The Bomb Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘We’ll split into two teams, then,’ she decided. ‘Mr Hogg, you take the Atropos complement, except for galley and dining saloon staff, and search the port side of the ship. Search everywhere except the cargo areas. Mr LeFever, I’d be pleased if you would go with them at first. I’ll take the Clotho complement and search the starboard. Ann, you can go with either team. Crew will dismiss to dinner at eighteen hundred.’ She paused for a moment as Ann gave a curt nod, then rushed on without noticing her American friend’s reticence. ‘Officers will report back to me here at that time, though we will stay in contact by walkie-talkie in the meantime. Mr LeFever, we will check the cargo holds after dinner.

  ‘Mr Hogg, I would be grateful if you could assure your men that this is not a race or a contest of any kind. I really do not want to start any rivalries between the crews, but if we wait to draw up balanced lists and areas of responsibility, we will lose the light, and this job will be quite hard enough even when we can see what we’re doing. And Mr Hogg,’ she added as that worthy was just on his way off the bridge, ‘remember that this will be an unrivalled opportunity to discover the whereabouts of Captain Black. If you find him, I want to know at once.’

  ‘Yes, Captain.’

  ‘Off you go, then. And I’ll come too. Mr Timmins, you have her.’

  *

  Walter Hogg was in a near-panic. He had been sure for some time that the Wide Boy had kept at least part of his stash somewhere under the spare propeller at the forward end of the deck between the hatch to number one hold and the forecastle head. Quite by chance, he had seen him acting suspiciously one night while on the prowl for a cure for night starvation and he had followed him down the deck as far as he dared — far enough to see the rough location of the nefarious activity but nothing more. While Reynolds had been alive, he hadn’t dared to look more closely. Since his death, there had been no real opportunity to check. This morning he had nearly had a heart attack when the new captain had announced that she was thinking of replacing the damaged propeller with the spare one. The sudden resumption of communications, however, had given him a respite and he had planned to have a look during the midnight watch tonight. And now the captain had ordered a stem to stern, truck to keel search.

  He realised how stupid he had been not to take a chance earlier. If he wasn’t quick about it, there was every likelihood that the limey woman would find Reynolds’s merchandise. That would be a total disaster. He didn’t like her, but he was not stupid enough to underestimate her. He was certain that anything she found she would simply destroy and no one would get any profit or pleasure from whatever it was at all. But what could he do? His team was made up of people he didn’t know or trust — starting with LeFever. Hogg couldn’t see any way of getting away from them to have a look on his own.

  He split the team up into smaller and smaller groups. He was not an able officer. He was young and untried, considering his seniority aboard, but he knew the ship well enough to be able to delegate a lot of specific areas to increasing numbers of groups. He sent most of his team to look through the engineering areas, the galleys and the accommodation on the bridge. Half of those he had brought outside with him he put under LeFever’s command to search down the decks behind the bridgehouse. Hogg himself worked his way down the main deck and he still had half a dozen men in tow.

  The bright sunlight had melted the thick frost which had cloaked the vessel this morning and the decks were slick and slippery. The low sun kept the nearby ice ablaze and split the deck into absolute patches of burning brightness and freezing shade. Hogg was aware that the captain had dispatched none of her men into the engineering sections yet. She was using the daylight to examine the decks first. The only chance he had of getting down to the spare propeller before she did lay in the fact that she had not split up her team to anything like the same extent as he had and the search she was making seemed to be much slower and more painstaking. ‘You three, swing that lifeboat out,’ he ordered, ‘and go through it with a fine-tooth comb.’ Three men shrugged and went to work. He set off down the rest of the deck with the last of his team. As he came out past the front of the bridgehouse and onto the weather deck, salvation presented itself. He hurried forward excitedly, hardly even bothering to check anything at his feet.

