And rings, bruise deep, below them.
On the sill before him lay his current reading, Nigel Balchin’s The Small Back Room. Richard remembered Sammy Rice’s first words in it: “In 1928 my foot was hurting all the time, so they took it off…” God! If only memories could be like that.
Every once in a while Richard Mariner’s memory would start to play up. It would never be for any particular reason, never on the anniversary of his first meeting with Rowena Heritage, of his marriage to her, or of her death. Out of the blue he would suddenly find himself prey to nightmares. In his dreams great ships would blow apart. Then sleep itself would become a dream. He would become moody, violent. Unable to concentrate. Unable to work. Surrounded by ghosts wherever he was.
The phone rang and he picked it up without moving more than his hand. “Mariner.”
“Good God! Do you ever sleep?” It was Audrey, the night secretary from the agency.
“As little as possible. What is it?”
“Emergency. Call from a Mr. Kostas Demetrios. Accident aboard his VLCC Prometheus. Can we replace the master and all deck officers except the radio officer? Also all engineering officers except the chief?”
“How soon?”
“Now.”
He glanced at his watch. The steel Rolex his wife, Rowena, had given him just before they set sail that last, fatal, time. Why wear it? Waste not, want not.
The same reason he maintained the membership to the Royal Automobile Club Sir William, her father, had bought him so long ago. Maintained it even when his back was to the wall and it had seemed an unnecessary expense. But the marble halls in the basement of the club’s Pall Mall headquarters, with their exercise areas, pools, and saunas had stood him good guard against the fat pot belly of city life ashore.
Rowena’s Rolex said the time was a minute or two past midnight, British Summer Time. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he said.
Seventeen minutes later, he stepped out of his long black E-Type Jaguar and walked briskly to the door marked CREWFINDERS. They owned a suite of three rooms on the fourth floor of a Victorian building overlooking St. Mary Axe in the City of London. Cheek by jowl with Leadenhall and Lloyd’s, it was in the best possible position to keep his finger on the pulse of world shipping — as was necessary if it was to become what Mariner dreamed: the largest in de pen dent crew-finding agency in the world.
Twenty minutes later, to the second, he stepped out of the lift into the reception area. “Any idea what went wrong?” he called to Audrey.
Audrey was at the night desk, with a small switchboard on her left and a slave monitor on her right connected to the computer’s central file. “No,” she answered at once. “Must have been something big, though; unless it was industrial action.”
“An officers’ strike, led by the captain?” His tone said it all.
“Have to be one hell of an accident. An explosion…” She tailed off in horror. She had uttered the forbidden word. Mariner seemed hardly to notice. “…would hardly have left enough of the ship to require a full complement of officers.”
He swung past her, already in his shirtsleeves and ready to get down to business. When he sat in his deep leather chair at the main console it was exactly 00.30 British Summer Time. Exactly three hours since he had left, exhausted, for home.
He got up again, with the back of the assignment broken, at dawn. And, had he been one for keeping anniversaries, he would have known that it was exactly five years to the minute since the nightmare began.
After the disaster, Mariner had chosen to remain ashore, yet at first sight, this man, one of the great sailors of his generation, seemed ill qualified for life on the beach. He had been a sailor for twenty-four years, a captain for eight, and a senior captain with Heritage Shipping for six. In all the long years before he had settled down as senior captain, heir apparent, husband to Rowena, his boss’s eldest daughter, he had moved about and worked for all and sundry. Before he became senior captain at Heritage Shipping and Mr. Rowena Heritage, he had not only earned the papers to command almost anything afloat, he had also set up an unrivaled network of contacts.
Contacts which, during the years of estrangement with the Heritage family after Rowena’s death, had formed the backbone of Crewfinders. It was not a company that would ever rival Heritage Shipping, even though Heritage had been half crippled by the loss of Richard’s last command, but it was Mariner’s own company. And it was growing stronger every day. And would continue to do so as long as its reputation remained intact.
That reputation rested on one fact: Crewfinders could replace officers and crew faster than any other agency in the business. Between one and three days. Any officer. Anywhere in the world.
But never before had they been asked to replace almost all the officers on a supertanker all at once.
Dawn came slowly and late, edging into a low gray sky only the thinnest strip of which was visible to Richard Mariner in any case, looking up as he was from a small side window between high building frontages. He watched it, nevertheless, deep in thought, with a huge mug of coffee cooling in his fist. The junior officers were already on their way, summoned by Audrey from beds and other haunts all over the world. But the first mate was proving more difficult to find. And there were no captains at all.
It was the merest chance, nothing more. He had four captains on paper, but none in fact. One had gone cruising somewhere in the Greek Islands. One had fallen off a ladder. One had been involved in a motor accident on the Kingston bypass, and the last had run over his foot with a lawn mower late yesterday evening. The soonest he could supply a captain was in about a week. Which would not be good enough.
Still, first things first. Let him get the mate sorted out and he would worry about the master then. He put the cold coffee down and went back into the computer room. He had no sooner sat down in front of his console than his phone purred.
“Yes?”
“I’ve just had a call from Ben Strong. He’s available.”
“Are you sure? I thought he was still in Bangkok. So did the computer.”
“He’s just reported back. The computer will be updating his file now. And it’s an expensive city, from what I’ve heard…” He knew that tone in Audrey’s voice. Ben had spun her a hard-luck story and flirted with her a bit to get preferential treatment.
Well, he deserved it, God knew. He was an excellent officer. And his father had been Richard’s own mate, once upon a time. He was Ben’s godfather. The closest thing to a real father Ben had left.
“Get him back. Tell him he’s now first mate on Prometheus. He needs to be there as soon as he can.”
After that he hit a block. He could not replace the captain. With all favors called and all debts cleared, he was still that one vital crew member short. There was simply no one he knew who could take command.
When the idea popped into his head he would never know. Suddenly he saw his own master’s papers as he had thrust them into his desk drawer at home after the inquiry five years ago. At first he dismissed it, but as his desperation grew the vision persisted.
He made excuses: he had always run a one-man show; there was no one to look after Crewfinders if he went. But he was in a cleft stick: if he didn’t go, there would be no more Crewfinders in any case. And anyway; he knew perfectly well that his capable, dedicated secretarial team could run it flawlessly without him.