The Pirate Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  As they crossed the reception hall, surrounded by such a crowd that it was out of the question to pause or to turn aside, Andrew looked down at her, wishing strength and life back into her with all his soul. And she seemed to respond to his desperate thoughts. Some colour flooded back into her cheeks, albeit livid and in sharp contrast to the greyish tinge of most of her face. Life flooded into the shaded pools of her eyes. ‘What are we going to do?’ she whispered. ‘What in heaven’s name are we going to do?’

  On the threshold, hesitating against the outward pressure of the milling crowd around them, holding everything still with almost superhuman force while he dragged her back to life, he hissed in answer, ‘We fight! For the next four weeks we work every hour God sends and then some. We pray the publicity alerts someone somewhere. We build a team, we come to court as fast as we can and hope to get this settled before the Treaty runs out and we make a case; we destroy their evidence item by item and point by point and we fight for all we’re worth to get him acquitted, exonerated and free!’

  Then, side by side, they moved out onto the steps, up to the howling crowd and into the headlines of every news programme, newspaper and news magazine in the world.

  TWO — Seram

  But O heart! heart! heart!

  O the bleeding drops of red!

  Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.

  Walt Whitman. Oh Captain! My Captain!

  Chapter Nineteen

  Lata Patel had enjoyed a sheltered upbringing, and her only really serious vices had all involved sweets.

  As the wildly indulged, only daughter of a hard-working family which owned a series of shops in the West End of London, she had attended an exclusive private school and put aside all thoughts of popular music, boyfriends and parties as she struggled to gain the best possible grades at GCE and ‘A’ Level. At Girton College, Cambridge, she had eschewed male society and other temptations equally assiduously, hoping to graduate at the top of her law class. And, now that she was in chambers, junior to one of the most flamboyant of the barristers in the Queen Elizabeth Building of the Middle Temple in London, she found she was far too busy to bother even with the most eligible of men.

  Taking all that for granted, then, it came as something of a shock to Lata when she began to suspect herself of harbouring unnatural thoughts towards a woman.

  The woman in question was her colleague, Magdalena DaSilva. The moment at which the shocking suspicion slithered into Lata’s innocent bosom was on the afternoon of Tuesday, 20 May 1997. It was unnaturally warm, as the whole winter had been, and the Old Bailey courtroom had become unbearably hot. The barrister, in her wig and heavy robes, had found it increasingly difficult to work, Lata had observed sympathetically. And when the judge had called for an early lunch, Maggie had fled home as fast as possible to her little flat in Fetter Lane, not to eat but to shower. The case was at a critical point and so Lata had accompanied her boss, laden with papers which they were searching through for that one vital inconsistency. Maggie had taken the case at short notice because of an illness and the papers had just arrived in reply to her request for disclosure.

  Going to Maggie’s flat was not an unusual occurrence for Lata, but Maggie herself was wound up tighter than usual by the case, in a massive rush, and standing on no ceremonies. As soon as the two women arrived in the hallway of the flat, she was kicking off her shoes and shrugging off her jacket. Lata went through to the tiny kitchenette and put the pile of papers on the table. ‘Would you like a drink?’ she called through.

  Maggie popped her slightly tousled head round the kitchen door. ‘I need cool water,’ she said. ‘Outside and in.’ She was pulling the hem of her blouse out of the waist of her calf-length black skirt as she spoke and by the time Lata handed her a glass of Ramaloosa from the fridge, she had all but unbuttoned it. ‘We haven’t much time,’ said the barrister decisively. ‘Bring the new papers through.’

  Lata arrived in the bedroom in time to see Maggie stepping out of the skirt. She left it like a puddle of black ink lying on the floor, and began to pull down her tights. Lata looked around for somewhere to sit, more than a little amused by the mess which characterised the room, and no more embarrassed yet than a girl in a girls’ dormitory. Maggie swept through into the shower room and Lata followed again. Here she found a little wicker stool with nothing but a cushion on it. She sat and arranged the papers on her lap, focusing her extremely intelligent concentration upon it. Distantly, she heard the roar of the shower going on, but her nimble mind was engaged in the intricacies of the case.

