Judicial Whispers

by Caro Fraser

  Leo stopped and leant against the railings of Berkeley Square, feeling the freezing air penetrating to his bones, the slight raw wind lifting strands of his grey hair. He thought again of the discreet canvassing he had done over the past few weeks. Not once had anyone betrayed a hint of any knowledge … Michael Winstanley had been quite confident, anticipating the thing as a fait accompli. Sir Bernard Lightfoot, when the thing had come up casually at that Benchers’ cocktail party, had murmured that it was an excellent thing, every success, my full support, and so forth. But Frank had said that Bernard had told Sir Mungo Stephenson the rumours about Leo. That either meant that Bernard dissembled very easily, or that he was not aware of the Lord Chancellor’s views.

  He pushed himself away from the railings, confused. Sir Mungo – well, he hadn’t spoken to Sir Mungo yet, and would now take care not to. Either Sir Mungo would take the Lord Chancellor’s line or he wouldn’t. That went for more or less the entire Commercial Bench. Much would depend upon what had been said, how much was mere rumour, or whether someone had got hold of something more concrete about Leo’s private affairs. Yes, that was what it came down to. How much was known, and how much believed. Yet he had no way of knowing what information was in circulation, or how damaging it might be. As he made his way slowly along Hill Street towards his mews house, Leo recalled the hour he had spent with Roger Ware. There had been, he now told himself, a certain watchfulness in Roger’s glance as they talked. The more he considered it and their conversation, the more convinced he became. Roger must know. He must have heard the rumours, and that must have been why he was so guarded. Leo had noticed it at the time.

  He walked along the cobbled mews to his house, then paused as he put the key in the lock. How had the rumour got around? How had anyone come to know? Perhaps he was deceiving himself. Perhaps it had been known for years. But he was sure it had not. He was sure he had been the model of discretion over the years. Except in the case of Anthony. Anthony … He wondered for the briefest of moments, as he stepped into the darkness of his hallway, whether Anthony … But he dismissed the thought almost immediately. Of course he could not be the source.

  You have been a fool, Leo, he told himself, as he snapped on the lights and went into the kitchen. A fool to think that anyone could live as you do without others coming to hear of it. Who knew how information, little snatches of gossip and conjecture, came to be blown upon the air? He sighed and rubbed his hands across his face. How appallingly naive he had been. As he stood in the middle of his kitchen, Leo felt quite powerless, and knew himself and his fate to be directed by forces that were now utterly beyond his control.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Anthony woke from a deep, unbroken sleep. The edges of the heavy curtains were rimmed with white light, and he suddenly remembered where he was. He got quickly out of bed and pulled back the curtains. The window opened onto a little marble balcony and he stepped out, marvelling at the gentle freshness of the heat reflected from the white walls of the hotel. He looked down at the sparkling blue water of the pool, still and unbroken, and traced the little flashing, darting movements of the birds in the tall palm trees.

  It should have been perfection, he knew, to be in such a place when one was in love. But there was nothing tangible in his love, no reassurance he could seek. Only uncertainty, imponderability. He must simply let time take care of it, he told himself, and went to dress.

  After breakfast, Rachel and Anthony were met in the lobby by Mr Gillespie, the surveyor, who was to go out to the ship with them. He was a rangy Scot with wispy reddish hair, wearing a blue linen suit already stained with sweat. They travelled together in an Ambassador car to the docks, Anthony and Rachel in the back, and Mr Gillespie towering beside the driver, who rattled and honked his car at terrific speed through the streets, while a little ivory statue of Ganesh, the elephant god, swayed on top of the dashboard.

  The scene at the docks was one of frantic clamour. Brown-skinned workmen swarmed everywhere, hauling sacks, tallying containers, heaving at water pipes to replenish the ships’ tanks, all shouting orders to each other at once. The air was filled with the rank smell of rotting vegetation and fruit, mingling with the odour of gasoline. Trucks careered slowly among the workers, their battered cabs gaudily painted and hung with strange, faded garlands of flowers, and tubby, sweating officials from the various shipping lines would emerge with clipboards fluttering with wads of paper, to holler and direct matters. Rachel could not imagine how anything ever got done in anything like an organised manner. She said as much to Mr Gillespie.

