Sea of Troubles Box Set

by Peter Tonkin

  And she was rather more at risk than she realised. John Shaw was at a peak of excitement. Here, as far as he knew, was a woman who might well have featured honourably in his personal collection of erotica; paying large amounts of money to entertain him to the most graphically pornographic show in Hong Kong. Fortunately the bustle of the clientele and the blare of the music made talk impossible so that he never managed to say anything even faintly inappropriate, in spite of the nature of his thoughts and suppositions.

  Robin moved from initial disgust into a mode of total concentration, using those eyes which had impressed the most experienced of watchkeepers to quarter and search the dim recesses of this ghastly place. Syme was at one of the most distant of tables, down near the clear space which Robin reluctantly recognised to be a stage. She leaned across towards John Shaw, her eyes never leaving the civil servant’s oiled gold helmet of hair. ‘Is there some kind of show?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes indeed! It is most —’ John Shaw stopped, aghast, sharply aware of how much he might inadvertently be giving away.

  ‘Any idea when it begins?’ Robin had not noticed anything untoward.

  ‘At nine. So I believe.’

  Robin glanced at her watch. It was an old-fashioned Boy Scout’s watch with a useful bevel and vivid luminous figures. ‘Five minutes,’ she observed, her eyes still on Syme; just beginning to wonder what might be coming up.

  Not in her wildest dreams could Robin have guessed what was going to come on as a floor show at Bottoms. Even the name of the place failed to warn her, though in her years as a full ship’s captain she had come across a broad range of predilections, on videotape and in glossy magazines, if nowhere else. Whatever dark motive masquerading as curiosity had driven her in here on the heels of the foul S John Syme, Robin had seen more than enough and broadened her experience far beyond her wish within moments of the floor show’s beginning. What the information about the civil servant’s unnatural erotic interests would be worth — if she ever dared admit to having followed him into such a place and to have witnessed such a show — was beyond computation. It was not worth putting up with any more of this disgusting spectacle to further her understanding of the man or to glean more information about his peculiar predilections. ‘That’s it!’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Hoping against hope that their ultimate destination would be his flat, John Shaw was happy to oblige. Hot on her heels, he followed her out into the Cat Street market. Here she hesitated for an instant, as though uncertain where to go next, and he was within the merest instant of taking control and directing her to his tower block when one of the stall-holders called out raucously and unexpectedly. It was a woman who specialised in newspapers and magazines in a range of Chinese dialects, and she had evidently just received a range of Chinese newspapers. ‘It’s her!’ screamed the harridan. ‘The gweilo woman — the wife of the mass murderer who was in court only this morning! Her photograph is in all the papers! It is her, I tell you!’

  Robin heard the commotion but had no idea what was being said or that she herself was the centre of attention. It was John who warned her first. ‘Missy,’ he called, regressing again ‘Captain …’ He caught her by the sleeve with such force that she was shocked. ‘We better go! These people, they know you … The newspapers …’

  Robin pulled away, her mind refusing to accept what was going on around her. It was a nightmare. The very instant she came creeping out of a pornographic show in a market she had never visited in a city she had been away from for years suddenly she was the centre of attention, the cynosure of all eyes. And not merely of all eyes. The old woman who had started the commotion burst out from behind her meagre stall brandishing a pink newspaper with a grainy but vivid black and white picture of her on the front page in the midst of a black sea of Chinese lettering. The newspaper was thrust like a kind of mirror into her face, and suddenly she was at the centre of a small knot of strangers, all calling out and grabbing. Her arms, her shoulders, her back, her hair. John Shaw’s hands were trying to pull her free with bruising force, but his were not the only hands pulling at her now. Wasn’t there a movie, she wondered for a horrified moment, where someone got torn to pieces by an uncontrollable mob? She pulled away with mounting terror, thrusting herself towards John Shaw but he was no longer where she thought he was. Wherever she turned, there were only twisted, Oriental faces and mocking monochrome pictures of herself. ‘Shaw!’ she screamed. ‘John Shaw!’

