Sea of Troubles Box Set

by Peter Tonkin

  Unable to stop herself, Robin picked up the last sheet which had spooled out of the machine and found herself looking at the photograph of a small, vibrantly excited boy dressed in shorts and a T-shirt standing outside a long, low-fronted stone building. In her neat, precise writing, his mother had written ‘Richard arrives at Summersend, August 1950’. He was as proud as a king, the glow of his joy emphasised by his halo of near-white hair.

  His hair had become so black that Robin sometimes forgot that he had been blond as a child. As, indeed, were her own two children. Summersend, the Mariners’ big old bungalow overlooking the North Sea, was where the twins were now.

  She looked at the ceiling, refusing to sniff or sob, and let the hot tears run back into her hair. Mr Feng concentrated absolutely on the records he was typing into his computer and for a moment there was quiet in the office. Then the phone began to ring.

  Mr Feng was concentrating so hard on his computer that Robin answered. ‘Mariner.’

  There was that slight time lapse which tells of very long distances, then, ‘Robin? It’s Audrey here. Are all the faxes through? The last sheet I sent was the picture of Summersend.’ Audrey could not really bring herself to trust these machines for all they sent automatic confirmation sheets.

  ‘All here, thanks, Audrey.’

  ‘Good. There’s something else, too.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You might want to check the China Queens office again. After all this fuss, I’ve been trying at odd hours. It gives me something to do during the long night watches. Well, I don’t know how important this is, but I finally got through on the number you gave me. It must have been about eight thirty in the morning Singapore time.’

  ‘And?’ Hope sprang up in Robin’s heart. Perhaps Anna Leung was back after all and she could put that whole section of the business firmly out of her mind. She looked automatically at her watch. Three hours ago.

  ‘I got this nice policeman who informed me that the China Queens offices were now under police guard pending an investigation. Is that important?’

  ‘We knew about the investigation, not the police guard. Thanks.’

  *

  ‘Yes, Mrs Mariner, that is correct. The office is under police guard.’ Inspector Sung chose his words carefully. ‘It is not accessible to anyone. Should a senior executive of the company require entry, that would be taken under consideration, of course. But in the meantime the office has been closed and sealed.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘As part of our investigation into the disappearance of Miss Anna Leung. As I have said, there is a question of financial impropriety.’

  Robin abruptly wished that she was calling from Andrew’s office; it would have been useful to have had access to a solicitor at this point in the conversation. But she had no one to refer to except Mr Feng.

  ‘Just a moment, please, Inspector. Mr Feng, when is the Seram Queen due in Singapore?’

  ‘Ten day.’ She noticed that he did not even have to refer to his computer for the information.

  ‘Might I ask, Inspector, whether this investigation is simply a missing persons case, or is there some suggestion that Miss Leung’s financial improprieties might involve the whole company?’

  ‘Too early to say. The paperwork in the China Queens office will guide us further, I am sure.’

  ‘Thank you, Inspector.’ She hung up, deep in thought. ‘Mr Feng, what is the name of the China Queens solicitor in Singapore?’

  ‘China Queens a respectable company, missy. No need solicitor in Singapore!’ He sounded genuinely outraged at the suggestion.

  She stood, wrapped in thought. So there was no company associate in Singapore that she could contact in order to look after their interests and find out what was going on. And she needed to know for certain in ten days’ time or they could lose the Seram Queen as easily as they had lost access to the China Queens office. And, she muttered grimly to herself, when things are already this bad, you really have to plan on them getting worse.

  ‘Mr Feng,’ she said, coming to an unwelcome decision, ‘where is the telephone number of that investigator in Singapore? What is his name? Edgar Tan?’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The problem with preparing for the worst, thought Robin glumly, was that you didn’t always know which direction the worst was coming from. She had no sooner set Edgar Tan onto the trail of Anna Leung, the facts about what had happened during those lost days in Singapore, and some kind of an estimation as to whether Seram Queen would be allowed out of the port again, than Tom Fowler called. They met in the coffee bar on the ground floor of the Queen Elizabeth.

  ‘It’s very much as we discussed,’ he said, stirring his coffee slowly with a biscuit and choosing his words with the utmost care, every inch the absent-minded professor. ‘He seems to have no clear idea of personal identity. He certainly has no memory which he can access for any part of his life before he woke up in hospital here.’ He pulled the biscuit out of his coffee just as it was beginning to crumble and sucked on it meditatively.

  ‘His general knowledge is quite wide, but I have no idea how wide it was before. Equally, he knows an awful lot more than I do about ships and shiphandling, but again, I don’t know how that measures up against his original knowledge. There are no personal memories there at the moment. No matter how far back I went, there was nothing we could get hold of. Business matters came and went. I can sense a pattern there, but I can’t see it. No real grasp of political events, nothing current about the cinema or television.’

  ‘He doesn’t watch much television as a rule.’

  ‘No, indeed.’ He reached for another biscuit and slid it into his increasingly lumpy coffee. ‘But it’s a standard indicator, you know.’

