The Pirate Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘No, of course not. It was a silly idea. I’m sorry.’ She looked up at him suddenly as the penny dropped. ‘You were aboard for twelve hours before the Sulu Queen came in?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered shortly.

  ‘So …’ She drew out the word gently and he could see her mind racing behind those still grey eyes which were so exactly the colour of the distant, beautiful hills.

  Huuk turned away again before she could ask the next, inevitable, question. He was certain that she did not realise that it was he who had shot her husband in the head and injured him so badly. And, for all sorts of reasons, Daniel Huuk did not want her to know; certainly not yet. ‘We’re nearly there,’ he said. ‘That’s Emperor Point, where we dock.’

  *

  Both the islanders were there to greet them, two wizened, elderly-looking men who nevertheless moved with great energy and seemed to be bright and lively. Certainly, they escorted their unexpected guests into the eerie, deserted village with every sign of boundless enjoyment and jabbered full, detailed answers in impenetrable, machine-gun-fire dialect to Huuk’s questions. The six of them — Robin, Andrew, Huuk and three sailors from Tamar — sat down and were given fragrant tea in cups like eggshells and tiny, honey-flavoured cakes as the interrogation continued. But for all their enthusiasm to discuss with each other and with their interrogator every possible answer to each question Huuk asked, his final summing up, in English, was short enough: ‘They know nothing.’

  Andrew’s eyes swept up the forested hillsides rising abruptly above them and stretching away to the south for more than a mile. ‘We’d better get busy then,’ he said, ‘if we’re going to earn our keep and have a good look round. With just six of us it’ll take a good while.’

  ‘We only have to walk round the coast,’ said Huuk. ‘I don’t think anyone is suggesting that anything is smuggled in or out by air, are they? And these two have heard no helicopters recently. No. If there is anything here, it must be within easy reach of the sea.’

  ‘And,’ added Robin grudgingly, ‘it can’t be of any great size either. Unless there is a deep-water inlet somewhere, you won’t get a ship of any size anywhere near the shore.’

  ‘Back to my river boats?’ asked Huuk, with just the slightest teasing edge to his voice.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she conceded. ‘But at least you could use a fleet of them out here and nobody would notice. Anyway.’ She gathered her fawn-coloured raincoat about herself and said, ‘Let’s go.’

  They split into two teams. Andrew and Robin took one of the sailors with a walkie-talkie and Huuk took the two others, also with a walkie-talkie.

  Robin’s team struck directly south, straight down the coast. Huuk’s team would go north to the furthest point and then swing down the far side of the island. They would meet halfway round and compare notes. Then, if need be, each team would continue and double-check the territory already covered by the other. They would meet again back here when they had finished their tour. At most, each team would walk little more than two miles and the exploration should not take long. Certainly, they had no intention of staying on the island for the night. None of them took the message on Andrew’s answerphone that seriously.

  Turning southwards meant that Robin and her team had to walk through the rest of the town to begin with, and that experience set the tone for much of what was to follow. The two islanders waved them away cheerily enough and vanished at once — no doubt to do the washing up. Isolation closed round the three of them like a fist. The houses seemed to crowd around them, their walls, eaves and roofs bright with stone, shale and shells, making the windows and doorways in contrast unnaturally dark. Above, etched black crosses of gulls wheeled against the restless overcast, screaming like lost children, and soon a wind sprang up. It was a strange wind, by no means blustery or stormy, hardly even forceful at first. But it was regular and persistent. It began to whisper and mutter in the empty dwellings all around them. As it gained force it began to whine piercingly and caused unexpected explosions of sound as doors, windows, shutters slammed. Sand, blown up from the beaches, slithered and hissed against edges and comers. Chimneys whimpered. Courtyards howled eerily. The cloud thickened and the noon light came and went, liberating a disturbing army of shadows to dance mockingly in the comers of their eyes.

  ‘I say,’ said Andrew after a while, ‘this is a pretty lonely spot, isn’t it?’

