soup of degraded chemicals. However, a small risk remained that one or more of the devices might still be dangerous if moved. The decision had been taken to blow the bombs up in situ rather than attempt to raise them, and defuse them, on the spot. Charges would be attached, then set off by remote control, in two days’ time.

  The council, keen to regain the tourist initiative, had decided to promote the Big Bang. A public lottery would be run, with the winner picking up £1,000 and the chance to push the button to set off the charges. The original suggestion, that little Eric Ross should have this honour, had been quietly dropped due to the mysterious provenance of the original ‘bomb’. Crowds would be allowed on the green, the clifftop, and the South Beach esplanade. The Daily Mail had already predicted 10,000 sightseers.

  That was before a British company which specialized in airships for advertising and TV work contacted the council and offered to fly its latest ‘blimp’ – christened Free Spirit – over the town after the bombs had been destroyed. It was also offering sightseeing passenger seats for the event – and by way of compensation, a special seat to Donald Ross, to mark the role inadvertently played by his three boys in uncovering the history of the 1915 raid. There was no doubt the proposed fly-past would be a sight to see. The Daily Mail had more than doubled its crowd prediction to 25,000 for Big Bang Day, and set off to try to find relatives of the Germans who’d flown the Zeppelin that day in 1915, offering to pay for them to take the passenger seats on offer for the flight. It had labelled this gesture a ‘token of reconciliation’.

  ‘This is our big chance,’ repeated Coram. ‘There will be TV and national newspaper coverage. International coverage. We need to put pressure on our local MPs, and our MEPs, to get a public inquiry into the pier underway. We’ve got clear grounds: nobody who voted the project through in 2010 would recognize what they’re planning to build now …’

  Applause swept the auditorium, energized now, even angry.

  ‘So we need to make ourselves felt. They need to know that this is a protest they can’t ignore. So how can we make a real splash? We need to use the Big Bang to our own advantage. We’ve had several suggestions and they’re all on this ballot paper …’ Coram waved a piece of yellow card. ‘Anyone here can vote. The decision will be taken by the STP committee, but we want to know what you think first.’

  Coram outlined the four options.

  A human chain encircling the town, crossing the main roads.

  A floating demo off the beach with protestors and banners in local boats.

  Five hundred specially made STP placards to be held up during the Big Bang and for the airship fly-past.

  A 50-foot square STP banner to be laid out on the green – clearly visible from the airship, which had already offered a window seat to the BBC.

  Ballot papers were handed out, and a deafening buzz of discussion filled the theatre.

  Shaw rested his chin on the velvet edge of the box. ‘We’re missing something, George. Missing the most important thing of all: motive. Someone wants to stop the pier so desperately they’ll kill to do it. Maybe they’ve killed already. But why? It’s not this lot, is it? These are middle-class bleeding hearts. Or grasping shopkeepers afraid they’ll lose a few quid? Eco-warriors? They don’t fit either. All right, if the Met finds us a real extremist group, then maybe. But otherwise this is about something much deeper, George. Something corrosive. We’re just too close to see it.’

  Coram was ready with the votes: B was the winner – a floating demo, right where the cameras would be pointing on the big day. An open debate began on organizing the fleet of little ships required. A police representative was invited on stage to advise on safety.

  The box door creaked open and DC Birley’s belligerent face filled the gap. ‘Sir. Jackie’s been on. They’ve finally wrung some sense from Roos’s email account. A lot of it was encrypted, apparently. Plenty of stuff, all incriminating, most of it copied to Beachcomber@btinternet.com.’

  TWENTY-NINE

  Shaw and Valentine took a table outside Beachcomber.

  A small clue had been there from the very start. The standard Arabic numerals – 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 – are so much a part of modern life that they are hardly seen at all – the neural message containing their inherent meaning speeding, sub-atomically, through the brain on the pathways of calculation. Except for the 7–. That strange Continental affectation of the cross-stroke always caught Shaw’s eye. He checked his own notebook and noted the carefully crossed sevens he had used since a teenager.

  Why had he started? The stylish tick was mildly nerdy, a habit to set him apart, suggesting an easy familiarity with sophisticated French artists, radical thinkers, and liberal ideas. If challenged, especially by teachers, he’d been happy to trundle out the usual explanation: with the added stroke, a ticked number one could look like a seven. But in reality it had all been about ego and proclaiming difference. It had quickly become part of his hieroglyphic baggage – as personal as his signature.

  Shaw considered the cheese toastie on the menu (with Worcestershire sauce) listed at a price of £1.7–0 – the seven neatly crossed. Lower down, the soup of the day (potato and scallop), with freshly baked bread, was £7–.50, the seven cross-beamed again. On the façade of the diner, the number was listed to phone in a reservation for food, the two sevens crossed, as he should have noticed on their first visit.

  Lester brought their coffee, and a large glass of white wine for himself, pulling out a chair at an angle which suggested he was only interested in the sea.

