Sea of Troubles Box Set

by Peter Tonkin

  He was glad enough to obey, but as he turned back to switch off the lights after closing the door behind her, he saw the mess in the dining room again and found himself going through and tidying it away after all.

  Robin walked slowly down the hill. The roadway was well lit and the town at the foot of the slope, a couple of hundred metres distant, was still bustling. The walk could not have been safer, and she was aware that if she gave in to offers like Andrew’s of a lift home too often she would soon become reclusive and useless. And she had not been spinning Andrew a line. She did want to wander along slowly, thinking on her feet.

  The black book Andrew had discovered contained some interesting information. Robin had worked out the cryptic notes without too much trouble; it was their precise meaning she wanted to think through, and some of that meaning was hidden between the lines. She had to think it through — to her own satisfaction at the very least. And she had to do it tonight for, regretting already the rush of blood to the head which had made him steal it for her, Andrew proposed to hand it back to the authorities tomorrow. She could hardly blame him, and in any case it did not seem to her to add to the case against Richard. Andrew continued to suggest most strongly that she hand back the disk as well, but somehow she could not bring herself to give that up. It contained a secret hie marked for her eyes only, after all, and she could not bring herself to trust Commander Lee or Huuk.

  In essence, the black book was a simple record of calls which had been made between the captain of the Sulu Queen and the company secretary in the China Queens office. Robin suspected there would be no record of these calls in the radio log itself if it were ever found. The calls were regular but at odd times of the night; and they were far longer than company rules stipulated. What was exercising Robin’s mind was the fact that the calls stopped just a little less than a month ago, on the very day that Richard had sent her the postcard of Raffles to show that he had arrived in Singapore. The book had been kept beyond that time, for there was a series of neat ticks against the days and one or two personal notes, but no further radio calls were recorded.

  And the most likely reason that Robin could think of why the captain of the Sulu Queen should stop making his regular radio calls was if he was no longer there to do so.

  Which might explain what Richard had been doing aboard in the first place and certainly explained why Wally Gough wasn’t listed among the dead found aboard Sulu Queen.

  But, if Wally wasn’t on board his command when she left Singapore, where the hell had he got to?

  Robin had just become fully alive to the urgency of switching rather more of the investigation to the city-state of Singapore at the earliest opportunity when she realised that she was no longer alone. A tall figure, dressed in black and almost indistinguishable from the shadows, was moving at her side. She jerked in her breath to scream but recognised his chuckle just in time. ‘You are hard woman to catch alone.’

  ‘I really need a way to get in contact with you, Twelvetoes.’

  ‘I will think of something. But I am always closer than you think.’

  ‘You don’t know how reassuring it is to hear you say that.’

  ‘You have more friends than you realise —’

  ‘That’s very —’

  ‘ — and more enemies than you know.’

  ‘Enemies?’

  ‘What did you find on Ping Chau Island?’

  ‘Containers. Empty.’

  ‘Perhaps not as empty as you think.’

  ‘Perhaps not. I didn’t have time for much of a look. Can you get me back there?’

  ‘No. But I will send someone on your behalf, quickly and secretly.’

  ‘Why can’t I go?’

  ‘Did you know Daniel Huuk has issued orders to send a launch back to check again? They sail tomorrow … No? He did not mention that this afternoon? Well, there are many things he does not want you to know; that is another of them. But I doubt the Navy will find anything this time. What you did was … unexpected.’ There was a smile in his voice on the word. He sounded a little like a proud parent.

  The pair of them were almost at the light of the first intersection now and, although they were walking more slowly, Robin was all too well aware that her time was strictly limited. What did she want to ask Twelvetoes now that the Ping Chau matter was settled? Her mind raced, but nothing solid would come. She would wake up in the middle of the night berating herself for not thinking more clearly, she knew. ‘Twelvetoes,’ she said, desperately, ‘do you know what is really going on?’

  ‘Of course not, Little Mistress, or I would tell you!’ The laughter had died in his voice, replaced by a tinge of indignation.

