The Dead Line

by Holly Watt

  ‘It should be impossible.’

  ‘You should see the official guide to defending yourself from pirates,’ Ed had said. By then, he was enjoying speaking to her, she could tell. ‘Issued by the authorities. They recommend barbed wire. And they note, quite politely, that pouring boiling water over the side of the ship can be helpful too.’

  ‘It sounds medieval,’ Casey had said.

  ‘It is, really.’

  The sun was a line of fire over the Bay of Bengal. Ed pulled Casey to her feet. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’

  Talking quietly, they wandered down the beach. The straggle of high-rise hotels slowly fell away, leaving just the coast road, and a fringe of palm trees.

  The sunset, the beach, the whispering palms. For a second, Casey saw Ed’s profile dark against the sky, and spiralled into the impossible.

  ‘How can you work for Declan Bentley?’ Casey forced the thoughts away.

  ‘There aren’t that many billionaires with a perfectly clean sheet,’ Ed protested. ‘I like the south of France. I get on fine with Declan. I know he comes across as a prick, but compared to some . . .’

  ‘But his factory in Ethiopia,’ Casey protested. ‘And God knows what the new Vietnamese factory is like.’

  ‘Who should I work for then?’ Ed rolled his eyes at her. ‘I was with one of the Saudi princes before Declan, and I know just what you’d have made of that.’

  The dozens of Saudi princes, Casey thought, the playboy billionaires who commuted to London for their fun. The wives stayed at home, of course.

  ‘You should have stuck with the prince,’ Casey admitted. ‘I would have found it harder to turn him.’

  ‘You’d have found a way, with your blackmailing habits.’

  The children in Yemen with their round stomachs and cavernous eyes. And the bombs, scattering death like blossom in a field. British-made, of course.

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘I know.’

  ‘Ruthless,’ he said again. He was smiling though, scraping his hand over his head. ‘Do I need to dye it again?’ He was laughing. ‘I stained my pillowcase last night. Disgusting.’

  ‘It looks fabulous.’

  They stared out across the ocean. The sea was indigo now, a shade darker than the denim blue of the sky.

  ‘It’s so beautiful here,’ Casey murmured.

  ‘But we’ll always remember it for those trafficked girls.’

  Casey thought about all the places that would always be the jab of a memory now, a spreading patchwork of misery. A beach in Spain: a toddler drowned. A Christmas market: the roar of a truck. A hilltop in London: this is the last time. The thought was a jolt.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Ed was watching her. Her mood had shifted, like a breeze drifting over the sea.

  ‘I’m fine. I have to get back to the hotel.’ Casey turned away abruptly, heading back towards the hotel, trying to hurry in the deep sand.

  ‘Casey?’ He was confused. ‘Wait . . .’

  She ignored him, almost stumbling in her haste. He caught up with her easily.

  You have to choose.

  ‘I need to get back . . .’

  ‘Why?’

  She faced him, almost angry, and he pulled back, waiting.

  ‘What’s the matter, Casey?’

  ‘I’m very glad you came out to Bangladesh,’ she managed. ‘But I have to get back to the hotel.’

  ‘Casey.’

  ‘What?’

  He was watching her face, and let her go. She stepped away, hesitated, turned back. They stared at each other.

  ‘I didn’t come out here,’ he said guardedly, ‘just because Declan told me to, you know.’

  She twisted away from him. ‘I know. You told me why you came.’

  ‘Yes. Casey—’

  ‘It’s fine,’ she interrupted him, almost a shout. ‘I needed you. For the story.’

  ‘For the story,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

  He folded himself down on the sand as she stood stubbornly. A silence settled, but Casey’s anger was gone. She scraped shapes in the sand with a piece of driftwood. Spades, diamonds, clubs, hearts, then stared out to sea. The ship lights glowed. Red and green, port and starboard, again and again and again, and suddenly Casey was hurrying down the beach towards the hotel.

  ‘Casey—’

  ‘Come on, Ed,’ she raced towards their dingy hotel, grabbing his hand in a burst of her excitement. ‘Quickly.’

  ‘Steady on.’ But he was laughing again, as she dragged him along.

  ‘The Teffy,’ Casey gasped. ‘What if she is a ship?’

