The Coffin Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  Mackerel skies and mares’ tails

  Make tall ships wear short sails.

  He suddenly realized he hadn’t heard a weather forecast in well over a week.

  At that moment, the helicopter lifted off again and Richard followed it with his eyes, forgetting about the weather for the moment. It was gone out of his sight in a few moments and his eyes turned south again, remembering the storm.

  But Watson had started his inquisition and he readily turned his mind back to the present. Then, over the next half hour, each contributing knowledge and speculation beyond the other’s ken, they began to reconstruct the bare bones of the fraud.

  They discussed Lloyd’s history of Kostas Demetrios, a former lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, lucky to be in Naples instead of Vietnam, leaving the service at the end of his tour of duty apparently clean—though medical supplies kept vanishing from the Italian port—returning to civilian life rich, but not lazy. He worked his way through business school and moved into shipping, rapaciously ambitious; infinitely greedy. The purchase of Prometheus was his first really big venture in the most lucrative market of all. Running it legally, he would have been well in profit, and able to build his fleet slowly and safely. If the fraud paid off, his profits were likely to be colossal.

  The crew selected for Prometheus might just have stood up to scrutiny, even had she sunk. There was nothing concrete against Levkas the registered master. Only Gallaher, the ship’s electrician, had a serious criminal record as an IRA terrorist, still wanted for bombing an Army patrol.

  Had Demetrios’s plan gone unhindered, it would have been foolproof. Prometheus, under an assumed name, would have sold her oil in Durban. She would have blown up and sunk off Senegal. Insurance would have been collected. Kostas Demetrios would have been very, very rich.

  Everything that had happened to Richard and his crew had been an increasingly desperate variation on that simple plan. Desperate, but not wildly so: there was still no absolute proof.

  Until the tanks were opened.

  “But if you couldn’t open the tanks?” asked Richard. “If we hadn’t brought her home?”

  “We’d have paid up. Simple as that. Still might have to, if anything goes wrong.”

  “But the suspicion…”

  “A story. Nothing more. The sort of thing you find in novels. I doubt it would ever stand up in court. Unsubstantiated hearsay, most of it. No damn good at all, without proof.”

  There seemed little more to say at the moment. Both men knew there were still a lot of loose ends to be tied up, but for the time being they had sketched out the broad outlines of the plot. Watson went below to check through the records, now he had a clearer idea of what he was looking for.

  Richard made a mental note to get the police aboard the moment they dropped anchor in Lyme Bay, then stood looking south, lost in thought. After a few moments, the door opened and closed. He turned to find Sir William beside him, his back ramrod straight and his shoulders square again.

  They stood in companionable silence, then Richard, unable to say how happy he was to be beside his father-in-law again, said instead, solicitously, “Robin said you’d not been well.”

  “Told you that, did she?”

  “Yup.”

  “Ah, well. Happen she thought she had reason.” A hint of displeasure, like distant thunder in his voice.

  “But there was no cause for alarm?”

  “No!” The northern accent drew the vowel out derisively. As though there could be anything wrong with Bill Heritage! The very idea invited scorn.

  Richard was lifted by the negative—and the old, familiar confidence beneath it. This was the man he remembered. Obviously he had found some way to strengthen the weak, broken man Robin had described so long ago…

  “How’s the oil market?” Richard asked, as though the suspicions, as though the last five years, had never existed.

  “Very buoyant. Rumors of another cut in Middle Eastern production. Prices going through the roof.”

  “You were lucky to buy in at the start.”

  “I was owed some favors by someone in the Foreign Office.”

  “And you sold it on…When?”

  “Ten days ago.”

  “That fits. Who to?”

  “Some outfit I’d never heard of. Good profit.”

  “Too good?”

  “Good enough to make me feel dirty? That what you mean?”

  “No, Bill. We’re over that. Good enough to look suspicious?”

  “Not with the market jumping like that…”

  Richard nodded. Then something further occurred to him. “Why’d you come out, Bill?” he asked. “It was more than just seeing Robin. She’s been her own woman for years now. You knew she was safe, like the rest of us. You’ve never fussed before.”

  “This was different!”

  “Right about that!” His tone was mild, robbing the words of offense.

  “And anyway…”

  “I knew there was more. What?”

  “It hardly seems important now. We’re headed for safe anchorage. Only a matter of hours to go.”

  “Right. So?”

  “I heard yesterday morning, and it frightened the life out of me, I admit.”

  “Out with it, Bill. What?”

  “Prometheus’s sister. Doesn’t have a name anymore. Last registered as Tethys. Tied up in the next anchorage to Prometheus in Valparaiso all these years…”

  “Yes?”

