by Peter Tonkin
And the rotten so-and-so hadn’t even bothered to write, though he should have been able to get a letter or two from Singapore to Skye. There had better be some good ones on the mat inside the door — and some long messages on the tape of the answerphone.
Still, they were home now, safe and sound, she thought as they came round on the pebbled forecourt outside Ashenden’s big black oak front door. She braked too hard even for the four-wheel drive, skidded a little and stopped with a lurch which threw them all against their seatbelts and started the twins whining again.
‘Here we are!’ she announced, with fierce brightness.
‘Let’s get you two into a nice warm bath while Janet and I rustle up some supper. Then it’s bedtime for all of us, I think.’
As soon as I’ve unloaded the Monterey, she thought to herself, tempted beyond bearing just to drive it into the garage as it was and deal with it in the morning.
But as soon as she opened Ashenden’s front door she knew things were moving rapidly from bad to bloody worse. She had to push the heavy door because of the great pile of letters, papers and junk mail packed behind it in the hall. How could such a massive pile of rubbish arrive in only a fortnight? she wondered. The twins danced and whined that she was taking too long because they were bursting to go to the toilet and she ended up shoving the black wood so hard that she tore much of the paper piled behind it — including, she noticed grimly as she stooped to pick it all up, at least one airmail letter postmarked Singapore. She looked at the screwed-up mess of flimsy blue paper, hoping fervently it contained no important news: it would be impossible to read it now.
The twins thundered past her, racing each other ill-naturedly for the same toilet, a fight obviously brewing between them. Janet came past her more slowly, lips thin, ready to wade in beside Robin when the fur began to fly, pausing to hand over the keys to the Monterey. ‘I’ve locked it up for the time being,’ she said, and Robin nodded; good idea. The Scottish nurse had enjoyed the holiday with the depleted family very much and her presence had gone a long way to making up for Richard’s absence. The two women were more like old friends, or even sisters, than employer and employee; certainly they were of an age and were not dissimilar in appearance. More than one hopeful islander had tried flirting with the pair of them during the last two weeks. To no avail whatever.
‘It’s gey cold in here though,’ distantly observed Janet whose language had become markedly Scottish up in Skye.
Robin followed her down the passage, still clutching the pile of bright, torn and crumpled paper. Janet was right. Hell’s teeth! she thought. Now what? But she knew well enough. Mr Patterson, the retired chief petty officer handyman from Friston, the nearest village, had promised to pop in and get the heating on, both the immersion heater and the oil-fired Raeburn. And to pick up the pile of mail from behind the door before it grew too large! But it was all too obvious that the usually reliable CPO Patterson had let them down. If she had been thinking clearly, the pile of mail behind the door would have told her that before the cold air of the hall confirmed it. A wave of bitterness washed over her. At least one letter from Richard gone beyond recall. No hot water. No central heating. No oven or hob. ‘We’d better get the kettle on and look for something to microwave,’ said Robin as the pair of them came into the cavernous, chilly kitchen. She put the bundle of papers onto the kitchen table and crossed to the inner door, thinking to go up to the landing and get the immersion heater on at once. The Raeburn, like the unpacking, would wait until the morning.
At the moment she opened the door through into the main house, the fight began in earnest and the immersion was forgotten as she tore up to the bathroom to find her children, each with their jeans and pants round their ankles, locked in mortal combat under the porcelain overhang of the toilet bowl. She stooped to grab the pair of them by the scruffs of their necks and dragged their squirming bodies up by main force. ‘Will you two stop this NOW!’ she bellowed in her terrifying captain’s quarterdeck voice, shaking them like rats.
They both burst into tears at once and she let them go, feeling unforgivably brutal. Janet appeared by the door. ‘I’ll look after Mary,’ she said soothingly.
‘I’ll take William downstairs,’ said Robin and led the sobbing child off. He went down the stairs on his bottom, refusing to pull his jeans up past his knees, and Robin let him, still feeling guilty over her outburst. She paused on the landing and switched on the immersion heater while he waddled away from the foot of the stairs below like a grumpy little penguin.
