The Black Tide

by Hammond Innes

  He waved a hand to the ruins of a colossal flint and tile wall that climbed away from us as the car swung. ‘That’s the outer remains of Camulodunum, the Roman centre of East Anglia.’ Sheepen Place appeared on a name-plate edged with snow, an industrial estate doubling back towards the A12 roundabout and the meadow land beyond. The car slowed, turned right into the entrance of a printing works. ‘Don’t forget the ramps,’ he said. ‘Two of them.’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten.’ She almost stalled the car as we bumped over the first, which showed only as the slightest hump in the wind-drifted snow. A board announced Lloyd’s Shipping Press and I saw there was a three-storey brick building beyond the printing works. No mention of Intelligence Services.

  ‘You’ve not been here before?’ He was watching for the next ramp, not looking at me, and I guessed it was just an idle queston.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Anybody in particular?’

  ‘A Mr Ferrers.’

  We bumped over the second ramp. The Shipping Press building was stretched over the car park on steel pillars. ‘What department?’

  ‘Special Enquiries.’

  He nodded. ‘Ah yes, of course, Marine Frauds.’ He turned in his seat, eyeing me curiously as the car slid to a stop outside the plate glass entrance doors. ‘Which particular marine casualty are you investigating – or aren’t you at liberty to say?’

  I hesitated. ‘I’ve come to see him about the Petros Jupiter.’

  He nodded. ‘That was an odd one, eh?’ He turned to his wife. ‘Remember, Margaret? A young woman – she blew it up and herself with it.’

  ‘Yes, I remember, Alfred.’

  ‘An odd way to end your life.’

  ‘She didn’t—’ I began, but then I stopped myself. Better leave it at that. No good trying to explain about oil slicks and pollution and sea birds dying. I began to get out and he said, ‘Intelligence Services is on the second floor.’

  I thanked him. I thanked them both and stood there in the bitter wind until their car was out of sight round the other side of the building. Now that I was here I wasn’t quite certain how to proceed. A muddy Triumph pulled into a parking place and a big fair man in a rumpled suit and no top-coat got out. I pushed open the plate glass door. There was a lift and some stairs and it was warm. I took the stairs. The swing doors facing the lift on the first floor were clearly marked Shipping Press. Through glass panels I could see men working at their desks, some in their shirt sleeves. It was an open-plan office covering virtually the whole floor and there were visual display units scattered about so that I knew the operation was computerized.

  The swing doors on the second floor were completely anonymous, no mention of Intelligence Services. As on the floor below, the offices were open-plan with a lot of electrical equipment, VDUs and telex machines, particularly on the far side where the wind, blowing straight in off the North Sea, drove the snow in near-horizontal white lines across the large, clear, sheet-glass windows. The lift doors opened behind me. It was the big fair man in the rumpled suit, and as he was pushing past me, he paused briefly, holding the swing doors open with his shoulder. ‘Looking for somebody?’

  ‘Ferrers,’ I said.

  ‘Barty Ferrers.’ He nodded and I stepped inside. ‘Expecting you?’ He was already slipping his jacket off.

  ‘Yes,’ I said and gave him my name.

  The big, open-plan floor was very warm. A lot of men there, most of them in their shirt sleeves, the desks flat tables littered with books and papers. A few women on the far side and one girl sitting with seven or eight men at a big table with a card on it marked Casualty Room.

  I could see he was a bit doubtful and I said quickly, ‘It’s about the Petros Jupiter’

  His eyes widened then, a sudden glint of recognition. ‘Yes, of course. The Petros Jupiter.’ He gave me a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. ‘I’m Ted Fairley. I run Lloyd’s Confidential Index.’ He gave me a big jovial smile. ‘That’s the prudent insurers’ index to vessels of doubtful virtue.’ He turned and surveyed the room. ‘Can’t see Barty at the moment. But Tim Spurling, the other half of the Marine Fraud twins, he’s there.’ He had his jacket off now and I followed him between the crowded tables. ‘Barty contacted you, did he?’

  ‘No. Was he going to?’

