by Tim Heald
A flight of wooden steps had been lowered over the side of the ship and two blond able-bodied seamen were standing at the bottom ready to assist the passengers’ landing. Mandy Goldslinger and Elizabeth went first, armed expertly from taut rubber to polished teak and followed closely by Tudor and the two wet-suits. At the head of this collapsible staircase stood an epauletted, white-haired skipper in tropical drill and a dapper figure in white canvas trousers, espadrilles and a striped Breton jerkin whom Tudor supposed to be Mandy’s friend Jeffrey Rayner. As she kissed him full on the lips Tudor felt his suspicions confirmed.
As he stepped gingerly on to the wooden deck Mandy introduced him to Rayner and the Captain who apparently had a German name that Tudor did not quite catch.
‘Jeffrey and the captain have one of our boats,’ said Mandy.
‘I didn’t know that one of our boats was missing,’ said Tudor.
The wet-suits had vanished.
‘No reason why you should,’ said Mandy. ‘Boat overboard!’ She honked a brassy laugh and stopped abruptly when no one else joined in. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s not a usual cry on board ship. On the other hand, our boat must have gone overboard and you’d think someone would have seen it and raised an alarm.’
There was a longish silence.
‘Seems to me,’ said Elizabeth, ‘that almost anything could disappear overboard on a big ship like ours without anyone noticing.’
Mandy Goldslinger went quickly into PR mode, assisted by the obvious fact that she disliked Elizabeth Burney very much. ‘The crew on the Duchess is highly trained to detect and report the slightest irregularity at all times and in all places,’ she said.
‘Oh come on, Mandy,’ said Tudor, ‘you know that isn’t true. It can’t be. It’s half a mile at least just to walk round the Promenade Deck. And at night when it’s dark and there are virtually no outside lights, you simply couldn’t see an object go over the side. And in anything more than a slight breeze you wouldn’t hear it either.’
‘Just a little plop as it hit the surface,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Plop. Then vanish never to be seen again. Easy peasy.’
‘Yes,’ said Mandy, ‘well.’ And she took out a cigarette and lit it. The captain asked her to put it out. She did, but looked furious.
‘So what exactly happened?’ asked Tudor. ‘I mean you were just sailing along and suddenly you saw one of our lifeboats in the middle of the Atlantic.’
‘Well no.’ Rayner looked bothered. He and the captain had decided it was unwise to say too much on open insecure lines but now they were all together in, as it were, private, they felt secure enough to reveal that there was another ship involved. The barquentine had spotted this before they were aware of the Duchess lifeboat. Indeed had it not been for the presence of the larger vessel they might not have seen the lifeboat at all. She was an elderly rust-bucket of the sort that seemed to sink periodically and usually east of Suez and, thought Tudor, nearly always full of pilgrims en route to the Haj. But hush, that was prejudice. Rayner and the captain reckoned she was a retired cross-channel steamer of some description. She was flying an Irish flag and bore the name Michael Collins on her bows and stern as well as the unlikely claim to be registered in the landlocked African republic of Chad.
All attempts to establish contact with the ship failed totally. The Michael Collins did not respond to shouts on the loudhailer, flags sending semaphore signals, an Aldis lamp flickering Morse Code and, least of all, to anything to do with electronics. Jeffrey Rayner had tapped her name into Google on one of the barquentine’s computers and had discovered that she was some sort of floating university campus.
‘Based in Limerick,’ said the Captain.
‘Some sort of self-proclaimed Institution for the Study of –’
‘World Republicanism,’ chipped in Tudor and Elizabeth, speaking in unison.
Mandy Goldslinger looked long-suffering but unsurprised. The captain and Jeffrey Rayner exchanged glances. They had never previously heard of such a thing and it obviously sounded as bogus to them as it had previously done to Tudor and Elizabeth.
‘Ashley Carpenter strikes again,’ said Tudor. ‘Originally I assumed this was cock-up, but I’m beginning to wonder if it might not be conspiracy after all. Mind if I have a look at the boat?’