  ‘Is there anyone who does know?’

  ‘Not that I know of, or I should be asking him.’ The way in which he said that made her pause.

  ‘But someone must have some idea!’ she almost cried.

  ‘There are, I believe, several people who know part of what is going on. They are Daniel Huuk, of course, and Victor Lee; a man I will not name who is the leader of the White Powder Triad; another who shall again remain nameless, who leads a family of pirates in Manila; two diplomats, I think — StJohn Syme and a man called Xiang Lo-wu who is currently entertaining Charles Lee from your company — did you know that? No? Believe me, it is true.’ The smile was back in his voice but the sound of it was becoming softer and softer as though he was fading away altogether.

  ‘Then there is yourself, your solicitor and Captain Walter Gough.’ The thread of his words persisted, though he himself was lost in the shadows again. ‘You all have a fairly clear idea, I think, of the section of the pattern you are involved in, though I suspect that Captain Gough only knows as much as Anna Leung will allow him to know. I myself see enough of the pattern to suspect where the rest lies and as soon as I know more than that you will too. But other than we few, I think there is only one person who has seen the grand design.’

  ‘And who is that? Who is that, Twelvetoes?’

  ‘Why, Richard, of course.’

  *

  It was impossible to guess the motives behind Twelvetoes’ information, its nature and its timing. What was certain, however, was that a good night’s sleep for Robin did not feature in the old man’s plan. She tossed and turned, sifting his information, testing it against her own knowledge and trying to use it as a lens through which she could examine what was going on from new perspectives and so gain new insights. But it all kept slipping away from her and ultimately she knew she would have to settle for the immediate targets she had agreed with Andrew. Only by sorting things out little by little and one step at a time could she have any realistic hope of clearing Richard’s name. And that was the overall goal, after all. Everything had to tend to that end. In one month’s time, plus however many more days the trial took to come to a conclusion, Richard had to be exonerated, declared innocent of all those terrible charges and free to come home with her. That was Robin’s only target. Any other pattern of motives, involvements and events which Twelvetoes Ho chose to talk about was relevant to her only if it helped her get Richard free.

  The first major step on this quest was to meet Professor Tom Fowler of the world-famous psychiatric section of the Maudsley Hospital in London at the airport next morning, but his flight wasn’t due until ten o’clock local time, so she had time to clear up a little niggling irritation first. She was at Andrew’s door at eight thirty and the pair of them were in his office by nine. She was on the phone to Singapore at five past. There was still no reply from the China Queens office. Enough was enough. She asked the operator to put her through to the Singapore authorities.

  So it was that at 9.15 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday, 27 May, Robin found herself in contact with Inspector Sung of the Singapore police.

  She explained who she was and what her problem was.

  Inspector Sung was good enough to inform her that the disappearance of Miss Anna Leung was already the subject of a police enquiry there. There had be
en some question of financial impropriety, not to mention moral laxity; and in any case co-operation had been sought by Commander Lee of the Royal Hong Kong constabulary.

  Exhausted, under enormous stress, extremely irate and mentally cursing herself, Robin announced that she would very much like to support the authorities in this matter and asked whether the inspector could by any chance give her the name of a reputable local private investigator.

  So Inspector Sung told her about Edgar Tan who, he happened to know, was not working on a case just at the moment.

  *

  Tom Fowler’s plane had come into Kai Tak, and, even after the time it had taken to clear immigration, collect his baggage and come through Customs, he was still as pale as the woman who had come to meet him.

  ‘How do you do?’ she said. ‘I’m Robin Mariner. Can I help you with any of that?’

  He handed over the briefcase and hung on to the suitcase. He rarely travelled and never travelled light. ‘I’ve organised a taxi to your digs,’ she said. ‘You’ll be staying with my solicitor if that’s acceptable. We can check you into an hotel if you would prefer but things are getting pretty busy now that it’s only a month or so to handover. Lots of people who don’t have to be here coming in for a visit; lots of people who can’t go anywhere else trying to do so, just in case. Very busy indeed.’