Robin returned to the kitchen and filled the electric kettle. Sod the children, she thought; this was for a cup of tea. Janet and she had more than earned it. Automatically as she did so, she glanced across at the kitchen clock. Nearly nine. The twins should have been in bed hours ago: no wonder they were so fractious. As she glanced down from the clock, her eyes fell on the crumpled remains of the blue airmail letter and she thought of Richard again. Her thoughts of him became a little more forgiving as she waited for the kettle to warm up. She pulled out the teapot and the tea. By the time the tea was brewing fragrantly under its cosy, she was almost in charity with her errant husband again.
She ran out of charity with her son, however, two minutes later. She came out of the kitchen in search of him as soon as the cosy was on the pot. ‘It’s brewing, Janet,’ she called up the stairs as she crossed to the downstairs cloakroom. No sign of William there. She crossed the hall and popped her head into Richard’s study where William often liked to play. No sign. Nor in the dining room. Where had the little monster got to? she wondered indulgently, opening the door into the great, broad sitting room whose wide windows gave a panoramic view of the Channel. A secretive flurry of motion told her she had found him — and that he was up to no good. ‘William!’ she snapped. ‘What are you up to?’
She reached over and switched the light on, revealing her son and heir crouching, with his jeans inexpertly adjusted, over the answerphone.
‘William! What are you doing? That is not a toy! You know very well —’
‘I wanted to talk to Daddy!’ he wailed. ‘There was a message from my daddy for me …’
‘Oh, William!’ She crossed the room and hugged him to her. He had always been Daddy’s boy and that was all there was to it. Whenever the twins had a fight or whenever Mummy or Janet told them off, William always ran to his daddy while Mary sulked and plotted dark revenge. She should have known that the exhausted boy would come in here after the fight and the telling-off. She led him back into the hall and across to the kitchen, too preoccupied to register the whirring and clicking sounds which came from the machine by the phone.
Robin and Janet had a nice cup of tea. Mary and William had beans on toast which they loved. Then the twins went to bed. Janet and Robin tucked them down and their mother switched on the tape recorder with their Beatrix Potter tapes. They were too exhausted even to squabble over whether it should be The Tale of Jeremy Fisher or The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Robin herself thought that The Two Bad Mice would have been the most appropriate, but she said nothing and kissed them goodnight and turned down the light.
As soon as there was quiet, the women went back downstairs and had a stiff whisky each. After the first sip of hers, Robin remembered about the Monterey and popped out to slip it into the garage. She would unpack it in the morning after all. There was no reason to worry about it, the garage was built like Fort Knox in case anyone got any idea about stealing Richard’s E-type Jaguar.
Robin and Janet had another whisky and then they also had beans on toast which they loved. Janet went off to bed at ten and Robin at last got the chance to look through the rest of the mail and give her father a ring. Idly, leafing through the crumpled pile, she walked through to the sitting room. The light was still on and she collapsed on the big overstuffed sofa beside the phone table. As soon as she was seated, she thought of Richard. This was the time of night he always phoned, wherever in the world he was, whatever time zone he was passing
through. And she would always be sitting curled on the overstuffed sofa looking out through the French windows across the garden and away across the Channel beyond, waiting for his call.
But it never came. As she waited, she checked through the letters in more detail, separating the junk from the rest, the business from the social. She read his hurried, apologetic missives — two postcards, one posted from Heathrow on his way out, the next from Singapore on his arrival. The promise of a letter soon. The destroyed airmail letter. Nothing more from him. Perhaps if she put the flimsy pieces back together in the morning she would be able to decipher the tiny, impenetrable scrawl he reserved for one-sheet airmail letters such as this. She flicked through the rest. Even the letter from Phylidda Gough with its familiar Budleigh Salterton postmark was put on one side. She would catch up on the adventures of the Wallys, father and son, and of her old friend, their wife and mother, in due course. She was too exhausted even to think straight now.