  And John Shaw came back to get her. He was not alone; Andrew Atherton Balfour was at his shoulder and they came in through the crowd of hysterical women, shoving bodies this way and that, like a fly half and a prop forward tearing down a rugby pitch, until they had her safe and could lead her back to the great green Aston Martin Vantage parked at the end of the street.

  ‘Just listen to this,’ ordered Andrew, his massive frame given an excess of restless energy by the adrenaline still coursing through it in the aftermath of the rescue.

  Robin sat, almost prostrate, in his office, gripped by whatever chemicals had the opposite effect of adrenaline. ‘Listen to what?’ she said pettishly, gracelessly, as though she was angry with him for coming to her rescue. As, in fact, she was.

  ‘It came in late this afternoon, after six. Well, after I called your office in Jardine House. I went out for a bite to eat. I checked back before returning to Repulse Bay and there it was. I called the Mandarin to tell you about it. The Mandarin told me where to find you. End of story.’

  ‘What is it, Andrew?’

  ‘Listen. Just listen.’

  He turned up the volume on his answerphone and the tape hissed as it moved across the heads. ‘ … Atherton’ it cut in suddenly and loudly enough to make them both jump a little. Just that one word, the consonants like rocks in the speaker’s mouth, the V teetering dangerously close to an ‘l’ sound, was enough to establish a Chinese accent. ‘You want see what happen Sulu Queen’s cargo, you go Ping Chau tomorrow night.’ There was a click and the caller hung up.

  Andrew switched off. Rewound. The voice repeated, clearly, in its Chinese accented English, ‘ … Atherton. You want see what happen Sulu Queen’s cargo, you go Ping Chau tomorrow night.’

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘Sulu Queen’s cargo is at Kwai Chung,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe, maybe not.’

  ‘Come on, Andrew. It’s where the ship is. It’s where the cargo is.’

  ‘Maybe not all of it.’

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘All right,’ she said quietly. ‘Let’s say I go along with that. Maybe there was something being smuggled on Sulu Queen. Where does that get us?’

  ‘Closer to an explanation as to what was actually going on?’

  ‘Possibly. Now, what is this Ping Chau?’

  ‘It’s an island. A ghost island. It’s way, way out in Mirs Bay, so far north and east of here that it’s only a swim from the mainland.’

  ‘From China!’ Andrew had Robin’s full attention now.

  ‘Yes. China. Po On District, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘What do you mean a “ghost island”?’

  ‘It has villages, near enough a town or two. It used to support thousands of people. But they all left. Went to England, most of them. Only two people live there now. Two people to open it all up for the tourists when they go out there for day visits, and close it all up again at night. Whole island. Couple of kilometres long; maybe a kilometre wide. Two people.’

  ‘You could hide a lot of stuff on an island that size.’ Against her better judgement, she was intrigued.

  ‘Do you think it’s conceivable that Sulu Queen could have been carrying contraband? Smuggling?’

  ‘Who knows? I’d need to see the full manifest. I don’t suppose whatever we’re looking for would be mentioned, but we could total actual capacity against the volume of cargo carried. If the two figures don’t match, then maybe …’

  ‘Any way you can check?’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said
slowly. ‘But I think I might just know a man who can.’

  ‘You get on to him, then,’ said Andrew, ‘and I’ll see about booking a boat.’

  ‘No, wait,’ she said. ‘If my man agrees to help us, he can probably supply a boat of his own.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Daniel Huuk stood at the point of the cutter’s bow, looking north-east across Mirs Bay towards Ping Chau Island which was heaving itself out of the calm grey water like a vivid green sea monster coming to the surface. It was mid-morning on Wednesday, 14 May. The island would be deserted except for the two watchkeepers and the cutter’s crew. The sun broke through and glinted on the slopes of Dragon Fall Hill.

  ‘Oh, that’s lovely,’ said Robin, standing just behind his shoulder. ‘What is it called?’

