Sea of Troubles Box Set

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘And the sea gave up the dead which were in it,’ he read idly, ‘and death and hell gave up the dead which were in them; and they were judged every man according to their works.’

  He closed it and put it back. On a panel behind his bed was a pair of earphones. On the table by his right side was some kind of remote control. He held the earphones to his ear and fiddled with the control but no sound came out. No national radio; no hospital channel.

  Well, he decided, he wasn’t going to find out very much just lying here and wondering.

  When he moved, it was with an explosion of energy, instantly controlled, as though he were a robot. He moved in slightly jerky movements, each one complete before the next was begun, as though he was incapable of doing more than one thing at a time. He sat up straight. He closed his right fist on the tangle of sheet and blanket at his waist and pulled it back. He paused, looking down. The pain in his head made his vision swim again but that was not the reason for his hesitation. It was the sight of his white hospital gown. If he was wearing a hospital gown, he reasoned, then his own clothes should be close by. Suddenly he very much wanted his own clothes.

  He swung his legs out of bed and slowly, stiffly bent his knees until his feet were firmly on the thick carpet. In the wall between his bed-head and the window there was a light door made of overlapping strips of wood. It looked like a cupboard door and this was where his clothes seemed most likely to be. He stood, again stiffly. Once up, he paused again, waiting for a nauseating giddiness to pass. Then he moved. Three firm, purposeful strides took him to the wardrobe door. He hesitated for an instant with his right hand on the handle, then pulled it wide with unnecessary force. The wardrobe thus revealed was utterly empty except for half a dozen wire coat-hangers. He could hardly believe his eyes. He stepped in and confirmed what he could see by touching the vacant shelf, sliding numbed fingers along the empty horizontal column of the clothes rail until the coathangers chimed like distant bells.

  ‘What is this?’ he asked himself, aloud in English.

  As though the sound of his own voice had liberated him from some magic spell, he swung round, pushing the wardrobe door closed behind him as he did so, and strode across to the big teak door. He closed his hand round the big brass handle, twisted and pulled. Nothing happened. He twisted again and pushed with all his might. The door remained absolutely firm.

  ‘It’s locked,’ he told himself bitterly, and slapped the wood as though it had insulted him.

  Full of decision and energy now, he strode across to the window and pulled up the blind. He saw a massive darkness etched against distant constellations. The stars in the lower galaxies were white and red and yellow and green. Some of them moved in a multitude of ways and some did not move at all. He stood there, blinking owlishly until his vision cleared.

  His first impression was one of height. He was in a room on an upper floor of a tall building. The feeling of height was emphasised because there was some distance between this building and the next. He was overlooking a black-shadowed area of grass and trees but around the edge of this panorama was a jagged light-specked wall of tall buildings which glimmered and wavered in the night heat. Beyond the buildings he could see the sea, a sparkling surface over a black heart through to nothingness in the far distance. He knew this scene. He recognised it — not exactly, for he had never been in this room before. But he knew this place. He knew where he was.

  A jumbo jet laboured by slightly below his line of sight and he felt, disturbingly, that the passengers whose pale faces he could make out all too clearly would be able to see into the room. Then the massive plane settled down behind the nearest of the buildings and he thought it must have crashed into the city or the sea until he realised that there was a runway stretching out across the bay; there was an airport down there.

  But, almost inevitably it seemed to him, his eyes were dragged away from the airport and out over the anchorage again, straining to see past those maddeningly familiar buildings down to the familiar sea. There would be something down there in that jewel-bright sparkle or that utter velvet blackness which he knew, which would make it all click back into place.

  Such was the survivor’s concentration on the scene below him that he did not hear the quiet grating of the key in the lock, but the swish of the door opening made him swing round at once. There were three men hesitating in the doorway, apparently surprised to see the bed empty. When their eyes fell on him, they seemed taken aback, almost nervous.