  ‘Yes, I think the legal boys want to talk to you.’ He stopped at a desk with a typewriter and a litter of books and tossed his jacket on to the empty chair. ‘That’s my square foot or so of lebensraum. Casualty History on one side, Casualty Reporting on the other. Very convenient and never a dull moment. Ah, there’s Barty.’ He veered towards an area of the floor jutting out to the north and full of the clatter of telexes and operators keying information into visual display units. ‘Information Room,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘This is where our two thousand agents all over the world report in by telex. Barty!’ He had to raise his voice against the clatter.

  Barty Ferrers wasn’t in the least what I had expected. He was a plump, jolly-looking man with a round, babyish face and thick horn-rimmed glasses that were bi-focal. He looked up from the telex he was reading, and when he realized who I was, his eyes seemed to freeze behind the thick glasses. They were pale blue, the sort of cold blue eyes that Swedes often have. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I started to explain, but he cut me short. ‘Never mind. I’ve been trying to get you at that Sennen number.’

  ‘The ship was wrecked deliberately then?’

  ‘We don’t know that.’

  ‘Why were you phoning me then?’

  ‘Marine solicitors. They want to see you.’

  ‘Why?’

  He shook his head. ‘Can’t talk here. First – read that.’ He handed me a telex slip one of the operators had passed across to him. ‘Came in last night.’

  It was from Lloyd’s agent at La Rochelle and dated the previous day, January 11: VAGUE D’OR LOCKED INTO TRAWLER BASIN HERE TWO DAYS AGO. CAPTAIN HAS NO INFORMATION ARISTIDES SPERIDION. MAN TAKEN ON BOARD OFF PORTH-CURNOW IS SHIP’S ENGINEER HENRI CHOFFEL. THIS MAN LEAVES IMMEDIATELY FOR PARIS EN ROUTE BY AIR TO BAHRAIN. THIS IS CERTAIN AS ALL NECESSARY BOOKINGS MADE LOCALLY. The telex then went on to describe Choffel as short with dark hair – POSSIBLY PIED NOIR, SPEAKS FRENCH WITH AN ACCENT, AQUILINE FEATURES, AGE 46, WIFE DEAD. DAUGHTER ONLY. ADDRESS 5042 LES TUFFEAUX, PARNAY, NEAR SAUMUR-ON-LOIRE. HOLDS FRENCH PASSPORT.

  Time and occupation right, the Breton fishing boat, too. I was remembering a list I had read in one of the papers giving the names of French boats operating off the Cornish coast. I was almost certain one of them had been the Vague d’Or. Only the man’s name was different. ‘He must have had two passports,’ I said.

  Ferrers nodded, handing me another telex. ‘This just came in.’

  It was from Bahrain: SUBJECT OF QUERY ARRIVED BAHRAIN YDAY MORNING. WENT STRAIGHT ABOARD FREIGHTER CORSAIRE, BUT NOT AS ENGINEER, AS PASSENGER. CORSAIRE NOW TAKING ON FUEL PREPARATORY TO SAILING.

  So by now he would have gone. Ferrers took the telexes from me and passed them to one of the operators with instructions to transmit the information to Forthright & Co. ‘They’re the solicitors.’ He gave me a quick, searching glance, then jerked his head towards the far corner of the floor. ‘We don’t encourage visitors,’ he said as we got away from the clatter of the telexes. ‘So I’d be glad if you’d keep it to yourself that you’ve been here.’

  ‘It doesn’t give the ship’s destination,’ I said.

  ‘No, but I can soon find that out.’ He pushed past a man with an armful of the Lloyd’s List and then we were in his little corner and he had plonked himself down at a table with a VDU on it. ‘Let’s see what the computer says.’ While his fingers were busy on the keyboard he introduced me to Spurling, a sharp-featured, sandy-haired man with a long freckled face and bushy sideburns. What the computer said was INSTRUCTION INCORRECT. ‘Hell!’ He tried it again with the same result. ‘Looks as though our fellow in Bahrain got the name of the ship wrong.’

  Sp
urling leaned over his shoulder. ‘Try the French spelling – with an ‘e’ at the end, same as in his telex.’

  He tried it and immediately line after line of print began coming up on the VDU screen, everything about the ship, the fact that it was French and due to sail today, also its destination, which was Karachi. He glanced up at me and I could see the wheels turning. ‘That ship you were mate on, plying between Bombay and the Gulf – based on Karachi, wasn’t she?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And the crew, Pakistani?’

