by Peter Tonkin
Yuk Tso spent much of the rest of Robin’s watch fiddling with the equipment, tutting with confusion. He went through the same routines which Robin had already tried, with her standing at his shoulder telling him she had tried that and she had told him so. Then he went through a rather more complex series of routines, still with no result. Finally he took out the manual, and Robin knew that this would take some time. She returned to her watch out on the bridge and busied herself about her duties while Yuk Tso took bits of the radio out and checked them; he removed one or two down to the workshop, but nothing he could do seemed to make any difference. ‘I don’t know what it is,’ he admitted to her at last. ‘Could anyone have come in here and fiddled with this stuff?’
‘Who?’ asked the irritated Robin. ‘Why?’
‘I do not know, missy. But this just not right.’
‘There’s been an officer on watch in here at all times.’ Yuk Tso shook his head. ‘Something wrong somewhere. But I can find nothing …’ By 15:00 he had stopped fiddling with the equipment and began to trace the wiring. He double-checked all the power lines, then he began to trace the aerial conduit round the room and up to the port-side wall. ‘Well,’ he announced at 16:00 as Wai Chan appeared to take up his watch accompanied by the captain who was ready to oversee the evening radio link, ‘the radio is still dead, and I can find nothing wrong inside.’
‘Maybe something’s wrong outside?’ suggested Robin, and wished at once that she had held her tongue.
From 16:15 until sunset she accompanied the deeply confused radio officer as he traced the aerial conduit up the outside of the bridgehouse. Privately as she fumed over landing herself with such a tedious and time-consuming duty, she thought that if there had been any damage done out here then it served Captain Sin right for filling the ship with natives in the night. At no time did it occur to her that the Vietnamese might have been involved. It was a long, long time later before she put together the disappearance of the chief steward, the loose drip feeds and the damaged equipment. But by then so much else was going on that her discoveries seemed hardly important.
In the meantime she toiled up the bridgehouse, helping the radio officer as best she could, doing a job which the meanest of the GP seamen would have been able to do as well as she. By 18:30 the pair of them were right up at the top of the radio mast, the better part to twenty-five metres above the surface of the water as the evening closed down through sunset, salmon-pink and rose, massive, calm and breathtaking. Standing on the little platform, perhaps four metres square, with her back to one narrow set of steps, looking at Yuk Tso standing atop another set, fiddling with the last few metres of aerial, she had ample opportunity to look around, savouring the dusty grey tones filtering into the French blue of the sea and sky, watching the way in which the last of the sunlight bled out of the air on one hand while the indigo armies of the shadows massed on the other, pulling the dark horizons in towards the ship like a massive tidal wave.
Just as the dark seemed to break over the ship and Yuk Tso announced that there was nothing more to do and they should give up and go back down, Robin saw, somewhere out to the south-east of them, away at the very foundation of that rushing wave of night, a bright burning light which flashed and was extinguished, as though some secret ship was signalling there, just on the very horizon. And, for some reason she could not fathom, the sight of it made her hair stir and her blood ran cold.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Maggie rose majestically, at ten past one next afternoon, Friday, 20 June.
‘My Lord,’ she began, ‘ladies and gentlemen of the jury. It is most fitting, I believe, that here and now, in the last days of the rule of British law in the Crown Colony, we should see it functioning in its purest form.
‘As you are aware, the adversarial system which stands at the heart of British common law is based upon an ancient and elegantly simple premise, that the prosecution and the defence present evidence, witness and testimony to a jury of clear-thinking men and women such as yourselves; peers, as it is said, of the accused. Each advocate seeks to present these things, to prove, to explain and to interpret them in such a way that the jury can have little or no doubt of the innocence or guilt of the accused, subject only to direction by the learned judge on relevant points of law. The jury then must decide their verdict, unanimously and, as the celebrated phrase has it, beyond a reasonable doubt.
‘But of course life is never that simple. There are often conflicts within each case. These will often be revealed, indeed, by the process called cross-examination. Evidence may not stand up to scrutiny; expert testimony can be called into doubt; witnesses can be shown to have mis-remembered and on occasion they can be proved to have perjured themselves.
‘Most notably, also, the explanations given by the accused and the victim to the jury can weigh very heavily in their minds, more heavily than all the testimony and evidence adduced elsewhere. And, finally, the appeal to their critical and logical faculties made by the prosecution or the defence can vary for any number of extraneous reasons. The whim of tabloid editors and programme presenters; the race, the gender, the profession, the social standing of the accused; his dress, his looks, the colour of his eyes or hair.
‘How fortunate we are, therefore, to be dealing with a case where there is almost no dispute about the major facts, for, as things stand, there will be no direct evidence from anyone actually involved in these events at all. Even the accused man, Captain Richard Mariner, having been severely wounded in the head by those men who might have been assumed to be his rescuers, has no current memory whatsoever of the dreadful events which make up the case against him. Everything, therefore, depends, purely and absolutely, upon the interpretation you, the jury, put upon the facts — largely undisputed, as I say — and the manner in which these facts may be interpreted.’