No one objected. The lifeboat had been taken on board and was sitting on the after-deck alongside the swimming-pool and looking like some sort of beached fish. It was out of its element and far from home.
Tudor clambered in. There was a brownish stain on the port side just where there was a hole in the side presumably for a rowlock, though the lifeboat had a moderately powerful inboard engine. The Duchess lifeboats were carefully maintained so there should have been no need to row.
‘Blood?’ asked Tudor, staring hard at the stain.
‘We assumed so,’ said the captain.
‘What exactly happened?’ asked Tudor, frowning knowledgeably at the supposed bloodstain.
It wasn’t entirely clear what ‘exactly’ happened because the whole incident was so murky. Star Clipper had been bowling along, minding her own business and doing her inimitable greyhound-of-the-sea act when they had stumbled, as it were, on the SS Michael Collins, doing something furtive with the Duchess’s lifeboat which appeared to be tied up alongside. As soon as the Michael Collins realized that the sailing ship was keen to establish what was going on, the old Afro-Irish ship turned tail and scuttled off.
Tudor listened attentively to what the two men had to say and, at the same time, paced up and down the wooden lifeboat not entirely sure what he was looking for, not at all sure what exactly was going on, but uneasily aware that he himself was a part of what was happening.
The boat was essentially open and undecked, designed to take between thirty and forty survivors who would have been packed tightly on the plank-like seats. She may have been a seaworthy craft but she was primitive. There were two lockers in the bows, one on which side, secured only by doors with only rudimentary latches such as you might find in any old country cottage. Without knowing quite why he was doing so Tudor opened one of these doors and felt inside. His hand encountered something squared off and brick-like. He grasped it and lifted it out. It was cold and metallic and, as he stared at it thoughtfully, he heard Elizabeth cry out, ‘That’s gold. You’ve struck gold!’
And after he had handed it to her and knelt down to look inside the locker he realized that he had indeed struck gold, for there, packed neatly in the compartment where he had expected to find life-jackets or torches or iron rations, were a great many ingots, stacked neatly as logs in a fire-basket.
‘Finders keepers,’ he said, softly and facetiously.
It was a veritable treasure trove.
On inspecting a sample ingot Tudor was pleased to find that, as he suspected, the letters GR were stamped on the base. To the uninitiated this might have suggested ‘George Rex’ and indicated an English king called George. Tudor knew, however, that it merely indicated that the gold had been supplied by his old sparring partner Guy Roberts, now knighted and therefore ‘Sir’ Guy but better known as ‘Golden Balls’, ‘Mr Goldbar’, ‘Goldilocks’ or any one of a number of similar sobriquets involving the precious metal.
Guy was an Eton and Oxford-educated smoothie who had unexpectedly gone into the world of gold-trading which was traditionally dominated by Essex-boy traders in leather jackets. Guy had taken this world by storm to such an extent that within a decade he was the world’s leading expert on the subject.
One of his stocks-in-trade was supplying gold bars to the mega-rich as an insurance against fluctuations in markets of all kinds. He gave billionaires the chance of the plutocratic equivalent of hiding used fivers under the mattress or the stair carpet. His clients were men such as Umlaut or Prince Abdullah and he offered them a rainy-day safety net. The Umlauts and Abdullahs of this world avoided tax by having their offices and headquarters in a floating tax haven. The naive pirates from the Emerald Isle had co
me up with the luck of the Irish. Stumbling on this sort of treasure trove was a brilliant fluke. But being flukey didn’t make it less brilliant.
Chapter Fifteen
The lifeboat and the gold ingots returned to the Duchess whence, presumably, they had come. No one aboard the Star Clipper seemed distressed by their departure; indeed they seemed relieved to be rid of them.
‘So what do you make of that?’ asked Elizabeth, as they clambered back on board the cruise ship. Turning back on the promenade deck they leaned against the rail and watched the barquentine let out sails and gather speed on her passage towards the Mediterranean. Music of some kind came wafting across the waves. It could have been Vangelis or something more classical. Distance lent the melody charm and ambiguity.
