The Black Tide Read online

  The previous night, just as I was leaving, Michael Stewart had come into the club with his wife and daughter. They had been to the theatre, but when Saltley introduced me to him I could see the evening had not been a success. The man was under intense strain. And that morning I had spent the first hour or so visiting two shipping offices close to the Baltic Exchange in St Mary Axe. Rates were low, a lot of vessels still laid up and the chances of employment very slight unless you happened to be in a place where the need of a ship’s officer was urgent.

  Humans, not files – that was the real world. In the circumstances I could count myself lucky I’d had two offers of a job and hadn’t had to go looking for either of them. There was a tap at the door and a sharp-faced man with a little brushed-up moustache sidled in, a file under his arm. ‘Rodin?’ He had a tired voice that matched the weary look on his face. He gave the impression of having seen too much of the wrong side of life.

  I nodded and he said his name was Pritchard. His eyes, which were dark, had a nervous, sort of clockwork tick, shifting back and forth, left and right, avoiding contact, but at the same time examining me closely. ‘Salt told me you’d be asking for the Petros Jupiter file. Any particular reason, apart from your wife’s involvement?’

  ‘Isn’t that sufficient?’ I disliked the darting eyes, his lack of sensitivity, the coldness of his manner.

  He put the file down on the desk in front of me, flipped open the plastic cover and pointed to the most recent item, a telex. ‘That arrived this morning.’ And he stood over me while I read it, watching me closely all the time, waiting no doubt to see how I would react to the news.

  The telex was from the Lloyd’s agent at Karachi. The Corsaire had docked that morning at first light. PASSENGER CHOFFEL NOT ON BOARD. TRANS-SHIPPED TO DHOW HORMUZ STRAITS 11.00 GMT YESTERDAY. CORSAIRE’S CAPTAIN UNABLE TO IDENTIFY DHOW’S NATIONALITY. NO NAME. NO FLAG. SKIPPER SPOKE SOME ENGLISH, NO FRENCH. ALL ON BOARD PROBABLY ARAB. ADVISE CONTACT AGENTS UAE PORTS.

  So he’d gone, got clear away. The chances of finding him now … I closed the file and sat staring at the phone. I could do as the Karachi agent advised, start ringing round the ports of the United Arab Emirates. But how would the Lloyd’s agent in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Doha, Bahrain or Kuwait know what dhow it was? There were so many in the Gulf.

  ‘You’ve seen all you want?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Your only interest then was Choffel?’ He was leaning over me, his eyes darting.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Pity!’ He hesitated. ‘I never had a case like this before. Stranding is one thing. We might have been able to claim negligence in their employment of a man like Choffel, particularly as he had assumed a different name. In any case, both the ship and its cargo could have been salvaged. That was what the Dutch said. But then your wife’s action … quite unprecedented. It introduced a new dimension altogether.’

  ‘She’s dead,’ I said.

  The words meant nothing to him. ‘There’s no policy I’ve ever seen covers that sort of thing. You couldn’t call it sabotage, could you?’

  I stared at him, disliking him intensely. No use telling him I’d seen her die, watched the ship go up, and the man who’d caused her death running free somewhere in the Gulf. I opened the file again, leafing through the thick wad of papers. It was similar to the Aurora B file, but much fuller, of course, since the vessel had been there on the rocks for all to see. Salvage reports were interspersed with newspaper cuttings and both shore and marine pollution assessments …

  ‘Salt said you might be going out there for us.’

  ‘Yes. I might.’ But where? Where would that dhow have taken him? Where the hell would he have gone? Dubai? Dubai was at least 100 miles from the Straits. Ras al Khaimah perhaps, or Khor al Fakkan, which was outside the Gulf on the shores of the Arabian sea, or Muscat even. There were so many places and all of Arabia for him to get lost in. Iran and Pakistan, too. The dhow might have headed north to the coasts of either of those countries, or to one of the islands in the Gulf.

  ‘If you do go out there for Saltley—’ I was searching back through the file as he went on, picking his words carefully: ‘He’ll be employing you on behalf of his own clients, to try and discover what happened to the Aurora B and this new one that’s disappeared.’ Another, longer pause. I wasn’t really listening. I had reached a wadge of newspaper clippings and was living again that night when I’d gone out with Andy in the ILB. ‘But you’ll keep me informed, won’t you? If you do find Choffel, I mean. That’s why you’re going, isn’t it? And if you find him, then try and get a written statement out of him.’