  ‘I want you three up there in that gantry,’ he grated as his men came under it. ‘Go over it inch by inch.’ The three crew members nodded resignedly and began to climb the steps up the right leg, one after the other. Hogg hurried forward alone at last. His heart was thumping and his mind was racing. Actually finding the hiding place and recovering anything that was there would only be half the battle. He would have to find another hiding place guaranteed to remain undisturbed. One much more convenient and easier of access. Would it be sufficient to announce that he had looked under the propeller and found nothing? If the captain would believe that, then he could come back later and move whatever he found at his leisure. If last night had been anything to go by, he could drive a forklift truck up and down the deck and no one would stir. Everyone seemed to have been flat out, even the captain on watch. There was no other possible explanation for the hour at which the ship had come to life this morning.

  The huge three-bladed propeller lay as flat as possible, its variable pitch blades in their minimum setting. Great hoops of steel pinned it to the deck and were secured by massive bolts to stop the propeller from moving in even the roughest weather. The first thing the captain would have to get done if she did go ahead with her plan to use it in the morning was to have those bolts cut off, Hogg calculated. He would probably find himself down here with the oxyacetylene crew first thing tomorrow, he thought grimly. The propeller had been swathed in tarpaulin which had been folded and secured neatly into place. It was like a Christmas parcel, he reflected, reaching it at last. Like a Christmas parcel in more ways than one. His hands were actually trembling as he began to undo the nearest lines.

  He had to fight the urge to keep glancing over his shoulder as he worked. Keep cool, he thought to himself. Act like you’re just obeying orders. The knots were surprisingly easy to undo. It was only a matter of minutes before he had the first rope loosened and stood ready to throw the tarpaulin back. He risked a glance around the deck. He was absolutely alone. The nearest people to him were the three men in the gantry halfway back along the deck. He threw the tarpaulin back just far enough to make an entrance. As though entering a tent in some childhood camp, he stepped inside.

  It was the smell he noticed first, even before he registered the gloom. He turned his head as though moving his nostrils through the dank, foetid air would make the odour clearer. Automatically, his short hairs prickling on the back of his fat neck, he stepped back. The flap of tarpaulin swung open wider. Wide enough to let in light from the setting sun.

  At first Hogg didn’t realise that the figure crouching there was dead. He stepped forward, about to speak. But the movement allowed light to fall across the face and the frosted pallor of the skin was revealed. Hogg reached forward, stunned. The folds of the dressing gown were set like stone. The whole figure was like some kind of statue. Shaking his head, Hogg stepped back again and, horribly, the corpse seemed to follow him, toppling forward to tumble at his feet, hitting the deck with the sound a balk of timber might make. Only then, when it rolled over, did Hogg see that the skin over half the face had gone, displaying muscle like a sheep’s side hanging skinned in a butcher’s shop. And no sooner had he registered this fact than he registered another, even more disturbing. The hands, reaching out strangely, as though bringing something up close to the late captain’s face, ended at the tops of the palms. Whoever had hidden him here and tied up the canopy so neatly afterwards had cut off all of Uncle Bobby’s fingers first.

  *

  By the time Nico and Harry Piper reached Clotho’s spare propeller, the sun had almost gone, but they were able to throw back the tarpaulin and check that there was no sign of any stowaway beneath it.

  ‘That only leaves
the holds, really,’ observed Harry. ‘Number one’s full of water,’ Nico reminded him. ‘Worth a look, though.’

  ‘Okay, but we’d better be careful. With the ship running full ahead, it’ll probably be a bit restless down there. When the captain went down last, I had to secure him pretty handily with a line.’

  ‘Better do the same for me, then,’ said Harry.

  By the time they had the line secured, it was twilight, the long, lingering luminous twilight of clear evenings in high latitudes. The hatch slid back and Harry climbed down onto the curving ladder every bit as carefully as Richard had done earlier. The twilight lit up the clear, almost colourless sky above, but it served only to emphasise the Stygian gloom in the hold itself. The ladder beneath Harry was unexpectedly firm, and he was able to move about quite well, but he found it very difficult to see anything much at all.

