Hammond Innes - The Black Tide

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 bastardized 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 toward 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.’