Ocean Prize (1972)

by Pattinson, James

  Madden’s eyes shied away like frightened fawns. He had been driven into a corner and he knew it. He temporised. “I’m not saying that exactly. Maybe they will.” He seemed to pick up courage and his gaze came back and held Barling’s for a moment. “But I’m telling you this: if they don’t have a proper overhaul in our next port I won’t be responsible for what happens on another voyage, and that’s the truth.”

  Barling thought about that. It occurred to him that Madden would scarcely have made such a statement if he had had any idea that the ship would not be going on another voyage. So perhaps, after all, the rumour had not got around. Unless Madden was fishing. Barling searched Madden’s face and could find no hint there of anything but the usual nagging worry.

  “Chief,” he said, “I give you my word that this is the last voyage I’ll take in this ship with the engines as they are. Now, does that satisfy you?”

  Madden shuffled his feet. “I’d be happier if they’d already been seen to, but maybe they’ll get us through just this one more crossing.” He sounded slightly mollified by Barling’s statement.

  “You’ll see that they do.”

  “I’m making no promises. I’m not a magician.”

  “You’re a very good engineer and that’s enough for me. I’m relying on you. And I’ll tell you this—there’s no one in the world I’d have more confidence in than Jonah Madden.”

  Sometimes you had to use flattery. He saw Madden square his narrow shoulders.

  “Well, I’ll do my best.”

  “That’s all I’m asking.”

  Madden went away and Barling was left to his own worries. Loder and Madden, they hadn’t got the burden that lay on his shoulders.

  Trubshaw, Lawson and Moir arrived back on board midway through the morning looking not at all chastened by their night in captivity. They had some bruises and Lawson’s upper lip was cut, but otherwise they seemed little the worse for their experience; in fact, they seemed to regard it as a huge joke.

  “What ’appened to you, Charlie boy?” Trubshaw asked when he saw Wilson. “Ow’d you manage to give them coppers the slip?”

  “I hid.”

  “Well you crafty young so-and-so. I didn’t see no place in that square where a flea could ’ide.”

  “I kept in the shadow. They were so busy with you lot they didn’t notice me.”

  “Well, ain’t you the lucky one.” Trubshaw shook his head, marvelling at Wilson’s good fortune. “You must ’ave someone up there lookin’ arter you.”

  “Yes,” Wilson said. “I expect I have.”

  He remembered that Bobbie also had called him lucky. What kind of a joke was that?

  The Hopeful Enterprise moved out into the stream and headed down-river with a Canadian pilot guiding her, a small, pinched man in a lumber-jacket and a leather cap. The cargo of wheat weighed the ship down and water lapped the load line, the keel biting deep. Madden’s precious engines were working, turning the massive propeller shaft in its tunnel under the decks, but Madden was not happy; he had a premonition of trouble ahead; he felt it in his bones. The other engineers laughed at him behind his back, referring to him disrespectfully as Old Worryguts. The imperfections of the ship’s machinery did not bother them. But they were younger men and the responsibility was not theirs. To Jonah Madden responsibility was a cross that he had to bear.

  So, with the screw pushing them and the current helping, they went floating down the St. Lawrence, slipping past the hazards that the pilot knew like his own face, past the small towns and the little wooden churches, past river steamers and motor launches and rowing-boats and all the wide variety of scum and flotsam that is borne on the broad back of a mighty river. And Wilson could think of nothing but the nude body of a blonde woman lying under a blanket in a room in Montreal. Or perhaps no longer lying there; perhaps discovered, removed to a mortuary, the hunt for the killer already on. Perhaps the message had been flashed down to Quebec to intercept the Hopeful Enterprise and arrest Able Seaman Charles Wilson on a charge of murder. Wilson felt sick at the thought; he went about his work with his mind on other things and earned the bosun’s rebukes for his clumsiness.

  “What in hell are you dreaming about?” Rankin demanded. “You’re in a bloody trance. It’s about time you got that bird out of your mind.”