  ‘I have his whole file in my briefcase here. All sorts of stuff from home.’

  ‘Good. The problem as I see it is, that we don’t know exactly who got shot in the head.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Robin felt an obscure sense of outrage as though Richard’s truthfulness had been called into question. As though her most basic beliefs were being challenged.

  ‘I’m sorry, I phrased that badly.’ He sucked on his biscuit again. This time his timing was not quite so good. As he pulled it out of the cooling liquid it began to crumble. A fair amount of it landed on the table, looking like rusks and baby food.

  ‘Well,’ she asked, slightly mollified, ‘what did you mean to say?’

  He gave no appearance of having heard her. ‘What I meant to say,’ he popped the rest of the biscuit into his mouth and chewed, ‘what we have to ask — though I cannot at this moment begin to wonder where we will find an answer — what we have to ask is, was he already in some kind of hysterical amnesia when the captain shot him in the head?’

  There was a brief silence.

  ‘You brought up the question yourself almost as soon as we met,’ he continued. ‘And that’s what it seems at this stage to come down to. Was Richard Mariner shot, a fully sensible, perfectly functioning Richard Mariner. In which case this is a relatively simple case of post-traumatic amnesia resulting from a severe closed head wound. Or was the person who was shot in the head already in a state of hysterical amnesia and no longer your Richard at all? In which case we have … duck soup.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘An impenetrable mess.’

  ‘A bit like the mess you have in your coffee cup?’

  ‘A sickeningly accurate comparison. But it presents us with a further conundrum which you should be aware of.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘If the duck soup theory is the correct one and at the moment when he received the blow to the head which began the post-traumatic amnesia …’ he tailed off.

  ‘Yes?’ she prompted.

  ‘If, at that moment, your husband was already in the grip of hysterical amnesia brought on by the unacceptable intensity of whatever experience he had been through …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well
, in that case we will have to be very careful about how we proceed because, you see, it might, in the worst case, be possible just to jump him back not into full knowledge of himself, but into that moment when he first switched off. We could bring back not your Richard but the madman with the .44 calibre pistol whom Captain Huuk says he had to shoot in self-defence.’

  That gave Robin pause, but not for long. ‘I don’t believe Captain Huuk,’ she said. ‘And even if I believed he thought he was telling the truth, I reckon he probably panicked and misinterpreted what he saw in any case.’

  ‘So, even if there was hysterical amnesia, there was no madman with a pistol.’

  ‘No. Never.’

  ‘OK. I’ll go along with that. In the meantime the first thing we have to establish is how badly Huuk’s antipersonnel round damaged Richard’s brain. Then we can begin to estimate the relative strengths of the conditions he may be suffering from.’

  ‘So, how do we find out?’

  ‘Someone somewhere nearby already has a good idea, I think.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘This is a fine hospital, well equipped and modem. Richard is under close arrest here but even so he is owed a duty of care. He can’t remember having had one, but they must have done a brain scan on him and someone in this hospital must have seen the result. There must have been a series of careful clinical tests done on him and, again, someone here must have the results — probably the same person.’

  ‘Dr Chu!’ she said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Chu. I think that’s his name. Richard’s doctor here. Dr Chu. But surely all these records should be made available to us. Andrew Balfour said —’

  ‘Experience with the British police and the Crown Prosecution Service suggests that they all will, eventually. But I would like to see the records as soon as possible, and talk to the doctor too. I will need to do all that before I see your husband again, I think. And ideally I should go through the records you have brought with you.’ He leaned forward urgently and his professorial demeanour disappeared for the twinkling of an eye. ‘It will all take time, you understand, even after we agree on a course of action. Recovering his memory, getting some sense of what was lost particularly while he was on board the ship, recovering his past life and personality may be only the beginning. Further treatment may well prove necessary and will take time. You do realise that?’

  ‘What do you mean, agree on a course of action?’

  Tom sat back. He picked up the cold cup with its coffee-coloured gruel and sipped appreciatively. ‘I don’t know how hard the people here have been digging, trying to reconstruct his memory. They may not have been punctilious in passing on the records of standard treatment, but I assume they would have had to get permission to try anything else. And the only persons they can approach for such permission are his defence or his legal next of kin; in other words, you. Therefore it should be safe to assume that they have not used drugs or hypnosis yet. But we can’t be absolutely certain until we ask.’

  ‘Drugs?’ she said with something akin to horror. ‘Hypnosis?’

  ‘If they haven’t, then we must,’ he warned. ‘Either one, or a combination of both, is the next step. It’s the only way, for a start, that we have any chance of accessing the memories of what happened on the Sulu Queen.’

  ‘But he doesn’t remember.’

  ‘Oh yes he does. He just can’t access the memories, or bring himself to get in contact with them, that’s all. If I can put him in a deep hypnotic trance then I will be able to access them for him. But it isn’t something we want to rush into. We have to prepare the ground. There’s a lot we don’t know. A lot we desperately need to know. What was the name of this doctor?’

  ‘DrChu.’

