The Titanic Secret (12 page)

But the mere fact that there were rumours on the diplomatic circuit, Mansfield Cumming suggested, meant that something was going on and that, together with the information obtained from Klaus Trommler, plus Voss’s unusual series of appointments in Berlin, had simply confirmed his certainty that there was a plot and that Voss was the architect of it.

‘Anything new?’ Maria asked as she sipped her drink and kept checking the room to ensure that nobody was moving close enough to hear what they were saying.

‘Not really,’ Tremayne replied. ‘Apart from this picture of Voss, of course.’ He passed the photograph across the table to Maria, who looked at it carefully, trying to commit the man’s features to memory. ‘Most of this is stuff that we already know.’

‘But . . . ’

‘But what?’ Tremayne asked.

‘The way you said that, it sounded to me as if a “but” should have been tacked onto the end of that sentence.’

Tremayne smiled at her. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘The only new bit, really, is the last paragraph. Before, it was a strong possibility, but now Mansfield has made it an order. He’s now specifically instructed us to ensure that our friend does not complete his journey.’

Although they were sitting at a secluded table, well away from those occupied by other first-class passengers, Tremayne was still aware that voices carry, and so they both needed to be circumspect in what they said, and what words they used.

‘And his friends? The ones we haven’t even identified yet, and who might not even be coming on board this ship. What about them?’

‘The same instructions apply,’ Tremayne said. ‘I was hoping, really hoping, that this would all turn out to be some kind of mistake, or that there might be some other way of resolving the situation. But unless something changes, it looks as if we’ll have to go through with it.’

Maria nodded. She, too, looked uncomfortable with the reality of the situation in which they now found themselves. Like Tremayne, in her brief career with the Bureau of Investigation she’d been forced to take a human life. In fact, she had been forced to take five lives, but in every case she had been involved in a covert operation and had either been defending herself or protecting a fellow agent. The idea that she would have to be involved in the cold-blooded killing of another person, and at the whim of a man she’d only recently met, made her feel very uneasy, despite the importance of the mission.

‘Anything else?’ she asked.

‘Yes, though the last bit doesn’t seem to me to make too much sense. Cumming has specified the wording of a particular telegraph message that we have to send from the ship as soon as we’ve completed what we have to do: that’s after all three of them have been taken care of. He says that we have to send the message no later than zero nine hundred hours – nine o’clock in the morning – on the fifteenth, otherwise he will, and I quote, “have to make an alternative arrangement to resolve the situation”.’

‘That doesn’t sound like Mansfield,’ Maria remarked. ‘I haven’t known him that long, obviously, but usually he spells everything out in words of one syllable. What do you think he means?’

‘I don’t know,’ Tremayne admitted. ‘Unless he’s trying to organize some kind of a reception committee in New York, and he needs the extra couple of days before the ship reaches port to get that in place. But that’s just a guess: I really don’t know. But what is obvious is that he’s given us a deadline. We have to finish this assignment by that date and that time. And we can’t do anything until Voss joins the ship at Cherbourg later today.’ He paused and glanced at his watch. ‘If the ship’s on time, we’ve got just under one hundred and ten hours to do this, and the clock is ticking.’

10 April 1912
RMS
Titanic
/Southampton

About half an hour later, as they sat talking together in the reception room, two empty glasses in front of them, the bellow of the ship’s siren sounded in a long, deafening blare. Tremayne glanced at his watch: it was just before noon.

‘It sounds like we’re about to leave,’ Maria said. ‘Let’s go up to the Boat Deck and watch.’

Rather than climb up the grand staircase, which was already crowded with people, they walked behind the ornate structure and entered one of the three lifts which had been installed there.

On the Boat Deck, the rails were already lined with passengers, waving handkerchiefs and scarves at the anonymous hordes of people still surging around on the dockside below. Tremayne spotted a small gap at one end of the rail, and taking Maria gently by the elbow, led her over to it. They peered down the steel side of the ship to the stone jetty below them.

