The Black Tide

by Hammond Innes

  But in the morning, when I walked up to the headland and stood staring out across the quiet sea at the Longships light and the creaming wash of the Atlantic swell breaking on the inshore rocks, the wretched man’s words came back to me – you can’t escape, can you, from either yourself or the past. I knew then that the chapter of my life that had started out there in the fog that night was not closed, would never be closed.

  This was the thought that stayed with me as I tramped the clifftop paths alone or went fishing off Sennen in Andy’s boat. The weather was good for late January, cold with little wind and clear pale skies. It was on the fourth day, when I was fishing out beyond The Tribbens, that I felt Choffel’s presence most. The swell was heavier then and the boat rocking; I suppose it was that which conjured up the memory of that dhow and what had happened. And his words … I found myself going over and over those rambling outbursts of his, the face pale under the stubble, the black curly hair, and the stench, the dark eyes staring. It all came back to me, everything he had said, and I began to wonder, And wondering, I began to think of his daughter – in England now and hating my guts for something I hadn’t done.

  The line tugged at my hand, but I didn’t move, for I was suddenly facing the fact that if I were innocent of what she firmly believed I had done, then perhaps he was innocent, too. And I sat there, the boat rocking gently and the fish tugging at the line, as I stared out across the half-tide rocks south of the Tribbens to the surf swirling around the Kettle’s Bottom and the single mast that was all that was left above water of the Petros Jupiter. I’ve paid and paid. And now the girl was accusing me of a murder I hadn’t committed.

  I pulled in the line, quickly, hand-over-hand. It was a crab of all things, a spider crab. I shook it loose and started the engine, threading my way back through the rocks to the jetty. It was lunchtime, the village deserted. I parked the boat and took the cliff path to Land’s End, walking fast, hoping exertion would kill my doubts and calm my mind.

  But it didn’t. The doubts remained. In the late afternoon a bank of fog moved in from seaward. I just made it back to Sennen before it engulfed the coast. Everything was then so like that night Karen had blown herself up that I stood for a while staring seaward, the Seven Stones’ diaphone bleating faintly and the double bang from the Longships loud enough to wake the dead. The wind was sou’westerly and I was suddenly imagining those two tankers thundering up the Atlantic to burst through the rolling bank of mist, and only myself to stop them – myself alone, just as Karen had been alone.

  ‘Think about it,’ Saltley had said. ‘If we knew where they were meeting up …’ And he had left it at that, taking the girl’s arm and walking her down the street to where he had parked his low-slung Porsche.

  And standing there, down by the lifeboat station, thinking about it, it was as though Karen were whispering to me out of the fog – find them, find them, you must find them. It was a distant foghorn, and there was another answering it. I needed an atlas, charts, the run of the pilot books for the coasts of Africa, dividers to work out distances and dates. Slow-steaming at eleven knots, that was 264 nautical miles a day. Forty days, Saltley had said, to Ushant and the English Channel. But the Aurora B would be steaming at full speed, say 400 a day, that would be 30 days, and she had left her hidey-hole by the Hormuz Straits nine days ago. Another twenty-one to go … I had turned automatically towards Andy’s cottage above the lifeboat station, something nagging at my mind, but what I didn’t know, conscious only that I had lost the better part of a week, and the distant foghorn drumming at my ears with its mournful sense of urgency.

  It was Rose who answered the door. Andy wasn’t there and they didn’t have a world atlas. But she gave me a cup of tea and after leaving me for a while returned with the Digest World Atlas borrowed from a retired lighthouse keeper a few doors away, a man, she said, who had never been outside of British waters but liked to visualize where all the ships passing him had come from. I opened it first at the geophysical maps of Africa. There were two of them right at the end of Section One, and on both coasts there were vast blanks between the names of ports and coastal towns. The east coast I knew. The seas were big in the monsoons, the currents tricky, and there was a lot of shipping. The Seychelles and Mauritius were too populated, too full of package tours, and the islands closer to Madagascar, like Aldabra and the Comores Archipelago, too likely to be overflown, the whole area liable to naval surveillance.

