Death Ship

by Jim Kelly

  A mounted telescope on the balcony was a reminder of Dirk Hartog’s lonely guesthouse bedroom. Just inside the room, partially hidden by a heavy set of drapes, stood a camera tripod. Shaw felt as if they’d stepped into a great eye – the bay, the iris; the wood-panelled back wall, the nerve-stitched cornea. Light flooded in, reflected, refracted, filling the space with random shards of colour.

  Edward Coram showed them his back, broad and muscular, supporting a round head, the neck lost in the collar of a crisp white shirt.

  ‘Father. I tried, but the inspector has insisted. DS Valentine is here too, no doubt on hand in case you try to outrun DI Shaw.’

  It was a strangely literal, patronizing introduction, and apparently superfluous until Coram half-turned, to reveal a right eye entirely obscured by a milky white cataract, the left still its original blue, although this too was glimpsed through a film of new, blinding tissue.

  The contrast between the eye-like room, staring out over the sea, and these cruelly disfigured irises actually took Shaw’s breath away.

  ‘You’re not needed, Thomas,’ he said, revealing a voice possibly three decades younger than his weather-beaten face.

  The son went to answer his father but bit back the thought before he could vocalize it, pausing only to give Shaw a murderous stare, the lift gates crashing closed as he fled as instructed.

  ‘A seat, Inspector …’ Coram directed his voice at Shaw, but selected an orientation for his head a few degrees from true. Looking back at the desk, Shaw noted a large magnifying glass, and a Cook’s glass for map reading.

  ‘Has this always been the family home?’ asked Shaw, as Coram took a seat at the table, and Valentine walked to the balcony edge, looking out to sea, where the floating protest was beginning to muster its miniature armada.

  ‘Not at all. I bought it in 1972 – after the property crash, when the price was right. I was born in a two-up two-down in Wells, Mr Shaw. There are no silver spoons in this family. I knew your father, by the way – Jack. Bit of a tearaway, but then we both were. I was on the council back then – police committee. So our paths crossed.’

  Shaw ignored the attempt to subtly edge the interview on to a more convivial footing. ‘I wanted to ask you about the night you took the Lagan out and tried to assist a Dutch coaster – the Calabria, although you might remember it as the Marlberg. January thirty-first, 1953. The night of the great flood.’

  The flesh on Coram’s face had long ago succumbed to the force of gravity, but the bone structure was still strong beneath, and Shaw thought he detected a stiffening of the jaw.

  ‘Not a night I could forget,’ Coram said, half smiling. ‘I lost a lot of friends, Inspector, out on the South Beach. And I lost the Lagan, of course. My first boat. We’ve a fleet now: six tugs – deep water, not little pond-skaters like the Lagan. I …’

  ‘A night to remember for the families of the crew of the Calabria, too. Three dead.’

  Coram’s eyes turned seawards, searching. ‘Sixty-three years ago. Time passes, and we can say now what should have been said then. If they’d taken a line, they’d have lived to see the next day – all of them. Money talks. It did that night. They had a radio link to Bremen. I think the owners said no, although it was never clear. She was in a bad way, the ship, but we’d have secured a decent percentage of her scrap value and the cargo. And they’d have all got to see their families again.’

  He gestured to a chair so that Shaw could sit close. ‘But a captain’s got the final word. What was it – Captain Beck?’ Coram looked suddenly vulnerable, as if he’d forgotten his own name.

  ‘Beck, yes,’ said Shaw. ‘Arjen. You saw her sink?’

  Coram covered his mouth with a hand the size of a rudder. ‘No. We left her, although we got close.’ He held his hands apart. ‘What – a hundred yards? The radio link failed in the end, so I got Ring to use the lamp – to signal. We offered to take them off – sod the ship. No answer. So we took her clear. Worse sea I’d ever seen, that night – no waves, no pattern, just like she was boiling, but flattened out by the wind.’

  ‘Tell me what you could see on board the Calabria. The crew?’ It was a question to buy time. So one of Coram’s crew was called Ring?

