Death Ship

by Jim Kelly

  ‘You’re all famous,’ said Shaw, pulling up a chair and showing their father his warrant card.

  For ten minutes they chatted about what the family would do with the rest of their holiday. Doctors had advised that Eric should be kept in for forty-eight hours, so they were going to stay in Lynn and go to the pictures (Interstellar in 3D), and Nando’s or the drive-through McDonald’s.

  Shaw’s interview style was disingenuously laconic. The techniques used he’d studied at Quantico, the FBI training college in Virginia. Shaw had taken a degree in Fine Art at Southampton University, which included a term out to study forensic ID reconstruction. The three-month sojourn in the US had been a vital component in developing his skills, so that by the time he joined the Met he was one of only fifty officers in the UK qualified to create sketches of suspects, or age the faces of missing children or adults, or ‘vitalize’ the features of the nameless dead after accidents or crimes, allowing the police to print posters and appeal to family and friends, neighbours or workmates, to step forward with the identity of the victim.

  The principal skill in gathering information from witnesses was to understand that memory – any memory – is, in fact, a series of images, not a bundle. Flashbacks are rarely total, but more often jigsaw-like fragments. The Quantico technique involved identifying these frail half-memories and using them to try to retrieve others, slowly rebuilding a face, an image, a sentence. Each remembered image was used to lead to the next, in a daisy chain of related snapshots. The mistake was to think that memory was binary: present or absent. Often, witnesses who professed to recall nothing could – if skilfully handled – eventually remember vital evidence.

  Quickly, he established the basic facts: Jonah spotted the object first, Marc cleared away a little sand, and then they decided to try to knock it out of the sandy wall using pebbles and stones from the shoreline.

  ‘You touched it, Marc?’

  ‘Yeah. It was like really cold – icy, metal.’

  ‘Sure?’

  Marc just nodded.

  ‘So how much of it could you see? Show me on my hand,’ said Shaw holding out his palm. The boy sketched an area about the size of a jam-jar lid with his finger.

  ‘That small? Rusted?’

  All three brothers shook their heads.

  ‘Shiny,’ said Marc.

  ‘And how far down from the surface? It was a big hole, right? So five feet down, four feet?’

  The boys exchanged glances but deferred to Marc. ‘I reckon two feet.’ He punched a button on the back of his camera and showed Shaw the image his father had taken on the lip of the pit.

  ‘See. It was near the surface,’ he said.

  Shaw was no ballistics expert but he was pretty sure a falling bomb should make a bigger impact in sand than two feet. And even an abandoned wartime shell case should be rusted, even friable, not a lustrous, shiny silver metal.

  ‘What did you think it was?’

  ‘A round biscuit tin,’ said Marc.

  ‘The metal was thin, then. Flexible?’

  ‘No. We thought it was full of sand. It was kind of lodged in. Good for the game.’

  ‘You played before on the beach … What did you find then?’

  ‘A boot. A bit of scaffolding – like the joint?’

  Shaw nodded.

  ‘An old thermos flask,’ said Eric, glancing up from the phone.

  ‘Rivets,’ said Marc.

  ‘Find anything else in this hole?’

  ‘No – but I heard it tick,’ said Jonah.

  ‘No, you didn’t, idiot. You just think you did,’ said Marc.

  ‘I did hear it,’ said Jonah, his eyes flooding with tears. ‘I put my ear to it – right, Eric?’

  ‘Yeah, he did,’ said Eric reluctantly. ‘I heard it too – but like, not tick-tock – just a tick, a few times, not like a clock.’

  Shaw thought about the hole. ‘Where was the object? Which side of the hole: north, south, east, west, or points between?’

  The boys conferred and then agreed on west. Shaw thought it unlikely there was a clock mechanism in the bomb. Ticking bombs were a myth from the early days of cinema. Marc had said the object was icy cold. Exposed in the west wall of the pit, it would have been heated by the sun till past noon. Is that what they’d heard: the metal expanding, creaking?

  They talked about all the people who’d come up to look in the hole. The boys remembered one man, in lifeguard’s red shorts, who’d taken a look and asked where their parents were; and another with a camera, who’d taken a picture and said they should keep their eyes on the sea at high tide because there’d been reports of seals offshore. And one teenager, barefoot in jeans, who’d asked to join in, but they’d said they were OK.