  In any case, I thought the rendezvous would have been planned much nearer to the target, and if that were Europe then it must be somewhere on the west coast. I turned then to the main maps, which were on a larger scale of 197 miles to the inch, staring idly at the offshore colouring, where the green of the open Atlantic shaded to white as the continental shelf tilted upwards to the coastal shallows. I was beginning to feel sleepy, for we were in the kitchen with the top of the old-fashioned range red-hot, the atmosphere overwhelming after the cold and the fog outside. Rose poured me another cup of tea from the pot brewing on the hob. Tristan da Cunha, St Helena, Ascension – those were all too far away. But on the next page, the one for North and West Africa, there was Hierro, Gomera, Palma, all out-islands of the Canaries and on the direct route. The Selvagens, too, and the Desertas, and Porto Santo off Madeira. Of these, only the Selvagens, perhaps the Desertas, could be regarded as possibles, the others being too well populated.

  The tea was strong and very sweet, and I sat there wrapped in the cosy warmth of that hot little kitchen, my head nodding as my mind groped for something I knew was there but could not find. Andy came back and I stayed on and had a meal with them. By the time I left, the fog had cleared and it was very close to freezing, the stars bright as diamonds overhead and the flash of the Longships and other lights further away, the glimmer of ships rounding Land’s End, all seemingly magnified in the startling clarity.

  Next morning I went up to the main road at first light and hitched a ride in a builder’s van going to Penzance. From there I got the train to Falmouth. I needed charts now and a look at the Admiralty pilots for Africa, my mind still groping for that elusive thought that lurked somewhere in my subconscious, logic suggesting that it was more probably a rendezvous well offshore, some fixed position clear of all shipping lanes.

  The first vessel I tried when I got to the harbour was a general cargo ship, but she was on a regular run to the Maritimes, Halifax mainly, and had no use for African charts. The mate indicated a yacht berthed alongside one of the tugs at the inner end of the breakwater. ‘Round-the-worlder,’ he said. ‘Came in last night from the Cape Verdes. He’ll have charts for that part of the African coast.’ And he went back to the job I used to do, checking the cargo coming out of the hold.

  The yacht was the Ocean Brigand. She flew a burgee with a black Maltese cross with a yellow crown on a white background and a red fly. Her ensign was blue and she had the letters RCC below her name on the stern. She was wood, her brightwork worn by salt and sun so that in places bare wood showed through the varnish, and her decks were a litter of ropes and sails and oilskins drying in the cold wind. The skipper, who was also the owner, was small and grey-haired with a smile that crinkled the wind-lines at the corners of his eyes. He had charts for most of the world, the pilots, too. ‘A bit out of date, some of them,’ he said. ‘But they cost a fortune now.’

  He sat me down at the chart table with a Bacardi and lime and left me to find what I wanted. ‘Still some clearing up to do.’ He smiled wearily. ‘We had it a bit rugged off Finisterre and the Bay was mostly between seven and nine. Silly time of year really to return to England, but my wife hasn’t been too good. Packed her off to hospital this morning.’

  I had never been on a real ocean-going yacht before, the chart table so small, tucked in on the starb’d side opposite the galley, yet everything I’d ever needed in the way of navigation was there – except radar. He hadn’t got radar, or Decca nav. And there was no gyro compass. But everything else, including VHF and single-sideband radi
o.

  I went through all his charts that showed any part of Africa and in the end I was no better off than I had been with the lighthouse keeper’s atlas. It had to be the last stretch, even as far north as the Bay of Biscay, but more likely somewhere in the neighbourhood of those Spanish and Portuguese islands off the coast of Spanish Sahara and Morocco. And of these the Desertas and the Selvagens, being without water and therefore more or less deserted, seemed most likely. But even then, with the pilot book open in front of me, I didn’t see it. Like the chart, it referred to both groups of islands by their Portuguese names. There was no indication that there might be an anglicized version of the name Selvagen.

