by Peter Tonkin
Unsurprisingly, Robin herself had no appetite. A quick call to Heritage House had established that the weather was moderating; they were considering opening the airport at Chek Lap Kok and Macau was open already. The first rescue flight had reported no sign of anything. No jetcat, no wreckage. Certainly no survivors. It was, after all, the better part of twenty-four hours since whatever had happened had occurred. No one had any idea what the disaster actually had been. No one ever would, now, in all probability. There was already a certain amount of eccentric speculation about aliens and a new Bermuda Triangle. The first report on the newspapers on the Sunday programme to which Robin was listening on the Monterey’s radio mentioned the headline ‘Jetcat Mary Celeste’ and she nearly drove off the road.
That Richard should have been involved with any of this seemed utterly incredible. No, it wasn’t at all. She was just fooling herself with that sort of thinking. It was exactly the sort of thing Richard was always getting caught up in. Ye gods, she had seen it often enough. Over and over, in fact. He was always living on the edge of disaster — pushing the envelope. It was like being married to a test pilot, an astronaut. Sometimes it seemed that the whole of their life had been one wild whirl of untrustworthy hulls and colleagues; companies always on the verge of bankruptcy; dangerous enemies, from lone saboteurs to terrorist groups; and all too many wars, from the Falklands and the Gulf to the civil war in Mau. She had thought it was all going to settle down once they got ensconced in Hong Kong with nothing for him to do but run a little shipping line and raise the twins.
It was a joke. The whole of her life was one big sodding joke.
But he had never gone missing like this before. Never got himself killed before.
She could not grasp the possibility of his death. Could not really convince herself that what everyone else was thinking might be true. Even after she had closed down Ashenden and got herself on to the familiar road up to London, she still could not bring herself to confront the idea that Richard might actually have gone down with the vanished jetcat. That he might really be drowned. Dead. Somewhere at the bottom of the South China Sea. Or, more likely, in the belly of a shark.
The idea was so impossible she simply could not register it.
Charles Lee had no such problems, however. ‘We have to assume that Richard is dead,’ he said with calculated brutality at the start of the emergency board meeting. A sort of a ripple went round the table and the muted rumble of traffic from the roadway outside sounded faintly threatening in the sudden silence.
‘Early days for that, surely,’ said Sir William, frowning. The old man had a lot of time for the Oriental’s intelligence and his Harvard Business School education, but every now and then he disapproved very strongly of his total lack of sensitivity.
Robin’s eyes were full of tears. ‘No, I agree with Charles,’ she said huskily. ‘Even if we don’t believe it to be true, we have to draw up some plans at least, assuming he won’t be around for a while.’
‘Well,’ temporised Helen DuFour quietly, ‘we certainly have to look at the immediate implications as far as the China Queens Company is concerned.’
‘It’s losing money hand over fist,’ said Charles.
‘Are you saying we want out then?’ asked Sir William, narrow-eyed.
‘We might have that option, just this once, if Richard is dead. We could use it as an excuse to close the company down, clear up on all the insurances and move on.’
‘What are the practicalities of that?’ Sir William asked Robin.
‘It can be done, quite easily. The company would take ten minutes to wind up. But if we did it, even under the circumstances you suggest, we could never go back, I don’t think. We would effectively be closing one of the biggest markets that exists, now and in the future. We wouldn’t only be letting down the employees in Xianggang, Singapore, Shanghai and the rest; we’d be damaging the pockets and the face of a lot of companies who ship their goods with us.’
‘That’s the point I’m making,’ said Charles silkily. ‘These are the only circumstances under which we might be able to walk away.’
‘Helen. The legal position?’
A Gallic shrug of a perfectly Chanel-clad shoulder in answer. ‘We own the company. We can do what we want with it. We would have to meet employment contracts and standard shipping contracts. We would have to consider political implications, though, especially if we wanted to sell on and pull what we could out of the fire.’
‘Politics, Charles?’