  And, finally, an overweight man in swimming shorts.

  ‘He spat in the hole,’ said Eric. ‘He said it was dangerous digging between the old pier posts, that the police would be angry. We said our dad said it was OK.’

  ‘He was wet, like he’d just come out of the water, and he came back too – twice,’ said Marc.

  ‘The last time you could see he was trying to be nice. He said it was a prize-winning hole but we should stop now. Did we want ice creams? We said no. We’ve been told to say no.’

  ‘Good boys,’ said Donald.

  ‘So he was overweight – anything else?’ pressed Shaw.

  ‘Strong,’ said Marc. ‘Like, not just fat; he had muscles, so he was wide too. Bald. Kind of fleshy …’

  ‘All right. So – back to the metal box,’ said Shaw. He’d bought a packet of wine gums on the hospital food court and handed them round. ‘So the surface was curved?’ Shaw used the palm of his hand, rotating his wrist, to indicate the classic ogive shape of a bombshell – the aerodynamic, tapering cone.

  ‘I reckon it was curved, but like big enough that the bit we could see didn’t look it at first sight,’ said Marc, and Jonah nodded. Shaw thought that sounded like a classic case of twenty/twenty hindsight.

  ‘But Dad saw it,’ said Jonah. ‘We were all scuttling back, like, when the sea came in, but he said he saw it for a second – right, Dad?’

  ‘That right, Mr Ross?’

  ‘Half a second – less. The sand wall collapsed and it kind of spilt it out into the surf. Yeah. I saw it, I guess.’

  Shaw imagined what a good defence lawyer would make of that half-hearted eye-witness account. ‘And …’

  ‘A big silver fish!’ shouted Eric, bouncing slightly on the bed springs.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Donald, embarrassed now. ‘I just saw the surface, the curve of it, and the sheen off the skin. A bomb, I reckon. Maybe … but like new.’

  Which, if true, was another awkward detail. If it wasn’t a wartime bomb, it shouldn’t be curved, thought Shaw. A modern device had no need to be aerodynamic.

  The boys’ eyes suddenly swung away from Shaw to look over the detective’s shoulder. A man walked down the middle of the ward carrying a selection of large, wrapped parcels. Shaw judged he was six foot three, heavily built, but with no visible fat. His fists hung from his arms like knuckles of bone.

  There was a cry of ‘Uncle Robbie!’ and the presents were handed out.

  Robert ‘Robbie’ Ross was introduced to Shaw as the boys’ uncle, Donald’s brother. He worked out on the pier head and, according to the boys, was a real-life tunnel tiger.

  All the boys crowded round Robbie on the edge of the bed as he opened up an iPad.

  ‘So, like, that’s under the sea?’ asked Eric, letting the phone slip from his hand.

  Robbie nodded and flipped the screen further back, so that Shaw could see a video running.

  ‘What are we looking at?’ asked Shaw, intrigued by the scene of a large, almost cavernous concrete room, with a rough, sandy floor, lit by a series of overhead neon beams.

  ‘I took this inside the caisson, the concrete box on the sea floor. We were down there yesterday for the first time. It’s dropped with the valves open so she fills up w
ith seawater. Then it’s pumped out. So it’s still pretty damp.’

  The picture was oddly distorted by what looked like condensation on the lens. The fleeting pictures of the men working reminded Shaw of the first live pictures from the moon landings in the sixties. There was something almost alien about the shuffling figures, linking cables, operating a Caterpillar digger, a series of pneumatic pumps. The noise level was high, grating, with a heavy-metal bass beat from the machinery. Somewhere, on an additional high-screeching note, muzak played.

  ‘You use explosives down there?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Yeah. Can do. But that’s a whole other job, right there. Company flies in the experts, and the gear is signed out, signed back in. It’s a big deal. We’ve just started and the seabed’s sand. But if we hit rock, then maybe …’

  Shaw thought this answer to his question was strangely formal, if not defensive.

