by Peter Tonkin
Five minutes later, Robin gingerly came onto the A259 and headed west for Brighton. She soon mastered the first three gears, but she felt she really needed a long, straight dual carriageway, or better, before she put the car into top and let it go. At Newhaven she swung carefully onto the A26. Here for the first time she experimented with top gear but she approached the roundabout south of Lewes very carefully indeed. She was not really happy with things until she swung off the roundabout onto the dual carriageway section of the A27. Even here she did not let the monster under the bonnet loose, but snarled and grumbled along at 70 mph, holding the car in check as she got to know it.
She slowed again at the Brighton bypass but prepared to give the car its head as she swung onto the A23 and headed up through the increasingly frequent dual carriageway sections towards the M23. At Bolney her right foot pressed down with more confidence and, in spite of the fact that she was coming up quite a steep hill, she watched the needle on the speedometer leap rapidly past 70 mph. She came over the brow of the hill and the road lay bright and straight ahead of her, stretching across the sleeping Sussex Downs towards the gilded gleam of the motorway and the distant amber blaze of Gatwick Airport.
‘What the hell, old girl,’ she said. ‘Let’s go!’
She skidded across the roundabout with the B2115, very lucky indeed that there was no traffic about, but even that signal warning that she should be careful how she judged very high speeds did not dampen her elation or slow her down. Quite the reverse, in fact; she went under the bridge at Handscross at 100 and entered the M23 at 120, speeding to the rescue of the man she had loved for more than three-quarters of her life.
She remembered the first time she had ever seen him: at the anchorage in St Tropez the New Year after Mummy died when he had moored his little yacht Rebecca beside theirs unaware. How vividly she recalled the opulent after section of her father’s ocean-going cruiser, open to the unseasonably clement night. Herself, little more than a teenager in awe of her fantastically beautiful elder sister Rowena; Daddy, still with the last of his youthful energy clinging about him, beginning to come out of mourning at last.
And Richard, tall, slim, dazzlingly good-looking, totally oblivious of their presence and of her gaze. Lonely and disconsolate, he had opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate the arrival of the seventies and the cork had flown across the tiny gap between the boats to hit Daddy on the head. The accident had led to apologies, mutual recognition, formal introductions and a night of lively conversation which had brightened the moment and changed all their lives. Richard had been a captain for some time by that stage even though he could have been little more than twenty-five years old. He had knocked about a bit and was looking to settle down. And Sir William Heritage had been looking for a senior captain to groom for executive office in Heritage shipping. It had all been perfect, except for the existence of Rowena.
Robin remembered how dashing Richard had looked at his wedding to her elder sister, and how she had walked down the aisle as bridesmaid in floods of silent tears. It had been a miracle that she managed to complete any ‘A’ level studies, such had been the power of her unhappily thwarted love.
She remembered all too clearly the look of shock and horror on his face when she had cornered him at her twenty-first birthday party three years later to inform him that her big sister, his wife, was using his time away at sea as an unrivalled opportunity to sleep her way through the younger, better-looking sections of Burke’s Peerage.
She preferred to forget the conversation she had with her father soon after, and the sight of Rowena going sulkily aboard Richard’s new command, her father’s new tanker flagship which even bore her name: Rowena.
That had been the last time Robin saw her sister alive and the last time she saw Richard for five barren years. Rowena had exploded and sunk. Rowena had gone down with her. Richard had been lucky to survive and his service with Heritage had ended.
In the time he was away setting up Crewfinders, Robin completed her studies at the London School of Economics, completed a Masters at Johns Hopkins, and finished her studies for her officer’s ticket. Had she been anyone other than her father’s daughter she would have stood no chance of achieving the wide range of qualifications she now held, but all her hard work had been more than amply rewarded when she had managed to get the position of third mate on Prometheus which Richard had crewed and then commanded after a terrible industrial accident.
Within a year of completing that horrific voyage on the coffin ship Prometheus, the pair of them had been married. Heritage Shipping subsumed Crewfinders to become Heritage Mariner and a legend had been born.