  ‘Right.’ He emptied the last, thick contents of his coffee cup down his throat with every evidence of enjoyment and put it down with a decided chink. ‘Dr Chu. He’ll be here somewhere. Let’s go and find him.’

  *

  Dr Chu was striking in several ways. His hair was incredibly black, thick and lustrous; so heavy that it seemed to weigh his head down. His body was bird-like and slim, so that his white coat flapped like wide starched wings. His skin was a peculiar, almost smoky shade, as though he spent several hours each day soaking in a bath of strong tea. And his accent was purest Oxbridge.

  ‘Even from the simplest medical viewpoint this is a fascinating case,’ he was saying, alive with academic enthusiasm. ‘The subject was so dissociated when he first arrived that I really thought his scan would show massive damage. But no — well, not massive at any rate. Certainly nowhere near the amount I would have suspected in the face of such a condition.’

  ‘Hmram … said Tom Fowler, studying the scans with gimlet eyes.

  ‘How was he when he first came in?’ asked Robin.

  ‘Ah …’ Dr Chu was caught on the hop by having to speak to a non-specialist, and one to whom he might accidentally give the sort of information Inspector Lee had warned him against discussing. ‘He was awake …’

  ‘So I would hope,’ said Tom, insidiously. ‘How many hours after he had been shot?’

  ‘Oh, only ninety minutes, I understand. They brought him in by chopper, you know.’

  ‘Even so.’

  ‘Well, awake but not really coherent. Classic dissociation, it seemed to me at that stage.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Tom, apparently appreciatively; much as a Rolls-Royce aero-engineer might appreciate the opinion of a Skoda fitter.

  ‘I did a thorough physical examination but really it was only the head wound which merited attention.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  ‘As soon as I was satisfied that there were no immediately life-threatening conditions — he had of course received paramedical attention in the helicopter — I put him in for the scan and a series of function tests and then a further series designed to demonstrate his current brain functions.’

  ‘You were of course concerned about both areas of damage to the skull.’

  ‘The damage at the back, naturally, but I could discover no damage to the occipital bone itself, or to the atlas or the joints in the area, even though it was almost as though he had been rabbit punched by the stairs on the way down. We still get a lot of martial arts combat victims, as I am sure you realise —’

  ‘Quite. No damage there except superficially to the scalp. But this damage to the temporal lobe …’

  ‘Much more interesting. It seems to be exactly over the top of an old injury. I would dearly love to know whether that original injuiy was also associated with any significant memory loss …’ Dr Chu looked hopefully at Robin and she was about to tell him what she had told Tom Fowler about that very injury when Tom cut in before she could open her mouth.

  ‘And the actual tests you tried were?’

  ‘Well, the function tests were the ones you would expect, ECG, liver and blood. The patient showed no sign of excesses of alcohol or any drug at all at that stage.’

  ‘He’s tee-total,’ interjected Robin. ‘He hasn’t had a drink in twenty years. Doesn’t smoke either.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Tom approvingly. ‘But you say you did some memory tests as well, Dr Chu.’

  ‘Well, I did an old Wechsler adult intelligence test. The results were below average, but of course I don’t know how he might have scored originally.’

  ‘High, I would have said. It’s a broad spectrum function intelligence test, Robin. Very standard. Anything else, Dr Chu?’

  ‘Well, I’d read up on the work Lehermitte and Signoret did —’’

  ‘Twenty-five years ago.’

  ‘Well yes, but, well, I did some spatial and temporal tests such as they —’

  ‘Right. Well, if you will let me have a glance through your notes, I’m sure they will make very interesting reading. Now, I would like to make some arrangements to try a series of my own tests. I am sure you are aware that it will be an integral part of the defence’s case to try and restore
Captain Mariner’s memories of the actual event so there is a legal basis for my access and for my work.’

  ‘Of course, Professor. Anything I can do to assist. I need hardly say that I am an employee of the hospital here. I am not by any means directly associated with the police or the prosecution.’

  ‘Quite, quite. Finally, Dr Chu, has your patient demonstrated full memory of basic functions? There has been no soiling? He remembers how to wash and bathe? He has been able to dress and undress himself at all times?’

  ‘Oh yes. There has never been any trouble with anything like that. He had been cleaned up by the time he came in to me so I can’t speak for the actual shooting incident itself.’

  ‘Has the accused been examined by another doctor, a police surgeon?’

  ‘Only on the helicopter. There was a police surgeon there with the paramedic, I understand. But he gave no real treatment. Simply cleaned up and applied a bandage or two. I was the one who did the full battery of tests. All the tests were my responsibility. One of the reasons I had to be so careful with my range of tests was that the police wished to interrogate him at the earliest opportunity.’

  It just so happened that Tom was close beside Robin when Dr Chu made this innocent admission and the psychologist’s hand caught her arm and restrained her into silence.

  ‘Naturally. Standard procedure. And what form did these interrogations take?’

  ‘Standard question and answer, except that the answers weren’t standard, of course.’

  ‘Of course. Many interrogations?’

  ‘Oh yes. Detailed and persistent, mostly by Commander Lee, but often by Captain Huuk.’