  One of them, a bird-like figure in a loose white coat, bustled forward. ‘You should be in bed!’ he chided with a surprisingly light tenor voice. He was familiar. The straight black hair; the ivory coloured, angular face, the bumingly intense, almost-black slanting eyes, the quiet, compelling Oxbridge English tones. The survivor remembered having talked with this man at some length. That was perhaps the most important of all of his disturbingly imprecise memories.

  The survivor stood where he was, looking past the doctor to the two men who had accompanied him. Both wore uniform. Both, like the doctor, were disorientatingly Oriental. One was a wiry young man with an open, almost boyish face. He wore a uniform which was familiar, Naval. The other was a taller, older, fatter man. His uniform was also easy to recognise. He carried a briefcase and wore the unmistakable uniform of a police officer. The policeman, like the doctor, was familiar.

  Even when the doctor took him by the arm, the survivor refused to move. Something about their demeanour told him that the doctor was almost redundant here, in spite of the fact that this was a hospital. It was the policeman and his youthful associate who were important.

  The fat policeman crossed to the bed and placed his briefcase on it. He moved with stiff precision, as though on parade. Leaning forward, with his back ramrod-straight, he snapped the locks up and lifted the top open. He pulled out a buff folder and crossed towards the window, opening it as he did so. The survivor watched the man’s face and eyes, not his hands. The eyes were rounder than the doctor’s, but not much. The skin quality was different — less refined. There was perspiration in the folds which ran from behind the policeman’s neat ears down to his collar and the bulge of his double chin. He looked like a Buddah and barked like a boatswain. ‘Any of this material familiar?’ he snapped, stumbling over Is and rs as he offered the folder to the survivor.

  The survivor took the folder and looked down as it fell open before him. He found himself looking at a glossy ten-by twelve-inch photograph of a blonde woman with bright eyes and an engaging smile. He turned the photograph over. There was nothing written on the back, no clue to the identity of the subject. Thoughtfully, he placed it face up on the windowsill and turned his attention to the next. It showed two children, a boy and a girl, seemingly about the same age, perhaps twins. They bore more than a passing resemblance to the woman so he put their picture on top of hers. Then there was a ship. That was more familiar, but he still couldn’t put his finger on why it seemed so important. He squinted at the forecastle, but the name had been blanked out in the photograph. He put it beside the pictures of the woman and the children, shaking his head in mild perplexity.

  For some reason he hesitated before looking down at the last picture. It showed a head and shoulders portrait of a man. The colours were a little too garish, perhaps, and made the face seem larger than life. The eyes in particular gleamed with an unsettling blue intensity. The black hair seemed unnaturally glossy, seeming to contain also a glint of blue. The long nose, broken slightly out of line, was etched against the long, lined cheek. The mouth was straight but full and with the slightest hint of an upward curl at its comers emphasised by the crows’ feet stretching back from eye comers to grey-flecked temples. The chin below the mouth was square and strong. The survivor’s eyes were drawn back almost against their will to the blue dazzle of the photograph’s hypnotic gaze. For the first time, the survivor seemed to flounder uncertainly as the suspicion came over him that there was something deeply, unsettlingly wrong here. He put th
e whole manila folder down with a decided slap. ‘Who are these people?’ he rasped. ‘What is going on here?’

  The boyish Oriental in the Naval uniform reached into the policeman’s case and crossed the room decisively. He handed the survivor something and the man took it before he realised what it was. It was a mirror; a long oval mirror set in wood with a wooden handle. Holding it, the survivor looked around the room again, shocked that he had missed such an obvious fact. Two pictures; no mirror. It had been important and he hadn’t even noticed. The survivor raised the little mirror and looked into it. Looked at the man in the fourth photograph. The hair in front of the ears was greyer and what little could be seen of it beyond that was dishevelled. The chin was grey with stubble and the mouth had no upward curl to it. But there was no mistaking the patrician line of that nose, broken slightly awry. Nor was there any escape from the hypnotic glimmer of those burning blue eyes.