  Coram shook his head. ‘Lights. And maybe some shadows on the bridge. But no crew. I don’t think we saw anyone. They must have been below decks trying to fix the pumps.’ He sat back, apparently exhausted. ‘What’s this about, Inspector?’ The old man’s hands seemed incapable of staying still, constantly moving over the objects on the desktop.

  ‘The man murdered in the sea, just off the coast, the diver – he was the son of the Calabria’s engineer.’

  ‘Good God,’ said Coram, blinking sightless eyes. He licked his dry, cracked lips, and Shaw wondered if, in his bluff overconfidence, Coram felt he’d said too much.

  ‘How did the Lagan sink?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Flotsam in the sea – that’s how we lost her. We didn’t know then, of course, the extent of the damage along the coast. All sorts of stuff had been blown offshore. The wind ripped up homes, roads, took out the railway line to Lynn, and that’s what we hit, a sleeper. Solid pine, like a torpedo, right through the port plates. Worst moment of my life, bar none. I heard it … I hear it now in my sleep.

  ‘We had a wooden dinghy, pretty thing, a slip of a boat. That’s what saved us, of course; she was so light she just skipped with the wind, which was from the north, driving us on to the sands. I’ve still got her, up at Wells on the quay. She’s not been in the water for half a century, but she saved my life that night.’

  ‘And the Calabria was over Roaring Island when she went down?’

  ‘Yes. A full tide, so there was plenty of depth, and she was drifting badly. Mind you, don’t forget this is 1953 – no GPS on board. But she’ll be in the sand somewhere. One day we’ll see her again – or her timbers.’

  Out at sea they heard a foghorn call.

  ‘Something’s up out at the rig,’ said Valentine, already keying a message into his phone.

  They could see hoses playing a series of curved watery rainbows out from the rig and down to the sea. In response, a water canon seemed to be firing back from a skidoo weaving between the legs of the Telamon. The jack-up crane seemed transfixed, its latest load of mud and gravel held motionless in mid-air.

  ‘Ring?’ said Shaw, trying to regain Coram’s attention as he struggled to his feet. ‘You said you got Ring to signal. The captain of the rig is Peter Ring – a local man. Same family?’

  Coram affected a shrug, walking stiffly out on to the balcony. ‘Probably. You know what this coast’s like. This was a Peter too – a good man. I spoke at his funeral. Family man, and you’re right: there may have been a boy.’

  Out at sea the protestors on the ships offshore were cheering wildly, banners high, as the skidoo made another high-speed pass beneath the rig. The foghorn boomed again, and Coram gripped a pair of binoculars from his desk and pressed them to his blinded eyes.

  THIRTY-NINE

  For a long time the boy had lain under Tad Atkins’ desk in his poolside office. At first he didn’t see him, not as an everyday, conscious incarnation, but he felt his presence, and, as the hallucinations continued, he heard him, whispering those final words: Is the bike broken?

  Of course, the words themselves were real, in an historical sense, in that the boy Tad Atkins had killed that day in the van had asked him that very question. The answer had been no – the bike was untouched, the back wheel spinning still, as Atkins held the boy’s broken body. The inquest had listed a litany of clean fractures, which had been stylized by the newspapers as ‘every bone in his body’. This had been unfair, even libellous, but Atkins’ lawyer had advised silence, given the circumstances.

  The mental health counsellor had told him that, while the images and the sounds continued, he should never consciously conjure up the boy’s name, which was bad advice, because there was no doubt that the effort of keeping the words at a distance
from his conscious mind simply imprinted the letters indelibly on his subconscious. As a result, Josh Ridding, aged nineteen, was haunting Tad Atkins.

  The boy was there now, and he knew that if he looked under the desk, he would see him; instead, he poured himself some more vodka, stood up, and went to the window of his office. The pool outside was deserted, despite the sunshine which seemed to fill the space with a sense of a suspended solid, a great rectangular block of golden energy. It was beautiful, and might have redeemed him in another life, on another day. Today, it wasn’t beautiful enough.

  He pressed the message button on his phone and listened once again to the constable’s voice, asking him if he could attend at St James’, Kings Lynn, for interview with DI Shaw and DS Valentine, who were conducting inquiries into members of the Leander Club. He knew the game was up, not because they might have evidence of his complicity, but because he couldn’t stop his hands shaking.

