Death Ship

by Jim Kelly

  FIFTY

  Over the next few days waves at last began to crash ashore on Shaw’s beach, marking the end perhaps of the calm waters of summer. The Met Office predicted a seven-foot swell along the East Coast of England for the next six days, and so the surfing crowd had arrived in force, the sea dotted with black wetsuits, bobbing as the sets rolled in, the breakers reaching to within fifty yards of Surf!.

  Lena and Fran had been in Jamaica a week, and Shaw had arranged their postcards behind the bar, depicting Caribbean sunsets and crystal blue seas, although no white breakers. The café was as busy as ever, the usual clientele boosted by the moneyed surfing set, their expensive waxed boards in a rack by the shop.

  Shaw and Valentine, off duty for the first time in weeks, sat before a bottle of white wine in a cooler, watching Jan enter the sea with one of Valentine’s stepdaughters.

  A waiter spun past with a full tray, offloading an iced bottle of Spanish beer in front of Valentine, who deftly picked the slice of lime from the neck and tossed it into the sand.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said, his eyes on Jan’s swimming cap, now out beyond the breakers.

  Shaw raised his wine glass. ‘To the scales of Justice.’

  That morning, they’d witnessed Edward Coram’s first appearance before magistrates in Lynn, to face a specimen charge of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. The serious crime unit was building a wider case, which would include charges of conspiracy to commit arson, incitement to murder, and murder. Tad Atkins’ suicide note underpinned their case, alongside Ava’s account of Kersk’s role in carrying out Coram’s orders. The team was carefully building a raft of circumstantial evidence to support their case at Crown Court.

  The sinews of Coram’s criminal operation were now clear. Atkins’ note described how Coram had controlled him by threatening to deprive him of his job. He said it would only take a word, Atkins had written. Atkins’ job was his life, the one thing that had kept him from the chasm of despair that had opened up after he’d killed Josh Ridding in his car, drunk at the wheel. A job that had facilitated his rehabilitation in the community he loved. In his turn, Atkins used his hold over Kersk to subcontract Coram’s orders, suggesting that the Ukrainian could, with the right amount of cash, get his lover out of Crimea and to the UK. In a limp attempt to salve his own conscience, Atkins had treated his protégé well, making sure he got all the overtime on offer, and even making a gift of the Leander Club watch he’d been given by the WaveCrest salesman for securing the club’s bulk order.

  Kersk had been responsible for the series of criminal attacks on the pier, including the violent assault on Dirk Hartog, whose quest threatened to divulge the secret of the Calabria. Was Hartog’s determination to locate the wreck of the Calabria really motivated by a desire to reunite his parents after death? Esther Keeble’s description of the inquest suggested another scenario: perhaps the relatives of the lost crewmen of the Calabria had somehow picked up the suspicions of the lifeboat crew. Did Hartog, perhaps, suspect that the truth lay in the hold of the lost ship?

  The device uncovered by the Ross family had now been fully analyzed at the Ark. A minute particle of paint on a metal fragment had been traced to a high-street provider of white goods and heating supplies, suggesting perhaps the use of a kitchen boiler to encase the explosives – a mixture of garden-centre fertilizer and TNT. Extensive inquiries through Coram’s shipyard had revealed a possible source for the explosives. One of the construction teams working on the new offshore windfarms near Skegness, regularly serviced by Coram’s tugs, had reported the theft of TNT on three separate occasions the previous year.

  The device had been designed by Coram, built by Atkins, and buried by Kersk, and included a commercially produced tip detonator, designed to trigger an explosion when Blue Square began the second phase of their project, the construction of the pier outward from the shore to the new pier head, on its caisson foundations. Roos and Lester, it was now clear, had operated independently, and were being held on remand, facing charges relating to vandalism, criminal damage, and breach of the peace.

  So far Edward Coram had pleaded not guilty, although – given the growing weight of evidence – this might well be altered at Crown Court, if he decided to take refuge behind a principled motive: that he had sought only to delay and abort the construction of the new pier. The events of the night of 31st January 1953 were unlikely to be aired in court at all unless they could find either the wreck of the Calabria or a credible reason why halting the construction of the pier was related to an act of violent piracy more than six decades ago.