  40

  To the north of Chittagong, the city straggles away along the coastline. All the way up this shoreline are broad mudflats, hundreds of yards wide, the slope down to the sea almost imperceptible. The mudflats are so wide that a pier has to be hundreds of yards long just to allow the boats to float.

  There was almost nothing in this muddy part of the world, for years. And then one day, in the wilderness of a cyclone, a Greek ship washed up on the flats. She sat there for months, the MD Alpine, sinking slowly into the sediment. And then quietly, secretively, the locals began to gouge away at her.

  Finally, in 1965, five years after she first ran aground, the battered old wreck was sold for scrap.

  A new industry sprang up overnight. Because the huge ships that circumnavigate the globe need a place to die, in the end. And the mudflats of Chittagong became their graveyard.

  The ships came in their hundreds, beached side by side on the silt. Thousands of workers hacked away at them, the glitter of the oxyfuel sparkling blue-orange across the mud. As they worked, the men ripped the ships apart from stem to stern, carving away huge hunks of metal.

  ‘We recycle everything,’ the shipwreckers said proudly. ‘All the steel and everything.’

  But the workers died, in their hundreds.

  One a week, a charity guessed, for years. Struggling with huge sheets of steels, and scrambling over the bulkheads. No ropes, no safety, plunging to their death.

  And, quite often, those workers were children.

  There is a strange sort of beauty to the dying ships of Chittagong. They are so proud, these ships, as they storm in on the highest of tides. They have fought the oceans for years, and survived the storms.

  And one day, it all ends.

  Sometimes, men build a bonfire in her path. Her last triumph, as a wall of salt water drowns the flames with contempt. But then the ship runs out of water, slamming full-speed into the mudflats. The magic of the sea captured in this most brutal of traps. The ship’s weight and all her arrogant speed carry her onwards, upwards, skidding along the flats, carving through the silt. Until finally, she grinds to a halt, gravity irresistible.

  There she is, grounded. Earthed. Stranded in the mud, all her dignity gone. The slow ignominy, as the tide goes out, and the ship is abandoned.

  She waits.

  And then they come for her.

  She is chiselled apart, day after day, night after night. Butchered where she lies. Disappearing, scrap by scrap.

  ‘The Teffy,’ said Casey. ‘I think that she is a ship.’

  Back in Casey’s room, Ed and Casey gazed at her laptop. They had raced through the hotel lobby, the night porter looking up blearily, surprised by the sudden movements.

  ‘Come on,’ Casey grumbled to herself, searching frantically. ‘Come on.’

  Casey had tracked ships around the world before. Almost all large ships sent out a signal, and on her computer she had trailed the colourful little dots for days at a time, as they swept across the map. The shipping lanes lit up like motorways: ships hurrying around the Cape of Good Hope, cornering around Cape Horn and shouldering up through the Strait of Hormuz. They clustered at the bottlenecks – at Panama, at Suez, at Malacca – queuing up impatiently, every minute costing.

  In the past, as she worked, Casey had watched the pirated ships, drifting aimlessly off the coast of Somalia. Still sending back their hopeful signals, we ar
e here, we are here. Even though no one would ever go to their rescue.

  Once, Casey had hunted down a notorious billionaire, glorying on his superyacht, and he had lashed out at her photographer, in the pretty harbour of Cephalonia. How the fuck did you find me?

  The Post’s business desk routinely tracked a few of the supertankers, because the giant ships unwittingly telegraphed the traders’ expectations about the price of oil. Sometimes, the vast tankers would be filled with oil, enough to fill a hundred huge swimming pools. But instead of beetling off busily, in their dead-straight lines towards Europe, and America and Australia, the ship’s huge engines would be switched off, drifting with the current out to sea. And there they dawdled, as the traders waited for the price of oil to rise. A strong vote of confidence, that was, with the tankers costing $50,000 a day just to leave out in the ocean.

  Ships could switch off their trackers though. Casey had watched ships hovering in the Mediterranean, just off the coast of Syria. One second to the next, they would melt off the screen. Vanishing for a few hours or a few days before they reappeared, all innocence, heading back up the Bosporus towards the Black Sea.