  ‘Putting it mildly,’ agreed Robin. ‘But it’ll be better when we’re out of the town, I expect.’ She looked across at the sailor Huuk had detailed to accompany them. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked him.

  He nodded cheerfully. ‘Alright,’ he said.

  The roadway they were following tended more and more steeply uphill, and as it rose the houses began to fall back and separate, revealing between their walls and over their flat roofs increasingly broad vistas of the sea. At last, they stood on a high promontory with a cliff at their feet and a breathtaking view away westwards towards Crooked Island before them. At their backs was a hillside reaching further up into Dragon Fall Hill which stretched down the middle of the island like a spine. On their right, the path they had just climbed meandered back down into the deserted town. On their left, the terrain sloped down and back into a shallow bay before turning through nearly forty-five degrees and gathering itself up into an even higher cliff which, Robin guessed, must look due south past Tai Long, down towards Brunei more than two thousand kilometres distant. The path down into the shallow bay was narrow and overgrown. There was no obvious path leading up the steep shoulder of the next slope. This may become hard going,’ observed Robin, glad of her jeans and stout travelling shoes in spite of the heat and humidity. ‘Are you up for this, Andrew?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, though he didn’t sound all that certain. ‘As long as there aren’t any snakes or venomous insects.’

  ‘Are there?’ Robin asked Huuk’s sailor.

  ‘Arright,’ he said.

  In fact the going was not that bad. The slopes further inward and upward were heavily wooded, but they managed to stay on the outskirts of the forest where the vegetation was low, thick grass and thin bush. The wind now made less disturbing noises. It was content to whisper, sigh and hiss. In any case, it would have been hard put to it to undermine the cheery whirring of the cicadas choiring their lunchtime songs. The wind was given occasionally breathtaking form, too, by clouds of bright yellow butterflies which seemed to leap from bush to bush ahead of them like peripatetic blossoms. In the groin of the little valley, however, the woods thrust down towards the sea in a wall and they had no choice but to push their way between the trees. Inevitably, they found a stream at the heart of this dim green tunnel and Robin stopped, standing on a low flat stone in the middle of the chuckling brook to look away down the last of the valley to the broad spread of shallow water washing across a rocky beach into the silvery ripples of the sea. As it went, it washed past a brown wall of seaweed piled along a high waterline. Almost inconsequentially, Robin found herself wondering about the tides in this region.

  The view from the top of the next cliff was simply breathtaking and their position, more than forty metres sheer in the air, put all thoughts of tides out of Robin’s head. Like a child about a summer holiday adventure, she went to the very edge of the cliff and lay down on her stomach. ‘I say, look out,’ called Andrew from some way back.

  ‘Oh Andrew, don’t be so pompous,’ she called. ‘It’s quite safe.’ His stick-in-the-mud concern brought out the worst in her and she wormed forward into a position which was, in fact, bordering upon the dangerous. With her hips right at the last safe point of grass-pillowed ground, holding onto a firmly-rooted bush with her right hand, she hung over the cliff edge, looking straight down. Below her, she saw the dizzying expanse of black rock falling as sheer as a wall. At its foot, a jumble of rocks littered a deep shelf which reached out into the foam, all covered with green swathes of weed and bright splashes of yellow salt-loving lichen. Lying there, for a moment it was
almost as though she was back on Skye and none of this had happened. The thought was so soothing that she was happy for it to persist for a while and she lost herself in the great sway of the sea as it thrust in at the cliff foot to crash among the black rocks and then whirl back out in long claws of foam.

  Had she not been lying in such an unwise position, she would never have seen the odd variation in the pattern of the waves, both coming in and washing back. And, had she not seen that odd pattern — though to begin with she paid little conscious attention to what she could see — she would not have allowed her eyes to follow that strange pattern on the water to its source, far down on her left. But she did all of these things and suddenly she was snapped out of her reverie into wide-eyed wakefulness. ‘Hey!’ she yelled. ‘Andrew, there’s a cave down there.’

  ‘What?’ His footsteps thudded on the turf behind her, then stopped.

