Death Ship

by Jim Kelly

  Only the owner seemed reluctant to abandon the yacht, until Shaw suggested a plan. Roaring Island’s crescent shape sheltered a lake to the south-east. This stretch of water, even at high tide, seemed to offer an anchorage of sorts, the shallow water dampening down high seas in winter. Local fishermen called it Holme Lake, although the maps never carried the name, perhaps chary at charting a lake in the middle of the sea. A large green navigation buoy lay beached in the lake, and Shaw suggested the crew of the Germinal ran an anchor line to it, so that when the tide washed in, the ship could ride safely until they were able to return. Given the benign forecast, there was every chance she’d survive the night intact, despite the broken mast.

  As the crew worked on running the line out by hand, Shaw walked away half a mile, surveying the flotsam and jetsam littering the sand. The twinkling lights of the rig lay directly south-east by six miles, the wind-farm navigation lights off Skegness directly north-west by fifteen. If the pier was built as planned, the ferry service would skirt Roaring Island twice daily on its scheduled route. Was there something here? Was there something that might be here, that someone wished to remain a secret? Hartog had made the trip several times according to the boatyard in Wells, and only his murder had prevented a return.

  By the time Shaw returned to the Flyer, the rescued crew was crowded into the rear recovery cabin. Wrapped in silver heat retention sheets, they looked cold and scared – the bravado of the fireside extinguished. Shaw took them back across the Wash at thirty-five knots, and they were back on dry land in less than twenty minutes. A medical check-up was standard practice, so an ambulance waited by the floodlit hangar as the Flyer crept back into the windless interior.

  The hovercraft crew took refuge in the mess on the second floor of the lifeboat house. A wood-burning stove provided a burst of heat, and a bay window gave a fifty-mile vista of the Wash – its channels and creeks still bleeding out into the North Sea. It would be long after dawn before the tide turned, bringing a flood into the Wash.

  Shaw’s second in command, Joe Paul, used a laptop to log details of the rescue and post them on the station’s website: crew names, the vessel assisted, those rescued, the weather and sea conditions. This was the digital record. In the quiet winter months one of the crew – an old navy hand – would transfer the key facts to the old-fashioned rescue boards in the boathouse, with their copperplate golden lettering, showing shouts going back to the mid-nineteenth century.

  A detail from the file on Dirk Hartog returned to Shaw: the Dutchman had visited the RNLI station three times in the period before his disappearance, taking a keen interest in the boat. Could his interest be entirely explained by a passion for marine engineering?

  The boathouse itself, below the mess room, was in darkness, but the idea had taken hold, so Shaw used his smartphone torch to light up the stairwell, and then the view from the observation platform above the boat itself – an inshore rigid inflatable – and the sand tractor designed to haul it down to the sea.

  The copperplate lettering on the boards caught the light. The nearest covered the period from 1945 to the present day. His good eye, always sharp, saw it immediately, the painted letters magically clear against the polished mahogany.

  31st January 1953

  18.30 hours. Le Strange launched to assist Calabria eight miles SW off Holme Point. Sea state tempest. Ship lost with crew of three.

  23.00 hours. Le Strange proceeds to South Beach to assist evacuation from inundated homes. Eighteen hours in attendance. Total rescued 128.

  The golden paint on the word Calabria seemed to shimmer with an inner light, as it did on the date: 31st January 1953. The night of the tempest: the night Joe Lester lost his sister to the cold North Sea.

  THIRTY-ONE

  That morning, shortly after dawn, light had fallen on their faces for the first time in more than half a century, leaving shadows in the eye sockets, catching the gold of a filling, and the silver of a signet ring on an exposed, extended finger bone, which lay in the sand, as if pointing to the refracted, shimmering light that dappled the wreck.

  The dogfish circled their grave, its dead eyes searching for the riveted plates of the hold, the patterned surface of the deck, which had held them in the dark for so long, but the jolt of the explosion on the beach had shook the wreck’s fragile hull, popping rivets, the rusted plates finally collapsing into the hold, to create a cloud of silt which had hung over the scene for days. The triple explosions that followed had rocked the dead in their steel cradle.