Maggie paused here, looking round the court, letting her golden gaze settle on each juror, before she turned and glanced at the judge.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Maggie continued, ‘what you are asked by the prosecution to believe is this. That Captain Mariner went on board the Sulu Queen, perhaps with the desire in his mind to kill everybody aboard. That, during the voyage towards Hong Kong, he decided that he definitely would kill everybody aboard. And that, finally, on the night of Thursday, 8 May, he acted with the full intention of killing or grievously wounding everyone aboard.
‘All of the weapons he used, ladies and gentlemen, we must expect him to have smuggled for the purpose either out of England or in from Singapore, one of the most carefully controlled societies in the world with regard to the supply and smuggling of guns. Or perhaps the prosecution is going to ask you to believe that, coming aboard with these murderous thoughts harboured within his breast, Captain Mariner was fortunate enough to find this striking range of weapons already concealed on the ship and convenient to his hand. Or even — though I find my own credulity beginning to stretch quite painfully here — the prosecution may ask you to believe that the captain arranged for a gang of mysterious confederates to appear out of the night, supply the weapons, perhaps even aid him in his gruesome task, and vanish again leaving no discernible trace. For, I ask you to recall, ladies and gentlemen, in fact I ask you never to forget, that in order to prove their case of murder, the prosecution must establish that Captain Mariner planned to do these things, meant to do them, saw an opportunity to do them and then actually did them; in cold blood and while of sound mind, with or without help. Each murder as charged, with each or all of the weapons named, must have been done by him or on his order. It must have been planned to some extent beforehand, it must have been done on purpose, not by accident, and it must have been done with full intent by a man of sound mind. If the actions of a person accused of murder do not fit into these categories, all of these categories, then he is not guilty of the crime. The prosecution ask you to believe one of the propositions I have already put to you, or something very like it; they ask you to believe that there is no other ex
planation, and that, beyond a reasonable doubt, Captain Mariner stands guilty as charged.’ Maggie, her throat dried by her carefully calculated oratory, reached down to the table behind which she was standing and took a sip of water. Once again, her eyes were on the jury. She was not addressing these remarks to anyone other than them, and was taking the opportunity to establish eye contact and a basic relationship, hopefully a sympathetic one, with each of them. With her eyes fastened on the plump, perspiring face of a particularly susceptible young man in the front row, she continued her opening address.
‘But what are the actual facts with which we are dealing here? They may be simply recounted. A little less than two months ago the Mariner family set off for a spring holiday. Captain Mariner stayed behind to finish some business while his wife drove up to Carlisle with their twins, six-year-olds, a boy and a girl. They all planned to meet up at her father’s home near Carlisle and to drive north in a day or so. Instead of her husband she received a brief message that he had been called to Singapore on business and would contact her. That contact failed to materialise or was destroyed.
‘Although he has no memory of what actually called him out, or what he did when he got there, we have established that, within a day of his arrival in Singapore, Captain Mariner was aboard the Sulu Queen, a ship owned by his own company who have recently acquired control of the China Queens Company which has run this ship and her sister ship for some years in the local area. On the very moment of sailing, Sulu Queen’s original captain, Walter Gough, was carried off, apparently with peritonitis, and vanished from Singapore General Hospital.
‘Captain Gough appears to have vanished from the whole of Singapore, in fact, apparently in company with the secretary of the China Queens Company. This lady, who worked under the alias of Anna Leung, was a complete mystery until earlier testimony explained that she was, in fact, an undercover police operative. Her motives remain a mystery to us — as does the reason why she failed to deliver a range of important messages.
‘Within days, as she came north towards Hong Kong, the Sulu Queen was out of radio contact. We know that somewhere along the line she picked up some Vietnamese people, women and children — dead women and children. There the facts we know about activity on the Sulu Queen herself, stop.
‘But then we learn of a mysterious message to the naval contingent coastguards section here in Hong Kong telling of an apparently derelict ship drifting without power into Hong Kong waters. The Navy disguises itself, no doubt to avoid any chance of diplomatic incident with your near neighbours the People’s Republic of China, and goes aboard. And, as we know — as the whole world now knows — the Navy finds aboard some forty-five corpses. They find only one man alive in that charnel house and so they shoot him in the head and destroy his memory. Then, while he is unable to enter any plea of his own because of the damage they did to him, the authorities accuse the survivor of murdering everyone else. Except, that is, for the unfortunate Vietnamese!
‘And so we stand here ready to consider this case with almost none of the facts disputed, with much of the evidence agreed and with no witnesses — without even one word of testimony from the accused — to cloud our deliberations. But while the defence disputes almost none of the facts in this case, we do most certainly dispute almost every interpretation the prosecution has put upon those facts. We absolutely and bluntly refute the charges the prosecution alleges arise out of those interpretations, and it is our hope and our belief that we will cause you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to doubt those interpretations also and to dismiss these ridiculous charges out of hand.’