  He turned his head just enough to see the loom of her right shoulder, clad in plum silk and covered, as though by a cloak, with her light fawn raincoat, and told her.

  Huuk was in two minds about this expedition. He was not particularly impressed by the solicitor’s tape, and it seemed hardly likely to him that even the most intrepid smuggler could get into Kwai Chung, past the men guarding the cargo of the Sulu Queen, remove a couple of containers without anyone noticing, and then bring them out here. Why should they? What for?

  And yet … And yet … There was a niggling doubt. Enough of a doubt to get him out here to check for himself, independently of the fact that Commander Lee, his effective boss at the moment, wanted to keep Andrew Balfour sweet, and Huuk himself was by no means averse to obliging Robin Mariner.

  This was not the most convenient time for him to be taking a jaunt out here looking for ghosts and mysteries, however. There was the cargo of the Sulu Queen to be catalogued in detail; there was every inch of her hull to be thoroughly searched. The Hong Kong police were doing that, of course, but Huuk and his men provided assistance and naval knowledge which could be vital. The men from the coroner’s office were establishing individual causes of death and matching up corpses and ship’s records surprisingly quickly, and Huuk knew that Lee wanted to proceed to formal indictment as soon as possible. There was just too much publicity in this case for anyone to be laggard or derelict. On the other hand, nobody wanted to risk anything being overlooked.

  Ultimately, that was why they were here. It had not required the razor sharp legal mind of Prosecutor Po to make them all understand that it was going to be very difficult to establish intention and motive. Although it seemed quite clear that Richard Mariner had gone berserk with at least one gun and killed everyone else on board — except the Vietnamese, who had already been dead — there was very little evidence as to why he had done so.

  Involvement in some kind of smuggling operation would further blacken Mariner’s name, undermine his reputation in the eyes of judge and jury, and provide enough of a motive to strengthen the prosecution case just where it needed most support, when the inevitable transfer was made from magistrate’s court to High Court.

  Robin, however, was in no doubt that discovery of smuggling activity centred on the Sulu Queen could only help to establish Richard’s innocence.

  She stood just behind Huuk’s right shoulder looking up over his uniform epaulette towards the island. As they neared, she began to make out the gleam of houses clustered at the waterline and to discern the patterns they made mounting the steep green hillsides. The sun came and went behind a thin overcast which kept the surface of the sea a dark blue-grey, like certain types of clay. Beyond the bright island, the sky seemed to curve down into a misty grey backdrop as it met the distant hills of Po On District on the mainland. ‘It is close,’ observed Robin quietly. ‘I hadn’t realised.’

  ‘Not as close as Shenzen,’ he grunted. He turned until the boat’s pulpit rail held his back like a friendly arm and leaned back. Framed against the misty hills and the vivid, verdant island slopes, he made a dashing figure in his whites, but he was not posing for effect. ‘If I were smuggling anything out of Kwai Chung into China,’ he said gently, ‘I’d slip it over the border at Man Kam To and take it up into the Special Economic Zone.’

  ‘Lots of border guards. Customs. Witnesses,’ she commented.

  ‘All right,’ he said slowly, warming to the debate. ‘I’d move it across the marshes south of Lok Ma Chau, then I could even slip it up the river if I wanted.’

  ‘Only if it was fairly light and easy to handle, and …’ she paused as a new thought occurred to her.

  ‘And?’ he prompted.

  ‘And if I hadn’t taken it off earlier in any case.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Before it got to Kwai Chung.’ Her voice was guarded now, for the new thought might be an important one and if it was then it had much better be put to Andrew Balfour rather than Daniel Huuk. She glanced back towards the wheelhouse where Andrew was standing talking to the helmsman — and keeping an eye on Robin.

  ‘How long before?’ Huuk asked silkily, recalling her to their conversation. ‘My men and I were on board for the twelve hours before she came into Tamar. Could it have been taken off then, do you suppose?’ He was daring her to accuse him of criminal complicity but in doing so he let slip a piece of information he would rather have kept secret from her.