  It had been relatively easy to contrive the evacuation of the building: he’d poured a plastic bottle full of his own urine into the water filter monitor in the basement, and the three red lights had come up on the control panel. Knocking them back to green, he’d repeated the exercise three times and the programmed computer protocol had overridden the pump, locking in the red lights. Making the necessary calls to the maintenance crew, he used the public address system to clear the pool. The health and safety executive’s regulations were not open to debate. The pool was closed until at least five o’clock. A notice on reopening would be posted on the Flume! website.

  Pouring himself another shot of the strangely sweet alcohol, he considered the poster on the wall. At home, in the bedsit, he had this same image over his bed. Boy on a High Dive, by Norman Rockwell, was a painting of preternatural reality; the crisp lines of the diving board and the metal steps seemed to invite a dive. A boy lay on the board, peering over the edge, looking down with wide eyes at the plunge beneath. The image spoke of fear, but it also implied bravery, in that Atkins could imagine this boy struggling to his feet, controlling his breathing, taking the heart-stopping plunge. He’d dived as a boy, developing that peculiar self-control that stemmed from constant, mind-numbing practice, so that finally he could take to the air without fear.

  It took courage, and he’d had that then. Now, when he looked at the image of the boy – which he’d read once was actually the painter’s son – he saw the face of Josh Ridding, the eyes wide in fear, not at the drop below, but at the approaching white van, with Tad Atkins at the wheel, his eyesight fatally distorted by alcohol.

  ‘So no excuse,’ he said now, out loud, because the simple fact was that he’d started drinking years before he’d killed Josh Ridding.

  If they’d sent him to prison for the full term for killing the boy, he’d have been torn apart, but – perhaps – rebuilt. But they hadn’t sent him to prison for long, and even then it had been an open facility on the south coast. Old friends paid off old favours, and the parole board – told that he’d have a job, that he’d have support, and that he’d be a force for good – had decided that he could go back to his home town and undertake community service, while accepting a lifetime ban from driving.

  What they didn’t know – the great and the good of the parole board – was that there would be an appalling payback for all those favours that had secured Tad Atkins’ early release into a secure job. They didn’t know, and could never have guessed, what he’d have to do in return. And – and this is where the concept of evil really first emerged – what he’d have to make others do, because, of course, he had very quickly realized how powerful favours were, and that if he extended them to others, he too would one day be in a position to collect.

  Trying to pick up his mobile, it fell from his uncertain fingers. Pathetically, he had to lean forward to check the screen and confirm that there were no messages or calls. He’d asked Kersk, cherub-faced Theo, for a final favour, and now it looked as if he’d never know if the young man had done the job. But this wasn’t really about honour; it was blackmail. It was all blackmail really, dressed up as other things, with which it had been easier to live.

  Why he’d put on his swimming shorts would be an enduring mystery, because he didn’t really need them. Leaving his tracksuit top on his chair, he went out and padded down the side of the pool, feeling the strange stipples beneath his skin, and recognizing that they were part of his life too, along with the chlorine and the hurtling plummet of the dive itself: the free fall, the sense of escape and otherness – as if he could transform himself in flight. At one time he’d hoped that in the moments of the dive he’d be free of the boy with the broken body, but even those brief, blurred seconds were haunted now. A sudden insight made him shiver: as a small boy, he’d dreamt of being Peter Pan, and in some ways diving had been a way to fly. Now he saw Peter’s elusive shadow in a different light, as a haunting too.

  As Atkins climbed the steps to the diving board, he tried to distract himself from reconsidering his purpose: he counted the steps – twelve to a tier, zig-zagging up, in eight switchback floors. It had been Atkins’ idea, during the redevelopment of Flume!, to push for the installation of the thirty-three-foot board: the top actually stuck out, above the roofline, just like the pinnacle of the flume tube itself, both encased in stylish glass domes. The pool far beneath was twenty feet deep – often appearing as a blue oasis, slightly inky at its heart, which reminded Atkins of the burial pits of Maya, in which they flung the murdered sacrificial youths. Those pits were seen as gateways to heaven.

