The Black Tide (10 page)

‘I could do it,’ I said angrily. ‘But I won’t.’ I reached across his desk and picked up the typescript. If I stayed in that untidy office any longer I knew I’d be tempted. Everything seen through her eyes, using my imagination – I’d always wanted to be a writer and I needed the money. Of course I could do it, the scenes already flashing through my mind. But in the end my memory of Karen would be blurred, the reality of her and what she had tried to do lost in a ghost creature of my own imagination.

‘You won’t do it then?’

‘No.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He pushed his chair back and stood facing me. ‘If you change your mind—’

‘I shan’t.’

‘But if you do, don’t leave it too long. A few months and there’ll be another tanker on the rocks spilling oil somewhere else.’ He held out his hand, limp and cold, and I left him, hurrying down the stairs and out into the street, clutching the typescript. The pavements were tight-packed ice and the ornate Victorian edifice of the Museum facing the Cromwell Road was picked out in thick white snowlines.

I was so angry I felt like flinging the typescript into the snow-clogged gutter. I had been sure they would take it, ever since I had received Jordan’s letter. I had been so certain I would come out of that meeting with a contract and a cheque for the advance that I hadn’t even checked the tramp rates or looked at the Shipping Index; I hadn’t the slightest idea what the chances of a berth were for anyone who had been ashore as long as I had.

My breath smoked in the cold air and I became conscious of the traffic building up, moving sluggishly through the snow as London headed for home early. It seemed to be getting colder by the minute, the wind north-westerly now, the snowflakes like glass flying in horizontal lines past my face. How disappointed Karen would have been, all those evenings spent listening to me as I had read passages aloud in the lamplight, all the typing! She had felt at times almost as involved with it as I was. And now … How long would it be before the
Corsaire
reached Karachi? Or had the ship already arrived? Perhaps she would be anchored outside with all the other freighters waiting for a berth … But then I remembered the new harbour. It would be finished now and once the
Corsaire
docked, Choffel could disappear into the labyrinth of the bazaars. Or maybe he’d find a berth on some vessel headed for Japan, Australia, some distant part of the world beyond my reach.

The man’s escape and the book’s rejection became fused in my mind, the anger of despair gripping me as I tramped
through the snow, the cold eating into me. And then suddenly there was a new thought in my head. Dramatise it, the man had said, so that’s what I’d do. I’d re-write it, the whole story, her death, everything. And the end of it would be my search for Aristides Speridion or Henri Choffel, or whatever he might be calling himself when I caught up with him. I’d find him somehow. I’d find the bastard, and when I’d done with him, then I’d write it all down, just as it happened – for Karen’s sake, for the sake of all those birds, for my own peace of mind. And reaching that decision, the emptiness, the hopeless feeling of depression was gone, determination taking hold.

I don’t know why, but I was suddenly remembering my mother, conscious of the same obstinate streak that had made her go it alone, bring up a child on a nurse’s pay in post-Mau Mau Nairobi, and later in the Gulf, in Dubai, where she had died of pulmonary pneumonia from overwork. I could hardly remember what she looked like, only that she was small and neat, and that she’d a lot of guts, a lot of nervous energy that had burned her up before she was 40. That and the climate, and the men she couldn’t resist.

Back at South Kensington station, I went straight to a call box and rang Forthright. Saltley was back from his luncheon at the Savoy, but he was on the phone. I hadn’t enough change to hang on, so I rang off and stood there, feeling very alone as I watched the milling crowd of office workers hurrying to get home before railway lines froze and roads became impassable. They were all so busy, so engrossed in their own worlds. I tried again a few minutes later and the girl said he was still talking. I had to ring twice more before she was finally able to put me through and a quiet, rather abrupt voice said, ‘Saltley here.’

Ferrers had clearly briefed him about me, and of course he had read the papers. He said he’d like to see me as soon as possible, but he had a rather urgent case on and would be tied up for a couple of hours at least. I suggested that perhaps I could see him at his office the following morning, but he said he would be preparing a brief and in court most of the
day. He hesitated, then told me that, because of the weather, he had arranged to stay the night at his club. ‘You a sailing man, by any chance?’

‘I had the loan of a boat once in Karachi,’ I told him. ‘A dinghy really.’