  ‘Oh, they’re organised, after a fashion,’ he said, as he jostled his way through the crowd of chattering dockers, holding his briefcase aloft, his face red and perspiring. ‘It’s just that they take a good deal longer to get things done. They love bureaucracy, the Indians – love nothing better than a load of official paperwork, everything in triplicate, stamped and signed. You might say it’s our legacy to them, from the days of the Empire.’

  They reached the place where the Valeo Dawn was docked and, after a good deal of official haggling and gesticulation between Mr Gillespie and a harbour official, were allowed to board and shown by a crewman to the master’s cabin.

  The master, Captain Craddock, was a weary, resigned man from Tynemouth who, along with his crew, had just about had enough of hanging around in Bombay waiting for things to be done that never got done, and was longing daily for repairs to be finished so that they could get away.

  He greeted his three visitors civilly, but eyed Rachel’s white cotton sleeveless dress unenthusiastically. ‘I think you might need something a bit more practical for the engine room,’ he remarked, ‘unless, of course, you’d rather just wait here in my cabin.’ He did not entirely approve of women on board his ship, and felt that this one, with her striking face and slender figure, might not exactly be good for his Greek crew.

  ‘No,’ said Rachel, ‘I’ll go down with Mr Cross and Mr Gillespie. I’m not particularly bothered about my dress getting a little dirty.’

  ‘That wasn’t quite what I was thinking about,’ said Captain Craddock. ‘I’ll get someone to find a pair of overalls for you.’

  Overalls were duly found, and the master, Mr Gillespie and Anthony all waited outside the cabin while Rachel changed. She emerged encased in voluminous canvas overalls which must have belonged to a seaman of considerable dimensions. Anthony smiled broadly, and Rachel, a little pink, lifted her chin and followed the men to the engine room. How can anyone manage to look sexy and beautiful even in those? wondered Anthony, as he watched her descend the first staircase down to the bowels of the ship.

  They climbed down, deeper and deeper, through clanging metal walkways and along gantries, until at last they reached the engine room.

  ‘Right,’ said Captain Craddock, ‘here we are on the bottom platform. There’s the engine control room, and along here’ – he walked along and the others followed – ‘is the number two generator, which is where the fire started.’

  They gazed around the vast metallic vault, at the massive piping, the gauges, dials, levers, lengths of blackened cable, and finally at the generator itself. Its shell was encrusted with the flaking silvery debris of a burnt-out fire, and the smell of burnt fuel oil still hung in the close air. Rachel felt stifled.

  ‘The engine control room was where my men were killed,’ said Captain Craddock. ‘They died of smoke inhalation. The fire crew tried to rescue them a few times with BA, but the heat and the smoke in the engine room made it impossible. The air in their BA kept running out before they could reach them.’

  Mr Gillespie knelt down and began his slow and careful inspection of the generator and its valves, pausing to take notes with difficulty in his squatting position, the sweat trickling down his beef-red neck and into the soaked collar of his shirt. Rachel and Anthony followed his discussions with the master as he went on to examine the smoke-blackened banks of insulation cables and shell plating, but after half an hour or so of li
stening attentively to what was being said, the conversation became so technically involved that Rachel and Anthony could follow none of it.

  They walked back along the clanking metal corridor to the engine room. A couple of crewmen watched them impassively. Even in that rig-out, thought Anthony, they can’t take their eyes off her. He felt possessive, wanting in some way, by word or gesture, to assert control over her. But she walked ahead of him, heedless and detached, utterly remote.

  They looked round the control room in silence, gazing at the sooty walls, the blackened dials and equipment, at the pathos of the plastic seating burnt off a chair, the charred papers lying on a desk. The temperature of the fire had been so great that the bulb of an alcohol-filled thermometer on the control panel had burst. Separately, they imagined the horror of the choking, airless deaths of the seamen entombed in that place.

