Death Ship

by Jim Kelly

‘The tempest, Mr Keeble. The great flood. You were on the boat that night?’

  For the first time Keeble looked up. ‘God, yes. Won’t forget it. I was living in the village then, at Old Hunstanton, so when the maroon went up, I ran for the boathouse. I hadn’t met Esther – she was here, in this house, with her mother and the small boys. Four brothers. So you can imagine.’

  It gave Shaw a moment to reimagine the house: not one set of footfalls running in from the beach, but a whole tribe, bouncing off the walls, clattering through the doors.

  ‘Esther’s dad had died the winter before, so her mum had to cope alone. Fine woman, Annie. We all had to cope. Forty-four dead here, Inspector. But you’ll know.’

  ‘So you were on the boat which stood off the Calabria? Out beyond Roaring Island?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. Another sad loss. No chance to help there; she was under at the stern when we saw her. I was the lookout. Won’t forget it. Dreadful sight. But we had to move on, because by then we knew the water had got through the seawall. Frustrating, of course, because we couldn’t get the old boat on to the marshes, where people were stranded. We dropped anchor and took some small boats out, dragged them over the seawall, did what we could.’ Keeble glanced up at a framed picture over the fireplace of the lifeboat cutting through a stormy sea. The old man’s eyes were rheumy and tired. ‘A lot of the prefabs on the marsh were swept away. This lot were high and dry, so they left them. Bit battered, but they stood the storm. They gave ’em a lick of paint and said get on with it. When Annie died, we moved in. Seemed to make sense. The shop was shut, so no reason to stay in the flat, you see. That was in 1990. Sixteen years … incredible really. It’s flown past,’ he added, but something about the grey skin and the rheumy eyes made Shaw think that might be a lie.

  Despite the packet of Marlboro and the lighter on the table beside his chair, Keeble didn’t light up a second time, stubbing out his first with a look of self-disgust. His large head, like a bowling ball, nodded until he spoke. ‘The bus queue’s the thing that’s been on my mind,’ he said.

  ‘In what sense?’ asked Shaw, taking the other chair.

  ‘I don’t think Esther’s well,’ he said, and some extravagant tears began to squeeze themselves out of the corner of his left eye. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s just that without her …’

  The empty room, the damp house, seemed to finish the sentence for him.

  ‘But the queue,’ prompted Shaw.

  ‘Sorry. It’s just our life has turned into a queue. The post office for the pension – OK, we get it now in the bank, but we did queue for years. The queue for the hospital. The queue for benefits. I worked for half a century – more. I’m not a scrounger. Not like a lot of ’em who come over here …’ His resolve broke and he lit the second cigarette. ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Esther wouldn’t have let that go by, you see. I’m a better person when she’s here.’ He tried to fill his lungs. ‘This summer, in those first weeks, when it was really hot, she pushed me along the esplanade, and we just sat and watched. Kids on the beach. We never had any, not because we didn’t want them, but because we weren’t blessed. And we tried, you know … Anyway, I said she should have an ice cream if she wanted one. I can’t – the sugar – but she’s got a sweet tooth, Esther. Thinks everyone else has too. So she gets the money and I watched her, in the queue for the ice-cream van. She was right at the back. She let some kids push in – and then it was a scrum, and she gave up. Said she’d gone off the idea. Maybe she just got the idea that it wasn’t fair …’ He pulled a face. ‘I sound like a kid meself. It’s not fair!’ He tapped his temple. ‘The bus, right – there was always a queue. Especially in summer, she’d have to wait for the next bus sometimes. I know she’s trim, but still, you’d think, wouldn’t you, that someone would say she could just get on first. Especially with her hip. And we gave up trying to get my chair on. Forget it. So I thought that perhaps it had weighed on her mind and she’d decided to let the anger out.’ Keeble’s voice had suddenly risen, as if acting out his wife’s frustrations. ‘She couldn’t have picked someone, singled them out. Not Esther. So perhaps she thought this was the answer, to let fate choose. I don’t understand, of course. But it might make sense.’