There was no one else in earshot.
‘I’ve heard of returning to the gold standard,’ said Tudor, ‘but I never thought I’d see it in practice. How much do you imagine that gold’s worth?’
‘Ask me another,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Stocks and shares may break my bones but gold...’ She shrugged. ‘I simply don’t know. But that’s a lot of gold. A hundred ingots, do you think? And whatever else gold keeps its price. Safer than houses. Maybe not as spectacular as a shrewd property investment or Princess Margaret’s jewellery but as safe as, well, houses.’
‘Safer than bricks and mortar, wouldn’t you say?’
Tudor frowned into the gathering gloom.
‘I’d say they were kilo bars. And if you’re talking about two hundred pounds an ounce, which I guess you are, then each bar is worth about seven grand, I would have thought we were looking at at least five hundred bars which would add up to around three and a half million quid. Not a lot these days but a useful stand-by for moments of need. Better than a piggy bank.’ This was unexpected.
‘You what?’ He was taken by surprise. One minute she professed complete ignorance and the next she came up with some arcane remark which indicated exactly the reverse. Maddening woman.
‘I’d say that the gold bars in that lifeboat add up to about three and a half million quid.’
The information hung in the salty air like a corpse waiting for dissection. A skilful forensic wielding of the scalpel should carve out some missing secrets. In clumsy hands, however, the knife might reveal nothing at all.
‘So,’ said Tudor thoughtfully, ‘you’re telling me that one of the Duchess’s lifeboats went AWOL in the middle of the night with three and a half million pounds of gold ingots on board. It fetches up against an unlikely floating college of an equally improbable Irish university which is surprised by our elegant flying greyhound of the sea. The Irish rustbucket does a bunk and the boat fetches up with Jeffrey and his pals with the loot intact but no human occupant and a sinister-looking bloodstain on board.’
‘Presumed bloodstain,’ said Elizabeth sharply. ‘We don’t know it was blood and we’ve no way of proving it one way or the other. Not until we reach New York.’
‘I don’t want to wait till New York; I want to solve this at sea. As you say – one way or another. I don’t trust any police force to get this one right. Least of all the Americans.’ Like many Englishmen he was sceptical about American expertise while actually having very little real first-hand experience of it. He was prejudiced and convinced of his own skills. Sometimes this self-confidence was justified and sometimes not. On this occasion he did not have to compete with any form of official police force but on the other hand he had some experienced opposition from among his fellow passengers. He was almost forgetting Sir Goronwy Watkyn and the former CID inspector, Freddie Grim. No doubt also senior members of the Duchess’s crew would also want their penny-worth. He would have to move fast for all sorts of reasons. In a sense, too, he already had an excess of evidence and a surfeit of information: idiotic Irish terrorists in the brig, gold ingots in an abandoned lifeboat, a mysterious bloodstain and a missing captain. It was almost too much.
He was less and less inclined to believe the story of laryngitis explaining the captain’s disappearance. A throat infection was too much to swallow in more ways than one. As far as he was concerned the captain was missing. It was not just his voice that was lost.
‘You could just wash your hands of the whole thing. Leave it till we dock in New York and let the professionals handle it.’
‘I am the professional,’ he said coldly. ‘As you perfectly well know I have a professional reputation to maintain. If we reach the United States with these mysteries unsolved the name of the University of Wessex will be mud.’
Elizabeth did not say what she was thinking which was that sometimes her boss could seem a little absurd. She admired him much of the time and there was no doubting his knowledge and abilities. Sometimes, however, he over-reached himself and she was beginning to wonder whether this might not be one of those occasions.
‘Penny for them,’ she said, wrinkling her nose and looking quizzical, ‘What are your thoughts, oh Mighty One?’
She had the rare knack of being able to send him up without his being irritated. Or, she sometimes thought, even noticing.
‘There are only two people on board ship who strike me as being rich enough to have that sort of loot on board. Likewise the same two people are just the sort of oddball, fly-by-night characters who might want to have ready cash in a reliable but disposable form. Your average Goldman Sachs wunderkind wouldn’t be on the Gold Standard.’