  ‘It seems to me,’ she called, raising her voice automatically to compensate for the noise of the water, ‘that it all turns on whether we can prove that the victim, Horton, did actually make improper advances towards the accused, William Perkins.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that,’ called Maggie from the shower stall. ‘The letter in blood, the black magic paraphernalia and the Dennis Wheatley books are all irrelevant.’

  ‘If we allow that the jury will see that, then it comes down to whether Horton cornered Perkins in an empty street at midnight and frightened the life out of him by demanding his wicked way there and then,’ said Lata. ‘It would be enough to frighten me. Horton was an enormous man. And we know there were questions as to his intellectual competence.’

  ‘So the fact that the murder weapon was a sacrificial dagger made of a goat’s foot is completely incidental …’ Maggie broke off, knowing that her junior would pick up her thought and run with it as though they were members of a rugby team.

  ‘And the prosecution have miscalculated by emphasising the occult aspects. This isn’t a ritual slaying by a crazed Devil worshipper …’

  ‘It’s a simple case of self-defence by a frightened, unworldly boy, threatened by a six-foot red-headed predatory homosexual in an empty street at midnight, fighting back with the first thing that came to hand,’ concluded Maggie, her voice rising as though the matter were settled now.

  ‘If we can prove that Horton was that way inclined,’ warned Lata, as careful as always.

  ‘And can we?’

  ‘Well …’ Lata temporised, sorting through the pile of papers which had recently arrived, ‘There’s a letter here … Its from a young doctor. He wrote to the police but they never followed it up. It’s no wonder they’ve been sitting on this!’

  ‘What’s it say?’

  ‘That the doctor, returning late from a party along that same street the night before our incident was cornered by a six-foot tall red-headed predatory homosexual male and was lucky to get away intact.’

  The door of the shower slammed back and Magdalena DaSilva emerged, running with diamond-bright drops of water. ‘Got them!’ she exulted. ‘Lata, you’re a genius!’

  Lata sat, simply awed, until Maggie, too excited to notice the effect she was having on the girl, said, ‘Pass me a towel, there’s a darling.’ And laughed like a silver bell when Lata spilled all the papers over her café-au-lait toes as she reached across to do so.

  Back in the bedroom five minutes later, Maggie was still in devastatingly expansive mood — and absolutely nothing else. Having cast the towel on top of the mess which hid her bed, she was rummaging around in her underwear drawer.

  ‘Will we need to contact the doctor?’ asked Lata trying to keep her mind on the business in hand and off the fact that she had never seen anything quite so elegant as the manner in which Maggie’s milk-chocolate back flared creamily outwards past her hips and then curved in secretly towards thighs which were almost the colour of toffee.

  ‘We certainly will!’

  Maggie swung round, holding some tiny pieces of white lace. She dropped them on top of the chest of drawers. Impulsively she crossed the room towards Lata who found herself actually shrinking back a little and trembling. Her shoulders hit the top edge of another tall chest of drawers and she was trapped. Maggie reached out towards her and Lata found herself falling helplessly into the golden depths of those great
cat’s eyes of hers. ‘There is one rule you’ve always got to remember,’ said Maggie, softly, intimately.

  ‘Yes?’ said Lata.

  ‘Fragrance first!’ And Maggie stepped back, holding the great amber bottle of Obsession she had picked off the chest behind Lata’s shoulder.

  The room looked like hell but smelt like heaven ten minutes later when the two women exited. Lata had regained her pile of trial papers — and some of her composure. Maggie remained innocently oblivious of what had gone on in the quiet junior’s mind, too excited at having discovered the fatal flaw in the prosecution’s case.

  As they hesitated at the door, the telephone began to ring. ‘I’ll get it,’ Maggie decided at once. ‘Always answer the telephone, even if you’re in the bath. Never miss an opportunity. Hello?’