This is not happening to me, Robin thought suddenly. I am not sitting here with my nearest family and colleagues discussing what to do with my company because my husband is dead. She got up and walked to the end of the room where several glass-sided cases held models of Prometheus, their tanker flagship, Katapult their leisure craft and Atropos their waste-disposal vessel. She looked out through the window into Leadenhall. Charles’s assessment of the current political situation and the place of the China Queens Company within it droned on in the background. She remembered how she had stood with Richard as the first Prometheus broke in half in the Channel; the heady thrill of running across the Gulf in Katapult at the better part of forty knots with Richard at the helm; the way Richard had split an ice barrier asunder to save her, nearly destroying both Atropos and her sister ship Clotho. Richard, Richard, Richard, she thought.
She turned and the sudden decisiveness of her movement stopped all the conversation and the speculation.
‘You can stay here calculating the odds for as long as you like,’ she said. ‘When you come to your decisions, you can phone me or fax me. But I’m not staying here talking any longer. I’m going back to see what needs to be done and to do it myself!’
8
Robin’s sudden access of decisiveness did not last long. It was just enough to set her in motion and then it was replaced by a lethargic sense of anticlimax and depression underpinned by an increasingly bitter sense of déjà vu. But that flash of her old fire was enough to get things going, like the one brief effort needed to start a boulder rolling down a slope.
With her words still ringing round the boardroom, she walked to the door, crossed the passageway and entered the lift. Moments later she was walking into the offices of Crewfinders. As Audrey had been on the night shift, it was Amanda who greeted her, grim-faced.
‘I want to get back,’ said Robin at once. ‘I don’t really care how I get there as long as it’s fast. I won’t have to have any jabs done and all my papers are in order. It’s just a case of confirming my return flight with BA or transferring me on to another airline altogether. But I’d like to leave as soon as possible.’
While Robin was still talking, Amanda began tapping into the Internet. The moment Robin stopped talking, she was able to answer her requirements.
‘BA are full until the middle of the week — as you’d expect; they had to cancel a good many flights because of the bad weather and they’ve picked up passengers from other airlines who had to do the same. Most of the major carriers seem to be in the same boat. Now, who is this? Canton Airlines. Ever heard of them? Me neither. But they have a flight leaving at fourteen hundred hours today, due in Xianggang at ten tomorrow morning our time, five o’clock local time, with one stopover. At Calcutta, of all places. That looks to be about it, unless, as I say, you want to hang on until Wednesday. You game?’
‘Needs must when the devil drives.’
‘That’s apt. But you don’t go via Hell. Just Luton.’
As Amanda was confirming the booking, Robin called Amberley School and discovered Hilary, her family and the twins were all at church. The headmistress would be available at one, if the captain wished to call back. That was convenient, thought Robin. She would have to check in at Luton by one at the latest if her experience of international flights was anything to go by. She could check in then call the school quickly.
When she returned to Amanda’s desk it was all sorted out. ‘Your ticket will be at the Canton Airlines desk. Yo
u have to be there by one. That gives you just over two hours. OK?’
‘Yup. I’ve closed up Ashenden and everything is in order. What you see is what I travel in and my weekend case holds all the rest. With room for a little more, come to that.’
It was fortunate there was some spare space in her weekend case because the other board members had files and folders to give her. Charles Lee tore off a print-out and handed it to her — the minutes of the meeting she had walked out on. ‘You’ll need to look through the final sections carefully,’ he said. ‘You’ll need to know our thinking and exactly where you stand.’
Oddly enough, considering she was saying farewell to her father and, effectively, her stepmother, it was Charles Lee who spoke to her last. ‘I’m sorry I can’t come with you,’ he said quietly. ‘But I am persona non grata there at the moment. I would be arrested the minute I crossed into Chinese airspace.’
‘I know,’ she said quietly, surprisingly moved by his earnest words.
He handed her a plain, unmarked envelope. ‘In this envelope,’ he said, almost fiercely, ‘is a list of people who might be able to help you. Memorise them if you can and get rid of the paper. I don’t want it crossing into Chinese airspace any more than I want to do it myself.’