  ‘I can’t see,’ he called up to Nico. At that moment the buzzer on Nico’s walkie-talkie began to sound. He felt the rope round his waist adjust as Nico moved to answer. Then it was just a distant, one-sided conversation which did not make much sense to the young engineer.

  ‘She said what? ... Found him where? ... Hogg did? I’m not surprised!’

  While he listened distantly, Harry’s eyes began to clear a little. He realised that the surface of the water just beneath him was behaving a little strangely. It didn’t look quite right either. He put his right hand down towards it but found that he could no more reach it than see it properly. He moved down a rung or two, listening still.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Someone must have ... And done the fingers too, but why? ... Frozen to death, yes ... Until there’s an autopsy, yes ... Then why?’

  Harry was well down on the ladder now. He reached down again and was surprised to find that the strange grey water in the hold would not let his fingers through its surface. He pulled his hand back, made a fist and punched down.

  ‘Ouch!’ It was ice, solid enough to bruise his knuckles.

  ‘Even so,’ Nico was saying above, ‘there’s something not right ... Damn right ... Yes, okay. Back we go.’ The Italian leaned over the raised edge of the hatch. ‘We’re going back,’ he shouted down.

  ‘It’s ice, Nico,’ Harry called back. ‘The water in here’s freezing solid.’

  ‘Jesu! We don’t want that! Wait a minute ...’

  The first mate’s shadow vanished and Harry wondered what he was up to. Then abruptly the most unexpected thing happened. The hold lights went on. It had never occurred to Harry that they would still be working, but they were. Brightness flooded the great square chamber and it threw into stark detail the glacial sheet of ice which lay across the surface, pushing up against the hold walls and securing the ladder firmly in its crystal grip. And revealing, immediately beneath its surface, looking up at Harry as though watching him through a window, the body of Jamie Curtis, suspended in the water spread against the underside with his eyes and mouth wide open, as though screaming some terrible warning.

  *

  Robin looked down at the corpse of Captain Black, her face frowning with concentration. She was not examining the dead man, simply trying to work out the implications of the discovery and the strange mutilation. In the warmth of the bridgehouse, the body was beginning to thaw, tiny droplets of water condensing on the marble skin, a fold or two of patterned silk beginning to darken out of petrified rigidity. It was only a matter of time before he began to leak. There was no question about it, he would have to be wrapped carefully and reverently, then placed in cold storage until they could get him to a port. And to a coroner’s court. Still, as she had said to Richard, he looked to her exactly like a man who had frozen to death. But perhaps he had been dead before he had frozen; she did not have the expertise to tell. And she had no way of knowing whether the skin missing from feet, palms and cheek — not to mention the fingers and thumbs — had gone before or after death. But there was no doubt in her mind that he had died — met his death — somewhere other than under the tarpaulin by the spare propeller. So he must have died early last night in one place aboard, then been discovered and moved much later last night. But where had he died? Outside, if he had frozen. Why had he been moved? Because he had found something or had died near something. Why had his fingers and thumbs been removed? Because he had touched something or had tight hold of something. She didn’t want to consider the possibility of torture, and ruled it out anyway because of the noise which would have been involved in removing a conscious person’s fingers. They had all, including her and with only two obvious exceptions, been asleep. But the screaming of a man having his fingers removed would have woken someone up, surely. And she could see no sign of bruising where the wrists might have been restrained. Most likely the fingers had been removed after death. So, who had done it? If he had been killed, then it seemed likely he had been killed and moved by the same person. And that left two areas of contention. Black must have been looking for Reynolds’s drugs. Maybe he found them and one of Reynolds’s associates found him. Or maybe the captain had found something else entirely. Like a bomb, for instance.

  Her blood ran cold at the thought, especially as it was suddenly much more real to her now. More real even than it had been from her father’s warning or even from the faxed poster and picture. Discussing both with her crews had got her nowhere, just as the search had been getting them nowhere until Captain Black had turned up. La Guerre Verte seemed so fantastic, somehow. But Captain Black’s hands were all too real.