  Climbing the final tier, he breasted the roofline and through the thick glass glimpsed the sea: a sudden vista he had not anticipated, which opened out with each step – the protest boats in a line offshore, the distant rig, tourists packed along the top of the esplanade. A helicopter swooped overhead, making the metal staircase beneath his feet hum with vibration.

  Eight steps got him to the end of the board.

  Never look down: the golden rule.

  The blue pool beneath, the blue-inky heart of the deep well into which he could fall, had always been waiting for him when he stepped off into the air. But not today: he had carefully monitored the pumps for the twenty minutes it had taken to drain the pool, 110,000 gallons of water gushing out, so that all that lay beneath him now was a damp tile floor, pump grids, and the blue lines separating the arid lanes.

  In the end, he fell: his knees giving way, his eyesight blurred.

  It was a blessing he never counted that there was no one to hear the sound.

  FORTY

  ‘FIFTY, FORTY-NINE, FORTY-EIGHT …’

  Shaw had always found the sound of voices in concert to be rather moving, an affirmation perhaps of community, of a common purpose. Even from a distance of a mile, the crowd on the esplanade – 8,000-strong according to AA and RAC reports on the radio, well short of the more hysterical predictions of the media – was still clearly, crisply audible.

  Lena, never slow to spot a business opportunity, had put picnic tables out on the sands in front of Surf!. The day’s special offer was a cocktail for £9.99, with a gourmet burger, cooked on the barbecue, toasted wholemeal bun, and salad. She’d judged her clientele perfectly, attracting families and couples who were keen to witness the Big Bang, but not too bothered about going to see it, content to sit back, away from the crowds, with an iced drink, some classy food, and a clear, if distant, view of the action.

  Besides, the real highlight of the event was likely to be the noise. The army experts predicted that the small detonators, when triggered, would ignite the original explosives within the corroded shells. The result would be a distinct double blast: a discrete cough, followed by an earth-shaking rumble. Three seconds after the first blast, the second would automatically follow, with the third another three seconds later: a triple bang of double bangs. The local paper, which had brought out a special supplement for the day, had described the noise with characteristic journalistic restraint as BA-BOOM! BA-BOOM! BA-BOOM!

  Le
na, bar towel over her shoulder, stood looking south. ‘Radio says there’s still plenty of people crowding into town, so maybe ten thousand in the end, when the counting’s done. If you believe the promoters, that’s what it will be like every day, Peter, once the pier’s open.’

  She didn’t look displeased at the prospect. Shaw knew that while he had doubts about an ugly conveyor-belt pier blocking the view from his beach, Lena saw discerning holidaymakers heading north, away from the crowds, the muzak, and the amusement arcades, to the peace and quiet of Surf!. For Shaw, though, there had to be a point when the popularity of peace and quiet became a self-defeating attraction.

  ‘THIRTY-NINE, THIRTY-EIGHT, THIRTY-SEVEN …’

  ‘All packed?’ he asked. Lena and Fran’s flight left that evening from East Midlands Airport. As soon as the triple blast was over, they were on the road, hoping to get ahead of the retreating crowds.

  ‘Ready to go.’

  ‘Just in case.’ He kissed her. ‘Let me know when you land. And tell me what you find. Your mum did this for a reason, Lena. She wants you to know something. Keep your eyes open. I’ve said goodbye to Fran. She’s so excited she can’t stand still. You’d never think you were off to a funeral.’

  Down at the water’s edge it was low tide, so there was plenty of room for two uniformed constables to arrange a set of bollards around an area the size of a football pitch, at the centre of which they’d placed a large fluorescent yellow sheet marked H.

  As soon as the army signalled the all-clear after the blasts, the West Norfolk’s police helicopter was due to touch down, picking up Shaw and Valentine, and executing a short hop to the Telamon’s helipad. Access by sea was still restricted, thanks to the STP supporters in the skidoo armed with a water cannon, who had been cheered on by the floating flotilla of their fellow protestors in their armada of little boats. A Dunkirk spirit had gripped the crowds, with STP banners sprinkled along the clifftop.