  He looked out the window then, his eyes welling up, his left hand holding the burning cigarette. Patting his chest, he began to sort through the papers on his lap, his lips forming a bow to produce a sibilant whistle. Shaw thought that, despite appearances, and his imprisonment in a chair, his enforced passivity, George Keeble was oddly in control of what was left of his life.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The darkened room shimmered with martial music booming on the soundtrack, as a white bordered ‘blackboard’ carried the title The Great Tempest and the Pathé News reel logo. The narrator’s voice, in epic American tones, overlaid an aerial shot of a devastated landscape, a drowned world, within which only an outline of civilization was left – tree-lined lanes, the rooftops of a village, a church tower, the water sweeping south. It looked like an ocean on the move, which made the caption all the more chilling: Lelystad: 42 miles inland.

  ‘Six nations have already come to the aid of the stricken Dutch,’ boomed the commentary. ‘One sixth of the country, so recently devastated by the world war, now lies beneath the waves …’

  Shaw consulted a note he’d been given by the curator and used the remote control to pause the digital projector, then fast-forwarded it two minutes and thirty seconds. Once the picture was frozen, he stood as close as he could without obscuring the beam of light, then pressed the restart.

  ‘They died at sea, as well as on the land. The Marlberg, pictured here leaving Antwerp on her maiden voyage just three days earlier, was lost with all hands in a sea torn apart by a storm of biblical proportions. Little did these men know that this would be their final voyage …’

  Who had shot the film? The new owners of the ship perhaps, marking her return to service and a new beginning. Captain Beck, a distant figure in cap and spectacles, waved briskly from the bridge as she slid past a set of dockside cranes. A crewman stood at the forward rail, hauling in rope. Hartog, reasoned Shaw, would be below, tending the ship’s old engines. What looked like a lick of fresh paint could not disguise the ship’s dilapidated condition: rust dripped from the davits and the bridge rivets; the smooth marine curve of the wooden hull dented by decades of collisions with docksides and tugs; the smoke billowing from the single funnel, sooty and dense.

  The door opened and a wedge of white light redefined the room. Radley Tombs, the curator of the county archives, pushed in a trolley carrying a large bound volume and a cardboard record box. ‘These might do the trick,’ he said, his voice slightly reedy with the physical effort of hauling them on to one of the desks.

  The rest of the building – by day, Lynn’s central library – was silent and closed.

  ‘And you don’t need these anymore,’ he added, unleashing a set of blinds which rolled up to reveal the night outside, the town-centre lights harsh beyond the gardens of Greyfriars Tower.

  ‘Thanks for this,’ said Shaw, pointing at the frozen image of the Marlberg.

  ‘Glad to help,’ said Tombs, his hand fluttering at his forehead. ‘We often show it to school parties – so I remembered the name, the Marlberg. Not much information, however; these should be better, although you’ll appreciate that local news coverage of the loss of the ship was very limited, given that the papers were full of what had happened on the coast itself. Forty-four dead, the heroes who’d saved so many, the public inquiry – it went on for years. By comparison, the loss of a foreign ship nearly ten miles out to sea didn’t rate a fuss. Anyway, I’ve marked the entries: three press cuttings from the Eastern Daily Press for 1953, and the documents box from the inquest. Enjoy.’

  Shaw left the image on the screen and used a downlighter to illuminate the bound editions of the EDP.

  The first cutting was for 2nd February 1953. It simply listed the ship – giving its f
ormer name, the Calabria – as ‘lost’, quoting the coxswain of the lifeboat:

  She was in the eye of the storm, showing navigation lights, and lights from the bridge, but we couldn’t see the crew, who must have been below. She rose on her beams in a few minutes, almost vertical, then sank. It was a dreadful sight. We felt the boilers blow a few moments later, and we circled the spot for thirty minutes, but there was very little debris except oil and some wooden duckboards. Our thoughts are with the bereaved.

  The second cutting was a news brief from April 1953, which simply stated that the consul from the Dutch Embassy would attend an inquest into the deaths of three mariners on the night of the great tempest. The consul, while in the town, would lay a wreath for those who had lost their lives on the South Beach at the memorial by the pier. The Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk would present the consul with a book of remembrance for those lost in the Netherlands, which had been opened at the town hall and had collected 12,000 signatures.