  ‘This doesn’t help,’ said Shaw, using his hand as a sunshade so that he could reread the email he’d received that morning from the chief constable:

  Shaw. Re your request for the diving unit to locate the wreck of the Calabria. I’ve attached costing from DI Forbes: you will note that the figure of £150,000 comes with no guarantee of success. You concede, I think, that the vessel may simply reappear on the sands. Even if located there, it is extremely unlikely – Forbes’ words – that any human remains could be located. It was a relatively small wooden vessel. We are not even sure the crew was aboard. It is possible they abandoned ship and were lost in the storm. I can’t sign off on this operation. Coram is behind bars. The charges are of a serious nature. He’ll serve the rest of his life in prison, or at least at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Your job is done. Give my congratulations to the team. CC.

  Jan appeared, dripping, grabbing a towel, her eyes on the surf where her daughter was bodyboarding. She had the kind of flushed skin tone that seems to be an emblem of good health. Seated, she poured herself a drink.

  ‘Do we have to have this on the table?’ said Valentine, taking the dull-russet plastic canister of ashes that they’d discovered in Hartog’s hotel room and placing it below on the sand.

  ‘Hartog wanted to sprinkle them on the spot where his father died,’ said Shaw. ‘It was, admittedly inadvertently, his final wish. I just thought we should take a boat out to Roaring Island and do the deed. Unless you’ve got a better idea.’

  ‘Hardly a last resting place,’ said Jan. ‘With burial at sea, they weight the coffin, so they get to lie on the seabed. But this is just ash, atoms – they’ll instantly be diluted, flowing with the tide, who knows where? Doesn’t seem quite right.’

  Valentine drained his Estrella, not bothering to lift his elbow from the table. ‘We’ve decided to move from Greenland Street,’ he said, adopting the tone of an official announcement. ‘Out here, God help us. A terraced house in Wells, on a backstreet. No sea view.’

  ‘But the quayside’s five minutes’ walk,’ added Jan, smiling.

  ‘So we’re not on your doorstep, Peter. No panic.’

  Jan slipped her arm through Valentine’s and pulled him close. ‘You can just feel the enthusiasm, can’t you? The excitement of it all.’

  Valentine caught the waiter’s eye, tipping his wrist with the empty Estrella bottle clasped in his fingers.

  ‘I thought – we thought – that Julie could do with some peace,’ he said. ‘Truth is, I’ve been haunting her, not the other way round.’

  Reaching down, Jan put the urn of ashes back on the table. ‘Why don’t you weight the urn? Then the whole thing will sink to the bottom.’

  ‘What about you?’ said Shaw, topping up Jan’s glass. ‘Wells must be full of memories. It was your old man’s manor. Local copper for twenty-five years. He’s the father of your children. Won’t you see him about the place – shop windows, a passing squad car?’

  Jan shook her head. ‘Kids have grown up. Beth’s getting married in the spring,’ she said, nodding towards the waves. ‘That makes a difference, because it’s like her story’s being written over mine, over ours.’

  Shaw looked along the beach, thinking of the childhood hours he’d spent here with his father. Sometimes, walking on the sands, he imagined finding their footprints.

  His phone buzzed intermittently, struggling to make
contact despite the poor signal. ‘It’s Lena,’ he said, checking the screen, concerned it was bad news. Disentangling his legs from the picnic table, he jogged up the beach to the dunes where the signal was best.

  Lena’s voice was suddenly clear. ‘Peter?’

  ‘Yes. I’m here. Signal’s good.’

  ‘We’re fine. Look, reception here isn’t good – it’s down to luck. I just wanted to touch base; if we lose you, don’t worry. I’ll call later in the week. The service is Friday, at Black River, then we’ll bury the ashes in the churchyard.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘We’re in Half Way Tree. At Milly’s. Jessie’s enjoying herself. Fran’s amazed that she’s part of this. I think they know why Mum wanted to be buried at Black River, but they’re not telling. Not yet. I can tell there’s this secret. They’re just bursting to say, but they can’t …’ Shaw heard a mumbled conversation. ‘We better go. Fran wants a word.’

