by Peter Tonkin
‘What is it that you require, Number One?’
‘Tell me about yesterday evening, Captain.’
‘What you mean?’
‘You know very well what I mean. By sunset last night this ship was awash with natives from the Paracel Islands. They were wearing very little and making a lot of very close friends amongst your crew.’
‘I do not know what you mean. This was, I am sure, some kind of an hallucination. From the blow to your head.’
‘Oh, come on, Captain!’
‘Or from the painkilling drugs with which you were treated. You ask Fat Chow. He warned me something like this might happen.’
‘You mean to tell me that Fat Chow said, “I’m just going to give the first officer some painkillers now, Captain, but don’t be surprised if she suddenly thinks the ship is full of naked Paracel islanders bonking the brains out of the crew”?’
‘You find Fat Chow; you ask him, missy!’
‘Well, Captain Sin, I think I shall do just that!’
But Fat Chow was not so easily found. After a cursory search for the chief steward, Robin became sucked into first officer duties and by midday she was back up on the bridge, relieving Sam Yung for the afternoon watch. It was only after he had thundered down to get some lunch that Robin realised the obvious: if Fat Chow was nowhere to be found in his usual haunts, then perhaps he was still tending the Vietnamese men. Perhaps he had even set up his own nursing watch on them.
Robin at once called the sickbay on the internal phone but there was no reply. She stood the first hour of her watch, brooding over the fact that she might have misjudged the grumpy little chief steward and the fact that she had definitely been derelict in her duty. As first officer it was she, and not the chief steward, who was ship’s medical officer. She should have been in charge of the treatment of the sick men, or at the very least fully apprised of what was happening to them. She should have arranged a round-the-clock watch on the sick men herself and a regular pattern of reports on their welfare.
By 13:00 Robin was so restless that when the unfortunate Sam Yung, also unable to find Fat Chow, came onto the bridge to ask a question about personal itching, she handed over to him instead of answering him, and vanished below. But Fat Chow was nowhere to be found in the sickbay.
Now that she was here, Robin thought to salve her conscience a little and check the patients for vital signs. Although they both remained comatose, their heartbeats were strong, their respiration seemed normal and their dark eyes reacted to light when the lids were rolled gently back. The only thing which seemed to have gone wrong was that the young one, the one with the burned hand, had pulled his drips loose. Although he was lying perfectly still now, he had obviously been restless at some time. She reinserted the needles into his arm and fastened the tape over them. Then, with a glance around the little room, she went about her business again.
Sam Yung obviously wanted to chat about something but she gave him no chance. As soon as she reached the bridge again, she sent him below with the specific mission of finding Fat Chow and setting up with him a regular watch on the Vietnamese. Or, if the chief steward remained hard to find, to select six sensible sailors and arrange a watch himself. The third officer went with an ill grace, and Robin served out the rest of his watch. There was a lot to do. She made up the logs, leaving a space in which she would in due course insert the goings-on in the Paracels; detailing the rescue of the Vietnamese, and describing the condition of the two survivors. She wrote up their position and their progress since the engines had been fixed. She plotted their exact position at noon, and duly assumed her own proper watch. And, now that normality was re-established, she crossed to the radio shack at 12:10 precisely to put through a call to Hong Kong and find out how her beloved husband was.
By 12:15 Robin began to suspect that there was something wrong with the radio, but it was nothing as simple as a loss of power. The set seemed to be on and to be operating normally; had she not been trying to use it she would probably have noticed nothing untoward. But no matter what combination of buttons her practised fingers pushed, no matter what dials and displays she checked and reset, the radio would not respond to her. Doggedly, increasingly irritably, she kept this up until 12:30 when she gave in and sent for Radio Officer Yuk Tso.
Yuk Tso spent much of the rest of Robin’s watch fiddling with the equipment, tutting with confusion. He went through the same routines which Robin had already tried, with her standing at his shoulder telling him she had tried that and she had told him so. Then he went through a rather more complex series of routines, still with no result. Finally he took out the manual, and Robin knew that this would take some time. She returned to her watch out on the bridge and busied herself about her duties while Yuk Tso took bits of the radio out and checked them; he removed one or two down to the workshop, but nothing he could do seemed to make any difference. ‘I don’t know what it is,’ he admitted to her at last. ‘Could anyone have come in here and fiddled with this stuff?’
‘Who?’ asked the irritated Robin. ‘Why?’
‘I do not know, missy. But this just not right.’
‘There’s been an officer on watch in here at all times.’ Yuk Tso shook his head. ‘Something wrong somewhere. But I can find nothing …’ By 15:00 he had stopped fiddling with the equipment and began to trace the wiring. He double-checked all the power lines, then he began to trace the aerial conduit round the room and up to the port-side wall. ‘Well,’ he announced at 16:00 as Wai Chan appeared to take up his watch accompanied by the captain who was ready to oversee the evening radio link, ‘the radio is still dead, and I can find nothing wrong inside.’
‘Maybe something’s wrong outside?’ suggested Robin, and wished at once that she had held her tongue.