  Wilson glanced at Rankin in sudden alarm. “What bird? What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about the one that’s taking your mind off your work, that’s the one.”

  Wilson gripped the bosun’s arm. “What do you know about her?”

  Rankin brushed Wilson’s hand away. “So that is the trouble with you. I thought as much. Well, take my advice, son, and forget about her. There’s none of ’em worth bothering your head over, none of ’em. I’m telling you.”

  Wilson saw with relief that Rankin knew nothing. How could he possibly have known? That remark about the bird had just been a random shot that had happened to strike home.

  “Yes, bose,” Wilson said. “I expect you’re right.” He was becoming altogether too sensitive and jumpy; if he went on like this he would give himself away; already he had become conscious of some questioning looks being turned on him in the mess. He had better watch it; the last thing he wanted was to arouse curiosity. Yet it was difficult to behave naturally when there was that monstrous cloud hanging over him.

  He looked forward with gloomy foreboding to the time when the ship would arrive at Quebec, for that was where he feared the police would come on board and take him. And there was no way of escaping them; in the Hopeful Enterprise he was as much a prisoner as he would have been in gaol. He was helpless, unable to do anything but wait for them to come and get him.

  It was morning when they reached Quebec. The carpenter, a heavy-limbed, black-bearded man named Orwell, stood by the steam windlass on the forecastle and let the anchor go with a great rattling of chain through the hawsepipe. The ship swung with the current and finished with her stern pointing downstream. Wilson, under the bosun’s direction, lowered a Jacob’s-ladder over the side and saw the pilot-boat heading out from the shore. There was nothing in that to cause him any disquiet; it was normal procedure to change pilots at Quebec. But a moment later he saw the police launch and his heart began to hammer.

  The launch was coming straight for the Hopeful Enterprise and there was no doubt at all in Wilson’s mind that it was coming for him. He could see the police uniforms and he had an impulse to rush to the other side of the ship, jump overboard and swim for the opposite shore. But what good would that do? They would catch him before he could get half-way. There was nothing he could do, nothing.

  “Oh, God!” he muttered. “Oh, God help me!”

  He gripped the top of the bulwark and pressed his forehead to the cold iron, trembling.

  A hand fell on his shoulder. He looked up and saw the bosun staring at him in no very friendly fashion.

  “What’s up with you now? Taking forty bloody winks?”

  “I feel sick.”

  “Sick! So am I. Sick of useless tools like you.”

  The pilot-boat had reached the ship. The new pilot began to climb the Jacob’s-ladder. Wilson saw that the police launch was less than fifty yards away. Suppose he were to run away and hide. But where? In the bilges? In one of the lifeboats? In the chain locker? All equally futile. They would find him wherever he was. It was inevitable.

  Rankin snarled an order and Wilson moved as if in a trance. He could hear the stammer of the engine of the police launch and it seemed to be beating a tattoo in his brain. It came closer, louder, then, unbelievably, began to decrease. The launch slipped past the stern of the Hopeful Enterprise and moved away.

  Wilson felt weak with relief; there was sweat on his forehead and his hands were shaking. They had not been coming for him after all. So perhaps the body had not yet been discovered. He clutched gladly at this small reprieve and the receding sound of the launch was like sweet music in his ears.

  Not so sweet
was the bosun’s impatient voice snarling at him. “You’re dreaming again. Get moving.”

  Wilson got moving.

  FIVE

  RUMOUR

  The Hopeful Enterprise hauled up her anchor and left Quebec astern. The St. Lawrence widened like a funnel with the water pouring through it in the wrong direction, and they steamed along the northern curve of the shore between Anticosti Island and the mainland, through the narrow Belle Isle Strait and out into the broad Atlantic.

  And Madden’s engines had not given a single moment’s cause for alarm—except to Madden himself, who looked upon even the smoothness of their working as an evil omen, a sinister design on the part of that ill-favoured machinery to lull him into a false sense of security before springing the trap.

