by Mark McCrum
‘I have no idea,’ said Sadie.
‘Ukranian. Like our charming captain.’
As Klaus fixed them with a knowing look, there was more commotion across the bar.
‘I am nart listening, Donald!’ Lauren was shouting. ‘If I wanna dance with somebody I will dance with them. What are you saying? That I can only dance with you. Maybe I’m sick of dancing with you …’
‘Lauren, please, people are watch—’
‘I don’t care if people are watching. Anyway, you dance like a donkey, you pig.’
It was clear, even before this non-sequitur, that she was drunk again. She turned back to him.
‘I could walk out tomorrow, you know that.’
‘Honey, please …’
‘Don’t “honey” me. How can I be your honey when you can’t even get it up, you useless old dipshit?’
‘Lauren, stop it …’ He moved towards her and took her upper arm.
‘Get off me!’
The courtly Indian had stepped into the breach.
‘Come on, Lauren, please, if I may—’
‘No, you may not!’ she cried. She wasn’t so drunk that she didn’t realize this wasn’t her husband. ‘This is between me and Don.’ Then she looked slowly round the bar, picked up on all the watching eyes and made for the exit, clacking out noisily across the dance floor in her high heels, her stacked cleavage wobbling as she went, leaving the silenced drinkers to slowly piece their conversations back together again; or not, given that here was something wonderful for everyone to start offering gossipy speculations about. The air was thick with ‘Did you see?’ and ‘Oh my gard!’ and ‘If looks could kill!’
‘How much older would you say he is,’ Francis heard, from the group of nodding skulls in the next bay, ‘thirdee years, fordee?’
‘She could be his daughter.’
‘His grand-daughter, more like.’
‘Ha ha ha! Not quite.’
‘Abso-lute-ly quite.’
Up at the bar, the old man was still very much present, head shaking stoically as he gulped a glass of brandy with his two friends.
‘Oh dear,’ said Sadie, making a face.
‘They have some unresolved issues between them, I think,’ said Klaus, getting to his feet.
‘So it would seem,’ Francis agreed; he did nothing to encourage him to stay.
In the background the pianist’s hands moved rapidly over the keyboard. The tinkling chords rose and fell and the little man sang on, in his proud, strong, Americanized Filipino voice.
FIVE
Day at Sea. Tuesday 25 April.
Francis was woken by a hideous groaning. Not of a stowaway, in a cupboard in his cabin; nor of some stricken old lady, being beaten to a pulp with an iron bar through the wall in another cabin; nor even of a group of drunken guests making their way down the corridor, but of the entire ship. Some terrible strain was being put on the fabric of the hull and he could hear it moaning in protest, feel the vibrations coming up through the floor to shake his bed.
He lay there for a minute or so, still half-asleep, wondering if he were dreaming. Then he sat up, leant across and clicked on the bedside light. It was 3.26 a.m.
He was not dreaming. The pictures on the wall were shaking too.
He rolled out of bed and pulled a pair of jeans and a jersey top over his pyjamas. He located his keycard on the coffee table and headed off into the corridor. The deck three Reception desk was closed for the night. He ran up three floors and let himself out through the heavy metal door on to deck six. At the stern, the water in the little spa pool was splashing up over the pale blue plastic surround and on to the scrubbed wooden decking. Now he could see what was going on. The ship was turning. A huge arc was marked in white on the dark surface of the sea. Francis became aware of figures above, leaning over the railings, scouring the choppy waves with powerful torches. He clattered up the metal steps to deck seven.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked a crew member in a brown boilersuit, who was standing to the stern of one of the lifeboats, which made a shadowy bulk against the brilliantly starry sky.
‘Man overboard. Captain is turning the ship.’
Man overboard! How on earth had that happened? Was it passenger – or crew? And what possible chance did they have of finding someone in this vast, black ocean, even if they did manage to get back to the exact point they had been when he’d gone over?