  ‘And not exactly the best time for a trial,’ Tom observed. ‘The worst.’

  He had stemmed the flow of information and he had not meant to do so. ‘But you have a trial date and are preparing the defence,’ he prompted.

  ‘That’s about the size of it. We have a little more than two weeks left. Our barrister is due later in the week. She’s flying out from London too.’

  ‘Are there no competent barristers here, then?’ He was surprised enough to ask an indelicate question.

  ‘On the contrary, the people here are extremely competent. The same is true of psychiatrists, of course. This barrister is something of a good luck charm, though.’

  ‘You think you need luck?’

  ‘I believe in luck and I’ll take all I can get.’

  ‘Very wise.’

  They had arrived at her taxi now and they handed the cases to the driver. ‘It’s a lovely drive to Repulse bay,’ Robin said. ‘And it’s long enough for us to start making some plans.’

  ‘What I need to know first,’ said Tom as the taxi headed out of Kai Tak, ‘is exactly what you require.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Obviously I stand to be corrected as I get to know the case more intimately, but from what I understand at this point we are dealing with a case of complete dissociative amnesia, taken to the point of loss of personality. There is a closed head injury involved —’

  ‘Closed head?’

  ‘What it sounds like — the head was not cut open. Quite. And there has been a history of amnesia.’

  ‘Richard lost his memory once a few years ago — another closed head injury. He fell out of a crashing helicopter and caught his head on some deck furniture.’

  ‘That incident lasted how long?’

  ‘A couple of days.’

  ‘That’s quite long.’

  ‘But nowhere as long as this time.’

  ‘That’s right. But we’ll have a look at the pathology of the case when I actually talk to your husband. We’ll take for granted that, for whatever reason, he cannot remember what has happened to him up to and including the time he spent on the ship Sulu Queen. In the meantime, let’s talk about what you want me to do.’

  ‘We’ve come round full circle here and I still don’t see exactly what you’re driving at.’

  ‘Do you want me to work on the area of retraining your husband in the basic memory skills?’

  ‘Teach him how to remember?’

  ‘Yes. Teach him how to progress from this point onwards, building a new memory and, if need be, a new sense of himself?’

  ‘Is that what you do?’ She sounded horrified.

  ‘In some cases, yes.’

  ‘God, no. I want you to try and make him really remember. Make him remember who he is and what happened on the Sulu Queen.’

  ‘But it may well be that he does not wish to remember what happened on the Sulu Queen,’ Tom warned her.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You must know that lengthy loss of memory through a simple knock on the head, no matter how hard, is quite rare. Fugue states such as this most commonly arise because the mind cannot accept what has gone on. In rejecting what it cannot accept, however, it sometimes rejects everything else as well. The result of this is that the patient has no memory of anything, even of their own identity. And sometimes they even damage their ability to use memory at all. They retain a range of skills and some basic general knowledge but they can lose the ability to concentrate. Sometimes they need to be reminded about new facts. It is rare but it has been known. Wars have furnished a good few classic examples; violent incidents, accidents, murders. There are well-documented cases, and almost all of them have involved people running away from something which they have found themselves absolutely unable to face.’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t be too surprising if that is what we’re dealing with, would it?’ she observed bitterly. ‘Richard was the only person found alive on a ship full of forty recently butchered people and six Vietnamese who had been dead for a few days longer. No matter what happened, he isn’t really going to want to remember it, is he? Would you?’

  ‘If people were trying to prove I had killed them all and I hadn’t actually done so, then I most certainly would want to remember, yes!’

  Robin looked at Tom and gave him a dazzling smile; he realised he had been outmanoeuvred. It was the price of allowing the conversation to drift into quasi-medical areas as he tried to explain some general principles to someone who did not possess the vocabulary needed. But being outmanoeuvred was a small price to pay for that smile. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘That’s exactly the situation Richard is in. We have to help him remember. You have to help him remember.’

