‘Tell me about your interview,’ I asked Campbell.
It had apparently been somewhat hilarious. Instead of being chastened at being caught with a small armoury under his bunk Campbell was airy and unconcerned about it, claiming that the guns were properly licensed, that he was a well-known collector and wouldn’t dream of travelling without something for target practice, and that in any case only one of his guns had been fired – and that by his daughter, gallantly defending herself from attack by a shipload of murderous pirates. He was scathing about Clare’s poor shooting and seemed not at all troubled by her having winged a man, only irked by her not having killed him outright. It appeared that while in Papeete, Kane had had a small bullet taken from his shoulder, ironically by the same doctor who tended to Geordie. He was not, it seemed, badly hurt, which disappointed Campbell considerably.
He was soundly reproved for not having declared the guns on his arrival and was threatened with their confiscation, but he’d wangled his way out of that somehow; and had got away with their being sealed at the mouth for the duration of our stay.
It turned out that the other gun that I had seen belonged to Nick Dugan, and he was similarly ticked off. According to Clare there had been at least two other small handguns in use during Esmerelda’s fight with Pearl, but none of them surfaced during the search that was made, and I asked no questions. I also learned that Geordie had a shotgun on board which apart from being legally licensed, had even been declared by him to the Papeete customs – and was the only gun on board that had not seen some action.
Campbell had blustered much as I had and had invoked all the powers he could think of to back his credentials, and apparently M. Chamant had done much what he had done with me – had let him speak at will, listened carefully, and had finally released him back to the ship with a fairly mild request that he write down an account of the affair. Everything pointed to our story being accepted, and indeed later that afternoon the guards began to let us all out on deck in twos and threes for some exercise, after they’d moved Esmerelda to a mooring buoy well away from the quayside. Things were looking up, and we all turned in that night a great deal happier than we’d been at the start of the day.
V
A senior police official came on board next morning and took formal statements from everyone on board, which took a considerable time, though some of us had written them out in advance and needed only to sign them in the official presence. My camera was removed as well, and I prayed that my photography had been up to scratch. The doctor came to see Geordie again and Campbell cornered him and asked innumerable questions about the hospital on Tanakabu, and about the possibility of getting another doctor to go out there soon.
We were all beginning to feel restless and uneasy. In spite of some relaxation, we were still confined to the ship and as they kept us battened down apart from whoever was being allowed on deck it was stifling and airless on board.
Some time in the afternoon Geordie sent word that he’d like a word with me and so I went to his cabin. He was propped up in bed and surrounded by books. His face was still heavily bandaged but he was obviously much stronger and the effects of the concussion had long worn off.
‘Sit down, boy,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve found something.’
‘To do with what?’ I asked, though I could already guess. Several of the books were nautical and the Pilot was prominent among them. ‘Has it got to do with those damned nodules?’
‘Yes, it has. Just listen awhile, will you?’
I felt a small indefinite itch starting in the back of my skull. At the end of the terrible business on Tanakabu I had felt sickened of the whole search and had wanted nothing more to do with it. The nodules could lie on the seabed forever as far as I was concerned, and with the murder of Mark more or less exposed even the urge to lay that ghost had died away to a dull resignation. But now, deprived of ordinary activity, I couldn’t help feeling that it would be interesting to have the problem to chew on again, and my professional curiosity was rising to the surface once more. So I settled down to hear Geordie out without protest.
‘I was thinking of that lunatic Kane,’ he said. ‘He slipped up when he mentioned New Britain – the time he shouldn’t have known about it. I got to thinking that maybe he’d slipped up again, so I started to think of all the things he ever said that I knew of, and I found this. It’s very interesting light reading.’
He handed me Volume Two of the Pacific Ocean Pilot opened at a particular page, and I began to read where he pointed. Before I had got to the bottom of the page my eyebrows had lifted in surprise. It was a lengthy passage and took some time to absorb, and when I had finished I said noncommittally, ‘Very interesting, Geordie – but why?’
He said carefully, ‘I don’t want to start any more hares – we blundered badly over Minerva – but I think that’s the explanation of the other drawing in the diary. If it seems to fit in with your professional requirements, that is.’
It did.
‘Let’s get the boss in on this,’ I said and he half-lifted himself from his bunk in delight. He’d played his fish and caught it.
I got up and went to round up Campbell, Ian and Clare and brought them back to the cabin. ‘Okay, Geordie. Begin at the beginning.’ I could see that the others were as pleased as I had been to have something new to think about.
‘I was thinking about Kane,’ Geordie said. ‘I was going over in my mind everything he’d said. Then I remembered that when he’d seen Clare’s drawings he’d called one of them a “scraggy falcon”. We all saw it as an eagle, didn’t we? So I checked on falcons in the Pilot and found there really is a Falcon Island. The local name is Fonua Fo’ou but it’s sometimes called Falcon because it was discovered by HMS Falcon in 1865.’
Clare said, ‘But where’s the “disappearing trick”?’
‘That’s the joker,’ I said. ‘Falcon Island disappears.’
‘Now wait a minute,’ said Campbell, a little alarmed. ‘We’ve had enough of this nonsense with Minerva.’
