"Danger, huh?" said Mark. He drew hard on his cigarette.
"'By the way," said Catriona, opening her bag, "do you remember this ship?"
"Sure," said Mark, examining the menu with narrowed eyes. "The Orange. Sank off the Indian coast, didn't she, four of five years ago? Just after the Armistice, anyway. Why?"
"Well, you know Philip Carter-Helm, don't you?"
"Sure. Not intimately, of course, but we seem to be getting on pretty reasonably together."
Catriona held her hat against a sudden gust of wind. "Do you have any idea why Philip Carter-Helm should have been arguing with my father about the Orange only a week or two before she sank?"
Mark studied the picture again, then looked back at Catriona. "No," he said slowly.
"He's in marine insurance, isn't he, Philip?"
"That's right. Well, that's what he tells me."
"Well, you don't think—"
Mark gave a quick glance over his shoulder, the instinctive reaction of a businessman who wants to make sure that nobody can overhear him. "You're not trying to suggest that your father and Philip Carter-Helm arranged to sink the Orange deliberately?'
"I don't know. But I've been thinking about it and thinking about it. I may be completely screwy. But the Orange sank without any loss of life at all, in calm water; and when the insurance money was paid by Lloyds, that did give father sufficient capital to lay down the keel of the Arcadia."
"It could have been coincidence."
"Well, yes, of course it could. And I don't have any means of proving it. But somehow the idea just won't seem to go away."
Mark took another deep suck at his cigarette. Then he flicked it, so that the butt spun out to sea. "Never did like smoking in the open air. You might just as well light a bonfire and breathe that in."
"But don't you think it's possible?" Catriona insisted. "Don't you think that the Orange could have been sunk for the money, and a nothing else?"
Mark shrugged. "I don't really know what to say. Stanley Keys was your old man, not mine."
"And your old man would never have done anything so underhand, is that it?"
"Do you think yours would?" asked Mark. "Come on, you know what a reputation he had for honesty. 'Stanley the Straight'."
"I know. But somehow—I can't really explain it—I seem to think that he could have done it. He was a very passionate man, you know; and when he wanted something, he did everything he possibly could to get it. He treated his workers exceptionally well, of course. They one all respected him, and admired him. But I wonder whether he did that only because he knew that was the best way to get them to work extra hard, and put in hours of overtime without being paid. I keep thinking about the woman that Edgar Deacon took me to see before we boarded. Father had done so much for her. In fact, in some ways, he seemed to have lavished more care on her than he ever did on my mother. Although he loved his own family, every one of us, I can't say he didn't—I think he considered that we were a nuisance, too, because we expected to be supported without making any real contribution to the company. There was something else that poor woman said, too: that her husband would have adored to have sailed on the Arcadia's maiden voyage. He'd put so much skill into building her, it seemed almost criminal that he wasn't allowed to sail on her. And, you know, there isn't a single Keys workman on this ship, apart from her maintenance crew. My father never gave anything away. Nothing. Not even his friendship."
Mark leaned back against the rail. "'Don't you think you're being a little bit too harsh on him?"
"I don't know. Perhaps I am."
"Maybe we should go and find ourselves some tea," Mark suggested. "Would you care for some tea?" he asked her, in a carefully studied English accent.
Catriona reached out and took his hand. "Yes, I would."
They walked along the deck to the staircase; but just as they were about to go down to the Orchid Lounge, they were hailed by John Crombey. "Mark, I really have to speak to you about those refit charges at Newport News."
"Does it have to be now?" asked Mark, impatiently. "Miss Keys and I were just going down for tea."
"I won't take more than a minute," John Crombey insisted.
They went downstairs together, John Crombey rattling through statistic after statistic: how the shipfitters were overcharging on hinges, pipework, underlay, and veneer work; how the suppliers were giving them short loads. "You have to understand, Mark, that for the cost of materials which we never get to see, we could build outselves another small ship."
John Crombey was still going through figures when they sat down. "We could halve the cost of turbine seals if we went to Oppenheimer's; and we could cut the cost of linoleum by over a third if we went to Indiana Flooring. We could save ourselves nearly a hundred thousand dollars if we had the sheet-metal work done by US Weld instead of Appalachian; and—what's that?"
There was an awkward pause. Then Mark said, blinking, nonplussed, "What's what?"
John Crombey reached across the table and picked up the menu of the SS Orange. "That's remarkable," he said.
"What's remarkable about it?" asked Mark.
"Well, it says SS Orange. And, yes, I guess it is the SS Orange. But it's not the Orange at all."
"I beg your pardon?" asked Catriona.
"What I mean is that this ship is sailing around the South China Sea, this identical ship, and yet she isn't called SS Orange at all. As far as I recall, she's called the Funabashi, and she belongs to the Kyoto Shipping and Trading Company."
"John," said Mark patiently, "the Orange was sunk nearly five years ago."
"I know that," said John Crombey, twitching his neat little moustache. "But the fact remains that this is the Funabashi. Look, you can tell by the notched effect on the stern counter. There is no a ship in the world that has that notch. It was designed specifically for the loading and offloading of cargoes of teak at Moulmein."
Mark looked across at Catriona, and she could see by the expression on his face that he was wondering how to prepare her for the thought that her father might have been very much less than the maritime hero he had always appeared to be.
Catriona saved his feelings by saying it out loud for both of them. "If the Funabashi is the Orange, then the Orange didn't sink at all; and yet Keys claimed the full insurance on her."
John Crombey stared at Mark worriedly, unused to a business competitor being so frank. Then, quite abruptly, he said, "It happens all the time, you know. It's not unusual, particularly with a ship that needs a refit. Well, available cash being what it is these days. All you have to do is take your ship out somewhere, open the seacocks, half flood the holds, and then allow yourself to be conveniently "discovered" by the ship of a friendly accomplice, so that all of your crew can be taken off to safety. You take photographs of the ship foundering, of course, to prove what happened; but immediately the "rescue vessel" is out of sight, you pump out the seawater, refloat your ship, paint over her name, and sail her at top speed to a prearranged dry dock to have her repainted and refitted. You leave as much debris floating on the ocean as you can; deck chairs with the ship's name stencilled on them, things like that; and with any luck you can claim your full insurance within two or three months; as well as the money you made from selling her off. You remember that Greek chap, what was his name, Kostas, he sunk the Iolanthe six times before they caught up with him; and he had the gall to keep selling her back to his own company."