  ‘It was me,’ said the survivor, stunned. ‘The last picture was a photograph of me!’

  ‘You are certain?’ asked the young Oriental officer. ‘You are sure? ‘Of course. But I —’

  ‘And me?’ the Oriental man interrupted gently. ‘I am Captain Daniel Huuk of the Royal Hong Kong Naval Contingent. Do you not remember me?’

  ‘Not your name … Your face …’

  The police officer stepped forward and interrupted as though his Oriental colleague and the survivor had not been speaking at all. ‘In that case, sir,’ he began, then paused to clear his throat with a mixture of formality, pomposity and nervousness. ‘In that case, I have to inform you that you are Captain Richard Mariner of the Heritage Mariner shipping company of London, England. Your registered domicile is Ashenden, South Dean, East Sussex, England.’ He stopped. Drew breath.

  ‘I have further to inform you that I am Commander Victor Lee of the Royal Hong Kong Police Force. I formally arrested you earlier this morning, at five past midnight when you were last conscious. At that time you signed the form waiving your right to legal representation. I now charge you with the wilful murder of Charles Macallan, chief engineer of the motor vessel Sulu Queen and of Brian Jordan the first officer. And, Captain Mariner, you should be aware that further charges concerning the murders of thirty-seven other crew members aboard the Sulu Queen will be laid against you in due course.

  ‘You were formally cautioned and told your rights earlier this evening. I must formally re-caution you now but presume you do not wish to say anything in the circumstances.’

  Chapter Three

  Robin Mariner had no sense of foreboding at all as she wrestled the big Monterey round the last turn of the drive and up to the front door of Ashenden, her home. She was too tired and far too angry to have any chance of entering the psychic plane. She was tired because it had taken her nine solid hours to get down here from Cold Fell, her father’s house outside Carlisle, a journey usually accomplished in six hours at the most. She was angry because the twins, William and Mary, six and a half years old, had taken leaving their beloved grandfather and ending their short holiday very badly indeed and had been murder for every blessed inch of the M6, M5, M40, M25 and A22 on the way down here. And not one service station, not one bloody toilet, between the back end of Manchester and Stratford-upon-Avon and then not another one until Sevenoaks! And all those accursed roadworks: mile after mile of three-lane traffic jams. It was enough to make a saint enraged.

  But most of all she was angry with her errant husband Richard.

  They had arranged this holiday — a fortnight away over the May Bank holiday — so that they could all be together for a change. They had planned it so carefully and booked it so hopefully and it should have been perfect, their little family and Nurse Janet in a perfect little holiday home just outside Portree on the Isle of Skye. She had arranged to take the Monterey all the way up and back, using the CalMac ferry from Mallaig and breaking the journey each way at Cold Fell where Richard was due to catch up with them on the outward journey, but had she imagined in her wildest dreams that Richard would have been called away to Singapore on the very day of their departure, she would have refused point-blank to go.

  It had been a disappointing holiday without him. She was as good a sailor, as intrepid a fell-walker and as knowledgeable a bird-spotter as he; she read — and told — as mean a story and played an equally cutthroat game of Monopoly, but she lacked something of his boundless zest for life. She had missed him bitterly and so had the twins. ‘It isn’t as much fun without Daddy,’ had been their endless, irritating cry. And, secretly, she had agreed with them.

  The weather had been stunning, the sea surprisingly warm and perfectly set for sailing and bathing. The fish had been plentiful and easy to catch — except for the trout — and delicious. The wildlife had been spectacular and endlessly fascinating. The local people had been warm, welcoming and cheerfully courteous. There had been beaches, cliffs, caves and wild places aplenty. They were returning, tanned and wind-blown, from what should have been a perfect family holiday and yet here they were, tired, dissatisfied and at each other’s throats. And all because Richard hadn’t been there!

  And the rotten so-and-so hadn’t even bothered to write, though he should have been able to get a letter or two from Singapore to Skye. There had better be some good ones on the mat inside the door — and some long messages on the tape of the answerphone.