  ‘Take my legs and hang on tight.’

  ‘Robin, I —’

  ‘Come on, Andrew, I just want to get a clear look. It might be important.’

  She felt him kneel beside her feet, then he took firm hold, thrusting his chest between her ankles and tucking her feet into his armpits. Safely anchored, she wormed her way a little further forward and was rewarded with a much clearer view. There was a deep cleft in the black rock, perhaps as wide as three metres where it met the cliff foot, thrust back like a knife wound into the side of the cliff. And there was the darker outline of a cave mouth like an ink stain running down to the waterline. As she watched, Robin saw a bright drift of seaweed — torn loose, no doubt, by the storm on the night she arrived. She watched it as the waves gathered it and guided it into that wide gap. ‘Just a little longer,’ she called back, her eyes fixed on the seaweed raft. With surprising rapidity, it was thrust up the narrow channel and thrown — no, sucked — in through the side of the cliff. And, as she watched, straining all her senses in absolute concentration, she heard the deep, telltale thunder of surf running in through subterranean caverns and the whole cliff top juddered slightly.

  ‘Pull me back,’ she called and Andrew obeyed with a will. In an instant she was back on terra firma, with her hair wild and her face flushed. ‘There’s a bloody great cave down there,’ she said. ‘No access from up here, but well worth checking out. We’ll warn Huuk that we might need to take a closer look in the cutter later.’

  Huuk was not overly impressed. Even over the radio link they could almost hear him shrug and his tone was little more than dismissive. But the discovery galvanised Robin. As the little team walked easily down the far side of the cliff, turned the corner at the rock’s southern point and began to come back up the China-facing side of the island, she regaled Andrew with excited stories of her childhood holidays in Devon and Cornwall when caverns exactly like the one she had just found had been the haunts of smugglers since the day that import duties were invented. She quoted Kipling so loudly, repetitively and often, that Andrew was soon able to join her in the chorus of ‘The Smuggler’s Song’.

  ‘Four and twenty ponies, trotting through the dark,’ they sang in unison as they walked briskly along the lower slopes above the white breadths of beach with Huuk’s sailor watching them from an increasing distance as though they had gone dangerously insane.

  They paused here, contacted Huuk, and then recited the whole poem right through one more time as they examined the way in which the next headland gathered itself up and thrust itself out into an easterly-facing point which was extended by a series of snaggle-toothed rocks.

  Then they began all over again.

  ‘Brandy for the parson, baccy for the clerk,’ they bellowed as they rushed up the slopes onto the crest of that other cliff beetling over the China side of Mirs Bay, the twin of the one with the cavern at its heart.

  ‘Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie,’ Robin concluded at the topmost point of the east-facing cliff, and she cast herself down again, paying no attention to the breathtaking view over not-so-distant China afforded by her position, preferring to wriggle forward and hang over the edge once more.

  ‘So watch the wall, my darling …’ continued Andrew, falling to his knees behind her, ready to take her ankles again, unaware to begin with that he was speaking alone. Then he stopped.

  ‘I’ll be damned!’ she said.

  ‘What?’ He took her ankles and tucked them into his armpits.

  She wriggled forward another metre and repeated, ‘I’ll be damned!’

  ‘What?

  ‘It’s the same. Exactly the same, but bigger!’

  ‘What are you talking about, Robin?’

  She jerked and rolled so actively that for a moment he thought she was falling. But no. She came in and curled round until her face was less than a metre from his own. ‘There’s another cave down there. Another smuggler’s cave.’

  ‘Really?’ He was much struck by the coincidence, and not a little carried away by her obvious excitement.

  ‘Except,’ she continued, wriggling further inland towards him so that she could grasp him by the shoulders and pull their faces into almost intimate proximity. ‘Except that it looks much bigger. And I think there’s a way to get into it without a boat.’

  From the next beach along, it was clear that the cliff thrust out towards China in such a way as to achieve something of an optical illusion. Only from the very top, and even then only if one was looking very carefully indeed, could it be observed that there was not one point but two. They were the better part of a hundred metres apart — and there was a cavern in the hidden section which reached inwards like the cavity in a rotten tooth.

