by Peter Tonkin
Chapter Twenty Four
Richard remained outside on the bridge wing for fifteen minutes, momentarily expecting to be summoned as Quine managed to contact the Coastguards. When no such thing happened, his patience ran out quickly. The occasionally glimpsed seas looked too dangerous for him to allow the boy much indulgence.
After the icy rigour of the storm, the bridge was almost suffocating. He paused for an instant to reorientate himself, streaming water. Nothing much had changed. Quine was palely wrestling to extract sense from his radio. Without success. Richard bit back further recrimination and turned to Robin.
'Number Three. Go down and ask your father if you can bring his radio up here. It may be open to less atmospheric interference than Mr Quine's.'
'Aye, sir,' snapped Robin and exited at once.
Robin was quite pleased at being asked to go to her father. Her bladder was about to burst courtesy of that unwise whisky at midnight and the mission at least saved her from having to ask to leave the bridge. Really, she should have gone straight to the Owner's cabin, but her need was too acute. She ran down to her own cabin first and let herself in with a sigh of relief. It was pitch dark in the little vestibule for the only light bulb in her quarters lit her cabin, perpetually dark now that the windows had been boarded up.
She knew, as soon as she stepped in, that she was not alone, and swung the door behind her wide again, to let light from the corridor in.
The layout of the cabin was similar to Richard's except that there was no dayroom or office on her left. Only the curtain before her into the shower and toilet, and the door on her right leading out of the little cubicle where she now stood, not even breathing, trying to make her ears overcome the bluster of the wind, the rattling of the window ply. What was it that had warned her? Some fragrance on the unquiet air? Some sound half-hidden in the wind? Some more subtle sense?
It was probably only one of the stewards after all. 'Who's there?' she called, as though she hadn't hesitated, being careful to open the door to her sleeping quarters before the door behind her closed.
The cabin was empty. There was no one visible and nowhere to hide: even the doors to her wardrobe had gone to fix the windows. She gave an angry sigh, irritated with herself for acting like a nervous child, frightened of her own shadow.
She went back out to the toilet, vexed.
Sitting in the dark, with the shower curtain eerily caressing her as it moved in the draught, her room suddenly became very clear before some inner eye, and she realised just how many things were not quite in the places she had left them.
The unease that this realisation brought started another train of thought. She let her mind go back to the instant before she had knocked on Ben's door to tell him they were off to France. Had it been imagination or had she really heard a scream? A scream all too similar to the one that was burned into her memory from the moment of Watson's death? She checked her luminous watch. She might just take a further moment to find out what was going on before she fetched her father.
As soon as Heritage was in her quarters, the door opposite across the corridor opened and C J Martyr crept out on silent feet. He was not a man used to creeping, though he had done some in Florida, taking care of his daughter's 'friends'. Now he was taking care of himself. 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. Levkas could have explained more, but he was useless now, dead twice over, in spite of the grim determination which had got him up the Pump Room ladder and back from the grave the first time. No one was going to believe Martyr himself - not with his record. But he could still hear Demetrios's tempting voice, even now: 'It'll be money for nothing, man. All you have to do is not notice anything and abandon with the rest. It's money for nothing. Take it for the kid.'
But someone on board had to know the truth; had to know how slight his involvement really was: the murderer. But who was the murderer?
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, adept at cold-cocking people with chair legs or not, 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. As if to emphasise her fears, the draught in the corridor suddenly brought the soft, other-worldly song of Nihil's strange pipes from the crew's quarters. Perhaps it was just the storm, but little currents of icy air were everywhere, disturbing the normally tranquil ambience 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 wellingtoned 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 hers: curtain in front, light-edged 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 agonisingly 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 realised 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 which caused her to jump. The squall responsible for the rogue wave took the door and flung it open, then closed. Ben was hurled backwards 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.
'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 towards his right eye.
'Better get that looked at,' said Richard, turning towards 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 dress the cut 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 that faint, tinny echo of a scream drove her on. She started to search the cabin, but with no success at all. She had never owned a personal tape recorder, but judging from the size of her father's, hiding places would be relatively limited. It never occurred to her that Sir William's fascination with gadgetry had led him to buy an early model - one far larger that Watson's. It never occurred to her that what she was looking for could be hidden in a roll of socks.
The sock drawer did furnish a clue, though. Just as Ben was opening the door out on to the bridge wing two decks above her head, she was pulling the sock drawer open. The lurch that knocked him down caused her to stagger back, pulling the drawer right out. She caught it underneath, before it could spill its contents, and steadied herself, ready to slide it back into its cabinet.