  Maggie stood silently for a moment or two as the instrument chattered urgently, and all the laughter drained out of her face. Lata stood watching, speculating on how deeply tragic the telephone message could be. Maggie was silent for a second or two after she hung up and her eyes had a distant, almost dreamy look which Lata had never seen in them before. Then the flamboyant barrister shook herself, like a tiger after a swim. The life came back into her face. ‘Let’s go and crucify the prosecution,’ she said. ‘And then … How would you like a couple of weeks in Hong Kong?’

  *

  The Special Forces officer handed Tom Fowler the handset with some difficulty because he didn’t want to put down his rifle, just in case.

  ‘Direct line, sir,’ he said. ‘There’s another one from the main communications vehicle; that will be used to monitor things so this is just for your use. Push the button to connect. Release the pressure to break off again.’

  Tom took the handset and looked down at it without pressing the button, his mind racing. He had an habitual air of absent-mindedness which he fostered. It went well with his professorial image and, more importantly, it gave him extra time to think, in a world where too many people too often spoke too quickly too soon. Often with fatal results.

  ‘You’ve got to speak to him, sir,’ said the Special Forces officer, turning his head only slightly as he spoke, so that he would not lose his view of the main door down the barrel of his high-powered rifle.

  ‘People tend not to do things just because they’re kept waiting for a moment,’ said Tom gently. ‘People tend to do things because they’re pushed; because of what is said, not because of what is unsaid.’

  ‘You know best, sir,’ said the soldier in his best ‘Sod You’ tone. ‘But he’s got the whole family in there and he’s got five pounds of commercial explosive strapped round his waist, all set to go.’

  ‘Then why is he sitting there waiting to talk to someone on the phone?’ asked Tom.

  The soldier opened his mouth to reply but Tom pressed the button and put the handset in position. ‘Hello, Mr Thomas? It’s Tom Fowler here. What can I do for you?’

  Hoarse breathing.

  The man was obviously terrified, Tom thought. He looked along the quiet, almost domestic street. Five police cars. Two armed police units. Bomb disposal squad. Fire brigade as back-up, just in case. Special services vehicle. That was unusual — the nearest people with sniper rifles, probably. Execution squad, nevertheless. And all there because a young man, apparently a builder, with various bits of wood and equipment had walked unexpectedly into a quiet terraced house and then phoned the police. If I was him, I’d be bloody terrified, Tom thought.

  ‘I seen you on the telly …’

  ‘So they said. Now what can I do for you?’

  ‘You talked the guy in the plane down.’

  Tom had accidentally stepped out of contented, relative obscurity at the Maudsley Hospital in South London when he had talked down a self-appointed terrorist with a flying licence, who was threatening to crash his Cessna into one of the terminals at Heathrow last Easter. The pilot wouldn’t tell them which terminal was his target; wouldn’t tell them anything other than that the Cessna was packed with explosives. He had been telling the truth too. And Tom had talked him into making a safe landing. He had been a Special Forces man, Tom remembered; retired, of course.

  ‘So you want me to talk you down, Mr Thomas? What’s your first name? Stanley? May I call you that?’

  ‘Christian name. Stanley’s me Christian name. You believe in Christ, Mr Fowler?’

  ‘Ah … um … Well now …’ There was a trap here. This was very disturbing. The man was supposed to be so desperate that he was begging for a shrink to talk him out and yet here he was playing games and laying traps. As a matter of fact, Tom Fowler did believe in Christ. He went to church every Sunday, read the lesson once a month and had even done a bit of lay preaching in his time; and his steady baritone was the backbone of the choir. But this wasn’t anything to do with the God Tom Fowler worshipped.

  Still, in for a penny … ‘Ah, yes, I think I do believe in God, Mr Thomas. In my own way.’

  Again the hoarse breathing.

  ‘Yeah. They said so on the telly. Lay preacher. Funny thing to be looking down on such a good man.’

  More hoarse breathing.

  He isn’t scared after all, Tom decided. He’s unafraid, in control and upstairs. What, apart from fear, makes a man breathe like that? Exertion. Pain. Excitement.

