The Black Tide (37 page)

It was a short piece, barely two pages, but it was the title that caught and held my attention –
A Look at the Salvage Islands
. ‘We sailed two days ago from Funchal …’ Averaging probably no more than 100 miles a day, that was in line
with the Pilot which gave the distance from the southernmost of the Desertas to Selvagem Grande as 135 miles. The names were the same, too, except for the
m
where it was singular – Selvagem Grande and Selvagem Pequena and, so that there should be no doubt whatsoever, he had written, ‘I had always hoped to visit the Salvage (Salvagen) Islands.’ He must have got the English name from somewhere and my guess was the Navy – at some time in the distant past British sailors had anglicized it and called them the Salvage Islands, just as they had called Ile d’Ouessant off the Brittany coast of France Ushant. And looking at the Atlantic Ocean Chart 2127 I saw that here the group were named the Salvagen Is – an
a
instead of an
e
.

Was that what Choffel had meant when he talked of salvage? Was it the Salvagen Islands he had been referring to?

There was Selvagem Grande and Selvagem Pequena, and an even smaller one called Fora. And I remembered that a mate I had served under had once described them to me as we were steaming between Gibraltar and Freetown – ‘Spooky,’ he had said of the smaller Selvagem. ‘The most godforsaken spooky bit of a volcanic island I ever saw.’ And reading the Journal, here was this yachtsman’s daughter using almost the same words – ‘Spooksville,’ she had called it, and there had been the wrecked hulk of a supertanker hung on the rocks, her father claiming he had never seen a more dreadful place.

‘They were on their way to the Caribbean,’ the owner said. ‘Just two of them on the leg south from Madeira to the Canaries.’ He gave me another drink, chatting to me for a while. Then a doctor arrived and I left him to the sad business of finding out what was wrong with his wife. There had been just the two of them and it was the finish of their second circumnavigation.

I phoned Forthright’s from the station, making it a personal call on reverse charges. Fortunately Saltley was in, but when I told him about the Salvage Islands, he said he and Stewart had already considered that possibility and had
read the piece in the RCC Journal. In fact, they had chartered a small plane out of Madeira to make a recce of the islands and he had received the pilot’s report that morning. The only tanker anywhere near the islands was the wreck stranded on the rocks of Selvagem Pequena. ‘Pity you’ve no date for the rendezvous. It means somebody keeping watch out there.’ He checked that I was at Balkaer and said he’d be in touch when he’d spoken to Michael Stewart again.

It was almost dark when I got back to the cottage and there was a note pinned to the door. It was in Jean’s handwriting. Saltley had phoned and it was urgent. I trudged back up the hill and she handed me the message without a word. I was to take the next ferry out of Plymouth for Roscoff in Brittany and then make my way to Gibraltar via Tangier. ‘At Gibraltar he says you can hide up on a yacht called
Prospero
which you’ll find berthed in the Marina.’ And Jean added, ‘It’s important, Trevor.’ Her hand was on my arm, her face, staring up at me, very serious. ‘Jimmy will drive you there tonight.’

‘What’s happened,’ I asked. ‘What else did he say?’

‘He didn’t want you to take any chances. That’s what he said. It’s just possible there’ll be a warrant issued for your arrest. And it was on the radio at lunchtime.’

‘On the radio?’ I stared at her.

‘Yes, an interview with Guinevere Choffel. She gave the whole story, all the ships her father had sailed in, including the
Petros Jupiter –
but differently to what you told us. She made him out a poor, unfortunate man trying to earn a living at sea and always being taken advantage of. Then, right at the end, she accused you of murdering him. She gave your name and then said she’d be going to the police right after the programme. It was an extraordinary statement to come over the radio. They cut her off then, of course. But the interview was live, so nothing they could do about it.’

I was in their sitting-room, leaning against the door, and I reached into my pocket for a cigarette. I felt suddenly as though the world of black and white had been turned upside down, Choffel declared innocent and myself the villain now.
I offered her the packet and she shook her head. ‘Vengeance,’ she said, a look of sadness that made her gipsy features suddenly older. ‘That’s Old Testament stuff.’