  ‘Dad? Listen. Two things. Go on to Instagram and look at my pictures; I’ve kept a kind of visual diary of the trip – yeah? Check it out. Also, you know that kid who went up in the airship – Ross. He’s on Instagram. The pictures are, like, amazing. You can see Surf! and everything. You do know how to do that, right?’

  An hour later Shaw was alone, his laptop open, Surf!’s Wi-Fi connecting him to Marc Ross’s Instagram feed.

  The teenager had created a gallery of about a hundred separate images chronicling his journey in Free Spirit, from the first shot of the airship’s nose poking out of the giant hangar at Cardington, to the last images of the dunes, right here, above Shaw’s beach.

  Flying north, Marc had caught rowers on the Cam like water boatmen, the geometric perfection of Ely Cathedral, a great Tudor house with sheep dotted beyond a ha-ha, the giant wind turbines at Swaffham, and then the harbour at Wells, dotted with boats, leading out to the mathematical patterns of the buoyage, marking the channel out to deeper water, the wind leaving grey wave patterns on the open water.

  Here young Ross had posted a comment: Now we’ve left the land behind it’s like we’re not moving at all, just hanging. And the engines are so quiet, you can’t hear them for the wind, and the sea.

  The next picture showed a coaster, the deck layout sharp as a pin, with gulls in its wake, and then a shot of a skidoo, and a little flotilla of windsurfers, indicating that land was close. The long windless summer had left the sea preternaturally clear, so that the images soon began to reveal the sand banks below, until the Telamon appeared: an intricate, jewel-like puzzle of mechanical structures.

  And then the subtlest of images, the one that Marc Ross had almost not bothered to post: a ghostly shape, made up of three broken lines, two curving to create the echo of a ship’s prow, the third a blunt stern. And now Shaw could see what young Ross had missed with his own eye: just off centre, as if dislodged from its precise mathematical position by time, the clean, crisp icon of a circle, marking what looked to Shaw like the once-sooty chimney of a stout tug.

  FIFTY-ONE

  As Shaw tumbled backwards off the dive unit’s boat, he lodged the image above in his mind as if in farewell: a wrack of cirrus cloud, the white morning light. Once the fizzing mass of oxygen bubbles cleared, he found the sea itself still unusually clear, thanks to the long windless summer, untroubled even by the return of the surfers’ swell. For a moment he hung in the salty, dense seawater, waiting for the familiar to return: a sense of up and down, of light and darkness, and – heard but not seen – the sudden implosion of the next diver entering the water over his head. Within a minute the three of them hung, suspended, at the corners of a watery triangle. Then the underwater lights thudded on, the camera pointing to the seabed, and they spiralled down.

  Using Marc Ross’s aerial picture, they had made a rough estimate of the location of the wreck glimpsed in the clear summer waters from the airship above. Using the Telamon as a fixed point of the fly-past route, they had accurately set GPS coordinates for the wreck. It had taken four dives to make contact with the sunken boat. An underwater image, captured on camera, showed the prow and the distinctive ogive curves of a ship.

  The exact wreck position was now marked by a moored diving platform above: an awkward, rectangular block which Shaw could just see, framed in silhouette against the sunlit surface of the sea. Descending, the seabed appeared, the low-gravity jolt of his touchdown raising plumes of silt, which cleared to reveal the three of them within a tight circle of blazing light, across which ran one line of the stunted wooden footings of the old pier. Three divers: Shaw with the red helmet, the dive leader with the yellow stripe, the cameraman in blue.

