Sea of Troubles Box Set

by Peter Tonkin

‘Yes?’

  ‘I want you to open your eyes, please.’ The eyes opened. They seemed to Robin absolutely flat, like tiny panes of stained glass.

  ‘What can you see?’ asked Tom.

  ‘People. Deck. Door.’

  ‘Is anything you can see familiar to you?’

  ‘I’ve been here before. With them.’ He turned his head, looking with his steely gaze at the huddle of Huuk, Chu and the guards. ‘Richard didn’t like coming here with them.’

  ‘Is Richard here?’

  ‘Richard hurts.’

  ‘All right. Don’t worry for the moment. Can you stand up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right. Stand up, please.’ The long body unfolded from the chair. The movements were fluid and sure although seemingly under Tom’s control; there was nothing stiff or robotic about the way Richard moved. And, when she came close to take his left arm as directed, Robin was surprised by the warmth and power in the limb. It was as though, with Richard’s mind locked away in whatever secret section of his brain it occupied, she had assumed that his strength and grace would have vanished too. But this was not the case. Quite the reverse. She felt nervous suddenly, hoping poignantly that she would only be required to guide him. If she needed to try and restrain him, she would stand no chance. She glanced around, to see where the guards were positioned, but before she could make eye contact with anyone, Tom had stepped through the door, called, ‘Follow me,’ and they were off.

  Robin’s perception of the others in the group vanished almost immediately. Her concentration became absolute and centred on the muscular limb she was holding. After a while it felt to her that everything she was experiencing was being filtered through that arm — except, perhaps, what she could see. For it soon became obvious from the play of the muscles and the jerking movements which neither of them could quite control that he could see very much more than she could, and was reacting accordingly.

  Someone somewhere had made an observation which struck her now: lunatics do not behave in an illogical manner, they react logically to a world which is almost unimaginably different from ours.

  There was no power on, but the afternoon was bright and humid. The bridgehouse was airy and cool with hardly any shadows. Yet it had an atmosphere of fearsome horror about it, as though it contained miasmas from countless haunted graveyards; strange that it should strike her now, on her third visit here. But then she realised that it struck her now because she was feeling something of what the man whose arm she was holding felt.

  No sooner had they followed Tom over the door sill than the long limb tensed. She felt the muscles from elbow to shoulder writhe into rock hardness. ‘It’s all right, darling,’ she whispered, as though to one of the twins. ‘It’s all right. I’m here.’ He paid no attention because, as far as he was concerned, she was not there at all.

  Slowly, with the others trailing a little despondently behind, they walked forwards to the foot of the first internal companionway. As soon as they got there, Robin found herself being jerked backwards like a rag doll.

  ‘Stop!’ ordered Tom. And was obeyed. ‘Tell me what you can see.’

  ‘There’s a man! With a gun!’ Richard’s right arm tore itself out of Tom’s grasp, pointing up the stairs to the first landing. ‘He’s going to shoot!’

  They all looked up as though they expected to see the gunman there, but the little landing was empty.

  ‘I’m going to count to three,’ said Tom. ‘When I get to three, the man with the gun will have vanished. Do you understand? One … two … three. Can you still see him?’

  ‘No. He’s gone now.’ Robin felt the muscles in his arm and shoulder relax. She noticed that as they mounted the stairs, however, he was careful where he walked, as though someone was still standing in his way. In the next corridor up, there were no sudden surprises, but she could feel the muscles begin to tighten again as they came towards the doorway into the first officer’s office. Relentlessly, Tom guided the three of them towards the door, which was closed. As he turned the handle, Tom said quietly, ‘There’s no need to be disturbed. There’s nothing here to harm you. Just tell me what you can see.’

  ‘Brian!’ shouted the survivor, his voice shaking with mingled sorrow and disgust. ‘Chas …’ He was fighting to turn away, bound by the rigid muscles as though by a strait-jacket.

  ‘It’s all right,’ soothed Tom.