‘It’s not quite the same thing,’ said Geordie. ‘Récife de Minerve was a shoal – exact position unknown. Falcon, or Fonua Fo’ou, has had its position measured to a hair – but it isn’t always there.’
‘What the hell do you mean by that?’ Campbell exploded.
Geordie grinned and said to me, ‘You’d better tell them – you’re the expert.’
‘Falcon Island is apparently the top of a submarine volcano of the cinder type,’ I said soberly. ‘Every so often it erupts and pumps out a few billion tons of ash and cinders, enough to form a sizeable island.’ I referred to the Pilot. ‘In 1889 it was over a mile square and about a hundred and fifty feet high; in April 1894 there wasn’t anything except a shoal, but by December of the same year it was three miles long, one and a half miles wide, and fifty feet high.’
I pointed to the pages. ‘There’s a long record of its coming and goings, but to bring it up to date – in 1930, Falcon was one and a quarter miles long and four hundred and seventy feet high. In 1949 it had vanished and there were nine fathoms of water in the same position.’
I passed the book over to Campbell. ‘What seems to happen is that the island gets washed away. The material coming out of the volcano would be pretty friable and a lot of it would be soluble in water.’
He said, ‘Does this tie in with your theory of nodule formation?’
‘It ties in perfectly. If these eruptions have been happening once every, say, twenty years, for the last hundred thousand years, that’s a hell of a lot of material being pumped into the sea. The percentage of metals would be minute, but that doesn’t matter. The process of nodule formation takes care of that – what metals there are would be scavenged and concentrated, ready to be picked up.’
Campbell looked baffled. ‘You come up with the damndest things,’ he complained. ‘First a reef that might or might not be there, and now a goddam disappearing island. What’s the present state of this freak?’
/> I looked at Geordie.
‘I don’t know. I’ll check up in the Pilot supplements – but they’re often printed a little behind the times anyway. The locals may know.’
‘Where is Falcon or Fonua-whatsit – when it’s available?’
‘In the Friendly Islands,’ I said. Clare smiled at that. ‘The Tongan group. It’s about forty miles north of Tongatapu, the main island.’
He frowned. ‘That’s a long way from Rabaul, and that’s where the Suarez-Navarro crowd is. And it’s a long way from here, where Mark was.’
I said mildly, ‘It’s halfway between.’
He nodded thoughtfully and we all chewed on it for a few minutes. After a while I spoke up. ‘In the light of this information, I think it would be worth concentrating on Falcon – if you’re carrying on, that is?’ I looked enquiringly at Campbell.
‘Yes, of course I am,’ he said energetically. His optimistic side was gaining steadily. ‘You really think this will be worth trying?’
Clare supported me. ‘I was sure those drawings meant something.’
‘Minerva meant two months of wasted time,’ Campbell said. ‘What do you think, Geordie?’
Geordie looked at me but with conviction. ‘He’s the expert.’
Ian Lewis waited with courteous patience. He was prepared to go anywhere, and do anything that was wanted of him. In spite of the horror of Tanakabu he was having a wonderful time, away from the dullness of home life.
The issue was settled for us while Campbell ruminated. A vagrant breeze from the open port flipped back a page or so of the Pilot and I happened to glance down. I looked at the page incredulously and began to laugh uncontrollably.
Campbell said, ‘For God’s sake, what’s so funny?’
I dumped the book into Geordie’s hands and he too began laughing. I said, ‘It seems we looked at the wrong Minerva. Look – Minerva Reefs, two hundred and sixty miles south-west of Tongatapu – that puts them only about three hundred miles from Falcon Island.’
‘You mean there’s another Minerva?’
‘That’s exactly what I mean.’
Geordie handed him the book. ‘They’re fully mapped. They’re on a plateau twenty-eight miles long. It’s hard ground – shell, coral and volcanic cinders, at a depth of eighteen hundred to thirty-six hundred feet.’
‘Just like Falcon Island but much, much older and well established,’ I put in.
‘There’s no mention of nodules,’ Campbell said.
‘These are naval records and the navy wouldn’t dredge for them. They’d just take soundings using a waxed weight to sample the bottom material. A nodule – even a small one – would be too heavy to stick to the wax.’
There was a rising air of jubilation in the small cabin.
Campbell said, ‘Well, that does it, I suppose. We go to Tonga.’ He looked at us all fiercely. ‘But this time there’d better be no mistakes.’
So it was settled what we’d do after we left Papeete – if we left Papeete.
VI
It seemed a long time.
Apparently a patrol boat had gone to Tanakabu and returned three days later, during which time things had got a little easier for us, but not much. All the crew members had been allowed to go ashore in batches, but Ian, the Campbells and I were still confined, as was Geordie for slightly different reasons. Paula managed to be allowed ashore mainly because she seemed to know everyone, including the policemen, but she only went under Jim or Taffy’s escort and didn’t stay ashore for long, having little faith in Hadley’s having truly disappeared.
On the fourth day we were taken ashore, Campbell and I, and driven to the police station where we were ushered into the same office as before. M. Chamant was awaiting us.
