The Coffin Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  As soon as Heritage was in her quarters, the door opposite across the corridor opened and C. J. Martyr crept out on silent feet. That English policeman hadn’t fooled him with his slow speech and hesitant manner. Heads were going to roll over this, and Martyr’s was closest to the block.

  Bodmin had brought this home with a vengeance. Martyr had been so wrapped up in what he was doing, and why, it simply hadn’t occurred to him how it would look from the outside. But now he saw all too clearly. He was the only survivor of the original crew—which had joined willingly in the fraud. He was a party to a huge insurance swindle, sanction-breaking, something damn near piracy, and murder. Again. They were going to lock him up and throw away the key. The only hope he could see to try to prove his innocence was to try to find Demetrios’s man. That at the very least might make them reduce his sentence.

  It was amusing, in a grim sort of way. Fate had placed him in the same old position—in the middle and at risk from both sides at once. If only he could be certain about Mariner…

  Well, Heritage had nothing incriminating in her cabin.

  Who was next on the list? Strong.

  No. Higgins would just have taken over the watch. Check Higgins first. Leave Strong till later.

  * * *

  Robin came out of her room and hesitated in the flat brightness of the corridor. It was enough to make one believe in ghosts, even in this bland atmosphere, but she had the feeling again that someone had just been there. And, as if to emphasize her fears, the draft in the corridor suddenly brought the soft, otherworldly song of Nihil’s strange flute from the crew’s quarters. Perhaps it was just the storm, but little currents of icy air were everywhere, disturbing the normally tranquil ambiance of the accommodation areas, as though the ill-fitting boards were giving access to a lot more than mere storm wind. She shivered, tightened her cold-weather gear around her, and hurried down to Ben’s cabin.

  Richard would be wondering where the hell she had got to, for she had spent some moments checking through her cabin again, completely mystified as to who would want to search it or why. She began to jog down the corridor, possessed of a sudden urgency, moving silently on her Wellington-ed feet, the only sound the whisper of her waterproof leggings.

  When she got to his door she didn’t even bother to knock. She knew well enough where he was. He was on the bridge.

  Or was he?—The light in his cabin was on!

  She hesitated in the dark vestibule of his quarters. They were laid out like the captain’s: curtain in front, dayroom office on the left, light-edged cabin door on her right.

  If the light was on, the man was in, she reasoned. And he would have heard her come in this far. No help for it, then: she turned the handle and entered the cabin.

  “Ben…”

  The cabin was empty.

  Richard forced himself to sit at ease while every nerve in his body was agonizingly taut. He was used to meeting tension with action; he had forgotten how hard it could be simply to sit and be in command.

  He had opened the bright yellow waterproof jacket but had made no other concession to the stifling closeness of the bridge. He might well have to go outside again—perhaps in a hurry—and fighting his way into recalcitrant cold-weather gear would only slow things up. The closeness was not simply a matter of atmosphere, either, he realized suddenly: though the air in here was too warm, too full of unexplained currents of tension, it was really the nature of the storm itself. There was no visual element to it. It was as though the hurricane winds were themselves coal-black. They forced themselves against the windows like the flanks of monstrous animals and it was impossible to see. Off the coast of South Africa, the storm, terrible though it was, had at least been visible—had at least attained some scale and grandeur. This was a much more personal—disturbing—thing; and the fact that it had wrapped the howling shroud of itself around the bridge windows made the normally airy place seem constricted, confining.

  Nor was he alone in this thought. Ben stirred at last from his brown study at the helmsman’s side. “I’ll stand out on the bridge wing. Check the lookout,” he yelled. Richard nodded.

  Ben slopped through the puddle Richard had made on his last entrance and took the door handle.

  Several things happened at once.

  Ben opened the door. A large sea gave Prometheus a right hook that caused her to jump. The squall responsible for the rogue wave took the door and flung it open, then closed.

  Ben was hurled backward over the slippery floor. He lost his footing and crashed down, striking his head against the edge of the chart table. He rolled over and lay still.

  “Ben!” Richard was at his side immediately, gentle fingers probing along the scalp line to discover a large gash oozing blood. But Ben’s eye flickered open at once, bright and clear. “You okay?” Richard asked.

  “Yeah!” Ben’s own fingers traced the wound. He sat up. “Fine.” But even as he spoke, a bright worm of blood began to crawl down toward his right eye.

  “Better get that looked at,” said Richard, turning toward John, who was looking anxiously across from the Collision Alarm Radar.

  “No,” said Ben at once. “You can’t spare anyone here. I’ll slip down and see to it myself.”

  Richard hesitated, then nodded. Ben was right. If he could see to it himself it would be better. With Robin still below, he could ill-spare John. And Quine knew nothing of first aid. So he helped Ben to his feet and guided him a step or two until his godson could cross the rest of the bridge unaided.

  At the door, Ben turned and looked back, but the others were already preoccupied. He wiped the blood back up into his hairline and allowed himself a grim little smile. Couldn’t have arranged it better, he thought. Now no one would suspect a thing.

