Hammond Innes: The Black Tide

Back at the cottage, with the aftermath of the gale beating into the cove, it was my own TV shadow, my wild, ghostly appearance that stayed in my mind, not the words I had spoken. I was tired by then, so emotionally exhausted that I fell asleep by the fire. I spent most of the night there and in the morning, when I went up to the top, above the elephant rock, and looked across to the Longships, all that remained of the Petros Jupiter was the blackened bridge housing half sunk and leaning drunkenly against the Kettle’s Bottom.

It was a bright, sparkling morning, the sort of morning that would have had Karen bubbling with

that almost childishly excited Welsh enthusiasm of hers. I walked on, across the fields and down the road into Sennen, and there I found the story of what she had done plastered all over the papers with eye-witness accounts and statements from the salvage boss and pollution experts, also from several politicians.

Reading about it, I found it all strangely remote, as though it hadn’t been Karen out there, but somebody else. Reporters came and a girl from the local radio station with a portable tape recorder. But by then I was in a daze, answering their questions automatically. It didn’t seem real, any of it, the seas now rolling in unobstructed to break on the Shark’s Fin, only the top of the hull’s twisted wreck just showing at low water and no slick, the oil all burned up or driven ashore. It only seemed real when I was back at Balkaer. Then the emptiness of the cottage was like a constant nagging ache. Or when I was down in the cove. Wreckers from far and wide were prowling the shores of Whitesand Bay, searching all the headlands. They were picking up bits and pieces of the Petros Jupiter as far north as Cape Cornwall.

I began to get a stack of mail, letters from all sorts of people, conservationists chiefly, though some of them attacked me for encouraging Karen to sacrifice herself unnecessarily or accused me of standing by while she committed suicide. They were from women mainly, the bulk of them praising what she had done. Saturday, the mail included several invitations to speak at conservationist meetings and a letter from the publishers. This I saved until after my return from

Penzance, where I saw the agents and put Balkaer up for sale. The letter was signed Ken Jordan, Senior Editor. He wanted me to go up to London and see him, but with Karen gone, the cottage for sale, that part of my life was ended. It didn’t seem important any more, the book no longer meaning very much to me. And on the Sunday, which was sunny with an easterly breeze, families wandered down the path from the lane to stand and point, and giggle in embarrassment when I told them to bugger off. There was even a man who pushed open the cottage door to take pictures of the interior. He was quite upset when I slammed it in his face. Because he had seen Balkaer on TV in his own home he seemed to think in some curious way that he owned the place.

And then, about dusk, when all the gawpers and souvenir hunters had gone, there was a knock at the door and I opened it to find a man dressed in a sheepskin jacket and a polo-necked sweater standing there. He had a fur cap rammed tight down on his bullet head.

I recognized him at once, though it must have been three years or more since I had last seen him; those broad powerful shoulders, the beer-barrel belly, the little pig eyes and the round heavy face. He was of that breed of Englishman that has made Brits a word of contempt.

I didn’t ask him in. I just stood there, waiting. The last time I’d seen him was at a shipboard party on a Liberian tanker waiting to load at Bahrain. ‘Remember me?’

I nodded. I had met him several times, on different ships, in different ports, and in hotel bars where he was always flush with money, always buying rounds of drinks. The word was that he was front man for a drug-smuggling ring.

‘Len Baldwick,’ he said, holding out a big paw. ‘Can I have a word with you?’

‘What about?’

‘You. The future.’ The small grey eyes were watching me, the whites as clear as if he’d never touched a drop of alcohol in his life. ‘You’ll be thinking of a ship now?’

‘Will I?’

He ducked his head, pushing his way in. ‘Saw you on the telly.’ He unzipped the sheepskin jacket, pushing the fur cap to the back of his head. ‘Peat fire, eh? You always were a bit simple-like. I told you, way back, didn’t I — being honest and licking the arses of the owners don’t pay. Now look where it’s got you. You lost your wife. She’s gone and you’re on your own. You got nothing, laddie, nothing at all.’

‘What the hell do you want?’ Any ordinary man I’d have thrown out. But he was well over six foot, massive as a rock. ‘Why are you here?’

‘To offer you a job.’ And he went on to explain that he was headhunting for a consortium going into the tanker business. ‘Oil money,’ he explained, drooping an eyelid. ‘You know how it is. Bubbles out of the arse of any Muslim in the Gulf. These people are starting their own fleet, see, an’ while crew’s no problem, it’s not so easy to find officers. The right sort,

that is.’ He was watching me out of the corner of his eyes. ‘The money’s good. Double British rates.’ He hesitated. ‘And a bonus at the end.’

‘End of what?’ I asked. ‘What’s the bonus for?’

He shrugged. ‘For getting the ship there. End of voyage bonus.’ He was standing with his legs apart, staring at me. ‘Air passage out, of course. Everything provided.’

The two years since I’d come to England fell away. I was back in the Gulf, back in a world where promises are seldom met, nothing is what it seems and men like Baldwick scavenge the hotels and clubs fomenting bar talk that is the never-never land of salesmen’s dreams. Nothing would have induced me to accept an offer from him, but I didn’t tell him that. I excused myself on the grounds that I had written a book and would be seeing the publishers shortly.

‘Jesus!’ he exclaimed and burst out laughing. ‘I come here offering you the job of first officer on a hundred thousand tonner, and you talk about a bloody book. You out of your mind?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Just a question of values. I know what I want to do with my life.’

‘Pollution. On the telly you was talking about pollution and crooked tanker owners, the need for government to introduce new laws.’ He hesitated, eyeing me speculatively. ‘Maybe these people can help.’ He said it tentatively and I nearly burst out laughing it was so damned silly. Baldwick of all people on the side of the angels! Quick as a flash he sensed my reaction. ‘So you won’t even discuss it?’

I shook my head.

‘I come all the way from Bristol to make you an offer most men would jump at—’

‘Then why haven’t they? Why come to me?’

‘I told you. I saw you on the telly.’ And he added, ‘These people, they understand about pollution. They can afford to run their ships so there won’t be any. The idea is to improve the tanker image, and they’ll put pressure on any government that doesn’t behave sensibly.’

‘What pressure?’ I asked.

‘How the hell do I know? Political pressure, I imagine. Anyway, Pieter Hals is one of the skippers. He wouldn’t have signed on if he hadn’t believed they were serious about it.’

Hals was the man who had stood on the deck of a flag-of-convenience tanker in the Niger River with a bomb in his hand threatening to blow it up, and himself with it, if the effects of a collision weren’t remedied before he sailed. She was scored along one side and leaking oil. The account I had read had commented that he was wilder than the Greenpeace movement or the union leader in Brest who’d called his men out to stop a Greek cargo vessel sailing with an oil leak in the stern gland. ‘Who are these people?’ I asked.