by Muriel Gray
She waited for a beat or two, watching as he listened intently to the speaker, then was rewarded. The man’s eyes flicked once more to the left, and this time she followed his gaze to see what was diverting him from the words of his superior officer.
He was looking along the line of young boys who were crushed up against the wall, pressing the sides of the coffee machine like book ends, their bony shoulders grazing each other in an attempt to get more space. It was impossible from her angle to tell which one was so diverting the man, but by watching the flicking of his eyes she narrowed it down to two. He was looking either at the small, slightly spotty youth who wore a cheap, soiled blue nylon shirt, or the taller boy with the grease-streaked face wearing the plain brown coveralls of the engine room. Both had the characteristic high cheekbones of their race and the suggestion of latent energy that only youth bestowed without demanding return, but there was no question that the engine-room boy was the better looking.
Esther’s heart beat a little faster. Her eyes returned to the man and she studied him with a growing unease. Was he gay? Would he be capable of murder, perhaps in revenge for some sexual favours either refused or tantalizingly withheld? Blackmail? Obsession? What?
The man’s gaze had innocently returned to the bosun and she glanced back at the young lad, trying desperately to rid her memory of the sight that had met her in the freezer only hours ago. The picture would not recede and she screwed shut her eyes against the abhorrence, willing it away.
She bent her head and ran a hand over her face, then sucked in a lungful of air, opened her eyes and snapped back to attention.
He was staring straight at her. It was not the stare of a bored listener, gratefully distracted by her slight movement. Nor was it even the simple stare of a hostile seaman regarding a foreign outsider with contempt.
The reason that it was chilling her blood was hard to define, but it was mainly due to a feeling that the eyes that regarded her so coldly did not seem to belong to the man in whose impassive face they were set.
They were older. And the age implied by them left Esther reeling, struggling uncomprehendingly against images of dust-blown bones and a rancour that would endure eternity. With an effort of will she broke the gaze and looked back across at Felix Chadin, her chest shuddering as she struggled to take the breath she had postponed for longer than was healthy.
Fen Sahg held his gaze on her face for another long minute, then slowly turned his attention back to the object of his more immediate interest.
In the dark, a raft of roosting gulls bobbed on the swell of the Pacific Ocean. The crests of the waves were occasionally lit by the deck lights of the Lysicrates, and although Lloyd Skinner, leaning on the rail of the poop deck, could not see them, they could see him.
His frame was considerably more hunched than normal, shoulders held low, head bowed, hands clasped in front in an attitude of prayer. But he was not praying. He was thinking.
The deck had never been better suited for such a purpose than now, being silent and still, devoid of a crew who were busy being briefed and further terrified by their bosun. But there was an uneasiness about the silence, and after only a few quiet moments, Lloyd Skinner drew himself up and softly left the deck to the stillness of the night.
Perhaps the static nature of air and ship played tricks with the night sounds. Perhaps not. But the fact remained that it was an unnaturally long time, in fact a good two minutes after Skinner had gone, and the door of the accommodation block swung shut with a barely audible thud, that the raft of gulls startled and dived.
No one had cleaned the blood off the tiled floor, and now that the freezer door was shut, it had melted. Matthew stood in the doorway of the storeroom and regarded the violent smears of red, holding the back of his hand to his mouth. It was hard to tell now if the abstract-art quality that the blood had bestowed on the floor had been caused by the struggle of the boy as he died, or had been spread around in angry crimson arcs by the seamen handling the body back into the freezer. Either way, it was lurid and gruesome, and it made Matthew question why he had come here. But he needed to see the body again. More importantly, he needed to see the area around the body.
Outside in the galley was his companion for the trip, a deck cadet named Jose, who refused to come into the storeroom.
Despite having protested about the two-person rule the captain had imposed on moving around the ship, Matthew was comforted by the sounds of Jose only a few metres away, swallowing back a throat full of snot, fiddling nervously with cooking utensils, and shuffling his feet.