He was quite pleasant. ‘Our findings on Tanakabu are consistent with your statements. I note that M. Trevelyan called off the search as soon as he found that the man Kane was armed, which is a point in your favour. I also found that you saved many lives at the hospital, and it is known that you were all aboard your ship when the doctor was shot and the fires started. Also your photographs were helpful.’
It was good news, and as near to an apology as we’d ever get.
‘When can we leave?’ asked Campbell.
Chamant shrugged. ‘We cannot hold you. If we had Kane and Hadley here you would be expected to stay and give evidence at their hearing, but …’
‘But you haven’t found them,’ I said bitterly.
‘If they are in French Oceania we will find them. But the Pacific is large.’
At least they seemed convinced of Hadley and Kane’s guilt, which would have come out sooner or later anyway. Hadley had been seen ashore and recognized by several of the people on Tanakabu, and it made me wonder all the more why they had stopped in Papeete to put the police on a false trail, instead of picking up their heels. But I thought that perhaps Hadley, whose mental processes were not as evident as his brutality, really thought that we would be found guilty of his crime, and so out of his way forever. It was impossible to try and read his mind. Now, if they were being hunted by the law themselves they would have less time to go after us, and we had already agreed to act as if they didn’t exist, otherwise we’d get nowhere.
‘You can go whenever you want, M. Campbell.’
‘We’re going west as we originally said,’ Campbell told him. ‘We’re heading towards Tonga. If we see them out there we’ll let the authorities know.’ We were being cooperative now, wanting no further opposition to our going about our own business.
Chamant said, ‘Very well, gentlemen. You may go. I will send instructions for the police guard to be withdrawn. But you will take care to be on your best behaviour for the remainder of your stay here, and I also strongly suggest that you leave these waters soon. Your family – ‘ He pointed to me. ‘Your family seems to cause trouble here, whether or not you intend to. And we do not want trouble on our hands.’
Campbell closed a hand firmly over my wrist. ‘Thank you, M. Chamant. We appreciate all you have said. And now can you arrange transport back to our ship, please?’
He was reluctant on general principles but finally we got a ride back to the docks and a short run out to Esmerelda, to carry back the welcome news of our release. Everyone deserved a couple of days off, and neither Campbell nor I begrudged them the time. The radio had been repaired and we had a lot of planning to do before we could set sail for the Friendly Islands, one of which might be there, or might not.
SIX
It was good to be at sea again, pounding along under the unfailing impulse of the trade wind. It would take about six days to sail to Tonga and we soon settled into shipboard routine.
Geordie was up and about. Although his face looked like the map of a battlefield he was fit enough otherwise, and took over the command from a reluctant Ian, who had gloried in his brief spell as skipper. The fresh wind blew away the last taint of Tanakabu and everyone benefited, and Kane’s disappearance had lifted the last reserve of secretiveness. They were all in the know now, including Geordie’s own crewmen, as we felt that it was only fair to warn them all of possible danger ahead, though none had taken advantage of Geordie’s offer to pay their fares home if they wished to leave us.
And Paula was still with us. Somehow that had been taken for granted and she had fitted in so well to shipboard life that there was no sense of surprise in her having agreed to come along. She and Clare set one another off nicely.
I immersed myself in text books and charts. I wanted to study currents, so I asked Geordie for pilot charts of the area. ‘Not that they’ll be any great help,’ I said. ‘The currents might have changed considerably in the last fifty thousand years. That’s why Mark worked with Norgaard – he was an expert at that sort of thing.’
‘The pilot charts only have the surface currents,’ said Geordie. ‘Who knows what goes on under the surface?’
‘There are gadgets that can tell that sort of thing, though I haven’t one with me. And they ca
n’t tell us what went on fifty thousand years ago, more’s the pity,’ I expounded. ‘Here is Fonua Fo’ou. There’s a warm offshoot of the South Equatorial Current sweeping south-west past the island. That should mean that any nodule deposits will also be laid down south-west of the island. But it’s a surface current – there may be other currents lower down, going in different directions. That we’ll have to check, if we can.’
I frowned at my own words. ‘The thing is, have those currents changed direction in those last fifty thousand years? I don’t know, but I shouldn’t think so. It’s not very long.’
Geordie snorted.
I put my finger on the chart. ‘What I’m really worried about is this spot here. That’s the Tonga Trench – our dredge will only go to 30,000 feet, and Horizon Depth in the Trench is nearly 35,000.’
‘Quite a bit of water,’ said Geordie dryly. ‘That’s over six and a half miles – a man could drown in that depth of water.’
‘If the high-cobalt nodules have formed at the bottom of the Trench we’re wasting time,’ I said, ignoring his baiting. ‘You could dredge them up, but it wouldn’t be an economic proposition – it would just amount to pouring money into the sea. By the way, I haven’t mentioned this to the boss. It would only cause alarm and despondency, and it might never happen.’
‘I won’t tell him,’ he promised.
But I did seek out Campbell for another reason, and found him on deck in his favourite spot reading a book. We chatted for a few minutes about the ship and the weather, and then I said, ‘Is it true what Clare said – that you’re a crack shot?’
The Snow Tiger / Night of Error Page 48