Hammond Innes - Solomons Seal

‘I’m sorry,’ I murmured. ‘But what I need to know is why he suddenly decided his time had come. Was he ill?’

‘No.’ He was staring down at the empty glass in his hand.

‘Then what decided him?’

There was a long silence. Then he raised his hand and smashed the glass on the floor. ‘I told you,’ he shouted, turning on me. ‘When a man’s too old to fight any more … he was eighty-three.’ He was glaring at me. ‘You — you’re in the prime of life. You’re hard, callous — you think the world’s at your feet; if you want anything, it’s there and you grab it. But you wait. You just wait. Wait till you’re old and tired and can’t face youngsters. Can’t fight the world any more. Then you’ll understand. An old bull … he was like an old bull … too proud to go under … too old to fight.’

‘To fight what?’ I asked.

But he had turned away, surveying the cabin. ‘I have to clear up here,’ he murmured. ‘Perenna won’t like it if it isn’t tidy.’

I hesitated, but he was already kneeling on the floor, picking up the pieces of broken glass with trembling fingers. I left him then and went to my cabin, lying on my bunk and trying to visualise the world towards which the monotonous throb of the ship’s engines was steadily driving me, the world that Colonel Holland had been too old to fight. Across the alleyway I could hear sounds of movement and Perenna’s voice.

The cabin door opposite me was closed when I went along to the wardroom for the evening meal. She didn’t appear, nor did her brother. Luke had taken the last Dog watch, and I relieved him at 20.00. The sky had clouded over and beyond the lights of the ship all was darkness. The watch passed slowly. I wasn’t accustomed to a helmsman who had no English, and I couldn’t even take star sights to pass the time.

I had just entered up the log for 22.00 and was working out the DR position on the chart when I became conscious of somebody else in the wheelhouse. Perenna was standing on the starboard side, staring straight ahead at the reflection of herself in the glass of the porthole. She was dressed in jeans and an open-necked shirt, the same clothes I think she had been wearing when she had first opened the door to me on that sunny summer morning back in England. She turned her head as I crossed towards her. ‘Mind if I share your watch for a bit?’

‘Of course not.’ She was no more than a shadow in the darkened wheelhouse, and though I couldn’t see her features clearly, I was conscious of a withdrawn mood. ‘How did it go?’

‘Oh, all right. At least he didn’t throw me off the ship.’ She had turned back to the porthole. ‘It’s very dark tonight. Do you think there are sharks out there? In the islands the crew used to catch sharks. For sport, not to eat. They’d tie their tails together and push them back into the sea. Sprit-sailing, they called it.’ She went on talking like that for a time, about nothing that touched either of us, treading cautiously as though unwilling to destroy the quiet peace of the night with the questions that were in her mind. ‘Where are we now?’

I took her over to the chart table and showed her, conscious of the effort she was making to behave normally, not to show her impatience at the slow progress towards Buka. ‘Another six hours and we should pick up the light on the north-east edge of Saumarez Reef.’

‘Is that named after the admiral who served with Nelson? His descendants live in Suffolk.’

‘How do you know about Admiral Saumarez?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘At Aldeburgh I had a lot of time for reading, especially at night. I got books out of the library, sea books mainly. I think I take after my grandfather. He started in the City of London, the family shipbroking business, but his real interest was the sea. Jona’s the same. It’s in the blood.’ She paused then, and there was a long silence. ‘I’m sorry you don’t know Tim,’ she said suddenly. ‘He’s different, very different.’ Silence again. ‘Has he told you anything about this voyage? The cargo, I mean, and where he’s delivering it.’

‘No.’

She nodded. ‘I can’t get anything out of him either.’ All this time she’d been staring down at the chart. Now, suddenly, she turned to me. ‘Those trucks. While we were waiting on the track leading down to the beach, I had a look in the back. They were full of crates. Do you know what’s in them?’

‘Outboard engines.’

‘Are you certain?’

‘It’s on the manifest.’

She nodded. ‘That’s what Jona said.’

‘And you don’t believe him?’

She was silent for a moment. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to believe.’ And then in a whisper, speaking half to herself: ‘Japanese outboards. It makes sense. It’s the sort of equipment that would sell well in the islands …’

‘Well then?’

‘It’s the secrecy I don’t understand. And those drivers. I don’t know what sort of men go in for trucking in Australia, but they didn’t seem like ordinary truck drivers to me. And the back-up vehicle to take them home wasn’t a ute or anything ordinary like a Holden. It was an English Jaguar.’

‘Did you find out anything about them?’

‘No. They weren’t the sort of men you ask about their backgrounds. I did ask Nobby, the one who drove me on board, where his home was, and all he said was, “You want my telephone number, too?”’ And then after a long pause: ‘There’s only one way to find out what’s in those crates.’ And when I reminded her they were Customs-sealed, she smiled. ‘It wouldn’t be the first piece of cargo that got dropped and fell open by accident.’

I didn’t say anything, and after a moment she asked about the watches. ‘It’s just you and Jona then?’

‘During the hours of darkness, yes.’

‘So we either do it now or just before dawn.’

I told her it was out of the question, that the cargo he carried was his own affair, and anyway, I was his guest on board. She stared at me. ‘I’ve a right to know. And so have you.’ I thought she was about to press me further, but then with a quick goodnight she was gone.

There was less than an hour of the watch to go, and I spent it pacing up and down, my mind going over and over what he had said that first evening when I had come on board in Darling Harbour, remembering how scared he had been, his conviction that I had been sent by somebody. Who? And why had he been scared, so scared that he had set out to drink himself into a stupor?

Midnight came and went. I entered up the log, then went to his cabin to wake him. But he wasn’t asleep. He was sitting there, a glazed look in his eyes, a glass of whisky beside him. His face looked pale, almost haggard, beads of sweat on his forehead. He lifted his arm, a slow, deliberate movement, and peered at his watch. ‘Thirteen minutes after midnight.’ I could see him struggling to pull himself together. ‘You should have called me before.’

‘No hurry,’ I told him and went back to the wheelhouse.

It was about five minutes before he came in. He had had a wash and seemed more or less himself. I gave him the course and was turning to go when he said, ‘Has Perenna been talking to you?’

‘She was here for a while.’

‘What did she say?’

‘Nothing very much; she talked about the sea, about the schooners she used to sail in.’

He was staring at me, his eyes unblinking, holding himself very carefully. ‘Anything else?’

I hesitated. I was on watch again in less than four hours, and I wanted to get my head down. But then I thought, to hell with it, the moment was probably as good as any to get the truth out of him, now, when he was still mentally exhausted by his sister’s suspicions. ‘She was asking me about those two trucks,’ I said.