The Black Tide (6 page)

I didn’t bother to clear up, I just got my anorak, picked up the containers holding the two live cormorants and shouldered my way out into the gale. One night. One single night. A split moment of time, and now everything changed, my whole life. Clear of the cottage the wind took hold, thrusting me up the path. It was blowing a good force 9 and I could hardly breathe, the collar of my anorak whipping against my chin with a harsh whirring sound, and the waves thundering below me, the cove a white maelstrom of broken water thrown back by the rocks.

It was quieter when I reached the lane, a grey, miserable morning with ragged wisps of cloud flying in the wind, the moors all hidden. A herring gull sailed past my head, a scrap of paper blown by the gale. She would have liked that – one bird at least without oil on its feathers.

The blue van was parked in the yard of the Kerrisons’ place and I found Jimmy cleaning out the chicken roost at the back of the outbuildings. I handed him the cardboard containers holding the cormorants. ‘The last thing she did,’ I said.

‘Okay, I’ll see they get to the cleansing centre.’

‘Can I use your phone?’

He nodded and took me through into the house. Jean called down to see if I was all right. The phone was at the foot of the stairs and she leaned over the banisters to ask if I could use a cup of coffee. I answered her automatically, trying to remember the departmental details given in Lloyd’s Nautical Year Book. I didn’t want underwriters or salvage experts; I wanted the people who dealt with fraudulent claims. But I couldn’t remember what the section was called, only that it was located outside London.

By the time I had been through Directory Enquiries and
Lloyd’s of London switchboard I was sweating, my nerves on edge, tiredness coming in waves. Colchester, the girl said – Intelligence Services. And she gave me the number.

‘You all right, Trevor?’ It was Jean, looking anxious and holding a cup of coffee out to me.

‘Yes, I’m all right.’ There were beads of sweat on my forehead. ‘It’s very warm in here, nice and warm after being outside.’

‘Come and sit down then. You can phone after you’ve had your coffee.’

‘No. No thanks. I’ll get this over, then I’ll sit down for a moment.’ I dialled the Colchester number, mopping the sweat from my forehead, and when I told the girl I was enquiring about the engineer of the
Petros Jupiter
she put me through to a quiet, friendly-sounding voice: ‘Ferrers, Special Enquiries Branch. Can I help you?’ But as soon as I asked him whether it was negligence, or if the tanker had been put ashore deliberately, his manner changed. ‘Have you any reason to suppose it was deliberate?’

‘The engineer,’ I said. ‘A Greek named Speridion. He took a dinghy from Porthcurnow. They say he was picked up by a Breton fishing boat.’

‘It doesn’t prove anything,’ the voice said. ‘A man who’s been shipwrecked …’ There was a pause, and then the inevitable question. ‘May I know your interest in the matter? Are you representing anyone in particular?’

‘No. Only myself.’ I told him my name then and where I was speaking from, and he said ‘Trevor Rodin’, repeating it slowly. ‘It was your wife …’ The voice trailed away, embarrassed, and I heard him say, ‘I’m sorry.’ After that there was a long silence. And when I asked him for information about the engineer, where he lived, or where the fishing boat had taken him, he said, ‘I can’t answer that. There’s nothing through yet. Why not try the police, or maybe the solicitors …’ He hesitated, ‘May I have your address please?’

I gave it to him, also the Kerrisons’ telephone number. ‘Could you ring me here if it turns out to be a scuttling job?’

‘What makes you think it might be?’

‘He’s fled the country, hasn’t he?’ And when he didn’t answer, I said, ‘Well, hasn’t he? Somebody put that bloody tanker on the rocks.’

‘That’s a matter for the courts.’ His voice sounded suddenly a little distant. Silence then. I thought he’d cut me off, but when I said ‘Hullo’, he answered at once. ‘Just a moment’ A long pause. Then he went on, ‘Sorry – I’ve got a telex here, and I was just looking at a newspaper report of what happened last night … you’ve been a ship’s officer, I see. Gulf, and Indian Ocean. You know Mina Zayed?’