  The dive leader checked a hand-held compass to obtain a bearing to the wreck, and as they waited, a miniature shoal of minnows twisted in the circular space between them like a living knot. Shaw felt the sudden presence of something larger, which threw a shadow over them in passing, making his heart quicken with a rapid double beat. Turning, corkscrewing down, it swept past them, slipping through the circle of light, and they saw it for what it was: an aged, battered dog fish, the shark-like shape scarred and mottled, the teeth parted to reveal a flash of the dark gullet beyond. Close enough to touch, the grey, padded, dry flesh was also pitted, Shaw noted, with the wounds of dog fights, the hallmarks of decades of feeding frenzies, here on the unseen plane beneath the sea.

  The dive leader prodded the fish with a baton and a dull spark buzzed, the fish skittering away in terror. They watched its retreat from black, to grey, to the echo of a shadow, before following the leader north, towards the other – unseen – line of pier footings, moving across the striated sandy floor, with its curious, curving, parallel rib-lines, as if they were traversing the surface of a giant fingerprint.

  They were over the wreck within fifty yards. Shaw, who’d drifted away from the others, was on the port side and therefore the only one who saw the stencilled name on the metal hull: Lagan.

  The underwater camera was running, but Shaw had a smaller stills model, and as he hung in motionless dead water, he recorded the nameplate, confirming in the single image the implications of the discovery: the Lagan lay a thousand yards off the low-tide mark, not three miles south-west of Holme – the position recorded in the inquest papers. The Lagan, its deckhouse ripped away by more than half a century of underwater currents, but its hull, protected by the sand, still settled in its seabed grave.

  The hull plates of the metal tug – riveted in the dry dock at Hull in the 1940s – still held fast. But the deck plates had popped, dislodged perhaps by the bomb blasts on the beach. The hold now gaped, a black rectangle twenty-five feet by eighteen, into which the camera lights were tilted, to reveal a cargo of railway sleepers, stacked neatly, the surface eaten away to a pitted, curved, organic skin.

  And three skeletons.

  All lay within the still, trapped water of the hold. Shaw’s eye, allied with his imagination, fixed on one that lay by the brass porthole, the skull perhaps a foot from the glass, which reflected the camera lights, as did the small, oval lenses of a pair of spectacles that had fallen to embrace the neck of the victim, lying on the chest bone. Did he edge towards the glass on that stormy night in 1953, seeing, perhaps, the fleeting lights of the town before the Lagan struck disaster, to sink within sight of land? Had the tug been staved in by a railway sleeper, or, in the chaos of the storm, had it struck the pier itself? The other two dead lay fixed in a tableau in the middle of the hold, their lower arms held together by what looked like leather bonds.

  Shaw had little doubt this was the last resting place of the crew of the Calabria, that they had been incarcerated in the hold, bound, and that they’d died here, in the terrifying darkness of that night, while the crew of the Lagan had fled to the sanctuary of the South Beach.

  Across the scene the shadow of the dogfish flashed again, and as Shaw looked up to catch its passing, it twisted along its spine and, with a single violent flexing of its tail, was gone.

  FIFTY-TWO

  Events moved sw
iftly in the hours after the discovery of the wreck of the Lagan. Edward Coram instructed his solicitor to inform the Crown Prosecution Service immediately that he would be entering a plea of guilty to all charges on appearance at Luton Crown Court, on the date set in early October. His next public appearance was to be a bail hearing in Lynn just twenty-four hours after the discovery of the wreck. Through his solicitor he made an application to the magistrates seeking permission to make a statement in court, indicating that he wished to give a full account of the events of 31st January 1953. Given the narrow time frame, relatives of the Calabria’s crew were unable to make the journey, although the Dutch consul indicated that he would attend on their behalf. Permission was granted for the statement, although the move was perhaps cynically interpreted by the prosecution as a ruse to help secure the defendant bail, on the grounds of failing health.

  The court was packed, Shaw and Valentine observing from the upper gallery.

  Coram’s solicitor confirmed that his client would be pleading guilty at Crown Court to two specimen charges of manslaughter and murder: the victims named as Dirk Hartog Senior and his son. Under English law, he was as culpable for the murder of the second – for which he had procured the help of Atkins and Kersk – as he was for the manslaughter of the first, in which he had taken an active, leading role by recklessly imprisoning the crew of the Calabria in the hold of his boat.