Sea of Troubles Box Set

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Brian Jordan,’ Robin supplied.

  ‘Even so. I called Lieutenant Jordan and he, as medical officer, diagnosed peritonitis and suggested that I must take the captain ashore at once in my cutter. But he did not have the papers to assume command, you see. So I suggested that the ship should return to Singapore at once. Then Captain Mariner showed me that he had the papers for command. He said that he would take the ship to Hong Kong and arrange for a new captain to be put aboard her there. I saw the papers. I made the regular checks. Everything was quite satisfactory. I have to tell you, however, that I did not dally over this. Time was extremely short and it seemed to me that Captain Gough was expiring even as we went through the procedures. It was, fortunately, a calm, clear night, and there was no trouble in carrying the stricken captain to my cutter and bringing him ashore. Naturally, we had radioed the China Queens office and were fortunate in being able to contact the secretary there, Miss Leung, if I remember correctly. Miss Leung was waiting at the quayside with an ambulance. It was taking my responsibility a little far, perhaps, but I rode in the ambulance with them to the Singapore General Hospital. In the ambulance I gave Miss Leung an envelope from Captain Mariner, and she assured me that she would make arrangements for all the correct procedures to be followed and notifications to be given. And that was that.’

  ‘Captain Mariner gave you an envelope?’ asked Robin at once. ‘Have you any idea what it contained?’

  ‘Not particularly. It was not a letter, I think. It seemed to me to be a hard square thing, perhaps a little more than three inches square. One can tell these things by touch, through the sides of an envelope.’

  ‘Indeed. And did this envelope have an address on it or anything like that?’

  ‘No. A name only. He had assigned it to himself, I believe.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘He had written on it “To Captain R. Mariner”. I remember particularly, you see, because it was such a strange thing to have done.’

  ‘In any case, you gave the envelope to Anna Leung and saw Captain Gough into the hospital.’

  ‘Yes. That is correct. Except that I did not actually go with him into the hospital, you understand. I felt that I had done my duty and so I went straight round the corner and got a taxi back out to the Port Authority. I do hope the poor fellow is better now. I hoped Miss Leung would inform me — she promised to do so, but she never did. And I have thought of him often during the last few days, after I heard what had become of his command …’

  *

  Tan drove slowly back along the highway towards the centre of Singapore. ‘That’s a bit of a poser,’ he said.

  ‘Why is that? It could explain what happened to poor Wally at least Peritonitis. That’s where your appendix actually bursts. It’s incredibly dangerous.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess, except for one thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hospitals and morgues were the first things I checked. It’s routine. Nobody called Walter Gough has been taken into any hospital in Singapore during the last five years at least.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The Seram Queen, inbound from Jakarta, fully laden with a range of goods all safely stowed in her sixty-five containers, came picking her way carefully through the narrow, reef-infested Selat Durian under the last of the light, four days later, while the first gentle puffs of the south-west monsoon began to blow behind her. The monsoon was a little late this year and allowed one last great thunderstorm to welcome the cargo vessel to Singapore.

  The temperature all day had been in the high thirties and the light winds had augmented a vertiginous tumbling of the local air pressure resulting from the sweltering heat. The waters of the Singapore Strait, and the Malacca Strait flowing into it, seemed to steam, giving up their lightest, hottest, most highly-charged and least stable water molecules into the humid air. And the air, puffed listlessly hither and yon, began to rise ever more powerfully, sucking up more and more of the water vapour as it went. By mid-afternoon there was a thickening overcast as the upper air met the cooler troposphere above, but this cool air with its thickening cloud was trapped at the top of a column which kept rising ever more fiercely from below. The clouds thickened, took more and more forcefully the towering anvil shapes of thunderclouds, and hovered, as though trapped helplessly, against the southernmost point of the Malaysian Peninsula.

  The first, hesitant puffs of the monsoon swept more vapour into the swirling storm factory and very soon it became clear to even the most mediocre watchkeeper that the wind was not so much blowing north-east as being sucked north-east. And sucked ever more powerfully towards the writhing static-charged hearts of the huge, black, square-shouldered clouds towering above the jewel brightness of the city.