  When they went back along the corridor, they found Mr Gillespie busily taking photographs of the generator and the surrounding equipment.

  ‘See here,’ he said to Anthony and Rachel, pulling a finished roll of film from his camera. They bent over as he pointed to an innocuous-looking stub of metal with a nut at one end rising from the oily, blackened shell. ‘That’s one of the lube-oil filters. There was a socket spanner attached to the release nut of the aft filter’ – he shifted and pointed further over – ‘which means the oil flow was through the outboard filters. In number four generator the inner pair would have been in use. My guess is that the oiler, when he was cleaning the oil filters, released the nut holding down the top of the outboard filter, but forgot to change the oil flow to the inboard filters.’

  ‘Which would mean,’ said Rachel, ‘that when he released the top of the filter, there would be quite some pressure on it.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mr Gillespie, and both he and the master glanced at her in surprise. ‘About thirty pounds per square inch, possibly more. Result – the rubber sealing gasket was pushed from its seat and you got this massive spray of oil. The oil filters are immediately below the auxiliary engine’s exhaust system, and the surface of that would be in excess of three hundred degrees centigrade.’

  ‘And since the flashpoint of lube-oil is something between a hundred and fifty and two hundred and thirty degrees,’ said Rachel, ‘it would ignite on the hot surface.’

  Mr Gillespie nodded. ‘Lube-oil is a bitch when it burns. Produces all this dense black smoke. Cable insulation will do the same. It would have taken less than a minute before the engine room and control room were choked with it.’

  ‘That looks pretty conclusive,’ said Anthony, running a finger along the grimy surface of the oil filter. Such a little mistake, he thought, such an easy thing to forget, changing the flow before turning that spanner. Poor guy. He sighed. ‘You think we can pretty well rule out any defect in the system?’ he asked Mr Gillespie.

  ‘I’ve checked everything thoroughly, twice. No defects. This has to be the answer. Human error, pure and simple.’

  ‘Well, that should cheer Mr Nikolaos up,’ said Anthony to Rachel. She stared at the little stub of metal and said nothing.

  The four of them made their way up and along the clanging gantries, out of the engine room and back to the upper reaches of the ship.

  ‘Well, I’ll have my report ready in a couple of weeks or so,’ said Mr Gillespie, ‘plus the photos. I have to drop in at one of the agents’ offices, so I’ll say goodbye here.’

  They shook hands with Mr Gillespie and he left. Rachel and Anthony stayed and had lunch with Captain Craddock, which was a strangely formal affair in his rather cramped quarters, with a couple of silent crewmen, spruced-up, helping everyone to cold ham and smoked cheese and bread and beer.

  When lunch was over, Rachel said, ‘I think I’d better get down to taking your statement now, Captain Craddock. We only have this afternoon, as Mr Cross and I leave tomorrow. I’d also like to see the fourth engineer and the first mate, if I may.’

  ‘I’ll be getting back to the hotel, then,’ said Anthony, and he left the master and Rachel to their business. He sauntered along the quayside towards the customs sheds, away from where their car was waiting, and watched a ferry taking on passengers for a trip down the coast. The decks teemed with people, and as the ferry hooted its departure, it listed heavily to one side with the sudden rush of passengers waving to relatives. At last the mooring ropes were untied and the vessel throbbed away. Anthony watched its progress across the harbour, out into the heat haze that lay like a shroud across the Arabian Sea, blurring the horizon, so that the tankers which lay at anchor far out in the bay, awaiting their berth, looked like the dim ghosts of ships.

  Anthony was suddenly seized by the wish that he could stay here, that he and Rachel could take a boat far down the coast, away from everything, to some place where they could just be together and where everything would come right. At that moment, in the heat and bustle of the Bombay docks, he felt that he didn’t care if he never saw London again, or the cold old stones of the Inns of Court, or the grimy grey splendour of the law courts, or that toiling world of briefs and opinions and fees and judges, just so long as he could stay with Rachel in this warm, strange haven. I want her to myself, he thought. I want to be with her away from all of that, from all the people we know. Then everything would work. As it was, he felt as though he were emotionally suspended in mid-air, waiting for some signal, some clue as to what came next.