The gangways which had linked the liner to the dockside had already been removed, lifted away by cranes and moved well clear of the side of the ship. Teams of dockyard workers were busy attending to the mooring lines which still held the massive ship in position, and Tremayne guessed that there would be tugs waiting to help manoeuvre the ship away from the harbour wall, probably already with lines attached on the other side of the vessel.

They watched as the last of the lines were released, the heavy lengths of rope splashing into the water as the
Titanic
began to move slowly away from the quayside. Powerful winches on board the ship recovered the ropes, and within a minute or two the last of them had vanished from sight.

Several of the passengers now strolled across to the opposite side of the Boat Deck to watch the activities as the tugs pulled the liner sideways, manoeuvring the ship out of her berth and into open water. Already, they could feel a slight vibration through the deck; the propellers were beginning to turn more quickly, assisting the efforts of the tugs.

It didn’t take long for the
Titanic
to start moving forward under her own power, and Tremayne was surprised by how quickly the ship started to pick up speed, as it began to move past the other vessels which were moored nearby. To him, it seemed that the vessel was going a little too fast in the restricted waters of Southampton’s harbour, but he presumed that the crew knew their business. Moments later, it looked as if his slight concern was justified.

The
Titanic
was passing alongside and fairly close to two other ships, one moored outboard of the other, so that they were side-by-side. The ship secured directly to the quayside was another White Star Line vessel, the
Oceanic
, and moored alongside her was the ocean liner the SS
New York
. The
Titanic
’s passage past these two vessels was creating a substantial bow wave and, as Tremayne looked behind, he could see a deep wake forming behind the ship.

Then things seemed to happen very quickly. The
Titanic
’s wake was so large that it lifted the much smaller SS
New York
high up in the water and then, as the wake passed, the vessel crashed down into the trough behind it. Tremayne clearly heard the loud snap as some of the ship’s mooring lines parted.

Immediately, the stern of the SS
New York
began to swing out into the seaway, directly towards the side of the
Titanic
. Shouts of alarm sounded as crew members suddenly realized what had happened, and the danger they faced if the sideways motion continued and their vessel hit the
Titanic
.

Tremayne felt a suddenly increased vibration through the deck, and presumed that the captain had ordered the propellers to go astern to try to slow the ship down and reduce the wake. But still the stern of the SS
New York
continued to move quickly out into the seaway. It looked to Tremayne as if a collision was both inevitable and imminent.

‘I think it’s going to hit us,’ he said to Maria. ‘Grab hold of something, just in case.’ He suited his actions to his words, seizing the top of the rail in front of him as he continued staring down at the drama unfolding below them.

Then he heard the roar of a powerful engine, and turned to see a tug – he spied the name
Vulcan
painted on the bow – moving quickly towards the SS
New York
, obviously intending to manoeuvre the ship back into its correct position. Within seconds, a line snaked down from the stern of the American ship, followed quickly by a hawser which the tug’s crew swiftly attached. The rope tightened as the tug started manoeuvring, trying to stop the swing of the ship and to drag it back alongside the
Oceanic
, the water behind the tug turning to white foam as the vessel’s propeller turned at maximum revolutions.

Other tugs, possibly those which had been used to assist the
Titanic
in moving from her berth, then appeared, engines roaring as they hurriedly moved into position.

The sideways movement of the stern of the SS
New York
had slowed, but it was still moving. Tremayne could clearly see members of the crew running away from that end of the vessel as it neared the side of the
Titanic
, trying to get out of danger.

The
Titanic
was quickly reducing speed, but it still looked as if it was too late, as if the two vessels were going to collide.

And then, almost as quickly as it had started, the incident came to a halt. When the stern of the smaller ship was within three or four feet of the side of the
Titanic
the actions by the tugs finally stopped the sideways movement. Within a few seconds the gap began to open, and the
New York
slowly began to be moved back to her berth, the
Vulcan
and other tugs fussing around her.