  Robin had the momentary impression of the others crowding round and craning to see in, but there was nothing for them to see. The room had been stripped; even the linoleum was gone now. It was a bare, metal-floored shell, with only two slight indentations to show where the dead men had lain. Two slight indentations in the bare grey metal, looking oddly like empty eye sockets.

  ‘I want to take you back,’ said Tom quietly, insistently. ‘Come back in time with me.’

  ‘Back …’ there was deep concern in the voice.

  ‘One day back. Think; look into this room one day before you saw the bodies there. Tell me what you see.’

  ‘One day back. One day …’

  The tone of voice in which this was said struck Robin as being so odd that she looked up at the profile so close beside her, just in time to see all expression there switch off.

  Now he was like a robot. No, not a robot, a mannequin, a dummy.

  ‘Come forward again,’ insisted Tom. ‘Come forward twelve hours.’

  Still that vacant stare, mouth slightly open, eyes like glass balls. She would have thought he was in some kind of seizure except that the arm to which she was clinging was relaxed. Almost soft, as though he was empty somehow. An empty shell. How could he still be standing up?

  ‘Tom?’ she said.

  ‘Six more hours,’ soothed Tom. ‘Eighteen hours forward … Yes, Robin?’

  ‘Can’t you feel it?’ she whispered. ‘It’s as though he’s empty.’

  ‘I feel it,’ said Tom, his voice was calm and quiet still. ‘I’m going to count you through the last six hours, Survivor. Nineteen hours forward. You’re coming back to us now … Twenty hours … Twenty-one … Twenty-two …’

  The body under her hands jumped. The muscles went rigid. ‘NO!’ came a great bellow.

  ‘What can you see?’

  ‘Dead,they’re … DEAD!’

  The massive body began to swing from side to side and Robin suddenly realised he was shaking his head again with terrible force, so fiercely she expected to hear the neck muscles tearing, the neck bones breaking apart.

  ‘Where are you?’ bellowed Tom. ‘Tell me where you are.’

  ‘Richard hurts!’

  ‘Tell me where you are and what you can see!’

  ‘Richard hurts!’

  ‘One thing! One thing that you can see and I will bring you out!’

  ‘RICHARD HURTS!’

  He tore loose from them then and it was only the shaking of his head that stopped him running amuck. He reached out, as though holding on to the sides of an invisible doorway, and hung there while his head shook, perspiration spraying right and left like rain.

  ‘All right,’ called Tom piercingly, ‘when I clap my hands you will wake up. One, two, three!’

  This time when his hands came together, Richard’s body pitched straight forward onto the floor and lay there as though he had been shot.

  Someone said, ‘Jesus Christ!’ Someone else was sobbing hoarsely.

  Robin slowly realised that Maggie had spoken, but it was she who was sobbing.

  She reacted with an anger which reflected her agony in its intensity; not a quiet anger, therefore, but a blazing rage teetering dangerously near to hysteria. She managed to control it during the silent ride back to the Queen Elizabeth, but she could feel it simmering inside her and not even the sight of Richard, fully restored and apparently unaware of what had happened, could calm it down.

  It exploded the moment they arrived back in Andrew’s office, and it was all aimed at Tom. ‘How could you, you bloody man! My God! What you put him throu
gh! And for what? What did we learn from all that agonyl Not one useful thing! Not one thing! Jesus Christ, I could weep when I think …’ She was, in fact, weeping already.

  Maggie began to cross the room, coming to support her friend, but she met Tom’s eye and stopped.

  ‘All right, Robin,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. But you do know it has to be done. If you want Richard back, something has to be done.’

  ‘But … God!’

  ‘The best treatment is rest and relaxation. He should be in hospital, tucked up in bed, warm and calm and sedated if need be until he manages to re-orientate himself. It’s only a question of maybe a month or two until he begins to come back to himself.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Tom!’ It was Maggie who said this, unable to stay out of a fight for long. ‘We haven’t got months. We’ve got weeks. And not too many of them, either.’

