Solomons Seal (18 page)

‘He needed this cargo. That's all he told me.' I got off the bunk and reached for my clothes. It was up to her to find out about that. ‘Talk to Shelvankar,' I said. ‘He's radio officer and cargo agent all in one, and I would imagine the best source of information on board. And if you know any of the crew … Do you understand the Buka language?'

She shook her head. ‘Not Buka. But Pidgin is the same all through the islands. I'm sure that will come back to me quite easily.'

‘Then have a look round the ship, talk to some of the crew while I get dressed.'

‘And what about Jona? You haven't told me what impression you've formed of him.'

‘No, and I'm not going to.' I had my back to her, rootling around for my shaving kit. ‘I'm a visitor on board this ship, and if he has problems, it's none of my business.' I was still tired, and her persistence irritated me. The old belief that a woman on board meant trouble may have had something to do with it.

Silence for a moment; then she said, ‘Very well, I'll
leave you to dress now.' I heard the door close. She was gone, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I went to the heads then and had a shower. By the time I was shaved and dressed it was past 10.30. I lay on my bunk and tried to read, but my mind wouldn't concentrate, wondering how well she knew her brother, how much he had told her in letters. It was five years since she had last seen him. A long gap, and some time in the next two hours she would confront him with the fact of her presence here on board this ship. And those two trucks. Like me, she must be wondering what the hell was in them, why the secrecy?

She had flown from Sydney to Brisbane and then hitched lifts up to within a few miles of the beach. That much I got out of her when I went into the wardroom for a quick bite of food before going on watch. But that was all. Holtz was there, and Shelvankar, both of them treating her very formally, and beneath the formality I sensed a mood of caution as though she were something to be handled with extreme care. Shelvankar, in particular. He was unusually silent, his eyes every now and then glancing at her furtively. And she herself was not at all communicative, sitting there quite still as though bracing herself for the moment when her brother would come in.

The steward brought me my coffee and then went along the alleyway to give Holland a shake. It was just past noon and time for me to relieve Luke. I excused myself and took my coffee along to the bridge. The course was due north, visibility good and the sea calm, a long shallow swell coming in from the south. We
were already clear of the continental shelf, no reading now on the echo-sounder and no sign of any land. I took a sun sight and was pleased when my calculations coincided almost exactly with our DR position. There was little for me to do then, and the watch passed slowly.

Any moment I expected Holland to come in and ask me why the hell I had gone behind his back and sent that message to his sister. Maybe she dissuaded him, but nobody came on the bridge during the whole of the afternoon watch, and when he relieved me at 16.00, he never mentioned it. He didn't even refer to her presence on board. He was tight-lipped and very tense, the lines on his forehead deep creases, and he had been drinking. I could smell the whisky on his breath. ‘Have some tea, then get your head down,' he said tersely. ‘You're on again at twenty hundred hours.'

‘What about McAvoy?' I asked.

‘No.' And when I suggested he had looked sober enough to stand a watch, he almost shouted at me. ‘I tell you, no.'

The door to McAvoy's cabin was open as I went down the alleyway to the wardroom. He was standing there, a glass in his hand, staring at his bunk, which had an open suitcase on it and a pile of clothes. An empty drawer lay upside down at his feet. He turned slowly, sensing my presence in the doorway. ‘You're out of luck.' He smiled at me slyly. ‘She's having my cabin tonight.' He waved the glass at me. ‘Thought you'd cleaned me out, didn't you?' The smile
broadened to a grin, but behind the grin he looked old and tired. ‘Care to join me in a drink? It's here somewhere.' He looked vaguely round for the bottle. ‘Well, say something, can't you?' His voice was suddenly petulant. ‘Bloody amateur doing my job.'

‘It's your own fault,' I murmured.

‘My own fault, you say.' He nodded slowly. ‘Aye. Maybe it is.' He looked down at the glass still clutched in his bony hand and smiled. But it was only a drawing back of the lips from yellowed teeth. There was no humour in the smile. ‘I haven't the guts, you see, to make an end of it. Not alone. I've tried, but I canna do it. So …' He lifted the glass to his lips, swallowing quickly. ‘You're lucky. No dark Celtic streak in you.'