  “It’s not going to last,” he confided to Mr. Loder. “It’s all going a sight too easily. But we’re not home yet, not by a long chalk. There’ll be a day of reckoning.”

  The mate did not bother to disagree. Madden’s fussing provided him with a good deal of malicious amusement, and he was not above throwing in a word or two to fan the chief engineer’s resentment at Barling’s failure to pay sufficient attention to the needs of the engine-room.

  “Perhaps,” Loder said, “there’s a day of reckoning coming for George Barling too. And not so very far away at that.”

  Madden’s gloomy eyes stared at Loder and his eyebrows went up like animated question-marks. “And what might you be meaning by that?”

  Loder dropped his voice to a conspiratorial level. “I fancy there’s a crash coming for the Barling and Calthorp line.”

  Madden looked even gloomier. “You’ve heard something?”

  “No, I haven’t heard anything. I’m just using my own powers of observation and deduction. It’s sticking out a mile. What do B. and C. add up to when all’s said and done? One rusty old ship with worn-out engines.”

  “They may have other assets.”

  “Do you believe that?” Loder gripped Madden’s lapel and pulled him closer; so close that he could see in detail all the unsightly blotches that littered the surface of Loder’s face like so many bits of rubbish littering a public park after a Bank Holiday. “Do you think if they had there’d be all this penny-pinching over ship’s stores? Dammit, they don’t buy enough paint to keep an auxiliary ketch in decent trim.”

  “So you really think they’re going under?”

  “I look at the signs, and if you want my opinion they all point that way.” He drew Madden even closer, so that their noses almost touched. “It seems to me, Chief, that you and I are likely to be looking for new berths before we’re very much older.”

  Madden put a hand on Loder’s chest and pushed him away. The mate was a little too close to be pleasant; his breath was offensive and what he was saying had a depressing effect on the chief engineer. Madden had no desire to go looking for a new appointment; in his heart of hearts he was not at all certain that he could get one, not at his age. He had hoped to serve out his time with Barling and Calthorp, whatever the shortcomings of that company might be regarding engine overhauls. But if Loder’s deductions were correct it looked as though Barling himself might soon be on the beach, and that was a dismal outlook indeed.

  “You could be wrong,” he said, but without conviction.

  “I could be, but I don’t think I am. Everything points that way, everything. If you’ve been counting on new boilers, Chief, or anything in that line, my advice to you is to forget it.”

  “Barling promised—” Madden began.

  “Yes?” Loder cocked his head on one side. “What did he promise?”

  “He said this was the last trip he’d be taking in this ship with the engines like they are. He—” Madden stopped again, aghast at the sudden realisation of the double meaning those words could have had.

  Loder was quick to seize on this revelation. “He said that, did he?”

  “Something of the kind.”

  “Well now, that’s interesting; that’s very interesting indeed. It bears out just what I’ve been saying.”

  “I don’t see—”

  Loder gave his twisted smile. “Oh, but I think you do, Chief. I think you see very well. Don’t you?”

  Madden turned away. He did see, and he did not wish to. It was too bleak a prospect.

  “Last voyage for the Hopeful Enterprise,” Loder said softly. “Make the most of it.”

  At about the same time as the Hopeful Enterprise was leaving Montreal a much newer ship was setting out from Philadelphia with a cargo of electrical and other machinery destined for Reykjavik in Iceland. The s.s. India Star was a vessel of 8,700 tons owned by a Greek millionaire, registered in Monrovia, flying the Liberian flag, manned by an Asiatic crew and commanded by a Dutch captain named van Donck.

  The fact that the India Star, by reason of her higher cruising speed and the course on which she was steaming, would, if all went according to plan for both ships, pass within a hundred miles or less of the Hopeful Enterprise somewhere between the thirtieth and fortieth parallels of longitude, was something of which neither Captain Barling nor Captain van Donck was aware. Not that the knowledge, even had they possessed it, would have been likely to excite either of them to any noticeable extent, since it was in the natural order of things that ships should pass other ships even in mid-ocean at no great distance. Yet to Barling at least the fact was to be of the utmost interest, and the India Star, of which he had scarcely even heard, was destined to float into his life and occupy a place of supreme importance in his plans.