  ‘Precisely. You know that, don’t you, Robin? You remember what this is all about? If Richard’s mind is still blank on the trial day then he’ll have lots of time to recover properly. But he’ll be locked away in a prison hospital, probably up at Siu Lam; or perhaps at Broadmoor with the Yorkshire Ripper. And then, when his memory comes back, we can start all over again, trying to get an appeal put together, organised, fitted on some judge’s calendar in some court somewhere, maybe in London, maybe out here again. Unless we run out of time, of course, and he’s executed under Chinese Basic Law.’

  This time Maggie did not stop when she crossed the room to Robin.

  ‘You really have to get a firm grip on this, Robin,’ Tom went on relentlessly. ‘Richard’s on trial for the brutal mass murder of forty people. This won’t go away. We can’t assume his innocence is absolute and will be obvious to a jury even if Maggie can find a jury of seven people here who haven’t made their minds up already from reading the bloody papers. We have to prove it. And the first place to start is with his version of what really went on during that last voyage, and especially during the final days. And we’ve made a good start, believe me. We made excellent progress today.’

  Had Maggie not been holding her, Robin would probably have collapsed under the weight of the truth in what he said. She knew he was right, but she went down fighting hard. ‘And what, for heaven’s sake, did we learn that was important today?’

  He came across to her as Maggie helped her into Andrew’s big old swivel chair. He smiled at her question. ‘You know very well,’ he said, as though he were chiding a wilful, beloved child. The tone of his voice was not intimate or patronising, it was supportive, almost uplifting. ‘We have now established that Richard suffered his breakdown on seeing something really terrible less than four hours before Huuk and his men came aboard. But by the time they did, Richard had been replaced by this half-formed personality calling itself the Survivor.’

  Much of her anger was gone by the time she was seated comfortably. And of course he was right. She knew exactly what he was talking about. ‘And it was the Survivor who got shot in the head,’ she concluded. ‘So it is the Survivor who has amnesia, and as he’s only four hours old, he must be confused as merry hell. Richard is in there somewhere, but he’s still locked far away and we have to get past the Survivor to get to him.’

  Clear-eyed as always, Robin saw more than that. She saw how wrong she had been to be so angry, and she also saw the reason for her anger and the fact that she could never hope to control it well enough to leave them be and let them do their jobs unhampered. And that meant she was more of a hindrance than a help here at the moment.

  Andrew arranged for a cup of tea and they all gathered round his desk to eat gingemuts, discuss their progress and make their plans. It gave Robin a chance to calm right down, admire the quality of the team which she had created, and realise just how much of an outsider she had suddenly become.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Edgar Tan turned out to be a dapper man of middle height who favoured conservative slacks, slip-on brown brogues with tassels instead of laces and rather more flamboyant shirts. He didn’t need a jacket; it was coming up to 30°C. His skin was the colour of teak and his eyes and hair were equally dark, though the hair was short while the eyes were long. He hung his head slightly, pushing his pointed, elfin chin forward, and he almost danced on his feet, seeming to lead with his shoulders like a boxer. He may, indeed, have been a boxer in his youth — his pock-cheeked face was battered enough — but Robin recognised his blood and antecedents at a glance. His forefathers had all to a man been orang laut — men of the sea.

  He recognised her from her photograph and crossed the arrivals hall at Changi with a grin and a wave, calling her name like an old friend, as he might just as well have been — they took to each other at once. They shook hands, sizing each other up and liking what they saw. ‘We’ve got a lot of ground to cover,’ he said. ‘You want to freshen up or go at once?’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  He glanced down at her weekend case, measured its weight like a bellboy and her strength like a trainer, decided she didn’t need any help and didn’t offer any. With a kind of amused distance, she watched him doing this and, taking strength from his aura of restless, relentless questioning, she hefted the bag and slung it over her shoulder.

  Then she settled the handle of her briefcase in the other hand and followed him.

  He led her through to the car park and showed her to an elderly but sturdy Nissan Bluebird. She would have expected something less conservative and considered asking about it; but she didn’t feel she knew him well enough yet. As she was all too well aware, cars can be as personal as underwear with men. She sat in contented silence, therefore, as he drove aggressively but safely along the East Coast Parkway. Once she got used to his particular style of driving, there was nothing much to distract her — the grass on either side of the highway was vividly green and perfectly tended. It was as though they were driving across a massive bowling green.