  ‘Some of them.’

  ‘So you speak the language.’

  ‘I speak a little Urdu, yes.’

  He nodded, turning his head to stare at the windows and the driving lines of snow. ‘Choffel,’ he murmured. ‘That name rings a bell.’ He turned to Spurling. ‘Remember that little Lebanese freighter they found waterlogged but still afloat off Pantelleria? I suddenly thought of her in my bath this morning. Not in connection with Choffel, of course. But Speridion. Wasn’t Speridion the name of the ship’s engineer?’

  Spurling thought for a moment, then shook his head. ‘Speridion, Choffel – not sure.’ He was frowning in concentration as he lit a cigarette from the butt of his last and stubbed out the remains in the tobacco tin beside his IN-tray. ‘It’s quite a time back. Seventy-six, maybe seventy-seven.’ He hesitated, drawing on the cigarette. ‘The crew abandoned her. Skipper’s name, I remember—’

  ‘Never mind the skipper. It’s the engineer we want.’

  ‘It’ll be on the file. I’m certain I put it on the file.’ He reached over to a small steel cabinet, but then he checked. ‘I need the ship’s name. You know that. Just give me the name …’

  But Ferrers couldn’t remember the name, only that there had been a Greek engineer involved. From what they said I gathered the cabinet contained confidential casualty information that included the background of ships’ officers and crew members known to have been involved in fraud. Then Spurling was muttering to himself, still frowning in concentration: ‘A crook Lebanese company owned her. Can’t recall the company’s name, but Beirut. That’s where the ship was registered. A small tanker. I’m sure it was a tanker.’ And he added, ‘Pity you can’t remember the name. Everything in that file is listed under the name of a ship.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Then you’d better start searching again.’

  ‘I’ve been through two years of casualty records already this morning. That’s seventy microfiches.’

  ‘You love it.’ Spurling grinned at me, nodding to a shelf full of thick loose-leafed volumes on the wall behind us. ‘All our casualty records are micro-filmed and filed in those binders. The VDU there acts as a viewing box and you can get a print-out at the touch of a button. It’s Barty’s own personal toy. Try the winter of seventy-five, seventy-six.’

  ‘Back to where we first started keeping records?’ Ferrers got slowly to his feet. ‘It’ll take me an hour to go through that lot.’

  Spurling smiled at him wickedly. ‘It’s what you’re paid for, isn’t it?’

  Ferrers gave a snort. ‘May I remind you we’re supposed to be keeping tabs on over six hundred vessels for various clients.’

  ‘They’ll never know, and if you pull the information Forthright want out of the box who’s to say you’re wasting your time?’ Spurling looked at me and dropped an eyelid, his face deadpan. ‘Come to think of it, I doubt if it was winter. They were several days in an open boat. Try March or April, seventy-seven. She had her tanks full of arms, that’s why you remember her.’

  Ferrers nodded, reaching down the second volume from the far end of the shelf. I watched him as he searched quickly through the fiche pockets, extracted one and slipped it into the scanning slot. Immediately the VDU screen came alive with information which changed quickly as he shifted from microfilm to microfilm. And when he had finished with that fiche, I put it back in its pocket for him, while he began searching the next. Each fiche, measuring about 6 × 4 inches, was imprinted with rows of tiny little microfilms hardly bigger than pinheads.

  He was over half an hour, working first forwards through 1977, then backwards into ‘76. He worked in the silence of total concentration, and with Spurling’s attention divided between his typewriter and the telephone, they seemed to have forgotten all about me. At one point Spurling passed me a telex giving the latest report on the Petros Jupiter salvage situation. Smit International, the Dutch salvage people, had announced their intention of withdrawing from any further attempt to salvage the wreck. Their divers had only been able to operate for two days since the explosion, a total of 8½ hours. But apparently this had been sufficient to establish the general condition of the wreck, which was now lying in three sections to the north of Kettle’s Bottom with only the skeletal remains of the superstructure awash at low tide. The effect of the explosion, followed by the intense heat generated by the ignition of the five tanks containing oil, had been such that they regarded any attempt to salvage the remains of the vessel as quite profitless. And they added that, in its present position, they did not consider it a danger to shipping. Further, all tanks were now completely ruptured and empty of oil.