  Still, they were home now, safe and sound, she thought as they came round on the pebbled forecourt outside Ashenden’s big black oak front door. She braked too hard even for the four-wheel drive, skidded a little and stopped with a lurch which threw them all against their seatbelts and started the twins whining again.

  ‘Here we are!’ she announced, with fierce brightness.

  ‘Let’s get you two into a nice warm bath while Janet and I rustle up some supper. Then it’s bedtime for all of us, I think.’

  As soon as I’ve unloaded the Monterey, she thought to herself, tempted beyond bearing just to drive it into the garage as it was and deal with it in the morning.

  But as soon as she opened Ashenden’s front door she knew things were moving rapidly from bad to bloody worse. She had to push the heavy door because of the great pile of letters, papers and junk mail packed behind it in the hall. How could such a massive pile of rubbish arrive in only a fortnight? she wondered. The twins danced and whined that she was taking too long because they were bursting to go to the toilet and she ended up shoving the black wood so hard that she tore much of the paper piled behind it — including, she noticed grimly as she stooped to pick it all up, at least one airmail letter postmarked Singapore. She looked at the screwed-up mess of flimsy blue paper, hoping fervently it contained no important news: it would be impossible to read it now.

  The twins thundered past her, racing each other ill-naturedly for the same toilet, a fight obviously brewing between them. Janet came past her more slowly, lips thin, ready to wade in beside Robin when the fur began to fly, pausing to hand over the keys to the Monterey. ‘I’ve locked it up for the time being,’ she said, and Robin nodded; good idea. The Scottish nurse had enjoyed the holiday with the depleted family very much and her presence had gone a long way to making up for Richard’s absence. The two women were more like old friends, or even sisters, than employer and employee; certainly they were of an age and were not dissimilar in appearance. More than one hopeful islander had tried flirting with the pair of them during the last two weeks. To no avail whatever.

  ‘It’s gey cold in here though,’ distantly observed Janet whose language had become markedly Scottish up in Skye.

  Robin followed her down the passage, still clutching the pile of bright, torn and crumpled paper. Janet was right. Hell’s teeth! she thought. Now what? But she knew well enough. Mr Patterson, the retired chief petty officer handyman from Friston, the nearest village, had promised to pop in and get the heating on, both the immersion heater and the oil-fired Raeburn. And to pick up the pile of mail from behind the door before it grew too large! But it wa
s all too obvious that the usually reliable CPO Patterson had let them down. If she had been thinking clearly, the pile of mail behind the door would have told her that before the cold air of the hall confirmed it. A wave of bitterness washed over her. At least one letter from Richard gone beyond recall. No hot water. No central heating. No oven or hob. ‘We’d better get the kettle on and look for something to microwave,’ said Robin as the pair of them came into the cavernous, chilly kitchen. She put the bundle of papers onto the kitchen table and crossed to the inner door, thinking to go up to the landing and get the immersion heater on at once. The Raeburn, like the unpacking, would wait until the morning.

  At the moment she opened the door through into the main house, the fight began in earnest and the immersion was forgotten as she tore up to the bathroom to find her children, each with their jeans and pants round their ankles, locked in mortal combat under the porcelain overhang of the toilet bowl. She stooped to grab the pair of them by the scruffs of their necks and dragged their squirming bodies up by main force. ‘Will you two stop this NOW!’ she bellowed in her terrifying captain’s quarterdeck voice, shaking them like rats.

  They both burst into tears at once and she let them go, feeling unforgivably brutal. Janet appeared by the door. ‘I’ll look after Mary,’ she said soothingly.

  ‘I’ll take William downstairs,’ said Robin and led the sobbing child off. He went down the stairs on his bottom, refusing to pull his jeans up past his knees, and Robin let him, still feeling guilty over her outburst. She paused on the landing and switched on the immersion heater while he waddled away from the foot of the stairs below like a grumpy little penguin.