  ‘What do you want to do first?’ he asked.

  A sensible person might have said, ‘Check in to my hotel’, but Robin was far beyond that stage by now. This was the late morning of Monday, 9 June. Richard’s trial was due to start one week today, one calendar month from the transfer, as Stipendiary Magistrate Morgan had ruled. Richard was due to be tried in Court Four of the Supreme Court Building before Mr Justice Fang. Robin had less than a week, therefore, to find out what had happened to Richard here, to check up on the China Queens Company, to try and trace Anna Leung and find out why Wally Gough had not sailed with his ship on that fateful day little more than a month ago — and what had happened to him since. In a few days also, the Seram Queen was due, and Robin had in her case that frustratingly impenetrable little computer disk, ready to slip it into the ship’s network at the earliest opportunity. The ticket in her wallet was an open-ended return, but she proposed to use it next Sunday evening after she had visited the Seram Queen and decoded its message.

  ‘It’s a long while since I’ve been here,’ she said, ‘and I never stayed for long. Singapore is not a city I know all that well. You know what we’ve got to do, you know what you’ve covered so far. Where would you start, Mr Tan?’

  ‘Well …’ Tan drew the word out as he thought. ‘I’ve checked at the Port Authority. They have the correct registration of the Sulu Queen arriving — Master: Captain Walter Gough, and all that sort of thing. And they have the same for when she left, so if your husband did go aboard here —’

  ‘He must have done.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess. But if he did, he didn’t notify the Port Authority. I’ve checked down there. No record. End of story.’

  ‘Well, that’s important, Mr Tan, and I don’t think it can be the end of the story because when the Sulu Queen was found, the only person aboard who held the correct papers to command her was my husband. There was no trace of Captain Walter Gough, Master and Commander; and the Port Authority here could not possibly have let a ship sail without a qualified captain in command of her.’

  ‘I didn’t realise t
hat.’

  ‘No reason that you should, Mr Tan. It’s the sort of thing that would occur to a sailor or a shipowner, though. I need to talk to the pilot who took Sulu Queen out into the roads. He should be able to tell me who was in command.’

  ‘And we’ll find him down at the Port Authority, will we?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So, I guess that’s where we’ll start,’ concluded Edgar Tan. ‘I’m glad you left this decision to me.’

  *

  They came in along the eight-lane Parkway, over the bridge onto the land extension and down through the massive road complex at its end into Keppel Road, heading for the World Trade Centre, past the ultra-modem, computerised Tanjong Pagar container terminal. As they drove past, Robin strained as though some magical exercise of her eyes could help her see into the big, square hangar-like buildings and into the great handling yards beyond, which fronted Keppel Harbour itself. They swung on up onto the Ayer Rajah Expressway and off towards Pasir Panjang, Port Singapore and the Authority building itself. Robin was familiar with most of this through conversation with her friends and captains, and through maps and charts, sometimes unfolded to settle a point, as often as not drawn in some more or less alcoholic liquid on a table top. But she had a vivid imagination and had travelled enough to make these travellers’ tales come to life accurately when they were told to her.

  They had no trouble discovering which pilot had taken Sulu Queen out after her last stop-over, but he was taking another ship out now and would not be available for interview until tonight.

  ‘We’ll be back,’ said Robin to the accommodating Port Authority clerk and turned to Tan once more.

  ‘Check in to your hotel?’ he suggested.

  ‘No. Let’s go to the China Queens offices first.’

  ‘You’re the boss.’

  ‘Seventy-four Kandahar Street, then. Wherever that is.’

  ‘Orchard South.’

  ‘Off we go, then.’

  Robin had brought the spare keys which Mr Feng had kept in the Heritage Mariner office and she was also armed with documentation prepared for her by Andrew. She did not want to have to start getting legal advice arranged here as well if she could possibly help it but she was well aware that Singapore had its own peculiar legal system, and if she had to deal with it at any level other than the most cursory, she had better get a local solicitor involved.