  The third cutting recorded the inquests on the crew in less than 200 words, although it did note that several relatives had made the journey to Norfolk from the Netherlands for the court appearance. The coroner heard that radio messages to the owners in Bremen had reported that the ship had begun to take on water forty miles out from the Dutch coast heading north. Captain Beck had taken the decision to try to reach Lynn before the storm reached the Wash. But the failure of the three electric bilge pumps had fatally slowed the ship’s traverse of the North Sea. The verdict in each case was left open, due to the absence of the bodies. But the coroner said he was confident the men had drowned at sea.

  The coroner issued a rider to his verdict, pointing up design faults in the ship that had contributed to her loss. The radio messages to Bremen made it clear that the ship had taken on water because the transom – the rear deck – had proved too low in the water, allowing the sea to flood the hold. The subsequent failure of the pumps had sealed the ship’s fate. The coroner added that the actions of the captain had further contributed to the loss of his own life, and that of the crew, in that he had turned down a radio message from the tug Lagan, which had offered assistance.

  Shaw knew this was the turning point, the moment when the truth began to unravel, but he forced himself to calmly write the name in his notebook with the addition: Coram’s boat.

  Opening the inquest document box, he found a typed statement from the master of the Lagan, William Edward Coram, presumably Tom Coram’s father, a laconic narrative which had been signed into the official evidence by the coroner, but not read in court. It contained one final surprise.

  We accepted a contract to stand by at the Alexandra Dock in Lynn by telephone at 16.30 hours that afternoon. Several vessels had sought safe harbour after a brief warning had been broadcast at 15.00 hours. We were to assist on the full tide. We left Wells and at 18.45 hours, approximately 18 miles off Holme, we made visual contact with a ship, lifeless in heavy seas. The captain identified her as the Calabria, a Dutch coaster. We offered a tow to port. This offer was declined. We stood off for 20 minutes and observed, from a distance of 300 yards, a severe forward list. We repeated the offer, and were declined. By just after 19.15 hours the storm had reached force 9. The sea state was chaotic.

  We ran for cover at Lynn, but at a speed of thirty knots we met a wave on the port side which drove a railway sleeper through the starboard plates, a foot below the waterline. At 19.25 we abandoned ship, and took to our dinghy, which we allowed to run before the storm south-west. We beached a mile north of Hunstanton. The next day we searched for the wreck of the Lagan, but despite making visual contact in shallow water, plans to salvage the vessel were abandoned. The wreck was not visible again.

  So the Lagan and the Calabria had sunk on the same night.

  Which seemed to bring the investigation back to the Coram family. Coram’s father had skippered the tug that had tried to save the Calabria. Was he still alive? Now his son led the campaign to stop the rebuilding of the old pier. Hartog’s body had been found between the piles of the old pier. What possible connection could there be between the pier and the loss of the Calabria?

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Shaw had never appreciated the extent to which the pier – or, more accurately, the precise east–west line of the old pier – was in fact a boundary, a border, between two very different worlds. The view from the rail of the roof café on top of Marine World gave him this new perspective. To the south lay the town’s Sea Life Sanctuary, then the dodgems and helter-skelters of the fun park, and the Big One – a 150-foot-high junior version of Blackpool’s towering white-knuckle ride. Beyond that, the seawall protected caravan sites, chalet homes, camping sites, and the distant holiday camp at Heacham. A collection of sometimes ramshackle homes jostled for a sea view along the grassy seawall, including the fragile line of prefabs comprising Empire Bank. In the far distance lay the cranes of Lynn Docks, a stubby flourmill, the lone pinnacle of the Campbell’s soup factory tower.

  The view north offered an aesthetic opposite. The planning rules, so freely interpreted south of the pier, were here rigorously applied. Within a few hundred yards, the concrete front petered out into the wave-cut platform below the toothpaste-striped cliffs. This was the last point of any height before the coast became a nearly continuous beach, leaving behind the rock-pool coast, stretching in a sinuous golden line past Holme and Brancaster, Wells and Morston, Blakeney Point, and on to Sheringham and Cromer: the hundred-mile beach, backed by dunes and marshes, sandy inlets and hidden harbours. The beach formed a linear wilderness, a littoral desert, stretching the eye to breaking point.