During the last fifteen years, in the face of the collapse of the British merchant marine, they had seen tanker traffic boom and dwindle. They had faced terrorism in the Gulf. They had moved into leisure boating with the fabulously successful Katapult range of multihulls. They had become involved by accident in the shipping of dangerous waste and had opened the North Atlantic to routes for the specially-designed waste carriers Atropos and Clotho — though here, too, they had faced a new kind of terrorism: La Guerre Verte.
Richard had faced his own kind of war in the Gulf, while she had been pregnant with the twins. Almost single-handed, he had pulled the great iceberg Manhattan to the war-torn state of Mau in West Africa, and then become involved in another sort of war as he and all the others fought to deliver the water Manhattan represented to the people who needed it the most.
And now he deserved a rest; a holiday. He was over fifty years old, for crying out loud. He should have been with her and the twins relaxing on Skye, not rushing off to Singapore. He should be safe at home in bed at Ashenden, not sitting accused of murder in Hong Kong. It was too much! It was just too bloody much!
*
Robin was extremely fortunate that, even at 2.35 a.m., the traffic moving north between Gatwick and the M25 was heavy. Rather against her inclination, with half her mind occupied by thoughts of Richard, she slowed the E-type to a much more reasonable pace and consequently sailed across the M5 intersection perfectly safely, managing to bring the long black car almost sedately onto the single carriageway of the A23, though she did not actually come anywhere near the speed limit until she stopped for petrol in Coulsden, wondering vaguely where the tank-full she had started out with had gone to.
After Coulsden came Purley and she speeded up going up the hill towards the old Croydon Airport. It had been there, she thought — as she always did on this route into town — that Monsieur Hercule Poirot had unravelled the mysterious fatality in Death In the Clouds. Between Croydon and Streatham there was a large number of roundabouts and so she rarely got up out of third and hardly ever exceeded 60 mph. She did not exceed the national speed limit again, in fact, until after she had slipped round the south circular and came hammering down Lordship Lane towards East Dulwich, heading for the Elephant and Castle.
The roundabout at the Elephant is big and complicated. At 2.44 a.m. it was empty so Robin’s speed and lanepositioning were of only academic importance. She shot through like the Wrath of God swinging a little wildly into Newington Causeway heading for London Bridge — and not even the sight of the law courts slowed her down. She had to slow through Borough, however, for there was a long series of traffic lights now and only true lunacy would have taken her through them on red. She went under the railway viaduct and out onto London Bridge itself at ten minutes to three. She went past the Monument less than a minute later, roared into narrow Gracechurch Street like a thunderstorm, jumped the lights at the Fenchurch Street intersection and swung into Leadenhall at 3.00 on the dot.
It was 3.10 by the time she had the E-type positioned to the mutual satisfaction of herself and the Heritage Mariner’s garage night-security man. For one nightmare moment it seemed possible that she would use her husband’s Jaguar to scratch her father’s Bentley and upset the two most important men in her life at once. But everything was settled satisfactorily before Robin ran out of patie
nce and she was in reception at Heritage House by 3.15.
The security man had warned Audrey the moment the distinctive oval grille thrust itself out of the dark like the snout of a cruising shark and she was waiting with another case for Robin. ‘There’s all the information you asked for under the company codeword,’ Audrey said quietly. ‘There’s a full itinerary too,’ she added as she handed over case and tickets. ‘Now, let me see, what else was there? Oh yes, there’s the most up-to-date information we can get on the situation in the Crown Colony during the last weeks before it goes back into Chinese control. There are no jabs needed urgently, you’ll be pleased to hear, but there are no flights allowed from City Airport at this time of night, I’m afraid, and we can’t use the heliport for another couple of hours either, so it’s back on the road for you.’
‘That’s OK. Do I have time to check what’s in the slop chest here?’ It was an old joke — and one that Robin would have avoided except that she was truly exhausted now that she no longer had the exhilaration of the wild drive to keep her going. Audrey and her staff were meticulous in the selection of clothing to cover emergencies such as this but everyone always made a game of assuming they packed emergency cases with cast-offs and secondhand clothing like the crew’s slop chest on a boat.