  Shaw switc
hed the menu round and held his finger over one of the Continental sevens. ‘Interesting affectation,’ he said.

  ‘Common amongst artists, actually. It’s far more stylish – needs a flourish, don’t you think?’

  Shaw opened his phone and showed Lester a picture of the largest anti-pier graffito on the A10 railway bridge – huge bulbous letters in a spectrum of colours, and the numbers indicating the money wasted on the pier.

  ‘Snap,’ said Valentine.

  Lester had the wine at his lips, but his hand held steady, only pausing a half second before he poured it down his open throat.

  ‘It’s only a number,’ he said. ‘Like the ones in two and two makes five. If that’s it, I’ve got some work to do out back.’

  ‘This morning we arrested Anna Roos, Mr Lester,’ said Shaw. ‘She’s a member of STP, as you’ll know. Her laptop was used to post a threatening note on the website of the company building the pier, which implied that following the explosion on the beach there would be further direct action if the work was not suspended. This further implied that she was in some way responsible for the explosion, and possibly the arson attack last week, and that lives would be put at greater risk.’

  ‘I know Anna,’ said Lester, crossing one leg flat across the other: ‘She’s spirited, passionate. She walks the beach too, so we’re not strangers. She’s about as capable of organizing an arson attack as one of the shrimps in her rock pools.’

  ‘Not strangers?’ asked Shaw. ‘Interesting choice of words. Her laptop held records of twelve thousand emails, Mr Lester, many of them digitally encrypted. You’re copied into nearly four hundred of them. Take this one: dated twenty-fourth June at three thirty-five – this is last year … Joe. Targets at PE36 6BL.’

  Lester’s eyes played over the seascape.

  Shaw waited ten seconds. ‘That evening a fleet of lorries carrying construction equipment was vandalized – sand in the petrol tanks, tyres slashed, cabs broken into. They were parked overnight at the council lay-by on South Beach. That’s the postcode for the spot: PE36 6BL.’

  ‘This is dull,’ said Lester. ‘Why don’t I ring my solicitor? I’ll come down the station. It’s a waste of my time and yours, but if you want to carry on …’

  ‘You could share Anna Roos’s lawyer,’ said Valentine. ‘She’s been charged, by the way, and bailed. So he’ll have a free hour …’

  Lester went for the wine again, but this time it was a lunge, and he spilt some in the sand.

  ‘What about this?’ said Shaw. ‘From ten days ago. “Joe. We need to talk. This wasn’t what we planned. I’m worried. Scared. Call.” That was the day after the arson attack on the rig. We’ll ask her what she meant, but you might like to get in first. Given the current tariff for arson, she may well like us to see that as a denouncement of you, and a defence of her reluctance to risk human life.’

  Lester didn’t blink. ‘I’m a beach-bum artist, Inspector. Not a commando.’

  ‘As I said. We’ve done our homework. Not a commando certainly, but hardly a peacenik either. Did it start that night in 1953? When dawn broke, you saw soldiers – Territorial Army volunteers. They must have been a welcoming sight, admirable certainly. Is that why you joined up?’ Valentine produced a file from his raincoat and handed it to Shaw. ‘This says you spent nearly eleven years in the TA. Rank of sergeant. Home defence, of course, but a short period on Gibraltar in the seventies. The Rock. Plenty of training too – my sergeant here’s read the file, but I seem to recall a course on radio communications, weapons, and a placement with the sappers. That was three months, at Norwich. We’ll make further inquiries of course, but presumably this included explosives.’

  A police squad car came into view, creeping along the bank top.

  ‘And one detail.’ Shaw shook his mobile. ‘I just rang an old mate at the MoD, who traced your unit in Gibraltar, and found the name of your commanding officer: Major Pryce Simms. He’s behind a desk now, in Whitehall, but it means he lives by a phone. He remembered you – or, more precisely, something about you.’

  Lester started texting on his phone. ‘Carry on – you seem to be enjoying yourself. I’m just getting that lawyer …’

  ‘Swim2Africa, they called it. Nine miles, from the Spanish coast, to the other side. Four hours in the water. Not easy, according to Simms – fog, shipping, currents, water temperature, waves. Three of you tried, but only one made it. So congratulations on that. Quite an achievement really, swimming between continents. It’s odd, but when you told us all about that night in 1953 – and I’ve checked the details, and it was all true – you gave us the impression, deliberately perhaps, that you hated the sea. No – more, that you feared it. Thalassophobia, by the way – a phobia of the sea. Not aquaphobia – that’s fear of water. Why did you want us to think that, Mr Lester?’

  THIRTY

  Lena touched his arm. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Peter, Peter. It’s the nightmare again.’

  But it wasn’t, not entirely, because there was a noise outside.

  ‘It’s the sea,’ he said, putting a foot on the wooden floor.