‘I didn’t kill him.’ The match flared, the flame trembling slightly as I lit my cigarette.

‘It was in your mind.’

She didn’t need to remind me. I half closed my eyes, inhaling the stale duty-free nicotine, thinking of Choffel. She didn’t have to start lecturing me, not now when I was being hounded out of the country. I wondered how he had felt, making up stories nobody believed. And then to seize that dhow just because I was on board the tanker, confronting him with his guilt. Did that make me responsible for the bullet in his guts?

‘Would you like me to try and see her?’

‘What the hell good would that do?’

She shrugged, shaking her head. ‘I don’t know.’ There were tears in her eyes. ‘I just thought it might be worth a try. If I could get her to come down here. If she saw where the
Petros Jupiter
had been wrecked, what a threat it had been to all our lives – if I told her, woman-to-woman, the sort of person Karen was, what she had done and why … Perhaps she’d understand then. Don’t you think she would?’ Her voice faltered and she turned away. ‘I’ll go and see what Jimmy’s up to,’ she said. ‘You phone Plymouth and find out when the ferry leaves.’

In fact, there wasn’t one until noon next day so I had a last night at Balkaer and took the early train from Penzance. I felt very lost after saying goodbye to the Kerrisons, feeling I would never see them again, or Balkaer, and that I was now a sort of pariah condemned like Choffel to roam the world under any name but my own, always looking over my shoulder, half afraid of my own shadow. Even when I had boarded the ferry, my temporary papers given no more than a cursory glance, I positioned myself at the rail so that I could see everyone who boarded the ship, until at last the gangway was pulled clear and we sailed.

It was the same when I got to France. There was no trouble on landing, yet I still glanced nervously over my
shoulder at the sound of footsteps, watchful and suspicious of anybody going in the same direction as myself. It was all in my imagination, of course, and a psychiatrist would probably have said I was developing a persecution mania, but it was real enough to me at the time, that sense of being watched. And so was the stupidity of it, the sheer craziness of it all. It was like a nightmare what was happening. A man wrecks a ship, your wife kills herself trying to burn up the oil spill he’s caused and you go after him – and from that simple, natural act, the whole thing blows up in your face, the man dead and his daughter accusing you of killing him. And nobody to prove you innocent.

Just as there had been nobody to prove him innocent
. That thought was in my mind, too.

How quickly you can be brainwashed, by changing circumstances or by the behaviour of other human beings. How strangely vulnerable is the human mind when locked in on itself, alone with nobody to act as a sounding box, nobody to say you’re right – right in thinking he’d sunk those ships, right to believe he was the cause of Karen’s death, right to believe in retribution.

Alone, the nagging doubt remained. An eye for an eye? The Old Testament, Jean had said, and even she hadn’t thought I was right, insisting that I do what Saltley said. The best friends a man could hope for and they had not only helped me run away, but had insisted I had no alternative. A lawyer, the media, two such good friends – and I hadn’t killed him. The stupid little bitch had got it wrong, leaping to conclusions. I could have thrown her father overboard. I could have taken him back to the tanker. Instead, I had cleaned him up, given him water … I was going over and over it in my mind all the way to Tangier, and still that sense of unreality. I couldn’t believe it, and at the same time that feeling of being watched, expecting some anonymous individual representing Interpol or some other Establishment organization to pick me up at any moment.

I reached Tangier and nobody stopped me. There was a levanter blowing through the Straits and it was rough crossing over to the Rock, Arabs and Gibraltarians all being sick
amongst a heaped-up mass of baggage. Nobody bothered about me. There was no policeman waiting for me on the jetty at Gibraltar. I got a water taxi and went round to the marina, the top of the Rock shrouded in mist and a drizzle of rain starting to fall.