  It was a Friday afternoon, 13 June, and passing through four o’clock. Everyone who was able to do so left work at once and headed away through the humid oven of the afternoon, hoping to make it home before the storm broke. Rush hour started early and snarled up quickly. The MTR became crowded and people, usually placid, became fractious and impatient. The hawkers who peddled their wares in little stalls along the tourist-packed roadways of Chinatown, Little India and Bugis Street looked at the restless sky and checked the lashings of their frail premises, muttering.

  Robin and Edgar were working in her suite in the Raffles. The main entrance to the hotel was on Beach Road but Robin had been given one of the suites on the southernmost corner so that her window looked out across Bras Basah Road, past the War memorial, over the Singapore Club and the park to the marina itself. It was not a view which gave her a great deal of seascape to look at, the Raffles is no high-rise, but it gave her an excellent view of the sky. Looking up at about four thirty, she caught her breath at what she saw.

  ‘Hey, Edgar. Come and look at this.’

  On their right, the Westin Plaza Hotel stood immediately across the road but the taller Westin Stamford loomed close behind it and rose so high that the upper floors seemed hidden by the thickening haze. Away beyond the bright-windowed skyscrapers was something even more breathtaking. It was a solid cliff of cloud. Seemingly as massive as the coal face it so strongly resembled, it stood apparently only a couple of kilometres to the south and only two hundred metres up above the arch of the expressway. As they stood silent, the only sound in the room the steady rhythmic pounding of the fan, the black cloud seemed to move relentlessly closer and lower. It looked disturbingly like the jaw of a black vice closing inexorably down to crush the city. ‘I’ve seen storm clouds in my time,’ said Robin quietly, ‘but I’ve never seen anything quite like that.’

  Edgar’s narrow eyes almost disappeared. He looked down at his watch. They had made no specific plans for this evening and he was wondering whether he could get across town to his modest little high-rise flat before Armageddon began.

  Seeing the movement and correctly reading the thoughts behind it, Robin said, ‘Edgar, why don’t you call it a day and try to get home before this lot breaks.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Look at the snarl-up out on the expressway there. I’ll give it another half-hour and see. There’s some stuff here I can tidy up.’

  Fifteen minutes later they were both engrossed in the paperwork again, though every now and then one or the other of them would glance unbelievingly out of the window to where the Stygian sky seemed to be trying for a new world record in natural darkness before exploding into the storm.

  The telephone rang.

  Robin picked it up, dipping her head slightly, as she always did when answering the phone, to clear her golden curls out of the way. ‘Hello?’

  The line crackled. Her hair swung back against her knuckles and gave her a considerable static shock. She hissed. ‘Hello?’ she said again.

  ‘Hello, Captain Mariner, this is Ram Seth. I am calling from the Port Authority building. The Seram Queen has just requested pilotage into Singapore harbour. I will be going out to her in one half-hour. Would you like to come?’

  ‘Wo
uld I ever! I’m on my way at once. Meet you at the Port Authority building, main entrance in twenty-five minutes at most. Oh, and Captain Seth?’

  ‘Yes, Captain Mariner?’

  Robin glanced back over her shoulder to where Edgar Tan was sitting, apparently still absorbed in the papers before him. Her hair crackled with static electricity as she moved and the line did the same. ‘May I bring a friend?’

  *

  Edgar Tan’s forebears through several generations may have been orang laut, men of the sea, but they had passed to him their blood, not their stomachs. As soon as he stepped into the pilot’s cutter, the detective knew that he had made a mistake. The boat was powerful and quite well fitted, with a big, comfortable cabin equipped with a range of comforts, from microwave ovens to coffee-making machines. Edgar liked the look of these things but found them far beyond anything he wanted to use once they got under way. From the moment the cutter began to move, all he wanted to use was the leeward rail. And he only knew to use the leeward rail because Robin took him up and explained it to him, very quickly and very clearly.