Francis looked up to see a familiar figure approaching across the deck. Klaus was looking remarkably relaxed in a purple tracksuit with white go-faster stripes, matched with a pair of well-worn trainers. Round his neck hung a powerful pair of binoculars.
‘A terrible accident, it seems,’ he said.
‘D’you have any idea who it is?’ Francis asked.
‘The young wife of the old man, who made such a scene in the bar earlier.’
‘Oh my God …’
‘Yes, indeed, “Oh my God”. They will be exceedingly lucky to find her now, given that she must have been drunk when she went over.’
‘And what if they don’t?’
Klaus’s eyebrows twitched meaningfully. ‘They keep moving,’ he replied. ‘These aren’t the waters of the United Kingdom or Italy or Miami, where you can scramble a helicopter in minutes. This is the Gulf of Guinea. There is no supportive rescue service for hundreds of miles. Thousands, maybe. If you ask me, the captain has only turned to obey protocols, not because he hopes to find this woman. He has to make the appearance of trying. If only for his records.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nobody is saying. I’m not sure they know. Perhaps she’d had enough of a life of arguing in public.’
‘Suicide? You don’t really think so?’
‘Or a little feminine protest that went too far. But it’s not easy to fall off a ship like this. You don’t just slip through these railings, do you?’
‘Unless you’re very drunk.’
‘You would still need to climb over. Unless of course you had some help.’ Klaus met Francis’s gaze with those alert grey eyes of his. ‘By the way, I was sorry to hear about the merry vidow.’
‘What did you hear?’
‘That she left us. At Takoradi. In a box.’
‘Who told you that?’
Klaus looked pleased with himself. ‘I have my sources. I had started to suspect it wasn’t food poisoning. Or even the norovirus. That sort of thing is usually over in a couple of days. She leaves a fortune perhaps?’
‘I don’t know about that.’
‘You don’t take four cruises a year unless you have very substantial money. Or perhaps you are a distinguished how-to-say freeloader like yourself.’
Francis was fairly sure that Klaus knew the difference between a freelancer and a freeloader, but he wasn’t going to rise to the old man’s egregious sense of humour. They stood side by side at the railing, watching as the ship completed a wide semicircle, then slowed and maintained its course for several minutes, returning the way it had come. Klaus had pulled his field glasses up to eye level and was keeping a close watch. The other men with binoculars were all standing on the port side of the ship, scanning the dark sea. There were a number in uniform, together with a group of the expedition staff, gathered in a huddle round tall Viktor.
Now a huge searchlight was switched on, its beam reaching down to make a bright track over the water. It swept back and forth, back and forth, but there was nothing to see but the crests of the waves. There were no waving arms, no bobbing head, no body.
After about half an hour the ship seemed to have stopped entirely. There was a lot of frantic hurrying to and fro, up and down stairs and into hidden doorways. The searchlight continued to scour the empty surface of the sea.
‘So,’ said Klaus, wandering back over to join him. ‘The party is over, I fear. For her at any rate.’
‘Surely they’ll wait till it’s light?’
‘They may. To keep face. But they are not going to find her now. She
is on her way to David Jones’s lock-up, as you say in England. Perhaps accompanied by a shark. I’m sorry to say there will be nothing more to see. I’m going back to my cabin.’
Francis surfaced slowly. He was aware of the brilliant sunlight on his curtains; then that something was wrong; then, with a jolt, he remembered. Man – or rather woman – overboard. He shuddered at the thought of it, unable to put out of his mind the circumstances of his own wife’s death, twenty years before. A shocking holiday accident on the Nile, when the felucca he and Kate had been sailing in had flipped over during a terrifying desert storm. He had survived, despite losing consciousness, but Kate hadn’t made it. The image of her naked body, washed up on the stony brown mud, still haunted him and his recurrent nightmares; in the life he had, as opposed to the life he might have had – should have had, he sometimes thought, before his better self took hold of him and told him that self-pity was not allowed, for Kate’s sake, if nothing else. She who would never have countenanced such indulgence.