‘That was really close,’ Maria said. ‘I do hope that’s not an omen for the rest of this voyage.’

They stayed up on the Boat Deck for a few minutes longer, watching as the SS
New York
was again secured alongside the
Oceanic
. The
Titanic
had come to a complete stop, and didn’t move for some time.

In the end, it was about half an hour before they again felt the propellers start to turn, and the ship started to move away, heading out of Southampton towards the open sea and the ship’s first port of call: Cherbourg.

Once out of the harbour, the ship began to increase speed as it made its way south-east down the Solent. The heading altered slightly to the east once it cleared the mouth of the estuary to pass between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight, and then as the
Titanic
reached a point east of Bembridge on the island, the helm was clearly altered again and the vessel turned well over to starboard on a direct track for the French port.

They remained on deck for a little while longer, watching as the Isle of Wight and the south coast of England steadily slipped away behind them, beyond the arrow-straight wake that the
Titanic
was carving through the choppy waters of the English Channel.

For most of the time they stood in silence, alone with their thoughts and oblivious to the chatter of other first-class passengers wandering the deck and taking the air. When they could no longer discern the individual towns lying along the south coast, and the coastline itself had started to fade into a faint grey-brown line, Tremayne turned at looked at Maria.

‘Are you superstitious?’ he asked, with a slight smile.

She shook her head. ‘Not especially. Why?’

‘What you said about us nearly hitting that other ship being an omen. Sailors are about the most superstitious bunch of people on the planet, and I’ll bet they’re down in their messes right now, muttering about the
Titanic
being doomed because of what happened.’

‘It was a close thing,’ Maria replied. ‘And if it
had
hit us, that would probably have ended this ship’s maiden voyage right then, and that might have got us off the hook. Voss would have found some other ship to take him to America, and there probably wouldn’t have been time to get us on board the same vessel.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ Tremayne admitted, ‘and you’re right. Maybe we were unlucky the collision never happened. I don’t think I’m particularly superstitious, but I can’t shake off a sense of foreboding about this voyage, and not just about what we have to do.’

‘It’s probably just a touch of seasickness,’ Maria said briskly. ‘Another Scotch should sort you out.’

10 April 1912
London

Mansfield Cumming had spent quite some time preparing the briefing sheet which he had given to Tremayne before he left for the railway station. That had been his highest priority, but once he completed that, he turned his attention to an Admiralty chart of the north Atlantic, and carefully plotted the route he had been told, through a contact at the White Star Line, that the
Titanic
would be taking after its last European port of call at Queenstown in Ireland. As well as the route itself, he also plotted the estimated position of the liner at noon and midnight on each day of the voyage.

The track he’d ended up with was, he realized, far from accurate. The actual course the ship would follow would be determined by a number of different factors, including the weather, and particularly the sea state, which could affect the cruising speed, and the vessel’s time of departure from Queenstown. All of these were imponderables, estimates at best, and the
Titanic
’s departure from Southampton, the only fixed time for the entire voyage, had already showed him how quickly the situation could change. After the near-collision the ship had had with the SS
New York
, the
Titanic
had been delayed there for almost thirty minutes. Cumming’s contact at the White Star Line had informed him of what had happened just a few minutes earlier.

He had stared at the chart for some time before coming to a decision. He drew a circle in pencil around one specific point on the route across the Atlantic, noted the date and time and the geographical coordinates, the latitude and longitude, of the location on a piece of paper, and then picked up the telephone earpiece and microphone, turned the handle to alert Mrs McTavish that he wanted to make a call, and instructed her to get him a particular number at the Admiralty.

When the senior officer answered, Cumming passed the information to him, waited while the details were read back, then ended the call. He had already put the arrangements in place earlier in the day, and the date, time and position he had calculated were the last pieces of information he had needed to convey.