by Peter Tonkin
Robin returned to the kitchen and filled the electric kettle. Sod the children, she thought; this was for a cup of tea. Janet and she had more than earned it. Automatically as she did so, she glanced across at the kitchen clock. Nearly nine. The twins should have been in bed hours ago: no wonder they were so fractious. As she glanced down from the clock, her eyes fell on the crumpled remains of the blue airmail letter and she thought of Richard again. Her thoughts of him became a little more forgiving as she waited for the kettle to warm up. She pulled out the teapot and the tea. By the time the tea was brewing fragrantly under its cosy, she was almost in charity with her errant husband again.
She ran out of charity with her son, however, two minutes later. She came out of the kitchen in search of him as soon as the cosy was on the pot. ‘It’s brewing, Janet,’ she called up the stairs as she crossed to the downstairs cloakroom. No sign of William there. She crossed the hall and popped her head into Richard’s study where William often liked to play. No sign. Nor in the dining room. Where had the little monster got to? she wondered indulgently, opening the door into the great, broad sitting room whose wide windows gave a panoramic view of the Channel. A secretive flurry of motion told her she had found him — and that he was up to no good. ‘William!’ she snapped. ‘What are you up to?’
She reached over and switched the light on, revealing her son and heir crouching, with his jeans inexpertly adjusted, over the answerphone.
‘William! What are you doing? That is not a toy! You know very well —’
‘I wanted to talk to Daddy!’ he wailed. ‘There was a message from my daddy for me …’
‘Oh, William!’ She crossed the room and hugged him to her. He had always been Daddy’s boy and that was all there was to it. Whenever the twins had a fight or whenever Mummy or Janet told them off, William always ran to his daddy while Mary sulked and plotted dark revenge. She should have known that the exhausted boy would come in here after the fight and the telling-off. She led him back into the hall and across to the kitchen, too preoccupied to register the whirring and clicking sounds which came from the machine by the phone.
Robin and Janet had a nice cup of tea. Mary and William had beans on toast which they loved. Then the twins went to bed. Janet and Robin tucked them down and their mother switched on the tape recorder with their Beatrix Potter tapes. They were too exhausted even to squabble over whether it should be The Tale of Jeremy Fisher or The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Robin herself thought that The Two Bad Mice would have been the most appropriate, but she said nothing and kissed them goodnight and turned down the light.
As soon as there was quiet, the women went back downstairs and had a stiff whisky each. After the first sip of hers, Robin remembered about the Monterey and popped out to slip it into the garage. She would unpack it in the morning after all. There was no reason to worry about it, the garage was built like Fort Knox in case anyone got any idea about stealing Richard’s E-type Jaguar.
Robin and Janet had another whisky and then they also had beans on toast which they loved. Janet went off to bed at ten and Robin at last got the chance to look through the rest of the mail and give her father a ring. Idly, leafing through the crumpled pile, she walked through to the sitting room. The light was still on and she collapsed on the big overstuffed sofa beside the phone table. As soon as she was seated, she thought of Richard. This was the time of night he always phoned, wherever in the world he was, whatever time zone he was passing through. And she would always be sitting curled on the overstuffed sofa looking out through the French windows across the garden and away across the Channel beyond, waiting for his call.
But it never came. As she waited, she checked through the letters in more detail, separating the junk from the rest, the business from the social. She read his hurried, apologetic missives — two postcards, one posted from Heathrow on his way out, the next from Singapore on his arrival. The promise of a letter soon. The destroyed airmail letter. Nothing more from him. Perhaps if she put the flimsy pieces back together in the morning she would be able to decipher the tiny, impenetrable scrawl he reserved for one-sheet airmail letters such as this. She flicked through the rest. Even the letter from Phylidda Gough with its familiar Budleigh Salterton postmark was put on one side. She would catch up on the adventures of the Wallys, father and son, and of her old friend, their wife and mother, in due course. She was too exhausted even to think straight now.