  Robbie’s camera must have tipped forward because suddenly the image was of the sea floor. They could see a crab there, high and dry, and the carcass of what looked like a rock salmon. Then the image shifted again to show a workman, in protective glasses, walking forward, offering a thermos and a cup. The idea that these men were working under the sea, enclosed in their concrete shell, made small globes of sweat form on Shaw’s forehead.

  ‘All this is pressurized,’ said Robbie. ‘So, boys, what’s the big danger?’

  ‘The bends,’ whispered Jonah.

  ‘Right. When we come up, we have to rest in the manlock. Otherwise, your blood can boil.’ Robbie wrapped his legs and arms in an agonized knot. ‘OK – this is it, boys; this is when it hits,’ he said, resting a fingertip on the screen.

  For a moment nothing happened. The slightly out-of-focus figures trundled about at their tasks, but then the image shook, the neon lights swung, and the picture went black.

  ‘We lost power for thirty seconds,’ said Robbie. ‘I tell ya, that isn’t pleasant. No power, no pumps, no air compressors. Pretty quickly, you’re going to fill up with seawater. Then you got a choice: run for it and take a chance on decompression sickness, or stick around and drown in the dark.’

  Shaw noted the slight mid-Atlantic twang to Robbie Ross’s accent, and guessed being a tunnel tiger was a skill that could get you an air ticket to construction sites on five continents.

  ‘That was the bomb blast striking the caisson?’ asked Shaw.

  Robbie tapped the screen in the lower right-hand corner: a digital clock read 15:31.

  ‘Yup. Well, the shock wave. That’s the thing about water, right; it’s a medium through which energy passes without losing a lot of its power. You get a decent wave in Cornwall, chances are the storm that built it was off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland – that’s a three-and-a-half-thousand-mile fetch, but the wave’s still twenty foot high. So your beach explosion was like a punch.’ Robbie sank a bony knuckle into a massive palm. ‘We felt it, all right. Believe me, that thirty seconds, it’s the longest year of my life.’

  Although the screen was black, the audio was clear: voices, not panicky, but insistent, one man’s in particular: ‘Use mobiles, guys.’ A single pool of light appeared, the beam quickly lighting a man’s face in the gloom, then others bloomed in an eerie undersea garden of coral flowers, until the darkness was studded with faces, each one a small study in chiaroscuro.

  The emergency lighting flickered, and a steady warning buzzer sounded. The machinery coughed back into life, the pumps thudding. A single red light on the wall of the chamber flashed in time with the buzzer.

  ‘That’s the signal to go aloft,’ said Robbie.

  ‘What did you do for those thirty seconds in the dark?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘I prayed.’

  ELEVEN

  As a schoolboy, Valentine had learnt to swim, reluctantly, at the Gladstone Street baths in Hunstanton. The class, bussed weekly from Lynn, had filled the tiled, windowless pool with murderous screams. Those boys and girls identified as reluctantly buoyant were thrown in and kept away from the edge by a schoolmaster armed with a bamboo pole. It had been the first, vivid episode in Valentine’s long distrustful relationship with water. He remembered it now and tried to push away the thought that in all likelihood he’d end up living out here, on the edge of the land, with nothing to see but water.

  Although Hunstanton’s seafront was now dominated by Waterworld, an Olympic-sized pool with wave-making technology, the town’s old baths were still in business, rebranded as Flume! – not so much a refurbishment as a transformation: plate-glass windows now filled one side, giving a distant view of the Norfolk hills behind the town. The white tiles had given way to technicolour designs. The pièce de résistance, the flume itself, projected above the pool roof, a spiral in see-through plastic scaled by a circular steel staircase, allowing howling children to plummet into the pool’s deep end from outside the building.

  Valentine had braced himself for the usual liquid cacophony, but the pool was totally silent, if not empty. In the water, embedded but breaking the surface, were six divers, in full wet suits. Each lay face down, limbs splayed, as if in free-fall flight. Valentine’s creaking heart froze for a beat: in any other situation, in any other place, he would presume the divers were dead. None wore breathing gear, none moved; while a few breached the surface, all floated with their airways submerged, mouth and nose beneath the mirror-like surface, the lethal boundary between water and air.