  Now the silt and sand had finally settled, like phantom snow clearing from a nightmare paperweight, revealing the lost ship’s cargo of bones. Two victims lay together, the skulls touching, in a bed of sand which had drifted over the pelvic bones, but left their legs lying clear, impossibly fragile, the feet a collection of disarticulated fragments, still roughly splayed. The right wrist of one was crossed with the left wrist of the other, the shattered bones held together by a leather bond.

  Around this couple, who lay at the centre of the hold, a shoal of fish now flashed in iridescent colours.

  Their companion lay apart, beside a brass porthole, the glass still in place but obscured by weed and barnacles. This victim’s bones were almost dust, except for the skull, although the point where the ankles crossed was marked by the third, and final, leather bond.

  The grizzled dogfish nosed at the skull of the skeleton by the porthole, releasing a thread of weed from the jaw bone, creating a miniature whirlpool of sand, which rose in the vortex left as the fish’s spine flexed, powering it upwards and out, in a sudden retreat.

  It circled twice, then returned, attracted by the glint of light in the skull’s dark eye sockets. But it fled at last, spooked by its own double image, held in the two unbroken lenses of the spectacles that lay still either side of the gaping nose.

  THIRTY-TWO

  As the mobile rang, Shaw imagined it lying on Jack Gosling’s desk, the sound rising up through the great glass atrium of Lloyd’s of London, as his old friend tried to end a conversation on a landline perhaps, or on one of his three other mobile phones. Gosling had been a fellow student at Southampton, an artist, with dreams of a studio in Amsterdam (his then girlfriend, now his wife, was Dutch). But the Gosling family had all been Names – the individuals whose collective wealth underwrote the world’s greatest insurance market. It’s difficult not to follow in the family footsteps, especially when they lead to a pot of gold.

  ‘Peter?’ Behind the voice, Shaw could hear the strange spacious echo of the great room, the stairways and lifts in tubular steel, and at its centre the wooden Gothic podium on which hung the Lutine Bell: rung once to signal the loss of a ship, twice for its return.

  ‘Peter – two seconds.’ With a thud, the mobile was thrown to the desktop.

  Shaw looked out at the beach beyond the panoramic window of Surf!. The incoming high tide had flooded the visible world. Not a single square yard of sand was above water level. The Wash was full, a bottleneck of salt water, brimming over. A coaster ran in towards Lynn on the horizon, following a path which a few hours earlier would have embedded it in a sandy grave.

  Lena brought him a fresh double espresso. ‘You should sleep,’ she said.

  He shook his head. ‘I’ll run you and Fran to the shops. Then I’ll crash.’

  Out at sea, the coaster had inched perceptively further south.

  Its progress reminded Shaw of Jack Gosling’s favourite story, of a great ship and a sandy grave. He’d taken Lena to meet his friend before they were married, and Gosling, proud of the family tradition, had insisted on a tour of the new Lloyd’s building. He had the story of the Lutine off pat: lost in 1799, it had foundered amongst the twisting channels of the Frisian Islands, a sandy maze of treacherous currents and shallows.

  The ship was never forgotten, for the simple fact that it was carrying gold bars, held in fragile wooden barrels. A persistent rumour suggested it had also taken on board – at a time of war – the Dutch cro
wn jewels. Lloyds paid up in full – an estimated £1.2 million at eighteenth-century prices, and then claimed the gold cargo under the rule of abandonment – a sub-clause of that great ephemeral legal tome, the laws of salvage. The Dutch said it was theirs by right too, under the sub-clause of ‘prize of war’. But the sea won, claiming it on the basis that the gold, and indeed the wreck, were swiftly entombed in sand. Very little of the precious metal had ever been recovered. But Lloyd’s had paid up in full on the policy, securing a reputation for reliable honesty.