  Now Casey focused on the fleet of dots gathered around the port of Chittagong. The huge cargo ships came and went in their hundreds from Bangladesh. Whisking away the cheap clothes, the cheap food, the cheap goods.

  She checked the ships, one by one. The Kristina. The MT Scorpio. The Somerset Lady. The Dolphin Blue. And at last she saw it.

  ‘There,’ she breathed. ‘The Tephi. That is what they were talking about.’

  Ed and Casey stared at the tiny dot. The Tephi’s beacon had sent its last plaintive message close to the coastline by Bhatiari, 10 miles to the north of Chittagong.

  ‘That’s lucky,’ breathed Casey. ‘I thought they might have switched off her tracker earlier. They often do.’

  Together, they looked up the Tephi’s history. Old photographs filled the screen, of a huge cargo ship, heavily laden.

  ‘She’s a Panamax,’ read Ed. ‘That’s the biggest ship that can fit through the Panama Canal.’

  Casey glanced at him, mouth turning up. ‘Geek.’

  ‘It’s true.’ He nudged her away. ‘There are others too. The Suezmax, which just fits down the Suez Canal. The Q-Max, that’s the biggest sort of vessel that can get in and out of Qatar. The Seawaymax, for getting down the Saint Lawrence Seaway into the Great Lakes in America.’

  ‘All right,’ Casey was laughing. ‘I get it.’

  They looked at the photographs of the Tephi, huge and blue, piled high with containers like Lego blocks. A distinctive red stripe had been painted all the way around her hull, a few feet below her decks. Below her waterline she was a dark forest-green. In the photographs, the green showed through as she battled through waves. Shipping enthusiasts had snapped her in Guangzhou and in Rotterdam, in Long Beach and in Mombasa, loaded with containers filled with new cars or bright dresses, toothpaste or prams.

  ‘She’s certainly notched up the miles,’ said Casey.

  She thought of the old ship, slapped over the nose with champagne at the start of her journeys, now trapped in the mud of Chittagong, her knickers showing shamefully.

  ‘The shipping companies sell them off when they get too old,’ she explained to Ed. ‘To the highest bidder. Cash buyers, usually, who sell them on straight away. The shipping companies know full well that the ships will end up in the wrecking yards of Bangladesh, but what do they care? They shrug their shoulders and say, “Gosh, we had no idea” when it emerges that their old ships are being disembowelled by eight-year-olds.’

  ‘A couple of steps removed,’ said Ed. ‘Deniable.’

  ‘It’s simple maths.’ Casey was nodding. ‘If you have your ship taken apart somewhere in Europe, you have to pay the scrapyard to do it carefully. In Bangladesh, they pay almost three hundred dollars a tonne for the steel.’

  ‘Who,’ said Ed, ‘could possibly say no?’

  ‘So this Jeetu character, who we think works closely with Dylan and Raz, bought up the Tephi,’ Casey said, ‘when she was on her last journey, and had her brought up to Chittagong.’

  ‘Jeetu might have been talking to Dylan or Raz when Jamalida overheard him, for all we know,’ said Ed.

  The Tephi’s last movements had been small, edging to and fro just off the coast.

  ‘Parked up, waiting for the tide,’ Ed said. ‘They wait for the highest tide, to get the ships as far up the beach as possible. It makes the breaking easier if it’s not wallowing in water.’

  ‘So wherever the Tephi is now,’ Casey was thinking aloud, ‘Dylan and his team are likely to have some sort of base. We need to look there.’

  She pulled up the Land Cruiser’s trajectory around Chittagong, after it had dropped them off in Cox’s Bazar on the first day.

  ‘There.’ The big black car had travelled up to Bhatiari, paused, then travelled across to the head of the long Sandwip pier that reached hundreds of yards out to sea, and paused again. It had made its way south along the coast road, stopping here and there. Then finally, it had headed back to the factory in Sagorika.

  ‘And what,’ Casey glowered at the screen, ‘were you doing up there?’

  41

  Back in London, after a long day at the Post, Miranda turned the key in the door of the pretty house in Queen’s Park. That hollow key sound, every evening.

  ‘I’m home,’ she called. The dream trappings, the trapped dream. ‘Hello?’

  I have to tell him.

  I don’t know how.