There was a ripple of something very like applause as Maggie took another sip of water, but a glare from Mr Justice Fang brought silence swiftly back. Then Maggie looked up, took a deep breath, and opened the defence case proper.
‘First, My Lord, I would like to call Dr Thomas Fowler, Consulting Psychologist to the Psychiatric Unit at the Maudsley Hospital, London.’
As Tom made his way to the stand, Maggie DaSilva stood, apparently the personification of cool confidence, trying to disguise from the jury the fact that she was feeling a little faint.
‘Now, Dr Fowler,’ Maggie said after having established Tom’s identity and credentials, ‘I would like you to describe the mental state of the accused as far as you understand it.’
‘Captain Mariner is emerging from a state of hysterical amnesia. He already seems to me to have emerged from a deeper state of physiological amnesia caused by a blow to his left temporal lobe.’
‘Lets be absolutely clear about this, Doctor. Captain Mariner was originally the subject of a physical amnesia caused by a blow to his head?’
‘That is correct. There was a large bruise in his left temple, with a great deal of short-term tissue damage immediately behind it.’
‘And we have heard in evidence already that this was caused by an anti-personnel round, fired during his arrest,’ Maggie slipped in.
‘I am not competent to comment on that though I understand that this was indeed the case,’ concurred Tom solidly.
‘But the captain has now recovered from the effects of this blow?’
‘I believe so.’
‘And yet, in your expert opinion, Doctor, he is still subject to amnesia?’
‘I believe that the captain was already in a state of hysterical amnesia, almost a fugue state, when he was hit on the head. Even though he has recovered from his injury, he is nevertheless still subject to the psychological state.’
‘Could you please clarify the terms “hysterical amnesia” and “fugue state” for the jury.’
‘Hysterical amnesia has nothing to do with the popular conception of hysteria. We are all, I expect, familiar with the Victorian idea of the hysterical woman who only needs a good slap to calm her down. Hysterical amnesia is very much more complex and dangerous than this. It occurs when a subject experiences something so terrible that he or she simply cannot accept that it has happened and refuses to remember anything about it or anything to do with it. In such a state the patient usually retains a sense of personal identity, his own general and expert knowledge and all his high motor functions.
‘In a fugue state, however, not only is the specific memory expunged, but so is all memory of personality, of past experience and acquaintance, much past knowledge and some higher functions of the brain. The fugue sufferer classically simply vanishes from his old life, assumes a new identity and makes a new life somewhere else. Cases of fugue state, popular though they are in fiction, are in fact very rare but those few fully documented have only been discovered when someone in the fugue state, who has assumed a new life and a new identity, suddenly recalls his original identity and finds himself in a place he does not recognise among people he does not know even though he may have been known to them in his new identity for years.’
‘So fugue states may in fact be more common than we realise simply because a high percentage of people simply never come out of the fugue?’
‘It is tempting to assume this, especially given the number of people each year who vanish without trace. But we have no way to test such an hypothesis. It seems to me, however, that Captain Mariner, certainly in the grip of hysterical amnesia of the sort familiar from the battlefield and from road accidents particularly, may have formed a new identity, that of the Survivor, shortly before he was hit in the head by Captain Huuk’s anti-personnel round. He was technically in a fugue state, therefore, when he suffered damage to the left temporal lobe of his brain and lost his memory for the second time.’
‘Have you ever come across a case like this before, Doctor?’
‘When a man who is already suffering a psychological loss of memory is hit on the head and suffers a physiological loss also? No, not personally. But there are known battlefield cases like this and in Captain Mariner’s case, it is the only hypothesis which fits the circumstances.’
Lata sat in the public section of the court and watched her colleague work. She had been so cl
osely involved in the construction of the case that each twist and turn, each stop along the golden thread of logic, came like the line in a familiar play — expected but oddly striking — exciting. While she had been a part of the construction of the case, however, there had never been any question of her representing Richard in court — the Hong Kong bar had found it hard enough to swallow Maggie herself. And yet Lata felt she was performing an important function. In the midst of the audience to this terrifying piece of theatre, she was able to keep her finger on the pulse of public reaction — to report back to Maggie her thoughts on how testimony was being received; and, perhaps most importantly, to stand as an obvious point of contact should Twelvetoes Ho have anything further to add. For they were all acutely aware that, useful though Twelvetoes’ help was, there was no way for them to bring anything he told them into court.
‘Now, Dr Fowler, you have said that hysterical amnesia and the fugue state most commonly occur when the individual in question is confronted with something which he simply cannot accept. Does the unacceptable vary, in your opinion?’
‘It certainly does. Effectively, it varies from person to person.’
‘And, in your expert opinion, what is most likely to prove absolutely unacceptable to Captain Mariner?’
‘The captain seems to me to be possessed of a classic dominant personality. It is most likely, therefore, that the unacceptable is likely to arise from some overwhelmingly horrific circumstances over which he has no control.’
‘Such as a number of people coming aboard his command, for instance, and killing his crew in spite of his attempts to stop the slaughter?’
‘Indeed. Precisely so.’