  Now, out on the sands, Shaw could see the army bomb disposal crews preparing the three sites where they planned to blow up the First World War 1,100-pounders the next day. At each pit a tent had been set up, and cables ran to a ‘trigger point’ on the green above. Here the winner of the special lottery would press the button and set off a series of controlled explosions. All along the clifftop and esplanade Shaw could see council workers setting out crash barriers to keep back the crowds. Offshore, a few boats were already anchored in a line 200 yards from the high-tide mark – the outliers of the small fleet that would carry protestors from STP, ready to feature in every TV and newspaper shot of the triple explosion.

  Anna Roos, when she arrived, was clearly an inhabitant of the world to the north of the pier, her face in shadow under a straw hat, her long, bare legs leading to bare, sandy feet. When he’d first seen her, amongst the rock pools with her young students, she’d seemed a natural, as one with the ecosystem she was trying to reveal. Given what Shaw now knew, this studied free-spirit image seemed disturbingly fraudulent.

  ‘Inspector,’ she said, taking a plastic bottle of mineral water from her bag, pulling out one of the café’s metal seats, the legs screeching on concrete. ‘Odd place to choose for breakfast. Given that I’m on bail, my solicitor informs me that I don’t have to answer any questions. And I hate this place. So the auguries aren’t good, are they?’ She’d almost spat out the words ‘this place’. Marine World was a glitzy tourist dive, with performing seals and sharks, a ‘casino’ of one-armed bandits, and a 3D cinema; a stark contrast to the Sea Life Sanctuary with its eco-friendly habitats.

  Shaw refused to be hurried. Out on the beach a small inquisitive crowd was forming behind the safety cordon 200 yards from the bomb pits.

  A text rang on his phone, incoming from Valentine: Coram Senior alive. Up at the Old Lookout. Hospital today. He’ll see us 9 tomorrow.

  Shaw took his time with a reply, before turning back to Roos. ‘How do you feel about fish in tanks?’ he asked.

  Below them, within Marine World, sea creatures lived in a dingy twilight environment beneath dimmed artificial lighting, in tanks of decanted, salinated water. The blue-green light, refracted by the water, played little captured rainbows on the drab concrete walls. It was one of the saddest places Shaw knew.

  Climbing up to the café through the central observation stairw
ell, separated from the attractions by a plate-glass window, Shaw had glimpsed a single grey seal on its artificial beach, gloomily staring at a party of Italian language students, one of whom had pronounced gravely: Gli occhi tristi – What sad eyes!

  Roos slung a pair of sunglasses on to the table.

  ‘Coffee?’ offered Shaw.

  ‘Can we get on? I’ve been summoned here for a philosophical debate on the concept of the zoo, on freedom and imprisonment?’

  ‘Your email inbox has proved illuminating,’ said Shaw. ‘I’m not quite sure where to start. I’ve a young DC called Paul Twine who dabbled with a career in finance. He’s at home, to some extent, in the world of offshore trusts, inheritance tax, investment vehicles. What used to be covered by that slippery euphemism, personal finance. He took an interest in your digital savings account – and particularly the regular payments from the Anchorstone Trust. Nice touch that – the nod to Hartley and the rock-pool coast. Nice touch or deliberate blind-sider?’

  She took off the sun hat and seemed to make an effort to sit up straight. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I don’t need to tell you this story, do I? Brave Dutch freedom fighter kayaks across North Sea. Then peace breaks out. His parents – your grandparents – didn’t survive the occupation in Amsterdam, which left him the sole heir to the family’s lucrative diamond brokerage. He sold up, and, taking the money, he bought a parcel of land. This land, Ms Roos …’ Shaw pointed down below their feet. ‘The operators of Marine World rent off the Anchorstone Trust; still do. And when your father died – tragically young, I’m sorry for that – he left you and your mother the income from the fund. Every time I hear a one-armed bandit chug out a few coins for the dopey gamblers downstairs, I’ll think of you, Ms Roos, and your cut of the takings. My DS saw your modest flat when we picked up the laptop. But that’s not really home, is it? There’s a Jacobean quayside house at Cley, and of course your mother’s house near Aix-en-Provence. I’m only guessing, but it sounds stunning – all that painterly light.’