  They’d built a short corridor between the old cottage and the café, and his feet scuffed the sand which was always caught in the grain of the floorboards. He had to squeeze between the suitcases they’d got out for the flight to Jamaica, and the piles of laundry.

  The plate-glass windows of Surf! were hinged, so that he could swing one out, revealing a moonlit seascape.

  The sound wasn’t a sound at all. It was the absence of a sound. The sea had gone.

  Lena religiously pinned up tide tables in the entrance to the café. Shaw noted that the highest tide of the year was due the following day; and so this was its ghostly counterpart, the lowest tide of the year. The sea, syphoned out of the shallows of the Wash, had left an eerie landscape of sand hills and creeks, ribbons of black water threaded between white, moonlit miniature cliffs. The illusion that he could simply walk the thirty miles west to the unseen Lincolnshire coast was magnetic.

  He grabbed jeans and a jumper, hauled them on, unable to take his eye off the view. Outside, his feet sinking in the cold sand, his ears searched for the familiar swish and swash of the sea, but there was nothing but the echo of a trickle, a distant bubble of percolating water, as the last of the salt water decanted itself from pool to pool, the great moon drawing it north. Using the telescope on the stoop, his good eye swept the vista, finding two or three of the great green-and-red navigation buoys high and dry, lying on their sides like discarded toys.

  The shattered reflection of a flare caught his eye, a second before the thud of the maroon shook his ear drums; then came the triple echo, first bouncing off the distant cliffs, then the side of Surf!, and finally the Old Boathouse. Instinctively, he turned south towards the lifeboat station, in time to catch the trailing light of the falling firework, its elegant downward trajectory unbroken by the slightest of atmospheric winds.

  Running back indoors, he grabbed a pre-packed rucksack from the corridor and his running shoes. Sitting on the wooden steps, pulling on his socks, he felt the pager on his belt vibrate: the code 111, indicating a ‘shout’, followed by 222, indicating that the hovercraft was needed, not the boat. His hovercraft.

  By the time he reached the slip-way at Old Hunstanton, three crew members had folded back the doors on the Flyer’s hangar, and switched on the floodlights which illuminated the runway – a twenty-metre-wide gap in the dunes from the boathouse down to the water’s edge.

  Shaw, in the pilot’s seat, edged the hovercraft out into the night, using the ailerons to swing her down the narrow pathway past the beach huts, the headlamps catching the sands ahead. Flyer had searchlights mounted on her cabin roof, and Shaw switched them all on, revealing the sand-dune landscape through which they were picking up speed, the exposed sea floor ribbed and patterned, burnished, it seemed, by the retreating sea.

  Findlay, the communications officer, gave them a summary of the incoming data over their h
elmet radio links: the vessel in distress was a thirty-eight-foot yacht called Germinal, registered in the port of Dunkirk. The crew was five strong, although two of them were teenagers on their first trip. The captain – a fully qualified ship’s master – had tried to make Lynn with a following wind but had misjudged the depth of the tide, running aground on Roaring Island, the five-acre sickle-shaped sandbar eight miles off Hunstanton, marked by an automatic anchored lightship.

  Given that Germinal was beached on dry ground, the lifeboat was useless; Flyer, in contrast, was perfectly suited to the terrain, and once free of the shoreline’s dips and berms, hit a steady forty knots, skimming over a series of low sandbars before encountering a wide lake, a mere inch deep, which held a perfect reflection of the full moon, a light so bright that Shaw was forced to pull down a tinted shade as he peered ahead through Flyer’s windscreen.

  Heading directly for the winking light of the lightship, Flyer came within sight of the deep water channel six miles out from the beach, cutting across their path, forming the umbilical cord that linked the North Sea to the Port of Lynn. Shaw slowed the hovercraft, swung her a few points to starboard, and hit the deep water at thirty knots, mist rising as they raced to the far bank, and the leading cliff edge of Roaring Island, a gentle ten-foot bank, which Flyer breasted with ease.

  Shaw would never forget the sight that greeted them as they made the high ground. Germinal lay a mile distant, on her port side, high and dry, the mast broken. The automatic lightship stood on the horizon in a shallow trench, its light winking on a ten-second cycle: once after two, twice after four, and for a third time on ten. What was extraordinary was that these two vessels were far from being alone on Roaring Island, for the flat sands were littered with wreckage: a Bermuda Triangle of lost things, thought Shaw, revealed perhaps just once or twice a year at the lowest of tides.

  The marooned crew of the Germinal had built a fire, gathering driftwood from around them and adding paraffin from the hold. Silhouettes waved wildly in welcome as Flyer edged forward, finally sinking into her skirts a hundred yards from the blazing beacon. Even here, the surface was scattered with debris: ship’s timbers, rope, broken hold cases, buoys, plastic bottles, a holed dinghy, a ripped sail still attached to a splinter of mast.