From 16:15 until sunset she accompanied the deeply confused radio officer as he traced the aerial conduit up the outside of the bridgehouse. Privately as she fumed over landing herself with such a tedious and time-consuming duty, she thought that if there had been any damage done out here then it served Captain Sin right for filling the ship with natives in the night. At no time did it occur to her that the Vietnamese might have been involved. It was a long, long time later before she put together the disappearance of the chief steward, the loose drip feeds and the damaged equipment. But by then so much else was going on that her discoveries seemed hardly important.
In the meantime she toiled up the bridgehouse, helping the radio officer as best she could, doing a job which the meanest of the GP seamen would have been able to do as well as she. By 18:30 the pair of them were right up at the top of the radio mast, the better part to twenty-five metres above the surface of the water as the evening closed down through sunset, salmon-pink and rose, massive, calm and breathtaking. Standing on the little platform, perhaps four metres square, with her back to one narrow set of steps, looking at Yuk Tso standing atop another set, fiddling with the last few metres of aerial, she had ample opportunity to look around, savouring the dusty grey tones filtering into the French blue of the sea and sky, watching the way in which the last of the sunlight bled out of the air on one hand while the indigo armies of the shadows massed on the other, pulling the dark horizons in towards the ship like a massive tidal wave.
Just as the dark seemed to break over the ship and Yuk Tso announced that there was nothing more to do and they should give up and go back down, Robin saw, somewhere out to the south-east of them, away at the very foundation of that rushing wave of night, a bright burning light which flashed and was extinguished, as though some secret ship was signalling there, just on the very horizon. And, for some reason she could not fathom, the sight of it made her hair stir and her blood ran cold.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Maggie rose majestically, at ten past one next afternoon, Friday, 20 June.
‘My Lord,’ she began, ‘ladies and gentlemen of the jury. It is most fitting, I believe, that here and now, in the last days of the rule of British law in the Crown Colony, we sh
ould see it functioning in its purest form.
‘As you are aware, the adversarial system which stands at the heart of British common law is based upon an ancient and elegantly simple premise, that the prosecution and the defence present evidence, witness and testimony to a jury of clear-thinking men and women such as yourselves; peers, as it is said, of the accused. Each advocate seeks to present these things, to prove, to explain and to interpret them in such a way that the jury can have little or no doubt of the innocence or guilt of the accused, subject only to direction by the learned judge on relevant points of law. The jury then must decide their verdict, unanimously and, as the celebrated phrase has it, beyond a reasonable doubt.
‘But of course life is never that simple. There are often conflicts within each case. These will often be revealed, indeed, by the process called cross-examination. Evidence may not stand up to scrutiny; expert testimony can be called into doubt; witnesses can be shown to have mis-remembered and on occasion they can be proved to have perjured themselves.
‘Most notably, also, the explanations given by the accused and the victim to the jury can weigh very heavily in their minds, more heavily than all the testimony and evidence adduced elsewhere. And, finally, the appeal to their critical and logical faculties made by the prosecution or the defence can vary for any number of extraneous reasons. The whim of tabloid editors and programme presenters; the race, the gender, the profession, the social standing of the accused; his dress, his looks, the colour of his eyes or hair.
‘How fortunate we are, therefore, to be dealing with a case where there is almost no dispute about the major facts, for, as things stand, there will be no direct evidence from anyone actually involved in these events at all. Even the accused man, Captain Richard Mariner, having been severely wounded in the head by those men who might have been assumed to be his rescuers, has no current memory whatsoever of the dreadful events which make up the case against him. Everything, therefore, depends, purely and absolutely, upon the interpretation you, the jury, put upon the facts — largely undisputed, as I say — and the manner in which these facts may be interpreted.’
Maggie paused here, looking round the court, letting her golden gaze settle on each juror, before she turned and glanced at the judge.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Maggie continued, ‘what you are asked by the prosecution to believe is this. That Captain Mariner went on board the Sulu Queen, perhaps with the desire in his mind to kill everybody aboard. That, during the voyage towards Hong Kong, he decided that he definitely would kill everybody aboard. And that, finally, on the night of Thursday, 8 May, he acted with the full intention of killing or grievously wounding everyone aboard.