  ‘No, of course not. It was a silly idea. I’m sorry.’ She looked up at him suddenly as the penny dropped. ‘You were aboard for twelve hours before the Sulu Queen came in?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered shortly.

  ‘So …’ She drew out the word gently and he could see her mind racing behind those still grey eyes which were so exactly the colour of the distant, beautiful hills.

  Huuk turned away again before she could ask the next, inevitable, question. He was certain that she did not realise that it was he who had shot her husband in the head and injured him so badly. And, for all sorts of reasons, Daniel Huuk did not want her to know; certainly not yet. ‘We’re nearly there,’ he said. ‘That’s Emperor Point, where we dock.’

  *

  Both the islanders were there to greet them, two wizened, elderly-looking men who nevertheless moved with great energy and seemed to be bright and lively. Certainly, they escorted their unexpected guests into the eerie, deserted village with every sign of boundless enjoyment and jabbered full, detailed answers in impenetrable, machine-gun-fire dialect to Huuk’s questions. The six of them — Robin, Andrew, Huuk and three sailors from Tamar — sat down and were given fragrant tea in cups like eggshells and tiny, honey-flavoured cakes as the interrogation continued. But for all their enthusiasm to discuss with each other and with their interrogator every possible answer to each question Huuk asked, his final summing up, in English, was short enough: ‘They know nothing.’

  Andrew’s eyes swept up the forested hillsides rising abruptly above them and stretching away to the south for more than a mile. ‘We’d better get busy then,’ he said, ‘if we’re going to earn our keep and have a good look round. With just six of us it’ll take a good while.’

  ‘We only have to walk round the coast,’ said Huuk. ‘I don’t think anyone is suggesting that anything is smuggled in or out by air, are they? And these two have heard no helicopters recently. No. If there is anything here, it must be within easy reach of the sea.’

  ‘And,’ added Robin grudgingly, ‘it can’t be of any great size either. Unless there is a deep-water inlet somewhere, you won’t get a ship of any size anywhere near the shore.’

  ‘Back to my river boats?’ asked Huuk, with just the slightest teasing edge to his voice.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she conceded. ‘But at least you could use a fleet of them out here and nobody would notice. Anyway.’ She gathered her fawn-coloured raincoat about herself and said, ‘Let’s go.’

  They split into two teams. Andrew and Robin took one of the sailors with a walkie-talkie and Huuk took the two others, also with a walkie-talkie.

  Robin’s team struck directly south, straight down the coast. Huuk’s team would go north to the furthest point and then swing do
wn the far side of the island. They would meet halfway round and compare notes. Then, if need be, each team would continue and double-check the territory already covered by the other. They would meet again back here when they had finished their tour. At most, each team would walk little more than two miles and the exploration should not take long. Certainly, they had no intention of staying on the island for the night. None of them took the message on Andrew’s answerphone that seriously.

  Turning southwards meant that Robin and her team had to walk through the rest of the town to begin with, and that experience set the tone for much of what was to follow. The two islanders waved them away cheerily enough and vanished at once — no doubt to do the washing up. Isolation closed round the three of them like a fist. The houses seemed to crowd around them, their walls, eaves and roofs bright with stone, shale and shells, making the windows and doorways in contrast unnaturally dark. Above, etched black crosses of gulls wheeled against the restless overcast, screaming like lost children, and soon a wind sprang up. It was a strange wind, by no means blustery or stormy, hardly even forceful at first. But it was regular and persistent. It began to whisper and mutter in the empty dwellings all around them. As it gained force it began to whine piercingly and caused unexpected explosions of sound as doors, windows, shutters slammed. Sand, blown up from the beaches, slithered and hissed against edges and comers. Chimneys whimpered. Courtyards howled eerily. The cloud thickened and the noon light came and went, liberating a disturbing army of shadows to dance mockingly in the comers of their eyes.

  ‘I say,’ said Andrew after a while, ‘this is a pretty lonely spot, isn’t it?’