By ten thirty she knew he was not going to call tonight. But she knew what to do about that, too. She would do what William had done and let the tape do the talking. But when she switched the machine onto Playback it only hissed at her. Hissed and whispered wordlessly. She got up and looked closely at it. The message counter read zero. Any messages which had been there were gone now. It made no difference what knobs she pressed or what dials she twisted, there was nothing on the message tape but a quiet, static whisper.
She returned to his letter from Singapore. She spread it out. With considerable effort she just managed to make out one side, only to find it was just their address. Turned it over. Pored over the other side thinking that if she could make out the outside, she might risk cutting it open and try for the inside — if she could work out which bits had been the edges and where they needed to be cut. The back gave the name of the hotel he was booked into, the Raffles, where he always stayed. But it took her so long to work it out she decided that, like everything else, the next step had better wait until morning.
In the meantime, there was still some action she could take. She knew where he was: she could give him a call. She walked through into his study and looked the number up on the big Rollerdex he kept on his desk. Singapore 337 8041. She dialled.
But the man on the reception desk of the Raffles Hotel, Beach Road, Singapore, informed her that Captain Mariner had vacated his executive suite nearly a week earlier. And no, he had no idea where the captain had gone after that. And no, there were no messages. And no, he could help no further at all; he was sorry. Would the caller like him to refer her to the night manager?
She phoned her father, but Sir William had received no recent news of Richard either.
She phoned Heritage House, but no one at Heritage Mariner’s headquarters had any news either. It was as though her husband had vanished off the face of the earth. Even the twenty-four-hour secretariat at Crewfinders were surprised to learn that Richard was not at the Raffles. He was out of touch with them for the first time in twenty years.
In the end she gave up and went to bed on the verge of tears. Now, in the quiet dark with the faintest whisper of the sea climbing the cliffs in the night wind, Robin did begin to feel a sense of foreboding. It grew to nightmare proportions as she fell into a restless sleep.
But not even the worst nightmare imaginable could have prepared her for the phone call which came through direct to her bedside from the Heritage Mariner office on the fourth floor of Jardine House, Connaught Road, Central District, Hong Kong, at half past midnight BST next morning.
Chapter Four
The ringing of the telephone insinuated itself into Robin’s nightmare and in her dream she answered it only to find that it had become a snake which was trying to choke the life out of her. As well as hissing, the suffocating serpent continued to ring insistently. When she could breathe no more, she tore herself awake and echoed in real life the action of her dream, reaching for the shrilling handset.
The earpiece was icy against her ear.
‘Hello?’ she said, her voice still rusty from the effect of the choking snake.
The line hissed and her hair stirred. This was the noise the creature in her nightmare had made. Adrenaline began to pump through her exhausted frame. Her mind tried to batter its way through the suffocating residue of her disturbed slumber.
‘Who is this?’
Deafening crackle. Distant connection, bringing a voice rushing through a one-sided conversation which seemed already to have begun. ‘You do not know me. I am John Shaw, office junior
at the Heritage Mariner office here in Jardine House, Hong Kong. Please excuse someone so junior for disturbing you like this but I thought it best under the circumstances. It is early morning here and I have arrived first at the office to complete an assignment for my manager Mr Feng. But instead I have read of this occurrence in the South China Morning Post. We have had no warning. There has been no announcement. Sulu Queen has not even been registered as missing. I do not understand how this could have occurred.’
‘Who is this? What are you talking about?’
Silence. Then ‘Excuse, please. This is Heritage Mariner office, London?’
‘This is Captain Robin Mariner, of Heritage Mariner, London. Who is this?’ Already her blood was running cold. Her respiration was speeding up. In a moment she would find it hard to breathe.
‘This is John Shaw, Heritage Mariner office Hong Kong. I have urgent report concerning motor vessel Sulu Queen and Captain Richard Mariner. This has not been verified, you understand. It is a report from the Morning Post. We have not been notified here.’
She breathed in. How thick the air seemed. How cold! What time was it? ‘What report, Mr Shaw?’