  But all that was yet several days ahead, and as he stood on the bridge of his ship gazing at the grey wastes of the North Atlantic his thoughts were only of the uncertain future, of his daughter Ann and what was to happen to her when Barling and Calthorp went into liquidation and he was thrown up on the beach with nothing but a few hundred pounds to call his own. His thoughts were sombre indeed, the thoughts of a man who sees that all his labours, all his schemes, all his expectations have ended in one thing—failure. And he was at the age when the realisation of failure is perhaps hardest to bear. A younger man could have started again with fresh hope; an older man might have accepted the situation with resignation; he could do neither.

  As the Hopeful Enterprise headed eastward the weather was good, the winds moderate and the sea unusually calm for the time of year. The much maligned engines continued to give no trouble, despite Madden’s forebodings, and the ship steamed on at a steady speed of ten knots, while the patent log, streaming from the taffrail, reeled off the long sea miles of this last ocean voyage of the thirty-year-old vessel so that they might be recorded faithfully to the end.

  Watches came and went, the chronometer was adjusted to the changing longitude, and all the set routine of a ship at sea was carried out from day to day. Now and then memories of an earlier voyage drifted into Barling’s mind, and looking down from the bridge he remembered the Bofors gun in the bows and the paravanes lying under the bulwarks; he remembered the degaussing cables and the Lewis guns and the black-out curtains. There had been company in those days, a small city of ships keeping together for mutual protection, the destroyers and corvettes out on the perimeter and maybe an armed merchant cruiser in the centre; sometimes a Sunderland or a Catalina circling round if you were near enough to base; zigzagging, the continual flutter of signal flags and pennants, the winking of Aldis lamps, the rumble of depth-charges and the sudden explosion in the night bringing the heart into the mouth.

  Dangerous times; the threat of death constantly there; and yet he had loved it. He had been young then; he had had youth and had taken it all in his stride. Now he was older; the ship was older; the guns had gone and the convoys had dispersed. Above all, youth had gone. It would never be the same again.

  It was two days after they had lost sight of land when Jonah Madden came to Barling’s cabin. Madden had come ostensibly to report that all was well so far in his department. Barling had not asked for a report and there was no reason why
Madden should have made one at that particular time; but the real purpose of the chief engineer’s visit was a rather different one: he wanted information. Ever since his talk with Loder the question had been nagging him: were Barling and Calthorp going down the drain? He could not sleep for worrying about it; it plagued his mind; it even made him sick in the stomach. He could not remain in suspense any longer; he had to know for certain, one way or the other. That was why he had come to see Barling.

  Yet, now that he was there, he still found difficulty in getting to the point. It was not the kind of question you asked a man straight out. Madden lingered, remarked on the strangely clement weather, other inconsequential matters, wearing out Barling’s patience.

  “What’s on your mind, Chief?”

  “On my mind?” Madden was startled, blissfully unaware that he had been revealing any uneasiness. “What makes you think there’s anything on my mind?”

  “There’s always something on your mind,” Barling said. “It’s usually engines. But you’ve just told me there’s no trouble there, so it must be something else.”

  Madden rubbed his nose, cleared his throat and stared hard at a framed photograph of the Hopeful Enterprise screwed to the bulkhead, a photograph he had seen many times before and could have little interest in now. “It’s a bit delicate.”

  “What is? Your health?”

  “No,” Madden said, taking the question with perfect seriousness. “I’m in good shape physically.”

  Barling would have considered that highly questionable, but he did not say so. He said: “I’m glad to hear it. So it it’s not your health that’s delicate, what is?”

  Madden cleared his throat again and turned his melancholy eyes on Barling. “The question I want to ask you.”