He seemed relieved. ‘Then at least you won’t be entirely out of your depth.’ And he suggested I had supper with him at the Royal Ocean Racing Club in St James’s Place. ‘Seven-thirty suit you? And if the bar’s crowded, then we’ll go into the Fastnet Room and talk there.’

I had two and a half hours to kill. I went into the Science Museum, which being a government building was pleasantly warm, and stayed there until it closed, idling the time away activating all the working models, the steam engines and looms and laser beams. There was hardly anybody left when they pushed us out into the night. The wind had dropped, the air still and deathly cold. I took the Underground to St James’s Park, bought an evening paper and read it over a cup of coffee in a cafeteria off Victoria Street. The City page carried the year’s results of the Norwegian subsidiary of a large British shipping company. They had half their ships laid up and had been operating at a loss throughout the second half of the year.

I wished to God I hadn’t seen it, for it did nothing to lift my morale as I went out into the frozen streets of London again. They had a dead look now, hardly any traffic. I walked up to St James’s Park. There wasn’t a soul there. It was as though I were the ghost of somebody who had returned after some terrible science fiction disaster. The water was a black pit under the bridge. The ducks and wild geese stood motionless on the ice, the flat white covering of snow scuffed with the imprint of their feet. The scene matched my mood. I could no longer conjure the soft Welsh lilt of Karen’s voice, or see her standing there beside me. I was alone now, intensely, intolerably alone, with only anger and hatred for company.

I stayed there, keeping a frozen vigil with the birds, until Big Ben boomed out the quarter after seven. Then I walked slowly across the Mall and up past the Palace to St James’s
Street. I seemed to be the only human being left alive. A taxi crept past me as I turned into St James’s Place. The Royal Ocean Racing Club was right at the end, past the Stafford Hotel where the taxi was now trying to turn. Somebody entered the Club ahead of me, the portholes of the inner doors momentarily revealed, two brass-rimmed eyes staring out at a dirty heap of snow piled against the railings.

Saltley was waiting for me in the bar, which was up the stairs past a nasty looking picture of the Fastnet Rock in a gale. It was a bright, cheerful place full of members locked into London by the state of the roads. He came forward to greet me, small, almost gnome-like, with pale, straw-coloured hair and thick glasses through which a pair of sharp, intensely blue eyes peered owlishly. He was younger than I had expected, mid-thirties, perhaps a little more, and as though to put me at my ease he said his odd appearance – those were the words he used, giving me a lopsided grin – was due to Swedish forebears, the name, too, originally Swedish, but bastardised to Saltley by dumb Anglo-Saxons who couldn’t get their tongues round it. The way he put it I thought he probably knew my father had been a Scot.

Even now I don’t know Saltley’s Christian name. Everybody seemed to call him by his surname, his friends shortening it to Salt or Salty, even old Salt, but what his initials C. R. stood for I still don’t know. It didn’t take me long in the atmosphere of that club to realize why he had asked me if I were a sailing man. The conversation as we stood drinking at the bar was general, the talk all about sailing, ocean races mainly – last season’s and the Southern Cross series in Australia which had just finished with the Sydney-Hobart.

It was only when we went into the dining-room that his attention focused on me personally. Those blue eyes, that crooked, very sensitive mouth, the soft, quiet voice – instead of finding out what it was he wanted to see me about, I found myself telling him about my life with Karen and the strange urge that had taken hold of me very early in life, trying to explain why I had wanted to become a writer. I told him something of my background, too, the way I had been
brought up. ‘So you never knew your father?’ He said it very quickly, reaching for the wine bottle.

‘No.’ Fortunately we had a table to ourselves, the background noise of conversation drowning my words as I added with that mixture of belligerence and frankness that I could never quite conceal, ‘And my mother never married.’

He filled my glass, smiling lopsidedly at me. ‘That worry you?’ He drank slowly, watching me and letting the silence run on. Oddly enough I felt no hostility to him, no anger at the expert way in which he had manoeuvred me into blurting out more than I had intended. ‘It shouldn’t,’ he said. ‘Not now. But, of course, things were different in the fifties. Something we’re apt to forget. We live in the present and our memories are short. But scars – deep, emotional scars – they remain in all of us, rooted there and producing gut reactions.’ He cut into his steak, concentrating on his food for a moment. ‘So you ran pretty wild as a kid?’