Robin glanced down at the envelope. ‘Oh, but we have a range of contacts out there, you know,’ she babbled, her mind racing. ‘Richard and I — ’
He held up his hand to silence her. ‘Not like these ones,’ he said quietly, and the emphasis in his words made her scalp prickle.
Robin had found herself being summoned to places all over the world at very short notice many times. She could have flown out to Luton in a helicopter, or she might equally well have gone in her own Monterey or her husband’s E-type Jag, both of which were locked in the secure area of the underground car park. Cost was no real object so she could have taken a cab all the way. But what she ended up doing was getting a taxi to Farringdon station and going out on the Thameslink train. This mode of transport, pedestrian though it might be, had the twin advantages of guaranteed punctuality and probable tranquillity.
She sat at the front left of one of the big open carriages with the dividing wall at her back, an empty seat on her right and a window on her left. The two seats opposite allowed her to open her case and go through some of the documents. The spare seat at her side became a filing area for the contents of the files and folders. These fell into three main areas. There was a pile of social, economic and political information, history and prediction about China. This seemed to have come from every source imaginable: the Chinese Legation; the Economist’s financial services unit; the International Maritime Agency. There were files recently downgraded from the FBI, CIA and the British Intelligence Services, and even a recent update of the United States Navy’s debrief to American shiphandlers about the dangers of the South China Sea. There was a larger pile, some of it very speculative indeed, about Xianggang. It came from the same sort of sources, and much of it was already familiar to Robin. And there was the most up-to-date information available on Heritage Mariner, its various subsidiaries and the China Queens Company. This last contained her own latest company report with sections by Richard, dated only last April. There was the print-out of the minutes of today’s emergency meeting of the Heritage Mariner board. And there was Charles Lee’s list of names and addresses. Handwritten. That fact alone added emphasis to his strictures regarding memorisation and disposal.
By the time the train pulled into Luton station, Robin had packed everything away again in the order that she wished to read it later, with Charles Lee’s list at the very top except only for her neat package of travel documents. As the carriage hissed to a stop, she rose and crossed to the door. There she found herself at the end of a little queue of quiet people, a young Indian family, the parents so youthful they might have been the elder siblings of the two vivid little girls who stood beside them; and a family of Chinese people spanning four generations, from the wizened great-grandmother to the tiny baby held in the granddaughter’s arms while her parents looked after the luggage. Something about the quiet contentment of these little family units made a sharp pain shoot through Robin’s breast.
From the train, they had to climb several flights of steps to attain the ticket barrier, then they proceeded through to the top of one narrow, vertiginously steep set of stairs down to where the bus was waiting to ferry them to the airport. At the top of this set of stairs, a middle-aged, overweight, wealthy-looking woman of Chinese extraction was standing, with a heavy, bulky suitcase, locked in acrimonious discussion with a surly British Rail employee. Her round, moon face was streaming with perspiration so that it was possible to suppose that her narrow, slightly puffy eyes were filled with tears.
‘It’s not my job to carry cases up and down them stairs,’ the man was saying.
‘But it is too heavy for me. I would fall … ’ The plump lady was utterly amazed that any underling should speak to her like this. The considerable bosom beneath the jade and poppy cheongsam heaved until the button threads creaked.
‘Up and dahn them stairs all day. I’d be. I’m an inspector not a porter. You go back dahn to the platform and see if they’ll open the door straight through. They do sometimes. For wheelchairs and such.’
‘But that will take a long time. I will miss the bus. And is such a long way! And so many steps again. It is too heavy! I cannot do it, I say.’
‘If it’s too heavy for you to carry then you shouldn’t be travelling with it. That’s what I say. And that’s all there is to it!’
