‘Here’s a fine how d’you do,’ the seaman muttered.
He glanced at the bare, blackened feet sticking out from the cover of the awning, at the skinny legs, visible only as far as the knee, and his gaze shifted away again. He seemed scared to investigate further, even with his eyes, appalled by the thought of what he might see.
Mr Brett said harshly: ‘Get that canvas off. Let’s have a look at him.’
The seaman obeyed. He slipped a thin knife out of its pigskin sheath and severed the cords that were holding the awning. Mr Brett thrust the canvas to one side and stared down at the body which lay, face upward, on a rough mattress soaked in sea-water.
It was the body of a big man, perhaps six feet tall, but so emaciated that the ribs could be seen beneath the sunburnt skin of the chest like the framework of a basket. But for a pair of stained drill shorts, he was completely naked, and his black hair, long and unkempt, came down to join the matted beard. He had a strong, rather beaked nose and his thin mouth was marked by a white rim of salt. There was salt too on his hair, his beard and his eyebrows. His eyes were closed.
The seaman’s voice was low, hushed in the presence of this evidence of so much suffering. ‘Is he dead, sir?’
Mr Brett bent down and put a hand on the naked chest. The skin had been coarsened by exposure; it was covered with sores. Mr Brett lowered his head and put his ear close to the salt-rimmed lips. He could detect no sound of breathing. Perhaps the last breath had already been expended.
Brett was not an imaginative man, but it occurred to him that this was a terrible way to die — alone in the centre of a vast desert of sea with no friend to mark the going, to give a last grip of the hand, a last word of hope and encouragement. Nowhere was there such utter loneliness as the loneliness of great waters.
And then the man’s right eyelid twitched.
Mr Brett got up and said softly: ‘He’s alive. We’d better get him on board.’
He looked up and saw the faces peering down at him; he saw Captain Rogerson and Watkins on the bridge; and he could sense the question that lay behind the silence of them all.
He answered this unspoken question with a shout, exulting suddenly in the thought that perhaps here was one more life that might be snatched back from that old, relentless enemy, the sea.
‘He’s not dead — not yet.’
The man lay on a bunk in the ship’s hospital and stared at the white deckhead above him. There was no expression on his face, no indication that he was seeing the painted iron or the line of rivets. His eyes were dull; he might have been staring only at an inward picture, a panorama of long drawn out suffering, of pain, of fear, of treading upon the very threshold of death.
A fan whirred ceaselessly, stirring the oppressive air in the cabin, but there were beads of sweat on the man’s forehead. They stayed there like drops of oil, motionless.
Captain Rogerson sat on a chair by the bunk and Mr Brett stood behind him. Mr Brett had his cap under his arm and his hands behind his back. He stared at the man on the bunk with curiosity not unmixed with pity.
‘And you can’t remember anything?’ Rogerson asked gently.
The man’s voice was like the sighing of a distant wind in the trees, incredibly faint; it seemed to come from a long way off, a reluctant sound dragged painfully out of the depths of his body.
‘Nothing.’
‘Your name is Keeton,’ Rogerson said. ‘Does that mean nothing to you?’
‘Nothing.’
The name was engraved on the identity discs looped about the man’s neck by a length of dirty tape. There was a number, the name — Keeton, C. H. — and the letters C.E., indicating that he was, ostensibly at least, of the faith of the Church of England.
On his left forearm was the tattoo of a rope twisted into the shape of a question mark. It seemed not altogether inappropriate in the circumstances.
‘Have you heard of a ship called the Valparaiso?’
‘Never.’
Rogerson turned his head and looked at Brett; there was meaning in the glance they exchanged. On the gunwale of the lifeboat near the bows the inscription Valparaiso I had been carved. Mr Brett had taken note of it before casting the boat adrift. It was a clue to the mystery. But in some ways it was a clue that served only to make the mystery even more intriguing.
‘We found you in number one lifeboat of the S.S. Valparaiso,’ Rogerson said gently but insistently. ‘Can’t you remember how you came to be in it?’
The man turned his head slowly on the pillow, grimacing as though the movement pained him. His dull eyes peered at Captain Rogerson. He seemed to be excessively weary, exhausted of all strength, all energy, all emotion.
‘I can remember nothing.’
Rogerson got up. ‘Perhaps after you have had a good long sleep it will be different. We’ll leave you now.’
The man did not answer.
Back in his own cabin Rogerson punched a hole in a can of chilled beer and poured it into a glass. The froth rose like whipped cream; he buried his nose in it, took a long draught and set the glass down.
‘I knew a ship called Valparaiso,’ he said. ‘You ever come across her, Ned?’
‘Can’t say I ever did,’ Brett admitted. He helped himself to beer. ‘What class of ship was she?’
‘Six thousand tons, thereabouts. Sampson Chandler line. Sunderland built if I’m not mistaken. Goal-post derricks and a long funnel.’
‘You’ve got a good memory.’
‘You don’t forget a ship you’ve sailed next to in convoy. Especially a bad convoy.’
Brett fished a pipe out of his pocket and began to fill it, pressing the tobacco down with the ball of his thumb. He appeared to be absorbed in this task.
‘Wonder where she is now?’
‘I don’t wonder,’ Rogerson said. ‘I know.’
Brett stopped tamping tobacco and stared at his captain ‘You didn’t tell me that.’
‘I couldn’t be certain at first. It seemed so unlikely. Thought my memory must be playing tricks. That’s why I looked it up.’
‘I don’t understand. How could you look it up?’
‘It’ s in a book, Ned. The Valparaiso was lost in January 1945. Sunk in the Pacific by a Japanese submarine.’
Brett forgot the pipe in his hand; he sat bolt upright. ‘But that’s nearly a year ago and—’
‘And here we find one of the Valparaiso’s lifeboats still afloat with a live man in it. It’s a queer do, Ned; a damned queer do. And just too bad that the man seems to have lost his memory. I’d like to hear his story.’
For one who had been so close to death Keeton made remarkably rapid progress along the road to recovery. He seemed to have all the recuperative powers of youth.
‘How old would you say he is?’ Rogerson asked Brett.
Brett stroked his chin. ‘Well now, if you’d asked me that question when we brought him on board I’d have said he was an old man. That’s what privation can do for you. But now that he’s been cleaned up, shaved and had his hair trimmed, you can see he’s young.’
Rogerson nodded. ‘Just a boy. If he’s a lot over twenty I’ll be surprised.’
‘He’s had a tough time for a kid.’
‘And still we know nothing about it. It’s galling. There he is, obviously with the most remarkable story tied up in him somewhere, and there’s no getting it out because his memory’s gone.’
‘Maybe it’ll come back,’ Brett suggested.