  He was leaning right over me, his voice insistent, and I felt like throwing the file at him. Couldn’t he understand what I was feeling, reading through those cuttings? And his voice going on again, cold, incise: ‘It could be worth quite a lot to you. I’m sure my clients would not be ungrateful. There’s usually a reward, something quite substantial, when an insurance claim is refuted. And the claim here is in the order of eleven million, so we’re not talking about—’

  I looked up at him then, hating him for his stupidity. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ My voice sounded high and uncontrolled. ‘Money! I’m not going after him for money.’

  He had the grace then to say he was sorry, a muttered apology as he turned away and opened the door. I think he was suddenly a little scared of me. ‘I’ll leave the file – you might like to look through it …’ The clockwork eyes darted back and forth. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘I didn’t quite realize …’ The door closed, and he was gone, leaving me alone with those macabre cuttings.

  A lot of the newspaper reports I hadn’t seen before. They were spread over several days, and there were pictures. For factual details the Telegraph coverage seemed the best, and both the Telegraph and The Times had run long articles on the problems of pollution. And then I came upon this, from a weekly magazine: Was she a nut-case, or just a totally impractical young woman determined to set fire to the slick? Or was it done in full command of her senses, an act of great courage undertaken with one aim in mind – to shock the country into taking action to deal with the terrible and growing menace that successive governments have swept under the carpet. And there was a headline I thought Karen would have appreciated – GIRL’S TANKER PYRE SAVES SEABIRDS. The pictures, too – the whole front page of the Sun, a night shot with the mist lit by flames, a photograph of Karen inset on one side and one of myself on the other, a clip probably from the TV interview after I’d come back with Andy, my hair plastered over my face, my mouth open and shouting, my eyes wild.

  I glanced at them all, pausing here and there to read. And then I had passed beyond that terrible Twelfth Night, back to cuttings that reported the effects of the stranding, the damage to the environment, the probable cost of pollution control, the proportion of the insurance claim to be borne by the London market, Lloyd’s in particular. There were pictures from two of the Sunday papers of the wreck and the salvage ships taken from the air. And then I was looking at a picture of the crew being landed at Sennen Cove. They looked Chinese, all except the officers whose names were given in the caption below. Aristides Speridion, Second Engineer. It was the first time I had seen a picture of the man. He had a lined, rather sad face, squarish with a dark moustache and dark hair, and a hooked nose so that he might have passed as a member of almost any of the Mediterranean races. He was wearing a sweater under his uniform reefer and his ears stuck out prominently on either side of the peaked cap, which he wore pushed up on to the back of his head and at a jaunty angle as though he was pleased with himself and to hell with everybody else. The picture also revealed that, if this were the full complement, officers and crew numbered only fifteen.

  I was sitting with my chin in my hands, my elbows on the desk, concentrating all my mind on absorbing and retaining the image of the man I now knew to be Choffel, and then suddenly my attention was caught by the face of a bystander right on the edge of the crowd
to the left of the picture – a big man, half a head taller than any of the others, broad-shouldered, thick-set. He was in profile, but even so I could see the heavy set of the jaw, the big jowls and the round bullet head. The size of the man alone, the way he stood, the arms slack but the body balanced and alert – I didn’t need a caption to tell me who it was. Baldwick! And the date of that cutting was January 3, which meant he had come from Bristol immediately the news of the stranding broke. Why? That Sunday when he had come to Balkaer … he hadn’t said anything about having been in Sennen nine days before.

  I leaned back, staring out of the window with its rime of snow, wondering why he had been there. Was it Choffel he had been after? At Balkaer all he had said was that he’d be in Falmouth that evening, to see the captain of the Petros Jupiter. No mention of the second engineer, no reference to the fact that he had been there, in Sennen, when the whole crew were brought ashore. In any case, it wasn’t the captain who’d put the engines out of action. No, it had to be Choffel, and if I was right, then the one man who knew where the little bastard would be now was Baldwick. The card he had given me was in my pocket, but when I rang the Liverpool number he had scribbled on the back of it he had already left – for France, the hotel said, but they had no forwarding address.