  She crossed Reynolds’s room — they had brought the Captain back here because it had been the last place he had been when alive — and picked up the phone. She dialled the bridge and Timmins answered. ‘I want two men to take the captain’s body to cold storage,’ she said. ‘You know the crew. You know who would be best for the job. Then, when you’ve sorted that out, I want you to get a list ready for me. I want to see everyone aboard in my cabin starting at nineteen hundred. I don’t care about the order, but I want to interview everyone aboard tonight.’

  When she had finished, she dialled Ann Cable’s cabin. ‘Ann, can you write shorthand?’

  ‘It’s a while since I took my Pitman’s course, but sure, I guess.’

  ‘Great. In that case, I’ve got a job for you.’

  *

  Richard drove the iron bar down as hard as he could but still it skidded off the ice and he grunted with frustration as he came near to dropping it. ‘It’s no good,’ he called up to Nico. ‘I’ll have to strike straight down. The ice seems to be so thick that it shouldn’t matter.’

  Nico said nothing. This was not the time to start trying to explain just how much bad luck was involved in damaging the dead, even if you did do it by accident while you were trying to chip them free of ice. He strengthened his grip on Richard’s lifeline and prayed silently that Johnny Sullivan did not hit anything too solid with the bow of the ship which he was currently in charge of as she ran full ahead into the thickening darkness. This was going to be delicate enough without any brushes with ice at twenty-five knots.

  Richard had a firm grip on the iron bar now and, pointing it straight down at Jamie’s midriff, he struck again. This time the ice cracked. He lowered his aim and struck again. Cracks radiated out from the two successful blows, distorting the already disturbing expression on the young man’s face. Richard was on the verge of screaming with frustration. The news that their boy had been lost at sea would be hard enough for Mr and Mrs Curtis to bear. Their modest terraced house would never really see sunlight again, he knew. But to have their sorrow compounded by the inevitable coroner’s hearing would be more than they could bear, he suspected. Brutally, he drove the bar down again just at the point of the cadet’s armpit, and it smashed through the ice and plunged into the water until it vanished into the swirl of Jamie’s wet-weather gear.

  The tip of it struck something. Richard was a fisherman and had been so since earliest childhood. He had never ceased to be fascinated by what subtleties of information could be
transmitted up a trembling line and along a rod, even to gloved fingers — as happened at that moment. Whatever the tip of the crowbar struck, it was not part of the boy. It should not have been there. The sensation of it, ringing up the metal pole as vivid as a salmon’s bite, sent the whole of Richard’s long body cold as ice. Then the cracks in the ice spread far enough to release the end of the ladder. The metal dipped and danced. The ice sprang to life, its level surface destroyed by the heaving liquid it had restrained. The silence in the hold was shattered at the same time by the clashing wash of the hold’s contents and by the creaking heave of the dancing ladder. And it suddenly became obvious that Jamie was not alone down there.

  Richard took a firm grip on the slippery rung with his left hand, hooked the crowbar on with his right and called up to Nico, ‘Young Rupert Biggs is down here too by the look of things. Throw me down a line with a loop and I’ll try to slip it over Jamie’s head and shoulders.’

  The line came down, but slipping it over Jamie was easier said than done. And even when he was secured, it was impossible to lift him more than halfway out of the hold because his safety lines were tangled. Richard climbed up past the dangling, cascading body and ran across to the nearest tool box for a knife. Then it was only a matter of minutes before the cadet was out on the deck and Richard was fishing for the third officer.

  They were back at their original position just across the ice barrier from Atropos by the time both bodies were up out of the hold, and so Andrew McTavish and Harry Piper came down to help carry them back to the bridgehouse. They took them straight to the ship’s cold store and laid them out side by side on the butcher’s table there among the hanging carcasses. There were tears in Richard’s eyes as he arranged them respectfully, with their arms crossed, before covering them and leaving them. As he folded Jamie’s arms he remembered the strange sensation he had felt along the length of the crowbar and he searched among the jumble of soaking wet-weather gear, safety harness and black line wrapped round the boy’s chest. And there, under his right arm, the handle of a knife protruded.