North Star

'Why are you telling me this?' My mouth felt dry.

'You don't have to be an engineer to identify the weak points of a rig like this one,' he said quietly. 'Anybody with any imagination can see it at a glance. It would mean divers, of course, and they'd have to be transported out here by sea. You're the guard ship. The orders you'll be given require you to make sure no vessel comes within the circle of the anchor buoys, only the supply ships. The crews on those ships have been thoroughly screened.' He turned, looking me straight in the face. 'That leaves you, doesn't it? That trawler of yours is the only ship that has a right to be here — and that I'm not sure about.'

Put like that I could see his point. 'If you don't trust me,' I said uneasily, 'then you'd better find another ship.'

He shook his head. 'As you say, it's very suitable employment for that trawler of yours. You'd require compensation, and anyway, there isn't another in Shetland, not that's available.' He turned away and began pacing the room. Finally he said, 'No. What I've got to do is make certain of you.' He had stopped and was facing me again. 'That's the answer, isn't it?' He went back to his chair and flopped into it, drumming with his fingers on the table top. 'Vulnerable was the word Garrard used. You're vulnerable — because of an incident in Hull. There's a suspicion you might have set fire to the house yourself.'

'Is that what he told you?'

'He didn't put it as bluntly, but that was the implication.' He stared at me, waiting, and when I didn't say anything, he went on, 'Fuller went into this charter blind, knowing nothing about you. It was a mistake, and now I have to make up my mind — whether to employ you or not. You weren't there by accident, were you?'

'Have you been in touch with the police handling the case?' I asked.

'Yes, I phoned Hull myself.'

'What do they think?'

'Either you threw that petrol bomb, believing the house to be empty, or you were there because you knew something like that was going to happen. They haven't made up their minds, but don't imagine they've closed the case.'

It was almost two months ago, the memory of that night blurred and unreal here on an oil rig, cocooned in power plant heat, the smell of oil and the background hum of the rig's machinery. 'You may not like my record,' I said, 'but I don't go around throwing petrol bombs.'

'But you were there. Why?'

L I hesitated. He had no right to question me, but it could be a way of clearing myself with the police so I told him about the meeting I had attended in Hull that evening, how it was packed with militants, most of them brought in from industrial towns farther north and some who had no right to be there at all. 'It was a particularly ugly meeting. A union official, who had come up from London, was howled down and virtually kicked off the platform. They'd got pickets on all the shipyard gates, a busload of them from the Tyne, and some from Liverpool, even the Clyde. Pierson & Watt were non-union. They whipped themselves up into a mood where they were ready to march on the offices and smash them up, and a man kept yelling for them to be set on fire. Then somebody, I don't know who — it was just a voice — shouted that the foreman was the bugger to get. The mood was pretty violent by then, half the room on its feet and everybody worked up. Somebody else shouted, "I'll fix the bastard." That was when I left.'

To go and watch the foreman's house.'

'To warn him. I knew Entwisle. I'd been mate on a trawler when it was into Pierson 8c Watt for repairs. But there was no answer when I rang the bell. I thought they were all out.'

'So you hung around.'

'Yes — fortunately as it turned out.'

'And afterwards, why didn't you wait for the police?'

'Why should I? Nobody was hurt.'

'A man's property was set on fire. That's arson.'

'The Fisher Maid was sailing at first light. And my hands hurt. They were cut and slightly burned.'

'So you went off on a distant water trawler. And when you got back, instead of returning to Hull, you headed for Shetland and got involved in salvaging the vessel we've now chartered.' He smiled, shaking his head. 'Some people would regard that as pretty strange behaviour.'

'But you don't?'

'Depends what your motives are. I think I can guess, knowing your background — and now that I've talked to you. You want to make something of your life before it's too late. I could help you there.'

I started to tell him I didn't want his help, that his whole outlook was entirely opposed to mine, but he stopped me. 'Of course our outlooks are different. You've been switching from one thing to another, experimenting with drugs and ideological theories. I've kept to one single basic tenet, the profit motive. You probably abhor that. But you're running your own business now. You'll learn. You can't run even a broken-down old trawler unless your cash flow is sufficient to keep the damn thing afloat.'

I stood there, silent, knowing it was true and that I hadn't considered what would happen when the charter ran out. The scrape of his chair as he got to his feet interrupted my thoughts.

'You're an awkward cuss,' he said. 'I was going to make you an offer — a gamble I suppose you'd call it.'

'I don't gamble,' I told him.

'No? Then why did you salvage that trawler?' He I i was smiling, his tanned, strangely handsome face suddenly alive. 'I'm not talking about cards or betting on horses. I'm talking about pitting one's wits and one's energies against the odds in life. That's what I'm doing drilling out here with this rig. It's what you're doing with that trawler. The rig's old, and so is your ship — both of us taking a chance.' He turned abruptly towards the door. 'Had any breakfast this morning?'

'No.'

'Nor have I.' He pulled it open. 'Let's go and feed. I'll tell you what I have in mind over our bacon and eggs.'

We went down a flight of metal treads to the lower deck of the crew housing. It was hot and airless with the same stale smell of food and oil combined with salt to be found on a ship. The shower was running in the men's room, the glimpse of a fat white body towelling itself, and inside the mess a long aluminium counter with two cooks in white chatting behind it. 'Bacon and eggs twice,' Villiers said. He handed me a plate. Try the rolls. They bake their own on the night watch.'

The room, with its three long, bare-scrubbed tables, was almost empty. We got our coffee from a machine set between windows looking out to an empty sea. The wind had freshened, occasional whitecaps breaking across the low line of the westerly swell. The barge engineer was there, sitting over his coffee with a Dutch cigar. We joined him and the talk centred on the drilling crew coming in on the first helicopter flight. A man named Ken Stewart would be relieving him.

The tool-pusher was American, a hard driver, van Dam said. 'Ed don't waste any time.'

'How long before we start drilling?' Villiers asked.

'Depends on the zeabed. The divers are going down in the bell now. If the zeabed is okay, then maybe tomorrow.'

'Pity, I have to be in Holland tomorrow.'

'Then you give my love to Rotterdam, eh?' And he added, 'Better you go today. Iz full 'ouse ven both drill crews are 'ere.'

The bacon and eggs came and Villiers began discussing gale conditions, up to what wind force the supply boats could keep going and whether the proper tension could be maintained on the anchor cables so that drilling could go on uninterrupted. Except that he was unshaven, it was hard to believe that he had been up all night, his voice quick and concise, his brain sharp. He was brimful of energy and I wondered how many years it would be before he burned" himself out. Every now and then I glanced out of the windows, but the sea remained empty, no sign of the trawler, or any other vessel, in that cold northern light.