  “Broke in half. Sank in minutes. Complete harbor watch gone. Riding in ballast. Clear day. No warning, nothing. They reckoned it was the long seas did it, bending her like a piece of wire, never varying. Bending her like a piece of wire till she snapped.”

  Richard felt his body chill.

  “No warning at all?”

  “One of the watch aboard was talking to his daughter on the ship-to-shore phone line. Cut off in midword. That’s how they found out so quickly. She looked out of the window and it was gone. Bloody great supertanker gone. No ship: no father. Nothing.” He snapped his fingers. “Quick as that.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The helicopter was back again in minutes, ferrying in a doctor and a nurse, another Coastguard, a customs officer who looked like the sailor on the front of the old cigarette packet, and the first policeman, a self-effacing detective sergeant from Falmouth.

  They might just as well have called in at any of the islands after all, thought Richard grimly. The only difference would have been the nationality of the officialdom that overwhelmed them.

  But all these new—and not particularly welcome—faces had the unexpected effect of bringing the crew even more closely together. If they looked upon the first influx as aliens, they looked upon the rest as little short of vermin. On the one hand, Richard found himself rapidly running out of patience as all sorts of bureaucratic pygmies made importunate demands on his time he could not begin to fulfill; on the other, the rest of the crew, from the first lieutenant to the lowliest of Ho’s stewards, flatly refused to do or say a thing without referring either directly or through the chain of command, to their captain. He had, after all, brought them this far against unimaginable odds; he would stand by them now.

  And he did. Although he would far rather have been leading a team to check for possible weaknesses in the hull that might trip them, fatally, at the last fence from home.

  The awe in which they seemed to hold him, therefore, became a source at once of great strength and of great irritation. And of increasing isolation.

  He felt alone, but he was not. They all, to varying degrees, felt isolated too. Robin, even though she was with her father, to whom she had given a lifetime of filial devotion, looked almost with pity on the grand old man because he had not shared what the rest of them had. No matter what he had seen or known, it could be nothing like this. There was a part of her that he would never be able to reach again. Which any other one of the crew, no matter how little known or how faintly remembered, had direct acces
s to. And each of the others, looking at the interlopers, felt the same. Events, and Richard’s titanic abilities as a leader, had welded them together into a combat unit. Had strung between them those bonds almost of blood, which would see the passing of years as nothing compared to the enduring of this experience.

  As midday approached, the captain firmly extricated himself from the clutches of the insistent customs man, swept past the policeman, and entered the bridge. His impatience was instantly obvious to his crew. It was pleasant to have the radio aboard, but the current news concerned only pop stars and drugs. They had missed the final test match, of course. There was nothing of real interest. He listened for a few minutes, then swung round.

  “Bearing to Mecca?”

  Ben was just relieving Robin, and it was she who rattled it off. She hadn’t seen Richard in this mood for many years, but she remembered it vividly and stood in awe of it. When he turned and exited the bridge, the mate and the third lieutenant exchanged a long look.

  A moment or two later, the ship’s address system came on. “Attention. Your attention, please. This is the captain speaking…” Absolute silence fell. Even the engine seemed to quiet.

  Surprised by this simple demonstration of this captain’s power, Moriarty turned, and his eyes met the awed glance of Quine, the new radio officer. They stood in respectful silence until the bearing of Mecca completed the messages.

  Then, “What sort of a man is he, your captain?” Moriarty asked Ben.

  “The only man alive who could have brought us through like this.” Ben might have been going to say more, but the subject of their discussion came back onto the bridge just then.

  “You can go down to lunch, Number Three. Tell them to send the rest of us up some sandwiches.”

  Robin was happy enough to leave, but he stopped her at the door. “Oh. And find that policeman. I don’t want him being sick all over my ship.”

  She turned away. Too soon.

  “And if you see Sir William, tell him he is welcome either to join us here or to eat with the officers below.”

  “Aye, sir.” She hadn’t called him “sir” since Durban, and not very often before Durban, either.

  The afternoon passed in that air of dangerous calm. Richard stayed on the bridge, unable to do anything else without tripping over importunate officialdom. Anyone who wanted to see him—fewer and fewer as the day progressed—came and were growled at there. Off their port beam the coast of En gland loomed and receded as they swept past bays and headlands most had never thought to see again. They had passed the Lizard, Black Head, and Manacle Point while Moriarty was getting used to her. They had passed distant Dodman Point and Chapel Point. They had passed the Eddystone Rocks soon after Richard’s curt broadcast; and now, looming large across Bigbury Bay, lay Prawle Point, and beyond it, Lyme Bay.