  Sadly he turned away from the docks and made his way back to the waiting car, and to the hotel. There he swam and read until late afternoon, watching the shadows lengthen on the lawn around the pool, waiting impatiently for Rachel to return. Time seemed to drag without her, and he was conscious of drinking one large gin and tonic too many to beguile the time. A whole hour passed between five and six, in which he reread page 103 of The Old Devils several times, unable to concentrate for thoughts of her, expecting every time he looked up to see her coming towards him in the late sunshine.

  When the sun had begun to go down, he left the poolside and went back into the hotel. He stopped at reception, but Rachel’s room key was still in its pigeonhole. He scribbled a note telling her he was in the coffee bar, and left it for her. He ate alone and tried to read, then to study the other people in the coffee bar, and finally he ordered a beer.

  When it was seven-thirty and she had still not appeared, he went back up to his room. The beer on top of the gin had been a mistake, he realised. He flung himself onto the bed and closed his eyes, and within five minutes he was asleep.

  When he woke to a tapping at his door, it was dark. ‘Yes?’ he murmured. ‘Rachel?’ He felt groggy. The door opened, and Rachel came in. He could see the glow of her white dress in the dimness of the room. He rolled over and lay on his back.

  ‘What time is it?’ he asked. His head felt muzzy and his limbs heavy.

  ‘It’s eight-thirty. I’m sorry. It all took longer than I thought. Have you eaten?’

  He nodded. Then he closed his eyes and laid a hand over them. He did not feel well. She sat down next to him on the bed, and he opened his eyes and looked up at her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered. ‘I really feel terrible. I think I sat too long in the sun. And I drank too much. Waiting for you.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Go back to sleep. We have an early flight, anyway. I’ll get something from room service.’

  ‘Don’t eat the local fish,’ he said, and smiled. He lay looking up at her, imagining how it would be if she bent to kiss him, how her soft hair would swing forward, how her mouth would feel. Remember what she said, he thought.

  ‘Rachel?’ he murmured.

  ‘Yes?’ He looked like a child lying there, she thought, fuzzy from sleep, his features barely discernible in the dark room.

  ‘Will you lie down next to me?’

  It was a simple request. She looked at him for a long moment. Of course you can do this, she told herself. Why not? He can’t have forgotten what was said yesterday. There is no harm.

&n
bsp; She swung her legs up and lay down hesitantly, a little way away from him. He turned slightly to face her, looked at her for a few seconds, then closed his eyes. She lay next to him in the gloom for a while – she did not know how long – watching his sleeping face. If she could stay there throughout the night, she thought, next to him, perhaps she would feel safer and safer. But when he woke and found her still there, there would be no safety. She inched herself off the bed and stood looking down at him for a moment, then went quietly to her own room.

  They met next morning in the lobby at five. Bills were paid, their bags loaded into the taxi, tips handed out, and the long ride back to the airport began. They spoke little on the way there.

  ‘My grandfather had a Morris Oxford,’ Anthony remarked at one point. He still didn’t feel too good. The aspirin he’d taken didn’t seem to have begun to work. Later on he said, yawning, ‘That was a long way to come just to look at an oil filter. At least you had some real work to do.’

  Rachel just smiled and said, ‘It’ll keep Mr Nikolaos happy. He likes his lawyers to have a hands-on approach.’

  ‘Oh, is that what it is?’ replied Anthony.

  The first streaks of dawn had touched the sky as they set off from the hotel, and by the time they reached the airport day had broken and the air was freshly warm and humid. After they had checked in, Anthony went back outside to savour the heat and colour of the Bombay day for the last time, even though the vista was only an unappealing stretch of road, a low concrete wall and a far-off drift of dusty trees. To him it was still magical.