'Now, if you'd sound two blasts on your siren…' He turned to the door then, so sure of me apparently that he didn't need an answer. It was that absolute blind assurance that turned my fear of him to anger.
Two steps and I had him by the shoulder, spinning him round, my face close to his. 'I could sail out of here, straight to Aberdeen, and hand you over.'
'You could indeed.' His face was without expression, no fear, nothing. 'My word against yours and political power behind me. You can try it if you like, but you wouldn't win.'
'There'll be fifty or more men on that rig. You expect me to endanger their lives…"
'I told you. Nobody is going to get hurt.' He took my hand from his shoulder, looking at me as though I was somehow to be pitied. 'Take after your father, don't you?'
'How do you mean?'
'I think you know. You've been making enquiries.'
'I know he was brought out of Norway-'
'He was compromised. And afterwards…' He shrugged. 'Rehabilitation can be a long process. Not many survived.'
I stood there, rooted to the spot. 'What are you trying to tell me?' My voice sounded strained, my mind gone numb. 'He's alive — is that what you're saying?'
He looked at me intently. 'Would that make any difference?' he asked softly. But I was too surprised, too shocked to say anything. 'Suppose you were able to talk to him?'
I couldn't believe it. I didn't want to believe it.
Those lines from Browning, the little plaque — 'It's not true,' I heard myself say and there was a tightness in my throat. 'It's not possible.'
He laughed. 'I think your Inspector Garrard. would tell you differently.' And he added, his voice gone hard again, 'But you can't go to him, can you? He knows too much about you. You can't go to the police, anybody. So you do as we tell you. Otherwise, you'll never know another moment's peace. And that's what you want, isn't it? To be left alone.' He nodded. 'Well, after this you will be, so long as you co-operate.' He stared at me a moment, then turned and went out of the cabin. I heard him ask Henrik to sound two blasts, the sound of his footsteps in the gangway, and I stood there, unable to move, unable to think.
I didn't go to the bridge until I heard the fishing boat alongside. He was already on board. He turned and looked at me, and then he disappeared into the wheelhouse and the boat pulled away from us. I watched as it steamed down Ham Voe, the tonk-tonk of its diesel echoing back until it disappeared beyond Baa Head. It was past six then and the crew were already feeding. I had mine on the bridge, alone, and afterwards I went to my bunk. But I didn't get much sleep, and at 03.30 we got our anchor and left Foula for our rendezvous with North Star.
PART TWO
THE RIG
CHAPTER ONE
There was no sign of the rig when we arrived at the location shortly after 11.00 on Sunday, 20th April. The Decca ship was lying hove-to ahead of two marker buoys in line. The dan-buoys marking the position of the eight anchors were already laid, spread uniformly round the drilling site, which itself was marked with a yellow-flagged buoy. All the dan-buoys had lights. I steamed within hailing distance of the Decca ship and asked her skipper when the rig would arrive.
'You on stand-by?' He was a small man with a bright red woollen cap on a round bullet head. 'Last I heard the ETA was 17.00. But she'll be later than that. The tug's under-powered for the job, and even with the two supply ships towing they made barely a knot and a half yesterday. The wind veering may help.'
They'll be anchoring at night then?'
'Sure they will, and that could be a fine balls-up, so keep well clear unless they start hollering for help.
Only a few weeks ago I fished one poor bugger out. It was black as a crow's arse and when we did get him we found the anchor hawser had taken half his head off. You tell your crew to watch those boys doing their stuff on the flat-iron decks of the supply ships, then they'll realize what cushy jobs they got.' He grinned, waving and turning back into his bridge.
The cook was standing at the rail below me and I heard him say, 'Aye, but they're in town several nights a week, not stuck out here for three bluidy months.' His name was Flett and he came from Orkney.
We could hear the rig's radio traffic, but none of it Voice, and shortly after midday we picked the blip of it up on our radar. By then the sea had gone down, only a slight swell. The wind was south-easterly, light, visibility good, and about an hour later she began to come up over the horizon. The shape of her grew very slowly and we lay wallowing in the swell playing cribbage until late in the afternoon the Decca ship steamed up alongside and asked us to take station four cables on her port side to form a 'gate' leading to the location marker buoys. By then the rig was standing out of the sea like a colossal steel water beetle, her size accentuated by the fact that she was riding high on her four 'torpedoes', which had been de-ballasted to within about twenty feet of the surface. She was still more than two miles away, and as we moved into position, a last watery gleam from the setting sun shone on the high antenna of the drill tower, the name North Star showing clear on the side of the platform. She was turning now, very gradually, to enter the 'gate'
against the tide, our radio picking up the barge engineer's instructions to the two supply ships and the tug, which was already dropping its tow.
'North Star to Bowstring — as soon as we are in position over ze marker I tell you, then you leave Rattler to hold us and lay out ze first anchor, is it?'
'Roger North Star.'
'Is Number Two anchor ze virst one.' A Dutchman by the sound of it, and in that last gleam we could see two figures on the helicopter deck, one with a walkie-talkie to his mouth as he acted as towmaster.
'Roger — out.'
And then the other ship's captain: 'You're relying on the tide to hold her, but suppose we get a cross-wind?'
'Ze forecast is good — so ve lay anchors vast and everyzing okay, is it.'
'Is it?' The voice crackled with emphasis. 'You don't have to lay the bloody anchors in the dark, mate.'
'Then ve lay them again tomorrow if zey are no good,' the Dutchman replied imperturbably. And, much fainter, another voice — 'See they lay them right first time, Pieter. I don't want any hold-up when the drilling crews…' The voice faded, but something in the crispness of it made me wonder if that was Villiers standing up there beside the barge engineer. I remembered reading some years back that he had had a narrow escape when the prototype belonging to a small aircraft company he had acquired crashed while doing landing and take-off tests. He was the sort of a man who would get a kick out of being on the spot at the start of a new venture.
The lurid gleam of sunlight vanished, the rig moving ponderously. Dusk came fast with low cloud rolling in, the huge structure abreast of us, twenty steel columns riding high on submerged pontoons with the derrick a latticed finger thrusting at the overcast, the ruby glow of its warning lights giving it a festive air. Decca to North Star, North Star to Rattler — our bridge radio crackled with instructions as the rig, a blaze of lights now, approached the tiny pinpoint of the location buoy.
It was night before North Star was in position and Bowstring, the smaller of the two supply ships, closed stern-on for her towing hawser to be let go. The time was 21.17. An arc light swung as the rig's crane moved, one of the crew clinging like a fly to the deck rails, hand on the heavy hook, guiding it into the eye of an anchor pennant. The brontosaurus-like head of the crane reared up to lift the anchor clear of its housing on the underwater section of the column, then bowed downwards as Bowstring backed in, men moving on the flat deck of the supply ship, balanced on the stern just clear of the roller, reaching out with gloved hands to connect the pennant to their winch hawser, and the mate standing with his walkie-talkie to his ear.