Audrey smiled. ‘Fraid not. But look on the bright side.’ She reached into the ticket folder and pulled out a Gold AmEx card. ‘You have the power to put things right. Now, how are you with trains and tunnels?’
Chapter Six
She had promised to phone Andrew Atherton Balfour from Heathrow or Gatwick. She called him instead from the new Eurostar rail-link departure area at Waterloo Station. The Paris express would be departing at 3.45 a.m., due at La Gare du Nord at 6.30 a.m. The sleek, still futuristic shape of the Eurostar train stood behind her, all gleaming power, taut with the promise of massive speed. Robin had been welcomed by the train’s guard already and her seat was safe. She just had time to check in as promised.
Andrew had had time to do some checking too. ‘It looks bad, Captain Mariner. There’s no mistake and the HK police aren’t fooling around. They have charged him with two counts of murder but I understand they are only specimen charges. They mean to accuse him of murdering the whole ship’s crew.’
‘But that’s fantastic! Insane! What does Richard say?’
‘I haven’t been able to see him yet. I should have the same right of access as I would in the British system, of course, but there’s something else going on I don’t understand yet and they won’t let me see him. They have him in a private room on the top floor of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital but I don’t know what’s wrong with him. It can’t be anything too serious or they wouldn’t be playing it the way they are. But I can’t be certain what’s up until I speak to him, or the arresting officer or someone in authority. They’re stonewalling me at the moment. Most unusual.’
‘I have to go at once if I’m coming out …’
‘Oh, you must come, Captain Mariner. As fast as you can. I’ve booked you a suite at the Mandarin, by the way.’
‘I’ll be there at eight your time tonight, Andrew, if everything goes to plan.’
‘But that’s impossible!’
‘Nothing’s impossible for Crewfinders and British Rail!’
*
The train pulled out at 3.45 a.m. on the dot and Robin settled back into the comfortable, softly moulded support of her seat, fully intending to sleep, but her mind would not rest. The situation had come about so suddenly. It was so impossible to believe. Richard charged with murder — soon to be charged with the murder of an entire ship’s crew. Her Richard. Her gentle, considerate, kindly Richard. It was simply beyond belief. But so much about this whole situation was so strange. Why had Richard really been called out to Singapore so suddenly? Why had he gone aboard the Sulu Queen? What had happened to the Sulu Queen and her crew in the dangerous waters of the South China Sea? If everyone else was dead, how had Richard survived? What grounds were there to accuse him of any murders, let alone all of them? And why, oh why had he not contacted Heritage Mariner or the Hong Kong lawyers or Andrew Balfour himself? Why had he not contacted her!
But of course he had. She thought of that ruined, indecipherable airmail letter crushed beneath the door and thrown so bitterly away. Of the tape on the answerphone wiped clean by the accidental actions of an angry child wanting a word from his absent daddy. Perhaps — her heart wrenched within her — perhaps he was waiting for her to act upon some instructions lost with the paper and the tape. Perhaps he was waiting for her to do something of vital importance which would resolve everything. As her mind dwelt on these thoughts, her weary eyes began to drift out of focus and her lids began to close. The vibrato whisper of the Eurostar hurling down through the southern suburbs of London and out into northern Kent began to lull her to sleep.
The train thundered through Sevenoaks, jerking Robin out of her reverie and she shook herself. If Richard was waiting for her to do something, then he would tell her about it tonight and she would get it done tomorrow. If it was something which could be done on a Sunday in Hong Kong.
Well, no matter what, she decided grimly, if she wasn’t going to sleep then she might as well look at the limited access company documents Audrey had found for her under the codeword Conrad. The carriage was surprisingly full of passengers heading for Paris even at this time in the morning, but Robin still had a little unit of four seats and a table to herself. She put the briefcase on the seat beside her and was arranging the files it contained in a neat pile on the table when the guard came by to check her ticket. ‘Still on time?’ she asked. She had an important connection to make, she knew.