Cotton took a breath and walked forward, stepping as best he could around the murderous red pattern.
Slowly and methodically he drove his gaze around the edges of the bloodstains, searching for any sign of the thing he dreaded seeing. But the tiled floor was pristine where the blood stopped, an antiseptic, polished surface unsullied by the shiny dried trail of slime he had been almost certain he would find. Cotton rubbed his brow with a finger and considered the room. Only one set of lights was on. Maybe he wasn’t seeing properly.
“Jose?”
His voice sounded strained and unnatural in the room, and so did the voice that answered.
“Yeah?”
“Turn on the rest of the lights in here, would you?”
Cotton heard the man shuffle forward. Suddenly the room was plunged into black.
“Hey!”
Jose shouted back. “Sorry. Sorry. Wrong switch. I got it.”
The striplights guttered, hummed and flickered back into life. It was this normal intermittent start-up that made Cotton glance gratefully at their position on the ceiling; but when he did, he felt his spine being slowly replaced by ice water.
Between the two lengths of tube lighting bolted firmly into their fixings, was an area of white painted metal, crossed by three pipes. Cotton stared up as though being addressed by a god.
Across the pipes and continuing along the ceiling all the way to the door into the galley, was a faint red-brown smear, varnished with the flaking, egg-white shine of a trail.
“Jose?”
Matthew’s voice was soft, as if he were speaking in church.
“Huh?”
“Go tell the captain I say we need to close all the holds.”
Jose appeared in the doorway tentatively, trying not to look in. “Go? With you?”
“No. Go now.”
Jose shook his head. “Two people. Remember? He say…”
“NOW!”
The bark made the deck cadet jump, and Cotton waited, his gaze still firmly fixed on the ceiling until he heard the man’s steps retreat from the galley into the corridor. The fact that the trail ended in the middle of the ceiling, had an implication that Matthew was struggling not to visualize. Garbage bags being dragged had, he realized now, been a comfortable if bizarre theory. But now he knew for sure that it was wrong. Because garbage bags could not be dragged across ceilings. And garbage bags did not drop down from ceilings on top of victims. And garbage bags most certainly did not eviscerate and skin young boys.
He ground his back teeth together, clenched his fists and turned back to the freezer. He needed to see the boy’s remains again, even more now than when he’d entered the room. But what was he looking for? A calling card? Matthew closed his eyes and tried to clear his head. The whole thing was as crazy as it was terrifying, but he needed to concentrate, to keep his head and think clearly for perhaps the first time in three years of anaesthetized hell.
He walked to the freezer.
Out of an unbreakable habit, he punched the red light before pulling on the massive metal handle, and stood back as the door swung open. As the mist of cold air meeting warm cleared, what was left of Salvo Acambra could be seen lying twisted and hard on the floor beside huge drums of frozen orange juice concentrate. Matthew stepped into the icy tomb and bent down beside the body. Gulping back his disgust, he pushed gently at the head to turn it face-up. It was no longer able to move independently
to the body, the whole thing being frozen into an immovable block, and so with a force of will he was surprised still to possess, Matthew put his hands beneath the torso and rolled it over. The knees, bent in a spastic rigour, pointed almost comically into the air as the skinless body rocked on its back and came to rest in a tortuous position of unfathomable ugliness. Matthew let go his held breath in a thick cloud, and gazed at the frosted red mess, searching for something that might help him understand. It was useless. He was a seaman, the first officer of a beat-up bulk carrier, not a forensic expert. Gazing on the horror of this mutilated human being meant nothing to him, except that the theory that was building in the part of his brain he would not yet acknowledge suggested that Matthew Cotton, after all he had been through, was now finally losing his mind.
Salvo’s frozen, raw death-grin snarled up at him. Matthew bent his head and dug his fingernails deep into the palms of his hand. The breath clouded from his panting nostrils, and he screwed his eyes shut against the pain of things that were threatening to surface in his normally well-guarded consciousness. They were still screwed shut when the muffled thud came, and by the time they opened in response to the noise and the immediate change in air pressure, it was too late.