When Viktor’s wake-up call came, it was not the cheery, sing-song ‘Gu-u-ten Mo-orgen!’ they had been used to previously. Just a clipped English ‘Good morning’, followed by an announcement that because of an incident that had happened during the night the first lecture at eleven o’clock had been cancelled and there would instead be a mandatory briefing in the theatre. ‘In the meantime,’ Viktor concluded, ‘I hope you will enjoy your breakfast.’
Francis took his omelette-with-everything out to the open area at the back of deck six, where the sun was already, at seven forty-five a.m., shining a brilliant yellow-gold on the slatted tables. John-since-1972 was as smiley and solicitious as ever, as if nothing untoward had happened. ‘Can I get you anything else, sir? More tea? Another croissant? Some jam?’
Francis had been back in his cabin only ten minutes before there was a knock at the door. He opened it to find himself face-to-face with the blonde expedition staffer, Carmen.
‘Hello,’ he said, a trifle awkwardly.
‘Francis,’ she began.
‘Yes.’
‘We didn’t get introduced properly yesterday. I’m Carmen, one of the expedition team.’
‘I’m aware of that.’
‘Viktor sends his apologies, he’s very busy this morning.’
‘I imagine.’
‘He was wondering if you might be able to join us in the captain’s office on the bridge.’
‘Is this to do with the man overboard?’
‘I wasn’t sure how much you were aware. The staff are under instructions not to talk about it.’
‘I was out there last night in the small hours. Up on deck seven when the ship was turning.’
‘I see,’ Carmen replied. ‘In any case, the captain is keen to have you present at our discussion. Would you be OK to come?’
‘Right now?’
‘If that’s OK.’
At the end of a short corridor, through a connecting door, the bridge was revealed as a quiet, orderly space, flooded with light from a long curve of floor-to-ceiling windows that looked directly down over an empty section of deck to the ocean ahead. In the centre was a huge console full of knobs and dials and gearstick type devices around a monitor that was presumably the main navigation control. Two long desks stretched away on either side. An officer in a white shirt sat at one, looking intently at a screen. Another officer with powerful binoculars was standing in the centre of the window at the front, a silhouette scanning the blue ocean beyond. Surely they weren’t still hoping to find her now?
The captain was in a little office to one side. Francis found the same small group as before, minus Dr Lagip. Both the captain and Viktor looked drained, as well they might after such a night.
‘Thank you for joining us,’ the captain said to Francis, as the burly four-stripe officer pulled the door firmly to behind them. ‘Your contribution was useful last time. Indeed, it resolved difficult situation for me.’
‘I was glad to help.’
‘You know everyone, I think.’ He gestured towards the four-stripe. ‘Alexei Ninishivili, our First Officer and Head of Security.’
Francis and Alexei exchanged a nod.
‘And so,’ the captain continued, taking his seat, yawning extravagantly then placing his big, hairy hands face down on the table, ‘I think we are all apprised of latest incident. Shortly after two a.m. last night we lost woman overboard. She fell from deck seven, it seems, from sun deck/viewing area towards stern. Alarm was raised by engineer who was running routine check up on port lifeboat.
‘First he was aware of situation was person below him, in gold evening dress, screaming as she flew past deck five and then straight down into sea below. He immediately threw down lifeline and safety ring and ran to get help from bridge. Because it was small hours, there was longer delay than there would have been in daylight, as we only have basic night watch up at that time. Any questions so far?’
‘He just saw her flying down, screaming?’ Francis asked. ‘There was nobody else around?’
‘So he said.’
‘And you believe him?’
‘I have no reason not to. He is trustworthy guy.’
‘And you don’t have any automatic systems in place for spotting a man overboard? Or CCTV or anything?’
‘No. This is only small ship. And you must understand, this MOB situation is extremely rare, even with those huge liners that carry five thousand passengers.’
‘I see.’