He stood there staring at me, and I didn't know what to say. But there were things I wanted to ask him, and in his fuddled state I thought perhaps it was as good a moment as any. ‘You knew Colonel Holland very well, I believe.' His bloodshot eyes were suddenly wary and hostile. ‘Miss Holland said you were his best skipper.'

‘Aye. He wouldn't let Perenna sail with anyone but me.' His voice was firmer, a touch of pride.

‘Would you tell me something then? As I understand it, Colonel Holland took a canoe and sailed off into the Pacific. Why?'

I thought at first he wasn't going to answer. He was glaring at me angrily. Then, as though it were being dragged out of him, his voice quivering, he said, ‘It was the custom. When you're too old … to lead and fight … it's the way the old Polynesian navigators
used to go when they'd come to the end of their lives. God damn it! It's better than dying in bed, to sail away, to the horizon, going on and on until in the end you meet your Maker, still proud, still active, sailing the way you've always sailed.' And he added, ‘He loved the sea. He had courage. He was the finest man … ' He jerked back the words, turning away, tears in his eyes. ‘Blast you!'

‘I'm sorry,' I murmured. ‘But what I need to know is why he suddenly decided his time had come. Was he ill?'

‘No.' He was staring down at the empty glass in his hand.

‘Then what decided him?'

There was a long silence. Then he raised his hand and smashed the glass on the floor. ‘I told you,' he shouted, turning on me. ‘When a man's too old to fight any more … he was eighty-three.' He was glaring at me. ‘You – you're in the prime of life. You're hard, callous – you think the world's at your feet; if you want anything, it's there and you grab it. But you wait. You just wait. Wait till you're old and tired and can't face youngsters. Can't fight the world any more. Then you'll understand. An old bull … he was like an old bull … too proud to go under … too old to fight.'

‘To fight what?' I asked.

But he had turned away, surveying the cabin. ‘I have to clear up here,' he murmured. ‘Perenna won't like it if it isn't tidy.'

I hesitated, but he was already kneeling on the floor, picking up the pieces of broken glass with
trembling fingers. I left him then and went to my cabin, lying on my bunk and trying to visualise the world towards which the monotonous throb of the ship's engines was steadily driving me, the world that Colonel Holland had been too old to fight. Across the alleyway I could hear sounds of movement and Perenna's voice.

The cabin door opposite me was closed when I went along to the wardroom for the evening meal. She didn't appear, nor did her brother. Luke had taken the last Dog watch, and I relieved him at 20.00. The sky had clouded over and beyond the lights of the ship all was darkness. The watch passed slowly. I wasn't accustomed to a helmsman who had no English, and I couldn't even take star sights to pass the time.

I had just entered up the log for 22.00 and was working out the DR position on the chart when I became conscious of somebody else in the wheelhouse. Perenna was standing on the starboard side, staring straight ahead at the reflection of herself in the glass of the porthole. She was dressed in jeans and an open-necked shirt, the same clothes I think she had been wearing when she had first opened the door to me on that sunny summer morning back in England. She turned her head as I crossed towards her. ‘Mind if I share your watch for a bit?'

‘Of course not.' She was no more than a shadow in the darkened wheelhouse, and though I couldn't see her features clearly, I was conscious of a withdrawn mood. ‘How did it go?'

‘Oh, all right. At least he didn't throw me off the
ship.' She had turned back to the porthole. ‘It's very dark tonight. Do you think there are sharks out there? In the islands the crew used to catch sharks. For sport, not to eat. They'd tie their tails together and push them back into the sea. Sprit-sailing, they called it.' She went on talking like that for a time, about nothing that touched either of us, treading cautiously as though unwilling to destroy the quiet peace of the night with the questions that were in her mind. ‘Where are we now?'

I took her over to the chart table and showed her, conscious of the effort she was making to behave normally, not to show her impatience at the slow progress towards Buka. ‘Another six hours and we should pick up the light on the north-east edge of Saumarez Reef.'