The freezer door was closed.
The only makeshift weapons Thomas and Antonio could find were a short length of chain and a piece of aluminium tubing that had fallen off the back of a dining chair in the mess room. They held these armaments close to their bodies as they progressed slowly along the walkway between the holds, carrying out their orders to search the ship with maximum reluctance. The silence, teased by the sea’s random breaking against a static hull, made the two men keep their own voices similarly low as they spoke.
“Why doesn’t Chadin just lock him up?”
Thomas glanced across at Antonio and shook his head. “You’re fucking crazy.”
“Yeah? Well if it isn’t Fen, then who is it?”
Thomas chose to remain silent, staring ahead and lifting his chin in a manner that stated the subject was not one for discussion. Such reticence, however, was not going to deter Antonio.
“You’ve seen him. You know the kind of stuff he’s into. Ronaldo’s shitting himself that he shares a cabin with him.”
Thomas kept his gaze forward and frowned as his companion’s voice increased in volume and pitch, the flame of Antonio’s indignation and nervousness fanned by the absence of a sympathetic ear.
“He says there must have been something going on between Salvo and him. I mean, I can’t say I’m surprised, fact that he’s not got a wife ashore, not even a girl or anything…”
“Hey.”
Antonio looked surprised by the interruption of Thomas’s softly-spoken single word.
“If you think he sliced up the boy, why don’t you go lock him up?”
It was Antonio’s turn to be quiet.
“Yeah,” said Thomas. “Exactly. You’ve sailed with the guy for four years, just like I have, and you know it’s not him. And like you just said, if it isn’t him, then who is it?”
They considered the implication of that thought in silence for a few moments, long enough to bring them level with hold number five. The smell from the open holds increased the further from the accommodation block they walked, and by this mid-way point it was becoming unbearable.
“Jesus and the Holy Mother,” exhaled Antonio.
“That’s getting serious in there.”
Thomas looked ahead then motioned to the open lip of the hatch. “We should go up top. Get a view along the holds.”
Antonio held out his arm in theatrical protest. “Oh, for Christ’s sake. They can see that from the bridge.”
Thomas stopped walking, and looked at his companion as though he were a stupid child. “You forgotten Chadin? When he said we should search every nook and cranny of the hold deck, he meant it. Now, just a wild guess, but I bet he’s going to ask if we checked along the tops of the hatches, and if you want to look him in his ferret eyes and say ‘yes, bosun,’ when the answer is plainly ‘no, bosun,’ then go right ahead.
“Don’t know about you, but I got at least five more voyages to make before I even make a dent on the payments on some shitty little Korean car my wife couldn’t live without, and I’m not screwing it up just because of the stench from that garbage.”
Antonio looked up at the overhang of great metal shelf, and for a moment his eyes glittered with the flitting suggestion of anxiety. Thomas sighed, remembering the smaller man’s aversion to heights, even this unchallenging one, and softened his voice. “Besides, if we can view the whole lot of the hatches from here and say we’ve done it, which we will have quite truthfully, it’ll save us climbing up onto the top of every fucking one. Okay?”
Antonio’s expression returned to a sulk, then he glanced guiltily up to the distant blackened windows of the bridge. “Well, you do it then.”
Thomas sighed, handed his companion his length of tubing, and silently clambered on to the metal winding gear that moved the great hatches back and forth. A hoist and a push-down like a free climber and he was on top of the hatch. He leant down and stretched his hand out for the weapon, which Antonio passed up with little grace before leaning against a metal support and crossing his arms.
The smell on top of the hatch was unbearable, and Thomas slapped his hand over his nose and mouth against the assault, but the urge to retch was hard to fight, and he felt the passage of hot bile rising. He knelt on the hard metal and concentrated, fought the vomit back to his stomach, and won.
“Christ,” he muttered, wiping the sweat from his face with the hand that had been protecting his nose.