  Robin hesitated in Ben’s cabin, thinking fast. Under other circumstances what she was about to do would be absolutely unacceptable—and extremely distasteful—but the memory of that look on his face drove her on. She started to search the cabin, but the search revealed nothing untoward. This was hardly surprising, since she had no idea what she was looking for. Committed to doing this now, she moved into his office quickly. And there she found what she had been looking for—just enough to make her suspicious. By his desk was a small safe. As first officer, he was responsible for any valuables aboard. The safe was open. Empty. And, above it, on the desk itself, stood Ben’s only real treasure, a photograph of his dead parents.

  Except that it wasn’t there. The frame remained, lying dismantled on the desktop, but the photograph was gone. She was standing, holding it, thinking like lightning when the door slammed wide.

  Ben hesitated on the stairs, a wave of nausea threatening to overcome him. He held on to the banister and wiped the back of his right hand over his forehead. It came away thick with blood. Impatiently, he pushed the congealing liquid back into his hair. It wasn’t as bad as it looked but it was worse than it was meant to be. He hadn’t felt as bad as this since the night of the explosion going down to try to sink her for the first time.

  But the time and the circumstances were too good to be missed now. The storm would cover the sound of the pumps—he had set them low and quiet anyway, expecting them to be doing their deadly work in a quiet anchorage. The storm would cover the loss of the ship—like the bomb was supposed to. It was a cataclysm so large that it would cover everything, no questions asked. He did not pause to consider the loss of his shipmates—right from the start he had known most of them were doomed.

  As soon as his head cleared, he ran on down the stairs. He considered going to his cabin—he had enough medication there to staunch the blood—but he went to the Cargo Control Room first.

  There was no need to switch the lights on. His deft fingers found the control-console keys in the dark and tapped in the secret code. The screen flickered and lit up:

  LADING SCHEDULE 11. LADING SCHEDULE LOGGED IN.

  He typed in: EXPEDITE and pressed RETURN.

  At once the screen went bl
ank, also according to the original program.

  He paused, listening with every fiber of his being, but he could not hear the pumps begin their deadly work. They were lost in the sound of the storm. But he knew well enough what they would be doing. The extra schedule he had programmed the machine to accept in Durban, called for all the cargo to be transferred to one tank. And as the pumps tried to obey the computer’s order, so the forces they obediently unleashed would tear the ship apart.

  He went out and paused again. Should he close up the wound in his head?

  No. Like the storm, it covered up so much. If he alone survived, it would look so impressive at the court of inquiry. And, after all that had happened, he would need to look impressive there.

  Or, if any of the others survived as well, then the wound, deep enough to bring mild concussion, would explain why he wasn’t on the bridge—why he was doing the apparently irrational things he needed to do if he were going to survive.

  The first of which was to get to the forecastle head, where his own personal life raft was hidden beneath the spare anchor.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The door to Ben’s office slammed wide and Martyr was standing there. Robin looked at him narrowly. She was not really surprised. “Is this it?” she asked quietly. “Is this what you have been searching for?” She held up the empty picture frame and he understood its meaning as readily as she had done: wherever he was now, what ever he was up to, Ben had no intention of ever coming back here.

  “Strong…” he whispered. “Where is he?”

  “On the bridge five minutes ago. But it looks as though he’s not going to stay there.”

  “Right.” He swung round, heading for the door. Then he stopped. “No. Wait.” He turned back. “He’s got to make sure we sink. He can’t leave it to chance. He’s got to be sure, but how?”

  “Tell you what I’d do,” said Robin thoughtfully, “I’d move the cargo so that she breaks up. Easy enough to do. Hell, we need all those machines and years of training to stop it happening in the first place.”

  “That’s it!” he agreed. “It has to be!”

  “Right. Tell you what: I’ve got to get the radio from my father. It’s what I came down for. You take this to the captain. I’ll get the radio and come to the bridge with it. And I’ll get my father to check the Cargo Control Room.”

  She caught Martyr’s questioning look. “Computers,” she snapped. “He loves them. They’re like toys to him. If anyone can find…”

  The American nodded.

  She was away at once.

  Robin made no hesitation outside Richard’s cabin this time, but crossed to her father’s quarters at a flat run. She thundered on the door until light washed over her feet, then burst impulsively in. Sir William was standing, clear-eyed but tousle-haired at the side of his bunk. He had been sleeping in his shirtsleeves and as his daughter entered he turned, running his thumbs up under his braces. “Well?” he snapped, none too pleased with being woken.

  Once she might have hesitated, cowed by his obvious displeasure. No longer. “Quine’s radio doesn’t work properly,” she responded coolly. “The captain wants to borrow yours.”

  “Of course. But I turned it off hours ago because of atmospheric interference.”

  She crossed to it as he was saying this. She nodded once, tight-mouthed, picked it up, and turned back.

  Then she did pause, for the first time, suddenly struck by the thought that she might well be sending him into unacceptable danger. He was shoeless, and something about his bright Argyll socks made her feel poignantly protective toward him. But she had a responsibility to all the rest of them as well. And he would do a better job than anybody else aboard. So: “Look…” she began. As quickly and accurately as she could—given that some of it at least was guesswork—she explained what she and Martyr had learned. And what she wanted him to do.