  Apparently idly, seemingly in a world of his own, Tom Fowler began to spread out such information as had been supplied to him about the people in there with Thomas. Mr and Mrs Saddiqui and their children, a boy and a girl, both in their early teens. Average. No clue, except that Mr Saddiqui was an elder in his temple and a local councillor.

  In his professional life Tom had come across a range of things people could do to each other, many of them mind-numbingly disgusting and most of them seemingly to do with sex, though Tom himself was of the post-Jungian school rather than the post-Freudian, and probably more influenced by R. D. Laing than either. But his doctorate work in the pathology of criminal psychology had been filtered through a lively inclination to believe in the redemptive possibilities of a higher power. And, occasionally, through a very un-Christian hope that Hell was hot. Many of those latter thoughts arose out of contemplating what people were capable of doing to each other, of a sexual nature. But, realistically, there was nothing immediate in that line that a man could do with several great slabs of explosive secured round his waist like a kilt.

  Exertion, then.

  He pressed the button on the handset, breaking contact for an instant. ‘Did he take anything in there with him?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Find out.

  It went against the grain to initiate conversation, but, ‘I take it you have convictions yourself, then, Mr Thomas?’

  ‘Convictions! Good word. Yeah, I got convictions!’

  So Sigmund was right about subconscious association, if nothing else. You idiot! thought Tom. You sodding idiot, Fowler! You’re not here to turn the screws on him. Yet.

  He pushed the button; broke the connection. ‘Anyone mention a criminal record?’

  ‘Nah. Not under that name.’

  So, Mr Thomas, you’ve been born again.

  ‘They’ve got a photo, though. They’re checking. That’s where the chief superintendent is — down at the command wagon looking at the computer.’

  ‘Do you belong to a local church, Mr Thomas?’

  ‘Universal. Know what I mean?’

  ‘No, I don’t think I do.’

  ‘We’re everywhere, Fowler; we’re the Universal …’

  Two policemen arrived together, the sergeant who had gone off to find out what Thomas had been carrying — but he stood no chance against the chief super, self-importantly full of information from the police computer network. ‘He’s Martin Henry Perrott. Builder from Brixton. Killed two Jamaicans outside a church in South London five years ago. Claimed they were infidels, polluting the country with ungodly religions. Got seven years less remission. Let out just over a month ago — Tuesday, April 15th.’
r />   ‘Easter Tuesday.’

  ‘Apparently he was upset about that. Should have come out a week earlier. Procedural foul-up.’

  ‘I see. And what did he take in with him?’ Tom turned to the sergeant.

  ‘Wood and a tool kit.’

  ‘Wood. What sort? Twigs? Sticks? Planks? Boards? Branches? Beams?’

  The sergeant opened his mouth to reply when the cross came out of the window. It came out of the upstairs bedroom window and it shattered the whole bay window casement. It was not a small cross and when it landed in the front lawn it buried its foot deeply but still stood more than six feet high.

  Long before the cross had landed, however, Tom Fowler had whirled to the side of the Special Forces man. Just for an instant, just for the blink of an eye as the window exploded outwards and the great cross fell, there was a clear sight of Martin Henry Perrott framed in the window as though he himself was crucified.

  ‘Shoot,’ spat Tom Fowler.

  The soldier obeyed at once. A single shot cracked out. Perrott jerked back out of view.

  At the very instant that the cross landed, upright, in the front garden, the rest of the window it had come through was blasted out after it by a massive explosion. The roof went up like a flock of starlings and everybody in the roadway dived for cover.

  Ten minutes later, a bevy of police men and women were leading the family out of the wreck of their house. They were lucky that they had been secured downstairs when the explosive — not quite five pounds after all — had detonated upstairs. They had been doubly fortunate, reckoned Tom, mopping a head wound from a sharp shard of roof tile. For there was no doubt in his mind that Mr Thomas — the late Martin Henry Perrott — had meant to make them an intimate part of his own martyrdom in a few minutes’ time.

  ‘I’ll put in a full report as soon as I’ve had this head-wound seen to,’ said Tom to the chief superintendent as they walked slowly back towards his debris-strewn Rover.