  His next destination was Nantes, a river port on the Loire, so probably Choffel had given him the names of possible ships’ officers he knew who needed money and were not too particular how they came by it. I phoned the Nantes number. It was the Hôtel du Commerce. Yes, Monsieur Baldwick had a reservation, but he do not arrive yet. His room there was booked for two nights.

  I leaned back again, staring out at the darkening sky, thinking about Len Baldwick and a story I had once heard of his early life in Sheffield, from a little rat-faced Sparks I’d met at an oil man’s flat in Basra. He’d been a shop floor convener in a privately owned steelworks then, a paid-up card-holding Communist, the man had said, and to his certain knowledge Baldwick had set fire to the home of a well-known Labour supporter who had accused him of intimidation. Was that what he’d done to Choffel, intimidated him? Had he fixed it all, the Vague d’Or, the Corsaire, the dhow in the Hormuz Straits? Was he the link by which I could catch up with the man?

  My hand reached slowly out to the internal phone, trembling slightly as I lifted the receiver and dialled the grey-haired woman’s extension. Phone me, she had said, if you want anything … and Saltley the night before trying to insist that I went out to Karachi for him. The woman answered. I took a deep breath and asked her to contact their usual travel agents and have them book me on the next flight to Nantes. She didn’t argue. She just took it in her stride as though a sudden request like that from a total stranger was the most natural thing in the world. All she said was, ‘Return or single, Mr Rodin?’

  ‘Single,’ I said. I thanked her and put down the receiver, and after that I just sat there, not caring what Saltley would say, only wondering what the hell I was letting myself in for.

  It must have been about ten minutes later that the door was pushed open and he came bustling in, a briefcase in one hand, a file of papers in the other, his face still pink with the cold outside and his overcoat glistening with melted snow. A bright red woollen cap was perched incongruously on his head. ‘So you’re going to Nantes.’ He dumped his papers and briefcase on the desk. ‘Mrs Shipton asked me to tell you they’ve booked you on tomorrow’s flight.’ He glanced at his watch, then passed me my anorak from the chair where I had thrown it. ‘We’ll be late, I’m afraid. I said one o’clock and it’s that already.’ He hurried me out, along a corridor that led to another set of lifts, explaining as we went that after I had left his club the previous night Michael Stewart had suggested we had lunch with him in the Captain’s Room at Lloyd’s. ‘That’s if you were going to work for us. I take it you are?’

  ‘So long as I have a free hand,’ I said.

  He gave me a quick hard look. ‘The Petros Jupiter?’

  I nodded.

  The lift came. ‘I don’t think we’ll object to your running the enquiries in tandem. I know Mike won’t. He knows now he slipped up on the Petros Jupiter. He should never have written the slips. As good as told me so last night. But it’s the other two claims … if he has to meet those—’ He gave a little shrug. We were out into Lime Street, picking our way diagonally across the grey, churned-up slush of the roadway and into the great arched portals of Lloyd’s itself.

  I couldn’t help it. I suddenly felt overwhelmed, a sense of excitement, of awe almost. All my life, ever since I had gone to sea, I’d always heard of Lloyd’s. It had always been there in the background, to initiate enquiries into any misadventure, any slip-up in navigation, to survey the ship, check seaworthiness, pay for damage, arrange salvage, the cargo too – and here I was entering the building, being taken to lunch in the Captain’s Room. A waiter took our coats, a magnificent figure in long scarlet greatcoat, black-collared and cuffed, the whole elaborate archaic paraphernalia topped off with a gold-banded tall black hat. The grandeur and opulence of that entrance; it was more like a museum, except the undercover roadway went through to the offices of the Baltic Exchange. ‘I said I’d pick him up at his box,’ Saltley said. ‘Give you an opportunity to see the Room.’

