So, at last, in spite of his bone-deep feelings of foreboding, he drove back to his flat by Vauxhall Bridge, packed his bags, and settled his affairs as though he knew he weren’t coming back.
Then Audrey drove him to Heathrow to catch the last flight out to the Gulf. Then, exhausted herself, she went straight home to bed. As soon as she arrived at the office next morning, she telexed Prometheus.
John Higgins heard about it first, because he happened to be outside the Radio Room when the telex came in and was able to take the flimsy off Tsirtos because the young radio officer was still disoriented by all the new arrivals and so easily browbeaten.
“Well, blow me down!” said the wiry Manxman, and, clutching the stem of his cold pipe firmly between his teeth — one of a range of pipes he sported constantly but never, ever, smoked — he strode off in search of his old friend the mate.
Ben Strong, here only a few hours but already very much in charge, was on the bridge. He straightened up as Higgins came in and caught his eye. “What is it, Number Two?” he asked at once. Higgins was one of those men who almost sparkle with ill-controlled energy — every muscle in his lithe frame always seemed at full stretch and he chewed through pipe stems at an alarming rate. Now he was almost luminous with glee.
“Message for the owner, Number One. Seen him?”
“In his cabin, I expect. Anything I should know?”
“New captain due aboard later this afternoon.” Higgins tried to keep it nonchalant. He failed.
“Oh?” Ben was suddenly all attention. “Anyone we know?”
“I should say so. Mariner’s coming himself.”
Ben just managed to hold himself in check, refusing to rise to Higgins’s bait. “Is that so?” he asked equably after a while. “Well, you’d better run along and let the owner know at once, if you’d be so kind. And we’d better get the last of the coffins ashore as soon as possible.”
“Righty-ho.” Higgins refused to be dashed by his cold reception and loped off in search of the owner, pipe jutting jauntily up toward his left ear.
As soon as he had gone, Ben mopped his brow. “Christ on a crutch,” he muttered. “Dick himself. Now, who would have thought of that!”
He was by no means alone on the bridge. As well as the seamen on duty, the third mate Danny Slope was there. Like John Higgins, Slope was of medium height, just topping Ben’s shoulder, but unlike the Manxman, he was plump and furtive. He habitually wore a veiled, secretive look. He was an unknown quantity among the Crewfinders men, not on the list long enough to be known to anyone other than the computer in St. Mary Axe. “What’s that all about, Number One?” he asked now, his voice high.
Ben looked at him with something akin to distaste. He had nothing against the third mate, indeed he seemed quite a competent man, but he looked and sounded like the school sneak in the sort of books Ben had enjoyed reading as a boy.
“Don’t you know anything, young Danny-me-lad?” he demanded; a schoolteacher with a criminally inattentive pupil. “Richard Mariner’s the man you work for. The man who owns Crewfinders.”
“Well, I know that…”
“You just don’t know what that has to do with the price of eggs. Right? Well, I’m precisely the man to tell you.
“Five years ago, Richard Mariner was senior captain of the Heritage Shipping fleet. He was married to Sir William Heritage’s eldest daughter and was captain of his most beautiful new tanker. Both the daughter and the ship were called Rowena. He took Rowena aboard Rowena for her maiden voyage — a sort of second honeymoon because their marriage had hit a bumpy patch — then lost them both in a collision and explosion in the Western Approaches.
“The inquiry exonerated him. Came out smelling of roses to everyone except Sir William Heritage, who was short one ship and one daughter — and was not happy about either.
“And the long and short of it is, Dick Mariner brushed the dust of supertankers off his shoes. Set up Crewfinders. Swore on the grave of his beloved, which was empty of course as her body lies blown to atoms at the bottom of the Channel, never to sail in these iron monsters again.”
“God,” said Slope, simply awed by the story. “How come you know so much about it?”
“You see before you a poor orphan boy, Number Three. Lost my mum on the day I was born. Lost my dad five years ago, almost to the day. He was Mariner’s first mate on that Heritage tanker.”
The news went round the ship like wildfire after that. Mariner was the sort of man legends clung to. Everybody in Crewfinders had their own favorite tale or memory of the great man. Tales that grew in the telling.
Chief Steward “Twelve Toes” Ho had no trouble in finding out all he wanted to know. As well as being perfectly trained stewards, his men were a finely tuned information-gathering machine.
Salah Malik, leader of the seamen, also heard what he wanted to hear, when he wanted to hear it. He was not displeased. The previous officers — late and unlamented, in his book — had not been the sort of men he relished dealing with.
The pair of them got together in the galley later that afternoon, prompted by almost telepathic communication, and decided what should be left and what concealed of the previous occupancy. They decided to conceal nothing and let matters take their course.
Only two men aboard remained relatively unaffected by the news. The owner, Kostas Demetrios, was a shipping man and not a sailor. He knew of Mariner’s reputation distantly. He knew nothing of exploding tankers, lost loves, and lost fortunes. It seemed to him fitting that on a contract this size, the boss should get his hands dirty too. He thought no more of it than that, as far as anyone else could tell.
Martyr heard. He heard some of the story from young Andrew McTavish, third engineer supplied by Crewfinders. It moved him not at all. It spoke to him of a man who had married the boss’s daughter for advancement in the firm; who only took her on the fatal voyage because he had been told to and was afraid of queering his pitch with the old man; and who had fouled up anyway and run away from the sea.
It was a story utterly without romance, as far as he was concerned; the tale of a man who by luck or circumstance had built himself a reputation, but when the testing time had come had simply cut and run. So now, probably down on his luck again, with his vaunted company at full stretch, he was being offered a fortune to come and get his hands dirty again. Dirty in more ways than one, Martyr thought.
As far as the taciturn American could see, this was just the man to replace the late, unlamented Levkas.
CHAPTER FIVE
They had left the last three coffins close to the top of the accommodation ladder so that they were the first things Mariner saw as he pulled himself wearily onto the deck.
They were the worst things he could possibly have seen during his first moments back aboard a supertanker and he froze, horrified. For a moment even his massive reserves of emotional strength were taxed to their limit.
Ben Strong pushed forward at once, shocked to see his godfather’s long, aristocratic face all bone and line; the massive chin steely with stubble; the incendiary blue eyes dull and dark-ringed, sunken with fatigue. His hand was raised, but more to support than to greet.
He was unceremoniously shoved aside by the owner. “So this is the great Richard Mariner,” boomed Kostas Demetrios. “Welcome aboard, sir. Welcome aboard.”
Mariner took Demetrios’s hand and shook it formally. He dragged his tired eyes away from the boxes and glanced around the deck. He saw little enough — only the expanse of green overlain with huge pipes, fifteen feet above, running fore and aft; port and starboard. Odd-shaped columns of manifolds, winches, hatches, tank tops; all standing to shoulder height — all dancing and wavering in the furnace heat of a Gulf afternoon. And beyond them, the incandescent brightness of the bridge. Five stories high. Far, far away.