The Wreck of the Mary Deare (36 page)

‘Who is it?' I asked. The blinds were drawn and the room all darkened.

‘It's Janet Taggart.' She came to the side of my bed and I recognised her then, though she looked very tired and there were dark hollows under her eyes. ‘I had to see you—as soon as you woke.'

I asked her how she had got here and she said, ‘It was in the papers. I came at once.' And then she leaned down over me. ‘Listen, Mr Sands. Please listen to me. I'm only allowed to stay a moment.' Her voice trembled with urgency. ‘I had to see you before you talked to anybody.'

She hesitated then, and I said, ‘Well, what is it?' I found it difficult to concentrate. There were so many things I wanted to know and my mind was still blurred.

‘The police will be coming to take a statement from you soon.' She paused again. She seemed to have difficulty in putting whatever it was she wanted to say into words. ‘Didn't Gideon once save your life?'

‘Gideon?' She meant Patch, of course. ‘Yes,' I said. ‘Yes, I suppose he did.' And then I asked her how he was. ‘Didn't somebody tell me he had pneumonia?' I had a vague memory of the doctor telling me that when he was examining my shoulder.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘He's very ill. But he passed the crisis last night. He'll be all right now, I hope.'

‘Have you been with him all the time?'

‘Yes, I insisted. I had to—in case he talked.' And then she went on quickly: ‘Mr Sands—that man Dellimare . . . You know what happened, don't you?'

I nodded. So he'd told her that, too. ‘Nobody need ever know now,' I murmured. I felt tired and very weak. ‘All the for'ard part of the ship broke up on that reef.'

‘Yes, I know. That's why I had to see you before you made any statement. Don't tell anybody about it, will you. Please. He's suffered enough.'

I nodded. ‘No. I won't tell anybody,' I said. And then I added, ‘But there's Mike. He knows.'

‘Mike Duncan? I've seen him. He hasn't said anything yet—either to the Press or to the police. He said he'd do nothing about it until he'd seen you. He'll do whatever you do.'

‘You've seen Mike?' I pulled myself up in the bed. ‘How is he? Is he all right?'

‘Yes, he's here in Peter Port.' She was leaning down over me again. ‘Can I tell him you're going to forget what Gideon told you? Can I tell him you want him to keep quiet about it, too?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Yes, of course—there's no point in saying anything about it now. It's over—finished.' And then I asked her how Mike had been picked up.

‘It was a fisherman from St Helier. He found the motor boat just before the storm broke. There was a man called Burrows on board, too. He was badly injured, but he made a statement to the police—about Higgins.' And then she said, ‘I must leave you now. I want to see Mr Duncan and then I must be with Gideon when he wakes—to see that he doesn't talk. It's the sort of silly thing he might do.' She smiled wanly. ‘I'm so grateful to you.'

‘Tell Mike to come and see me,' I said. And as she reached the door, I added, ‘And tell—Gideon—when he wakes that he's nothing to worry about any more . . . nothing at all.'

She smiled then—a sudden warmth that lit her whole face up; for an instant she was the girl in the photograph again. And then the door closed and I lay back and went to sleep. When I woke again it was morning and the curtains were drawn back so that the sun streamed in. The police were there and I made a statement. One of them was a plain-clothes man from Southampton, but he was uncommunicative. All he would say about Patch was that he'd no instructions at the moment to make any arrest. After that there were reporters, and then Mike arrived. The police had refused to let him see me until I had made my statement.

He was full of news. The stern section of the
Mary Deare
had gone ashore on Chausey Island. He showed me a newspaper picture of it lying on its side in a litter of rocks at low water. And yesterday Snetterton had been through Peter Port. He'd had a salvage team with him and they had left for Chausey Island in a local fishing boat. ‘And I've been on to our insurance people,' he said. ‘They're meeting our claim in full. We'll have enough to build to our own design, if we want to.'

‘That means losing a whole season,' I said.

He nodded, grinning. ‘As it happens there's a boat for sale right here in Peter Port would suit us nicely. I had a look at her last night. Not as pretty as
Sea Witch
, of course . . .' He was full of plans—one of those irrepressible people who bounce back up as soon as they're knocked down. He was as good a tonic as I could have wished and, though he still had a piece of adhesive tape stuck across the side of his jaw where the skin was split, he seemed none the worse for his thirty hours on the water-logged wreck of that motor boat.