Then she hesitated.
The drawer was constructed of front, back and sides with a thin plywood bottom. Looking into the drawer in the normal way, one would suppose the bottom to be at the base of the sides. It was not. In fact, there was quite a gap beneath it. And into this gap, Ben had taped something.
She crossed to his bunk and emptied the socks onto it, then turned the drawer upside down, thinking she had found something important.
She had heard about the magazines, even glimpsed one from a distance, but had never come across them up close before. In their clumsy, almost chauvinist way, even the crudest of them had tried to protect her from this. Nor - despite her wide experience of the world - were they even faintly like anything she had seen before. She leafed through them, scarcely able to believe her eyes, radically reassessing the bluff, currently friendly First Mate in the light of the stomach-churning obscenities he clearly found sexually exciting.
She still had the garish pile of them lying in her lap when the cabin 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 forehand. 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 when he went 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 still anchorage. The storm would cover the loss of the ship - like the bomb had been supposed to, that cursed bomb off the west coast of Africa; like that other bomb the fool Demetrios had brought aboard yesterday. It would be 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. He found the notion more exciting than anything else.
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 at once - 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 code at once, his fingers doing purposely what Martyr's had done accidentally on the night of the explosion. The screen flickered and lit up:
LADING SCHEDULE ELEVEN.
LADING SCHEDULE
LOGGED IN
He typed in: EXPEDITE and pressed RETURN.
At once the screen went black, also according to the original programme. It was work well done, he thought - something of his own devising prepared in Durban while he had been overseeing the exchange of water for oil in the tanks. He had been forced to reprogram anyway, trying to conceal the change in liquids with different weights, volumes and consistencies behind false figures here. A little variation in Demetrios's plan for Nicoli - because where Nicoli would have had freedom of action, Ben had to be discreet. And this was neater - so much neater, he thought: even a relatively slight disparity in the weight of the cargo in the tanks would cause unbearable stress on the hull along the line where the tanks met. Within minutes she would begin to break up, and no one would be any the wiser.
He paused, listening with every fibre of his being, but he could not hear the pumps begin their deadly work. They were lost in the sound of the storm.
He went out and paused again. Should he close up the wound in his head?
No. Like the storm, it covered so much up. If he alone survived, it would look 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 was going to survive.
The first of which was to get to the fo'c'sle head where his own personal life-raft was hidden.
Chapter Twenty Five
The door to Ben's cabin slammed wide and Martyr was standing there. Robin looked up at him, too surprised to push the filth on her lap aside. The look on his face was just as it had been before she hit him with the chair leg: a mask of hatred, scarcely sane. But he was not looking at her. He was looking at the magazines.
Impulsively, she pushed them away and they cascaded to the floor, forming a bright pool there, like vomit. Robin felt her own heart twisting so painfully the sensation brought tears to her eyes. Pale figures moved in her mind, figures from the pictures in the magazines: doing the things this man's daughter had been forced to do.
She was on her feet, unable to remember standing. She was before him, face to face, her hands on his shoulders, unable to remember moving. 'Is this it?' she asked quietly. 'Is this what you have been searching for?'
'Strong ...' he whispered. It was not what he had been looking for, of course, but it was the final part of the puzzle - or so it seemed. The look on his face almost slipped beyond sanity, making Robin take a step back. Her legs collided with Ben Strong's bunk and she sat heavily, her right hand going to the heart of the pile of socks. Where she found what was actually the final piece to the puzzle - Watson's tape recorder.
'So there it is!' Martyr was on it in an instant. He pressed PLAY and they listened in stunned silence to the tinny conversation which explained so much.
'Demetrios!' exploded Martyr as soon as Ben's contact began to speak. 'So he came aboard himself. He must be getting pretty desperate.'
'And he had a bomb!'
'Ngaaaaaaaaaah ...' The recorder interrupted their speculations with the scream which made them realise all too clearly that Watson's death had been no accident.
They rewound and listened in chastened silence to the whole tape.
'
We have to get this to Richard,' said Robin, the scream still echoing in the tiny cabin.
Martyr's eyes became veiled but he nodded. 'What about the Cargo Control Room?' he asked. 'From the sound of things we don't need to worry about another bomb, but we sure as hell need a guard in there.'
'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, and she was up and away at once.
He turned and spread the magazines with his toe. He need not have bothered: there were no familiar faces.
Nevertheless he said to himself, 'Strong, you scum: you're dead.'
Robin did not hesitate 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 rapped. 'The Captain wants to borrow yours.'
'Of course. But I turned it off hours ago because of atmospheric interference.'