‘The Abu Dhabi port?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is that where he’s headed?’

‘It’s where the tanker was loaded. Do you know it?’ And when I told him I’d been into it only once since it was built, he said, ‘Well, that’s more than most ships’ officers have.’ And he asked me whether I was ever in London.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not for a long time.’ But then I remembered about the book and the publishers I had sent it to. I’d have to sort that out, think about what I was going to do. ‘Maybe now …’ I murmured.

‘You’ll be coming to London then?’

‘I expect so.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know – soon. It depends.’

‘Well, let me know.’ He repeated the number I had given him, promised to phone me if they heard anything definite, then hung up.

I drank the rest of my coffee there by the phone, wondering why he wanted to know if I’d be in London. There was nothing I could tell him. I took the empty cup through into the kitchen. Jean was there, looking a little tearful as she insisted I lunch with them. ‘You’re going to leave Balkaer now, aren’t you?’

I nodded. There was a sort of extra-marital closeness between us. Perhaps it was her mixed Romany blood, but she always seemed to know what was in my mind. ‘Yes, time to leave now.’ Time to go back to the superficial companionship of officers’ quarters on some tramp.

‘Back to sea?’

I nodded, not relishing the thought.

‘What about the book?’

I shook my head. It was over a month since I had sent it to the publishers and not a word. ‘It’ll be back to the Gulf again, I suppose. But first—’ I stopped there, my hands trembling, my mind on that engineer. I couldn’t tell her what I planned to do. I couldn’t tell anybody. ‘I’ll take a break first.’ My voice sounded faint, little more than a mumble. ‘Try and sort things out.’

She put the saucepan down carefully and caught me by the arm. ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right, Trevor. They never did.’ And she added, ‘I know how you feel, but … just leave it be, love. The thing’s done. Leave it be.’ And then, without waiting for an answer, she said, ‘Now go on down to the cottage, clean things up and come back here for lunch just after twelve. Cold ham and salad. And I’ll do you some meringues.’ She knew I liked meringues.

‘All right,’ I said.

But instead of going back to Balkaer, I went with Jimmy in his van to the cleansing station. We helped there for a while, getting back just in time for lunch. And afterwards I stayed on, enjoying the warmth of their company, the cosy heat of the coal fire. The wind had dropped, but there was still cloud over the moors and it got dark early. I didn’t think about it when they switched the television on for the news, but then, suddenly, I was sitting up, electrified, seeing it all over again through the eyes of the camera – the red glow of the blazing tanker and the ILB coming into the slipway, the three of us caught against the furnace glare of the burning oil with ragged wisps of fog in the background, and myself, dazed and speaking slowly, as though in a trance, trying to answer their questions, telling them what had happened. The wind was blowing in my hair and my face had the pallor of death in the hard glare of the spotlight.

Back at the cottage, with the aftermath of the gale beating into the cove, it was my own TV shadow, my wild, ghostly appearance that stayed in my mind, not the words I had spoken. I was tired by then, so emotionally exhausted that I
fell asleep by the fire. I spent most of the night there and in the morning, when I went up to the top, above the elephant rock, and looked across to the Longships, all that remained of the
Petros Jupiter
was the blackened bridge housing half sunk and leaning drunkenly against the Kettle’s Bottom.

It was a bright, sparkling morning, the sort of morning that would have had Karen bubbling with that almost childishly excited Welsh enthusiasm of hers. I walked on, across the fields and down the road into Sennen, and there I found the story of what she had done plastered all over the papers with eye-witness accounts and statements from the salvage boss and pollution experts, also from several politicians.

Reading about it, I found it all strangely remote, as though it hadn’t been Karen out there, but somebody else. Reporters came and a girl from the local radio station with a portable tape recorder. But by then I was in a daze, answering their questions automatically. It didn’t seem real, any of it, the seas now rolling in unobstructed to break on the Shark’s Fin, only the top of the hull’s twisted wreck just showing at low water and no slick, the oil all burned up or driven ashore. It only seemed real when I was back at Balkaer. Then the emptiness of the cottage was like a constant nagging ache. Or when I was down in the cove. Wreckers from far and wide were prowling the shores of Whitesand Bay, searching all the headlands. They were picking up bits and pieces of the
Petros Jupiter
as far north as Cape Cornwall.