  A pair of sea boots appeared in the companionway to my right and the owner leaned his head down, peering over my shoulder. ‘Ah, I see you’re reading up on the Madeira–Canaries passage, but I doubt whether your friends would have put into either the Desertas or the Selvagens. No water, no safe anchorage and both of them bloody inhospitable groups of islands by all accounts. Never been there myself, but our vice-commodore now, he went to the Selvagens I seem to remember – 1980, I think …’ He went past me into the saloon, putting on a pair of half-spectacles and peering along a battened-in shelf of books. ‘Here we are.’ He handed me a carefully plastic-wrapped copy of the Royal Cruising Club Journal. ‘There’s a glimpse of what he calls the Salvage Islands. A little more descriptive than the Pilot.’

  It was a short piece, barely two pages, but it was the title that caught and held my attention – A Look at the Salvage Islands. ‘We sailed two days ago from Funchal …’ Averaging probably no more than 100 miles a day, that was in line with the Pilot which gave the distance from the southernmost of the Desertas to Selvagem Grande as 135 miles. The names were the same, too, except for the m where it was singular – Selvagem Grande and Selvagem Pequena and, so that there should be no doubt whatsoever, he had written, ‘I had always hoped to visit the Salvage (Salvagen) Islands.’ He must have got the English name from somewhere and my guess was the Navy – at some time in the distant past British sailors had anglicized it and called them the Salvage Islands, just as they had called Ile d’Ouessant off the Brittany coast of France Ushant. And looking at the Atlantic Ocean Chart 2127 I saw that here the group were named the Salvagen Is – an a instead of an e.

  Was that what Choffel had meant when he talked of salvage? Was it the Salvagen Islands he had been referring to?

  There was Selvagem Grande and Selvagem Pequena, and an even smaller one called Fora. And I remembered that a mate I had served under had once described them to me as we were steaming between Gibraltar and Freetown – ‘Spooky,’ he had said of the smaller Selvagem. ‘The most godforsaken spooky bit of a volcanic island I ever saw.’ And reading the Journal, here was this yachtsman’s daughter using almost the same words – ‘Spooksville,’ she had called it, and there had been the wrecked hulk of a supertanker hung on the rocks, her father claiming he had never seen a more dreadful place.

  ‘They were on their way to the Caribbean,’ the owner said. ‘Just two of them on the leg south from Madeira to the Canaries.’ He gave me another drink, chatting to me for a while. Then a doctor arrived and I left him to the sad business of finding out what was wrong with his wife. There had been just the two of them and it was the finish of their second circumnavigation.

  I phoned Forthright’s from the station, making it a personal call on reverse charges. Fortunately Saltley was in, but when I told him about the Salvage Islands, he said he and Stewart had already considered that possibility and had read the piece in the RCC Journal. In fact, they had chartered a small plane out of Madeira to make a recce of the islands and he had received the pilot’s report that morning. The only tanker anywhere near the islands was the wreck stranded on the rocks of Selvagem Pequena. ‘Pity you’ve no date for the rendezvous. It means somebody keeping watch out there.’ He checked that I was at Balkaer and said he’d be in touch when he’d spoken to Michael Stewart again.

  It was almost dark when I got back to the cottage and there was a note pinned to the door. It was in Jean’s handwriting. Saltley had phoned and it was urgent. I trudged back up the hill and she handed me the message without a word. I was to take the next ferry out of Plymouth for Roscoff in Brittany and then make my way to Gibraltar via Tangier. ‘At Gibraltar he says you can hide up on a yacht called Prospero which you’ll find berthed in the Marina.’ And Jean added, ‘It’s important, Trevor.’ Her hand was on my arm, her face, staring up at me, very serious. ‘Jimmy will drive you there tonight.’

  ‘What’s happened,’ I asked. ‘What else did he say?’

  ‘He didn’t want you to take any chances. That’s what he said. It’s just possible there’ll be a warrant issued for your arrest. And it was on the radio at lunchtime.’

  ‘On the radio?’ I stared at her.

  ‘Yes, an interview with Guinevere Choffel. She gave the whole story, all the ships her father had sailed in, including the Petros Jupiter – but differently to what you told us. She made him out a poor, unfortunate man trying to earn a living at sea and always being taken advantage of. Then, right at the end, she accused you of murdering him. She gave your name and then said she’d be going to the police right after the programme. It was an extraordinary statement to come over the radio. They cut her off then, of course. But the interview was live, so nothing they could do about it.’