‘Bang on time, Captain Mariner,’ he answered. ‘We should be pulling into La Gare du Nord at six thirty on the dot.’
Robin nodded once, and the guard went on down the train. No one else disturbed her until the concession trolley came past and she bought two cups of strong black coffee, filled them with as much sugar as they would hold and drank them one after the other, pausing in her reading as she did so to admire the dazzle of lights which sped past and were snatched away as the train plunged into the tunnel itself.
The atmosphere changed subtly as they sped underground, the sound, the rhythm of the movement, the pressure and odour of the very air all changed. Robin dismissed the sensation and went back to her reading. Her head did not come up again until an exact reversal of the process of atmospheric change in the carriage announced their arrival in France. She was courteous in return to the courteous questions of the French Customs official who came down the carriage as they came fully into French jurisdiction, then she had two more cups of sweet black coffee as the Eurostar exceeded 200 kph, accelerating breathlessly across the broad, dark fields of Normandy. And she read, and read, and read.
Facts from the files fitted against each other like the pieces in a jigsaw, revealing the breadth of Heritage Mariner’s plans for the East and the Far East. Much of it was familiar to her and she skimmed it rapidly; some of it was newer, and she studied it with more care. And there were sections of it — and implications arising from it — which were quite new to her and required much frowning, concentrated thought. Facts, observations, long-held beliefs all became related to each other in new, sometimes surprising ways. Things which seemed to be discrete and utterly unconnected suddenly seemed to attain some kind of relationship, giving Robin chimeric glimpses of truths which came dazzlingly into view and then vanished like mirages in the desert. This was particularly, disturbingly, true if you placed Hong Kong in the centre of things and looked at it all from that new perspective.
Take Canada, for instance. Heritage Mariner were closely associated with an East Coast company in Sept Isles, on the St Lawrence. They were in full co-operation with the Sept Isles Toxic Waste Disposal Company, and together they ran the two great ships Atropos and Clotho, specifically designed for the safe transport of nuclear waste across the North Atlantic and its disposal at the Thorp
reprocessing plant in England and the Canadian facility in Quebec. But in order to explore the possibilities of taking that business west — especially since Helen DuFour’s visits to St Petersburg and Moscow had established that much of the fissionable material resulting from the Russian decommissioning of their nuclear arsenal under the SALT agreements was flowing towards Archangel and not Murmansk — both companies had opened offices in Vancouver. Heritage Mariner’s office was staffed by expatriate Hong Kong associates of Charles Lee; and it was located beside the new offices opened by Jardine Matheson when they had moved their corporate headquarters out of Hong Kong Central.
Even their association with the West African coastal state of Mau which had originated with Richard’s commissioning by the UN to tow the great iceberg Manhattan to that troubled country seemed to have led inexorably Eastwards, for it was the profit from that epic enterprise that had financed the purchase of the China Queens Company. Their offices, so recently taken over by Heritage Mariner, were located on the fourth floor of Jardine House in Hong Kong Central, and it was their ship, Sulu Queen, that was currently being towed into Aberdeen Harbour to be impounded by the Hong Kong authorities.
Some refocusing of their business towards the East had been inevitable after Charles Lee had taken her father’s place as chief executive of the company after Sir William’s near-fatal heart attack four summers ago. Charles’s family were Hong Kong boat-owners from way back. They had pirated and smuggled their way to and through many fortunes in their time but Charles’s father had insisted on the latest generation getting a proper education and so young Charles had been sent West and gone through the best business training available. But, back in Hong Kong to take Lee Shipping into the twenty-first century and the big league, he had become involved with the student protest movement in China. After Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government had realised that the young Hong Kong businessman had simply been trying to suborn the next generation of Chinese intellectuals so that after 1997 he would have a power base of increasing influence in Beijing. The Lee Shipping Company would not survive the return of the Crown Colony to Chinese influence, he was informed. And so he had gone West again. He was a dynamic, powerful chief executive and although he and Richard had often clashed, the pair of them were expanding the business rapidly.