The Pirate Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  She wondered if Huuk’s men had gone through the bookshelves as thoroughly as she and Twelvetoes had done. She checked; they had. Even the disk behind the family photograph was gone.

  Robin unbuttoned her pocket and slid the disk out, noting as though for the last time Brian Jordan’s schoolboy hand on the bright label, the numbers beneath the title, the little air bubbles trapped beneath the paper. Then she slipped it into the machine in drive A.

  PRESS ENTER TO PROCEED said the screen.

  She watched it as though it was a venomous serpent poised to strike her. Nothing happened. She raised her hand. She pressed ENTER.

  The screen went black and all hell was let loose. She sprang back, upsetting the chair, such was the unexpected brutality of the noise the machine emitted. One of Huuk’s computer experts had rigged the machine so that the action of pressing ENTER would trigger an alarm. Nor was that all. When she pressed the release button, trying to retrieve the disk, it soon became apparent that this had been tampered with as well and the little grey square of plastic was not going to come out again at her command. And in the meantime, the siren wailed and wailed.

  Huuk himself was there within moments, his face like stone. He gestured to her to get out and she obeyed. She did not see what he did, but the wailing stopped and when he came out into the corridor where she was waiting he was holding the disk.

  ‘Lieutenant Jordan had a system,’ he said. ‘All the disks were numbered as well as labelled. We knew one was missing from the time you last visited the ship. Thank you for returning it to us.’

  ‘Can I at least take the records you printed out?’ she asked a little desperately, just as Andrew puffed up beside her.

  ‘Of course. They are defence copies. Is there anything else?’

  She looked at Andrew. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Nothing else.’ Huuk nodded. Silently he turned, stepped back, picked up the pile of print-outs and returned with them in his hand. He gave them to Robin with something of a gesture, like a duellist saluting a gallant but lesser opponent. Then he escorted them to the gangway and watched them as they walked down to the Vantage.

  ‘Was it worth it?’ asked Andrew as they settled into the massive sports car.

  ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I’m half convinced that devil Huuk can still hear us. Do you suppose he’s psychic?’

  ‘God knows.’ He turned the starter and the engine crashed into life. He pulled off before Robin fastened her safety belt, but it was not until they reached the main gate that she reached down and pulled a second disk out of her shoe. She put it up on the dashboard and the last of the evening sun glinted on the side with sufficient force to show the tiny traces of adhesive which remained where the label had been carefully removed.

  As she was strapping on her seatbelt with a secret little smile playing around her lips, Andrew reached into his jacket pocket. ‘Brilliant idea, that, checking the radio room,’ he said. ‘Look what I retrieved from under the main transmitter while Huuk was downstairs dealing with you.’ And he threw a little black-covered notebook onto the top of the dashboard beside the disk.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  It was nearly midnight when Andrew said, ‘Look, Robin, you’ve got to go back to your own flat now and get to bed. Think of what you’ve got to do tomorrow. You have to meet Professor Fowler, brief him and take him in to see Richard. It’s going to be hard enough even if you’re brighteyed and bushy-tailed. It’ll be hell if you’ve had too little sleep.’

  ‘Sleep?’ she said in a tone of voice he hadn’t heard her use before. ‘You think I sleep?’

  ‘Listen to yourself, Robin. You’re exhausted. You want me to run you down the hill in the Vantage?’

  ‘What, wake up that monster simply to drop me somewhere I can get to in a five-minute walk?’

  ‘Well …’ he shrugged a little helplessly.

  ‘You’re sweet. And you’re right. I’ll go at once. Do you want a hand with this stuff?’ She gestured vaguely at the leftovers from a takeaway Sechuan feast.

  ‘No. The amah will tidy it up in the morning,’ he said. And she was too tired to argue.

  At the door he took her coat down and then reached for his own. ‘No,’ she said gently when she saw what he was doing. ‘I’ll be all right. I want to walk slowly and finish thinking this through. You get some rest yourself.’

  He was glad enough to obey, but as he turned back to switch off the lights after closing the door behind her, he saw the mess in the dining room again and found himself going through and tidying it away after all.

  Robin walked slowly down the hill. The roadway was well lit and the town at the foot of the slope, a couple of hundred metres distant, was still bustling. The walk could not have been safer, and she was aware that if she gave in to offers like Andrew’s of a lift home too often she would soon become reclusive and useless. And she had not been spinning Andrew a line. She did want to wander along slowly, thinking on her feet.

  The black book Andrew had discovered contained some interesting information. Robin had worked out the cryptic notes without too much trouble; it was their precise meaning she wanted to think through, and some of that meaning was hidden between the lines. She had to think it through — to her own satisfaction at the very least. And she had to do it tonight for, regretting already the rush of blood to the head which had made him steal it for her, Andrew proposed to hand it back to the authorities tomorrow. She could hardly blame him, and in any case it did not seem to her to add to the case against Richard. Andrew continued to suggest most strongly that she hand back the disk as well, but somehow she could not bring herself to give that up. It contained a secret hie marked for her eyes only, after all, and she could not bring herself to trust Commander Lee or Huuk.