I began to get a stack of mail, letters from all sorts of people, conservationists chiefly, though some of them attacked me for encouraging Karen to sacrifice herself unnecessarily or accused me of standing by while she committed suicide. They were from women mainly, the bulk of them praising what she had done. Saturday, the mail included several invitations to speak at conservationist meetings and a letter from the publishers. This I saved until after my return from Penzance, where I saw the agents and put Balkaer up for sale. The letter was signed Ken Jordan, Senior Editor. He wanted me to go up to London and see him, but with Karen gone, the cottage for sale, that part of my life was ended. It didn’t seem important any more, the book no longer meaning very much to me. And on the
Sunday, which was sunny with an easterly breeze, families wandered down the path from the lane to stand and point, and giggle in embarrassment when I told them to bugger off. There was even a man who pushed open the cottage door to take pictures of the interior. He was quite upset when I slammed it in his face. Because he had seen Balkaer on TV in his own home he seemed to think in some curious way that he owned the place.

And then, about dusk, when all the gawpers and souvenir hunters had gone, there was a knock at the door and I opened it to find a man dressed in a sheepskin jacket and a polo-necked sweater standing there. He had a fur cap rammed tight down on his bullet head.

I recognized him at once, though it must have been three years or more since I had last seen him; those broad powerful shoulders, the beer-barrel belly, the little pig eyes and the round heavy face. He was of that breed of Englishman that has made Brits a word of contempt.

I didn’t ask him in. I just stood there, waiting. The last time I’d seen him was at a shipboard party on a Liberian tanker waiting to load at Bahrain. ‘Remember me?’

I nodded. I had met him several times, on different ships, in different ports, and in hotel bars where he was always flush with money, always buying rounds of drinks. The word was that he was front man for a drug-smuggling ring.

‘Len Baldwick,’ he said, holding out a big paw. ‘Can I have a word with you?’

‘What about?’

‘You. The future.’ The small grey eyes were watching me, the whites as clear as if he’d never touched a drop of alcohol in his life. ‘You’ll be thinking of a ship now?’

‘Will I?’

He ducked his head, pushing his way in. ‘Saw you on the telly.’ He unzipped the sheepskin jacket, pushing the fur cap to the back of his head. ‘Peat fire, eh? You always were a bit simple-like. I told you, way back, didn’t I – being honest and licking the arses of the owners don’t pay. Now look where it’s got you. You lost your wife. She’s gone and you’re on your own. You got nothing, laddie, nothing at all.’

‘What the hell do you want?’ Any ordinary man I’d have
thrown out. But he was well over six foot, massive as a rock. ‘Why are you here?’

‘To offer you a job.’ And he went on to explain that he was head-hunting for a consortium going into the tanker business. ‘Oil money,’ he explained, drooping an eyelid. ‘You know how it is. Bubbles out of the arse of any Muslim in the Gulf. These people are starting their own fleet, see, an’ while crew’s no problem, it’s not so easy to find officers. The right sort, that is.’ He was watching me out of the corner of his eyes. ‘The money’s good. Double British rates.’ He hesitated. ‘And a bonus at the end.’

‘End of what?’ I asked. ‘What’s the bonus for?’

He shrugged. ‘For getting the ship there. End of voyage bonus.’ He was standing with his legs apart, staring at me. ‘Air passage out, of course. Everything provided.’

The two years since I’d come to England fell away. I was back in the Gulf, back in a world where promises are seldom met, nothing is what it seems and men like Baldwick scavenge the hotels and clubs fomenting bar talk that is the never-never land of salesmen’s dreams. Nothing would have induced me to accept an offer from him, but I didn’t tell him that. I excused myself on the grounds that I had written a book and would be seeing the publishers shortly.