Thomas breathed heavily, took a moment to recover, then gripping the aluminium tubing, stood up and ran a sleeve over his wet brow.
“Hey! Antonio!”
The man being hailed moved away from his metal support to the rail at the edge of the ship until he could see Thomas.
“What?”
“Don’t ever let me moan about hauling coal again. This is the worst fucking cargo I ever sailed with.”
Antonio made an upward nod of the head, doing little to mask his lack of interest in his companion’s opinion, then started to wander slowly down the deck towards the holds at the bow.
The illuminated deck seemed to float not in water, but in deep space, so dark was the night that surrounded it, and the absence of a white bow wave only bolstered the illusion. Thomas squinted along the row of hatch covers as he walked forward to the edge of the partially open hold. He didn’t like the feeling of the ship being hove to.
Perhaps it was the instinctive unease a sailor has for being becalmed, or merely the frustration felt by any traveller by land or sea, when forward motion ceases. Whatever the reason, his unease was exacerbated by the view of the hold deck, so still and silent and white-lit in the inky black infinity that surrounded it.
On account of the ship’s stillness, he was able to stand right on the edge of the great rectangular pit, the toes of his cheap Manila-bought shoes overhanging the metal lip of the hatch. The random nature of the normal swaying and pitching of a ship under sail automatically stopped any experienced seaman from such folly, but having wrestled his stomach under control he was curious about the nature of something that could produce such a violent, tangible stench, and he wanted to look at it in the same way that small boys want to prod road-kill with sticks.
There was, however, disappointingly little to see. A dark marsh of irregular shapes and viscous lumps lay still in its strip of illumination, the everyday objects like portions of bike wheel or springs from upholstery, taking on an organic appearance that was assisted by the occasional twitching of a rat concealed beneath smaller pieces of detritus. Thomas crouched down, arms on his knees, his weight on the balls of his feet, mesmerized by the repugnance of it, and glanced up to look for Antonio in order to express his disgust verbally.
His companion was now at least three holds away, still in view but out of ears
hot. Thomas blinked at the figure. Antonio’s small frame was casting a sharp star shadow in the halogen lights that came from four sides, and as he walked, it undulated over the pipes and capstans like pieces of trailing black silk. What made Thomas stop thinking about the trash in the hold, and the comments he wanted to make about it to his colleague, was the fact that a larger, but similar shadow was being cast further ahead between holds eight and nine, out of Antonio’s line of view, but moving quickly towards him. Thomas felt his pulse quicken and he stood up. With merely the benefit of the height difference between crouching and standing, part of the figure that was casting the shadow so far away up the deck came into view.
It was hard to make out, but for the brief moment during which Thomas squinted and glimpsed its upper body passing through the narrow alleyway between the holds, the impression was of a man dressed like a carnival animal. There seemed to be a great deal of fussy elements to the figure’s attire, maybe even an elaborate head-dress. It was confusing and impossible to make out in detail. All the more so since the speed and gait it moved with was quite unlike a man. It had an animal swiftness of foot and purpose that made Thomas call out in alarm.
“Antonio!”
He yelled as hard as he could, but even in the silence of the calm night, his voice was incapable of rising above the idling thrum of the engines, or carrying the distance it required to be heard. Antonio strolled on oblivious, and cupping his hands to his mouth, Thomas made ready to shout again, when an unconscious half-step forward in his alarm at not being heard the first time caused the man-made sole of his shoe to slip over the edge of the hatch. His leg buckled. His arms windmilled for a beat like a cartoon animal on the edge of the cliff, then the reality of gravity that was unfortunately only afforded to real living beings and not those rendered in two dimensions, took over and did the rest. It was only a fall of eight, maybe nine feet, but he landed awkwardly on one knee, and tipped forward onto a hard piece of wood that gouged and bloodied his cheek as his hands grabbed for something safe. As it would have been in quicksand, the best solution to Thomas’s peril would have been to remain as flat and spread-eagled as he could manage, as well as keeping calm.