There was only one course open, no matter how suspicious it looked. He hesitated no longer. “Bill,” he said quietly, gesturing with his head toward the bridge wing.
Sir William paused, holding the heavy door wide for his son-in-law, but before Richard could step through it, Robin was out into the bright, clear morning. This looked damned suspicious. Richard could feel their eyes on his back. Well, a captain answered to no one on his own bridge. Let them think what they liked. He stepped out, and Sir William followed, closing the door tight.
“Right. What is it you want to know so desperately, Richard?” The slightly flat vowels of Sir William’s northern childhood colored his speech, showing that he was not quite as relaxed as he seemed.
“How much do you know about what’s going on here, Bill?”
“Nowt. Nothing at all. Smells fishy to me, though…”
“You know it has to be fraud, Daddy. You know the oil must have been…” Richard watched her narrowly. Of course, with her lively intelligence she would have worked it out too, even if she hadn’t been implicated.
The bridge wing door opened. Moriarty pushed his massive frame through. “They’ve given us the all clear on the wireless, Captain. I’ll be taking her down to a safe anchorage in Lyme Bay now, with your permission.” There was a chilly note in his precise Edinburgh accent.
“Yes, Captain Moriarty, you have her,” snapped Richard. “I shall be back on the bridge in a moment.”
He turned away as the door closed with a decided slam and took up Robin’s surprising accusation. “You know the oil has to have been taken off at Durban. That this is all a fraud.”
“That seems quite obvious, now, yes.”
“That the idea has always been to break the embargo by selling the oil to South Africa, then to sink the ship and claim full insurance on both cargo and hull.”
“Seems logical.”
Richard took a step forward, forced near the edge of his self-control by Sir William’s calm agreement.
“But it’s your oil!” The agonized accusation rang out in Robin’s voice.
Suddenly Richard understood her involvement completely and clearly. Her arrival at Dubai, her presence aboard, all the things that had seemed so suspicious because they couldn’t be as pat as they appeared in spite of what she said. She had been lying; lying all along. But not because she had come as part of the plot. She had come because she, too, suspected her father and was trying to stop what ever was going on before it dragged the old man down. But of course she had found herself working with the one man she could not bring herself to trust in this one matter alone. As far as she knew, Rowena still lay between her father and her lover, making them the bitterest of enemies.
God! She had been strong to hold together through this tangle.
Horror showed on Sir William’s face as he recognized the accusation in their eyes. “No!” he cried. “No. It’s not true. I knew nothing. Nothing at all. I bought and sold that oil in good faith. I’ve done nothing. How could you…Either of you…”
He turned away, overcome by sorrow and rage.
They looked at each other, shocked. That one word sold raising the terrible weight of suspicion from their minds. Robin went forward to lay her hand on one bowed shoulder. Richard went back onto the bridge. He felt a new man. He met each suspicious gaze and held it till it fell.
Now he could deal with Watson, though he suspected the tall young man was only the vanguard of a full Lloyd’s team that would descend upon them once they were safe in Lyme Bay. That would be in a little less than twelve hours’ time. Sunset. Then they could all relax — all except those guilty of complicity.
It would all be over with the day.
It seemed hardly possible.
Watson’s clouded blue eyes were set deep in a face composed principally of chin and cheekbone, framed with unfashionably long hair. He carried a small Dictaphone tape recorder. They went out onto the starboard bridge wing; Robin and Sir William were still out on the port one. Watson started talking into the little machine at once, giving day, date, exact time; but Richard’s mind was elsewhere. On this side of the ship he was looking toward the south rather than the north, and, as is sometimes the case, the different side meant different weather. It was only the slightest imaginable difference, but it made him narrow his eyes looking away over France nevertheless. Yes. There it was. The narrowest possible band of mackerel cloud, preceded by some high, feathery whisps of mares’ tails. He remembered John’s doggerel said in the blue waters north of Durban where he had last seen such a cloud formation:
Mackerel skies and mares’ tails
Make tall ships wear short sails.
He suddenly realized he hadn’t heard a weather forecast in well over a week.
At that moment, the helicopter lifted off again and Richard followed it with his eyes, forgetting about the weather for the moment. It was gone out of his sight in a few moments and his eyes turned south again, remembering the storm.
But Watson had started his inquisition and he readily turned his mind back to the present. Then, over the next half hour, each contributing knowledge and speculation beyond the other’s ken, they began to reconstruct the bare bones of the fraud.
They discussed Lloyd’s history of Kostas Demetrios, a former lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, lucky to be in Naples instead of Vietnam, leaving the service at the end of his tour of duty apparently clean — though medical supplies kept vanishing from the Italian port — returning to civilian life rich, but not lazy. He worked his way through business school and moved into shipping, rapaciously ambitious; infinitely greedy. The purchase of Prometheus was his first really big venture in the most lucrative market of all. Running it legally, he would have been well in profit, and able to build his fleet slowly and safely. If the fraud paid off, his profits were likely to be colossal.
The crew selected for Prometheus might just have stood up to scrutiny, even had she sunk. There was nothing concrete against Levkas the registered master. Only Gallaher, the ship’s electrician, had a serious criminal record as an IRA terrorist, still wanted for bombing an Army patrol.
Had Demetrios’s plan gone unhindered, it would have been foolproof. Prometheus, under an assumed name, would have sold her oil in Durban. She would have blown up and sunk off Senegal. Insurance would have been collected. Kostas Demetrios would have been very, very rich.
Everything that had happened to Richard and his crew had been an increasingly desperate variation on that simple plan. Desperate, but not wildly so: there was still no absolute proof.
Until the tanks were opened.
“But if you couldn’t open the tanks?” asked Richard. “If we hadn’t brought her home?”
“We’d have paid up. Simple as that. Still might have to, if anything goes wrong.”
“But the suspicion…”
“A story. Nothing more. The sort of thing you find in novels. I doubt it would ever stand up in court. Unsubstantiated hearsay, most of it. No damn good at all, without proof.”
There seemed little more to say at the moment. Both men knew there were still a lot of loose ends to be tied up, but for the time being they had sketched out the broad outlines of the plot. Watson went below to check through the records, now he had a clearer idea of what he was looking for.
Richard made a mental note to get the police aboard the moment they dropped anchor in Lyme Bay, then stood looking south, lost in thought. After a few moments, the door opened and closed. He turned to find Sir William beside him, his back ramrod straight and his shoulders square again.