  They had managed to reach the Port Authority building before the storm broke, though the oppressive feeling of high humidity and static electricity made everything everybody did almost impossibly stressful. There were several major accidents on the parkways and innumerable shunts on the lesser roads, each one surrounded by a tight knot of viciously ill-tempered people, so that they were lucky to make their rendezvous on time. ‘You’re late,’ snapped Seth irritably.

  Robin shrugged accommodatingly and Tan apologised. ‘Traffic,’ he explained.

  The cutter was waiting for them at the bottom of the Authority steps, ready to go. At the sight of it, Edgar froze. ‘I thought you used helicopters nowadays!’ he exclaimed.

  Seth gave him a tiny, tight grin. ‘You don’t think they’d risk a helicopter in this weather, do you?’

  The wind was gusty as they pulled away, and the lowering sky felt as heavy as an avalanche upon their shoulders, but the cataclysm had not yet begun. As they looked south-westwards through the cutter’s clearview, it seemed as though the sky was going to close down against the surface of the sea before the first bolt of lightning ignited the whole pyrotechnic process. There was the thinnest band of clear blue sky ahead of them. Under the black weight of the clouds, it was a dazzlingly blue colour — blue enough, in fact, to remind Robin of Richard’s eyes.

  Edgar Tan, who had done most things and thought he had seen all there was to see, was fascinated. He had always retired to his flat and hidden when the thunderheads began to build. Never in his wildest dreams had he thought that he would ever be out in one of Singapore’s famous deluges, let alone in a small boat rushing across the harbour and out through the roads. The sight of the sky overcame the uneasy signals emanating from his stomach and, to begin with at least, he stood up by the helmsman looking out along their course. He saw the black sky close down inexorably, seeming to squeeze more blinding brightness into the narrowing strip of sky ahead. And then, just when he thought that the horizontal line of brightness along the horizon which gave the quadrant its name could not become any brighter, a truly blinding bolt of lightning leaped down vertically into the sea immediately ahead.

  Tan staggered back, his eyes closed, with the circle of his blind vision precisely chopped into four by the afterglow of the intersection of two lines of brightness. The helmsman called something to the pilot, a warning perhaps, then everything was lost in the holocaust which followed. As though that one bolt of lightning had been sufficient to tear the guts out of the monster above them, sheets of rain were released at once. The immeasurable forces unleashed by the falling of so much rain summoned up storm-force winds in a twinkling, and big seas came with them, pitching the little cutter wildly hither and yon. It was at this moment that Edgar Tan wished most urgently to become acquainted with the deck rail, and Robin took him outside into the driving maelstrom and made sure that whatever he did he did downwind.

  Out on the foredeck, the awesome power of the storm was enhanced by the impact of the noise it was making. The thunder seemed to be continuous. Edgar’s vision was blurred by wind, rain and spray at once but Robin was treated to a display of lightning jumping down onto the water all around them. As Edgar heaved his last few meals out over the leeward rail, the experienced captain was aware that they were badly at risk out here. If the lightning was exploding down to the sea surface so close ahead, then it was only a question of time before it began to hit the cutter. ‘We’d better get in,’ she said to Tan. ‘Let’s go below!’ She saw his face clearly in another blue-white bolt of light. ‘I’ll get you a bowl,’ she said, just as the greatest crack of thunder yet seemed to split the air, making it doubtful whether he heard her.

  Half an hour later, the pilot’s cutter pulled into the wind shadow under the lee of Seram Queen. A Jacob’s ladder was unrolled and flapped resdessly against the side. One of the cutter’s crew steadied a light on it and Seth crossed towards it, with a halo of rain exploding off his wet-weather gear. Robin looked at her briefcase and knew she would never be able to get it up the ladder. She looked down at Tan and knew he would never be able to get himself up there either. She opened the briefcase, slipped the gift-wrapped package into her pocket and then left the two pieces of excess baggage side by side.