  The front sitting room had been knocked into the back, like every other sitting room on the street. Tom had wanted to extend the kitchen, right the way across the back of the house. He liked the way the Adamsons had done it, at number 56. Family space, they called it.

  He hadn’t got round to it.

  Not yet.

  ‘Hello?’ Miranda called again.

  When she walked into the kitchen at the back of the house, Tom was sitting at the table with an expression she didn’t recognise on his face. There was a bunch of pink roses, still wrapped in their brown paper, shoved awkwardly into too small a vase. The water had splashed on the countertop.

  ‘Miranda . . .’ He jumped to his feet.

  She was so surprised for a second that she had to lean a hand on the kitchen surface.

  Not yet.

  No.

  ‘Tom?’ Miranda couldn’t keep the shake out of her voice. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Miranda, I had no idea.’ Tom was walking towards her, smiling, one hand reaching for hers. He had a leaflet in his other hand.

  ‘What?’ Miranda blinked at him.

  ‘I’m so sorry, darling. So sorry . . .’ Miranda didn’t recognise his smile for a second, realised that she hadn’t seen it for years, not properly.

  ‘What on earth are you talking about, Tom?’

  Her husband held it up, a brightly coloured pamphlet. Miranda saw it with a thud of realisation: a leaflet from Dr Greystone’s clinic.

  The secretary must have handed it to her as she left her appointment. And Miranda had shoved it in her handbag, without thinking.

  ‘You looked in my handbag?’

  He was surprised for a moment. ‘I needed a pen. You always have pens, in your handbag.’

  The journalist’s habit, it had been their joke for years.

  ‘Right. Of course.’

  ‘I didn’t know, Miranda. You should have told me. We could have . . .’

  Tom was opening the leaflet, peering at a bouncing baby.

  ‘It’s not,’ Miranda sat down heavily at the bleached pine kitchen table, ‘what you think.’

  But Tom wasn’t listening. He pulled up a chair beside her, reaching for her hands again.

  ‘I thought you didn’t . . .’ There was that smile again, so familiar, unfamiliar. ‘I didn’t know what to do . . . I so wanted . . .’

  Miranda felt exhaustion descending like a blanket. ‘It’s not . . .’
<
br />   She stared down at her hands. There was an ink stain on her right hand, she noticed. And her gold wedding ring. Bangles jingled on her wrist, a memory of love.

  Tom interrupted her again. ‘They can do so much, these days, Miranda. I spoke to Reuben . . .’

  ‘Reuben?’ The mention of one of his colleagues confused her. ‘Why on earth were you talking to Reuben . . .’

  ‘I just’ – he peered at her face, shrugged – ‘did. I’ve been so desperate for this to happen, Miranda . . . We never . . . talked.’

  Not yet.

  ‘No,’ Miranda almost shouted the word, suddenly desperate to cut him off. ‘It’s not what you think, Tom. It’s just . . . That leaflet is just for work.’

  The words took a moment to reach him, and then his face shattered.

  ‘Work?’ Tom stared down at the leaflet. ‘How can this be work?’

  ‘It just is.’ Miranda snatched the leaflet off him, rammed it into her handbag. ‘Don’t go through my bag again, Tom.’

  ‘I wasn’t . . .’ Tom turned towards the window, looked out to the dark garden. ‘You mean, you’re not. You don’t want . . .’

  He was staring through the security shutters, still pulled across. Outside, the cherry-tree branches rattled in the wind.

  ‘No,’ Miranda heard a new cruelty in her voice. ‘I don’t think I do, Tom. No.’

  She felt an odd flood of regret and relief. A blaze of guilt too, as his shoulders sank. From her chair, Miranda watched his back. He was tall, Tom. His dark hair thinning slightly in a patch at the back. He was still wearing his suit from work: the blue shirt, the navy pinstripe, the black shoes.

  ‘Never?’ He turned, and for a second, the movement twisted her heart, so that she almost reached out for him. But she placed her hands flat on the kitchen table.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘But we’ve said . . .’

  ‘We haven’t.’ It was almost true. It sounded true.

  Tom folded his arms, almost hugging himself. He bowed his head, staring at his shoes.

  I will never lie to you, she had promised him, long ago. That one promise in a life full of lies: I will always tell you the truth.