  We went through swing doors into a high room floored in black, white and grey marble, half a dozen flags flanking a stained glass window at one end, and at the other a scarlet-coated waiter sitting at a desk. Saltley said good morning to him, produced a plastic pass card and went on through revolving doors that were posted as Private – for the use of Members and their associates, through into a lofty, galleried room the size of a football field filled with dark-suited men armed with papers, books and files. They stood about, talking softly or hurrying between the ranks of ‘boxes’ that were the underwriters’ pitches and looked like old-fashioned, high-backed pews, except that the men sitting in them were writing busily or looking up information in the books and ledgers that were stacked on the shelves.

  ‘It goes on like this all day,’ Saltley said over his shoulder as he pushed his way to the far end of the Room. ‘Most of the fellows you see rushing about are brokers and their clerks busy getting underwriters to sign the slips that give insurance cover to whatever the business is they’re handling. Looks a madhouse, but the box arrangement is the most space-saving way of handling such a huge volume of business.’

  The wall to the left was papered with telex sheets and typed information, the Stock Exchange news running into weather forecasts and sports results. There were three lifts, but Saltley turned away from them, threading his way quickly between ledger-piled boxes, heading out from under the balcony into the centre of the Room. Michael Stewart’s box was in the far corner. There were three men in it and a queue of three or four clerks waiting upon him with papers ready in their hands. He handed over to one of the others and came hurrying across. I saw him glance at Saltley, who gave a little nod, then he was greeting me. ‘We’ll have a quick drink first. I’ve sent my daughter up to grab a table. She insisted on lunching with us.’ His hand was on my arm, steering me to the lifts near the Lime Street entrance, and I was remembering my meeting with the girl the previous night. She had been quite plain-looking with a squarish face, very little make-up and no jewellery; a big, sensible girl with strong hands and a nice smile. ‘You’ve seen the files, have you? Got all the information you need?’ His voice sounded tense. ‘That’s the Casualty Board, incidentally.’ He nodded to two short display panels opposite the lifts peppered with yellow pages of typescript secured with bulldog clips. ‘That’s where all the bad news is posted. The Ulcer Board, a friend of mine calls it. Every year, it seems, the casualties get worse. When are you leaving?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning,’ Saltley answered for me. ‘He’s flying to Nantes.’

  ‘Nantes! Why Nantes?’

  ‘A contact,’ I told him. I turned to Saltley. ‘A hunch really.’ I knew he’d understand that.

  ‘And after
Nantes?’ Stewart asked.

  ‘One of the Gulf ports. Dubai most probably since that seems to be my man’s present base. But from my knowledge of him I’d say he operates in any port of the Gulf where there’s drugs or arms or something equally nasty to be shipped. At the moment he’s head-hunting officers for a consortium starting up in the tanker business. I think he’s recruited Choffel.’

  ‘And you’re going to let yourself be recruited, that it?’ His assumption came as a shock, though I suppose the thought had been there at the back of my mind. We were in the lift then and he was smiling, his manner suddenly easier and more relaxed. He turned to Saltley. ‘Looks like you’ve picked a flier.’ And then to me: ‘You don’t waste time. How did you hear this man was recruiting ships’ officers?’

  I explained briefly and by then we had reached the second floor and were out into a big room with high narrow windows. It was very crowded, the waitresses bustling from table to table with trays of drinks. ‘Ah! There’s Pam, and she’s got a table.’ His face had brightened, his manner suddenly almost boyish. ‘Best of running a boat, even daughters do as they’re told.’

  Pamela Stewart was holding the fort at a table in a large annexe guarded by white pillars. There was an oil painting above her head of the Room cleared of boxes with a diamond-spangled ball in formal swing. She jumped to her feet, her eyes lighting, and in that instant she looked quite lovely, brimming over with youth and vitality. Perhaps it was her presence, the way she leaned forward, her eyes on me all the time, but before I had even finished my Bloody Mary I had filled them in on Baldwick and how he and Choffel were a possible lead. And over lunch, in one of the wooden cubicles of the solid, rather old-fashioned restaurant they called the Captain’s Room after the room in the old Lloyd’s Coffee House where the insurance business had all started, I even talked about my book. And all the time I was conscious of Pamela’s brownish-green eyes watching me intently. She was dressed in a close-knit woollen dress, very plain with a high neck. It was the colour of autumn gold and there was a golden eagle clutching a round globe of some deep-red stone at her throat.