  The mobile clattered. ‘Peter. Sorry. Everyone OK – Lena, Fran? Sorry, sorry. I got your email. You asked for some help on that ship name. I’ve been running from pillar to post; I’ll make it a priority. Sorry. What was it? The Cala? Nothing came up when I did a digital search …’

  Gosling’s desk was out on the main floor of the market, and Shaw imagined him now, slumped back in his chair, looking up into the guts of the twelve-storey building, around which occasional sparrows circled on invisible gyres.

  ‘It’s all right, Jack. I’ve got more info. But I still need help. In fact, it’s pretty urgent. I gave you a fragment of the name. Now I’ve got it in full: the Calabria. She went down on thirty-first January 1953, eight miles off Holme Point – so that’s in the Wash.’

  Shaw explained that he had already used Lloyd’s register online to trace ships lost within fifty miles of Hunstanton and had found none with a name starting Cala. So how could this be true?

  Gosling, walking now, said he’d check the written register for that date. Shaw heard a tannoy announcement of a Caribbean hurricane warning, then the sound of a lift rising, followed by the sudden hush of a small room: a library perhaps, or an archive.

  ‘Here we go,’ said Gosling. ‘I’ve got you on the earphone, Peter. If I disappear, just hang on. Right. Here we are: Feb first. Hell of a night, Peter. This was the North Sea surge, hundreds killed, ships lost …’

  ‘I know, I know. But the Calabria?’

  Shaw actually heard his friend turn the page on the ledger – the tiny flick of aged paper between fingers.

  ‘Ah. OK. On that night, in that position, we have listed the loss of a Dutch coaster – the Marlberg – formerly the Calabria. A five-hundred-ton coaster – I’m guessing here, but from that size I’d say she was an old wooden ship. Steel ships, modern vessels, are larger. But there’s your mystery, Peter – name changed. Not as rare as you think, and almost always bad news. You pick a name for a fresh start. That implies you need a fresh start. I guess that’s why people think it’s bad luck.’

  ‘Why does it appear as the Calabria on our rescue board at the boathouse?’

  ‘Crew often go on using the old name, especially if there’s been a change of ownership. So if your guys asked the crew the name of the ship, they’d have said Calabria. If it was its first voyage under the new name, then they might not even have got round to a fresh nameplate. A name change often means the last owners went out of business. If the crew didn’t like the new owners, that’s another good reason to stick with the old name. I’m guessing here, but you see my point?’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yup. Loss of crew. Three dead. You want the names? I can send you a digital version. Surnames are Beck – listed as captain – with Spaans and an engineer, Hartog.’

  Gosling filled up the silence on Shaw’s end of the line with a description of the cargo: a hundred tonnes of Scandinavian timber bound for the Lincolnshire port of Boston, plus fifty tonnes of dried fish meal, and eighty tonnes of sea salt.

  But Shaw was transfixed by the idea that Dirk Hartog, aged sixty-three, had come to Hunstanton in search of the wreckage of the Calabria, a vessel on which he’d lost – surely – his own father, sixty-three years earlier. Shaw bitterly saw his error in not pursuing the father’s story. Hartog must have been a babe in arms. Did the father ever hold the son? Why had Hartog returned to the coast? Did he plan to scatter his mother’s ashes out on Roaring Island, close to the spot where the Calabria had sunk? Why had that simple ambition cost him his life? Did the son simply wish to mark the spot, or did he suspect the wreck held other secrets?

  THIRTY-THREE

  Valentine’s text message pinged on Shaw’s mobile: 999 call at 22 Empire Bank. George Keeble. Can you?

  Shaw ran to the Porsche along the beach, then, checking the distance with the map app on his phone, carried on running, along the cliff edge, down past the still cordoned-off beach, and out along the seawall to the south.

  Empire Bank was a row of pre-war prefabs clinging to the seawall, which at this point comprised an earth embankment nearly thirty feet above the marsh on the landward side. Lester’s Beachcomber café stood a mile further, just visible on the tapering sands. High tide washed against the seaward bank, churning its way up the beach in coffee-coloured waves.

  The ambulance stood on the dirt road, its light flashing silently. The houses were neat, whitewashed, with faux Tudor beams; the whole row bungalow-style, with pebble-dashed walls and corrugated iron roofs.

