Geoffrey Jenkins - Southtrap

I put down the phone and reached for my drink. There was a knock at the door.

'Come in!'

It was Linn. Her black pants and champagne-coloured tunic made her look slimmer than before. At dinner she had squired the VIPs to the captain's table — my table. The Jacobsens did not put in art appearance. However, captain's tables are not my scene. I had been grateful, for once, to have McKinley around.

Now the tell-tale marks of her grief were skilfully masked by eye-shadow.

She said, 'I'm suffocating. It felt as if the walls of my cabin were closing in on me. Does it mean anything in particular, this frightful sogginess in the air?'

'It goes hand-in-hand with the south-easter. And the Agulhas Bank is one of the worst areas in the world for electrical storms.' I ushered her to a chair. 'A drink — mine's brandy.'

'No brandy, thanks. Something short.'

'Vanderhum? Might as well keep it in the Cape family.'

That will do fine.'

I fixed the drink and said, 'I'm glad you came, Linn. I was in a miscellaneous mood. I don't know where to start my thinking.'

She pulled a coin from her pants pocket and laid it between us on the desk-top. It was a Krugerrand, the South African coin which contains exactly one fine ounce of gold.

I picked it up. It was warm — warm from her groin where her pocket was, a surge of my pulse told me.

I said lightly, 'Now you're compounding my confusion.'

She eyed me over the rim of her liqueur glass. 'When the old Norsemen set out on voyages into the unknown they buried a gold coin in the step of their mast to bring them good luck. Can you find a similar place for this?'

I couldn't see myself boring a hole into the Quest's utilitarian mast — it was more a crane than a mast — and attempting to conceal the coin. At today's gold price it would be a healthy lucky dip for any crewman who might spot it.

Wegger and his boat were still in my mind. 'I'll tell you what I'll do — I'll salt it away in the mast of the launch we'll be using for the shore parties at Prince Edward.'

'You're not just fobbing me off? You're not laughing at me, John?'

She seemed very small, vulnerable and so alone. She looked into her glass and added: 'The voyage came unstuck right at the start — didn't it — except for that little time on deck before the message came about Dad's death.'

So the bells had rung for her, too.

'A bad beginning can mean a good end,' I replied. 'There's no reason why the trip shouldn't go off smoothly from now on. We've got a good ship and a good crew. Everything's running like clockwork.'

'That's what you say, but do you really believe it, John?'

I side-stepped the question. 'I didn't see Captain Jacobsen at dinner. How did he take the news of your father's death?'

'Badly, I'm afraid. It was a traumatic occasion for both of us. I felt I had to be the one to break it to him.'

'You don't evade your responsibilities, Linn.'

'Mrs Jacobsen wasn't pleased — I think my news could have aggravated that heart condition of his.'

'What did he say when you told him?'

'"Now there's no point in going on" — something like that.'

'Anything else?'

'Why do you ask, John?'

'I can't get your father's last words out of my mind. Or rather, not so much his words, as what he was trying to say but couldn't. I'm quite sure he wanted to explain something about that war-time business. And Jacobsen was one of the three captains who escaped.'

Linn put down her glass. 'When you meet Captain Jacobsen you'll find he's not the talkative kind. In fact, he's pretty dour and reserved. After he said that about no point going on he just sat and stared for a long time. Then he muttered something that sounded like, "It's not far from where it all happened — the position for launching the weather buoy. About a day and a half's steaming."'

'What was he driving at, Linn?'

'I don't know. After that his face went purplish, and then very white. Mrs Jacobsen rushed for his heart pills and shooed me out.'

I poured myself another brandy. 'Does it strike you, Linn, that Jacobsen is now the last skipper alive of the three who were involved in that war-time escape? The other two — your father and a man called Torgersen — are both dead.'

She answered so softly I could scarcely hear. 'Murdered.'

'It doesn't make sense,' I went on. 'There's a gap of about thirty years between the two deaths. If they really are linked, and someone is bent on taking revenge…'

'But why, John? In God's name, why? My father never did anything wrong…'

I recalled the dying man's words about doing something which seemed right at the time. I looked at Linn's strained face and decided not to mention it. My mind went on to Captain Prestrud's final words.

'Linn, you were telling me Dina's Island is Prince Edward…'

'It was never actually called Dina's Island. The name figures on some eighteenth-century charts, that's all. Captain Cook's name for it, Prince Edward, has always been the one in general use.'

'Which adds to the puzzle, Linn. Your father's last words to me were, "Stay away from Dina's Island."'

She stared at me. 'Are you sure you heard right?'

'Quite sure. He said that very clearly. But why should he, when the whole purpose of this cruise — and apparently a life-time ambition of his own — was to get to Dina's Island, in other words, Prince Edward? And why should he call it by a name which it took you ages to unearth in the archives? How did he know the name? It doesn't add up, Linn.'

She stood up. 'Let's go on deck and get some air. These walls are beginning to close in too.'

Once we had got clear of the shelter of the lifeboat deck I took her arm to steer her towards the stern. Our eyes were not yet fully adjusted to the darkness. I kept close to the rail to avoid a newly-painted red patch on the deck.

'What's that, John?' she asked.

'They're supposed to be markings for a deck quoits court, but in fact they have an ulterior purpose.'

The outline on the deck was like a miniature helicopter landing-pad.

'I don't like the colour of Quest,' I told her. 'White's all right for a fine-weather cruise. Nice and yachty, like in the magazines. But it's too near the colour of ice. If this ship ran into trouble down South she'd be mighty hard to spot by air search. I'm hedging my safety bets — this red patch and the Quest's red lifeboats combined would be visible from a search plane twenty kilometres away.'

She shivered and was silent.

We went aft. At the rail by the jackstaff above the stern a bare-footed man in crumpled running shorts and towel singlet was getting ready to throw something overboard. It looked like a hooped butterfly net with a bottle wedged in its end, and it had a weight attached.

He said, without preliminary, 'We're travelling much too fast for me to collect anything, really. But I go on hoping.' He pitched the thing untidily over the side and gestured at the water.

'That's what I'm after.'

Little globes of luminosity were passing along the ship's side beneath the water. The Quest appeared to be skimming on ballbearings of warm light.

'Nothing very unusual, but they never fail to thrill me-jelly-fish.'

He straightened up and laughed. A stray wisp of hair couldn't hide his receding hairline.

They say all oceanographers are nuts. Or is it oceanologists? I never know. Maybe I am. But you can't live in the presence of great mysteries without some of them rubbing off on you. I'm Toby Trimen.'

He tugged at the dip-net and gave a small whoop. 'Got him!'

Deftly he swung the net clear of the ship's side and manoeuvred it upright. Then he rummaged inside the muslin-like material and towing bridles and untied the tapes that held a collecting-jar in position at its rear, and showed us the bottle containing the sea-creature. It looked like a beautiful pale pink toadstool, except that it had trailing tentacles. It was all aglow.