‘Is that named after the admiral who served with Nelson? His descendants live in Suffolk.'

‘How do you know about Admiral Saumarez?' I asked.

She shrugged. ‘At Aldeburgh I had a lot of time for reading, especially at night. I got books out of the library, sea books mainly. I think I take after my grandfather. He started in the City of London, the family shipbroking business, but his real interest was the sea. Jona's the same. It's in the blood.' She paused then, and there was a long silence. ‘I'm sorry you don't know Tim,' she said suddenly. ‘He's different, very different.' Silence again. ‘Has he told you anything about this voyage? The cargo, I mean, and where he's delivering it.'

‘No.'

She nodded. ‘I can't get anything out of him either.' All this time she'd been staring down at the chart. Now, suddenly, she turned to me. ‘Those trucks. While we were waiting on the track leading down to the beach, I had a look in the back. They were full of crates. Do you know what's in them?'

‘Outboard engines.'

‘Are you certain?'

‘It's on the manifest.'

She nodded. ‘That's what Jona said.'

‘And you don't believe him?'

She was silent for a moment. ‘I don't know. I don't know what to believe.' And then in a whisper, speaking half to herself: ‘Japanese outboards. It makes sense. It's the sort of equipment that would sell well in the islands …'

‘Well then?'

‘It's the secrecy I don't understand. And those drivers. I don't know what sort of men go in for trucking in Australia, but they didn't seem like ordinary truck drivers to me. And the back-up vehicle to take them home wasn't a ute or anything ordinary like a Holden. It was an English Jaguar.'

‘Did you find out anything about them?'

‘No. They weren't the sort of men you ask about their backgrounds. I did ask Nobby, the one who drove me on board, where his home was, and all he said was, “You want my telephone number, too?”' And then after a long pause: ‘There's only one way to find out what's in those crates.' And when I reminded her
they were Customs-sealed, she smiled. ‘It wouldn't be the first piece of cargo that got dropped and fell open by accident.'

I didn't say anything, and after a moment she asked about the watches. ‘It's just you and Jona then?'

‘During the hours of darkness, yes.'

‘So we either do it now or just before dawn.'

I told her it was out of the question, that the cargo he carried was his own affair, and anyway, I was his guest on board. She stared at me. ‘I've a right to know. And so have you.' I thought she was about to press me further, but then with a quick goodnight she was gone.

There was less than an hour of the watch to go, and I spent it pacing up and down, my mind going over and over what he had said that first evening when I had come on board in Darling Harbour, remembering how scared he had been, his conviction that I had been sent by somebody. Who? And why had he been scared, so scared that he had set out to drink himself into a stupor?

Midnight came and went. I entered up the log, then went to his cabin to wake him. But he wasn't asleep. He was sitting there, a glazed look in his eyes, a glass of whisky beside him. His face looked pale, almost haggard, beads of sweat on his forehead. He lifted his arm, a slow, deliberate movement, and peered at his watch. ‘Thirteen minutes after midnight.' I could see him struggling to pull himself together. ‘You should have called me before.'

‘No hurry,' I told him and went back to the wheelhouse.

It was about five minutes before he came in. He had had a wash and seemed more or less himself. I gave him the course and was turning to go when he said, ‘Has Perenna been talking to you?'

‘She was here for a while.'

‘What did she say?'

‘Nothing very much; she talked about the sea, about the schooners she used to sail in.'

He was staring at me, his eyes unblinking, holding himself very carefully. ‘Anything else?'

I hesitated. I was on watch again in less than four hours, and I wanted to get my head down. But then I thought, to hell with it, the moment was probably as good as any to get the truth out of him, now, when he was still mentally exhausted by his sister's suspicions. ‘She was asking me about those two trucks,' I said.

He turned away from me then, to the high chair that was still in the wheelhouse, relic of the ship's Service life. ‘God in Heaven!' He slammed his hand down on the wooden back of it. ‘Why did she have to come now? If she'd done what I told her, stayed in Perth … ' I thought he was about to reproach me for sending that cable, but instead, he asked me in a very quiet voice, ‘What did you tell her?'