I was discharged from hospital next day and when Mike came up to collect me, he brought a whole pile of London papers with him. ‘Altogether you've had a pretty good Press,' he said, dumping them on my bed. ‘And there's a newspaper fellow flew in this morning offering you a tidy little sum for a first-hand account of what happened. He's down at the hotel now.'

Later we went and looked at the boat Mike had discovered. She was cheap and sound and we bought her on the spot. And that night Snetterton turned up at our hotel, still neat, still dapper in his pin-stripe suit, though he'd spent two days on Chausey Island. They had cut into Number Four hold at low water and opened up three of the aero engine cases. The contents consisted of concrete blocks. ‘A satisfactory result, Mr Sands. Most satisfactory. I have sent a full report to Scotland Yard.'

‘But your San Francisco people will still have to pay the insurance, won't they?' I asked him.

‘Oh, yes. Yes, of course. But we shall recover it from the Dellimare Company. Very fortunately they have a big sum standing to their credit in a Singapore bank—the proceeds of the sale of the
Torre Annunziata
and her cargo. We were able to get it frozen pending investigation. I think,' he added thoughtfully, ‘that Mr Gundersen would have been better advised to have organised the re-sale of the aero engines through another company: But there—the best laid schemes . . .' He smiled as he sipped his sherry. ‘It was a clever idea, though. Very clever indeed. That it failed is due entirely to Mr Patch—and to you, sir,' he added, looking at me over his glass. ‘I have requested the H. B. & K. M. . . . well, we shall see.'

I wasn't able to see Patch before I left Peter Port. But I saw him three weeks later when we gave evidence before the resumed Court of Enquiry. He was still very weak. The charges against him had already been dropped; Gundersen had slipped out of the country and Burrows and other members of the crew were only too willing to tell the truth now, pleading that they had supported Higgins's story because they were frightened of him. The Court found the loss of the
Mary Deare
was due to conspiracy to defraud on the part of the owners, Patch was absolved from all blame and the whole matter was referred to the police for action.

A good deal of publicity was given to the affair at the time and, as a result of it, Patch was given command of the
Wacomo
, a 10,000-ton freighter. He and Janet were married by then, but our diving programme had prevented us from attending the wedding and I didn't see him again until September of the following year. Mike and I were in Avonmouth then, getting ready to dive for a wreck in the Bristol Channel, and the
Wacomo
came in from Singapore and moored across the dock from us. That night we dined on board with Patch.

I barely recognised him. The lines were gone from his face and, though the stoop was still there and his hair was greying at the temples, he looked young and full of confidence in his uniform with the gold stripes. On his desk stood the same photograph in its silver frame, but across the bottom Janet had written:
For my husband now
—
bons voyages
. And framed on the wall was a letter from the H. B. & K. M. Corporation of San Francisco.

That letter had been handed to Janet by Snetterton at their wedding reception, and with it a cheque for £5,000 for her husband's part in exposing the fraud—a strangely apt figure! At the time Mike and I had been working on a wreck off the Hook of Holland and when we got back I found a similar letter waiting for me, together with a cheque for £2,500—
as some compensation for the loss of your vessel
.

The body of Alfred Higgins was never recovered, but in August of that year a metal dinghy, with patches of blue paint still adhering to it, was found wedged in a crevice of the rocks on the south side of Alderney. It had been battered almost flat by the seas.

One final thing—an entry in the log of
Sea Witch II
made on September 8, just after we had located and buoyed the wreck in the Bristol Channel. It reads:
11.48—Freighter WACOMO passed us outward-bound for Singapore and Hong Kong. Signalled us: ‘Captain Patch's compliments and he is not, repeat not, trying to run you down this time! Good wrecking!' She then gave us three blasts on her siren, to which we responded on the fog-horn
. A month later, with
Sea Witch II
laid up for the winter, I began this account of the loss of the
Mary Deare
.

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Copyright © The Estate of Hammond Innes 1956

First published by Collins in 1956

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099577430