Prospero
, when I found her, was about 50 feet long, broad-beamed with a broad stern and a sharp bow. She looked like a hugh plastic and chrome dart with a metal mast against which the halyards frapped unceasingly in the wind, adding to the jingling metallic symphony of sound that rattled across the marina. Terylene ropes lay in tangled confusion, the cockpit floorboards up, the wheel linkage in pieces. A man in blue shorts and a blue sweater was working on what looked like a self-steering gear. He turned at my hail and came aft. ‘You’re Trevor Rodin, are you?’ He had broad open features with a wide smile. ‘I had a telex this morning to expect you. I’m Mark Stewart, Pamela’s brother.’

He didn’t need to tell me that. They were very alike. He took me below into the wood-trimmed saloon and poured me a drink. ‘Boat’s a bit of a mess at the moment, but with luck we’ll get away by the end of the week.’ They had originally been planning to make Malta in time for the Middle Sea Race, but his father hadn’t been able to get away and Saltley, who usually navigated for them, was tied up on a case he felt he couldn’t leave. ‘So we’re still here,’ he said. ‘Lucky really.’ And he added, ‘Pamela and the old Salt will be here tomorrow. There’s Toni Bartello, a Gibraltarian pal of mine, you and me. That’s the lot. Anyway, going south we shouldn’t get anything much above seven or eight, so it should be all right. Pam’s not so good on the foredeck – not so good as a man, I mean – but she’s bloody good on the helm, and she’ll stay there just about for ever, no matter what’s coming aboard.’

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘Didn’t Salt brief you?’

I shook my head. No point in telling him I’d been offered the boat as a hide-out for a fortnight or so until somebody somewhere sighted those tankers.

He took me over to the chart table and from the top drawer
produced Chart No. 4104, Lisbon to Freetown. He spread it out. ‘There. That’s where we’re going.’ He reached over, putting the tip of his forefinger on the Selvagen Islands.

We finished our drink then and he took me on a tour of the ship. But I didn’t take much of it in. I was thinking of the Selvagens, the bleakness of that description I’d read, wondering what it would be like hanging round the islands in the depth of winter waiting for two tankers which might never appear.

Gibraltar was a strange interlude, quite unreal in a sense, the Rock towering above us and most of those in the marina in holiday clothes and a holiday mood. The sun shone and it was quite warm by day, except in the wind which blew hard from the east. There was a lot to do, for the boat had been stripped of everything to get at the hydraulics, which ran the length of the hull and had sprung a leak, and there were stores to get, water and fuel to load. Each day I listened to the BBC news on the radio above the chart table, half expecting to hear my name and hoping to God I wouldn’t.

I had asked Saltley, of course, as soon as he’d arrived on board. But as far as he knew no warrant had been issued for my arrest. ‘I’m not at all sure the Choffel business comes within their jurisdiction.’ We were down in the bare saloon then, his bags opened on the table as he changed into work clothes of jeans and T-shirt. Pamela was changing up for’ard and Mark had taken the taxi back into town. ‘It’s probably a question of where the killing took place.’

‘He was shot on the dhow.’

‘Yes, yes.’ I think he was a little tired after his flight, his voice impatient. ‘That’s Arab territory. But the dhow was tied up alongside the tanker, and if it could be proved that the
Aurora B
was still a British ship, then they would have jurisdiction, the killing having occurred on British territory.’ He zipped up his trousers and reached for the drink I had poured him. ‘Personally I don’t think she’s a hope in hell of getting you arrested. So just relax and concentrate on the job in hand, which is finding that bloody tanker.’

‘But if you thought that, why did you tell Jean Kerrison to get me on the next ferry to France?’

He looked at me over his drink, the lop-sided face and the china blue eyes suddenly looking a little crafty. ‘I wasn’t taking any chances, that’s all. I wanted you here.’ He raised his glass, smiling. ‘Here’s luck – to us both.’ And he added, ‘I’m not a criminal lawyer, but I do know something about the law as it applies internationally. For that girl to have you arrested, she’s either got to prove you killed her father on British territory or get whatever country it happened in – the Oman, say – to order your arrest, and since this yacht is British territory it then depends on whether we have an extradition treaty with the Oman.’