‘Yes, he showed me the telex. It was from the Lloyd’s agent in La Rochelle where the fishing boat landed him.’
‘Suppose we were to send you to Karachi, everything paid, and a fee… You fly out, you’d be there about the time the Corsaire arrives.’ He looked at me then. ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it? You want to talk to Aristides Speridion who now calls himself Henri Choffel.’ I nodded and he smiled. ‘One of our partners would be interested in that, too. He’s handling the Petros Jupiter case.’ He paused then, watching me. ‘Well, what do you say?’
I didn’t answer immediately. In fact, I was thinking of Baldwick and his proposition. This, in a way, was even odder. Saltley misinterpreted my silence. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Afraid I’ve put it to you very abruptly. Let me fill you in a bit. First, the seat of the pants side of it. Back in November the Aurora B disappeared. We don’t know where. All we know is she missed her radio schedule when she should have been west of Sri Lanka and hasn’t been heard of since. Now, just a few days ago, another VLCC, the Howdo Stranger, misses her schedule.’
‘I was with Ferrers when the news came through,’ I said. ‘They both missed their schedules in the same area.’
He nodded. ‘With a twice-weekly radio schedule it’s just guesswork where they disappeared. But yes, the same area roughly. Both insured at Lloyd’s, and the lead underwriter in each case Michael Stewart. He’s a member here and a friend of mine. In fact, I was at his daughter’s twenty-first today. We both started our racing together, you see, in the Lloyd’s yacht Lutine.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Not the best day to pick for a party. And the poor fellow wrote the slip for the Petros Jupiter as well, all three of them for the same syndicate, including the Sinister Syndicate, which is hard luck on the girls. He took quite a slice of it for them.’
I suppose he sensed I didn’t really understand what he was talking about, for he said, ‘You know how Lloyd’s work do you? The Members — Names, we call them — operate in syndicates. There are around twenty thousand Names and their personal financial commitment is total. Each is limited in the extent of the premium income he, or she, can underwrite, but if things go wrong, then there’s no limit at all to the amount they may be called upon to pay out, even to the point of complete bankruptcy.’ And he added, ‘One of the syndicates involved here is a rather special one. It’s a marine syndicate composed entirely of Members’ wives and daughters. My wife’s a member of it, so is Mike’s, and now his daughter Pamela. She’s one of his regular racing crew, and her birthday being on New Year’s Eve, the party today was really more to celebrate the start of her underwriting.’ He smiled wryly. ‘Virgins Unlimited, or the Sinister Syndicate, those are the tags the syndicate has got stuck with and I’m afraid it may prove more apt than intended. They could be facing a very big loss on these three vessels if all the claims are substantiated. And that won’t do Mike’s reputation any good. He might not even survive it.’
And then abruptly he switched back to the missing ships. ‘GODCO — that’s the company that owns the two missing VLCCs — operates right through the Gulf. They have offices not far from here, in Curzon Street of all places. But the centre of their operation is Dubai. If you went out, I’d see you had letters of introduction to Gulf Oil executives, the Lloyd’s agents of course, also some very useful contacts I’ve built up over the years. But,’ he added, ‘that’s on the official level. Much more important, I feel, is what you, with your knowledge of Urdu, might pick up unofficially, in the docks, or the bazaars, also in hotel bars. I’m thinking of Karachi, you see. I don’t know why, but ever since this second GODCO tanker went missing I’ve had a feeling…’ He hesitated, staring at me, then gave a little shrug and picked up his drink.
‘You think it’s sabotage?’ I asked.
‘It has to be, doesn’t it? Two GODCO ships in two months. They haven’t lost a VLCC in eight years. But even if I’m right, I’ve still got to prove it.’
‘And the Petros Jupiter}’ I asked. ‘Who owned her?’
‘A Dutch company.’
‘I thought it was Greek.’
‘It was, but they sold her a few months back. We’ll be checking on the Dutch company, of course, but I’m told it’s a perfectly reputable outfit.’ He didn’t know its name or anything about it. Another partner, a man named Pritchard, was handling the Petros Jupiter. And he explained that he’d been fully occupied recently preparing a briefing for arbitration in the matter of a £30 million claim where it was suspected that navigational negligence was a contributing factor in the loss of a giant tanker. But now, with the Howdo Stranger failing to keep its radio schedule, Stewart was pressing him to begin a full scale investigation of the Aurora B claim. That meant, not one, but two new casualties added to his work load. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ve made you a proposition. You go away and think about it. Tomorrow come along to our offices and have a look through the files.’ And he added, with a quick little smile, so that I knew he was baiting the hook for me, ‘The Petros Jupiter’s cargo was re-sold on the spot market the day before she was wrecked and the skipper’s statement makes it clear that his instructions to alter course for Rotterdam reached him when he was midway between Land’s End and the Scillies.’ And he added, ‘I can arrange for you to see that statement. In fact, the whole file, if you like.’
That was how, on the following morning, with the snow still falling and half England a no-go area because of blocked roads, I came to be sitting in the offices of Forthright & Co., marine solicitors, at Salt-ley’s desk, with the Petros Jupiter file in front of me. All I had been given on arrival were the papers relating to the Aurora B claim. There was nothing on the Howdo Stranger. At least, that was what I was told by the only girl I could find who knew her way around the files. Saltley’s secretary hadn’t made it to the office, nor had half the Forthright staff, so that the whole place had a slightly deserted air, particularly the reception area, which must have cost a fortune in rental it was so vast. A matronly, grey-haired woman in tweeds, standing in as receptionist because neither of the girls at the two big desks had arrived, took me down a long corridor through fire doors to Saltley’s empty office. ‘Phone me if you want anything.’ She gave me the number to dial on the internal phone, then shut the door on me so that I felt like a prisoner being locked into his cell.
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.