Hammond Innes - The Black Tide

It didn’t take me long to go through the Aurora B file — the failure to meet her radio schedule on November 7, details of loading at Mina Zayed, condition and rating of vessel, information about the recent installation of anti-explosion precautions, all the basic,

humdrum details on which any assessment of what might have caused the vessel’s mysterious disappearance would depend. There was nothing about crew, no photograph, nothing — which was odd as GODCO always photographed and dossiered crew personnel before every voyage. I knew that because I had shipped a man once who had refused to sail on a GODCO tanker at the last moment because he wouldn’t be photographed. In the end, he told me the reason he was camera-shy was that he was bigamously married and afraid that his first wife, whom he described as a right bitch, might see it and come after him. Why we all leap so readily to fanciful conclusions I am not sure, but until then I was convinced that he was either one of the train robbers still on the run, or else a murderer.

There was an internal and an external telephone on the desk. I lifted the external receiver and asked the switchboard operator for a line. She didn’t ask who I was or who I was going to ring at the office’s expense, she just gave me the line. But when I got through to the GODCO offices in Curzon Street and asked for the current voyage Aurora B crew details and pictures, they said all crew information was held at their Dubai offices. They gave me the number and the man to contact.

I might not have followed it up, except that I had asked for the Petros Jupiter file and the girl had come back to say that it was with Mr Pritchard and he was asking who I was and why I wanted it. While I waited, hoping he’d let me see it, I asked the switchboard if it

was possible to get me the Dubai number and in a matter of minutes I was through to the GODCO Marine Superintendent’s office. The man in charge of crew dossiers said that copies of all information concerning the Aurora B and the Howdo Stranger crews, including copies of the crew pictures, had been despatched airmail to London two days ago. But when I rang the London office again the man I had spoken to before finally admitted their staff was so depleted that morning that he couldn’t tell me whether the crew details had arrived or not.

After that there was nothing for me to do but sit there waiting in that empty office. It was an odd feeling, as though I was suspended in limbo — the frozen world outside, and here, encased in concrete and glass, an organization that fed upon disaster, encapsulating the realities of existence, the gales, the sand storms, the oiled-up beaches, the furnace heat of raging fires, into typed reports and telex messages compressed and neatly filed between plastic covers. Cargoes, ships, dockside greed and boardroom chicanery, the remote cold-bloodedness of owners whose decisions were based on money, not humanity, it was all there, neatly filed and docketed — remote, unreal. Legal cases, nothing more.

The previous night, just as I was leaving, Michael Stewart had come into the club with his wife and daughter. They had been to the theatre, but when Saltley introduced me to him I could see the evening had not been a success. The man was under intense strain. And that morning I had spent the first hour

or so visiting two shipping offices close to the Baltic Exchange in St Mary Axe. Rates were low, a lot of vessels still laid up and the chances of employment very slight unless you happened to be in a place where the need of a ship’s officer was urgent.

Humans, not files — that was the real world. In the circumstances I could count myself lucky I’d had two offers of a job and hadn’t had to go looking for either of them. There was a tap at the door and a sharp-faced man with a little brushed-up moustache sidled in, a file under his arm. ‘Rodin?’ He had a tired voice that matched the weary look on his face. He gave the impression of having seen too much of the wrong side of life.

I nodded and he said his name was Pritchard. His eyes, which were dark, had a nervous sort of clockwork tick, shifting back and forth, left and right, avoiding contact, but at the same time examining me closely. ‘Salt told me you’d be asking for the Petros Jupiter file. Any particular reason, apart from your wife’s involvement?’

‘Isn’t that sufficient?’ I disliked the darting eyes, his lack of sensitivity, the coldness of his manner.

He put the file down on the desk in front of me, flipped open the plastic cover and pointed to the most recent item, a telex. ‘That arrived this morning.’ And he stood over me while I read it, watching me closely all the time, waiting no doubt to see how I would react to the news.

The telex was from the Lloyd’s agent at Karachi. The Corsaire had docked that morning at first light.

PASSENGER CHOFFEL NOT ON BOARD. TRANSSHIPPED TO DHOW HORMUZ STRAITS II.OO GMT YESTERDAY. CORSAIRE’S CAPTAIN UNABLE TO IDENTIFY DHOW’S NATIONALITY. NO NAME. NO FLAG. SKIPPER SPOKE SOME ENGLISH, NO FRENCH. ALL ON BOARD PROBABLY ARAB. ADVISE CONTACT AGENTS UAE PORTS.

So he’d gone, got clear away. The chances of finding him now … I closed the file and sat staring at the phone. I could do as the Karachi agent advised, start ringing round the ports of the United Arab Emirates. But how would the Lloyd’s agent in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Doha, Bahrain or Kuwait know what dhow it was? There were so many in the Gulf.

‘You’ve seen all you want?’

I nodded.

‘Your only interest then was Choffel?’ He was leaning over me, his eyes darting.

‘Yes.’

‘Pity!’ He hesitated. T never had a case like this before. Stranding is one thing. We might have been able to claim negligence in their employment of a man like Choffel, particularly as he had assumed a different name. In any case, both the ship and its cargo could have been salvaged. That was what the Dutch said. But then your wife’s action… quite unprecedented. It introduced a new dimension altogether.’

‘She’s dead,’ I said.

The words meant nothing to him. ‘There’s no

policy I’ve ever seen covers that sort of thing. You couldn’t call it sabotage, could you?’

I stared at him, disliking him intensely. No use telling him I’d seen her die, watched the ship go up, and the man who’d caused her death running free somewhere in the Gulf. I opened the file again, leafing through the thick wad of papers. It was similar to the Aurora B file, but much fuller, of course, since the vessel had been there on the rocks for all to see. Salvage reports were interspersed with newspaper cuttings and both shore and marine pollution assessments …

‘Salt said you might be going out there for us.’

‘Yes. I might.’ But where? Where would that dhow have taken him? Where the hell would he have gone? Dubai? Dubai was at least 100 miles from the Straits. Ras al Khaimah perhaps, or Khor al Fakkan, which was outside the Gulf on the shores of the Arabian Sea, or Muscat even. There were so many places and all of Arabia for him to get lost in. Iran and Pakistan, too. The dhow might have headed north to the coasts of either of those countries, or to one of the islands in the Gulf.

‘If you do go out there for Saltley—’ I was searching back through the file as he went on, picking his words carefully: ‘He’ll be employing you on behalf of his own clients, to try and discover what happened to the Aurora B and this new one that’s disappeared.’ Another, longer pause. I wasn’t really listening. I had reached a wadge of newspaper clippings and was living again that night when I’d gone out with Andy in the ILB. ‘But you’ll keep me informed, won’t you? If you

do find Choffel, I mean. That’s why you’re going, isn’t it? And if you find him, then try and get a written statement out of him.’