I nodded.

‘Where?’

‘I told you, Nairobi, Dubai …’ I stopped there, remembering a scene on the waterfront, a little Baluch boy they’d drowned.

‘And Karachi?’ he asked. ‘Ferrers said something about Karachi.’

I nodded.

‘That was after your mother died.’

‘Yes.’

‘You were fourteen then. Was it to contact your father’s old regiment that you jumped a dhow headed for Karachi?’ He was suddenly looking straight at me.

‘I went to Gwadar,’ I said.

‘Ah yes.’ He nodded. ‘Dubai-Baluchistan – the old pearls and slaves route. Quite a journey for a kid of fourteen on his own, down the Gulf, out through the Straits of Hormuz to Gwadar, then to Karachi and almost the length of West Pakistan to Peshawar.

I stopped eating then, wondering how the hell he knew all that. ‘It was a long time ago,’ I said.

He gave me a little apologetic smile. ‘I’ve had somebody checking up on you.’

‘Why?’

He didn’t answer that. And when I asked him what else he had found out about me, he said, ‘Your father was a lieutenant in the Khyber Rifles. After Partition he joined the Trucial Oman Scouts. He was stationed near Sharjah. That’s how he met your mother. She was a nurse, an Anglo-Indian, I think.’

‘If you know all that,’ I said angrily, ‘then you’ll know that he was killed in the Muscat war. You’ll also no doubt know that my mother’s mother, my grandmother, was from the North West Frontier, an Afridi.’ And I added, the tone of belligerence back in my voice, ‘My mother was hot-blooded, very beautiful, a wonderfully exciting person – but it’s nothing to do with you what she was. Nothing to do with the
Petros Jupiter
either.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He gave a shrug and the same little apologetic smile. ‘Force of habit. I make my living asking awkward questions.’ The strange, bony features were touched suddenly with humour, the eyes smiling at me. ‘Please – don’t let your food get cold.’ He waved his hand at my plate and switched the conversation to dinghy sailing. He navigated now for a man with a Class I ocean racer, but he’d started in dinghies.

It was after we had finished eating, sitting over our coffee, that he finally came to the point. ‘I think you know roughly what my job is, but probably not much about the way marine solicitors operate.’ And he went on to explain that there were only about a dozen firms in the City specializing in the legal side of marine insurance. At Forthright they concentrated on hull insurance. There were other firms that concentrated on cargoes. ‘But as I say, there are only a handful of us trying to sort out all the legal problems that occur when there is an incident – fire, collision, fraud, anything concerning ships or their cargoes that results in an insurance claim. It’s very specialist and often there is a great deal of money involved. We’re so specialist, in fact, that
we’re involved worldwide, not just the London market.’ He suddenly got to his feet. ‘Sorry, you haven’t got a drink. Brandy or port?’

‘Rum, if I could,’ I said, and he nodded. ‘Good idea. Help keep the cold out.’

The bar was crowded and while he was getting the drink, I was wondering why he was taking all this trouble, what possible use I could be to such a specialized firm of solicitors operating in the City. I said as much when he handed me my drink and sat down again. He smiled. ‘Yes, well, let me explain. We have forty or so partners. I’m never certain what the exact number is. They’re solicitors, all of them. They each have their own clients, their own reputations. Then there are a number of trainees, a mass of articled clerks, lots of secretaries. In addition, we employ over a dozen ship captains, men who can go off to any port in the world where we have a problem and by their training and long experience can ask the right questions of the right people and assess what the answers are worth. Some of them develop a remarkable nose for ferreting out the truth. And, of course, each claim being different, and therefore requiring an individual approach, we use any method we feel may be necessary to protect our clients’ interests. And that,’ he added with a slight emphasis in his voice, ‘sometimes includes the employment of people whom we consider have special qualifications for getting at the truth of a particular case.’

He sipped his port, the blue eyes watching me behind the thick-lensed glasses. ‘You know Karachi. You speak Urdu. And you’ve been a ship’s officer. I think you’re the man I need.’

‘For what?’ I asked.