  ‘Very well,’ he capitulated. Secretly he smiled a little himself. Robin Mariner had a much more positive air about her now. That was all to the good: he did not want her to be added to the list of his patients. And when it came right down to it, as a fully trained doctor, he would go through the set routines and make up his mind for himself no matter what possibilities he was willing to discuss now.

  ‘What I would like you to do,’ said Tom gently, ‘is to try and tell me the absolute truth. Whatever it is. At all times.’

  ‘Right-ho,’ said the Sulu Queen’s survivor. He smiled up at the doctor and the expression in his eyes was as bright, and as shallow, as sunlight on glass.

  This was an extremely bad beginning, thought Tom. But immediately he wiped such preconceptions from his mind. Watch and record; don’t judge. He smiled supportively. ‘Good,’ he said. He sat down opposite his patient and put a small personal tape-recorder on the plain, painted wood. ‘Do you mind?’

  The survivor shrugged amenably but silently. The sudden cessation of spoken communication was not lost on Tom either. He remembered all too vividly the way that Thomas, the religious fanatic with several pounds of commercial explosive had also been playing mind games, apparently without reason, while he was building himself a cross. Tom switched the machine on and watched the little tape spool running for a moment while he cleared his mind again. Then, ‘Just for the record,’ he said, apparently casually, ‘could you tell me your name?’

  *

  Robin was fit to explode, but she saw the logic in Tom Fowler’s asking her to stay away from the first interview at least. After dropping him off at the hospital, she took her taxi on down to the Heritage Mariner office. She had lots of things she could be getting on with the first of which involved Mr Feng. Mr Feng was slight and bald. His whole head was dominated by an enormous pair of black-rimmed spectacles. The impact of this eyewear was intensified by the fact that the thick len
ses were light-sensitive and even in cloudy conditions or shade, they remained darkly tinted. He had the appearance and furtive air of a night creature caught out in the day. John Shaw drily suggested that night was a time when Mr Feng came into his own: he and Mrs Feng had ten children, though he was sending the eldest ones abroad to relatives all over the world just at the moment, in case things went badly here after the handover.

  But the fact was that Mr Feng was a well-connected, astute and efficient businessman and even though he kept short and precise office hours, he did a first-rate job. Robin was impressed. It seemed to her that she had to expend so much time and energy to get anything done at all that the effortless ease with which Mr Feng performed made her shake her head and sigh to herself.

  In the absence of half of their China Seas fleet, Mr Feng had perforce moved the focus of their operations into brokerage and he was currently engaged in finding cargo space for a whole range of goods which he could no longer fit on the Seram Queen whose holds would be fully laden when she passed through Hong Kong in the wake of her stricken sister. Further, a great deal of extra work had landed on his desk because of the absence of Anna Leung and the effective closure of the China Queens office in Singapore. And even more work had been heaped upon his frail shoulders by the fact that Robin wished to set up a far more efficient and comprehensive series of communications channels between Hong Kong, Singapore and head office in London. She had seen all too quickly that the offices here regarded themselves as subsidiary members of Heritage Mariner only very distantly indeed. If communications had been better, she would have been in possession of a full itinerary of Richard’s movements.

  But the communication she had come to check on had been moving the other way down the newly-cleared channels to London. Slowly spooling, page by page, out of the fax machine on Mr Feng’s desk was the whole of the bulky Heritage Mariner file on Richard. The last time she had looked at it, that file had been nearly fifty pages long, comprising as it did a whole series of documents accumulated in the range of companies and situations Richard had worked his way through. Helen DuFour had also sent Audrey, the night secretary from Crewfinders and one of their oldest friends, down to Ashenden. The result of Audrey’s research was that, as a kind of appendix, there was a whole pile of family stuff — birth certificates, wedding lines, letters and photographs — which traced Richard’s life from his earliest years as the son of a country vet who had done his war service in the Navy, married the daughter of a Momingside solicitor, and set up an idyllic practice in the village of Bolingbroke at the heart of the Lincolnshire fens.