  Robin actually ran back across the beach until she was able to scramble up onto the jumble of rocks at the low cliff foot. Here she waited for Andrew to come puffing up beside her. ‘Look,’ she said, as he pulled off his shoes and emptied the sand out of them. ‘You see what happens out there? The rocks give way to a solid platform which stands just above water level. If we can get onto that platform it will lead us round the point and back into the cave mouth!’ She folded up her raincoat and dropped it onto a convenient rock.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Andrew asked sceptically.

  ‘Certain. I saw it all from the top of the cliff.’

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Can’t argue with a confident woman.’

  And they were off, with Huuk’s sailor lagging unhappily behind.

  It was exactly as Robin had said. The jumble of pool-filled rocks that they were clambering over soon gave onto a solid rock ledge which stood like a shelf out above the quiet water. With Robin in the lead, they pushed out onto this ledge. Only because she was by nature intrepid and by situation desperate did they proceed round the point. The sheer cliff loomed over them and at the very point, the ledge apparently stopped dead. The snaggle-toothed rocks which were apparently a straight line beginning at the cliff foot itself were revealed to be a narrow-based arrowhead, the nearest of which stood in a dangerous-looking welter of foam three metres distant. Too far to be of any help in an emergency but near enough to present a very real danger as the waves tore around it into a deadly welter.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ bellowed Andrew.

  ‘Hold my hand,’ ordered Robin. ‘I’m going round.’ He obeyed, but less than wholeheartedly. ‘Tight!’ she snarled, sounding just as dangerous as the foam. He closed his hand round her right wrist as though her arm was a rope in a tug of war. She swung out, stepped round the massive point of rock and stopped, spread-eagled. He could only see her right arm to the shoulder and her right thigh, calf and shoe, so sharp was the corner she was going round. Her right arm shook violently and he suddenly realised that she wanted him to let go. With a sick feeling in his stomach, he obeyed, and she was gone.

  A glassy green heave of wave came thundering inwards, shattered on the nearest rock and washed up over the narrow pathway to the great black knife-blade of rock. Andrew stepped back automatically to protect his shoes. And as he did so he realised that he would never voluntarily s
tep forward again. Nothing in the world would make him take his life into his hands and follow Robin into her cave. Almost desperately, he looked back to the point where the ledge was lost in the jumble of rocks at the groin of the white-sand beach. Here Huuk’s man was waiting and watching. Andrew waved. The sailor gestured. The solicitor took one last, forlorn glance back to the terrible place where his client had vanished. ‘Robin?’ he called, but there was no reply.

  ‘Robin?’ he yelled, in the voice he normally used when cheering his team to victory.

  ‘ROBIN?’ he screamed, so loudly that he felt his sides and vocal chords begin to tear.

  No reply. There was the calling of the gulls and the thundering swell of the sea. But there was no reply.

  Then, deflated, defeated, and suddenly full of deep foreboding combined with not a little naked terror, he began to inch back toward the pale, forlorn square of Robin’s folded coat, towards the sailor — and the walkie-talkie.

  *

  Robin stood with her back to the sheer, icy rock wall and watched the foam slide past her toe-tips as though it was full of lethal sea serpents. She had taken one step, turned to face outwards and flattened herself against the wet stone like a limpet. There was no thought in her mind that Andrew might be coming round after her. It was immediately clear to her that only a suicidal lunatic would have come round in the first place and she did not really expect Andrew to put himself in such idiotic peril. Crucified to the safe solidity behind, she took stock of her situation, her mind, as always, a swirl of conflicting sensations and emotions. She watched the deadly green thrust of the water, cloaked in illusory webs of foam, wash past her toes with sinister, muscular vigour and plunge into the absolute darkness on her right. All too vividly aware of the sudden chill and the way it combined with the clammy dampness of the place, she raised her eyes to look across the cave mouth which was rapidly losing light and heat because it faced east and it was well past midday.