Chapter 104
Early the next morning, Ashby went to the police station in central Freetown, feeling annoyed with himself. When he met the Sergeant, he could see that the policeman regretted making him lose his flight ; there was a vagueness and reticence about what he’d found and whether it was really so important after all.
When both of them finally reached the breaker’s yard, everything was quiet and deserted, compared with the noise and activity of their last visit.
“I am sorry, Mr Ashby that I made you miss your flight,” said the Sergeant. “It was stupid of me. But after we spoke, I thought you might want to look around here again. We also questioned that Kikuna fellow. What he told us – maybe it will interest you.”
“What did he say ?”
“Well.....after you and Brandt left, we decided to have a closer look at these two ships.”
By this time, they had wandered through the yard. The beach area was an environmental catastrophe. Much further along the foreshore, they came to the two cargo carriers.
As the first had been inaccessible, it hadn’t been examined by Ashby, Brandt or the police. To remedy this, the police had constructed a makeshift set of steps leading up to the deck.
The second ship – the one they’d inspected – was no different from when he’d last seen it.
“Did you look at this before ?” asked the Sergeant, as he led Ashby to the end of the foreshore landing.
Previously, they hadn’t bothered to inspect the hull of the second ship as they assumed its name had been painted over. But when the Sergeant led him to the stern, in the glare of sunshine falling on the metalwork, it was possible to make out a name written across it : “Provencale”. The faded port of registration was “Panama”.
“Provencale.....” repeated Ashby.
“Doesn’t mean anything ? Well, let’s go up the walkway on the other ship,” said the Sergeant. “You go first – it will only take one person at a time – I will be there in a minute.”
It occurred to Ashby that the French word Provencale sounded close to the English word Provincial : the latter had been identified to Mzenga, the loss adjuster by a customs officer in Lagos some weeks earlier. Were they the same ship ?
The gangway fitted by the police on the first ship, bounced up and down precariously as he climbed to the deck. Apart from the footprints made by the police, he could see that no-one had been on the ship for a very long time, possibly months, if not years. The deck was slippery with a green moss that had grown in the tropical heat and rain. As there was no lighting and he didn’t have a torch, his tour was limited to the main and upper deck areas. All of the steelwork was slippery and slimy and he had to take measured steps in order not to fall over, as if he was walking on ice.
The only way was up and he decided to go onto the bridge to see what he could find. At the top of the stairway, the door wasn’t locked : it was the chart room. Maps were littered everywhere and there was a smell of mildew from the humidity. Someone, probably one of the officers, had left a half empty packet of cigarettes on the table. They were an American brand but with Greek writing. The charts showed a course from the Mediterranean, along the coast of Africa with stops at St Louis in Mauritania and at Freetown. Dates had also been written in pencil as the voyage progressed.
Next door was the radio room where there were lots of hand-written notes, all of them in what looked like Greek. It was all in running writing. Printed notices in Greek were stuck to the walls. The adjoining room was the officers’ mess. Empty bottles of Metaxa and Ouzo were lying on the floor alongside piles of empty beer bottles, all of them from Cyprus. Evidently, there had been a celebration of some sort.
In the wheelhouse, papers were strewn about the floor everywhere. Some of them were Greek newspapers dating from 1980. Ashby imagined what it must have been like to run the ship from the captain’s bridge, to give orders to the crew and the engine room and how it would take years of training to become a ship’s master.
He stood at the helm and tried to look through the windows which had a film of green moss growing on them. It was still possible to see the forward half of the ship, the winch gear, hatches and the forecastle. He imagined the ship, set on its course or coming into port, guided by tugs. It would have been a delicate operation to manoeuvre something as large as this, into place at a wharf. Then his gaze fell on something immediately below the front windows of the bridge : a wooden plaque was fixed to the wall.
On it were two words in faded brass and in Greek lettering :
“ΚΑΠΕΤΑΝΙΟΣ ΣΤΡΑΤΟΣ”
He couldn’t speak modern Greek although he knew half the alphabet in ancient Greek which was used in mathematical formulae. From this, the first and last letters of the second word were Sigma – an ‘S’. He knew a bit of Russian which used the Cyrillic alphabet. The Russian letter “P” was equivalent to “R” in the Roman alphabet.
Putting all of this together, the second word looked like ‘Stratos’. The first word started with “Kap” – the third letter was Pi, well known by children studying geometry. Therefore, the word was something like ‘Kapetanios’.
For a moment, he felt stunned as if something had hit him. It was one of those rare moments in life when something real, was like a delusion. Was it the heat or was he going mad ? Could he really be standing on the same ship which was supposed to be lying several thousand fathoms down, on the floor of the Atlantic off the Portuguese coast – with its cargo, crew and Captain ? Or had Christoforou merely kept the ship’s name-plate as a souvenir and stuck it on the bridge of this ship ?
Immediately, he rushed out of the wheelhouse onto the landing of the upper deck then began slipping and sliding everywhere and yelled “Sergeant. Come up here – quick.”
Plantation A Legal Thriller Page 104