‘The Hong Kong authorities are towing Sulu Queen into port. She was discovered drifting without power out in the South China Sea at dawn yesterday and Hong Kong Naval officers went aboard. All her crew are dead. Murdered.’ The darkness seemed to be smothering her. She reached across clumsily with her left hand and turned on the bedside light. She knew the name of the ship well enough. Some of the new cash which had come into Heritage Mariner from the affair of the iceberg codenamed Manhattan by the United Nations had been invested in a small shipping line with two freighters working between the Philippines, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Japan. It was called the China Queens Line and she had reason to remember its existence clearly — it had been on China Queens business that Richard had gone to Singapore ten days ago. The captain of the Sulu Queen was Wally Gough the elder, husband to the Phylidda whose letter lay unopened beside the dead answerphone downstairs.
The shock of that realisation jerked her awake like a douche of cold water.
The Chinese-accented voice from the Hong Kong office was still relaying to her the contents of the newspaper report: ‘A terrible scene. Wholesale slaughter with guns and knives. This is according to what the reporter has learned from the officers who boarded her, you understand. No one else has been aboard. It is understood that the ship will be impounded in a secure dock, searched in every detail and then held until the trial.’
‘The trial?’
Her question brought the flow of words to a stop, but only for a moment. ‘That is why I phoned through at once. I waited only for the international operator to get me through. I do not have the direct dialling numbers here, you understand. These are in the manager’s office and Mr Feng will not be here until after eight o’clock on normal work day but today it is Saturday and I do not think he will be in at all so I thought … Under the circumstance …’
‘What? What are you trying to say? What trial? What is going on, for heaven’s sake?’
‘It is the captain, Captain Mariner. He was the only man left alive on board the Sulu Queen. It reports in the paper that he has been charged already. He will be put on trial as soon as possible, they say, accused of the murder of the whole ship’s crew.’
*
She sat curled in her bed waiting for her breathing to steady, her heart to slow and her mind to clear. It was one o’clock in the morning and she couldn’t work out who to call first. Obviously John Shaw, the clerk in the Hong Kong office, had come through directly to Ashenden because of a mistake made by the international operator but that made no real difference. If he had got straight through to Heritage House, someone would have phoned her anyway. Her father was retired now and increasingly out of touch with the business he had set up. Heritage Mariner’s chief executive Charles Lee, himself from Hong Kong, was in Beijing at the moment, negotiating contracts for the company in the days, so close at hand now, after Hong Kong was returned to Chinese control.
Helen DuFour, the other senior executive, was in Moscow, still negotiating with the Russians and the independent republics of the old Soviet Union for the official, controlled shipping and the proper, safe disposal of the weapons grade plutonium, lithium and tritium resultant from the decommissioning of their nuclear arsenal. These were negotiations which she had been holding for some years now, ever since the SALT agreements; but the fissionable material, together with the triggers and mechanisms used in weapons preparation, seemed to be haemorrhaging away into the Mafia-controlled black market. Almost none of it was being disposed of properly. For Heritage Mariner this meant a dangerous loss of potential revenue; what it meant for international security was much more difficult to calculate.
No. As things stood, John Shaw’s terrible news would have come through to her in the end. But what should she do about it first?
Check it out, of course.
She pulled her stiff limbs into the baggy old track suit which often served as a dressing gown and pattered downstairs barefoot into Richard’s study. All the contact numbers he possessed were on a disk for his neat PC and Robin was as computer literate as anyone, but for some reason she chose to turn to the Rollerdex tonight. Perhaps it gave her some kind of security.
The first number under ‘Hong Kong’ was the Tourist Board at 125 Pall Mall. She dialled without further thought but there was no reply. Not at this time of night! Stupid. She wasn’t thinking clearly at all.