‘All of the weapons he used, ladies and gentlemen, we must expect him to have smuggled for the purpose either out of England or in from Singapore, one of the most carefully controlled societies in the world with regard to the supply and smuggling of guns. Or perhaps the prosecution is going to ask you to believe that, coming aboard with these murderous thoughts harboured within his breast, Captain Mariner was fortunate enough to find this striking range of weapons already concealed on the ship and convenient to his hand. Or even — though I find my own credulity beginning to stretch quite painfully here — the prosecution may ask you to believe that the captain arranged for a gang of mysterious confederates to appear out of the night, supply the weapons, perhaps even aid him in his gruesome task, and vanish again leaving no discernible trace. For, I ask you to recall, ladies and gentlemen, in fact I ask you never to forget, that in order to prove their case of murder, the prosecution must establish that Captain Mariner planned to do these things, meant to do them, saw an opportunity to do them and then actually did them; in cold blood and while of sound mind, with or without help. Each murder as charged, with each or all of the weapons named, must have been done by him or on his order. It must have been planned to some extent beforehand, it must have been done on purpose, not by accident, and it must have been done with full intent by a man of sound mind. If the actions of a person accused of murder do not fit into these categories, all of these categories, then he is not guilty of the crime. The prosecution ask you to believe one of the propositions I have already put to you, or something very like it; they ask you to believe that there is no other explanation, and that, beyond a reasonable doubt, Captain Mariner stands guilty as charged.’ Maggie, her throat dried by her carefully calculated oratory, reached down to the table behind which she was standing and took a sip of water. Once again, her eyes were on the jury. She was not addressing these remarks to anyone other than them, and was taking the opportunity to establish eye contact and a basic relationship, hopefully a sympathetic one, with each of them. With her eyes fastened on the plump, perspiring face of a particularly susceptible young man in the front row, she continued her opening address.
‘But what are the actual facts with which we are dealing here? They may be simply recounted. A little less than two months ago the Mariner family set off for a spring holiday. Captain Mariner stayed behind to finish some business while his wife drove up to Carlisle with their twins, six-year-olds, a boy and a girl. They all planned to meet up at her father’s home near Carlisle and to drive north in a day or so. Instead of her husband she received a brief message that he had been called to Singapore on business and would contact her. That contact failed to materialise or was destroyed.
‘Although he has no memory of what actually called him out, or what he did when he got there, we have established that, within a day of his arrival in Singapore, Captain Mariner was aboard the Sulu Queen, a ship owned by his own company who have recently acquired control of the China Queens Company which has run this ship and her sister ship for some years in the local area. On the very moment of sailing, Sulu Queen’s original captain, Walter Gough, was carried off, apparently with peritonitis, and vanished from Singapore General Hospital.
‘Captain Gough appears to have vanished from the whole of Singapore, in fact, apparently in company with the secretary of the China Queens Company. This lady, who worked under the alias of Anna Leung, was a complete mystery until earlier testimony explained that she was, in fact, an undercover police operative. Her motives remain a mystery to us — as does the reason why she failed to deliver a range of important messages.
‘Within days, as she came north towards Hong Kong, the Sulu Queen was out of radio contact. We know that somewhere along the line she picked up some Vietnamese people, women and children — dead women and children. There the facts we know about activity on the Sulu Queen herself, stop.
‘But then we learn of a mysterious message to the naval contingent coastguards section here in Hong Kong telling of an apparently derelict ship drifting without power into Hong Kong waters. The Navy disguises itself, no doubt to avoid any chance of diplomatic incident with your near neighbours the People’s Republic of China, and goes aboard. And, as we know — as the whole world now knows — the Navy finds aboard some forty-five corpses. They find only one man alive in that charnel house and so they shoot him in the head and destroy his memory. Then, while he is unable to enter any plea of his own because of the damage they did to him, the authorities accuse the survivor of murdering everyone else. Except, that is, for the unfortunate Vietnamese!
‘And so we stand here ready to consider this case with almost none of the facts disputed, with much of the evidence agreed and with no witnesses — without even one word of testimony from the accused — to cloud our deliberations. But while the defence disputes almost none of the facts in this case, we do most certainly dispute almost every interpretation the prosecution has put upon those facts. We absolutely and bluntly refute the charges the prosecution alleges arise out of those interpretations, and it is our hope and our belief that we will cause you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to doubt those interpretations also and to dismiss these ridiculous charges out of hand.’
There was a ripple of something very like applause as Maggie took another sip of water, but a glare from Mr
Justice Fang brought silence swiftly back. Then Maggie looked up, took a deep breath, and opened the defence case proper.
‘First, My Lord, I would like to call Dr Thomas Fowler, Consulting Psychologist to the Psychiatric Unit at the Maudsley Hospital, London.’
As Tom made his way to the stand, Maggie DaSilva stood, apparently the personification of cool confidence, trying to disguise from the jury the fact that she was feeling a little faint.
‘Now, Dr Fowler,’ Maggie said after having established Tom’s identity and credentials, ‘I would like you to describe the mental state of the accused as far as you understand it.’
‘Captain Mariner is emerging from a state of hysterical amnesia. He already seems to me to have emerged from a deeper state of physiological amnesia caused by a blow to his left temporal lobe.’
‘Lets be absolutely clear about this, Doctor. Captain Mariner was originally the subject of a physical amnesia caused by a blow to his head?’
‘That is correct. There was a large bruise in his left temple, with a great deal of short-term tissue damage immediately behind it.’
‘And we have heard in evidence already that this was caused by an anti-personnel round, fired during his arrest,’ Maggie slipped in.
‘I am not competent to comment on that though I understand that this was indeed the case,’ concurred Tom solidly.
‘But the captain has now recovered from the effects of this blow?’