  It was a hard climb, the weather had hardly moderated, though it was difficult to imagine that it could possibly maintain this fearsome intensity for very much longer. As she ran, sure-footed, along the slippery deck, hurrying to catch up with the little group formed by the pilot and the officer sent to welcome them aboard, she nevertheless took the opportunity to glance around. She was in the lee of the containers, though she could hear the wind screaming through the gaps between them like an army of banshees. The containers seemed perfectly loaded and well secured. Certainly, she had no sense of danger as the weather crashed against their far side, trying to blow the whole lot over on top of her.

  The two men waited for her in the shelter of the port bridge wing and then they all stepped through the big door, over the high sill, into the relative tranquillity of the A-deck corridor.

  The pilot bustled on ahead, shaking off the water as though it had personally insulted him. Robin found herself walking alongside a tall, spare man of indeterminate Eastern origin. He could have originated from anywhere — Malaya, the Philippines, Vietnam; it was impossible to tell. Robin looked up into the slightly woebegone skull of his face and smiled. ‘I’m the owner,’ she said firmly. ‘And you are?’

  He could have been any crew member; beneath his black oilskin, his white overall was innocent of badges of rank or responsibility. ‘Wai Chan,’ he said. ‘Secor roffis, Sera Quee. You berra comalomg, missy see captir now.’

  ‘After you, Second Officer Chan,’ she said.

  As they waited for the lift to return from delivering the pilot to the bridge, Robin took the opportunity to ask, ‘Is the first officer better now? I understand he had malaria.’

  ‘For roffis worsa naow. Maybe send hospitar. Captir say. Afir turraroun Singapore.’

  I hope the captain’s English is better than this, thought Robin as the lift came.

  His English was; his temper was not. ‘Mrs Mariner, what are you doing aboard here uninvited?’ demanded Captain Sin as she crossed the bridgehouse towards him. He was a fat little man, hardly taller than the pilot but without Seth’s rubber-ball hardness. Captain Sin seemed soft, self-indulgent. There were big black bags under his eyes and his skin was ivory-pale. He affected a small moustache. Designed no doubt to bristle and swagger, it drooped like a black caterpillar which had crawled there and died. He gave an impression of slight oiliness and sloppy dissidence, even though he wore a well-pressed uniform of dark blue cloth and a white-crowned captain’s cap. ‘I’m sorry to hear your lading officer is so unwell,’ she said, offering her hand. ‘That will be inconvenient. It may even slow you down.’

  Sin disregarded her hand. ‘First Officer L
au has malaria. It is an old ailment. He will be up and about in time for turnaround.’

  ‘I can go down and take a look at him if you like. I have treated many cases of malaria. I have served as medical officer on several ships and my first aid certificates are all up to date. Is he on penicillin?’

  ‘I …’ Captain Sin stopped speaking. His face grew rigid as his mind all too obviously raced. Then he turned towards her and reached for her hand after all. Close to he had a personal odour compounded of sweat, cinnamon and Old Spice. His breath smelt of something minty when he spoke. ‘I would be very pleased if you would take this trouble, Mrs Mariner. We have put up a day bed in his office to save him dragging himself up and down all the time.’ He smiled his most charming smile. The gesture revealed two gold canine teeth of unusual length and brightness, separated by a range of uneven greyish incisors, and did not have the effect he clearly intended.

  Robin smiled back, disengaged her hand and glanced around the bridge one last time. Pilot Captain Ram Seth was quietly in command and they were moving towards the distant lights of the city through the still whirling heart of the storm. As she looked, entranced by the beauty of Singapore’s waterfront illumination, bright even beyond the columns of the lightning bolts, she saw the riding lights of the pilot cutter pulling away ahead, bouncing up and down as the little vessel dashed from one wave crest to the next. Poor old Edgar Tan, she thought. Another rough ride home. But the thought was an automatic one, far at the back of her mind, for her eyes were searching for something other than the distant gleam of the lights. And she found it. A computer monitor. It stood in precisely the same place as the one on Sulu Queen’s bridge and looked to be of exactly the same type. Great. She was really in business now.