  In essence, the black book was a simple record of calls which had been made between the captain of the Sulu Queen and the company secretary in the China Queens office. Robin suspected there would be no record of these calls in the radio log itself if it were ever found. The calls were regular but at odd times of the night; and they were far longer than company rules stipulated. What was exercising Robin’s mind was the fact that the calls stopped just a little less than a month ago, on the very day that Richard had sent her the postcard of Raffles to show that he had arrived in Singapore. The book had been kept beyond that time, for there was a series of neat ticks against the days and one or two personal notes, but no further radio calls were recorded.

  And the most likely reason that Robin could think of why the captain of the Sulu Queen should stop making his regular radio calls was if he was no longer there to do so.

  Which might explain what Richard had been doing aboard in the first place and certainly explained why Wally Gough wasn’t listed among the dead found aboard Sulu Queen.

  But, if Wally wasn’t on board his command when she left Singapore, where the hell had he got to?

  Robin had just become fully alive to the urgency of switching rather more of the investigation to the city-state of Singapore at the earliest opportunity when she realised that she was no longer alone. A tall figure, dressed in black and almost indistinguishable from the shadows, was moving at her side. She jerked in her breath to scream but recognised his chuckle just in time. ‘You are hard woman to catch alone.’

  ‘I really need a way to get in contact with you, Twelvetoes.’

  ‘I will think of something. But I am always closer than you think.’

  ‘You don’t know how reassuring it is to hear you say that.’

  ‘You have more friends than you realise —’

  ‘That’s very —’

  ‘ — and more enemies than you know.’

  ‘Enemies?’

  ‘What did you find on Ping Chau Island?’

  ‘Containers. Empty.’

  ‘Perhaps not as empty as you think.’

  ‘Perhaps not. I didn’t have time for much of a look. Can you get me back there?’

  ‘No. But I will send someone on your behalf, quickly and sec
retly.’

  ‘Why can’t I go?’

  ‘Did you know Daniel Huuk has issued orders to send a launch back to check again? They sail tomorrow … No? He did not mention that this afternoon? Well, there are many things he does not want you to know; that is another of them. But I doubt the Navy will find anything this time. What you did was … unexpected.’ There was a smile in his voice on the word. He sounded a little like a proud parent.

  The pair of them were almost at the light of the first intersection now and, although they were walking more slowly, Robin was all too well aware that her time was strictly limited. What did she want to ask Twelvetoes now that the Ping Chau matter was settled? Her mind raced, but nothing solid would come. She would wake up in the middle of the night berating herself for not thinking more clearly, she knew. ‘Twelvetoes,’ she said, desperately, ‘do you know what is really going on?’

  ‘Of course not, Little Mistress, or I would tell you!’ The laughter had died in his voice, replaced by a tinge of indignation.

  ‘Is there anyone who does know?’

  ‘Not that I know of, or I should be asking him.’ The way in which he said that made her pause.

  ‘But someone must have some idea!’ she almost cried.

  ‘There are, I believe, several people who know part of what is going on. They are Daniel Huuk, of course, and Victor Lee; a man I will not name who is the leader of the White Powder Triad; another who shall again remain nameless, who leads a family of pirates in Manila; two diplomats, I think — StJohn Syme and a man called Xiang Lo-wu who is currently entertaining Charles Lee from your company — did you know that? No? Believe me, it is true.’ The smile was back in his voice but the sound of it was becoming softer and softer as though he was fading away altogether.

  ‘Then there is yourself, your solicitor and Captain Walter Gough.’ The thread of his words persisted, though he himself was lost in the shadows again. ‘You all have a fairly clear idea, I think, of the section of the pattern you are involved in, though I suspect that Captain Gough only knows as much as Anna Leung will allow him to know. I myself see enough of the pattern to suspect where the rest lies and as soon as I know more than that you will too. But other than we few, I think there is only one person who has seen the grand design.’

  ‘And who is that? Who is that, Twelvetoes?’

  ‘Why, Richard, of course.’

  *

  It was impossible to guess the motives behind Twelvetoes’ information, its nature and its timing. What was certain, however, was that a good night’s sleep for Robin did not feature in the old man’s plan. She tossed and turned, sifting his information, testing it against her own knowledge and trying to use it as a lens through which she could examine what was going on from new perspectives and so gain new insights. But it all kept slipping away from her and ultimately she knew she would have to settle for the immediate targets she had agreed with Andrew. Only by sorting things out little by little and one step at a time could she have any realistic hope of clearing Richard’s name. And that was the overall goal, after all. Everything had to tend to that end. In one month’s time, plus however many more days the trial took to come to a conclusion, Richard had to be exonerated, declared innocent of all those terrible charges and free to come home with her. That was Robin’s only target. Any other pattern of motives, involvements and events which Twelvetoes Ho chose to talk about was relevant to her only if it helped her get Richard free.

  The first major step on this quest was to meet Professor Tom Fowler of the world-famous psychiatric section of the Maudsley Hospital in London at the airport next morning, but his flight wasn’t due until ten o’clock local time, so she had time to clear up a little niggling irritation first. She was at Andrew’s door at eight thirty and the pair of them were in his office by nine. She was on the phone to Singapore at five past. There was still no reply from the China Queens office. Enough was enough. She asked the operator to put her through to the Singapore authorities.