  Within moments of her first word he was seated on his bunk, reaching for his shoes. By the time she was finished he was laced up and ready to go.

  They parted at the lift. He stepped in, to sink two decks. She ran on to the stairs and bounded up them. Running onto the bridge, she had handed Sir William’s little radio to Quine before she noticed something was wrong. John was there alone. There were no other officers in sight.

  No sign of Richard or Martyr. Or of Ben.

  She went cold.

  John was at the helmsman’s left shoulder. She strode quickly across to him. “John!” She had to yell to make herself heard. “Where are the others?”

  “Captain’s on the starboard bridge wing.”

  “But Martyr? Ben Strong?”

  “Martyr’s in the engine room if I know him. Ben bashed his head open and went below, what? ten minutes ago?”

  “Oh God.”

  “Robin? Robin, where are you…Number Three! Christ!”

  But she was gone.

  Sir William pushed the door of the Cargo Control Room open and very nearly panicked. He found himself confronted with a solid wall of smoke. He unconsciously echoed John Higgins three decks above. “Christ!” he muttered, hit the lights, and plunged in.

  There was no sound of flames, merely a telltale hissing. Nor was there any real sensation of heat; just the smoke: McTavish’s wires were shorting out again, though William Heritage did not know this.

  Sir William paused in the center of the room. His eyes were watering and, for all that he was holding his breath, the acrid smoke caught at his throat. Forcing himself not to cough, he looked around, all too aware that his time was severely limited. But at the center of the room, the smoke seemed thinner and the light as it flickered on revealed the seat of the fire—a thinning column of smoke oozing oilily from behind a blistered, twisted tin panel. Sir William kicked it twice, ruining some of Lobb and Company’s finest work, and it fell back to reveal a black mare’s nest of burned wires.

  McTavish had left a red can of electrical-safe fire-fighting foam on the nearest work surface and Bill used this to kill the last pungent clouds.

  His breath ran out then but instead of going out toward the open door, he crossed to the rattling sheet of board that was trying to wrench itself out of the blast-twisted windowframe. It came away surprisingly easily and the storm wind burst in, blasting the smoke away.

  And bringing William Heritage almost face to face with a tall, yellow-clad figure who turned away before the old man could be certain who it was, to vanish down the deck.

  The storm hit Ben with full force the moment he stepped out of the A deck door. The solid ram of the wind blasted him back against the ravaged iron of the upper works. A sheet of water, solid as ice, slid along the deck beneath his feet, almost sweeping them away. He turned and was suddenly blinded by a bright light. He turned again, his back to the brightness, and staggered away from the bridge house, feeling acutely the loss of his chance to summon up some reserves of energy and fortitude. But he had to pause almost at once, fortuitously, in the first shadow; then, leaning forward into the brunt of the wind, placing his feet carefully as though planting them and willing them to grow safe roots into the throbbing deck, he began to walk down the length of the ship.

  It never occurred to him that the brightness meant that he had been spotted. It seemed unlikely that anyone from the bridge would see him, though he was dressed in the bright wet-weather gear they had broken out before turning to run for France. The bridge windows, plain glass without the benefit of clearview, would hide most of the deck under a vertical sheet of water. He had no intention, however, of using the raised catwalk above the pipes running down the center of the deck. No. He would sneak down among the shadows of the manifolds and tank caps here at deck level, and hope the hell he wasn’t washed overboard. Danger of one sort saving him from the far greater danger of exposure.

  That was the one thing he really dreaded. He was one of nature’s natural spies. Under the bland surface he presented to the world he could hide anything. Even this. But the surface was important to him.
He enjoyed the respect of his peers. He needed to have standing in his community. He lived in an expensive little Surrey village where rich ex-Londoners played at being countryfolk. He kept his accounts at local stores. He was a church warden and attended services every Sunday when at home; following prayer with a drink or two at the local pub and an occasional slog with a bat on the village green for the village cricket team. Soon there would be a quiet, patient, biddable, preferably rich wife. A captaincy. Children. He had it all mapped out. But it all required money. And that had been too slow in coming. Until he met Kostas Demetrios in a casino one night.

  These were the thoughts that occupied his mind as his body fought its way down the deck. Perforce they occupied only part of it. The rest of his consciousness was trying to deal with the physical sensations of the storm. The effect of it was intensified by the darkness. There was no sense of scale, as there had been off Durban. There was simply an unremitting personal attack, as though the wind hated him and was trying to wrestle him to the deck where the rain and spray could drown him. It had fingers that grasped any loose piece of clothing. It had arms that wrapped around him, trying to lift him and throw him. It had legs that thrust against his legs, trying to trip him—and all too often succeeding. It had fists that pummeled his face armed with knuckledusters of hail, until he couldn’t feel his cheekbones and his slitted eyes seemed as bruised and swollen as his nose. He fought it as it fought him, unrelentingly. And so he proceeded down the deck.