‘But Umlaut or Prince Abdullah might be?’
‘What made you think of those two?’ Tudor asked, irritably.
‘I’m not stupid,’ she said. ‘Or hadn’t you noticed?’
He smiled.
‘So whoever was in the lifeboat nicked Umlaut or the Prince’s pocket money and was about to transfer it to the Irish university rustbucket when they were surprised by the Flying Dutchman.’
‘So the thief,’ she said, pursing her lips in thought, ‘went aboard the floating Irish ivory tower but left the gold on the lifeboat because he was a guilty thing surprised.’
‘Something like that,’ agreed Tudor.
‘He couldn’t have boarded the sailing ship. Jeffrey would have told us. I’ve known Jeffrey for years. He wouldn’t connive in a crime like that. Not any sort of crime actually. Straight as a die, Jeffrey.’
‘And there’s a connection between the abortive hijacking and the theft of the gold bars and the disappearance of the captain,’ said Tudor. ‘Besides which our mutual friend Ashley Carpenter is involved.’
‘So it seems,’ she agreed.
‘Don’t you think we should talk to Umlaut and Abdullah and find out which of them owns the gold?’
This obvious next move was deferred by the sudden arrival of Sir Goronwy Watkyn looking majestic but bothered in a sort of Celtic Merlin mode. His mane of white hair was awry and a black cape fastened with a brass chain at the neck flapped theatrically in the breeze.
‘Crime at sea, I understand,’ said the old knight. ‘Never fear there is no such thing as a perfect crime, especially when Sir Goronwy Watkyn is at hand. Do we have a body?’
‘Everything is under control,’ said Tudor.
‘Not what I hear, dear boy,’ said Sir Goronwy patting Tudor’s shoulder in a gesture that managed to be both avuncular and threatening, ‘Never fear though. Uncle Goronwy will sort everything out.’
‘Thank you,’ said Tudor, ‘but everything is under control and there’s no need for anyone else to be bothered.’
‘No bother. No bother at all.’ The old Celt tossed his head and gazed out at the horizon. ‘It’s a rare privilege to be able to do in practice what I have spent a lifetime perfecting in theory.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Tudor. ‘I’ve been in communication with all concerned and, as I say, it’s under control. There’s no need for you to be involved in any way. Just act normally and carry on with the lecturing.’
‘What I say now.’ The old man lowered his voice so that his listeners had to strain to catch what he was saying over the
sibilant sighing of the sea, ‘What I always say is cherchez le pied.’ He beamed with self-satisfaction.
‘You sure you don’t mean cherchez la femme,’ said Elizabeth, a little obviously.
‘Certainly not!’ he said with asperity, ‘Cherchez chiropody, if one is being alliterative. The answer lies in the feet. People tell palms or look for character in a person’s face but I tell you now that the solutions to practically everything may be found below the ankle. Just mark my words. I concede that this is a discovery I have made late in life but it is none the less valid for being belated.’
He inclined his head in an old-fashioned thespian manner and seemed on the verge of clicking his heels and kissing Elizabeth’s hand. At the last moment however he seemed to think better of it and simply turned and disappeared indoors.
‘Silly old phoney!’ said Tudor.
‘I suppose so,’ said Elizabeth. She frowned. ‘And talking of feet I’m afraid PC Plod is heading our way.’
It was indeed Grim, the unlikely lay-reader, formerly of the Metropolitan Police who was heading their way. His appearance lived up to his surname. He looked serious and forbidding in a curmudgeonly disobliging sort of way. Not at all the expression you’d expect to find on the face of a lay preacher on a Sunday after matins.
‘I’ve had words with the First Officer, Cornwall,’ said Freddie, ‘And I take an exceedingly dim view. It seems to my good self that you have abrogated an entirely inappropriate level of responsibility in the matter of what appears to be prima facie an act of piracy on the High Seas. What have you got to say for yourself?’