  A man stood on the poolside in a lifeguard’s bib, holding a stopwatch, his eyes on the floating bodies in the water, but beckoning Valentine closer with his hand. Up close, Valentine realized he was a teenager, with the cherubic face of a fresco angel: slightly plump cheeks, tight fair curls held close to the rounded skull, and pale skin.

  ‘Moment, please,’ he said, the voice light and airy, with a definite East European accent. ‘Tad? He the manager. In office …’ He extended his arm along the poolside, his eyes – remarkably – still on the divers. Valentine tried to place the foreign inflection: Bulgarian perhaps, or even Russian.

  Valentine turned away towards a windowed cubicle, where an older man sat with a landline phone pressed to his ear, but as he padded the stippled poolside tiles, a hiss came from the water, a strangely alien sound which made Valentine’s skin suddenly rise in goosebumps.

  One of the suspended swimmers had turned turtle, swivelling along her body axis, so that her face stared up at the vaulted roof. The sound had been an almost inhuman exhalation, far from the gasp Valentine would have expected. She lay still, her chest rising and falling slowly, the spine arching to press the body upwards; her face was colourless, the lips invisible. Valentine recalled an image from science fiction, the long-distance astronaut waking from suspended animation, unfurling creaking joints, flexing bloodless fingers.

  The pool manager stood now at his office window, watching the scene outside: he was elderly, florid, calling to mind the white-haired, high-stepping fisherman of an ‘It’s so bracing’ seaside poster.

  His name was Tad Atkins. ‘Swum all my life,’ he said, in an attempt to answer a question unposed. ‘Live in the water, if I could, but this …’ He indicated the pool and the wet-suited swimmers, shaking his head.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Valentine, holding out his warrant card. ‘I’m here on business – but what exactly is this?’

  Atkins retrieved a rock from the room’s second desk, about the size of a bowling ball, made of a strange mineral infused with thousands of small holes.

  Valentine took it, weighing it in both hands.

  ‘About twenty-two pounds – dead weight,’ said Atkins. ‘Theo will tell you the full story, but the gist is simple enough. The Med, places like that, when divers go down to look at wrecks, they find these – dotted about. First off, I guess, they thought they’re rocks.’ Atkins laughed, the inflated barrel-chest heaving. ‘Then they figured it out, cos most of the time the seabed’s just sand and silt.’ He held the rock in his capacious hand. ‘You get yourself a net, pop the rock in, and it takes
you down to the wreck. Gravity does the work, even in water. We’re talking way back – I don’t know – the Greeks, whatever. Like I said, Theo’s got it rote. Down there, on the bottom, you hold your breath, see if you can salvage the gold, or the silver, or the coins, from the wreck, then you swim up. Maybe they put a rope on the net and hauled the lot up, rock and treasure together. This one’s volcanic, from Etna. They found it sitting in the sand next to a Roman trireme.’ He made an effort to pronounce the word correctly, emphasizing the second syllable. ‘Theo says that was in the Adriatic, five hundred miles from the volcano.’

  ‘So this lot are just holding their collective breath?’ said Valentine. Several of the divers had turned over now, and lay exhausted, spent, shaped like stars.

  The belly laugh again. ‘Yeah. But not collective. It’s an individual sport, highly competitive. Static apnea, they call it: holding your breath but not moving. Dynamic’s when you swim and hold your breath. It’s all free diving really. Pearl divers and that. This lot are doing it natural, but you can take oxygen too, for half an hour before you start. Theo’s competed, got a silver medal at some competition in Monaco. Yanks are into it too. It’s catching on. This class –’ he made a scything motion with a chubby hand – ‘sold out.’

  Atkins subsided into a wide captain’s chair, his weight making the frame creak. ‘Business, you said?’

  Valentine retrieved an evidence bag from his raincoat pocket and let it flop on to the desktop in front of Atkins. It contained a swimmer’s watch in matt black, with a white face, and the usual digital signals: time, depth, temperature, and a stopwatch to record the length of a dive, against a target based on the oxygen available. Set across the face was the blue insignia of Flume! – a fluid corkscrew – but this time entwined with the words Leander Club.