By ten thirty she knew he was not going to call tonight. But she knew what to do about that, too. She would do what William had done and let the tape do the talking. But when she switched the machine onto Playback it only hissed at her. Hissed and whispered wordlessly. She got up and looked closely at it. The message counter read zero. Any messages which had been there were gone now. It made no difference what knobs she pressed or what dials she twisted, there was nothing on the message tape but a quiet, static whisper.
She returned to his letter from Singapore. She spread it out. With considerable effort she just managed to make out one side, only to find it was just their address. Turned it over. Pored over the other side thinking that if she could make out the outside, she might risk cutting it open and try for the inside — if she could work out which bits had been the edges and where they needed to be cut. The back gave the name of the hotel he was booked into, the Raffles, where he always stayed. But it took her so long to work it out she decided that, like everything else, the next step had better wait until morning.
In the meantime, there was still some action she could take. She knew where he was: she could give him a call. She walked through into his study and looked the number up on the big Rollerdex he kept on his desk. Singapore 337 8041. She dialled.
But the man on the reception desk of the Raffles Hotel, Beach Road, Singapore, informed her that Captain Mariner had vacated his executive suite nearly a week earlier. And no, he had no idea where the captain had gone after that. And no, there were no messages. And no, he could help no further at all; he was sorry. Would the caller like him to refer her to the night manager?
She phoned her father, but Sir William had received no recent news of Richard either.
She phoned Heritage House, but no one at Heritage Mariner’s headquarters had any news either. It was as though her husband had vanished off the face of the earth. Even the twenty-four-hour secretariat at Crewfinders were surprised to learn that Richard was not at the Raffles. He was out of touch with them for the first time in twenty years.
In the end she gave up and went to bed on the verge of tears. Now, in the quiet dark with the faintest whisper of the sea climbing the cliffs in the night wind, Robin did begin to feel a sense of foreboding. It grew to nightmare proportions as she fell into a restless sleep.
But not even the worst nightmare imaginable could have prepared her for the phone call which came through direct to her bedside from the Heritage Mariner office on the fourth floor of Jardine House, Connaught Road, Central District, Hong Kong, at half past midnight BST next morning.
Chapter Four
The ringing of the telephone insinuated itself into Robin’s nightmare and in her dream she answered it only to find that it had become a snake which was trying to choke the life out of her. As well as hissing, the suffocating serpent continued to ring insistently. When she could breathe no more, she tore herself awake and echoed in real life the action of her dream, reaching for the shrilling handset.
The earpiece was icy against her ear.
‘Hello?’ she said, her voice still rusty from the effect of the choking snake.
The line hissed and her hair stirred. This was the noise the creature in her nightmare had made. Adrenaline began to pump through her exhausted frame. Her mind tried to batter its way through the suffocating residue of her disturbed slumber.
‘Who is this?’
Deafening crackle. Distant connection, bringing a voice rushing through a one-sided conversation which seemed already to have begun. ‘You do not know me. I am John Shaw, office junior at the Heritage Mariner office here in Jardine House, Hong Kong. Please excuse someone so junior for disturbing you like this but I thought it best under the circumstances. It is early morning here and I have arrived first at the office to complete an assignment for my manager Mr Feng. But instead I have read of this occurrence in the South China Morning Post. We have had no warning. There has been no announcement. Sulu Queen has not even been registered as missing. I do not understand how this could have occurred.’
‘Who is this? What are you talking about?’
Silence. Then ‘Excuse, please. This is Heritage Mariner office, London?’
‘This is Captain Robin Mariner, of Heritage Mariner, London. Who is this?’ Already her blood was running cold. Her respiration was speeding up. In a moment she would find it hard to breathe.
‘This is John Shaw, Heritage Mariner office Hong Kong. I have urgent report concerning motor vessel Sulu Queen and Captain Richard Mariner. This has not been verified, you understand. It is a report from the Morning Post. We have not been notified here.’