  There were three sheets of the telexed report and I had just come to the end of it when Ferrers suddenly exclaimed, ‘Got it! The Stella Rosa. March 20, 1976.’ Spurling looked up and nodded, smiling. ‘Of course. The Stella Rosa.’

  ‘Outward bound from Tripoli to Algiers.’ Ferrers was reading from the scanner, his face close to the screen. ‘Arms for the Polisario – Sam-7s and Kalashnikovs.’ He straightened up, pressing the button that gave him the print-out, and when he had it, he passed it to Spurling. But by then Spurling had the Stella Rosa file out and was running quickly through it; ‘Skipper Italian, Mario Pavesi from Palermo. Ah, here we are. Second engineer Aristides Speridion. No address given. Not among the survivors. First engineer – now we have something – guess who? None other than Henri Choffel, French. He was picked up and is described here as suspect on his past record. He was chief engineer of the Olympic Ore and is thought to have been implicated in her sinking in 1972. At the Enquiry into the sinking of the Stella Rosa he claimed it was Speridion who opened the sea cocks.’ He passed the file to Ferrers. ‘Good hunch of yours.’

  Ferrers gave a little shrug. ‘No indication then that Speridion got away in a boat?’

  Spurling shook his head. ‘No. And no record that he managed to land on Pantelleria. All it says is – no indication that he is still alive.’

  ‘So Choffel knew he was dead. He must have known otherwise he wouldn’t have used the man’s name. And to use Speridion’s name he’d need his papers.’ Ferrers was staring down at the file. ‘I wonder what really happened to Speridion? It says here – At the Enquiry held at Palermo Chief Engineer Henri Choffel stated that he and two of his men tried to stop the flow of water into the engine-room, but the cocks on the sea water inlet to the cooling systems had been opened and then damaged. Speridion had been on duty. Choffel thought he had probably been paid to sink the ship by agents of the Moroccan government.’ Ferrers shook his head, sucking in air through his teeth. ‘And on the Petros Jupiter he was using the name Speridion. That means it’s almost certainly sabotage.’

  ‘And if he did have the Greek’s papers and the police start looking into the Stella Rosa sinking—’ Spurling hesitated. ‘It could be murder, couldn’t it?’

  I thought he was jumping to conclusions. But perhaps that was because I had been thinking all the time in terms of Speridion. Choffel was something different, something new. It took time for my mind to switch. But murder as well as sabotage … ‘God Almighty!’ I said. ‘Nobody who’d killed his second engineer, and then accused him of sabotaging the ship, would dream of using the man’s name.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he?’ Spurling had turned to his typewriter, the file beside him. ‘If I let you loose on that filing cabinet, you’d be surprised at the stupidity of some of the marine frauds and the damn fool things men do. They’re
amateurs, most of them, not professionals. Remember the Salem, sunk off the West African coast right within sight of a BP tanker. They never seem to realize it takes time to sink a really big ship. I tell you, they do the craziest things.’

  ‘If they didn’t,’ Ferrers said, ‘there isn’t a member of any marine syndicate at Lloyd’s who’d be making money. They’d be losing their shirts instead.’ He turned as Fairley appeared at his elbow, a telex in his hand.

  ‘Just come in,’ he said. ‘Michael Stewart’s box. Anything we can tell him about the How do Stranger. It’s gone missing.’ He placed the telex on Spurling’s typewriter. ‘I’ve checked the Confidential Index. Nothing. Hardly surprising. It’s owned and run by Gulf Oil Development.’

  ‘A tanker then?’ Spurling picked up the telex and began reading it.

  Fairley nodded. ‘About the same size as the Aurora B, the GODCO ship that went missing two months ago.’ He leaned over Spurling’s shoulder, checking the telex. ‘This one’s 116,000 tons. She had a full cargo for Japan. Same destination, you see. And loaded out of the same port, Mina Zayed.’ He straighted up with a shrug. ‘She’s ten years old, but she’d just passed survey A. 1, yet now, suddenly, she fails to report on schedule.’