She sat back and took a deep breath. The Hong Kong numbers were the usual hotchpotch of personal contacts (but not too personal or they would be filed under names), hotel reception numbers, offices. She looked at her watch: 01.10. Hong Kong was eight hours ahead of GMT, seven ahead of BST. It was coming up for 08.15 out there. Eight fifteen on Saturday morning. Even Government House would still be closed.
Who was it that she really wanted to talk to? Newspapers for further information, someone in authority for confirmation, lawyers for advice and action. But if she could get through to the right lawyer, he could do the checking on the scene while she got into action …
She hunched forward and punched in the familiar number of the twenty-four-hour line at Heritage House.
Musical tones of almost instantaneous connection.
One ring.
‘Good morning. Heritage Mariner. Claire speaking. How may I help you?’
‘Claire, this is Robin Mariner. I need some information urgently. Can you access the memory banks for me?’
‘I would need a current company codeword for anything confidential, Captain Mariner.’
‘This won’t be confidential. I need the home telephone number of the Heritage Mariner legal contact in Hong Kong.’
‘Let me see … Hong Kong … That would be the firm of … Balfour Stephenson, 116 Johnston Road … Yes. Here it is. Contact Andrew Atherton Balfour. He lives in Repulse Bay. His number is … Have you got a pencil, Captain Mariner?’
*
The phone rang three times and there was a click. Robin’s heart sank. A stilted mechanical voice like that of a Scottish robot said, ‘Hello, this is Andrew Atherton Balfour. I cannot answer the phone at the moment. If you need my professional advice you may contact my office on 8246444. Otherwise, please leave a message after the tone.’
‘Mr Balfour. My name is Robin Mariner. I am very much afraid that my husband Captain Richard Mariner of Heritage Mariner may have been arrested in Hong Kong. I have information that he may be involved in an incident to do with the motor vessel Sulu Queen —’
‘Hello? Hello, Mrs Mariner?’
‘Mr Balfour?’
‘Aye, I’m sorry, yes … You caught me still in bed, I’m afraid. There was a bit of a party at Government House last night.’
‘Have you heard anything about the Sulu Queen?’
‘Nothing at all … Look, it’s still early here, but I can start checking —’
‘Do you have a new
spaper delivered?’
‘I do indeed. Well, the maid brings it in. The South China Morning Post’
‘Could you look at the front page for me, please?’
‘Well … Yes, of course. Just a moment, please; I’ll just slip into a dressing gown and grab the walkabout …’
The line went dead. Robin waited, her eyes unfocused. She didn’t know it, but she was chewing her fingernails, a habit she thought she had broken more than twenty-five years ago.
‘Wai!’ The unexpected Cantonese greeting made her jump. ‘Still there?’ Balfour’s gentle Scottish tones flowed smoothly on.
‘Still here.’
‘Right … Just bear with me for a second … Jou shan, Su Lin, mgoi.’ There was the chink of a teacup and Robin remembered that mgoi meant ‘thank you’. ‘Right …’ A rustle of paper.
Inconsequentially, Robin wondered just how much British Telecom would be charging her for the privilege of listening to a Hong Kong solicitor the better part of ten thousand miles distant say ‘good morning’ to his housemaid Su Lin, accept a cup of tea and unfold his morning paper.
Then idle speculation was shattered. ‘My God!’ said Andrew Atherton Balfour, his voice horrified. ‘Sweet Christ!’ And Robin had formed the firm opinion that this was not a man who approved of blasphemy under normal circumstances at all. ‘I’ll get onto this,’ he said, as though she could see the paper as clearly as he. ‘I know just the man to ask about this. Jesus. Captain Mariner himself. It’s incredible.’
‘I’m on my way,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘I’m coming out myself. At once. Book me a suite for tonight. From tonight, open-ended. No. Look for a leave flat, just in case.’
‘Mrs Mariner —’
‘Get the suite at the Mandarin if you can. I haven’t been out for some time but it used to be my favourite. Or the Peninsula if Kowloon side is better. Someone will be in contact later with my arrival details. And don’t forget the leave flat if it looks as though it’ll be a long-term thing. Would you mind?’