  I was in their sitting-room, leaning against the door, and I reached into my pocket for a cigarette. I felt suddenly as though the world of black and white had been turned upside down, Choffel declared innocent and myself the villain now. I offered her the packet and she shook her head. ‘Vengeance,’ she said, a look of sadness that made her gipsy features suddenly older. ‘That’s Old Testament stuff.’

  ‘I didn’t kill him.’ The match flared, the flame trembling slightly as I lit my cigarette.

  ‘It was in your mind.’

  She didn’t need to remind me. I half closed my eyes, inhaling the stale duty-free nicotine, thinking of Choffel. She didn’t have to start lecturing me, not now when I was being hounded out of the country. I wondered how he had felt, making up stories nobody believed. And then to seize that dhow just because I was on board the tanker, confronting him with his guilt. Did that make me responsible for the bullet in his guts?

  ‘Would you like me to try and see her?’

  ‘What the hell good would that do?’

  She shrugged, shaking her head. ‘I don’t know.’ There were tears in her eyes. ‘I just thought it might be worth a try. If I could get her to come down here. If she saw where the Petros Jupiter had been wrecked, what a threat it had been to all our lives – if I told her, woman-to-woman, the sort of person Karen was, what she had done and why … Perhaps she’d understand then. Don’t you think she would?’ Her voice faltered and she turned away. ‘I’ll go and see what Jimmy’s up to,’ she said. ‘You phone Plymouth and find out when the ferry leaves.’

  In fact, there wasn’t one until noon next day so I had a last night at Balkaer and took the early train from Penzance. I felt very lost after saying goodbye to the Kerrisons, feeling I would never see them again, or Balkaer, and that I was now a sort of pariah condemned like Choffel to roam the world under any name but my own, always looking over my shoulder, half afraid of my own shadow. Even when I had boarded the ferry, my temporary papers given no more than a cursory glance, I positioned myself at the rail so that I could see everyone who boarded the ship, until at last the gangway was pulled clear and we sailed.

  It was the same when I got to France. There was no trouble on landing, yet I still glanced nervously over my shoulder at the sound of footsteps, watchful and suspicious of anybody going in the same direction as myself. It was all in my imagination, of course, and a psychiatrist would probably have said I was developing a persecution mania, but it was real enough to me at the time, that sense of being watched. And so was the stupidity of it, the sheer craziness of it all. It was like a nightmare what was h
appening. A man wrecks a ship, your wife kills herself trying to burn up the oil spill he’s caused and you go after him – and from that simple, natural act, the whole thing blows up in your face, the man dead and his daughter accusing you of killing him. And nobody to prove you innocent.

  Just as there had been nobody to prove him innocent. That thought was in my mind, too.

  How quickly you can be brainwashed, by changing circumstances or by the behaviour of other human beings. How strangely vulnerable is the human mind when locked in on itself, alone with nobody to act as a sounding box, nobody to say you’re right – right in thinking he’d sunk those ships, right to believe he was the cause of Karen’s death, right to believe in retribution.

  Alone, the nagging doubt remained. An eye for an eye? The Old Testament, Jean had said, and even she hadn’t thought I was right, insisting that I do what Saltley said. The best friends a man could hope for and they had not only helped me run away, but had insisted I had no alternative. A lawyer, the media, two such good friends – and I hadn’t killed him. The stupid little bitch had got it wrong, leaping to conclusions. I could have thrown her father overboard. I could have taken him back to the tanker. Instead, I had cleaned him up, given him water … I was going over and over it in my mind all the way to Tangier, and still that sense of unreality. I couldn’t believe it, and at the same time that feeling of being watched, expecting some anonymous individual representing Interpol or some other Establishment organization to pick me up at any moment.

  I reached Tangier and nobody stopped me. There was a levanter blowing through the Straits and it was rough crossing over to the Rock, Arabs and Gibraltarians all being sick amongst a heaped-up mass of baggage. Nobody bothered about me. There was no policeman waiting for me on the jetty at Gibraltar. I got a water taxi and went round to the marina, the top of the Rock shrouded in mist and a drizzle of rain starting to fall.