‘Here!’ said Robin, with unaccustomed gruffness, shouldering past the man. ‘Please allow me.’ The case was extremely heavy, but she managed to get it down the stairs without straining herself, followed by the volubly grateful owner. By the time the bus arrived, Robin had a travelling companion. The lady’s name was Mrs Hip. She had been to see her daughter who was married to an English-born businessman of Chinese extraction late of Hong Kong and currently of Camden Town. The pair of them had been fortunate holders of a limited edition British entry visa in the dark days of 1997 and had been wise to use it. They were very happy running their newspaper shop and had just celebrated the birth of their first child. Hence her visit. Now she was returning to her own home up on the Peak above Kowloon, and to the indulgent arms of her husband.
Mrs Hip was a mixed blessing. She was overpoweringly voluble but she was good-hearted and grateful. Robin warmed to her and at any other time would have been happy to share the journey. But Mrs Hip had only one topic of conversation: the disappearance of the Macau jetcat. Her oft-repeated, increasingly superstitious opinions were not based upon any knowledge, simply upon the gossip that had swept through the Chinese community in which she had been staying. She would in all probability not have talked at such length had she realised Robin’s own concern in the subject, but she was oblivious and Robin did not enlighten her. By the time the bus reached the airport, Robin was beginning to hope that they would be in different classes — ideally on different planes.
Robin’s ticket was waiting for her as promised at the Canton Airlines check-in desk. But so was the first unpleasant surprise. ‘That no go as cabin baggage,’ said the courteous but determined young woman behind the desk.
‘But I bought it specially. It’s exactly the right size. I’ve never had any trouble before.’
‘New rule. That go in hold. You take smaller bag into cabin if you want.’
‘All right. Please wait a moment.’ Robin took the weekend case back and opened it. The pile of information came out easily enough and was popped on one side as she closed the case again and handed it over. It was at that point that Mrs Hip turned up again, all solicitude. Tersely, Robin explained the problem and the redoubtable lady went off to take on importunate officialdom on Robin’s behalf. She came back, crestfallen, a couple of minutes later. All she could do was to help Robin sort out the papers into a manageable form before going back to check in her own massive ca
se.
As Mrs Hip did this, Robin, with the precious bundle tucked under one arm, went across to the bookshop to buy enough odds and ends to guarantee a fairly robust carrier bag. Among the last of the items she purchased was that morning’s Daily Telegraph. Then, with everything, as she thought, safely inside the bookstore’s plastic bag, she went across to the public telephones.
‘Yes, they’re fine,’ said Hilary Harper’s distant voice, cheerfully reassuring. ‘They’ve seen the news and are full of the fact that Hong Kong is in all the headlines, but there’s been nothing specific. I’ll start vetting things pretty carefully from now on. In case there’s a direct reference, you know. It won’t be too difficult; there’s so much going on here that is new and exciting to them. And in the meantime I’ll expect to hear from you fairly soon in any case. You’ll want them out with you in a week or two, I expect, either for a big family reunion or … well, in any other eventuality.’
This practical consideration left Robin wrong-footed for a moment. And before she had a chance to recover, the tannoy cut into her considerations, warning her that it was time to go through to security. All she could think as she walked, dazedly, through into the international departures section was, ‘I’ll have to come home and get them myself. Quite apart from anything else, they’re still both on my passport!’
Mrs Hip caught up with her in the duty free area. The large Chinese was trying to buy something her husband would appreciate. He liked whisky but usually drank Suntory. Mrs Hip felt that she should take him a good Scotch. But, aiyah! Such confusion. Sidetracked and not a little amused, Robin began to explain about blends and single malts, about bottle-strength and cask; about Highland, Lowland and Island distilleries. Mrs Hip hastily pulled out a piece of scrap paper and began to make notes on it, looking so forlorn that Robin couldn’t help laughing. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘my husband Richard is fond of a drop of Scotch. His favourite blend is the Famous Grouse — this one here. Dimple Haig and Walker’s Black Label are also highly spoken of. His favourite island malt is this one, Laphroaig, but it tastes too peaty for my palate. It makes me think of iodine, I’m afraid. And he also loves these two, Glenmorangie and the Tomintoul Glenlivet.’