  The Keebles’ door stood open, and Shaw met a paramedic coming out. ‘Family?’ she asked, a sudden sweep of sunlight making her high-vis jacket glare orange.

  ‘There’s just the wife – she’s away,’ said Shaw, offering his warrant card.

  ‘I know. He said.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘See for yourself. Heart’s erratic. He’s elected to stay put. No resus. Otherwise, I’d take him in, which would start the whole process off again – tests, and check-ups, and scans. He blacked out, so maybe a small stroke. Home help found him. It’s happened before. He’s a dying man, but he knows that, so there’s no need to labour the point.’

  Shaw found the home help in the kitchen making a cup of tea. A teenager, despite proudly calling herself Hilda, she took her time examining Shaw’s warrant card. She explained that she worked for the council social services and that she had delivered Mr Keeble’s breakfast, before cleaning the kitchen and toilet. She’d found him lying on the living-room floor.

  ‘It’s sad, isn’t it?’ she asked. ‘When people give up.’ They stood awkwardly in the tiny galley kitchen. ‘I’ll take him this,’ she said, escaping with the cup.

  Shaw took a quick look in each room: a double bedroom, a box room full of tea crates, a WC and hip bath. Dampness, he’d expected, and he noted the disfiguring blotches in the corners of the bedroom, but there was something else too: a sense of precarious survival, a home perched on a flood bank, the rear windows looking out across a thousand square miles of seawater.

  From the double bedroom he could see the slope down to the sea’s edge, a family already encamped behind a windbreak, three children trailing spades.

  There was a single wedding picture over the bed, in which Esther looked timid and scared, and George held her arm as if he was on parade. A cat, a long-haired specimen with pink eyes, watched Shaw dubiously from the pillow.

  He knocked once on the door to the living room and found Keeble in an armchair, flicking through a box file. He was deathly white, his skin glistening with sweat.

  ‘Ah. DI Shaw? Yes – I knew your father. You’re on the hovercraft, right? Very good. I was on the boat. Thirty years …’ He shook his head, surprised at his own life story.

  ‘You should take it easy, Mr Keeble.’

  He shrugged. ‘The next time I go out that door, I’ll be in a box, Inspector.’ It was the kind of thing people said, but it made Shaw feel cold, despite the sun on the sea outside the window.

  ‘They need Esther’s medical card. She’s at Bedford now – in the prison, on remand – and they want to see her NHS records.’ Losing patience, he tipped the contents of the file on to his lap. ‘They hanged Hanratty there, of course, at Bedford – bit before your time …’

  The arm of his wheelchair held an ashtray, attached by elastic bands and full of butts. His hand wandered towards a pack on a handily positioned shelf, and he deftly selected a cigarette, perhaps distracted by the idea of
his wife, in another age, paying the ultimate price for murder.

  The acrid stench of the lit cigarette was a shock, concentrated in the small room. It propelled Shaw back into the decades in which smoking indoors was simply part of everyday British life, like holding a smartphone. The wallpaper in the living room was stippled and magnolia, but vertical lines of nicotine ran from the picture rail to the floor, as if the house, like some discarded tin cooking pot, had boiled over on the hob.

  They’d interviewed George Keeble under caution at St James’, but he had insisted he knew nothing about his wife’s aberrant behaviour. Shaw felt that here, in his home, he might be enticed to speculate. According to the file, they’d been married for fifty-one years. It was an almost inconceivable period of time to live beside another human being. He must, surely, have an insight into what Shaw could only term his wife’s pathology: what had been the course of her disease, where had it begun?

  But at the mention of her crime George Keeble seemed to retreat, at least psychologically if not physically, immersing himself in his pile of documents and old photographs. Of his wife’s motive he knew no more now than he had done on the day she’d been arrested, he said, indicating that he’d like that particular conversation to end there.

  Shaw felt obliged to stay with him a little longer while he drank his tea. He stood at the window, noting with approval the absence of the otherwise ubiquitous bungalow net curtains, and was looking out to sea when it occurred to him for the first time that George Keeble might have been a witness to the sinking of the Calabria.