  So it was that at 9.15 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday, 27 May, Robin found herself in contact with Inspector Sung of the Singapore police.

  She explained who she was and what her problem was.

  Inspector Sung was good enough to inform her that the disappearance of Miss Anna Leung was already the subject of a police enquiry there. There had been some question of financial impropriety, not to mention moral laxity; and in any case co-operation had been sought by Commander Lee of the Royal Hong Kong constabulary.

  Exhausted, under enormous stress, extremely irate and mentally cursing herself, Robin announced that she would very much like to support the authorities in this matter and asked whether the inspector could by any chance give her the name of a reputable local private investigator.

  So Inspector Sung told her about Edgar Tan who, he happened to know, was not working on a case just at the moment.

  *

  Tom Fowler’s plane had come into Kai Tak, and, even after the time it had taken to clear immigration, collect his baggage and come through Customs, he was still as pale as the woman who had come to meet him.

  ‘How do you do?’ she said. ‘I’m Robin Mariner. Can I help you with any of that?’

  He handed over the briefcase and hung on to the suitcase. He rarely travelled and never travelled light. ‘I’ve organised a taxi to your digs,’ she said. ‘You’ll be staying with my solicitor if that’s acceptable. We can check you into an hotel if you would prefer but things are getting pretty busy now that it’s only a month or so to handover. Lots of people who don’t have to be here coming in for a visit; lots of people who can’t go anywhere else trying to do so, just in case. Very busy indeed.’

  ‘And not exactly the best time for a trial,’ Tom observed. ‘The worst.’

  He had stemmed the flow of information and he had not meant to do so. ‘But you have a trial date and are preparing the defence,’ he prompted.

  ‘That’s about the size of it. We have a little more than two weeks left. Our barrister is due later in the week. She’s flying out from London too.’

  ‘Are there no competent barristers here, then?’ He was surprised enough to ask an indelicate question.

  ‘On the contrary, the people here are extremely competent. The same is true of psychiatrists, of course. This barrister is something of a good luck charm, though.’

  ‘You think you need luck?’

  ‘I believe in luck and I’ll take all I can get.’

  ‘Very wise.’

  They had arrived at her taxi now and they handed the cases to the driver. ‘It’s a lovely drive to Repulse bay,’ Robin said. ‘And it’s long enough for us to start making some plans.’

  ‘What I need to know first,’ said Tom as the taxi headed out of Kai Tak, ‘is exactly what you require.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Obviously I stand to be corrected as I get to know the case more intimately, but from what I understand at this point we are dealing with a case of complete dissociative amnesia, taken to the point of loss of personality. There is a closed head injury involved —’

  ‘Closed head?’

  ‘What it sounds like — the head was not cut open. Quite. And there has been a history of amnesia.’

  ‘Richard lost his memory once a few years ago — another closed head injury. He fell out of a crashing helicopter and caught his head on some deck furniture.’

  ‘That incident lasted how long?’

  ‘A couple of days.’

  ‘That’s quite long.’

  ‘But nowhere as long as this time.’

  ‘That’s right. But we’ll have a look at the pathology of the case when I actually talk to your husband. We’ll take for granted that, for whatever reason, he cannot remember what has happened to him up to and including the time he spent on the ship Sulu Queen. In the meantime, let’s talk about what you want me to do.’

  ‘We’ve come round full circle here and I still don’t see exactly what you’re driving at.’


  ‘Do you want me to work on the area of retraining your husband in the basic memory skills?’

  ‘Teach him how to remember?’

  ‘Yes. Teach him how to progress from this point onwards, building a new memory and, if need be, a new sense of himself?’

  ‘Is that what you do?’ She sounded horrified.

  ‘In some cases, yes.’

  ‘God, no. I want you to try and make him really remember. Make him remember who he is and what happened on the Sulu Queen.’

  ‘But it may well be that he does not wish to remember what happened on the Sulu Queen,’ Tom warned her.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You must know that lengthy loss of memory through a simple knock on the head, no matter how hard, is quite rare. Fugue states such as this most commonly arise because the mind cannot accept what has gone on. In rejecting what it cannot accept, however, it sometimes rejects everything else as well. The result of this is that the patient has no memory of anything, even of their own identity. And sometimes they even damage their ability to use memory at all. They retain a range of skills and some basic general knowledge but they can lose the ability to concentrate. Sometimes they need to be reminded about new facts. It is rare but it has been known. Wars have furnished a good few classic examples; violent incidents, accidents, murders. There are well-documented cases, and almost all of them have involved people running away from something which they have found themselves absolutely unable to face.’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t be too surprising if that is what we’re dealing with, would it?’ she observed bitterly. ‘Richard was the only person found alive on a ship full of forty recently butchered people and six Vietnamese who had been dead for a few days longer. No matter what happened, he isn’t really going to want to remember it, is he? Would you?’

  ‘If people were trying to prove I had killed them all and I hadn’t actually done so, then I most certainly would want to remember, yes!’