‘So,’ the captain continued, ‘we took immediate action and executed standard Williamson turn, but at speed we were going this didn’t start until we were several nautical miles beyond spot where incident occurred. Having turned, we tracked back to position that was our best guess of where this woman went over. We brought ship to standstill and used all resources to check surface of ocean. But even with searchlights, we saw nothing. I can’t say I was hopeful of success, but nonetheless I waited until first light at five thirty a.m. Still nothing, so after further hour of looking, I gave order to abandon search. Unless they are picked up very quickly, I’m afraid chances of finding someone in remote waters such as these are very small.’
‘Is there no one else who can help?’ Francis asked. ‘Other ships, coastguards?’
‘I have obviously put out an Attention All Shipping, with estimated coordinates of incident. But there are not so many ships round here. A few African fishing boats, but many of them don’t have radios, so they wouldn’t hear. Illegal Chinese ones will not want to get involved. So what else am I to do? Summon Liberian navy?’
‘Is there one?’
The captain laughed. ‘Actually, there is coast guard officer based at US Embassy in Monrovia. But we are three hundred miles from there. The nearest port in Cote d’Ivoire is Abidjan, but they have nothing other than those kind of inflatables you would use in port or very near to port.’
‘So this engineer who reported the incident,’ asked Francis. ‘Did he see how or why the body went over?’
‘He said not. He heard scream, then he saw body falling down, splash, into ocean. It was only by chance that he was there at all. Normally these routine checks take place by daylight.’
‘So why was he out there at two in the morning then?’
‘He thought he had forgotten to do something. One of important safety procedures.’
‘Is that likely?’ Francis asked, eyeballing the captain.
‘I know this man,’ the captain replied. ‘He’s very conscientious. It’s typical that he would have double-checked. It’s not as if he was sleeping otherwise. He was anyway on night shift.’
‘OK.’ Francis nodded. ‘So nobody really knows what happened?’
‘No.’
‘And yet the decks and stairways are well-protected by guard rails. You would be unlikely to slip and fall by accident.’
‘No,’ said the captain. ‘On other hand, this is ship. Far out at sea. If you wish to climb over railings or jump from deck there is nothing stopping
you.’
‘So what are you all thinking?’ Francis asked. ‘That this was a suicide?’ He looked slowly round: at the captain, the first officer, Viktor and Carmen. They were all silent, as if unable to voice the thought that was surely now on all their minds. ‘Or even,’ he continued, ‘foul play? Related perhaps to Eve’s death?’
‘I don’t personally think “foul play”,’ said the captain. He gave a slight twist to the phrase, as if he found this very English coinage quaint. ‘Suicide?’ He shrugged in disbelief. ‘She was, I heard, drunk earlier in evening and arguing in bar with husband.’
‘Yes,’ said Francis. ‘Not for the first time. They were becoming a bit of an after-dinner cabaret act. One of those couples who have deep-seated issues that keep bubbling over.’
‘Or perhaps,’ said the captain, ‘they enjoyed arguing. It is kind of foreplay maybe.’
‘It didn’t look much like foreplay to me,’ said Francis. Despite the sombre mood, there was laughter from the group. Even First Officer Alexei managed a smile.
‘Foreplay,’ he said gruffly. ‘Then foul play.’
‘Whatever cause of death,’ said the captain, ignoring this, ‘there is nothing we can do about it now. This woman is gone. I am obliged to report her missing, which we have done. But action to find her has been taken and proved unsuccessful, so we don’t technically have to do anything further.’
‘And who else do you report to?’ asked Francis. ‘The Bermudan police again?’
‘The Bahamas Maritime Authority, yes. We are in international waters here. Those are our protocols.’
‘I still find it incredible,’ Francis said, ‘that you don’t have to tell the US authorities, for example, or the FBI, that one of their citizens has gone missing. It seems like a giant loophole. If I was someone who wanted to bump off their partner, I’d look seriously into the cruise option. It doesn’t seem to have too many downsides.’