  What had started as a bright day was gathering itself into a dull evening. The mares’ tails that Richard had seen this morning were replaced by a flat, gray overcast. The sea, gray-green at the best of times, now seemed almost black, rolling in on the starboard quarter from Biscay and the southwest.

  The detective sergeant’s name was Bodmin, like the moor; and he wasn’t either as self-effacing or as seasick as he seemed. He had been born and raised in Falmouth, able to sail a boat before he could ride a bike. Only education in London, at Hendon, and his detective’s course in Manchester had taken him far away from the sea. And as soon as he had passed out of police training college, he had transferred back to the Cornish force and his childhood sweetheart, content to make his way slowly and happily down here.

  Nor was he a fool, for all that he played up his accent and acted before the ignorant a little of the country bumpkin.

  So when he told the chief engineer to consider himself under arrest, Harry Bodmin knew well enough what he was up to. The American took it surprisingly calmly, and at first the detective thought he couldn’t have heard above the grumble of the engines in the Engine Control Room. But Martyr had heard all right, as had Rice and McTavish. Their reaction was more marked than the chief’s, for, as it was with Captain Mariner and the deck officers, so obviously it was with Martyr and his engineers. For a moment, Bodmin wondered if he had miscalculated after all and was about to meet a sticky end.

  But Martyr swung round slowly, wearily. “Can’t prove nothing, son,” he said. “But you’re welcome to try like the others back home.”

  “Thank you, sir. At least I can assume you are not going anywhere for the moment, and I know you are necessary to the running of the ship, so it’s a notional arrest. Unless you try to escape before this inquiry is over, of course.” He saw the skeptical look in the chief’s eye and added dryly, “Scotland Yard is of course aware of the warrant for homicide outstanding against you in New York, though I believe that to be a federal offense; and, together with the investigator from Lloyd’s, I cannot see how this alleged fraud could possibly have been perpetrated without your active or passive connivance. You are the last of the original officers left alive. This ship was always bound, illegally, for Durban. You and your dead colleagues must have known that from the start. When we have proved what is actually in those tanks, we might well be adding our own charges to the federal warrant against you.”

  Rather pleased with that as an exit speech, he swung wide the door into the strangely misshapen, blast-damaged corridor past the Pump Room and went to pursue the rest of his inquiries.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon in the first mate’s office, interviewing everyone aboard. But it really got him nowhere. No one actually admitted to knowing anything, and he began to realize that unless he and Watson could prove that the ship had visited Durban on purpose—and the food poisoning was going to make that difficult—then there was precious little proof that anything illegal had been done since Mariner had assumed command.

  And yet it was quite obvious that here was a massive fraud, attempted mass murder by the use of explosives, perhaps the same thing by the use of poison off Durban, and heaven only knew what else. Grievous Bodily Harm at the very least, if the American’s face was anything to go by. He had better get ashore, he thought, and turn this lot over to his superiors.

  He found Martyr and the captain on the bridge, both looking morosely across the choppy expanse of Lyme Bay to where the lights of Exmouth twinkled in the distance. As soon as Mariner saw him, he went straight into the attack. “I hear you’ve put my chief under some kind of arrest.”

  It was only to be expected, thought Bodmin, without a trace of resentment at the hostility. It hadn’t taken him long to see how close-knit this crew had become, like some station houses he had known on the force. He hoped if he ever got into trouble there would be people like these to stand beside him. He calculated that this was the time for a softly-softly approach, if he wanted to get ashore.

  “Only notionally, sir. I’m not quite sure of my authority. If Mr. Martyr were considering coming ashore, I might be able to arrange some sort of accommodation until…”

  “He’s not. Now that we’re at anchor, we’re keeping a harbor watch until the rest of the authorities come aboard in the morning.”

  “And that watch will include the chief?”

  “Yes. It includes all the crew.”

  “Fine. How do I get ashore?”

  “If you hurry, Captain Moriarty may let you have a seat with Mr. Watson in the pilot’s cutter. It’s just about to pull away.”

  Bodmin left at a run.

  Richard had not been lying to protect his chief. He did fully intend to keep watches above-and belowdeck all night, no matter how exhausted he and his crew were. He had a feeling that their safety was by no means assured now they were at anchor—indeed, he was absolutely certain that this position was not the beginning of safety but the climax of danger.

  The real investigation would not start until tomorrow after all. Anyone left active in Demetrios’s murderous plot, therefore, would have to act to night.