She breathed in. How thick the air seemed. How cold! What time was it? ‘What report, Mr Shaw?’
‘The Hong Kong authorities are towing Sulu Queen into port. She was discovered drifting without power out in the South China Sea at dawn yesterday and Hong Kong Naval officers went aboard. All her crew are dead. Murdered.’ The darkness seemed to be smothering her. She reached across clumsily with her left hand and turned on the bedside light. She knew the name of the ship well enough. Some of the new cash which had come into Heritage Mariner from the affair of the iceberg codenamed Manhattan by the United Nations had been invested in a small shipping line with two freighters working between the Philippines, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Japan. It was called the China Queens Line and she had reason to remember its existence clearly — it had been on China Queens business that Richard had gone to Singapore ten days ago. The captain of the Sulu Queen was Wally Gough the elder, husband to the Phylidda whose letter lay unopened beside the dead answerphone downstairs.
The shock of that realisation jerked her awake like a douche of cold water.
The Chinese-accented voice from the Hong Kong office was still relaying to her the contents of the newspaper report: ‘A terrible scene. Wholesale slaughter with guns and knives. This is according to what the reporter has learned from the officers who boarded her, you understand. No one else has been aboard. It is understood that the ship will be impounded in a secure dock, searched in every detail and then held until the trial.’
‘The trial?’
Her question brought the flow of words to a stop, but only for a moment. ‘That is why I phoned through at once. I waited only for the international operator to get me through. I do not have the direct dialling numbers here, you understand. These are in the manager’s office and Mr Feng will not be here until after eight o’clock on normal work day but today it is Saturday and I do not think he will be in at all so I thought … Under the circumstance …’
‘What? What are you trying to say? What trial? What is going on, for heaven’s sake?’
‘It is the captain, Captain Mariner. He was the only man left alive on board the Sulu Queen. It reports in the paper that he has been charged already. He will be put on trial as soon as possible, they say, accused of the murder of the whole ship’s crew.’
*
She sat curled in her bed waiting for her breathing to steady, her heart to slow and her mind to clear. I
t was one o’clock in the morning and she couldn’t work out who to call first. Obviously John Shaw, the clerk in the Hong Kong office, had come through directly to Ashenden because of a mistake made by the international operator but that made no real difference. If he had got straight through to Heritage House, someone would have phoned her anyway. Her father was retired now and increasingly out of touch with the business he had set up. Heritage Mariner’s chief executive Charles Lee, himself from Hong Kong, was in Beijing at the moment, negotiating contracts for the company in the days, so close at hand now, after Hong Kong was returned to Chinese control.
Helen DuFour, the other senior executive, was in Moscow, still negotiating with the Russians and the independent republics of the old Soviet Union for the official, controlled shipping and the proper, safe disposal of the weapons grade plutonium, lithium and tritium resultant from the decommissioning of their nuclear arsenal. These were negotiations which she had been holding for some years now, ever since the SALT agreements; but the fissionable material, together with the triggers and mechanisms used in weapons preparation, seemed to be haemorrhaging away into the Mafia-controlled black market. Almost none of it was being disposed of properly. For Heritage Mariner this meant a dangerous loss of potential revenue; what it meant for international security was much more difficult to calculate.
No. As things stood, John Shaw’s terrible news would have come through to her in the end. But what should she do about it first?
Check it out, of course.
She pulled her stiff limbs into the baggy old track suit which often served as a dressing gown and pattered downstairs barefoot into Richard’s study. All the contact numbers he possessed were on a disk for his neat PC and Robin was as computer literate as anyone, but for some reason she chose to turn to the Rollerdex tonight. Perhaps it gave her some kind of security.
The first number under ‘Hong Kong’ was the Tourist Board at 125 Pall Mall. She dialled without further thought but there was no reply. Not at this time of night! Stupid. She wasn’t thinking clearly at all.